The Ice Soldier Read Online Free PDF Page A

diamonds. But for Carton, that diamond fact was a thing to be held up to the light, to be twisted and turned and examined for its angle of greatest interest. And if he believed that the fact might be of better use to him if it was held up in just such a way, or turned even slightly, to achieve that particular wide-eyed look of wonder—part horror, part fascination, part incredulity—he would make it so. Each summer he returned from the Alps with new and hair-raising stories for his audiences.
    He also accumulated a collection of artifacts which had
been expelled from glaciers. Anything which fell down a crevasse would, sooner or later, be tombed in ice and carried through to the glacier’s end. The movement of these glaciers had been studied enough that when something, or someone, disappeared down a crevasse, it could often be predicted to within a year or two when that thing or person would reappear.
    Carton established contacts among the Society of Alpine Guides and quietly bought up the relics of mountaineering disasters. These included ice axes, clearly marked to men whose lives had ended decades before and whose bodies had never been found. He purchased the bones of Alpine cave bears, which had been extinct for thousands of years. There were shreds of clothing, spewed out in slow motion by the ice; their tattered edges seemed to prove the violent ends of those who had once worn them.
    And then there was Archie.
    One year, thirteen members of the Climbers’ Club were invited to a Saturday lunch in the club’s dining room. There was some uneasiness as to why Carton would have chosen thirteen people, when the superstition attached to the number still meant that hotels did not have a thirteenth room, that hunting parties never comprised thirteen people, and that you did not invite thirteen people to a luncheon.
    The guests arrived to find fourteen places laid for dinner.
    Who was the fourteenth guest? they asked.
    Carton would not say.
    Just as the meal was about to begin, Carton rang a small brass bell and the waiters wheeled in something that caused two people, both of them men, to faint.
    It was a skeleton sitting in a chair. The bones had been wired together and then strapped to the chair, but not before it had been dressed in a gray suit with a red tie bearing a white
skull-and-crossbones design. The skeleton had been wired in such a way that its arms were folded across its chest. This, combined with the grinning teeth, served to give Archie a cheerful and irreverent expression, much like Carton himself.
    Carton never disclosed exactly where the skeleton had come from, saying only that he’d picked it up in the Alps and that it had been found near a glacier.
    The skeleton bore no signs of identity and the clothes had been added later, so it was impossible to say who the person had been, although one guest, who was a doctor, did confirm that the skeleton belonged to a man.
    Once again, rumors circulated. The most persistent of these was that the body had been stolen from the old morgue in the hospice of the Great St. Bernard Pass. There, the bodies of those who had become lost in the mountains were gathered to await identification. Because of the dry air and the fact that many of these bodies were never claimed, some had become mummified. Even though Carton had never seen the place, he described it in vivid detail to his audiences, based on stories he had himself been told.
    Pringle wrote Carton a letter that began, “You Brute!” and listed the names of forty vanished mountaineers whose skeleton Archie might be. Carton had the letter framed and hung it in the men’s bathroom at the club.
    Soon after, Archie was moved to the head of the table and the Saturday lunches developed into a regular event. At these lunches, Archie would be toasted by the guests, who always numbered thirteen. Carton drank to Archie from a battered pewter mug engraved with the initials E.B. This had emerged from