Stormchild (6 page)

“Genesis?” I asked him, wondering if I had missed some subtle biblical point.

“Look below the photograph, in the box!” David’s tone clearly suggested that he believed this reminder of Nicole’s continued existence could do my life no good whatsoever. He drank a slug of my whiskey, lit his pipe, then stared gloomily at the birds in my unkempt orchard.

At the bottom of the page was a box in which the newspaper listed the various militant groups that were using sabotage, which they called “ecotage,” to jar the world’s governments into paying more attention to the environment. One of those groups was called the Genesis community, presumably, the writer averred, because its members wished to restore the world to its pristine condition. Not much was known about Genesis except that it was led by a man called Caspar von Rellsteb, who was one of the most outspoken supporters of ecotage, and that the group specialized in seaborne activities. They had attempted to sabotage the sixty-mile drift nets with which the Japanese and Taiwanese were obliterating life in the Pacific Ocean, and were believed to have attacked two Japanese whaling ships. The group’s activities were confined to the Pacific, where they had made strong, though futile, efforts to stop French nuclear testing. “It doesn’t say where they’re based!” I protested.

“Obviously in the Pacific,” David said.

“Oh, very helpful,” I said sarcastically, then looked again at the photograph as though there might be some clue in its grainy composition as to where I might find my daughter. Yet all the picture told me was that Nicole had been alive when the picture was taken the previous autumn. I recognized the catamaran as the
Erebus
which, nearly four years before, had taken Nicole out of my life. I could not see Caspar von Rellsteb in the photograph; if any one of the six protesters seemed to dominate the scene, it was Nicole herself. The obsessive look on her face was so familiar to me; a look of such determination that it veered toward bitterness. “Buggering up the French bomb, eh?” I said enthusiastically. “Good for her!”

“If the Frogs want a nuclear bomb,” David said irritably, “then they have to test it somewhere. It’s not doing us any harm, is it?”

“Don’t be such a fool,” I said. “Good for Nicole!”

David puffed a smoke screen from his pipe. “If you read the rest of the article,” he said in a very guarded voice, “you’ll notice that the attacks on the Japanese whaling ships were made with dynamite.”

There was a second of silence, then I exploded with indignation at the inference he was making. “Don’t be so bloody ridiculous, David!”

“I’m not being ridiculous,” he said, “but merely pointing out to you what that damned policeman will undoubtedly notice.”

“Fletcher’s lost interest,” I said. “Besides, if anything, this article proves that Fletcher was wrong! It proves Nicole can’t have killed her mother.”

“It does?” David asked. “How?”

“She’s in the Pacific!” I pointed out. “Even Fletcher will have to admit that it’s difficult for someone in the Pacific to plant bombs in England! How’s she supposed to have done it? She just popped out one night, sailed halfway round the world, planted a bomb, then sailed back again. Is that it?”

“Of course you’re right.” David had not intended to trigger my anger, and now mollified it by changing the subject. He picked up the can of soup. “Is this lunch?”

“Yes.”

“You’d better come to the rectory instead. Betty’s made a loin of pork with applesauce.”

“No dog breeders you want me to meet?”

“None at all,” he promised.

So I went to Sunday lunch at the rectory, where the three of us discussed the article, examined the photograph, and agreed that Nicole looked wonderfully well. I was feverish with excitement, which worried David and Betty, who both feared that my hopes of a reunion with Nicole might be horribly premature. Yet I could not resist my own pleasure; my daughter was alive and was working to make a better world. Her activities were far away, which suggested she could not have known of her mother’s death. “I’m going to find her,” I told David. “Find her and tell her.”

“It’ll be a bit difficult,” David warned me. “That article doesn’t give you much of a clue where Genesis might be.”

But the name was clue enough and, the next morning, still excited, I went to London to find out more.

Matthew Allenby was the secretary, founder, chairperson, inspiration, spokesperson, and dogsbody for one of Britain’s largest and most active environmental pressure groups. He was also a remarkably modest and kind man. I did not know him well, but we had sometimes met at conferences where I was a spokesman for the boat trade against the protestors who complained that our marinas polluted coastal waters. Allenby had always treated my arguments fairly, and I liked him for it. Now, though we had not met for at least two years, he greeted me warmly. “I should have written with condolences about your wife,” he said ruefully, “and I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to read the letters anyway.”

He offered me a smile of grateful understanding. “I suppose it must be like that.” He poured me coffee, then, after the obligatory small talk, asked me just why I had been so insistent on an immediate meeting.

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.”