Cannibals and Missionaries (11 page)

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.

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.

Besides, he had taken a liking to Aileen and he now followed her willingly when, on the pretext of locating an ash tray, she set out on her own job of espionage, stalking the first-class passengers who had cornered the two clerics. “I have an idea those women are former parishioners of the Rev’s.” Waving her cigarette as a
laisser-passer,
she drew Van Vliet forward, bobbing in and out of the small crowd, till they had reached a listening-post. “Did you hear that? ‘Reverend Mr. Barber.’ Not ‘Reverend Barber,’ ‘Reverend
Mr.
Barber.’ It’s one of the clues those social people drop to let the rest of us know who they are.” Her confederate showed puzzlement; there was some drama afoot, evidently, that he was failing to appreciate.

Aileen elucidated. St. Matthew’s was a fashionable New York church, right on the edge of a slum, naturally. “And Reverend Barber is a fashionable preacher?” Henk re-examined the “long” dominie with the happy protruding ears and twisted bow tie and concluded that fashion in America must have to wear a democratic disguise. “Well, he
was
,” said Aileen. “He got to be
too
fashionable, intellectually, for his Gracie Square flock. He invited a black revolutionary to preach from his pulpit one Sunday, and his front pews left him in a body and went over to St. James’s, on Madison Avenue. These are some of the front pews, I’ll bet.” Van Vliet felt suddenly bored. In Holland, he told her, such “happenings” in churches were commonplace, only there it was the Catholics, following
aggiornamento,
who staged trendy masses, with guitars and rock music and student hippies and schismatic Marxists mounting to the pulpit to sermonize. “They have ships’ biscuits”—he stifled a yawn—“that they pass in a basket for communion and a chalice of wine that goes from hand to hand. There’s a movement to make it a beer tankard—in Holland, why not?” She nodded. “Sort of love feasts. We have that too. But this black revolutionary at St. Matthew’s demanded reparations from the churches. It was all in the papers. Millions of dollars, just like war reparations. Do you have that in Holland?” Before Van Vliet could answer, she had made a silencing gesture. “
Au revoir,
dear impetuous Mr. Barber. We shall look for you in Naqsh-i-Rustan. So nice to find you again, and in mufti, after all these years.” “‘Mufti’!” snorted Aileen, as the woman moved off at an unhurried pace. “You see, I was right.” Van Vliet did not understand her interest in following this encounter, nor indeed where her true sympathies lay. He would have liked, though, to know whether the Reverend’s church had paid reparations and, if so, how many guilders. But the plane was boarding.

It was a 747 this time and less than half full. They would be able to stretch out, after lunch had been served, and sleep or meditate till quarter of five, local time, when they were supposed to arrive in Tel Aviv—their only stop. They had agreed to sit together in the well-named (said the Senator) Salon Rouge, the middle cabin of Economy, where smoking was permitted. That little sacrifice on the part of the non-smokers would enable the group to visit back and forth without disturbing other passengers, and yet each would have a bank of two or three seats to himself. When nap-time came, the Bishop and he could lie head to head, the Reverend pointed out, all a-marvel at the discovery. He had never ridden in a jumbo jet before. Lenz, of course, was the non-conformist. Where the others were spread out within conversational range through the center portion of the cabin, he had elected to be up front beside the movie screen, and found himself next to an Israeli couple with a baby in a swinging bassinet-thing that the hostess fitted into place—an arrangement that was not going to suit Sapphire, he objected, appearing suddenly in the aisle in his long flapping overcoat when he ought to have been strapped into his seat belt.

His cat, he said, was sensitive to noise, and what was an infant doing in a section reserved for smokers? “Isn’t that the parents’ business?” a voice behind him demanded, and for a moment, as Lenz swung around, it looked as if there might be an incident. He was persuaded to return to his place by the steward’s promise that after take-off he and the cat could move. But he had to be near a door, he stipulated, pausing on his way. “Near a door?” “Because of my claustrophobia.” Someone tittered. “You can go into the Salon Jaune, sir,” calmly said the steward, indicating two seats by an exit door in the front of the cabin behind. That suggestion did not please Lenz either: too close to the serving-pantry, and Sapphire was sensitive to cooking smells. “Well, sir, I cannot help you then. We cannot ask that family to move. They have reserve that place. It is near the toilets. And anyway, sir, they go only as far as Tel Aviv.” “Go back and sit down, Victor,” called the Senator. “We want to take off.”

Ahead, the young orthodox couple (cute as two pins, it was decided; the husband wore a beard in ringlets and a black hat) seemed impervious, luckily, to the controversy; the bassinet placidly rocked. “You must excuse our friend,” the Reverend told the steward, when Victor was finally out of earshot. “Do you have this type of problem often?” “Very often, sir. Especially with gentlemen. They do not wish to sit near a baby.” The Bishop nodded. “‘Suffer the little children.’ We humans are funny animals, aren’t we? Why, bless me, if the plane had been full, our Victor would be feeling no call to be choosy. But with all these empty seats to pick from, he’ll never find one that suits him. There’s a moral there, surely.” “Explicate that, Gus,” begged the Reverend, but the old man’s rumbling tones were lost like the Sibyl’s utterance in the sudden roar of the engines.

When the No Smoking sign went off, Van Vliet lit a Batavia twist. With a careful turn of his head, he established that the two dark men he had wondered about were directly behind him, on the aisle. After a moment’s reflection, he unfastened his seat belt and moved across to join Aileen. If he did not join her, he considered, she was likely to come over to him—an invitation to eavesdroppers if there ever was one. In the middle bank of seats, the Senator, just ahead of her, had already stretched out, in his shirt sleeves, with his arms folded behind his head on two pillows and did not look ready for company. Cameron, a difficult conversationalist, was puffing on his pipe by a window on the Senator’s left. The Bishop and the Reverend, in front of the Senator, were minding the Lord’s store, reciting the service for the day—the first Sunday after Epiphany—with the Bishop taking the responses. Van Vliet recognized the Anglican rite, which the Americans called Episcopalian. The droning of voices took him back to his school days with the monks in Brabant.

In choosing Aileen, Van Vliet was obeying his good angel. While the plane was gaining altitude, he had made up his mind to pair off with President Simmons, since there was bound to be pairing in a group of this kind. He did not enjoy being unfaithful to his wife, but it happened on trips if he did not take precautions. The Weil girl—actually a woman; he estimated her age at thirty-four—was the occasion of sin to be avoided. His aversion to bright young women journalists (one of the Dutch lot had pursued him from Schiphol to Athens, with the full backing of her editor, at that time, but no longer, his friend) might fail him, he feared, in her case. She had a tense, brave way of talking, in short, breathless spurts, and an arresting face, like a Byzantine icon—Cameron had produced the comparison this morning, watching her come in with the cake. At present, she was sitting alone, in the row ahead of Cameron, by the window. As he stood up to take the lay of the land, he had picked out the curly black head leaning against the seat back’s bright red antimacassar. She put up a hand to cover a yawn, and he admired the long spatulate fingers and the stretch of the long olive neck.

He set his jaw. If he left her alone, she would gravitate to the Senator or vice versa. The lines of force were predictable in these situations. He was vain of being a good-looking, well-setup male and did not envy the American his two meters—a tall Dutchman was a gross error of Nature. In age he had the advantage of fifteen to twenty years. In mother-wit, they were about equal, he reckoned, and he suspected he was a truer poet. But in power—irresistible to some women—the leader of a minority fraction in Her Majesty’s Staten-generaal was Thumbling by comparison, which would make a contest interesting to the permanent spectator in himself. He pushed away the thought: the challenge to his virility represented by a formidable U.S. lawmaker was temptation in its most infantile form. Besides, he had no doubt as to who would win; as in a fairy-tale, he had only to wish it.

He heard the rector beginning on the lesson for the day. “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice…. And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The shoe seemed to fit. Making a wry face, Henk crossed the aisle like a Rubicon and left the field to Carey. The die was cast. Aileen would help divert him from the other while posing no danger herself. On that score, as a male, he felt confidence. He had no sexual interest (it was cruel, but he could not help it) in women who had passed the age of child-bearing—which no doubt made him a “sexist,” as somebody like Sophie, if he bedded her, would be quick to tell him.

Aileen looked up with a smile. “Mynheer Van Vliet! So you’ve come to talk to me!” She snatched up the long scarf she had unwound from her coppery hair and patted the seat beside her. On her lap was an archaeological guide to Persia, which the Bishop had passed back to her. “‘I’m too old, my dear, for ancient history, and we have other work to do in that unfertile soil.’ That was his presentation speech. Isn’t he dear?” Van Vliet took up the book, which was the property, it seemed, of “Mr. Charles.” On second thought, he set it aside and went to retrieve his briefcase, reminded of the blue folder he had put in it with the list of names and addresses in Teheran. He could not leave that lying about. It occurred to him, moreover, that in view of a possible search at the airport, he would do well to commit the contents to memory and flush it down a toilet in Tel Aviv. There was also
Elle
with the horoscope, which he ought to consult soon, if only to repay Sophie for her trouble. “Oh, dear, do we have to
work
?” Aileen lamented on seeing the briefcase. He made a silencing motion. He had heard Dutch being spoken.