The Infant of Prague
- Автор: Granger Bill
- Серия: November Man #8
- Год: 1987
- Язык: французский
- Год: Warner
- ISBN: 0446347809
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Infant of Prague». Краткое содержание книги:
For in a humble Chicago parish church, the sacred statue of the Infant of Prague is found weeping real tears. A visiting Czech child star actress, transfigured by the wondrous event, declares, on live television, her intent to remain in American in the name of Christ and freedom.
Only an operative as cynical and seasoned as the November Man can sense the sinister link between two dramatic, yet apparently unrelated defections. A miracle has plunged him into a vast global adventure. And it will take a miracle to get him through it alive.
The defection of a highly visible Czech sparks an international crisis, and the November Man is caught in the middle.
“I’m so tired,” she said.
“One more and then we catch the airplane—”
“I’m so tired,” she said again. They were treading their way through snakes of cables and the apparatus of backstage. “Can’t we cancel this?”
But Anton Huss was a man of duty. The schedule must be obeyed. Even Anna knew that.
Hal Newt said, “This is fine, this is fine, Kay. Look at the light level. Dick does good picture. And this is ours? I mean, this is all ours exclusively?”
“Ours and that includes the newspapers, at least until tomorrow morning. The priest is in a bind, the way I told you.” Her face was flushed. At the last minute, she had thought she wouldn’t get the Cardinal at all, but he had done a nice little sit-down about faith moving mountains and some other blah-blah-blah. Kay Davis had worked her ass off on this and it showed. And she noticed Hal Newt wasn’t talking about “book” and “public perception” and “grooming” and all the other bullshit he threw at her at Arnie’s last Friday.
“Fine, fine,” Hal Newt said, watching the monitor unroll the tape. They were sitting side by side in the control booth. Below, on the set of News at Five—the same as News at Ten except the cardboard skyline of the city was moonlit on News at Ten—Dr. Winkle the weatherman was sticking rainclouds over Minnesota and northern Wisconsin and otherwise preparing his map.
They had gone over the tape twice and Hal Newt had asked the serious questions that Kay knew the answers to. And they kept going back to the big scene, the one that made it all worthwhile. The whole town was talking about a statue that wept in a Catholic church on the northwest side — but no one except for a few who had gone to mass in the morning had actually seen the miracle.
“There,” Kay Davis said.
They froze the tape.
“There and there,” she said, tapping the monitor.
“It’s clear, but you have to say what it is,” Hal Newt said.
“Tears,” she said. “Tears on the face of the Christ Child.”
“I just wish it stood out more. Had more… you know… drama.”
Kay Davis sighed. It was always like this. The inside people never understood a fucking thing. Stand on your head, balance thirty-two bottles of champagne, interview the President in his underwear, and you bring it back and shrink it down to twenty-one diagonal inches on videotape and someone says he wished it was more dramatic. Fuck them.
“You expected blood, Hal? I told you it was a crying statue, not a bleeding one.”
“Well, just so we make it clear what we’re seeing. Tell them what it is.”
“Do a freeze-frame,” she said. “Freeze it and blow it up so they understand what they’re seeing.”
“We want dignity though,” Hal was saying. “No Geraldo Rivera on this, we got to keep it from turning into a circus.”
Kay Davis didn’t say a thing. She was riding a good high and Hal couldn’t bring her down from it. It’s the high from being inside on a story, making the news instead of running after it. He couldn’t bring her down from that.
“Other problem is time. We got eighty-seven seconds here and I can’t figure where to cut. Let’s lose the Cardinal,” Hal said.
“I promised—”
“What?”
“The priest. Hogan. He’s in a box on this. I think he thinks the church might think he was hotdogging on this miracle thing and I promised him I would slice in the Cardinal so that it looks more… well, like you said, dignified.”
“We’ve got to get this down to fifty-five moving and five seconds on the freeze frame.”
“It’s News at Five, Hal, not World News Tonight. It’s worth it, Hal.”
“Honey, the end of World War Two isn’t worth eighty-seven seconds. People lose their concentration. You can’t beat them over the head with this.”
“Hal, this is Chicago, a very big Catholic city, very religious.”
“Gimme a break, Kay,” Hal said. “But maybe I’ll talk downstairs with Big Tuna, see what we can work out.”
Kay felt chilled. Big Tuna was the Man, the Voice, the Presence, the $900,000 salary. He was Tom Day, smoked a pipe and boomed the news. No event happened until Tom Day said it had. Tom Day might just be able to give eighty-seven seconds — if he could worm his way into the story.
Kay got up then and walked up the stairs out the back of the control booth into the concrete-block hallway that led to the dressing rooms and Studio B. Here they taped all the public-service programs like the Sunday-morning winner Leap of Faith, which involved religious discussions with aerobic exercises. Dick Lester was coming out of the tape room. He smiled at Kay. “What do they think?”
“Hal said you do good picture.”
“I’m thrilled,” Dick Lester said. “Are they going to freeze-frame the tears?”
“Yes. I think so.” She felt distracted. It was a good story but now Big Tuna was going to worm his way into it.
“What did you think? I never asked you,” Dick said.
“About what?”
“The statue,” he said.
“What about it?”
“What about the tears? I mean, I’ve been thinking about it. You get these weird things sometimes, like that barn in Ohio where someone said he saw Christ on it. I mean, I was there and that statue was crying.”
“Oh, come on, Dick.”
“I looked all around—”
“Look, Dick. The roof leaks or something or there’s undried wood under the plaster or something. Statues don’t cry.”
Dick flushed. “I know that. But I know what I saw. So what did I see?”
Kay Davis tried a bright, smart smile, the one that made men think she was just a bit too cool and too damned competent and was the reason she was not on her way to New York and might very well be going back to Iowa.
“You saw sixty seconds on News at Five and, if we get lucky, a slot on the national news tomorrow night. That’s what you saw, Dick.”
Tom Day boomed: “Prague is in the news tonight.”
Kay Davis, sitting to his right, nearly groaned. Only Big Tuna would make a connection like that.
The child sat between them in the guest chair on the set. The set was called The Bridge by nearly everyone because it was designed to look like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. In the middle of the bridge was Anna Jelinak, a child star from Czechoslovakia. Tom Day, in his typically idiotic way, was connecting the girl from Prague with Kay’s story of a weeping statue.
Tom Day was doing more than that and it made Kay furious beneath her Number 2 coat of pancake makeup. It broke all the rules: Tom was leading into her story and giving it away.
“And just how did you manage to get this remarkable film, Kay?”
He still said “film” instead of “tape.” He even believed in the coaxial cable and thought instant replay was magic.
Kay was not prepared for the question and pushed it aside. “Tom,” she ad-libbed, “this is an extraordinary story of a statue that apparently weeps, the statue of the Christ Child called the Infant of Prague. As you know, I’ve been the first person to see the statue and now I have tape tonight so that you can see what I’ve seen and judge for yourself.”
Take that, asshole, she thought. Hal Newt was slicing his hand across his throat in the control booth and squeaking into Tom Day’s earpiece, “Cut it, cut it, cut it, she’s running over.”
But the tape was running now.
Between the two newsreaders, Anna Jelinak sat still and watched the monitor off camera at the side of the set. The monitor flashed a shot of St. Margaret of Scotland and then cut to Kay Davis inside the church and then to a statue.