Cannibals and Missionaries (44 page)

The sun was setting when they boarded, for first they had to undergo a search, pronounced very humiliating by Eloise, who had been stripped by Greet and Elfride. The point of the search was not clear to those remaining. “Pure sadism” was Aileen’s verdict. To prevent the smuggling out of information, Henk thought—a plan of the house, for example, with some indication of the wiring system. Jim could not see that. The collector group on its own was capable of drawing a plan, describing the sleeping arrangements, guessing at the location of the fuse-box, and so on. Henk shook his head. Of the eight that had been freed, only Charles, he reasoned, had wit enough to provide useful information, and Charles would have an over-supply of it, very apt to mystify the authorities. “No, Jim. Our
kapers
are fearful only of you and me. They look on us two as their peers.
‘Weerga,’
we say.” In his belief, the
kapers
feared that he and Jim, between them, might contrive to send the authorities not only plans and diagrams but political counsel—advice on the timing of an attack, analysis of the leadership structure of the commando, recommendations on negotiating tactics…. “Inscribed on the head of a pin?” Jim inquired.

It was true that, in their place, Jeroen would have been doing just about that. Taping tiny spills of paper covered with writing—doubtless in code—to Eloise’s underwear. But he himself had not once thought of spiriting out a message of any sort, let alone one of a para-military nature. Nor, evidently, had Henk. There was no need of messages, written or oral. The returning hostages would report that their fellow-captives when last seen were alive and well, which was all that mattered to the families. More significant for the authorities, they would report that Gus had died a natural death. As for hints on negotiation, Jim had none to offer; in the last hours he had come to see the situation as hopeless, barring, as ever, a miracle. Jeroen had moved into a no-win position and apparently did not know it. And if Henk had a clever formula in mind for breaking out of the deadlock, he would have mentioned it. There was no information lying around here that could not be transmitted by direct word of mouth. Aileen must be right; pure sadism was the explanation. Or else it was something the
kapers
read in a terrorist’s handbook: frisk captives prior to release.

Jim was struck, though, by the notion—which had not occurred to him—that the
kapers,
i.e., Jeroen, regarded them as their peers. If it meant simply that on both sides there was a sound sense of power and its leverage—Jeroen a gifted tyro and Henk and himself old adepts—the idea, though novel, was not especially interesting. But it could imply something else: a mutual recognition. That tied in with a thought he had been pursuing—till interrupted by the arrival of the pictures—that the situation of a terrorist in terms of achievement of ends was hopelessly circumscribed. He was limited by the
status quo ante
that in principle he was setting out to topple. People liked to say that terrorism “could not really change anything.” And unfortunately that was the fact. The demands it was able to see satisfied were demands in keeping with the established value system: turnover of money or equivalent goods, supply of transport, distribution of food to the poor. Even the freeing of the occasional “class-war prisoner” fell considerably short of amnesty and was more like parole; the liberated comrade nine times out of ten was promptly re-arrested, on suspicion of recidivism, i.e., on sight. The same with safe-conduct; it saw the undesirables safely out of the country, at which point they became fugitives with a price on their heads, obliged to take cover in semi-friendly countries where as terrorists they found no employment. All in all, an unprofitable exercise of juvenile energy and imagination. And yet they kept trying.

But what had his own career of bucking the system netted in the long run? A few immediate gains compatible with the
status quo ante
and no fundamental change. He could claim the fall of Johnson and the tempering of the war in Vietnam. But the fall of Johnson had eventuated in Nixon (which had to figure as a debit), and the war in Vietnam would have been winding down anyway. The establishment dipped into its provident fund and gave what it would not feel the loss of to dissent burning its draft card. He had been as much of a millennialist in his hopes as any “misguided” terrorist. Observing that, he laughed, feeling a real fondness for Jeroen. What Greet liked to call the armed politics of the underground—their euphemism, he guessed, for terror—was only the kid brother of minority electoral politics, with the same old Achilles heel.

Coming out of his abstraction, Jim looked around him. Night had fallen, and they were alone with the paintings. Mrs. Cézanne in a blue apron was propped against the TV set, and the Titian “Gentleman in Armor” was opposite, behind the davenport. The ever-silent Yusuf was on guard. Contrary to expectations, the house felt lonely. Maybe Harold was right that the paintings needed reflectors, for the longer Jim stared at them, the more disappointing they seemed. Longer acquaintance was not helping him to see “new treasures” in any of these canvases, as Lily had promised him it would. The contrary, almost, was true. Probably a trained eye was required. He was relieved anyhow that the Marie Laurencins had been sent back to the shed. Johnnie’s collection, stacked up in the parlor, he found the most rewarding. There was something to look at in those pictures beyond pictorial “values”; some of them even told a story, or you could make a story out of them, and the animals were great, particularly the “Stags Fighting.” He also liked the fact that, as far as he could judge, the horse in the Stubbs, though a breed you did not see now, had its bones and muscles in the right places—Lily said Stubbs had written a book on the anatomy of the horse. By contrast, he was more and more bothered by that arm on one of the “Bathers”; he wished Margaret had never mentioned that it was “out of drawing,” for now he could see that himself; in fact it was the only thing he
could
see in the picture.

He had no doubt that he was reacting like a philistine, like the two Dutch pilots, who seemed to be made highly uncomfortable by the pictures, walking up to study them with heavily knit brows, shaking their heads and turning away, then drifting back, unable to resist having another look. Like him, the pilots were more at ease with Johnnie’s pictures. Not Yusuf, though. It occurred to Jim, measuring Yusuf’s inflexible frown, that he was asking himself whether the chief had not gone loco.

Art had a disquieting power of producing social embarrassment; Jim was familiar with the symptoms in Eleanor. In museums he had noticed that it caused people to make silly remarks and then laugh self-consciously, as if the pictures, which knew better, could hear them. It could not be just ignorance; displays of armor and mummies and natural-history exhibits did not have that effect. And even he was prone to it, for all his self-possession. If you were alone with art long enough, as here—or when he used to wait for a girl he knew on a bench in front of “An Old Woman Cutting her Nails”—you began to get the feeling that it was looking right at you. Like the reproduction in his grandmother’s parlor of a trick painting of Jesus whose sorrowing eyes seemed to follow you: the Hound of Heaven. Lily said there was a room in Mantua with a frescoed horse whose eyes moved when you did. Jim had missed that—and a lot else—in Virgil’s burg while wandering along the Mincio with the Ninth Bucolic in hand:
“qua se subducere colles incipiunt.”
Fortunately, anyhow, he did not sense the apples eyeing him—what worried him there was that he could not find anything especially clumsy in the way they were painted.

All these ghostly and somehow demanding presences were unnerving in the quiet house. It would be better when Mrs. Cézanne was replaced by the seven o’clock news—live. He found it impossible to ignore them, though, according to Beryl, that was what collectors did. “They hardly ever look at them. Ask Mother.” There was some truth in that, Lily admitted. One of the boons, then, of being a collector was that you felt at home with art to the point of not noticing its presence; it was just part of the furniture.

“If you don’t look at the stuff you own, what gives you the right to have it?” Victor. The paintings must have been getting at that touchy customer too. With his sprouting beard and blackheads and the boils on his neck, he looked noisome, as if he were coming to a head; during exercise, he had been playing with the rabbits, and he had rabbit hairs all over him. “The rest of the race isn’t all that jaded.” “One isn’t ‘jaded,’ Victor,” said Lily. “I think one’s constantly aware of one’s beautiful things—what’s the word?—subliminally.” “But tell us something,” demanded Aileen, whose hackles were also up. “What do you gain as a person by living with your ‘beautiful things’? Has it made you any different? Would it make Jim and me any different? Can you pretend that any of that beauty has rubbed off on Harold and Eloise? Why, Harold could be a museum guard, for all the good that being exposed to Cézanne has done him.” “Harold’s rather a new collector,” observed Lily. “And Morgan and Frick?” “But is art meant to be morally improving?” objected Sophie. “Think of Goering.” “Well, leave out morals for the moment,” Aileen agreed. “Show me
any
result. Really, having been with this tour of yours for a week now, I wonder…. I can’t see what this vaunted ownership has done for you. Well, all right, there’s Charles. I guess it’s made him kinkier than he might have been.” “They don’t claim to be art authorities or scholars, Aileen,” Sophie said. “Art authorities would be worse,” said Beryl. “Poor Ma’s just having fun.”

“So art gives pleasure to man, can we agree on that?” said Frank. “It’s like God’s own delight in His Creation.” Lily nodded. “Genesis. ‘And, behold, it was very good.’ I often think about that.” “Come off it,” Victor retorted. “Is that why they take schoolchildren to museums? Stop dodging the issue, you folks. We all know in our gut that art educates. In other societies, they’re aware of the power it has of speaking directly to the masses, teaching them to be better socialists, better citizens. The trouble is that with us it’s fallen into the wrong hands. Forget the speculators. I mean you proud possessors that claim to have a corner in it. This isn’t the eighteenth century. The concept of the collector is so rotten by now that it stinks. Why, Yusuf here instinctively has a better appreciation of those apples than all your museum boards. Cézanne painted for
him;
he’s been hungry and knows what an apple means.” All eyes turned inquiringly on Yusuf, whose scowling features betrayed no interest even in hearing his name. “I want to get this on record,” Victor went on excitedly, raising his thin voice and striking his fist into his palm. “In my considered belief, Jeroen and Greet had a great idea in liberating these pictures from their plushy jailers. The more I’ve seen and heard here, the more I salute them for that.”

This harangue, coming from that quarter, caused less of a stir than Victor had probably hoped. “Has he been drinking? Where did he get it?” Aileen whispered. “Why, the man’s a common agitator,” Margaret exclaimed, not deigning to lower her voice. “Kind of an uncommon agitator,” Jim said, behind his hand, to Henk. Lily had overheard. “How interesting that you say that,” she murmured. “Why interesting, Lily?” “Well, I don’t like to say it, but I had a little theory of my own.” “Oh?” They moved behind the TV set. “I rather thought, Jim, that he might be connected with—well, with certain initials….” “You mean—?” She meant CIA.

“What made you think that?” “Oh, little things. He seemed different from the rest of your committee. As if he didn’t quite belong. None of you knew him before. Then that mushroom look he has. The man from underground. I don’t mean to be snobbish. There are a number of well-connected, brainy men in that organization. In fact, Beryl and I have letters to one in Teheran—a cousin of a cousin. He’s quite out in the open, attached to the Embassy. But this cousin said that Teheran was
full
of them, open and not so open. They have a kind of investment in the Shah. That made me wonder, too. Then I couldn’t help noticing that Victor drank more than was good for him. They say that’s a characteristic of agents. The strain of the life they lead. The constant deception…But of course none of that’s
proof.
”

“No.” He pondered. “Have you mentioned this to Beryl?” “Surely not. She’d laugh at me.” “Well, don’t. I’ve no more knowledge than you have, Lily, but if what you think is true and word of it gets to the Committee of Public Safety here, well, we could witness a real execution. Or if it isn’t true, for that matter.” But it
was
true, he felt confident, and it alarmed him for Victor that Lily should have spotted it. His own case was different; he was a pro. It had become evident to him, some time back, that Victor must be an agent. He had all the earmarks. Starting with the cover: half the university specialists traveling around on grants in the Middle East were working part-time or full-time for the Agency. Jim had nothing against that; as long as they confined themselves to information-gathering, they served some sort of purpose. Moreover, it stood to reason that the CIA would try to plant a man of its own on the committee, to observe and report back via the Embassy cable-room or maybe even to obstruct the committee in its work. As far as that went, Cameron could be an MI-5 plant, although Jim doubted it. Britain’s interests were not so tied to the Shah, and Archie appeared to be what he seemed: a burry don with no secret drawers about him. Jim doubted, too, that either of them would have been reporting directly to SAVAK, which would have made for an interesting time in the Shah’s country, almost as lively as a hijacking. In any case, the hijacking had made the entire question immaterial. Jim had mentioned his thought to Henk, he could not remember when—while they were still at Schiphol, he believed—in confidence, naturally, on a no-action basis. The cat by then had died, and Victor, they agreed, was at present more to be pitied than subjected to any form of ostracism. They had not spoken of it again.