Conspiracy (16 page)

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, still 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.

Katya seized the moment, and quickly wrote her message between the lines of Dan Richards’s penciled questions. Then she flipped up the notepad paper to a clean sheet and began to sketch.

“So,” she said when she was done. “This will give me more room, and your camera angles will be more flattering.” She tore out the page, turned the notepad back so that the top sheet was the one with her message, and handed both to Richards, along with his pencil.

He glanced at the drawing. They’d be happy to make the changes, he said, and gave it to one of the others, who soon had several crewmen moving the springboard and high bar to fit the layout Katya had drawn. As they worked, Tamara got up and strolled over to inspect the piece of notepaper. “Purely as a matter of routine,” as she would tell Katya later.

Meanwhile, Dan Richards was keeping his voice under professional control as he asked his remaining background questions and stared at what Katya had hastily scrawled across his notepad. The message read: PLEASE HELP I MUST TALK WITH YOU ALONE.

Minutes later, Dan had the cameras taping, ahead of schedule. “I know we haven’t prepared either of you two ladies for this question,” he said, “but I wonder if we could get a closeup of Ms. Filatova. If I remember correctly, Tamara, you were in Tokyo in ’68 and took a fourth place in the single sculls rowing event, is that correct?”

Tamara blushed and shot an accusing glance at Katya, who shrugged helplessly. “You have a good memory, Mr. Richards,” Tamara said. The camera swung around, red light glowing, and she looked up with an awkward smile. “My own sport, weightlifting, was not yet in the women’s Olympic event at that time. The women’s gymnastics events, I might add, were also considerably different from today’s styles. Perhaps Katya could tell you about that.”

“Actually, what we’re interested in, Tamara, is the work you’re doing now. Is it true that you’re instructed not to let Katya Romanova here out of your sight?”

Katya was as surprised as anyone else, but she understood quickly what Dan Richards was doing. “Tamara is my companion for traveling, Mr. Richards,” she said, speaking up to draw the cameras to her and flashing Tamara a “chin up” signal. In a way, Katya felt sorry that she had caused Tamara embarrassment. The woman was trapped within the system, just as Katya was; the difference between them was that Katya had to get out, while Tamara did not. The two of them were still Russian women together here.

But she knew she could not let that sort of feeling interfere with her purpose. “She goes with me from place to place,” Katya continued, “in the way of a chaperone.” Then she added, looking up at Tamara to show she had remembered her training, “In the European manner.”

“But does she go everywhere, every moment? If your brother Sergei wanted to take you out to dinner here in Madrid, would Tamara go along and sit at your table?”

“Tamara is a good friend and I enjoy her company, Mr. Richards.”

“You mean she’d be there?”

“I would enjoy her company. However, she might decide that since I was with my brother, there would be no need of a chaperone. She would be the one to make that decision.”

“Is this true, Tamara? What would you do in a case like that?”

Under the camera light again, Tamara’s benign smile appeared forced. But she had been prepared for this sort of thing. The best defense, they had told her, was to take the offensive. “It is the same with American athletes, Mr. Richards. I am sure you know as well as I do that the young American gymnast ladies do not roam the streets alone when they are traveling for competition.”

“But would you go with Katya and her brother? That’s what I’m asking.”

“Katya is a free Soviet citizen, Mr. Richards. I am on hand merely to smooth the pathway before her, or to offer advice.”

“As a chaperone.”

“Just as she said.”

“So with her brother, there would be no need for a chaperone?”

“Probably not, but one cannot always say for certain. It would depend on the situation, just as it would with an American young gymnast lady, yes?”

Dan nodded. “So, Katya—forgive me if this next question sounds harsh, but Americans are eager to know about the life of a world-class Soviet athlete, and we’ve been told some pretty harsh things, okay?”

Katya nodded. She saw Tamara move to the edge of her seat, eager to do more verbal battle with the imperialists here in their own lair. Oh, there would be an exciting letter on its way to the young veterinarian in Moscow in tomorrow’s mail!

“So, Katya, you don’t consider yourself a prisoner of this woman? You feel free to come and go pretty much as you choose?”