Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

There was no smell of decay. The exposed portions of both bodies’ faces and hands—and a bit of Meyer’s chest under a rip in the fabric there—were bleached almost white by ultraviolet rays, as Mallory’s back had been, and the skin of each man looked slightly mummified, and their eyes and cheeks had fallen in the way corpses’ faces do, but the goraks hadn’t been at them. I had no clue as to why not. There was a bullet wound visible in Meyer’s upper left shoulder—it shouldn’t have been an instantly fatal wound, the Deacon said—but although we rolled Bromley’s body over carefully, we found no entrance or exit wounds on him.

“So the Germans didn’t kill Lord Percival?” I said, my voice thick with fatigue, altitude, and emotion.

“They killed him, my friend,” said Jean-Claude. “But not by shooting him. Rather, by shooting Herr Meyer and making Lord Percy either jump or be shot the same way.”

“Put your gloves back on, Reggie,” the Deacon said gently. I’d just watched him pull wool gloves over his now bloody silken ones.

“Lady Bromley-Montfort,” said Pasang, “we shall search Lord Percival for you.”

Reggie shook her head. “No. Pasang, will you please help me with Percy? Then analyze Meyer’s bullet wound. The rest of you can look through Meyer’s clothing.”

“What are we hunting for?” asked Jean-Claude.

“I don’t know exactly,” said Reggie. “But it will be very portable. Meyer carried it for thousands of miles across Europe, the Middle East, and then Persia and China.”

We treated the bodies with a slow gentleness, although they were far beyond feeling any insult or injury. Perhaps we were just following Reggie’s tender-touch lead.

The first thing I noticed about Meyer, despite the weathering effects of hanging in midair off Mount Everest for a year, was that he looked very, very young.

“How old was this Austrian?” I asked no one in particular.

“Seventeen, I believe,” said Reggie. She was absorbed with going through her cousin’s pockets.

Neither Meyer nor Bromley had a rucksack on. We went through the many pockets of what was left of their outer anoraks, wool trousers, Norfolk jackets, and waistcoats. Meyer had multiple letters in German in his left jacket pocket—I couldn’t even decipher the Fraktur handwriting on the envelopes—and his Austrian passport, stamped at a score of border crossings.

In Meyer’s left jacket pocket was a large wad of pound notes.

“Good God,” I said. “Are these real?”

The Deacon fanned through them. The clumps of bills were still banded, and the writing on those bands was still quite clear—NATIONAL PROVINCIAL BANK LTD. LONDON.

“This is a real bank, Ree-shard? ”

“It had better be,” said the Deacon. “I have what little money I have left stored there.” He was counting the bills. “There’s fifteen thousand pounds here.”

“So your cousin Percy was paying for this information,” J.C. said to Reggie.

She looked up from the pockets she was searching. “Probably. It’s what he did with his sources willing to risk their lives and their families’ lives to betray their Austrian or German masters. From the little Percy told me—usually after a fine dinner and much wine—espionage is mostly about paying unsavory characters.”

“So,” I said, pointing to the body of the dead young man we were still searching, “this Austrian was an unsavory character.”

“I believe not,” said Reggie, her words almost lost in the gusts of wind from the west. “Look at his passport again and you’ll see why he probably did what he did, and risked everything to do it.”

I looked at the Austrian passport and its description, but I could find nothing especially interesting. NAME: Kurt Abraham Meyer. BIRTHDATE: 4 Oct. 1907. OCCUPATION: apprentice typesetter.

“Here,” said the Deacon and pointed to the Fraktur- labeled category: RELIGION. Under it was written, in the perfect penmanship of some bureaucrat: HEBREW.

“He spied for your cousin because he was a Jew?” I asked Reggie, but she didn’t respond.

Instead, she’d removed a thick, solid manila envelope from the Norfolk jacket breast pocket of her cousin’s corpse. She was careful not to let the increasing wind gusts grab the envelope out of her hands, shielding it with her body.

Inside the larger envelope were five smaller ones. Each one seemed to hold the same number of photographs—seven. I couldn’t exactly see what the photographs were because Reggie was still hunched over the package, but I was thinking that for £15,000 in cash, they’d damned well better be photostats of Count von Zeppelin’s newest military airships.

“Ahhh,” said Reggie, and the syllable combined a sense of the air being knocked out of her and the confrontation with some revelation. “Do you want to see what Percy and Meyer died for, gentlemen?”

All of us, except for Pasang, nodded. The doctor was busy cutting away waistcoat and shirt fabric on Meyer’s corpse to inspect the bullet wound in his upper shoulder, just below the collarbone.

“Be careful,” said Reggie. “There are five identical sets of these, but this set has the negatives. Don’t let any of the pictures blow away.” She handed one of the packets of photographs to the Deacon, who looked at all seven, nodded slowly, and carefully handed the packet to Jean-Claude.

J.C. made up for the Deacon’s nonreaction by responding physically and vocally, his head snapping back as if he’d been confronted by a bad smell, his arms thrusting the photos further from him, and crying, “ Mon Dieu , these are…this is…these are… abominable. ”

I strained to see the pictures over his shoulder but only could catch glimpses of white figures against a dark background.

“Abominable,” J.C. rasped again, shaking his head. “Completement abominable!”

He turned his face away and handed me the photos. I had to clutch them tightly in both hands and lower my face toward them to see them in the wind. Then I remembered that my snow goggles were still in place and roughly shoved them up as I went through the seven black-and-white photographs.

Each photo was of a very pale, very thin man in his late twenties or early thirties having sex with what I counted as four different young men—no, with boys. The oldest boy having sex with this man must have been about thirteen. The youngest was no older than eight or nine. The photographs were very clear, the naked flesh very white against a background that was very dark save for the gray blur of tumbled sheets. The room looked to be a cheap European hotel room, perhaps Austrian, with heavy furniture and dark painted walls. The photographer must have used a flash or a long exposure, because shades were drawn on the one window visible in the snapshots. The sharpness of each photograph and the critical depth of field suggested a high-quality camera. Each print was about five by seven inches, and the negatives were in a paper sleeve at the bottom of the packet.

For only seven photographs, an incredible variety of deviancy was on display. I confess that my expression must have shown my shock as I looked through the pictures and then looked through again. Modesty should have made me look away after seeing the first print, but I had to see—it was the same compulsion I would feel in later years when passing a serious highway accident.

The adult male was a very thin and obviously poorly fed fellow, his ribs and hipbones rampant, some scabs visible; a man who probably looked bourgeois enough, with his hair parted on the left side as suggested in these photos and his severe, short, greased-back haircut carefully combed—but in the tumble and passion of these moments, that greasy hair stood out in wild tufts. The man had thin lips and a stern demeanor in the only photograph where his mouth was not hanging open either in the throes of passion or in the midst of some more explicit and disturbing sex act he was involved in.