EIGER: July 12
Ben snapped up from a shallow doze with the gasp of a man drowning in his own unconsciousness. The distant roar of avalanche bridged between his chaotic sleep and the bright, unreal hotel lobby. He blinked and looked around, trying to set himself in time and space. Three in the morning. Two rumpled reporters slept in chairs, sprawled loose-hinged like discarded mannikins. The night clerk transferred information from a list to file cards, his movements somnolent and automatic. The scratch of his pen carried across the room. When Ben rose from his chair, sweat adhered his buttocks and back to the plastic upholstery. The room was cool enough; it was the dreams that had sweated him.
He stretched the kinks out of his back. Thunder rumbled distantly, and the noise was trebled by the crisper sound of snowslide. He crossed the lobby and looked onto the deserted terrace, lifeless in the slanting light through the window, like a stage setting stored in the wings. It was no longer raining in the valley. All the storm had collected up in the concave amphitheatre of the Eigerwand. And even there it was losing its crescendo as a frigid high from the north drove it out. It would be clear by dawn and the face would be visible—if there were anything to be seen.
The elevator doors clattered open, the noise uncommonly loud because it was not buried in the ambient sound of the day. Ben turned and watched Anna walk toward him, her poise and posture betrayed by makeup that was thirty hours old.
She stood close to him, looking out the window. There had been no greetings. "The weather is clearing a little, it seems," she said.
"Yes." Ben did not feel like talking.
"I just heard that Jean-Paul had an accident."
"You just heard?"
She turned toward him and spoke with odd angry intensity. "Yes, I just heard it. From a young man I was with. Does that shock you?" She was bitter and punishing herself.
Ben continued to stare dully into the night. "I don't care who you fuck, lady."
She lowered her lashes and sighed on a tired intake of breath that fluttered. "Was Jean-Paul hurt badly?"
Ben inadvertently paused half a beat before answering. "No."
Anna examined his broad, heavily lined face. "You are lying, of course."
Another, more distant roll of thunder echoed from the mountain. Ben slapped the back of his neck and turned away from the window to cross the lobby. Anna followed.
Ben asked the desk clerk if he could get him a couple of bottles of beer. The clerk was effusive in his regrets, but at that hour there was no way within the rigid boundaries of his printed instructions that he could accommodate.
"I have brandy in my room," Anna offered.
"No thanks." Ben cocked his head and looked at her. "All right. Fine."
In the elevator Anna said, "You didn't answer when I said you were lying. Does that mean Jean-Paul's fall was serious?"
Fatigue from his long watch was seeping in and saturating his body. "I don't know," he admitted. "He moved funny after his fall. Not like something was broken, but—funny. I got the feeling he was hurt."
Anna unlocked the door to her room and walked in ahead of Ben, turning on the lights as she passed through. Ben paused for a moment before entering.
"Come in, Mr. Bowman. What is wrong?" She laughed dryly. "Oh, I see. You half expected to see the young man I mentioned." She poured out a liberal portion of brandy and returned to him with it. "No, Mr. Bowman. Never in the bed I share with my husband."
"You draw the line in funny places. Thanks." He downed the drink.
"I love Jean-Paul."
"Uh-huh."
"I did not say I was true to him physically; I said I love him. Some women have needs beyond the capacities of their men. Like alcoholics, they are to be pitied."
"I'm tired, lady."
"Do you think I am trying to seduce you?"
"I have testicles. There don't seem to be any other requirements."
Anna retreated into laughter. Then instantly she was serious. "They will get down alive, won't they?"
The brandy worked quickly up the dry wick of Ben's worn body. He had to struggle against relaxation. "I don't know. They may be..." He set down the glass. "Thanks. I'll see you around." He started for the door.
She finished the thought with atonic calm. "They may be dead already."
"It's possible."
After Ben left, Anna sat at her dressing table, idly lifting and dropping the cut glass stopper of a perfume bottle. She was at least forty.
The four figures were as motionless as the mountain they huddled against. Their clothing was stiff with a brittle crust of ice, just as the rock was glazed over with a shell of frozen rain and melt water. It was not yet dawn, but the saturation of night was diluting in the east. Jonathan could dimly make out the ice-scabbed folds of his waterproof trousers. He had been crouched over for hours, staring sightlessly into his lap, ever since the force of the storm had abated sufficiently to allow him to open his eyes. Despite the penetrating cold that fol-owed the storm, he had not moved a muscle. His cringing posture was exactly what it had been when the foehn struck, tucked up in as tight a ball as his stance permitted, offering the elements the smallest possible target.
It had broken upon them without warning, and it was not possible to reckon the time it had lasted—one interminable moment of terror and chaos compounded of driving rain and stinging hail, of tearing wind that lashed around them and wedged itself between man and rock, trying to drive them apart. There were blinding flashes and blind darkness, pain from clinging and numbness from the cold. But most of all there had been sound: the deafening crack of thunder close at hand, the persistent scream of the wind, the roar and clatter of the avalanche spilling to the right and left and bouncing in eccentric patterns over the outcropping of rock that protected them.
It was quiet now. The storm was gone.
The torrent of sensation had washed Jonathan's mind clean, and thought returned slowly and in rudimentary forms. He told himself in simple words that he was looking at his pants. Then he reasoned that they were covered with a crust of ice. Eventually, he interpreted the pain as cold. And only then, with doubt and wonder, but no excitement, he knew that he was alive. He must be.
The storm was over, but the dark and the cold only slowly retreated from his consciousness, and the transition from pain and storm to calm and cold was an imperceptible blend. His body and nerves remembered the fury, and his senses told him it had passed, but he could recall neither the end of the storm nor the beginning of the calm.
He moved his arm, and there was a noise, a tinkling clatter as his movement broke the crust of ice on his sleeve. He clenched and unclenched his fists and pressed his toes against the soles of his boots, forcing his thickened blood out to his extremities. The numbness phased into electric tingle, then into throbbing pain, but these were not unpleasant sensations because they were proofs of life. The dark had retreated enough for him to make out Karl's bowed and unmoving back a few feet from him, but he wasted no thought on Karl's condition; all his attention was focused on the returning sense of life within himself.
There was a sound just beneath him.
"Anderl?" Jonathan's voice was clogged and dry.
Anderl stirred tentatively, like a man checking to see if things were still working. His coating of ice shattered with his movement and tinkled down the face. "There was a storm last night." His voice was gruffly gay. "I imagine you noticed."
With the advance of dawn came a wind, persistent, dry, and very cold. Anderl squinted at his wrist altimeter. "It reads forty meters low," he announced matter-of-factly. Jonathan nodded. Forty meters low. That meant the barometric pressure was two points higher than normal. They were in a strong, cold high that might last any amount of time.