Stormchild Page 7

  I tore myself free of the crowd and sprinted after Charles. He had already rammed through a door and jumped off the terrace where the tables were set for breakfast. I leaped after him. Palm trees were burning at the edge of the beach, and I realized it had been their ignition that had sheeted the sky with red flame. The night air stank of burning and of the gasoline I guessed had been used to set the trees alight. The thatched roof of a beach bar had also caught the fire and was furiously spewing sparks into the night wind.

  Charles was overtaking the fugitives who ran toward the sea which lay just beyond the burning trees. The three men were wearing green overalls and had ninjalike scarves round their heads, and I realized, with a sudden excitement, that it was the same pale green in which Caspar von Rellsteb had uniformed Nicole when she sailed away on Erebus. One of the fugitives, slower than his companions, dodged between the empty lounges beside the hotel’s swimming pool, and Charles leaped onto the man’s back with a flying tackle that would have made an international rugby player proud. There was a terrible crash as the two men fell into the wooden furniture and I heard the Genesis fugitive cry aloud in pain. “Hold him!” I shouted at Charles in unnecessary encouragement.

  The other two men turned back to help their comrade. I reached the pool’s apron, ran past Charles and his struggling prisoner, and charged the two men. I shoulder butted the nearest one, who toppled, shouted in fear, then fell backward into the black pool. The second man tried to swerve past me, but I grabbed his arm, turned him, and thumped a fist into his belly. I followed that blow with a wild swing at his face that was cushioned by the man’s vast and springy beard into which I tried to hook my fingers, but the man managed to find his balance and tear himself free, leaving a handful of wiry hairs in my right fist. Abandoning his two companions the man sprinted toward the beach.

  The man I had pushed into the water was already climbing out of the pool’s far side, and I saw that his green overalls were discolored by black streaks which, together with the thick stench that polluted the night air, made me realize that the swimming pool had been deliberately fouled with gallons of black and stinking oil. Behind me Charles suddenly grunted, and I turned to see his captive still desperately struggling. I ran over and thumped a boot into the man’s midriff. “Get him into the bushes!” I said.

  Conference delegates were flooding into the gardens. I did not want to share my captive with anyone, but instead wanted to force some swift information from the man. Charles dragged the bearded figure into the deep shadows behind the small hut where the hotel’s bathing towels were kept. The prisoner made one last frantic effort to twist out of Charles’s grip, but only received a smashing punch in the stomach for his pains. He doubled over, but I grabbed his beard and rammed his head back so that his skull thumped painfully against the hut’s wall. “Do you want me to give you to the police?” I asked him.

  The man said nothing. I could barely see his face, so dark were the shadows, but I could see that our captive was not Caspar von Rellsteb. “Do you speak English?” I asked him.

  Still he said nothing. I sensed Charles moving beside me, and the prisoner suddenly gave a small cry of pain. “I speak English,” the man said hastily. He had an American accent and breath that smelled rotten.

  “Are you from Genesis?” I asked, and, in my excitement, I pronounced it the English way. “Genesis?” I corrected myself.

  “Yes!” he said, but with difficulty, for I was holding him by the throat.

  “Listen,” I said, and slightly released the pressure of my hooked fingers as I spoke. “My name is Tim Blackburn. My daughter is Nicole Blackburn. Do you know Nicole?”

  He nodded frantically. I could see the whites of his eyes as he glanced in panic toward the urgent voices of the conference delegates who were milling excitedly by the fouled pool. I could smell the fear in our captive. He had been hurt by Charles and now feared that I was about to add to his pain or, worse, was about to hand him over to a vengeful mob.

  “Is Nicole here tonight?” I asked urgently.

  He whimpered something that I did not catch.

  “Is she?” I insisted.

  “No! No!”

  “So where is she?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know!”

  “But she’s with Genesis?”

  “Yes!” he said.

  “Where is Genesis!” I hissed at him. “Where’s your base?”

  He said nothing.

  “Answer me!” I said too loudly.

  Still the man said nothing, so I rammed a fist into his belly. “Where the fuck is my daughter?” I shouted at him, suddenly not caring if we were overheard. The man stubbornly shook his bearded face. He had evidently decided to act the heroic prisoner; he would give me his name, rank, and number, but he was determined not to reveal where the Genesis community lived. “Where?” I gripped him by the throat and shook him like a dog shakes a rat.

  “Hurry!” Charles urged me. Flashlight beams were raking the nearby bushes, and it could only be minutes or even seconds before we were seen. “Hurry!” Charles said again.

  “Was von Rellsteb here tonight?” I asked our prisoner.

  “Yes!”

  “I want to meet him. Tell him that. Tell him I’ve got some important news for Nicole. Ask him to give her this letter, but tell him I’d like to talk with him first.” I took the letter from my jacket pocket, then borrowed a pen from Charles and wrote the guest-house telephone number on the back of the envelope. Afterward I fumbled about our captive’s overalls until I found a pocket into which I stuffed the precious letter. “Tell von Rellsteb to telephone me at the number on that envelope. Tell him there’s no trap. I just want to meet him. Do you understand?”

  The man whimpered his assent. Behind us a flashlight beam slashed through the bushes, and a burning frond of palm whipped over our heads. The hotel’s fire alarm was at last silenced, though somewhere in the night’s distance I could hear the visceral wail of approaching sirens.

  “And when you next see Nicole”—I still held the Genesis man by the throat—”tell her I love her.” The man looked somewhat startled at the incongruity of those last words, but he managed to nod his comprehension.

  I pushed him away from me. “Go!” I said.

  For a split second the man stood astonished, then he twisted away and ran frantically toward the sea. He was now a messenger to my daughter, and I silently urged his escape past the angry conference delegates, who, seeing the fugitive flee from the bushes, shouted the alarm and set off in renewed pursuit.

  My messenger almost did not make it to freedom. He ran just inches ahead of his pursuers. I saw him leap off the sea wall, and I thought he must have been overwhelmed by the flood of people who jumped after him, but when Charles and I reached the wall’s top we saw that our man was still inches ahead of the hunt. We also saw that there was a large black inflatable boat a few yards offshore with people aboard who were shouting encouragement as our man splashed into the shallows. “Tell Nicole I love her!” I yelled after him, but my voice was drowned by the crackle of flames, the shouts of the crowd, the growl of the inflat-able’s outboard engine, and the scream of the sirens as Key West’s firefighters reached the hotel. The outboard engine roared as the helmsman curved toward the beach, driving the clumsy rubber bow into the surf where the bearded fugitive hurled himself into the face of a breaking wave. “There goes your letter!” Charles said.

  The crowd of angry delegates stampeded into the sea after the fugitive. Their feet churned the water white as they charged. The man was swimming now. A woman lunged after him, but fell fractionally short, then hands reached from the inflatable boat, the man was half dragged over the gunwale, and the outboard motor was throttled up so that the lopsided boat thundered away toward the open sea. The man had escaped.

  “I think you owe me a drink,” Charles said in a hurt voice. “A big drink. I’ve ruined a perfectly good pair of pants on your behalf.” His white cotton trousers had been ripped, presumably
when he had tackled and overpowered our captive.

  We left the hotel before anyone could ask us questions and I bought Charles a very stiff scotch in one of the many bars that claimed to have been Ernest Hemingway’s spiritual home. I ordered myself an Irish whiskey and, as I drank it, I unfolded and read one of the leaflets that the fleeing Genesis activists had scattered in their wake. The leaflets had been handwritten and copied on an old-fashioned copier that had left smudges of ink on the glossy paper.

  “To the Traitors of the Environment,” the leaflet endearingly began, “you have Cut and Burned the world’s Rain Forests, so we shall Cut and Burn your Fancy Trees. You have Fouled the World’s Waterways with Oil, so We shall Take Away your Toy Pool. You have Soured the World’s Skies with Noxious Fumes, so We shall Make You Breathe a similar Stench. You Consort with the Enemy, with Politicians, and with their Panders, so how can you Expect a Real Warrior of the World’s Ecosystem to Address your Traitorous Conference!” The leaflet went on in a similar vein of capitalized hatred, ending with the boast “We are Genesis. We make Clean by Destroying the Dirt-Makers.”

  “Very charming,” Charles said with fastidious distaste when he had skimmed through the poorly written leaflet. “But why attack fellow environmentalists? Why don’t they attack a conference of industrialists?”

  “I suppose it’s von Rellsteb’s way of making a bid for green leadership. He obviously thinks that Greenpeace and all the others are hopelessly respectable, and this is his way of showing it.”

  “It seems very puerile,” Charles said, and so it did. Oil and stink bombs were the weapons of naughty children, not of the eco-warriors the Genesis community aspired to be, yet at least, I consoled myself, they had not used dynamite.

  “I’m sorry about your trousers,” I said to Charles.

  “It was stupid of me to have worn them.” Charles looked painfully at the rip in the white cotton.

  I could not help grinning at the anguish in his voice. “For a ragged-trousered fairy, Charles,” I complimented him, “you’re good in a fight.”

  He looked even more pained. “I’ll have you know that Alexander the Great was gay, and who made up the Sacred Band of Thebes? A hundred and fifty fairy couples, that’s who, and they were reckoned to be the most lethal regiment that ever marched into battle. And your Lawrence of Arabia knew his way around a Turkish bath well enough, yet he was no slouch in a fight. You should be very glad that we gays are mostly pacifists, or else we’d probably rule the world.” He finished his scotch and put the empty glass in front of me. “Perhaps, if you’re going to air all your pathetic prejudices about my kind, you should buy me another drink first?”

  I spared him my prejudices, but bought him another drink anyway, and wondered if von Rellsteb would call.

  No telephone call came on Thursday, and by that evening I suspected that no call would come. Why should von Rellsteb contact me? He had gone to immense trouble to hide himself and his followers from the world, and I could see no reason why he should risk that concealment by responding to a plea from the distraught parent of one of his activists. Besides, the phone number, like the letter, had probably been obliterated by the seawater.

  “You tried!” Charles attempted to console me.

  “Yes. I tried.” And, when no message arrived on Friday, which was the conference’s last day, I realized I had failed. I had lunch with Matthew Allenby, who ruefully compared the half-inch of column space that his speech had earned in the Florida newspapers with the massive coverage that the Genesis attack had provoked. The local television news had made the Genesis assault their lead story, reporting that the police and coast guard had found no sign of the perpetrators. “The publicity is why von Rellsteb does it, of course,” Matthew Allenby said wistfully.

  I thought how Fletcher had talked of terrorists wanting more bucks for their bangs. “And does publicity generate cash for Genesis?” I asked.

  Matthew frowned. “I don’t see how it can. They publish no address for anyone to send a donation, yet they must need money. They have to move around the world, buy their equipment, maintain their boats, recruit their people. They have to feed themselves, and the word is that they’ve got upward of fifty members. Perhaps they have a secret benefactor?” He crumbled a bread roll. “If I was a journalist,” he went on slowly, “that’s the question I’d want answered. Where do they get their money?”

  I picked listlessly at my salad. Matthew, sensing my disappointment with the week’s events, apologized yet again for tempting me to Key West. “But maybe he’ll still call?”

  “Maybe,” I agreed, but my flight home left Miami in less than forty-eight hours, and I knew I had chased Nicole across an ocean for nothing.

  Then, next morning, just when I had finally abandoned hope, von Rellsteb called.

  I had left the guest house to buy some small presents for David and the boatyard staff. Charles was out, so one of the kitchen help took the message, which he said was from a man with an unremarkable accent. The message merely said that if I wanted the meeting I had requested I should wait at the end of the main dirt road on Sun Kiss Key at midnight. The caller stressed that I had to be alone, or else there would be no rendezvous.

  I smacked a fist into a palm, showing an excitement that the more cautious Charles did not share. “You mustn’t go on your own!” he insisted, but I did not reply. I was too excited to care about caution. “Do you hear me?” Charles asked. “Earth to Tim! Earth to Tim!”

  “Of course I’m going on my own!” I was not going to risk losing any news of Nicole by disobeying the cryptic orders.

  “Suppose it’s a trap?” Charles asked.

  “Why on earth should it be a trap?” I asked with stubborn incomprehension.

  “Because it’s all so secretive,” Charles said. “Dirt roads at midnight, no one else to be there. I’d say it was a trap, wouldn’t you?”

  “Why on earth would they want to trap me?”

  “Because we hurt that fellow, that’s why, and he probably wants revenge.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “I don’t like it, I don’t trust it,” Charles said unhappily. He had fetched one of the tourist guides from the guest-house reception desk and discovered that Sun Kiss Key was a real-estate name for a proposed housing development on one of the middle keys that lay some twenty miles from Key West. He telephoned a realtor friend and learned that none of the houses had yet been built, and that consequently there was nothing on the island but newly excavated boat canals and a network of unpaved roads. At night it would be deserted. “If I stay a hundred paces behind you,” Charles suggested, “then maybe they won’t notice?”

  “No!” I insisted.

  “Then take this.” He opened the drawer of a bureau and brought out a holstered revolver. “It’s licensed!” he said, as though that made possession of the handgun quite acceptable. I felt the surprise and revulsion that most Europeans feel for handguns, but nevertheless I gingerly reached for the weapon. It was a long-barreled, single-action Ruger, only .22 caliber, but it looked lethal enough. “Have you ever fired a handgun?” Charles asked me.

  I nodded, though the last time had been twenty years before in the army, and even then I had only fired six reluctant shots to satisfy an insistent firearms instructor. “I’m sure I won’t need this,” I said to Charles, though his supposition that von Rellsteb wanted revenge was enough to make me keep the small gun.

  “If you don’t need it, then just keep it hidden. But if you do need it, then you’ll be glad to have it along.” Charles took the gun from me and loaded its cylinder with cartridges.

  “Why do you keep a gun?” I asked him.

  He paused for a second. “Once upon a time,” he said, “my car broke down in Texas. I’d decided to drive all the way to San Francisco in an old Packard. It was an antique car, very rare, and someone had told me I could sell it for a lot of money in California, but its back axle broke in Texas. Then two guys stopped in a pick-up. I thought they were goi
ng to help me, but...” He stopped abruptly, and I wished I had not asked the question, for I saw how the memory pained him, but then he grinned and thrust the revolver toward me. “Fairy firepower, Tim. It shoots slightly up and to the right. And I suppose you’ll want to borrow the car as well?”

  “Can I?” I asked.

  “You may,” he said grandly, “indeed you may. But bring it back in one piece. You can be replaced, but Austin-Healeys are rare indeed.”

  I spent that afternoon writing another letter to Nicole, in case the first was illegible. It was much the same as the first letter. I told my daughter that I loved her, that I wanted to see her, and that I was lonely for family. I told her I had not killed her brother, and I was sure she knew that, too. It was not a long message, but it still took a long time to write. Then, filled with hope and dread, I waited.

  The weather forecast hinted at the possibility of a thunderstorm over the Keys, so I borrowed a black nylon rain slicker from Charles, which I wore over black trousers, black shoes, and a dark blue shirt. “Black suits you,” Charles said approvingly.

  I growled something ungrateful in reply.

  “Don’t let a compliment go to your head,” he told me, “because your appearance could still take a few basic improvements. A water-based moisturizer for your skin, a decent haircut, and some nice clothes would be a start.”

  “Shut the hell up,” I said, and tucked his holstered gun into my right-hand trouser’s pocket. I had Nicole’s letter in my shirt pocket, where, if it rained, it would be sheltered by the nylon slicker.

  “And for God’s sake,” Charles went on, “stay under the speed limit on the highway. If the police find you with that gun, we’ll both be up to our buns in trouble.”

  I stayed under the speed limit as I drove up the Overseas Highway which arced on stilts across the channels between the islands. I had left Key West at nine o’clock, wanting to arrive very early at Sun Kiss Key, so that I could scout the rendezvous to smell for even the smallest hint of trouble. Not that I expected trouble, but the strangeness of the occasion and the heaviness of the thundery air gave the whole night an unreal tinge. Ahead of me, like a grim sign of doom, the northern sky was banded by jet black clouds, while overhead the stars pricked bright. There was a half-moon in the east that made the unclouded part of the night’s sky lighter than I had anticipated.