Jonathan finished his coffee and rose, promising to meet the others in Ben's room in half an hour to go over Karl's proposed route. Anna got up too; she had no intention of boring herself with the forthcoming planning session. Together they walked to the lobby where Jonathan picked up his mail. One envelope had neither stamp nor postmark, so he tore it open first and glanced at the note. It was an invitation to an intimate supper with the Greek merchant and his American wife. Mentioned also (in the wife's round, plump hand) was the fact that they had recently purchased a lot of paintings through Sotheby's. She would be delighted to have Jonathan glance them over and make an evaluation. She reminded him that he had once performed a similar service for her first husband.
Jonathan stepped to the desk and hastily wrote a note. He mentioned that evaluation was a professional, not social, activity for him. He added that he had to decline the offer of supper as he would be involved in preparations for the climb and, anyway, he was suffering from a debilitating hangnail.
Anna looked at him quizzically from the other side of the elevator car, her habitual expression of defensive amusement crinkling her eyes.
"That must have given you pleasure."
"You read over my shoulder?"
"Of course. You're very like my husband, you know."
"Would he have declined an invitation from those people?"
"Never! His self-image would have driven him to accept."
"Then how am I similar?"
"You also acted without choice. Your self-image forced you to decline." She paused at the door to her suite. "Would you care to come in for a moment?"
"I think not, thank you."
She shrugged. "As you wish. Opportunities to decline seem to abound for you today."
"If I read the signs correctly, I am not the one you've selected anyway."
She arched her eyebrows, but did not respond. "I assume it's Karl," he continued.
"And you also assume it is any concern of yours?"
"I have to climb with both of them. Be discreet."
"I thought you were usually paid for your evaluations." She entered her room and closed the door behind her.
Jonathan sat in a deep chair beside the window. He had just finished a smoke and was in full relax. On his lap was a small bundle of mail that had, from the evidence of superimposed postal hieroglyphics, been chasing him for some time. The rain, mixed now with dancing pebbles of hail, drilled against the window in treble timpani, and the light filling the room was greenish-gray and chill.
He went through his mail listlessly.
From the chairman of his department: "...and I'm pleased to be able to announce a considerable salary increase for the next academic year. Of course, it is impossible to reflect in dollars the value..."
Yeah, Yeah. Flip. Into the wastepaper basket.
A bill on the house. Flip.
"The administration has granted a mandate to form a special committee on student unrest, with particular emphasis on the task of channeling this social energy into productive and..."
Flip. He missed the basket. It was his practice never to serve on committees.
A bill on the house. Flip.
The journal was in dire need of his article on Lautrec. Flip.
The last was a postage-free official envelope from the American Embassy in Bern. It contained a photocopy of a cryptogram from Dragon.
"Message starts... Hemlock... break... Search has had no success in designating your objective... break... Alternate plan now in operation... break... Have placed details in the hands of Clement Pope... break... Plan will crystalize for you tomorrow... break... Can anything be done to decrease the attention the news media have given to your proposed climb... question mark... break... Miss Brown remains outside our cognizance... break... best regards... break, break... Message ends."
Flip.
Jonathan relaxed into the depths of his chair and watched the hail pebbles ricochet up from the windowsill. Two basso rolls of thunder caused his attention to strain through the clatter of rain and hail. He wanted very much to hear the heavy rumble of an avalanche on the face, because if avalanches did not scrub the face clean of amassed snow and poised rubble...
He would have to do something definite about Jemima.
It was all piling up on him.
He rolled another smoke.
What was Dragon's purpose in putting Pope in charge of designating the target? Despite his mannerisms of the B-movie detective, Pope had had no very distinguished record with Search before Dragon had elevated him to number two position in SS Division.
This sudden infliction of Pope upon the scene was disturbing, but there was no unraveling the serpentine patterns of check and double check, of distrust and redundancy that substituted for security in CII, so Jonathan put it out of his mind for the moment.
He slumped down in his chair and closed his eyes while the smoke loosened him up. It was the first time he had had to himself since meeting the other climbers, and he took the opportunity to recall how each had reacted. Nothing had indicated the least suspicion or fear. Good. He was fairly sure that Miles Mellough had not had a chance to contact the target before the affair in the desert, but he was relieved to have the added evidence of their behavior.
The jangle of his telephone intersected his thoughts.
"Guess where I'm calling from?"
"I don't know, Gem." He was surprised at the fatigued sound of his own voice.
"From Bern. How about that?"
"What are you doing in Bern?" He was both relieved and oddly distressed.
"I'm not in Bern. That's just it. I'm in my cafe, just a pleasant fifteen-minute walk from your hotel. Which you may take as an invitation, if you have a mind to."
Jonathan waited, assuming she would explain.
"They routed my call through Bern. Isn't that weird?"
"Not really." Jonathan had experience with Swiss telephone systems, which rival only the French for efficiency. "The whole thing is based on the assumption that the shortest distance between two points is a cube."
"Well, I thought it was weird."
He suspected she had no real reason for calling him, and he could sense a tone of helpless embarrassment in her voice.
"I'll try to see you tomorrow, Gem."
"OK. But if you feel an irresistible urge to drop in on me tonight, I'll try to arrange my schedule to make..." She gave up on it. Then, after a pause, "I love you, Jonathan." The ensuing silence begged for a response. When none came, she laughed without foundation. "I don't mean to drip all over you."
"I know you don't."
Her pickup was artificially gay. "Right then! Until tomorrow?"
"Until then." He held the line for a moment, hoping she would hang up first. When she did not, he placed the receiver gently onto its cradle, as though to soften the end of the conversation.
The sun glinted through a rift in the clouds, and hail and rain fell in silver diagonals through shafts of sunlight.
Two hours later the five men sat around a table in the middle of Ben's room. They leaned over a large photographic blowup of the Eigerwand, the corners of which were held down by rings of pitons. Karl traced with his finger a white line he had inked on the glossy surface.
Jonathan saw at a glance that the proposed route was a blend of the Sedlmayer/Mehringer approach and the classic path. It constituted a direct climb of the face, a linear attack that met the obstacles as they came with a minimum of traversing. It was almost the line a rock would take if it fell from the summit.
"We take the face here," Karl said, pointing to a spot three hundred meters left of the First Pillar, "and we go straight up to the Eigerwand Station. The climb is difficult—grade five, occasionally grade six—but it is possible."
"That first eight hundred feet will be wide open," Ben said in objection. And it was true that the first pitch offered no protection from the rock and ice that rattles down the face each morning when the touch of the sun melts the frost that has glued the loose rubble to the mountain through the night.