Cannibals and Missionaries (16 page)

“Are all of you charming people traveling together?” the fluting voice inquired of Aileen. “Dr. Cameron and Deputy Van Vliet de Jonge too? I see. Now don’t tell me. I must put my thinking cap on. What can you have in common that’s taking you to Teheran or is it Tel Aviv?” He counted on his white ringed fingers. “My old friend Augustus Hurlbut, the Reverend Mr. Barber (St. Matthew’s, isn’t it?), Senator Carey…Why, you must be a committee!” He looked around him triumphantly. “I see I can take silence for consent. A bishop, a senator, a parson, the president of a distinguished college. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor. A Dutch parliamentary leader, a don from the British Isles. A trouble-shooting young woman journalist. It’s as plain as Pikes Peak. What you lack, if I may say so, is a rabbi.” In the seat ahead of Aileen, the Reverend had one of his fits of merriment. He slapped his knee. With an air of contented malice, Tennant continued. “Now what can your committee be up to? Are you off to quiz Golda, poor dear? No, I remember. We agreed to meet in Teheran, didn’t we, Augustus? Ah, yes, well.” He sighed. “I fear I can guess your business. And the Shah started out so well. Charming man, I’m told. But a visionary, always so dangerous. And he fell under the influence of that dreadful vizier of his.” “Nassiri,” said Sophie. “That’s it, his secret police chief! A thoroughly wicked person. My dear, the shocking things they do to those young men in prison, some of them from excellent families. Well, you know better than I, naturally. That electric grill. They slide those young bodies into the device and
toast
them. A friend in England sent me a clipping on the subject which quite put me off my feed. It came in the morning mail, which I open while I wait for my toast to pop up. I couldn’t
look
at an English muffin.” “St. Lawrence on the gridiron. Old idea,” said Carey.

“How clever of you, James. Yes, with all our technology, we’re relapsing into barbarism. One sees the proofs of it all around one. Sheer medieval savagery. I shan’t live to see the dawn of a new Renaissance.” “That was damned barbaric too,” growled Cameron. “Yes, one can’t deny that. But there were compensations—glorious art and literature. The main enemy of civilization—you’ll excuse me, Augustus—has always been religion, the spirit of fanaticism. Hunting down heresy, those dreadful dogs of the Inquisition, St. Dominic’s hounds, that one sees in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella. Today we find them amusing. We don’t stop to think that we ourselves are living in a new age of wars of religion. Persecution of unbelievers. One thought one had seen the last of that with Hitler.”

“And Stalin?” demanded Aileen. “Quite right, dear lady. One ought to have known. But I confess that for a long time I simply refused to believe in the horrors of the Soviet camps. I opposed the cold war on principle and then, you see, I belong to a generation that taught itself not to accept atrocity stories. The ‘rape of Belgium.’ Now one wonders whether Kaiser Willy’s troops
weren’t
impaling babies on bayonets and crucifying nuns.” His shrill ululating laugh caused Carey to wince and duck his head.

Though he had known Charles Tennant for years, he had seldom felt entirely easy in his company. By now, thanks to death and retirement, Carey had moved up (he reckoned) to second or third on Charles’s senatorial mailing list for regular advice and remonstrance—Charles never wrote to a newspaper but to selected members of the upper house, presidents, secretaries of defense and state. Those voluminous, closely penned “epistles” on pale blue monogrammed stationery usually wound up, Carey assumed, in the burn bag, which was a pity because Charles, while long-winded, was a sharp old bird and moreover had “done his homework,” as was evidenced by the quantity of heavily underscored enclosures clipped from technical journals, the
Times
of London,
Stars and Stripes,
the
Guardian, Barron’s Weekly,
stockholders’ reports. He was never without a silver clipping tool resembling a small pen and had a horror of photostats. As a moderately active legislator, Carey could rarely do justice to that hand-crafted correspondence (if only Charles had learned to use the typewriter or would dictate to a secretary!), but he kept a fair amount of it in a file he had marked
Vox Populi.
To his credit, the far-sighted old liberal had been an early opponent of the war in Vietnam; he boasted that his reproaches to Kennedy on that subject, though uncatalogued in the Kennedy Library, dated back to ’61. And on the day Carey announced himself as an anti-war candidate against Johnson, a check from Charles W. Tennant on the State Street Trust was in the mail. “Accept a thousand ‘iron men’ for your ‘war chest.’ Gratefully…” Dated October 7, 1967. Carey would not forget that. When, rising from a doubtful seat and half-attainted stall (for he was taking some flak from the home front and from his old enemies, the columnists, who had hit on the word “lackluster” for his performance), he went into New Hampshire that brave winter, he would frequently find Charles, wrapped in layers of scarves, shawls, and steamer rugs, seated in a front row of the hall—generally a chilly high-school gymnasium—with a box lunch containing chicken and watercress sandwiches, a large damask napkin, and a silver Thermos of his cook’s bouillon on his lap. A somewhat unwelcome cynosure of attention, as was his antique Armstrong-Siddeley stationed outside, with a chauffeur at the wheel. “All that guy lacks is finger bowls,” one of the young campaign workers had commented. “What would you call him, Senator?” “A philanthropist, I guess,” Carey had said shortly. “Can’t you persuade him to stay away, Jim?” Eleanor had entreated. The old hedonist’s shrieked observations on “the quality of life” (meaning the hotel accommodations) in rural New Hampshire were being poorly received in the hall. “‘I know not the man,’” Carey had cited sardonically. “No. I won’t.”

But in today’s flying auditorium Charles’s unabashed, intrepid old voice was tempting Carey to deny him—thrice over—if only he could. Though he was normally immune to social embarrassment (a female complaint, he considered), doubts as to the threshold of tolerance of less sophisticated passengers could not be repressed. Without ill will, with remorseful affection even, he wished their visitor would go back to first class, where, whatever he thought, he belonged.

“So you plan to spend your time in that lovely country investigating torture in the Shah’s jails. And I shall be with my millionaires’ tour. As Lenin said, ‘From each according to his capacities.’ Dear me. I must say I’ve felt a qualm or two about my little jaunt. Mind you, I haven’t
seen
the toaster thing, but there can hardly be so much smoke without fire, can there? But then I said to myself that one would become a total shut-in if one let moral considerations dictate one’s travel plans. I suppose one could still permit oneself to visit the Scandinavian countries, though there’s so little to see there. And your delightful country, Mr. Van Vliet de Jonge, with its splendid museums and attractive people. The Dutch have been much maligned by their neighbors; I’ve never found them in the least stolid or phlegmatic. But France, Italy? Thoroughly corrupt and police-ridden, and in France you have shocking discrimination against the foreign labor force. No wonder, I say, that they have all these tiresome strikes. England? Well, one has one’s friends there, but there’ve been some quite off-putting disclosures about English prison conditions. And I’m told that Scotland Yard—can that be true, Dr. Cameron?—uses the third degree.” He laughed. “No, a peep into Portugal and perhaps into Greece, now that the colonels are gone, and then one would be forced to go virtuously home.” “Hear, hear!” came a mutter from the rear, causing Charles to turn around, smiling amiably in all directions like royalty acknowledging applause. Nevertheless he slightly lowered his voice.

“I did draw the line at the colonels, but, between ourselves, my digestion was grateful for a holiday from the nasty Greek food and wine. As for Iran, well, I said to myself that it’s no wickeder probably than Spain, where my liberal friends go in droves. And what would I accomplish for those poor young oppositionists by staying home? It’s not as if the Shah were dependent on tourism to make ends meet, is it? I am not such a noodle as to fancy that my depreciated dollars could make the slightest difference to him. Then, too, I said, that were I to meet him, which is not beyond the bounds of possibility, I would give him a piece of my mind. ‘Look here,’ I would say—”

Carey softly groaned. Nobody was censuring the old duck for clinging to the pleasure principle in the few years he had left. Amnesty International would surely get its tithe from the sybarite’s holiday that in his own mind he ought to be renouncing—Charles paid up regularly for his venial sins. And as for the Shah’s getting “a piece of his mind,” that could be forecast with utter certainty if an invitation to the palace were to be issued. No one within earshot today would expect Charles, wherever he found himself, to show a lack of gumption. But Charles was not going to meet the Shah, at least not immediately—a point that in the flush of victory he seemed to be over-looking.

Indeed the fact of that victory—and of Charles basking like a lizard in the glory of it—was starting to worry Carey. The more he pondered it, the less he liked it. The old man’s naughty venturesomeness had been rewarded. He had got his way. With every captive eye watching, the hijacker had backed down. But to anyone familiar with power and its vagaries, it was obvious that consequences could be in store. Another passenger, encouraged by Charles’s success, would “try something,” and the hijacker would over-react, to prove himself.

For the first time, Carey felt distinctly uneasy. He had a bodily premonition of danger, such as he had known once or twice—and with justification—in the navigator’s seat with an unseasoned pilot beside him, though now he could not sense, glancing about, in what quarter trouble might be lurking. He felt confident of his power to deter Cameron, who anyway was well fenced in by Charles and his lolling walking-stick. And he trusted Van Vliet de Jonge, a political animal like himself, to have the right reflexes if an emergency were to present itself. But he would feel far happier were he posted commandingly in an aisle seat to restrain any untoward moves. He meditated asking Aileen to change places with him. Yet the slightest stir among the passengers was capable, if he was right in his foreboding, of producing a volley of gunfire.

He looked at his watch again. “Jesus!” he swore. They must have already overflown Paris. He would not feel easy till they were on the ground somewhere. Once they were on the ground, the likelihood of an incident within the plane would be minimal, or so his instinct told him. Outside, the police (in what country’s uniforms?) might surround the plane and, if negotiations broke down, try to take it by storm. But that would be a whole new ballgame, which the passengers would have to sit out in the grandstand, waiting for the result to declare itself.

Charles’s zestful prattle had finally died down. Next to Sophie, Van Vliet de Jonge had turned his head and was scrutinizing the seats in back. He looked mystified by whatever he saw there. A note was passed along from him—addressed, surprisingly, to “Miss Symans.” She opened it and turned her head too, studying the rows behind. She frowned. “Something wrong?” inquired Carey. “Well, no. But it’s strange. He wants me to tell him whether some young Dutch people who were sitting back there were a figment of his imagination. Here, read it.” He put on his glasses. “You have to know the context,” Aileen explained. “He has this phobia about being Dutch. How they have a secret language and how Holland is an imaginary country. I didn’t follow it all too well. But when he sees Dutch people, I mean outside Holland, he gets a haunted feeling, as if they were a mirage.” Carey laughed sympathetically. “But the strange part is, Senator Jim, that young couple isn’t there any more. Isn’t that weird? Of course I don’t
know
they were Dutch. I just took his word for it. I didn’t pay too much attention to them. If you asked me, I couldn’t describe them. But I could swear there were two young people sitting behind us, and now that whole row is empty.” “Probably moved,” said Carey. “Yes, but where to? I don’t see them anywhere back there. Still, as I say, I might not recognize them if I did.” “Well, reassure him. Tell him you saw them too.” Aileen ruminated. “I suppose he missed them when he had to go to the men’s room.” Her sharp eyes flew open wide. “I’ll bet that’s
why
he went to the men’s room! The secret language. He wanted to pass them a message that nobody but a Dutch person could understand. Like a code. He had some plan in mind and needed their help.”

Carey held up a hand. The pilot was starting his descent. Overhead, the seat belt signs flashed on. In a few minutes, they should be able to see land below. Now, short of a crash, nothing could happen, Carey decided: the passengers were concentrating on the windows, trying to make out where they were. He held his lighter to Aileen’s cigarette. “You’d better have one too,” she told him. “It’ll be our last for days maybe. They’ll never let us smoke on an airfield.” “‘For days’?” he said quizzingly. “Come on, it’s not that grim. The plane and the crew are all these fellows need for bargaining purposes. The odds are, they’ll let the passengers go. For them, we civilians constitute a headache.” She stared at him. “A ‘headache’? Why, Jim, with you aboard and the Bishop and the deputy, they’ve captured a real prize. Don’t you think these men know that?” He reflected. “No. I don’t believe they studied the passenger list.” She shrugged. “Even if they didn’t know in advance, by now they must realize.” “How?” “Senator Carey! Do you recall giving out your autograph to a whole pack of students back in the airport lounge? Do you think you were invisible? If I saw you, these men must have. And you had Sophie giving out autographs too. Don’t tell me a hijacker wouldn’t be interested. Why, this is the most important international hijacking that’s ever happened. Those millionaires up in first class are just the meringue on the pie.”

The plane emerged from the cloud cover. A patch of water was sighted, but then a swirl of fog came in. No visibility, Cameron reported from his window. The pilot had decreased speed. “Oh, God, what now?” said Aileen. “Holding pattern,” explained Carey. “Could be the fog. Or could be the pilot negotiating with the control tower for permission to land. Or could be he’s just waiting his turn.” “Wouldn’t you think that at least we’d have priority?” Aileen exclaimed, irritably stabbing out her cigarette. Then a rift in the fog opened up. Van Vliet de Jonge rose in his seat, like a rider in stirrups. “Holland!” he called out.
“Nederland!”
Tears of laughter were running down his handsome ruddy cheeks. The fog closed in again. The plane continued to circle.