Collision of Evil (2 page)

Charles stopped for a moment to check his bearings. The hotel was out of sight and the path had taken him higher, into rocky meadowland flush with high grass. A herd of cows grazed nearby, noting his presence in their bovine way, but otherwise paying him no heed. Charles unclipped his water bottle and indulged in a long drink while observing that the sky had now darkened. Purple cloud banks were moving in silently, as if hoping to cover the sun by stealth. For a second Charles considered cutting short his trek and returning to the hotel, but he reasoned that the clouds might pass, and he did not want to spend the afternoon sipping beer in the hotel bar. Even if it rained, he concluded, that wouldn’t kill him.

By one in the afternoon, it was obvious that the ascent was taking longer than anticipated due to the rough, untraveled route. Although the terrain remained open ground with a scattering of
boulders, the grade was steep enough that his calves and ankles ached. More troubling was that the blue skies of morning had now been entirely vanquished and the clouds were of a brooding gun metal hue. Still, Charles thought, there might be a hut up ahead where he could wait out the storm. He moved on.

An hour later the first drops of rain pelted down with force. Within minutes the storm intensified, the water turning to hail, driven by a sudden wind and accompanied by a drop in temperature. “Shit” Charles muttered as he pulled a crumpled Boston Red Sox baseball cap from his backpack. He noted through waves of hail that the meadows gave way to a tree line up ahead, offering a prospect of protection. Breathing in deeply, he broke into a trot, skidding from time to time on the slick grass beneath his feet. He passed through the first row of pine trees and felt the cushioning carpet of needles under his boots. The assault of hail and rain diminished, absorbed by the tangle of branches above him.

It was dark in the woods. The sky, stripped of sun by the storm, and the thick forest filtered away most of the remaining light, and color was reduced to somber greens and browns. Leaning against the bark of a large tree, Charles pulled a Corny energy bar from his jeans and consumed it in slow bites while considering what to do. Before he finished with the snack, the first flash of lightning and the jolting report of thunder nearly threw him to the ground. The blast had struck somewhere very close, and he heard the unmistakable sound of shearing timber. It occurred to him that he was now in exactly the wrong place during a thunderstorm, and he felt a knot tighten in his stomach.

Searching for better shelter, Charles saw an outcropping of gray stone up ahead through the sentinel ranks of the trees. He forced his aching legs into motion and moved toward the rocks, slipped, and fell hard into the pine needles below, the contents of his backpack slamming into his spine. With effort, he raised himself from the dank surface and launched again toward the gray mass in front of him. Three minutes later he was at the outcropping and saw that its rough surface was the exposed base of the massif itself, thrusting
up from the earth and forming an alpine peak high above. The stone was slick, rivulets of water cascading down from the torrent.

Another flash seared his eyes, the tear of a thunderclap reverberating off the rock before him. Charles pitched forward, cutting his cheek against the jagged stone. He was aware of his heart pumping heavily in his chest. The sting of the cold water in his eyes blurred his vision, and he grasped at the wall of stone with both hands, edging along it in a crab walk, hoping to find a crevice in its surface affording better shelter. An angry gust of wind stripped off his cap, but he did not try to retrieve it and continued following the stone outcropping like a blind man, his palms starting to bleed as they ran across the sharp, uneven surface.

He was suddenly aware that there was no longer a surface under his hands; the massif sheared away from him at a sharp angle. He moved to follow its contour again, crashing loudly through a maze of brush and fallen branches. A crevice he thought, just as he had hoped. He stumbled over loose slate and fell forward with enough force to drive the air from his lungs. Charles pulled himself up to a kneeling position. It was then that he was aware that it was no longer raining. At least, not raining on him. The sound of the storm was behind him but he was protected from its assault. Glancing up he saw darkness and understood that he had found a cave, as if a hole had been punched into the expanse of dolomite.

As his eyes focused, he was able to make out that his refuge was narrow but appeared deep. He twisted around and saw the forest and the cave entrance a foot or so behind him. He felt the talons of fear loosen their grip and he knew that he was safe from the elements; he could wait out the storm and return to the hotel after it had passed. He pulled the backpack off his shoulders and settled it at his knees, digging at it until he located the small plastic flashlight. Flicking it on, he played the beam of light around him.

He was in a rock arch, the natural ceiling perhaps seven feet above his head. The cave floor consisted of a scattering of pine needles blown in over time from the forest and a surface of pungent earth, its primordial smell filling his nostrils. Edging the light ahead
of him he saw that the cave was indeed narrow but deep, disappearing into the distance. He left his backpack where it had dropped and decided to see how far the cave went; he might as well explore his find while the storm raged on. The walls were not uniform, at intervals bulging and receding from his path, but the passage remained sufficiently broad to permit him to navigate its length. He was surprised that after five minutes of walking the cave debouched into a rough chamber perhaps twenty feet across and fifty feet deep. But the pale, steady glare of his flashlight revealed more. At first, he was not certain what he was looking at.

A series of cubic shapes, perfect squares, were stacked across the chamber. Charles finally realized that the forms he was staring at were crates, their wooden planks heavy with dust. On some of the crates Charles could distinguish black stenciled numbers beneath the veneer of grime.
What have we here, deep in an alpine fastness
, he wondered as he moved forward to investigate, the recent perils of the storm forgotten.

Like a temper tantrum that had spent itself, the mountain thunderstorm hurled down the last of its fury before sputtering into a soft shower, the mass of clouds gradually thinning and drifting off. It was nearly dusk and such vestigial light as there was promised to be fleeting. The pine trees cast long shadows across the grasses and the rich greens of the alpine meadows were rendered richer still, enhanced by the magical, deep golden light of a summer’s afternoon in noble decline. Somewhere, far below the craggy dolomite peaks, a cowbell rang as its charge meandered to a rude hut in the valley to spend its night.

Pushing aside the chaos of fallen branches and brush that had concealed the mouth of the cave, Charles emerged from his shelter, breathed deeply of the cold post-storm mountain air, and retraced his path back through the somber stand of pines, the woods alive with the sound of falling drops of water. The scent of spruce was overwhelming and Charles found it pleasant after the stale, claustrophobic
air of the cavern. He stopped and noted his surroundings carefully, consulting his map. He would need to come back here to what he had discovered, and did not want to risk losing the location. Satisfied that he could find the cave again, Charles moved ahead, picking his way through the woods in the fading light. After twenty minutes of hiking, he could detect the brighter green of the meadow in the distance. He breathed easier and concluded that even if darkness descended before he reached the hotel, he should have no trouble navigating through the fields with the aid of his flashlight. The worst was behind him.

He continued to walk downward, the incline steep enough to cause him to shift his weight backward to avoid pitching forward. The nocturnal panorama of the valley spread out around him now and the first stars crept into a sky still not entirely surrendered to darkness. He found the path that had lead him from the valley floor and knew that he had simply to follow it down until he arrived at the hotel. Just a matter of one step at a time. A crudely erected timber fence embraced the meadow near the path and he moved to it, leaning his weight against the wood for a moment of rest before continuing on. He slipped off his backpack and indulgently stretched his taut muscles.

The force of the first blow was massive, sufficient to drive him to his knees. The blow caught him hard at the back of the head and he was strangely conscious of a resounding crack as his skull lost integrity. He was in the process of trying to turn and understand what was happening when the second assault caught him full between the shoulder blades, slamming him forward into the fence, the rough wood tearing his cheeks and lips. He felt a sticky tide of warmth cover his back and extend over his ribcage and he knew that it was his own blood. He felt oddly detached but fought to remain conscious and to understand. His limbs were shaking uncontrollably now, but he struggled to push himself up to see his attacker. The third blow ended that attempt with shattering finality, a sharpened edge of metal cleaving through Charles’s thick dark hair, ripping
scalp tissue and sundering his skull. A mist of blood sprayed from the head wound, a strip of pulsing brain tissue revealed and steaming in the cold alpine air. His final feeling, no longer fully sentient as his mind shut down, was of overwhelming confusion. That he was experiencing his own death he did comprehend, the terror of its breathtaking suddenness combining with an equal amount of wonder as to why it was happening at all.

That a guest had not returned to his lodgings that night was not noted by the hotel staff that, in the European fashion, treated customers with both discretion and distance. The corpse might have gone undiscovered for days given its solitary location, had it not been for the passing of a
Bergwacht
climber who had decided to check the high meadows to see if lightning strikes from the storm had hit any cows.

Indeed, the man at first thought that Charles’s body, seen initially from a distance, was a calf, but wondered at the adjacent blue splash of color from what later was discovered to be a backpack. Proximity having clarified his initial error, the
Bergwacht
worker vomited into the tall grass near where the body lay. After some minutes of heavy breathing, he pulled a cell phone from his windbreaker and had the operator connect him with the Bavarian police. The police responded with celerity, their four-wheel-drive Mercedes wagon climbing into the meadow twenty minutes later, flashing blue lights dwarfed against the majestic background of the mountains.

After several paper cups of coffee at the scene offered by the policemen, the
Bergwacht
volunteer was permitted to return home, having told his tale many times, and now free to deliver its morbid details yet again to a circle of fascinated friends who would buy him rounds of beer in exchange. Charles’s wallet was in a pocket of his jeans and made identification a simple affair. It was short work to determine that he had been a guest at the nearby Hotel Alpenhof and his plane ticket was soon after found in the room. A list of scrawled telephone numbers in his pocket organizer, also found in
the room, made next of kin notification a minor task. At the top of Charles Hirter’s telephone list was the name of one Robert Hirter.

As the deceased was an American, the local police decided to have one of their men with high-school-level English make the call to Robert Hirter and to the nearest U.S. consulate, which was in Munich. The “death of a U.S. citizen” notification to a consular official was concluded with cool dispatch on both ends, but the policeman knew that notifying a relative of such an unanticipated loss was trickier. The six-hour difference in time zones between Bavaria and the East Coast meant that Robert Hirter was awakened from sleep at four in the morning.

For a moment, it was apparent to the policeman that Robert Hirter did not understand the phrase “We have find your brother Charles who it is sorry for us to say now is dead.” The policeman’s efforts were quickly simplified when Robert Hirter began asking questions in very passable German. The policeman gently, politely provided what details he thought appropriate, determined that his interlocutor was the older brother of the murder victim, and advised him how best to journey to Gamsdorf to claim the remains and arrange for their transport to the United States. When, after a few minutes, Robert Hirter stopped asking questions and began to sob, the policeman understood that the conversation was at an end.

Dulles Airport and the Virginia suburbs surrounding Washington, D.C., fell away rapidly, the distinctive patterns of housing developments and other visual details framed by the small double-paned window of the passenger plane. In a few minutes there was no trace of solid land at all, only the soundless expanse of the Atlantic, shimmering dull silver in the subdued light of an overcast afternoon. The ocean, too, lost detail as the aircraft gained elevation until there was nothing but clouds pressing close and gray against the gently humming fuselage.

The time-zone difference meant that Robert Hirter would fly to Munich through the night, arriving in early morning, the unseen crossing of the sea rendered banal by bad films and worse food, plastic knives that could not cut and plastic forks that could not stab. The events of 2001 had made air travel safer by placing passengers in the position of self-destructive patients in a mental asylum.
A necessary response to brutal times
, Robert thought. The nature of brutality had occupied him considerably in the day it had taken to find his passport and arrange his flight. The Bavarian policeman had been quite clear on the point that his brother Charles had been murdered.