Sigl frowns. “I am only a witness, Herr Deacon. It is the defendant—the usually guilty party—who sits in the dock in British courts, no? The witness sits…where? On the chair near the judge, ja?”
“Ja,” agrees the Deacon, still smiling. “I stand corrected. Would you prefer that we speak in German so that all your friends can understand? I’ll translate for Jake later.”
“Nein,” says Bruno Sigl. “We will speak English. Your Berlin accent grates on my Bavarian ears.”
“Sorry,” says the Deacon. “But we agree that you were the only witness to see Lord Percival Bromley and his fellow climber Kurt Meyer swept to their death by an avalanche, is this not true?”
“By what authority, Herr Deacon, do you interrogate…or even interview me?”
“No authority whatsoever,” the Deacon says calmly. “Jake Perry and I came to Munich to speak to you as a personal favor to Lady Bromley, who, understandably, simply seeks more details about her son’s sudden death on the mountain.”
“A favor to Lady Bromley,” Sigl says, the sarcasm audible in his voice even through the heavy German accent. “I presume there is money changing hands as part of this…favor.”
The Deacon merely continues smiling and waits.
Finally Sigl slams down his empty stone stein, waves the attentive waiter over for a new one, and grumbles, “Everything I saw of the accident I reported both to German newspapers and in the German alpine journal and in a letter to your Royal Geographic Alpine Club journal.”
“It was a very short report,” the Deacon says.
“It was a very quick avalanche,” snaps Sigl. “You were on both of Mallory’s earlier Everest expeditions. I trust you saw snow avalanches? Or at least in the Alps?”
The Deacon nods twice.
“You know, then, that one second the person or persons are there, the next second they are not.”
“Yes,” agrees the Deacon. “But it is difficult to understand what Lord Percival and the man named Meyer were doing on the mountain at all. Why were they there? Why were you and your six German friends there? Your report in the journals said that you and several other German…explorers…had come south to Tibet through China. That your permit was Chinese, not Tibetan, but for some reason the Tibetan dzongpens accepted it as they would an official pass. You told the Frankfurter Zeitung that you’d diverted your route when you heard in Tingri that a German and an Englishman had rented yaks and purchased climbing equipment in the Tibetan town of Tingri Dzong, and that you and your friends had gone south to investigate…out of sheer curiosity. Nothing more.”
“Everything I told the newspapers is correct,” Sigl says in a dismissive tone. “You and your American comrade came all the way to Munich to hear me confirm what I have already explained?”
“Much of it makes little or no sense,” says the Deacon. “Lady Bromley—young Percival’s mother—will be very appreciative if you can help us discover the missing facts. That’s all she wants.”
“And you have come all this way to help the old lady learn a few more…how do you say it in England?…tit-bits about her son’s death,” says Sigl with an expression very close to a sneer. I marvel that the Deacon keeps from losing his temper.
“Was this Kurt Meyer from your…ah…exploration group?” asks the Deacon.
“Nein! We had never heard of him before the Tibetans in Tingri Dzong told us his name…and that he had ridden southeast toward Rongbuk with Lord Percival Bromley of England.”
“So Meyer was not a climber?”
Sigl drinks a long gulp of beer, belches, and shrugs. “None of us had ever heard of Kurt Meyer. We heard his name only from the Tibetans in Tingri who had spoken to him. Between those of us at this table, we know almost all of Germany’s and Austria’s real climbers. Ja, meine Freunde?” He is addressing the question to his fellow Germans. They nod, and several of them say “Ja” even though Sigl just told us they didn’t understand English.
The Deacon sighs. “Rather than my directing questions to you that make you feel like you’re in a courtroom, Herr Sigl, why don’t you just tell us the full story of why you were there at the approaches to Everest, and what you saw of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer? Perhaps you even know why the two men’s ponies had been shot.”
“We saw the ponies lying there dead when we arrived,” says Sigl. “The Camp One area, as you know, Herr Deacon, is very rough moraine. Perhaps the ponies had both broken their legs. Or perhaps Herr Bromley or Herr Meyer had gone mad and shot the ponies. Who knows?” The German climber shrugs again.
“As for our reason for ‘following’ Bromley and Meyer to Rongbuk Glacier,” continues Sigl, “I shall reveal to you what I have told no one—not even our local newspapers. My six friends and I were merely interested in meeting George Mallory, Colonel Norton, and the other climbers we had heard were attempting Everest that spring. Obviously, since we were in China during most of our trip, we heard no news of Mallory’s and Irvine’s deaths, or even that the expedition had reached the mountain. But when the Tibetans in Tingri told us that Bromley was headed for the mountain they call Chomolungma, we decided—as you British and Americans say—‘Why not?’ And so we went southeast rather than back north.”
(Und zo ve vent soudeast razzer zan back nord. Sigl’s accent is beginning to grate on me for some reason.)
“But certainly,” said the Deacon, his tone polite but insistent, “when you saw that Norton’s and Mallory’s Base Camp had been abandoned, except for scraps of tents and dumps of uneaten canned food, you must have known that the expedition had already departed. Why then continue up the glacier all the way to the North Col and above?”
“Because we saw two figures descending the North Ridge, and it was obvious they were in trouble,” snaps Sigl.
“You could see that from Base Camp, twelve miles away from Mount Everest?” asks the Deacon, more in a tone of wonder than one of challenge.
“Nein, nein! We had gone up to Camp Two after finding the dead ponies, thinking that Bromley and this Meyer person whom we’d never heard of might be in some difficulty. We saw them on the ridgelines from Mallory’s Camp Two. We used fine German field glasses—Zeiss—the best in the world.”
The Deacon nods his acknowledgment of this fact. “So you set up your own tents at the site of Mallory’s old Camp Three just below the thousand-foot ascent to the North Col, then climbed onto the Col itself. Did you use the rope ladder that Colonel Norton’s group had left behind for the last hundred-some vertical feet?”
Sigl waves away that suggestion with a flicking motion of his fingers. “We used no old ladder or fixed ropes. We used our own ice-climbing axes and other German techniques to ascend the ice wall.”
“Kami Chiring reported seeing several of your men coming down from the Col using Sandy Irvine’s rope ladder,” says the Deacon.
“Who is this Kami Chiring?” demands Sigl.
“The Sherpa you met and aimed a revolver at near Camp Three that day. The one you told the story of Bromley’s death to.”
Bruno Sigl shrugs and sneers. “Sherpa. There you have it. Sherpas lie constantly. As do Tibetans. My six friends and I went nowhere near that worn-out rope ladder. We had no need to, you see.”
“So you were on a purely exploratory trip through China, but you brought your mountain- and ice-climbing gear with you,” says the Deacon, getting out his pipe and beginning to fill it. The huge room cannot get much smokier than it is already.