6

“I like Vicente,” Nicky said. “He’s our friend.”

“I think he is too,” Angus called over from his cell. He was lying on the thin, soiled mattress of his makeshift bed and filling empty time by watching two large beetles on the wall.

“Then un-think, both of you!” Jessica snapped. “Liking anyone here is stupid and naïve.”

She stopped, wanting to bite her tongue and call the words back. There was no need to have spoken sharply.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that to come out the way it did.”

The trouble was that after fifteen days of close confinement in their tiny cages, the strain was telling on them all, wearing their spirits down. Jessica had done her best to keep morale, if not high, at least at a level above despair. She also made sure they all performed daily exercises, which she led. But clearly, despite best intentions, the close physical restriction, monotony and loneliness were having an inevitable effect.

Additionally, the greasy, unpalatable food was one more burden that sapped their physical resources.

Compounding those miseries, and despite their efforts to stay washed, they were usually dirty, odorous, and frequently sweating, with their soiled clothes sticking to them.

It was all very well, Jessica thought, to remind herself that her anti-terrorism course mentor, Brigadier Wade, had suffered a good deal more and for a longer period in his below-ground hellhole in Korea. But Cedric Wade was an exceptional, committed person serving his country in time of war. There was no war here to stiffen the mind or sinews. They were merely civilians caught in a petty skirmish … for what purpose? Jessica still didn’t know.

Just the same, the thought of Brigadier Wade and Nicky’s remark about liking Vicente, plus Angus’s endorsement, reminded her of something she had learned from Wade. Now seemed a good time to bring it up.

Speaking softly while glancing warily at the guard on duty, she asked, “Angus and Nicky, have either of you heard of the Stockholm syndrome?”

“I think so,” Angus said. “Not sure, though.”

“Nicky?”

“No, Mom. What is it?”

The guard was the one who sometimes brought a comic book; he seemed engrossed in one now and indifferent to their talking. Jessica also knew he spoke no English.

“I’ll tell you,” Jessica said.

In memory she could hear Brigadier Wade’s voice informing the small study group of which she had been part, “One thing that happens in almost every terrorist hijack or kidnap situation is that after a while at least some of the hostages come to like the terrorists. Sometimes hostages go so far as to think of the terrorists as their friends and the police or troops outside, who are trying to rescue the hostages, as the enemy. That’s the Stockholm syndrome.”

All of which was true, Jessica confirmed subsequently through additional reading. She had also been curious enough to go back and learn how the process got its label.

Now, dipping into memory and using her own words, she described the strange story while Nicky and Angus listened.

It happened in Stockholm, Sweden, on August 23, 1973.

That morning, at Norrmalmstorg, a central city square, an escaped convict, Jan-Erik Olsson, age thirty-two, entered Sveriges Kreditbanken, one of Stockholm’s larger banks. From beneath a folded jacket Olsson produced a submachine gun which he fired into the ceiling, creating panic amid a shower of concrete and glass.

The ordeal that followed lasted six days.

In the course of it no one participating had any notion that for years and probably centuries to come, an outcropping of the experience they were sharing would become famous as the Stockholm syndrome—a medical and scientific phrase destined to be as familiar worldwide to students and practitioners as Cesarean section, anorexia, penis envy or Alzheimer’s disease.

Three women and a man, all bank employees, were taken hostage by Olsson and an accomplice, Clark Olofsson, age twenty-six. The hostages were Birgitta Lundblad, thirty-one, a pretty blond; Kristin Ehnmark, twenty-three, spirited and black-haired; Elisabeth Oldgren, twenty-one, small, fair and gentle; and Sven Säfström, twenty-five, a tall, slender bachelor. For most of the next six days this sextet was confined to a safe-deposit vault from where the criminals presented their demands by telephone—for three million kronor in cash ($710,000), two pistols and a getaway car.

During the siege, the hostages suffered. They were forced to stand with ropes around their necks so that falling would strangle them. From time to time, as a machine gun was thrust into their ribs, they expected death. For fifty hours they were without food. Plastic wastebaskets became their only toilets. Within the vault, claustrophobia and fear were all-pervading.

Yet all the while a strange closeness between hostages and captors grew. There was a moment when Birgitta could have walked away but didn’t. Kristin managed to give information to the police, then acknowledged, “I felt like a traitor.” The male hostage, Sven, described his captors as “kind.” Elisabeth agreed.

Stockholm’s police, waging a war of attrition to free the prisoners, encountered hostility from them. Kristin said by telephone that she trusted the robbers, adding “I want you to let us go away with them … They have been very nice.” Of Olsson, she declared, “He is protecting us from the police.” When told, “The police will not harm you,” Kristin replied, “I do not believe it.”

It was revealed later that Kristin held hands with the younger criminal, Olofsson. She told an investigator, “Clark gave me tenderness.” And after the hostages’ release, while being taken by stretcher to an ambulance, Kristin called to Olofsson, “Clark, I’ll see you again.”

Lab technicians searching the vault found traces of semen. Following a week of questioning, one of the women, while denying having had sex, said that during one night while others were asleep she helped Olsson to masturbate. Investigators, while skeptical about the no-sex statement, dropped the matter.

During questioning by doctors the freed hostages referred to police as “the enemy” and believed it was the criminals to whom they owed their lives. Elisabeth accused a doctor of attempting to “brainwash away” her regard for Olsson and Olofsson.

In 1974, nearly a year after the bank drama, Birgitta visited Olofsson in jail, conversing with him for half an hour.

Investigating doctors eventually declared the hostages’ reaction typical of anyone caught in “survival situations.” They quoted Anna Freud who described such reactions as “identification with the aggressor.” But it took the Swedish bank drama to create a permanent, memorable name: the Stockholm syndrome.

“Hey, that’s neat, Mom,” Nicky called out.

“I never knew all that, Jessie,” Angus added.

Nicky asked, “Got any more good stuff?”

Jessica was pleased. “A little.”

Once more she drew on her memories of the Britisher, Brigadier Wade. “I have two pieces of advice for you,” he once told his anti-terrorist class. “First, if you’re a captive and a hostage: Beware the Stockholm syndrome! Second, when dealing with terrorists keep in mind that ‘Love your enemies’ is vapid nonsense. At the other extreme, don’t squander time and effort hating terrorists, because hate is a wasteful, draining emotion. Just never for a moment trust them, or like them, and never stop thinking of them as the enemy.”

Jessica repeated the Wade advice for Nicky and Angus. She went on to describe airplane hijackings where people who had been seized and abused developed friendly feelings for their attackers. This proved true with the infamous TWA flight 847 in 1985 when some passengers expressed sympathy for the Shiite hijackers and expounded their captors’ propagandist views.

More recently, Jessica explained, a released hostage from the Middle East—a pathetic figure, clearly another victim of the Stockholm syndrome—even delivered a message from his jailers to the Pope and the U.S. President, gaining much publicity while he did. The nature of the message was not disclosed, though unofficially it was called banal and pointless.

Of even greater concern to those who understood the Stockholm syndrome was the case of kidnap victim Patricia Hearst. Unfortunately for Hearst, who was arrested in 1975 and tried the following year for alleged crimes while dominated by her brutish captors, the events in Stockholm were not sufficiently known to allow either sympathy or justice. Speaking at one of the Wade anti-terrorist sessions, an American lawyer declared, “In legal and intellectual values the Patty Hearst trial must be equated with the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692.” He added, “Knowing what we do now, and remembering that the wrong done was recognized by President Carter who commuted her prison sentence, it will be a dark day of shame for our country if Patricia Hearst is allowed to die unpardoned.”

“So what you’re saying, Jessie,” Angus said, “is not to be taken in by Vicente’s seeming easy. He’s still an enemy.”

“If he weren’t,” Jessica pointed out, “we could just walk out of here while he’s guarding us.”

“Which we know we can’t.” Angus directed his voice to the middle cell. “Have you got that, Nicky? Your mom’s right and you and I were wrong.”

Nicky nodded glumly, without speaking. One of the sadnesses of this incarceration, Jessica thought, was that Nicky was being faced—earlier than would have happened normally—with some harsh realities of human infamy.

As always in Peru, the developing news concerning the Sloane family kidnapping traveled over the longest distances and to the country’s remotest places by radio.

The first news of the linkage of Peru and Sendero Luminoso to the kidnapping was reported on Saturday, the day following the CBA National Evening News broadcast in which the exclusive material assembled by the network’s special task force was revealed. While the kidnapping had been reported earlier by Peru’s media in a minor way, the local involvement made it instant major news. Here, too, radio was the means of widest dissemination.

Similarly, on the Tuesday morning following Monday’s news breakthrough by the Baltimore Star, radio delivered to the Andes mountain city of Ayacucho and the Selva hamlet Nueva Esperanza the first report of Theodore Elliott’s rejection of the kidnappers’ demands and his low opinion of Sendero Luminoso.

In Ayacucho the radio report was heard by Sendero leaders and in Nueva Esperanza by the terrorist Ulises Rodríguez, alias Miguel.

Soon after, a telephone conversation took place between Miguel and a Sendero leader in Ayacucho, though neither disclosed his name while talking. Both were aware that the telephone connection was poor by modern standards and that the line passed through other locations where anyone could be listening, including the army or police. Thus they talked in generalities and veiled references, at which many in Peru were practiced, though to both men the meaning was understood.

This was: Something must be done immediately to prove to the American TV network, CBA, that they were dealing with neither fools nor weaklings. Killing one of the hostages and leaving the body to be found in Lima was a possibility. Miguel, while agreeing that would be effective, suggested for the moment keeping all three hostages alive, preserving them like capital. Instead of killing, he advised another course of action which—remembering something he had learned while at Hackensack—he believed would be devastating psychologically to those at the other end of the equation in New York.

This was promptly agreed to and, since physical transportation would be needed, a car or truck, whichever proved available, would leave Ayacucho immediately for Nueva Esperanza.

In Nueva Esperanza, Miguel began his preparations by sending for Socorro.

Jessica, Nicky and Angus looked up as a small procession filed into the area immediately outside their cells. It consisted of Miguel, Socorro, Gustavo, Ramón and one of the other men who served as guards. From their sense of purpose it was evident something was about to happen and Jessica and the others waited apprehensively to discover what.

One thing Jessica was sure of: Whatever was expected of her, she would cooperate. It was now six days since she had made the videotape recording in course of which, because of her initial defiance, Nicky had been tortured by agonizing burns. Since then, Socorro had come in daily to inspect the burns, which were sufficiently healed so that Nicky was no longer in pain. Jessica, who still felt guilty about Nicky’s suffering, was determined he would not be hurt again.

Consequently, when Nicky’s cell was opened and the terrorists crowded in with Nicky, ignoring Jessica and Angus, Jessica cried out anxiously, “What are you doing? I beg of you don’t hurt him. He’s suffered enough. Do what you have to do to me!”

It was Socorro who swung to face Jessica and shouted through the screen between them, “Shut up! There’s no way you can stop what’s going to happen.”

Jessica screamed frantically, “What is happening?” Miguel, she saw, had brought a small wooden table into Nicky’s cell while Gustavo and the fourth man had seized Nicky and were holding him so he was unable to move. Jessica cried again, “Oh, this isn’t fair! For god’s sake let him go!”

Ignoring Jessica, Socorro said to Nicky, “You’re going to have two of your fingers cut off.”

At the word “fingers,” Nicky, already frantic, screamed and struggled, but to no avail.

Socorro continued, “These men will do it, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. But it will hurt more if you struggle, so keep still!”

Ignoring the warning, mouthing incoherent words, his eyes moving wildly, Nicky fought even more desperately to free himself, to somehow pull back his hands, but did not succeed.

Jessica emitted a piercing wail. “Oh, no! Not fingers! Don’t you understand? He plays the piano! It’s his life …”

“I know.” This time it was Miguel who turned, a small smile on his face. “I heard your husband say so on television; he was answering a question. When he receives those fingers he’ll wish he hadn’t.”

On the other side of Nicky’s cell, Angus was banging his screen and shouting too. He held up his hands. “Take mine! What difference will it make? Why spoil the rest of the boy’s life?”

Miguel, this time his face working angrily, flared back. “What do two fingers of a bourgeois brat matter when every year sixty thousand Peru children die before the age of five?”

“We’re Americans!” Angus hurled at him. “We’re not to blame for that!”

“You are! The capitalist system, your system which exploits the people, is depraved, destructive. It is to blame …”

Miguel’s statistics about the deaths of children were a quote from Abimael Guzmán, Sendero Luminoso’s founder. As Miguel knew, Guzmán’s figure might be exaggerated, but without question Peru’s child malnutrition death toll was one of the highest in the world.

While the epithets flowed back and forth, it happened quickly.

The small table Gustavo had brought was moved in front of Nicky. While the boy continued to squirm and wriggle, begging and crying, pleading pitifully, Gustavo forced the boy’s right index finger on top of the table so it was there alone, the other fingers curled back against the table’s edge. Ramón had produced a sheath knife. Now, grinning, he tested the bright blade’s razor sharpness with a thumb.

Satisfied, Ramón moved forward, placed the blade against the second joint of Nicky’s exposed finger and, with a single swift movement, brought the heel of his beefy left hand down sharply against the back of the knife. With a thunk sound, a spurt of blood, and a piercing scream from Nicky, the finger was almost severed, but not quite. Ramón lifted the knife, then cut away the remaining tissue and flesh to complete the finger’s severance. Nicky’s despairing cries, now from pain, were shrill and harrowing.

Blood flooded the tabletop and was on the hands of the men holding Nicky. They ignored it and moved the boy’s little finger, also of the right hand, from the table’s edge to the top. This time the action and result were faster. With a single chop of Ramón’s knife, the finger was separated from the hand, falling clear while more blood spurted.

Socorro, who had collected the first severed finger and put it in a plastic bag, now added the second and passed the bag to Miguel. Socorro was pale, her lips compressed. She glanced briefly toward Jessica whose face was covered with her hands, her body racked by sobbing.

By now, Nicky—barely conscious, his features ashen white—had fallen back on the narrow bed, his screaming turned to agonized moans. As Miguel, Ramón and the fourth man moved out from the cell, taking the bloody table with them, Socorro told Gustavo whom she had signaled to wait, “Agarra el chico. ¡Sientalo!”

Responding, Gustavo raised Nicky to a seated position and held him while Socorro moved outside, returning with a bowl of warm soapy water she had brought when the group arrived. Taking Nicky’s right hand and holding it upright, Socorro carefully washed the raw stumps of the two severed fingers to forestall infection. The water turned bright red as she did. Then, after covering both wounds with several gauze pads, she securely bandaged the entire hand. Even through pads and bandage, bloodstains showed, though it appeared the flow of blood was slowing.

Through it all, Nicky, clearly in shock, his whole body trembling, neither helped nor hindered what was being done.

Miguel was still in the area outside the cells and Jessica, who had moved to her own cell doorway called to him tearfully. “Please let me go to my son! Please, please, please!”

Miguel shook his head. He said contemptuously, “No mother for a gutless chicken! Let the mocoso try to become a man!”

“He’s more of a man than you will ever be.” The voice was Angus’s, filled with rage and loathing; he too had moved to the doorway of his cell to face Miguel. Angus groped for the Spanish curse Nicky had taught him a week before. “You … ¡Maldito hijo de puta!”

Angus remembered what it meant: Cursed son of a whore! Nicky had repeated to Angus what his playground Cuban friends had told him: To bring a man’s mother into a Spanish curse was the gravest insult possible.

Slowly, deliberately, Miguel turned his head. He looked directly at Angus with eyes that were glacial, vicious and unforgiving. Then, his face set, his expression unchanged, he turned away.

Gustavo had emerged from Nicky’s cell in time to hear the words and observe Miguel’s reaction. Shaking his head, Gustavo said to Angus in his halting English, “Old man, you make bad mistake. He not forget.”

As the hours passed, Jessica became increasingly concerned about Nicky’s mental state. She had tried talking to him, attempting to find some way, through words, to comfort him, but with no success or even a response. Part of the time Nicky lay still, occasionally moaning. Then suddenly his body would jerk several times and sharp cries escape him, followed by a bout of trembling. Jessica was sure that severed nerves caused the movement and accompanying pain. As far as she could tell, most of the time Nicky’s eyes were open but his face was blank.

Jessica even pleaded for an answer. “Just a word, Nicky darling! Just a word! Please—say something, anything!” But there was no response. Jessica wondered if perhaps she was going mad herself. The inability to reach out, to touch and hold her son, to try to bring some solace physically, was a frustrating denial of what she craved.

For a while Jessica herself, close to hysteria, tried to empty her head of thoughts and, lying down, shed silent, bitter tears.

Then with a mental chiding … Take hold! Pull yourself together! Don’t give in! … she resumed the attempt to talk with Nicky.

Angus joined in but the result was as unproductive as before.

Food arrived and was put into their cells. Not surprisingly, Nicky took no notice. Knowing she should preserve her strength, Jessica tried to eat but found she had no appetite and pushed the food away. She had no idea how Angus fared.

Darkness came. As the night advanced, the guard changed. Vicente came on duty. Sounds from outside grew fainter and, when only the hum of insects could be heard, Socorro arrived. She was carrying the water bowl she had used before, several more gauze pads, a bandage, and a kerosene lamp she took with her into Nicky’s cell. Gently she sat Nicky upright and began to change the dressing on his hand.

Nicky seemed easier, less in pain, the jerking of his body more infrequent.

After a while Jessica called out softly, “Socorro, please …”

Immediately Socorro swung around. Putting a finger to her lips, she signaled Jessica to be silent. Uncertain about anything, disoriented by strain and anguish, Jessica complied.

When the bandaging was done, Socorro left Nicky’s cell but didn’t lock it. Instead, she came to Jessica’s and opened the padlock with a key. Again, the signal for silence. Then Socorro waved Jessica out from her cell and pointed to the open door of Nicky’s.

Jessica’s heart lifted.

“You must go back before daylight,” Socorro whispered. She nodded in the direction of Vicente. “He will tell you when.”

About to move toward Nicky, Jessica stopped and turned. Impulsively, irrationally, she moved to Socorro and kissed the other woman’s cheek.

Moments later, Jessica was holding Nicky, careful of his bandaged hand.

“Oh, Mom!” he said.

As best they could, they hugged each other. Soon after, Nicky fell asleep.