Conspiracy (11 page)

Or had been, before she’d gotten so wrapped up in her work.

“What happened to the guy who hired you?” he asked. “Didn’t he want to move you up for promotion?”

She shook her head. “He took medical retirement three months after I started work. Not because of me, I hasten to add. A long-standing battle with ulcers.”

“And you still think it’s magic?”

“Yep. Only I’m looking at it from the magician’s point of view, where the work is. Out there in the audience, I know there are still people like Grandpa, waiting for the time to pass till they can tune in to their favorite show.”

“You don’t think they pass too much of that time in front of the TV, watching crap?”

Her chin came up. “I think people can make up their own minds and set their own limits on TV. We don’t have limits on radio, magazines, newspapers, or library books, do we? And what seems like junk viewing to me might be your favorite light entertainment—”

“Hold it,” he said, laughing. “I’m not the FCC or the CIA or anybody—I just want to know how you feel about the business you’re in.”

“I guess I’m thin-skinned,” she admitted. “I get tired of reading all the criticism. Sure, we’re boring to some and we can be misused, just like Cokes and Hershey bars can make you fat and sick. But if we weren’t doing something right, people around the world wouldn’t be watching American TV more than they watch their own programming. That’s a fact most people don’t realize, but it happens to be true.”

Dinner came: thin, dark red slices of sun-cured mountain ham,
jamon serrano
, with a rich Spanish omelette and—since Keith was more or less in training—mugs of
leche caliente
, hot sweetened milk. As they ate, Sharon wondered if she had sounded foolishly one-sided in defending television. So she talked of some of the problems Keith might encounter if he chose to enter the field: union walkouts, personality conflicts, survival by ratings and marketing studies.

“I’m sure all that’s true,” he said when she had finished, “but the same things apply in any other business that sells a product to the public, don’t they?” And watching her nod in agreement and sip delicately at her milk, watching the smooth, controlled way she moved her hands, the changing surfaces of her bared neck and throat, he thought,
She’s happy enough without you
.

Suppose he did fall in love with her, marry her, get a job in TV, or just tend to his own investments—would she want to stop traveling and stay home for him? Or would he tag along, idling away hour waiting for her to finish work, falling asleep on her sofa or watching TV in her hotel room? She seemed to him suddenly a separate world, sufficient unto herself, almost as though she were another man’s wife. Which she had been, he reminded himself. He glanced around the room, momentarily expecting to see pictures of the lost family, but there were none. Except for a miniature TV-clock-radio on the table beside the bed, and a small gold statuette on the dressing table, the room might have been vacant.

“What’s the statue?”

She smiled. “That’s my unofficial Emmy. From Larry. If you look up close, you can see it’s got a little purple heart.”

Married to her work, he thought. The digital readout on her bedside TV clock said 2:45. “I’d better let you get some sleep,” he said, and pushed his chair back from the room-service table cart. “Next time, maybe I can take you out and catch some of the local color. I’m told the flamenco shows here in Madrid are really worth staying up for.”

He doesn’t want to stay, she thought, and had a moment of self-pitying loneliness before she realized the impression she must have given him. Dummy, she thought, you’ve been talking to him as if you were at an on-campus recruiting program. Talking work so you wouldn’t discover anything you might be afraid to lose.

She was on her feet too, walking with him to the door. What was about to happen was so clear in her mind that she could almost see it: the smiles of thanks for the dinner and his doing the interview, the light, almost-chaste kiss, the “sometime real soon,” the door closing and her alone with Larry’s Emmy and her two TVs and the wake-up call at six-thirty from the Spanish switchboard operator to look forward to. How many times before had she done the same thing? Four times in New York with Keith, and before that, during the six years with others she could scarcely remember, how many promises of “sometime real soon”?

She linked her arm with his and stopped walking. He turned, momentarily off balance, his dark eyes surprised, his face almost touching hers.

Then she kissed him. 

So what if I fall in love
, he thought, and drew her close.

When Sharon awoke sometime later, Keith was asleep beside her and the room was cold. The breeze snapped the curtains; the air smelled like rain. She got up to close the window.
Hello, world
, she thought, looking down four stories at the still-illuminated plaza and Ross Cantrell’s limousine.
Hello, world, I’m back.

She was closing the window when she noticed that now Cantrell’s limousine had its uniformed chauffeur standing beside the passenger door. She looked at her clock: nearly four-thirty. Didn’t Ross Cantrell ever sleep?

Then she saw the explanation, and smiled to herself. A tall, statuesque brunette in evening dress, visible only for a moment, crossed the sidewalk in a few quick steps to the door the chauffeur had instantly opened. So Ross Cantrell is human too, Sharon thought. She watched the Rolls glide away from the curb.

PART TWO

June 14-25

1

Alone in the soft double bed of his hotel room, UBC producer Larry Noble woke at just after half-past five with the feeling that something was wrong. 

Automatically he sat up in bed and reached for the cigarette pack he kept on the bedside table with what he called his waking-and-sleeping paraphernalia, the little collection he carried around from one sports event to another, from one hotel room to the next. The pocket lighter, gold-plated, a gift from his wife the Christmas before she died; the wide glass ashtray that each morning he lifted from its leather-covered stand and took with him into the bathroom to empty; the miniaturized Sony TV and digital clock radio like the one he had given Sharon; the box of cherries in cognac, covered in bittersweet chocolate shells. 

Now that he was sleeping alone, Larry liked to munch on cherry cordials at bedtime and then, again, before getting up. The cognac, he had explained to Sharon as they went through Spanish customs together, helped him to unwind at night, and the caffeine and sugar in the chocolate helped him to get started in the morning. She had looked at his one-month supply—twenty-five boxes, each with a dozen cordials—and scolded him properly: his weight, his sweet tooth, his smoking. . . . He took the chiding as he took everything else, showing only an outward serenity.

The clock said it was thirty-three and a half minutes past five. In New York the eleven o’clock news would be over, in Los Angeles it would be 8:33, and the UBC broadcast would still have twenty-seven minutes to run. Larry blinked at the clock as he lit his first cigarette of the day, searching his memory of last evening for a clue as to what was bothering him. As he put the lighter back on the table, he felt a twinge of pain in his left arm; as he plucked two cherry cordials from the box, he felt another. He popped both cordials into his mouth, savoring the warmth of the cognac.

It couldn’t be that he was late for work, he thought, though that was how he felt—as though he had overslept and missed something urgently important. Yet he was not due at the stadium until well past noon. Sharon was handling the morning: the taping of the American practice session, the evaluation of the replacement cameraman, the sideline interviews with the players. When Larry came in, there would be the program conference for tonight’s broadcast; the scramble to tape the highlights of the afternoon games from Zarragoza and Oviedo; then, later, the same scramble for the night contests from Valencia and Gijon. Four important teams in those four games: France, Spain, Brazil, and Argentina, all strong contenders.

And then he remembered. Coming between the two sets of games, at 4:00 p.m.—10:00 a.m. in New York—would be the Nielson Overnights, the magic numbers that had to read twenty-one or better before the week was out. Was that it? Sure, it was bothering him. He’d been told not to worry about ratings all the way along, until last night. Then, suddenly, a new ball game. But was the new demand on him so unfair that he should wake up to worry about it almost six hours before he had to leave for work? He helped himself to another chocolate, and as he did, he felt a tiny flower of pain start to bloom in his abdomen. Indigestion, he supposed. Maybe he ought to just go back to sleep.

Instead, he swung his chubby legs out from under the covers and went to the bathroom. When he came out again, he felt the same discomfort. He decided to stay up and work on his program notebook. He removed the wax-and-cotton stopples from his ears and heard the early-morning traffic of Madrid outside his open window. He stuffed the earplugs into the breast pocket of his tight-fitting silk pajamas, ate another chocolate, which left him two to last until breakfast, and began to dress.

On the far side of the bed the phone rang, or rather it rattled, because he had gone to the trouble to muffle its noisy bell with a Kleenex several afternoons earlier, after it had jolted him from his jet-lag nap.
Damnation
, he thought, and sprawled himself across the bed to reach the receiver. No good came of calls at this hour; that was a lesson he had learned early in his career. He lifted the receiver on the third ring and identified himself.

“Hotel switchboard, Senõr Noble. You have an overseas call.”

The overseas operator came on next, and then the voice of Strether, the minor State Department functionary who had dithered at him yesterday from somewhere in Washington. Strether sounded disappointed this morning, indignant, even: “I’m glad you answered this time, Mr. Noble. We’ve been trying to reach you for the better part of an hour.”

Damnation, Larry thought again. He hadn’t heard the phone. With the earplugs in and the bell packed with tissue, the ringing hadn’t been loud enough to register—though it had likely penetrated his sleep and set him worrying enough to wake up just afterward. “I haven’t been here long,” he lied. “What’s so important?”

“It concerns the documentary we discussed yesterday, Mr. Noble.”

In his prissy bureaucrat’s voice, Strether went on to say that the Soviets had protested the documentary on their team immediately after it had aired that evening, and he himself was at a loss to understand why UBC had broken the agreement it had made with his office concerning certain changes—

“Hold it.” Larry propped himself up on his elbows and drew his knees under him. The discomfort in his abdomen was growing worse. “We made those changes. Worked them out with the Russians’ main PR honcho over here. We even dropped the tide sequence—ran the thing untitled, just because they didn’t like our play on words.”

“ ‘Roulette,’ Mr. Noble?” Strether’s emphasis on the word had an ominous tone, and Larry suddenly remembered the other thing that had bothered him: that because they were running out of time, neither he nor Sharon had reviewed the edited segment. They’d just copied it at high speed onto the final edited master.

“Don’t tell me we ran the original tape,” he breathed.

“I watched it myself. I found your inflammatory references to Soviet foreign policy rather unsettling at this particularly delicate phase of international relations. We at State, of course, are not seeking to limit the editorial content of your broadcasts, but as a matter of courtesy . . .”

He droned on about the need for diplomacy and cooperation, about the hearings that could devolve from this incident, at which UBC personnel would be asked to testify.

Larry looked at the clock. It was 5:40 a.m. “Listen,” he cut in, “I told you it was a mistake. A foulup. If I call the technician on duty now, there’s a chance he can find the right tape and put that on for the L.A. transmission—the one to the West Coast that’s running right now. Call me back, okay?”

“You’re claiming it was a mistake?”

“Yes.” He wanted to scream, but he held back. “Yes, I am. And if I call now, as I said, there may still be time—”

“I was thinking, you see, of something that tends to support your claim, Mr. Noble. Your broadcast ran five minutes past nine o’clock. The station announced the overtime as if it were an unexpected development. We might obtain a statement from the announcer on duty to corroborate what you’ve been saying.”

“Yes. Fine. Do that,” he whispered. The pain in his abdomen made him wince. “Now I’d like to make that call—”

“Because from what we can gather here, Mr. Noble, your documentary has generated a lot of attention. We’ve had calls into our switchboard from as far west as Denver. No doubt you will face charges that your network deliberately baited the Soviets to stimulate your ratings for future broadcasts. You’ll need some conclusive evidence, I think, to demonstrate to the contrary.”

“I’m calling the studio now,” said Larry. He tried not to think of the hundred and twenty-three independent stations whose announcers had been similarly surprised by the five minutes of extra signal from Spain, and of the complaints they would make because their evening’s programming had been thrown off schedule.

“Fine, and I’ll be back in touch in fifteen minutes exactly. It’s best to stay on top—”

Larry hung up and then, praying that the State Department would have cleared the line, began to jiggle the switchhook for the operator.

Two minutes later he had been put through to the technician in charge, one Carlos Antonio. Carlos, a clever, blond-haired Catalan native of Madrid, had been selected for his knowledge of the local electric power generators and transmission equipment, which would be needed in the event of a breakdown in the UBC transmitters. The one limitation he had, Larry now realized with sinking heart, was that he spoke only limited English.