Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“The unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch,” the Deacon explains to me. “It started from this beer hall, as I remember.”

Sigl glares at him through my friend’s pipe smoke. “We prefer the term Hitlerputsch or Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch, ” snaps the German climber. “And it was not—as you say—‘unsuccessful.’”

“Really?” says the Deacon. “The police put down the uprising, scattered the marching Nazis, and arrested its leaders, including your Herr Hitler. I believe he’s currently serving a five-year sentence for treason in the old fortress prison of Landsberg, on a cliff above the river Lech.”

Sigl smiles strangely. “Adolf Hitler has become a hero of the German people. He will be out of prison before the end of this year. Even while there, he is treated like royalty by his so-called ‘guards.’ They know that he will someday lead this nation.”

The Deacon taps out his pipe, sets it in his tweed jacket pocket, and nods appreciatively. “Thank you, Herr Sigl, for tonight’s information and for setting me straight, as they say in Jake’s America, about my misperceptions and faulty information regarding the Hitlerputsch and the current status of Herr Hitler.”

“I will walk you to the door of the Bürgerbräukeller,” says Sigl.

Our train to the border on the way to Zurich leaves the station promptly at ten p.m. Promptness, I’m learning, is a German trait.

I’m glad that we have a private compartment in which we can stretch out on the padded benches and doze, if we choose, before we change rails and trains at the Swiss border later in the night. On the cab ride from the Bürgerbräukeller to the Munich train station, I realize that I’ve sweated through my undershirt, through my starched shirt, and into my thick wool suit jacket. My hands are trembling as I watch the lights of Munich recede into the relative darkness of the countryside. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see the lights of any city disappear behind me.

Finally, when I can speak without a tremor in my voice that would match the earlier shaking of my hands, I say, “This Adolf Hitler—I have read the name but remembered nothing about him—is he a local Communist leader calling for the overthrow of the Weimar Republic?”

“Rather the other way around, old boy,” replies the Deacon from where he is stretched out on the compartment’s other long, padded bench. “Hitler was—is, since his trial gave him a national audience for his rants—famous and much loved for his very far -right-wing views, virulent anti-Semitism and all.”

“Ah,” I say. “But he is in prison for five years for the treason of his attempted coup last year?”

The Deacon has sat up to light his pipe again and opens the train window a bit to reduce the smoke in the compartment, although I don’t mind it. “I believe that Herr Sigl was right on both counts about that…that is, that Hitler will be out before the new year, with less than one year served, and that the authorities are treating him like a royal guest in that prison above the river.”

“Why?”

The Deacon shrugs slightly. “Nineteen twenty-four German politics is far beyond my poor powers to understand, but the extreme right wing—the Nazis, to be precise—certainly seems to be speaking for a lot of frustrated people since this superinflation struck.”

I realize that I’m not really interested in the little man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache.

“By the by,” adds the Deacon, “that bald, round-faced, scowling gentleman who sat across from you at the table and who slapped your hand when you seemed about to touch their sacred Blood Flag?”

“Yes?”

“Ulrich Graf was Herr Hitler’s personal bodyguard—which may be why he took several bullets aimed Hitler’s way during last November’s absurd botch of a putsch . But Graf is a hardy fellow, as you saw tonight, and will probably live to be the savior of Germany’s Nazi hero once again, I am sure. Before becoming a Nazi and bodyguard to their leader, Graf was a butcher, a semi-professional wrestler, and a for-hire street brawler. Sometimes he would volunteer to beat up—or even kill—Jews or Communists without charging his bosses.”

I think about this for a long moment. Finally I speak in just above a whisper, despite the compartment walls around us.

“Do you believe Sigl in his account of how Lord Percival and the Austrian Meyer died?” I ask. Personally, as much as I disliked Sigl and some of his friends, I can’t see an alternative to believing him.

“Not a word of it,” says the Deacon.

This causes me to sit up straight from where I’ve been half-reclining.

“No?”

“No.”

“Then what do you think happened to Bromley and Meyer? And why would Sigl lie?”

The Deacon shrugs slightly again. “It is possible that Sigl and his friends were ready to make an illegal bid for the summit after they heard in Tingri that the rest of Mallory’s team had left. Sigl certainly had no Tibetan climbing or travel permit himself. Perhaps Sigl and his six friends caught up with Bromley somewhere below the North Col and pressed him and this Meyer person to go with him on the climb in the tricky near-monsoon weather. When Bromley and Meyer fell to their deaths—or perhaps died some other way on the mountain—Sigl had to retreat and make up the Lost Boys story of the other two men climbing alone and being carried away by an avalanche.”

“You don’t believe in his avalanche story?”

“I’ve been on that part of the ridge and face, Jake,” says the Deacon. “That section of the face rarely accumulates enough snow for the kind of massive slab-slide avalanche Sigl described. And if it did, my feeling is that Bromley had garnered enough avalanche-avoidance experience in the Alps to know better than to venture out onto such a slope.”

“If the avalanche didn’t kill Bromley and the Austrian, do you think they fell while climbing above Camp Six with Sigl?”

“There are other possibilities,” says the Deacon. “Especially since the little I remember about Percy Bromley would not include the possibility of his being bullied into an Everest summit attempt by a German political fanatic intent upon bagging Mount Everest for das Vaterland. ”

The Deacon studies his pipe. ”I wish I’d known Lord Percival better. As I told you and Jean-Claude, I was brought to the estate—rather as nobility would send out for any other commodity to be delivered—to be an occasional playmate for Percy’s older brother, Charles, who was about my age, nine or ten at the time. Young Percival always wanted to tag along. He was—what is your American term, Jake?—a right pain in the arse.”

“You never saw Percival after that?”

“Oh, I’d bump into him from time to time at English garden parties or on the Continent,” the Deacon says vaguely.

“Was Percival really…inverted?” It’s hard for me to say the word aloud. “Did he really frequent European brothels where young men were the prostitutes?”

“So it’s rumored,” says the Deacon. “Is that important to you in some way, Jake?”

I think about that but can’t make up my mind. I’ve led a sheltered life, I realize. I’ve never had any inverted friends. Or at least none that I knew about.

“How else might Bromley and Kurt Meyer have died?” I ask, embarrassed and eager to change the subject.

“Bruno Sigl may have killed them both,” says the Deacon. There is a blue haze between us, but it hovers and then moves for the open window. The sound of steel wheels on metal rails is very loud.

I’m profoundly shocked at this. Is the Deacon saying this for effect? Just to shock me? If so, he’s succeeded beautifully.