The Cooperman Variations

by Howard Engel

  I bought a paper and a TV Guide and spent some time in my room watching the NTC late-evening shows. Spread out with my paper on the bed, with the TV blaring, I felt as though the colour was draining out of my life and finding a new home through some electronic transfusion in the box. Everybody on the tube seemed to be having one hell of a fine time. Even Vic Vernon, the talkshow host, was in good form. He was interviewing a diplomat just back from Albania, while a strongman from a circus was having a cinder block broken on his chest through the agency of a blonde, leopard-skinned bodybeautiful with a sledgehammer.

  Vic took a moment, with his face close to the camera, to pay a solemn fifteen-second tribute to the late Bob Foley, a friend to all and a brother to everyone on the show. Then, without a wasted second, he grinned to the camera and announced that he would be right back. When he returned after what seemed to me an endless stream of commercials, he talked to a young actress who had just played a young man in a movie. On the face of it, it was unlikely casting. The conversation didn’t touch on playing a particular character, it lingered on the cross-dressing aspect. I yawned and switched off the set. I’d given my pint for today, I thought, and picked up the paper.

  It was sometime after that when I dimmed my light and discovered the problems of the bed and the bedding. The bedding made a good first impression: it was white and wrinkleless, smelling of Bounce, but on closer acquaintance, it proved to be sleep-resistant. I could make no lasting impression in the pillows, punch them as I might. At least the moving shadows on the ceiling were a distraction. If I got any sleep, they probably paved the way.

  Thursday

  I was in the office before Sally Jackson had changed out of her walking shoes into her sitting-behind-a-desk shoes. She wasn’t particularly happy to see me. She told me that Ms. Moss never appeared before ten, as though this were a natural phenomenon comparable to the tidal bore on the Bay of Fundy.

  “By the way, Mr. Cooperman, you had a call a few minutes ago.” She handed me a blue slip that was covered with numbers.

  “What kind of call is this?” I said aloud, although I hadn’t meant to.

  “Overseas. Would you like me to get it for you?” I nodded vigorously and handed back the paper. In under a minute she said my name. I picked up and said “Hello” without much conviction.

  “Benny? Is that you?”

  “Anna! Where are you? How’d you find me?”

  “Rapolano Terme. It’s near Siena in Tuscany. I checked your answering service and then had a chat with Frank. He gave me your Toronto numbers.”

  “I thought you’d be in Paris by now. How’s the weather?”

  “Glorious. We’re pushing the season a little, but at least we’re ahead of the crowds.”

  “‘We,’ who’s ‘we’? You’re not on a tour.”

  “Oh, I met Andrew Moser on the plane when I was bumped up to First. He’s a mushroom grower from California. He’s been sort of looking after me.”

  “Nice,” I said through my teeth.

  “I’d forgotten how charming some wealthy men can be.”

  “Nice. Are you seeing your fill of the galleries?”

  “More than that. Andy loves food and we’ve been on a food orgy, on a high level, you understand. We’ve run down a few great spots. It’s like Bloor Street in Toronto. This place is a famous spa, although I haven’t taken more than a sample of the waters.”

  “Nice. When will you leave for Paris?”

  “My first lecture’s not until Monday, the twelfth, in the old place I told you about on the rue d’Ulm. Remember?”

  “I miss you.”

  “I’ll be home in a couple of weeks. You can tell me what you’re up to in Toronto when I see you.”

  “Right. I’ll be talking to you.” Anna said goodbye, and I started wondering what that was all about. Was it an announcement of some kind? It would be a little after lunch-time in Italy. I wondered whether she’d eaten yet or whether her mushroom millionaire had left her waiting at the hotel. Maybe he was planning a late supper that evening in some out-of-the-way hilltop village. How do I know he’s a millionaire? Is this my day-dream or yours? I thought about the morning coffee I hadn’t had yet. Sally was at the door. It took me a moment to recross the Atlantic. I squeezed the bridge of my nose to force my concentration.

  “Do you know where Vanessa’s staying right now, Sally? Since the murder, I mean.”

  “If Ms. Moss wants you to know, I’m sure she’ll tell you, Mr. Cooperman. I have instructions not to tell anyone.”

  “Good point,” I said, and began sifting through some pages in front of me on my desk, like I was busy at something. When I looked at them, actually focusing, I saw that they were the rundowns I’d asked for yesterday.

  On top was a name and phone number: Frances Scerri. Ah, yes: Vanessa’s sister. The one she’s not on speaking terms with. I put it in my pocket. Under that I found a hierarchical chart that divided the page into several boxes. The first box on the left had Chairman written at the top. His name was Hampton Fisher, and he was NTC’s controlling shareholder, owning forty-two per cent of the A shares. Hampton Fisher and I had never met, but I had known his wife, Peggy O’Toole, the movie star, about ten years ago when she was making Ice Bridge in Niagara Falls. I got to know her fairly well, now I come to think of it, but her standoffish, germ-fearing husband so rarely came out in public he was being accused of being Howard Hughes back from the dead. He had surrounded himself with flunkies in Niagara Falls, rented a whole floor at the Colonel John Butler Hotel, and watched people’s comings and goings through a series of TV monitors. If he and Peggy had had any children, I never heard about it. Yet they stayed married, which was an improvement on Hughes. Fisher had not scrimped and saved to make his fortune, nor had he beat his way to the top pushing less dedicated entrepreneurs out of his way. He was born into a successful newspaper family. It was his grandfather who’d done all the pushing and shoving. Hamp simply inherited it all when his father died. For that reason, many tried to write off Hamp Fisher. He was easy to put down: the drinking water he had flown in from California, the thermometer he carried at all times, his peculiar diets. All this gave reporters from opposition papers a field day whenever he threatened to take over another group of dailies. To tell the truth, Fisher had weeded and trimmed his garden of papers, pruning the unproductive ones and fertilizing the promising. His grandfather would have been proud of him. More recently, having put the papers in a holding company, he had been buying up television stations and setting up the newest of our TV networks. I guess it beat collecting stamps.

  Two lines had been drawn from the Chairman box. The top one ran to a box marked Board of Directors. On it, I would find that the members, friendly outsiders, plus the chairman and the president, owned another twenty-six per cent of the A shares. The names of the friendly outsiders didn’t light up my sky at once, but on a second reading I recognized the name Ted Thornhill. Hell, I’d even met him! He was the guy who made a guest appearance at the signing of the Dermot Keogh Hall contracts, the man who’d arrived with his own photographer. He was the president and general manager, the chief executive officer of the whole shebang. Not only did his name appear in a list of the Board of Directors, but it appeared just below it in a box all his own, joined by a line to the Chairman box. A vertical line ran down from the President, General Manager & CEO box to a horizontal line from which depended several boxes: Finance, Programming, Advertising & Sales, News. All of these were vice-presidents. Again, the names here meant nothing to me.

  I tried to remember what I once knew about shares in limited corporations. The A shares were voting shares, the preferred shares held by a few insiders. The B shares were publicly traded. The insiders were allowed to own only five per cent of the B shares, according to what my paper said. That left twenty-seven per cent of the remaining B shares widely owned in small batches. I put this page away for future reference after checking to see that Vanessa’s name turned up in a box of its own directly u
nder David L. Simbrow, the vice-president of programming. She was designated Head of Entertainment. Her name had been inserted where that of Nathan Green had been removed.

  I called out to Sally, “What happened to Nate Green, Sally? Where did he fit into the frame of things?” Sally looked at me for a good deal longer than I thought necessary to prepare an answer.

  “Mr. Green died three months ago, Mr. Cooperman. Cancer of the oesophagus. Very sad.” As soon as she’d said it, I remembered Vanessa telling me on our first official outing together. Meanwhile, Sally had gone back to her reading, once she’d passed on her news. Again I abruptly pulled her attention away from the copy of Billboard she was clipping.

  “But Ms. Moss has been here for a year, more or less. What department was Mr. Green moved to?” I was plainly annoying Sally now, and she slapped down the paper on top of a stack of out-of-town newspapers.

  “He had several titles: first he was vice-president of Arts and Entertainment for a time, switched to become a senior assistant to Mr. Thornhill, then he was made vicepresident of Arts and Sciences. That was his title at the time of his death.”

  “I see. Who’s the vice-president of Arts and Sciences right now, Sally?”

  “There isn’t one. I don’t expect there will be.”

  “So, it was created for Green and died with him?”

  “That’s one opinion, Mr. Cooperman.”

  “Do you have another?”

  “The charter of the National Television Corporation has always insisted that we have a mandate to keep the arts and sciences within our purview. Some think that we have been lax in this area. Having a vice-president in charge tended to defuse that criticism.”

  “So, the ailing Nate Green helped quell the charge of programming for the lowest common denominator.”

  “Mr. Cooperman,” she said, colouring just a little, “we program to a wide popular audience, not to the lowest common denominator.”

  “You believe that?” I asked, but was destined not to get an answer, for at this moment Vanessa Moss thundered into the room banging down a full briefcase on the broadloom. Once again, she was beautifully turned out, thanks to her friend at Holt’s. This morning she wore a navy pinstripe with a white collar open at the throat and pointing down towards the sort of cleavage that should never be worn by applicants for junior positions at NTC. Boards are notoriously puritanical.

  “Where the hell have you been?” There could be no mistake about who she meant.

  “I could be dead and buried by now and you wouldn’t know about it until you saw the noon news. Come on, Benny. Get with the program!” I told her that I’d spent the late afternoon with Sykes and his partner, examining the scene of the crime and checking over what measures they had taken to see that no harm comes to her. “And?” she demanded.

  “And, yes, the cops have taken steps. They are tailing you day and night. I might have checked in with you, but you didn’t leave me with an address or phone number. They also told me you were in Niagara Falls the day before yesterday, not Niagara-on-the-Lake. Funny how they get these things wrong, isn’t it?” She lowered her guns, and tried to smooth things over.

  “I can explain about that. It was a secret meeting with the Shaw Festival artistic director. He suggested we not be seen too close to his present employers.”

  “But you failed to tell me the truth, innocent as it appears to be.”

  “Coffee?”

  I nodded. Sally got up to go fetch. “By the way, Sally, did you get the things I asked you to get for Mr. Cooperman?”

  “They were waiting for me on my desk when I got here an hour ago, Vanessa.”

  “Good,” Vanessa said through her teeth, without looking up, and Sally stalked out on her morning mission, her trade journals left unattended on her desk. Vanessa began sorting through the newly arrived paper in her IN box. “The daily hell,” she announced. So, after frowning for five minutes, I started telling her about my meetings with Sykes and Boyd. When I stopped talking, she said, “They think I did it. They still think I did it!”

  “Not necessarily, Vanessa. Sure, they’re watching you, but that’s at least partly to see that what happened to Renata doesn’t happen to you too. To tell you the truth, I don’t think Sykes himself knows what he thinks happened. All he’s doing is hedging his bets. That’s the best he can do. He’s also making sure that Bob Foley’s suicide is properly gone into. Foley may have been pissed off at the Vic Vernon people, but even Vic Vernon doesn’t drive everybody to suicide. What do you know about him?”

  “Vic’s an egomaniacal—”

  “Not Vernon. You told me about him already. I mean Foley.”

  “Bob? I don’t know. He was a good technician. One of the best, so I understand. I don’t deal directly with the grips, riggers, lighting and sound people, Benny. The job just won’t let me. I know that there are cameramen, and I recognize most of them, but that’s out of my realm. Bob Foley I know by reputation. He was good at what he did. So good that Dermot Keogh got him to do all of his last Canadian recordings. Wouldn’t work with anybody else.”

  “Yesterday in the car you mentioned a foundation. Raymond Devlin spoke of it too.”

  “Oh, yes. Bob was one of the trustees of Dermot’s foundation. Under Dermot’s will, Raymond set up the Plevna Foundation. Don’t ask me what Plevna means. The foundation basically establishes bursaries for brilliant but poor music scholars, and thinks up new ways to spend Dermot’s posthumous earnings, which are considerable.”

  “How did that happen? Dermot was a well-known, world-famous celebrity; Foley a fine, but obscure, technician. Wasn’t there some social and economic distance between them?”

  “Dermot was many things, Benny, some of them maddening, but he was not a snob. He and Foley, in the course of their recording work for the last two years of his life, grew close to one another. Dermot attended Foley’s father’s funeral. Foley had keys to Dermot’s downtown studio. He drives Dermot’s old Jaguar. I heard—this is hearsay, because I didn’t get it first-hand— that Foley once complained that working with Dermot included walking his dog, staying up all night and moving furniture from Toronto to Dermot’s summer place. Dermot loved the diamond in the rough, Benny. He introduced me to amateurish ivory carvers with no talent, a virtuoso bubblegum artist and a charming panhandler who made his home at the corner of Bloor and Walmer Road. Outside, on the street.”

  “How old was Foley?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Ask the cops,” she said, unbuttoning her jacket. Here I was treated to what every male in my class at Grantham Collegiate Institute and Vocational School would have killed to see: a little more of Stella Seco than Stella noticed was on display. When she saw my expression, she made an adjustment, clucking her tongue. “Benny, won’t you ever grow up?”

  “If taking you for granted, Vanessa, is mature behaviour, then I hope to stay in short pants forever.”

  “I suppose that’s very sweet, but from over here it’s boring.”

  There was something calculated about Vanessa’s sudden unbuttoning of her jacket. She knew the effect it would have on me. Was she trying to change the subject?

  “What does Vanessa Moss have planned for today?” She looked at an electronic appointment book and snapped it shut after a few seconds’ study.

  “Yesterday, you met the junior executives trying to boot me from my Entertainment throne. This morning, you’ll meet the senior executives equally dedicated to the same noble purpose.”

  “How is it you manage to make all these people mad at you?”

  “I don’t take shit, Benny. Not from incompetents below me or above me without making damned sure everybody knows about it. I chose to come into broadcasting a long time ago. In my way, I care about it. I’m not going to carry the can for those bastards who can’t see higher than the bottom line. That’s my answer. You’ll have to get Sally drunk some night and pump her for her version. Sally’s separated, by the way. Do you think you can melt such frosty, unmalleable
clay? I’d like to see it, but not on my time. You hear?” I loved the way Vanessa could make a subversive suggestion and, a moment later, accuse you of thinking it up on your own.

  The meeting of top executives took place in the boardroom at the end of the corridor on the twenty-first floor. It was a big room that tried to look impressive. Until you recognized the sober-faced portraits on the wall as set decorations from everything from Martha O’Malley’s Children and The Bartletts of Oak Street to The Blue Team and Northern Cross, you might have been taken in. The books on the beautiful dark wood shelves were more studio cast-offs. Fake books. Just the spines showed. My respect for this bunch was quickly going downhill. The centre of the table, which was an amazing bit of woodcraft, was reserved for the CEO of NTC. The table must have been built here from a kit of some kind. It certainly didn’t come through any of the doors I’d seen. Ted Thornhill, too, would have had difficulty getting through some doors. But here he could be sure that there were no living or inanimate obstacles between him and his high-backed black leather chair. Apart from the abundance of Ted Thornhill and his pink, wagging chins, I could see that he moved with a certain balletic grace. When he stood, it was with a boxer’s firm stance; when he sat, it was an act of will, not the passive subsidence of oneeighth of a ton of flesh and bone.

  He was soon surrounded by his fellow board members and the vice-presidents. As head of Entertainment, Vanessa almost counted as a vice-president, but not quite. Except for me and a stenographer in Yves Saint-Laurent glasses, Vanessa was the lowest life form present. All the others carried voting stock totalling just over a quarter of the voting shares. But this didn’t look like that kind of board meeting. None of the four women present had had their hair done for the occasion. Only Thornhill sported a boutonnière and it looked like a leftover from an earlier event. Once more, Vanessa tried to introduce me to her colleagues and no one looked up. Papers were exchanged across the table. The steno distributed photocopied pages all round. Even I got a set. I wondered whether all boards were like this.