The Touch of Innocents. Michael Dobbs

Чтение книги онлайн.

       TWO

      Grubb rapped on the door, hesitating fractionally before he entered. Characteristically he was a man who pushed his way around life ignoring the sensibilities and wishes of others and wouldn’t think twice about barging into hospitals, funerals, bedrooms and even ladies’ washrooms in search of his prey, but the managing editor had only recently taken over and was something of an unknown quantity.

      Hugo Hagi, of West Coast Japanese-American stock via Wharton Business School and IBM, knew relatively little about TV news and had the good sense not to pretend otherwise. Instead of constantly watching television on one of the half-dozen screens which hid his office wall he would embalm himself in front of the computer screen which sat on the end of his desk. He was not, as Grubb would complain after a couple of beers, ‘batting from the same dugout’. The whole industry was being taken over by accountants who cared nothing for the professional pride of a world scoop and the exhilaration of dumping all over rival channels but who got their rocks off by studying bottom lines. Maybe they didn’t reproduce, didn’t know how to, just split in two like amoebae.

      The new man had the frustrating habit of switching off the screen every time someone entered his room, as if he were protecting some great secret with which others couldn’t be trusted. Hell, there were no secrets in an open-plan newsroom where you had to raise your voice even to proposition one of the graduate researchers, but Hagi’s office was alien turf. Behind his back they called him ET on account of the unnatural green glow of the computer screen which normally lit his sallow features, and because everyone wished he would go home.

      ‘Hugi, got a minute?’ Grubb enquired, using the foreshortened soubriquet the Japanese-American hated only marginally less than ET.

      The switch was thrown and the green glow subsided. The alien emerged in human form with a thin smile on his well-groomed features. He was considerably the younger, a three-hour marathon man, lacking the rough edges and dusty aura which hung around the foreign editor. There were no family photographs on the wall, only his framed MBA and a signed photograph of Wilbur Burns. It left Grubb feeling both resentful and nervous.

      ‘How can I help, Eldred?’ Hagi emphasized the name, retaliating in kind, insisting on the formal version of the foreign editor’s name rather than the more familiar Ed. How could you run a news room with people calling you ‘Eldred’, Chrissake?

      ‘Thought you’d like to know … Hugo,’ Grubb added, withdrawing from the field of battle under cover of a smile. ‘Problem solved. We’ve just heard from Izzy Dean, seems she’s been in a mother of a car smash and got herself stuck in a coma in some hospital in the West of England. She’s gonna be OK. Bad news about the kid, though. The young ‘un didn’t make it.’

      Hagi seemed to be taking his time digesting the information, and by the vinegary expression on his face it seemed to have given him wind. ‘Did you say the problem was solved?’

      It was the turn of the foreign editor to wrinkle his brow. ‘Sure. I mean, we know where she is. She hasn’t disappeared.’

      ‘But is she back working? Is she gracing our screens, pulling in the viewers?’

      ‘Hell, Hugo. She just lost a kid. Nearly killed herself, too. What’s the friggin’ problem?’

      ‘The problem, Eldred, is that Izzy Dean is once more not doing the job we pay her for.’

      The screen flickered back to life as Hagi checked the details. He always checked details.

      ‘In May and June she was off the air for more than six weeks.’

      ‘That was maternity leave. She was entitled. Hugo, she worked right up to the wire. Even had the baby induced so’s she could get back in time to take the Paris posting. What more do you want?’

      ‘And two years ago it was another six weeks maternity leave. Makes me wonder where her priorities lie, making news or making babies,’ Hagi continued.

      ‘She’s a woman …’ Grubb began to splutter, but subsided; he could see the direction in which his superior was headed. His tone grew suddenly more practical. ‘She is one of the best.’

      ‘Not if she’s off screen, she’s not.’

      Vivid language came drifting through the door as a young female production assistant СКАЧАТЬ