Flying Hero Class (20 page)

As a witness to Stone's outcry, McCloud thought there was the same bored mischief still working in Cale as had earlier caused him to try so hard to lever a drink out of the steward; as—for that matter—in his literate quoting of D. H. Lawrence. Had Lawrence ever written those words, or had Cale composed them himself? That question was obviously the sort of trouble Cale
liked
to raise in the mind.

Now, not having got quite the display of chagrin out of McCloud which he needed to soothe his ennui or terror, and with the Zionist Hack placard still waiting beneath him on the floor, he was enjoying more success by transforming himself among the electrical fuses into a Jew baiter than he'd got earlier as a derider of native culture.

“Come on, Cale,” McCloud appealed out of what he thought was fairness. “Mr. Stone is an American citizen. He didn't drive the Palestinians out, either.”

“Fair crack of the whip, eh, cobber?” asked Cale, imitating the idiom in which the Barramatjara spoke. “Who put the weapons in the Israelis' hands? Good American Bar Mitzvah boys like Stone here.”

“Don't be so fucking offensive,” Stone told him.

“Are you saying you haven't had a hand?”

“Naturally I cherish the concept of that state.”

“Ah, yes.
Cherish
.…”

Stone sat forward, asserting his right to his proper space in the pit in the face of Cale's imperial spread of flesh. “Mr. McCloud has it right. You fucking conservatives are the worst anti-Semites! Except you hate and fear the Arabs worse than you hate and fear us. And besides that, we're better business. Or we were until Arab oil entered the picture.”

“Kindly don't call me an anti-Semite, man,” said Cale, pointing his finger with apparent passion at Stone. About the real intensity behind the movement, though, it was hard to guess. “I pushed Arabs around for you when I was a young officer. I wrote glowing reports about your fucking kibbutzim and your moshavim. And I'm a Zionist—it says so on my label.”

“Okay,” Stone called, settling the air with his hands. “But you commit the worst crime in your goddamn head. You think we've got Satanic cleverness! You believe we're cleverer than anyone else! You look at me and you think I'm full of fucking snakelike cunning. Brighter than the Japanese and twice as alien! Admit it!”

There was a sudden and—McCloud thought—theatrical calm, as if Cale were orchestrating it.

Cale, of course, chose when to break it. “Those Palestinians upstairs didn't arrest us without a basis,” he announced. “Poor bloody McCloud is the innocent. For him the rap is—as they say—bum. But they knew that you and I had had an effect on
them
, old son. On whatever miseries they believe they bear on earth. You and I have made things happen contrary to their interests. So like me, you probably
are
a cunning bastard. I'm willing to believe that. That doesn't take a leap of faith.”

Stone began to laugh. “Cunning, Mr. Cale? My father came to New York in 1948. He opened a handbag repair shop in Spring Street in lower Manhattan. His clients were Jews as proud as himself, and the poorer Poles and Italians. Gentrification and high rent drove the poor old son-of-a-bitch out in the early seventies. They needed his shop for the bar of a rib joint! During his life he went every day, morning and night, to the Orthodox synagogue down on East Broadway, even though cataracts had just about blinded him by the age of sixty. This is cunning? This is Satanic?

“Sure, he lectured my brother and me to excel academically and not goof off like the Italians. This—again I ask the question—is cunning? And I suppose you think it's a cliché that he was crippled by the age of sixty-five—fallout from SS beatings he took in Birkenau. It was cunning of him, I'm sure you'll agree, not to seek any compensation from the West German government, though New York was full of lawyers who could have arranged it for him! ‘They won't put a price on my suffering,' he used to say.

“But see, the problem with New York is you can't sit still without either freezing or frying. You can't lie down with crippled joints. The Rome of the modern world and its climate is unlivable! Its climate gives you pneumonia. Of which in time, and far too early, he died. And this cunning Jew, this superconspirator, this agent of the anti-Christ and of Mossad—in your view of things his life crawled with cunning. His life was substantially different from your father's, Cale, or from McCloud's father's. Because
he
was the evil force behind everything that went wrong on earth!”

In this narrow space, amid the leads in their colored plastic sleeves, amid the color-coded fuses and levers, Cale threw his arms about dangerously and seemed well pleased with what he'd got from Stone. “Oh, the irony! Interspersed only with the piquant and flagrant paranoia. All because I merely
suggest
that it might be certain rabid elements in Mossad who were paying Taliq and his boys for this little excursion! And not so much Taliq and the boys. Paying the people behind Taliq. That's all I wanted to infer. A mere thread of possibility.…”

“So I may be shot,” Stone kept on. “I—a Jew—may be shot. A Jew! And even that is the fault of the Jews?”

Stone was so seriously affronted that McCloud could see the small population of this hole might fall away into fragments: even as the dance troupe might have done if Bluey's sighting of the dead had been an authentic vision. The idea frightened him primitively. It was as if anger might burn up all the oxygen in the electronics bay.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “for sweet Christ's sake! If you know so much about Taliq and the others, you ought to know they want us fighting like this.”

“The piety of the boy!” said Cale. “Listen, let me tell you something. The world is complicated. And nothing is more complicated than malice. And those who won't see that, sonny Jim, are dead!”

Bladder ache seemed less significant now to McCloud than a weariness which came down on him. The three of them, he and his fellow condemned, seemed to him to be fatally deprived of any grandeur. The secrets were all known by Cale and were all banal. The earth was a complicated but cheap equation, and if McCloud was condemned by Taliq,
that
was cheap, too, the result of a finite outlay of funds by the secret police of some government. The sadness of his lack of deeper worth, of Cale's, of Stone's, caused him all at once to slump.

“Move up there, old chap,” Cale reproached him.

There was without warning a surge of engines. New air washed into the pit, tempered by the engines.

“We're going to take off again,” Stone remarked dryly. “It must be the Jews' fault.”

CHAPTER NINE:

The Upstairs Dispensation

The plane had leveled itself in the sky, and the air in the pit grew polar again. McCloud noticed now how gray and unfashionable even the handsome Mr. Stone looked. That might be what they are doing. They are curing us here. As soon as we look despicably gray and less than human, they'll bring us out and exhibit us for trial.

When the hatch above was opened, McCloud was at first aware of it more by sound than by any other factor. He looked up. Hasni, the one who had begun the journey beside Pauline, stared down with such gentle inquiry that McCloud hoped for a moment the boy was bringing some sort of reprieve.

“You have taken your placards off,” he said leniently. “Put your placards back on.”

McCloud was quick to obey and thought the other two were also. They didn't want that hatch shut again. There was shuffling and sorting in the pit. “Mine's ‘Zionist Hack,' I think,” said Cale, pretending to be exercised by his search for the right placard and smiling crookedly. He nonetheless donned it like something he was accustomed to.

“Stand up,” Hasni said just as uninsistently.

Their labels reassumed, they all stood, wincing with cramp.

In the first-class cabin, when McCloud at last climbed up from the electronics pit, daylight had turned the window shades beige. Stubble was beginning to appear on the faces of the few businessmen left there. Some of them slept. None of them were attending to their briefcases anymore. Wrapped in their blankets, they looked like an aristocracy who were certain their rights were about to be canceled.

He noticed too as, half-blinded with the pain of it, he moved from leg to leg, that Daisy Nakamura's seat was empty.

“Have they shot anyone?” McCloud whispered to one of the businessmen.

The man shook his head marginally. He didn't want Hasni to spot him either affirming or denying.

“Where did we land?”

The businessman's eyes flickered. He didn't know. Or perhaps for some reason, because of the mark of condemnation McCloud wore, he wasn't telling.

Hasni shepherded them to the base of the spiral staircase and let them use a toilet one at a time. Because of an obscure sense of honor, McCloud insisted on going last. Since Hasni would not let the door be shut, McCloud heard the other two voiding themselves. He closed his eyes, trying to suppress his own bladder by mental suasion. When his time came, he felt an unutterable sense of thanks. But since Stone and Cale—on emerging from the water closet—showed no gratitude for this brief mercy, neither did he.

At Hasni's order, they hobbled up the stairwell. McCloud was aware that stiffness made him look ridiculous, a hateful dodderer. His limbs, Taliq might argue, as crippled as his moral sense. The plane by contrast felt smooth and cold as a knife in this highest quarter of a Mediterranean day.

At the top of the stairs, in the front seats, one of the Palestinian boys, Musa, slept embracing his automatic rifle, his radio twittering on his hip. (It reminded McCloud straight away of the threatened Plastique in the luggage hold.) Musa's armless cricketing sweater hung voluminously on him, as if he'd borrowed it from some West Indian pace bowler at whatever British university or polytechnic he attended. McCloud could see the gooseflesh on his bare lower arms.

Farther along, alone and reflectively sipping orange juice, Bluey sat by a window. He had a window shade half-open and was staring forth. At first McCloud felt a spasm of fear for this illicit behavior of Bluey's, but then understood it must be allowed. The inhabitants of this upper deck, eligible because of the sufferings of their race, were allowed to squint out at the day. Not all of them, it seemed. But Bluey, at least.

At the back, by the galley, the other four members of the dance troupe sat and stood about, listening to Taliq, who was speaking softly, a cigarette held in his ravaged right hand, his eyes half-closed rather in the manner of Whitey Wappitji. Two steps closer, and McCloud saw Daisy Nakamura was there also, minute in a large seat, a little shrunken in her green dress, a blue blanket shawled around her shoulders.

“Leave them there, Hasni,” Taliq called musically. “Make them kneel.”

The idea turned McCloud desperate. “For God's sake, we can't bloody-well kneel. We're half-crippled already with cramp. Do you want to try men who can't even stand?”

Taliq was amused and gestured with the cigarette he was smoking and weaved his handsome head about. “Stand, then,” he lightly ordered. “But be still. I haven't finished speaking yet to my friends.”

He extended his hand to indicate the dance troupe and Daisy Nakamura, none of whom looked in the direction of McCloud and the other two guilty persons.

This gesture of Taliq's, this including wave of a damaged hand, was that of an apparently emotional man, and its warmth somehow alarmed McCloud.

He tried to attract the attention of Bluey Kannata, hoping that Bluey's eyes, bruised with fear of curses, would turn brimming with reassurance toward him. But Bluey kept staring out the window.
But I sat with you half the night at a transmitter
, McCloud wanted to yell.

Out there, beyond the Perspex, in the sky Bluey frowned at, it seemed to McCloud there were no points of reference; nothing but a great plain of bright cumulus.

“We're thirsty, too,” called Daniel Stone suddenly.

“The Jew is thirsty,” said Taliq. “‘Cut me, do I not bleed?' Pour something into each of them, Hasni.”

What a curious sound that command had!

McCloud had not been aware of the extent of his own thirst. He had been fixed on cramp and cold and the dull ache of his bladder; that feeling he'd had on bad afternoons in the classrooms of his childhood: that unreleased fluids were turning to stone inside him. But now the American had alerted him to thirst he found that yes, he was parched.

Hasni went to the drinks trolley behind Taliq and took three small cans of cola from it. He opened the first. The stuff sizzled in its contact with the plane's cold air. Still the dance troupe and Daisy averted their eyes. Was it that they took no pleasure in any of this? Or was it that they were no longer interested?

Hasni brought the can and placed it to McCloud's mouth. Given a choice, McCloud would have liked to assert his brotherhood with Stone again and to have said, “Him first.” But the metal was hard up against his teeth—Hasni would not let him enjoy the dignity of holding the thing—and he had no choice but to drink. And drinking, he became desperate to find every drop Hasni was pouring, to prevent any of it from wasting itself down his chin and into the stubble of his chest.

When his can was empty, he could not prevent himself watching Stone drink. Self-possessed Stone, McCloud was somehow pleased to see, was similarly avid to take in the moisture. His lips too worked prehensilely against the rim of the can.

But when it was Cale's turn to be offered drink, he told Hasni, “Let me hold it, son.”

Hasni could tell somehow that this was a crucial demand. That if it was agreed to, things between Cale and himself would be changed for good.

Hasni held the can in the air but distant from Cale. “Do you want to drink?” he asked airily, like a schoolboy with a weak teacher at his mercy.