But they knew. The mountain rescuers knew. Because they were first in line to hear the really sinister stories.
Mrs. Marjorie Hatfield from Tintagel, England, for instance. Some twenty years ago she left Grimentz for a stroll in the mountains. Zigzagging her way up for less than half an hour, a cold mist came down the trail. One wrong turn and she was off course. Another and she was lost. Marjorie decided to keep descending in order to find her way back to the village, but after hours and hours, and much to her shock, she reached the edge of a ginormous bulging glacier. It wasn’t supposed to be there. She slipped and fell off a jutting patch of bedrock. The following day, hikers found her in the woods above Grimentz. Missing her eyes, she couldn’t stop screaming.
Cécile said, “I asked how they knew all this, and Benjamin said they must have deduced it from her screaming. With bandages on her empty eye sockets, she died five days later in a bed in H?pital du Valais, blind and still screaming. Apparently, her heart muscle tore between two gasps.”
Or Alexander Rüegsegger’s call, Cécile said, pausing only to bring her Cardinal draft to her lips. Her words vibrated in the semidark like some ancient, forgotten childhood fear.
“Benjamin got the call a few times, but he says he never gets used to it. The first time it happened, it was after dark and a storm had grounded all helicopters, but the radio at the base in Sion suddenly crackled and it was Rüegsegger. He said he wanted to return to the base but couldn’t find his way out of the valley. Over his voice, Benjamin said he could hear the chopper’s turbine. That and those squeaky disturbances, like he was on some wrong wavelength.”
Benjamin had told Rüegsegger he had to keep looking. That he’d eventually find a way out. Telling this to Cécile, he was all rattled. “You do what you can, you know?” he’d said. “Am I wrong to give a soul some hope?”
Everyone on the base knew that Alexander Rüegsegger and two of his coworkers had crashed their helicopter during a search flight on the Maudit back in ’78. The wreckage was never found. Benjamin said it hadn’t been the first incident, and no helicopters have apparently gone up since. Not theirs, not the Rega’s, and not Air Zermatt’s.
“He said if you disappear up there, you disappear for good.”
Except Nick hadn’t.
Benjamin Crettenand, he was the real hero of this story. After all, it was his decision to fly out that saved Nick.
“His coworkers asked him if he was sure,” Cécile said, “and Benjamin said they still had an hour’s daylight left. Didn’t they ever want to see with their own eyes what was up there? So they agreed to go as far as the col and not a single foot beyond. If Nick wasn’t there, they’d turn back. But he was. Even though they flew into a whiteout, they spotted him through a break in the clouds. First they thought he was dead. He was lying flat on his stomach and showed no sign of life. The fresh snow around him was infused with blood. He was still clasping his cell phone with his bare hand. And . . .” Cécile hesitated but pushed on. “According to Benjamin, there were crows’ footprints in the snow all over the place.”
The inn felt like it got twenty degrees colder.
“Anyway, they plucked Nick off the col and returned him to Lausanne, where Dr. Genet operated on him the same evening. Apparently he regained consciousness long enough to make it clear to them there was a second climber involved and that he’d fallen into a crevasse on the glacier. Still, Augustin Laber was considered a tragic death, not a missing person. Benjamin spoke with the Police Cantonale and they wrote up a report. The whole thing was fabricated, because no one flew back that evening. No one saw an ice axe on the edge of some crevasse. Contrary to regulations, no representative of the Police Cantonale ever accompanied them. Someone had looked the other way.”
As in any good story, Cécile had saved the best for last. As in any good story, I had to ask her if Benjamin had seen something strange up there.
“No,” she said. “But when he’d let the paramedics out to get Nick ready for transport and was hovering over the col, he claims the place had started to hypnotize him. Like he’d lost track of time. And when suddenly one of the paramedics’ voices came blaring through the headset, asking him what the hell he was doing, it turned out he’d strayed hundreds of yards into the valley. Hundreds of yards away from where he thought he was hovering.”
“No . . .”
“Yes. And he swore he’d made only small corrections with his stick and pedals, so he would stay put. He said nothing like that had ever happened to him before. He thinks something must have pulled him in. I asked if it could have been the wind, but he said wind doesn’t do that. And he added one more thing. One last thing, before he didn’t want to talk anymore.”
“What was that?”
“He said, ‘Now I know: all those stories are true. It’s a bad place, and no one can make me think otherwise.’ ”
6
Fade in to H?tel du Barrage, late evening. In the past hour, more people had gone out through the street door than in; the remaining dinner guests were now drinking schnapps. No more “O sole mio” from the kitchen, only the clatter of plates going into the dishwasher. In the semidark above the bar, the black bird shuffled quietly in its cage. Opposite me, Cécile Métrailler, secret agent, lit a cigarette, fingers trembling like she was playing invisible castanets.
And I said, “D’you believe him?” Staring at her, two empty beer glasses and smoke and darkness separating us, I said, “D’you believe all those stories?”
She sighed. “Maybe something strange really happened to him, or he thinks something strange happened to him. I wasn’t there, but I was there when he told me, and I’m convinced he believed he was telling the truth . . .”
Cécile, she was musing. Pulling up a smoke screen of words. Tempering the disclosure that she really did believe the story. I’ve seen it before; I’ve done it too.
“There’s just so much.” Probing the air with her fingers, face swimming in the half-light, she said, “So many incidents can be attributed to that place, if you start adding things up. And the implications are dead serious. People disappear up there. There are two parents in Germany who were lied to about what happened to their son. Imagine how they must feel.”
The barwoman came to our corner, asked if we wanted to order another drink. I saw Cécile hunch her shoulders when the woman leaned over and wiped the rings off the table, like she was caught leaking classified information. I smiled and said, “Two more of the same, please.”
When she was gone, I asked, “Okay, but what are we talking about, Cécile? If it’s all true, what are we dealing with here?”