Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  Five

  A VOICE WAS SPEAKING to Van Vliet de Jonge in Dutch. They were still at Schiphol. Outside it was full day. He looked up into the pale green eyes, enlarged by thick lenses, of the young man who had shot the cat. “You sleep too soundly, Deputy. Come along now. We want a chat with your honor.” They knew him, of course. As he had been saying, Holland was a small country. For his part, he knew the accent of Groningen—not the once-moated city, but the dour, grudge-holding province. This was a lad from the grim Northeast, reared—one could be eighty per cent certain—in a “black stockings” sect of the deepest Protestant dye. The bad teeth, half-bared in a tight sarcastic smile, bore it out: the gereformeerde kerk looked on dentistry as devil’s work. Henk adjusted his scarf and reluctantly rose. These harsh signs of election did not bode well for a Brabanter from the sweet Catholic land “below the rivers”—current political preferences and class rancors aside.

  Mounting the spiral staircase to the second story, in the cockpit he found the Air France captain, his co-pilots, and yesterday’s grenadier, now armed with a very realistic large pistol. The hulking northlander—Roodeschool? Stadskanaal?—dismissed the second co-pilot and took his place in the swiveling “navigator’s seat” with his back to the instrument panel and his rifle across his big knees. The gunwoman, wearing a woolen peasant blouse and a miniskirt, brought in a tray with five cups of coffee and retired, presumably to guard duty in the adjoining first-class cabin. The interview was brief. Six minutes later, he was back in his place beside Sophie, who was energetically combing her hair.

  The talk had gone rapidly, in English—the common language, it transpired, as at any international meeting. He and his friends were hostages. He would be treated as group leader and held responsible for its full cooperation. During the night, negotiations had begun with the criminal government in The Hague. “Why not with the French criminals at the Quai d’Orsay?” Van Vliet had inquired, in Dutch. The question had been ignored. Nor had he been able to discover what demands the hijackers were making. For the moment, they merely wanted a plane, to be supplied by the Dutch, to fly to their next destination with the hostages. “Your government, Deputy, has refused.” It was not his government, he objected, with a measure of truth. “Your fraction is the accomplice of the ruling social democrats,” retorted the gunwoman, reappearing in the doorway with her coffee-pot. “If Van Vliet de Jonge’s fraction voted against the American stooges, they would fall.” As this was a fact known to everyone in Holland, he had not denied it. Nor did he feel moved to point out—what would surely be of no interest to these people—that the consequence of such an action would be a government of the Right.

  Still, if the Prime Minister—or, more likely, the Minister of Defense—was refusing to give them a plane they craved, it was hardly his fault. In any case, they were knocking at the wrong door. It was the French they ought to have been dealing with. That the 747 was now on Dutch soil was immaterial. Permission to land must have been granted at the request of the French ambassador; that was probably why the pilot had circled so long yesterday, while the request was being considered. Yet between the hijackers and France’s representative no dialogue had been opened, though messages had come last night from the control tower that he was at the airport and ready to talk. At least so the co-pilot intervened to say, wearily, out of the corner of his mouth, glancing backward at Van Vliet, as if for help with these intractable people. Van Vliet turned to the rifleman: “Is dat waar?” “A ruse,” replied that one, with contempt.

  Van Vliet shook his head. He was mystified. Why pick on the Dutch? The French, he remarked, were in a position to send them any aircraft they wanted, in exchange for the one they were holding. Even the latest model of bomber, if that were their heart’s desire. “Bien sûr,” the pilot concurred. “Mais soyons sèrieux. Plutôt un DC-8.” In any event, as he had been telling the air pirates, they were exhausting themselves here to no purpose; he had only to return them in the Boeing to De Gaulle, where their demand would be studied. “This option does not interest us,” the Arab air pirate had answered.

  More than once during this puzzling conversation, Van Vliet had tried to steer it into Dutch. Each time this had brought a scowl from the Arab, which yielded, at any rate, one piece of information: perfect trust did not reign among the confederates. It was the young woman who chiefly roused his curiosity. Was she the northlander’s sweetheart or did she “belong” to the Arab? Or was she—despite the coffee service—their boss? If he could have got her to speak Dutch, he might have the first elements of an Identikit portrait. But not only would she not speak it, when she heard him speak it to her comrade-at-arms, she put on a blank face, as though waiting to be supplied with a translation. If he had not overheard the pair of them yesterday talking Dutch behind him (unfortunate that he had heard but not listened!), her show of ignorance might have convinced. She was fiercely determined, evidently, not to admit by a word or sign that she shared a mother-tongue with the enemy.

  Yet for what reason, unless because he was Dutch, had he been selected as go-between or interlocutor? Were they unaware that Senator Carey was aboard? It now indeed looked as if yesterday’s exploit had been based on a tip-off that a catch of notorious liberals—“your group”—would be on the Teheran flight. Mindful of SAVAK, Van Vliet de Jonge had told no one of the trip except his family and one trusted associate and he assumed that the others too had been reasonably discreet. Yet obviously there had been a leak. The young Iranians in Paris may have innocently boasted of what was afoot to their fellow-students, who would include the usual anarchists and PFLP zealots. Even more probably, the tip had come from SAVAK. Had he not cheerily estimated, in what now seemed another incarnation, that SAVAK’s spies would have seen to it that this committee did not arrive unannounced in Teheran? But prevention was the better cure. What could be more fitting than that a “black” secret police should transmit a full Interpol description, down to the flight number, of an incoming party of pinks to a squad of red terrorists? Two birds with one stone, if all went well, that is to say badly. In an hour or so, the Shah and his murderous vizier would be rubbing their hands as they followed the current episode on Iranian television. Still, even SAVAK’s information system, being in some degree human, was necessarily imperfect. Since the committee itself had not known, till it met itself yesterday at breakfast, who would be in the party, it was possible that Carey’s identity was not yet known to the hijackers.

  Eventually, Van Vliet supposed, they would think of conducting a passport check. But at present their attention was centered on the exaction of a getaway plane. Now he understood why he had been summoned: they were looking to him for counsel. “Have you told my government that you have a Dutch parliamentarian aboard?” To his amazement, they had not. “Tell them,” he advised, shortly. He knew his countrymen. The stubborn fellow at Defense would resign rather than give up a single training glider so long as no Dutch interest was involved. To be told that Prince Philip or the Pope of Rome was among the captives would not budge him. Henk, however, was another story. As it happened, he was a good friend of the Minister’s (during a late session they often lifted a glass in the parliamentary bar), but even a mortal enemy, if he sat in the Tweede Kamer, was a vital piece of Holland worth at least a Fokker Friendship to the old boy. “Say that you are holding a member of Her Majesty’s Parliament,” he had reiterated. Yet, watching the faces cloud over, he saw that he had failed to convince them.

  He could not fathom their reluctance. How could it harm their cause to let it be known that a Dutch deputy was aboard? The psychology of terrorists was evidently a closed book to him. Did they fear that the police would storm the plane to free him? He could easily have shown them that the effect on his government would be quite the opposite—an increase in caution. But: “We have heard enough from you.” The discussion was over. It was as if an instinct, impervious to reason, warned them against revealing the smallest fact to the enemy, who might find a means to profit.
r />   In a strange way, he was disappointed. Returned to his seat, he felt crestfallen. No doubt it irked him as a lawyer to give sound advice and perceive that it would not be followed: he had begun to look on these malefactors as his clients. Yet, beyond that, there was in him a persistent desire to be helpful, even when this helpfulness, if allowed to have its way, would further some project for which he had no great sympathy. In the present case, an antipathy: he had a distaste for hijackers and hijacking which the interview just terminated had done nothing to modify. Nevertheless, he had found himself “identifying” with these poor brutes—kapers, as his countrymen called them, from the old word for privateers—or, rather, with the problem they confronted: the procurement of an escape plane from his old friend and parliamentary colleague. Since he had at once seen the problem’s solution in the card at their disposal—himself—it had seemed urgent to get them to play it, and his failure at persuasion was somehow profoundly saddening.

  He had a love of solutions and a sometimes fatal generosity in offering them. A footnote in his country’s annals might one day tell how in the year 1972, when parlous elections had left Holland without a majority, the radical deputy Van Vliet de Jonge had gone to the Queen with a truly beautiful formula of his own devising to allow Mr. Owl, his political opponent, to assume the reins of government. Like a proud child speeding to the sovereign with the year’s first kievit egg—a Dutch rite of spring. Juliana was still grateful to him; Beatrix too. He had declined his due guerdon—a post in the Cabinet. And he had no regrets: “Paete, non dolet,” as the Stoic’s wife said, passing him the sword she had plunged into her Roman heart.

  He foresaw no regrets today were the hijackers, thanks to his coaching, to finally get their plane. True, he and his fellow-hostages would be winging off with them on the next leg of a journey which was not bright with promise. But his cerebral part would feel satisfied to have broken a deadlock by the simple application of reason. The alternative was sitting it out here in dreary confinement while each side sought by threats or deceitful promises to sap the other’s morale. Since immediate release seemed not to be in question, his preference, on balance, was for a change of scene.

  In this, he knew, lay the best and the worst of him: disinterested, eager absorption in the thickening plot of his time and place that went with a certain lightness, not to say levity, of commitment. If he was not small-minded, neither was he—as the palace believed—“large-souled.” His attempt to be helpful to the kapers could hardly be laid to brotherly love. The feeling that moved him was more like the friendly impatience of a bystander watching a game of bowls. A prompting instinct, such as caused his eyes, during a debate in the House, to drop to his neighbor’s half-penciled-in crossword puzzle while the gallery waited for him to claim the floor. At the journalists’ Kring in Amsterdam, he would stop in late at night, to sit behind the chess players, move on to the match at the billiard table, lend an argument to a literary dispute. Adversary situations drew him, but his interest span was short. Though his life might be at stake, his lively brain was unable to enlist in a heavy-breathing contest between hijackers and lawful authority; he was outside it, above the chessboard, looking down the bishop’s diagonal, swiftly noting openings and opportunities, foreseeing moves for either side. In short, like Senator Carey (or the reputation Carey bore), he was an intellectual and political dilettante, lacking the qualities of leadership.

  Already wife and children, his dear vested interests, were becoming remote; they belonged to out there, beyond the portholes’ range of vision, like blips flitting across the radar screen. If Durgie was watching television—which often she did not—they must be anxious or envious. Were they ringing Air France to ask whether pappie was listed as a passenger on the big plane they could see on their set? There had been several flights yesterday from Paris to Teheran. And Air France’s line, it went without saying, would be busy or unresponsive. Yet from his perspective, as two-thirds of a ghost, his family and the little alarms he might be causing them seemed ghostly themselves, diminished in reality. He could not enter into their feelings, even by conjecture, and his greatest pang of remorse, on their account, came from the thought that he might have bought flight insurance at one of those vending machines at the airport. He had never been inclined to do that and always wondered at the provident souls who could—a safe landing must give rise to mixed emotions in the insured one—but the next time, he now vowed, he would: for ten francs, roughly eight guilders, Durgie might hit the jackpot. Catching himself, he laughed shortly. “The next time”! As a matter of fact, he did not recall seeing such an infernal machine at De Gaulle yesterday; perhaps they had gone out, like complimentary razor blades in the toilets, when the kapers came in.

  Meanwhile the others had gathered some news of their own. During his absence, the talkative steward had come by; the crew had heard that the first-class passengers were about to be released. “Did those fellows tell you anything about that?” the Bishop called out. He was the only one of the group to seem spry this morning. In the toilets, the electricity was kapot, so that the water-closets would not flush and the outlets for electric razors were inoperative. But the Bishop had shaved, with an old-style razor evidently; Van Vliet noticed a curl of shaving cream near his capacious ear, the deafer one. On Carey’s chin, there was a dark stubble that matched his mercurial eyebrows. The pastor must have tried to use the Bishop’s blade, as some still bleeding cuts and white styptic-pencil marks bore witness. Charles had applied a thick dusting of powder. Victor was sleeping, finally, beneath his overcoat and a heap of blankets, his head burrowing in a pillow. The heating too had ceased to function, and it was cold in the cabin. But the Bishop, in his thick tweeds, was comfortably dressed for the occasion.

  In answer to the old man’s question, Henk could only shout that negotiations were going on for a Dutch plane: no mention had been made of first-class passengers. But he could report that they were still there; in the “lounge,” he had seen them, being served Bloody Marys. A cry went up. Here in Economy, they had had nothing but some weak coffee the steward had brought. “Not even a Danish,” sighed Sophie. “Did they give them breakfast up there too?” Aileen demanded, giving his shoulder a peremptory tap. Van Vliet could not say; he had noticed what the Americans called “nibbles” on the service wagon as he edged past, but that information, he decided, was better kept to himself. Angry patches had appeared on Aileen’s sharp cheekbones; the little jaw had tightened. He was not especially hungry, and what was gnawing at this poor woman’s vitals, he surmised, was principally social envy. It would do none of them harm to miss a meal. Moreover, he would feel a little ashamed, as a well-nourished man, to mention a need of food to hijackers who represented, at least in their own minds, the famished of the earth. Yet if negotiations were going to drag on, the hijackers, he judged, would do well to ask for something to eat for the hostages—a compassionate service the Dutch would not refuse.

  A few rows ahead, the young woman now stood on guard, her pistol stuck into the bosom of her blue embroidered blouse. It was up to him, probably, in the interests of general harmony, to voice the suggestion. He cleared his throat, preparing to raise his hand. It went up slowly. He found he had no appetite for making a plea on behalf of these, on the whole, too corpulent bellies. Sophie looked at him inquiringly. But the gunwoman’s eyes flicked past his feebly waving hand—she was not going to give him even the briefest attention—and he let it fall, like a flag of surrender. “She didn’t see you,” said Sophie. “No.” He was a craven and grateful to be spared.

  Then, by good fortune, the Bishop remembered the cake. He lifted it out of its box, on its paper-lace doily, cut it with the Senator’s pocket knife, said grace, and distributed slices. They ate while the hijacker dourly watched, stroking her pistol. “Why, bless me,” said the old man. “She may be hungry too.” He wrapped a generous slice in his pocket handkerchief, and Sophie bore it forward. “What is this?” said the recipient in a loud, suspicious tone. “Well
, it was a birthday cake,” said Sophie. “Would your friends like some? There’s plenty. We must just save a piece for him.” Her nod indicated Victor, supine under his coverings. “Get back to your seat,” replied the hijacker. Without further comment, she slowly ate the cake. The Bishop’s gesture had not had any noticeable softening effect.

  Once the crumbs had been cleared away, time hung heavy. There was nothing to do but guess about what was happening, and Van Vliet was the best authority the group possessed. “Is your Cabinet meeting?” Sophie wondered. Not the full Cabinet, he thought, but an emergency task force: the Minister of Justice would have been the first to be alerted; he would have called the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs; they must have met last night and again this morning. “Where?” At the Ministry of Justice, probably, so as not to give the affair undue importance. He himself wondered about the Queen. Had she been told yet? And Bernhard? The consort, he explained, had a keen interest in planes and flying; in addition, he had the title of Inspector General of the Armed Forces. “Does that mean his ideas will be listened to, because he’s the Queen’s husband? I thought you had a constitutional monarchy.” Van Vliet was not prepared to dilate, just now, on the role of the monarchy in present-day Holland. “The Queen is listened to. Like her mother. She’s respected, as a person, and strains to be progressive.” But the consort, who had the outlook of a business man, was something else. His ideas, if he were to offer any, on what attitude should be taken toward the hijackers, would be conveyed to the Defense Minister and duly tabled, with thanks. “But why the Defense Minister? Why should the armed forces have a voice? When I picture Mr. Schlesinger and the Pentagon, it scares me silly.” The vision of his starchy and punctilious friend in the role of Dr. Strangelove was amusing, but Van Vliet saw he had to be patient with this bony, beautiful American who construed everything on the hated paradigm of her own government—“the military industrial complex.”