The Eiger Sanction Page 10

  "Frankly, it is more than I expected you to offer. But it's much less than I shall receive."

  "Oh?" Mrs. Cerberus placed a restraining hand on Dragon's arm, solicitous of his blood pressure.

  "Yes," Jonathan continued easily. "I shall receive the Pissarro right now, and a hundred thousand dollars when I finish the job. Plus expenses, of course."

  "You recognize that this is outrageous."

  "Yes. But I view it as retirement pay. This is the last assignment I am going to take for your people."

  "That, of course, is your own decision. Unlike those on the other side, we have no desire to keep you after your affection for us had fled. But we do not intend to support you for life."

  "A hundred thousand will only support me for four years."

  "After which?"

  "I'll think of something by then."

  "I have no doubt of it. But a hundred thousand dollars is out of the question."

  "Oh, no, it isn't. I have listened patiently while you described the pressing need for the sanction, and your need for me—and no one else—to handle it. You have no choice but to pay what I ask."

  Dragon was pensive. "You are punishing us for Miss Brown. Is that it?"

  Jonathan flashed angrily. "Just pay the money."

  "I have been expecting your withdrawal from our organization for some time, Hemlock. Mr. Pope and I were discussing the possibility just this morning."

  "That's another thing. If you want to keep Pope intact, keep him out of my way."

  "You are striking to the right and left in your rage, aren't you." Dragon considered for a moment. "You have something more on your mind. You know perfectly well that I could promise the money now, then either fail to pay or get it back from you by some means."

  "That will never happen again," Jonathan said coldly. "I shall receive the money now—a cashier's check sent to my bank with instructions that it will be paid to me on my appearance or your further instructions, not before seven weeks from now. If I fail to make the sanction, I'll probably be dead, and the check will go uncashed. If I make it, I take the money and retire. If I don't, you can instruct the bank to pay the money to you, on proof of my death."

  Dragon pressed the thick pads against his eyes and searched the blackness for a flaw in Jonathan's case. Then his hands dropped to the black sheets. He laughed his three ha's. "Do you know, Hemlock? I think you have us." There was a mixture of wonder and admiration in his voice. "The check will be sent to your bank as you have directed; the painting will be in your home when you return."

  "Good."

  "I imagine this is the last time I shall have the pleasure of your company. I shall miss you, Hemlock."

  "You always have Mrs. Cerberus here."

  There was a flat sadness in the response. "True."

  Jonathan rose to leave, but he was restrained by Dragon's last question. "You are quite sure that you had nothing to do with the disappearance of Miss Brown?"

  "Quite sure. But I suspect she'll turn up sooner or later."

  LONG ISLAND: That Evening

  Mauve and pewter skies at sunset; the leaden skin of the ocean undulated in low furrows, alive only at the thin froth edge that the tide had languidly carried up close to his feet.

  He had sat on the hard sand of the lower beach for hours, since his return from the city. Feeling heavy and tired, he rose with a grunt and batted the sand from his trousers. He had not yet been in the house, having chosen instead, after a moment of indecision at the door, to roam the grounds.

  In the vestibule he discovered a large rectangle wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. He assumed it was the Pissarro, but he did not bother to examine it; indeed, he did not even touch it. As a matter of principle, he had insisted on its return from Dragon, but he no longer had a taste for it.

  The nave was cool and thick with shadow. He walked its length and mounted the steps to his bar. He splashed half a glass of Laphroaig into a tumbler and drank it off, then he refilled his glass and turned to face the nave, leaning his elbows on the bar.

  A dim arc of light caught the tail of his eye—the firefly trail of a cigarette.

  "Gem?"

  Jonathan crossed rapidly to the dun female figure sitting in the greenhouse garden.

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Making myself available, as usual," Cherry answered. "It that for me?" She indicated the glass of Scotch.

  "No. Go home." Jonathan sat in a wicker chair opposite her, not so displeased with the idea of company as he seemed, but feeling the sick adrenalin collapse of vast disappointment.

  "I don't know what I'm going to do with you, Dr. Hemlock," Cherry rose to get the drink he had refused her. "You're always trying to butter me up," she said over her shoulder as she walked up to the bar. "I know what you're after with all that sweet talk about 'No! Go home.' You're just trying to get into my pants. Maybe the only way to get rid of you is to finally give in." She paused to allow him to respond. He did not. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," she continued, still covering her initial sting with a balm of words, "I guess that's the only way I'll get any peace. Hey! Is there such a thing as a Freudian pun?" Her next pause drew no response either. By now she had returned with her drink, and she slumped petulantly into her chair. "All right. How do you feel about the films of Marcel Carne? Do you believe the advantages of nonstick cooking with Teflon justify the expense of the space program? Or what are your views on the tactical problems of mass retreat should there ever be a war between the Italians and the Arabs?" Then she paused. "Who's Gem?"

  "Go home,"

  "By which I infer she is a woman. She must be something else, considering how fast you got over here, from the bar just now."

  Jonathan's voice was paternal. "Look, dear. I'm not up to it tonight."

  "The evening sparkles with puns. Can I get you another drink?"

  "Please."

  "You don't want me to go home really," she said as she went again to the bar. "You're feeling bad, and you want to talk about it."

  "You couldn't be more wrong."

  "About your feeling bad?"

  "About my wanting to talk about it."

  "This Gem person must really have come at you. I hate her without even knowing her. Here." She gave him the tumbler. "I'm going to get you all liquored up, and I'm going to make you on the rebound." She produced her best imitation of a witch's cackle.

  Jonathan was angry, therefore embarrassed. "For Christ's sake, I'm not on the rebound!"

  "Liar, liar, your pants are on fire. Say, I'll bet they really are."

  "Go home."

  "Was she pretty good in bed?"

  Jonathan's voice chilled instantly. "Now you'd better really go home."

  Cherry was cowed. "I'm sorry, Jonathan. That was a stupid thing to say. But gee-golly, pal, how do you think it affects a girl's ego when she's been trying to make a man for ever and ever, then some other woman with an unlikely name just takes him—like that." She tried several times to snap her fingers, but produced no sound. "I never could do that."

  Jonathan smiled in spite of himself. "Listen, dear. I'll be leaving tomorrow morning."

  "For how long?"

  "Most of the summer."

  "Because of this girl?"

  "No! I'm going to do a little climbing."

  "You just happen to suddenly decide on that after you meet this woman, right?"

  "She has nothing to do with it."

  "I really have to doubt that. All right. When are you leaving?"

  "Dawnish."

  "Well, great! We have the whole night. What do you say, mister. Huh? Huh? What do you say? You going to set me loose before you go? Remember, it's going to be a long summer for us virgins."

  "Will you look after the place while I'm away?"

  "Gladly. Now, let's talk about return favors."

  "Drink up and go home. I have to get some sleep."

  Cherry nodded resignedly. "OK. That woman must really have come at you. I hate her."


  "Me too," he said quietly.

  "Oh, bullshit, Jonathan!"

  "There's a new facet of your vocabulary."

  "I think I'd better go home."

  He walked her to the door and kissed her on the forehead. "I'll see you when I get back."

  "Hey, what do you say to a mountain climber? You tell an actor to break a leg, but that sounds kind of ominous for a mountain climber."

  "You say you hope it's a go."

  "I hope it's a go."

  "Thank you. Good night."

  "Great. Thanks a lot for that 'good night.' I'll just cling to that all night long."

  ARIZONA: June 15

  Standing between his suitcases at the grassy edge of a modest airfield, Jonathan watched the CII cabin jet from which he had just deplaned turn and, with a majestic conversion of power into pollution, taxi to the leeward end of the strip. The wave of heat behind its engine rippled the landscape; its atonic roar was painful.

  From across the strip, a new but battered Land-Rover darted out between two corrugated metal hangars, skidded in a right-angle turn that sprayed dust over complaining mechanics, bounced with all four wheels off the ground over a mound of gravel, narrowly missed a Piper that was warming up, triggering a vigorous exchange of abuse between driver and pilot, then bore down on Jonathan with a maximum acceleration until, at the last possible moment, the four-wheel brakes were locked and the Rover screeched to a side-slipping stop, its bumper only inches from Jonathan's knee.

  Big Ben Bowman was out before the Land-Rover stopped rocking. "Jon! Goddam my eyes, how are you?" He ripped one suitcase from Jonathan's grasp and tossed it into the back of the vehicle with scant concern for the contents. "I'll tell you one thing, ol' buddy. We're going to drink a bunch of beer before you get out of here. Hey!" His broad hairy paws closed down on Jonathan's upper arms, and after an awkward crushing hug, Jonathan was held out at arm's length for inspection. "You're looking good, ol' buddy. A little soft, maybe. But goddam my ass if it ain't good to see you! Wait till you see the ol' place. It's got..." The scream of the CII jet taxiing to take off eclipsed all sound, but Big Ben talked on insouciantly as he loaded Jonathan's second bag and grappled its owner into the Rover. Ben hopped around to jump in behind the wheel, slapped into gear, and they jumped off, bouncing over the drain ditch beside the field as they described a wide skidding turn. Jonathan gripped the seat and shouted as he caught sight of the CII jet roaring down on them from the left. Big Ben laughed and made a sharp cut to the right, and for a moment they raced parallel to the jet, under the shadow of its wing. "No chance!" Ben shouted over the combined din, and he turned left, passing so close behind the jet that Jonathan felt the hot, gritty blast of its engine.

  "For Christ's sake, Ben!"

  "Can't help it! Can't beat a jet!" Then he roared with laughter and jammed down on the gas pedal. They cut around the random scatter of airport buildings without using the designed roads, leaped the curbing to the main highway, and knifed through traffic with a U-turn that made brakes squeal and horns bleat angrily. Ben gestured classically to the offended drivers.

  About a mile out of town they skidded off the highway onto a dirt road. "Just a piece down this way, ol' buddy," Ben shouted. "You remember?"

  "About twenty miles, isn't it?"

  "Yeah, about. Takes eighteen minutes, unless I'm in a hurry."

  Jonathan gripped the "chicken bar" and said as casually as he could, "I don't see any special reason to hurry, Ben."

  "You won't recognize the old place!"

  "I hope I get a chance to see it"

  "What?"

  "Nothing!"

  As they raced along, bouncing over chuckholes, Ben described some of the improvements he had made. Evidently the whole character of his climbing school had changed to some kind of resort ranch. He looked at Jonathan while he talked, only glancing at the road to make corrections when he felt the wheels go into the soft shoulder. Jonathan had forgotten Ben's crisis-style of driving. On a sheer face with nothing but rotten rock to cling to, there was no man he would rather have beside him, but in the driver's seat...

  "Oh-oh! Hang on!"

  They were suddenly in a cut-back turn and going too fast to make it. The Rover bounced over the shoulder, and the wheels on Jonathan's side dug into the soft sand. For an interminable moment they balanced on those wheels, then Ben whipped to the right, slamming the wheels back to the sand and beginning a fishtail skid. He steered into the skid and pressed down on the gas, converting the skid into a power slide that spun them back up onto the road. "Goddam my ass if I don't forget that turn every time!"

  "Ben, I think I'd rather walk."

  "OK, OK." He laughed and slowed down for a time, but by inevitable degrees their speed increased, and it was not long before Jonathan's hands were white-knuckled on the chicken bar again. He decided there was nothing to be gained by wearing himself out trying to guide the Land-Rover by positive concentration, so he relaxed fatalistically and tried to empty his mind of thought.

  Big Ben chuckled.

  "What is it?" Jonathan asked.

  "I was thinking about the Aconcagua. Remember what I did to that old bitch?"

  "I remember."

  They had met in the Alps. The gulf between their temperaments suggested that they would be an unlikely team, and neither had been pleased when they were thrown together because their partners were unavailable for climbs they had set their hearts on. So with formidable misgivings they decided to make the climbs together, and they treated each other with that politeness that substitutes for friendship. Slowly and reluctantly they discovered that their polar talents as climbers meshed to create a powerful team. Jonathan attacked a mountain like a mathematical problem, picking routes, evaluating supplies against energy, against time; Big Ben pounded the face into submission with his uncommon strength and indomitable will. Fanciful fellow climbers came to refer to them as The Rapier and The Mace, which nicknames caught the fancy of writers who contributed articles on their achievements to Alpine journals. Jonathan was particularly suited to rock work where the minute tactics of leverage and purchase fitted his intellectual style. Big Ben took over when they were on ice and snow where he would pant and bull through the drifts, breasting an upward path like an inevitable machine of fate.

  In bivouac, their differences of personality again operated as a lubricant for the social friction these cramped and sometimes dangerous quarters induce. Ben was older by ten years, loquacious, loudly appreciative of humor. So divergent were their backgrounds and values that they were never in social competition. Even in the lodge after a victory they celebrated in their different ways with different people, and they rewarded themselves that night with different lands of girls.

  For six years they passed the climbing seasons together, bagging peaks: Walker, Dru, the Canadian Rockies. And their international reputations were in no way diminished by Jonathan's contributions to mountaineering publications in which their accomplishments were recorded with calculated phlegmatic understatement that eventually became the stylistic standard for such journals.

  It was quite natural, therefore, that when a team of young Germans determined to assail Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, they contacted Jonathan and Ben to accompany them. Ben was particularly enthusiastic; it was his kind of climb, a grinding, man-eroding ascent requiring little in the way of surface tactics, but much in the way of endurance and supply strategy.

  Jonathan's response was cooler. As was just, considering that they had conceived the plan, the Germans were to be the primary assault pair. Jonathan and Ben working in support and going after the peak only if something untoward happened to the Germans. It was fair that it should be so, but it was not Jonathan's way. Unlike Ben, who loved each step of a climb, Jonathan climbed for the victory. The great expense involved also dampened Jonathan's exuberance, as did the fact that his particular talents would be of secondary importance on a climb like this.

  But Ben was not to be deni
ed. The financial problems he solved by selling the small ranch that was his livelihood; and in a long telephone call he persuaded Jonathan by admitting that, considering his age, this would probably be the last major climb he would ever make.

  As it turned out, he was right.

  From the sea, Aconcagua seems to rise up just behind Valparaiso, a regular and, from that distance, gentle cone. But getting there is half the hell. Its base is tucked in among a tangle of lower mountains, and the team spent a week alternating between the antithetical torments of miasmic jungle and dusty ravines as they followed the old Fitz-Gerald route to the foot.

  There is in this world no more demoralizing climb than that vast heap of rotten rock and ice. It destroys men, not with the noble counterstrokes of an Eigerwand or a Nanga Parbat, but by eroding a man's nerve and body until he is a staggering, whimpering maniac. No single stretch of the hill is particularly difficult, or even interesting in the Alpine sense. It is no exaggeration to say that any athletic layman could handle any given thousand feet of it, if properly equipped and conditioned to the thin air. But Aconcagua rises thousands upon thousands of feet, and one climbs hour after hour up through shale and ragged rock, through moraine and crevassed glacier, day upon day, with no sense of accomplishment, with no feeling that the summit is nearing. And time and again, the flash storms that twist around the peaks pin the climbers down for who knows how long. Maybe forever. And still that pile of garbage left from the Creation goes on and upward.

  Within three thousand feet of the summit, one of the Germans gave in, demoralized with mountain sickness and the bone-deep cold. "What's the use?" he asked. "It really doesn't matter." They all knew what he meant. So slight is the technical challenge of the Aconcagua that it is less a cachet to a climber's career than an avowal of the latent death wish that drives so many of them up.

  But no bitch-kitty of a hill was going to stop Big Ben! And it was unthinkable that Jonathan could let him go it alone. It was decided that the Germans would stay where they were and try to improve the camp to receive the new summit team when they staggered back.