Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  “Nay,” Van Vliet was saying. Just down the row, another voice, pleasanter than Harold’s, intervened—Beryl’s mother. “Dear Mr. Van Vliet, don’t argue with them. You’re only making them cross. Let’s just do as we’re told and get it over with.” “Can it, Mother. We’re not meant to be talking, don’t you realize that?”

  But Henk answered, and the big fellow did not stop him. Sophie tried to listen, but her attention kept wandering. Had no one else noticed the shovels? She touched Carey’s sleeve and pointed. He shrugged. He was more interested in what Henk was saying—something about being a lawyer and advice being his profession. Could she be wrong in the dire conclusion she had leapt to? Leaping to conclusions was a bad habit with her. Wouldn’t they be spades rather than shovels if a grave was to be dug? She ordered herself to listen. Henk was telling the hostages in English what he had told the two leaders in Dutch. “They have said that they are not accountable to us. In strict power terms that is true. But I counsel them that it is in their own interest not to keep us in ignorance when they need our cooperation.” Sophie bridled. “Cooperation?” she muttered to Carey. What did that mean? They were in a no-choice situation; they had to cooperate. He was a charming, absurd Dutchman, over-trained in coalition politics. Nevertheless, she reminded herself, softening, he was brave, and for that she owed him some attention. Slave labor, he was saying, was always inefficient. “That is known from the camps. But in the gulag there were millions, so the low productivity of each individual unit was unimportant; in the scale of things it did not matter.” Why was Henk telling all this to the hostages, half of whom could not care less? Then slowly she understood: he was really addressing himself to the kapers, taking advantage of having the floor to repeat an argument that he had been making in camera. It was a parliamentary trick, to use an attentive gallery to make your point sink in, as though doubling the size of the audience doubled the force of your words. And possibly it did. “Here tonight,” he continued cheerily, “the labor force is very small. Perhaps thirty persons. They need the full productivity of thirty persons and therefore they must pay for it.” “‘Pay’? That’s a bit stiff, isn’t it, under the circs?” The collector called Ramsbotham laughed in a worldly way, as if he thought poor Henk quite mad or in need of a business education. Henk took his meaning. “I am not a ‘simple,’ as we say in Dutch. No. Ask yourself a question. What have our friends here got that we haven’t?” “Guns,” yelled Harold. “Evidently,” said Henk. “But what else?” No one knew. “Information,” answered Henk. “They must pay us in information.”

  “Your Bishop is alive,” the woman said abruptly. “He has not been harmed. No one will be harmed at this stage of the operation that behaves himself. He is too old, simply, for the work, and we have told him so. He will only be in the way.” “The work?” echoed Beryl’s mother. “You will see,” said the man. “Now fall out, madam. Fall out again, funny old gentleman.” That was Charles, who had slipped back into line—doubtless to hear better. “And you, Deputy, fall in.”

  It ought to have been plain as a pikestaff. It was a question of moving the helicopter. Henk had guessed it before they told him. Jim Carey had guessed it. That was the “work.” As soon as the fog cleared, or in the morning at the very latest, search planes would come looking for them. That man Harold had been griping, half an hour ago, that none had come yet. The helicopter would have to be hidden. It could not be left standing here all night in plain view.

  That of course they could not leave it parked on the highway was a fact of life too obvious to have escaped Sophie’s attention; she would have had to be a total idiot not to see that. But she had given no consideration to the mechanics of its removal; when they were ready, the pilot, she had assumed, would taxi it off the road to some nearby hiding-place. All that would have been thought through. But in the dark she had failed to notice something that the men had seen at once: the helicopter did not have wheels; it had skids. Yet why claim the dark as an excuse? The truth was that she had not used her eyes, while the men had. And even if at some point she had vaguely taken note of the skids, she would probably have failed to grasp the implications: without wheels, the craft could not taxi. Having to hear that explained to her now, jointly, by Henk and Jim made her blush for herself as a journalist. She would fire herself had she been here on assignment, charged with “covering” the event. She hated imperceptiveness, most of all in herself. And being a woman, alas, had something to do with this particular lapse from grace; women did not think about machinery.

  Henk said that the hijackers themselves had failed to notice the skids at Schiphol. They had become aware of them here. And right away they had got angry at the pilots. But it was not the pilots who had flown the aircraft in from Germany. They were Dutch Air Force men and the Germans who had brought it had turned it over as it stood, complete with the operations manual for the Dutchmen to figure out. Still, commented Sophie, you would think that these Dutch would have mentioned the skids while the helicopter was still at Schiphol and it would not have been too late to change them. No point, Henk retorted: there was not a set of wheels in Holland that would fit this model. His placid tone irritated her; she wanted blame to be assigned. Then why in the world, she said crossly, did the Germans send one with skids? Henk shrugged. At this time of year the craft was probably used for paratrooper training exercises on snow and ice; when the order came down from the Ministry, nobody at the base had thought to put on wheels. Very natural, too, said Carey. “These birds should have sent their specifications along. Hell, they might have got pontoons.” The two men laughed. Being males, they found the quandary amusing.

  So, since the helicopter could not taxi, it was going to have to be pushed or pulled. The road was icing up nicely, Carey estimated, testing it with his feet. “But that’s impossible,” Sophie protested. “Why can’t the pilot fly it to wherever they want it to go?” That was the idea of the kapers, Henk said. But the pilot had refused. The argument just now had been about that. “You could hear it all?” said Carey. “Enough,” Henk said, “to seize the drift. Or do you say ‘catch the drift’?” “‘Get the drift,’” said Sophie, feeling quite impatient. “But go on. Why did the pilot refuse?” “Not enough room for maneuver,” answered the Senator. “If he took it up and tried to turn it on a dime in these conditions, there’d be a fair chance of a foul-up.” “And he was unwilling to take the chance,” observed Sophie. “Why didn’t they ask the co-pilot if he was so afraid?” Henk said that the co-pilot had agreed with the pilot. “These fellows are Dutch and stubborn.” He held up a finger, recommending quiet. Over by the helicopter, the argument with the pilots had resumed. And no wonder, Sophie thought. A fresh survey of this band of hostages ought to have convinced them that the job could not be done by manpower—sheer madness even to consider it. “They are telling that the helicopter is the property of the German air arm,” Henk reported. “And they say the Royal Dutch Air Force has responsibility for this property.” “Kind of funny,” said Carey. “I mean to be harping on property and responsibility when you want to make an anarchist see your point.”

  Then all at once the discussion was over. The big hijacker and the co-pilot were underneath the helicopter, looking up at something. The pilots had won their point. Carey said he was not surprised. On balance, he guessed, the hijackers could not have been too eager to see the helicopter take off with the Royal Dutch Air Force at the controls. “Nothing much to prevent them from flying it back to Schiphol, wouldn’t you say, Henk? Then good-bye getaway craft.” “But why do they need a getaway craft?” Sophie demanded. “Psychological,” said Carey, and let it go at that. The pilot was now inside the helicopter. From the bottom he was letting out a long cable. “Standard equipment,” said Carey. “A hoist, they call it. Used for making drops and pick-ups normally. He has a winch in there that’s operated by a motor.” He had been a flyer, Sophie remembered, in the Second World War. The cable unwound and lay on the pavement, in coils, like a thin black snake. “But
I thought we were going to push,” said Sophie. “They’ll try the hoist for now,” Carey said. “But I expect the time for pushing will come.”

  The lazy voice broke off. Suddenly there was a great deal of action. It was as though a whistle had been blown. First, the male hostages were quickly separated from the women and formed into a squad, which was set to work unwinding the cable. Then, from the periphery, four new figures appeared. All were dressed in windbreakers and baggy pants, but one might be a woman—she was too far off still to tell. Two stayed by the cable, watching it play out, and two ran off to a point several yards up the highway. They had brought lanterns with them, and now you could see better. But without Carey to brief her, Sophie felt at a loss. She could not make out what was happening, exactly. The pair up the highway was shouting in rapid German. “Ja!” “Nein,” “Doch, das stimmt.” “Nein. Es stimmt nicht.” Eventually it dawned on her: they were looking for a tree to fix the cable to. But the trees along the road were just big saplings—willows, Sophie thought, and she tried to remember from her parents’ property whether willow was a soft wood or a hard wood. There could not be any full-grown trees anywhere here; the polder was too new. In the thicket were only tall bushes. And along the road no telephone poles. Nothing stout and fixed to anchor onto. And no hope of a big jutting rock; the land was perfectly flat—level sea-bottom. She was not surprised that Carey had sounded skeptical. Yet the confederates, apparently, had found a tree, several yards further up the road, that they thought would suit the purpose, for one of them called out “Jeroen! Ja, ja! Hier!” and the tall Dutch hijacker—they were big, Henk said, in the fenlands he came from—went up to consult with them. Then an order was given, and the hostages hoisted the cable onto their shoulders and marching in step, spaced out in single file, carried it up the road till the order to halt came. The frieze of toiling figures with the cable stretched between them looked curiously like a chain gang silhouetted against the night sky.

  The end of the cable reached, but there could not be much slack, because a wait followed while the men tried to hook it to the tree trunk, cursing in a babel of tongues (“Merde!” cried the voice of Henk). Finally the laborers fell back. There was a sound of cranking and groaning as the winch turned and the cable tautened. The helicopter moved. It was proceeding on a diagonal to the highway’s edge. The problem, of course, was the skids. The thin glaze of ice on the highway was uneven, and halfway along the great hulk seemed to balk. You could hear the skids scrape on the pavement. “Halt!” called the co-pilot and went over to inspect.

  There was a consultation. No damage seemed to have been done, and the hijackers, apparently, had been prepared for a setback. An emollient of some kind, Sophie guessed, was needed to grease the skids; the ice was too patchy. She thought madly of Dutch butter. But mud, it seemed, was the answer, and there was no shortage of it in the ditch beside the highway. That was where the shovels fitted in.

  Now the women were put to work. Pails were produced, and two groups were formed, one to carry the pails, which “Gretel” was rapidly filling, and the other to apply the contents by hand to the stretch of pavement in front of the runners. The new confederate, who was in fact a woman, pale, thin, German, and young, seized the second shovel and followed Gretel’s example. While this was going on, the men took places at the rear of the helicopter, to start pushing when the word came—they would push in concert with the turning winch. Having lost—or wasted—so much time, the hijackers were now in a great hurry. But the pails were small, almost like children’s pails, and the mud was cold; actually there were splinters of ice in it. Sophie’s hands ached, and she looked with pity at the manicured fingernails of Harold’s wife, which showed a blackish red in the lantern light. In Sophie’s view, it would have made sense to let the hostages use a shovel to smooth the mud onto the pavement rather than have them slather it on like cold cream with their bare hands. But the shovels were reserved for the use of Gretel and the other. Rather than trust the captives with them, they leaned on them during pauses to watch contemptuously, like forewomen, while the feeble carriers bore off their dripping loads.

  At length the leadership was satisfied with the slippery state of the pavement, and the pilot resumed his place. The winch turned, the men pushed, but, instead of advancing, the helicopter was sliding backward. The cable was pulling the tree, which slowly rose, turned a sort of somersault, exposing its roots, and was dragged along the road. A sound of clucking came from the women. “Sheer vandalism,” Sophie’s nearest neighbor pronounced. “Don’t you agree? When one thinks of the money this government must have spent planting those trees…” Yet they were going to try again, with another tree—still frailer in appearance, Sophie considered. She rather sympathized with her neighbor: before they were through, they would have ripped up every tree in the area. But at least this next one, unlike its predecessor, had not been weakened by a first assault. And the hijackers this time were trying a new strategy. A rope was brought from the helicopter and tied to the tree trunk. The workers were redistributed. Males, both hostages and hijackers, were assigned to pull on the rope, to hold the tree steady when the winch started its counter-pull, while the women, all of them, were to push the helicopter from the rear. They practiced, then “One, two, three!” the fenland giant counted. The cable tightened. The helicopter moved forward. They had done it.

  But the job was not yet over. The ditch they had been digging in constituted a new hazard. It was not very wide; nevertheless there was the danger that one of the skids could slip into it and tip the helicopter over on its side. “Jeroen”—at any rate they now knew his name, which rhymed with “shoon”; was it Dutch for “Jerome”?—stood with his hands on his hips, studying the ditch. He measured the skids and shook his head. Then he called to Ahmed, who brought him a small ax, of the kind used for cutting firewood. Seizing it in his huge hands, he set to work to chop branches off the young willows till he had enough to fill in the ditch at the point the helicopter would cross. Here there was no question of using the winch. Again the women got behind to push; in front, the work-gang of men pulled on the cable. Without gloves, their hands slipped; it was hard to get a purchase. But the bed of twigs and branches was wet and slimy; in half a minute the helicopter was across.

  Now there was less hurry. Even though the helicopter was still visible, it was not blocking the road to a truck or car that wanted to pass—there must be maintenance men at that pumping-station and if they worked in shifts, some could be arriving or leaving at any hour of the night. This highway must connect with the mainland, where people lived, and to Sophie it was a miracle that no vehicle so far had appeared. And if one had, what would the hijackers have done? Taken whoever was in it prisoner, she supposed. But then the car would have to be hidden too. At any rate it would have had wheels. And if the night-shift worker had had a family, wouldn’t somebody have given the alarm when he failed to come home? All the time they had been pushing and shoving she had been worrying, she realized, that a car would come before they finished, and now that that danger no longer mattered much—in the dark a driver would be concentrating on the road and not looking to see what was beside it—she pushed the damp fringe back from her forehead and breathed easier.

  There remained the thick underbrush to be dealt with. A sort of path or track, she noticed, already ran through it, and the vegetation was crushed and trampled in places. But the track was too narrow for the helicopter to pass. It would have to be widened. Otherwise, she guessed, the rotor blades might get tangled in the tall reeds. Or some other damage could befall its vital parts. Fatigue was making her unmechanical brain even more hazy: in Vietnam she had ridden in dozens of helicopters and actually come under fire from the ground once, yet now she could not even remember where their engines were exactly. But she was right about widening the path.

  While the teams of hostages rested and the men mopped their brows (“Wonderful exercise!” she heard the minister proclaim), Ahmed busied himself with the ax. His progre
ss along the thicket’s encroaching edges was maddeningly slow, and behind him he left masses of snarled reeds and prickly branches, which the others, following in his wake, had to clear away. Carey, walking beside her and watching the young man’s clumsy efforts, was manifestly losing patience. “Here, let me have that,” he said and proceeded to cut a clean swath, rapidly felling bushes on either side as he went. There came a piercing whistle. “Put that ax down!” It was strange how these people, though they must be even more tired than the hostages, could be so alert. They must have their wits about them to be instantly conscious of the deadly-weapon potential latent in an ax or a mere shovel.