Ronald Malfi - The Ascent

the same flight. Petras slept, and I thumbed through various magazines as well as a newly purchased copy of the George Mallory book I hadn’t finished. Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew Irvine, disappeared while climbing the northeast ridge of Everest in 1924. His body wasn’t discovered until 1999, and although the book skimped on description, I could only imagine what would have been left behind after being lost out there in the unforgiving wilds of Everest for seventy-five years.

In London, we boarded separate planes—John Petras to Wisconsin, me to Baltimore-Washington International. Petras’s plane left first. At his gate, we embraced, like brothers about to part.

“There’s one thing we haven’t discussed yet.”

I knew what it was. I nodded, rubbing my forehead with aching fingers. “I know. What do you think?”

“I think we can go back and tell the truth,” he said. “Call the police,

tell them what happened. Tell them everything about Andrew.”

“Then there’s the other option.”

Petras raked his fingers through his beard and down his neck. “It was all an accident, a horrible accident. Just like the Sherpas said.”

“I don’t have it in me to go through all that right now,” I said. “I may never have it in me.”

“Then it was an accident.”

“And Andrew?”

“Another accident, just like the others. Andrew Trumbauer went over the cliff. End of story.” One hand on my shoulder, he squeezed my aching muscles and smiled. Then he turned and shuffled through the doors and down the gangway to the airplane.

You only saw what the land let you see, I thought.

I remained at his gate until the plane taxied down the runway, my nose nearly pressed against the window, my eyes as vacant as twin chunks of ice.

PART FOUR

THE GHOSTS WE RETURN TO

Chapter 18

1

AS THE MOON PASSED BEHIND A DRIFT OF DARk

clouds, I turned away from the windows and encircled Marta in my arms. She sighed. Her warm legs intertwined with mine beneath the sheets; she hugged my arms. I peppered her neck with tiny kisses. “I need to get up,” I whispered in her ear. “Hmm.” Warmly.

Five minutes later, dressed in running shorts and Nikes, I took off along the waterfront. To my right, the bay glistened with moonlight, this distant shimmer of the Bay Bridge like something tangible materializing through the fog of a dream. I ran through Eastport and over the small drawbridge, flanked on both sides by the lull of sleeping sailboats. Into downtown, I ran up Main Street and downgraded to a slow jog around Church Circle. The conical spire of St. Anne’s looked like a stalagmite rising off the floor of a limestone cave. At this hour, the city was asleep. Only the occasional vehicle rolled past me on the narrow roadways. But other than that, all was silent.

It had been four months since I’d returned from Nepal. A strict regime of exercise and healthy eating had seen to it that I’d fully recovered from the events that occurred on the Godesh Ridge. Now,halfway around the world and a year in the future, it was almost possible to convince myself, particularly on nights such as these, that it had all been a nightmare.

Almost possible.

Of course, there were still the actual nightmares—waking up slick with sweat and with a scream caught in my throat from some half-remembered dream where I ran through feet of snow as some faceless, heartless creature pursued me down the face of a mountain. Often the chase would end when I turned a sharp corner and found myself at the edge of a cliff. Behind me, my pursuer slowed to a predatory crawl, hidden in the heavy shadows. My choices were simple: either jump off the cliff or face whatever followed me. For whatever reason, I usually woke up before having to make the decision.

Immediately following my return, I was obsessed with researching the background of the men who had died on the Godesh Ridge, including Andrew Trumbauer. And in most cases, I was able to derive some reason why Andrew would have wanted revenge on them …

Donald Shotsky was the easiest, as I already had some information to go by. He’d been a fisherman and a deckhand on various crab boats in the Bering Sea. Years ago, he’d been a crewman on a ship called the Kula Plate , along with Andrew.

Eventually I tracked down the captain—a grizzled veteran of the Korean War named Footie Teacar—who confirmed the story of how Shotsky had nearly gone over the side only to be saved by a greenhorn named Andy something-or-other. Of course, Teacar’s description of the greenhorn matched Andrew Trumbauer perfectly.

As I’d expected, confirming Shotsky’s involvement with a group of Las Vegas thugs was much more difficult. But following a phone call to an old college buddy of mine who’d for years worked as a blackjack dealer at a number of casinos on the strip, I learned one piece of interesting information: for the past decade, a New York corporation had reserved a hotel suite at the MGM Grand, although noone could say for certain if the suite had actually ever been used. The corporation was Trumbauer Petrol, the company Andrew inherited from his father after his death.

Chad Nando possessed an extensive arrest portfolio with various police departments throughout the country, mostly petty stuff—possession of dope, minor theft, a couple of DUIs. Undoubtedly, Chad’s biggest claim to fame, at least on the police blotter circuit, had been his arrest in participation with a cocaine-smuggling operation.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, I requested and received documents pertinent to the case, and, although the names and specific identifiers had been blocked out by a black Sharpie, I was able to discern Chad’s role in the whole ordeal with little difficulty: he’d been the snitch. Arrested right up front, he agreed to cooperate in exchange for leniency by the courts, which was granted to him in the form of three years’ probation.

When police followed the cocaine’s money trail, a number of high-profile businesses were mentioned in the report, though they were never able to make anything stick, and the business owners were quickly dropped as targets. One business was a small American entrepreneurial company called CliffDiver, Inc. An Internet search yielded very little information about CliffDiver, which had immediately gone out of business following the investigation. I found no records of any of the company’s personnel except for one—Drew Bauer, president and CEO.

Only the police report provided any further insight, stating that just prior to their investigation, CliffDiver had given money to a pharmaceutical company that had patented a pill to combat heart failure. Approval by the FDA never came, the pharmaceutical company folded, and CliffDiver faded into the background before disappearing entirely. Vague? Yes. However, I possessed one small bit of knowledge that the police working the case did not: the word Cliff-Diver was tattooed on Andrew Trumbauer’s upper thigh, something

I would have never noticed had he not stripped out of his clothes and jumped off the cliff that night in San Juan so many years ago.

The rest were more difficult to decipher, knowing so little about their backgrounds and their individual relationships with Andrew. Any parallels would only be supposition on my part. Yet who knew what sort of things happened in the six months Michael Hollinger spent with Andrew and two aboriginal women in the Australian outback, for instance? The women could never be found, and even if they were, the chances that they knew anything were more than slim.

What had Curtis Booker done to earn his gravestone? I found very little information about the ex-Marine on the Internet, save for an Ohio address. Feeling it necessary, I mailed a letter to that address. The letter mentioned Curtis’s death on the Godesh Ridge, although I went into no specific detail, and concluded with my return address and telephone number in case anyone wanted to get in touch with me for more information. I addressed the letter to Curtis’s daughter, Lucinda Booker. I’d yet to receive a reply.