“It looks more like a stab wound.”
I stared at her.
“Sorry, it sounds bad . . . but it looks like someone stabbed him in the cheek with a knife, so deep that it came out the other cheek. And then wrenched it forward with force.”
A horrible image popped up in my head: Nick, not bleeding to death, but single-footedly staggering down a glacier to a spot where his phone got a signal so he could call a chopper, the icy wind whistling through the hole in his face. It gave me such a jolt I almost kicked over the table.
“But wouldn’t Dr. Genet have noticed that?” I said with difficulty.
“I talked about it with Dr. Genet.”
“So what did he say?”
“He said, at first glance, Nick’s wounds don’t tally with what the mountain rescue said happened to him, but they could. Rocks can be awfully sharp. Nick’s head would have had to be turned sideways, and the rock would have had to be shaped more like a tent peg . . . but it’s possible. Another scenario, according to him, is that Nick’s ice axe could have done it when he fell. Also improbable, but not impossible.” Cécile flushed and played with her cappuccino spoon. “I said he must be crazy if he believed that.”
“Really? What did he say?”
She looked at me intently. “He said if I didn’t want to lose my job, I should keep my mouth shut and not ask any questions.”
I whistled. “Wow. Is he always such a jerk?”
“No, and that’s what’s strange. Dr. Genet is a really friendly, competent surgeon. And he has a point when he says that even if something is improbable, you shouldn’t disregard it as a theory, as long as there aren’t any better explanations. It was high up in the mountains and his friend really did fall into a crevasse. The rescue team found his axe next to the opening, and they weren’t roped together, so he was probably alone then. Weather conditions were bad. As long as Nick doesn’t claim otherwise, there’s no reason to assume that what happened to him wasn’t an accident. And that Augustin had wanted to get help.”
“But Nick has claimed otherwise.”
“Right. And that brings me back to the nature of his wounds. I know what a stab wound looks like, Sam.”
I thought, And I didn’t buy his story.
My admiration for Cécile Métrailler was growing. She’d risked her job by meeting me here. I thought she had the right to know what Nick’s last note said, so I took the shreds out of my pocket, flattened them, and spread them out on the table. Torn, ripped like his face. Another SOS mosaic.
“Je crains de devenir fou” is French for “Scared I’m going crazy.”
“Fuir en hurlant” is French for “Run away screaming.”
“But why would he say that?” I asked. “If they got robbed or if someone meant to hurt them, why is he still so scared?”
And Cécile’s face all awkward, like I was the last person in the world to understand.
“Because what you say doesn’t make sense,” she sighed. “They weren’t robbed, Sam. Nick’s passport and wallet were still in his backpack. These are the Swiss Alps, not the Caucasus. Go higher than 10,000 feet and you only come across other mountain climbers, not muggers. And according to Air-Glaciers, they were in a totally remote area where climbers usually don’t go. They didn’t report any sightings of other climbers in the area where they found Nick.” Cécile had trouble looking at me, but she didn’t give up now, took my hand. “Do you understand what I’m getting at? If there was violence, it had to have been between them.”
Shit.
“The nurses are all whispering about it, but no one dares to say something out loud. I thought you should know.”
Augustin did it. Something happened up there and it was Augustin who did it. Augustin had mutilated Nick.
It suddenly hit me. Cold like a handful of ice. Chilly like whispers from a crevasse.
It was Augustin . . . but Augustin was dead.
You’d run away screaming if you . . .
If you found out what I did.
So I sat there, sweating behind my shades, dripping next to an undrunk iced mochaccino in a country I didn’t want to be in, a country that, unlike the rest of the world, had no real horizon—only rows of ragged teeth stretching out into infinity. My own Invisible Man in the hospital, plugged into an IV pole, yellow and red juices leaking in and out of him, and me, scared, conspiracy-theory scared, that he had something terrible to answer for.
I slid my chair back and said I had to go.
7
Faster than a speeding bullet to the CHUV, but when I stormed into Nick’s room, he was asleep. I called the day nurse, insisted she check his vital signs. Charmed by my concern, she assured me he was perfectly stable. That did nothing to soothe me, but I realized the fever afflicting him was raging only in his conscience. I stayed by his bed way into late afternoon, channel-zapping on mute between Swiss infomercials for Ab Wonders, Flex Belts, and Thighmasters till I almost OD’d on oiled six-packs. Pretty faces, laughing faces, plastic faces, they look the same everywhere.
Zapping through a thousand possible scenarios in my head, always coming back to one: self-defense.
Will you stay with me if my face is gone? Will you stay with me if I murdered someone?
It had to have been self-defense. In-your-face evidence. Like, literally. Whatever the reason, things got terribly out of hand up there—cabin fever, mountain madness, whatever—and Augustin must have gone at Nick with some outdoor knife. Why? Dunno. Didn’t matter. Nick, seriously wounded, had shoved him off. They were somewhere high. Ice tower. Glacial basin. Whatever the hell it looked like up there. Augustin fell. A one-way express ticket to reincarnation.
Not the kind of copy you hand in to Lonely Planet about your latest adventure, not the review you write for Tripadvisor sharing your experiences of the Val d’Anniviers.
Not what you tell the Police Cantonale or even your boyfriend.
Body Xtremes, Total Gyms, and Power Crunchers—ever more perfect, laughing faces living in perfect bubbles. Zap and they burst; zap and they’re replaced. Zap, and Nick’s perfect face would never laugh again. Nick’s perfect smile slashed away by the memory of what he’d done. How could I’ve been so stupid? Why hadn’t I seen it right away? Why hadn’t I conveyed to him that he didn’t have to face this alone?
Rather than distancing me from him, knowing what he did brought on a renewed determination to stand by his side. Immoral? Maybe. But this was something I could live with. Anything’s better than the futility of an accident. Hell, even if it was something worse than self-defense, how could I ever desert him? Nick, my Nick, scared shitless cuz he was responsible for someone’s death. That’s why he hadn’t said anything. And he didn’t need to, cuz the evidence was buried in a crevasse, deep-frozen for the next ten thousand years.
By the time anyone might discover the ice mummy, it wouldn’t be forensic investigation, just an archeological curiosity.
Augustin: ?tzi the Iceman 2.0.
8