A Long and Quiet Life

Chapter One: The Man at the Bar

The rain came down on Huaraz the way it did every afternoon in September, straight and hard for forty minutes, and then stopped as though a tap had been shut. Jonah Weller sat in the window of the Hotel Andino's bar with a beer he had been making last for an hour and watched the water run off the awnings into the gutters, carrying cigarette ends and bus tickets down the hill towards the market.

He had eleven days left on his money. He had counted it that morning on the bed of his six-dollar room, coins included, and had arrived at a number that would keep him fed until the twentieth if he ate one meal a day and walked everywhere. After that there were three options, all of them familiar: find work, find someone to lend him money he would not repay, or go home. Home was Fleetwood, Lancashire, a flat above a chip shop where his mother watched afternoon television with the curtains half-drawn, and the sea came in grey and went out grey, and nobody had ever expected anything of him but the worst.

So it would be work.

The bar filled slowly as the light went. It was the tail of the season and the town was full of climbers, thin brown men with cracked lips and enormous appetites, arguing in four languages about weather windows. Jonah knew the type well enough to be one of them. He had the hands and the forearms, the sunburn line across the bridge of the nose, and the little collection of scars on the knuckles that came from jamming them into granite. What he did not have was the paper.

What he had instead was a document folder, kept flat in the bottom of his rucksack, containing a mountain leadership certificate with a serial number he had chosen because he liked the shape of it, a logbook in three different inks describing four years of routes, roughly half of which he had actually climbed, and two letters of reference on headed paper he had made himself in a photocopy shop in Chamonix. The certificate was the best thing he had ever done. He had drawn it with a mapping pen over eleven evenings, and the crest at the top had taken three attempts, and when he was finished he had held it up to the window and felt something close to what he supposed other people felt at church.

He was twenty-six. He had been getting away with it for four years.

The Englishman came in at seven, wet to the shoulders, laughing at something the man behind him had said. Jonah heard him before he saw him, and the voice did what such voices always did: it made every other conversation in the room adjust itself by a fraction.

"Absolutely not," the Englishman was saying. "I have paid for that mule twice already. I refuse to pay for it a third time on the grounds that it is now sad."

He was tall and loosely built, with a fair, sunburnt face and an expensive fleece jacket gone shabby in an expensive way. He put a wallet on the bar without looking at it, ordered two beers in poor but confident Spanish, and turned round to survey the room like a man checking whether his table was ready.

His eyes went over Jonah and came back.

"You're English," he said.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You're reading the football results in a four-day-old newspaper." He came over, carrying both beers, and set one down in front of Jonah as though the matter had already been agreed. "Freddie Balfour. Are you climbing or convalescing?"

"Jonah Weller. Neither, at the moment."

"Then you're the man I'm looking for." He sat, stretched his legs out, and put his elbows on the table. "How much do you know about Rondoy?"

Jonah knew about Rondoy. Everyone in that bar knew about Rondoy: a black and white tooth at the north end of the Huayhuash, with a face on it that had turned back five expeditions in six years. He had walked in to look at it three weeks earlier because looking was free.

"North face," Jonah said. "There's a line up the left of the central buttress that nobody's done. Everybody who talks about it is drunk."

Balfour grinned. He had very good teeth, and he used them.

"I'm going to climb it," he said. "In about three weeks, when the weather sorts itself out. And I need a second who won't die and won't talk."

"Those are usually different people."

"Not this time." He drank. "Here's the arrangement, and I'll tell you now because it saves us both an evening. I'm doing it alone. That's what the world will be told, and that's what my family have already been told, and that's what will be printed if it comes off. Solo, unsupported, new line. But I am not an idiot, and I don't intend to carry sixty kilos up the moraine on my own, or fix the first eight hundred feet on my own, or lie in a tent at five thousand metres with nobody to make tea. So I want a man on the payroll who isn't on any payroll. Porter, second, nursemaid. Eight weeks. Cash, in dollars, half up front. You come down before the summit push and you keep your mouth shut for the rest of your life."

Jonah turned his glass round on the table.

"How much?"

"Four thousand."

It was more than Jonah had earned in the previous eighteen months. He made himself wait a full three seconds.

"Five," he said.

"Four and a half, and I buy your boots, because those ones are a disgrace."

"Done."

They shook on it. Balfour's hand was dry and hard and he held on a half-second longer than necessary, which Jonah understood to be a small test, and returned by holding on a half-second longer than that.

"Good," Balfour said, pleased. "Now show me your papers."

Jonah went up to his room and came down with the folder. He had learned long ago that the trick was not to be reluctant. Reluctance was what people remembered. He handed the whole thing over and went to the bar and bought two more beers with money he could not spare, and when he came back Balfour was holding the certificate at arm's length under the light.

"Nineteen ninety," he said. "Where?"

"Glenmore. Winter assessment."

"Who assessed you?"

"Man called Dunlop." There had been a Dunlop; Jonah had once shared a bothy with him and listened to him complain about paperwork for six hours, which was where half the details came from. "Bad knee. Talked about it constantly."

Balfour laughed. "That's the one." He turned pages of the logbook, reading out route names with the pleasure of a man saying words he liked. "You've done a lot of ice."

"I like ice. It's honest. It's either there or it isn't."

"And rock?"

"I lead E2 on a good day and follow anything."

"On a good day," Balfour repeated. "I like that. Every liar I've ever met leads E5." He squared the papers up neatly and put them on the table. "I'm going to have these copied and posted home. My sister checks people for me. She's frighteningly good at it — she runs the family firm and she's never once been wrong about a man in her life, which is a very irritating quality in a sister. Do you mind?"

Jonah had a moment then. He remembered it afterwards, over years, with a clarity that never softened: the wet street outside, the smell of frying oil, the certificate lying face up on a table sticky with beer, and a door standing open behind him that he could still, at that instant, have walked back through.

"Post away," he said.

"Splendid." Balfour was already looking at the door, at the next thing. "We leave for Llámac on Thursday. Bring everything you own; if it doesn't fit on a mule you don't need it."

He stood, and then paused, and looked down at Jonah with an expression of frank and cheerful curiosity, as if he were considering a horse.

"You're not going to tell anyone, are you," he said. It was not a question. "That's the thing about hiring a man with no ties. There's nobody to tell."

"There's nobody to tell," Jonah agreed.

After Balfour had gone he sat for a while with the second beer, which he had not paid for, and let himself feel it: the loosening in the chest, the sense of the world tilting very slightly in his favour. Four and a half thousand dollars. Eight weeks in the Huayhuash. Somebody's hand on his shoulder saying, you'll do.

On the wall behind the bar there was a photograph of Rondoy, taken from the pass in evening light, the north face in shadow and the summit ridge burning orange. Jonah looked at it for a long time.

He had spent his whole life so far standing at the edges of other people's lives and copying what he saw. He was good at it. He could do a Yorkshire accent, an Edinburgh accent, a soft, expensive, nowhere-in-particular accent like Freddie Balfour's. He could sign four different men's names and make bank clerks smile. He had been a scholarship boy at a school where he had learned exactly two things — how the confident spoke, and that he would never be one of them — and had been expelled at fifteen for something he had genuinely not done, which he had come to regard as the single most useful injustice of his life. It had cured him of the belief that behaving well would be noticed.

He finished the beer, went up to his room, and lay on the bed listening to the dogs.

He did not think about killing anyone. That is worth saying plainly, because of everything that came after. On the second of September 1994, in a hotel in Huaraz, Jonah Weller thought about four and a half thousand dollars, a face nobody had climbed, and a man who had bought him a beer.