“I was already telling you!”
“OK.” I held my hands up in mock surrender. “Please, continue.”
“Molly insisted on going to Hamburg, because that was where von Rellsteb’s mother came from. Molly said two heads were better than one, and it really was a good idea, because she speaks German, and she found this lawyer and he was terrific! He had a cousin who lives in Detroit, and I guess that helped, because we could tell him all about Detroit and he was really interested, because he’s never been to the States and he was thinking of going, in fact, he was thinking he might go this Christmas, and Molly—”
“Jackie!” I snapped. “I do not care where your God-damned Hamburg lawyer will spend his Christmas. I want to know about Caspar von Rellsteb!”
David was half choking with laughter, while Betty, who was used to organizing the waifs and strays of society, looked as though she wanted to tuck Jackie under her arm and carry her away for a proper feed. Jackie, astonished at my reproof, gazed wide-eyed at me for a few seconds, then looked contrite. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but the thing is that Friedrich, that’s the lawyer I was telling you about, was really terrific and he didn’t charge us a penny, and that was what I was trying to explain to you, because you’ve got to review these accounts”—she pushed the untidy pile of scruffy papers toward me—“to see that we didn’t spend your money unwisely, and Friedrich, and this is what I’ve been trying to tell you all along, only you keep interrupting me, knew all about the von Rellsteb legacy, because it was quite a celebrated case, and he dug all the papers out of the archives and he gave Molly and me copies, and, of course, we paid for the photocopying, you’ll see it down there at the bottom of page three, there, see? Twenty-nine marks? And that’s cheap for photocopying, because in America you probably pay ten cents a sheet, in fact, a place near my house charges fifteen cents a sheet! Fifteen! And we paid much less for two copies each of a hundred and ten pages. I’ve got a proper receipt for the photocopying as well.” She dug through her vast bag. “I know I’ve got it. I remember putting it aside.”
David, hugely amused by Jackie, had gone to the table where he leafed through her carefully handwritten accounts. “What’s this?” He demanded with mock sternness. “Six marks and thirty-seven pfenning on ice cream?”
“Oh, gee.” Jackie blushed with embarrassment. “I told Molly we shouldn’t have bought the ice cream, but she said it was all right, because we deserved some reward for all our work, and the food was really terrible. All those sausages, which neither of us would eat, and we’d run out of our own money and we just wanted some ice cream. I’ll pay you back, Mr. Blackburn, truly I will.”
“You can have the ice cream,” I said magnanimously, “if you tell me about Caspar von Rellsteb.”
She did, though it took her the best part of a half hour. Betty made us all tea and we sat in the big stateroom, listening to the wind sigh in the rigging and to the rain patter on the coach roof and to the small waves slap on Stormchild’s hull, as Jackie Potten slowly unveiled the mystery.
Caspar von Rellsteb’s father, Jackie said, was not alive, but had died in the air battles at the very end of the Second World War. Caspar von Rellsteb had discovered his father’s identity when he went through his mother’s papers after her death, and the same papers suggested that he might have a claim on his dead father’s considerable property. He had sailed to Germany to make that claim, taking with him a letter, in which, shortly before his death, Oberstleutnant Auguste von Rellsteb had bequeathed his whole estate to Caspar’s mother, Fräulein Eva Fellnagel. The letter, written from a Luftwaffe station late in the war, was hardly a legal will, but Auguste von Rellsteb left no other instructions for the disposition of his property before he was killed when his Focke-Wulf 190 was shot down by an American Mustang. The legal status of the letter was challenged by the estate’s trustees, but the German judges had dismissed the challenge and upheld the validity of Oberstleutnant Auguste von Rellsteb’s last wishes. Caspar von Rellsteb had won his case.
“So how much did he inherit?” Betty, quite caught up in Jackie’s breathless retelling of the story, asked.
“It’s kind of hard to say,” Jackie answered, then explained that the legacy went back to the early nineteenth century when a certain Otto von Rellsteb, the youngest son of a landed Junker family from East Prussia, had crossed the Atlantic to the newly independent Republic of Chile. Otto von Rellsteb, like thousands of other hopeful Germans, had gone to buy land at the southern tip of South America, an area so popular with German immigrants that it had been nicknamed the New Bavaria. Otto, unable to afford the richer farmland on the Argentine pampas, had purchased a huge spread of cheap coastal land in Chile, where he had established his finca, his estate, and where he had raised thousands upon thousands of sheep. He had also discovered an easily quarried deposit of limestone on his finca and, thus provided by nature, he had prospered, as had his descendants until his great-great-grandson, Auguste, hating the bleak, wild, stormy coast, and detesting the sound of sheep, and loathing the dumb, insolent faces of his workers, had returned to Europe where, glorying in the Reich, he had joined the Luftwaffe, impregnated a whore with his son, then died in a blazing aircraft for his führer.
Jackie Potten carefully unfolded a photocopied map that she pushed across Stormchild’s cabin table. “It’s there,” she said, “all that’s left of the von Rellsteb finca.”
I did not look at the map. Instead my mind was reeling with the sudden understanding that the Genesis community was not in Alaska after all, but in Patagonia.
“How big is the estate?” David turned the map toward him. It was not a very helpful map, showing hardly any detail, but instead just some shaded-in islands that rimmed the wild western coast of South America.
“Caspar inherited about twelve thousand acres,” Jackie said. “The estate lost a good deal of land when Allende was in power, but Pinochet restored most of it to the German trustees. General Pinochet really liked the Germans, you see, and I guess he was kind of hoping that a German might go back and live at the finca. There’s evidently a really big farmhouse, and there are still some industrial buildings left at the quarry, because they went on extracting limestone right up until the Second World War.”
“The land can’t be worth anything,” David said dismissively.
“But what a perfect hiding place,” I said, and I pulled the photocopied map toward me and saw that Otto von Rellsteb had made his finca in the Archipiélago Sangre de Cristo, the Islands of Christ’s Blood, in the Magellanic region of Chile, at the very end of the earth, in the last land God made, in the remotest region any man might search for his enemies; in Patagonia.
I knew something about the Patagonian coast, because I had once made plans to take a British army expedition there, but those plans had collapsed when the Ministry of Defense had tediously demanded either scientific or military justification for the jaunt. Perhaps I had been lucky in the Ministry’s obduracy, for, though there are one or two wilder places than Patagonia, there is no coast on earth where the sea and wind combine to vent such an implacable and relentless anger. Patagonia has a coast out of a nightmare. It is a seashore from hell.
It is a coastline that is still being formed, a coastline being ripped and burned and forged from the clash of volcano and tectonic plate, and of ocean and glacier. On a chart the coast looks as though it has been fractured into islands so numerous they are uncountable. It is a coast of dizzying cliffs, murderous tidal surges, howling winds, whirlpools, sudden fire, and crushing ice. It is the coast where the massive fetch of the great Pacific rollers ends in numbing violence. From the Gulf of Corcovado to the northern limit of the Land of Fire are five hundred miles of ragged islands about which the wild sea heaps and shatters itself white. There are no roads down that coast. A few wild tracks cross the Andes from the grass plains of the Argentine, but no roads can be built parallel to the tortuous Chilean coast, so the only way to travel is by boat, threading the narrow channels between the inland glaciers and the outer barrier islands. Yet even the innermost channels offer no certain safety to a mariner. A Chilean naval ship, taking food to one of the coast’s rare lighthouses, was once trapped in such a channel for forty days as the frenzied Pacific waves pounded the outer rocks and filled the sky with stinging whips of freezing spume. Within the channels, where thick growths of kelp clog propellers and thicker fogs blind helmsmen and lookouts, williwaws or rafagas, which are sudden squalls of hurricane-force wind, hurtle down the mountainsides to explode the seemingly sheltered waters into frantic madness. Such winds can destroy a boat in seconds.