Flying Dutch полностью

It was, she admitted to herself as she parked in front of the boatyard, a long shot, a hunch—or, if you preferred English to the language of the talking pictures, a very silly idea. It had started as she sat on the flight back from Inverness, trying to think of good reasons why she shouldn’t follow the Montalban lead. This had not been easy; it was, after all, the logical next step, to go to Geneva, find this Montalban, dream up some pretext for talking to him, and find out what he knew. But for some reason best known to herself—natural diffidence, probably, with a large slice of embarrassment and laziness thrown in—she didn’t want to go to Geneva. Her mind had been floating on the meniscus of this problem when she saw a paragraph on the back page of someone else’s newspaper about terrible storms in the North Sea. It occurred to her that Vanderdecker would be somewhere in the North Sea at this precise moment, on his way to wherever he was going when he met the Erdkrieger (Holland, probably; after all, he was Dutch) and that he might have got caught up in this storm. With unaccustomed boorishness she leaned forward and studied the other person’s newspaper, and saw that the storm (the worst for fifty years, so they reckoned) had been off the Dutch coast. Well then, she said, Vanderdecker’s ship is very old and probably very fragile. If he’s been out in that, he may well need repairs. And where does he come to get his boat fixed? Bridport, of course. A long shot. A hunch. A very silly idea. We shall see.

♦

“Sorry,” said the sound recordist. “I didn’t see you there.”

Danny Bennet looked at the sleeve of his suede jacket, then at the sound recordist, and said something very quietly which nobody was supposed to hear. His debut in the field of sports coverage was not going well, mainly because he hadn’t the faintest idea of what was going on.

It was still raining outside, and from that point of view the inside of the scanner van was as good a place to be as any. It was dry, there was a Thermos of at least luke-warm coffee, and no cameramen. That, however, was about it as far as the attractions of the venue went. On the other hand, there were the monitors, and Danny didn’t like them at all.

So far as he could make out, his job was to direct operations in such a way that the viewer at home got the best possible view of the proceedings from the best possible angles. In order to manage this, Danny had to make sure that the little motor boats with his camera crews in them were in the right place at the right time. Since he hadn’t the faintest idea where they were, this was of course impossible. All he could see were the pictures on the screens. There was another minor difficulty to face up to; he was entirely ignorant of the rules of old ship racing, which meant that he didn’t have a clue what the pictures on the screens were supposed to look like. Racing, as far as he understood it, meant a number of competitors trying to go faster than each other; but all the old ships went quite remarkably slowly. This was confusing, like a boxing match between two pacifists. There was no way of knowing whether he was doing it right or not.

Usually in these situations the wise thing to do was to leave it all to the cameramen and not get under their feet. Cameramen have invariably done it all before and know precisely what they are supposed to be doing; their Aatens would be glued to the centre of the action all the time, and all the producer would have to do is sit in the van and stay awake. Unfortunately, this was the first year that the BBC had seen fit to televise this stirring maritime spectacle, and so everyone was as ignorant as he was. For the first time in his television career, cameramen were asking him things instead of telling him. It should have been a moment to savour. It wasn’t.

At least he had the radios. He could shout into them. It didn’t improve matters—in fact it seemed to make them worse—but it make him feel better.

“Chris,” he yelled, “can you hear me, Chris?”

Chris replied that he could hear him perfectly well, thank you.

“Chris,” Danny said, “what the hell am I meant to do with this close-up of a seagull you’re giving me? This isn’t bloody “Naturewatch”, you know.”

Not unreasonably, Chris asked what he should be filming instead, and Danny was at a loss for a reply. Then he had an inspiration.

“Chris,” he yelled, “use your bloody common sense, will you? This is supposed to be a boat race, right?” Then he switched to another frequency quickly, before Chris had a chance to argue.

“Don’t let’s play silly buggers, Terry,” he was saying now, glorying in this marvellous new formula he had found, “this is meant to be a boat race, okay? Just use your common sense and get on with it.” Click. “Derek, can I just remind you we’re supposed to be filming a boat race here?” It was as easy as that.