Cannibals and Missionaries

by Mary McCarthy

  “Funny bunch, aren’t they? What do you make of Lily?” “Why, I like her,” answered Sophie, having duly weighed the question. “She’s much the nicest of them, isn’t she? Henk says she reminds him of some pale pink rose she described that isn’t grown any more. Its name was Van F-l-e-e-t.” Spelling that out seemed to please her. “I’ll miss her and Beryl when they go. But of course they’re another world. If we met them again in real life, we’d have nothing to say to each other, would we? Except about this. Perhaps we should hold reunions, like the press corps that served in Vietnam. But those things are always grisly—total flops. You’ve been through some experience together which gives you the sense that you have something in common. But when you meet again, you find that you’ve all reverted to type. The thing that held you together is gone, and you discover that you don’t even have the same memories of it. It’s better not to try, I think.”

  She was talking of herself and Henk, obviously. Jim lightly took her hand. “You don’t agree with the Rev, then, that some of us can be changed by the opportunity we’ve been offered?” “He least of all.” She laughed. “A few of us maybe think we’ve been altered. But we all have to revert. It’s a law of nature. Like in the plant world, with the perennials going back to the original sick magenta. Frightening. Have you ever been to a college reunion? Or a veterans’ reunion?” “I’m a politician,” he said. “And I’ll see you again, Sophie.” “That’s different. We have a reason to see each other. We work the same side of the street. It’s not a complete accident that we were on the plane together. Your being on that committee was pretty much why I came along. I always wanted to know you. But the rest is fortuitous, mainly. We’ve been thrown together like marbles shaken in a bag.” “And yet connections came to light,” he suggested. “You knew Beryl. Beryl knew Aileen. Charles knew Henk’s grandfather. And I knew of Henk.” “You researched him,” teased Sophie. “I wish I could read his poetry, don’t you?” “You could learn Dutch,” he said. “When you know German, it’s not hard. I find I understand quite a bit.”

  Sophie smiled. “Remember ‘haast hebben’?” She was dreamy—her first words of Dutch “taking her back,” like a yellowed dance program. Then her tone changed. “You never learn a language unless you use it. Anyway, the committee’s a unit. And the millionaires are another. Oil and water. I think we deserve credit for having mixed as well as we have. That’s Henk, mainly, on our side, and Lily, I suppose, on theirs. They’ve both been well brought up. But Lily in real life would be unbearably conventional, wouldn’t she? Otherwise why would Beryl have declared a revolution?” She had touched on a vital point. “I prefer Lily,” he said shortly. “Well, I’ve known Beryl longer,” said Sophie. “But I admit I wouldn’t seek her out as a friend. She has no real interests, that’s her trouble. Having been brought up in an arch-Republican family, she’s rebelled by being totally a-political. And she hates art and books; Lily’s a great reader, it seems.” Jim pricked up his ears but he only remarked: “Arch-Republican? I should have thought of Lily as a swing-voter.” “You know what Henk says?” Sophie went on. “That they’re the common-law criminals—the millionaires, I mean—and we’re the politicals. Do you see?”

  Jim saw indeed. It was an interesting idea. On the model of a Soviet labor camp, the common-law criminals—murderers, thieves, and such—would be serving short sentences, while the political offenders would be in for long stretches, often till their health broke, or in dire cases, like the poet Mandelstam’s, till death intervened. In the scales of “people’s justice” as weighed out here on the polder, a similar distinction seemed to apply. The millionaires—ordinary pickpockets and highway robbers—would be going home, having paid for their crimes. But conditions for the committee’s release, individually or as a unit, had never been “aired” in any communiqué that had reached their ears. Not a quid or a quo vouchsafed. From time to time, their likenesses appeared on the screen—always Henk and himself—accompanied by the comment “So far as is known, the deputy [or the Senator] is still alive.” As in the Gulag, a blanket of silence covered the politicals’ fate; for all the world knew, they could in fact be dead. Confronting himself over and over on the screen—mainly on the ’68 campaign trail, preaching to the unconverted, suffering the little children—Jim got the eerie feeling that he had died, at any rate politically, some time back and was watching the pages of a memorial album turn.

  When the collectors were gone, it might be the committee’s turn finally to learn what they must give—or see given for them—in exchange for their freedom. But the itch to know in Jim’s case was far from overwhelming. He feared he could guess. Would their release in fact hang on Demand Two? If Henk was right, it would be artistically appropriate—meet and just in the topers’ eyes—for the fate of the “politicals” to be sewed up with that demand, political as a stick of dynamite. Moreover, like Charles’s banishment, it would constitute a punishment suited to the crime. Their crime as liberals—he believed he could confess for all—was, primo, to support the Atlantic Pact. Critically, and with this or that reservation, nevertheless, grosso modo, they were for the “shield.” Secundo, they were for the survival of the Jewish state; any reservations they had put on record as to Israel’s policies could be shown to stem from the belief that her current behavior was suicidal. To be instrumental in the dismantling of NATO and the ostracism of Israel would be a torture worthy of SAVAK. Perhaps, like the Potter lady with her picture, most of them would rather die than stand by as helpless spectators while such a deal was arrived at in their interest.

  Jim pulled himself up short. That would never happen. There was no cause to fear it. But what if constraint were put on them to make a bunch of tapes urging the acceptance of the second demand? That could be in the cards. And what would he do if “invited” to make a tape? An uneasiness took hold of him as he foresaw the argument that might edge him into consenting. It was what he had just told himself for the nth time: that Demand Two was unacceptable. Whatever pleas the eminent hostages might make, Den Uyl and his Cabinet would have to stand firm, stoppering their ears like the sailors of Ulysses. Hence it could do no harm to make a tape. He was free to make a tape, in all good conscience, at the bidding of his own intelligence, which reminded him that a hundred tapes could not alter the outcome. So then? His uneasiness only grew deeper. Something in him was opposed to making a tape—perhaps the old Christian yearning for martyrdom or just an addiction to truth-telling. He was wary, with reason, of his brain. Not that it misled him; its assessments were generally dead-right. It was not clouded by self-interest or prone to “rationalization.” But it had deterred him, too often, from action by showing him the futility of it. That had happened after Wisconsin. Now it could prompt him to embark on an action by the same type of demonstration. He might allow himself to do a distasteful, base thing secure in the private knowledge that it could have no effect. The operative word was “base.” It was an ordinary matter of honor. He guessed that an honorable act—or abstention from action—was always needless, wasteful, uncalled for. The requirements of honor had to buck the assessments of intelligence. And in James Augustine Carey, he acknowledged, laziness and intelligence could be accomplices. The easiest thing would be to make the tape.

  They were finishing lunch when the pictures came. In custom-made flat wooden cases that fitted their dimensions and were going to be a job to open. In the shed, the hijackers went to work on them with hammers and pliers, and Ahmed promptly smashed his thumb, reopening the six-day-old wound. Chadwick’s offer to help had been turned down, but he was allowed to stand around kibitzing. As on the first night, revolutionary discipline had relaxed; the collectors wandered in and out of the shed, expressing anxiety over the paintings that were no longer theirs. They were anxious, more selfishly, over the slow progress of the uncrating; by the time the pictures were vetted, the sun might have set, and the pilot of this helicopter did not want to take off in the dark.

  The first case to be opened produced a
surprise. The picture that was emerging, to Jim’s inexpert eye, did not look like an Old Master. In fact, it was a good-sized Cézanne. Soon Harold’s Cézannes, all eight of them, were sharing wall space with a kiddy-car and the family bicycles. Someone had blundered. But they were carried into the family room and stacked against the wall; Harold set them up, one by one, in front of the TV set to be looked at. “Of course you’re seeing them without reflectors,” he explained. To Jim, they looked like every Cézanne he had ever seen, only more so: there were the apples, Mrs. Cézanne, that mountain near Aix, pine trees with red bark growing in red earth, some pears with more apples and a white pitcher, the card-players, and what Harold said were the first oils of “The Bathers.” Jim glanced at Lily. The feeling he was getting of déjà vu made him wonder whether they were not high-class copies—had Harold been stung or had that lawyer of his pulled a fast one? She read his thought. “Rather standard, aren’t they? But he’s not an adventurous collector. You’d almost doubt they were real, they’re so ‘classic,’ so much what one’s conditioned to expect. But they are, you know. You see how the paint is laid on, very characteristic. Dear, clumsy Cézanne.” “Couldn’t draw, of course,” boomed Margaret. “Look at that arm.” She pointed to a nude figure among the bathers. “Completely out of drawing.” Jim was impressed.

  A large envelope containing documentation had come with the shipment. Jeroen took a long time studying the photos and transparencies and comparing them with the paintings. While this was happening, a number of the hostages, Jim himself and Lily included, returned to the shed. They were in time to see a long narrow painting of a horse race unpacked. Jim would not have recognized it as a Degas. “Oh, yes,” said Lily. “He did a great many of those. I believe he was mad about racing. Lovely, isn’t it? Johnnie has an eye. Do you think that’s Longchamp—see the stand there? Or did it exist in his time?” “I can’t tell you, Lily,” said Jim. “I only know Aqueduct.” “That’s a joke, isn’t it?” “Yes.” There followed a huge landscape with precipitous gray cliffs and a sunlit meadow below on which sheep, very small, were grazing. “The Ward,” Lily said. “Nearly as grand as the one in the Tate.” “I like it,” said Jim. “Notice the waterfall?” Then came an artist he recognized—Winslow Homer—and another—Dufy—and half a dozen “sporting” subjects: stags locking horns, a lion and a tiger fighting, two boxers in a ring, an archery contest, a horse in a stable with a groom and a cat—Stubbs, said Lily—a game of horseshoes, a horse market at a country fair. “Thomas Hardy,” said Jim. “Oh, no, I don’t think so,” said Lily. “Maybe a Morland. Oh, I see, you mean Hardy. Yes. The Mayor of Casterbridge.” That was a good recovery, he thought. He frowned. “What the hell is this one?” Lily put on her glasses and bent down. “That must be a mistake. It’s a print. Not very old either. ‘Elephants Wading,’ it says.” “Where’s the tie-in with sport?” “I don’t really know, Jim. Johnnie’s idea of sport can be rather all-embracing. Still, in India, in the old days, didn’t the rajahs hunt elephants? I seem to remember that.” He saw that if he stuck with this lady he was going to learn a good deal.

  Jeroen meanwhile had declared himself satisfied with the Cézannes. The inspection of Johnnie’s works was more cursory, to the point of offending Johnnie, who stood by, eager to show the provenances and present photos for comparison. Jeroen, he complained, should not be approving them in bulk like a job lot. The Stubbs Arabian, for instance, would repay examination—the market these days was full of journeyman “Gimcracks” and “Herods” being offered as Stubbses. “Well, I oughtn’t to blame him. You have to remember that until recently sporting art was put below the salt—a reaction against Landseer and good old Rosa Bonheur. I was a pioneer, along with Mellon, when I started my collection.” “Mellon?” Jim queried. “Paul,” Lily whispered. Johnnie was continuing. “People thought those things had no standing as art, belonged in a club or a trophy room. All that’s changed, thanks, if I may say it, to my labors.”

  “He gives this talk,” Lily explained softly, “whenever he shows his collection.” “Shut up, Ma,” said Beryl. Johnnie raced on regardless; he needed no spurring. “I’ve promoted it with the serious investor the way I would a stock, commissioned monographs, underwritten college lectures. I’m offering my alma mater a Ramsbotham Chair in the Visual History of Sport. The result is, we’re beginning to see fakes—the surest sign, of course, of the impetus we’ve given. Up to now though—here’s the funny bit—we’ve had no success in interesting the collector crowd in dog subjects. Nobody wants dogs except as accessories in a conversation piece or a fox-hunting scene. Though there were many fine artists once upon a time who made a pile in dog portraits. Take old Maud Earl. How do you explain that?” No one had a suggestion. His “job lot” was consigned to the parlor, and he was a free man, cleared for take-off as soon as the rest were ready.

  Henry’s Titian—a man in black armor—also passed muster. There remained several smallish cases. “Those are Margaret’s things, I suppose,” Lily said. “Though I remembered the Greco as bigger.” When the cases were pried open, a cry rang out. “My Marie Laurencins! Oh, shit, Chaddie, what have those horse’s asses done?” There were six of them, and one much like the next: the same doe-eyed misty maidens that Jim recalled from his early days. They were easy to like. In fact, when he was young, Marie Laurencin had been his favorite modern painter. He guessed that was because he had always been able to spot her, like a Stutz Bearcat. He had liked Redon and Rouault for the same reason. But from Lily’s little cluck of disappointment, he judged that the artist had “dated.”

  Margaret’s art had been left behind somehow. A quick check with the pilot confirmed that it had not been sent on from Dulles—so far as he knew. Evidently the signals had got crossed: Chadwick’s Cézannes had been meant to come in the next shipment, and Eloise’s Laurencins had not been meant to come at all. It was reassuring in a way to see that life among the terrorists was just as liable to foul-ups as normal government activity on Capitol Hill. But the alarming discovery was that the Vermeer was missing too. It was definitely not in the helicopter; to satisfy Jeroen, Ahmed and Carlos went out and searched, though there was no place it could be hiding.

  Jeroen was angry. For the first time, he let his displeasure show. He did not appear to mind so much about Margaret’s stuff; it was the Vermeer that his heart had been set on. He shouted that there was a plot among the imperialists to hold it back. In reply, he was canceling all departures. The helicopter would return empty. “Carlos, tell the pilot he should go.” The moment, plainly, was critical. The collectors cowered before the vengeful giant, as if before their eyes he had turned into a cruel ogre. The whole crowd was looking to Henk, as if trusting him to mediate. But abruptly Greet intervened, playing, for her, the unusual role of pacifier. She spoke with Jeroen in Dutch. “She reminds him of the food supply,” whispered Henk. They debated. At length Jeroen squared his shoulders, accepting, it seemed, her arguments. “You will go now as promised,” Greet announced. “The armed proletariat keeps its word.” The Chadwick couple, she said, would replace Helen and Margaret, the total remaining at eight. There could be no question of letting Henry remain behind. “You are to tell the imperialists that this is our last concession. We will tolerate no more delays and evasions.”

  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. “N
o, 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.