Cannibals and Missionaries (25 page)

Now the moon was trying to show itself, and a few stars twinkled in and out of the clouds. The fog had lifted, and, besides, their eyes had adjusted to the darkness. It had to do with the pupils dilating or else contracting, one or the other—Harold, who had started out as a pharmacist, would probably know. They saw Beryl plump herself down on the pavement; she had plenty of padding but she would ruin her nice coat. The others had found it wiser to stay on their feet and keep exercising their limbs—the Senator was throwing imaginary pitches. The temperature was dropping; you could tell because the pavement was getting slippery—a thin glaze of ice had started to form. Along each side of the road ran a ditch, too deep to see whether it held water. Beyond, there were tall reeds or sedges, and some distance off, perhaps half a mile, in the direction from which they had heard the foghorn, they could now make out a house of sorts, distinguishable by the roofline, and a big looming shed or barn. No lights showed.

Every few minutes someone consulted Johnnie’s luminous watch. What had happened to their captors? No one was talking any more. Each seemed to be wrapped in his thoughts. The younger of Warren’s two friends had assumed a yoga posture. Helen’s head jerked on her neck; she was falling asleep on her feet. At that point, forceful Margaret decided to take the reins in her hands. “Rector,” she ordered. “Give us an evening prayer.” When he launched into “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord,” everyone had to laugh—it was so appropriate. Then, looking around like a chairwoman, she called on Van Vliet to tell them what kind of government his country had. “Wait a minute,” burst in Harold. “Don’t say it. Let me have one guess. Socialist.” He had scored on the first try, which seemed to give him some grim satisfaction, though you would think he would rather have been wrong. “Thanks, Maggie, for asking. Now we know.” “Know what?” demanded Beryl. “Know what?” echoed the woman with the wailing Southern voice. They saw the Senator turn his head to listen.

Dear Lily undertook to pour oil on the troubled waters. “There are socialists
and
socialists, Harold. One has to know which kind.” “There’s only one kind,” retorted Harold. The Senator gave a brief laugh and went back to pitching. Johnnie came to Lily’s aid. In his understanding, he said, Holland was something like England—what they liked to call a “welfare state,” with the Queen and Labor. “And isn’t Holland in NATO?” ventured Lily. “I feel sure I read that somewhere.” “You’re thinking of Belgium, Mother.” But Lily was right. Indeed Holland was in NATO, Mr. Van Vliet assured them. And he tiptoed over to the “whirlybird” and tenderly patted the little tail-propeller. “The NATO shield.” Even Harold had to chuckle when the humor of it was explained to him. The “chopper” was part of the NATO defense screen. Mr. Van Vliet’s government had borrowed it from the Germans. To oblige a team of international terrorists. “A crazy world,” summed up Lily’s rector-as-was.

But after that “light moment,” despondency returned. Seven o’clock came and still no sign of the main hijackers. “Abdul” and “Ahmed” were talking in low voices. Maybe they too were getting worried. Harold wondered why Dutch planes had not started looking for the party. “Christ, our course could have been plotted by radar. They ought to have pinpointed where we are. By now we should have heard some action overhead.” But the partly covered sky was silent, and a new tooting of foghorns indicated a very obvious reason: no search plane would undertake a mission in this weather. “I’m scared, Chaddie,” said Eloise. In fact they were all growing frightened. Older people could perish of exposure if left standing here all night. And the odor of whiskey still emanating from the Vuitton case was tantalizing, to say the least. What a pity that Henry had not packed his private stock more carefully.

If another half-hour were to pass in this vain waiting, some initiative would have to be taken. Everyone might decide to move in a body back into the helicopter, where at least there were seats and some shelter. Or start a bonfire—there were those leafless young trees along the road that appeared to be poplars; the men could tear branches off, although the wood might be too damp to burn. But first one would have to convince the two Arabs, who must be freezing themselves, to let them disobey Gretel’s order; perhaps Beryl could try.

Life was full of irony. The last thing one would have expected was that one would find oneself longing for Hans and Gretel to return. Why were they staying away so long? Had something dreadful happened back there in that house? The conspirators might have got into an argument and killed each other in a shoot-out. Or blown themselves up while wiring the place with explosives. But then one would have heard the noise. The wildest conjectures must be passing through every mind, though no one dared voice them. It was like being left by one’s nurse as a child in the park with one’s pail and shovel and told to stay put till she came back. The fears that rose to assail one when she did not appear for hours and one’s little feet were getting cold! That she had been run over by a car, that she had got lost in the park, that the bogey-man had taken her, that she had just walked off on purpose and was never coming back. That sense of utter abandonment—it was odd to feel it now. And the same fear one had had then of disobeying by going to look for her. Nurse, as one knew now, had simply been off with some young man and when she came back, she was cross that one was frightened and made one promise not to tell the Missus. Well, most of us have had such experiences, and they leave a mark.

Of course the situations were not parallel. One had usually loved Nurse. One had wanted her never to leave. While if one was sure that Hans and Gretel had disappeared for good, it would be bliss beyond belief. It was the doubt that was so harrowing. Rather than remain a prey to useless guessing and imagining, not to mention desperately hungry and chilled to the bone, almost anybody, actually, would prefer to see their scowling faces. It was normal to be silently pleading for them to come back soon: “
Please,
Hans and Gretel, where are you?” And the Bishop, too, of course. How strange to have almost forgotten about him.

Seven

I
T WOULD BE AN
exaggeration to say that these people had never been so glad to see anyone in their lives. More exactly (Sophie estimated), no sound of footsteps had ever been so welcome to them as the purposeful tread advancing almost in march-time—the leaders had changed their footwear and were wearing thick boots. All too soon, naturally, they were perceived again in their true colors—hardly had they shown their faces when it was obvious that the leopard had not changed his spots. Absent, they had been idealized: it was curious how, within the mere space of an anxious hour or so, the group huddled here had succeeded in forgetting what their captors had been like. Apprehension as to what was coming next would have been the rational emotion. Instead, if her own feelings were an index, the nearing steps of the
kapers,
heralded by a distant snapping of twigs, had evoked simple gratitude: they were a rescue party.

Their return meant food, shelter, sleep, possibly a blanket—civilization. At any rate, to Sophie: she had been picturing the shadowy house off there as a sort of canteen or mess, with cauldrons of hot soup, bread, Dutch cheese, coffee. She had not eaten a full meal for seventy-two hours. And for the older people, people of her parents’ age, all this must have been much harder. She was hungry, and her legs, encased like sausages in these elegant leather boots, had lost all feeling. Yet as a journalist she was familiar with rough assignments—she had humped about in army trucks and slept in a cave alongside guerrillas eager to be interviewed; she had lived for days on a diet of black beans and rice—and furthermore she was thirty-six, still young. The older people, with their hardening arteries and poor circulation, not to mention proneness to worry, could only be objects of compassion to someone so junior and so far ahead in experience. For their sake, she tried to picture army cots in the house or barn or at least rows of mattresses; if this was to last long, sleep would become essential for keeping a steady head. For her, hay or the floor would do, if only she could get these boots off—a razor, she feared, might be required.

She felt sorriest for the art collectors. A millionaire’s life was no preparation for the trials of being a hostage. Perhaps, in the light of present-day trends, they should be getting special training courses to harden them up for the eventuality. But in fact the collectors had borne up remarkably well, and she wondered whether her parents could have equaled them—they had the double handicap of being semi-rich and Jewish, which taken together seemed to soften the fibre. These super-rich Wasps had been lambs on the whole: no complaints, no moans, just the stately silliness proper to their station in life. The only black sheep among them had been the quarrelsome man with the Midwestern accent and the younger wife; it was hard to imagine what art he collected—cock-fighting subjects? On the fringe, as if not quite accepted among the super-rich, was a pair of queens with the usual age difference between them. They were bearing up well too, considering the fact that they
were
on the fringe. She tried to guess what the parched old one collected—the other probably cooked, drove the car, and generally catered—prints, she thought: Beardsley first impressions, Klimt, Cocteau, Japanese erotica.

The fat girl, Beryl Somebody, Sophie remembered from school; she was the one who had appeared in the sixth-form year with a trunkful of incredible clothes that she had cut to pieces with a pinking shears on a dreary Sunday afternoon in a fit of misery or boredom while her roommate looked on. It was easy to sympathize with the act, which had contrived to get her expelled—a thing that almost never happened at Putney and caused her to stand out in the memory as someone who had put Mrs. H.’s progressiveness to the supreme test. She deserved a commemorative plaque, really, for exposing the hypocrisy of the place. It had been odd to find her again, traveling with her mother and dressed in a long lustrous matronly mink coat but otherwise not much changed from the old Beryl. She was still fat and flaxen with made-up electric blue eyes that blinked like a china doll’s and still a disciplinary problem, or so it sounded. Sophie saw that she could not have changed greatly herself, for it was clear that Beryl remembered her too. “Hi, there,” she had muttered over her shoulder as they were boarding the helicopter. Later they might have a chat, dormitory style, when Sophie’s boots were off and the older generation would be snoozing, having taken its Valium or sleeping-pill.

But something was wrong with that picture. They were not going to be bedded down yet. And where was the Bishop? The hijackers had not brought him back with them. The realization seemed to steal over the whole group of hostages in the course of an instant, as though they were one body that had been nudged to attention. What had this pair done with the nice old man? Near her, eyebrows shot up, making points of interrogation; shrugging shoulders replied in dumb show. Nobody, Sophie supposed, wished to be the one to ask, partly for fear of learning the answer but mostly for fear of angering their hosts—if that was the right word for these redoubtable people. In any case, for the moment the leaders were unapproachable—they were over by the helicopter arguing heatedly with the pilot; their voices were raised—and the Arabs, though available, could claim not to know. If other members of the band had come back with the leaders, they were waiting silently in the bushes.

Sophie told herself that there could be an innocent explanation for the Bishop’s disappearance, and no doubt her fellow-hostages were telling themselves the same thing. He might be asleep, for instance. Yet this sop she was offering her conscience for not speaking up—“Where is the Bishop?” she was free to shout, or “Please, where is Bishop Hurlbut?”—failed to be effective, since from long experience she recognized it as a sop. She sensed in herself a reluctance to antagonize that she knew too well, a disabling reluctance for someone in her profession. She had proof of her physical courage and the courage of her pen, but spoken words, for her, were different. It was not mere dread of offending a powerful person but embarrassment: she did not like to ask a point-blank question when the anticipated reply, or evasion, was something only a prosecuting attorney could pounce on with joy. She had given long thought to this subject; was it tact or shyness or femininity that inhibited her? She was sure that if she had had the bad fate to interview Nixon, she would have helped him cover up, at least while she sat in his office under his shifty eye. Poor girl (she sighed to herself), she wanted to be “clean.” She always pitied confessors, who in their stuffy intimate boxes had to hear and wash away such a lot of dirty sins. And tonight, added to that squeamishness was a plain, weak, selfish desire not to incur the special hostility of “Hans” and “Gretel,” as the collectors were calling them—naming the animals, the Senator had observed. She was the only Jew, she guessed, in this whole caboodle; why should it fall to her to speak up?

But the parson, thank God, had recognized his duty. They watched him approach the Arab guard and secure a permission, apparently. Then he brought out a pocket handkerchief—plaid, but in the dark it could pass for white—and holding it up as a truce flag he manfully crossed the open ground to the helicopter, where the second pilot had joined the loud debate. Two flashlight beams played over the tall missionary form. “He’s asking,” Simmons marveled. “I wouldn’t have the courage; honestly, would you? But then he has to. Being his brother’s keeper, I mean.” “He’s getting the bum’s rush,” commented Harold. It was true. In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, the parson was hurtling back toward his companions; a rough final shove from the older Arab caused him to slip on the icy pavement—he fell. “I guess they mean business,” he said, trying to laugh as he picked himself up. He applied the flag of truce, groaning, to his shin. But it was only a scrape. “And so what did they tell you?” Sophie demanded. “Nothing. Not a darned thing. She just gave me a piece of her mind for butting in. Quite a scold, she is. A regular martinet.” Soon the woman herself strode up, as if to enforce the lesson poor Mr. Barber had got. The dispute with the pilots—whatever it had been about—seemed to be over. But something had left her in a vicious humor. “We are not here to answer your questions. We are not accountable to you swine. You were ordered not to disperse, and one of you has disobeyed. Now you will form a line, quickly. We have no time to waste.”