Dark Places

2. Hear Ye, Hear Ye

We went back to the two Gunsang lodges, rickety wood-and-stone buildings that faced off across the trail like sumo wrestlers waiting for the signal to begin. There was nothing there; no pack, no people, nothing but the bored proprietors waiting for the rest of the day's batch of lodgers. Gavin and I were the first and so far only trekkers to stop here for the night. Gunsang wasn't on the Lonely Planet Trail, so the vast majority went from Manang straight to Letdar without stopping. The only reason we had stopped was because I felt sick and wasn't eager to go up another thousand feet. And because we both appreciated that it wasn't on the Lonely Planet Trail.
   We asked the lodge owners, both stout Nepali women with impassive faces, who like all lodge owners spoke enough broken English to communicate. No Canada-man had stayed in Gunsang last night; just a group of Dutch in one lodge, and the usual melange in the other, one German man, one French woman, and a Kiwi couple. Conclusion: either the dead man was coming from the other direction, downhill from Letdar to Manang, or he had left Manang much earlier than Gavin and I. Which was entirely possible. We had begun the day's trek well after first light.
   We left the lodges and stood on the trail between them. The midday clouds were thick above Annapurna and its heavenly vista was almost entirely concealed. In the distance we could see a pair of trekkers approaching from below.
   "Right," Gavin said. "I guess it's pretty obvious what we do."
   "Split up?" I asked.
   "Ja," he said. "One of us goes to Manang and tells the police. In case they can't identify him, the other goes to Letdar and tries to find out who he was."
   "Sounds good," I said. "I'll go to Letdar." There was no sensible reason for me to be the one to go there; I just didn't want to deal with the police. Besides, in the real world, Gavin was a legal-aid advocate for poor South Africans. This bearer-of-bad-news thing was right up his alley.
   He looked at me narrowly. "You sure? I thought you had AMS."
   I shook my head. "I feel fine now. Actually I feel great."
   "Izzit?" Gavin asked, a South African expression that basically translated to really? "Well, it's an ill wind. All right. You think you can get there and back to Manang before sunset?"
   I thought it over. If I left my pack here I'd make good time. After nine days of carrying forty pounds on my back, walking unencumbered felt almost like flying. On the other hand, it was already midday, who knew how long I'd have to stay in Letdar, and up here the sun dropped like a stone.
   "I can get back to Manang tonight," I said. "Probably late night, but that's no problem."
   Gavin shook his head. "I don't think you should do that."
   "Don't see why not," I said. "I've got plenty of layers with me, and I'm not about to get lost, the stars and moon are so damn bright up here you can practically read a news—"
   "That's not what I mean," he interrupted.
   "Then what do you mean?"
   "I mean I'd hate for the body count to increase at your expense."
   "Oh," I said, and then "oh," again. It hadn't even occurred to me in a personal-risk way that there was a bona fide murderer out there who might not appreciate our attempts to identify the victim and find out what had happened to him. I managed a wavering grin and said "Right. Self-preservation being my personal specialty, I'll spend the evening in cosmopolitan Letdar."
   "Right," he said. "See you tomorrow." And we went our separate ways.

* * *

   My heels burned, my knees ached, my back itched, but I had grown accustomed to my various agonies, and God knew I had a lot to think about. The trail wound upwards, ever upwards, through fields of lichen and bramble, hugging the bottom of a massive slope of jagged red rock. The notion of some day going downhill felt like a myth. At one point a faint subtrail separated itself and veered nearly straight up that slope, so steep that I doubted even the surefooted mules and horses of Nepal could navigate it. I wondered where it went. All the way to Tibet, probably. We were less than twenty miles from that border.
   It was strange, trekking on my own. For the first time I began to understand just how far from civilization I had come. The constant presence of other Westerners, the nights spent in halfway civilized lodges with hot water and hot food, and the well-marked trail had made it very easy to think of the trek as just another hike. In fact this was one of the most remote places I had ever been. I was a seven-day walk from the nearest road, seven days of much tougher hiking than I had expected, and I would soon be higher above sea level than any place in North America outside of a few Alaskan peaks. The Coke bottles in the lodges up here had Chinese characters on them, because it was cheaper to smuggle them in on yaks from Tibet than to carry them up from Kathmandu.
   I was surrounded by some of the world's highest mountains, but clouds had drawn in and I could not see above the snowline. These weren't the typical mountain clouds, the vapor that forms above snowcapped peaks after the sun has heated them and then expands throughout the day, so that you only get the postcard views for the first hour or two after dawn. These were storm clouds. I wondered if there was snow on the Thorung La, the narrow pass that marked the apogee of our trek. More than a few inches and they shut the pass down. Maybe the dead man didn't need us; maybe his murderer would be trapped by the fickle Nepali weather.
   It was just like Laura. Just like Laura's murder in Limbe, Cameroon. That was unbelievable. What were the odds? The odds were astronomical. I felt like there was something going on, something unexplained, something more mysterious than a single murder. If only I had a good conspiracy theory to hang my hat on. But it was pure chance that we had decided to wander around that brokedown abandoned village, pure chance that we had stumbled on that slumped corpse.
   I wished we hadn't. For two years now I had been trying to drive the memory of Laura out of my mind, or if that was impossible, at least trap it in a cage and tame it. And now, when I felt I was so close, when on good days I could look at the pictures of her I kept buried in my closet without tears clogging my eyes, there was this reminder of how her body had looked on the black sand of Mile Six Beach. It had taken months, after we had found her there, before I could close my eyes without that sight superimposed on my eyelids.
   I forced myself to think of something else, anything else. I tried to imagine what had happened to that nameless Canadian victim. There hadn't been a struggle. He must have been ambushed from behind. Or maybe it was somebody he knew. And somebody either very strong or swinging something very heavy, from the way his skull had nearly cracked open like an egg.
   And then the victim had sat down neatly with his back to the wall, the way we had found him? That didn't seem likely. Toppling over seemed more likely. The killer must have dragged him over to the wall, arranged the body. I couldn't remember seeing any bloodstains on the ground. On the other hand I couldn't remember looking for any either. It couldn't have been far away from where he was found though. And then the knives, I was somehow convinced that they must have come last, some kind of horrifically depraved signature. Just like the knives in Laura's eyes.
   Could it be the same person? Obviously it couldn't be. Obviously it didn't make any sense that I, of all the people in the world, should just happen to follow the same killer's trail twice, two years apart, on two different continents. The very notion was ridiculous, was completely implausible, was… unscientific. But I couldn't help holding it up in my mind and turning it around. Couldn't help wondering if I would recognize any of the faces in Letdar.
   And what would I do if I did? That was the real question. What would I do?

* * *

   Burdened by my pack and my contemplation, I didn't get to Letdar until about an hour before sunset. It wasn't a village, just a collection of a dozen lodges. Two more were under construction, a backbreaking proposition up here near the vegetation line. Every plank, every brick, every pot and pan had to be carried up here on the backs of prematurely wizened Nepali porters. I wondered if they resented the white tourists whose presence led to their toil, or whether they welcomed the work. Probably no, to both. Probably they didn't think about us at all; they just shouldered the loads and unquestioningly took them where they were told to go.
   Nearly every bed was already occupied, which explained why new lodges were under construction. Adam Smith's invisible hand at work. I got a wooden bed frame, sans mattress, in a dormitory room with five others at the Churi Lattar Lodge. The dinner hour had just begun, and I was famished, but I knew I had to get to all the lodges before night fell and all the trekkers retired to their sleeping bags. I wished, for neither the first nor the last time, that Gavin had not been overcome by the desire to explore that abandoned village.
   It had gotten cold enough that nearly everyone was in the common room, seated around low wooden tables, eating garlic noodle soup and drinking lemon tea, waiting for their dinner orders to emerge in random order from the kitchen. I put an order in for dhal baat, knowing it would be at least an hour. Then I walked to the doorway and looked around at the assembled masses. About thirty people, various groups, various languages. Usually common rooms roared with conversation, but altitude sickness and sheer exhaustion had drained a lot of the joie de vivre from this crowd. Which made my job easier. But not easy. I had always hated public speaking, always hated calling attention to myself in front of strangers. Still. A man had died, and I had a job to do, and that had to trump my stage fright.
   I took an empty teacup and a sugar spoon and banged the spoon against the teacup. It made a hollow empty sound that did not carry. I took another empty teacup and clashed the two cups together as hard as I dared, and this worked much better. A hush fell over the room and thirty pairs of confused, expectant, and irritated eyes turned towards me.
   "Listen," I said, trying to project, plowing ahead before I had a chance to get embarrassed and tongue-tied. "This is important. My friend and I found a dead body today, back in Gunsang. A trekker. We're pretty sure he's Canadian, we're pretty sure he died today, and we're pretty sure that he was murdered."
   There was a long pause during which I feared irrationally that they would laugh at me and turn away; and then a half-dozen voices asked, with varying accents, "Murdered?"
   "Murdered," I repeated. The room had fallen silent and they were staring at me with utter fascination. "His pack is gone, his ID is gone, and his watch is gone. My friend has gone back to Manang, to the police. We don't have any idea who the dead man is. What I want to know is if any of you knew him."
   "Tell us what he looks like," a burly German demanded.
   "Dark hair," I said. "He was wearing a blue jacket from a Canadian store, a green wool sweater, and jeans."
   Silence. I looked around the room, really looked, for the first time. To no avail. No faces I recognized, no guilty or shifty expressions, nothing but genuine surprise. A few expressions of sympathy, or dismay… but mostly fascination. They wanted to hear more, I could tell, but they had nothing to add.
   "All right," I told the crowd. "I'm going to go ask at the other lodges. If any of your friends are sick or sleeping, ask them when you can. I'm staying here tonight. And do me a favour, if dhal baat comes out for dormitory bed six before I get back, save it for me."
   The crowd stared at me expectantly. I searched for a pithy end to my speech and came up with "Thanks. I'll be back later."
   Exit, stage center, out through the door. And for once I hadn't felt my usual awkwardness and embarrassment when talking to a crowd. Because I knew I had them in the palm of my hand. Nobody was going to catcall a dramatic revelation of Murder On The Trail.
   For some reason I was angry with the people in the lodge, and the way they had reacted. A man was dead, a man who had walked the same trail they had for the last week, and there had been no sympathy, no grief, no cries of "that's awful!", no voices volunteering to help in any way they could. Just amazement, fascination. As if it was part of the scheduled entertainment. Another notch on their travel belt, that they had walked with a murdered man. Another story for their friends when they returned to their safe European homes. He wasn't really a dead man to them; he was another element in their life-enriching trip, just another Travel Experience, like an animatron on a Disney ride.
   And it wasn't just them. I felt some of that myself. Would I have reacted so casually, so clinically, if I had found a dead man with knives in his eyes back in California or Canada? Like hell I would have. But I was here on an adventure. Until today a safe, tame, communal adventure, but an adventure nonetheless, and I was treating the murdered man as just another episode in my journey. I felt like I had co-opted his death, that it was no longer his own.

* * *

   It was in the seventh lodge, after I had described the dead man for the seventh time, that the silence was broken by a voice from the back. "We know someone like that," the voice said, an Australian voice, its tone alarmed. "His name is Stanley. We were expecting him here but he never showed up."
   The voice belonged to a woman named Abigail who was traveling with a German man named Christian and a younger Aussie girl named Madeleine. I sat down next to them. The rest of the room listened expectantly.
   "What happened?" Abigail asked, and she, at least, was genuinely upset. I told her most of the story, leaving out any mention of the knives.
   "Fucking hell," Madeleine said. "God. I can't believe it. I can't believe I was traveling with someone who was murdered today."
   "Can you tell me anything about him?" I asked them. "I'm going back to Manang tomorrow to talk to the police. His last name?"
   They looked at each other, tried to call it to mind. Christian nodded abruptly. "Goebel," he said. "His last name is Goebel. I saw it at the checkpoint in Chame." Every day or two on the trail we had to sign in at a police or Annapurna Conservation Area checkpoint, mostly to keep track of trekkers who got lost or stumbled off cliffs. "It's a German name, that's why I remember."
   Stanley Goebel. The dead man had a name.
   "We met him in Pisang," Abigail said. "Three days ago. He was Canadian, yeah. He was traveling on his own. I don't know. He seemed like a good bloke. He worked in an auto factory somewhere near Toronto. He was only in Nepal for a month."
   "He didn't have much money," Madeleine added.
   They fell silent. They didn't have anything else to add. I grew irrationally angry again, this time at the paucity of their epitaph. He seemed like a good bloke. He didn't have much money. That was it? That was all they had to say? Abigail and Christian at least seemed upset. Madeleine watched me with that awful wide-eyed fascination.
   "All right," I said. "I'm staying at the Churi Lattar. If you think of anything else, could you come and let me know?" I sounded to myself like a detective on Homicide: Life On The Street. I should give them my card, that was what Pembleton and Bayliss did. "I'm going to go check the other lodges, to see if anyone else knows anything."
   And to get away from here, because no offense, I know we only just met, but I can't stand your company any more.
   And, maybe, to see if I recognize anyone in the other lodges.
   But I did not recognize anyone, and nobody else knew anything. I returned to my lodge famished and exhausted. Some kind soul had saved my dhal baat, and never have rice and lentils and curried vegetables tasted so good. I had a second helping, drank a pot of lemon tea, returned to the dorm room, peeled my boots off, and curled up in my sleeping bag.
   Sleep came hard that night, and it wasn't because of the hard wooden bed or my snuffling dormitory companions. I didn't want to be alone. I wanted a warm body next to me. No; more than that. For the first time in a long time I allowed myself to admit what I wanted more than anything, what I knew I would always want more than anything. I wanted Laura next to me. Laura and her quick laugh, her mane of long dark hair, her gentle touch. Laura who had been dead for two years.
   Nicole had told me, on the night the tribe of the truck disbanded, that one day I would get over it. Wise and wonderful Nicole. We had camped by the side of a dirt road, just outside Douala, a city popularly and accurately known as the armpit of Africa. It was late, the fire had burned down to ash and glowing embers, and almost everyone had retired to their tents. Only my closest mates had stayed up. Nicole, her husband Hallam, Lawrence, Steve. Thinking about it now I realized they had stayed up primarily to keep an eye on me. I was in bad shape, those first few weeks. I guess they thought I was a danger to myself.
   "It'll get better," she had said. "You'll get better. I know you probably can't believe that right now, but…Just believe that it's possible. You'll get over it. We'll all get over it. I know that sounds callous and horrible, and maybe it is. But it's true. Remember that."
   I had remembered. But I thought that for once wise and wonderful Nicole might have gotten it wrong.
    I didn't want to think about it any more. I didn't want to think about anything any more. I dug out my Walkman, put in my Prodigy tape, and blasted it into my ears as loud as I dared. All I wanted was to exterminate all rational thought, but somehow it eventually put me to sleep.