far back?’ Mitch asked when Tilde rejoined them.
‘Ten meters,’ Franco said. ‘Very cold back there, better than a freezer.’
‘But not for long,’ Tilde said. ‘I think this is the first year this area has been so open. Next summer, it could get above freezing. A warm wind could get back in there.’ She made a face and pinched her nose.
Mitch unslung his pack and rummaged for the electric torches, the pack of hobby knives, vinyl gloves, all he could find in the stores down in the town. He dropped these into a small plastic bag, sealed the bag, slipped it into his coat pocket, and looked between Franco and Tilde.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Go,’ Tilde said, making a pushing motion with her hands. She smiled generously.
He stooped, got on his hands and knees, and entered the cave first. Franco came a few seconds later, and Tilde just behind him.
Mitch held the strap of the small torch in his teeth, pushing and squeezing forward six or eight inches at a time. Ice and fine powdered snow formed a thin blanket on the floor of the cave. The walls were smooth and rose to a tight wedge near the ceiling. He would not be able to even crouch here. Franco called forward, ‘It will get wider.’
‘A cozy little hole,’ Tilde said, her voice hollow.
The air smelled neutral, empty. Cold, well below zero. The rock sucked away his heat even through the insulated jacket and snow pants. He passed over a vein of ice, milky against the black rock, and scraped it with his fingers. Solid. The snow and ice must have packed in at least this far when the cave was covered. Just beyond the ice vein, the cave began to slant upward, and he felt a faint puff of air, coming from an opening, another wedge in the rock, recently clear of ice.
Mitch felt a little queasy, not at the thought of what he was about to see, but at the unorthodox and even criminal character of this investigation. The slightest wrong move, any breath of this getting out, news of his not going through the proper channels and making sure everything was legitimate …
Mitch had gotten in trouble with institutions before. He had lost his job at the Hayer Museum in Seattle less than six months before, but that had been a political thing, ridiculous and unfair.
Until now, he had never slighted Dame Science herself.
He had argued with Franco and Tilde back in the hotel in Salzburg for hours, but they had refused to budge. If he had not decided to go with them, they would have taken somebody else – Tilde had suggested perhaps an unemployed medical student she had once dated. Tilde had a wide selection of ex-boyfriends, it seemed, all of them much less qualified and far less scrupulous than Mitch.
Whatever Tilde’s motives or moral character, Mitch was not the type to turn her down, then turn them in; everybody has his limits, his boundary in the social wilderness. Mitch’s boundary began at the prospect of getting ex-girlfriends in trouble with the Austrian police.
Franco plucked a crampon on the sole of Mitch’s boot. ‘Problem?’ he asked.
‘No problem,’ Mitch replied, and grunted forward another six inches.
A sudden oblong of light formed in one eye, like a large out-of-focus moon. His body seemed to balloon in size. He swallowed hard. ‘Shit,’ he muttered, hoping that didn’t mean what he thought it meant. The oblong faded. His body returned to normal.
Here, the cave constricted to a narrow throat, less than a foot high and twenty-one or twenty-two inches wide. Angling his head sideways, he grabbed hold of a crack just beyond the throat and shinnied through. His coat caught and he heard a tearing sound as he strained to unhook and slip past.
‘That’s the bad part,’ Franco said. ‘I can barely make it.’
‘Why did you go this far?’ Mitch asked, gathering his courage in the broader but still dark and cramped space beyond.
‘Because it was here, no?’ Tilde said, voice like the call of a distant bird, ‘I dared Franco. He dared me.’ She laughed and the tinkling echoed in the gloom beyond. Mitch’s neck hair rose. The new Iceman was laughing with them, perhaps at them. He was dead already. He had nothing to worry about, plenty to be amused about, that so many people would make themselves miserable to see his mortal remains.
‘How long since you last came here?’ Mitch asked. He wondered why he hadn’t asked before. Perhaps until now he hadn’t really believed. They had come this far, no sign of pulling a joke on him, something he doubted Tilde was constitutionally capable of anyway.
‘A week, eight days,’ Franco said. The passage was wide enough that Franco could push himself up beside Mitch’s legs, and Mitch could shine the torch back into his face. Franco gave him a toothy Mediterranean smile.
Mitch looked forward. He could see something ahead, dark, like a small pile of ashes.
‘We are close?’ Tilde asked. ‘Mitch, first it is just a foot.’
Mitch tried to parse this sentence. But Tilde spoke pure metric. A ‘foot,’ he realized, was not distance, it was an appendage. ‘I don’t see it yet.’
‘No, there are ashes first,’ Franco said. ‘That may be it.’ He pointed to the small black pile. Mitch could feel the air falling slowly just in front of him, flowing along his sides, leaving the rear of the cave undisturbed.
He moved forward with reverent slowness, inspecting everything with the torch. Any slightest bit of evidence that might have survived an earlier entry – chips of stone, pieces of twig or wood, markings on the walls …
Nothing. He got on his hands and knees with a great sense of relief and crawled forward. Franco became impatient.
‘It is right ahead,’ Franco said, tapping his crampon again.
‘Damn it, I’m taking this real slow, not to miss anything, you know?’ Mitch said. He restrained an urge to kick out like a mule.
‘All right,’ Franco said amiably.
Mitch could see around the curve. The floor flattened slightly. He smelled something grassy, salty, like fresh fish. His neck hair rose again, and a mist formed over his eyes. Ancient sympathies.
‘I see it,’ he said. A foot pushed out beyond a ledge, curled up on itself, small, really, like a child’s, very wrinkled and dark brown, almost black. The cave opened up at that point and there were scraps of dried and blackened fiber spread on the floor – grass perhaps. Reeds. Ötzi, the original Iceman, had worn a reed cape over his head.
‘My god,’ Mitch said. Another white oblong in his eye, slowly fading, and a whisper of pain in his temple.
‘It’s bigger up there,’ Tilde called. ‘We can all fit and not disturb them.’
‘Them?’ Mitch asked, shining his light back between his legs.
Franco smiled, framed by Mitch’s knees.
‘The real surprise,’ Franco said. ‘There are two.’
