Stormchild

PART ONE

The sea was weeping.

It was a gray sea being kicked into life by a sudden wind; a sea being torn into raggedness and flecked white. The fishermen called it a weeping sea, and claimed it presaged disaster.

“It won’t last.” My wife, Joanna, spoke of the sea’s sudden spite.

The two of us were standing on the quay of our boatyard watching the black clouds fly up the English channel. It was the late afternoon of Good Friday, yet the air temperature felt like November and the bitter gray sea looked like January. The deteriorating weather had inevitably brought out the wind-surfers whose bright sails scudded through the gloom and bounced dangerously across the broken waters of the estuary’s bar where the high bows of a returning fishing boat battered the sea into wind-slavered ruin. Our own boat, a Contessa 32 called Slip-Slider, jerked and pitched and thudded against her fenders on the outer pontoon beneath our quay.

“It can’t last,” Joanna insisted in her most robust voice as though she could enforce decent Easter weather by sheer willpower.

“It’ll get worse before it gets better,” I said with idle pessimism.

“So we won’t sail tonight,” Joanna said more usefully, “but we’ll surely get away at dawn tomorrow.” We had been planning a night passage to Guernsey, where Joanna’s sister lived, and where, after church on Easter morning, my wife’s family would sit down to roast lamb and new potatoes. The Easter family reunion had become a tradition, and that year Joanna and I had been looking forward to it with a special relish, for it seemed we had both at last recovered from the tragedies of our son’s death and our daughter’s disappearance. Time might not have completely healed those twin wounds, but it had layered them over with skins of tough scar tissue, and Joanna and I were aware of ordinary happinesses once again intruding on what had been a long period of mourning and bafflement. Life, in short, was becoming normal, and being normal, it presented its usual crop of problems.

Our biggest immediate problem was a damaged four-and-a-half-ton yawl which had been standing ready to be launched when our crane-driver had rammed it with the jib of his machine. The damage was superficial, merely some mangled guardrails and a nasty gash in the hull’s gelcoat, but the yawl’s owner, a petulant obstetrician from Basingstoke, was driving to the yard next lunchtime and expected to find his boat launched, rigged, and ready. Billy, our foreman, had offered to stay and make good the damage, but Billy was already covering for my absence over the Easter weekend and I had been unhappy about adding to his workload.

So the ill wind that had made the sea weep at least blew Billy some good, for I sent him home to his new wife while I towed the big yawl into the shed where wind and rain rattled the corrugated tin roof as I stripped out the damage under the big lamps. I planned the next morning’s sail as I worked. If the marine forecast was right and this sudden hard weather abated, we could leave the river at daybreak and endure an hour of foul tide before the ebb swept us past the Anvil and out into mid-channel. We would make Guernsey in time for supper, and the only possible inconvenience in our revised plans was the probability that the visitor’s marina in St. Peter’s Port would be filled by the time of our arrival and we would have to find a mooring in the outer harbor.

As night fell it seemed improbable that the weather would relent by dawn. The shrieking wind was flaying the river with white foam. The gale was strong enough to persuade some of the Sailing Club members to borrow our launch and tow a gaggle of the club’s dinghies off the midstream buoys and into the shelter of our pontoons. Joanna helped them, then spent two hours bringing the boatyard accounts up to date before braving the filthy weather to fetch two bags of cod and chips from the high street. It was while she was gone that Harry Carstairs phoned. “Thank God you’re still there,” Carstairs greeted me, “I thought you might have gone away for Easter.”

Carstairs was a yacht broker who worked out of an air-conditioned office in London’s Mayfair. His clients were not the small-boat sailors who were my bread and butter, but rather the hyper-rich who could afford professional skippers at the helm, naked starlets on the foredeck, and stroll-on, stroll-off berths in Monte Carlo. Our yard’s normal business was much too paltry for Carstairs’s expensive trade, but that year Joanna and I happened to have a great steel-hulled sloop for sale and, though at over a hundred and fifty thousand pounds Stormchild was at the very upper range of our stock, she barely scraped in at the slum end of Harry’s business. “I’ve got a likely client who wants to look at the beast tomorrow,” he told me in his champagne and caviar accent. “Is that all right with you?”

I hesitated before answering. Of late, as our life returned to normal, Joanna and I had discussed buying Stormchild for ourselves. We had dreamed of selling our house, hiring a manager to look after the yard, then sailing away to far white beaches and exotic harbors. Stormchild would have been the perfect boat to make those dreams come true, but the trouble was they were only dreams, not plans, and I knew we were not ready to make the change, just as I knew I could not pass up a proper offer for the big steel boat. “Stormchild’s still here,” I reluctantly told Carstairs, “and the yard’s open from eight until six, so help yourself to a viewing. You can get Stormchild’s keys from my foreman. His name’s Billy and I’ll make sure he puts some heat into the boat.”

“The customer will be with you at midday”—Harry ignored everything I had said—“and he’ll try to knock you down to a hundred and ten, but I told him you wouldn’t go a penny below one-thirty.”

“Hang on!” I protested angrily. It was not the suggested price that was making me bridle but rather Harry’s bland assumption that I would be available to show Stormchild to his customer. “I’ll be halfway to the Channel Islands by midday tomorrow. Why can’t you show the boat yourself?”

“Because I shall be in Majorca, selling a triple-decked whorehouse to a Sheik of Araby,” Harry said carelessly. Then, after a deliberately worrying pause, “OK, Tim, if you don’t want to sell your sloop, what about that big German yawl at Cobb’s Quay? Do you know if she’s still available?”

“Sod you,” I growled, thus provoking an evil chuckle from Harry, who knew Joanna and I should never have taken Stormchild onto our brokerage list. The big yacht was out of our league, but she was an estate sale and the widow was an old friend of the family, and we had been unable to refuse her request that we look after the sale. Out of sentimentality we had even waived our brokerage fee, but not even that concession had shifted the big sloop off our jackstands, and thus, for over a year now, Stormchild’s fifty-two-foot hull had taken up precious space in our yard, and she looked like she would be staying for at least another year unless we found a buyer who was immune to Britain’s sky-high interest rates. Harry Carstairs knew just how desperately I needed to make room in my cramped yard, which was why he was so blithely confident that I would change my Easter plans. For a few seconds I contemplated letting Billy handle the London lawyer, but I knew my foreman was neither good at nor happy with such negotiations, which meant I would have to stay and deal with the sale myself. “OK, Harry”—I resigned myself to the inevitable—“I’ll be here.”

“Good man, Tim. The customer’s name is John Miller, got it? He’s a more than the usually poisonous lawyer but he’s rich, of course, which is why I promise I’m not wasting your time.”

I put the phone down and ducked into the pouring rain to see if Joanna had returned. The streetlights on the far side of the river shook and danced their reflections in the black water and I thought I saw a moving shadow silhouetted against one of those liquid spears. The movement seemed to be on board Slip-Slider, and I assumed Joanna must have taken our supper down into the Contessa’s cozy cabin. “Jo!” I shouted toward the shadow.

The yard gate clanged shut behind me. “I’m here.” Joanna ran through the pelting rain to the shelter of the yard’s office. “Come and eat while it’s hot!”

“Just a minute!” I turned on the yard’s security lights. Rain sliced past the yellow lamps, but otherwise nothing untoward moved on the wave-rocked pontoons and I guessed the shadow by Slip-Slider had been my imagination, or perhaps one of the dozen stray cats that had taken up residence in the yard.

“What is it?” Joanna asked me from the office doorway.

“Nothing.” I killed the lights, but still gazed toward the rain-hammered river where, at the midstream buoys that the Sailing Club had emptied at dusk, I now thought I could see a big, dark yacht moored, but the smeared afterimage of the bright security lights blurred my sight and made me uncertain whether I was seeing true or just imagining shadows in the darkness.

I went to the office and told Joanna about Harry’s prospective customer, and we agreed that the opportunity of selling the big yacht was too good to pass up. The widow of Stormchild’s owner was feeling the pinch and, in consequence, we were feeling responsible. That guilt was unreasonable, for the state of the economy was the fault of the bloody politicians, but reasonable or not that guilt meant I would have to sacrifice this weekend’s family reunion in an effort to sell the boat. Joanna offered to stay as well, but I knew how eagerly she was looking forward to Easter day, so I encouraged her to sail alone to Guernsey. “Perhaps you can get a flight?” Joanna suggested, though without much optimism for she knew that the chance of finding a spare seat to the Channel Islands on an Easter Saturday flight was remote. “But look on the bright side,” Joanna said wickedly, “because now you’ve got no reason not to hear your brother’s Easter sermon.”

“Oh, Christ, I hadn’t thought of that.” My brother David, rural dean in the local diocese and rector of our parish church, frequently complained that while he often patronized my place of work I rarely patronized his. David’s muscular Christianity was not entirely to my taste, but, thanks to a London lawyer, it looked as if I would have to grin and bear a dose this Easter.

I left Joanna with the accounts and went back to finish the yawl’s repairs. As I ran across the yard I noted that the midstream buoys were empty, which meant that the big yacht I thought I had seen there must have been a figment of my imagination, which made sense for no one in their right mind would have slipped and gone to sea in the teeth of this vicious wind. The weather seemed to be worsening, making a mockery of the marine forecast’s promise of a fair morning, but Joanna, more trusting than I, went home at nine o’clock to get a good night’s sleep before her early start. When I followed her up the hill three hours later the gale was still blowing the sky ragged, yet, when the alarm woke me before dawn, the wind had indeed veered westerly and lost its spitting venom. “I told you so,” Joanna said sleepily. “Did you finish the yawl?”

I nodded. “The bugger’ll never know it was hit.”

She opened the bedroom window and sniffed the wind. “It’s going to be a fast crossing,” she said happily. Joanna had grown up in Guernsey where she had learned to sail as naturally as other children learned to ride a bicycle. She relished strong winds and hard seas and, anticipating that this day would bring her a fast wet channel crossing, all spray and dash and thumping seas, she was eager to get under way.

I cooked Joanna’s breakfast, then drove her down to the river. She was dressed in oilies, while her red-gold hair, beaded by a light shower, sprang in a stiff undisciplined mop from the edges of her yellow woolen watch hat. She suddenly looked so young that, for an instant, her eager face cruelly reminded me of our daughter, Nicole.

“You look miserable,” Joanna, catching sight of my expression, called from the cockpit.

I knew better than to mention Nicole, so invented another reason for my apparent misery. “I just wish I was coming with you.”

“I wish you were, too,” she said in her no-nonsense voice, which acknowledged we could do nothing to change the day’s fate, “but you can’t. So be nice to the London lawyer instead.”

“Of course I’ll be nice to him,” I said irritably.

“Why ‘of course’? You usually growl at customers you don’t like, and I’ve yet to meet a lawyer you don’t treat like something you scrape off a shoe.” Joanna laughed, then blew me a kiss. “Perhaps I should stay and make the sale?”

I smiled and shook my head. “I’ll be good to the bastard,” I promised her, then I released Slip-Slider’s bowline and shoved her off the pontoon. “Give me a call when you arrive!”

“I will! And go to David’s sermon! And eat properly! Lots of salad and vegetables!” Joanna had released the stern line and put the engine in gear. “Love you!”

“Love you,” I called back, and I was struck again by Joanna’s sudden resemblance to our daughter, then, after a last blown kiss, she turned to look down river to where the channel waves crashed white on the estuary’s bar. I watched her hoist the sails before a gray squall of sudden hard rain hid Slip-Slider and made me run for the shelter of my car. I drove to a lorry driver’s cafe on the bypass where they made a proper breakfast of blood pudding, eggs, fried bread, bacon, sausage, kidneys, mushrooms, and tomatoes, all mopped up with bread and butter and washed down with tea strong enough to strip paint.

By the time I opened the yard for business the rain had eased and a watery sun was glossing the river where, one by one, the boats hoisted their sails and slapped out toward the boisterous sea. I stripped the tarpaulins from Stormchild’s decks and jealously thought how Joanna would be sailing Slip-Slider sharp into the wind, slicing the gray seas white, while I swept Stormchild’s topsides clean, then put two industrial heaters into her cabins to take the winter’s lingering chill out of her hull.

The London lawyer turned up an hour late for his appointment. He was a young man, no more than thirty, yet he had clearly done well for himself for he arrived in a big BMW and, before climbing out, he ostentatiously used the car phone so that we peasants would realize he possessed such a thing. But we were more inclined to notice the girl who accompanied him, for she was a tall, willowy model type who unfolded endless legs from the car. The lawyer finished his telephone call, then climbed out to greet me. He was wearing a designer oilskin jacket with a zip-in float liner and a built-in safety harness. “Tim Blackburn?” He held out his hand.

“I’m Blackburn,” I confirmed.

“I’m John Miller. This is Mandy.”

Mandy gave me a limp hand to shake. “You’re quite famous, aren’t you?” She greeted me.

“Am I?”

“Daddy says you are. He says you won lots of races. Is that right?”

“A long time ago,” I said dismissively. I had been one of the last Englishmen to win the single-handed Atlantic race before the French speed-sleds made the contest a Gallic preserve, then, for a brief period, I had held the record for sailing nonstop and single-handed round the world. Those accomplishments hardly accorded me rock-star status, but among sailors my name still rang a faint bell.

“Daddy says it was impressive, anyway,” the girl said with airy politeness, then gazed up at the deep-keeled Stormchild which was cradled by massive metal jackstands. “Golly, isn’t it huge!”

“You must stop saying that to me,” the lawyer, who was no more than five foot two inches tall, guffawed at his own wit, then sternly told me he had expected to find the boat in the water with her mast stepped and sails bent on.

“Hardly at this time of year”—I was remembering Joanna’s instruction to be nice to this little man, and thus kept my voice very patient and calm—“the season’s scarcely begun and no one puts a boat in the water until they need to. Besides,” I went on blithely, “I thought you’d appreciate seeing the state of her hull.”

“There is that, of course,” he said grudgingly, though I doubted he would have noticed if the hull had been a rat-infested maze of rust holes. John Miller clearly did not know boats, and that ignorance made him palpably impatient as I ran down the list of Stormchild’s virtues. Those virtues were many; the yacht had been custom built for an experienced and demanding owner who had wanted a boat sturdy enough for the worst seas, yet comfortable enough to live aboard for months at a time. The result was a massive, heavy boat, as safe as any cruising yacht in the world, with a powerful brute of a turbocharged diesel deep in her belly. But Stormchild was also a pretty boat, with fine lines, a graceful rig, and decks and coach roofs handsomely planked in the finest teak.

“Which is why,” I told the lawyer a little too brusquely, “I’d be grateful if you took off your street shoes before climbing aboard.”

Miller scowled at my request, but nevertheless slipped off his expensive brogues. Mandy, who had begun to shiver in the unseasonably cold wind, discarded her stiletto heels before tiptoeing up the wooden boarding stairs and stepping down into Stormchild’s cockpit. “She’s ever so pretty,” Mandy said gallantly. The lawyer ignored her. He was peering at the cockpit instrument display and pretending that he understood what he was seeing.

“You’ll take a hundred thousand?” he challenged me suddenly.

“Don’t be so bloody silly,” I snapped back. My anger was piqued by the knowledge that Stormchild was horribly underpriced even at a hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and I felt another twinge of regret that Joanna and I were not ready to buy her.

Miller had bridled at my flash of temper, but controlled his own, perhaps because I was at least fourteen inches taller than him, or perhaps because my fading fame carried with it a reputation for having a difficult temperament. One tabloid newspaper had called me the “Solo Seadog Who Bites,” which was unfair, for I simply had the prickly facade that often conceals a chronic shyness, to which I added an honest man’s natural dislike of all lawyers, frauds, pimps, politicians, and bureaucrats, and this lawyer, despite his pristine foul-weather gear, was plainly a prick of the first order. “We were thinking of keeping her in the Med”—Miller tapped the compass as though it was a barometer—“I suppose you can deliver her?”

“It might be possible,” I said, though my tone implied there could be vast difficulties in such a delivery for, eager as I was to sell Stormchild, I was not at all certain that her proper fate was to become a flashy toy to impress Miller’s friends and clients. Stormchild was a very serious boat, and I loved boats enough not to want this beautifully built craft to degenerate in the hands of a careless owner. “If it’s a warm-weather vacation boat that you want,” I said as tactfully as I could, “then perhaps you ought to think about a fiberglass hull? They need much less maintenance and they offer better insulation.”

“There are plenty of people willing to do maintenance work in the Med,” the lawyer said unpleasantly, “and we can always bung some air conditioners into her.”

My flash of temper had clearly not discouraged the little runt, so I tried warning him that cooling a boat the size of Stormchild would be an expensive business.

“Let me worry about expense,” Miller said, then bared his teeth in a grimace that I could, if I chose, translate as a smile. “In my line of work, Blackburn, I occasionally need to impress a client, and you don’t do that by being cheap.”

“Surely the best way to impress clients is to keep them out of jail?” I suggested.

He gave a scornful bark of laughter. “Good God, man, I’m not a criminal lawyer! Christ, no! I negotiate property deals between the City and Japan. It’s quite specialized work, actually.” He insinuated, correctly, that I would not understand the specialization. “But the Japanese are pathetically impressed by big white boats”—he glanced at his shivering girlfriend—“and by the girls that go with them.”

Mandy giggled while I, suppressing an urge to wring Miller’s neck, took him below decks to show off the impressive array of instruments that were mounted above Stormchild’s navigation table. Miller dismissed my description of the SatNav, Decca, radar, and weatherfax, saying that his marine surveyor would attend to such details. Miller himself was more interested in the boat’s comforts which, though somewhat lacking in gloss, nevertheless met his grudging approval. He especially liked the aft master cabin where, warmed by one of my big industrial heaters, Mandy had stretched her lithe length across the double berth’s king-size mattress. “Hello, sailor,” she greeted Miller.

“Oh, jolly good.” Miller was clearly anticipating the effect that Mandy’s lissome beauty would have on his Japanese clients. “Will you take a hundred and ten?” he suddenly demanded of me.

He had obviously smelled that Stormchild was a bargain, and I felt a terrible sadness for I knew that, once the boat had been used as the sweetener on a few deals, and once Miller had made his fortune from those deals, she would be left to rot in some stagnant backwater. “Why don’t you take a good look at the other cabins,” I said with as much patience as I could muster, “then we can negotiate a price in my office. Would you like some coffee waiting for you?”

“Decaffeinated,” he ordered imperiously, “with skim milk and an artificial sweetener.”

I planned to give him powdered caffeine laced with condensed milk and white sugar. “The coffee will be waiting in the office,” I promised, then left them to it.

Billy, who had just finished rigging the repaired four-and-a-half-ton yawl, ambushed me halfway across the yard. His chivalrous concern, like that of every other red-blooded male in the yard, was for the lubricious and goose-pimpled Mandy. “Bloody hell, boss, what does she see in the little fucker?”

“She sees his wallet, Billy.”

“Did you see the fucker’s oilskin coat?” Billy asked indignantly.

“It can get very rough on the boating pond in Hyde Park,” I said reprovingly, then I turned away because a car had just driven past the big sign that read “Absolutely No Unauthorized Vehicles Beyond This Notice,” and I was readying myself to shout at the driver, when I realized that the car was my brother’s antique Riley.

“They’re not racing today, are they?” Billy asked, and my own first thought was that David must have come to the yard to launch his 505 racing dinghy. My reverend elder brother was a lethal competitor and, like others who were addicted to the frail, wet discomfort of fragile racing boats, he pretended to despise the sybaritic conveniences of long-distance sailors like myself. “You mean you have a lavatory on that barge?” he would boom at some hapless victim. “You pee in windless comfort, do you? Next you will inform me that you have a cooking stove on board. You do! Then why not just stay in some luxury hotel, dear boy?”

“You’re not taking your eggshell out in this wind, are you?” I greeted David as he opened the Riley’s door, then I saw he could not possibly be thinking of taking out the 505, for he was wearing his dog collar and cassock, and even David’s mild eccentricities did not extend to sailing in full clerical rig. Instead he was dressed ready for the afternoon’s Easter weddings, and I supposed he had come to inveigle me into buying him a pub lunch before he performed his splicing duties. Then the passenger door of the Riley opened and another man climbed out.

It is at that point, just as Brian Callendar climbs out of David’s car, that my memory of that Easter weekend becomes like some dark and sinister film that is played over and over in my head. It is a film that I constantly want to change, as if by rewriting its action or dialogue I can miraculously change the film’s ending.

Brian Callendar comes toward me. He is an acquaintance rather than a friend, and he is also a detective sergeant in the County Police Force, and there is something about his face, and about David’s face behind him, which suggests that the two men have not come to the boatyard for pleasure. The Riley’s engine is still running and its front doors have been left open. I remember how the wind was whirling wood-shavings out of the carpenter’s shop and across the sloping cobbles of the boatyard’s ramp. “Tim?” Callendar said in a very forced voice. I am still smiling, but there is something about the policeman’s voice which tells me that I won’t be smiling again for a very long time. “Tim?” Callendar says again.

And I want the film to stop. I so badly want the film to stop.

But it won’t.

David took my elbow and walked me down to the pontoon where he stood beside me as Callendar told me that a yacht had exploded in mid-channel. Some wreckage had been found, and amongst that wreckage was a yellow horseshoe life buoy with the name Slip-Slider painted in black letters.

I stared at the policeman. “No,” I said. I was incapable of saying anything else. “No.”

“A Dutch cargo ship saw it happen, Mr. Blackburn.” Callendar, as befitted a bringer of bad news, had slipped into a stilted formality. “They say it was a bad explosion.”

“No.” The word was more than a denial, it was a protest. David’s hand was still on my elbow. Church bells were clamorous in the town, foretelling the afternoon’s weddings.

Callendar paused to light a cigarette. “There are no survivors, Mr. Blackburn,” he said at last, “at least none they could find. The Dutch boat has been looking, and the navy sent a helicopter, but all they’re finding is wreckage, and not much of that either.”

“No.” I was staring blindly at the river.

“Who was on board, Mr. Blackburn?”

I turned to look into the policeman’s eyes, but I could not speak.

“Was it Joanna?” David sounded uncomfortable, as he always did when raw emotions extruded above the calm surface of life, but he also sounded heartbroken, for he knew exactly who would have been sailing Slip-Slider. The question still had to be asked. “Was Joanna aboard?”

I nodded. There was a thickening in my throat. I wanted to turn and walk away as though I could deny this conversation. I looked back to Callendar to see if he was joking. I even half smiled, hoping that the policeman would smile back and it would all turn out to be a bad joke.

“Was anyone else aboard, Mr. Blackburn?” Callendar asked me instead.

I shook my head. “Just Joanna.” I was shaking. Nothing was real. The world had slipped its gears. In a second David would laugh and slap my back and everything would be normal again. Except David did no such thing, but just looked stricken and unhappy and embarrassed.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. I had given up smoking fifteen years before, but I took the cigarette from Callendar’s fingers and dragged on it. I supposed that either the navy or the Dutch boat had called the Coastguard with Slip-Slider’s name, and the Coastguard would have looked in their card-index and discovered that I was Slip-Slider’s owner. Then they would have called the police, and Callendar, being on friendly terms with me, would have volunteered for this horrid duty, but he had first recruited David to help him. “Oh, Jesus,” I said again, then threw the foul-tasting cigarette into the river. “When?” I asked. “When did it happen?” Not that it mattered, but all I had left now were questions which would try to turn tragedy into sense.

“Just after nine o’clock this morning,” Callender said.

But nothing made sense, Nothing. Except the slow realization that my Joanna was dead, and I began to cry.

The film goes scratchy then; scratchy and fragmented. I didn’t want to watch the film, yet night after night it would show itself to me until I was crying again, or drunk, or usually both.

I remember telling the London lawyer and his girl to fuck off. I remember David pouring brandy into me, then taking me to his home where his wife, Betty, began to cry. David had to leave and marry three couples, so Betty and I sat in the cheerless comfort of their childless home while the church bells rang a message of joy into the wind-scoured air. The first reporters sniffed the stench of carrion and phoned the rectory in an effort to discover my whereabouts. Betty denied my presence, but when David came back from his weddings a group of pressmen waylaid him at the rectory gate. He told them to go to hell.

I felt I was already in that fiery pit. David, more comfortable with actions than emotions, tried to find a mechanical reason for Joanna’s death. He wondered if there had been a leak of cooking gas on Slip-Slider, but I shook my head. “We had a gas alarm installed. Joanna insisted on it.”

“Alarms don’t always work,” David said, as though that would comfort me.

“Does it matter?” I asked. I only wanted to cry. First my son had been killed, then Nicole had disappeared, and now, Joanna. I could not believe she was dead. Somehow, hopelessly, I thought Joanna might still be alive. For the next few days I fiercely tried to imagine that she had been blown clear of the exploding boat and was still swimming in the channel. I knew it was a stupidly impossible scenario, but I convinced myself she would somehow be safe. Even when they found Joanna’s remains I tried to convince myself that it was not her.

It was, of course, and when the pathologists were done with what remained of my wife, the undertakers put the scraps in a bag, then into a coffin, and afterward they made up the coffin’s weight with sand before David buried her in the cemetery high on the hill where she and I had used to sit and watch the channel. Joanna was buried in the same grave as our son, Dickie, who had also died in an explosion just as a year was blossoming into new life.

A navy boat scooped up what remained of Slip-Slider, and the wreckage was brought ashore and examined by forensic scientists, who confirmed what the pathologists had already deduced from their examination of Joanna’s remains. My wife had been killed by a bomb.

I remember gaping at Sergeant Brian Callendar when he told me that news, and I again tried to deny the undeniable. “No, no.”

“I’m sorry, Tim. It’s true.”

There was not much physical wreckage for the forensic scientists to analyze; just the life buoy, some shredded cushions from the cockpit, a plastic bucket, the man-overboard buoy, the radar reflector, the dinghy, one oar, the shaft of a boathook, and the wooden jackstaff to which the red ensign, scarred by the bomb blast, was still attached. It was in the shaft of the jackstaff that the scientists discovered a tiny cogwheel which they later identified as coming from a very common brand of alarm clock, and I was able to confirm that to the best of my knowledge there had been no such clock on board Slip-Slider, which meant the cheap alarm must have been used to trigger the bomb’s detonator.

The police laboratories, despite the paucity of Slip-Slider’s remains, were nevertheless able to deduce what kind of explosive had been used, and how it had been detonated. By analyzing where each scrap of wreckage had been stored on board, the forensic men could even tell that the bomb had been planted low down on the port side of the engine block. The blast of the bomb would have driven a gaping hole in Slip-Slider’s bilges through which the cold sea must have recoiled in a torrent, but the blast had also erupted razor shards of shattered fiberglass upward and outward to throw whatever and whoever was in the cockpit into the sea. In the same blinding instant the explosion must have filled Slip-Slider’s cabins with an intolerable pressure that had blown the decks clean off the hull. The boat would have sunk in seconds, and Joanna, Brian Callendar assured me, would have known nothing.

Callendar had come to the house where he had made me a cup of tea before giving me all the grim details of the forensic findings. “It means they’ll bring in the hard men from Scotland Yard”—he paused—“and it means you’re going to be run ragged by the press.”

The reporters were already besieging me. I protected myself as best I could by taking the phone off the hook and barricading myself in the house where I lived off whiskey, despair, and the sandwiches David brought me. The journalists shouted their questions whenever they saw a shadow at the windows, but I ignored them. I had no answers anyway.

The journalists, just like the police, wanted to know who had planted the bomb. For a time the police suspected me, but when the hard men from London searched the boatyard and the house they found nothing incriminating, and nothing to suggest our marriage had not been happy. The police grilled me about my army experiences, but that was of no help to them either, for my time in the army had been spent almost entirely in David’s company playing bone-crunching rugby or going on uselessly strenuous expeditions that had not the slightest military value. David and I had kayaked through the Northwest Passage, dogsledded across Greenland, and climbed allegedly unconquered peaks in the Andes, and all courtesy of the British taxpayer, whose only reward had been press photographs of grinning maniacs with frost-encrusted beards. What I had never done in the army was learn to use explosives.

Nor did I have any motive for destroying Slip-Slider. Yet there were other men who might have had a motive to plant a bomb on board the boat; the same men who had constructed the bomb that had killed my son. “But that bomb,” Inspector Fletcher said, “was your common or garden Provisional IRA Mark One Milk Churn, remotely detonated by radio and stuffed full of Czechoslovak Semtex. Remind me where it happened?”

“Freeduff.” The name still sounded so stupid to me. Freeduff, County Armagh, was the inconspicuous farmlet where Lieutenant Richard Blackburn, commanding his very first patrol, had been blown into gobbets of scorched flesh and shattered bones.

“Freeduff,” Fletcher said in the voice of a man recalling old pleasures, “between Crossmaglen and Cullyhanna. Am I right?”

I gave him a long, meditative look. Inspector Godfrey Fletcher was the hardest of the hard men who had been assigned to investigate Joanna’s murder, and he was evidently no ordinary policeman, but an official thug who moved in the shadowy world of counter-terrorism and political nastiness. He had the narrow face of a predator and eyes that were not nearly so friendly as his manner. The old adage advises that you set a thief to catch a thief, and on that basis Fletcher was probably a man well suited to catching murderous bastards. He was also a man who had clearly enjoyed his time in Northern Ireland. “What were you,” I asked him after a while, “SAS?”

He pretended not to have heard me, lighting a cigarette instead. “But the bomb that killed your wife was not a Mark One Provo Milk Churn, was it?” His gunfighter eyes stared at me through the cigarette smoke. “And the Provos never claimed responsibility for your wife’s death, did they?” It was two weeks after Joanna’s funeral and Fletcher had come to the house to tell me, very grudgingly, that he no longer suspected me of my wife’s murder. But nor, it now seemed, did he think that the Provisional IRA was responsible.

It had been the press who, in the absence of any other culprits, began the speculation that the Provisional IRA had planted the bomb that destroyed Slip-Slider. It was not such a fanciful notion as it might have seemed, for Joanna and I had often loaned the Contessa 32 to British Army crews, who wanted some race experience; Slip-Slider had won her class in the last Fastnet Race with a crew of Green Jackets aboard, and some newspapers surmised that the IRA had assumed an army crew would be sailing the Contessa that Easter weekend.

“But this wasn’t your average IRA bomb,” Fletcher went on. “The Provos are too sophisticated to use mechanical clocks. They like to use silicon-chip timers out of microwaves or VCRs. Using a tick-tock these days is like planting a blackball with a smoking fuse; it’s messy and crude.”

“Maybe it was a splinter group of the IRA?” I was repeating the press speculation, but without any conviction.

“Then why didn’t they claim responsibility? What’s the point of slaughtering an innocent woman for the cause of a New Ireland unless you tell the world of your achievement? Because if you don’t boast about your murders then the Libyans won’t know where to send their money and you’ve merely wasted a bang, and these days the IRA want bigger bucks for their bangs.” Fletcher was standing at the open kitchen door, staring down the long valley toward the restless channel. Joanna had bought the house for that gentle long view toward the sea. Fletcher blew smoke toward the orchard. “No, Mr. Blackburn”—he did not turn round as he spoke—“I don’t reckon your wife died for a New Ireland. Your son did, but his death was an explicable act of political terrorism; your wife’s death was made to look like an IRA follow-up, but it wasn’t. The IRA don’t use toytown bombs anymore. So who does? Who are your enemies, Mr. Blackburn?” He turned from the door and stared into my eyes.

“I don’t have any enemies,” I said.

Fletcher crossed the kitchen in two quick paces and slammed his fist hard on the table. “Who knew about your traditional Easter family reunion?” He waited, but got no answer. “Did someone assume that you’d both be on that boat?” He insisted. “Who tried to kill you and your wife together?” His eyes had the blank cruelty of a hawk’s gaze. I still said nothing, and Fletcher despised me for my silence. “Who scoops the pot if you’re dead, Mr. Blackburn?” He asked in a scornful voice.

“Don’t be so bloody ridiculous,” I snapped.

“There must be a fair bit of scratch in your family?” Fletcher’s voice was sour as bilge-water. “Your father was a Harley Street surgeon, wasn’t he? One of the very best, and one of the most expensive. How much did he leave you and your brother? Half a million each?”

“It’s none of your damned business,” I snapped.

“Ah, but it is.” He leaned forward to breathe cigarette fumes into my face. “Anything’s my business, Mr. Blackburn, until I’ve nailed the fucker who killed your wife. Or was it a bitch who did the killing?”

I said nothing.

Fletcher dropped his half-smoked cigarette into my half-drunk cup of tea. “If you won’t help me,” he spoke sourly, “then you’ll probably cop the next bomb yourself, and frankly, Mr. Blackburn, you’ll fucking deserve it unless you tell me where she is.”

I looked into his merciless gaze, but said nothing.

“You know it’s her, don’t you?” Fletcher demanded.

“No,” I said. “No!” And once again that simple word became a protest as well as a denial. “No, no, no!”

Fletcher was suggesting that my daughter, Nicole, had murdered her mother. Fletcher was crazy. It was not Nicole. Not my daughter. Not Nicole.

Richard and Nicole were twins. Nicole was always the leader, the braver, the instigator of disobedience and daring, though Richard was never far behind his tomboy sister. At ten years old they had been rescued off the cliffs to the east of the town, though Nicole, who had led her brother on the expedition to find gulls’ nests, had defiantly insisted that she and Richard had been entirely safe. At thirteen, in a sudden spring storm, their Heron dinghy had been pulled off the shoals by the town’s Lifeboat. The Lifeboat’s coxswain, being a good man, had first saved their lives, then given them each a good hiding and said that the next time he would leave them there to drown. Nicole had been furious, not at the coxswain for clapping her ears, but at herself for being trapped on a drying lee shore.

“She’s a wild one,” the coxswain had told me the next day, “spat at me like a cat, she did.”

Nicole became wild when she was thwarted. She thwarted herself most of all, failing in some ambition she had set for herself. Not that she failed often, for she was a capable and an extraordinarily tough girl. You learn about peoples’ characters when you sail with them in small cruising yachts, and I learned a lot about Nicole, even though she prided herself on hiding her feelings. I watched her in gales, in cold, and in fogs, and I never once saw her come near breaking point. The harder a voyage became, the harder Nicole proved. Her brother relied on humor to cushion hardship, but Nicole cultivated a rock-hard endurance. Sometimes that hardness worried Joanna and me, for it spoke of a lack of sympathy in our daughter, yet we also had much to be thankful for. Nicole, like her twin brother, grew into a good-looking adolescent with straight straw-colored hair, sea-blue eyes, and broad shoulders.

The twins had the attractiveness of good health and physical confidence, yet still there was that unsettling streak of ice in Nicole’s character. Richard could be immensely giving and understanding, but Nicole was intolerant of any weakness, either in herself or in others. Nicole had to be the best, with one, and only one, exception. Her twin brother Richard, and only Richard, was allowed to be her equal, and even her superior. They were inseparable, the best of friends, and Nicole regarded Dickie’s victories as hers, and his defeats as personal slights on her. Once, when Richard was beaten three times in one afternoon’s dinghy racing by a newcomer to the town, Nicole was furious. Richard was typically generous in praise of the newcomer, but Nicole regarded his victories as an insult. She swore revenge, but Nicole sailed a Shearwater, a catamaran, while Richard preferred a Fireball, which was a monohull. Nicole’s Uncle David, who had missed a place on an Olympic team by just one race, and therefore knew a thing or two about dinghy competition, warned Nicole that the newcomer was too good and that her unfamiliarity with the Fireball dinghy would lead to a hiding, but Nicole would have none of it. She practiced for a week and, at week’s end, in her brother’s boat and with her mother as crew, she routed the newcomer. She won every race and never once, according to Joanna, cracked a smile. “It was war out there,” Joanna said. “Terrifying!”

Nicole calmed as she grew older. By her late teens she had learned to put a governor on her temper, and by the time she went to university she could, as her brother lovingly put it, do a passable imitation of a normal human being. Richard had already left home, going, much to my pleasure, into my old regiment. Nicole, who had been suffering from a temporary bout of anti-militarism, had initially disapproved of Richard’s career, but the disapproval passed. She herself went to a north-country university where she studied geology. For a time Joanna and I worried that the constraints of scholarship might irritate Nicole into rebellion, but instead she settled down and even displayed an academic aptitude that surprised us both. Not that the old, angry Nicole vanished entirely. She threw herself eagerly into campus politics and succeeded in having herself arrested for throwing eggs at the Prime Minister in a protest against power-station emissions. When I said that it seemed damned silly to be arrested for throwing eggs, I was treated to a half hour’s scathing denunciation of my generation, my views, and my carelessness for the planet’s future. Yet, despite her passionate intolerance for any views other than her own, Nicole seemed happy and purposeful, and Joanna and I had begun to anticipate the day when we could fulfill our long-held dream of selling the house and buying a boat large enough to live aboard permanently.

Then, in an Irish springtime, when the blossoms exploded white in the deep hedgerows of County Armagh, Richard had died.

And something in Nicole had died with her twin brother.

She abandoned her studies and came home where, like a wild thing, she raged against life’s injustices. Joanna and I were advised to give Nicole’s grief time to work itself out like some splinter of shrapnel, but instead it seemed to go deeper, and there sour into a grim and hopeless misery. Nicole lost weight, became pale and snappish, and for a time she haunted the local churches, even going so far as to declare an intention of entering a Discalced Carmelite house in Provence. Her Uncle David told her to snap out of it, which she did, but only to hurl herself in entirely the opposite direction. She was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and three weeks later for possession of marijuana. Joanna and I paid those fines, only to discover that our daughter was pregnant and had no idea who the baby’s father was. Nicole herself opted to abort the child, and afterward sank into a sullen, vituperative mood that was worse than her previous extremes of religiosity and carnality.

“It isn’t your fault.” David tried to reassure Joanna and me, though David, who had no children himself, was hardly an expert on childrearing.

“I could understand,” Joanna had said, “if we’d dropped her on her head as a baby, or abused her, or disliked her, but Nickel had a wonderful childhood!” “Nickel” was the family’s nickname for Nicole.

“It’s just her nature,” David had said. “Some people are excessively ambitious and competitive, and Nickel’s one of them. It’s a Blackburn trait, and you’ll just have to endure while she learns to channel it. Right now she’s like a motor given too powerful a fuel, but she’ll eventually learn to control it, and then you’ll be proud of her. Mark my words, Nickel will achieve great things one day!”

Joanna had sighed. “I hope you are right.”

Then, that same summer, Nicole met Caspar von Rellsteb. She met him in our boatyard, where he had docked to repair his catamaran’s broken forestay. It was a Saturday, and Joanna and I had been trying to hack some order into our tangled garden when, late in the afternoon, Nicole came home and calmly announced that she was leaving to live with a man called Caspar. “I’m going right now,” she added.

“Now? With Caspar? Caspar who?” an astonished Joanna had asked.

“Just Caspar.” Nicole either did not know the rest of his name or did not want us to know. “He’s an ecologist. He’s also a live-aboard like you want to be,” she airily told us, “and he’s leaving on this evening’s tide.”

“Leaving where?” Joanna asked.

“I don’t know. Just leaving.” Nicole went into the house and began singing as she collected her oilskins and seaboots. For a moment Joanna and I had just stared at each other, then we had tentatively agreed that our daughter’s sudden and unexpected happiness might prove a blessing, and that running away with the mysterious seagoing Caspar had to be better than a life of shoeless desiccation in a French nunnery, or of witless drunkenness in the town’s pubs.

Nicole, her kit bag hastily packed, did not want us to go to the boatyard to see her off, but she could hardly stop us, so we drove her to the river where Caspar’s boat proved to be a great brute of a wooden catamaran called Erebus. Erebus was a graceless craft, nearly fifty feet in length, with a boxy, clumsy appearance that suggested she had been constructed by an amateur builder who had compensated for his lack of experience by making every part of his craft hugely heavy. That precautionary strength must have paid off, for Erebus carried the unmistakable marks of long and hard usage. Her gear was chafed, her hulls were streaked, and her decks had been blanched by long days of hard tropic sunlight. There was no indication of where the boat had come from, for no hailing port was painted on either of her transoms and her ensign was an anonymous pale green rag that hung listless in the day’s sullen heat.

The big catamaran was moored at our visitor’s pontoon. Clothes and dishrags were hanging to dry from her guardrails, but there was no other sign of life on board until, quite suddenly, a tribe of very small, very fair-haired and very naked children erupted from the cabin to scream and chase one another across the coach roof and down onto the trampoline netting that formed the catamaran’s foredeck. “Are they Caspar’s children?” Joanna asked, with what I thought was a remarkable forbearance.

“Yes,” Nicole said, as though it was the most normal thing in the world for a girl to wander off and join a ready-made family she had met only two or three hours before.

“So he’s married?” I asked.

“Don’t be a toad, Daddy.” Nicole swung her kit bag onto her shoulder and walked down to the pontoon.

The four naked children on the catamaran’s foredeck netting were shrieking with loud excitement, but then a very tall and excruciatingly thin man, who had a pale green scarf knotted around his neck, suddenly appeared in Erebus’s cockpit. “Shut up!” He spoke in German, which I had learned years before and still half understood.

The four children were immediately quiet and utterly immobile.

“Oh dear, sweet Lord,” Joanna murmured, for the man, apart from the wispy pale green scarf, was bare-assed naked. His skin was tanned the color of old mahogany against which his long white hair and straggly white beard showed bright. He glowered at the cowering children for a few seconds, then turned as he heard Nicole’s footsteps on the wooden pontoon. He smiled at her, then held out a hand to assist her on board.

“Time to become the heavy father,” I said grimly, then climbed out of the car into the summer afternoon’s sunshine. Billy grinned at me from the inner pontoon where he was rerigging a Beneteau, but I did not grin back. Instead I strode down the pontoon, past the fuel pumps, and jumped down into Erebus’s cockpit. “Nicole!”

Nicole and the naked man had disappeared into the catamaran’s spacious main cabin. I ducked down the companionway into the familiar cruising-yacht reek of unwashed bedding and smelly oilskins. Once in the big saloon my immediate impression was of a tangle of sun-browned skin and greasy hair, then I unraveled the impressions to see that, besides Nicole and the bearded man, there were two other girls in the big cabin. Both girls were about Nicole’s age, and both girls were naked. One was completely nude, while the other, a startling redhead, wore nothing but a pale green sarong that was loosely knotted round her waist. That girl seemed to be helping Nicole undress. “What the hell is going on?” I demanded fiercely.

“This is my father,” Nicole offered in laconic explanation. The two girls, both as blond as Nicole, snatched up clothes to cover their nakedness, while the man, whom I assumed was the beguiling Caspar, turned slowly to face me. He said nothing, but just stared at me with an oddly quizzical look on his thin face.

“What the hell is going on?” I demanded again.

“Do you want to join us?” the man asked in a courteous voice.

“Nicole! For God’s sake,” I said, “come away.”

“Daddy! Please go away,” Nicole said, as though I was being tiresome.

“Tim?” That was Joanna, calling me from the pontoon.

Caspar slowly unfolded himself to stand upright in the spacious cabin. He found a pair of faded khaki shorts, which he pulled on, then he gestured for me to go back to the cockpit. “I would like to talk with you,” he said, and his manner was so polite that I felt I had no choice but to do as he requested. “You are unhappy?” he asked when we were both in the open air. His English was strongly accented with German and held a tone of pained puzzlement. “You think your daughter is coming to some harm, yes? I am sorry. It is just that we are most casual on the boat.” He smiled contentedly, as though inviting me to share pleasure in his explanation.

But I was beyond reason. “You’re running a bloody whorehouse!” I shouted.

Joanna, standing on the pontoon, tried to calm me down. Caspar offered her the hint of a bow. “My name is Caspar von Rellsteb”—he introduced himself—“and I welcome you both on board Erebus. Your daughter wishes to join our small group, and I am delighted for her and for us.” He waved a thin hand about the boat, encompassing the frightened children who huddled together at the catamaran’s bows. “We have work to do,” he added mysteriously.

“Work?” Joanna asked.

“We do not sail for our recreation,” Caspar von Rellsteb said very portentously, “but to measure the damage being done to our planet.” His voice was suddenly tougher, and I saw that despite his scrawny build he was no weakling, but had hard muscle under the deeply tanned skin. I guessed he was about my own age, early forties, though it was hard to tell because his long hair, which had gone prematurely white, made him look older, while the lithe movements of his tanned and sinewy body suggested a much younger age.

“Nicole tells us you’re an ecologist,” Joanna said in her best conversational tone.

“It is a convenient label, yes, though I prefer to think of myself as a surveyor of the planet. My present task is to gauge the extent of pollution and of species-murder. My small boat is ill-equipped to fight such evils, but I monitor them so that the extent of the world’s ills will be understood.”

“He’s not an ecologist,” I broke in scornfully, “he’s just running a private knocking-shop.” I pushed past the tall man and shouted into the cabin’s shadows. “Nicole!”

There was no answer. Caspar von Rellsteb half smiled as though Nicole’s lack of response was a measure of his victory. “Nicole is an adult, Mr. Blackburn,” he explained to me in a patronizing voice, “and she can choose her own life. You can choose to use violence against me if you wish, but nothing you can do will alter what is ordained.” He turned away from me. “Nicole! Do you wish to leave Erebus and return to your parents’ home?”

There was silence except for the small waves slapping at the twin hulls and the raucous cry of gulls in the warm air.

“Answer me, Nicole!” Caspar von Rellsteb’s voice held a sudden heart of steel.

“I want to stay.” Nicole’s voice was unnaturally timid, as though she feared this skinny man’s displeasure, and Joanna and I, hearing such unaccustomed meekness in our daughter’s voice, were both astonished.

“Then stay you shall,” von Rellsteb said magnanimously, “but first it is only right that you should say farewell to your mother and your father. Come!”

He left us alone with Nicole who was now wearing a shirt and trousers in the pale green that seemed to be the uniform color of the Erebus crew, when they wore any clothes at all. “I’m sorry,” she said awkwardly, “it’s just something I have to do.”

“What is?” I demanded too angrily.

“Oh, Daddy.” She sighed and looked at her mother, who was making soothing noises and telling Nicole to look after herself.

“You don’t know anything about this man!” I attempted one last line of attack.

Nicole shook her head in denial of my anger. “Caspar’s a good sailor, and he means to do something about a filthy world, and that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Her head went up as she recovered some of her usual defiance. “I want to make a difference. I want to leave the world a better place. Is that so bad?”

Oh God, I thought, but there was no way of dissuading the young when they discovered the world’s salvation was in their passionate grasp. “I love you,” I said awkwardly, and I tried to give her all the money in my wallet, but Nicole would not take it. Instead she kissed me, kissed her mother, then, cuffing tears from her cheeks, ushered us both ashore.

Joanna and I walked to the car, then drove to the Cross and Anchor from where we could watch the tideway. Joanna nursed a gin and tonic, while I drank beer. After a half hour we saw Erebus shove off from the pontoon and motor out into the fairway. All three girls were now on deck, and all were wearing pale green clothes.

“Nicole looks happy,” Joanna said wistfully. She had fetched a pair of binoculars from the car and now offered me the glasses. “Don’t you think she looks happy? And maybe this is just something she has to work out of her system.”

“It’s what that superannuated hippie is working into her system that riles me,” I said grimly. Then the hippie himself appeared on the catamaran’s deck, dressed in his shorts with his white hair tied into a long ponytail. There was something goatlike about him, I thought, and something very disturbing in the girls’ matching clothes, which somehow suggested that they had uniformly humbled themselves before von Rellsteb’s authority.

“He’s a very charismatic man,” Joanna said unhappily.

“Balls.”

“He defused you.” Joanna stroked my hand as the clumsy catamaran motored past us toward the sea. The tide was flooding, which suggested von Rellsteb planned an eastward passage, perhaps back to Germany. I focused the binoculars to see that Nicole, who did indeed look happy, had taken the catamaran’s wheel, while Caspar von Rellsteb was winching up the mainsail. The Erebus’s sail was banded in broad stripes of white and pale green, the same green as the odd uniform clothes that Nicole and the other girls were wearing.

“She’s enlisting in a very good cause, Tim,” Joanna said as she watched her daughter sail away.

“She’s volunteering for a floating harem,” I insisted.

“They’re young,” Joanna said patiently, “and they’re full of idealism and hope. Besides, Nicole’s always been an environmentalist, and surely that’s better than getting arrested or having abortions?”

“She’ll have that goat’s baby instead?” I demanded angrily.

“They just want to clean up a polluted world,” Joanna said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Except I don’t think that bastard’s a real environmentalist. He’s an opportunist. He knows how desperately the young want a cause, so he attracts them with a load of earnest-sounding claptrap, then turns them into his private harem.”

“You don’t know that,” Joanna said patiently.

“If he’s such a wonderful environmentalist,” I demanded, “then why are his engines so filthy?” The Erebus’s twin exhausts were leaving a dirty cloud of black smoke to drift across the river. “I should have stopped her.”

“You couldn’t have stopped her,” Joanna said, her eyes on the departing catamaran. She paused for a long time, then looked sadly at me. “I’ve never told you this, Tim, because it’s so very unfair and so very stupid, but Nickel blames you for Dickie’s death.”

“Me?” I stared at Joanna. The accusation was so unexpected and so untrue that, instead of shocking me, it merely surprised me. “She blames me?”

“Because you encouraged Dickie to join the army.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I swore in exasperation. “Why didn’t she talk to me about it?”

“Lord knows. I don’t understand the young. I’m sure she knows it isn’t really your fault, but—” Joanna, unable to finish the thought, shrugged it away. “She’ll be back, Tim.”

But I was beyond such hopeful consolations. I was watching my daughter, who blamed me for her brother’s death, sail into the unknown. Legally she was a grown woman, able to make her own choices, but she was still our daughter, and now our only child, and I had just lost her to a man I had instinctively hated at first sight. I also knew I had handled my confrontation with Caspar von Rellsteb very badly, but I had not known how else to cope with the man I now thought of as my daughter’s abductor.

“Nicole’s tough.” Joanna tried to find more reassurance as we watched our daughter expertly steer the catamaran through the Bull Sands Channel. “She’ll use him and his ideas to get what she wants, and then she’ll come home. He’s an attractive man, but I doubt he’s clever enough to keep her, you mark my words. She’ll be home by Christmas.”

But Nicole was not home by that Christmas, nor by the next. She did not write to us, nor did she telephone. Our daughter had disappeared, gone we knew not where with a man we could not trace on a boat we could not find. She sailed away and she never came home, though Fletcher, my grimly unpleasant policeman, still insisted that Nicole had come back like a thief in the night to plant a bomb that had killed her mother and had been meant to kill her father, too.

“No.” I dismissed Fletcher’s allegation scornfully.

Fletcher’s knowing smile derided my denial. “Is she still in your will?” he asked. When I did not answer, he assumed correctly that Nicole was. “She gets everything, does she?” he insisted.

“It’s none of your business.”

“Change your will.” Fletcher ignored my anger. “Cut her out. So even if the next bomb does get you, she won’t profit from it. We don’t want the wicked to flourish, do we, Mr. Blackburn?”

“Don’t be so offensive,” I snapped at him, but even to myself the retort sounded futile and, for the first time in my life, and despite my fame as a solo sailor, I felt entirely alone.

The public interest in Joanna’s murder faded as the months passed and no one was arrested. The newspapers found juicier bones to chew, while the police transferred their efforts to fresher crimes that were more easily solved. Joanna was forgotten.

My life recovered, then limped on. To my astonishment the London attorney, Miller, bought Stormchild after all, or rather he and his partners purchased the boat which they announced was to become a “client hospitality facility.” The law firm paid a decent price, then offered my yard yet more money to have the boat rigged and launched. Miller demanded that her name be changed from Stormchild to Tort-au-Citron, which was evidently some kind of legal joke, and though I told him it was bad luck to change a boat’s name, he insisted it was not my luck that was at risk but his, and so I had the new name painted on Stormchild’s transom. Miller and a group of loud friends came from London to take the newly christened Tort-au-Citron on her first voyage. They did not hoist the sails, but merely motored beyond the bar, where they anchored and drank champagne in the summer sunshine before bringing the beautiful boat back to the yard. “Can you keep her until a delivery crew fetches her?” Miller asked me.

“How long?” I asked suspiciously, because I did not want to tie up one of our precious moorings for too many weeks.

“A month at the most. I’m having her delivered to Antibes.” He clearly wanted me to know that he did his business in fashionable waters.

I agreed he could keep Tort-au-Citron on one of the yard’s moorings for a month, but at that month’s end no delivery crew had arrived. Then another month passed, and still the abandoned boat swung to her mooring on the changing tides. Autumn winds shivered the river cold, and the first gray frosts of winter etched Tort-au-Citron’s rigging white, but still no one fetched her. Her hull became foul with weed and her coach roofs streaked with gull droppings. Telephone calls to Miller’s office elicited no instructions, so I sent him a whacking bill for the mooring’s rent, but the bill, like the boat itself, was ignored.

Not that I cared very much, for Joanna’s death had left me in a state of numbed despair. The house decayed about me, the garden turned rank and wild, and the boatyard only functioned because the staff ignored me and ran it by themselves. I wallowed in self-pity. I had lost a son and a wife, my daughter had disappeared, and I seemed trapped in hopelessness. For weeks I wept in the night, the tears fueled by whiskey. My friends rallied, but it was the friendship of marriage that I missed most; I missed it so much that I often wished I was with Joanna and Richard in their graveyard high above the sea. Christmas was a nightmare, and Joanna’s birthday a purgatory. David tried to comfort me, but his efforts did not work; my brother was never a comforting kind of man. To be a comforting man one needs a much greater sensitivity to pain than David either possessed or wanted to possess. “Well at least you might cut your hair,” he finally told me, “you look like a damned hippie.”

The mention of a damned hippie made me think of Caspar von Rellsteb, then of Nicole, and, for the umpteenth time, I wondered aloud where she was, and how I could send her news of her mother’s death. Since the bombing I had renewed my efforts to locate Nicole. I had contacted an old friend who now worked in Army Intelligence, and he had pulled official strings in Germany, but no one there knew of a man named Caspar von Rellsteb, or had heard of a boat called Erebus. Nicole had simply vanished. “If she knew her mother was dead,” I insisted to David, “she’d come home. I know she would.”

David muttered something about letting bygones be bygones. He wanted me to forget Nicole, not because he disliked her, but because he doubted she would ever return home. My brother, with his vigorous view of life, wanted me to dismiss the past and start again, and a year after Joanna’s death he tried to kick-start that new beginning by introducing me to a widow who had moved to our town from Brighton, but I bored the lady by talking of nothing but Joanna and Nicole. I did not want a replacement family; I wanted what was left of my original family.

David finally challenged me over Nicole. “Do you have the slightest evidence that she cares about you? Or wants to have anything to do with you?”

“If she knew her mother was dead,” I insisted, “she’d feel differently.”

“Dear, sweet God.” David sighed. “Has it ever occurred to you, Tim, that Nicole herself might be dead? Perish the thought, but that catamaran she sailed away on doesn’t sound like the safest vessel afloat.”

“Maybe she is dead,” I said listlessly.

“One prays not,” David said enthusiastically, “but whatever’s happened to Nicole, you simply cannot ruin your life wondering about it. You need a new interest, Tim. You’ve always liked dogs, haven’t you?”

“Dogs?” I gaped at my brother.

“Dogs!” he said again. “I mean I quite understand if Irene wasn’t the lady for you”—Irene had been the widow from Brighton—“but Betty’s found a charming woman who breeds dogs up on the downs.”

“I don’t want a dog breeder,” I snapped. “I want to find Nicole.”

“But I thought you agreed she might be dead?”

“Fuck off,” I told my reverend and insensitive brother.

David might have half wanted Nicole to be dead, yet oddly it was he who found her, or rather who brought me the evidence that Nicole might still be alive. It happened on the Sunday after our brief argument. I was at home, trying to ignore the whiskey bottle as I contemplated opening a can of soup for lunch, when David, still in his cassock, appeared at the back door. “It’s me,” he said unnecessarily, then dropped the color supplement of one of the Sunday newspapers on the table beside my can of tomato soup. “Mrs. Whittaker gave it to me after Matins”—he explained the newspaper—“because she recognized, well, you can see for yourself. Page forty. Mind if I have a whiskey?”

I did not answer. Instead, with a heart thudding like a diesel engine, I turned to page forty. I knew it was Nicole. David did not need to say anything; there was something in his demeanor that told me my daughter had at long last reappeared.

Nicole was in a photograph that showed a group of environmental activists harassing a French warship on the edge of France’s nuclear weapons testing facility in the South Pacific. The picture was part of a long article about the growing militancy of the ecology movement and there, in the very center of the photograph, was Nicole. My heart skipped as I stared at the photograph. Nicole. I wanted to laugh and to cry. The fifteen months of despair and sadness since Joanna’s death were suddenly shot through with brilliance, like a spear of lightning slashing through gray clouds. Nicole was alive, and I was not alone. My breath caught in my throat, and my eyes pricked with tears.

The picture, taken in black and white through a telephoto lens, showed a catamaran that was festooned with banners carrying antinuclear slogans. In the foreground an inflatable boat manned by armed French sailors was motoring toward the catamaran, which was wallowing hove-to in a surging sea. Six young people lined the catamaran’s cockpit, all evidently shouting toward the photographer, who had presumably been on board a French warship astern of the inflatable boat. Nicole was one of the six protesters. Her face, distorted by anger, looked lean and tough.

“Oh, God,” I said weakly, because seeing my daughter’s face after four years seemed something like a resurrection.

“Genesis,” David said. He was striding up and down the unwashed kitchen tiles, and was plainly uncomfortable with my emotion.

“Genesis?” I asked him, wondering if I had missed some subtle biblical point.

“Look below the photograph, in the box!” David’s tone clearly suggested that he believed this reminder of Nicole’s continued existence could do my life no good whatsoever. He drank a slug of my whiskey, lit his pipe, then stared gloomily at the birds in my unkempt orchard.

At the bottom of the page was a box in which the newspaper listed the various militant groups that were using sabotage, which they called “ecotage,” to jar the world’s governments into paying more attention to the environment. One of those groups was called the Genesis community, presumably, the writer averred, because its members wished to restore the world to its pristine condition. Not much was known about Genesis except that it was led by a man called Caspar von Rellsteb, who was one of the most outspoken supporters of ecotage, and that the group specialized in seaborne activities. They had attempted to sabotage the sixty-mile drift nets with which the Japanese and Taiwanese were obliterating life in the Pacific Ocean, and were believed to have attacked two Japanese whaling ships. The group’s activities were confined to the Pacific, where they had made strong, though futile, efforts to stop French nuclear testing. “It doesn’t say where they’re based!” I protested.

“Obviously in the Pacific,” David said.

“Oh, very helpful,” I said sarcastically, then looked again at the photograph as though there might be some clue in its grainy composition as to where I might find my daughter. Yet all the picture told me was that Nicole had been alive when the picture was taken the previous autumn. I recognized the catamaran as the Erebus which, nearly four years before, had taken Nicole out of my life. I could not see Caspar von Rellsteb in the photograph; if any one of the six protesters seemed to dominate the scene, it was Nicole herself. The obsessive look on her face was so familiar to me; a look of such determination that it veered toward bitterness. “Buggering up the French bomb, eh?” I said enthusiastically. “Good for her!”

“If the Frogs want a nuclear bomb,” David said irritably, “then they have to test it somewhere. It’s not doing us any harm, is it?”

“Don’t be such a fool,” I said. “Good for Nicole!”

David puffed a smoke screen from his pipe. “If you read the rest of the article,” he said in a very guarded voice, “you’ll notice that the attacks on the Japanese whaling ships were made with dynamite.”

There was a second of silence, then I exploded with indignation at the inference he was making. “Don’t be so bloody ridiculous, David!”

“I’m not being ridiculous,” he said, “but merely pointing out to you what that damned policeman will undoubtedly notice.”

“Fletcher’s lost interest,” I said. “Besides, if anything, this article proves that Fletcher was wrong! It proves Nicole can’t have killed her mother.”

“It does?” David asked. “How?”

“She’s in the Pacific!” I pointed out. “Even Fletcher will have to admit that it’s difficult for someone in the Pacific to plant bombs in England! How’s she supposed to have done it? She just popped out one night, sailed halfway round the world, planted a bomb, then sailed back again. Is that it?”

“Of course you’re right.” David had not intended to trigger my anger, and now mollified it by changing the subject. He picked up the can of soup. “Is this lunch?”

“Yes.”

“You’d better come to the rectory instead. Betty’s made a loin of pork with applesauce.”

“No dog breeders you want me to meet?”

“None at all,” he promised.

So I went to Sunday lunch at the rectory, where the three of us discussed the article, examined the photograph, and agreed that Nicole looked wonderfully well. I was feverish with excitement, which worried David and Betty, who both feared that my hopes of a reunion with Nicole might be horribly premature. Yet I could not resist my own pleasure; my daughter was alive and was working to make a better world. Her activities were far away, which suggested she could not have known of her mother’s death. “I’m going to find her,” I told David. “Find her and tell her.”

“It’ll be a bit difficult,” David warned me. “That article doesn’t give you much of a clue where Genesis might be.”

But the name was clue enough and, the next morning, still excited, I went to London to find out more.

Matthew Allenby was the secretary, founder, chairperson, inspiration, spokesperson, and dogsbody for one of Britain’s largest and most active environmental pressure groups. He was also a remarkably modest and kind man. I did not know him well, but we had sometimes met at conferences where I was a spokesman for the boat trade against the protestors who complained that our marinas polluted coastal waters. Allenby had always treated my arguments fairly, and I liked him for it. Now, though we had not met for at least two years, he greeted me warmly. “I should have written with condolences about your wife,” he said ruefully, “and I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to read the letters anyway.”

He offered me a smile of grateful understanding. “I suppose it must be like that.” He poured me coffee, then, after the obligatory small talk, asked me just why I had been so insistent on an immediate meeting.

To answer I pushed the color supplement across his desk. I had ringed Nicole’s face with ink. “She’s my daughter,” I said, “and I want to find her.”

“Ah, Genesis!” Matthew Allenby said with immediate recognition. He pronounced the word with a hard “G,” and with a note of dismay.

“Genesis?” I was querying the hard “G.”

“The German pronunciation,” he explained. “I believe the group’s leader was born in Germany.”

“I’ve met him.”

“Have you now?” Allenby immediately looked interested. “I haven’t met von Rellsteb. Not many people have.”

I described the circumstances of my encounter with the naked harem on von Rellsteb’s catamaran. Allenby seemed amused by my account, and he was a man clearly in need of amusement, for his office was papered with posters that depicted the torn and bloody corpses of seals, dolphins, whales, porpoises, manatees, and sea otters. Other pictures showed poisoned landscapes, fouled rivers, oil-choked beaches, and skies heavy with toxic clouds. It was not a cheerful office, but nor were the evils against which Allenby had devoted his life and which had given him a Sisyphean gravity beyond his years. “What I really want to know,” I finished up, “is who Genesis are and where I can find them.”

“Genesis”—Allenby still stared at the photograph of Nicole—“is an impassioned community of environmental activists; green militants. They’re remarkably secretive and, as a result, somewhat notorious.”

“Notorious?” I said with some surprise. “I never heard of them before yesterday!”

Allenby pushed the color supplement back across the desk. “That’s because until now the Genesis community has confined its activities to the Pacific, but believe me, within our movement, they are notorious.”

“You sound disapproving,” I challenged him.

“That’s because I do disapprove of them.” His disapproval was qualified, perhaps because he did not want to sound too disloyal to a group that espoused his own organization’s aims. “Genesis believe that the time for persuasion and negotiation is long past, and that the enemies of the environment understand only one thing: force. It’s a view.” He shifted uneasily in his chair. “But the trouble with ecotage, Mr. Blackburn, is that it can very easily become eco-terrorism.”

“Does Genesis’s ecotage involve killing people?” I asked, and hated myself for indulging the suspicion that Nicole had been responsible for her mother’s death, but the article’s mention of dynamite had sown a tiny seed of doubt that I wanted eradicated.

“No, not that I know of,” Allenby said to my relief. “In fact, I think most of their actions have been somewhat clumsy. They’ve made various attempts to tow paravanes equipped with cutting gear into Japanese drift nets, but I believe they lose their gear more often than they destroy the nets, which is a pity. Do you know about the drift nets?”

“Not much,” I admitted, and Allenby described the fifty- and sixty-mile-long monofilament nets with which the Japanese, Taiwanese, and Koreans were destroying sea life in the Pacific.

“Nothing living can escape such a net.” Allenby could not disguise his bitterness. “It’s the nuclear weapon of the fishing industry, and it leaves behind a dead swath of sea. In the short term, of course, the profits from such a device are phenomenal, but in the long term it will strip the ocean of life. The men who use the nets know that, but they don’t care.”

“The newspaper says that Genesis used dynamite in some of their attacks?” I said.

“Ah, rumors,” he said in a very neutral voice.

“Just rumors?” I probed.

He paused as though weighing the wisdom of retelling mere rumors, then shrugged as though it would do no harm. “Last year two Japanese whaling ships were being scaled in South Korea when bombs destroyed the dock-gate mechanisms. Both ships were effectively sealed inside their dry docks. A dozen green organizations claimed responsibility for the ecotage, but there is substantial evidence which points to Genesis as the responsible group.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Of course the Japanese insisted that the whaling ships were being used merely for scientific research, but the Japanese always make that claim. You will detect, Mr. Blackburn, a certain ambivalence in my attitude toward Genesis. On the one hand I believe they do nothing but harm to our movement, alienating the very people whose help we need if we’re to achieve our aims, but on the other hand I sometimes find myself applauding the directness of their actions.”

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.

“People can’t just disappear off the face of the earth!” I complained to David.

“Of course they can. Happens everyday. That’s why the Salvation Army has a missing-persons’ bureau.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Report the Genesis community to the Salvation Army?”

David laughed. “Why not? They’re very efficient at finding people.”

Instead of the Salvation Army I tried the French navy, politely inquiring whether they had any information about the activists who had harassed their nuclear tests in the Pacific, but their only reply was a formal denial that any such harassment had even occurred. It seemed, as the weeks passed, that von Rellsteb had truly succeeded in vanishing off the face of the polluted earth.

Then Matthew Allenby struck gold.

“Actually I didn’t do a thing,” he said modestly when he telephoned me with his news. “It was one of our American groups who found him out.”

“Where?” I said eagerly.

“Have you ever heard of the Zavatoni Conference?” Allenby asked me.

“No.”

“It’s a biannual event, a chance for environmentalists and politicians to get together, and it’s convening in Key West in two weeks. Most of us would like to hold it somewhere more ecologically significant, but if you don’t offer politicians the comforts of a five-star hotel, then they won’t turn up for anything. But the point is, Mr. Blackburn, that the organizers sent an invitation to von Rellsteb….”

“They knew where to write to him?” I interrupted angrily, thinking of all my wasted efforts to discover Genesis’s whereabouts.

“Of course they didn’t,” Allenby said soothingly. “Instead they placed advertisements in all the West Coast environmental magazines. But the amazing thing is that he’s accepted their offer. He’s agreed to give the keynote speech. It’s something of a coup for the organizers, because most of the ecotage people won’t agree to debate with the mainline organizations, and—”

“Where exactly is this conference?” I interrupted Matthew Allenby again.

“I told you, in Key West, Florida.” He gave me the name of the hotel.

“So how do I get in?” I asked.

“If you make your own travel and hotel arrangements,” Allenby suggested with diffident generosity, “then I’ll say you’re one of my delegates. But I know that hotel doesn’t have any spare rooms, so you’re going to have trouble finding a bed.”

“I don’t give a damn.” I could already feel the excitement of the chase. “I’ll sleep in the street if I have to!”

“Don’t be too eager!” Allenby warned me. “Von Rellsteb might not turn up. In fact, if I had to give odds, I’d say there’s less than an even chance that he will actually arrive.”

“Those odds are good enough for me!”

“It really is a long shot,” Matthew warned me again.

But I reckoned that only by a long shot would I ever find Nicole, and so I bought myself a ticket to Miami. David opined that I was mad, an opinion he hammered at me right until the moment I left England. He drove me to Heathrow in his ancient Riley. “Nicole won’t be at Key West! You do realize that, don’t you?”

“How do you know?”

“Of course I don’t know!” he said. “It is just that like other sensible human beings I predicate my actions, especially the expensive actions, on probabilities rather than on vague hopes that will almost certainly lead to a debilitating disappointment.”

“You don’t believe in miracles?” I teased him.

“Of course I do,” he said stoutly, “but I also believe in the existence of false hopes, disappointment, and wasted efforts.”

“All I want to do,” I explained very calmly, “is to find Nicole and tell her about her mother’s death. Nothing else.” That was not entirely true. I also wanted, I needed, Nicole’s assurance that she no longer believed I was responsible for her brother’s death. That belief of Nicole’s might be irrational, but it had snagged in my heart and still hurt. “And to find Nicole,” I went on, “I’m willing to waste quite a lot of my own money. Is that so very bad?”

David sniffed rather than answer my question, then, for a few silent miles, he brooded on my obstinancy. “They have pink taxis there, did you know that?” he finally asked as we turned into the airport.

“Pink taxis?”

“In Key West,” he said ominously, as though the existence of pink taxis was the final argument that would prevent my leaving. He braked outside the British Airways terminal. “Pink taxis,” he said again, even more ominously.

“It sounds like fun,” I said, then climbed from the car and went to find my child.

David was right. There were bright pink taxis in Key West.

And I was suddenly glad to be there because it was a preposterous, outrageous, and utterly unnecessary town; a fairy-tale place of Victorian timber houses built on a sun-drenched coral reef at the end of a one-hundred-mile highway that skipped between a chain of palm-clad islands across an impossibly blue sea.

I felt I had been transported out of grayness to a sudden, vivid world that contrasted cruelly with the damp drabness that had been my life since Joanna had died. My hangdog spirits lifted as the pink taxi drove me from Key West’s tiny airport into the old town’s tangle of narrow streets. I was headed for a private guest house that my travel agent had somehow discovered, which proved to be a pretty house on a tree-shaded street close to the town center. The guest house was owned and run by a man named Charles de Charlus, who, when I arrived, was flat on his back beneath a jacked-up Austin-Healey 3000. He wriggled backward, stood to greet me, and I saw that he was a handsome, tall, and deeply tanned man whose face was smeared with engine oil. “Our visitor from England, how very nice,” de Charlus greeted me as he wiped his hands on a rag. “You look exhausted, Mr. Blackburn. Come inside.” He ushered me into a hallway lavish with beautiful Victorian furniture, where he plucked a room key from the drawer of a bureau. “I’m giving you a room that overlooks the Jacuzzi in the courtyard. Do feel free to use it. We have a weight room if you need some exercise, and an electric beach.”

“An electric beach?”

“An electric tanning salon. For cloudy days.”

“I doubt I’ll have much time for relaxation,” I said, trying not to show the awkwardness that suddenly flared through me. “I’m here for the Zavatoni Conference.”

“Oh, you’re a green! Well, of course, aren’t we all these days?” Charles led me upstairs and ushered me into a wonderfully comfortable room. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t come in and show you where everything is.” In explanation he held up his hands which were still greasy from his car, then tossed the room key onto the bed. “Your bathroom is through the blue door, and the air conditioner controls are under the window. Enjoy!” He left me in the cool of the airconditioning. The curtains were closed, presumably to fend off the fierce sun, but I pulled them aside to let in some light and found myself staring down into the palm-shaded courtyard where the bright blue-tiled Jacuzzi shimmered and foamed in the heat. Two men were sprawled in the water. Both were stark naked. One of them, seeing me, raised a languid hand in greeting.

I let the curtain drop. I could feel myself blushing. Joanna, I thought, would have been mightily amused, and I could almost hear her accusing me of a most ridiculous embarrassment. I took her framed photograph from my seabag, put it on the bedside table, and thought how very much I missed her.

Then I sat on the bed and fished out the visiting card that Matthew Allenby had given me. I dialed Molly Tetterman’s number in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The phone rang four times, then an answering machine announced that Molly could not come to the phone right now so would I please leave a message. I gave my name and said I had come to America because Caspar von Rellsteb was supposed to be giving a speech at the Zavatoni Conference in Key West, and if the Genesis Parents’ Support Group had any observers at the conference I’d be very glad to meet them. I dictated the guest-house telephone number to Molly Tetterman’s answering machine, then, overcome by tiredness, I lay back on the bed’s pretty patchwork quilt and slept.

The next morning, a Monday, was the opening day of the Zavatoni Conference. I walked to the conference hotel where I discovered that Matthew Allenby had left my name with the registration desk in the entrance foyer. I also found that I was just one of hundreds of other delegates, which surprised me for I had somehow imagined that the event would be a small and rather obscure conference like those I had attended in Britain. The Zavatoni Conference was to be a full-blown celebration of the environment and of the efforts being made to preserve it. The tone was set from the moment I registered and was presented with a badge which read “Hi! I’m Tim! And I Care!” The badge was printed in a livid Day-Glo green. “It’s made from recycled plastic,” the friendly official reassured me, then directed me to a huge notice board that listed all the day’s attractions at the conference.

Most were the predictable fare of such conferences; I could see a film about Greenpeace’s work, or attend a lecture on the depredations of the logging industry in Malaysia, or catch a bus that would take delegates to see the endangered Key deer on Big Pine Key. Yet this was also a conference for political action, so there were axes being ground; a Swedish parliamentarian was lecturing on “Environmental Taxes: A Strategy for Fiscal Eco-Enforcement,” while the Women Against Meat-Eaters were caucusing with the Coalition for an Alcohol-Free America in the Hemingway Lounge. The European Proletarian Alliance Against Oil Producers was holding a multicultural symposium in the Henry Morgan Suite, where their guest celebrity was a British actress, and I wondered, for the millionth fruitless time, just why the acting profession labored under the misapprehension that trumpery fame gave its members the expertise to tell the rest of us how to conduct our lives.

I decided to give the actress, and all the other meetings, a miss, though I did avail myself of the exhibition in the Versailles Mezzanine where all the environmental groups who were officially represented at the conference displayed their wares. The exhibition ranged from a tableau vivant mounted by Mothers Against Nuclear Physics, which showed cosmetically scorched women holding half-melted plastic dolls in rigidly agonized post-disaster poses, to The Land Of Milk And Honey exhibit, which was neatly staffed by well dressed born-again Christian fundamentalists. Matthew Allenby’s organization had an intelligently sober exhibit, as did the Sierra Club and a score of other mainline pressure groups, but, despite Caspar von Rellsteb’s agreement to address the conference, there was no display illustrating the life and work of the Genesis community.

I went back to the lobby where I was accosted by a woman wearing a clown costume who solicited my signature for a petition demanding an end to offshore oil-drilling throughout the world. Other activists were attempting to ban nuclear power stations, sexism, fur coats, mercury in dental fillings, and pesticides. I signed the petition on fur coats, then spotted Matthew Allenby standing in the open doorway of a crowded room where he was listening to a lecture.

“I feel rather guilty for telling you about this conference,” he said. “I rather suspect I’ve encouraged you to waste a good deal of your money and time. There’s absolutely no sign of von Rellsteb, and I’m told it would be very typical of him to agree to attend but then not turn up.”

“It won’t be your fault if that happens,” I said. “Any parent would snatch at the smallest chance of finding his child, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, of course,” Matthew agreed, though he still sounded dubious. We had wandered close to the hotel’s front door, outside of which a number of demonstrators angrily harangued arriving delegates. The anger was directed at anyone who arrived in a car, and thereby contributed exhaust fumes to global warming. “They’re from WASH.” Matthew gestured at the angry demonstrators.

“WASH?” I assumed it was a town I had never heard of, or else a contraction of Washington.

“It’s an acronym,” Matthew explained. “W.A.S.H., or the World Alliance to Save Humanity.” He grimaced. “For a time their British branch picketed my office.”

“Your office?” I said in astonishment. “What were they accusing you of?”

“They thought my organization should support their call for the abolition of private cars.” Matthew sighed. “The green movement is riddled with a holier-than-thou attitude, which means that the extremists are always trying to show how much purer they are than the mainstream groups. It’s all rather counterproductive, of course. If we cooperated and agreed on some specific goals then we could make real progress. We could certainly outlaw drift netting in the Pacific. We could probably end the use of CFCs in refrigerators and aerosols, we could seriously reduce carbon monoxide emissions, and we might even save what’s left of the rain forests. But what we can’t do is ban all cars from the road, and we don’t help our cause by saying that we can. Ordinary people don’t want to lose their cars, just as they don’t want to go cold in winter merely because they’re told that oil and coal power stations pollute the air, and nuclear power is unsafe. I know, because I’m an ordinary person and I don’t want to stop using a car, and I don’t want my children to be cold in winter. The problem with our movement, Mr. Blackburn, is that we’re always trying to ban things, but we don’t offer alternatives. And I mean genuine alternatives that will heat peoples’ homes and apply deodorants to their armpits and propel their automobiles. People will listen to us if we offer them hope, and they’ll even pay a few pennies more if they think the extra cost will help the planet, but if we offer them only doom, they’ll accept the doom and decide they might as well be comfortable as they endure it. It’s the primrose path syndrome; why be uncomfortable if you’re going to hell?”

I smiled. “You sound as if you ought to be giving the keynote speech.”

“I’ve been asked to do just that, but only if von Rellsteb doesn’t turn up on Wednesday night. Of course my speech won’t be as popular, because common sense never is as interesting as fanaticism. If von Rellsteb comes and rants about paying back pollution with violence, then he’ll make every newspaper in the free world, while my realism won’t even make two inches in the local paper.”

There was certainly a great deal of press and television interest in the conference. The numerous reporters were not required to wear the delegates’ Day-Glo green name badges, but instead had official-looking red press tags that, under their names, announced what newspaper or magazine they worked for. As Matthew and I stood by the entrance one such reporter arrived to run the gauntlet of WASH hatred. She was a pale and flustered-looking girl with something so disorganized in her looks and so fearful in her expression that I instinctively felt protective toward her. She was wearing a long yellow skirt which gave her a fresh, springlike appearance. She must have arrived by car or taxi for the WASH demonstrators were giving her a particularly hard time. “You can see,” Matthew said quietly, “just how easily fanaticism could spill into terrorism.”

“Are you saying WASH are terrorists?”

“No, but they think their cause justifies their actions, and it won’t be long before frustration with results will demand even more violent action. No doubt that will be Caspar von Rellsteb’s message on Wednesday night. If he comes.”

The frail reporter, her fair hair awry, made it safely into the hotel where, in her relief, she spilled a great pile of papers and folders onto the floor. She looked as if she would burst into tears, but then a hotel porter hurried to help her pick up the strewn pile.

“Wednesday night,” Matthew repeated to me. “If von Rellsteb is going to come, Mr. Blackburn, you’ll see him on Wednesday night. Until then, I suspect, you won’t need to bother yourself with these proceedings.”

The pale and worried-looking girl, her papers rescued, had disappeared into the crowd, but something about her face stayed in my mind. It was not her beauty that had lodged in my consciousness, for the girl’s looks had hardly been striking, but rather it was her vulnerability that made her attractive, or perhaps it was her green-eyed gaze of anxious innocence. I smiled, for that sudden pulse of interest was the first resurgence of something I thought had died with Joanna in the bomb-churned waters of the English channel. Key West, with its vividly improbable happenings, was making me feel alive again, and, Genesis or no Genesis, I was glad to have come.

Next day, trusting Matthew Allenby’s intuition that I need not bother with the conference until Wednesday, I explored the pretty tree-shaded streets of Key West, and I thought how much Joanna would have liked the old town. The houses had been built by nineteenth-century shipwrights whose techniques of allowing a ship’s timbers to flex with the surge of the sea had enabled the houses to ride out Florida’s awesome hurricanes. The facades were intricately carved and shaded by flowering trees. The smell of the sea pervaded every street and courtyard, and the heat was made bearable by the ocean breeze. Charles, my guest-house host, explained Key West’s prettiness by saying that for years the old town had been too poor to afford new buildings, and thus had been forced to keep its old ones. Now the beautiful gingerbread houses were reckoned to be American architectural treasures. “Though it took us to realize it,” Charles said indignantly.

“Us?”

“You know what the realtors say? Follow the fairies. Because we always find the prettiest, forgotten places, then we fill them with marvelous restaurants and wonderful shops. If you want to increase property values in your hometown, Tim, then invite a gay colony to move in.” He saw my fleeting look of alarm, and laughed.

It was Tuesday afternoon and I was sweating with the effort of raising the engine block of Charles’s Austin-Healey. Charles had discovered that I had once owned a similar car and knew more than a little about engines, so he had recruited me to help him install a rebuilt clutch. As we worked he drew from me the full story of my journey to Key West — the tale of Joanna and Nicole, and of von Rellsteb’s Genesis community. “What will you do if von Rellsteb does show up tomorrow night?” Charles asked me.

“Grab the bastard and ask him to take a message to Nicole.” It was not much of a plan, but it was all I could think of.

“Perhaps I’d better come and help you,” Charles offered. “I’m good at grabbing men.” He flexed his arm muscles and, though I somehow doubted that any physical force would be needed, the thought of Charles’s companionship was comforting.

I telephoned the conference organizers the next day, but no one could tell me whether or not von Rellsteb had arrived. If the Genesis leader had come to Florida, he was leaving his appearance until the very last moment. Even when Charles and I drove the repaired Austin Healey to the hotel that evening we still did not know if the guest of honor had actually arrived. Charles was in high spirits, anticipating an adventure, though I suspected the evening promised to bring nothing but disappointment.

Because, as the delegates drifted toward the banqueting hall, von Rellsteb had still not shown up. I found Matthew Allenby frantically polishing his moderate speech in anticipation of having to fill von Rellsteb’s shoes. “I’m sorry,” he said to me, as though it was his fault that I was to be disappointed.

“It doesn’t matter,” I reassured him.

“He might yet come,” Matthew said, and in that hope Charles and I took our positions at the back of the banqueting hall. We deliberately did not try to find places at the tables, preferring to wait by the room’s main doors. If von Rellsteb did come he would enter the room by those doors, and our new plan of attack, enthusiastically proposed by Charles, was that we should grab him as he arrived. I had spent a thoughtful afternoon writing a letter to Nicole; that letter was in my jacket pocket. Charles reasoned that von Rellsteb, ambushed at the door, would agree to take the letter just to be rid of us, but, as the meal went on and there was still no sign of the guest of honor, my letter and Charles’s enthusiasm both seemed irrelevant.

The speeches began. The conference chairperson gave a short talk extolling the life of Otto Zavatoni, whose vast brewing fortune, left in trust, made these biannual conferences possible. Then the visiting politicians were introduced and applauded. Most, I noted, came from small European opposition parties and were politicians whose hopes of office had long faded and whose careers therefore could not be hurt by an association with the more extreme green elements. And there was a handful of politicians from the Third World who received the loudest and warmest receptions. The introductions took a long and tedious time and, for want of any better way of entertaining myself, I looked around the huge banqueting hall for the reporter who had been wearing the yellow skirt. I did not see her.

Nor was there any sign of von Rellsteb. Conference officials, still hoping for his arrival, scurried in and out of the banqueting hall. The room was restless. I noted how many reporters were present, clearly drawn by the chance of meeting the mysterious proponent of ecotage. But von Rellsteb still did not show, and, finally, the chairperson stood and bleakly announced that a change of plans was unfortunately dictated by the absence of the guest speaker, but that nevertheless the conference was most fortunate in having the company of Matthew Allenby who had agreed to replace the absent Caspar von Rellsteb. The applause that greeted the announcement was scattered and unenthusiastic.

Matthew gave his reasonable and sensible speech. He was a good orator, but, even so, I could see the more extreme delegates shifting unhappily as he talked of consensus and education, and of agreement and cooperation. Many of the delegates had not come to hear about consensus, but about confrontation, and five minutes into Matthew’s speech there were the first stirrings of dissent as a table of Scandinavian activists started to heckle. Matthew made his voice stronger, temporarily stilling his critics. By now it was dark outside, and the big windows that faced the sea were a black sheen in which the chandeliers, ablaze with thousands of light bulbs, reflected brightly. Matthew spoke of setting attainable goals and of the importance of not alienating the ordinary man and woman who wanted to feel they could make a genuine contribution toward repairing the damaged fabric of the earth. A man who disagreed with the moderation of Matthew’s proposals struck the handle of his knife against his empty water glass. Someone else joined the ringing protest, and suddenly the room was clamorous with dissent. The chairperson called for order, while a conflicting voice yelled at Matthew to sit down and be quiet. I was about to shout my own protest against the protesters, when suddenly the great room’s lights blinked out, the western sky sheeted a fiery red, and the first guests screamed with horror.

Genesis had come at last.

The doors behind Charles and me were kicked violently open. A woman at a nearby table screamed in terror. I turned to see three bearded men silhouetted against the hallway lights that were still shining bright. The three men half stepped over the banqueting hall’s threshold. Everything was happening so fast that I was still pushing myself upright from where I had been leaning idly against the wall. Then the three men hurled missiles deep into the darkened room and I twisted awkwardly and frantically aside. I saw smoke trails fluttering behind the objects. Christ! I thought, the bastards are using grenades! and I was instinctively shrinking into a groin-protecting crouch as the first missile cracked apart in a foul-smelling gout of chemical stench. The “grenades” were stink bombs.

“Come on, Tim! Come on!” Charles had recovered more quickly than me, and was already pursuing the fleeing men.

I followed, only to be crushed in the sudden crowd of choking, screaming, and panicked delegates, who fought toward the cleaner air of the hallway. A fire alarm had begun to shrill, its bell filling the hotel’s vast spaces with a terrible urgency. The stink bombs were pumping a noxious, gagging smoke that overwhelmed the air conditioner ducts. I heard a crash as a table was overturned. A woman in a sari tripped and fell in front of me. I dragged her upright, shoved her out of my way, then drove my shoulder hard into the press of fleeing people to make a path through them.

“This way, Tim!” Charles was free of the panic and running toward the hotel gardens. The men who had attacked the conference were fleeing through those gardens toward the sea, scattering leaflets in their wake. I could just see the three running figures in the eerie light of the flickering flames that illuminated the hotel grounds.

I tore myself free of the crowd and sprinted after Charles. He had already rammed through a door and jumped off the terrace where the tables were set for breakfast. I leaped after him. Palm trees were burning at the edge of the beach, and I realized it had been their ignition that had sheeted the sky with red flame. The night air stank of burning and of the gasoline I guessed had been used to set the trees alight. The thatched roof of a beach bar had also caught the fire and was furiously spewing sparks into the night wind.

Charles was overtaking the fugitives who ran toward the sea which lay just beyond the burning trees. The three men were wearing green overalls and had ninjalike scarves round their heads, and I realized, with a sudden excitement, that it was the same pale green in which Caspar von Rellsteb had uniformed Nicole when she sailed away on Erebus. One of the fugitives, slower than his companions, dodged between the empty lounges beside the hotel’s swimming pool, and Charles leaped onto the man’s back with a flying tackle that would have made an international rugby player proud. There was a terrible crash as the two men fell into the wooden furniture and I heard the Genesis fugitive cry aloud in pain. “Hold him!” I shouted at Charles in unnecessary encouragement.

The other two men turned back to help their comrade. I reached the pool’s apron, ran past Charles and his struggling prisoner, and charged the two men. I shoulder butted the nearest one, who toppled, shouted in fear, then fell backward into the black pool. The second man tried to swerve past me, but I grabbed his arm, turned him, and thumped a fist into his belly. I followed that blow with a wild swing at his face that was cushioned by the man’s vast and springy beard into which I tried to hook my fingers, but the man managed to find his balance and tear himself free, leaving a handful of wiry hairs in my right fist. Abandoning his two companions the man sprinted toward the beach.

The man I had pushed into the water was already climbing out of the pool’s far side, and I saw that his green overalls were discolored by black streaks which, together with the thick stench that polluted the night air, made me realize that the swimming pool had been deliberately fouled with gallons of black and stinking oil. Behind me Charles suddenly grunted, and I turned to see his captive still desperately struggling. I ran over and thumped a boot into the man’s midriff. “Get him into the bushes!” I said.

Conference delegates were flooding into the gardens. I did not want to share my captive with anyone, but instead wanted to force some swift information from the man. Charles dragged the bearded figure into the deep shadows behind the small hut where the hotel’s bathing towels were kept. The prisoner made one last frantic effort to twist out of Charles’s grip, but only received a smashing punch in the stomach for his pains. He doubled over, but I grabbed his beard and rammed his head back so that his skull thumped painfully against the hut’s wall. “Do you want me to give you to the police?” I asked him.

The man said nothing. I could barely see his face, so dark were the shadows, but I could see that our captive was not Caspar von Rellsteb. “Do you speak English?” I asked him.

Still he said nothing. I sensed Charles moving beside me, and the prisoner suddenly gave a small cry of pain. “I speak English,” the man said hastily. He had an American accent and breath that smelled rotten.

“Are you from Genesis?” I asked, and, in my excitement, I pronounced it the English way. “Genesis?” I corrected myself.

“Yes!” he said, but with difficulty, for I was holding him by the throat.

“Listen,” I said, and slightly released the pressure of my hooked fingers as I spoke. “My name is Tim Blackburn. My daughter is Nicole Blackburn. Do you know Nicole?”

He nodded frantically. I could see the whites of his eyes as he glanced in panic toward the urgent voices of the conference delegates who were milling excitedly by the fouled pool. I could smell the fear in our captive. He had been hurt by Charles and now feared that I was about to add to his pain or, worse, was about to hand him over to a vengeful mob.

“Is Nicole here tonight?” I asked urgently.

He whimpered something that I did not catch.

“Is she?” I insisted.

“No! No!”

“So where is she?” I demanded.

“I don’t know!”

“But she’s with Genesis?”

“Yes!” he said.

“Where is Genesis!” I hissed at him. “Where’s your base?”

He said nothing.

“Answer me!” I said too loudly.

Still the man said nothing, so I rammed a fist into his belly. “Where the fuck is my daughter?” I shouted at him, suddenly not caring if we were overheard. The man stubbornly shook his bearded face. He had evidently decided to act the heroic prisoner; he would give me his name, rank, and number, but he was determined not to reveal where the Genesis community lived. “Where?” I gripped him by the throat and shook him like a dog shakes a rat.

“Hurry!” Charles urged me. Flashlight beams were raking the nearby bushes, and it could only be minutes or even seconds before we were seen. “Hurry!” Charles said again.

“Was von Rellsteb here tonight?” I asked our prisoner.

“Yes!”

“I want to meet him. Tell him that. Tell him I’ve got some important news for Nicole. Ask him to give her this letter, but tell him I’d like to talk with him first.” I took the letter from my jacket pocket, then borrowed a pen from Charles and wrote the guest-house telephone number on the back of the envelope. Afterward I fumbled about our captive’s overalls until I found a pocket into which I stuffed the precious letter. “Tell von Rellsteb to telephone me at the number on that envelope. Tell him there’s no trap. I just want to meet him. Do you understand?”

The man whimpered his assent. Behind us a flashlight beam slashed through the bushes, and a burning frond of palm whipped over our heads. The hotel’s fire alarm was at last silenced, though somewhere in the night’s distance I could hear the visceral wail of approaching sirens.

“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.

“Suppose it’s a trap?” Charles asked.

“Why on earth should it be a trap?” I asked with stubborn incomprehension.

“Because it’s all so secretive,” Charles said. “Dirt roads at midnight, no one else to be there. I’d say it was a trap, wouldn’t you?”

“Why on earth would they want to trap me?”

“Because we hurt that fellow, that’s why, and he probably wants revenge.”

“Nonsense!”

“I don’t like it, I don’t trust it,” Charles said unhappily. He had fetched one of the tourist guides from the guest-house reception desk and discovered that Sun Kiss Key was a real-estate name for a proposed housing development on one of the middle keys that lay some twenty miles from Key West. He telephoned a realtor friend and learned that none of the houses had yet been built, and that consequently there was nothing on the island but newly excavated boat canals and a network of unpaved roads. At night it would be deserted. “If I stay a hundred paces behind you,” Charles suggested, “then maybe they won’t notice?”

“No!” I insisted.

“Then take this.” He opened the drawer of a bureau and brought out a holstered revolver. “It’s licensed!” he said, as though that made possession of the handgun quite acceptable. I felt the surprise and revulsion that most Europeans feel for handguns, but nevertheless I gingerly reached for the weapon. It was a long-barreled, single-action Ruger, only.22 caliber, but it looked lethal enough. “Have you ever fired a handgun?” Charles asked me.

I nodded, though the last time had been twenty years before in the army, and even then I had only fired six reluctant shots to satisfy an insistent firearms instructor. “I’m sure I won’t need this,” I said to Charles, though his supposition that von Rellsteb wanted revenge was enough to make me keep the small gun.

“If you don’t need it, then just keep it hidden. But if you do need it, then you’ll be glad to have it along.” Charles took the gun from me and loaded its cylinder with cartridges.

“Why do you keep a gun?” I asked him.

He paused for a second. “Once upon a time,” he said, “my car broke down in Texas. I’d decided to drive all the way to San Francisco in an old Packard. It was an antique car, very rare, and someone had told me I could sell it for a lot of money in California, but its back axle broke in Texas. Then two guys stopped in a pick-up. I thought they were going to help me, but…” He stopped abruptly, and I wished I had not asked the question, for I saw how the memory pained him, but then he grinned and thrust the revolver toward me. “Fairy firepower, Tim. It shoots slightly up and to the right. And I suppose you’ll want to borrow the car as well?”

“Can I?” I asked.

“You may,” he said grandly, “indeed you may. But bring it back in one piece. You can be replaced, but Austin-Healeys are rare indeed.”

I spent that afternoon writing another letter to Nicole, in case the first was illegible. It was much the same as the first letter. I told my daughter that I loved her, that I wanted to see her, and that I was lonely for family. I told her I had not killed her brother, and I was sure she knew that, too. It was not a long message, but it still took a long time to write. Then, filled with hope and dread, I waited.

The weather forecast hinted at the possibility of a thunderstorm over the Keys, so I borrowed a black nylon rain slicker from Charles, which I wore over black trousers, black shoes, and a dark blue shirt. “Black suits you,” Charles said approvingly.

I growled something ungrateful in reply.

“Don’t let a compliment go to your head,” he told me, “because your appearance could still take a few basic improvements. A water-based moisturizer for your skin, a decent haircut, and some nice clothes would be a start.”

“Shut the hell up,” I said, and tucked his holstered gun into my right-hand trouser’s pocket. I had Nicole’s letter in my shirt pocket, where, if it rained, it would be sheltered by the nylon slicker.

“And for God’s sake,” Charles went on, “stay under the speed limit on the highway. If the police find you with that gun, we’ll both be up to our buns in trouble.”

I stayed under the speed limit as I drove up the Overseas Highway which arced on stilts across the channels between the islands. I had left Key West at nine o’clock, wanting to arrive very early at Sun Kiss Key, so that I could scout the rendezvous to smell for even the smallest hint of trouble. Not that I expected trouble, but the strangeness of the occasion and the heaviness of the thundery air gave the whole night an unreal tinge. Ahead of me, like a grim sign of doom, the northern sky was banded by jet black clouds, while overhead the stars pricked bright. There was a half-moon in the east that made the unclouded part of the night’s sky lighter than I had anticipated.

I found the dirt road leading off the highway. As I slowed and turned my headlamps flashed across a massive billboard which advertised “Sun Kiss Key, Your Home in the Sun! Waterfront Lots from Just $160,000!” Beyond the billboard the dirt road lay like a white ribbon through the low scrubland. To my left a few pilings had been driven into a cleared patch of land. The pilings were evidently supposed to form the stilts of the development’s show house, but work must have come to a standstill, for the pilings were now being used only as supports for a couple of ragged osprey nests. The water in the newly-cut canals was black and still.

I looked in the mirror. No one was following me. Dust from the sport car’s tires plumed to drift onto the bushes. I passed another of the canals that was designed to provide boat docks for the planned houses. Behind me the headlight beams blazed and faded along the highway, but no vehicles turned to follow the Austin-Healey onto this lonely and bumpy road.

I came to the end of the track, where I parked the Austin-Healey in a patch of inky shadow. With the engine switched off the night seemed very silent, then my ears tuned themselves to the noises of a myriad of insects and to the faraway drone of the traffic on the Overseas Highway behind me. I climbed out of the car. The night was warm and still. Far off to my left the sea sucked and splashed at the shallows that edged the keys, while beyond the reefs a motor-cruiser with brightly glowing navigation lights ran fast toward the southwest. To my right, beyond the highway, I could see the lights of the houses on the Atlantic side of the island. The half-moon hung above those houses, while to the north the clouds seemed thicker and blacker. Sheet lightning suddenly paled those dark clouds, hinting at rain over the Everglades. I walked to the water’s edge to see that it was a mangrove-edged channel leading to the open sea. Sun Kiss Key was a lonely place for egrets and bonefish, herons and ospreys, but a place doomed to be destroyed by bulldozers and pile drivers, by houses and carports, by powerboats and barbecues.

Waves fretted on the offshore coral. More sheet lightning flickered silent to the north. Someone, I thought, was having a bellyful of bad weather, though the dark clouds did not seem to be spreading any further south. The thought of bad weather gave me a sudden and stunningly realistic image of hard ocean rain falling at sea; an image of clean, fresh water thrashing at a boat’s sails and drumming on her coach roof and sluicing down her scuppers, and I wondered just how many months it had been since I had last sailed a boat properly.

It had been too long, I thought, much too long. Apart from the odd delivery job up-channel and shunting boats about the boatyard’s pontoons, I had not sailed properly since Joanna’s murder. I had not had the energy to provision a boat nor to face the problems of navigation, yet suddenly, in the humid night air of Sun Kiss Key, I missed the ocean. I wanted to feel the chill wind’s bite again. I wanted to go far from land into the blank emptiness of the charts where the only guide to life was a belief in God and the high, cold light of His stars. I thought of Tort-au-Citron, Stormchild as was, and I resented that she was rotting on a mooring when she and I could have been sailing the long winds of nowhere, and that sudden yearning made me feel that I was at last waking from a nightmare, and I vowed that when I got home I would rig a boat, any boat, and, late though the season was, I would cross the channel and sail round Ushant to where the Biscay rollers would shatter themselves white on my boat’s stem.

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.”

He had almost seduced me with his gently beguiling voice, but some part of me, a robust part of me, would not be sucked into his vision. “You call lacing a swimming pool with oil living in the center of silence?”

“Oh, dear.” Von Rellsteb seemed disappointed with me. He was quiet for a few heartbeats, then offered a further explanation. “We don’t want to be selfish. We don’t want to withdraw totally from the world. Most of the community does stay separate, but a few of us, like myself and Nicole, have to go into the world and deliver shocks to those people who would fill the planet with noise and disgust and dirt and rancor. One day, Mr. Blackburn, the whole world will live in harmony, and the Genesis community both anticipates that era and tries to bring it about. But if I told people where we lived, then I know visitors would come to us, and distract us, and maybe weaken us.”

“You don’t have much faith in your vision, do you?”

“I have no faith in those who do not share my vision,” von Rellsteb said firmly. “And even though I am sure you are not hostile to it, you are still not one of us. Unless you’d like to join us?”

“No!”

He laughed, then stepped back. “I’ll give Nicole your letter. I know she’ll be pained about her mother.”

“I want to see her!”

“Maybe you can.” Von Rellsteb stepped back another pace. He was going into the darkness.

“What the hell does that mean?” I demanded.

“If she wants to see you, then you will see her.” He stepped further back.

I felt my chances of seeing Nicole slipping away with von Rellsteb’s retreat. “Tell her I love her!” I called to him.

“The world is love, Mr. Blackburn.” Lightning slashed at the sea, drowning the air with its sudden light, and in its slicing brilliance I caught a frozen glimpse of Caspar von Rellsteb’s face, and, in that instant, he seemed to be laughing at me with satanic glee. What earlier had seemed comforting and intelligent now looked evil, but, when my eyes adjusted to the dark again, von Rellsteb had vanished. He had come from the night, and seemed to have dissolved back into it.

“Von Rellsteb!” I shouted.

There was no answer. The sea sucked at the mangrove roots.

“Von Rellsteb!”

But there was only silence and darkness.

I turned away. I felt dizzy, almost drunk, as though I had been mesmerized by von Rellsteb’s voice, yet I could not shake the memory of that sudden satanic epiphany. Had he been laughing at me? Had his victory this night consisted of fooling a man whose wife he had killed and whose daughter he had seduced? I stopped and, despite the heat, I was shivering. I also realized that my encounter had yielded me nothing. I had achieved nothing, and I had learned nothing.

Then why, I suddenly wondered, had von Rellsteb agreed to meet me? What had been his purpose this night? To mock me? Then I thought of his denial that he might have used real bombs instead of stink bombs, and remembered the real bombs that had stranded the two Japanese whaling ships in their Korean dry docks. Fear surged inside me. Suppose Nicole was dead? Suppose that von Rellsteb had killed her, and Joanna, and now wanted to kill me? Fletcher had been right when he guessed that my father had left David and me comfortably provided for. We were not flamboyantly wealthy, but nor were we stretched for money, and inheritance has always been a motive for murder. And why else, it suddenly crashed on me, would von Rellsteb have raised the subject of Nicole being disinherited! Sweet God, I thought, that was how von Rellsteb made his money, by making heirs and heiresses of his cowed disciples!

God, he was clever! I remembered the uniformlike clothes Nicole had worn on the day she left with von Rellsteb; clothes which suggested a perverted subservience to von Rellsteb’s wishes. Did he have some kind of mesmeric hold over his women? And, once they were under his spell, did he manipulate their lives to enrich his own? Even Matthew had wondered where the Genesis community found its money, and now I knew. I knew.

But I had to carry my knowledge off Sun Kiss Key, and if von Rellsteb wanted me dead so that Nicole would inherit my wealth where better to kill me than on this empty Key in the middle of a thunder-ripped night? Fear swamped me. I ran to the car. I freed the revolver from its holster, slid into the driver’s seat, and fumbled for the keys. The engine banged reassuringly into life. I was panting. Sweat was streaming down my face as I let out the clutch and the car lurched forward.

Were they waiting for me? Had they thought to have a backup party guarding against just such an escape as this? I scrabbled Charles’s gun close to me, then shifted into second gear. I had left the headlights switched off. The car bounced sickeningly on the rough track. I shifted again, accelerating hard, spewing a plume of white dust behind me as the bright red car charged toward the highway. Moonlight was bright on the dirt track while lightning blazed to the north.

No one fired at me. No gun muzzle sparked and flamed in the night, yet still the irrational panic made me crouch low behind the leather-covered steering wheel as the little car bucked and banged and howled in the night. I could see the headlights of a great truck hammering down the highway, and I knew I should slow down and let the truck go past, but surely the best position for a Genesis ambush was where the track joined the main road? So I ignored good sense and put my foot down to the floor to try and race the truck.

The truck’s noise filled the night. Its chrome trim gleamed in the light of the small orange lamps that the driver had strung across his high cab. This beast of a truck was an eighteen wheeler, one of the behemoth super tankers of the highways, and it was thundering south with a tractor trailer attached and I was about to spin Charles’s small car under its juggernaut wheels.

Christ, but it was too late to stop now! I shifted down, making the Austin-Healey’s reconditioned engine scream in protest. Then I had the back wheels drifting because the main road was close, very close, and still no one fired at me, but it did not matter, for I was about to die anyway under the hammer blow of a Mack truck’s impact. The driver flicked his headlights to full beam as he hit the Klaxons, and the blinding night was suddenly filled with the violence of his giant horns. I kept going, and the truck driver stood on his brakes, so that the Mack’s rear end slewed across the road as I accelerated into its path. The Austin-Healey’s back wheels screamed and smoked on the blacktop, the steering wheel shuddered as the car’s right-hand wheels began to lift, and then the little vehicle skidded toward destruction under the truck’s massive tires. The big rig was threatening to jackknife, and its towering chrome radiator grille was filling the noisy night just inches from my rear fender. The Klaxons howled at the moon, tire smoke hazed the bitter air, then the Austin-Healey’s starboard wheels hit the road and the small car found its traction, and, suddenly, I was accelerating safely away, while behind me the truck driver went on hammering his horns in angry and impotent protest.

I drove a full mile before putting on my lights and slowing down. Sweat was pouring off me. I felt like a fool. I had not panicked like that in years, not since David had pulled me off a rock face in the Dolomites where I had frozen in absolute terror. That had been over twenty years ago, and then I had at least had real reason for the fear, while tonight the panic had been entirely self-induced. My imagination had worked on my fears, turning von Rellsteb’s sinister face into a devilish threat that had never existed. I was still shaking.

I slowed down, worried that the truck driver might have alerted the police with his CB radio, but no patrol car waited for me as I drove back to the warren of Key West’s streets, nor as I at last parked in the small driveway of Charles’s guest house. I turned off the engine, then sat in the car for a few seconds, feeling the jackhammer beat of my still frightened heart.

The revolver had fallen off the seat when I skidded onto the highway. I groped on the floor for the weapon then, wearily, I climbed out of the car. The guest house was dark, though I was sure Charles would be waiting up for me, even if only to reassure himself that I had not damaged his beautiful Austin-Healey. I closed the car door.

Then, from the deeply shadowed porch behind me, I heard the scrape of a footstep. I turned in a renewed and terrible panic, realizing that of course they would ambush me here, where else? If I died here it would be written off as just another street crime, and so I ripped the gun from its holster, then half fell against the car as I twisted desperately away from the threat of whoever had been waiting for me in the darkness. I used both hands to raise the Ruger and pointed dead center at the shadow, which now moved toward me from the porch.

“No!” It was a girl, who flinched away from the threat of the gun, and who screamed at me in a panic every bit as frantic as my own. “No! Please! No! No!”

It was the girl from the conference, the girl in the yellow skirt, the girl who had obscurely made me feel glad to be alive. And I had almost shot her.

“I hate guns!” The girl was gasping in her panic. “I hate guns!”

“It’s all right,” I said with an urgency equal to her terror, “it’s OK!”

“I hate them!” Her fear seemed out of proportion to its cause. She had twisted away so violently from the sight of the gun that she had dropped her huge, sacklike handbag, which had consequently spilled its contents across the path. “Have you put the gun away?” she asked in a stricken voice. She was still shaking like a sail loosed to a gale.

“It’s gone,” I said.

She dropped to her knees to retrieve the slew of notebooks, pens, tape cassettes, lipstick, chewing gum, and small change that had cascaded from her enormous bag. “Are you Tim Blackburn?” She turned her anxious face up to me.

“Yes”—I stooped to help her collect her scattered belongings—“and I’m sorry I frightened you.”

“You didn’t frighten me, the gun frightened me. I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Why didn’t you ring the doorbell and wait inside?”

“I telephoned,” she explained as she grabbed coins out of Charles’s flower beds, “and someone said you were out, but would be coming back later, so I came straight round here, but there were no lights on downstairs. I thought everyone must be in bed already and I didn’t want to disturb anyone. So I waited.”

“A long time?”

She nodded. “Long enough.”

“I thought journalists didn’t care about waking people up?”

She blinked at me in gratifying astonishment. “How did you know I was a journalist?”

“I noticed you at the conference,” I confessed, “and saw you had a press badge.”

“Wow!” Her amazement seemed to stem from the fact that anyone might have noticed her. She retrieved a last pencil and straightened up. “My name’s Jackie Potten. Actually my name is Jacqueline-Lee Potten, but I don’t use the Lee because it was my father’s name, and he left my mom when I was kind of little, and Molly Tetterman says she’s sorry she wasn’t at home when you phoned, but she was away in Maine because her son is in college there and she was visiting him all week, and she only got home today, and I phoned her tonight and she told me about your messages on her answering machine, and she asked me to talk to you, which is why I wanted to see you, and I’m sorry it’s so late, but I’m leaving tomorrow…”

“Whoa!” I held up my hands to check the impetuous flow, found my key, and opened the guest-house door. “Come and have a drink,” I told Jackie. I did not yet know her connection with the Genesis Parents’ Support Group or exactly why she wanted to see me, but there was something in her disorganized volubility that I liked. Her presence was also good for me because her vulnerability forced me to control the panic that raced had my own heart and filled me with an inchoate fright.

“I don’t drink alcohol or coffee,” Jackie informed me in an anxious voice, as though I might be about to force those poisons down her throat.

“Come in anyway,” I said.

“Tim!” Charles, hearing his front door open, shouted from the private parlor upstairs. He was waiting up for me, as I had assumed he would, so I gave him the news he really wanted to hear, which was that his precious Austin-Healey was unscratched.

“I didn’t expect you back so soon.” Charles, who was splendidly dressed in a Chinese silk bathrobe, appeared at the top of the stairs. “What happened?”

“He was early,” I said, then placed the gun on the hall table. “I didn’t need it, but thank you anyway.”

“And who on earth are you?” Charles imperiously demanded of Jackie Potten who, faced with the ethereal creature on the stairway, shrank back into the doorway.

“My name’s Potten,” she said, “Jackie Potten.”

“I assume,” Charles said haughtily, “that you are the person who telephoned earlier. You may wait for Mr. Blackburn in the guest parlor, and he will help me make a pot of coffee.” Charles walked slowly downstairs. “Come, Tim.”

As soon as we were in the kitchen Charles dropped his absurdly pretentious manner. “So what happened? Tell me!”

“Not a lot. He was early, we spoke, he took the letter, and then vanished. I didn’t learn a thing.”

“Is that all?” Charles was disappointed.

“That’s all.” I sat on a stool and shook my head. “I don’t know, Charles. For a time there I actually liked the bastard, then at the end I thought he was laughing at me.” I had also thought that von Rellsteb had wanted me dead, so that Nicole could inherit, but there had been no ambush, so even that theory was wilting.

“You don’t need coffee”—Charles saw the weariness in my face—“you want something stronger. Your usual Irish?”

“Please.”

Charles pulled open a cupboard and sorted through the bottles. “What do you know about that creature?” He waved in the vague direction of the parlor where Jackie Potten waited.

“She’s a journalist,” I explained, “and I suspect she must be interested in the Genesis community because she said Molly Tetterman told her about me. You don’t mind her being here, do you?”

He offered me a dramatic shudder. “Of course I mind. She’s such a drab little thing.”

“Drab?” I sounded offended. “I don’t think she’s drab at all.”

“You don’t? That hair? And that awful blouse? And the skirt? That skirt wasn’t tailored, Tim, it was a remnant from a chain-saw massacre! Here!” He tossed me a bottle of Jamesons.

“I think she’s rather appealing,” I said stubbornly.

Charles raised his eyes to heaven, then poured himself a large vodka. “Would you like to find out what this ravishing creature of your dreams wants to drink?”

“She told me no coffee or alcohol.”

“A club soda and ice, then,” Charles decided. “I’m certainly not wasting designer water and a twist on such a creature.”

I carried the soda water back to the parlor, where Jackie was staring very solemnly at an alabaster reproduction of Michelangelo’s David. Charles followed me. “So tell us what happened,” he instructed me, as though we had not already spoken in the kitchen.

I told, leaving out only the details of my panicked flight from Sun Kiss Key, lest Charles should think I had been anything less than careful with his precious car. Not that there was much to tell, for my meeting with von Rellsteb had been remarkably unproductive. “I should have come with you,” Charles said.

“What good would that have done?” I asked.

“I would have pointed the gun at him, and then told him he had five seconds to tell me where the Genesis community lived. What is it?” This last, rather brusque, question was addressed to Jackie.

“The ice cubes.” She gestured at her club soda. “Are they made with tap water?”

“Of course.”

She blushed. “Do you mind?” She began fishing out the ice, which she dropped into an ashtray. Charles was amused, but pretended to be exasperated. Jackie Potten, once the offending ice was safely out of her drink, took a tentative sip, then searched through her capacious handbag for a notebook and pencil. “How did von Rellsteb travel tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean by boat? Car?”

“I don’t know. He sort of appeared, then vanished.”

“By broomstick,” Charles said happily.

“Gee.” Jackie frowned at me. “I mean they had a boat the other night, so I guess they must have come to Florida by sea. I hired a motorboat to look for them, and I searched most places from here to Marathon Key, but I didn’t see them.”

“What were you looking for?” I asked her. “Erebus?”

“Erebus?” She frowned. “Oh, the catamaran! They renamed her Genesis One. They’ve got two other boats we know of, Genesis Two and Genesis Three.”

“How do you know?”

“Molly asked the State Department, and they gave us copies of complaints that Japanese fishing boats had made. It was nothing to do with the State Department really, because none of the Genesis boats are American, but the Japanese complained to them anyway. And sent some photographs.”

“And you looked for one of the boats here?”

She nodded. “But I didn’t see any of them. I wondered if von Rellsteb and the others flew here. Maybe I should try and find their records in the airline computers?”

She seemed to be asking my advice, but I knew nothing of such matters and had nothing useful to say, so I merely shrugged. I wished I could have been more helpful because I was finding her oddly attractive. I did not understand why, she was an unremarkable girl, but I was acutely aware of her presence. I decided her eyes were her best feature. They were large and a curious silvery green, though perhaps that was just the reflection of the sea-green lampshades Charles favored in the guest parlor. Otherwise Jackie’s face was very narrow in the chin and broad in the forehead. Her skin was chalky pale and she seemed, under the billowy clothes that had so offended Charles, to be painfully thin. Her fair hair was in disarray despite the pins and clips she had used to tame it. I put her age at mid- to late-twenties, but her innocence made her seem more like a fourteen-year-old waif; the orphan of some heartless storm.

“Would you mind telling me,” Charles asked in his silkiest voice, “just who you are, Miss Potten?”

“Oh, gee.” She was instantly flustered. “I’m here for the Genesis Parents’ Support Group.” She paused, as if expecting us to respond, and when neither of us spoke, she added a nervous explanation. “I’m Molly’s investigator,” she added in further reassurance.

“Investigator?” I sounded incredulous.

“I investigate Genesis,” Jackie said defensively.

“So you’re not a real journalist?” Charles made the question sound like a sneer.

“Oh, yes! I work for a paper in Kalamazoo”—she paused because Charles had sniggered, but then she decided not to make anything of his scorn—“and the editor isn’t really sure that the Genesis community is a proper story for our paper. I mean our only connection with Genesis is through Molly Tetterman, but the editor doesn’t like Molly very much. Not because she isn’t a good person, because she is, but because she can be very insistent, and she keeps on pestering Norman, he’s the editor, about the Genesis Parents’ Support Group.”

“Jackie,” I interrupted her very politely, but I was becoming aware that this orphan of the storm could talk the back legs off a herd of donkeys unless she was checked. “What were you doing at the conference?”

“Oh!” She was momentarily confused, as if trying to remember just what conference I was talking about. “I went there because I hoped to get an interview with Caspar von Rellsteb. Which I didn’t, of course.” She looked at me rather pathetically. “It’s been a wasted trip, really.”

“And mine,” I said as though it might make her feel better.

“Did you ask von Rellsteb where Genesis lived?” Jackie asked me.

I nodded. “But he wouldn’t tell me. He just fed me a whole lot of mystical nonsense about how Genesis needed its privacy.”

“I think it’s Alaska,” Jackie said suddenly.

“Alaska?” I asked.

“The Genesis group has always been based in the Pacific,” Jackie explained, “and when they left British Columbia they probably wanted to stay somewhere on that same coast, and von Rellsteb has always been intrigued by Alaska. No one would know if they were there, because parts of that coast are really inaccessible, so they wouldn’t need to bother with green cards or anything like that.”

“But why Alaska?” I insisted.

“Because I found the man he shared a prison cell with in Texas, and he said von Rellsteb was always talking about Alaska, and how it was the new frontier and a place where a man could…”

“Prison!” I interrupted.

Jackie nodded, but, for once, had nothing more to say.

“Why was he in prison?” I asked.

“It was attempted robbery,” Jackie said, “but I only found out about it last month, so I haven’t had time to write it up in Molly’s newsletter. It all happened ten years ago. He served two years of an eight-year sentence, and when he was released they sent him back to Canada because he should never have been living in Texas anyway. He tried to hold up an armored truck. You know, the kind that collects money from stores and banks? But it all went wrong and he didn’t steal a penny in the end. The whole thing was really kind of stupid, except he was carrying a gun, which didn’t help his defense in court. His lawyer tried to claim that von Rellsteb was alienated, and that he was only protesting against society.”

“Did he fire the gun?” Charles asked.

Jackie shook her head. “The police say it jammed, but for some reason the technical evidence about the gun was inadmissible.”

“But if the evidence had been admissible,” I said slowly, “von Rellsteb might have been arraigned on a charge of attempted murder?”

Jackie nodded slowly, as though she had not thought of that possibility before. “I guess so, yes.”

“Bloody hell,” I said.

Charles, plainly bored with the night’s lack of interesting news, yawned, and Jackie hurriedly said she had to be leaving. She was driving back north the next day and we agreed that she would give me a lift as far as Miami Airport. The hundred-and-fifty-mile journey would give us each a chance to pick the other’s brain for more news of Genesis. “Though of what use such a dull creature can possibly be is beyond me,” Charles said grandly after Jackie had left for her motel.

She returned at ten o’clock the next morning in a tiny imported Japanese car that was spattered with bumper stickers; so many stickers that they had spread off the fender onto the fading paint of the trunk. “Vegetarians Do It on a Bed of Lettuce,” one sticker proclaimed, while another warned “I Brake for the Physically Challenged,” which seemed to imply that the rest of us plowed indiscriminately into wheelchairs with merriment aforethought. “You car?” I asked Jackie.

“Sure. I worked out that it would be cheaper to drive than fly, so long as I stayed in really economical motels.” Jackie explained that her editor in Kalamazoo was not interested in Genesis, so she had attended the conference on her own time and on her own and Molly Tetterman’s money.

I put my seabag onto the car’s backseat, said farewell to Charles, then climbed into the cramped front passenger seat of Jackie’s car, where one dashboard sticker thanked me for not smoking and another enjoined me to buckle up.

We took four wrong turns in our mutual attempts to navigate out of town, but eventually Jackie steered the car safely onto the Overseas Highway where she gingerly accelerated to forty-five miles an hour. “Are you really going to drive all the way to Kalamazoo?” I asked in astonishment.

She evidently thought I was being critical of the car rather than of her nervous driving. “It sort of shakes if you go too fast.” She began to describe various other symptoms of the car and, while she spoke, I surreptitiously examined her and wondered just what it was that attracted me to her. She did not, after all, have the impact of beauty, and I did not know her nearly well enough to determine her character, yet still I felt an odd excitement in her company. It was, I finally decided, her very touching look of earnest innocence which made her seem so very fragile and which made me feel so very fatherly toward her. She was, after all, just about young enough to be my daughter.

When she had exhausted the problems of car ownership I asked what had first made her interested in Genesis.

“Berenice,” Jackie said, as if that would explain everything, then, realizing that it explained nothing, she rushed into more detail. “She’s Molly’s eldest daughter, you see, and she went off with von Rellsteb about five years ago, and Molly thinks that Berenice was brainwashed by him, because she’s never even written her mother a letter, and they were really close! Berenice was my best friend, I mean, we told each other everything! Everything! Which is why I’ve been trying to find her. I know she wouldn’t just have just cut me dead, I mean, people don’t do that, do they?”

“Perhaps she wanted some peace and quiet?” I suggested wickedly.

She looked immediately contrite. “I talk too much,” she said miserably. “I know I do. My mother always says I do, and so does Molly, and so did Professor Falk, he was my Ethics of Journalism professor.”

“There are ethics in journalism?” I asked.

“Of course there are!” She offered me a reproving look, which, taking her gaze off the highway, made us wander dangerously across the center yellow line.

I leaned over and steered the car back toward safety. “So Berenice just ran away?”

“She went to a school in Virginia, where she met this guy, and in her senior year he took her to British Columbia for spring break, which I thought was kind of weird because she’d always gone to Florida before. That’s where she met the Genesis people. They weren’t called Genesis then, that came later. They were some kind of weird commune, know what I mean? And they just swallowed Berenice alive! No letters, no calls, nothing!”

“And you’ve been trying to reach her ever since?”

Jackie nodded. “I even visited British Columbia, but they threatened to call the police and have me arrested for trespassing! I couldn’t believe their nerve!” She frowned. “But at least they didn’t point guns at me.”

I thought she was reproving me for my behavior of the previous night, and I offered yet another apology.

“I don’t mean that,” she said hurriedly, “but Genesis is heavily into survivalism. Didn’t you know that?”

“I don’t even know what survivalism is.”

She bit her lower lip as she framed her definition. “It’s a kind of apocalyptic horror thing, know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Survivalists say that the nuclear holocaust is inevitable, but they’re determined to survive it, right? So they live in really remote places, and they have guns, so that if any other survivor tries to take their women or food stocks they can fight them off.”

“Charming,” I said.

“It’s kind of freaky,” Jackie agreed, then stopped talking as an eighteen-wheel truck, like the one that had nearly killed me the previous night, overtook us in a thunder of vibration and noise. Jackie was plainly terrified by the truck’s looming proximity and I wondered how she was ever going to endure the hundreds of miles between here and Kalamazoo.

“Why did they leave British Columbia?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Unless they just wanted to be somewhere more remote? Their island was pretty terrible, sort of cold-water standpipes and mud everywhere and real primitive, but a sympathizer let them use it for free, and it had a sheltered harbor for their boats. I guess boats are important to von Rellsteb. Do you know anything about boats?”

“A bit,” I said, then changed the subject back. “Who was the sympathizer who gave them an island?”

“She’s a rich widow who’s into New Age. You know, channellers and crystals and all that really weird stuff? I think she was charmed by von Rellsteb. I mean she was really cut up when he just left her without saying anything. He didn’t even tell her where they were going.” Jackie paused. “She must have given him money, and I guess he was screwing her.” She touchingly glanced at me to make certain I was not embarrassed by her allegation. “She thought that maybe he’d moved Genesis to Europe, because they disappeared soon after he came back from his European trip. But I don’t think she’s right. I think they’re still in the North Pacific.”

“With my daughter,” I said grimly, and Jackie then wanted to know about Nicole, and so I spent a half hour telling my family’s story before we stopped for lunch at a waterfront cafe where Jackie ordered a salad of celery, lettuce, and a ghastly concoction called tofu, which she told me was made from soybeans, but looked to me like the foam insulation that my boatyard sometimes pumps into the space between a steel hull and the cabin paneling. “I assume you’re a vegetarian?” I asked her.

“I haven’t eaten flesh since I was six,” she said enthusiastically. “Mom tried to make me eat chicken or turkey, and some fish as well, because she said I needed the protein to grow properly, but I couldn’t bear to think of all the suffering, and even at Thanksgiving I used to make my own fake turkey with vegetables and bread. I used to mix them and…”

“Jackie…!” I said warningly.

“I know.” She was instantly contrite. “I’m talking too much.” She suppressed a shudder at the size of the steak on my plate, then reverted to the safer subject of the Genesis community. She told me how difficult it was to get even the smallest scraps of information. “We can’t even talk to people who used to belong because, so far as we know, not one member of Genesis has ever left the community since they moved out of British Columbia! Not one. A handful left before that, but none of them know where von Rellsteb might have gone.”

It took me a few seconds to understand the implication of Jackie’s news. “You think he kills them if they try to escape?”

Jackie was unwilling to endorse the implication of murder, but she thought it more than probable that some members of Genesis were being held against their will. “I never got beyond the pier when I visited British Columbia,” she said, “but I got this really bad feeling. I mean like von Rellsteb was into control? Like heavy discipline? I spoke to this professor at Berkeley, and he told me that a lot of Utopian groups finish up by substituting control systems for consensus because their leaders aren’t really into agreement and compromise, but have this blueprint which they insist will only work if it’s followed exactly, and they somehow manage to impose it on the group, then enforce it with rewards and punishments. Do you know what I mean?”

I was nodding eagerly, because Jackie was reinforcing my own theory that von Rellsteb had some kind of sinister mastery over his followers, and Jackie’s revelation offered an explanation of my daughter’s silence. Nicole had ignored me because she had no choice. Nicole was not a convert, but a convict, and I told Jackie about the unsettling image of the three girls wearing von Rellsteb’s strange green uniform on the day Nicole had sailed away.

“It’s not just uniforms,” Jackie said. “This guy at Berkeley says these groups make really weird hierarchies for themselves. Some groups degrade into slaves and owners, and in others the underlings have to work their way up the hierarchy by pleasing the guys at the top.”

“It makes sense!” I spoke enthusiastically, for how else could my Nicole’s vivid spirit have been broken except by some brutal methodology? Nicole, I suddenly knew, was a prisoner, and my suspicion that von Rellsteb used his disciples to make himself wealthy seemed overwhelmingly confirmed by Jackie’s description of how Utopian ideals deteriorated into fascist regimes.

Jackie suddenly looked very troubled. “Aren’t you going to eat your salad?”

“Of course not. I’m not a rabbit.”

“It’s good for you.” She waited to see if that encouragement would make me relent, then took the salad for herself when it was obvious I was not going to eat it.

I watched as she picked at the lettuce. “Why doesn’t your editor want you to write about Genesis?” I asked her.

“Because he doesn’t really believe Genesis is as bad as I say, and the paper can’t afford to send me all over the world to find out if I’m right, and I haven’t got enough proof or experience to persuade a bigger newspaper to let me do it. If I took the story to a Chicago paper they’d just put one of their own staffers on it, which means I’d be passing up my best chance of a Pulitzer, so I’m chasing the story in my own time. And with Molly’s help, of course.”

“So you can get a Pulitzer?”

“Sure, why not?” She responded as though that achievement was well within her grasp, and I decided there was more to Ms. Jackie Potten than her unprepossessing exterior promised. “It depends on the story, of course,” she explained. “I mean if von Rellsteb really is holding people against their will, then it will be a Pulitzer story, but if he’s running just another survivalist commune, then it’s page thirty-two beneath the fold.”

“It’s no story at all,” I said, “if you can’t find him.”

“What I’d like to do is track down where he gets his money. Of course I’d like to find where they’re all living, but I guess that would be difficult because the coast of Alaska is really huge! And it’s got lots of inlets and islands. They could be anywhere, and maybe they’re not even in Alaska!” She sounded rather despairing at the difficulty of the task she had set herself, then she cheered up. “But there might be another way of finding them. The paper trail.”

“Paper trail?” I asked in bemusement.

“People can’t just disappear,” Jackie said with renewed enthusiasm. “There are always records! How does the Genesis community get their money? They must use a bank somewhere, and if they use a bank, then the Internal Revenue Service has to know about them, so maybe I should go that route.”

“I know where they get their money,” I said with some satisfaction.

“Where?” She was immediately interested.

So I told Jackie about my suspicions that von Rellsteb was raising funds by forcing inheritances onto his cowed followers who, in turn, would pass the money to von Rellsteb. After all, if Joanna and I had both died in the English channel then Nicole would have inherited our expensive house that overlooked the sea, our investments, and our boatyard with its healthy cashflow, and if Nicole was indeed a brainwashed prisoner of the Genesis community, as I now believed her to be, then von Rellsteb would have become the effective owner of that plump legacy. And I had no doubt that von Rellsteb was still interested in that legacy. Why else, I asked, would he have raised the matter of Nicole’s inheritance?

“He did what?”

I told Jackie about von Rellsteb’s odd concern that perhaps Nicole might have been disinherited. “Isn’t it obvious why he raised the subject?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.” Jackie was clearly unconvinced by my theory. “I haven’t heard of any other Genesis parents just disappearing, and why would von Rellsteb go all the way to Europe to find a victim? A lot of his followers come from Canada or the States, so why not pick on them?”

“Because,” I suggested, “a murder in Europe is far less likely to be traced back to a commune in Alaska.”

Jackie was still unconvinced. “It would be a messy way of making money. Think of all the other family members he’d have to deal with, let alone the lawyers. Mind you”—she was clearly worried that I might be upset by her abrupt dismissal of my theory, so she tried to soften it—“we know so little about what makes von Rellsteb tick. I still haven’t discovered why he went to Europe four years ago, and it was clearly important, because it was after that trip that the whole commune disappeared.”

Jackie was referring to the journey during which he had met Nicole, and I suggested that perhaps von Rellsteb had been on a recruiting trip.

“Maybe,” Jackie said, but without enthusiam.

“Perhaps he was going back to Germany,” I said. “He must have relatives there.”

Jackie stared at me, then, very slowly, laid down her fork. “I bet that’s why he went to Europe!” she said in the tone of voice that betrayed the dawning of an idea.

“Why?”

“Oh, boy! Why didn’t I think of that?”

“What?”

“Jeez!” She was mad at herself. “Wow! I’ve been dumb! You know that? Really dumb! His father!”

“Father?”

“Only his mother emigrated to Canada. There’s no record of a father, but I’ll bet that’s it!” Then, being Jackie, she told me the story from its very beginning, from the time that Caspar von Rellsteb had been born in Hamburg in the very last months of the Second World War, which, I realized with a pang, made him almost my exact contemporary. Jackie confessed that she had discovered nothing about von Rellsteb’s real father, but had instead concentrated her research on his mother who had been a German national called Eva Fellnagel. In 1949 Eva Fellnagel had married a Canadian army sergeant called Skinner, and afterward had gone to live with him in Vancouver. Caspar, Eva’s son, had traveled with the couple, and, though the marriage to Sergeant Skinner had not lasted long, it had been sufficient to secure both Eva and her son Canadian citizenship. Jackie said she had always assumed Caspar’s aristocratic surname had been an affectation wished on him by his mother. “But perhaps there really was a von Rellsteb!” Jackie said excitedly, “and maybe that’s why Caspar went to Europe! To find his real father!”

“And if we could find him, too?” I suggested.

“Sure!” Jackie was excited, certain that by retracing von Rellsteb’s European footsteps she could track him all the way down to the present. Then her face fell. “There’s just one problem,” she said ruefully, “I’d have to go to Germany.”

“Which you can’t afford to do?” I took a guess at the reason for her dubiety.

“I haven’t got any money,” she confessed, “and Molly’s spent almost all her savings.”

“I’ve got money,” I said very simply, because suddenly life had become extremely simple. Nicole was being held prisoner by a man who was trying to forge his own insane Utopia. I would find that man’s hiding place and I would free my daughter. It would take money, but I had money, and I would do anything to get my daughter back.

I was going hunting.

“You’ve done what?” David asked me when I told him the results of my American visit.

“I’ve hired an investigator.”

“Oh, good God! You’ve hired someone! To do what?”

“To find Nicole, of course.”

“Good God!” At first I thought David was upset because of my profligacy, but then I realized he was frightened of my obsession with Nicole, expecting it to end in crippling disappointment. “Tell me, for God’s sake!”

I told him about Jackie Potten, and the telling took all the way from Heathrow Airport to the coast where, before taking me home, David stopped for lunch at the Stave and Anchor. We sat at our usual table by the fire, where I took pleasure in a pint of decent-tasting beer and David took an equal pleasure in mocking me. “So! Let us celebrate your achievements, Tim. You have permitted some American girl to fleece you of sixteen hundred pounds. I do applaud you, Tim, I really do.”

It was lunchtime, but a depression that had brought a gale of wind and rain up the channel had also fetched a mass of clouds that made the pub windows as dark as evening. The lights were on in the bar where a group of idle fisherman amused themselves by listening to our conversation. I tried to defend myself against David’s scorn. “Jackie Potten is a very enterprising reporter,” I insisted with as much dignity as my tiredness would allow. “That’s what I like about the Americans. They’re so full of enthusiasm! They’re not like us.”

“You mean they don’t roam the world giving away their wealth to passing females?” David inquired robustly. “Good God, Tim, the trollop must have thought Christmas had arrived early! She must think you are the greatest fool in Christendom! You never did have any sense of financial responsibility.”

“I am merely subsidizing Jackie’s investigations,” I insisted.

“Oh, dear Lord,” my brother said in despair. He scratched a match on the stone of the hearth, then laboriously lit his pipe as he prepared his next broadside. “You remind me of Tuppy Hargreaves. Do you remember Tuppy? He had that very rich parish in Dorset, and a rather grand wife, but he abandoned them both to run away with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter, and in no time at all the poor sod was wearing a wig and gobbling down vitamins and monkey-gland extract. He died of a heart attack in Bognor Regis, as I recall, and the floozie drove off with an Italian hairdresser in Tuppy’s Wolseley. I took the cremation service in some ghastly place near Southampton. They only paid me two pounds, I remember. Two measly pounds! No doubt a similar fate awaits you, Tim, with this Jackie creature.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

“It is not me being ridiculous,” David said very grandly, then gave me a most suspicious glance. “Was this child beautiful? Did she bat false eyelashes at you, is that it?”

“I am merely paying for Jackie to continue her investigation of Genesis.”

“Her investigation of gullibility!” David pounced gleefully. “Good God, Tim, how gullible can a grown man be? This Miss Potten presents you with a few tattered assumptions about the Genesis community and you reward her with the balance of monies in your pocket, barely leaving yourself enough to buy a pint of ale! Do you really believe she’ll travel to Germany on your behalf?” David, despite his calling, had little faith in humankind. “Not that we can do much about the girl now,” he went on, “you’re home, the damage is done, so now you can do some proper work.”

“What does that mean?” I asked suspiciously.

“It means that your boatyard, now that you’ve had your fling, could profit from a firm managerial touch.” David usually kept an eye on the yard while I was away. “Not that Billy doesn’t do his best,” he added hastily, “because he does, but he hasn’t got the swiftest brain I’ve ever encountered in a parishioner, and he’s a hopeless salesman. And that’s what you need, Tim, a salesman! You must sell some of the yard’s inventory before you entirely run out of space! You won’t believe this, but Tort-au-Citron is back on the market. God knows what that lawyer thought he was playing at when he bought her, but you’ve got her back, and doubtless you’ll have to haul her out of the water and let her clutter up the yard again.”

“Stormchild is for sale again?” I asked in mild astonishment.

“Stormchild, yes, or Tort-au-Citron,” David confirmed. “It seems young Miller rather overplayed his hand in buying the boat, and his partners are now understandably keen to get the brute off their books. I warned them that in today’s market it won’t sell quickly, but if you can find a buyer, Tim, I think they’ll be willing to drop their price pretty savagely. In fact I think they’ll take a loss just to put the whole embarrassing exercise behind them.”

“Maybe they’ll go as low as ninety-five?” I wondered.

“Good Lord, no!” David seemed offended. “You’ll have to ask a higher price than that! At least a hundred and ten thousand! Remember, Tim, you’re on a broker’s percentage, and they’re lawyers! In the words of the good Lord himself, screw the wretches till they squeal.”

“Ninety-five,” I said again, “because I’ve already got a buyer lined up.”

David stared at me with a gratifying amazement. “You do?”

“Yes,” I said, “me.”

That stopped David cold. He gazed at me for a few seconds over the rim of his glass, took a long swallow of ale, then momentarily closed his eyes. “I could have sworn you said you intended to purchase Tort-au-Citron for yourself. Please inform me that I misheard.”

Instead of answering I took our glasses to the bar and had them refilled. When I carried the pints back to the table I confirmed David’s worst suspicions. “I’ve decided to sell the house,” I said, “put a sales manager into the yard, and buy Stormchild.” I was damned if I would go to sea in a boat named after some legal jest. She would have her old name back. “With any luck I’ll be away before Christmas. Cheers.” I raised my glass to David.

“Go and see Doc Stilgoe and have him prescribe you a nerve tonic,” my brother advised.

I smiled. “Truly, David, I’ve had time to think about my life, and I don’t want it to trickle on like it is. Besides, I was never any damned good at running the business; Joanna was always the one who did the books, and I’m a much better sailor than I am a salesman, so I’ll buy Stormchild, then go looking for Nicole.”

“You can’t just disappear!” David exploded at me.

“Why ever not? Nicole did.”

“She was young! She was a fool! She was irresponsible!”

“And I’m alone,” I said, “and what responsibilities do I have?”

“You have responsibilities to Nicole, for a start,” David said trenchantly. “If the silly girl ever does decide to come home, then it’s going to be mighty difficult for her if home is halfway round the globe and still moving!”

“Nickel’s not coming home, David. None of the Genesis community has ever left von Rellsteb, at least not since he went into hiding. Maybe some of his followers have tried to escape, but he’s made damn sure that none get away to tell any tales.”

“So what the hell are you going to do? Just wander away on a boat and grow a beard?”

“I’m going to find Nicole, of course,” I said, then held up a hand to stop David from interrupting me. “I believe she’s being held against her will. I can’t prove that, of course, unless I find her, so that’s what I’ll do.”

David snorted derision. “You are mad.” He was scornful, yet I also heard doubt in my brother’s voice, as though he knew I was right and was simply reluctant to admit it.

“No,” I said very seriously, “I’m doing what you and I have often dreamed of doing. I’m going on an adventure, an old-fashioned quest across far seas, and, perhaps, at the end of it, I shall find Nicole.”

“My dear Tim, what terrible things the Florida sun has done to your sanity,” David said, though I heard a distinct tone of jealousy in his voice. David often complained that the world had become dull and offered no chances for adventure.

“Why don’t you come with me?” I asked him.

He laughed. “My dear Tim, I’m busy.”

“God will give you a sabbatical, won’t he?”

“I’m overdue for one,” he said wistfully, and I could see he was tempted, but he was also frightened of the temptation. In some ways the relationship between David and myself was like the one that had existed between Nicole and her brother. Nicole, like me, was the daring one, the instigator of mischief, while David, like Dickie, was more cautious. My brother, tough as he was, did not like embarking on uncertain endeavors. That, I often thought, was why he preferred dinghy sailing to deep-water cruising. However fast and exciting a racing dinghy might seem, it is almost always sailed within sight of land, in sheltered waters, and in daylight. Blue-water cruisers, on the other hand, go out into the great waters where tempests, darkness, and dangers wait. “Damn it, Tim, I’d love to come,” David now said, “but duty forbids.”

Outside the pub the gray wind beat bleak rain across the town’s roofs and brought the far sound of the wild seas breaking on the river’s bar. To me the noise was music, for it was the sound that would take me back to sea, and to the world’s far ends and, if God willed it, back to Nicole.

In a boat called Stormchild.

I craned Tort-au-Citron out of the water, scrubbed her hull clean of a season’s weed and barnacles, then gave her a triple coating of antifouling paint. First, though, I took the ridiculous name off her transom and painted her original name in its place. She was Stormchild again, and I was sentimental enough to think that the lovely boat was grateful for the change.

I paid ninety-six thousand for her. She was worth nearly double that price, but I had persuaded Miller’s legal partners that she had deteriorated badly. The lawyers should have insisted on a survey, but they took my word on the boat’s condition, confirming David’s suspicions that Miller’s partners were simply glad to be rid of the yacht. Which suited me, for I now possessed a boat superbly suited to my purpose. Stormchild was tough, but she was also fast, safe, and comfortable. My plan was to provision her, then, leaving David to tie up the loose ends of my affairs, I would head south across Biscay. I could expect a lively time of that crossing, for it was already very late in the year, but I would be heading into the regions of perpetual summer, and, when the trade wind belt moved north, I would go west toward America.

“You’ve heard nothing from that wretched child, I suppose?” David never called Jackie by her name. That was not from unkindness, but rather out of David’s fear of the unknown, and I, who knew my brother’s foibles only too well, knew I would never shake his preconception that Jackie, being young and foreign, was a threat to me.

“I’ve heard nothing,” I confirmed.

“A fool and his money are easily parted,” David said with sanctimonious relish. It was five weeks after my return from Florida and, on a bitterly cold day, he was helping me rig Stormchild. We had craned her into the water the day before and now she floated, lone and glorious, at the winter pontoons.

“She might contact me yet,” I said defensively, though in truth I had rather abandoned hope of Jackie Potten. I did not for one moment credit David’s belief that she had cheated me, but I did fear that her investigatory skills had not proved equal to discovering why von Rellsteb had made his journey to Europe. I had not heard from Jackie, nor from Nicole. I had harbored a secret hope that the carefully written letter I had given to von Rellsteb on Sun Kiss Key would spur Nicole into a reply, but I had to assume that the letter had never been delivered.

“If that wretched girl doesn’t come through with the goods,” David said acidly, “then you’re sailing into the unknown are you not?”

“Not really. I think Alaska or British Columbia are the places to search.” I had bought the Admiralty charts for those far, inhospitable, and secretive coasts, and the more I studied the charts, the more I became convinced that von Rellsteb might indeed have taken refuge in one of the tortuous inlets of the North Pacific. In that expectation I now prepared Stormchild for desolate and icy waters. I had put a diesel-powered heater into her saloon and new layers of insulation inside her cold, steel hull. I had built extra water and fuel tanks into her belly and crammed spare parts and tools into every locker. I had treated myself to the best foul-weather gear that money could buy, and I was stocking Stormchild’s galley with the kind of food that fought off winter’s gloom: cartons of thick soups, cans of steak and kidney pies, stewed beef, and plum duff. Thus, day by cold day, my boat settled lower in the water.

Some of the equipment I needed was not available from my own chandlery, or from any yachtsman’s discount catalog. I had been alarmed by Jackie Potten’s description of the Genesis community as survivalists and impressed by her contention that Utopian communes often became degraded by the imposition of a controlling discipline, and I did not want to face such a belligerent group unarmed, so I quietly put the word about that I was in the market for a good rifle. Billy, my foreman, solved the problem by revealing that his father had hoarded two British Army rifles as souvenirs of his war service. “Silly old bugger shouldn’t have them at all,” Billy said, “not at his age. Bloody things ain’t licensed, and all the old fool will ever do is shoot hisself in the foot one day. You’d be doing me a right favor to take them out of the house.”

He wanted me to buy both rifles. They were.303 Lee-Enfields, the No. 4 Mark I version, which was a robust, bolt-action weapon, tough and forgiving, with a ten-shot magazine and a maximum range of twelve hundred yards, though only an optimist would bother to take aim if the target was much above three hundred paces. The Lee-Enfield had once been the standard rifle of the British forces, and was still used by armies that appreciated the merits of its rugged construction. Both guns still had their army-issue, brass-tipped, webbing slings, while their stocks and barrel sleevings had been lovingly polished with linseed oil.

David helped me hide the two guns deep inside Stormchild; one we placed in a specially disguised compartment under the generator in the bow, while the other we hid behind the timber paneling of the after companionway. “It’s sensible to take two,” David said with a most unchristian relish, “because if one goes wrong, then you can always shoot von Rellsteb with the second one.”

“Don’t be daft,” I said, “I’m not going to shoot him. I’m only taking the guns as a precaution.”

“Don’t let him shoot first,” David warned me. To my brother Stormchild’s voyage had transformed itself from an exercise in futility to an enviable demonstration of moral absolutes that would end with good triumphing over evil. David’s initial opposition to my expedition had changed when I told him how idealistic communes like the Genesis community often became fouled by the politics of domination. To David, therefore, Nicole had become a pristine maiden victimized by a Prussian villain, and that dislike intensified when I told David of my conversation with von Rellsteb, and how he had expressed a desire to live at one with the planet. That was just the kind of heretical mysticism that brought out the Christian soldier in my straightforward brother, and so, enthused by righteous indignation, he encouraged me to slay the enemy and release Nicole. But that enemy was well armed, and I was sailing alone, which was one of the reasons I wanted David, who was my closest friend as well as my brother, to accompany me. I made my strongest effort to change his mind on the day when, at long last, we took Stormchild for a long shakedown sail off the southern English coast. “Nothing would please me more than to accompany you,” David said, “but it’s impossible.”

“Betty wouldn’t mind, would she?”

“She’s all for it! She says it would do me good.” David was standing at Stormchild’s wheel, which, in the manner of many brilliant dinghy helmsmen who find themselves sailing a larger yacht, he twitched far too frequently. We had left the river long before dawn and flown up-channel in the grip of a bitter east wind that had now gentled and backed into an evening whisper. Stormchild had taken the day’s white-topped waves beautifully, while now, serene and beautiful, she ghosted the evening’s flood tide homeward. “She sails very sweetly,” David said as he glanced up at her towering, sunset-touched main.

“She does,” I agreed, “but I still wouldn’t mind a second pair of hands aboard.”

“Doubtless, doubtless.” David crouched out of the small wind to light his pipe, then chucked the dead match overboard. “Even the bishop said a sabbatical might do me good,” he added wistfully.

“Then come!” I said, exasperated by his refusal.

“It would be sheer irresponsibility,” he said with a touch of irascibility. “Besides, I’m older than you. I don’t think I could cope with the discomforts of long-distance cruising.”

“Balls.”

He shrugged. “If I could find someone to look after the parishes, I would, maybe.” He sounded very uncertain.

“I wish you would come. Think of all the bird life in Alaska!”

“There is that,” he said wistfully. David and Betty were both ardent ornithologists, and their house was filled with bird books and pictures.

“So come!” I urged him.

He shook his head. “You’ve been itching to make a long voyage for years, Tim. It’s been too long since you sailed round the world. But I’m not itching for the same thing. I’ve become a creature of habit. People think I’m a curmudgeonly old clergyman, and that’s exactly what I want to be. You go, and I’ll stay at home and pray for you. And I’ll keep a pastoral eye on the boatyard, too.”

“If you change your mind,” I said, “you can always fly out and join me.”

“That’s true, that’s true.”

Our wake was now just a shimmer of evening light, proof how sea-kindly was Stormchild’s sleek hull. We were hurrying home in an autumn dusk, sliding past a dark shore where the first lights hazed the misted hills yellow. There was a chill in the air, a foretaste of winter, an invitation to follow the migrating birds and turn our boat’s bows south. In front of us the sea was dark, studded by the winking lights of the buoys, while astern of Stormchild the empty sea was touched with the dying sun’s gold so that it looked like a shining path which would lead to the earth’s farthest ends and to where all our secret hopes and wildest dreams might one day come true.

I had Stormchild’s compasses swung professionally, then had a technician give her radar a final service. I had learned that the Alaskan coast was prey to ship-killing fogs, so the radar was more than a frill, it was a necessity. The aerial was mounted at the mast’s upper spreaders and fed its signal to two screens; a main one above the navigation station at the foot of the companionway, and a repeater screen that was mounted in the yacht’s center cockpit.

A new spray hood arrived. It was made from stout blue canvas with clear plastic windows that would shelter the forward section of Stormchild’s cockpit against the bitter northern seas and shrieking winds. Stormchild had a small auxiliary wheel mounted in that forward section of the cockpit, while the main wheel was further aft. Astern of the large main wheel was the teak-planked coach roof over the after cabin. That cabin was the most comfortable aboard, but not in a rough sea when the motion amidships was always easier, so I was using the after cabin as a storeroom. I planned to live, sleep, navigate, and cook in the main living quarters amidships. On the starboard side of those midships quarters was the navigation station, which was equipped with a generous table, good chart stowage, and plenty of space for the radios and instrumentation. Aft of the navigation table was a shower and lavatory, while opposite, on the port side of the companionway, was a large galley. Forward of the galley was the saloon with its two wide sofas, table, and wall of shelves that held books and cassette tapes. The diesel-powered heater looked something like a small and complex woodstove, and gave the saloon a decidedly cozy air, a feeling heightened by the framed pictures and glass-shaded oil lamps.

Forward of the main cabin were two smaller sleeping cabins that shared a common bathroom. I had turned one of the cabins into a engineering workroom, while the other was crammed with stores. Last were two chain lockers, a sail locker, and a watertight compartment that held Stormchild’s small diesel generator, under which one of the two rifles was hidden.

On deck I had a life raft in a container, a dinghy that was lashed to the after-coach roof, and a stout rack filled with boat hooks, whisker poles, and oars. At the stern, on a short staff, I flew the bomb-scarred red ensign which had flown from Slip-Slider and which the navy had rescued from the channel. I would take that ragged flag to my own journey’s end as a symbol of Joanna.

Stormchild had been rerigged, repainted, and replenished. The work had taken me eight weeks exactly, and now she was ready. The sale of my house was progressing smoothly, the boatyard had a new manager and all I needed now was the right weather to slip down channel and round Ushant. That weather arrived in early November, and I topped up Stormchild’s water and fuel tanks, checked her inventory one more time, then went ashore for my last night in England. I stayed with David and Betty, and used their telephone to make a final effort to reach Jackie Potten. There was no answer from Jackie’s telephone, and only the answering machine responded when I called Molly Tetterman’s house. So much for the ladies of Kalamazoo, I thought, and put the phone down without leaving any message.

The next morning, in a cold rain and gusting wind, I carried the last of my luggage down to the boatyard where the heavily laden Stormchild waited at the pontoon. Friends had come to bid me farewell and cheered when David’s wife, Betty, broke a bottle of champagne on Stormchild’s stemhead. David said a prayer of blessing over the boat, then we all trooped below to drink more champagne. David and Betty gave me two parting gifts: a book about Alaskan birds and the Book of Common Prayer. “Not the modern rubbish,” David assured me, “but the 1662 version.” It was a beautiful and ancient book with a morocco leather binding and gilt-edged pages.

“Too good for the boat,” I protested.

“Nonsense. It isn’t for decoration anyway, but for use. Take it.”

Billy, on behalf of the boatyard staff, then presented me with a ship’s bell that he ceremoniously hung above the main companionway. “It’s proper brass, boss,” he told me, “so it’ll tarnish like buggery, but that’ll make you think of us every time you have to clean the sod.”

We opened still more champagne, though I, who would be taking Stormchild down channel when the tide ebbed, only drank two glasses. It was a sad, bittersweet day; a parting, but also a beginning. I went to find my daughter, but I also went to fulfill a dream that had given such joy to Joanna — the dream of living aboard a cruising boat, of following the warm winds and long waves. I was going away, leaving no address and no promise of a return.

At midday, as the tide became fair, my guests climbed back onto the pontoon. Friends shouted farewells as the rain slicked Stormchild’s teak deck dark. I started the big engine. Billy disconnected the shoreside electricity, then slipped my springs, leaving the big yacht tethered only by her bow and stern lines. David was the last to leave the boat. He gripped my hand. “Good luck,” he said, “and God bless.”

“Are you sure you won’t come?”

“Good luck,” he said again, then climbed ashore. I looked ahead, past Stormchild’s bows, at the rain-beaten river, down which Joanna had sailed to her death, and from where Nicole had sailed into oblivion. Now it was my turn to leave, and I glanced up at the hill where my wife and son were buried, and I said my own small prayer of farewell.

People were shouting their goodbyes. Most were laughing, and a few were crying. Someone threw a paper streamer. Billy had already let go the bow line and David was standing by the aft. “Ready, Tim?” he shouted.

“Let go!” I called.

“You’re free, Tim!” David tossed the bitter end of the aft line onto Stormchild’s deck. “Good luck! God bless! Bon voyage!”

I put the engine into gear. Water seethed at Stormchild’s stern as she drew heavily and slowly away from her berth. Next stop, the Canaries!

“Goodbye!” a score of voices shouted. “Good luck, Tim!” More paper streamers arced across Stormchild’s guardrails and sagged into the widening strip of gray-white water. “Bon voyage!”

I waved, and there were tears in my eyes as the streamers stretched taut, snapped, and fell away. One of the boatyard staff was sounding a raucous farewell on an air-powered foghorn. “Goodbye!” I shouted one last time.

“Mr. Blackburn!” A small and determined voice screamed above the racket, and I glanced back across the strip of propeller-churned water, and there, crammed among my friends and dressed in a baggy sweater and shapeless trousers with her bulging handbag gripped in a thin pale hand, was the lady from Kalamazoo. Jackie Potten had surfaced at last. She had not let me down after all. “Mr. Blackburn!” she shouted again.

I banged Stormchild’s gearbox into reverse. White water foamed and boiled as the propeller struggled to check the deadweight of over twenty tons of boat and supplies. I slung a line ashore, David and Billy hauled, and ignominiously, just thirty seconds after leaving, I and my boat came home again.

Jackie Potten was panting from the exertion of running through the boatyard carrying a suitcase and her enormous handbag. “A man at the marina office said you were leaving, and I just ran,” she explained her breathlessness, “and I can’t believe I caught you! Wow! This is some boat! Is it yours?”

“Yes, mine.” I ushered Jackie into Stormchild’s cockpit where I introduced her to David and Betty, who, alone of the rather bemused crowd who had come to bid me farewell, had returned on board the yacht. My brother now behaved with an excruciating gallantry toward her. He invited her down into the saloon, enjoining her to watch the stairs and not to crack her skull on the companionway lintel.

“I tried to telephone you from London Airport”—Jackie talked to me all the way down into the saloon—“but they said your home number was disconnected, and then I telephoned the boatyard and they said you were leaving today, and I would have been here hours ago, but British Rail is some kind of joke. They just pretend to run a railroad. Anyway I caught a bus in the end, which was kind of interesting. Is this some cabin! Are those books for real? You read Yeats?”

“The Yeats belonged to Nicole,” I said. I had put a lot of Nicole’s books onto the shelves, which were equipped with varnished drop bars to hold their contents against the sea’s motion.

“Is this really a stove? That’s neat. I didn’t know you could heat boats. And a carpet! Wow! This is more comfortable than my apartment!”

David, standing beside me at the chart table, watched Jackie explore the big saloon. “I see I did you an injustice,” he said softly.

“Meaning?”

“She’s hardly a Salome, is she? Or a Cleopatra. Not at all the sultry Jezebel I had imagined.”

“I hired her for her journalistic skills,” I said testily, “not for her looks.”

“Thank God for that,” David said with amusement, and Jackie, in her voluminous and colorless clothes, did look more than ever like some drab, wan, and orphaned child, an impression that was not helped by a brown felt hat of spectacular ugliness.

“Can I use this?” Jackie Potten referred to the saloon table, where she sat and spread some crumpled and dirty papers. “I have to account for your money, see? I guess I really did some pretty dumb things, and I’m not really sure that I separated out all Molly’s German expenses from mine…”

“You took Mrs. Tetterman to Germany?” I interrupted to ask.

“Sure! But not on your money. Really!” She sounded very anxious.

“Guide’s honor?” David, instantly divining the girl’s innocence, could not resist teasing her.

“Guide’s honor?” Jackie frowned at him. “Oh, you mean like Girl Scouts? Sure, Scout’s honor. Except maybe some of the receipts got muddled and that’s why I need to run through the paperwork with you, Mr. Blackburn, because you never said that Molly should go, but she kind of insisted and she’s really hard to turn down, know what I mean? And she speaks German, too, so it was a real help having her along, but we got those tickets you book thirty days in advance and we traveled midweek, only my ticket cost a lot more because I had to come here as well and Molly didn’t. She’s flying straight back to Detroit, while I’ve come to report to you. I don’t think we were really extravagant. I mean we stayed at this real fleabag. It was weird. They had a pool, which I thought was kind of neat, but the Germans swim naked! These fat guys, right? Really gross! Molly said it was just natural and healthy, and she went skinny-dipping with them, but I couldn’t do it, I really couldn’t. And the food was awful — they don’t know what vegetarian food is—”

“Quiet!” I sang out.

“I was only trying to tell you…” Jackie made another valiant effort to keep going, while David and Betty were trying hard not to laugh aloud.

“Quiet!” I had entirely forgotten this girl’s capacity to talk. I put a finger on my lips to keep her silent as I walked slowly to the cabin table. Once there I put my hands on the table’s edge and bent toward Jackie Potten’s indignant, pale face. “Did you find out why Caspar von Rellsteb sailed to Europe four-and-a-half years ago?” I asked her at last.

“That’s exactly what I was about to tell you!” Jackie said very indignantly. “Yes, I did!”

“Oh, blessed girl,” I sat opposite her. “So tell me now.”

“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.

The coast, inhospitable though it is, still has its few inhabitants. A handful of ranches cling to the islands and mainland hills; there is one fishing settlement with the unlikely name of Puerto Eden, and one surviving limestone quarry which still extracts stone, but otherwise the long savage coast has been abandoned to the seas and to the winds, to the smoking vents of volcanoes, to the glaciers, and to the earth tremors, which reveal that this is a place where a seam of the planet is still grinding and tearing itself into ruin. The nightmare coast comes to its end in the “Land of Fire,” the Tierra del Fuego, at Cape Horn where, before the Panama Canal was dug, the great ships used to die, and where the biggest seas on earth still heap and surge through the narrow and shallow Drake Passage which runs between the Land of Fire and the northernmost tip of Antarctica. It is a horrid coast, a bitter coast, a dangerous and rock-riven coast, where men and boats die easily. It was also a coast which, if I was to find my child and let her loose from a madman’s thrall, I would have to search.

“Remember Peter Carter-Pirie?” I asked David.

“I was just thinking of him.”

“Carter-Pirie?” Betty asked.

“He was a mad Royal Marine,” I explained, “who used to sail a wooden boat to unlikely places. David and I met him in Greenland when we were guinea-pigging survival gear for the army, and he rather excited us at the prospect of sailing the Patagonian coast. He’d been there a couple of times, you see, and I remember he told us quite a bit about it.”

“And none of it particularly good,” David said grimly.

“He said the bird life was remarkable,” I reproved David’s pessimism. “Lots of condors, steamer ducks, penguins, that sort of thing. If I remember rightly Carter-Pirie went there to prove that Patagonia was the breeding ground for the greater-crested snipe or something like that.”

“There is no greater-crested snipe,” said Betty, with the easy authority of an expert, “though there is a Patagonian hummingbird; the green-backed firecrown.”

Jackie Potten was staring at the three of us as though we had lost our collective marbles. “Hummingbird?” she said faintly.

“I’d rather like to see that hummingbird,” David said wistfully.

“Patagonia can’t be a very comfortable place for a hummingbird,” I suggested. “I thought they sipped nectar in warm climes?”

“It can’t be a very comfortable place for von Rellsteb and his Genesis community either”—David was peering at the map—“if indeed they’re there?”

“Where else?” I asked.

“But Patagonia means rather a drastic change in your plans, Tim, does it not?” David inquired.

“Not really.” I spoke with an insouciance I did not entirely feel. “It just means that I turn left when I reach the Pacific, instead of turning right.”

“You mean…” Jackie Potten frowned at me.

I glanced across the table at her. “Oh, I’m sorry, I never told you where I was going, did I? When you arrived I was just leaving to find the Genesis community.”

“In this?” She gestured round Stormchild’s spacious saloon.

“It’s a great deal more suitable than a Ford Escort,” I said very seriously.

“You were just leaving?” She ignored my feeble jest. “But you didn’t know where to look!”

“I had a mind to try Alaska,” I explained, “but I would probably have tried to telephone you as soon as I reached the far side of the Atlantic, and I guess you’d have told me to try Patagonia instead.”

“So now you’ll just go to Chile?” Jackie seemed astonished that such a decision could be made so lightly. “How do you get there?”

“Sail south till the butter melts, then turn right.” David offered the ancient joke.

“I’ll sail south to the Canary Islands,” I offered more sensibly, “and wait there till the trade winds establish themselves, then I’ll run across to the West Indies. After that it’ll be a brisk sail to Panama, and I’m guessing now, because I’m not familiar with the waters, but I imagine it will be easier to go west into the Pacific, then dogleg back to South America rather than fight the Humboldt Current all the way down the coast. And with any luck I should be in Chile by March next year, which will be toward the end of their summer and, if there’s ever a good time to sail in Patagonian waters, late summer is probably that time.”

“Wow!” Jackie Potten said in what I took to be admiration, but then it was her turn to astound me. “Can I come?”

Stormchild sailed on the next tide, just after midnight. She slipped unseen down the river with her navigation lights softly blurred by the light rain. Instead of the champagne parting and the paper streamers there had only been David and Betty calling their farewells from the pontoons, and once their voices had been lost in the night there were only the sounds of the big motor in Stormchild’s belly, the splash of the water at her stem, and the hiss of the wet wind. That wind was southerly, but the forecast promised it would back easterly by dawn, and, if the forecast held good, I could not hope for a better departure wind. It was blowing hard, but the big, heavily laden and steel-hulled Stormchild needed a good wind to shift her ponderous weight.

I raised sail at the river’s mouth, killed the engine, and hardened onto a broad reach. The wake foamed white into the blackness astern as the coastal lights winked and faded in the rain that still pattered on the deck and dripped from the rigging. The green and red lights of the river’s buoys vanished astern, and soon the only mark to guide Stormchild was the flickering loom of the far Portland light. I had lost count of how many times I had begun voyages in just this manner; slipping on a fast tide down-channel, making my way southerly to avoid the tidal rips that churn off the great headlands of southern England, then letting my boat tear her way westward toward the open Atlantic, yet however many times I had done it there was always the same excitement.

“Gee, but it’s cold,” Jackie Potten said suddenly.

“If you’re going to moan all the way across the Atlantic,” I snapped, “then I’ll turn round now and drop you off.”

There was a stunned silence. I had surprised myself by the anger in my voice, which had clearly made Jackie intensely miserable. I felt sorry that I had snapped at her, but I also felt justified, for I was not at all sure that I wanted her on board Stormchild, but the notion of Jackie accompanying me had energized David and Betty with a vast amusement, and they had overriden my objections with their joint enthusiasm. Betty had taken Jackie shopping, returning with a carload of vegetarian supplies and armfuls of expensive foul-weather gear that I had been forced to pay for. I had ventured to ask the American girl whether she had any sailing experience at all, only to be told that she and her mother had once spent a week on a Miami-based cruise ship.

“But you can cook, can’t you?” David had demanded.

“A bit.” Jackie had been confused by the question.

“Then you won’t be entirely useless.” David’s characteristic bluntness had left Jackie rather dazed.

Dazed or not, Jackie was now my sole companion on Stormchild, which meant I had the inconvenience of sharing a boat with a complete novice. I could not let her take a watch or even helm the ship until I had trained her in basic seamanship, and that training was going to slow me down. Worse, she might prove to be seasick or utterly incompetent. All in all, I was sourly thinking, it had been bloody inconsiderate of David and Betty to have encouraged her to join the ship.

There was also another and murkier reason for my unhappiness. I had felt an inexplicable tug of attraction toward this odd little stray girl, and I did not want that irrational feeling to be nurtured by the forced intimacy of a small boat. I told myself I did not need the complication, and that this girl was too young, too naive, too idealistic, too noisy, and too pathetic. “I thought you had a job to go home to,” I said nastily, as though, being reminded of her employment, Jackie might suddenly demand to be put ashore. “Aren’t you the Kalamazoo Gazette’s star reporter?”

“I was fired,” she said miserably.

“What for? Talking too much?” I immediately regretted the jibe, and apologized.

“I do talk too much,” she said, “I know I do. But that wasn’t why I was fired. I was fired because I insisted on going to Hamburg. I was supposed to be writing some articles on date rape in junior high schools, but I thought the Genesis community was a better story, so I left the paper. And now I’ve got a chance to sail the Atlantic, so you see I was quite right. Molly says that we should always take our chances in life, or else we’ll miss out on everything.”

“It’s a pity to miss out on roast beef,” I said nastily. “What is all that sprouting shit you brought on board?”

“It isn’t shit,” she said in a hurt voice. “You put seeds in the trays, water them twice a day, and harvest the sprouts. It’s a really good, fresh source of protein.”

I glanced up at the pale mass of the mainsail. “Did you know that Hitler and Mussolini were both vegetarians? And so was the guy who founded the KGB?”

There was a pause, then Miss Jackie Potten showed me another side of her character. “I know you’re captain of this ship,” she said, “but I think it’s important that we respect each other’s beliefs, and that we don’t mock each other’s private convictions. I kind of think that’s really crucial.”

I had just been told off by a floozy young enough to be my daughter. I was so mortified that I said nothing, but just clung to the big wheel and glanced down at the binnacle to make certain we were still on a course of 240 degrees.

“Because we all need our private space,” Jackie went doggedly on, evidently translating my silence as incomprehension, “and if we don’t recognize each other’s unique human qualities, Mr. Blackburn, then we won’t respect each other, and I really believe that we need to share mutual respect if we’re to spend so much time together.”

“You’re right,” I said briskly, “and I’m sorry.” I meant the apology, too, though my voice probably sounded too robust to convey the contrition I genuinely felt, but I had been boorish and Jackie had been right to protest. She had also been very brave, but it was evident, from the embarrassed silence that followed, that the display of defiance had exhausted her courage. “Is there anything I can do to help, then?” she finally asked me in a very small and very timid voice.

“You can call me Tim,” I said, “and then you can go below and make me a mug of coffee, with caffeine and milk, but no sugar, and you can get me a corned beef sandwich with butter and mustard, but nothing else, and certainly with nothing green in it.”

“Right, Tim,” she said, and went to do it.

By the time we docked in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, I had developed a healthy respect for the frail-looking Jackie Potten. Not that she looked so frail anymore, for fifteen hundred sea miles had put some healthy color into her cheeks and bleached her mousy hair into pale gold. After her complaint about feeling cold on our first night out she had uttered not a single grievance. In fact she had proved to possess a patient tenacity that was well suited to sailing and, despite her fondness for a diet that might have starved an anorexic stick-insect, she had a stomach that could take the roughest motion of the waves. In the beginning, as Stormchild had thrashed into the great gray channel rollers with their hissing and bubbling white tops, Jackie had been nervous, especially when the first sullen dawn showed that we were out of sight of land. That, to me, is always a special moment; when at last you can look around the horizon and see nothing but God’s good ocean. For Jackie, when all she saw was the cold crinkling heave of the careless waves, her overwhelming sensation was the terror of insignificance.

The terror did not last. Instead she began to enjoy the challenge, and learned to have confidence in the boat and in her own ability to control Stormchild. Within two days she was watch-keeping alone, at first only by daylight, but within a week she was standing the night watches and all traces of her initial nervousness had disappeared. She was a natural sailor, and, as her competence grew, her character hardened out of timidity into confidence. She even talked less, and I realized her previous volubility had been merely a symptom of shyness.

We marked off our private territories within the boat. Jackie had excavated a sleeping space among the heaped stores in the starboard forward cabin where she settled like some small cozy animal. Once in a while I would hear her speaking aloud in that cabin. At first I thought she was just chattering to herself, but later I learned she was dictating into a small tape recorder. She was making a record of the journey, but would not let me listen to the tape. “I’m just making notes,” she said disparagingly, “only rough notes.”

We raced across Biscay where Jackie, equipped with Stormchild’s copy of The Birds of Britain and Europe learned to identify the various seabirds that kept us company. There were fulmars on either beam, storm petrels flickering above our wake, and handsome, slim-winged shearwaters effortlessly skimming all about us. As Jackie learned to identify the birds, I taught myself more about Stormchild’s character. She was a stubborn boat, good in heavy seas, but sluggish and sullen when, ten days into our voyage, we encountered light winds north and east of Madeira. The winds eventually died to a flat calm and the sails slatted uselessly to the boat’s motion on the long swell. I was tempted to turn on the powerful engine, but there was no point in wasting fuel, for nothing would hurry the establishment of the trade winds and I reasoned that we might just as well wait it out at sea than pay daily harbor fees of seventy pesetas per foot of boat length in a Canary Islands port.

After three days the winds came again and Stormchild dipped her bows to the long ocean swell. The weather had turned fiercely warm. I changed into shorts, but Jackie had no summer clothes so stayed in her usual baggy attire. I stored our foul-weather gear in a hanging locker and suspected that, storms apart, we would not need the heavy warm clothes again until we had long cleared the Panama Canal, for now we were entering the latitudes of the perpetual lotus-eaters and would stay in these warm latitudes for weeks.

We raised the Canary Islands on a Sunday morning and by mid-afternoon we had cleared the Spanish immigration procedures in Las Palmas. Jackie was wide-eyed with the realization that it was in this ancient harbor that Columbus himself had waited for the trade winds to take him into the unknown west.

Next day, for lack of space in Las Palmas, we moved to the harbor at Mogan, on the island’s south coast. Mogan, like all the other island harbors, was crammed with cruising yachts waiting to make the Atlantic crossing. There had been a time when barely a dozen small yachts a year made this passage, but now the Canary Island ports could scarcely keep up with the demand for berth space. Hundreds of boats would cross with us, making a great flock of sails that would speed across the blue heart of the Atlantic.

“So how long do we wait for the trade winds?” Jackie asked.

“A month? Maybe longer.”

We collected our mail from the English pub where David, God bless him, had sent every available chart of the Patagonian coast. He had also sent me the details of the Chilean government’s regulations for visiting boats, which were complex, together with his advice to see a Chilean consul somewhere in Central America. “I’m going to talk to Peter Carter-Pirie,” he wrote to me, “for his advice on sailing the Patagonian channels. I’ll have his words of wisdom waiting for you Poste Restante in Antigua, with copies to Panama. Betty and I send best wishes to the lady from Kalamazoo, that is if you’re still talking to each other!” I could almost hear David’s evil chortling as he wrote that sentence.

I took the charts back to Stormchild where I planned to spend the afternoon studying the awful coast where the Genesis community had apparently taken shelter. I had Stormchild to myself, for Jackie had taken the boat’s folding bicycle to explore the nearby countryside and to look for shops where she could buy galley supplies. I had also instructed her to buy herself some summer clothes, for the weather was stifling and she could not go on wearing her shapeless sweaters and capacious trousers. I spread the Patagonian charts in Stormchild’s cockpit, over which I had rigged a white cotton awning, then settled down with a tall jug of Bloody Marys.

I discovered the Archipelago of Christ’s Blood to be a tortured group of islands some two hundred miles north of Puerto Natales, which was where the settlements of Tierra del Fuego began. I traced my finger northward from Puerto Natales, across a tangle of islands, fjords, channels, and glaciers, and noted the odd mixture of place names. Some were English, legacies of the great naval explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; thus there was an Isla Darwin, a Nelson Straits, an Isla Duque de York, and an Isla Victoria. The majority of the names, naturally enough, were Spanish; some pious, like the Isla Madre de Dios, and some ominous, like the Isla Desolación, but a good number of German names were also salted among the Anglo-Spanish mix; I found a Puerto Weber, the Canal Erhardt, the Isla Stubbenkammer and the Monte Siegfried; just enough Teutonic names to record how many hopeful people had emigrated from Germany to Chile’s bleak and inhospitable coast.

None of the charts marked von Rellsteb’s finca, but of the score of islands which made up the Archipiélago Sangre de Cristo only one seemed large enough to sustain a ranch. That island bore the ominous name of Isla Tormentos, the Isle of Torments, and I wondered if it had been so named by shipwrecked sailors who had suffered on its inhospitable coasts. The long Pacific shore of the Isle of Torments was shown as a stretch of gigantic cliffs, pierced by a single fjord that reached so deep into the island it almost slashed Isla Tormentos in half. The opposite shore of the island was far more ragged than the ocean-facing cliffs; the eastern coast was a cartographer’s nightmare, for it looked as though the island had been raggedly ripped from the rest of the archipelago to leave a tattered, scattered, and shattered litter of rocks and islands and shoals, which, in turn, were all navigational hazards within the forbiddingly named Estrecho Desolado, the Desolate Straits. The Patagonian coast was thickly printed with such depressing names, but the Archipiélago Sangre de Cristo seemed to have more than its fair share of forbidding nomenclature, suggesting that sailing its labyrinthine channels would be hard and dangerous work. I traced the difficult course of the Desolate Straits to find they were not true straits at all, but rather a blind sea loch that ran uselessly into the heartland of the Isle of Torments.

I was distracted from these dispiriting researches by Jackie’s noisy return. She came laden with string bags that were crammed with papayas, avocados, tomatoes, leeks, pineapples, cabbages, bunches of radishes, and the island’s small, good-tasting potatoes. She was clearly delighted with the Canary Islands. “I got talking to this Dutch lady, who’s on one of the boats moored by the wall over there, and she speaks Spanish and she talked to the lady in the shop, and she told us that everything in the shop was grown organically. Everything! Isn’t that just great, Tim?”

“It’s absolutely astonishingly terrifically wonderful,” I said with an utter lack of enthusiasm. “Did you buy some organic meat for your organic skipper?”

“Yeah, sure. Of course I did.” She produced a cellophane pack, which held a very scrawny portion of tired-looking chicken, then dived enthusiastically down the main companionway with her purchases. “Chicken’s OK, isn’t it? They had rabbits, too, but I really couldn’t bring myself to buy a dead bunny rabbit, Tim. I’m sorry.” She shouted the apology up from the galley where she was evidently storing the food into lockers.

“Did the dead bunnies have their paws on?”

There was a pause, then her small, wedge-shaped face frowned at me from the foot of the companionway. “I didn’t look. Why? Is it important?”

“If the paws are still on the carcass, then it probably is rabbit,” I said, “but if the paws are missing, then it’s a pretty sure bet you’re looking at a dead pussycat.”

A heartbeat of silence. Then, “No!”

“Cat doesn’t taste bad,” I said with feigned insouciance. “It depends on how well the family fed the pussy, really. The ones fed on that dry cat food taste like shit, but the others are OK.”

“Gross me out!” But she laughed, then went back to her chores. She began singing, but her voice faded as she went forward to her own cabin. While we were in port I had taken over the stern cabin to give us both some privacy. At sea I could collapse onto a saloon sofa, but in port it was more difficult to preserve mutual modesty if I was sprawled in the boat’s main living space.

Silence settled on the boat, and I guessed Jackie was resting after the excitement of discovering organic stick-insect food in the middle of the Atlantic. I sipped my Bloody Mary and looked back to the charts of the Archipiélago Sangre de Cristo. I assumed that if the von Rellsteb finca was indeed on the Isla Tormentos, then it must be built on the tangled eastern coast, facing the Desolate Straits, for in the nineteenth century, when the estate wanted to take its fleeces to market, or to ship its quarried limestone to the world, it would doubtless have used coastal sailing vessels to carry the produce north to Puerto Montt. Such ships could never have found shelter on the ocean-fronting western coast, so I could safely assume that the settlement, if it was on the Isla Tormentos, must stand on the eastern shore, where, if the old charts were accurate, several bays looked promising as possible harbors.

“Tim? What do you think?” Jackie’s oddly coy voice startled my somnolent researches. She had appeared on deck, but instead of using the main companionway she had climbed through the forward hatch into the bright sunlight of Stormchild’s foredeck. I looked up from the Estrecho Desolado to blink at the sudden brilliance of the tropical daylight, in which, to my considerable surprise, a very shy Jackie Potten was standing in a newly bought bikini. “You don’t like it,” she responded anxiously to my half second of silence.

“I think it’s very nice,” I said with clumsy inadequacy, and I knew I was not referring to the bikini, which was yellow and more or less like any other bikini I had ever seen, but to Jackie herself, who was unexpectedly revealed as sinuous and shapely, and I had to look quickly down at the charts as though I had noticed nothing out of the ordinary. “I hope you bought some good suntan lotion.”

“I did. Yes. Lots.” She sounded very chastened, and I guessed she had never worn anything as daring as a bikini before. “The Dutch lady made me buy it,” Jackie explained. “She said it was silly to wear too many clothes in the tropics. I’ve bought some shorts and a skirt as well,” she added hurriedly, “because the lady in the shop said that it’s kind of respectful to look pretty decent in the town, but that the bikini’s OK on the beaches or on board a boat. Is it really OK?” She asked very earnestly.

“Yes,” I said very truthfully, “it really is OK.” She needed still more reassurance. “It’s a very, very nice swimsuit,” I said inadequately, “and you look terrific,” and the realization that I had spoken the truth was suddenly very embarrassing because Jackie was only a year or so older than my Nicole, and I also realized that I was blushing, so I looked hurriedly down at my charts and tried to imagine the speed of the winds funneling through the Estrecho Desolado, but somehow I could not concentrate on winds and tides and currents. I looked back to the foredeck, but Jackie was lying down, hidden from me by the thick coils of halyards that hung from the cleats at the base of the mainmast. I sighed and shut my eyes. I told myself that bringing her on this voyage was a mistake, that it had always been a mistake, and that now it suddenly threatened to be an even bigger mistake, because I could feel the temptation to make a damn bloody great fool of myself over some crumpet from Kalamazoo.

So I poured myself a great drink instead.

We waited for the winds to take us away. My birthday came, and Jackie had somehow discovered its date and solemnly presented me with a book of Robert Frost’s poetry that she had miraculously discovered in a secondhand bookshop in Las Palmas, and that night she served me a birthday dinner of rabbit stew, the cooking of which was a real triumph of friendship over conviction, and she invited the Dutch woman, who had helped her shop, and whose boat was moored nearby, to join us with her husband. The four of us sat round a dining table under the cockpit’s awning, and three of us drank wine until, at last, Jackie decided that she would not die if she tried it too, after which four of us drank wine and told tall stories of far seas and I felt the subtly pleasurable flattery of being mistaken for Jackie’s lover.

“I didn’t realize,” Jackie said after the Dutch couple had left us, “that you were kind of famous.”

“It’s a very fading fame,” I said, “if it ever was really fame at all.”

The next day, still waiting for the trade winds, we took a ferry to Lanzarote where we hired a car to explore the famous black island. Jackie wanted to ride one of the camels that carried tourists up the flanks of the volcano, and I, who had taken the uncomfortable trip before, let her go on her own. The camels were rigged with curious wooden seats that accommodated three people abreast, one on each side and one perched high on the beast’s hump, and Jackie found herself sitting next to a young Frenchman. He was obviously attracted to her, and I watched the animation with which she responded to his remarks and felt a twinge of the most stupid jealousy, but nevertheless a twinge so strong that I had to turn away to stare across the landscape of black lava.

Joanna. I said my wife’s name to myself over and over, as though the repetition would prove a talisman to help me. I was tempted to insist that Jackie fly home, except now I did not want her to go. Things would be better, I told myself, when we could leave, for then we would become absorbed in the routine of sailing a boat. At sea, on a shorthanded yacht, a crew sees remarkably little of each other. I would be awake when Jackie slept, and she awake when I slept, and in those few moments when we might share the deck or a meal together, we would be far too busy with the minutiae of navigation and ship-keeping to be worried about my adolescent fantasies.

More and more boats left. I waited, not because I wished to draw out these lotus-eating days, but because the winds about the islands were still depressingly light, and I did not want to motor the heavy Stormchild all the way south to where the unvarying trade winds blew across the Atlantic. I was waiting for a northerly wind to take me away, and each day I haunted the splendid Meteorological Office in Mogan to study their synoptic charts. “Soon, Tim, soon!” one of the duty weathermen would greet me each morning.

Jackie translated my irritability as an impatience to leave the Canary Islands. She confessed to some impatience herself, declaring that she had developed an unexpected taste for sailing. “I mean I used to watch the yachts on Lake Michigan, right? But I never guessed I would ever be on one. I thought yachts were just for the rich, or at least for the middle class!”

“Aren’t you middle class?” I asked idly.

“Jeez, no! Mom works in a hardware store. My dad left her when we were real little, and he never sent us any money, so things have always been kind of tough.” Jackie spoke without any touch of self-pity. She was sitting in a corner of the cockpit with her bare, brown knees drawn up to her chin. It was evening, and behind her the sun was setting toward the high harbor wall, and its light imbued her untidy hair with a lambent beauty. She laughed suddenly. “Mom would be really knocked out to see me now.”

“Does that mean she’d be pleased?”

“Don’t be stuffy, Tim, of course it means she’d be pleased. Mom always said I should get more fresh air, because I guess I was kind of bookish as a kid. My brother was always out-of-doors, but I was the family’s nerd. Mom would be really astonished to see me now.” She turned to watch a graceful French sloop that was motoring slowly toward the harbor entrance. A lot of boats liked to leave at nightfall, thinking to use an evening breeze to spur them through the doldrums.

“It’s strange,” I said, “how we don’t really know our children. We think we do, but we don’t. I never thought Nicole would do anything stupid. Then, of course, her brother died, and she really went berserk.”

“She was fond of her brother?”

I nodded. “They were inseparable.” I paused, thinking about Nicole’s childhood, raking over the ancient coals of guilt to discover whether I had caused her unhappiness. “The trouble is I was away a lot when they were little. I was sailing round the world, being mildly famous. And Joanna was always busy, so the twins were left alone a lot. But they were happy. They did all the things kids are supposed to do.” I poured myself another finger of Irish whiskey. “I was really proud of her. She was a tough kid, but I thought she was levelheaded.”

Jackie smiled. “And that’s important to you, Tim, isn’t it? Being levelheaded.”

“Absolutely.”

“And you think when Nicole ran off with von Rellsteb she wasn’t being levelheaded?”

“Of course she wasn’t,” I said firmly.

“Maybe she was, Tim.” Jackie stirred the ice cubes in her glass, then added a shot of diet cola. One of the advantages of being alongside a pontoon was that we could connect the boat’s refrigerator to shoreside electricity and thus satisfy Jackie’s insatiable American appetite for ice cubes, though Jackie, with her terror of ingesting anything that might harbor a microbe, insisted on freezing only bottled water, and not the perfectly good stuff that came out of the pontoon hose. The pontoon not only had electricity and water, it even had television cables so that the more lavishly equipped boats could watch “Dallas” in Spanish, French, or English. Jackie, her drink suitably chilled into tastelessness, frowned at me. “Just because we both believe that Caspar von Rellsteb is a weird guy, it doesn’t mean that his group hasn’t achieved some good things. They’re surely right to try and stop drift netting and whaling, aren’t they?”

“They are,” I agreed, “if that’s all they do.”

Jackie heard the tension in my voice and stared gravely at me over the rim of her glass. “You’ve really convinced yourself that von Rellsteb planted the bomb that killed Joanna, haven’t you?”

I shrugged. “I can’t think who else would have done it.” That was not the most convincing proof of von Rellsteb’s guilt, but it was the only explanation I could find for Joanna’s death, and the explanation convinced me. We knew that von Rellsteb had made himself independent of his Canadian benefactress by means of his father’s legacy and it made cruel sense to me that, if von Rellsteb found himself in need of more money, he would seek a further inheritance: mine. I also believed Nicole to be in von Rellsteb’s thrall, a victim of his malevolent hierarchy, and that she had consequently been unable to prevent his machinations. “We know von Rellsteb uses criminal violence,” I began to justify my suspicions, “and we…”

“Once!” Jackie interrupted to reprove me. “We know he committed one crime in Texas, Tim, and that was over ten years ago and no one was hurt.” She frowned, thinking. “We’re going on a journey of discovery, that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to find out just what von Rellsteb is, because we don’t really know anything about him. We don’t really know if he keeps people against their will, or if he uses violence. We might even discover that he’s running a really legitimate operation, a bit fanatical, maybe, but straight.”

“Balls,” I said.

Jackie laughed. “You’re so full of shit, Tim!”

“Listen.” It was my turn to speak earnestly. “I’m not sailing halfway round the damn world with an open mind. I’m sailing because I think von Rellsteb is an eco-terrorist. His aims might be good, but you don’t approve of terrorists just because you agree with their political aims. That’s the mitigating plea offered by every terrorist in the world! The innocent have to suffer so that Ireland can be united, or the whales saved, or Israel destroyed, or apartheid dissolved, or whatever else is the cause of the month, and the terrorist claims exemption from civilized restraints on the grounds that his cause is too noble. In fact he claims not to be a terrorist at all, but a freedom fighter! But if you disagree with this freedom fighter, then he’ll murder you or kidnap your wife or blow up your children.” I had spoken with a more venomous anger than the conversation had deserved, and in doing so I had said more than I probably believed, for I did not know whether von Rellsteb was a terrorist or not. For all I knew he might be nothing more than a holy fool, though I suspected he was considerably more dangerous. At best, I imagined, Caspar von Rellsteb was a manipulative man who sheltered his activities behind the virtuous smokescreen of environmental activism, giving even his survivalist notions a dubious respectability by a green antinuclear stance, but, as Jackie had maintained, I had no direct proof that he was a terrorist. I saw that my anger had disconcerted Jackie and, as the fury ebbed out of me like a foul tide, I apologized to her.

Jackie dismissed my apology with a shake of her head. “You’re thinking of your son, right?”

“Of course. And of Joanna.”

“Oh God, I’m sorry.” She stared across the harbor to where a bright painted fishing boat was chugging toward the sea. “Is this a crusade for you, Tim?”

“A crusade?” I asked.

“I mean have you condemned von Rellsteb already? Is that why you’re going to Chile? To punish him?”

It was a shrewd question, and I almost answered it unthinkingly by saying that of course I wanted to shoot the goatlike bastard. I remembered that moment on Sun Kiss Key when I thought he was laughing at me and I wondered, as I often did, whether the reason he had agreed to meet me in Florida was just so he could gloat over the fool he had bereaved and whose daughter he had bedded. Of course I wanted to kill him, but, instead, I just said I was going to Patagonia to find my daughter.

Jackie nodded at that answer, then frowned as she swirled her melting ice around her glass. “What if Nicole doesn’t want to leave von Rellsteb?” she asked after a while.

“Then she can stay, of course,” I said, “so long as she tells me that herself, and so long as I’m convinced von Rellsteb isn’t forcing her to say it, or isn’t forcing her to stay in Patagonia against her will.”

“And what will you do if you think he is forcing her to do what he wants?”

For an answer, and because I remembered her extravagant reaction to the revolver in Key West, I just dismissed the question with a wave of my hand.

But Jackie would not be so easily fobbed off. “You’re not thinking of fighting von Rellsteb, are you?” She waited, but got no answer. “You’d better not, Tim, because I told you he used to be into survivalism, and I’ll bet he still is, which means he’s bound to have a lot of guns.” She shuddered at that thought, then shot me a penetrating look. “You don’t have a gun, do you?” Her tone was indignant, as though she had already guessed the true answer.

“No,” I said too hurriedly, then, like a fool, compounded the lie. “Of course I don’t have a gun. I’m English! We don’t carry guns like you mad Yanks!”

“You did in Key West,” she accused me.

“That was because of Charles. He just wanted me to take care of his precious car.”

“Because I really hate guns.” Jackie’s suspicions were subsiding. “They’re just a stupid statement of intent, right? People claim guns are only for defense, but that’s bullshit, I mean, you can defend yourself without using a mechanism designed to kill people. Don’t you agree?”

“Sure I agree,” I said dismissively, because I did not want to talk about guns. I leaned my head on Stormchild’s lower guardrail and stared past the awning’s edge at the first bright star that was pricking a hole of light in the softening sky. Then, because the sun had dipped below the harbor wall and because I ran an old-fashioned boat, which meant that our bomb-scarred ensign only flew during the hours of daylight, I stepped past Jackie and took the flag off its staff, then reverently folded the faded and torn cotton.

“Are you OK, Tim?” Jackie must have sensed a sudden saddening in me.

“I’m fine.” I told another lie, because I was not fine, but rather I suddenly felt lonely, and I told myself that the attack of self-pity had been triggered by the memories that lurked in the sun-warmed weave of the cotton I held in my hands. “I’m fine,” I said again, yet that night, lying sleepless in the stern cabin, I heard a couple making love on the next boat and I felt insanely jealous. I heard a woman’s warm soft laughter, unforced and full of pleasure, a sound to aggravate puritans and feminists and loneliness, a sound old as time, comfortable, and full of enjoyment. The gentle laughter died into contentment and I consoled myself with the sour thought that it did not matter for we would all die one day, then I tried to sleep as the water slapped petulantly at Stormchild’s hull.

The next morning, unable to bear the idle frustration any longer, I sent a fax to David, telling him our next destination and my estimated arrival date, then I slipped Stormchild’s mooring lines. Jackie, knowing that the winds were not yet propitious, was puzzled by our precipitous departure, but her respect for my sailing experience made her accept my muttered explanation that, despite the depressing forecast, I was expecting a northerly blow at any minute. We motored our way offshore and suddenly, five miles from land, and against all the careful predictions of the weathermen, a steady northeaster did indeed begin to blow. I killed the motor, trimmed the sails, and let Stormchild run free. The unexpected wind proved to Jackie that I was a genius, while I knew I was merely a fraud. Two days later we found the trade winds and turned our bows west and thus we ran in Columbus’s path, bound for the Americas.

We furled the big mainsail, lashed the boom down, then whisker-poled our twin headsails, one to port and the other to starboard. The wind came from dead astern, the twin sails hauled us, the wind vane guided us, the flying fish landed on our deck, and Stormchild crossed the Atlantic, rolling like a drunken pig, just as every other boat had run the unvarying trade winds ever since Columbus’s Santa Maria had first wallowed along these same latitudes under the command of a man who insisted he was sailing to the Orient and who, to his dying day, angrily denied that he had ever discovered the Americas.

Jackie and I sailed through sunlit days and phosphorescent nights. We saw no other boats. Hundreds of craft were out there, strung and scattered across the conveyer belt of the trade wind latitudes, but we sailed in apparent solitude, lost in an immensity of warm sea and endless sky under which we fell once more into our watch-keeping routine. I took the first watch from midnight until four, then Jackie would take the deck until ten in the morning. She then slept until nearly six o’clock in the evening, when she would join me in the cockpit for our main meal of the day. At eight I would go below and try to sleep until midnight, when Jackie would wake me for the first watch with a cup of coffee. I was always on call in case of an emergency, but she never needed to rouse me; she claimed that the hounds of hell could not have woken me, so deeply and well did I sleep at sea. My snores, Jackie claimed, began the moment I went below.

I did sleep well. For the first time since Joanna’s death I was sleeping the night through, unharassed by regret. There was only one single morning on that whole voyage of two thousand seven hundred miles that I woke early. On that morning my eyes opened just after eight, a full hour before I usually rolled out of my sleeping bag, and for some reason I could not fall asleep again. It was not the solo sailor’s instinct for danger that had woken me, because there was nothing wrong with the boat’s motion and there were no odd sounds that betrayed a piece of broken rigging, and I could tell Jackie was safe, because I could hear the shuffle and slap of her bare feet on the foredeck. I wondered if she had gone forward to deal with some small emergency that had woken me, and which, before I was fully conscious, she had brought under control. I could think of no other explanation for being awake.

I yawned, wriggled out from behind the lee cloths which held my sleeping body against the boat’s rolling motion, and climbed toward the cockpit. I paused at the midpoint of the companionway and turned to look forward, only to see Jackie doing strenuous aerobic exercises on the sun-drenched foredeck. I froze in sudden and acute embarrassment, because she was doing her bends and stretches in the nude. For a few seconds I stared at her, half in amazement and half in admiration, then, before she became aware of my early appearance, I ducked swiftly back into the galley, where I ostentatiously clattered some pots and pans together.

“You’re awake early,” she called down a few seconds later.

“Couldn’t sleep. What’s it like up there?” I shouted the question so she would not think I had already been on deck.

“Same as ever. Sunny, warm, and a force-four wind. I’ve got six flying fish for your lunch.”

“Chuck them back!” There comes a point when the taste of flying fish palls. “Do you want your tea now?” I asked her. Jackie had brought on board an herbal concoction of caffeine-free leaves, which I gallantly brewed for her whenever I took over the watch.

“Please!”

By the time I reached the deck she was in her bikini, looking positively overdressed. “You can turn in early, if you like,” I said.

“I’m not tired.” She sat cross-legged on the far thwart and I was suddenly assailed by a vivid memory of her lithe, tanned body flexing and arching between the foresails’ sheets. I stared upward so that Jackie could not see my blush and, high above Stormchild’s swinging masthead, I saw a trans-Atlantic jet scratching its white contrail against the sky. “They say you can navigate by those jets,” I said, just to distract myself.

“You can do what?” Jackie had been concentrating on harvesting her sprouts which grew in their plastic trays with an astonishing vigor, and which she ate with an equally astonishing enjoyment.

“I’m told that some people have successfully navigated the Atlantic by following the vapor trails of big jets.”

She looked up at the white line scratching itself between the puff-ball clouds. “Figures. Cheaper than buying a sextant.”

The next morning six dolphins appeared to escort Stormchild. Their arrival gave an ecstatic pleasure to Jackie, and I had not seen such joy in another person since the day I had woken Nicole to the exact same sight twelve years before. Nicole’s delighted face had shown an unusual softness, and now, with Jackie’s enthusiasm to bring the memory into sharp and sudden focus, it did not seem so odd that Nicole had become the disciple of a man who claimed to be a fanatical environmentalist. “Tim, they’re so cute!” Jackie enthused.

“They taste good, too.”

“Oh, shut up!” She laughed and hit me. There were times when she seemed impossibly young, and I hated those times. Mostly, to hide my feelings, I treated her with an exaggerated formality, and she seemed to reciprocate the courtesy, but, once in a while, as when she watched the dolphins leaping, her polite mask would slip and I would feel the scar being torn from my soul. I convinced myself that Joanna’s death had made me unusually vulnerable to a young woman’s charms, and I armored myself against any display of that vulnerability by my painfully correct behavior.

Thus we sailed on. Stormchild threw us a few problems, but none that were unusually difficult; a steel cotter pin snapped on the self-steering gear so that the boat suddenly rounded up toward the wind and the sails slatted like demented bat wings. Jackie was on watch, and, by the time I was on deck, she had already recovered the helm and had opened the locker where we kept the spare fastenings. Another day I discovered the bilge was slowly flooding and traced the problem to a pinhole leak in a spare water tank. The odd sail seam opened, but nothing that a few minutes with a needle and sailmaker’s pad could not mend.

Day by day the pencil line that represented Stormchild’s progress inched its way across our chart. I measured its advance by taking running fixes with the sextant, a process that, at first, Jackie had liked to double-check by turning on the satellite receiver and waiting for the small green numerals to betray the ship’s position, but gradually she learned to trust the sun more than the clever box of silicon chips, and soon she wanted to master the sextant herself. I taught her, and it was a good day when I was able to congratulate her for fixing our position within fifty miles. She laughed, rightly pleased with her achievement, then she spread her arms as though to encompass all of Stormchild and all of the unending sea and sky. “I could do this forever, Tim.”

“You mean sail forever.”

“Oh, sure.” Her eyes were alight.

“There’s nothing to stop you,” I said, and felt my heart racing with a ridiculous and futile hope.

“Yeah, there is.” She turned away. “Money and a job.”

“Sure,” I said meaninglessly, and the ship rolled to starboard, back to port, and Jackie’s plait swung against her shoulder blades with Stormchild’s endless motion. Jackie’s hair, which had been mousy and bobbed when I first met her, had grown wildly long and had been bleached into a pale white gold by the salt and sun, so that now it lay in startling contrast against her dark-tanned skin. She looked exotic and fit now, and it was hard to see in this lean, bright-eyed and confident girl the nervous, timid, baggy-trousered waif who had first accosted me in Florida.

We sailed on, mile after rolling mile, in what for me was the most perfect trade-wind crossing of the Atlantic I had ever made. I doubt that a single wave broke high enough on our cutwater to wet Stormchild’s deck, and only at the end, as we neared the Caribbean, did two squalls briefly soak our topsides with a sudden and drenching rain. Not long after the squalls, as our deck steamed dry under the tropic sun, we at last saw the airy castles of white cloud rising high above the horizon and I told Jackie that the clouds were forming above land. That afternoon an extravagantly tailed frigate bird swooped close to Stormchild and both Jackie and I felt the nervousness that is engendered by an approaching landfall. It is a nervousness that comes from a reluctance to abandon the safe security and comforting routine of a ship for the dangers of a strange harbor and its unpredictable people.

I washed our shore-going clothes by sloshing them around in a plastic garbage bag half filled with seawater and detergent. Later, as the clothes dried in the rigging, we loosed the lashed down boom and hoisted the huge mainsail and let Stormchild steady onto a port reach. The rolling stopped immediately and the noises of the ship, which had stayed so constant for four weeks, changed with the new motion. I turned on the VHF radio and heard the intrusive babble of voices.

Two mornings later we were safe in Antigua’s English Harbour where, blessedly, there was space at the Dockyard Quay. The Dutch couple, with whom we had dined on my birthday and who had sailed from the Canaries a full month before us, took our mooring lines, and Jackie, to celebrate the completion of her first transatlantic sail, insisted on buying a bottle of cheap champagne that we all four drank at lunchtime. “I didn’t think you had any money,” I said lightly when the friendly Dutch couple was gone.

“I used my last crumpled dollars,” she said, “though I do have some plastic, but I’m afraid to use it because the bills would never reach me, and then the bank will have me crucified.” She leaned back on the thwart, under the shade of the cockpit canopy that I had rigged once more. “This is fun, Tim,” she said with languorous warmth, then reached and lightly touched my hand. “Thank you for letting me come. God, but this is fun!”

A week later, our ship dressed overall with what flags I could muster and with underwear filling in the gaps, we celebrated Christmas. I gave Jackie a coral necklace, and she gave me a woolen scarf that she had been secretly knitting. “I’ve nothing else to give you,” she apologized, “and you said it will be cold in Patagonia.”

“It’s wonderful,” I said, “thank you.”

“It isn’t much. I bought the wool in the Canaries. It’s real nice wool, isn’t it?”

I felt an urge to kiss her, just as a thank you, but I did not have the courage to move, or else I had too much sense to move, and Jackie must have intuited that something was out of joint for she looked at me oddly, then smiled and twisted away up the companionway. “It’s weird, isn’t it,” she said, “to be having a hot-weather Christmas?” I suspected she was covering a moment of mutual embarrassment with a meaningless babble of conversation. “I have an aunt who goes to Florida every winter, and she cooks a turkey and all the trimmings, but she has to turn the air-conditioning way up before she can bear to eat it. Oh, wow, look at that!”

“That” was a majestic French yawl, agleam with bright work and brass, that had shaken out its mainsail ready for sea. I envied the French crew, for I, too, would have liked to have been at sea where, somehow, coexistence with Jackie was easier than in port, but I was waiting for David’s promised letter which would enclose the sailing directions for the Chilean coast. I telephoned him on Christmas Day, but got no answer. I decided to wait until New Year’s Day, after which, letter or no letter, Jackie and I would sail again.

Jackie telephoned her mother on New Year’s Eve, and afterward called Molly Tetterman. “She wanted to come down and join us,” Jackie said when she joined me outside the telephone office, “but I couldn’t bear it! She never stops talking! Never!” Then she burst into laughter as she remembered how I had used to accuse her of the same sin. “Have I changed, Tim?”

“Yes,” I said, “you have.” We were walking back toward the dockyard in the hard, bright sunlight.

“Is it a good change?” Jackie asked coyly.

“Yes.” I smiled. “I think it probably is.”

Suddenly, and with what seemed like an impulsive artlessness, she put her arm through mine. “I was so scared of you at the beginning. I suppose I should never have asked to come with you. It was kind of rude of me, right? But once I was on board you were so awful to me!”

“I was not.”

“You were! I just happened to mention that I was a tiny bit cold and you jumped down my throat! I thought you were going to throw me off the boat!”

I laughed. “I don’t want you to get off the boat”—I hesitated, knowing I should not say the next word, but I said it anyway—“ever,” and immediately after I had spoken it I felt like such a damn fool that I wanted to take the word back. I felt Jackie stop, then pull her arm out of my elbow. She stared up at me looking shocked, and I knew I was blushing.

“Tim?” Her voice was suddenly very serious.

“Look—” I began to try and explain myself, and Jackie began to say something at the same moment, and then we both stopped to let the other carry on, and I was cursing myself for being such a clumsy and insensitive idiot. Then we were both interrupted by a voice that boomed at us from across the street.

“There you are, Tim! Good man! Well done! Don’t move! Splendid! And Miss Potten, too! First class! I was on my way to the harbor, piece of luck finding you here!” It was my brother David, who, lugging two enormous seabags, dodged between the bicycles and bright-painted taxis to join us. “I’m signing on,” he said as he dropped the bags on the pavement by my feet.

“You’ve come to join us?” I asked in horror.

“Indeed I have, dear boy. I decided you were right! I need the change. I need the rest. I need the inspiration, my God, do I need that! I have been granted a sabbatical! Twenty years, Miss Potten, I have labored in the Lord’s vineyard, and now I am free to sip the wine for a season of idleness.” He beamed his pleasure at me. “Betty sends her love.”

“She let you off the leash?”

“She cut the leash! She almost insisted that I come! So I have left her the keys to the Riley, and I have installed a Low Church curate in my place who will probably destroy my congregation’s faith, but I care not!” David turned his happy face to Jackie, who, I thought, did not seem overjoyed at his arrival. “My dear Miss Potten, permit me the liberty of observing that you look positively different!”

Jackie forced a smile. “Hi.”

“Hi, indeed.” David plucked his seabags from the pavement. “The last time I was here the Admiralty Inn served a halfway decent beer and a damn good meal.”

“It still does,” I said.

“Then show me to it, dear boy. Show me to it.”

We found a table in the pub, but there was an immediate awkwardness between the three of us, to which David, full of news of home, seemed oblivious. The boatyard, he said, was surviving my absence. There had been a fire in a hardware store in the town’s high street, but no one had been hurt. The bishop had broken his leg on a dry-ski slope in the local shopping precinct. “It was entirely his own fault,” David said with unholy relish, “I see the church has to be relevant to modern life, but that doesn’t need to be proved by hurtling down plastic ramps.”

“The bishop doesn’t mind you taking a sabbatical?” I asked David.

“He’s all for it. He thinks I’ve been working too hard. He also believes that rubbing up against some foreign cultures will broaden my horizons, but I told him that was nonsense, I just wanted to do a bit of bird-watching.” David rubbed his hands gleefully. “Just think of it, Tim! The green-backed firecrown hummingbird.”

“I thought you were feeling too old to cope with a yacht’s discomforts,” I said accusingly.

“Old?” David laughed. “I’m only fifty! Just three years older than you, Tim.” Jackie glanced at me, then looked away quickly. “So!” David spread his arms to encompass the table. “What do the next three months hold for us?”

“You’re here for three months?” I gaped at him. I had somehow thought he might have come for just two weeks.

“That should be long enough to settle von Rellsteb’s hash,” David said happily, “and still give us time to spot a hummingbird or two. But first we have to beard the monster in his Patagonian lair. How do you plan to do that?”

I unfolded a paper napkin, found a pen, and, still dazed by David’s blunt happiness, made a crude sketch of South America. “We sail to Panama as soon as possible,” I said, “then make a loop out into the Pacific to avoid the Humboldt Current. I’m afraid there won’t be any time to make a visit to Easter Island, or to put in at any of the ports in northern Chile, instead we’ll go straight to the southern coast, probably to Puerto Montt.” I stabbed my crude map low down on the Chilean coast.

“You seem to be in a devil of a hurry.” David lit his pipe.

“From everything I hear it’s sensible to make a landfall in Patagonia before the end of February,” I said, “and between now and then we’ve got the best part of five thousand miles to go, so yes, I’m in a hurry.” I paused. “It’s going to be a very uncomfortable voyage, David.”

David laughed. “He thinks I’ve gone soft,” he confided in Jackie, then looked back to me. “I assure you I’m as fit as you are, Tim.”

“Who’s keeping an eye on the boatyard while you’re away?” I asked with alarm.

“Your new manager. Very good chap, by the way. Knows his onions.”

“Oh, Christ!” I sighed because my elder brother’s arrival threatened to tear my life into shreds. Just three months ago I had been begging for his company, but now, isolated in the strange relationship I had with Jackie, I did not want David’s loud intrusion. Except he was here now, and could not be sent back, which meant that the small fragile bubble in which Jackie and I had been so delicately existing was about to be obliterated by the great gales of David’s bluff goodwill.

Jackie clearly felt the same sense of violated privacy for she had spoken hardly a word since we sat down in the pub, but now she leaned toward me with a frown on her sun-tanned face. “I think maybe you don’t really need me anymore, Tim. Now that your brother’s here.”

“Of course I need you!” I said hastily.

“Every ship must have a cook!” David put in his three cents’ worth of appalling insensitivity.

“Shut your bloody trap!” I snapped at him, then looked back to Jackie. “You can’t jump ship now!”

“What I was thinking,” she said, and without even acknowledging David’s presence at the table, “was that I ought to fly home and make sure everything’s OK there. With my mom, you know? And with my apartment. I mean, hell, I just walked away from it! Things may need looking after.”

“You’re abandoning the Genesis community?” I asked in disbelief.

“No! I just ought to visit home, that’s all! And when I’m there I’ll try and raise the cash to fly down to Chile and meet you. I mean if we really are going to find the Genesis community then I ought to be prepared for it, and I don’t even have a camera with me! What kind of a journalist am I without a camera?”

“I have a camera.” David seemed oblivious of the effect his arrival had caused, but he had never been a sensitive man. A good man, but not subtle. He unzipped one of his bags and pulled out a 35mm camera that he put on the table. “It’s an efficient camera, but if you find it too complicated, my dear, then we can always buy one of those idiot-proof point-and-shoot jobs, isn’t that so, Tim?”

I ignored David, while Jackie, who had gone pale under her tan, just continued talking as though my brother had never spoken. “And maybe if I go home, Tim, I can sell the story to an editor. I know a lot more about Genesis than I did before, and maybe a major newspaper will listen to me now?”

“They’ll certainly listen if you tell them that the famous circumnavigator, Tim Blackburn, is sailing to Chile to shoot a bloody ecologist!” David hooted with laughter at his own wit.

“Shut up.” I spoke with hissing menace to my brother, then looked back to Jackie. “Why don’t you get the story first, then sell it to a newspaper?”

“I don’t know, Tim.” Jackie glanced very quickly at David, thus suggesting to me that his bluff arrival was her real reason for not staying. She seemed not to have taken his words about shooting von Rellsteb seriously, which was a relief, but David was never a man to let a sleeping dog lie, and now he pushed his camera across the table toward Jackie.

“Take it, dear girl, with my blessing.”

“No, really.” Jackie tried to push the camera back.

“Of course you must take it. We are one for all and all for one, are we not?” David offered Jackie his most benevolent smile. “Besides, you look much too frail to use one of the rifles. Not that I think we shall need the guns.” David palpably changed mental gears and offered me his most serious expression. “I need to talk with you, Tim, about what we plan to achieve in Patagonia. I really don’t think I can involve myself in violence. It just wouldn’t look good in the Church Times! Of course, if we’re attacked, and we do have to defend ourselves, then I assure you I’ll be shoulder to shoulder with you.” He smiled at Jackie. “And frankly those old Lee-Enfields have the devil of a kick, so I doubt you’d be strong enough to fire one. Not that I think we’ll need them, but you never know.”

“Shut up,” I said plaintively, but much too late.

“Lee-Enfields?” Jackie asked. “What are Lee-Enfields, Tim?”

I did not answer. I had been cornered in a lie and I was desperately thinking how to find an elegant way out, but there was none.

“Are they guns?” Jackie demanded of me.

“There are two rifles on board Stormchild,” I told her very flatly. “I hid them before I left. It seemed a good idea at the time.”

“A damned good idea!” David said with an elephantine lack of tact.

Jackie stared at me very coldly. “Are you planning to fight von Rellsteb, Tim? Is that what you’ve been planning all along?”

“I’m planning to find my daughter,” I said as calmly as I could.

“For which purpose you’re carrying guns?” Jackie accused me.

“You’re the one who warned Tim that these wretched people are survivalists”—David was trying to retrieve the damage he at last perceived he had caused—“and you can’t really expect us to face such maniacs unarmed, can you?”

Jackie ignored him. “I’m going to the Archipiélago Sangre de Cristo to secure a story, Tim, and I thought you were going to help me.” She paused in an effort to control the fury that was suffusing her voice, but instead of calming down she seemed to shake with a sudden rage. “But now I find that you lied to me! That you’re carrying guns! And that you expect me to help you in your stupid macho crusade!”

There was silence. Some Americans at the next table, embarrassed by the intensity of Jackie’s words, raised their voices as if to demonstrate that they were not really eavesdropping, while David, realizing that he had sown the wind that had raised this whirlwind, desperately tried to calm the storm. “Dear girl! Please calm down!”

Jackie still ignored him, fixing me with a fierce look instead. “Did you lie about the guns?”

“Yes,” I said wretchedly. “I’m sorry.”

“So all this time, when you’ve been talking about finding your daughter and reasoning with her, you were really planning to use violence?”

“No!” I insisted, though weakly, because I was again lying. I believed von Rellsteb had murdered Joanna, and I knew I would take revenge if it was possible. I could see Jackie did not believe my feeble denial, so I tried another and more plausible justification. “If we’re attacked,” I said, “then we have to be able to defend ourselves.”

“Even the act of carrying a weapon is offensive,” Jackie said passionately, “and is liable to encourage violence in others.”

“Oh, come!” David said. “Does carrying a fire extinguisher make a man an arsonist?”

Jackie threw down her napkin. “I thought we were going to Chile to find a story! To discover a truth! I can’t be a part of some stupid scheme to start a fight!” Her eyes were bright with tears and she shuddered, clearly in the grip of an overpowering emotion. “And I will not involve myself in even the smallest part of your futile and primitive violence!” She glared at David. “Not even as a fucking cook!”

Her piercing voice had now attracted the attention of half the bar. Someone cheered her last words.

“For God’s sake, girl!” David tried frantically to calm her, but Jackie would not be calmed. She flung her chair backward and stalked away between the tables. An amused group of Americans offered her loud applause and a berth on their own yacht.

“Oh, good Lord,” David groaned, “I’m sorry, Tim.”

“Look after the bill,” I said to him, then hurried after Jackie, but she had run from the pub to the quay, and, by the time I came out into the harsh sunlight, she was already swinging herself down to Stormchild’s deck. “Jackie?” I called as she disappeared down the yacht’s companionway.

“God damn it, Tim! Leave me alone!”

By the time I had reached Stormchild’s saloon Jackie had already locked herself in her forward cabin. “I don’t want you to leave!” I shouted through the door.

“I am not going to be part of a killing expedition! That is not why I came! I want to write a good piece of journalism, and I want to help the parents whose kids have run off with von Rellsteb, but that is all I want to do! I do not want to be a part of your violence, so from now on I’ll have to make my own arrangements!” I could hear a half sob in her voice.

“Jackie!” I tried to open the door, but its bolt was too solid to be forced. “I don’t want to kill anyone,” I said, but it sounded a rather feeble defense, even to me.

“Then throw the guns overboard! You know how I hate guns! Will you throw them overboard?”

“Just come out and talk to me,” I said, “please.”

“Will you throw the guns away?”

“I might if you come out and talk to me,” I said, but my halfhearted concession earned nothing but Jackie’s silence, or rather the sounds a girl makes when she stuffs a seabag full of dirty clothes. “Jackie!” I rattled the door again.

“Go away.”

“You can’t leave,” I said, “you haven’t got any money.”

“I’ve got plastic!” she shouted at me as though I had insulted her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll make you some tea, then we’ll talk about it, OK?” I went back to the galley, leaned my hands on the stove, and sighed. God damn it, I thought, God damn it. Then, taking my time so that Jackie would have a chance to calm down, I made a pot of the herbal tea she liked so much. I let the concoction steep, then poured it into her favorite mug — one that showed two cats with twined lovers’ tails and surrounded by little love hearts. I carried the tea to her cabin. “Jackie?”

There was no answer.

I knocked harder. “Jackie?”

The silence was absolute.

“Jackie!”

I ran back through the saloon, up the companionway, and onto Stormchild’s deck, where I found the forehatch was open and the bird was flown. She must have climbed on deck while I was making the tea, tiptoed her way aft, then climbed to the quay and disappeared. I ran through the dockyard, but there was no sign of her. I even caught a cab and raced to the island’s small airport, but still I did not find her. My shipmate had vanished; she was gone.

“There’s an obvious explanation for the girl’s behavior,” David said to me a week later. It had been an awkward week. We had spoken about such mundane matters as navigation and watch-keeping, but neither of us had spoken about Jackie’s abrupt departure. David, realizing that he had behaved in Antigua with the sensibility of a falling rock, seemed to be ashamed of himself for detonating the emotional outburst, while I was just plain miserable. But now, as Stormchild slammed into a vicious steep wave, my brother at last tried to break the silence that was so painfully between us.

“Tell me what is obvious,” I, at last, invited him.

“The girl was in love with you.”

“Thank you, David,” I said with a caustic venom, “and now please shut up.”

I had waited three days for Jackie to return to Stormchild, but she had not appeared. I couldn’t raise any answer from her home telephone number, and, finally, believing that action would be a better diversion than anger, I put back to sea where I had crammed on all sail to drive the big yacht through the Caribbean as though the devil himself was in our wake. It was proving a rough passage for the east winds were driving the Atlantic waters into the shallow basin of the Caribbean and heaping them into steep, short waves. David and I had rigged jacklines down either side of the deck, and I insisted that we wore safety harnesses and lifelines if either of us moved out of the cockpit. We had also erected the new spray hood so that the helmsman could crouch behind its view-perspex screens as the seas shattered white at our stem and splattered down the decks like shrapnel. Now, four nights out of English Harbour, David and I were sharing the sunset watch as he steered Stormchild fast toward the Panama Canal. He was also trying to repair the breach that gaped between us. “I think you’ll find I’m right,” he said mildly, “she showed all the symptoms.”

“I thought you were a vicar, not an agony aunt.”

He crouched to light his pipe. When, at last, the tobacco was drawing sweetly, he straightened up to steer Stormchild into the next steep wave. “A man in my job is constantly being tapped for help by people having emotional crises, so one does learn to recognize the symptoms.”

I was tempted to observe that an emotionally troubled parishioner seeking David’s help was the equivalent of a seriously ill patient calling for the services of a mortician, but I contented myself with asking him how on earth Jackie’s behavior had suggested to him a bad case of love. “I would have thought,” I continued sarcastically, “that if the girl was in love with me she’d have stayed on board. She’d hardly have run away from me!”

“Love is very mysterious,” David said, as though that explained everything. He was in a confident mood, sure that his diagnosis was unassailable. “As you just observed,” he went on, “the girl’s reaction to the situation was extraordinary, which would suggest to any reasonably intelligent person that she was seeking a reason, any reason, to escape from what she saw as an intolerable and increasingly irksome dilemma.”

“What in hell’s name are you going on about?”

“Pour me another Irish whiskey, dear boy, and I shall tell you.”

I poured him the whiskey, choosing a moment when Stormchild was between white-topped crests. “Here!” I served him the whiskey in one of the plastic-spouted childrens’ training cups, which saved us from spilling precious Jamesons across the deck.

“As I told you, the American girl”—even now David found it hard to articulate her name—“is in love with you. I saw it in her face the moment I met you both on Antigua. There is a mooncalf quality about the young when they’re in love, and she had it. Doubtless she is searching for an authority figure, which is why she finds older men attractive. I daresay her father died when she was young?”

“He abandoned the family.”

“Ah! There you are! You don’t have to grow a beard and call yourself Sigmund Freud to pluck the bones out of that one! She’s after a father figure, isn’t she? You, of course, being a man of honor, did not return her schoolgirlish crush, which frustrated her, and, being an innocent child and uncertain how to surmount the obstacle of your indifference, she made the wise decision to cut her losses and skedaddle. It was clearly too embarrassing a matter for her to explain calmly, so instead, and quite sensibly in my view, she seized upon the first convenient excuse to make her admittedly embarrassing and hasty exit.” My reverend brother smiled very smugly at me. “Quod erat demonstrandum, I believe?”

I stared past the streaming drops on the spray hood’s screen to the ragged turmoil of the sea beyond. “She wasn’t in love with me, David,” I said after a long pause, “I was in love with her.”

David smiled as if I had made a fine joke, then he suddenly realized that I might have spoken the truth and he looked appalled instead. “Oh, dear,” was all he could say.

“I’m besotted,” I confessed. “I’m the mooncalf, not her.”

David puffed fiercely at his pipe. For a moment I thought I had silenced him, then he glowered at me from beneath his impressively bushy eyebrows. “The girl’s young enough to be your daughter!”

“You think I don’t know that, for Christ’s sake?” I exploded at him. Jackie was just twenty-six, one year older than Nicole. Indeed, Jackie had not even been born when Joanna and I had married.

“I blame myself,” David said with a noble air of abnegation.

“You? Why are you to blame?”

“I encouraged her to accompany you, did I not? But only as someone to spare you the cooking and cleaning chores. Good God, man, I didn’t think you’d make a prize fool of yourself!”

“Well I did,” I said bitterly.

“Then it’s a good thing she’s cut her losses and run,” David said trenchantly. “You said yourself that this was meant to be an adventure, and certainly not some half-baked romance.”

“Can we shut up about it?” I begged him.

“Old enough to be her father!” David, abjuring tact, would now try to jolly me out of misery with mockery. “October falling in love with April! My cradle-snatching brother!”

“Shut up!”

We sailed on in silence as David’s pipe smoke whipped back in the wind’s path. He looked very self-satisfied and very self-righteous. I probably looked miserable. I could not shift Jackie out of my head, and all I could think about was the desperate hope that she might be waiting for us in Colón Harbor at the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal.

We reached Colón two weeks later, dropping our sails as we passed through the breakwater entrance, then motoring through a downpour of rain toward the yacht moorings. Thunder bellowed across the sky, and lightning stabbed viciously above Fort Sherman. As soon as the customs and immigration launch had dealt with us, I insisted on unlashing Stormchild’s dinghy, dragging the outboard motor up from its locker in the engine room, then going ashore to the Panama Canal Yacht Club. I told David, with a remarkable lack of conviction, that I wanted to speak with the weather service. He gave me a disbelieving look, but did not try to dissuade me, nor did he suggest that I might use Stormchild’s radio-telephone to get a forecast. The thunder echoed back from the hills as the little dinghy buffeted its way through the filthy waters. The yacht club was the rendezvous for small boat crews, but Jackie was not waiting there, and the only mail for Stormchild was a good luck message from Betty which contained the reassurance that all was well at the boatyard. At that point I could not have cared if the boatyard staff had gone mad and burned the place to the ground. I cared for nothing but Jackie. I rang her home number and, at last, heard her voice, but only on a newly installed answering machine. “Hi! This is Jackie Potten and I’d really like to talk with you, but I can’t take your call right now, so please leave a message after the beep. Oh! And have a nice day!”

“This is Tim,” I said, “and I would really like to talk with you. We’re going through the Panama Canal tomorrow, then heading south to Puerto Montt. But you can leave a message for me at the Balboa Yacht Club”—I fumbled to find the number of the yacht club, which lay at the canal’s Pacific end—“that’s 52-2524, and we’ll be there tomorrow evening.”

“So what is the forecast?” David boomed at me when I returned.

“I couldn’t get through to the weather people,” I lied. “It seems the rain has tied up the phone lines.” David made a mocking noise, but was mollified when I presented him with a bottle of brandy I had bought ashore. “It’s something,” I said, “to celebrate our first trip through the canal.”

It was a trip I would normally have enjoyed; an extraordinary passage past basking iguanas and through the massive, water-churning locks, where local line-handlers, especially hired for the transit, skillfully held Stormchild’s gunwales off the towering walls. We followed a vast German bulk-carrier through the locks and Stormchild bucked in the merchantman’s wake as though she was stemming a North Sea storm. David let loose a cheer as we cleared the final lock, then uncorked the brandy.

No message waited at the Balboa Yacht Club, and the only response from Jackie’s telephone was the sprightly machine that wished me a nice day, so David and I, in a wet wind and on a gray sea, sailed on.

We sailed into sickening calms and contrary currents against which, day by day and inch by inch, we made our slow way out into the vast and empty Pacific until, a week from Panama, a real wind at last plucked us from our lethargy and bent Stormchild’s sails toward the sea. Water hissed at our stem and broke into a creamy wake astern.

The wind carried us into the chill airs brought north by the Humboldt Current. Ten days out of Panama I put away my shorts and took out long trousers, and three days later I dragged my heavy foul-weather gear out of Stormchild’s wet locker where I also discovered Jackie’s oilskins. I pushed them into a kit bag that I stored under the bunk she had used, and which was now once again given over to ship’s stores. For days I had been finding her belongings scattered about the boat. Her sprouting seeds had gone mad, luxuriating like a tiny forest in their plastic home until I had tossed the whole mess overboard. I had discovered her bikini in a wash bag, and that, like her oilskins, I stored aboard. I found an unused sound tape for her recorder, a pen, her awful felt hat, and a pathetic pair of pink socks. “Chuck ’em!” David robustly encouraged me when he saw me holding the little socks with the reverence that a Catholic might yield to a scrap of the true cross.

“They’re not mine to chuck.”

“You are master under God of this ship, which gives you inalienable rights under international law over all persons and objects and smelly socks found in your domain. Allow me to lighten your ship, Tim, if you lack the resolve.” He plucked the socks from my hand and hurled them far into the wind. I saw the flash of bright pink wool floating briefly amongst a mess of white foam on a wave’s grim face, then the socks were gone forever. The next morning I hurled the silly mug with the loving cats overboard, though I took a perverse comfort from wearing the scarf Jackie had knitted me.

We thumped on, curving round the bulge of a continent, then steering Stormchild hard to the south. I saw our first albatross, vast, serene, and riding the sky like an angel. There were whales in the gray-green sea and strange stars above us as we left the northern hemisphere behind and slashed on into the southern emptiness. Mile after lonely mile we went, with neither a sail nor a ship in sight, nor even an aircraft above us. This was one of the empty seas, as empty as when Alexander Selkirk, who would be transmuted by genius into Robinson Crusoe, was marooned on an island in the middle of its desolation.

The further south we sailed, the worse the weather became. We seemed to have entered a region of perpetual cloud that shadowed the sea with a sinister, slaty cast. Squalls hissed across that gray, dark sea. The wind flecked the water white and lifted spindrift that permeated every inch of Stormchild’s cabins. David and I, when on watch, crouched behind the spray hood and tried not to move our heads too much because the skin of our necks, unused to the confining stiffness of the oilskin’s collars, had been chafed to rawness. My mood, already tormented by Jackie’s disappearance, was further soured by the weather. My only escape from doom-laden misery lay in sailing Stormchild as efficiently as possible, taking pleasure in a skill well done. I could lose myself behind the wheel, imagining that my endless path through the heave and pattern of great waves could last forever.

There was too much cloud for celestial navigation, and I could not be bothered to use the SatNav, yet I knew we were closing on an unseen coast because of the increasing numbers of molly-mawks, gray gulls, terns, and storm petrels that came near Stormchild. One day, miraculously, the sun shone, but the weather stayed cold and when I dipped a thermometer into the sea the temperature measured a mere six degrees centigrade, which meant we had plunged into the very heart of the icy Humboldt Current which drags tons of Antarctic meltwater north into the Pacific. I dug out the red, white, and blue Chilean courtesy ensign I had bought in Colón and stored it in a ready locker of the cockpit.

That night the phosphorescence made a dazzling path behind Stormchild’s transom. A school of Chilean dolphins embroidered that starry wake by weaving trails of shattered light around it, yet the beauty of the moment was deceptive for the weather was becoming ominous and the seas still heavier. So far, in the nine thousand miles of Stormchild’s voyage, I had escaped all the bad storms, but that night, almost as though the Genesis community was aware of our coming and had summoned the spirits of the deep to stop Stormchild, a black gale came hurtling out of the northeast. The barometer plummeted, and the sea, its current fighting against the wind, became frighteningly steep and confused. The dolphins flicked one last dazzling curve in Stormchild’s wake, then left.

David, dragged from his bunk, helped me shorten sail. We were both swathed in oilskins and sea boots, and had our lifelines clipped to steel rings bedded in the cockpit’s sole. An hour later we took in all but the storm trysail and jib, yet still the wind rose, and by midnight we had reefed down to just the triple-stitched scrap of storm jib which dragged us scudding through the maelstrom of vicious sea and shrieking wind. Stormchild rode the storm beautifully. She thumped up those bastard seas, slashing through their confused summits before plunging down into the dark troughs. At times a cross sea would jar the boat sideways and the cockpit would fill with a seething swirl of freezing water, but always Stormchild held firm on course to meet the next wind-haunted crest.

The gale seemed to increase its fury. Once, when a flicker of lightning sliced the sky, I saw that David was praying. A few moments later, when the wind was a deafening and demonic screech, he manfully went below and somehow heated soup which he brought precariously back to the cockpit. Rarely had food tasted better. The boat bucked and shuddered in the worst of the seas, but as dawn approached I sensed that the anger was at last dying from the wind. First light showed us mad waters, blown white by the storm’s anger, but already the madness was settling and slowly, as the gray day lightened and the wind became tired, we could at last stow the storm jib, set headsails, and turn our weary boat toward the hidden shore. “If all I hear about Patagonia is right,” David remarked ominously, “then that little blow is a mere promise of what is to come.”

“Indeed.”

“But she’s a well-named boat,” he said with great satisfaction, and indeed she was, for Stormchild had worn the gale’s quick savagery with an easy confidence. I knew there was worse to come, much worse, for we were approaching a coast renowned for killing ships, yet our baptism of tempest augured well. “I fear the galley is painted with spilled tomato soup,” David confessed, but otherwise there was not a great deal of damage. A seam in the storm jib had begun to tear its lockstitches apart, some ill-stowed wineglasses had shattered, and an errant wave crashing on our stern had carried away one of the two life buoys, but otherwise Stormchild had indeed lived up to the promise of her name.

That evening, as we sipped our whiskey and as Stormchild hissed and bubbled her quick wake across the long, exhausted swell of an ocean after storm, the far peaks of Chile showed like jagged clouds above the eastern horizon. We had come to our landfall, to the high snowcapped Andean mountains that lay behind the Patagonian coast. David stared at the mountains through binoculars, then raised his plastic cup in a heartfelt tribute to my navigation. “Well done, my good and excellent little brother, well done.”

I said nothing at first. Instead I just stared through red-rimmed eyes at the pink sparks of sun-reflecting snow in that far distance, and I thought with what innocent delight Jackie Potten would have greeted this landfall. “It’s a funny old world,” I said at last, and raised my beaker in response to my brother’s compliment. The sea was darkening into night, mirroring the sky’s gloom to leave those high, brilliant, snow-white peaks suspended like shards of rosy light in the dusky air. I watched till the last light drained away and we could see nothing but the strange southern constellations hanging high between the scudding clouds.

We hove to, not wanting to make an unfamiliar coast in the darkness. Stormchild, as though impatient with our caution, fretted all night in the short, steep waves until the creeping dawn silhouetted the far peaks black and foreboding, and, at last, under the mountains’ ominous loom, we loosened Stormchild’s sheets, untied her wheel, and plunged toward the land.