Goldengirl

by Peter Lovesey

  Instead of moving with the mass of the crowd toward the Stadium approach, they turned right at the street’s end and headed toward one of the three training tracks where athletes warmed up for their events. There was a better chance of seeing Goldine here than trying to penetrate the security at the Olympic Village, which was organized with the 1972 shootout in Munich still much in mind.

  The track was a full 400-meter circuit surrounded by a double wire fence patrolled by officials. The public enclosure extended along one side of the stretch. There must have been two hundred or more spectators seated on the tiered benches simply watching athletes in warm-ups jogging around the perimeter and exercising on the grass. Almost as many again were clustered around the competitors’ entrance: autograph collecting is a popular activity in the Soviet Union, engaged in by adults as well as children.

  And as Dryden and Melody arrived, something was happening there. A team bus had drawn up and officials had swung metal barriers into place to provide a passage through the converging crowd. The athletes debouched at speed, ignoring the papers and pens hopefully thrust toward them.

  Dryden was looking through his field glasses at some girl athletes limbering up on the far side.

  “No chance?” Melody asked.

  “None at all. They aren’t even Americans.”

  “Who are these people arriving?”

  “Not Yanks, for sure. We obviously picked the wrong training track.”

  A small Latin-looking man at his elbow seemed agitated when Dryden started to replace the glasses in their case. He tugged at Dryden’s sleeve, jabbering unintelligibly, stabbing his finger in the direction of the crowd at the gate. It seemed ungracious to push him away; he was evidently doing this from the best motives. He didn’t want Dryden to miss the excitement at the gate.

  One word came through the spate of sounds and by repetition made itself understood: “Krüll.” The little man wanted them to know he had spotted Ursula Krüll.

  “Krüll. Oh, yes. Ursula Krüll,” said Dryden, nodding energetically. He turned the glasses on the slim brunette who had just run the gauntlet of autograph hunters.

  She was talking with two other girls dressed similarly in the blue tracksuit with the letters DDR displayed. Cameramen were crowding around them, but she continued the conversation with the cultivated indifference of someone who has lived in the public eye for a long time. It was a pretty face, whatever preconceptions you had about Eastern Bloc athletes, the cheekbones shaped high, the curving top lip lifted interestingly even in repose. Her blue eyes continued to look steadily at her companions, undistracted by the cameras.

  “Cool,” said Melody.

  “Krüll, si,” said the little man.

  “Let’s go,” said Dryden. “If the East Germans are here, you may be sure the Americans aren’t coming.”

  As they were moving off, they saw Krüll slip her thumbs in the waistband of the tracksuit and ease it over her hips, still talking as she lifted her lightly tanned legs from the garment. She checked the level of the famous shorts with a quick movement of her hand, turned abruptly and wagged a playful finger at a cameraman, then trotted leisurely away around the track. If she felt any tension at the prospect of the afternoon’s events, it didn’t show.

  They fared no better at the next training track, except having it confirmed by some U.S. 800-meter men that Goldine wasn’t likely to appear on the public training tracks at all. “The only place you’ll see that chick is in the Stadium racing,” one told him. “She works out on the Village track, then they rush her to the Stadium in a hired Zim, along with two musclemen and her physician. Man, you have to be somebody to rate that class of service.”

  *

  At three o’clock that afternoon, eight girls bucked from the blocks in the first Semi-Final of the 100 meters. In the tiered seating beyond the finish, Melody tightened her grip on Dryden’s hand. From their foreshortened view, it was difficult to tell who had started well. The line of runners moved without the impression of speed you got from seeing them side-on; but the energy of sprinting, the rhythm and power, were dramatized in the hammer motion of legs — knees raised, it seemed, extravagantly high, shoes pounding the track.

  They had covered more than half the distance, and the symmetry was threatened by two girls in lanes 4 and 5 edging ahead — a Russian and a British girl. Goldine, in lane 2, was in the pack with the rest. The first four would qualify for the Final.

  “It looks bad,” said Melody gratuitously.

  “It’s the angle,” responded Dryden, hoping it was.

  The roar that greeted the Russian victory was worthy of the Final. The Soviet girl was overcome, covering her eyes as officials crowded around her.

  Goldine had crossed at least two meters behind, third or fourth. Mary-Lou Devine was out.

  The time was flashed on the scoreboard: a new Soviet Record.

  “How do you read that?” asked Melody.

  He didn’t answer. He was training the glasses on Goldine. She was walking back to the start with the British girl. Muratova was besieged by pressmen. The others couldn’t get near to make the token touch of congratulation.

  “Playing possum?” suggested Melody.

  “She does have a four hundred-meter heat to run before the Final. The object was to qualify, and she did.”

  On the track, the next set of girls were already testing their blocks.

  “This could be instructive,” said Dryden. “Krüll is taking on the Cuban girl who beat Goldine in the heats yesterday.”

  A small section of the crowd was chanting “Ur-su-la.” Their idol ignored them, ignored the girls lining up beside her, the photographers positioned to capture the start.

  The chanting stopped as the eight got into the crouch position. The gun cracked.

  A fraction over ten seconds later, Krüll crossed the line emphatically clear of the rest, eased to a trot, corrected the coverage of her shorts, waved away photographers and jogged smartly back to the start. Before she reached there, the scoreboard flashed the news that for the third time she had improved the Olympic Record. The latest — 10.83 — made the Russian girl’s time look ordinary, Goldine’s pedestrian.

  “Wishing you could change your meal ticket?” Melody asked.

  It was not long till the 400-meter First Round heats. They noticed two late substitutions: Canute, J. (U.S.A.) replaced Jones (U.S.A.) in Heat One; Krüll, U. (G.D.R.) replaced Muller (G.D.R.) in Heat Six.

  “So Janie Canute gets her chance, after all,” said Melody. “How did she manage that? The power of prayer?”

  “Didn’t you hear? Jones came down with glandular fever a week ago. She didn’t make the trip. What interests me is that Krüll has come in. I heard the Germans were considering this, but it’s a hell of a gamble when she hasn’t trained for three events.”

  “How do you know she hasn’t?” asked Melody. “Wouldn’t it be typical of the Commies to train her in secret and then spring this at the last moment? They could figure it’s a way of psyching Goldengirl.”

  “Equally, Goldine could have psyched them by holding herself back in the heats of the one hundred. The Germans could believe Krüll has the sprints so buttoned up it won’t hurt to take in the four hundred as well.”

  Melody shook her head. “That’s not the way Germans think. They’re methodical. They don’t gamble.”

  “The coaches might not,” said Dryden, “but politicians would. If those people saw a chance of proving their system produced a super-woman, do you think they’d pass it up? Krüll is the prestige vehicle of an ideology. She’s running in the name of Marx and Lenin. Since she’s running well, those ideologues can put enormous pressure on the coaches to try her for the triple. What do they care if she’s a spent husk at the end of it?”

  “You wouldn’t, by any chance, be justifying anything to yourself?” said Melody without looking at him.

  The heats of the 400 meters resolved none of the speculation. Goldine qualified in second place in Heat
Three, cruising through easily in slow time. Ursula Krüll, too, ran well within herself in her race, third in a marginally faster time. The fastest qualifier of the round was Janie Canute, with 51.02 secs.

  In the next hour, Dryden twice approached the covered warmup area below the stand in hope of contacting Goldine, but security guards intercepted him. The only consolation was that if he couldn’t get through, neither could Esselstyn.

  In the arena the Finals of the men’s 800 meters and 400-meter-hurdles came and went, and a protracted struggle developed between the Swedish and West German pole-vaulters. Many of the crowd seemed disengaged from what was happening, waiting only for the last event of the day, the women’s 100-meter Final. Two girls, Muratova and Krüll, had beaten eleven seconds in the preliminaries, so it seemed set as a Soviet-German clash, with the rest scrapping for bronze.

  While officials cleared the track of hurdles, Dryden was scanning a section of the crowd through his field glasses. “Come on,” he abruptly said to Melody. “We’re moving. I want a better view this time. Some people up there are leaving.” He hustled her along the row, down a gangway and past two officials in conversation. The seats were situated high up, almost level with the finish. The people sitting alongside gave them suspicious looks, and then someone said, “Amerikanka,” which seemed to explain everything.

  The eight finalists had appeared in the arena. For the first time in the afternoon the atmosphere was charged with that tension that can bind a hundred thousand people into a unit, totally absorbed in a human activity as simple as a ten-second run. Across the world millions more watched and waited. And the eight who had earned the right to a few seconds’ attention from the biggest audience in history jogged about the small grass enclosure, preoccupied, heads down, steeling themselves. The vast majority of those watching regarded this as a mild diversion to be looked at, enjoyed, forgotten, but those eight pent-up athletes had lived with this moment for years and would relive it till their lives’ end. A faulty start, a lapse of concentration, a cramp, and how much was lost? A race? A professional contract? An Order of Lenin? A way of life?

  One conclusion was certain: when that 100 meters had been run, not one of those eight girls would be quite the same person.

  The starter touched a button that sounded an electronic signal to the finalists. Warm-ups were peeled off, spikes checked, secret prayers uttered.

  Dryden had Goldine in focus. She appeared to be smiling, saying something to Ursula Krüll. The German looked away. In the stands, people were chanting her name. The Russians were responding with “Mu-ra-to-va.”

  The starter spoke into his microphone, and the chanting stopped.

  “Na Mesta.”

  The girls moved forward. Each starting block was fitted with its own loudspeaker, so that there should be no split-second’s acoustic advantage.

  “Gotovo.”

  Goldine was in lane 3, Krüll 5, Muratova 6.

  One hundred and three thousand spectators, and you could hear a flag flapping on the lip of the Stadium.

  Suddenly it was happening. The gun had fired and they were off their blocks, building speed, oblivious to the deluge of sound from every side. Goldine was angled low, impelled by the power of her start. There was a purpose to her running that had not been evident in earlier rounds. She was declaring herself now, when it counted, running with an action that made the others look mechanical. Meter by meter she imposed herself on the race. Her will reached up the strip to the finish, as clear as the lane markings.

  A meter down, Krüll was summoning the power acquired in those years of weightlifting. Although it was taking her clear of the other runners, it hauled back nothing from Goldine. The muscular effort for a 100-meter sprint theoretically requires about seven liters of oxygen, but the lungs cannot supply more than half a liter in the ten seconds. So when the muscles have used the oxygen available, they incur a debt. They gather lactic acid and other alien substances that the body can tolerate only for a short time. Krüll’s capacity to surmount the oxygen debt had been calculated by East German physiologists to be worth a full meter in the last thirty. But where was it?

  Goldine held her lead to the line, dipped as Klugman had drilled her, ran on, turned, bowed to draw breath, and was engulfed by cameramen.

  SERAFIN USA 10.81 flashed the scoreboard. NEW OLYMPIC RECORD.

  “How was that for openers?” said Melody.

  Dryden didn’t answer. A pulse was beating in his head and his whole body was shaking.

  “Snap out of it,” said Melody. “You look like death. She won — okay?”

  He still sat in silence, feeling the tension subside, startling him with his physical involvement in what had happened.

  Around them, as if they had needed time to make a mental adjustment, people were beginning to clap, many standing for a better view. It had percolated that Ursula Krüll had been decisively defeated, not by Muratova, but the blond American, who had concealed her devastating form through all the previous rounds.

  Dryden, who knew Goldine’s ability, who had touted it around the board rooms of Los Angeles and New York, should not have reacted this way. Now he secretly admitted to himself that after the Semi-Finals he had written off her chance of gold.

  He stood with the others to see Goldine approach Krüll, now being consoled by teammates. They touched hands. The German girl nodded, looking Goldine up and down as if she were from another planet, then turned to retrace the 100-meter stretch she had believed was hers.

  On NBC-TV William Weston said, “Watching that instant replay with me was Dr. William Serafin, the proudest man in this Lenin Stadium. How about that, Doc? Wasn’t she just incredible?”

  “Oh, quite credible to me,” said Serafin. “Without presuming to boast, I knew she would win. She is unique, you see.”

  “No one here is going to disagree with that, Doc.”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t using the term superficially. She is physiologically unique. Her skeletal development —”

  “Her what? I didn’t catch that.”

  “Her skeletal development. The configuration of her bones. If I may explain —”

  “First tell us how you feel, Doc.”

  “Feel?”

  “Yeah, you must be over the moon right now.”

  “There’s an element of satisfaction, yes.”

  “Well, how about that for Quote of the Week? ‘An element of satisfaction.’ Just now I said you were the proudest man in the Lenin Stadium. Maybe ‘coolest’ would be more apt. And there we must leave it. With the first U.S. gold medal in track going to Goldine Serafin, of Bakersfield, California, I return you to Dave Yardley in New York.”

  In the Stadium, two large men in U.S. blazers were steering Goldine off the track to the competitors’ tunnel in a throng of pressmen and cameras.

  “What happens now?” asked Melody. “Does she get her medal?”

  “Tomorrow. The action’s over for the day, so the crowd are going home,” said Dryden. “There should be a press conference shortly, and I want to get a word with her, if I can, before it starts. Would you wait?”

  He made his way below. One of the architectural achievements of the Lenin Stadium is that a capacity crowd can be dispersed within six minutes. This assumes that everyone is making for the nearest exit. Dryden wanted the press center under the west stand. He got there by degrees and brute stubbornness. It was a good thing he had left Melody upstairs; anyone as small as she would have found themselves outside and halfway to the metro station by now.

  He confirmed with a photographer by the entrance that Goldine hadn’t yet arrived for the conference. Uncertain which direction she would approach from, he waited there till he spotted a face he knew among those streaming inside: Klugman, actually smiling.

  In time, he remembered Klugman’s personal stake in this, and held out his hand to him. “Congratulations! Beautifully managed!”

  “Thanks.” Klugman was pink with pride. “I’ll enjoy it myself when I see it
on TV. She did everything right. But for the crosswind, she’d have taken the world record.”

  “The important thing was taking Ursula Krüll. Where is Goldine now?”

  “The doctor’s looking at her,” said Klugman. He held up his hand. “No sweat, it’s routine. You’d like to see her? I can get you in.”

  He led Dryden back along the covered area under the stand to where each team management had its individual office. There was a cluster of cameramen outside the U.S. office. Klugman spoke to the two men on the door and Dryden was allowed past.

  He pushed open a second door. It looked unlike any office in his experience. There was a bed in the center and Goldine was lying on it, still in her tracksuit, except the shoes. At a table to the right a girl in a blue nylon coat was testing urine in a chemical flask. Two men in white jackets were by the bed, one making notes, the other holding a syringe containing blood. He turned as Dryden entered and asked, “Who the hell are you?”

  “It’s okay,” said Goldine, glancing expressionlessly at Dryden. “Personal friend.”

  The doctor wasn’t satisfied. “Look, this isn’t —”

  “Save it,” snapped Goldine. “I said he was my friend. Well,” she asked Dryden, “are you here to congratulate me, or not?”

  Something in her tone stopped him. “It’ll keep,” he said. “You’ll get plenty of that. There’s this press conference coming up. I want to speak to you about it. There’s a man called Esselstyn.” Dryden described him briefly. “You haven’t met him already? Good. If he’s there, he could be difficult. Likes to put the knife in. He, er, has a theory that you trained a long time for this. He doesn’t believe the jogging story. If I were you, I wouldn’t mention it unless you have to. You follow me?”

  “You came here to tell me that?” she said without showing if it had registered.