by Dana Black
The main issue, then, was clear. Find a room, then decide what to do about Rachel. He was about to ask the barman to step over and give some opinions about the other hotels in town, when his thoughts were interrupted by a voice behind him.
“Alec Conroy, right?”
It wasn’t a new situation by any means. People were always coming up to him that way; even though he hadn’t cut a record in five years, they remembered his posters and photographs from the fan magazines. Alec encouraged it, in fact, by continuing to wear the white suit that had once been his trademark as a performer. So when he turned around, it was with a smile, expecting to maybe get a free drink and hear about a concert years ago in Philly or Birmingham or somewhere.
He saw a faded blue rugby shirt stretched by a barrel chest and heavily muscled arms, and then looked up into the pig-eyed Neanderthal features of Derek Bates. If Alec hadn’t had the cocaine in him, very probably he would have tried to make a run for it. But the drug made him fearless. He greeted Bates as a fellow countryman.
“What are you doing here?” he said. “You’re supposed to be scoring goals for merry old England.”
“They tell me you’re screwing my wife,” said Bates, taking a step closer.
“Don’t crowd me,” Alec replied, coolly sipping scotch. “Who’s ‘they’?”
Later, Bates would tell of his call from Bill Brautigam, but now he was in no mood to answer questions. His frustrations over Helen had been building ever since their wedding night four months earlier, when she had rejected his choice of hotels, informing him that even though she had married beneath herself, she did not intend to live beneath herself. She was beautiful, elegant, and he was eager for bed, so he had accepted the rebuff and changed hotels.
But since that night he had felt differently about her. Though he did not admit it even to himself, in his mind she became a kind of overseer, taking on the same emotional coloration he felt for Rowlands, the principal owner of Bates’s soccer club, and others of his class. He began bringing Helen flowers on Fridays and tried to persuade her to come to watch him at a Saturday game. She refused to mingle with “hooligans.” He felt the urge to blacken both her eyes when she put on those airs, but she was too good in bed and too attractive a decoration at social occasions for him to harm her.
He told himself that Helen had been brought up wealthy and was only acting according to her background. But knowing that she would probably never change for him increased his sense of subjugation and fueled his resentment. The call from the TV reporter had let loose those feelings.
In a way, Bates was glad of the excuse to get angry; he knew no man was expected to keep his temper with an unfaithful wife, no matter how well bred either of them was or wasn’t. He had come to Madrid ready to have it out with her, but she was not in her room and he didn’t know where to look. Conroy, Brautigam had said, was at the Palace. Bates went there straight from Helen’s empty room. To fortify himself with a drink before he faced what might be the pair of them in Conroy’s quarters, he had stopped at the bar.
Now, hearing this blond-haired degenerate take the same arrogant tone as Helen, Derek Bates felt a great cleansing rage. Conroy’s insolent, pampered face seemed to leer at him, inviting a pounding. Bates balled his hands into fists and loosed a roundhouse right that would have shattered Alec’s cheekbone if it had landed.
But Alec, cocaine-high, was on his guard. To him, Bates seemed a dangerous but predictable animal. Alec had been in enough barroom brawls to know the best moves, and with his heightened perceptions he felt completely in command. It was as though he knew Bates’s punch seconds before it was thrown, from the instant he saw the muscles in Bates’s thick neck tense up as Alec said “Who’s ‘they’?” So he pushed himself back, tilting his stool, and as Bates’s huge arm flashed by, Alec stood clear and dashed the contents of his tumbler of scotch straight into the man’s eyes.
A bellow of pain came from the blinded soccer star. He charged at where Alec had been when last he could see. His eyes felt on fire from the alcohol. The humiliation of being tricked in a fight by the same man who had bedded his wife drove him berserk. His hands clawed out for his tormenter and caught hold, not of Alec, who had dodged nimbly out of the line of attack, but of a white-jacketed waiter who had correctly perceived that a fight was about to erupt and had come over to try to keep it from happening at the bar.
Bates slammed the waiter to the floor. Not hearing the man’s cries, seeing only the white cloth of his coat, and that none too well, he tried to batter the man in the face. Some of the blows hit the floor as the waiter twisted; others landed. Permanent damage might have been done had not Alec picked up the barstool he had been sitting on and broken it over the back of Bates’s head.
Bates slumped over his unintended victim, unconscious. In a short while he was in the hands of the Madrid police, trying to explain himself. American television, he said, had driven him to what he had done, which prompted the police to call the American TV people they knew best: UBC. The officer in charge insisted on speaking with the “top” UBC person immediately, and Molly, keeping Spanish hours at her switchboard and unable to locate Sharon, acted on her boss’s instructions and put the call through to Cantrell. She listened in, of course.
The indignation that she heard in Cantrell’s voice gave her pause. As she heard the Madrid policeman describe Derek Bates’s allegations of UBC libel against his wife and UBC provocation against Bates himself, Molly expected her boss to come to a strong defense of his people.
Instead, Cantrell seemed incensed that UBC had had anything to do with this kind of thing. “We don’t deal in smut,” Cantrell declared with vehemence. “Give me the name of whoever this man says is responsible. If he’s proved correct, I’ll fire the son of a bitch on the spot.”
Molly waited out the pause while the policeman found the name. “A Senõr Bill Brautigam.” And she shared the relief in Cantrell’s voice when he responded, “Hell, Brautigam ain’t with us. He works for NBC!”
Still, Molly was nervous. Like the rest of the UBC staff, she knew about the Conroy tape. From the tone her boss had taken, he was going to be pretty upset when he found out that UBC people had been involved after all.
Several events occurred before Cantrell found out.
First, the Madrid police, checking Bates’s story, located Bill Brautigam and asked him for answers. Brautigam, knowing his rights as a reporter were not as liberal under Spanish law as in the States, claimed he had been acting on a tip acquired at a Madrid bar from an American, name and Madrid address unknown, who claimed to work for another network that had a tape of Alec Conroy. The police thanked Brautigam for his cooperation and let him go in time for him to make a few phone calls.
Then Brautigam filed an update to his story on Mr. and Mrs. Bates. The NBC seven o’clock news duly carried the report. Careful to dissociate their own network from gossip-mongering, the anchorman pointed out that another network had made a tape of Alec Conroy that had provoked Derek Bates into going AWOL from his team and becoming involved in a barroom brawl that landed him in jail.
During that bit of commentary, NBC ran an edited version of the Conroy tape, which, the anchorman said, had “come into possession of NBC.” As a footnote to the tape, he added other details that Brautigam had been able to supply. Bates had been suspended by his team and would be sent home to England on the next flight, with or without his wife. Arrangements with the Spanish police had been worked out. Also, Helen Bates could not be located for comment.
At that time it was 2:30 a.m. in Madrid. Alec had told his story to the police. The waiter had come from the hospital to testify, and both he and the barman supported Alec’s claim that Bates had thrown the first punch, so Alec was released. Now he was in his hotel room with Rachel Quinn, having a none-too-pleasant talk.
She’d been a fool to turn the tape in to begin with, he said accusingly. The networks were all alike, heartless corporations who thought only of ratings and profits. How could R
achel have turned the tape over to NBC? he asked.
Rachel was surprised to find herself on the defensive. She felt that she had no way to prove she hadn’t turned over the tape to NBC. And by letting Alec stay the week, she seemed more or less to have forfeited her claim to outrage over his infidelity. Also, she wanted him in bed.
She fell back on the argument that had worked best with Alec in the past: she began to take off her clothes.
Alec was aroused quickly. Even though he found Helen more sexually desirable than Rachel, he had not slept with either of them for the past two days. And Helen had not returned his call when he came back from the police station. It was possible she might have gotten wind of the bad publicity, he thought. She might even have left Spain and gone home.
He soon was naked with Rachel under the sheets, having postponed his resolution to become independent of her for another day.
At the time of the NBC broadcast, it was also 2:20 a.m. in England. The British authorities did not take any action on this affront to their country’s representatives until more than nine hours later. At about noon on Friday, Molly, at the UBC switchboard, received a call from the British Foreign Ministry asking to speak to the person in charge.
Molly had an intuition as to what the call was about, so she did not put it through to Cantrell. Though she knew the call was important, she remembered too vividly his stormy response when the Madrid police had called about the British athlete the day before. British officials, she sensed, would be calling about the same problem. Further, her boss had not come into the office yet today. That probably meant last night had been a late one. He was usually in a foul humor on the days he started work late. To intrude on him at his hotel suite with a call like this one would be bad judgment.
Molly put the call through to Sharon.
Naturally she listened in.
13
Sharon, meanwhile, had been feeling for the past few days as though her life had come through a kind of sea-change. Normally she was skeptical of people who told her that a promotion, or a new love, really made a big difference. Day-to-day feelings, she had believed ever since losing her husband and children years ago, depended on a person’s inner resolve more than anything else. You could change jobs, apartments, lovers, take vacation trips or what have you, but whether you enjoyed life or not still depended on the face you saw when you looked in the mirror the next morning.
Now, however, she had to admit it: she felt better. Not that she had been suffering; she would never have said that. But lately things seemed to be falling into place. The daily rush of details and conflicts was just as heavy, but it was easier to handle. Instead of rushing from one to the next all day long and then shutting off like a machine for sleep, she had begun to take occasional breaks—to look back, to look ahead, to get things into perspective and see where she was going and what the UBC team, after all the sound and fury, really was doing.
In other words, she guessed, she was beginning to see the big picture. Was that a good point to have reached, after just over a week? She didn’t know and didn’t care. She wasn’t judging herself as much these days, not worrying as much, either—just getting the job done.
Most of the credit for her changed outlook, she thought, belonged to Keith. In their nightly talks on the telephone, each of them relived the day for the other. Telling Keith about the things she had done put them into a different light. He was tired after each of his games—more tired than ever before, he had told her—yet not too tired to listen to his “golden-haired world-beater,” as he now called Sharon. To hear him tell it, Sharon was personally responsible for a boom in soccer that would propel America to the top of world soccer for generations to come. Sharon laughed at such outrageous praise, and looked forward each night to hearing his voice.
Being a producer instead of an associate producer had its points, too. Sharon knew about power-hunger and empire-building from her years of moving up through the ranks, and it was something of a relief for her to discover that once she had power, she wasn’t particularly overawed or impressed with herself. For the first day or two she made it a point not to talk to people any differently than she had before, and then gradually she forgot about how a producer ought to talk and just got things done.
What exhilarated her, though, was being able to make choices without first having to check with a “superior.” It was a strange kind of freedom, one that she supposed she would become used to before the World Cup was over. After that, maybe Cantrell would keep her on for other projects, if things continued to go well. Or she would have this experience on her record to qualify for a position with another network.
Assuming, of course, that her relationship with Keith would allow for that kind of work. Not that she was expecting to marry and quit working as soon as they got back to the States; she’d want to give both of them plenty of time to get over the enchantment of falling in love in Spain and being kept apart. Though she harbored a secret hope that the feeling would last for years, part of her insisted on not rushing into a wedding— the overcautious part, she thought sometimes. She would be glad when Keith came back to Madrid tonight after the Uruguay game. He would play Tuesday’s game against Brazil here at Bernabeau, and again, a week from tomorrow, here against Australia, and then the second phase of the tournament would be over.
And America would either have made the semifinals or not.
But tonight, she knew, they would not be thinking about soccer. The magic of their two nights together would return.
The phone rang in the studio truck, where she was watching possible documentary tapes for tonight’s broadcast. When Molly told her it was the British Foreign Ministry, she felt the pleasure of anticipation. Other countries had been calling to buy rebroadcast rights to a number of UBC features that their representatives in America had seen. This World Cup was drawing the largest worldwide TV audience ever; many countries were expanding their coverage and needed new material. Sharon assumed that the British had liked Rachel Quinn’s feature on some of their “Women in Waiting,” which had aired the night before.
What she heard made her too surprised to react immediately: an ascerbic voice dripping with hauteur, informing her that neither British nor Scottish players or associates would be cooperating with UBC for the duration of the tournament, and that a protest had already been filed with the U.S. State Department through the American embassy in London. When Sharon asked why, the man’s tone turned sharper still as he told her he’d assumed that Americans with broadcasting equipment, who called themselves networks, knew what they did with the material they collected, even if that material was libelous in intent. It was then that Sharon had her first inkling that the tape of Alec Conroy had somehow gotten out of the archives.
Later that afternoon, when it was morning across the Atlantic, the calls started coming in from America. And the reporters started coming around the UBC truck, asking for more background. Was it true UBC had hidden a camera inside hotel room 702 and were holding back that tape for a higher bid? Were they hiding Helen Bates until they had released the rest of the story? And so on. Sharon decided that the time had come to tell Ross Cantrell the bad news. She made the appointment through Molly, and after telling Maria to guard the fort, she left the studio truck for the walk into the stadium and the elevator ride up to Cantrell’s penthouse office.
Molly couldn’t listen in on that one, but Lynnette, the receptionist, could, because she could hear Cantrell thundering through the sheetrock wall that separated her cubicle from his office. She also heard Sharon defending her people. No harm had been done until the tape had gotten out, Sharon said, and that was her own fault as much as anyone’s for not having it erased at the beginning. So until whoever gave it to NBC stepped forward, she would accept the responsibility. If Cantrell wanted her to clear out now, she would. It was Lynnette’s repeating of this conversation later on that caused many to blame Sharon’s losing her job on what came to be called “the Conroy tape.”
When Sharon arrived back at the studio truck, she was still producer, and determined not to let the flap over something another network had done interfere with tonight’s broadcast. There were highlights to capture from the U.S.-Uruguay game—which would not be hard-played, since both teams were qualified for the second phase and would not want to risk injuries. Also playing today were the Soviet Union against Mexico and Australia against Finland. The Soviets had qualified too, but the game would provide yet another chance to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the team that many were predicting would reach the finals undefeated.
So Sharon didn’t call in Rachel and Walter J. and Max and give them a talking-to. She did, however, say something to Wayne Taggart as they were settling in to take the signal from the Soviet game at La Coruna. Someone had leaked the Conroy tape, and Taggart was at the top of her list of candidates.
“Bill Brautigam’s in town,” she said, watching his face.
He reddened and his eyes darted first away and then back to meet hers. “So?” He chewed the ends of his mustache, waiting, and she knew that he had been the one.
But she also knew that she couldn’t prove it without disrupting the operation worse than it already had been. “I remembered you worked with him before,” she said. “Maybe you’d like to again.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means three strikes and you’re out, Wayne.”
He gave a little laugh and looked over his shoulder to see if anyone else was watching before turning back to her. “Why, Sharon, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you just say what’s on your mind?”
Somehow, she thought, there ought to be a way to talk to the Wayne Taggarts of the world without feeling frustrated. She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “Somebody made a copy of the Conroy tape for Bill Brautigam. If I find out who, or if I find somebody doing the same thing again, that person’s fired. Do I have to spell it out any plainer?”