Washingtonian
April, 1998, p. 70

"They've Got Your Father"
By Valerie Elbrick Hanlon

Valerie Elbrick Hanlon is at work on a book about Warsaw in 1938 and a history of farming communities in upstate New York, where she spent summers growing up and still visits often.

UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR BURKE ELBRICK WAS KIDNAPPED BY TERRORISTS, A STORY TOLD IN A NEW FILM, FOUR DAYS IN SEPTEMBER. HERE THE AMBASSADOR'S DAUGHTER TELLS HER STORY — ABOUT HER FATHER, THE KIDNAPPING, AND HOW IT CHANGED EVERYONE INVOLVED.

IN MID-MARCH THE WEIGHT OF summer lifts from Rio de Janeiro, bringing relief to the shantytowns, the silver blocks of high-rises, the perfumed gardens of villas hidden above the city. Tonight, as I stand on the rooftop terrace of a high-rise, the lights of a mountain village glimmer behind me, quietly displacing the lights of Washington, DC, where I boarded a plane five days ago.

I am the guest of film producers Lucy and Luis Carlos Barreto this evening, part of a small group invited to dinner early, because the Barreto production company is in the midst of shooting and everyone is tired. It is March 1996, and their son Bruno is directing the film Four Days in September, which recounts the story of the kidnapping of an American ambassador to Brazil in 1969. The ambassador was ransomed for the release of 15 political prisoners by leftist guerrillas who snatched him off a Rio street in broad daylight. The story is important historically because it was the first successful kidnapping of a diplomat; a succession of like abductions followed.

The story is important to me because the ambassador kidnapped on that Rio street in 1969 was my father, Charles Burke Elbrick.

BRUNO BARRETO HAD COME TO Washington 18 months before filming started. I met him and his scriptwriter, Leopoldo Serran, at the Jefferson Hotel. They said they wanted to get a sense of my father's "persona" and about how informed he was about political events when he arrived in Brazil. Two foreign-service officers who had been at the American Embassy in Rio that year joined us: deputy chief of mission William Belton and political counselor Richard Johnson.

As I talked about my father, he began to take shape before me in his dark English tailored suit and immaculate blue shirt, cuffs clasped together by tiny garnet-and-gold cuff links. His eyes are sharp, light blue, the blue encircled by a black line, with small pupils. He is tall and walks like European men, all of a piece, his back stiff, without arms or legs flailing. He has an Irish wit that gives a lift to the serious. German side of the family. The only trace of his Kentucky birthplace is a quiet, formal Southern charm and a respect for good bourbon whiskey. He is reserved; he draws a line around himself that no one thinks of crossing, including his family. Whenever I leave home to go back to school, my father doesn't hug me — he squeezes my hand quickly and gives me a skimming kiss and says, "See you in December" or "June." He never says good-bye.

"WERE YOU IN RIO WHEN your father was kidnapped?" Barreto had asked.

"No. Yugoslavia. I was in Novi Sad, working on a film."

I was 26 years old in 1969, and it was good to have a job that paid $300 a week plus a hefty per diem. My parents had just left for Brazil after five years in Belgrade. For three of those years, I was with them, working for Avalafilm, a film studio. I was beginning to forget what life was like outside Eastern Europe, and so that June I packed a trunk full of Yugoslav primitive art and all my clothes and struck out for London. In a matter of days I met Mel Brooks.

A friend of a friend who ran a casting agency returned my phone call. "I know you're looking for a job," she said. "The most divine man has just left my office."

"Is there some connection?"

"It was Mel Brooks."

"Who's Mel Brooks?"

"He's making a movie in Yugoslavia, and he's hiring. I told him about you."

"Yugoslavia? I just left Yugoslavia."

"He wants to take you to dinner tonight, and he's picking you up at seven o'clock. Talk to him."

The fact that I had never heard of him troubled Brooks even after I explained that I had been out of the United States for three years. He made me laugh through dinner, offered to pay the rent on my new apartment if that was a problem — it was — mentioned the salary, and said it would be a great adventure. The next day I signed a contract to work on The Twelve Chairs, an American, British, and Yugoslav co-production to be filmed on location in Yugoslavia.

BY SEPTEMBER 4 OF '69 WE WERE shooting in Novi Sad, a town sprawled at the foot of a high, walled fortress about 1 1/2 hours north of Belgrade. After a long day's shoot we gathered for dinner in the hotel dining room, a vast, colorless space that was brightly lit, like every dining room in communist Yugoslavia. The cast and production staff sat around a long table, eating bits of lamb on skewers with raw onions on the side, talking about the shoot.

A waiter in a white jacket approached the table and gestured that I had a telephone call. I followed him to a small telephone room in the lobby.

The voice on the line belonged to Paul Wheeler, public-affairs officer at the American Embassy in Belgrade. He asked if I had any friends with me.

"Friends?" I said. "About 20."

Paul spoke slowly, his voice heavy. "This afternoon in Rio your father was held up by four or five men on his way to the office. They were young and armed, one of several terrorist groups in the country right now. His car was stopped a couple of blocks from the residence. The chauffeur was pushed out of the driver's seat, and they drove your father off and transferred him to another car."

He paused, and I was aware that he was in pain. Paul and my father had worked closely for the last three years. "It happened at about two o'clock this afternoon," he said.

I felt my body shutting down, as if someone had thrown an electric switch that cut off the power to my limbs. I had no sensation except in my right hand, which held the telephone against my head so hard my ear was flat, but I felt nothing, a numbness before pain but no pain, only heat scampering over my face like spiders. On the wall beside me a number was etched into the plaster with the girl's name Branka in Cyrillic letters beside it.

The air in the little room was so close I strained to see through the door to the air outside, but I saw a slice of the dining-room table. Beside my empty chair, costume designer Ruth Myers was telling a story, her hand frozen in a gesture. I was barely breathing, air going in and out of my mouth, making no noise so I could hear the voice on the line, which was saying, "They left a note in the car, making certain demands."

"Demands?"

"They asked for 15 political prisoners to be released from jail. They want a manifesto they have written to be published in the papers. The note was signed by two antigovernment leftist groups. The chauffeur wasn't hurt — it was around two o'clock in the afternoon, did I say that?" Paul kept returning to the time of day, as if the hour and place were the only things he could hold onto in this intangible, unintelligible story.

"Was he hurt, do you know?"

"He may have been chloroformed, someone said. He was taken off in a van; he must have been all right at that point."

Paul asked if I wanted to come to his house in Belgrade. I thanked him and said I would call him back.

The voices at the table were louder when I returned, and the wine bottles on the stained tablecloth were empty. Ruth looked up.

I felt close to Ruth suddenly, as if I'd known her for years instead of the six weeks we had worked together on this film. She was English and missing her first baby, a three-month-old left behind in London.

"My father has been kidnapped in Brazil," I said.

I gave it as a piece of information, which it wasn't; as fact, which it wasn't either. It was the feel of cold air moving in the closed room, the overpowering smell of onions, the thin hand of the huge wall clock stuck between seconds. Conversation died around the table.

"What the hell is your father doing in Brazil?" Mel Brooks said the next day.

SLEEP THAT NIGHT WAS HALF sleep, half dream, and dim consciousness of shadows coming and going in my room. Dom DeLuise had already taken his nightly Sominex, but he sat stubbornly in an armchair at the foot of my bed, holding his eyes open with his fingers, making little jokes for me. Throughout the night Ruth opened the door and looked in. Figures in the half-lit room merged with images of my father.

I am in a car skimming along the highway with my family. I am 11. My mother sits in the front seat beside my father, describing the hairline on the back of his neck with her fingertips. He laughs uneasily when she touches him and takes her hand away. We sing "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leafed Clover" as we cross the Tuscan hills, and "Sur le Pont d'Avignon" as we drive through southern France, and in Vienna my father bursts into "Wien, Wien, Nur Du Allein" in a clear tenor with such feeling that I sense he is connected to this place, although he has never lived in Germany or Austria, and he speaks only college German.

He combs his fine brown hair carefully to the side, flat, the way young men combed their hair in the '20s. If it blows in his face, he raises his hand up to hold it still. It glistens in the light; it looks as if it might crack if I touch it. As a little girl I wanted to squirm up on his lap and pat his hair. I wanted to pull his bright white handkerchief from his pocket and pretend to sneeze and make him laugh, but I didn't dare. I wanted to cover him up with sand on the beach. I wanted to take him off for the day, anywhere, with me. But he dodged if I reached for his head, or he straightened his handkerchief, or he brushed his shoulder at the first fine grains of sand.

He is on an aircraft carrier in Lisbon harbor addressing rows and rows of naval officers, seamen, and diplomats, as the American flag furls and unfurls behind him, seeming to drop from his shoulders like a cape. Like a Superman cape, it protects him; it protects us all. As he talks about the importance of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, my teenage eyes squint in the sun. Everyone listens to him so hard and is so proud watching him against the glare of the water and the bright stars on the flag that the light seems to come from my father himself. In fact, he is as remote to me as he is to anyone listening, as splendid.

Eventually I dreamed. My father sat in the back seat of his limousine in a gray summer suit, his door swinging open suddenly and his lap filling with light. I heard the soft rip of cloth as the threads of his sleeve pulled apart and he fell out of the door sideways, head first, disappearing into a space so amorphous I couldn't call after him. He reappeared in a semicircle of machine guns pointed at his head, asking, "What is it? What have I done? Have I failed to do something?" But the men holding the guns had no mouths or faces, and I woke not to gunfire but to the jangle of nightingales outside my window. A few minutes later the first rays of light fingered the curtain; it was 3:30 AM, dawn in Yugoslavia.

THAT DAY, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, I moved in with Paul, the public-affairs officer who had called me, and his family in Belgrade. I would be near a telephone, and Paul would bring the news from the embassy wire service twice a day.

When I reached my mother in Rio, her voice was calm on the telephone and I remembered that she is always calm in emergencies, that it is the small details of every day that rattle her. She is afraid of elevators, of museums that might close her inside, of airplanes, sickrooms, and lost luggage. But in moments of real danger she is regal. I have never seen her cry. She told me she had organized food for the embassy staff camped in the house, she had asked the Marine guards to double up, and she had not canceled a small dinner at home that night with friends, whom she began to name. I didn't want to hear the names, I said, trying not to scream.

She said she believed my father would be returned safely and that we were all protected by the massive figure of Christ on the hill behind the house in Rio; he made a benediction on the city where he stood in passing clouds that alternately revealed and obscured him, as my mother obscured her own fears now in a hail of words.

"Stay where you are," she said when I told her I was coming. "No one knows what this is all about. Anything could happen."

I agreed not to come. When I stayed away, it was another strain on the fragile connection with my father, already stretched as thin and delicate as strands of hair. In a plane, I thought, I would be out of touch for hours.

IN MOST OF MY CHILDHOOD pictures of our family, my father is not present. He is obvious because of the space he leaves empty, taking on added importance because he is not there. The place in the photograph is like a gap in a white fence or a missing book on the shelf. He is not in the rows of faces looking up at me in the school play, and he's not in the college auditorium either, where he encouraged me to perform, and where my acting career burned brightly for an instant. He's not running alongside my bicycle when I learn to ride. I'm ten and tall and too big to be leaning so hard on the long-suffering aunt beside me.

There is a picture of my father and me on a beach at the Jamanitas Club in Havana. He wears a turquoise-and-white bathing suit, and the water is sun-clapped white behind him. I am eight, and my two flat braids float on the sea as I make slow progress toward him in the water, my body disjointed and awkward as the beach slips away from my feet. I hold my head erect like a dog to keep the salt water out of my mouth. It tastes strong, not like the sweet brown creek at our summer house in upstate New York. My father stands a short distance away with his arms outstretched.

"You're backing up," I call, but he smiles and pretends not to hear. Whitecaps flash behind him, and the shadow of a ship stands still on the horizon. "You're backing up!" I yell again, but he continues to move away. I must have reached him sometime, and lots more times that afternoon, but I have no memory of the touch of his fingertips or of being hoisted in the air; I do remember his arms waiting, and the horizon splitting him in two, and the top part of his body floating toward it.

AT THE WHEELERS' HOUSE IN Belgrade, the ring of the telephone was shattering, like shots, and continuous. Each time it rang I felt a jolt along my spinal cord, and I prepared for a voice that would say a body had been found in an alley or in the trunk of a car; he had died instantly — of course they would say that, kindly. I would thank the person who called. I would be as calm as my father. Thank you for calling. It's kind of you to call. You shouldn't have. But Paul's wife, Louise, answered the telephone to a tide of reporters. Reuters, AP, UPI, the New York Times all wanted to know what I was thinking, what I was doing. I was doing nothing, and I talked to none of them.

"How do they know I'm here?" I asked, and someone said my brother in London had given them my telephone number. He had invited the reporters waiting outside his door into his living room and given them tea. How different he is from me, I thought, folding myself up like a bird in a wind-wracked tree, staying still, saving my energy for something I didn't know, something that might come through the cracks or underneath the door or through the telephone wire. Something that movement might unsettle.

I had lost gravity; pieces of myself could separate at any moment and go flying off into space. My father had always held the strings of our lives. He carried the plans for each of us in his camel-colored attache case that closed with gold snaps. Inside it were his passport, official papers with the American eagle etched on them, and his Leica. My mother sometimes shared the information in the briefcase, because it concerned us and she didn't believe in secrets. She told us that we were bound for Paris or London or Havana, although it was often not confirmed, so we could tell no one. If we did we might skew it and we might not go.

When she named our destination, her eyes were full of mystery and she was excited for us because she knew we, as children, could not be excited by the word "Havana," as we should be. She described sugared beaches, rosebushes that grew from a single stem stuck in the ground, mosquito nets tucked around our beds, and the seductive sounds of palm trees in the night. Some of what she told us was true and some was invention, but we were too young to know or care.

We sensed that our father was an illusionist; we didn't see him. At his sign from offstage, the office buildings of Washington would be replaced by huge pastel houses, and the streets would melt into palm-lined avenues running to the sea. From year to year and country to country, my father navigated a course set by his secret conversations with the stars. As we watched our lives dissolve behind us, we had only each other to confirm that we had been anywhere at all.

IN BELGRADE, PAUL HAD NOT TOLD me that the note left behind in the car had said that if the gunmen's demands were not met within 48 hours, my father would be killed. I heard this part of the message from the voice of the BBC radio in the Wheelers' living room. It was an old radio, with a long, silver antenna that pointed to the ceiling like a warning. The radio had an enormous, sensitive dial that had to be turned to the exact point where the BBC came in at noon every day. My fingers trembled when I held the knob. The Wheelers' son, P.J., was nine and came in sometimes to be with me. "I'll get it better," he would say as he moved the knob slightly, and the English voice would turn into loud static.

"Your father is probably talking to those men right now," an officer from the embassy said. "He speaks the language. He knows how to deal with people. They can't not like him. They're probably sitting around this minute, chatting. You know how charming he is."

I tried to imagine him sitting in a dimly lit room, leaning forward slightly in that engaging, earnest way he had, talking in a gentle voice as if sharing a confidence. Around him the terrorists lounged in a circle sharing one of his Robert Burns cigarillos, perhaps, smiling and nodding as he held them in the smoky circle of his charm. Their guns lay on their laps. I held onto the image for an instant, the time it took for the smoke to disappear.

Who were they? I assembled their faces piece by piece, as you might pick up bits of a child's game — beard, glasses, hair -- placing them in different configurations, but nothing made a whole. What was the sound of their voices? Were they threatening? Cold and calm?

"It would not have happened here," a Yugoslav friend commented. "Your father should have stayed in Yugoslavia."

JOSIP BROZ TITO HAD CONTROLLED Yugoslavia since 1945, when he had brought to the country a Communist economic, political, and social system similar to that in the Soviet Union. The thin layer of coal dust that clung to every surface in Belgrade also covered the photographs of Lenin and Tito that had hung on my office wall at Avalafilm. Communism was 24 years old in Yugoslavia in 1969, not a young man's game anymore. The partisan guerrillas who fought the Germans in the mountains during World War II were middle-aged now.

My Yugoslav friends in their twenties were part of a new class, a generation that was more interested in Western products than in Communist ideology. Some of them were children of government officials; some were children of former aristocrats who lived in a few rooms of their requisitioned houses and apartments. They gave dinner parties against a backdrop of iridescent icons on the wall, heavy silver candelabra, rows of books, and they smoked fat cigarettes and dressed in black tie. I wondered how they found dinner jackets in Belgrade. I saw tiny bathrooms where our dinners were cooked, dirty plates piled in the bathtub, a Bunsen burner in the corner that heated coffee for gold demitasse cups.

My friends had to report to the secret police about the time they spent with me, about my travel plans, details of our conversations. When we wanted to speak in private, we walked into the garden. We never mentioned politics in a restaurant, on a bus, in the theater, or on a street corner. The secret police were sprawling and efficient: Telephones were bugged; embassy cars were tailed. When someone said my father would not have been kidnapped if he had stayed in Yugoslavia, it was true. There was no margin for conspiracy in a place where the police knew where you were — all the time.

MATISSE SAID THAT THE SUBJECT of a painting is defined by the negative space around it. When my parents stepped off the ship from New York into the Brazilian sun on July 9, 1969, they entered an unfamiliar negative space.

A military junta had seized control of Brazil five years earlier, ousting democratically elected Joao Goulart from the presidency. Goulart had aligned himself with leftist elements to ensure his reelection, tripping the sensitive switch in Washington to threats of communist inroads in Latin America. Cold War attitudes had directed millions in USAID funds to Brazil up to this point, some of which had been labeled "impact aid" to influence state elections.

Although the United States did not actively participate in the military coup, Washington was kept informed about the events leading up to it and made its support clear to the planners in Rio. Six US warships hovering near Brazilian waters were ready to be called upon "if needed" by the military. Immediately after the takeover, Ambassador Lincoln Gordon encouraged Lyndon Johnson to send a message of congratulations to the Brazilian junta. The message was received almost before the smoke had cleared. After that, the Brazilian notion that the United States had taken part in the revolution was set, like a bright stain on stone.

The overthrow of Goulart was followed the same week by the first in a series of "Institutional Acts" imposed by the military that banned basic freedoms, like trade unions, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press. It was a government by coercion, and it set off an escalating chain of events.

Brazilians had resented the heavy US presence in Brazil for a long time, and some were more resentful than others: Nationalists, students, and the Catholic clergy were among them.

In the mid-1960s, university students had begun to agitate for reforms in the schools; their complaints included outdated curricula and the need for better teachers and modern facilities. At first the government ignored the issues they raised, but as the students became louder and more organized, the military leaders began to think of them as subversives and to treat them as such. Extraordinary energy was put into gathering information on the students — wiretapping, infiltrating student groups, issuing restrictive orders, and making arrests. Treated as dangerous political enemies, the students began to attract the support of more-radical groups.

On March 26, 1968, police killed 18-year-old Edson Luis de Lima Souto on the fringes of a clash between students and police outside the Calabouco restaurant in Rio, where Lima Souto had stopped for dinner on his way home from university. On March 28, his fellow students declared a national strike and organized a series of student demonstrations in other states. His funeral was attended by thousands. Two more students died in demonstrations in the following weeks. A Mass for the students at the Candelaria church in Rio sparked violent encounters between police and spectators outside the church. About this time federal and military police invaded the campus of the University of Brasilia, where they seized a student leader named Honestino Guimaraes. He was arrested, imprisoned, and never heard from again.

One of the methods the military police used against dissident groups was to interrogate young people immediately after they were arrested, before the arrest was generally known about. This could lead to the discovery of the "safe house" and others in the group before they had time to destroy documents and flee. To extract information quickly, police used torture, which was legalized in a 1968 Institutional Act that also reinstated the death penalty.

The atmosphere of fear, anger, and helplessness fed the resolve of the dissident groups. To sustain themselves and finance their cause, they took to robbing banks, apartments, and houses; they sometimes succeeded in infiltrating banks and embezzling money. Infuriated, the military stepped up operations by the secret police.

By the summer of 1969, the young dissidents were prepared to do something more dramatic.

FRANKLIN MARTINS WAS 21 years old that summer. He fit the profile of a terrorist: a young person with a deep belief in his cause, tough, unconcerned about his own life or the life of his victim. He had a specific political goal; he was desperate to be heard, and he believed that all other avenues of communication were shut. Martins would not have been described as vicious, but he was capable of killing. He had been politically active since the age of 14, a leader of the left in school.

That summer Martins and a friend conceived the idea of kidnapping the American ambassador. It would be a spectacular event, they thought, throwing a floodlight of international attention on the political situation in Brazil. If it was successful, the ransom could secure the release of a number of political prisoners. The week of September 7, Brazilian Independence Day, was chosen for the action. Representatives from more experienced urban guerrilla groups came to Rio from Sao Paulo to help draw up a plan. Thursday, September 4, was to be the day.

On Friday morning, September 5, news of the kidnapping of the American ambassador to Brazil appeared on the front pages of newspapers on every continent. My father's picture looked at me from newsstands all over Belgrade.

I thought of him as he must have left the house that day, as he did every day, black limousine waiting by the front door, the butler standing inside holding the camel-colored briefcase, mumbling "Mr. Ambassador" as he handed it to my father. Doors opened for him, a space parted, and he moved through it. In the briefcase he carried messages from Washington, which he delivered to the Brazilian foreign office in a quiet, even voice, never offering an opinion or criticizing the contents of the message. If he analyzed the contents to himself, he never spoke about it. He did this so well that he appeared to have no political opinions at all. He became angry when I asked "Why?" or "How come?" or "How can you be sure?" when he was telling me something. His thick eyebrows would knit over his brilliant blue eyes, and I would see all the goodwill I had ever hoped to find there disappear and his voice would come out in chinks of ice. He was always so sure, so definite about what not to ask. He saw things in straight lines, not like me, who saw things in wavy lines and asked the odd question. From one administration to another, from one post to the next, he moved forward without blinking.

When I was younger, during the times we lived in Washington, my mother explained to my brother and me why we didn't see our father for long periods of time. He was at the State Department working late, she said, or off on an official trip.

On one of the nights he came home early, she asked him to tell us a bedtime story, and he invented one about a little English girl who went to Portugal with her parents for a summer holiday. While they were there she was kidnapped by a band of gypsies. The gypsies were kind to her, and she began to like the gypsy life. My father described their caravan route through Portugal and Spain in minute detail, the eucalyptus and jacaranda trees that shaded the road they took and the sea urchins they cooked on the beach in a pepper sauce. Sometimes the girl's parents came close to finding her, but she always disappeared just ahead of them.

The story unraveled over months and years, wandering the Iberian peninsula, binding our father to us while he spun it out in our room. When we drove through the almond trees in southern Portugal and would come upon a band of gypsies on the road, I always looked for her, a glint of blond hair among the kerchiefs and dark eyes, but I never saw her, and the story never ended. I think my father didn't want it to. Perhaps she was his fantasy of another life without rules except the ones you made yourself.

MEMBERS OF THE CABINET AND military officers rushed to the Brazilian Foreign Ministry on Thursday after the ransom note was found and stayed there into the night. One man sat quietly while the others spoke.

He was not an imposing figure — he did not wear a uniform, and there were no medals on his chest; he was of medium height with a receding chin that melted into his collar as he looked down at his folded hands. He wore owlish black glasses, and by this time of day his pale suit was rumpled. He listened to some who spoke in harsh voices about "this band of thugs." They said they would not tolerate simple criminals, bank robbers stockpiling stolen weapons, boys in their twenties who now were taking on the army, navy, and air force, who had kidnapped the American ambassador so their criminal cohorts could be sprung from jail, making their government appear ridiculous to the world.

The ransom note had given them 48 hours.

"We will deliver the 15 prisoners they ask for," a uniform said. "We'll deliver their corpses. We'll take them out and execute them. Their friends can come collect the bodies." There were murmurs of approval.

The man in the pale suit stood up, and the room grew quiet. He said they had one matter before them.

"At issue is the life of the United States ambassador. As a government we are responsible for his life, for his safe return to his family and to his official duties here in Rio. We are responsible to our ally the United States and to the diplomatic corps in Brazil. The rest can be dealt with later — this band of thugs, as you say."

The man who spoke was the deputy foreign minister, Mozart Valente. He had just spent five years in Belgrade as Brazilian ambassador, and when he left that city six months earlier for Rio, I was with the diplomatic corps at the airport to say good-bye. The Valentes had been close friends for four years, and as their plane rose and slowly vanished in the night sky, I remember thinking it was unlikely we would ever meet again.

The night of the kidnapping, Mozart Valente did not go home. At the Foreign Ministry in Rio, he struggled with the generals and admirals into the morning to bring my father back alive. His wife, Eliane, kept a vigil on the terrace below my mother's window, waiting for word.

THE FIRST NEWS AFTER THE Rransom note was discovered in the car came the following day, on Friday, September 5. The newspaper Jornal do Brasil had received an anonymous telephone call reporting that a message had been left in the alms box at the church of Nossa Senhora de Gloria in Rio. The message said my father was well, and it included a note from him to my mother in his handwriting.

Dearest Elfie,

I am all right and I am hoping that I shall be liberated and see you soon. Please don't worry — I am trying not to.

The Brazilian authorities have been informed of the demands of the people who are holding me. They should not try to find where I am, which might be dangerous, but hurry to meet the conditions for my release. These people, of course, are very determined.

All my love, darling — hoping that we shall be together soon.

Burke

"These people are very determined," it was clear, meant that he knew they were prepared to kill him.

FRIDAY MORNING THE GOVERNMENT announced that it would release 15 political prisoners and fly them out of the country. The manifesto left in the car condemning the military regime in Brazil, publicizing its torture of political prisoners, and announcing that the war against oppression was now "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" was read over all major radio and television stations in Brazil and published in the newspapers, as requested.

Finally, the Mexican government announced that it would receive the prisoners.

Later that day the list of people to be freed was left in the suggestion box of a supermarket in the suburb of Leblon. It too was accompanied by a note from my father to my mother: "I will be released as soon as it is confirmed that the 15 released prisoners have arrived in Mexico. I look forward to being with you very soon."

The 14 men and one woman who were to be released ranged from a student leader serving a sentence for his part in demonstrations against the government a year before to a ranking member of the clandestine Communist party who had been imprisoned since 1964. The 15 — some of the strongest opponents of the regime — were scattered in jails throughout the country. It would take tense hours to bring them together.

On Saturday afternoon we heard that a Brazilian air-force transport plane was prepared to take off from Rio's Santos Dumont airport with prisoners aboard; it would stop in Recife and Belem to pick up two more. At that moment 200 men in navy uniforms, angry that the government had capitulated to the terrorists, surrounded the aircraft and immobilized it. The flight sat still for two hours. Finally an order from a higher command was issued, and the navy men slowly filed off the runway. The plane taxied, tilted up, and made its abrupt ascent over Sugarloaf Mountain.

Hours later the flight touched down in Mexico City, and the Mexican government granted asylum to the 15 dazed Brazilians on board.

On Sunday afternoon, September 7, my father was driven to a spot near the huge Maracana stadium by four or five of his abductors. A soccer game was just letting out, and the streets were jammed with pedestrians and cars. He wore the white shirt they had washed for him, and he held the camel-colored briefcase they had put back in his hand. He was told to wait and to count to 50 before walking away. When he stepped from the car he turned around, reached through the window, and shook hands with each of them. They drove off, and he walked straight ahead and hailed a taxi. The driver looked up at him. "You are the American ambassador," he said. "Please" — he opened the door — "I will take you home."

SUNDAY NIGHT PAUL CALLED ME to the telephone in Belgrade, and I heard a voice I had tried hard to remember during the last four days, in case I was not to hear it again.

"I'm home," he said.

"Really, home?"

"Yes."

"Are you all right?'

"I have a little scrape on my forehead, that's all."

"It's wonderful to hear your voice."

"It's very good to, it's just very good to hear you."

I flew to Washington for Christmas; my parents came from Brazil, and my brother arrived from London. At the airport my father stood tall and straight waiting for me to come off the plane. I reached up and put my arms around him, and he held onto me for a long moment, not letting go as we walked to the car. That Sunday we went to Mass at Saint Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, where my parents had been married. As I stood in the shadowy church I felt my father's shape beside me as I had felt it in churches in Havana, Paris, London, Lisbon, and Belgrade; a comforting shape, a tall presence, tangible and alive, and I cried for the first time.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED I noticed subtle changes in my father. He was conscious of the small pleasures — breakfast, music, time alone with us. When we talked, he answered my questions as seriously as if I were any State Department official. He listened carefully, and he took to quoting me: "My daughter thinks this . . . about that." He had never done that before. We talked about Vietnam, Cuba, civil rights — and if we didn't agree, he was outspoken and didn't worry about what he said. Something had happened to him in Rio; a window had opened on his thinking, and a breath of fresh air had blown through it. One day he told me that when he had said good-bye to his captors he had tears in his eyes.

"Why tears?" I asked.

He said they were all young, idealistic, and totally committed. They were educated, intellectual. They washed his shirt, they apologized for their cooking, they talked with him into the night. They put themselves in harm's way when they set him free.

"I didn't agree with their methods; I understood their motives," he said.

He believed they would be found by the military police within hours, and he had a clear idea of what would happen to them when they were caught.

"They were your brother's age," he said.

They must have been full of light, full of the fire of revolution. It was a light that had never inflamed him. There was a part of them I think he admired, but he did not say so.

In Brazil a manhunt followed. A few, like Franklin Martins, escaped across the border. Others were killed, some were arrested and tortured, some were released later in exchange for the kidnapped German ambassador. "I didn't agree with their methods; I understood their motives." His statements would haunt him when he chose to stay on in Brazil, making his position with the foreign office awkward. In retrospect, he thought it had been a mistake to stay. Six months later he fainted as he was getting out of his car in Rio; when he came back to Washington for medical tests, he collapsed on the examining table with an embolism in his neck. Although he recovered, he never returned to Brazil.

ON THE EVENING OF MARCH 19, 1996, the air is soft on the rooftop terrace in Rio where the Barretos' guests are having drinks before dinner. The man across from me smiles a broad, white smile. He is Fernando Gabeira, the author of the book on which Four Days in September is based.

He has been waiting for me to arrive, and he puts out his hand. I have come to the party late. Even when all activity and thought have been directed to this time and place, I have managed to hesitate over what to wear and to forget about the evening traffic that will clog the streets.

A nervous grinding began in my stomach in mid-afternoon and is much stronger now. I am wired, adrenaline walking me towards Gabeira, once a faceless terrorist who now faces me, giving me his white smile.

He wears a black cotton double-breasted jacket, his shirt open at the neck; a wave of silver hair drifts across his forehead. I take his hand, and as I do I feel I have come an enormous distance. A mix of anxiety and release makes my head light.

I hold onto a small tape recorder and ask if he minds if I record our conversation.

"Not at all," he says. "Perhaps you would like to test it first." His voice is easy, melting the space between us — the voice my father heard from behind the blindfold. He must have an understanding of tape recorders, of their ways of disappointing when the words or the time or the place are irretrievable.

He may have recorded my father's voice in the room where they held him. Tapes were found later by the police. Were his hands clammy, as mine are now? They didn't say they were going to record him; they blindfolded him, pushed him onto a stool, and held a gun to his head. No one asked if he minded.

"We had many conversations," Gabeira says gently, opening the door to the room, letting me in. "He was very patient with me."

My father didn't knit his brow or drum his fingers on the table when the man with the gun spoke. He was aware of the gun and was probably aware, through his voice, that the young man was jumpy.

"With my thoughts about the United States. We talked about our countries, about Vietnam. I thought at the time the Black Panthers were going to change the fate of the American people. It was our literature," Gabeira adds, almost apologetic.

What did my father find to say then, my Kentucky father with his memories of lazy summers, Derby Day, different times?

THEY DESCRIBED THE METHODS the military police used to extract information from their suspects, young people behind other closed doors who were beaten, burned, nearly drowned, given electric shocks, sometimes crippled, or simply left to die.

"He didn't know about these things," Gabeira says. "I think he had been in Brazil only a short time."

"Two months."

"I think he was embarrassed when he heard these things."

He was embarrassed, perhaps, when they told him the CIA was training their police on how to extract information from young people. These things he did not know, if they were true. But he knew that there were things he did not know.

What visions did my father have behind the painted black glasses he wore? Did he see his own body on the bloodstained floor? Did he see himself as the lamb carved in marble on the altar of St. Matthew's Cathedral, dangling from a strip of cloth, a cloth changed to red, white, and blue?

"In the script they say you would be the one to shoot," I hear myself say.

"To — ?"

He doesn't understand.

"To shoot. To kill my father, if it came to that."

"No," he says, "it depends on the person who is there at the moment."

But I continue. "In the script they say they will make sure you are there at ten o'clock when the answer comes, perhaps because you are the most unlikely."

"No."

"You don't remember that."

"It's not I don't remember."

"You don't think that's right? Maybe they made that up."

"To make things more . . . "

"Movie-like."

"Yes," he nods with a little smile, and I smile back.

GABEIRA SITS ACROSS FROM ME, swims in my vision, holding a drink, holding a gun, holding out his hand to me, to my father in farewell, to the woman offering him a plate of sweets. Tonight, in this instant, into this hole of memory, Gabeira brings my father, rendering him as he was that week in September at his most vulnerable. Their contempt for his country removed his protection; the blindfold and the guns took away his control and his balance; and his own terror broke the rules he tried to impose on his mind. He became an essence, a core, the outer layers gone. I think my father felt a clarity about himself that was very bright, that outshone everything he had ever learned, and that came back with him.

Gabeira says he is not the man he was in 1969. Time has changed him. Time and life in Algeria, Sweden. He advocates non-violence, promotes ecological issues, is a father now himself. "Your father was very patient with me," he says again. I tell him I imagine he too is more patient now; he is close to the age my father was then. He smiles and says, "Yes. Maybe."

I will talk to Franklin Martins later on the telephone, one of the ringleaders of the little group who had had the idea for the kidnapping. He spoke about my father.

"He was nervous on the first day, a little dazed," Martins says. I notice my hand is holding the receiver very tightly, as it did years before in Novi Sad in the little phone booth.

"He had the blow on the head."

"How did he get that?" I ask.

"We had to make him understand he could not resist. He was very brave. Very dignified. When a man is faced with something like that, you know him, how brave he is. He was very calm. I had many conversations with him."

You know him. As no one else knew him, I think. Better than I knew him. I am jealous that they got that close, that they got him to listen.

My father was calm, he says, and I am not surprised. But his hand shook when he wrote to my mother. I could see it in the letters he drew.

"I DO NOT BELIEVE THE US should support foreign governments that are not democratically elected," my father told them. I never knew he had said this.

But the United States did support that government. And he represented the United States. Would he say the same thing if a gun were not pointed at his head? He didn't name the officers in the embassy who were CIA, whom he certainly knew, with the same gun pointing at him. Was he speaking for himself? It was clear to me he was.

"It was a military operation, not a happening, as Gabeira says in his book," Martins says. "We were prepared to kill him." He says it flat, with no emphasis. As he talks, I enter the house where they spent four days in September.

These men take me to a time and place when my father was the most distant of all the moments he was gone, the farthest away. In our conversations the space that was created over many years between myself and this event, and that existed between myself and my father, is closed. I represent him to these two, so in some sense I become him tonight, and he is very close, 13 years after his death.

The men and women who kidnapped my father were all in their twenties, my age at the time, when they dared to snatch him off the street and carry him away with them. They did something I couldn't do — they didn't stop for a minute at the protective circle he drew around himself but went right through it. Inside that circle they communicated freely. They were half shaven in undershirts, talking to someone who wore a tie on Saturdays and Sundays, who never left his room unshaven.

He was different when he came back from Brazil. I was an adult then, and he had time and did not go away anymore, but I always missed him, always had that sense of longing even when I was with him, and the certainty I couldn't go back, as you might retrace the tracks a gypsy caravan has made and find a little girl whose parents are looking for her. But it was I who was looking for my father.

AFTER THE KIDNAPPING, FERNANDO Gabeira was hunted down, shot, arrested, imprisoned, tortured in the hospital where he lay, and months later released with other prisoners in exchange for the kidnapped German ambassador. He spent his years in exile in Algeria and Sweden, and he returned to Brazil under a general amnesty in 1979, when he helped found the Green Party; he is now a deputy in Congress. Each week he commutes from Brasilia to Rio, where his children attend the German School. The school, ironically, is located in our old house, the former American Embassy residence, on the Rua Sao Clemente, under the Corcovado mountain and the Christ on the hill.

Franklin Martins escaped arrest and spent ten years in exile. He is now director of O Globo in Brasilia, a newspaper with one of the largest circulations in Brazil. He left the Communist Party in 1985.

Their efforts, the lives spent, did not produce the changes they hoped for. It would be 20 years before democratic government returned to Brazil, and when it came, it was not by means of a revolution.

UNDER A WARM BLANKET OF blue sky in March 1996, a reenactment of the kidnapping takes place on a narrow street in Rio. A dark sedan and a Volkswagen Beetle slam into a narrow street and blockade a long black limousine. Four men jump out of the cars, waving their guns in the air. I stand on a street corner and watch Alan Arkin, in the role of my father, accosted in the back seat of the limousine. Arkin is a gifted actor and completely unlike my father in every respect. He is not tall and thin, he is squarish. He is open and relaxed — when he walks he's not of a piece; he ambles. He is balding; he looks Middle Eastern, not Irish. When I see him interpreting the script, he doesn't remind me of anyone. He creates something new. He is strong in the part.

It is my last day in Brazil. In my pocket is a letter that a production assistant handed me when I arrived five days ago. It reads:

To the participants in the film Four Days in September.

At this moment when the filming of September is about to begin, I would like to extend my wishes for its great success to all those involved in the project.

As you know, although the author's rights were ceded in the early Eighties, actual filming has not been possible until now. This project will be part of an exceptional moment in Brazilian filmmaking, part of a strong resurgence of film with other works launched this year. One of them, O Quatrilho, is an Oscar nominee for best foreign film.

I believe that the film will depict a particular stage of Brazilian history very well, but more than that, it will describe something permanent; the complexity and delicacy of human relations within the limits of this story.

I would like especially to greet Valerie Elbrick, wishing her an excellent stay in Brazil, and reaffirming my admiration for her father, Charles Burke Elbrick, an extraordinary human being who, in a certain way, taught me to understand and respect the country of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, whose fate also ultimately became linked to that of Brazil.

Fernando Gabeira

IN RIO THERE IS NO POLITE separation of nature from the city. The forests grope the neighborhoods and tangle their exotic flowers, parrots, and macaques with the telephone poles that line the urban streets. The mountains rise up in the middle of downtown, imposing their presence on traffic and pedestrians. They seem to shift continually throughout the day, so that entering or leaving a building you are aware that they have changed position and that the shape of the city has been altered. They shoot up suddenly over here or there, like extraordinary events that shatter, expose, or illuminate us.