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Chapter 1: Otemma Glacier
May 1983
 
I had started out before dawn from Chanrion, following the glow of my headlamp up the long slope of the glacier. This should have been the fifth and final day of a solo tour from Chamonix to Zermatt, over the top of the Alps. I'd had sun for four days, thanks to high pressure over the North Sea, bringing cool dry air down from Scandinavia. The days had been warm, the nights freezing. My skis followed ankle-deep tracks worn in the refrozen surface.
 
But last night the wind had shifted into the southwest. It would drive moisture in from the Atlantic. I hoped to get up the glacier and over the pass to Zermaatt before sunset, because a storm would surely coast in on the warm, damp breeze. That wind pushed from behind, and kept me moving upward.
 
A couple of hours after dawn a cheery voice shouted "Track!" Obligingly, I stepped out of the ruts and looked back. A bright orange bedsheet came rushing up the rails, billowed before the wind.
 
"Track!" boomed the voice behind the spinnaker. This skier was sailing blind, trusting his skis to ride the grooves in the glacier.
 
"Ahoy!" I shouted.
 
"An Englishman!" The ice sailor reeled in a corner of his 'chute and peered around. The asymmetry overbalanced him, and in a moment he tumbled in a heap at my feet, crampons and axe clanging on his shovel in satisfying metallic finale.
 
"American," I said, and offered a hand. He grinned white against a brown and stubbled face, a face I had seen in photos. He grabbed my wrist and regained his feet.
 
"My name is Marco Plank, from Cervinia," he said.
 
"And mine is Samuel Ruykuyser, from New York," I said.
 
"It's not often you meet a New Yorker alone and defenseless, 3000 meters high amidst the mountain gods."
 
"It's not often you meet an Olympic silver medalist sprawled on his face on a flat and gentle glacier."
 
"Touché. You are moving not very fast for a New Yorker. If you pull out your bivouac sack I'll show you how to sail in this wind and you may buy me lunch at Vignettes."
 
And so we rode the incoming storm ten kilometers up the glacier, watching the clouds descend to cloak the Pigne d'Arolla on our left. The wind freshened, and the first flakes whirled about our ears as the immense stone-built refuge came in sight. It hugged a rock buttress and beetled out over the valley. We furled our sails, turned north and hustled the last mile with wind blasting cold and wet against the left cheek. By the time we reached the hut I could see only Marco's pack through the whirling snow, dim in the silvery light of a midday blizzard. The shovel clanged like a ship's bell with each stride.
 
Hut is the wrong word for the Vignettes refuge. The four-story fortress was built some eighty years ago for the comfort of alpinists climbing the Grand Combin and neighboring peaks. The cafeteria can feed one hundred hungry climbers through a five-day storm.
 
But through the early afternoon, at the onset of this blow, we had the place nearly to ourselves. We hung our packs in the entry hall, our parkas on hooks near a table, and unlaced our boots. Marco ordered soup, cheese and black bread. I paid for the meal in Swiss francs, and added a bottle of chianti.
 
"Solo alpinism is not healthy for city people," Marco observed as we munched. "Not healthy even compared to living in New York."
 
"Believe me, this is healthier than living in New York."
 
"There are many ways to die in these mountains, if you travel alone. In a crevasse, under the avalanche. One might sprain an ankle and die of hypothermia, or fall on his own axe."
 
"Let me tell you how you can die in New York. You can fall under a subway train or overdose on heroin. You can be stabbed in your own kitchen. You can be shot by a thug because you walked into a liquor store at the wrong moment, or shot by a cop because you walked out of a liquor store at the wrong moment."
 
Marco looked at me gravely. With his snow glasses off, his eyes were a startling blue against his black hair and deeply tanned face. He tore off a piece of bread, dipped it in the soup. "You," he said, "are some sort of refugee, no?"
 
I nodded.
 
Marco chewed his bread, and squirmed on the bench. "I think all of us who come out here alone must be fleeing from something down in the valley," he said. "Me, I can't race any longer because my knees have turned to mush." He rubbed his left knee. "And I can't stand to live in the same town with my father. So I come up here where things are simple, and I will decide what to do next, where to go with my life. And you have seen some horrors which you hope to exorcise. What do you do in New York?"
 
"I inject dye into the brains of live laboratory cats, then kill them and dissect them to see where the dye has gone along the ganglia. It's called brain mapping, and it will get me a doctorate in physiology some day. At night, to earn money, I collect human bodies. I drive an ambulance."
 
Marco shuddered. Perhaps it was another squirm. He straightened his legs under the table and I heard his knees pop. "You hate your life," he said. He pointed at the ring on my finger. "You take a holiday, you leave your wife below and come up here to the snow, where things are simple and you can decide what to do."
 
"Things are simple here," I agreed. "I plan to go back to New York where things are very complicated indeed." I twisted the wedding ring, the way Marco rubbed his knees. Carole was at home in Manhattan, I hoped.
 
"You have alternatives," Marco said. "No one has to live in New York."
 
"Someone has to live there." "Why? Healthy people leave those places. I've never met anyone from a big city who was not somehow neurotic. They keep each other that way. Anyone with sense lives where the air is clean."
 
"What if everyone left the cities? Who would run things?"
 
"Every person would then run his own life, and everyone would be happier."
 
"You live where the air is clean. Do you run your own life?"
 
"I will, very soon. I'm going to America. I'll find a job in a ski town, perhaps in Aspen. I'll be away from Cervinia."
 
"What's wrong with Cervinia?"
 
"History." And he told me his story.
 
Marco Plank was destined to be a great skier. Born to a German- speaking family in Santa Caterina, raised in Cervinia, he learned to ski in the shadow of the Matterhorn, and in the shadow of his father.
 
In the depths of the Depression, Guillermo Plank had been a hero of the fascisti, because he was the fastest skier in the world. In 1935 Willi Plank and his friends hiked to the top of a glacier and smoothed out a three-kilometer piste arrowing straight down toward the village. They intended to ski this line, flapping and tearing through the air, to see just how fast a man could go on skis. Willi carved his own oak skis, ten feet long, and bolted steel handles just in front of the toe irons. Bending forward and holding tight to the grips, he was clocked at 149 kilometers per hour, a world record, duly certified. Willi Plank was famous throughout the Alps. Mussolini sent a telegram.
 
Guillermo Plank and his brother Uberto were drafted into the Italian army. As a national hero, Willi spent his war training ski troops and needlessly guarding the Swiss border. Hubert fought in North Africa, and had the good sense to surrender to an American unit. He spent three years chopping cotton in a Louisiana POW camp.
 
When the war ended, ski racing resumed. Willi became world downhill champion. Hubert settled in New Orleans.
 
"Even when I became famous for my own skiing, it was very hard to be Willi's son," Marco said. "He was always very strong with me: I had to be the very best. When I came third in a race, he wanted to know why I was not second. When I was second, he asked why I did not win. When I won, he claimed credit for the wax."
 
"I've heard this story about the son of every famous man."
 
Marco put his hands on the table, took his weight upon them, and stood, straightening his knees carefully. He walked in place on the slate floor.
 
"Well, when you are 19 years old and have crashed at 130 kilometers an hour in downhill training, and your knees are ruined, but your father says you must continue to ski until you are champion, what do you do?"
 
"Quit. Go away. Drop out."
 
"The American way. I wasn't this smart, yet. My uncle Hubert brought me drugs from New Orleans to help the pain in my knees. I remained with the Squadra Corse Italiano. This was before all the drug testing they do now, of course." Marco paced. "I took Percodan and injected cortisone in my knees. I had to take what you call uppers to stay alert on the race course. My father knew about the drugs but pretended otherwise."
 
Marco sat, drummed a tattoo on the tabletop. The man couldn't sit still. He laughed. "So I was twenty years old, with the Olympics coming, and I was a drug addict."
 
"You won the silver medal in downhill."
 
"I did."
 
"Did it make your father happy?"
 
"It was only a silver medal. I retired from racing and went to university, in Milano."
 
"And the drugs?"
 
"I still needed the painkillers. Look at me. My knees stiffen if I sit still for ten minutes. It hurt even to study. The economics faculty is very rigorous. To pass exams I had to speed. Hubert always had something for me."
 
"So you are still an addict."
 
Marco smiled, bobbed his head from side to side in the gesture that means "What can you do?" He drew a pill bottle from his breast pocket and shook out a couple of different capsules.
 
"Percodan," he said, "and amphetamine." He swallowed the pills and drank wine. "It's not so bad if you can get what you need. Sometimes I fall asleep, or stay up all night. I'm not antisocial."
 
"Your father must understand."
 
"My father understands that the medal on his wall is gold." He slapped his chest to make an impressive hollow thud. "Big Willi. My father."
 
"Do you talk about this with your father?"
 
Marco narrowed his eyes and leaned across the table. "When I had completed a year at university, I went home. I had done very well in school, and was proud. But he would hardly talk. I said 'What must I do to earn your respect?'"
 
"'Do something no one has done before,' he said. He showed me a peak in the Dolomites, a needle that had never been climbed, he said.
 
'Do it, then we'll talk,' he said.
 
"So I climbed the damn needle. I went solo, and nearly died. It took three days. I slept two nights in a hammock nailed to the rock. On the second day I ran out of water. My knees hurt so badly I wept. On the afternoon of the third day I was almost hallucinating with thirst and drugs and pain, but I reached the summit.
 
"And there was a cairn, a little pile of stones someone had built. So I was not the first to climb there. Under the cairn was a tin tobacco box, containing a note. It said 'We reached this summit first, 7 July 1938.' It was signed by my father and Uncle Hubert.
 
"He knew what this would do to me. It was his way to say 'You will never be as fine a man as your father.'"
 
"Fascist swine," I said.
 
Marco stared at me, then guffawed. "Yes, indeed!" he roared. Then he sat and poured wine into both glasses. "Yes, indeed. Now you tell me a story."
 
"This happened last summer," I said. "Hot night, miserable muggy New York weather, no wind, not a breath. Night shift is eleven to seven in the morning, and if it's a quiet weekday night I can get some of my lab notes typed. Sometimes you can go two hours without a call. Fridays and Saturdays are never quiet. You get parties, drunks on the streets, car wrecks, shootings.
 
"This was a weeknight, a slow one. About two o'clock we get a call on 134th Street, near the tracks. One of those abandoned tenements, partly burned out, windows boarded up. We're teamed two to a van. I'm an emergency medical technician, I drive the van, and I've got a nurse practitioner with me, a real smart lady named Cora Wonder. That's a real American name. She's in charge. Cora's always in charge, she's a big no-shit character who takes no crap off the neighborhood jerks we run into. Tough woman."
 
Marco listened intently, but his hands moved constantly -- he laced and unlaced his fingers, tapped quietly on the table, rubbed his knees, clenched a fist. I stopped to watch the hands.
 
"Sorry," he said. "I can't help it." He sat on his hands, shrugged. "Go on."
 
"Dispatcher says to look at a woman on the second floor, not breathing. We figure it'll be an overdose. We grab our gear and flashlights and run up, not thinking about who called this in. I mean, it's an abandoned building, no lights, no phones, no cops around. The whole deal says shooting gallery. We just want to find the patient. Some guy at the top of the stairs yells 'In here!' We follow him, I'm in the lead hauling this box of stuff, Cora's storming up the stairs behind me.
 
"I follow the guy into an apartment and someone clubs me down from behind. Then they start kicking me. I'm out cold. I wake up in the hospital, all bandaged up, hurting all over.
 
"Cora's dead. They beat the shit out of her, gagged her with a rubber glove and she choked to death.
 
"These guys stole the van, looking for drugs. Call an ambulance, it's got to have drug in it, right?"
 
Marco's hands traced the grain of the tabletop. "Were they captured?" he said.
 
"How? I never saw them. I had concussion, busted ribs, a broken arm. I'm lucky to be alive. Two hours after we went out, the office finally called the cops to look for us."
 
"And you went back to that job?"
 
"Yeah. I went out and bought a gun. I have a carry permit and I never get out of the van without it."
 
"After something like that, I'd leave the city."
 
"My wife says not until I finish my degree."
 
"Now what did I say about city people and neurosis?" Marco said. He slammed an open palm on the table, thunderously. "What reward is there for such a life? What reward for your wife? You are in as deep as I am, friend. And if you don't get out you will surely die."