Cannibals and Missionaries (32 page)

In the end, his arguments had persuaded her. The polder house, he had showed her, was one incentive the more, almost dictating their action to them. When again would they possess a stronghold with ample storage facilities, completely isolated and yet accessible by helicopter? It would not even be necessary for the helicopters bringing the canvases to land; their cargo could be dropped in the open field. In the event that large canvases were delivered—statuary, unless small, should not be attempted—the barn roof could be finished and insulated, which would be a job for the hostages.

Jeroen sighed. Thinking backward, to the great moment of decision in the Boeing, his mind was leaping too far ahead. Doggedly, he pulled the set to him and tried the Aachen frequency. Only static. Yet he could not make a serious plan until he knew what the collections, if in fact they existed, consisted of. There was no point in interrogating the prisoners, as Carlos had proposed: they would lie. And if there were no important works of art in the collections, it was hardly worth the effort. Better to get rid of the whole tour, though he could not think how. He would not accept dubious attributions or “school” or “follower” works. And no American stuff. His heart was set on the masters. He wanted Rubens, Rembrandt, Goya, Vermeer, as well as the Titians and Giorgiones, which may have been only a figure of speech. With American buying power in mind, he had been choosing, letting his memory range over the whole history of art. “You have gone back to your old love, Jeroen,” Greet had reproached him on the plane. Now she slid open the door and, seeing him with the radio, she said it again. “Back to your first love. Be careful, Jeroen.”

The accusation was partly true. In his young days in Amsterdam, when the word
“waarde”
had sounded in his brain, it had not once occurred to him to work to become rich so that he could own a fine canal house with pictures in it. His idea had been to consecrate himself, in poverty like a monk, to the value people called “art” by learning, if possible, to make some of it himself. As though to pay back a debt he owed for the joy his eyes were experiencing in the museums and along the canals. For a time he tried to teach himself by sketching in the Rijksmuseum and eventually also in the Stedelijkmuseum—he still loved Van Gogh as a person and as an artist. He went to night classes in drawing. But then he became interested in his trade union and began to give his evenings to union meetings and slowly he grew disillusioned with art. Next, moving steadily leftward, by a process that now seemed to him logical and as natural as the growth process in an organism, he joined the Party. There he got his only higher education—his parents had put him to work at the legal school-quitting age of sixteen. In the Party, too, he had learned to make prints and to letter; they paid for his going to classes and used his crude work in posters and handbills and sometimes in
De Waarheid,
their paper. He knew it was crude and was proud of that, for now the sole value he saw in art was that of transmitting messages to the people to incite them to action—at election times he painted wooden placards to be placed on the bridges urging the masses to vote for the C.P.N. He hated “art for art’s sake,” though he accepted the Party’s teaching that in a classless society such a wasteful indulgence could finally be afforded. Then he became disillusioned with the Party and turned sharply against it. He saw that he had let himself be deceived: it was merely another part of the system of world-wide oppression—openly as in the Soviet Union or covertly as in Holland, where it served as a willing safety valve for the masses’ discontent. He was ashamed of having had his work in
De Waarheid,
which did not tell the Truth, as its name pretended, but just a different set of lies. When he broke, he passed almost overnight to direct action. He became what was called a terrorist.

Now art, even the Party kind of making propaganda, lost all interest for him, except in the sense that a deed was a work of art—the only true one, he had become convinced. The deed, unless botched, was totally expressive; ends and means coincided. Unlike the Party’s “art as a weapon,” it was pure, its own justification. It had no aim outside itself. The purpose served by the capture of the Boeing was simply the continuance or asseveration of the original thrust; ransom money, the release of fellow-actionists, were not goals in which one came to rest but means of ensuring repetition.

Direct action had a perfect circular motion; it aimed at its own autonomous perpetuation and sovereignty. And the circle, as all students of drawing knew, was the most beautiful of forms. Thus in a sense he had returned to where he had started: terrorism was art for art’s sake in the political realm. Some in the movement believed that their action would give rise to a new society, but this belief was an impurity. Jeroen was not even sure that the construction of a just society ought to concern a revolutionary; that dream had been dreamed too often. He thought Trotsky was right in his notion of the permanent revolution, right but insincere—in his day of power his ruthless repression of the sailors of Kronstadt had exposed his real attitude. Revolution, if it was not just a catchword, should mean revolving, an eternal spinning, the opposite of evolution, so attractive to the bourgeois soul. For the true revolutionary, the only point of rest lay in the stillness at the center of the circle, just as a wheel rapidly turning on its axis gave the appearance of arrested motion.

Such ideas were deeply troubling to Greet. She did not like to hear him state that the struggles of the Palestinian people were merely a parenthesis, to be closed without regret when they had served their purpose—“Your theories again.” She was jealous of his brain, which she regarded as an untrustworthy organ capable of leading him away from her and the others into a foreign sphere. As she sat across the table somberly gazing at him, he could read her mind. She was fearing that his interest in the group of collectors was a sign of softening or backsliding, that he would let himself be diverted by his old passion from the main end. There she was wrong. His “artistic” interest in them was of another sort; he was excited by the sheer beauty of the coup he envisioned. He had seen that they could be
transmuted;
it only needed the Midas touch of exchanging them against their masterpieces to turn their base substance into pure gold. The method of persuasion remained to be studied—whatever was best calculated to convince the collectors to accept the principle of paying their ransom “in kind.” He foresaw a two-way airlift: crates of art descending, the “owners” ascending, to be shipped back home or to Teheran according to their mood. The transfer would put an end to the crowding and, far more interesting, it would render the farmhouse impregnable. Once the house contained irreplaceable masterpieces, any notion of taking it by storm would have to be abandoned by the imperialists unless they wished to pass for “barbarians” before the eyes of their entire “civilized” world. At that point, the commando could dictate its own terms and at its own good leisure; there would be no hurry.

Yet in the immediate time was pressing. It might only be a matter of hours before the disguise of the polder house was penetrated. The short-wave radio, indispensable as it was at this stage, was also a danger that had to be reckoned with. If the enemy were to pick up the “pirate” transmissions, the unlicensed frequencies could of course be spotted, and the authorities at both ends, having mapped the bearings, would swiftly close in. Here on the polder, the hostages were a safeguard, precluding an instant swoop, but the comrades in Aachen risked being surprised with their mobile transmitter by a cordon of police. Each transmission was increasing the likelihood of detection. The remedy was to shift to another set of frequencies, but there was a limit to how long that game could be played. Out of regard for the Aachen comrades, communications should be discontinued at the earliest possible moment. Yet to break off contact while New York was still to be heard from would constitute a defeat, and the Aachen cell, so far, agreed. For a while longer, Werner would keep trying and accept the risk, only moving to a neighboring frequency, by agreement, every third hour. The best hope was that the possibility of clandestine transmissions to and from the “criminal band” would be slow to occur to the authorities. And up to now there had been no discernible attempt at jamming—the usual warning sign. Yet unfortunately the absence of interference could read in two opposite senses.

There was nothing to do but stupidly wait. The fact that this morning no plane had yet come prowling overhead was at least a reassurance. The fools might be off on another track. Every hour the radio announced that an “energetic” hunt for the missing helicopter was in progress but gave no particulars. The evening news on television was bound to be fuller, if only in order to pander to the public’s craving for thrills; they might even be shown the “dragnet” of search planes and police with walkie-talkies, or would it be merely interviews with the Defense and Justice ministers and the families of the hostages? Belgian and German radio reported a “security blanket,” and of course there was not a hope of seeing a newspaper. As the hours passed, Jeroen grew unwontedly restless. To be marooned here with no news except that doled out by official sources was an experience he had not pictured in his planning. He felt cut off, left out of events and decisions that nevertheless should concern him as a prime actor—hardly, in that respect, in a better position than the hostages, who must be guessing and speculating too.

The final ridiculous touch was to discover this morning that the farm couple had had their telephone service suspended: the farmer had indicated to Horst that there was a coin box down the highway in case the crew needed to place long-distance calls. That was of no significance, so long as they had the radio, but the sight of the dead instrument on the kitchen counter was a sour reminder of the meanness and mistrust in the bourgeois nature, preparing petty frustrations for the foreigner in return for his generosity—what if the “crew” from Hamburg had urgently needed a doctor?

Adding to Jeroen’s own frustration was the feeling that the comrades here were showing a certain reserve toward his plans for the collectors. He could count on Greet; she was loyal, in spite of her cavils. And in fairness he could not expect Horst and Elfride and Carlos to immediately share his enthusiasm; not having been on the Boeing, they had learned only last night of the abrupt revision of the program that had raised the number of hostages from eight to twenty. As for the Arabs, they had not yet had the collectors explained to them—there would be time enough for that when New York had pronounced—and had not been moved to ask; for them, the evidence that these additional people were rich was doubtless sufficient reason for their being here. It was depressing, though, that Werner, on being told late last night by radio of the unforeseen development, had responded almost with ecstasy
(“Wunderbar, nicht? Unglaublich!”),
while those here on the spot had had only neutral comments, as if to say time would tell. Nor had they warmed up appreciably as time had gone by.

It must be the waiting and watching him fiddle uselessly with the radio. Werner, in freedom, had the active part, telephoning New York, and on his own initiative making roundabout inquiries of a famous Aachen collector, who, however, knew only hyper-realism, post-op, post-pop, earth art, and the Americans who collected such
rommel.
Here the comrades were condemned to unemployment; they had nothing to do but eat and stand guard and rebuff the hostages’ incessant demands for news.

Inactivity was the problem. From being masters of the situation, they were slipping into a state of dependency and powerlessness in respect to the outside world. The moment they got the information, good tidings or bad, it would be necessary, Jeroen decided, for the commando to assert itself and abandon this cat-and-mouse game. There could be no further need for hiding and waiting, maiden-like, to be found. An announcement from the command post would declare its location—why not? A flag might even be flown, boldly, from the roof. Making one on the Singer from the housewife’s scraps of dressmaking material would give the hostages something to do. Some of the present precautions could be relaxed. There was no reason that the prisoners should not be permitted to go for short walks around the house, twice a day, under guard. For aerial reconnaissance to observe them at their exercise could do no harm. Jeroen did not agree that the headquarters should be regarded as a punitive re-education center—Elfride’s idea, typically German. Contrary to what she said, it was not his intention to coddle the hostages, but last night’s experience showed that given favorable conditions even the most unpromising human material was capable of cooperation.

The evening meal was being distributed when Aachen finally signaled that it was ready to transmit. Horst was monitoring the set, and the stewardess came running to bring Jeroen from the family room, where he stood looking at television. They were showing Royal Navy dredges dragging the Ijsselmeer for the helicopter—good entertainment; a few of the hostages, seated on the floor, were laughing and clapping. From the shadows on the screen, the time would appear to have been early afternoon, now several hours in the past. Just before dark, doubtless at the close of that costly and fruitless operation, a plane had circled over the farmhouse and disappeared into the sunset; the hostages had watched it through the pastor’s binoculars. Now the house stood in darkness, except for the family room, lit by the television and a single lamp, the playroom upstairs, where the farm children would be doing their homework, the stairway, and the kitchen.

Jeroen seated himself at the table, fitted the gray rubber earphones on his head, took the pencil Horst was holding out to him, and prepared to write. The message was coming through clearly. The code they had settled on was simple, more like a shorthand used by children in a family to communicate among themselves when elders were listening than like the usual ciphers, which were child’s play for the experts to “break.”