Cannibals and Missionaries (26 page)

The erect old collector reached for his wife’s dressing-case. “Here you are, Helen. Margaret, my dear, where’s yours?” “Drop that case!” exclaimed the woman. “And form a line, I said.” “But we need our things,” protested Harold’s wife. “Our night things, don’t you see, so as to go to bed.” She might have been explaining matters to a child, Sophie thought. “‘Beddy-bye,’
‘do-do,’”
the mincing voice went on. “Forget
do-do,
Mrs. Parasite,” said the woman. “You are going to be put to work.” “Me?” “Some of you. All of you. We will decide.” What work could she mean? Uncertainly, the hostages lined up and faced the two confederates. Like confused recruits, they did not understand the order and were too frightened to ask more. All that was clear to Sophie was that the leaders were making a selection. They went down the long line using their little flashlights like methodical probes. After a brief appearance the moon had gone in again, and the last few stars were covered. The dancing rays of light made the dark seem darker. Sophie was glad to know, anyway, that she had Henk on her right side and on her left Jim Carey, who laced his fingers firmly in hers and murmured “Whatever’s coming, let’s the three of us try to stay together.” On his other side was Simmons; a faint shriek came from that quarter. “He was
feeling
me, Jim,” the wailing voice confided. “What part of you?” asked the Senator. “I guess you’d call it my biceps,” she admitted, raising a laugh. “Auschwitz,” muttered Sophie, not finding this very funny. Paranoia, perhaps, but it did seem to her that a Nazi-style sifting of those fit to work was going on. What would they do with the others—kill them or save the ammunition and leave them to die of exposure? She asked herself what it meant that neither of the two had bothered to test
her
muscles. Again she considered the fact of being Jewish: did that classify her as fit to work or the opposite? Hunger was making her light-headed. If she was slightly delirious, that would account for the somber imaginings that were assailing her—her own special pink elephants; her parents had got out of Frankfurt early, but distant relatives from the French branch had died in the ovens. “Fall out,” barked the woman. Sophie jumped. “Ahmed, take him away.” It was Charles the woman was speaking of. How shameful to feel relief.

Yet the elimination of Charles threw a new and terribly clear light on the Bishop’s disappearance. In a flash the confusion in her head was replaced by hyper-lucidity. The old and the unfit. “Take him away”—a code expression, most likely, on the model of “the final solution” or “Waste ’em” in Vietnam. At the same time, in another part of her mind she was finding it wildly comical that “Ahmed’s” name was Ahmed. And in still a different compartment, her brain was working on a hideous new theory: the Bishop had died of a heart attack,
or
they had killed him, and they were picking a burial squad. Sophie could not stand it. “I’m going to
demand
that they tell us. If they won’t say where he is, it means they’ve done away with him.” “What good will it do us to know, Sophie?” Carey said gently, stroking her cold fingers. “It
always
does good to know,” Sophie said passionately, pushing his hand away. “No talking there!” shouted the man’s voice. A flashlight was turned in their direction. In its path Sophie distinctly saw—unless it was a hallucination—a figure carrying a shovel crossing the road. Her knees began to buckle. “Henk!” she appealed, in a whisper. He was not there. It was like waking up from a bad dream and finding the place beside you empty. But he had merely stepped forward, without saying a word. The leaders saw him. “Back in line there, Deputy. Take your place.”

He was not going to obey. He stood there quite coolly (she could tell from his profile and the tilt of his chin), his head thrown back as if idly contemplating the sky. As she watched, he calmly folded his arms and continued to gaze upward, like the musing figure of a poet in a German Romantic painting—all he lacked was a black cloak wrapped around him. Sophie smiled; in this half-minute she had grown uncannily calm herself. No doubt it was the advent of real danger that had done it. She ought to tremble at his daring; instead, she was content—perhaps the true word was “thrilled”—that he was standing his ground.

If Henk did not move, she reasoned, they would come over to him themselves. The odds were that they would not shoot him unless they had to. A little plume of white vapor, like smoke, came from the nostril she could see and made her think of a bull-god snorting. And of course he was not a political animal for nothing; the bold strategy was working. First the man and then the woman materialized from the shadows, drawn as if by a magnet or by common, normal curiosity—an underrated force of attraction. Henk shifted his head in their direction, like somebody who thought he had heard visitors. The man said something in Dutch. Henk answered with a word that sounded like “Nay.” Stepping up rather too close to him, the woman pointed her flashlight into his face. He ignored it and started talking to the man. Then he made an irritable gesture, as if to ward off the beam of light, like a buzzing fly, from his eyes. The man’s hand suddenly closed over the woman’s; he clicked her flashlight off. His own he kept pointed at the pavement, lighting up patches of ice. Henk continued. “He’s asking about the Bishop,” Sophie murmured to Carey. “I heard him say
‘bisschop.’”
They strained their ears to follow. Carey caught the words
“oud man”
which must be “old man.” But as the rapid exchange went on, they could pick up less and less. Their German was not much help; the pronunciation was too different. The recurring “Nay,” a nasal sound, was evidently “No” or
“Nein,”
and the woman kept interrupting with what sounded like
“haast hebben,”
which might be kin to German
“Die Hast”
and English “hurry.”

If so, she was not the only impatient one. From the far end of the line, the unmistakable voice of Harold called out. “What’s going on? What are you telling them, de Jonge?” He must have received a cuff or a sharp poke from an Arab gun butt, for there was a loud grunt and he subsided. The discussion in Dutch went on. The word “helicopter,” however spelled, was being pronounced. Sophie turned quickly to Carey. He had got it too. He emitted a soft whistle. She could not guess what he was surmising, but for her part Sophie had just had a sudden joyful suspicion. Was the Bishop going to be evacuated, as an act of mercy—“medevac,” the Army would have called it in Vietnam—and Charles too? “Bishop,” “old man,” “helicopter,” even
“hebben haast”—
it all added up to that. As for the work-detail the leaders had been choosing, that could be for ordinary chores; collecting firewood, for instance, or KP—nothing would make her happier now than to be set to peeling potatoes, especially if she knew than an ailing old cleric and his ancient crony were going to be flown out. She blessed Henk for his gift of persuasion. The hulking man, she estimated, was more than half convinced; at least he was listening and nodding his head up and down, as if pondering. And the woman was staying out of it. Her restless flashlight was on again, playing over the pavement. Sophie’s eye absently followed it. She froze. Lying by the edge of the road were
two
shovels.

“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.”