by Dana Black
She felt Keith’s absence keenly, and turned to the remedy she knew best: work. Signs that the UBC coverage of the World Cup was going well encouraged her. The American papers—flown to Madrid by messenger service each day— had praised the coverage. They had called the documentary on the Russian team “courageous,” and then had called the following night’s on-the-air corrections, retractions, and explanations “statesmanlike”—an attitude that had amused Yuri Zadiev.
“You manage to have it both ways,” he told Sharon. “Is this the free and objective Western press I’ve heard so much about?”
But beyond that small gibe he had shown no ill will, no resentment. Surprisingly, when Sharon had first called him to apologize for the mixup—telling him the truth—Zadiev had shown no signs of disbelief at what must have seemed a flimsy explanation to come from a supposedly competent TV professional. He had taken the news philosophically, murmuring some Russian folk saying about wolves and caribou, the point of which was that accidents will happen. There would be a protest filed, he said, but if UBC made the retraction Sharon was promising that night, and agreed not to license distribution of the uncut version, the matter would be dropped.
“Part of the image,” Larry Noble had said when Sharon told him during her afternoon hospital visit. “They want to look like the good guys as long as they can—right up to the moment one of their players kicks out an opponent’s teeth.”
Soviet officialdom evidently agreed with Zadiev. On Friday, the day after the UBC retraction, Tass issued a brief statement to the effect that if the Americans would present the truth and shun wicked propaganda that defamed the Soviet people, no further difficulty between them and UBC need arise.
“I don’t like it,” Rachel Quinn had said. “They’ve got to be thinking we did it on purpose, and they ought to be screaming. I wonder what they’re up to.”
But others at UBC were content to enjoy the dual status of muckrakers and statesmen, seekers of truth and keepers of peace, at the rare moments when they took time to reflect on such matters. Cindy Ling, who had at first been ready to offer her resignation for allowing such a catastrophe to happen, had responded favorably to Sharon’s strong backing and assurances that things would eventually right themselves. She continued to work, but now Cindy labeled edited cassettes in brushed-on red nail polish, and before she put them into the machine. Wayne Taggart, on whom suspicion had fallen, had admitted to “fumbling around” with the cassettes while he watched Cindy edit his own materials. Like chewing a pencil, he said. He hadn’t really been aware of what his fingers were doing and he certainly hadn’t intended to cause anyone any trouble, if in fact it had been his fault, because he really didn’t know.
Taggart changed his tune somewhat after the overnight ratings came in for the second night, however. They were good: a 20.6, up two full points over the first night’s 18.6. Thinking about it then, Wayne said he might have peeled off the label and put it on the other cassette during a “Freudian slip,” because he had really felt strongly that the original version would help the ratings. Could they profit from that example, he asked, and air some more really hard-hitting stuff? It could boost them up over the magic twenty-one percentage and maybe even make them all famous.
Now, in the studio truck, he was urging Sharon to get a handheld unit into the Seville locker room, even though both Spanish authorities and IFFA regulations prohibited TV cameras there on the grounds that they invaded team privacy and security.
“We’ve just gotta be in there—the American people expect it! And after this next game, it’ll be perfect—they’ll either be sky-high about a victory, or they’ll be into a do-or-die thing for the third game with Uruguay—”
“Ruled out a tie, have you?” Sharon cut in.
“You know what I mean. Now that we’ve got this victory, every game’s a real biggie. And I can get a guy in there, if I can just fly down to Seville and locate the right people. What do you say?”
“I think we’ll stay legal, Wayne.”
But he still wouldn’t quit. As he got ready to leave the studio truck, Wayne let it be known that he was having a “working breakfast” with Ross Cantrell the next morning, and that he would be asking Cantrell’s opinion about a locker-room camera.
For the first time since she had taken Larry’s place as producer, Sharon felt her temper starting to crack. She knew that the rest of the crew in the close quarters of the truck’s interior could hear every word Wayne said, and that his deliberate flaunting of her authority would certainly not go unnoticed. If Taggart thought nothing of going over her head directly to Cantrell, and if he was allowed to keep on with that attitude, there would soon be others taking the same route whenever they felt they had a better answer. On the other hand, Sharon knew that you didn’t assert your authority in a television studio by crying “foul!” the first time somebody tried to get away with a run around your end.
“Wayne,” she said quietly as he was going out the door. “He won’t give you a camera in the locker room.”
He swung around. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She wanted to keep peace in the family, so she kept her tone reasonable, even though she could cheerfully have set fire to his quivering mustache. “We’ve got a contract with IFFA and the Spanish authorities, and Mr. Cantrell knows that. He’s the one who signed it.”
“Trouble with you,” Taggart shot back, “is that you think small all the time. Your head’s clogged up with contracts and laws and petty crap. Cantrell’s different. If he thinks it’ll work, he’ll give me that camera!”
The falsetto voice of Earvin Williams floated mockingly out from the slo-mo cubicle: “Yeah, and maybe he’ll give you a lollipop to stick in your cowboy hat, sucker!”
The others chimed in, a chorus of laughter and hoots: Cantrell would give him a new permanent wave for his hair, new gold stars for his chair, new brown for his nose—
Taggart flushed crimson with anger and slammed the door behind him.
“Why don’t you just fire him?” Wesley Wilson asked Sharon a few moments later. “Nobody in here would miss that creep for a minute.”
Sharon was tempted to agree, but she wanted to be fair. “Thanks for backing me up,” she said. “He’s a good director, though, and we’re in kind of deep to change horses.”
“I don’t see why you talk like that,” Earvin said, joining them at the instrument board. “Don’t you know that man is after your job?”
She felt surprise, even though she supposed she ought to have seen it coming. “I guess you learn something new every day,” she said.
They told her some of the unflattering things Taggart had said about female producers in general. Women were too timid to lead, you needed a man to be decisive—things like that. And about Sharon in particular: too sweetness-and-light to go for the jugular; too much involved with Keith Palermo to be objective.
“I’ll give him ‘objective,’ ” she said. “I’ll give him his ‘jugular.’ ” She could hire another director, she thought, instead of hiring herself an assistant, and let Wayne work out his contract directing local-color shots in the cities of Spain.
But she knew she would have to work around the problem a different way. It wouldn’t be right to treat Taggart’s gossip that seriously. It wouldn’t be right to use someone who didn’t work as well directing the complex, fluid, ever-changing patterns that a soccer game always presented for TV coverage. Besides, if Taggart really wanted to be a producer, he would be motivated to work extra hard. She would try to channel some of that motivation to add extra quality to the UBC broadcasts.
After the crew had gone, Rachel Quinn came in to see Sharon. She was wearing her on-camera makeup, and she looked tired, as Sharon had noticed she generally did, following a broadcast. Rachel seemed nervous about something. As she sat down, the pale straw tote bag she was carrying bulged open on the top, and Sharon saw a book inside: You’re Not Too Old to Have a Baby. Rachel was thirty-eight. Sharon wondered if the UBC re
porter was reading the book for professional reasons or if she was seriously thinking of motherhood for herself. But with Alec Conroy as the father? The decaying rock singer was hardly—and then Sharon caught her thoughts up short. Gossip, she thought. She was not here to judge Rachel’s private life, but to put on a broadcast. In less than half an hour the Spanish cameras would be lighting up the board with the action from the Soviet-Australia game in Vigo, on the Atlantic, and other things had to be done before the crew came back in to tape the highlights.
Rachel had come with a story idea for which she asked budget approval from Sharon: a documentary called “Women in Waiting.”
“We do an up-close on some of the women who’ve come here for the tournament—wives and girlfriends of the big-name players,” she told Sharon. “I’ll bet a lot of viewers would like to see who Antonio Javier spends his nights with; I’ll bet a lot of women would like to see what kind of lives the wives lead while their husbands are away. Their hotel rooms, the restaurants and shops, the waiting and the tensions— that kind of thing. You think it’ll go?”
Sharon thought it was a fine idea. As they both knew, the majority of American TV sets in prime time were controlled by women. The story could be featured in the advertising for whatever evening UBC decided to run it. Maybe it could be expanded into two or three different stories, to run on other nights throughout the week. She talked about the idea some more with Rachel, made some suggestions, and then sent her off with the promise of an extra two thousand dollars in expense money. A good idea, she thought, and wondered if she ought to call Ross Cantrell to tell him about it.
No, she decided. She would mention it when she next had her regularly scheduled meeting with Cantrell, tomorrow night. Not before. Let Wayne Taggart be the one to take up Cantrell’s time.
Besides, she thought, with the American win today, a twenty-one rating was practically a sure thing. People would tune in to watch in droves tonight, because the regular news and sports would have alerted them to the U.S. victory. Tonight’s broadcast would be real entertainment, something to savor and enjoy. People would watch, and the overnights would show a good strong audience. When she talked with Cantrell tomorrow night, he would be feeling pleased with the world.
7
At five o’clock the following afternoon, Katya Romanova arrived at the Bernabeau Stadium studio for her interview with Dan Richards. Taping was not scheduled to begin until six; however, an hour in advance had been set aside for makeup, staging rehearsal, background interviews, and the like, Tamara had explained. Katya did her best to conceal her joy at having the extra time.
She and Tamara had come by taxi from shopping in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, where a few of the stalls had opened on Sunday afternoon to cash in on the continued tourist craving for souvenirs. Katya had wanted a pair of boots—a stupendous prize, with leather so hard to come by in the Soviet Union—but Tamara had custody of the money. She selected a brightly colored scarf and paid for it with the most maddening air of importance, as though she were doing Katya an enormous good turn. “You will be sure to tell the Americans that you have been shopping,” she said, her puffy lips and cheeks set firmly. “But for souvenirs only, because you can buy everything you really want at GUM. Yes?”
As they got out of their taxi to face the Spanish guard outside Bernabeau Studium, Katya slipped the scarf over her head, babushka-style. The guard, a young man bored with protecting a virtually empty stadium on a hot afternoon, grinned at the two women, possibly because of Katya’s scarf, or possibly at the vast difference in size between Katya and her burly keeper.
Tamara was ever alert to decadent Western attempts to ridicule innocent members of the Socialist Workers’ State. “What are you smirking at, you?” she growled as they showed their identification. Then she caught sight of Katya. “You, Katya Ivanovna!” she sputtered in Russian. “We have not brought you to Europe to have you masquerade as an ignorant peasant! You will wear that scarf in the fashionable manner!”
“Peasants made the Revolution, Tamara Borisovna,” Katya replied sweetiy. Nonetheless, she removed the scarf and tied it around her neck. The Spanish guard, outweighed by fifty pounds by Tamara, caught Katya’s eye as though the two of them shared a joke. This sent Tamara into another outburst of indignation. She kept at Katya through the tunnel. The guard was plainly a Western spy, a provocateur posted to receive them and lay some trap. Westerners were always looking for opportunities to humiliate and embarrass unsuspecting Soviet citizens, and here Katya had handed the fellow his opportunity on a platter! How could she have forgotten herself, after all the preparations? The lecturers who had warned them what to expect in Spain, that puppet of the imperialist militarists!
They had told Katya that on this trip, when she was not sheltered by her fellow members of the gymnastics team, she would be singled out for Western tricks of all kinds. Then she had been taken to GUM’s exclusive Western section, which the public never saw, along with her brother and the others of the Soviet soccer team. Current Western magazines of fashion had been passed around for them to examine, and then they had been given ration cards and allowed to choose from among clothes worth more rubles than Katya had seen in her lifetime. Select as though you were already European, they were told. As representatives of their country, they would show that Soviet citizens and the Soviet way of life would fit in anywhere. And when they arrived in Madrid, they would please make an effort to act as though they were accustomed to dressing in this manner, and not parade like bumpkins who wanted to show off new finery.
“And Katya Ivanovna, you choose to forget all this when we are practically in front of the American television, yes? Whatever are we to do with you?”
“I was only testing you,” said Katya.
This was not entirely true, because Katya liked putting on a scarf babushka-style.
Of all her childhood memories from her early years in Arkhangelsk, a cold, ice-clogged port city near the mouth of the White Sea, her mother’s babushka-clad face appeared in the happiest. There had been the proud moment when Katya was selected for the group of five-year-old girls who would receive special gymnastics training in the kindergarten, even as her brother before her had been chosen for special training in soccer. Mother had been there. And on the great day when, at age seven, Katya took top honors on both uneven parallel bar and floor exercises, her mother had been given special time off from her job in the shipping warehouse to come see the awards ceremony.
They had walked home from the school auditorium that night, just Katya and her mother under the cold northern sky with the trees groaning in the subzero darkness and the encrusted snow crackling under their boots.
Katya had not realized why they had to walk the whole distance instead of waiting for the bus, nor did she quite know why her mother picked her up and carried her some of the way after she had just won an award as an athlete, for heaven’s sake! Her ears began to freeze in the crystalline air, so her mother had taken the scarf from her own head and wrapped it around Katya’s and held her very close.
The next morning, Katya had awakened to find her dresser drawer empty of everything but her best outfit, the one she had worn the night before. The rest of Katya’s clothes were packed in a blue cloth bag with yellow drawstrings that her mother had sewn. They were going to the railway station, her mother explained, and Katya was leaving for the special gymnastics institute in Minsk. It was a wonderful opportunity; she would be given meat four dinners in every week, imagine! And there must be no tears from Katya, or her mother would surely cry too and bring shame to the memory of Ivan, her husband and Katya’s father, who would have been so very proud of his daughter today.
Her mother had worn a scarf on that cold railway platform, and waved as Katya’s train pulled away. Elena Romanova had died a month later, before she could come to Minsk to see her daughter. Katya’s last memory of her was the image of that waving figure on the railway platform, receding smaller and smaller into the distant noonday shadows, stil
l waving.
So Katya was not without some feeling for the babushka, even though she knew it was not fashionable.
“Besides,” Katya went on, “have you looked at the label, Tamara? The scarf was made in Hong Kong.”
“The devil take Hong Kong,” Tamara said. She stopped outside the double steel doors marked UBC TV. “You just be vigilant in there, yes? Don’t go acting as though their stupid gadgets and their clothes impress you!”
A few minutes later she was seated at a modem chromed-steel table with Dan Richards, who was going over some questions he had written on his notepad. The ever-watchful Tamara sat on a folding chair against the wall, in a strategic position where she could hear every word Katya said. Richards, who seemed to have aged a decade in the year since Katya had seen him, was nonetheless warm and friendly. Katya allowed herself to feel hope. He must help her! Yes, she was practicing, despite a heavy schedule of interviews with other news people from other countries. Twice a day, in rented space. No, she hadn’t changed her diet since Ottawa. Yes, she’d tried some Spanish dishes.
Glancing over at the gymnastic apparatus set up in the opposite corner of the studio, Katya interrupted Dan’s next question. “Excuse me, but may I suggest a change in the way you have positioned that equipment?” Her English was good; she was grateful for her Moscow instructors and the lessons they had hammered into her, because to have an interpreter here would make the situation utterly hopeless.
He glanced up, a bit surprised. “Sure, Katya. You call the shots.”
“Give me your pad and I will sketch the layout for you.” Her mouth was dry as she spoke, and she tried not to look at Tamara, but she could not help it. The powerfully muscled woman sat upright in her uniform-like summer-weight suit and blouse, as though she had been called to attention and were about to spring up, salute, and then rush forward like a bull to tear the notepad from Katya’s hands and hold it up, crying, “Treason!” Katya forced herself to nod in conspiratorial fashion to Tamara, as if to say, “You see? I am not going to let these Americans trick me with improperly positioned facilities.” Tamara appeared caught off guard by Katya’s “covert” signal. She gave a slight self-conscious nod in return, folded her arms, and sat back in her chair as though she knew everyone in the room was looking at her but was determined not to let on.