Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

‘How do they work?’ I asked.

‘You run the unedited tape through on the left-hand screen and pick out the best bits, then you record just those on to the second tape, showing on the second screen. You can switch it all around until it looks good and you get a good feeling. We transmit it like that, but New York often cuts it shorter. Depends how much else they’ve got to fit in.’

‘Can you work these machines yourself?’ I asked.

‘I’m slow. If you really want to know now, you can watch Joe later when we get the oil fire and Devil-Boy tapes — he’s one of the best.’

‘Great,’ I said.

‘I’m surprised you’re so interested.’

‘Well, I’ve some tapes I want to edit myself. It would be nice to learn how.’

‘Is that why you came here so early?’ She sounded as if I might say yes without at all offending her.

I said, ‘Partly. Mostly to see you... and what you do.’

She was close enough to hug and I had no insight at all into what she was thinking. A brick wall between minds. Disconcerting.

She looked with friendliness but nothing else into my face, and the only thing I was sure of was that she didn’t feel as I did about a little uninhibited love-making on the spot.

She asked if I would like to see the library and I said yes please: and the library turned out to be not books but rows and rows of recorded tapes, past years of news stories forgotten but waiting like bombs in the dark, records of things said, undeniable.

‘Mostly used for obituaries,’ Danielle said. ‘Reactivated scandals. Things like that.’

We returned to her news desk, where over the next hour I sat and listened to the progress of events. (Devil-Boy had arrived at the stage door, fit, well and fully made-up in a blaze of technicolor lights to the gratified hysterics of a streetful of fans) and met Danielle’s working companions, the bureau chief, Joe the editor, the gaunt transmitter expert, two spare cameramen and a bored and unallocated female talent. About sixty people altogether worked for the bureau, Danielle said, but of course never all at one time. The day shift, from ten to six-thirty, was much bigger: in the daytime there were two to do her job.

At one o’clock Ed Cervano telephoned to say they’d gotten a whole load of spectacular shots of the oil fire but the blaze was now under control and the story was as dead as tomorrow’s ashes.

‘Bring back the tapes anyway,’ Danielle said. ‘We don’t have any oil fire stock shots in the library.’

She put down the receiver resignedly. ‘So it goes.’

The crew from the royal gala returned noisily bearing Devil-Boy’s capers themselves, and at the same time a delivery man brought a stock of morning newspapers to put on Danielle’s desk for her to look through for possible stories. The Daily Flag , as it happened, lay on top, and I opened it at Intimate Details to re-read Leggatt’s words.

‘What are you looking at?’ Danielle asked.

I pointed. She read the apology and blinked.

‘I didn’t think you stood a chance,’ she said frankly. ‘Did they agree to the compensation also?’

‘Not so far.’

‘They’ll have to,’ she said. ‘They’ve practically admitted liability.’

I shook my head. ‘British courts don’t award huge damages for libel. It’s doubtful whether Bobby would actually win if he sued, and even if he won, unless the Flag was ordered to pay his costs, which also isn’t certain, he simply couldn’t afford the lawyers’ fees.’

She gazed at me. ‘Back home you don’t pay the lawyers unless you win. Then the lawyers take their slice of the damages. Forty per cent, sometimes.’

‘It’s not like that here.’

Here, I thought numbly, one bargained with threats. On the one side: I’ll get your wrist slapped by the Press Council, I‘II get questions asked in Parliament, I’ll see your ex-convict journalist back in the dock. And on the other, I’ll slice your tendons, I’ll lose you your jockey’s licence for taking bribes, I’ll put you in prison. Reviled, dishonoured, and with publicity, disgraced.

Catch me first, I thought.

I watched Joe the editor, dark-skinned and with rapid fingers, sort his way through a mass of noisy peacock footage, clicking his tongue as a sort of commentary to himself, punctuating the lifted sections he was stringing together to make the most flamboyant impact. Kaleidoscope arrival of Devil-Boy, earlier entrance of royals, wriggling release of new incomprehensible song.

‘Thirty seconds,’ he said, running through the finished sequence. ‘Maybe they’ll use it all, maybe they won’t.’

‘It looks good to me.’

‘Thirty seconds is a long news item.’ He took the spooled tape from the machine, put it into an already labelled box and handed it to the gaunt transmitter man, who was waiting to take it away. ‘Danielle says you want to learn to edit, so what do you want to know?’

‘Er... what these machines will do, for a start.’

‘Quite a lot.’ He fluttered his dark fingers over the banks of controls, barely touching them. ‘They’ll take any size tape, any make, and record on any other. You can bring the sound up, cut it out, transpose it, superimpose any sounds you like. You can put the sound from one tape on to the pictures of another, you can cut two tapes together so that it looks as if the people are talking to each other when they were recorded hours and miles apart, you can tell lies and goddam lies and put a false face on truth.’

‘Anything else?’

‘That about covers it.’

He showed me how to achieve some of his effects, but his speed confounded me.

‘Have you got an actual tape you want to edit?’ he asked finally.

‘Yes, but I want to add to it first, if I can.’

He looked at me assessingly, a poised black man of perhaps my own age with a touch of humour in the eyes but a rarely smiling mouth. I felt untidy in my anorak beside his neat suit and cream shirt; also battered and sweaty and dim. It had been, I thought ruefully, too long a day.

‘Danielle says you’re OK,’ he said surprisingly. ‘I don’t see why you can’t ask the chief to rent you the use of this room some night we’re not busy. You tell me what you want, and I’ll edit your tapes for you, if you like.’

‘Joe’s a nice guy,’ Danielle said, stretching lazily beside me in the rented Mercedes on her way home. ‘Sure, if he said he’d edit your tape, he means it. He gets bored. He waited three hours tonight for the Devil-Boy slot. He loves editing. Has a passion for it. He wants to work in movies. He’ll enjoy doing your tape.’

The bureau chief, solicited, had proved equally generous. ‘If Joe’s using the machines, go ahead.’ He’d looked over to where Danielle was eyes down marking paragraphs in the morning papers. ‘I had New York on the line this evening congratulating me on the upswing of our output recently. That’s her doing. She says you’re OK, you’re OK.’

For her too it had been a long day.

‘Towcester,’ she said, yawning, ‘seems light years back.’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘What did Princess Casilia say after you went in, when you got back to Eaton Square?’

Danielle looked at me with amusement. ‘In the hall she told me that good manners were a sign of strength, and in the drawing room she asked if I thought you would really be fit for Ascot.’

‘What did you say?’ I asked, faintly alarmed.

‘I said yes, you would.’

I relaxed. That’s all right, then.’

‘I did not say,’ Danielle said mildly, ‘that you were insane, but only that you didn’t appear to notice when you’d been injured. Aunt Casilia said she thought this to be fairly typical of steeplechase jockeys.’