by Simon Brett
The present tense prompted Charles to ask whether Fat Otto knew that Klinger was dead.
‘Sure. I heard. Good thing, I reckon. Without the business, he hadn’t got anything. And he needed a lot of bread for his . . . you know, the drinking.’
‘That was a problem?’
‘Not for him it wasn’t.’ Fat Otto puffed out another laugh. ‘Danny sure liked his oil.’
‘And you say the business was finished before he died? It’s not because he’s dead that it folded?’
‘Hell, no. He heard about it. Happened while he was in England. I had to call him all the way to England to tell him. I guess that’s why he killed himself.’ Fat Otto spoke without guilt, even with mild satisfaction. He was only the messenger of bad news; he wasn’t responsible for the effect that it had on the recipient.
‘When you say it happened while he was in England, what exactly happened?’
‘The cops came and said the firm was under investigation. Stop trading. They wanted to talk to Danny. Don’t know, maybe they wanted to arrest him, they didn’t say.’
‘Do you know why?’
The fat head moved resolutely from side to side, rippling its chins.
‘You mean you don’t know of any malpractices that were being committed in Musimotive?’
‘If I understand your question, and I’m not too sure through all those long words, the answer’s no. Hell, I only packed up the cassettes.’
Only obeying orders, it was a familiar defence. And yet Charles believed it. Fat Otto gave an impression of detachment. He’d get on with what he had to do and wouldn’t ask questions. Just as he felt no connection with Klinger’s death, although he had passed on the news that may have caused it, so he would feel no connection with Klinger’s crimes, although he may have helped in their execution.
He continued, clarifying that this was indeed his view. ‘Listen, I knew Danny Klinger a long time, really long time, and he was always good to me. Whenever he moved on to something new, there’d always be a job in it for me. He was a nice guy, he’d always buy me a drink, always got a friendly word, so, so far as I was concerned, he was okay.
‘Now I know he did some bad things, I heard people talk about them, but I never asked no questions. I just didn’t want to know. I guess that’s why he went on giving me jobs – well, and I hope he kinda liked me a bit – but really I don’t know what he was doing. So far as I know, he never made me do anything illegal and that was good enough for me. I told all this to the cops. They kept asking me about the business, I reckon they still think I’m holding out on them, but no way. I just don’t know anything – except that he’s dead and I’m out of a job.’
‘Hmm. Have I got it right – Musimotive produced background music for bars and factories and waiting rooms and lobbies, like Muzak?’
‘Yeah, same sort of idea.’
‘Did you have anything to do with the music side, the sessions and –?’
‘Like I said, I only packed the cassettes and sent them off.’
‘So Danny dealt with all the music recording and that sort of stuff?’
‘Must have done. There was only him and me.’
‘And so far as you know the business was pretty healthy?’
‘Seemed okay. I got my paycheck every week. Danny could afford a nice apartment on the Upper East Side, always seemed to have enough for a bottle of Scotch.’
The mention of Scotch prompted the offer of another drink. Fat Otto accepted. The barman had not gained any social graces since the previous order.
When Charles returned with the drinks, Fat Otto’s mood had changed. He started on a series of maudlin reminiscences of his former boss. ‘He was quite a guy. When I first met him, he worked in this radio station where I was janitor. He used to do the lot, bit of disc jockeying – hell, he was a terrible jock – compiling shows, sorting out quizzes, fixing music sessions, jawboning record companies, organising the bread – it was a public subscription station, kept running out of bread. He was always dashing around, fixing, all the time until . . . well, until he left.’
Charles was quick to pick up the hesitation. ‘Was there some trouble?’
‘There was always trouble where Danny was. All kinds of talk after he’d gone. Payola from the record companies, selling off pre-release discs, even putting some of the dough they raised on the auctions into his own pocket, but –’
‘Auctions?’
‘Yeah, they used to have these crazy auctions. When the station ran out of bread, they’d have twenty-four-hour non-stop programmes auctioning off all kinds of trash – you know, pop star’s shorts, guitar strings, locks of hair – and the kids’d ring in with bids and they’d make enough dough to keep the station running another couple of weeks.’
How different, Charles thought, from the home life of our own dear BBC. ‘And Danny was pocketing that money?’
‘Hell, I don’t know. Some people said so. Certainly he left the station. Wasn’t my business. I liked the guy, and when he called a couple of weeks later and offered me a job in a record-plugging outfit he was setting up, I said sure. And I followed him around since. He was a lot of fun to know. I tell you, he could bullshit his way out of anything.’
‘But he never said to you whether he took the money or not?’
‘Never mentioned it. Hell, why should he? I wasn’t interested. All I know is, him and Mike left at the same time and everyone said it was because of the dough, that they’d had their hands in the till.’
‘Mike?’
‘Mike was his buddy. Another jock on the station. Another real bright guy. Hell, the things those two got up to. They used to send each other messages over the air. Real dirty talk sometimes, but none of the listeners would ever know, because they had this code. They’d send out dedications and they’d choose discs with some kind of message in them. Hell, they were real guys, those two.’
Charles wanted to press on with questions about Klinger’s criminality rather than his lovability, but Fat Otto was not to be deflected from reminiscence. ‘I remember a time when Danny was screwing the wife of the guy in charge of the station and they’d got this great thing going where Mike would send a message when the poor jerk of a husband was on his way home. He’d say something over the air and give Danny and the dame time to straighten out the sheets. Don’t know how many times they did that. They had these code-words. Mike’d play the disc of Danny Boy as a warning, or another one – they’d send out a message to Mrs Joylene Carter of Ditmas Avenue, Flatbush, never forget that. That was the signal that a message was coming. Time for one last screw.’ The bicycle-pump laugh started up again at the recollection. ‘Hell, Danny was a horny bastard.’
‘And was this guy Mike involved in Danny’s other business ventures?’
‘Nope. Don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he stuck in the music business, went into some other branch – plugging, producing, agenting – I don’t know. Maybe he moved out to Salt Lake City and start selling insurance.’ Two more strokes of the bicycle pump.
‘What was his second name, this guy Mike?’
‘Fergus. Michael Fergus. Never forget, when he was doing the all-night shift, he’d start, “This is Mike Fergus roaming in the gloaming with you until the wee small hours”.’
‘And you think it’s possible O’Grady may also have been involved in taking the money?’
‘Listen, I said I don’t know anything about money being taken. I don’t know nothing from nothing.’ For the first time Fat Otto sounded annoyed. Charles bought him another beer and changed the subject. ‘You don’t know if Danny met an English girl over here the week before his death?’
‘Hell, I don’t know what he did with his spare time. I didn’t have no bug in his bedroom.’
‘No, this girl may have come to the office. English, as I say, fairly tall, blonde hair.’
‘Oh, her? Yes, I remember her all right.’ The small eyes looked at Charles with suspicion. ‘She asked a lot of questions, just like you.
Had some kind of swanky name.’
‘Andrea Gower.’
‘That’s right.’ Fat Otto now talked a lot slower, his suspicions hardening. ‘You connected with her then?’
‘No, I just know her – knew her.’
‘You sure you ain’t a cop?’
‘Yes. Why do you ask?’
‘I figured maybe she was some kind of police.’
‘Why?’
‘Dunno. Just she came round and a couple of days later we have the cops there closing us up.’
‘Did Danny think she was a cop?’
‘He never met her. He’d left for England a couple of days before she turned up.’
‘Oh, really?’ Farewell, all theories based on an affair between Andrea and Danny Klinger.
Fat Otto’s expression was now one of total distrust. ‘Hell, why is it all you English people get so interested in Musimotive? Did you have dealings with Danny over in England?’
‘No, I never met him.’
‘But you know the girl?’
‘I met her once just before she . . .’ No, there was no point in getting Fat Otto involved in all that. ‘Just the once.’
‘And what about the other English guy, the one who came over in the Fall?’
‘Other English guy?’
‘Yes, his name was Kelly. That’s what Danny called him, Kelly.’
‘I don’t think I know him. Did he ask a lot of questions too?’
‘Not so many. I think he and Danny may have been setting up some deal. They talked a lot.’ Fat Otto was going slower and slower, undecided whether to release more information.
‘What was this guy Kelly like?’
The gate came down. Nothing else was forthcoming. ‘Since you don’t know him, I don’t see how it matters to you. I gotta go. Doing some deliveries for one of the music publishers.’
Fat Otto, with surprising grace and balance, rose from his seat and walked out of Motti’s bar.
It was ten past two when Charles met up with two very cross ladies in Bloomingdale’s children’s department.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE SECOND FULL meeting of the Features Action Group had an air of retreat about it.
Held again in John Christie’s office, it started at six rather than seven, showing a greater urgency on the part of the participants to get home. And, even with the earlier assembly time, it was considerably less well attended than the first meeting. John Christie read out a long list of apologies at the commencement of proceedings. People were in the studio, they were editing, they were on courses, they were on holiday (the BBC virtually closes down for July and August), some just weren’t there.
John Christie welcomed the survivors with the impersonal enthusiasm of a diplomat and said how more certain he was than ever that the setting up of a Features Department was a really tremendous idea and just the thing to get radio out of the doldrums into which it had been drifting for the past few years. He hoped that the assembled company shared his conviction.
At this point Ronnie Barron, the Studio Managers’ representative, was called upon to read the minutes of the last meeting, which he did with the pace and variety of a metronome. None of it sounded even mildly familiar to Charles, but he knew he hadn’t paid much attention at the time. All he was aware of was that John Christie seemed to have said a lot, ever coming in with a judicious summing-up, ever moving the conversation on to some new tack. He recalled something his solicitor friend Gerald Venables had once said, that the art of meetings is not what you do or say at the time, but what you manage to get minuted. It seemed that John Christie had influenced Ronnie Barron’s selective processes.
Charles didn’t really care much. When asked, he was quite happy that the minutes should be ‘signed as a true and accurate record of what took place at the previous meeting’. However, he seemed to be in a minority.
There were strong objections from the girl with Shredded Wheat hair, who felt that her points about the sexist bias of the composition of the group had not been properly represented, thus compounding the crime of sexist bias and giving a distorted male-oriented view of the proceedings.
Then the young man with the wild beard made a similar defence of his remarks about the lack of blacks on the committee, concluding that he couldn’t condone ‘the suppression of the workers’ right to free speech by the traditional forces of the bourgeois oligarchy’.
Somebody else complained that, though he didn’t care from his own point of view, because he wasn’t into that kind of reward-seeking, he still found it odd that the minutes contained no reference to the gagging of his programme on Buddhism in the London suburbs.
And, finally, in a long, apologetic monologue, Harry Bassett from Leeds let them know that, in a sense, he was, not to put too fine a point on it and speaking with his regional hat on, not a little disappointed to hear that the minutes contained no reference to the regions.
All this took time to iron out and Charles began to wonder why he had come. The primary reason was that John Christie had rung and asked him and he couldn’t think of a previous engagement in time. But also he knew he wanted to see Steve Kennett again, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the mortification which he had experienced at their last meeting.
And he still wanted to know more about Andrea Gower’s death. Any contact with the BBC offered the prospect of illumination. He didn’t know what he thought now about the case, mostly just confusion, but through it percolated a conviction that a crime had been committed. His strange, in retrospect almost surreal, interview with Fat Otto in New York only went to reinforce that conviction. Something odd was going on somewhere.
The case was only one of the elements of his life that was in a state of suspended animation. There was also his relationship with Frances. The New York trip, in spite of its circumstances, had been good for both of them. They had, in a way, rediscovered each other. The sex had been good, Frances revelling in a new, post-menopausal freedom. In fact they had grown increasingly amorous. The Italian waiter in the coffee shop, who had let the information about the funeral, like all information he received from his customers, slip in one ear and out the other, asked on their last morning if they were on a second honeymoon. And that had certainly been the feeling of the latter part of the trip.
But arrival at Heathrow and the tedious business of getting back into Central London had dissipated the mood. It was all too mundane, too ordinary. They had caught the new Underground line from the airport and, though Charles had contemplated some kind of declaration and offer to accompany Frances back to Muswell Hill, when the parting of the ways came at Earl’s Court, he had only given her a peck on the cheek and the eternal promise that he would ring her. As the doors closed, he had seen her sitting on the train, surrounded by luggage and new purchases, and, not for the first time in his life, felt a heel.
And somehow, in the forty-eight hours they’d been back, he hadn’t phoned her. And here he was sitting all maudlin, because he was in the same room as Steve Kennett, whom he believed to be having an affair with another. And he had never even expressed any interest in her.
Once again, he felt confused by the male psyche. Confused by the whole system of marriage. Once again, he concluded that it was a generalised system, designed to suit everyone in general terms all of the time, and suiting no one in detail any of the time.
Helmut Winkler, the mad German, was talking, his fingers embroidering the air. ‘How can ye expect to produce interesting features yen ye are zo hidebound in our sinking about ze whole concept off radio? Now ye should not sink in narrow terms about radio, but in more general terms, of ze philosophy off sound. Radio is not just ze programmes zat are broadcast, it is ze whole mechanizmus off radio, discs, ze cassette players, even television. Each vun off zeese media is anuzzer facet off ze same diamond zat is sound. And any sinking ye do into sound must recognise zese different elements and ze effect zey have on ze philosophical attitudes off man in an audio-society. Radio is not just radio, it is man
in radio – more zan zat, it is audio-man in audio-environment. And yet ye go on producing ze same kind off programmes uninformed by zis realisation.
‘Vy, for instance, do ve always use ze best bit off tape, vy ze best take? Isn’t it better zat ye should use all ze tape, ze bad bits and mistakes viz ze good? Vy shouldn’t ye pick up all ze bits off tape zat are left after an editing session and edit zem together in random sequence to create an alternative audio experience? After all, ze creative process should be unpredictable. Vy are ye in radio so committed to outdated concepts of sense and intelligibility? Surely sometimes, and particularly in ze features area, it is necessary to lose the audience to gain truth.’
Charles was convinced that the guy was completely dotty, but he knew from Nick Monckton that such pronouncements had often appeared in The Listener under Winkler’s name and been greeted with serious academic approbation. Winkler was a licensed BBC intellectual, a species of which management preserved a few in reservations, and who they wheeled out to baffle and side-track any committee that might be set up to investigate the future of broadcasting.
But his views were not allowed to pass completely unopposed. The lady from Woman’s Hour objected, ‘I disagree completely. To be intelligible is the first duty of any broadcaster. When we did our feature on hysterectomy, not only did we make a damn good feature, we also made one that every damn person in the listening audience could understand.’
Ronnie Barron of the SMs department had another objection. ‘I’m no intellectual, Helmut, but it strikes me that what you suggest is going to be very wasteful of tape. Every year recording tape costs more and we seem to use more of it. In times of straitened financial circumstances, I feel it hardly appropriate that we should be finding new ways of using tape; we should be economising on it, particularly when we have just received a directive from MDR insisting that we do just that.’
Winkler’s hands swept away Barron’s arguments like shoulder-high reeds. ‘I am not concerned viz economy; I am concerned viz ze philosophy off audio.’
