The Germans were practical people, their looks said. It was an idea worth considering, to see if it would help Germany.
This was not the worst response Mary had gotten, so she left the meeting feeling drained, and in serious need of a drink, following a session in the gym punching things; but not as depressed as she had been after some of the other meetings. Germans: they had seen the worst. They knew how bad it could get. Even though these were the grandchildren of the ones who had lived through it, or now mostly the great-grandchildren, there was still a cultural memory they could not escape, a memory that would last centuries. There was repression, of course, but wherever there is repression there is also the return of the repressed, often twisted and compressed by the repression into something even more dangerous to the self. Maybe that meant that Germans were focused on staying safe to a degree that had turned dangerous. They wouldn’t be the first.
Then on to Russia. Russia’s central bank was almost as much a state operation as China’s. Half of its profits went to the Russian state, by constitutional design. It owned sixty percent of Sberbank, the country’s largest commercial bank, and one hundred percent of the country’s national reinsurance company. Their central bankers were very intent on protecting Russian interests above all. It made sense to Mary; and the men who met her were friendly. Any country that could produce Tatiana probably had some good in it. And Russians too had seen the worst that could happen. Their empire had imploded on them within living memory, and before that they had suffered the extreme trauma of the world war. They had reasons to hate the Germans, also to hate the Americans, to a lesser extent; really to hate everybody, you might say. Russia against the world: that had been part of their collective psyche for as long as they had been aware of the world. But their own problems absorbed most of their attention most of the time; they were a world apart, to some extent. So many places had been like that for most of human time, and were like that still— everyone living in the past of their own region’s psyche to one extent or another, because they all lived in their languages, and if your native language was anything but English, you were estranged to one degree or other from the global village. Globalization was many things— including a reality, in that they all lived on one shared planet in which borders were historical fantasies— but it was also a form of Americanization, of soft power imperialism combined with economic dominance, in that the US still had seventy percent of the capital assets of the world secured in its banks and companies, even though it had only five percent of the world’s population. So the globalization determined by physical reality could never be escaped, and would only become more prevalent as the biosphere problems got worse, while the globalization of American imperialism could not possibly last, as it was one of the main causes of the biosphere’s problems. And yet the world’s lingua franca was a permanent soft power.
So the two globalizations were at war, and both had to change; they had to be destranded and dealt with separately, but also understood for now as one, and dealt with together.
In the midst of these thoughts, feeling the useless spin of them, as in a bad dream, she got a call from Badim.
“What’s up?”
“That man who kidnapped you?”
“Yes?”
“They’ve caught him.”
“Ah! Where?”
“In Zurich.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Down by the river, in Needle Park. He was helping at a refugee dinner, and they got attacked by some fascist group and he got in the fight.”
“How did they know it was him?”
“DNA. And they’ve got him on some cameras, as usual. The DNA also links him to a death on a beach on Lake Maggiore, Swiss side. Someone got punched in the face and died. Looks like your man was the one who punched him.”
“Damn,” she said, feeling shocked. “Well, I’m on the train back to Zuri in the morning. I’ll want a full report.”
Mary spent that long trip home stewing. She didn’t know what she thought or what she felt. A thrill of fear; a strong curiosity; a sense of triumph; a big touch of relief. Now at least she was safe. She wasn’t going to wake up some night being strangled by that disturbed young man. That was good; but the thought of him imprisoned was also strangely upsetting to her. Should people suffering mental illness really be incarcerated? Well, sometimes they had to be. So it was quite a confusing mix of feelings to feel.
But there was no denying that whatever these feelings were, she was interested. Interested enough that she even somehow wanted to see this man again. And with him in jail, it would be safe. But why should she want it? She didn’t know. Something about that night had snagged her. As of course it would.
As the train crossed Germany, she realized she was going to do it. She was going to go see him, whether she understood the impulse or not. That suggested to part of her that it might be a bad idea. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she had done something she knew was not smart. Always she had been prone to the rash act. She put it down to something Irish. It seemed to her that Irish women doing rash things was precisely how her people had managed to perpetuate themselves.
A phrase occurred to her: Stockholm Syndrome. Was that what this was? She looked it up. Conversion of hostages to a state of sympathy for their kidnappers. Generally regarded as a mistake on the hostages’
