Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 4, April 1977

Bad Guys Are Nice by Anita Zelman

The young woman fell for the hijackers — but the older woman beside her knew the bitter truth.

“Isn’t he wonderful,” Marcia said as she looked adoringly into the eyes of the hijacker who was passing our seats, his gun at the ready.

I waited until he was well past us and had gone back to the pilot’s cabin.

“No, he’s not wonderful. He’s a rotten Dead End kid.”

“What’s a Dead End kid?”

Served me right for using references from the past. Marcia was such a young woman and I such a middle-aged one. I explained who the Dead End kids were.

“But he’s not like that. He’s polite and humanitarian and really believes in his cause.”

This is the sort of thing that my own daughter would have said and I wanted to shake this young woman sitting next to me, a girl who had been a stranger to me before I had boarded the plane.

“You didn’t think that when these hoodlums, these thugs, first took over,” I said. “You were as scared-and-angry-at-the-same-time as the rest of us.”

“But that was before they explained why they were doing it.”

“You’re experiencing a common idiocy now that we’re into our eighth hour, if my watch is right. It may have gone into shock when I did. Most hijackees are angry but a lot, like you, begin to think their captors are wonderful. Why do you think they’re great, Marcia? Just because they haven’t killed you yet?”

“I... well, I think they’re so beautifully idealistic. They’re willing to blow up the plane and themselves with it for the sake of their country if their demands aren’t met. I liked what that one — you know, the one with the drooping mustache, who speaks with such spiritual intensity — said about his homeland.”

“Oh, God, you mean that awful lecture he gave, on his scroungy little country? I couldn’t even point to it on a map if my life depended on it.” I laughed bitterly at what I had just heard myself saying.

“I’ll admit,” Marcia said, “that I hadn’t heard of it before today. My fault. We should learn to be more loving and caring about other places in this world, especially moneyed people like you and me.”

“What makes you think I’m rich?”

This is a sensitive subject with me. I always pride myself that I don’t announce my money with clothes or jewelry. My diamonds, usually in the safe deposit box, are hopefully not getting dimmer by their confinement.

“We’re both here in first class,” Marcia said.

“True. But I could be an executive or a saleswoman of a corporation, traveling on company money.”

“But you aren’t,” Marcia said. “You give away your wealth with that simple hairstyle. It takes time and money to get hair to fall like that.”

“Guilty as charged. Do you think they’ll treat us any the worse because we’re in first class?” I asked.

“Oh, no, they’ve been terribly nice so far.”

“Poor Marcia. You’re brainwashed. Someone should do a study on whether rich hijackees are more apt to undergo identification with the aggressor than the people in coach. We rich carry a larger burden of guilt on our shoulders. I wonder if Mansley and Heisman, who did the study on Bullying, Building Admiration Through Menace, would be interested in doing such a piece?”

“You sound so knowledgeable. Is psychology of kidnap victims your hobby?”

“My dear, I’ve read every bit of information I can get on the subject. Yes, it’s a hobby, I suppose, but one that was forced on me by ugly circumstance.”

Before Marcia could ask what ugly circumstance, our present ugly circumstance pressed in on us. We heard one of the hijackers clearing his throat over the loudspeaker system. Everyone in the cabin tensed. Would it be another of his political speeches, another tirade against oppressors? Perhaps it would be better to be blown up here and now than hear one of those speeches. No. I valued my life. I listened.

“You’ll be glad to hear that the plane is about to descend,” the hijacker said. “When we land, we’ll be met with food and comfort. Do not attempt to leave the plane until Ché and Ben make arrangements. I’ll let you know when that will be.”

They had called each other by first names only from the beginning of the hijacking.

“I hope Ché and Ben are greeted with a swift kick in the pants,” I said to Marcia.

“You don’t mean that.” She looked shocked. “I mean, not only for their sakes but for ours.”

She would have put that in reverse eight hours earlier but now she was clearly rooting for them and I was reminded of the studies done about the airline passengers in Mindanao in the Philippines, who shielded their hijackers from police trying to rescue the hijackers.

The wheels of the plane touched the ground and a collective sigh went up from the passengers. Our droopy-mustached hijacker, the one Marcia thought so humanitarian and idealistic, came out of the pilot’s cabin and stood with his back to it, facing us, gun trained in the general direction of the passengers. Marcia was smiling gently, almost maternally, at him.

I looked out the window.

“What do you see?” Marcia asked, straining to peer over my shoulder.

“A couple of negotiators, I hope.”

Two unarmed men dressed in business suits were approaching the plane across the spotlighted field. My shoulder was blocking Marcia’s view and I was about to pull back in my chair to let her have a chance to see when something caught my attention, a feeling of movement rather than movement itself somewhere on the ground, in the dark, past the nose of the plane.

Then I saw him, a man crouched and coining forward — no, several men — coming out of the darkness. I prayed that the hijackers hadn’t seen them. But, of course, logic told me, they hadn’t. I could account for all four of them. Our idealist was standing right in front of us, Ché and Ben were standing at their open door somewhere in second class, getting ready to receive the two negotiators. The fourth hijacker had to be standing with a gun trained on the coach class passengers.

The only people who could have seen the stealthy movements were the pilot up in front and I. It would be our secret. I kept my shoulder in front of the window, continuing to hog the view. Let Marcia think I was rude and selfish in my excitement.

If Marcia knew, she’d snitch and prove my point. She’d be the epitome of the identification with the aggressor theory. God, how I had wanted that point to be proven in the past few months! I had yearned for it, hungered for it, I who had never in my life had trouble telling the good guys from the bad.

Then it hit me. It could be proven right now. It would mean risking my life for what I wanted the world to know — an awful risk to prove a point. It would mean helping these thugs, these Dead End kids. But what publicity for the theory! The world was watching.

The men were coming closer and from where I sat you could see them now as men and not as shapes. I thought it over for two seconds. Then I decided it was no contest.

“Your turn to look out the window, Marcia,” I said and leaned back.

Then it happened. Fast. Marcia looked and yelled the message to the hijacker. Without hesitation. The passenger across the aisle looked at Marcia with shock. The hijacker came forward and peered out our window as I cooperatively continued to press back in my chair, insuring his thorough view. Then, he ran down the aisle, past first class, yelling as he went. There were shouts, confusion.

I ducked to the floor, pulling Marcia down with me. People were screaming. Then it was over and I was still alive. Uniformed men came aboard and began to guide passengers off the plane.

I approached the modest airport, vaguely registering the name of the country I was in, but mostly making sure that the passenger who had been across the aisle from me got to the reporters first.

I dawdled behind the security guards and listened to a frustrated reporter filling in time with his introduction of me before he could get past the guard.

“I’m about to talk to her,” he said. “This woman whose courage everyone has so admired as she has seen her share of tragedy, her only daughter, Angie, kidnapped nine months ago by the Symbiosis Libertarian Army, a. case that so closely paralleled the Patty Hearst one.

“Angie announced to the public, that she, herself, had joined the group. Angie, as you know, was convicted last month, in spite of her mother’s immense efforts in court to prove that the girl had been brainwashed by her captors.

“The irony of tonight’s situation is that, as you’ve just heard in the interview with the passenger who sat across the aisle, Angie’s mother was sitting next to a young woman who was so thoroughly brainwashed in the eight hours of the hijacking that she betrayed a whole planeload of people.”

The reporter was past the guard now and no more introductions were necessary. The world not only knew me but in fact, had become pretty tired of me.

“Can you talk to us,” he asked and thrust the microphone at me.

I smiled at him. “Yes, of course. I’ll be glad to. I have something to say.”