The engine I was hearing belonged to the fishing boat which had vainly pursued Stormchild two days before and which now had steamed up the Desolate Straits and was berthed alongside the pier. Black smoke drizzled from her tall chimney. The sea kayaks that I had holed with bullets were now piled on her deck. Outboard of the trawler was a catamaran, while in the center of the waterway a stained and weathered sloop lay hove-to. I fished out what was left of my binoculars and trained the single lens on the boats. The sloop turned as I watched and, with a burst of troubled water at her stern, began motoring down the straits toward the far settlement.
I panned to the catamaran, daring to hope it was Nicole’s boat, but instead I saw that it was the old catamaran in which von Rellsteb had come to my English river so long ago. I recognized neither of the men on board who now cast off from the trawler and, their engines going, turned to follow the sloop.
The trawler alone was left. Lisl was standing on the pier by the fishing boat’s gangplank, from where she stared toward the factory ramp down which I had tumbled. It was evident that she was waiting for something or someone. Above her the gulls wheeled and screamed in the rain. The Desolate Straits looked gray, greasy, and cold, while the colors of the far hills, which only two days before had seemed so bright and heavenly, were now dulled by the rain into a dun drab. I shivered.
I assumed that, obedient to von Rellsteb’s parting instructions, the Genesis crews were retreating to the settlement. There they could rendezvous and assess what damage, if any, Stormchild’s visit had caused them. If von Rellsteb had captured my boat, then that damage would have been minimal, whereas if David was still free and threatening to carry Berenice’s testimony to the authorities, von Rellsteb would urgently need to start his pursuit, and I wondered if the departure of the two yachts was the commencement of that urgent pursuit.
It did indeed look as though every Genesis boat and every Genesis crew member was being committed to Stormchild’s chase, for, as far as I could tell, they were leaving the mine workings unguarded. That implied there was very little at the workings worth protecting, but it also indicated that Lisl believed me to be dead. That misconception was my one small advantage over Genesis.
I watched Lisl stamp her feet against the cold, then, panning my broken glass right, I saw what it was she waited for. Two men were struggling toward the fishing boat with the body of the gunman I had wounded, and whom, I suspected, the Genesis group had themselves finished off. Now one man held the corpse by the shoulders of its coat while the other grasped the dead man’s ankles. The cadaver’s bearded head hung backward so that its long hair brushed at the pier’s stones and its huge beard jutted pugnaciously toward the rain clouds. Lisl seemed to shudder and back away from the body’s passing. The two men very nearly dropped the corpse into the water as they shuffled across the makeshift gangplank, but at last they had the body safe aboard, and Lisl, still keeping her distance from the dead, cast off the trawler’s mooring lines. The engine smoke thickened as, with an awful wheezing and clanking, the decrepit vessel steamed away up the wide straits.
When the fishing boat disappeared I rolled over the lip of the quarry.
No one shot at me. It seemed that no one had been left behind to guard the mine against my ghost. I lay panting and pained on the thin turf, then slowly, when my stomach muscles uncramped, I gathered my strength, stood up, and, using the rifle like a crutch, I limped toward the mine buildings, where I still had a daughter to find.
It was in the low stone buildings, which were built into the hillside at the back of the quay, that I found the first signs of Nicole. The buildings were single-storied, and crouched against the spite of the sea wind like a row of Cornish fishermens’ cottages. The buildings were locked, but not locked well enough, and inside I discovered crude and uncomfortable living quarters. Some effort had been made to decorate the five bedrooms; one boasted a livid mural showing a humpback whale venting beside an iceberg, while a second was decorated with a painted effigy of an Indian god, its colors bright as the sun, but mostly the rooms were as characterless and cheerless as an army barracks. I wondered which of the beds Nicole used, though the barrenness of the small bedrooms suggested that they were used only when the severity of the weather drove Nicole’s crew out of their boat and into the shelter of the cottage’s stone walls. There was a small kitchen equipped with a woodstove, a cupboard which held nothing but packets of dehydrated stew, and a battered enamel washing bowl, in which a large evil-looking spider lived. There was also a wooden table, six chairs, and a wall that was covered with peeling paper, or so I thought until I pushed back the kitchen’s shutters and saw that the peeling paper was, in fact, rows of curling photographs.
I had found Nicole.
I felt the sudden catch and choke of incipient tears, for there was my daughter’s face among the Genesis crews. “Nicole,” I whispered her name aloud like an incantation, “Nicole, Nicole.” I even reached up a tentative finger and stroked one of the photographs. Suddenly it was all worth it — the voyage, the cold, the pain, and the fear, for here she was, my daughter, and I had found her.
Or rather I had found her face among the photographs, which showed a variety of Genesis activists. In some of the pictures they were attacking fishnets with grapnels and cutting gear, while in another a Genesis group in an inflatable boat was taunting a French naval patrol vessel which had presumably been guarding France’s nuclear-testing site in the Pacific. The pictures were amateurish, like fading holiday snapshots, and somehow that suggested that the Genesis eco-terrorists were a group of energetically carefree young people enjoying a most innocent and happy vacation; whenever two people were photographed together they inevitably had their arms about each others’ necks, and in almost every snapshot they seemed to be shouting good-natured insults at the camera.
The pictures, I saw, were all of the same crew: Nicole’s. Nicole herself appeared in a dozen of the photographs, and in all but one of those she was either smiling or laughing. One photograph had been taken while she took a bucket shower on her catamaran’s foredeck. She had been naked, and had clearly not known that she was being photographed, for the next picture showed her indignant, but good-humored face as she attacked the photographer. In a half dozen of the pictures she was shown with a thin, flaxen-haired boy, who had a blunt face that reminded me uncannily of my dead son. The more I looked, the more the boy in the pictures looked like Dickie. It was unsettling, for there was something about the way in which Nicole and the blond boy had been photographed together that suggested they were lovers.
I tried not to follow those insinuations. Instead I gazed for a long time at those pictures of my daughter, and I wondered just what thoughts and dreams moved her in this new life. None of the happy photographs revealed the answer to that question, but there was a clue in the one unsmiling picture of Nicole. That picture had been taken in an inflatable boat which had been thrashing through a choppy sea beneath a threatening sky. Nicole, sitting in the bows of the rubber boat, had just turned to face the photographer, and the camera had caught her face in a grim and taut expression that put me in mind of Berenice’s timid description of my daughter as “fierce.” I had a horrible feeling that the grim face was the real face, a face that betrayed no forgiveness nor any love. The picture worried me.