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.