But what if it wasn’t a mistake? What if you had been forced, by being taken hostage, to focus for once on the reality of the other— on their desperation, which had to have been extreme to drive them to their own rash act? What if you saw that you might do the same sort of thing in the other’s shoes? If that insight were to occur to you, in the immense protraction of time that occurred when taken hostage, you would then see the situation newly, and change somehow, even if much later. Possibly that change was, at least sometimes, the right reaction to what had happened.
No doubt it depended on circumstances, as always. In the original Stockholm situation, she read, a pair of bank robbers had held four hostages, three women and a man, in a bank vault that they too were trapped in, and over the course of a week many small kindnesses had passed both ways. By the time it was all over, and of course it had ended peacefully, with the kidnappers surrendering, there was a bit of sympathy established. The hostages had refused to testify at trial against the kidnappers. The syndrome named after them was said to affect about ten percent of the victims of kidnappings, and the kinder the behavior of the kidnappers, inside the fundamentally hostile act of holding a person against their will, the more likely the effect. As made sense.
There was also a Lima Syndrome, she read, in which the kidnappers developed for their hostages a sympathy so strong that they let them go.
What if both syndromes occurred at once? Surely that was how it would sometimes happen, in a kind of symmetry: two people, both suffering from different kinds and degrees of trauma, recognizing in a moment of high stress a fellow sufferer. Wasn’t that right?
So hard to say about these things. Trying to put a name on a confusion of feelings. A wrong feeling that nevertheless got felt. Many psychologists doubted the reality of Stockholm Syndrome. It had never made it into the DSM handbooks. It was pop psychology, a journalistic term, a fiction.
Well, but. Every possible thing happened, eventually. In moments of high stress strange things happened. Probably it was stupid to try to put any kind of label on these events, any kind of explanation. Syndromes, psychology in general: bollocks. It was just that one time, every time. In this case, just Mary and that young man, in a kitchen for a very intense couple of hours. Not that different from a bad date you felt obliged to ride out. Well, no. That pistol, that moment of fear— a jolting spike of fear for her life— she had not forgotten that, or forgiven it. She never would. Nothing was quite like that. But nothing was quite like anything.
In Zurich she left the Hauptbahnhof and crossed the river to the tram stop and got on the next 6 tram and rode it up the hill to Kirche Fluntern. Wearily she walked along Hochstrasse to her building and let herself in. Bodyguards still stood outside, pleased to see her. Up the stairs, feeling wasted. Poured herself a glass of white wine on ice and slurped it down fast. She didn’t like living alone, but she didn’t like living with bodyguards either. Probably she should have invited them inside; it was cold out. But at times like this she didn’t want to talk to anyone. It would have been impossible, she was too confused. She would have been snappish, even if she had tried to be polite. As it was she took a quick shower and fell into bed, still stewing. Luckily sleep swept her off.
In the morning she went first to her office and got through the necessary things. Then she looked at the report that Badim had worked up on the young man. Frank May. He had indeed survived the great India heat wave; he had been right in the area worst hit, while there as an aid worker. At the time he had been twenty-two years old. And his DNA had been found at the murder site on Lake Maggiore, on a chunk of wood used as the weapon. Probably that would be charged as manslaughter. But they had him dead to rights, it looked like. She sighed. The other stuff was trivial in comparison, but the problem was that it made a pattern, added up to a repeat offender. Meaning more time in prison.
She looked up where he was— Gefängnis Zurich, the Zurich Jail. After a call to make sure of visiting hours and his availability, she walked to the tram stop. While waiting for the next tram she inspected the stuff in the kiosk shop. What did you bring a prisoner? Then she remembered she was visiting her kidnapper. She didn’t buy anything.
The jail was located on Rotwandstrasse, Red Wall Street. The nearest tram stop was Paradeplatz. She got off and walked to the street; no red walls in sight. It could have been repainted, or knocked down eight hundred years before. The jail was obvious; a three-story concrete building, extending for most of a block. Institutional; tall windows in deep embrasures, obviously not meant to be opened.
She went in and identified herself. They called in; the prisoner was willing to meet with her. There was a big meeting room. First she had to leave her phone and other stuff in a locker, then go through an X-ray machine, as in airport security. After that she was escorted by a guard down a hall and through two doors that unlocked and opened automatically. Like an airlock in space stations, she thought. Inside this building, a different atmosphere.
And it was true. It looked different, it smelled different. The Swiss almost always
