Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  To answer I pushed the color supplement across his desk. I had ringed Nicole’s face with ink. “She’s my daughter,” I said, “and I want to find her.”

  “Ah, Genesis!” Matthew Allenby said with immediate recognition. He pronounced the word with a hard “G,” and with a note of dismay.

  “Genesis?” I was querying the hard “G.”

  “The German pronunciation,” he explained. “I believe the group’s leader was born in Germany.”

  “I’ve met him.”

  “Have you now?” Allenby immediately looked interested. “I haven’t met von Rellsteb. Not many people have.”

  I described the circumstances of my encounter with the naked harem on von Rellsteb’s catamaran. Allenby seemed amused by my account, and he was a man clearly in need of amusement, for his office was papered with posters that depicted the torn and bloody corpses of seals, dolphins, whales, porpoises, manatees, and sea otters. Other pictures showed poisoned landscapes, fouled rivers, oil-choked beaches, and skies heavy with toxic clouds. It was not a cheerful office, but nor were the evils against which Allenby had devoted his life and which had given him a Sisyphean gravity beyond his years. “What I really want to know,” I finished up, “is who Genesis are and where I can find them.”

  “Genesis”—Allenby still stared at the photograph of Nicole—”is an impassioned community of environmental activists; green militants. They’re remarkably secretive and, as a result, somewhat notorious.”

  “Notorious?” I said with some surprise. “I never heard of them before yesterday!”

  Allenby pushed the color supplement back across the desk. “That’s because until now the Genesis community has confined its activities to the Pacific, but believe me, within our movement, they are notorious.”

  “You sound disapproving,” I challenged him.

  “That’s because I do disapprove of them.” His disapproval was qualified, perhaps because he did not want to sound too disloyal to a group that espoused his own organization’s aims. “Genesis believe that the time for persuasion and negotiation is long past, and that the enemies of the environment understand only one thing: force. It’s a view.” He shifted uneasily in his chair. “But the trouble with ecotage, Mr. Blackburn, is that it can very easily become eco-terrorism.”

  “Does Genesis’s ecotage involve killing people?” I asked, and hated myself for indulging the suspicion that Nicole had been responsible for her mother’s death, but the article’s mention of dynamite had sown a tiny seed of doubt that I wanted eradicated.

  “No, not that I know of,” Allenby said to my relief. “In fact, I think most of their actions have been somewhat clumsy. They’ve made various attempts to tow paravanes equipped with cutting gear into Japanese drift nets, but I believe they lose their gear more often than they destroy the nets, which is a pity. Do you know about the drift nets?”

  “Not much,” I admitted, and Allenby described the fifty- and sixty-mile-long monofilament nets with which the Japanese, Taiwanese, and Koreans were destroying sea life in the Pacific.

  “Nothing living can escape such a net.” Allenby could not disguise his bitterness. “It’s the nuclear weapon of the fishing industry, and it leaves behind a dead swath of sea. In the short term, of course, the profits from such a device are phenomenal, but in the long term it will strip the ocean of life. The men who use the nets know that, but they don’t care.”

  “The newspaper says that Genesis used dynamite in some of their attacks?” I said.

  “Ah, rumors,” he said in a very neutral voice.

  “Just rumors?” I probed.

  He paused as though weighing the wisdom of retelling mere rumors, then shrugged as though it would do no harm. “Last year two Japanese whaling ships were being scaled in South Korea when bombs destroyed the dock-gate mechanisms. Both ships were effectively sealed inside their dry docks. A dozen green organizations claimed responsibility for the ecotage, but there is substantial evidence which points to Genesis as the responsible group.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Of course the Japanese insisted that the whaling ships were being used merely for scientific research, but the Japanese always make that claim. You will detect, Mr. Blackburn, a certain ambivalence in my attitude toward Genesis. On the one hand I believe they do nothing but harm to our movement, alienating the very people whose help we need if we’re to achieve our aims, but on the other hand I sometimes find myself applauding the directness of their actions.”

  I tried to imagine Nicole as a green storm trooper. Could she risk a Korean jail by planting a bomb? And if so, would she risk a British jail for a similar crime? The suspicion that my daughter was a bomb maker, first planted by Fletcher, then nurtured by the newspaper article, would not die in me. “Have you heard of any Genesis activity in the Atlantic?” I asked Allenby, forcing myself to use the German pronunciation with its hard “G.”

  “None at all, but that doesn’t mean they’ve never operated here. They specialize in hit-and-run tactics and they could, I assume, sail in and out of the Atlantic without any of us being the wiser. You, of all people, must surely appreciate that possibility?”

  Crossing the Atlantic, I thought to myself, was a more complicated task than Allenby evidently took it to be. Of course Nicole had not planted the bomb! Of course not! “How do I find Genesis?” I asked Allenby instead of pursuing the possibility of Nicole’s guilt.

  “I honestly don’t know.” Matthew Allenby spread long pale hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Part of the group’s appeal is their secretiveness. They don’t publish an address.”

  “They must have a base somewhere!”

  Again he made the oddly graceful gesture of helplessness. “For a long time they were based in British Columbia. Von Rellsteb grew up there, of course, so...”

  “He’s Canadian?” I asked with surprise for I had long assumed that von Rellsteb was a German.

  “He was born in Germany,” Allenby explained, “but he grew up near Vancouver.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said, at last understanding why my researches in Germany had turned up nothing.

  “But it’s no good looking for Genesis in Canada now,” Allenby warned me. “They had an encampment on an island off the British Columbian coast, but they left it four or five years ago, and no one seems to know where they went.”

  My instant guess was that the Genesis community was still in British Columbia, because that coast was a nightmare tangle of islands, straits, and inlets, and if a man wanted somewhere to hide from the world then there were few better places than the waters north of Vancouver.

  Allenby was sifting through a heap of business cards he had spilled from a bowl on his desk. “If anyone can help you,” he said, “these people can.” He offered me a card that bore the name Molly Tetterman and had an address in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. Under the name was printed the legend “Chairperson, the Genesis Parents’ Support Group.”

  “Mrs. Tetterman’s daughter, like yours, joined Genesis and hasn’t been seen since,” Allenby explained, “and Mrs. Tetterman wrote and asked for my help, but alas, I had no more information to give her than I’ve been able to give you.”

  “You’ve been very helpful,” I said politely. I picked up the color supplement which had printed Nicole’s photograph and leafed through its pages to find the name of the journalist who had written the article. “Perhaps he can help me?”

  “I doubt it.” Allenby smiled. “He got most of that information from me anyway.”

  “Oh.” I felt the frustration of a trail gone cold.

  “But what I will do,” Allenby offered, “is ask around and pass on any information I might discover. I can’t really encourage you to be hopeful, but it’s odd how things turn up when you least expect them.”

  “I’d be grateful,” I said, but my acknowledgement of his offer was almost as automatic as his making of it, for I could tell from Allenby’s tone that he did not truly expect to discover any new information about Genesis. “Perhaps
I should talk to this journalist after all.” I tapped the article in the magazine. “You never know, he might have found another good source.”

  “If you talk to the journalist,” Allenby said very carefully, “then he’ll want to know why you’re so interested in Genesis, and even the dullest journalist will eventually connect your inquiry about bombed whaling ships in Korea with an unexplained bomb in the English channel. I’m sure there’s no connection,” he said gently, “but journalism thrives on such suppositions.”

  I stared into Allenby’s intelligent face and realized how very astute he was, and how very kind too, for he had just saved me from blundering into a heap of unwanted publicity. “There is no connection,” I said, loyal to my belief in Nicole’s innocence.

  “Of course there isn’t,” Allenby agreed, “but the coincidence is too palpable for any journalist to ignore. So why don’t you let me talk to the journalist,” he offered, “without mentioning your name, and I’ll also talk to some of my Canadian and American colleagues, and if I discover anything, anything at all, then I’ll pass it straight on to you. And in the meantime, what you can do, Mr. Blackburn, is to keep on running a nonpolluting boatyard.”

  I thanked him, and went back to do just that, but despite Allenby’s good advice I could not resist trying to discover more about Genesis for myself. I telephoned Fletcher, but he knew nothing of von Rellsteb’s organization. “I’ve heard of a rock group called Genesis, but not a green group,” he said sourly, then asked why I was so interested. I revealed that Nicole was a member of Genesis, and I immediately heard a professional interest quicken Fletcher’s voice. “You’re suggesting that they’re connected with your wife’s murder?” he asked.

  “No, I am not,” I said firmly.

  “The greens are all so pure, aren’t they?” Fletcher had entirely ignored my denial. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not as bloody minded as anyone else. After all we’ve got the Animal Liberation Front, who think it’s cute to use bombs on humans. I mean I can just about understand the IRA, but blowing up people on behalf of pussycats?” The policeman paused. “Are you going looking for this Genesis mob?”

  “There’s not much point, is there? I don’t know where they live.”

  “Well, if I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”

  The promise was purely automatic, and I heard nothing more from Fletcher. Even Matthew Allenby could only send me some five-year-old pamphlets written by Caspar von Rellsteb. The pamphlets, printed on recycled paper by an obscure environmental press in California, proved to be savage but imprecise attacks on industry. There was no mention of Genesis, suggesting that the group’s name had not been coined when the pamphlets were written, though one of the tracts did outline a communal style of “eco-existence,” an “ecommunity,” in which children could be raised to think “ecorrectly,” and that individual greed would be subsumed by the group’s “eco-idealism.” The suggestion was nothing more than the old Utopian ideal harnessed to an environmental wagon, and I assumed that the ideas in the pamphlet had become reality in the Genesis community.

  The pamphlets provided no clues as to where the Genesis community might have moved when they abandoned their British Columbian encampment. I wrote to Molly Tetterman in Kalamazoo, and in reply received some typewritten and photocopied newsletters from her Genesis Parents’ Support Group, but the newsletters added very little to what I already knew. Caspar von Rellsteb had established his Canadian ecommunity on a private island north of the Johnstone Strait, but had since vanished, and the newsletters, far from solving the mystery of the community’s present whereabouts, only made it more tantalizing by appealing for anyone with any information to please contact Molly Tetterman in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

  “People can’t just disappear off the face of the earth!” I complained to David.

  “Of course they can. Happens everyday. That’s why the Salvation Army has a missing-persons’ bureau.”

  “So what am I supposed to do? Report the Genesis community to the Salvation Army?”

  David laughed. “Why not? They’re very efficient at finding people.”

  Instead of the Salvation Army I tried the French navy, politely inquiring whether they had any information about the activists who had harassed their nuclear tests in the Pacific, but their only reply was a formal denial that any such harassment had even occurred. It seemed, as the weeks passed, that von Rellsteb had truly succeeded in vanishing off the face of the polluted earth.

  Then Matthew Allenby struck gold.

  “Actually I didn’t do a thing,” he said modestly when he telephoned me with his news. “It was one of our American groups who found him out.”

  “Where?” I said eagerly.

  “Have you ever heard of the Zavatoni Conference?” Allenby asked me.

  “No.”

  “It’s a biannual event, a chance for environmentalists and politicians to get together, and it’s convening in Key West in two weeks. Most of us would like to hold it somewhere more ecologically significant, but if you don’t offer politicians the comforts of a five-star hotel, then they won’t turn up for anything. But the point is, Mr. Blackburn, that the organizers sent an invitation to von Rellsteb.. “

  “They knew where to write to him?” I interrupted angrily, thinking of all my wasted efforts to discover Genesis’s whereabouts.

  “Of course they didn’t,” Allenby said soothingly. “Instead they placed advertisements in all the West Coast environmental magazines. But the amazing thing is that he’s accepted their offer. He’s agreed to give the keynote speech. It’s something of a coup for the organizers, because most of the ecotage people won’t agree to debate with the mainline organizations, and—”

  “Where exactly is this conference?” I interrupted Matthew Allenby again.

  “I told you, in Key West, Florida.” He gave me the name of the hotel.

  “So how do I get in?” I asked. “If you make your own travel and hotel arrangements,” Allenby suggested with diffident generosity, “then I’ll say you’re one of my delegates. But I know that hotel doesn’t have any spare rooms, so you’re going to have trouble finding a bed.”

  “I don’t give a damn.” I could already feel the excitement of the chase. “I’ll sleep in the street if I have to!”

  “Don’t be too eager!” Allenby warned me. “Von Rellsteb might not turn up. In fact, if I had to give odds, I’d say there’s less than an even chance that he will actually arrive.”

  “Those odds are good enough for me!”

  “It really is a long shot,” Matthew warned me again.

  But I reckoned that only by a long shot would I ever find Nicole, and so I bought myself a ticket to Miami. David opined that I was mad, an opinion he hammered at me right until the moment I left England. He drove me to Heathrow in his ancient Riley. “Nicole won’t be at Key West! You do realize that, don’t you?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Of course I don’t know!” he said. “It is just that like other sensible human beings I predicate my actions, especially the expensive actions, on probabilities rather than on vague hopes that will almost certainly lead to a debilitating disappointment.”

  “You don’t believe in miracles?” I teased him.

  “Of course I do,” he said stoutly, “but I also believe in the existence of false hopes, disappointment, and wasted efforts.”

  “All I want to do,” I explained very calmly, “is to find Nicole and tell her about her mother’s death. Nothing else.” That was not entirely true. I also wanted, I needed, Nicole’s assurance that she no longer believed I was responsible for her brother’s death. That belief of Nicole’s might be irrational, but it had snagged in my heart and still hurt. “And to find Nicole,” I went on, “I’m willing to waste quite a lot of my own money. Is that so very bad?”

  David sniffed rather than answer my question, then, for a few silent miles, he brooded on my obstinancy. “They have pink taxis there, did you know that?” he finally a
sked as we turned into the airport.

  “Pink taxis?”

  “In Key West,” he said ominously, as though the existence of pink taxis was the final argument that would prevent my leaving. He braked outside the British Airways terminal. “Pink taxis,” he said again, even more ominously.

  “It sounds like fun,” I said, then climbed from the car and went to find my child.

  David was right. There were bright pink taxis in Key West.

  And I was suddenly glad to be there because it was a preposterous, outrageous, and utterly unnecessary town; a fairy-tale place of Victorian timber houses built on a sun-drenched coral reef at the end of a one-hundred-mile highway that skipped between a chain of palm-clad islands across an impossibly blue sea.

  I felt I had been transported out of grayness to a sudden, vivid world that contrasted cruelly with the damp drabness that had been my life since Joanna had died. My hangdog spirits lifted as the pink taxi drove me from Key West’s tiny airport into the old town’s tangle of narrow streets. I was headed for a private guest house that my travel agent had somehow discovered, which proved to be a pretty house on a tree-shaded street close to the town center. The guest house was owned and run by a man named Charles de Charlus, who, when I arrived, was flat on his back beneath a jacked-up Austin-Healey 3000. He wriggled backward, stood to greet me, and I saw that he was a handsome, tall, and deeply tanned man whose face was smeared with engine oil. “Our visitor from England, how very nice,” de Charlus greeted me as he wiped his hands on a rag. “You look exhausted, Mr. Blackburn. Come inside.” He ushered me into a hallway lavish with beautiful Victorian furniture, where he plucked a room key from the drawer of a bureau. “I’m giving you a room that overlooks the Jacuzzi in the courtyard. Do feel free to use it. We have a weight room if you need some exercise, and an electric beach.”

  “An electric beach?”