Cannibals and Missionaries (34 page)

Henk tapped his head warningly with a forefinger, and Sophie nodded. But the others were going to argue with this lunatic. “Now wait a minute there!” burst out the minister. “You’re taking a very illiberal attitude. An ignorant attitude, sir. The Gospels aren’t signed, and do you refuse to read them? Do you close your mind to Homer?” “I agree, Reverend,” cried Aileen. “Why should we have to listen to this affluent nonsense? Does he refuse to read the Dow Index and the Stock Exchange quotations? They’re not signed, but I’ll bet he reads them
religiously.
Don’t you? Come on, admit it!” “But he doesn’t,” said Helen. “Henry says a gentleman leaves the financial page to his broker.”

“Does he leave it to his butler to shit for him?” called out Victor from the next room. Attracted by the raised voices, a group was collecting in the doorway. Carey stood in the center with folded arms and a look of amusement. Beside him appeared Harold, truculent as always. “What’s going on? Was somebody in here talking about climbers?” “Climbing
roses,
Chaddie,” said Eloise. “Now they’re arguing about some silly report on torture.” “What do you mean, ‘silly’?” “What do
you
know?” Several angry voices were shouting at once. Ahmed, posted in the hallway, could be heard calling to Jeroen to come from the kitchen. Then Charles raised a pale hand.

“My dears, we do sound like a prison riot. And we don’t want to be punished, do we? Although, with all this din, some of us might welcome a turn in solitary. Potter, dear fellow, our companions are a committee to look into these allegations. Or
were
a committee, I should say. No doubt you aren’t aware of that. You don’t wish to impugn their motives, I’m sure. When and if their report is made, it will of course carry their signatures. You need have no fear on that score. For my part, I haven’t had access to these particular documents, but friends abroad, knowing my interests, send me cuttings on affairs of this kind. The electric grill you mention is a matter of record. I believe I have even seen a diagram. One can picture it as a pop-up toaster or as one of those sandwich-like contrivances our countrymen use to carbonize beefsteaks at their ‘cook-outs’—deplorable practice and quite carcinogenic, I’m told.” A shriek came from Simmons. “Doesn’t he slay you?” she said to Sophie. “Yes,” said Sophie. It was true that she found Charles a rather frightening personality. He intended to shock, of course, but was it shock therapy he had in mind or some dreadful private joke? In any case, it was working here. The checkers players drifted back to their improvised board, and the bridge-players resumed their foursome: “Two no trump.” In the parlor, the discussion moved on to cancer and a supposed cure for cancer. The Bishop produced his flask—a horn of plenty or pitcher of Baucis and Philemon—and offered a nip to Henry, who had begun to shake again. Soon the shakes stopped.

The episode led Sophie to wonder about the effects of deprivation if the present state of affairs were to continue long. What would happen when the Bishop’s flask, which he must be replenishing from that hold-all, finally ran dry? Henry might get a rather high-priced cure, for which his wife would be grateful. But what about tobacco—Cameron’s pipe, Henk’s cigars, her own and Aileen’s cigarettes? Most of the hostages were addicts of one kind or another, she supposed. With the older people, if it was not liquor or tobacco—Charles allowed himself a single Sobranie after meals as an aid to digestion—it would be pills. Yet the terrorists, who did not seem to have any of the usual vices or “dependences” themselves, would be in no position, even if willing, to cater to their captives’ habits when private stores ran out. This could result in demoralization or, at best, a general fraying of nerves. The solidarity of the hostage group—such as it was—would not be proof against sudden fits of irritability such as they had just seen. With this in mind, Sophie was already rationing her cigarette consumption, so as to be able to share. In her bag were two cartons of Trues, designed to last three weeks in Iran, but in four days, thanks mainly to the harrowing time at Schiphol, one was half gone. Now, however, it should not be too hard to cut down; in these close rooms smoking seemed anti-social anyway. And yet, to her shame and surprise—she was used to thinking of herself as a both contained and generous person—she had felt something close to fury when Beryl, twice, had “borrowed” a cigarette to offer Ahmed. They said that extreme situations brought out the truth of one’s character. Another cherished image, she realized, was a picture of herself as fearless which she had come to accept on hearsay: “You’re so brave, Sophie.” Would she have to discard that too? So far, she thought she could say honestly, she had not been really afraid. But so far nothing really scary had happened, and it was possible that when a test came she would discover, simply, that up to then she “had never known the meaning of fear.” She replaced the cigarette—which would have been her fourth since breakfast—in the pack and took up her notebook again. “Eleven-thirty a.m., Flevoland…” She wrote on steadily, but there was little to record but her thoughts—only the occasional buzz of a plane overhead, the passage of a solitary heron and a flock of black birds with white bills that Henk said were coots from the Ijsselmeer.

Lily closed the folder and appeared to meditate on the contents. In the circumstances, being a slow reader was enviable: she had got two hours, Sophie estimated, out of roughly eighty double-spaced pages, which worked out to about two-thirds of a page a minute. She polished her reading-glasses with a chamois and restored them to their embroidered case. “Could the Shah be back of this, I wonder?” “Back of
what,
Mother?” Beryl had got tired of packing her grandmother’s trunk and was staring out the window in the parlor.
“This,”
repeated Lily, waving a hand. She meant the hijacking, obviously. “Oh, Mother, don’t be so stupid. How could the Shah figure?” “Very simply,” Henk answered. “The idea is not stupid. Or at any rate I have had it myself.” “Me too,” agreed Sophie. To anyone with a political head it was by no means improbable that, if not the Shah in person, SAVAK, his secret police, had arranged for their committee to be deflected. As Henk was pointing out, collusion between “red” terrorists and “black” secret police was classical; it went back at least to czarist Russia. But by what route the insight had entered Lily’s mind was a mystery. Had they “done”
The Possessed
at Saint Timothy’s under an unusually thorough teacher? Sophie sought to imagine Lily in middy and skirt delivering an oral report on the ties between the Okhrana and terrorist circles such as Dostoievsky described in the novel. In any case, the insight, however come by, was impressive in a woman of her background.

But “awfully far-fetched” opined Margaret, and the Reverend concurred, though from a different starting-point, clearly.
She
refused to entertain the thought because it reflected on the ethics of the Shah, and Frank would not harbor it because he did not want to be “over-critical” of the terrorists. Whereas Beryl, more simply, scouted it because it had been voiced by her mother. It was an interesting study in the reception or, rather, non-reception of ideas. And still another factor was at work in these minds, as Sophie slowly recognized—the ineluctable factor of class.

Shah or no Shah, the first-class hostages, on the whole, resented any suggestion that the hijacking could have been aimed at passengers in Economy. They preferred to see themselves as the sole cause. And vice versa. “How can you talk such nonsense, Lily?” boomed Margaret. “I don’t give a fig about the Shah, but it was
us
these people were after—no question of it.” “But why us, dear?” wailed Lily. “Because we’re filthy rich, Mother; that’s why.” “The Shah doesn’t want our money,” pursued Margaret. “He can buy and sell the lot of us. That’s why he couldn’t be behind this outrage for a minute. But the gang in there was after our money all right. They marked the plane down because they heard we would be on it. No one can tell me otherwise.”

“I can, Madam.” Cameron’s voice, accompanied by a puff of pipe smoke, came like an oracle from under the table. “You confuse two notional sequences. Lack of training in clear thinking, I daresay. Let us separate the two sequences and examine them. Taking the premise that you were the target, I believe we can all agree that the Shah may be exculpated. As you say, he has no need of money, least of all dollars, of which you have a great many, if I can judge by my ears. But this premise cannot be assumed; it is what you started out to prove. Therefore, rightly, it should appear at the end of your argument, as the logical or persuasive conclusion. If we take the opposite premise, that the committee in Economy was the target, then things have another look. The Shah cannot be cleared of suspicion. We may decide that he was the priming agent that set the operation in motion, very likely with funds drawn from the secret-police budget—this was not engineered on a shoestring. The more we consider it, the more plausible it comes to seem that the committee was indeed the target. But again we are assuming what we set out to prove. Moreover, if we affirm that the committee was the target, this leaves us to explain your presence here, just as your belief that you and you alone were aimed at leaves you to explain
our
presence. It might be useful to think in terms of primary and secondary targets. In that case, the simplest hypothesis, and hence the one to be preferred, is that we were the primary target, that is, in essence the Shah’s pigeon—though we may have been interesting to these anarchists for other reasons—and that you,
ab initio,
or at some later stage, came to be viewed as a prize in your own right.”

“Bravo, Archie,” applauded Henk. “Beautiful,” said Sophie. “My God!” said Aileen, who had been yawning. “He’s going to set that carpet on fire!” In fact a coal from the don’s pipe must have singed the rug from under which his bristly head had appeared. There was a smell of burning wool. “Water!” called Beryl. “Ahmed, quick, bring some water!” “Dear me, no,” said Charles. “You must smother it.” After a minute, thanks to Charles’s recipe, the incipient fire had been put out, leaving only a charred spot.

But the argument smoldered. “The Shah’s a red herring,” declared Henry. “I haven’t seen a shred of evidence that connects him. Just a bee in certain bonnets and logic-chopping.” That was true, Sophie reflected. Henry continued, observing that he had the floor. “Let’s take a look at what’s under our noses. Put yourself in the shoes of these people here.” “Who are you speaking to?” said Aileen. “You. You impress me as a bright lady with a tongue in her head. I’d like to hear your opinion. Assuming you were a terrorist, would you hold
you
for ransom or my wife? I’ve no doubt that you have many fine personal qualities that make you valuable to your associates, whatever you do in life, but let me state it bluntly: what do you
own
?” “Just the clothes on my back,” said Aileen, preening. “These old rags from Filene’s.” “Well, then?”

She pursed her lips and grew serious, as though the educator in her had been called on to address this forum. “I’m important in what I stand for. My name counts. The half-dozen boards and committees I serve on represent the most vital currents in American opinion. I’m a
public person,
Mister Potter. You don’t know what that means. Why, right this minute, I’ll bet, my picture is on the front page of the
Times,
along with the Senator’s naturally, and the Reverend’s and Bishop Hurlbut’s, I guess. And thousands of my alumnae are deeply concerned for my fate. You can’t say that for your wife and her friends. They’ll be lucky if their picture is in the society columns, which have blacks and Jews nowadays, in case you don’t know it. I’m sorry, Mister Potter, but you don’t
mean
anything in the world. And nobody is more on to that than a terrorist. All that these Baader-Meinhofs and so on care for is publicity, being spread over the front page. They’re totally indifferent to money; the sensational million-dollar ransoms they demand are just headline-grabbers. Now who is going to get them more publicity, who is the public truly anxious about, our committee or your ridiculous tour? Add to that the fact, which is probably news to you, that they hate liberals even more than you do. Because they’re serious and know that we’re the enemy. We stand in their way.”

Simmons’s cheeks were flushed, making a curious color-contrast with her rouge; her eyes sparkled. She seemed earnestly moved, almost to the point of tears, as though the conviction she had of her importance were a religious matter—a cause she was pleading. But the collector group was offended, and the Bishop was shaking his head in sorrow, maybe at the prospect of another rift. Besides, it was unchristian, surely, to tell another human being to his face that he was nobody. Without being a sorrowing Christian, Sophie felt shocked and troubled herself. To her mind, it was a shameless performance, regardless of the truth of the assertions, which in fact somehow made it worse. She smiled comfortingly at Lily, who smiled back. Henry and Helen sat rigid. To make things worse, Beryl decided to weigh in. She turned on the finally silent Aileen. “I know you,” she said rudely. “‘Thousands of alumnae’! You’re ‘Simmie.’ You were the registrar at Lucy Skinner when they kicked me out. But you didn’t have the war paint and the henna then. And you were no flaming liberal. Remember, Sophie?” “I didn’t go to Lucy Skinner,” said Sophie, glad to be able to stay out of this.

“The laughing cavalier!” suddenly cried Lily. She was indicating Henk. “I
knew
I knew that face. Don’t you see it, Helen? A haunting resemblance. If you just add a tiny chin beard and mustaches.” “What the hell are you talking about?” said Beryl. “Why, the Hals in the Wallace Collection, darling. The subject must have been an ancestor of yours, Henk.” “Oh, Christ,” replied Beryl. “Stop trying to create a diversion. Or stop being so obvious about it.” Upon this, silence ensued. You could hear Aileen sniffling. At a meaningful nod from the Bishop, Frank installed himself once more at the harmonium and sounded a chord for attention.