“When the ivory had warmed, Lemke lay an ear to the tusk and rapped it with his knuckle. The sound told him it was the finest of African ivory and he bought the tusk on the spot. Could Bauer bring him more? Bauer could. But he was a secretive man, coming at night and never entering if a customer was in the shop. A few times he brought his son Conrad, a young mountaineer with a twisted back and his left shoulder higher than the other. Bauer even showed Lemke something wrapped in oilskin, claiming it was the map to the elephant graveyard.
“One day the son Conrad arrived at Lemke’s shop alone bringing a tusk he said would be the last. While passing the ivory to him across a crevasse on the Miage Glacier beneath Mont Blanc, the elder Bauer had slipped and fallen to his death deep inside the glacier. After expressing his regret, Lemke asked if Conrad couldn’t continue his father’s work. But Conrad admitted he’d never been to the elephant graveyard. He said his father always made him wait up there on the Miage, a place the elder Bauer liked because he could see if he was being followed. When his father returned with a tusk, it was Conrad’s job to carry it back to Geneva. When Lemke asked about the map, Conrad shook his head. He knew nothing about any map.
“So with his supply of what he thought was Alpine ivory at an end, Lemke retired from business rather than work with a lesser material.”
The author of Swiss Eccentrics and Eccentricities ended the chapter with this explanation: “Clearly the gullible instrument maker had been taken in by a thief and confidence man. Bauer probably worked as a strongman in one of the several Geneva-based circuses. Traditionally, circus owners hid away the tusks of their dead elephants as a kind of retirement fund. Bauer must have stolen his employer’s cache and concocted the elephant graveyard story to explain how he’d come by the ivory. His swindle had two parts. He would sell Lemke the stolen tusks. Then he would announce he was retiring from the strenuous business and offer to sell Lemke the fraudulent map.
“Now Conrad, a partner in the original theft of the tusks, began to suspect his father meant to abscond with their money once Lemke bought the last one. So the son turned the tables on his father and robbed and killed him and disposed of his body. Then he sold Lemke the remaining tusk and fled the city.”
Ganelon closed the book. The author’s explanation might have convinced him if he hadn’t heard the wonderful mountain echo in Glendening Gunderson’s Alpine tusk-horn. What if Bauer’s story was true? And if the father’s, why not the son’s?
As luck would have it, Ganelon’s man in Geneva was sick in bed with eavesdropsy, a common affliction among detectives. Early medicine attributed the disease to a parasite of the earwig family that infested thatched roofs beneath whose eaves the detectives stood to listen at windows. Today science holds the ailment comes from the bite of the bitter dust mites that thrive on the surfaces of window glass.
So Ganelon would have to go to Geneva himself. But he could try to save time by first paying a visit to O’Hagen at the Polyhymnia. The Ulsterman greeted him warmly and moved the model of the Schreckhorn from its place of honor across the arms of the room’s other chair so that the detective could sit down.
When Ganelon asked about the Miage Glacier, O’Hagen seemed amused. “Well, I never imagined you interested in mountain climbing,” he said. “We climbers hold that when a man’s circumference bears more than a certain ratio to his altitude he prefers his country flat.”
Ganelon fought back a sharp reply and waited while O’Hagen dragged a model of Mont Blanc from under his bed. Sitting there with the mountain in his lap, the man used a caliper which he swung up the mountain like a stiff-legged stick figure while he described the path he’d taken to reach the peak. Then he swung the caliper down to the Miage glacier on the mountain’s eastern slope and looked at Ganelon.
The detective asked how long it would take a body fallen into a crevasse twenty-five years ago to emerge from the glacier, knowing O’Hagen’s answer could only be approximate since Ganelon did not know the exact location of the crevasse on the ice.
O’Hagen worked with a protractor, his calipers, and a pencil and paper for a few minutes. Then he announced that either the body had already emerged or would do so in the next five years or so. Then, setting the model aside, he crossed to the window and, standing with his back to the room, he began to outline the four principal theories of glacial movement beginning with James David Forbes’s viscous theory, which declares a glacier to be an imperfect fluid or viscous body which is urged down the slopes of a certain inclination by the mutual pressure of its parts.
Ganelon made his quiet escape from O’Hagen’s room amid this torrent of words. Downstairs in the club lobby he ran into LeGrand. The piano maker grew excited when Ganelon told him he now believed the Alpine elephant graveyard actually existed. Laying his hand on Ganelon’s arm, LeGrand insisted, “Then you must find it before Dr. Ludwig Fong does. My fortune is at your disposal in all this. Ambrose, Europe stands at a crossroads. Will we choose the road to sublimity or to degradation, the road to the concert hall or to the pool hall?”
Out on the street again, with LeGrand’s rhetoric still ringing in his ears, Ganelon turned back for a moment and there at an upper window of the Polyhymnia was O’Hagen, arms waving, still in full monologue. Ganelon tipped his hat but was not sure he caught the Ulsterman’s attention.
In the late eighteenth century, under the influence of Goethe’s romantic novel The Sorrows of Werther, Europe’s young people turned gloomy and suicidal in the face of unrequited love. Among the economical, death by throwing oneself into glacial crevasses became popular for it saved families the expense of funerals and cemetery plots.
The Biblical injunction to bury the dead inspired some devout Protestant laymen to form a community to deal with suicides and those who died on the ice by accident. People called them the Weir Brotherhood because they built traps beneath the glaciers to catch emerging bodies. They also provided small chapels and churchyards for the dead. The Brotherhood had an establishment beneath the Miage Glacier beside a rushing stream that was one of the sources of the Isére River.
The talking head of a young gravedigger hard at work in the churchyard directed Ganelon to a side door of the chapel where he found the Weir Brother in charge, a large-nosed man who gave him that half-interested look those preoccupied with the dead save for the living. “Yes,” he said, consulting a ledger, “we recovered the body of an Otto Bauer on the seventeenth of August two years ago. We seldom know the names of our charges. But I found his written on a map wrapped in oilskin and sewn into the jacket lining. If you have proof you are a relative I will turn his belongings over to you.”
Admitting he had no such proof, Ganelon asked if he might at least have a look at the map of which the man spoke. The Brother gave a sniff, consulted his ledger again, and led the way down into the chapel cellar. Behind a counter stood a wall of shelves holding numbered cardboard boxes. He took one down and dumped its contents — several copper coins, a short-stemmed clay pipe, and a pocketknife — onto the counter.
He stuck his nose back into the box. “Strange,” he said. “The map is gone.” He grew thoughtful. “And now I recall something odd. The day after we found the body, Old Schmidt, our sexton and gravedigger who had worked for us for twenty-five years, vanished without a word, leaving behind a month’s wages due to him.”