“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 inflatable’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.