Cannibals and Missionaries (31 page)

Jeroen ought to have foreseen that. When poor Greet, all unsuspecting, came by with the tickets and the hotel vouchers, it had been too late to change. Everything depended on adherence to the schedule, which had the family’s departure from Schiphol synchronizing with the Boeing’s departure from De Gaulle and following, by eighteen hours, on the crossing of the border at Maastricht by the German-led detail. The man’s sudden balking, at that juncture, could have been a real disaster. Luckily, he had allowed Greet and his disappointed family to persuade him to overlook, for once, the observance of the Sabbath: the fault would not be his but Hamburg’s for setting an inflexible date. And on the way to the airport, as the woman pointed out, they could get the Gereformeerd service on the car radio.

Aside from this conscientious obstacle—the ultimate close shave—the family had given no real problems. Early Sunday morning, Elfride and Horst had arrived at the farmhouse in the by-now-familiar truck, explaining that the Dutch crew would follow: they had been held up in Amsterdam by trouble with one of the cameras; probably the family would cross them on the road. The woman, at Greet’s suggestion, had prepared a list of instructions as to the watering of the plants, the regulation of the thermostat, disposal of the garbage, and so on. The Fiesta was already packed, and the man was worrying about parking it at the airport in a place where it would not be stolen—“too many lawless elements these days,” he told Horst in broken German. Then came the transfer of the keys, and for an instant Elfride thought she saw a shade of doubt in the woman’s eyes; clearly she would rather have Greet, who spoke her language, to entrust them to—that would be almost like “in the family.” The man told her to hurry. Outside, the children, restless and eager to leave, were examining the truck. The older boy was pulling at one of the stickers. He called out something in Dutch. “Look,
moeder,
it comes off!” was what he was saying, plainly. He held up the sticker in his grubby little hand. Elfride caught her breath. She was sure she saw a funny, thoughtful expression come over the woman’s face. But Horst was really a wonder.
“Ja, ja,
it comes off,” he told the child in German, with a hearty laugh. “Now let’s put it back, shall we?” Seeing his good humor, the woman scolded the child.
“Genoeg!”
she said—“That’s enough.” Then, to Horst, “Excuse it.” Whatever she may have asked herself for a fleeting second, the importance of the stickers had not sunk into her mind. The Fiesta drove off, with the children waving from the rear window. In a few minutes, the back-up car waiting with Yusuf and Carlos was able to emerge from a side road off the highway. Supplies and the short-wave radio were swiftly transferred to the house. Werner, the driver, would head straight for the German border. The truck, stolen in Rotterdam, with the false Hamburg license-plate and altered serial number, had no further part to play; eventually it would be found by the police in the parking lot at Schiphol, where the young comrade assigned to fetch it had been instructed to abandon it after wiping off his fingerprints.

Now, two days later, Jeroen sat at the kitchen table before the short-wave set, holding an earphone to his right ear—the hearing of the left had been impaired by a beating he had got in a “Red Youth” demonstration in The Hague. The breakfast service was finished. The Air France people had washed up the coffee-pot and cleared off the paper plates and cups, which would be burned in the outdoor incinerator when the right moment came. He was alone. The kitchen had been declared out of bounds except to the Air France cabin crew and the two Dutch pilots. It had been decided to treat them as neutrals; they were working folk, with the usual pay grievances, and so, in principle, capable of being radicalized—Greet herself was a former KLM hostess, won to the just cause during a siege on the Cairo air-strip. In any case, their services were needed for the preparation and issue of food. Jeroen had elected to make the kitchen their command post because of its size, the unbroken view from the windows, and the privacy it offered during most of the day; it had sliding doors, which could be closed, as now, when important business was being transacted. Moreover, it pleased him to sit in a kitchen.

Werner’s voice was coming through, clearly now, from Aachen. Still no news. Irritably, Jeroen put down the earphone and pushed the big set aside: he did not need to be reminded of the time difference; he knew quite well that it was only four in the morning in New York. Of course it was too early to expect a full report on the list of eleven parasites that Aachen had relayed to the comrades there; obviously museums and galleries would not open till ten, which would be four in the afternoon here. But there were other sources; newspapers stayed open all night. The names he and Greet had hurried last night to copy from the first-class passports must be on file in any newspaper “morgue.” In that metropolis, surely, there were also students of art, critics of art, professors of art, with links to the movement who could be waked up for consultation. Some relevant information, however incomplete, should have reached the cell in Aachen by this time; the details could be filled in when the museums and art libraries opened.

But the names “Ramsbotham,” “Tallboys,” “Potter,” “Chadwick,” et cetera—with home cities added to avoid the possibility of confusion—had produced from New York, so far, only such banalities as “millionaire sportsman,” “fat cat,” “self-styled philanthropist,” “extreme right-winger.” Not a word suggestive of art patronage, to the point where Jeroen was beginning to wonder whether he and Greet had not made a mistake. Had they been too impulsive in departing, on their own initiative, from the agreed-on plan calling for the release of all first-class passengers? When they had got wind of a tour of collectors aboard the Boeing, it had seemed, at least to Jeroen, a challenge that could not be refused. Now, however, he asked himself if he and Greet had not over-reacted when she had hurried forward bringing word of “Giorgiones and Titians” belonging to a tour of millionaires traveling in first class: she had heard the little liberal woman say so. But that woman was an exaggerator, as they had since observed. Perhaps these people were not art collectors at all but just ordinary rich people who “owned” a painting or two.

To have seized a group of ordinary rich people, even millionaires, held no interest for Jeroen. Money, though it would have to figure on the list of demands, was the least of the commando’s objectives. Furthermore, extorting ransom from a handful of plutocrats would fatally shift the emphasis: a jugular strike based on principle and aimed dramatically at the “superstructure,” in Marxian terms, of Western capitalism would take on the appearance of another pinprick hardly distinguishable from run-of-the-mill criminality. Millionaires could pay “a king’s ransom” and barely feel it, just as your rich bourgeois, held up on the street, surrendered his purse gladly, unlike the poor man—there was plenty more where it came from. To deal a blow at this society, it was necessary to take from it something it deemed irreplaceable.

That, at any rate, had been the concept behind the capture of the Boeing, known to be carrying an international committee of liberal cat’s paws of the energy interests to investigate torture in Iran. The other passengers were of no concern—bystanders or civilians, to be sent about their business as rapidly as possible. “Excess baggage,” as Horst had formulated it; for the coup to make its point, the committee must be
seen
to be the exclusive target. Seizing this body of self-appointed just men on an errand of mercy to the Third World struck at the core of the West’s pious notion of itself. And to strike not at random but selectively, choosing showcase models of civic virtue whose price was above rubies and whom the West would have to save at any cost or renounce its image of “caring,” was, of course, sacrilege. Without sacrilege, as history showed, there could be no terror worthy of the name. And the fact that these good souls were journeying on a patently selfless mission, in Economy class as befitted their social outlook, could be counted on to add to the horror and condemnation the deed would call forth. A reaction of universal shock and outrage was essential to the success of the design. There would have been nothing like it since the Olympic Games “massacre,” and those were only athletes.

To the people’s ear, the chorus of indignation would have a comic sound, for the West, in fact, set no value on concerned and high-minded citizens except when they could be used to further some purpose of its own. Had this committee perished in a plane crash, Washington, ordering a day of remembrance, would have been relieved, on the whole, to be rid of them, since its anti-Soviet interest required a simulation of friendship with the Shah, despite pressures from business elements hurt by the oil “squeeze” and desirous of a tougher line with him—this conflict of interests, out of which such a committee of innocents would tend to be born, was a typical contradiction of late capitalism.

Yet a pretense of valuing its critics was still essential to the system in its present stage, and the price of maintaining the pretense in this case was going to be rather high. To save these sacred skins, the horrified West would have to accept an exchange: for every just man, four people’s army militants, to be released from the imperialists’ jails. Having calculated the ratio with an eye to due measure, Jeroen had not believed that they should ask more. To ask more might decide the imperialists to refuse any concessions, on the ground that terror, knowing no bounds, could be met only with firmness. For the commando, there would then be nothing for it but to execute the prisoners.

In the new circumstances, however, that thinking was no longer viable. It had been natural to postulate the release of class-war militants according to a strict ratio, particularly for the German comrades, who had had Andreas and Ulrike in mind and Gudrun and Jan-Carl and the other Werner and Irmgaard…. But that goal, they would have to see, was no longer within reach of the commando. Study of the passports proved that, contrary to earlier and supposedly “sure” information, the venerable prelate from Köln was not among the prisoners—Greet and Jeroen, in the Boeing, had already thought as much—hence, Bonn could sit back and smile at the fantasy of such a demand. Similarly, an American rabbi and Israeli stooge “guaranteed” to be with this committee was nowhere in evidence, so that the Zionist state could smile, too, at any ultimatum calling for the freeing of the Arab brothers it held. Bad luck for the Palestinian army, but it would have to be accepted. The whole position would have to be re-thought, in view of the current actuality, and larger demands conceived. It was a challenge to the imagination to find a truly radical approach. The old formula of a body-for-bodies exchange was too often unproductive, leading to killing for want of a better result. The enemy by his attitude, rather than proletarian justice, dictated your disposal of the prisoners.

In any case, killing was not a choice Jeroen cared to make except as a last resort. Killing the cat had been a botch, offensive to his workman’s instinct; he had felt momentary pleasure in the act of taking aim, but using the poor creature to set an example to the passengers had surely been unnecessary. He blamed his nerves, which had been on edge as the pilot kept circling over Schiphol and it had begun to look as if they could not land. Killing accomplished little and with forethought could usually be avoided. As for torture, that was not envisioned. Elfride had been eager to give these liberals a taste of the conditions of detention suffered by comrades in the imperialists’ jails. But solitary confinement, as at Stammheim, in a windowless box with a judas-hole and a blinding overhead light burning night and day, was clearly impossible in these living quarters which had not been designed as a prison. Perfect reciprocity—an eye for an eye—was an ideal that the revolutionary with his inferior means could not hope to achieve. Furthermore, the age of most of the hostages and their soft habits of life would make simple detention, with the inevitable crowding and inadequate toilet facilities, a species of harsh punishment that in their case suited the crime.

“Torture” in fact was the word they were already using to describe having had to sleep without blankets or mattress “like sardines in a can,” one lot on the floor of the family livingroom and the rest in the unfinished attic—those who had passed the night in the living-room objected to the bad air and those who had been sent to the attic protested the lack of heating. Posted with his rifle at the head of the stairway, Carlos had had to hear their grumblings and their intermittent snores. And now Greet reported that a petition was about to be presented by the pastor asking, on humane grounds, that any who wished it should be allowed to sleep in the helicopter; in the family room they were still disputing over the wording. Jeroen could have told them that they were wasting their breath. It was a rule of guerrilla operations never to disperse your hostages.

In the original plan, of course, excessive crowding had not been foreseen. The addition of twelve from first class to the nucleus of eight liberals was responsible. Yet if these people proved to be important collectors of art, then the difficulties of housekeeping and management created by their numbers would seem slight in comparison to the matchless opportunity their uninteresting bodies represented. If their collections were to contain a single Titian or Giorgione, their presence in the chosen plane constituted a windfall that Jeroen in his wildest dreams would hardly have dared to conceive.

Back in the Boeing, having brought him the incredible news, Greet, woman-like, had cooled in the face of his enthusiasm. All at once, she professed not to see the difference between a collector of paintings and any other Mr. or Mrs. Moneybags. “What causes you to think they are better, pray?” “Not they in themselves,” he had answered. “What they have is better. Better than cars or yachts or ‘securities.’ Maybe not in our eyes but in the eyes of their society.” “In
your
eyes, Jeroen,” Greet had retorted. “I do not like to see you so excited.” And in a moment she had added “I think I am sorry I told you.” Faced with that wilful blindness, he had had to make her understand the uniqueness of the opportunity: finding this tour aboard put them within striking distance of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of priceless works of art. How they would manage to get hold of a few of those treasures was not yet clear to him. He would have to think, he had told her. But once they
had
managed it, no demand would be too bold. This society had two talismans: one moral and therefore hypocritical, honored by lip service, and the other material, honored in daily practice and most highly venerated in the form of works of art. In the interior of the Boeing, by one chance in a million, the pair coexisted, even if for the moment the art works were present only nominally, at a second remove. Such a chance would never arise again; if they let the collectors go, they would renounce a prize that would not be offered them twice. If they kept them, they ran no extra risk.