Trance
The plot is well-known: members of a left-wing cadre calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnap newspaper heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. Within a few months the missing girl is calling herself Tania (after Che Guevara’s lover), declaring her allegiance to her captors’ vague revolutionary cause, sticking up a bank, and posing for photographs brandishing an automatic weapon. Most of the real SLA members appear in Trance (most of them were also dead within a year of the group’s founding), but Hearst is represented by the fictional surrogate Alice Galton.
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After he helps the group get back to the west coast, he can’t seem to fully rid himself of his obsession with Tania. Arguing that after all he went through he ought to get something for his trouble, he tells Hank Galton, publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, that he might be able to put him in contact with his abducted daughter–for a price. They meet numerous times, but no deal ever materializes. At their final sit-down in a San Francisco restaurant–under surveillance by FBI agents a couple tables away–Mock realizes the deal will never happen, his thoughts rendered by Sorrentino in a deft stream: “War over, Nixon out, and all the wind basically went out of the sails of the movement. Stands to reason that a zany little twerp like [Teko] would be the last man on deck.
