Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  Victor’s room did not answer, the rector reported. Aileen threw up her hands. “Where can he have got to? He’s found some low zinc, I’ll bet anything.” His key was not in his box but of course it could be in his pocket. “Strange that I didn’t see him go out, though. In the dining-room, where I sat, I had my eye on our bags and the door the whole time. And since then, we’ve all been here in the lobby. Are you sure you rang the right room…?” She checked her watch with the clock behind the desk. “Well, if he turns up in five minutes, and sober, he can still pass by the consulate.” “But it’s Sunday, my dear,” said the Bishop gently, interposing a word.

  “Sunday! You mean the consulate will be closed?” She wheeled on Mohammed, forgetting in her agitation to speak French. “It’s not possible. They must work Sundays at your consulate. They’re Moslems.” Mohammed shook his head; the office was closed. He might have mentioned that sooner instead of letting her run on. When she had wanted the consulate’s address, did he suppose it was to put in her memory book? And why had none of the others seen fit to remind her that it was Sunday, since they all seemed to have known it? “We weren’t privy to your thoughts,” said the Senator.

  In the midst of this, Sophie entered, breathless, through the revolving door, bearing a ribboned box from a pastry shop. The cake, of course. “I couldn’t find candles,” she explained. That was why she had been so long. But she had two votive tapers from a church in her handbag. “Did you steal them or pay?” The Senator was teasing, but she considered the question gravely, knitting up her brows—like a child, Van Vliet de Jonge thought. She had put two francs in the box and yet felt like a thief. “Quite right,” said the Senator. “They’re consecrated.” “I know.” Under her long arm was a magazine with a girl in a knitted cap on the cover: Elle. She offered it to Van Vliet: it had a nifty horoscope column; on the plane the birthday boys could read what the stars had to tell them. But she had chosen the wrong moment. The rector took the cake box from her and placed it out of view on a side table. “Professor Lenz has disappeared.”

  The second and third taxis were now at the door. It was decided that the Bishop, with Dr. Cameron and the rector, should take the first one, immediately, to the airport. The others could give Lenz five minutes more, and if he was still missing, the second taxi would take Aileen, Van Vliet, and the Senator. Sophie volunteered to remain, with Mohammed.

  Contrary to what might have been assumed, the dispatch of the first group did nothing to relieve the uneasiness of those remaining. For one thing, their shrunken numbers—they were only four now, not counting Mohammed—gave them a woeful look of having been abandoned, thus bearing out, Van Vliet noted, Aileen’s theory of a “community.” For another, now that the Bishop was out of the way, they could speak freely. “Do you think he could be dead up there?” Aileen asked before a minute had passed. “You always read about foreigners dying in sordid Paris hotel rooms.” She shot a telling glance at the dusty rubber plants and unemptied ash trays in the lobby. “His color was awful yesterday. Like whey, as my Mamma says. Maybe one of us should go and knock on his door.” “If he’s dead, how will that tell us?” said the Senator. Nevertheless, he strode across the lobby and pressed the elevator button.

  “If he has gone and died and on Sunday too, what a nuisance,” Aileen continued. “One of us will have to stay, that’s all.” “Mr. Barber is the obvious candidate, isn’t he?” Sophie suggested with a small smile. Aileen’s face cleared momentarily. “How true. What else can the clergy do for us but marry us and bury us? Still, would it be right to go on to Teheran without him? The Bishop certainly wouldn’t want to.” The Senator’s deep laughing voice called out. “I don’t know about Victor, but the elevator has bitten the dust.”

  Sophie looked at the clock. “You three had better go on. I’ll wait here with Mohammed. We can send the concierge up on foot with a pass-key, just to ease our minds. When you check in, ask for a message.” “Well…” said Aileen. “It’s true, Sophie, you’re not one of the committee.” After a moment’s wavering, she followed Van Vliet and the Senator through the revolving door, reappearing promptly on the next rotation. “I have an idea. In case he still turns up. Will they maybe give him a visa at the airport in Teheran? Ask Mohammed what he thinks. A friend of mine once…”

  The question was rendered moot by the appearance of Lenz from the carpeted staircase. He had been stuck between floors in the elevator, and a chambermaid had let him out. He was carrying the cat-container, and the maid followed with his baggage. And he had his visa. He showed it to them, folded into his passport, seeming surprised but not offended at the general stupefaction. He could not know (Van Vliet reflected, pondering the gravity-defying power of ideas to stand unsupported by evidence) that his co-nationals had been fully persuaded that he was visa-less and half-persuaded that he was dead.

  Till now, it had not occurred to any of them to ask whether the cat needed papers. “Well, I’m not going to worry about that detail,” said Aileen, seating herself in the taxi between Van Vliet and the Senator, then turning around to peer out the back window to make sure the others got off. As the third taxi began to move, a clerk came running out of the hotel and signaled to the driver to stop. Lenz had forgotten to pay his bill, naturally. Aileen called to their own driver to stop too. Lenz had dismounted and seemed to be arguing with the clerk about the bill, angrily indicating some item with his forefinger. “They’re trying to charge him for Sappho,” estimated the Senator. In the third taxi, where Sophie was waiting, a large dog had sat up in the front seat beside the driver, contributing his bark to the affray while his owner held him back. He must be trying to leap over the seat at the caged cat in the rear. “Do you say it’s raining cats and dogs?” asked the Dutchman. “Or dogs and cats?” Aileen screamed. “Let’s go. I can’t stand it. I’m a wreck. Look! Now he’s going to wait for his change.” Lenz was still on the sidewalk, the dog was still barking and growling, and a fourth taxi was pulling up, when Aileen and the two men drove off.

  Nevertheless, the entire party reached the airport with a few minutes to spare. Alighting from the moving belt, Van Vliet and Aileen found the Bishop and the rector in the departure satellite talking with two ladies wearing mink coats and an old powdered man in a wide-brimmed black hat whom Aileen gaily greeted as “Mr. Charles.” Cameron was on the level below exploring the duty-free shops, where Lenz had stopped off too. Mohammed had been said good-bye to at the check-in counter, having earned a merit badge by remembering the cake and going back to fetch it in a fifth taxi, for which Sophie had succeeded in reimbursing him. At the head of the moving staircase, the Senator was surrounded by young admirers bound for Moscow, whom he had introduced to Sophie; a joint autographing session was in progress. Everyone was present or accounted for.

  Yet Van Vliet, studying the scene from a solitary banquette where Aileen had left him, felt puzzled, like a new boy in class observing a network of relationships to which he has no clue. The old gloved party leaning on an ivory-headed stick and the mink-draped ladies—could they possibly be members of a committee of inquiry? The briefings given by the Iranian youths had left many questions unanswered. He had sensed a possible mystery in the group’s financing; although he was paying his own way, he was entitled as a lawyer to wonder whether outside funds were not being supplied. Could the expensive-looking trio be what the Americans called “angels”? Van Vliet did not like it. He signaled to Aileen, who detached herself and came hurrying to his side. “Those people—are they with us too?” She laughed and patted his arm. “After this morning, you can believe anything, can’t you?” But he was not to worry; they were just millionaire art collectors—part of a tour—on their way to visit archaeological sites in Iran. There was no connection, except that “Mr. Charles” was an old friend of the Bishop’s. “You wouldn’t guess he was an American, would you?”

  Van Vliet would not have. His visual ideas about Americans were derived mainly from the movies. Though he knew England and the English wel
l, he had not met many live Americans before this morning. He discounted the NATO generals he had shaken hands with while inspecting maneuvers; the military, like the armies of tourists who came to view the tulips, offered an unreliable index to a country’s national character. In the taxi he had confessed his ignorance. Senator Carey of course was familiar to him from Dutch television as a leading dove in the Senate and he was a type, like Adlai Stevenson in the previous generation, that Europeans thought they understood. But the rest of the American delegation were novelties to a Dutchman, he admitted. If the pastor brought back memories of Harold Lloyd in The Freshman, no contemporary analogy for him in movieland presented itself. And there were no Old World equivalents that Van Vliet could find for these curious American liberals. The exception was the young woman, the journalist, whom he felt he knew. “Our Sophie!” Aileen cried. “Why, she’s the ‘new journalism’—the latest American thing.” “We have many of her in Holland, believe me,” Van Vliet assured her. “Dozens of Sophies, dear me!” She gave a sharp tinkle of a laugh. “Then we don’t have to warn you that she’ll be making all of us characters in the piece she’s writing.”

  Van Vliet nodded; he had taken account of that prospect at breakfast. “Well, of course, you’re a political man. But the sweet old Bishop and the rector don’t seem to have grasped the implications at all.” “What implications?” Van Vliet said blandly. “Why, of having her along with us. They can be devastating.” The Senator threw back his silver head and laughed, savoring his amusement as if it were a rich morsel of private food for thought. “You’re used to ‘exposure,’ Senator,” Aileen insisted. “But it’s hurting, for the rest of us, to see our little foibles and mannerisms faithfully reproduced on the printed page. Like all our ‘new’ journalists, Mr. Van Vliet, Sophie Weil has a phonographic ear. That’s the way they’re trained nowadays. I don’t mean it against her personally. Just to give you an example, there was a young man from one of the news magazines who spent five days on our campus. I had him to breakfast and dinner and I don’t know what all. Then I found spread out in the magazine word for word all these things I’d told him, the way you would a friend, about myself and the problems we had at Lucy Skinner. I know he didn’t see anything wrong in what he did. He liked me, I could tell. Of course my press man wrote a letter. But there are things you can’t reply to. Like comparing my voice to Martha Mitchell’s. She’s from my home state, Mr. Van Vliet: Pine Bluffs, Arkansas. But they talk differently over there. And such a cruel description of my appearance: ‘a sprightly weight-watcher’ with ‘an incipient double chin.’” She arched her neck. “Well, if you’re used to that in Holland, you’ll survive. We all will, of course. What I really fear is that more space will be given to us and our squabbles and divisions than to those poor torture victims.” “I think we’re kind of dull,” said the Senator, perversely offering a ray of hope. “Unless the Reverend gets oecumenical with those Mohammedans, we’re not likely to provide much copy.”

  “Why does he laugh so much, that long fellow?” Van Vliet inquired. “We Americans are great laughers,” said the Senator. “You mean ‘tall,’ not ‘long,’” corrected Aileen. That was a common Dutch mistake, which Van Vliet went on making, though he had been patiently set right by dozens, perhaps hundreds, of native English-speakers. His retort was to give the two a lesson in how to pronounce his surname in the correct, Dutch way. “‘Fan Fleet,’” essayed the Senator. “Sounds like a name for a strip dancer.” Van Vliet surprised them by catching the allusion. He was aware of Fanne Foxe. “In Amsterdam we read the Herald Tribune.” “Does that ‘van’ mean you’re noble?” Aileen wanted to know. The “van” in Holland, he had to explain, as so often to English people (the French and Spanish never asked), was not like the German “von.” It was not a particule de noblesse. And “de Jonge”? No, that did not prove blue blood either; there were lots of “de Jonge”s tacked onto ordinary Dutch surnames. “Not even gentry,” summed up Aileen in a regretful tone. “Sorry. I’m a commoner.” “Well, aren’t we all, Senator?” she sighed, making the best of it.

  His Christian name, he told them, was Henk. “Oh, I like that!” she cried. “Is it short for Hendrik?” It had been once, but now it was a regular given name. “Like Harry with us,” said the Senator. “They nearly named me that till one of the relatives thought of ‘hari-kari.’” “What were your people, Senator Jim?” “Farmers.” “But they must have been well-to-do if they sent you to a monastery to study. How long were you there?” “Four years of high school. Then I went to the seminary.” He winked at Henk. “Your turn.” To Van Vliet’s amusement, the persistent little woman obediently turned his way. “And you, Mr. Van Vliet, do you come from a long line of lawyers?” “My father was a judge.” The Senator’s terse style was catching. But he lacked the heart to hold back something half the Netherlands could tell her: his paternal grandfather (1865–1935), also a magistrate, had been the author of fifty-seven popular novels—Adriaan Van Vliet de Jonge, once a household word. “Oh. Are they translated?” “Into German, two or three. We Dutch have a hermetic literature.”

  “But you’re a poet yourself,” interposed the Senator. Van Vliet was impressed. First-rate staff work, he conjectured with envy; it was never like that in The Hague. Aileen was excited. “You mean a known poet?” “Two impressive volumes of verse,” said the Senator. “Nearly cost you your seat in Parliament.” “How did you find all that out?” exclaimed Aileen, evidently envious too. The lazy-voiced man smiled. “You forget there’s a Dutch Embassy in Washington. The ambassador is a friend of mine, as it happens.” Aileen seized both men’s arms. “The Senator writes poetry too! I know I read that somewhere. But he calls himself a ‘Sunday poet,’ so he doesn’t publish. Another tie between you two. You mustn’t laugh. Something like that—bonding—can be vital in situations of stress.”

  Van Vliet looked at her with greater attention. Bright wary eyes, sharp nose, soft chin—a little hawk’s face. He had been taking her chatter as no more than a bad habit or a screen to mask pervasive anxiety—she was single (“Miss”) and getting on. But her last words and her grip on their arms suggested that the little predator was feeling a specific alarm. Did she imagine the Shah was going to jail her? Van Vliet smiled at the innocence—or, rather, ignorance—of such a foreboding, which he could easily dispel.

  None of the Americans, he gathered—except their most junior, Miss Weil—had ever taken part in an enterprise of this kind. Europeans were more used to putting their noses into the affairs of foreign police states. Before he went to Parliament, he had worked with Amnesty and sat in on trials in Spain; in Bolivia he had taken depositions from terrorized witnesses and their families. More recently, when the Dutch had raised the question of the Greek colonels in the Council of Europe, he and a Socialist deputy had been empowered by their parties to fly to Athens and try to substantiate the stories of torture and murder in the regime’s prisons and penal colonies. To say it in all modesty, their mission had been rather successful: if the colonels had not fallen as a direct result, their government at least had been censured by the Council for violation of human rights as specified in the charter. A small victory, typically Dutch-sized and won by Dutch perseverance. More relevantly, neither he nor his fellow-deputy had been molested by the colonels’ police. They had been obstructed but not harassed, and he did not think they had owed their immunity to their status as members of Parliament of a NATO country.

  The worst this group could expect would be that they would be followed. Or that at midnight, when they arrived, they would find that their hotel reservations had vanished without a trace. Van Vliet did not share Cameron’s faith in Mohammed’s voucher. He assumed that the young man’s organization would have been infiltrated by Parisian agents of SAVAK, who would have informed Teheran of the committee’s make-up and intentions in the fullest possible detail. Unless (he reflected) poor Mohammed’s network was largely imaginary, which would not be promising for the hotel voucher either.

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p; Van Vliet was not an apprehensive subject; he had his portion of the national phlegm. Accommodations, he felt sure, would be found, one way or another, if necessary through the pastor’s church or the Senator’s connections with the Embassy—the Dutchmen of the Queen’s Embassy would have been long since abed. Yet SAVAK engaged his interest; his imagination, though a tranquil organ, was active. Riding beside Aileen on the escalator and again on the long moving belt like a flattened montagne suisse bearing them up to the departure satellite, he had taken note of two dark men—one mustached—who seemed to be sticking too close for comfort and who were speaking a language that might well be Iranian. Then he had reined in his fancy: a plane going to Teheran would naturally have Iranians aboard. In any case, he did not mind being watched by secret policemen, who were easily shaken off when a real need arose; during dull moments in unfree countries, he had been able to amuse himself by picking them out in a courtroom or in a crowded café.

  He did not invite Aileen to join him in that pastime as they sat together waiting for the boarding announcement. He was sympathetic to women and their gift for worry, which was curiously random in its objects, he had found in his legal practice. Perhaps the idea that the dread SAVAK could possess ubiquity had not crossed her mind. He would have liked, as a matter of fact, to have a look at his horoscope while they waited—Elle’s astrologer was an amazing fellow, often cited by his wife after a session at the hairdresser’s. But considering his present companion, he overcame the impulse to take the magazine from his briefcase. She would be bound to read over his shoulder and, not content with Capricorn, leap ahead to her own sign—a risky procedure for one on the brink of a momentous undertaking and as susceptible as she. Van Vliet sighed. On his birthday, he should have the right to consult with the augurs while the day was still young, but chivalry, he supposed, was enjoined on him.