Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  “An electric tanning salon. For cloudy days.”

  “I doubt I’ll have much time for relaxation,” I said, trying not to show the awkwardness that suddenly flared through me. “I’m here for the Zavatoni Conference.”

  “Oh, you’re a green! Well, of course, aren’t we all these days?” Charles led me upstairs and ushered me into a wonderfully comfortable room. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t come in and show you where everything is.” In explanation he held up his hands which were still greasy from his car, then tossed the room key onto the bed. “Your bathroom is through the blue door, and the air conditioner controls are under the window. Enjoy!” He left me in the cool of the airconditioning. The curtains were closed, presumably to fend off the fierce sun, but I pulled them aside to let in some light and found myself staring down into the palm-shaded courtyard where the bright blue-tiled Jacuzzi shimmered and foamed in the heat. Two men were sprawled in the water. Both were stark naked. One of them, seeing me, raised a languid hand in greeting.

  I let the curtain drop. I could feel myself blushing. Joanna, I thought, would have been mightily amused, and I could almost hear her accusing me of a most ridiculous embarrassment. I took her framed photograph from my seabag, put it on the bedside table, and thought how very much I missed her.

  Then I sat on the bed and fished out the visiting card that Matthew Allenby had given me. I dialed Molly Tetterman’s number in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The phone rang four times, then an answering machine announced that Molly could not come to the phone right now so would I please leave a message. I gave my name and said I had come to America because Caspar von Rellsteb was supposed to be giving a speech at the Zavatoni Conference in Key West, and if the Genesis Parents’ Support Group had any observers at the conference I’d be very glad to meet them. I dictated the guest-house telephone number to Molly Tetterman’s answering machine, then, overcome by tiredness, I lay back on the bed’s pretty patchwork quilt and slept.

  The next morning, a Monday, was the opening day of the Zavatoni Conference. I walked to the conference hotel where I discovered that Matthew Allenby had left my name with the registration desk in the entrance foyer. I also found that I was just one of hundreds of other delegates, which surprised me for I had somehow imagined that the event would be a small and rather obscure conference like those I had attended in Britain. The Zavatoni Conference was to be a full-blown celebration of the environment and of the efforts being made to preserve it. The tone was set from the moment I registered and was presented with a badge which read “Hi! I’m Tim! And I Care!” The badge was printed in a livid Day-Glo green. “It’s made from recycled plastic,” the friendly official reassured me, then directed me to a huge notice board that listed all the day’s attractions at the conference.

  Most were the predictable fare of such conferences; I could see a film about Greenpeace’s work, or attend a lecture on the depredations of the logging industry in Malaysia, or catch a bus that would take delegates to see the endangered Key deer on Big Pine Key. Yet this was also a conference for political action, so there were axes being ground; a Swedish parliamentarian was lecturing on “Environmental Taxes: A Strategy for Fiscal Eco-Enforcement,” while the Women Against Meat-Eaters were caucusing with the Coalition for an Alcohol-Free America in the Hemingway Lounge. The European Proletarian Alliance Against Oil Producers was holding a multicultural symposium in the Henry Morgan Suite, where their guest celebrity was a British actress, and I wondered, for the millionth fruitless time, just why the acting profession labored under the misapprehension that trumpery fame gave its members the expertise to tell the rest of us how to conduct our lives.

  I decided to give the actress, and all the other meetings, a miss, though I did avail myself of the exhibition in the Versailles Mezzanine where all the environmental groups who were officially represented at the conference displayed their wares. The exhibition ranged from a tableau vivant mounted by Mothers Against Nuclear Physics, which showed cosmetically scorched women holding half-melted plastic dolls in rigidly agonized post-disaster poses, to The Land Of Milk And Honey exhibit, which was neatly staffed by well dressed born-again Christian fundamentalists. Matthew Allenby’s organization had an intelligently sober exhibit, as did the Sierra Club and a score of other mainline pressure groups, but, despite Caspar von Rellsteb’s agreement to address the conference, there was no display illustrating the life and work of the Genesis community.

  I went back to the lobby where I was accosted by a woman wearing a clown costume who solicited my signature for a petition demanding an end to offshore oil-drilling throughout the world. Other activists were attempting to ban nuclear power stations, sexism, fur coats, mercury in dental fillings, and pesticides. I signed the petition on fur coats, then spotted Matthew Allenby standing in the open doorway of a crowded room where he was listening to a lecture.

  “I feel rather guilty for telling you about this conference,” he said. “I rather suspect I’ve encouraged you to waste a good deal of your money and time. There’s absolutely no sign of von Rellsteb, and I’m told it would be very typical of him to agree to attend but then not turn up.”

  “It won’t be your fault if that happens,” I said. “Any parent would snatch at the smallest chance of finding his child, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yes, of course,” Matthew agreed, though he still sounded dubious. We had wandered close to the hotel’s front door, outside of which a number of demonstrators angrily harangued arriving delegates. The anger was directed at anyone who arrived in a car, and thereby contributed exhaust fumes to global warming. “They’re from WASH.” Matthew gestured at the angry demonstrators.

  “WASH?” I assumed it was a town I had never heard of, or else a contraction of Washington.

  “It’s an acronym,” Matthew explained. “W.A.S.H., or the World Alliance to Save Humanity.” He grimaced. “For a time their British branch picketed my office.”

  “Your office?” I said in astonishment. “What were they accusing you of?”

  “They thought my organization should support their call for the abolition of private cars.” Matthew sighed. “The green movement is riddled with a holier-than-thou attitude, which means that the extremists are always trying to show how much purer they are than the mainstream groups. It’s all rather counterproductive, of course. If we cooperated and agreed on some specific goals then we could make real progress. We could certainly outlaw drift netting in the Pacific. We could prob-ably end the use of CFCs in refrigerators and aerosols, we could seriously reduce carbon monoxide emissions, and we might even save what’s left of the rain forests. But what we can’t do is ban all cars from the road, and we don’t help our cause by saying that we can. Ordinary people don’t want to lose their cars, just as they don’t want to go cold in winter merely because they’re told that oil and coal power stations pollute the air, and nuclear power is unsafe. I know, because I’m an ordinary person and I don’t want to stop using a car, and I don’t want my children to be cold in winter. The problem with our movement, Mr. Blackburn, is that we’re always trying to ban things, but we don’t offer alternatives. And I mean genuine alternatives that will heat peoples’ homes and apply deodorants to their armpits and propel their automobiles. People will listen to us if we offer them hope, and they’ll even pay a few pennies more if they think the extra cost will help the planet, but if we offer them only doom, they’ll accept the doom and decide they might as well be comfortable as they endure it. It’s the primrose path syndrome; why be uncomfortable if you’re going to hell?”

  I smiled. “You sound as if you ought to be giving the keynote speech.”

  “I’ve been asked to do just that, but only if von Rellsteb doesn’t turn up on Wednesday night. Of course my speech won’t be as popular, because common sense never is as interesting as fanaticism. If von Rellsteb comes and rants about paying back pollution with violence, then he’ll make every newspaper in the free world, while my realism won’t even make two inches in the local pap
er.”

  There was certainly a great deal of press and television interest in the conference. The numerous reporters were not required to wear the delegates’ Day-Glo green name badges, but instead had official-looking red press tags that, under their names, announced what newspaper or magazine they worked for. As Matthew and I stood by the entrance one such reporter arrived to run the gauntlet of WASH hatred. She was a pale and flustered-looking girl with something so disorganized in her looks and so fearful in her expression that I instinctively felt protective toward her. She was wearing a long yellow skirt which gave her a fresh, springlike appearance. She must have arrived by car or taxi for the WASH demonstrators were giving her a particularly hard time. “You can see,” Matthew said quietly, “just how easily fanaticism could spill into terrorism.”

  “Are you saying WASH are terrorists?”

  “No, but they think their cause justifies their actions, and it won’t be long before frustration with results will demand even more violent action. No doubt that will be Caspar von Rellsteb’s message on Wednesday night. If he comes.”

  The frail reporter, her fair hair awry, made it safely into the hotel where, in her relief, she spilled a great pile of papers and folders onto the floor. She looked as if she would burst into tears, but then a hotel porter hurried to help her pick up the strewn pile.

  “Wednesday night,” Matthew repeated to me. “If von Rellsteb is going to come, Mr. Blackburn, you’ll see him on Wednesday night. Until then, I suspect, you won’t need to bother yourself with these proceedings.”

  The pale and worried-looking girl, her papers rescued, had disappeared into the crowd, but something about her face stayed in my mind. It was not her beauty that had lodged in my consciousness, for the girl’s looks had hardly been striking, but rather it was her vulnerability that made her attractive, or perhaps it was her green-eyed gaze of anxious innocence. I smiled, for that sudden pulse of interest was the first resurgence of something I thought had died with Joanna in the bomb-churned waters of the English channel. Key West, with its vividly improbable happenings, was making me feel alive again, and, Genesis or no Genesis, I was glad to have come.

  Next day, trusting Matthew Allenby’s intuition that I need not bother with the conference until Wednesday, I explored the pretty tree-shaded streets of Key West, and I thought how much Joanna would have liked the old town. The houses had been built by nineteenth-century shipwrights whose techniques of allowing a ship’s timbers to flex with the surge of the sea had enabled the houses to ride out Florida’s awesome hurricanes. The facades were intricately carved and shaded by flowering trees. The smell of the sea pervaded every street and courtyard, and the heat was made bearable by the ocean breeze. Charles, my guest-house host, explained Key West’s prettiness by saying that for years the old town had been too poor to afford new buildings, and thus had been forced to keep its old ones. Now the beautiful gingerbread houses were reckoned to be American architectural treasures. “Though it took us to realize it,” Charles said indignantly.

  “Us?”

  “You know what the realtors say? Follow the fairies. Because we always find the prettiest, forgotten places, then we fill them with marvelous restaurants and wonderful shops. If you want to increase property values in your hometown, Tim, then invite a gay colony to move in.” He saw my fleeting look of alarm, and laughed.

  It was Tuesday afternoon and I was sweating with the effort of raising the engine block of Charles’s Aus-tin-Healey. Charles had discovered that I had once owned a similar car and knew more than a little about engines, so he had recruited me to help him install a rebuilt clutch. As we worked he drew from me the full story of my journey to Key West—the tale of Joanna and Nicole, and of von Rellsteb’s Genesis community. “What will you do if von Rellsteb does show up tomorrow night?” Charles asked me.

  “Grab the bastard and ask him to take a message to Nicole.” It was not much of a plan, but it was all I could think of.

  “Perhaps I’d better come and help you,” Charles offered. “I’m good at grabbing men.” He flexed his arm muscles and, though I somehow doubted that any physical force would be needed, the thought of Charles’s companionship was comforting.

  I telephoned the conference organizers the next day, but no one could tell me whether or not von Rellsteb had arrived. If the Genesis leader had come to Florida, he was leaving his appearance until the very last moment. Even when Charles and I drove the repaired Austin Healey to the hotel that evening we still did not know if the guest of honor had actually arrived. Charles was in high spirits, anticipating an adventure, though I suspected the evening promised to bring nothing but disappointment.

  Because, as the delegates drifted toward the banqueting hall, von Rellsteb had still not shown up. I found Matthew Allenby frantically polishing his moderate speech in anticipation of having to fill von Rellsteb’s shoes. “I’m sorry,” he said to me, as though it was his fault that I was to be disappointed.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I reassured him.

  “He might yet come,” Matthew said, and in that hope Charles and I took our positions at the back of the banqueting hall. We deliberately did not try to find places at the tables, preferring to wait by the room’s main doors. If von Rellsteb did come he would enter the room by those doors, and our new plan of attack, enthusiastically proposed by Charles, was that we should grab him as he arrived. I had spent a thoughtful afternoon writing a letter to Nicole; that letter was in my jacket pocket. Charles reasoned that von Rellsteb, ambushed at the door, would agree to take the letter just to be rid of us, but, as the meal went on and there was still no sign of the guest of honor, my letter and Charles’s enthusiasm both seemed irrelevant.

  The speeches began. The conference chairperson gave a short talk extolling the life of Otto Zavatoni, whose vast brewing fortune, left in trust, made these biannual conferences possible. Then the visiting politicians were introduced and applauded. Most, I noted, came from small European opposition parties and were politicians whose hopes of office had long faded and whose careers therefore could not be hurt by an association with the more extreme green elements. And there was a handful of politicians from the Third World who received the loudest and warmest receptions. The introductions took a long and tedious time and, for want of any better way of entertaining myself, I looked around the huge banqueting hall for the reporter who had been wearing the yellow skirt. I did not see her.

  Nor was there any sign of von Rellsteb. Conference officials, still hoping for his arrival, scurried in and out of the banqueting hall. The room was restless. I noted how many reporters were present, clearly drawn by the chance of meeting the mysterious proponent of ecotage. But von Rellsteb still did not show, and, finally, the chairperson stood and bleakly announced that a change of plans was unfortunately dictated by the absence of the guest speaker, but that nevertheless the conference was most fortunate in having the company of Matthew Allenby who had agreed to replace the absent Caspar von Rellsteb. The applause that greeted the announcement was scattered and unenthusiastic.

  Matthew gave his reasonable and sensible speech. He was a good orator, but, even so, I could see the more extreme delegates shifting unhappily as he talked of consensus and education, and of agreement and cooperation. Many of the delegates had not come to hear about consensus, but about confrontation, and five minutes into Matthew’s speech there were the first stirrings of dissent as a table of Scandinavian activists started to heckle. Matthew made his voice stronger, temporarily stilling his critics. By now it was dark outside, and the big windows that faced the sea were a black sheen in which the chandeliers, ablaze with thousands of light bulbs, reflected brightly. Matthew spoke of setting attainable goals and of the importance of not alienating the ordinary man and woman who wanted to feel they could make a genuine contribution toward repairing the damaged fabric of the earth. A man who disagreed with the moderation of Matthew’s proposals struck the handle of his knife against his empty water glass. Someone else joined th
e ringing protest, and suddenly the room was clamorous with dissent. The chairperson called for order, while a conflicting voice yelled at Matthew to sit down and be quiet. I was about to shout my own protest against the protesters, when suddenly the great room’s lights blinked out, the western sky sheeted a fiery red, and the first guests screamed with horror.

  Genesis had come at last.

  The doors behind Charles and me were kicked violently open. A woman at a nearby table screamed in terror. I turned to see three bearded men silhouetted against the hallway lights that were still shining bright. The three men half stepped over the banqueting hall’s threshold. Everything was happening so fast that I was still pushing myself upright from where I had been leaning idly against the wall. Then the three men hurled missiles deep into the darkened room and I twisted awkwardly and frantically aside. I saw smoke trails fluttering behind the objects. Christ! I thought, the bastards are using grenades! and I was instinctively shrinking into a groin-protecting crouch as the first missile cracked apart in a foul-smelling gout of chemical stench. The “grenades” were stink bombs.

  “Come on, Tim! Come on!” Charles had recovered more quickly than me, and was already pursuing the fleeing men.

  I followed, only to be crushed in the sudden crowd of choking, screaming, and panicked delegates, who fought toward the cleaner air of the hallway. A fire alarm had begun to shrill, its bell filling the hotel’s vast spaces with a terrible urgency. The stink bombs were pumping a noxious, gagging smoke that overwhelmed the air conditioner ducts. I heard a crash as a table was overturned. A woman in a sari tripped and fell in front of me. I dragged her upright, shoved her out of my way, then drove my shoulder hard into the press of fleeing people to make a path through them.

  “This way, Tim!” Charles was free of the panic and running toward the hotel gardens. The men who had attacked the conference were fleeing through those gardens toward the sea, scattering leaflets in their wake. I could just see the three running figures in the eerie light of the flickering flames that illuminated the hotel grounds.