Conspiracy (15 page)

Keith was aware only of the ball, the black-and-white orb that seemed to hang high, waiting for him even as it rushed to its target. The ball seemed to draw him like a spinning magnet, so close now that his eyes could pick out the stitching along its hexagon-pentagon seams. This was the moment:
now
. His right hand stretched upward through the air, extending every tendon to intercept the ball and knock it away. With two stiffened fingers he made contact. Hard, stinging contact.

Then he was falling, curling up and twisting his neck to follow the flight of the ball and see if what he had done was enough.

It was. As Keith hit the ground, the ball, its course deflected, sailed harmlessly over the eight-foot crossbar. The score remained U.S.A. one, Czechoslovakia zero, and the roar of the crowd, one hundred thousand strong, exploded into cries of exultation and the swelling chant that had built up after each of Keith’s previous saves. Paler-mo, Paler-mo, Paler-MO!

“Don’t roll Able,” Sharon Foster said into her microphone. She was speaking to Don of the slo-mo crew, from her position at the board at the front of the UBC studio truck. Her heart pounded in her throat and she wanted to cry with relief, but she kept her concentration on the monitor panels. Only a few seconds more, and the game would be over. “Stay live till time runs out, and then be ready to go in sequence.”

“Put up Eight,” said Wayne Taggart, seated beside her. “God, but that was close! That man is amazing!” Eight was a field-level shot of Keith getting to his feet as, behind him in the distance, the Czechs set up for a corner kick. Taggart then went to a crowd shot, a scoreboard shot to show the time— eight seconds, unofficial time—and then back to the action. Sharon bit her lip. Her eyes were riveted on the screen that showed the ball sailing infield toward the knot of leaping players, Czechs trying to “head” it toward the goal, vying for position with Americans jumping to knock it upfield.

The voice of Dan Richards came from the metal ceiling speaker overhead: “. . . in the air, and it’s . . . Wyler! Wyler knocks it out to Jamison on the sideline . . . and upfield, a long booming kick that will end this game, ladies and gentlemen, if the clock on the scoreboard is in any way near to being accurate . . . and yes! The referee signals and the Americans have won, and the crowd here in Seville’s Sanchez Pizjuan Stadium is on its feet to show appreciation for the extraordinary performance we have witnessed here by American goalie Keith Palermo . . . who this afternoon took everything the brilliant Czech offensive unit could throw at him and shut them out, ladies and gentlemen . Shut them
out
!”

They ran the replays of Keith’s final save. Once again, Sharon watched. Despite her efforts to think objectively of the moment as one of many elements that would be used in tonight’s broadcast, she watched spellbound as the wiry body once more bounded high into the air to take flight, only this time in slow motion, so the moments of flight were extended, the muscle groups of his body visible for a longer look. And then again, from another angle, and then again.

“I can’t emphasize enough the importance,” Dan Richards was saying, “. . . the importance of what this American team has done here this afternoon. By winning this first game, they have not only established themselves as a contender of merit in the eyes of the world, they have taken a tremendous forward stride toward that important second phase of this tournament. If they can duplicate this victory in either of their two remaining games of this first round, they will move up, a feat the experts predicted could not happen for another four years, some for even longer. . . .”

“Fantastic effort,” Taggart said a few minutes later, when the transmission from Seville had shut down. “We have got to have a remote in the locker room for the Zaire game on Tuesday, I don’t care what anybody says. . . .”

Six more days, Sharon was thinking. Six more days until Friday the twenty-fifth, when Keith would get on the plane with the rest of the team after the Uruguay game and fly back to Madrid. She had gone with him to the airport yesterday afternoon, taking time she knew ought to have been spent on a hundred other things because she wanted to be with him. The strain had begun to show on his face, deepening the lines and hollows. He was a professional; there had been thousands of games before the one he was about to play, but none so important. On the wide cement walkway outside the domestic flights terminal building, he drew her close to him. The afternoon sun and the airport wind had both been in Sharon’s eyes along with tears she tried to blink away.

“You’d think I’d grow up,” she told him, and he would have said something, but an American photographer spotted the two of them and ran over.

“Keith Palermo! Can you turn this way, Keith, over here—”

“He looks bigger than I am,” Keith said softly to Sharon. “I better not hit him.”

And so Sharon’s goodbye memories had included a “Call me up, will ya?” and a quarter-page newspaper photo captioned “American Goalie and Friend,” in the International Herald Tribune the next morning.

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 reporter 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?”