Cannibals and Missionaries (14 page)

At least they deterred Carey. His curiosity, though aroused, was satisfied to exercise itself in the abstract; he felt no real need to know. Cameron, he expected, was on a different track: he must be taking as a working hypothesis the conviction that the grenades were inoperative or just irrelevant to some Boy Scout ethic of action. Carey scrawled a fresh note on a paper napkin and sent it along. Van Vliet de Jonge read it as it went by him. He nodded. “‘Who steals my purse steals trash,’” Carey had written. “Keep your shirt on.” Only money, filthy lucre, was at stake, after all. And it was not as if the raiders were after Cameron’s life-savings, which perhaps were worth defending at knife-point. It was corporate money, “covered” by insurance, whose transfer to the hijackers’ pockets nobody could feel as touching him personally in a vital spot. Except in terms of envy: a hard-working lecturer in history or, for that matter, a U.S. Senator might well see red at the thought of a fortune acquired with so little honest sweat. But that was a daily occurrence in the board rooms and offices of government procurement; Cameron could not be ignorant of the facts of modern business life.

No doubt there was a principle somewhere to be discerned in this affair that a righteous man might be inclined to do battle for—resistance to the tyranny of arms or the right to travel unharassed and unimpeded. But this right in fact was a fringe benefit of paid-up membership in the shrinking Free World and even in England, its cradle, only a couple of centuries old; to “go unarmed unharmed,” as the saying went, had been far from the rule on the American frontier. Freedom of travel was conceded today in only a residual part of the globe and there hedged about by passport and visa formalities which had been unknown in most of the “civilized” world up to the First War. If air piracy represented a reversion to an age of lawlessness, when nobody could count himself safe outside his own door, it had also reintroduced illegal searches, which Americans (Carey spoke for himself and a few of his colleagues in the Senate) had begun by resenting and had quickly got used to, evidently preferring their personal safety to their constitutional rights.

As a constitutionalist, Carey was unhappy about the fact of being hijacked, to which there was no constitutional or democratic reply. Having submitted to an illegal search at the airport, he was now submitting to force while consoling himself with history and philosophy, whereas, in his mind—and not merely as a male animal, in his gut—he believed that force should always be resisted. By hook or crook; in his interior citadel, if nowhere else, James Augustine Carey ought to be saying no to power-at-the-end-of-a-gun-barrel. Yet here he sat, staring at a slab of Nesselrode pudding, and the unaccustomed sensation of lacking power was disagreeable, for there was an implication of consent. But rushing to improvised arms, even if that were feasible, would be an over-reaction, also damaging to the self-respect. Moreover, there were others to be considered. They had the right, surely, not to be blown sky-high—for once the figure was appropriate—as the result of a unilateral decision to meet force with force. An opportunity for taking a poll seemed unlikely to present itself, but if consulted, an overwhelming majority of the passengers would vote to sit tight. Your majority’s chief wish was to stay out of trouble; few, if any, battles would ever have been fought if the choice had rested with the troops.

In the past, history indicated, warlike tribes had been known, and courage, if you could believe the chroniclers, could be roused by oratory. But today the citizenry grew up fearful, every man-jack a non-interventionist. Only kooks, far out on the Right and Left, were ready to take up arms for what they believed in, which was why the Founding Fathers’ wisdom in assigning the power to declare war to the Congress, rather than the Executive, had been short-sighted—they had relied on a nation of minute-men. Roosevelt had had to con the people and their elected representatives into the Second World War, and Johnson had followed suit, manufacturing his own Pearl Harbor in Tonkin Gulf to get a blank check issued to him for the war in Vietnam. While Carey had approved of the first commitment and disapproved of the second, he could see that deception had been needful in both cases if intervention was what was desired, and he had often wondered whether Kennedy’s handling of the missiles crisis would have been endorsed by the country if a draft of his intentions had been submitted in advance to a vote.

Cameron, evidently, was looking to
him
now to exercise leadership, and he did not care for the assignment. Vetoing hare-brained counter-insurgency schemes was easy enough, but the alternatives were not clear. Short of supine acceptance, there ought to be some middle course, involving the arts of persuasion or mere watchful waiting on opportunity, generally glimpsed too late. And it was not just Cameron who was turning to him for leadership. He sensed that he had been “elected” by his own group—and probably by a fair number of others who had got wind that he was aboard—if only to set the tone. It was mainly a question of style. Whatever he did, or failed to do, would be on the record. It was a “moment of truth” which he would have been glad to evade. But he was too experienced politically to ignore the sensation, stiffening his spine like a chilling yardstick thrust down his collar, of being a model in a showcase: “
SENATE DOVE KEEPS HIS COOL
. Asked how a liberal legislator felt on being hijacked, Carey quipped ‘There ought to be a law.’”

It irritated him to surmise that others were looking to him for guidance when, like the rest of the human cargo, he lacked the first requisite—information—on which to base a line of conduct. He was used to being briefed on any matter likely to confront him, but now no aide sat by his side to whisper in his ear or pass him a folder of vital statistics on air piracy. Of course if he were feeling inventive, he could easily devise some innocent-seeming experiments to assess these men and the lengths to which they were willing to go. But he was not feeling inventive, and the trial balloon he had idly sent up half an hour ago with his jape “Are they on the house?” had signally railed as a temperature-taker. The gunman, if he had heard, made as if he hadn’t, like old Father Peter in study hall deciding not to let himself be provoked by a solitary humorist in the back rows. And Milady Simmons was still displeased with him for his ill-timed—as she saw it—levity. “What made you want to tease that poor hostess? She’s scared to come near us now. You saw how she trembled when she tried to open your champagne. Why, Senator, I think you’re perverse.”

The passing of notes made her nervous too. “Be careful. They’ll see you. They’ll think you and Mr. Cameron are up to something. We don’t want to make them jumpy.” As she spoke, the gunman crossed in front of the movie screen and came slowly down the aisle. “He’s going to make you show him what you’ve been writing. Oh, my God!” Carey grinned. “Shall I swallow it?” With his teeth, he tore a shred from Cameron’s original missive and carefully chewed it. The machine-gunner passed by. Aileen opened an eye. “He’s gone.
Please
don’t try to bait them any more, Senator. You act as though this was a game. Don’t you take anything seriously?” From beneath her penciled brows came a sidelong measuring look. “I never wanted to believe the stories they told—” “How I lost the nomination to McGovern.” He had heard that music before. “Don’t sneer. I always defended you. I said you were just being honest. But students who worked for you in Miami said you were
impossible.
You quipped and clowned when delegates asked you questions instead of taking clear stands.” “My positions were known,” retorted Carey. “Anyway Nixon would have clobbered me. I would have rather it happened to George.”

In fact he took the hijackers as seriously, he thought, as they deserved. Since they were neither Westerners nor Africans nor Orientals, they were Arabs, one could reasonably assume. No doubt they believed they were furthering the cause of Palestinian liberation—that hornet’s nest Israel had idiotically stirred up for herself when she elected not to give back the occupied territories. The only puzzle was why a French airliner had been chosen as a target; since France was a friend to the Arab cause, Air France was regarded as a “safe” company to fly with. If that was no longer so, a cleavage might be opening in French-Arab relations which no one in Washington was yet aware of—something to do, perhaps, with Mystère and Mirage deliveries. Or could France be quietly resuming shipment of parts to Israel? Seen in that light, this morning’s take-over could possess some real interest; he asked himself whether the Dutch parliamentarian was considering these implications too.

On the other hand, this pair might be low-grade members of the North African underworld without awareness of the political significance of seizing a French plane. In their ignorance of larger stakes, they would have been expecting to be received with military honors in Tripoli or Damascus when in fact their arrival could only be an embarrassment. The sudden change of course, just now, favored that hypothesis; indeed, there could be no other explanation for the pilot’s executing a U-turn midway to Rome than that the Arab capitals, queried by radio, had refused the plane clearance to land. For the past ten minutes—Carey checked his watch—they had been proceeding north-northwest and must now be re-crossing the Alps. It seemed odd, though, that the gunman showed no loss of aplomb. Carey could only conclude that the change of course had been negotiated with the invisible grenadier, who was probably in command of the operation and in touch with the pilot by inter-com. Unless, up front, there was a third hijacker? Across the aisle, the Scot and the Dutchman were again bent over a map. Carey scratched his head. It almost looked as if they were returning to base—Charles de Gaulle airport. But for what reason? Feeling the first trace of misgiving, he listened but could hear nothing amiss in the regular pulse of the engines. Refueling? Unnecessary, unless their next stop was to be Moscow, and the Russians did not take to hijackers. A radar failure?

The stewardesses collecting the lunch trays were giving out no flight bulletins. “I don’t know, sir,” said the girl, as Carey handed over his. He retained the glass of Evian—his throat was dry. The mystery was thickening, like the cloud cover outside. If it was De Gaulle they were heading for, the pilot ought to be starting his descent. But they were still at cruising speed.

A wild surmise—Erin—entered his mind. Improbable, he sharply told himself, to the last degree that this pair could be linked with breakaway IRA terrorists and be seeking a hideout on a remote farm in Galway to barter the plane and its passengers against a package composed of Bridget Rose Dugdale, the Price sisters, and the usual Palestinian guerrillas held in Israeli jails. He must have had one too many last night with his friends from the Embassy. Only an Irishman, or a hungover half-Irishman, could summon up such a bogey from the ancestral peat fires. Granted, it was no secret that ties existed between those boyos and Palestinian guerrilla units, who were training them (as if they needed it!) in terrorist techniques and supplying them with arms. But no boggy meadow or field could take a jumbo jet, and an attempt to land on a small hidden airstrip, if such existed in the Irish Republic, would result in gruesome casualties, if not certain death for all concerned. Were the hijackers to put forward such a crazy demand, the pilot would have to dissuade them and, if he failed, let them shoot him rather than carry out their orders.

Carey sighed. He repented last night’s conviviality. Since Eleanor had died, he had been resorting to drink, mainly from boredom and because he was sleeping badly. If it had not been for their religion, they would have divorced long ago, and yet now he missed her. His punishment, he supposed, for not having believed her when she used to tell him “When I die, you’ll be sorry.” In her last illness, she had finally stopped saying that, perhaps from lack of conviction; a pity she could not be here now to enjoy her triumph or, to be fair to her many virtues, seek to console him for the loss of her.

She drank herself, like most senators’ wives, but for him she had been jealous of booze: “It takes you away from us.” Jealousy made her exaggerate his attachment to the bottle: “The curse of the Irish; if it weren’t for me, you’d be an alcoholic.” He had never been more than a sporadic drinker, while campaigning or, precisely, to get away from her after a tiresome quarrel, and in the Senate he could count as abstemious, but now he had to accord her a certain skill in divination. He rarely went to bed totally sober these days, and this morning he had broken his own golden rule—not to add alcohol, even a beer, to a hangover. The double birthday, however, had imposed a celebratory glass, and the champagne he had ordered for the panache. He had not finished it and had felt no temptation to follow up with wine. Actually, to be fair to himself, last night’s overindulgence had been venial, mainly a matter of late hours, and excused by the prospect of a dull journey to Teheran. He had counted on a restorative snooze all the way to Tel Aviv, but first this little woman had come to jaw with him, then there was the false alarm on Victor’s cat, and finally the hijackers had burst on the scene. If he had known he was going to be hijacked, he would have been better prepared, he hoped, but then, as the Church taught, the wise virgin always had her lamp trimmed.

In the seat ahead, he noticed, the Bishop was dozing—a display of holy sangfroid he envied. But if he himself were to take forty winks, it would only contribute to his Luciferian legend. “
Perverse!
Why, let me tell you, that man slept right through a hijacking. As soon as he saw what was happening, he ordered a bottle of champagne, and the next thing I knew he was snoring. I don’t deny his intelligence or his charm, when he wants to use it, but would you want him in the White House? I mean, in a nuclear crisis…”

Jim Carey supposed it was his fate to be type-cast as a semibad apple. Being good-looking played its part in that. “He certainly is a
handsome
man,” Eleanor’s father, a mortician, used to comment whenever the tall law student, then known as Augie, came to take her out in his ancient salesman’s coupe—a grudging professional concession that the suitor would make a nice corpse. Yet being handsome had never hurt the Kennedys or Stu Symington—no sulphurous additive suspected there. He was a better Catholic than any of the Kennedys, though few, outside his confessor, would believe that. But when he made a retreat, which he still did occasionally, it went on the debit side: the inference drawn by the gossip columns was that he was a “spoiled priest.” In his last try for the Democratic nod, his backers had implored him, for Christ’s sake, to stay out of monasteries; if he needed a rest from the world, he could find some island in Maine and commune with Nature—the “spoiled priest” canard was turning off not only Jews and Protestants but Catholics. When he ignored the advice and slipped into a Benedictine monastery for a weekend—with the Secret Service, assigned to him by law as a candidate, camping in a motel opposite so they could check on the monks’ fire-escapes—his chief speech-writer went over to Shirley Chisholm. No great loss; he could write his own speeches. But he did not care for the golden handshake the scribe gave him on quitting: “I have great respect for Senator Carey’s moral courage, but the guy doesn’t want to get elected. I guess what he wants is for somebody to hand him a crown.”