Stormchild (43 page)

I very slowly unslung the M-16 and placed it on the floor.

“Kick it toward me,” von Rellsteb said.

I kicked the assault rifle toward him. It skidded against a rug, then disappeared under the bed. The Lee-Enfield, on top of the bed, was concealed by the folds of the eiderdown, but I was too far from the bed for the hidden gun to be of any use to me. I had been trapped by my overconfidence.

Now von Rellsteb had the advantage and I did not see how he could lose it. “I should have killed you in Florida,” he said in an oddly friendly voice. “Your daughter was angry that I hadn’t. She wants to inherit your boatyard, you see. She still does, in fact, though I’ve told her that you’ve probably changed your will by now. Even so, she was right. I should have killed you.”

Was he trying to shock me by talking so casually of Nicole’s wish to kill me? I refused to rise to his bait, preferring to keep my voice very calm as though we merely talked about the weather. “Was that why you agreed to meet me there? Did you lose your nerve?”

He shook his head. “I met you out of mere curiosity, Mr. Blackburn. You said you had important news, remember, and I wanted to hear it. I was wasting my time, but it was still interesting, and your letter was very pathetic.”

“You bastard,” I said in impotent anger.

He mocked me with a grimace of feigned sympathy. “I think you have had your revenge here tonight. A pity. It will take us weeks to clear up the mess, but in the meantime we shall feed your body to the hawks.”

“It’s no good shooting me,” I said defiantly, “because the authorities know I’m here.”

“Oh, my God! I am so very frightened!” Von Rellsteb laughed. “The authorities! You hear that, Lisl? Perhaps we had better surrender immediately.”

“My boat will be in Puerto Natales by now,” I plowed on in the face of von Rellsteb’s mockery, then tried a little of my own. “You probably thought it was going north?” I smiled, as though I pitied him his misconception.

“Actually,” von Rellsteb put a scornful English accent on the word, “I think your boat is on its way here. I suspect it has been hiding offshore for the last two days.”

I said nothing. How the hell did he know these things? And once again, just as I had when we confronted each other at the mine, I wondered if this devil was a mind reader.

Von Rellsteb laughed. “Mr. Blackburn, what VHF channel would you monitor if you knew you were dealing with the owner of an English boatyard? Which channel does your daughter prefer when she wants a measure of privacy?” He shook his head as though he was disappointed in my stupidity. “I have been monitoring channel 37 ever since you first arrived in our waters! I thought you might use it to try and reach Nicole, but instead I heard your friend answer your transmission last night. We couldn’t hear you, I imagine because you were using a low-power transmitter? Whatever, your friend is now innocently sailing toward us, and I assure you we will prepare a suitable welcome for him; you, I think, will be dead by then. But first, tell me! Are you responsible for the dreadful Mrs. Tetterman being here?”

I tried to look very vague. “Who?”

Von Rellsteb was silent for a second, then shrugged as though he did not really care whether I told the truth or not. “How did you escape at the quarry?”

It was my turn to shrug. “I flew.”

Lisl fired a burst of three or four bullets that missed my right shoulder by a whisker. The room was suddenly echoing with noise and stinking with the acrid smell of the gun’s propellant. “How did you escape?” she asked harshly.

“When you saw me fall,” I confessed, “I had a rope round my waist. I then climbed to the quarry floor and waited you out.”

“Nicole inherited your cunning,” von Rellsteb said with a touch of genuine admiration, “and perhaps also your daring. She is very brave. Too brave. I have always thought that one day she will come too close to a Japanese fishing boat and they will ram her. Of all of us, you see, she has caused the most damage to the Japanese nets. There are also times”—he smiled—”when I am tempted to hope that she will come too close to a Japanese fishing boat. She wants to take over from Lisl and me, but luckily for us Nicole does not, how do you say, own the farm? Which is why she went to England. She wanted her own farm.” He was watching me very closely. “But you already knew that. How does it feel to have a daughter who wants to kill you? Who killed her own mother? She meant to get you both, of course.”

He was trying to rile me, but I said nothing. That was not defiance, but helplessness. My heart was thumping in my chest, my stomach was bitter with defeat, my knees were weak and my mind a blur of hopeless schemes: I could jump to the window, I could leap to the hidden gun on the bed, I could grow wings and fly away. The truth was that I was going to die and von Rellsteb was enjoying the infliction of that truth.

“Why?” I finally managed to find my voice, though it was a very weak and plaintive voice. “Why do you do this? You’re supposed to be preserving life, not taking it.”

“Now you’re being very boring and entirely predictable,” von Rellsteb said. “Do you think that by enticing me into a sophomoric discussion of my motives you will gain time? Or perhaps you imagine you can persuade me to let you live? Maybe I should let you live until Nicole reaches us? She is coming, you know. I talked to her on the radio not three hours ago and told her you were here. Would you like to wait for her?”

“Yes!” I pleaded.

“I think not.” Von Rellsteb enjoyed thus contradicting my hopes, “because my people are waiting outside in the rain, and I would like them to come inside and get warm, which means I have to kill you before they return. Most of them are loyal, but some of them are still naive enough to be shocked by murder.” He aimed the rifle at my face and I saw Lisl half smile in anticipation of my death, then Jackie, who must have climbed the stairs to stand in the doorway that I had blown open with the Lee-Enfield, ordered von Rellsteb to put the gun down.

Von Rellsteb stiffened in shock, while an astonished Lisl half turned toward the sudden threat.

“Put the guns down!” Jackie’s voice was hysterical. “I’ll shoot!”

Von Rellsteb heard the desperation in that threat, and he must have realized that Jackie was almost helpless with nervousness. His eyes flicked toward me, and I could see what he was thinking, that he could step out of Jackie’s line of sight, then shoot me, but to do that he would leave Lisl exposed.

“Shoot him if he moves a finger!” I called to Jackie, and I wished she would shoot anyway, but I knew she would not. It was a miracle that she had even managed to aim her gun toward von Rellsteb, but she was about as likely to pull her trigger as eat a pork chop. Her sudden appearance had gained me time, but it would be my responsibility to talk Jackie and me out of this unexpected stand-off. “You can’t kill me,” I said to von Rellsteb, “so you might as well drop your gun. Both of you.”

“Why can’t we kill you?” Von Rellsteb, despite having Jackie’s gun aimed at his back, evidently found my defiance amusing.

“Because the
San Rafael
is coming back here”—I was snatching arguments out of the thinnest air—”and the women who arrived on the
San Rafael
will tell the crew that you murdered me, and that’ll be the end of you.”

“You are telling me the game is up?” Von Rellsteb mocked me with his use of the stilted cliché.

“Of course the game’s up, you fool!” I snapped.

“Not really,” von Rellsteb said happily. “I shall radio the
San Rafael
and tell them that their two passengers have decided to join our little band of conservationists, and that therefore they have no need to go so far out of their way. I think they will be grateful to be spared the expense of the fuel, don’t you?” He smiled. “I also think, Mr. Blackburn, that if your very nervous rescuer truly planned to kill me, then she would have fired at me already”—he paused to make certain I was directly in his rifle’s sights—”so fare thee well, Mr. Blackburn, fare thee well.”

And the gun fired.

Jackie screamed terribly.

Lisl began to turn. I threw myself backward, instinctively falling away from the expected bullets.

Von Rellsteb pitched forward.

Jackie still screamed.

I fell against the wall and bounced back towards Lisl. The sound of gunfire was obscenely loud, echoing off the walls and filling the house. Bullets were chopping across gilt-framed pictures and churning the wall’s horsehair plaster into dust and ruin. Picture glass shattered bright, mingling with the blood that was spurting vividly across the room.

It was von Rellsteb’s blood, because it had been Jackie who fired.

She had fired her rifle on automatic and, by luck more than judgment, her aim had been perfect. So perfect that her stream of bullets had literally exploded von Rellsteb’s chest. She had turned his torso inside out, so that blood and bits of lung tissue and shards of bone and strips of heart were spraying across the carpeted floor.

And Jackie was screaming with horror.

Lisl was falling as she turned. She was smothered in blood, but it was not her blood. She had caught her dying lover’s last heartbeat and now she was twisting her rifle toward Jackie whose own gun was now empty. I threw myself forward. My movements were stiff. My clothes were heavy and waterlogged. My joints ached. I moved like a man underwater.

Lisl saw my movement and began to swing her gun back toward me. I heard Jackie scream again, and Lisl’s gun jerked once more toward her. I had sprawled on the bed’s thick and fluffy eiderdown that was drenched with von Rellsteb’s blood. I scrabbled for the Lee-Enfield. Lisl was ignoring me, aiming at Jackie, and then the heavy rifle was in my hands and I could not remember if the safety catch was on or off, but I didn’t have time to find out so I just pointed the barrel and pulled the trigger, and the muzzle was still caught in the eiderdown so that the expanding gasses and the speeding bullet exploded a blizzard of duck feathers, and the bolt would not work because it was also trapped in the thick folds, but I managed to force the bolt to ram another round into the chamber, and I fired again, but Lisl’s face had already disappeared in a bright eruption of blood where the first bullet had struck her. The second bullet banged through her gullet, jerking her head forward and back, and then she slumped into a sitting position with her blood pouring thick and shining to make a puddle between her legs.

“Oh, my God!” Jackie was panting. “Oh, my God!”

The room stank of blood and cordite.

Feathers floated in the dusty air. Lisl’s red hair had been made a brighter red by her dying blood in which two drifting feathers had stuck to give her an oddly festive look. For a second I thought she was still alive as her hands twitched and I almost fired again until I realized that I was merely watching her fingers contract into the claws of death. They twitched, curled, then she was still.

Jackie was sobbing helplessly.

I disentangled the Lee-Enfield and worked another round into the chamber. There were yet other gunmen at large and I had already foolishly allowed myself to be ambushed once.

Von Rellsteb’s dead body voided a long fart.

Lisl’s body slumped sideways. The room looked and smelled like a slaughterhouse.

Bile was sour in my throat. I slid off the bed and stood up.

“Oh, my God.” Jackie recovered her breath, choked, breathed again, then staggered into the room. “I tried to warn you they were coming”—she was speaking very fast as if she would lose track of her words if she spoke slowly—”because I saw their boat come, so I kept firing the gun. Oh, my God!” She had gasped the words out like a small girl delivering a very important message she did not wholly understand, then she vomited.

The candle guttered. Outside the window a baby was crying. It was still raining.

I stepped over the horror and gathered Jackie in my arms.

And Genesis was almost, but not quite, finished.

By dawn the unhappy Genesis survivors were back in their ruined house. They had no fight left.

As a group they had believed that their aims could best be achieved by violent confrontation, yet, when their methods had been used against them, they had collapsed like a pricked bubble.

Except that Nicole had not collapsed, and, if von Rellsteb had told me the truth, she was even now sailing back for her vengeance. One other Genesis boat had returned in convoy with von Rellsteb and now rode at anchor beside his catamaran in the settlement’s bay. That left two Genesis boats still at sea: Nicole’s catamaran and the second sloop. I did not fear the sloop’s return, for, like the other crews, I suspected their hostility would crumble when they saw the full measure of their community’s defeat. But Nicole, everyone assured me, was made of grimmer stuff. Von Rellsteb’s radio operator, a glum Californian, confirmed that he had reached Nicole’s boat on his single sideband set, but claimed to have forgotten to ask
Genesis Four
for a precise position report. I did not believe him, and, encouraged by the Lee-Enfield’s blackened muzzle, he confessed that Nicole’s catamaran was hurrying home, but was still some three or four days from making a landfall.

In the wet dawn I disabled the two Genesis yachts by cutting their running rigging and emptying the oil from their engines. I then ran the engines till the pistons seized, hauled in the yachts’ anchors, shot the guts out of their radios, then left them to drift until they beached themselves close to the burned-out trawler.

Once the boats were finished I wrapped the bodies of von Rellsteb and his lover in sailcloth and dragged them through the cloying mud to one of the tanning sheds. I assumed the Chilean authorities would want to see the two corpses. Not that I cared, because I would be long gone.

Jackie, aghast at having killed, went to the sea’s edge in the dawn and sat for a long time with her head in her hands. I thought she might have been praying, and perhaps she was, but when her prayers were done, or her thoughts finished, she came and held me very tight. She said nothing and when I tried to speak she just hushed me. She just wanted to be touched.