I smiled at that thought, then looked at my watch. I still had two hours to wait. It had been stupid of me, I thought, to arrive so early, and even more stupid to bring the gun that was a hard lump in my pocket.
“Good evening, Mr. Blackburn.”
“Christ!” I jumped like a fearful thing, twisting round to face the sudden voice. I had recognized the voice immediately, for von Rellsteb’s German accented English had not changed since my last confrontation with him on the deck of Erebus. How the hell had he gotten so close without my hearing him? I could see him now; a dark shape just fifteen yards away. Had he come by boat? Was he alone?
“I’m quite alone.” He chuckled as though taking pleasure in anticipating my question. He stepped closer, and I saw by the moonlight that his appearance, like his beguiling voice, had not changed. His face was as narrow and goatlike as I remembered it, and he still had a waist-length ponytail of white hair and a thin straggly beard. He also demonstrated a calm confidence as he reached out to shake my hand. “I rather hoped you would be early,” he said. “Midnight seems such a witching hour for a meeting, does it not? But alas, at the time I made the arrangement I did not think I could reach this place any sooner. Luckily things freed up for me. How are you?”
I had warily shaken his hand, but did not respond to his friendly question, preferring to ask one of my own. “Where’s Nicole?”
“Ah, she’s well! And she’s safe!”
“You got my letter for her?”
“It was rather ruined by seawater. The telephone number was written in ballpoint, and decipherable, but the rest? I suspect it was washed away. I am sorry.” He shrugged apologetically.
“I have another one for her.” I took the letter from my shirt pocket and held it out to von Rellsteb. I was feeling extraordinarily clumsy. Von Rellsteb, not I, had taken charge of this encounter.
Von Rellsteb took the letter and pushed it into a pocket. “You told George that you had important news for Nicole? I assume that news is in the letter?”
“I wanted to tell her that her mother is dead.”
“Her mother is…” Von Rellsteb began to echo my words, then a look of awful pain shuddered across his face, and I thought of the police suspicion that the Genesis community had planted the bomb that killed Joanna, and I knew that if those suspicions were true, then this man was one of the greatest actors who had ever lived. Von Rellsteb momentarily closed his eyes. “My dear Mr. Blackburn,” he said at last, “I am so very sorry. Was it an illness?”
“No.” I did not elaborate.
“Poor Nicole!” Von Rellsteb said. “Poor Nicole! And you, too. How very sad. No wonder you are so eager to see her!” He had handled the news of my wife’s death with a superb assurance. Most of us, confronted with the mention of death, become tongue-tied and confused, but von Rellsteb’s comforting sympathy had been instant and seemingly heartfelt, and I, at last, began to understand how my daughter could have been attracted to this gaunt man. I remembered how Joanna had described him as attractive, and I could begin to see why; his long, thin face had the appeal of sensitivity and intelligence, which made him appear competent to handle the secret hurts of those he met. “You must understand, though,” von Rellsteb continued, “that your daughter is frightened.”
“Nicole? Frightened?” I asked.
“She thinks you will not forgive her.” Von Rellsteb paused to frown in thought. “Sometimes, you know, we do things, and then we find they are gone too far to be retrieved. Do you know what I mean?”
“Not really,” I said.
Von Rellsteb gave me a swift, apologetic smile. “I do not always express myself well in English. Nicole is frightened because she did not write or talk to you for so long that each new day makes it harder for her to risk facing the disappointment she knows you must feel.”
“But I love her.”
“Of course you do.” He smiled, complicit with my grief, then stirred the air with his hand as if, frustrated in his efforts to find the right words, he might conjure them from the night’s darkness. “I think Nicole knows you love her, but she fears you will be angry because of her absence. She even told me that, perhaps, you had disinherited her!” Von Rellsteb offered a small shrug, as if to share with me the ridiculousness of such a notion, and I did not think to notice that even the mention of disinheritance was an oddity in this admittedly odd rendezvous.
“Disinherit her?” I said instead. “Of course not.”
“Not that it matters,” von Rellsteb said loftily. “We should be above such mundane matters, yes?”
“And I want to see her!”
“Naturally you do, naturally!” Von Rellsteb said with eager understanding. Behind me the lightning flickered eerily to blanch the rippling water in the mangrove channel. “But it’s difficult,” von Rellsteb murmured after a pause.
“What is?” I sounded hostile.
“I try to keep the Genesis community separate from the world.”
“Why? I thought you wanted to save the world?”
He smiled. “We are not apart from the world, but rather from the people who make the world unclean. The sins of the fathers, Mr. Blackburn, are being visited on their children, so we children must be pure if we are to redeem our fathers’ world.” His thin, expressive face was suddenly lit by another sheet of lightning which rampaged across the Everglades. “I am expressing myself badly,” von Rellsteb went on, “but what I am trying to say, is that we in Genesis have forsaken family, Mr. Blackburn. It is a measure of the seriousness of our purpose.”
The pretensions of his words struck me as preposterous. “Seriousness?” I challenged him. “Stink bombs? Oil in a swimming pool?”
He smiled at the accusation. “Of course stink bombs are a joke, but those people at the conference are so, what is the word? Complacent! They talk and talk and talk, and congratulate one another on the purity of their commitment, but while they talk the dolphins are dying and the world’s hardwoods are being cut down and oil is being spewed into the seaways. I think it will be the Genesis community, and groups like Genesis, who will cleanse the world, not these fashionable environmentalists with their shrill talk and soft hands. I wanted the journalists at that conference to be aware of the need for extreme measures if the world is to be saved, so I used stink bombs. Would you rather I had used real bombs?”
“Could you have?” I asked him coldly.
“No, Mr. Blackburn, no.” His voice was very gentle, as though he dealt with a fractious child.
“Where is Nicole?” I asked him.
“In the Pacific.”
“Where, exactly?” I insisted.
Von Rellsteb paused. “I won’t tell you.” He held up a placatory hand to still my protest, then, as though he needed to move if he was to think and express himself properly, he began pacing up and down the channel’s bank. “I have long dreamed of a community that could devote itself to oneness with the earth. A biocentric community, without distractions, living in a silence that might let us hear the echoes of creation and the music of life.” He gave me a sudden smile. “You, of all people, know what I mean! You’ve known the transforming wonder of sitting in a small boat in the center of an ocean in the middle of a night, and suddenly feeling that you steered a vessel among the stars. You could live forever at that moment. There’s no history, no anger, no pride, just you and creation and a terrifying, exhilarating mystery. If I am to pierce that mystery, and find its meaning, then I must live in the center of silence. That’s what we do.” He paused, seeking a further explanation that would satisfy me. “Perhaps we’re making the first eco-religion? Perhaps the new millennium will need such a faith? But to forge it, we must live without distraction, and so our first rule, our golden rule, is that we keep ourselves private. That, Mr. Blackburn, is why I will not tell you where we live.”