Cannibals and Missionaries (37 page)

“My wife’s a Presbyterian,” said Henry. “You won’t find graven images in her church. But you’re dead right on one point. She idolizes that Vermeer.” Helen still wore her dreamy smile. “Did you ever happen to see it, Frank? It was hanging on show at Wildenstein’s. For the Crippled Children. There was always a throng around it, wasn’t there, Henry?” “I’m sorry,” confessed Frank. “I missed it. I’m so darned busy with church work that I don’t get out much to exhibitions any more.” “Oh, well, then…If you had, you might understand.” She was in love with the picture, that was obvious, though the minister did not seem to realize it. Moreover, there was a suggestion of tender reminiscence in her tone, a commemorative note, as though the “Girl” belonged to a distant, enshrined past, too far off now for tears. However the others were interpreting the ultimatum, Helen had clearly decided that she was on her way to a better world, leaving her dear possession behind.

Undiscouraged, Frank tried another tack. “Maybe we make too much of a cult of originals. Helen has had the privilege of living with one, but if she’d lived with a reproduction instead, nobody could take it away from her. If it happened to be stolen, she could always get another, exactly the same. Whereas when you lose a loved one, say a member of your family, there’s no replacement. That’s why, Helen, we hold human life sacred; the individual in each of us is one of a kind, loved by the Creator for the divine unique spark in him. Don’t let your ‘torch’ go out. Your life is sacred to me, Helen, as it should be to you. You blaspheme if you think of exchanging it for a mere material possession, a thing whose value may be specious—in the sense of highly relative—as you yourself admit.” But the Vermeer was one of a kind; that was the point he himself had just made, even if for him it would have done better to exist in the plural. It was odd that he did not see that everything he was saying about human life applied for Helen, equally—indeed more emphatically—to her “Girl.”

“Leave her be, Frankie,” gently spoke up the Bishop. “Let her follow her own counsel. We shall pray for you, my dear, and ask the good Lord to soften the hearts of these misguided young people toward you.” “Helen Potter!” Jeroen himself stood in the doorway. “Come along now.” Henk half rose, as if to intervene. “Stay where you are, Deputy,” Jeroen said. “This affair does not concern you. You also, Henry Potter. Your wife does not need your company.” With her short teetering steps, she followed him into the kitchen; Hussein with his pistol was at her back. The Bishop wiped his eyes. There went the stuff of martyrs. “Queen Victoria,” whispered Henk, gravely approving. In fact there
was
a resemblance to the queen in her later years, something of pudgy royal dignity, that all at once had become visible.

“I suppose I might have offered to take her place,” muttered Henry. “It wouldn’t have done any good,” the others assured him. “She’s made her bed,” said Harold. “Shut up, you,” said Sophie. The door to the kitchen was closed. Outside Hussein stood on guard, his pistol raised. Frank and the Bishop moved their lips in silent prayer. Carey swiftly crossed himself. “I can’t bear it,” cried Aileen, putting her fingers to her ears. For an eternity they waited.

Ten

W
ITHOUT ANY WARNING, TOWARD
the end of the afternoon, the television screen lit up. It was still Wednesday. Yusuf, very helpfully, got to work twirling the dials till the image would stay put. In the box appeared the farmhouse they were prisoners in, shown from several angles and surprisingly close up. The shots had been taken from the air: those military planes that they had heard zooming about this morning; sometimes, annoyingly, a wing got in the way of the picture. It was odd to have a bird’s-eye view of your place of confinement, which you had never fully seen with your own eyes—on the night they had arrived it had been too dark. Now they were able to look down on the broad sloping roof—underneath was the drafty attic half of them had been sleeping in—the television aerial, the chicken coop and the rabbit run near the spot where the men peed. From above they saw a crisscrossing of canals and ditches, the highway they had landed on, and the big unfinished barn with its roofing of tarpaulin. Although the snow had melted, the camouflage job was still effective; examining it from a pilot’s perspective, even Harold admitted to a certain satisfaction in the result of their labors, what the Sophie girl called “pride of workmanship.”

Yusuf had turned up the sound, and Henk, who was found napping on the floor behind the sofa, was rushed to the screen to translate. They had missed the beginning while they were trying to wake him up, but they learned—what they could see anyway—that the long-awaited breakthrough had happened. It was the hijackers themselves who had taken the initiative. They had broadcast a message to the authorities announcing their location; the radio in the kitchen, it seemed, was a powerful short-wave sending and receiving set, which one of the Arabs—Yusuf probably—had known how to rig up to the TV aerial. Henk and Carey said that they had suspected that there would be a “pirate station” in the house—a pity that they had not come out with that sooner, when it would have cleared up some little misunderstandings. Anyway, the authorities, at first, had treated the message as a hoax, with the result that two whole hours had been lost. The message identifying the “command post’s” position had come through shortly after two, according to the commentator, and now it was a few minutes past four.

The program, apparently, had started with a full list of the hijackers’ demands; that of course would be the part they had missed. But now a spokesman came on the screen recapitulating the chief ones. First, an astronomic ransom—one and a quarter million dollars, half to be distributed among the workers and peasants of Surinam—for the return of the helicopter and its crew. Second, immediate withdrawal of Holland from NATO and breaking of relations with Israel. Third, liberation of all “class-war prisoners” from Dutch jails. Superficially, that one sounded more feasible: in a very liberal country like Holland, there could not be so many. But in fact it could mean anything, depending on the definition: the release of common criminals, for instance, if they were of working-class origin, which obviously most of them would be. The demand, Henk said, would be unacceptable as it stood to his government; several rounds of “clarification” might be needed before the ruling coalition could consider acting on it. Eventually a few fringe elements who by stretching a point could be regarded as political prisoners might be let out: e.g., small groups of squatters who had occupied canal houses and struck policemen seeking to evict them…. But in his opinion the
kapers
did not take this demand of theirs too seriously; it was on their list
pro forma,
to satisfy revolutionary protocol. The outcome for the hostages would surely not hinge on it. The same with NATO and Israel: he doubted that the terrorists really expected to change the foreign policy of the Netherlands by their “rhetoric”—his expression—of violence.

More to the point was the final demand: that a small helicopter with a one-man crew be supplied to pick up a bundle of tapes containing instructions from the prisoners to their families on how to bring about their release. This demand had a deadline attached to it. In less than half an hour from now, the pilot was to begin hovering over a designated spot, which would be marked by a flag and lanterns, thirty meters from the command post; at a signal he was to drop a cable. He was not to attempt to land, and any other craft entering the air space during the pick-up would be shot down. The tapes must then be transferred to a long-range carrier and delivered to the families of the hostages; under no circumstances should they be allowed to fall into the hands of the FBI or any other agency of the U.S. imperialist government. Failure to observe this condition would bring immediate reprisals. The Dutch military attaché in Washington would be held responsible for the prompt transfer of the tapes to the parties concerned. Delay or sabotage on his part would be viewed as an act of war, to be answered for in blood by the prisoner Van Vliet de Jonge, whose image in full color now flashed on the screen…. As he sat on the floor, fiddling with the knobs, they saw him chatting with the Queen at the opening of Parliament addressing a crowd, eating a herring at a street stall. Then came some still photos of his wife and their children, poor little tykes—it was a surprise to learn that he was married to a Javanese beauty, slender, with sloe eyes. Henk’s family vanished from the screen and were replaced by the Minister of Defense, a funny stiff old socialist, declaring that Her Majesty’s government, mindful of the human factor, was bending every effort to meet the conditions laid down in the final demand: a helicopter of the Alouette II type was being dispatched, and a Lockheed Lodestar stood ready to receive the bundle of tapes. With a last sweeping view of the farmhouse, the special broadcast ended. Further news and commentary would be shown on the regular program at eighteen hours fifty-five, five minutes of seven.

As the image of their prison faded from the screen, the Chadwicks eyed each other. It looked indeed as though Senator Carey had known whereof he spoke when he said that making the tapes was not “the easy way out.” He had tried to warn Harold in particular against that fatal cocksureness of his. It had been foolish of Harold, foolish of all of them, to imagine that the
“kapers,”
as Henk called them, would not do everything in their power to keep the FBI from interfering with their plan. As for “stalling” over the delivery of the paintings (“gaining time”!), from what they had just heard such tactics could cost Henk his life. Harold might not care if Henk was executed, but the others would. He was such good company, their “Laughing Cavalier,” and he had a brilliant career ahead of him—they had not understood that till they saw him on television, though Charles had always said so.

No wonder Harold and Eloise were looking doubtfully at each other. After all, if he had not been so brassily confident of the harmlessness of making the tapes, the others might have hesitated. And there sat Helen, the living proof of how wrong they had been to listen to him. Jeroen and Company—so far at least—had wreaked no vengeance on her. She had made a tape with instructions to turn over the Titian as the price of Henry’s head. That was all. No one had struck her or furiously twisted her arm. They had simply told her that they would be seeing her later. She had seemed almost let down when she came trotting back into the room. It was hard to believe that the band would give up on the Vermeer so easily; they would surely try again. But two hours had passed, and no new summons had come for her. If anyone had “gained time,” it was she. Of course they had other business to occupy them, most importantly the helicopter, which was due any minute if the deadline was really going to be met.

The hostages in the parlor crowded against the western window to watch for it. In the dusk, they saw lanterns moving in the direction of the field. Nothing yet but a star—Venus rising—in the sky. “Watchman, tell us of the night,” someone hummed, as a “sick” joke surely, for it was not signs of promise such as had appeared to the Magi that they were awaiting—rather, the reverse in the collectors’ case. Still, one could not deny that there was something strangely thrilling in scanning the evening sky for the approach of a visitant from what seemed now like the other world. At any rate, it would be a break in the monotony. For some time, they had been hearing heavy thumps against the house wall: extra sandbags, the men said, being piled up around it in the event of an attack. At last Eloise’s sharp ears caught the sound of the helicopter’s rotors. There it was, hovering, a midget compared to theirs. They were able to watch the drop of the cable, but, disappointingly, the armed guards with lanterns patrolling cut off a view of the loading. Also it had become dark. They had only a glimpse of an indistinct object swinging upward to tell them that the pick-up was over. The little craft with their voices aboard immediately started to climb.

It was natural to feel despondent when it had disappeared. Only Harold, by bluster, avoided a sinking of spirits. He claimed not to feel that they had just said good-bye to their paintings—he still had faith in the FBI. According to him, the warning on television only meant that the FBI would have to be careful. They knew how to work under cover. If the Dutch tried to keep them out of the picture, they would have their own means. “Why, Maggie’s butler could be understudied by an FBI man and not even the other help the wiser. Half the waiters and butlers passing trays of drinks and sandwiches at your red-as-a-rose fund-raisers are FBI plants. Like detectives guarding the wedding presents in monkey suits. If Gerry Ford knows what’s good for him, they’ll be careful.” He patted his trousers pocket, where, one presumed, his billfold lay. The ladies sighed. How far away the time seemed when they were wont to tell each other that Harold and his wife—the first one—were “deliciously common”!

Johnnie shook his head. “No, Harold, my boy. If the FBI gets into it, they’ll blow it. Sure as shooting.” “Even if it means some of our lives,” said Lily, sadly. “I’m awfully afraid you’re right. It’s a terrible commentary, isn’t it?” “I never thought I’d reach the point of looking on the FBI as my enemy,” declared Margaret.

“It only needs a weensy change in perspective, doesn’t it?” That was Charles, being dreadful again. “A little bird tells me that we’re not the enthusiasts for ‘law and order’ that we were a few days ago. It was that interesting third demand that brought it home to me. Why, my dear, I said to myself, if the whole criminal population of Holland were turned loose—every last cutthroat and child-molester and wife-beater—I’d have no objection as long as it meant that I’d be allowed to journey to Naqsh-i-Rustan with my ears and toes and fingers still safely about me. And since I’m a rational animal and not totally selfish, I hope, I found myself led to question the social utility of prisons. What difference would it make, Charles, I said, if in fact those criminals
were
all let loose? Very little, I concluded. Accepting such a prospect for my own subjective motives, rather than fearing it for society at large, allowed me to regard it objectively—a distinct gain, I always think. Till today, I confess, I’d tended to look on our penal institutions as a necessary evil. And, as for the second demand, can we honestly say that it would be a tragedy if Holland were to leave NATO and suspend relations with Israel? My own answer, I admit, would be prejudiced. As a pacifist, I hold no brief for NATO, and, though I’m not unsympathetic to Israel, I feel she could use a little lesson.”