“Very much so.”
“Not here. My head feels as if it’s about to blow apart. You remember I told you I had a relative who was on the mountain in 2008? And you remember I said he was dead?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, he was. Or at least presumed dead. But I should take it from the top. I called my uncle in Khumbu. He functions as a sort of local information exchange, and we went through the whole list you sent. The only relative we found there was this one person, and I was about to give up. If he was dead then he was dead and couldn’t very well show up in Stockholm and die all over again. But my uncle told me that no body had ever been found. I looked into it all more closely, and I saw that the age was right, and so was the height.
“What’s his name?”
“Nima Rita.”
“He was one of the leaders, wasn’t he?”
“He was the Sirdar, the head of the group of Sherpas, and the one who worked hardest on the mountain that day.”
“I know, I know, I read about him…He saved Mads Larsen, and Charlotte somebody.”
“That’s right, and if it hadn’t been for him, there would have been an even worse catastrophe. But he paid a high price. He raced up and down like a galley slave, and afterwards he had bad frost damage to his face and chest. He had to have some of his fingers and toes amputated.”
“So you really do think it’s him?”
“It has to be. He had a tattoo of a Buddhist wheel on his wrist.”
“My God,” Blomkvist said.
“Exactly, it’s all falling into place. Nima Rita is my third cousin, as they call it, so it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that he and I shared that special mutation in the Y chromosome that your researcher colleague pointed out.”
“Can you see any explanation for his having ended up in Sweden?”
“No, I can’t. But there’s a follow-up which is interesting.”
“Tell me. I haven’t had time to acquaint myself with all the details yet.”
“At first the assistant guides, Robin Hamill and Martin Norris, were praised for their rescue efforts, to the extent there was any praise going since Engelman and Grankin were dead,” Carson said. “But with the issuing of the more comprehensive reports, it was clear that the decisive role in the drama had been played by Nima Rita and his Sherpas. But I don’t know if that did Nima much good.”
“Why not?”
“Because by then he was going through hell already. He had fourth-degree frostbite, which is indescribably painful, and the doctors waited as long as they could before amputating. They knew that his livelihood depended on his being able to climb. For a native of the Khumbu Valley, Nima Rita had earned a lot—although still not much by European standards—but money just ran through his fingers. He drank heavily and had no savings at all. But, worse still, his name was being dragged through the mud. He was plagued by his own demons.”
“In what way?”
“It turned out that he had been paid by Engelman to take special care of Klara—he had of course failed to do that—and afterwards was accused of having worked against her interests. I don’t believe that. Nima Rita was by all accounts an incredibly loyal person. But like many other Sherpas, he was extremely superstitious, and thought of Everest as a living being which punishes climbers for their sins, and Klara Engelman…well, I guess you’ve read about her?”
“I saw the reports at the time.”
“Many of the Sherpas were upset by her. At Base Camp they were complaining that she could jinx the expedition and she must have irritated Nima, too. He certainly went through the tortures of hell afterwards. Apparently he suffered from hallucinations, and that may have been partly neurological. He had sustained brain damage from all the time he’d spent above twenty-six thousand feet, and he became increasingly bitter and behaved strangely. He had lost a number of his friends. No-one wanted anything to do with him. No-one except his wife, Luna.”
“Luna Rita, I presume. And where is she now?”
“That’s just the point. Luna took care of Nima after his operations. She baked bread and grew potatoes, and sometimes went over to Tibet to buy wool and salt which she sold in Nepal. But in the end it wasn’t enough, so she started working on climbing expeditions. She was much younger than Nima, and she was strong. She quickly rose from kitchen help to become a climbing Sherpani. But in 2013 she was part of the Dutch attempt on Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth highest mountain, and she fell into a crevasse at high altitude. The expedition turned into total chaos. There was an avalanche, a blizzard was blowing, and the climbers had to get off the mountain in a hurry. They left Luna to die in the crevasse. Nima was driven mad with grief, and he took it for an act of racism. He shouted that if it had happened to a Sahib, they would have got him out straightaway.”
“But she was just a poor local woman.”
“I have no idea if that made any difference. I doubt it did. Generally, I have a high opinion of people in the climbing world. But Nima was determined, and he tried to get an expedition going to recover her body from up there and give her a decent burial. There was not one single volunteer so in the end he set off on his own, far too old and apparently not sober either.”
“Jesus.”
“If you speak to my relatives in Khumbu, that was his greatest achievement, more so than all his ascents of Everest. He got up there and saw Luna down in the crevasse, preserved forever in the ice, and he decided to climb down and lie next to her so they could be reborn together. But then…the mountain goddess whispered to him that he should go out into the world instead and tell her story.”
“Sounds…”
“…totally crazy, oh yes,” Carson said. “And although he really did go out into the world, or at least to Kathmandu, and told the tale, nobody could make out what he was talking about. He became more and more incoherent, and was sometimes seen crying beneath the flags at the Boudhanath Stupa. Every so often he would go to the shopping districts in Thamel to nail up papers in poor English and even worse handwriting. He was still going on about Klara Engelman.”
“What did he say?”
“By this point he was suffering from severe mental disorder, don’t forget, and it was probably all one big muddle in his head, Luna and Klara and everything else. He was completely shot, and after he launched a diatribe against a British tourist and was locked up for a day, his relatives got him into the Jeetjung Marg mental health centre in Kathmandu. He stayed there on and off until the end of September 2017, and then one day he goes off to get himself some beer and vodka. He was apparently suspicious about the drugs the doctors were giving him and said that the only thing that silenced the voices in his head was alcohol. I think the staff reluctantly let it happen. They allowed him to abscond because they knew he would always come back. But this time he didn’t come back, and they grew concerned at the hospital. They knew he was expecting a visit that he was very excited about.”