Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [249]
He said, “You’re ungrateful. You never read the paper, you schmuck, and the whole thing would have passed you by without me. Just like the Thaxter business.”
“What Thaxter business?”
“You see? You don’t know anything. I didn’t want to rattle you by telling you about Thaxter till the negotiations got started. You don’t know what happened to Thaxter? He was kidnaped in Argentina.”
“He wasn’t! By whom, terrorists? But why? Why Thaxter? Have they hurt him?”
“America should thank God for its gangsters. The Mafia at least makes sense. These political guys don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They’re snatching and murdering all over South America without rhyme and reason. How should I know why they picked on him. He must have acted like a big shot. They let him send out one letter and he mentioned your name in it. And you didn’t even know you were all over the world press.”
“What did he say?”
“He appealed to the internationally famous historian and playwright Charles Citrine for help. He said you’d vouch for him.”
“Those fellows don’t know what they’re doing. I hope they won’t harm Thaxter.”
“They’ll be sore as hell when they find out he’s a phony.”
“I don’t understand. What was he pretending? Whom did they take him to be?”
“They’re very confused in all those countries,” said Cantabile.
“Ah, my old friend Professor Durnwald is probably right when he says how nice it would be to hack off the Western Hemisphere at the isthmus and let the southern part drift away. Only there are so many parts of the earth of which that holds true now.”
“Charles, the more commission you pay me, the less you’ll have left for those terrorists.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Oh, it’ll be you all right,” said Cantabile.
forty
Thaxter’s captivity by terrorists oppressed me. It made me grieve at heart to imagine him locked in a black cellar with rats and terrified of torture. He was, after all, an innocent sort of person. True, he was not perfectly upright but much of his wrongdoing was simply delirium. Restless, seeking a piece of the action, he had now been cast among even more violently hallucinated parties who cut off ears and planted bombs in mailboxes or hijacked jet planes and slaughtered passengers. The last time I troubled to read a newspaper I noted that an oil company, after paying a ransom of ten million dollars, was still unable to obtain the release of one of its executives from his Argentine kidnapers.
That afternoon from the hotel I wrote to Carl Stewart, Thaxter’s publisher. I said, “I understand Pierre has been abducted and that in his appeal for help he has named me. Well, of course, I will give everything I’ve got to save his life. In a way all his own, he is a wonderful man and I do love him; I have been his faithful friend for more than twenty years. I assume you have been in touch with the State Department and also with the US Embassy in Buenos Aires. Despite the fact that I have written on political matters I am not a political person. Let me put it this way, that for forty years during the worst crises of civilization I read the papers faithfully and this faithful reading did no one any good. Nothing was prevented thereby. I gradually stopped reading the news. It now appears to me, however, and I say this as a dispassionate observer, that between gunboat diplomacy at one extreme and submission to acts of piracy at the other, there ought to be some middle ground for a great power. In this regard, the flabbiness of the United States is disheartening. Are we only now catching up with the lessons of World War I? We learned from Sarajevo not to let acts of terrorism precipitate wars and from Woodrow Wilson that small nations have rights that great ones must respect. But that’s it and we have gotten stuck some six decades back and set the world a miserable example by allowing ourselves to be bullied.
“To come back to Thaxter, however, I am wildly anxious about him. As recently as three months ago I would have been able to offer a ransom of $250,000. But that