Flying Hero Class Read online

  “Why do you blokes do that?” he’d asked McCloud.

  “Pay for parking?”

  “Yeah. Where do those coins go?”

  “Into the parking meter,” said McCloud.

  “I know that. A man’s not a fool, Frank. Just the same, where do those bloody coins go in the end?”

  McCloud could tell he must try hard to pick up the tenor of the question, for Gullagara was aware of exactly the distance he was exposing himself by asking this question. He was beginning to frown too and to adjust the great leather belt around his slight beer gut. He seemed to be aware he was risking his dignity, asking for information that every five-year-old city child might have knowledge of. Here, outside the Italian place, he wondered had he done the right thing to ask an intimate, cultural question like this; just as a European might wonder after asking a question about something so basic to the Barramatjara cosmos that no one ever thought of explaining it.

  In the deserts of Australia, men of influence like Gullagara and Whitey Wappitji were sometimes engaged in rituals involving the stroking and advising of certain rocks, stones associated with this animal or that. They spoke to, charmed, persuaded the stone. And the species was increased in number, or at least maintained in its levels.

  In the street in New York, it had been McCloud’s guess that Gullagara saw the parking meter as a white model of this rite of rock persuasion. Pour coins into the meter’s narrow little mouth, and the metropolis with all its strange and ambiguous species was sustained! So the ceremony of parking brought a sort of immunity, Tom Gullagara might have thought, and an indefinable richness.

  What Tom did not know was how thoroughly the city had expunged all myth.

  So McCloud rushed to reassure him. There were no serious rites here. The meter had a little gut in which the money sat, and men with meter keys came round and took the money to cover the city’s expenses. It was not the physics of magic. It was the physics of urban economics.

  So Gullagara, like Daisy Nakamura, was staring at the hijacker in the cabin and at the backs of the two stewards collecting the passports as if he were trying to work out whether this too was just business or a powerful ceremony.

  McCloud chose a light tone. “They want to look at people’s passports so they can see whether any of their enemies are on board,” he whispered. “I don’t think you’re likely to be one of their enemies, Tom.”

  He was not as successful a whisperer as Cale, however. Yusuf the hijacker called, “That gentleman down there should shut up.” His voice, like Hasni’s, was quaintly accented with American. Or perhaps Canadian or some other brand of English which spelled opportunity to a young Palestinian.

  As if to prove the normality of whatever demands they might make, of whatever acts they might perform, Taliq and his men permitted a meal to be served. McCloud had no appetite. He felt that he was tasting ashes. Yusuf watched the serving and eating but made no ideological comment on the food that was presented up here. Even the Sevruga caviar and the Stolichnaya vodka were permitted to be offered. The only requirement was that the diners should not speak to each other, nor listen in on headphones to the plane’s broadcast system.

  Occasionally McCloud would raise his glass to Tom Gullagara, who would in return toss his head in a way that said, The things that can happen to a man when he goes on a dance tour!

  Palpable fragments of hijacking accounts McCloud had read in newspapers recurred to him. The half-remembered details stifled him. Wasn’t there one hijack where Egyptian commandos were ordered to liberate the plane yet destroyed in their efforts ten times as many hostages as hijackers? Was there another where the cabin blew up? And others where some mistake or wayward surge of electricity set off the Plastique in the hold and carried all the exalted ambitions of the hijackers, all the pedestrian hopes of travelers, screaming together down to earth?

  There were more serious questions than these honestly horrifying ones. He was not American or Israeli. But how could he watch Americans and Israelis beaten and bloodied and remain silent? The experts said that for some people it became all too easy. He could not imagine it becoming all too easy for him, though, but everyone said you never knew these things ahead of time. Under terror, would he get into a frame of mind where he’d start believing that a single American carried a lethal portion of blame for American policy? And if—as he hoped—he refused to believe that, if he did not remain silent, how prepared was he for punishment?

  The event was rumored to make the man. This event held no promise of making him. It was as if his lack of literary, managerial, and marital credit fitted him badly for this moment.

  He wondered too would Pauline have any trouble from her seating neighbor Hasni? He suspected she might be safer relying on Hasni’s apparent good manners than on any fighting return by him, by McCloud, to the rear of the plane—even if it were possible. For if he appeared, he thought, she might be unsettled into a sort of recklessness, the recklessness of a mother or spouse. Or else the recklessness—if any were left in her—of the lover.

  Then the Barramatjara. Surely they were safe? Surely they were the oppressed of the earth, bearing no blame for anyone’s policy? Victims of policy, in fact. And dispossessed of their land? Well, against the wishes of many whites, in recent years they’d been given it back freehold by an embarrassed government. But dispossessed in the past and potentially dispossessed in the present! And surely—according to these men with the Polish automatic weapons—daily and spiritually dispossessed by capitalism?

  The first-class passengers had coffee in front of them: Cale and—McCloud suspected, though he couldn’t see directly—Bluey Kannata a cognac apiece as well, and Daisy Nakamura a port. Cale was smoking, hungrily and with energy.

  A beeper on Yusuf’s belt began to bleat. Yusuf, his eyes darting around from the face of one of his well-fed passengers to that of another, pulled his small radio from his back pocket and spoke softly into it. He inclined his head then and listened to the words which emerged in return. He nodded and then seemed to prepare himself for a visit from someone.

  Within seconds McCloud saw a tall, clean-shaven man, a solid being in his late thirties, wearing a close imitation of army fatigues, pass down the aisle and stand by Yusuf. He turned and faced the passengers. His features were large and not unpleasant. There was already a faint bluishness of fatigue or disenchantment under his eyes.

  He pulled cigarettes from his breast pocket. “Since some of you are smoking,” he said, “I shall join you.” He lit the cigarette with one of those transparent lighters you can see the fluid in and looked reflectively at his prisoners.

  “I suppose you think you know what to expect,” he said in a well-modulated Anglo-Arab voice, the same voice which earlier had come from the flight deck. “You have all seen this on the movies, haven’t you? The chief hijacker standing before you? He is a fanatic, isn’t he? He is rabid. He is not a man born of woman. He speaks in jargon. Oh yes, my friends and my enemies, we shall hear jargon. There will be what you might call classes. This will be for some of you a short, sharp seminar. Some things will seem familiar to you, some things beyond your imaginings.

  “For the moment, I ask you to consider one idea—that the alienation, the—if you like—trauma you are suffering at the moment is but an echo of the trauma suffered by my people for the past fifty years. Imagine this, as an instance! A Sunni Muslim woman in the village of Saf in October 1948. An enemy soldier rapes and then executes her. Trauma, you see. My grandmother, as it happens. I know you have heard such stories before. Now you may listen to them with a little more immediacy of spirit.… For the moment, I wanted you to see me, and I wanted to see you.”

  Examining them, he took one quick, energetic gulp from his cigarette.

  “My name is Taliq. T-a-l-i-q. I hope you all ate well, since these matters are likely to become more erratic as we go.”

  He nodded to Yusuf and walked down the aisle again. McCloud looked over his shoulder and saw him ascending the stairw
ell to the upper deck. Returning to the cockpit, the threatened core of this small, hostage planet.

  Tom Gullagara leaned toward McCloud. “What’s that he says about his grandmother?” he asked.

  “She was raped,” murmured McCloud, trying not to move his lips. He saw Tom Gullagara close one eye and consider this news. From across the aisle he could hear distinctly the journalist Cale’s words. “I was in Palestine in ’48 when the mandate ran out. The Arabs couldn’t have organized a farting contest! Now it’s everyone’s fault but theirs that they were beaten.”

  “Shut up, fatso,” called Yusuf. Yet casually, as if he hadn’t heard or cared about the content of what Cale said.

  Cale is mad and dangerous, McCloud decided. Wanting to keep his profession a secret but making sure Yusuf notices him. Seeking anonymity but crying, “I was in Palestine in ’48.…”

  One of the American businessmen asked now if he could use the lavatory. Yusuf searched him, feeling for weapon bumps on the man’s body. Cale—forcing the issue again—rose in his place at once, as if he intended to go step by step with the American. But Yusuf seemed bent on ignoring Cale as a problem figure in the cabin. He muttered to him in passing that it was to be one at a time.

  McCloud watched the American go past. He walked slowly. He was the one McCloud had seen close his eyes as he yielded up his passport: one of those well-made, middle-aged men who wear a tan in autumnal New York, as if they spend every second weekend in the Bahamas.

  Through all this—the serving of meals, the speech by Taliq—the Barramatjara Dance Troupe seemed to McCloud to sustain their normal calm. Bluey Kannata, star and troubled soul, remained penned in the window seat by Whitey Wappitji. McCloud had seen his head following events in the cabin, darting in that birdlike way he reproduced when dancing the emu or the brush turkey.

  Across the aisle, Daisy Nakamura in her emerald dress had actually fallen serenely asleep. McCloud was astonished by her calmness, as distinct from the calmness of the Barramatjara Dance Troupe, by now well canvassed by the press and commented on in feature articles.

  When the businessman returned, Yusuf searched Cale, who stepped forward up the cabin as if to accommodate the hijacker. The search over, the Englishman turned and, brushing against McCloud’s seat, murmured, “You come next. First toilet on your left.”

  McCloud considered not putting his hand up. But then he wondered why Cale had specified the cabinet on the left. Did he plan to leave something there? And if McCloud did not pick it up, wasn’t Yusuf sure to find it in the end? McCloud therefore flinchingly raised his hand like a child in the classroom. He feared the Englishman was somehow going to give him an extra care, on top of his care for the troupe and for Pauline. It struck him now that he very likely had more responsibilities than anyone on the plane other than the captain and, of course, the handsome Taliq, who also had—after his own strange fashion—responsibilities of a dual nature.

  Yusuf, searching McCloud now, gave off a musk of mint and fresh, moderate sweat. A boy with a pleasant savor.

  “Made in Singapore by Vincent Fong Tailors, Orchard Road,” Yusuf read from a label on the inside of McCloud’s jacket. He did not seem to be adducing the label as evidence of imperialist decadence. He seemed interested in an old-fashioned way in cloth and stitching. His features, McCloud thought, were little different from those of Lebanese immigrants who ran menswear stores in Australian country towns.

  “I was in Singapore with a chamber orchestra last year,” McCloud said, an excuse if it was needed. He chose not to say it was a twenty-four-hour jacket—“I don’t wear suits,” he’d told the incredulous and natty Mr. Fong. McCloud felt guilty enough ordering the thing, since he knew that however good the cloth, no one could make a twenty-four-hour jacket without sweated labor. He’d imagined a Singapore Chinese machinist working a treadle sewer by dim light while two of her small children coughed and were restive on a mattress in the corner. Such were the dreams of an uneasy foreign devil ordering clothes in Singapore.

  “My father was a tailor,” murmured Yusuf, continuing the search. “Even at home we used to see this Asian stitching. It stinks, you know.”

  “I know,” said McCloud, displaying a section where the lining had come adrift. You have grievances? This is my grievance!

  When he entered the cabinet and locked the door, he could not see any evident signs, unless you considered the sodden towel Cale had left in the basin a sign. He pulled open the small tray where after-shave and skin lotion were kept and found a note.

  “Flush this,” it said. “In view of the passport thing, my name is not Cale. My name on the passport I handed in is Bennett. Be careful with this Taliq, old son. My early judgment is: a complicated and well-trained fellow of some psychological resources. Again, flush this.” And then below that, C for Cale.

  The onus is not so great, then. A drunk named Cale had become a drunk named Bennett. I needn’t call him anything at all, since no one need know the two of us have talked.

  Finished urinating, a gush of startled yellow, he watched Cale’s slip of paper disappear in a swirl of blue water as he obeyed the man and flushed.

  Instead of moving back to his seat, he decided to risk getting a sight of Pauline, maybe even speaking brief words with her. For it seemed the hijackers were in unchallenged command now, as they weren’t when Hasni first ordered him forward. He wanted to share this observation with his wife, to give comfort and be comforted.

  McCloud turned right toward the rear of the plane and came through a curtain. A stocky man in a sports shirt and jeans and a sort of cricketing sweater blocked his path. This must be, McCloud concluded from the automatic weapon the young man held in his hands, one of the brothers—Musa, temporarily down from upstairs. “Back, back,” Musa yelled.

  “I want to visit my wife,” he said. McCloud felt tears prick his eyelids. “Please. My wife is back there. I want to tell her everything will be all right. Have some compassion.”

  “You’ve had a chance to start the compassion. All you damn fools up there. You’ve had a chance to set the tone,” said stocky Musa. He spoke with a Midlands British accent and smiled ironically but without too much enmity. “You should let her travel with you. I thought only the unwashed Arabs did such things to their wives.”

  “It was a mix-up,” McCloud began to explain.

  “Don’t worry,” said the young man. “I’m a Christian just like you. Orthodox. We treat our women like shit, too. Back, back, or I’ll shoot you. What do I care for your sodding little marriage?”

  A small yelp escaped a middle-aged couple in the window seats who were listening to this exchange. He saw in their faces an unfeigned shock at the idea that there were people who could so brutally deny an appeal to do with marriage.

  Musa pushed him from behind with the metal handle of the weapon. Such hard edges! From the door of the first-class compartment Musa yelled in Arabic at Yusuf, abusing him for being too relaxed.

  Yusuf seemed to reply good-naturedly. Then he spoke in English to the passengers. “My brother Musa is ready to shoot dead anyone who tries to go out.” He gave a shrug, again a sporting man’s, a skirt chaser’s shrug. “That’s the way it is.” He walked down the aisle toward McCloud. “Sir, from now on you will need to piss and shit in a corner, in full view. Your lavatory rights are canceled.”

  But Yusuf sounded so friendly about it, McCloud was left with a basis for hoping this was as severe as they’d be on him.

  The lights were dimmed. Taliq announced from the flight deck that passengers should take some rest while he and his brothers of the Arab Youth Popular Socialist Front examined their passports. There was actually, McCloud thought, a quotient of paternal care in his voice.

  McCloud noticed that Tom Gullagara did not settle to sleep. He sat upright, as if to have a solid think. Occasionally he rolled a thin cigarette and smoked it. Tobacco, which the Barramatjara had encountered as a gift from cattlemen and governments, which had kept them captive in their reserv
ation and soothed them and served as their wages when they worked livestock on the great stations! Now Tom smoked the first skinny stockman’s cigarette, the first bush durry, of his life as a hostage.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  Searching Out the Guilty

  Few seemed to sleep, McCloud noticed, but all—even Cale/Bennett—seemed passive in the cabin. McCloud knew that in the version of this plane which they carried in their heads, there was a grenade on the flight deck above and Plastique in the hold below. People were sandwiched by these threats, and Yusuf strolled the aisle with an air of easy knowledge of how most of them breathed shallowly for fear of acting as a trigger.

  Secretly watching him around the edge of his seat, McCloud saw the young hijacker, as if impishly, knowing how utter was his control, disappear through the curtain toward the back of the plane.

  Almost at once, passengers became aware that they were for the moment without supervision. A few of them began to whisper to each other in the near darkness Taliq intended them to use for sleep.

  “These are those PLO fellers, eh?” Tom Gullagara asked McCloud all at once.

  “Something like that, Tom.” He remembered Arafat on television, with apparent good faith renouncing terror. He regretted he had not paid more attention to the maps and tables of Palestinian organization, of the fragments of Palestinian alienation and fervor, which sometimes appeared in the press. “Maybe just what they call a splinter group,” he said.