Bodies

by Robert Barnard

  “Interesting,” I said. “Yet how they’ve all been swearing by their agent, as if he were the sport’s Archbishop of Canterbury.”

  “Well, anyway, the next thing Pete said was: ‘I never heard of Todd offering anything dirty to any of his guys.’ And Geoff replied: ‘You wouldn’t, would you, with that image of his to protect? I think he goes about it some other way.’ Well, there was a bit more muttering not much to the purpose, but that was about it.”

  “Funny,” I said. “You’re right—it does tie in with other things I’ve heard. They do all talk about their agents. But so far as I remember they all give them a bill of moral health as the sole arbiter of what is acceptable. He’s the man who protects their reputations in ‘the sport,’ as they call it. Just how many of these agents are there—ones that specialize in body people?”

  Charlie shrugged his shoulders.

  “A few. But I’d guess there’s only the one big one. That’s the Todd Masterman that they were talking about. He’s the only one you hear mention of, as a rule.”

  “I think I’m going to drop by to talk to Todd,” I said. “I’ve no doubt I shall find him a fine, upstanding fellow, full of impeccable moral sentiments.”

  “His office is Two-sixty-one A Dean Street,” said Charlie promptly. “I looked it up. He advertises in the muscle magazines.”

  I noted the number down in my notebook.

  “Thanks, Charlie. That was definitely moussaka-worthy. Do you mind my calling you Charlie? I suppose it’s someone’s bad joke?”

  “Yeah. Who was Charlie Peace, anyway?”

  “A burglar who killed a policeman. Killing policemen wasn’t so commonplace then. I don’t think otherwise he was an especially interesting criminal.”

  “Just my luck.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Dexter, can you imagine? Forget it. I’ve got used to Charlie.”

  I paid the bill and we made our way out. The family conference was over, and the restaurant virtually empty. “Keep your ears skinned, if that’s possible,” I said to Charlie, and we parted again at the door, he to make his way back to the gym in Little Moulson Street, while I turned and walked thoughtfully towards Dean Street.

  Number two-sixty-one A, when I found it, turned out to be a slightly tatty three-storey building, very much in the Soho mould. Among the other name-plates by the door, though, Todd Masterman’s still had some of the sheen of newness on it. FORM DIVINE AGENCY, it read. T. MASTERMAN (PROP.) Ho, ho, very classy, I thought. I supposed it had been difficult to think of a name that covered both the male and female bodies that Todd Masterman dealt in. Or marketed might be a better word. One must not go in with a pre-formed attitude of disapproval, however: sportsmen marketed themselves—did they ever market themselves, some of them!—so why not musclemen and glamour girls? They had a product people wanted to see (product seemed the word, after watching some of these men at their training—something artificially produced), so why not make sure that the widest public sees it, why not get the best terms possible for the exhibition of their perfection? Bodies fitted as well as anything into our beautiful current free-market philosophy.

  I went up the dirty, linoleumed stairs, very reminiscent of those at the Bodies office, found the outer door of the Form Divine Agency, knocked and went in. The girl at the desk was a bottle-blonde and pouting-pretty, with the busty figure of a “fifties” starlet. She could have co-starred in an early Elvis movie. The room stank of the nail varnish she was slipping into a desk drawer. She looked, in fact, the dimmest kind of temp, but I suppose she was engaged because she consolidated the image of the divine form.

  “I was wondering if I might have a talk with Mr. Masterman,” I said.

  I think she thought I wanted him to market my body, because she looked at me dubiously, then drew the appointments book under her beautiful breasts and began peering closely at it. Too vain to wear glasses, I thought, not well enough paid to buy contact lenses.

  “Mr. Masterman is very busy these next few days,” she began . . .

  “Police,” I said, and pushed my identification in front of her artificially sparkling eyes.

  “Oh . . . Oh, I see . . . Well, I’d better go and have a word with him,” she said, uncertain about anything outside routine. She disappeared into the inner room, and I heard low voices for a minute through the door that she had closed. Then she reappeared, smiling brightly the smile of the housewife whose whites have just come up whiter than she would have believed possible, thanks to Schmoof.

  “Mr. Masterman will see you now.”

  He was there waiting to shake my hand. Todd Masterman did very much less for the image of the form divine than his receptionist, and perhaps this was why he kept himself behind closed doors. If he was the agent who had been Mr. Southport of 1974, then he had suffered slippage in the intervening years. He was heavy-jowled, double-chinned, and his whole body had fleshed itself out till it became cumbersome and ponderous, centering on one massive belly that no form-flattering trousers could make look anything but gross. There was a posing picture framed over the mantelpiece, and I had to look twice to make sure it was him.

  “You lose it,” said Todd Masterman, with no regret apparent in his voice. “Sometimes you lose it quite fast. Won’t you sit down, Superintendent? What can I do for you?”

  We both of us sat down on either side of his desk. His face, in its heavy way, was a powerful one, and had once been good-looking. But it was marred by thinning hair, a straight, hard mouth, and small, greedy eyes. (Come, come, Perry: we all know, don’t we, that there’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face? Common observation must have shown you many fine, upstanding people with small eyes . . . Yeah. Henry the Eighth, for one.) Anyway, what I’m saying is, even if the body could have aimed at avuncular geniality, it would have been undercut by the face. Nevertheless, Mr. Masterman was an accomplished performer. He looked interested and helpful.

  “Was Wayne Flushing a client of yours?” I asked, deciding to dispense with preliminaries.

  “Yes. Yes, he was. Not one of my big earners, or someone I had any great expectations of, but he was on my books. I was able to get him slots from time to time.”

  “Such as the Bodies job?”

  “Oh God, yes. Don’t remind me. Makes me feel responsible.”

  “What other sorts of things?”

  “Oh, the odd advertisement, catalogues, that sort of thing.”

  “Would you mind telling me, Mr. Masterman, exactly what you do?”

  He sat back in his chair, amply filling, even over-filling it, and prepared to give me a spiel. He had clearly been asked this before, by potential clients and others.

  “I find fine bodies for people. Advertisers are needing them all the time, you see. If they want a pretty face to sell chocolate bars, there’s plenty of agencies to supply those. But if the product has a fitness connotation, or if they want to suggest that it might have, then they’ll come to me. Muesli, or glucose drinks, or slimming foods—they want the people in the ads to look healthy.”

  “You don’t only deal with musclemen, then?”

  “By no means. Anyone with a good healthy body. They don’t necessarily have to be stripped, the boys and girls in these ads, though they ought to look as if they would strip well. Then again, it isn’t only fitness products that use me. Beer isn’t one, by a long chalk, but there’s plenty of breweries want to give it a he-man image, so they come along to me.”

  “I’d guess that would go against the grain with some of the people on your books.”

  “It does. I have to know my clients, and fit the product to the man, obviously. You can get quite a puritanical type in the bodybuilding sport. For some of them, their body is their religion. You have to handle them with kid gloves.”

  “Right. That’s the advertising side. What about the posing and magazine side?”

  “Quite a lot of outlets there, though we’re not talking about the same kind of money. Hardly
worth my while in itself, but you’d be surprised how often it leads to something bigger. So I act as a sort of liaison between the mags and the boys and girls on my books.”

  “When you talk about mags, do you include sex mags, gay mags, that sort of thing?”

  Todd banged the palms of his hands down on the desk.

  “Absolutely not. Wouldn’t touch them. Ruin my reputation, ruin their reputation. That sort of thing damages them in the sport, sometimes beyond repair. You’ve no idea how careful they have to be, and since more and more of my girls are in the bodybuilding game too, the same applies to many of them. No, no, no. Never.”

  “I see.” I went carefully, deliberately deciding not to question his assurances on this interview. I wanted to leave him confident he was not seriously involved in the case. “Any other sort of work you’d find for them?”

  “Stage. TV. Quite a lot of my people have Equity cards, though none of them has stage training. But if they’ve got the card, I can get them anything that’s going. Often the part doesn’t require much more than standing around looking healthy. Or the TV detective may visit a gym, so my people can be going through their paces in the background. Or there are some who can do a bit of rudimentary acting—playing heavies, thugs, and so on.”

  “Wayne Flushing wouldn’t have been one of those, I take it?”

  “Good God, no. Wayne passed muster at these competitions, he could put on some sort of Exhibition Performance convincingly enough, but put him in front of a camera and you saw his limitations at once. He could just about smile and flex a bicep at the same time. If you asked for much more, you’d be in for a long session. I shouldn’t be knocking one of my clients, but that’s the way it was. I’d never have signed up Wayne for any of the big things.”

  “No question, then, of his doing porn films—without your knowledge, of course?”

  “Absolutely not. Even had he been willing (which, knowing Wayne very well, as I did, I can tell you he wouldn’t have been), he would just have been laughable.”

  “Most of the porn films I’ve seen have been just that—but still, I take your point. They’d use people for preference who needed less direction. Now, to get on, you represent a lot of people like Wayne, don’t you?”

  Todd Masterman sat back confidently in his chair, the master agent.

  “Oh yes—most of the best in the field.”

  “Denzil Crabtree?”

  “Yes.”

  “Vince Haggarty?”

  “Yes, in his time.”

  “I gathered from him that he still does body posing and fashion stuff.”

  “Oh yes. Vince still looks fine in ads. I just meant his time in the bodybuilding competitions was over.”

  “What about the girl who was killed? Susan Platt-Morrison. Did you represent her?”

  “No. She’d have been an independent operator, I imagine.”

  “Which of the people on your books, do you think, would be prepared to go into the porn market?”

  Todd Masterman leaned forward, very solemn, as if he were discussing a pact with the Devil.

  “Now that depends on what you mean by prepared. We’re not all angles in this business, God knows, but we’re not all sleazy types either, not by a long way. There’d be some who wouldn’t have much objection morally to doing that kind of thing—to that extent they’d be prepared. Whether they’d be willing, after the lecture I give them when I take them on to my books is another matter.”

  “Stern?”

  “I make it very plain that I won’t be getting them any offers of that kind of work, that if they do it they’ll damage, perhaps finish, their careers in the sport, and that if I hear of them taking on that kind of filth, they can look around for another agent, because I won’t be handling them any longer.”

  “I see. They can’t say they haven’t been warned. What you’re saying applies more to the men than the women?”

  “Oh, much more. Quite a few girls are going into the bodybuilding side, but it’s a bit of an uphill battle to get them taken seriously. Many of my girls are your normal keep-fit kind, not organized in any way, or into any particular sport. For some of those, pretty much anything goes—though I’d still refuse to handle anyone who got themselves into the porn racket.”

  This last was a hasty addition, delivered with a touch of self-righteousness that I felt patently laid on.

  “I see. Now, though you won’t involve your clients in it, you must know something about the porn racket.”

  “No, I don’t. Nothing. I make sure that I know nothing. That way I’m sure I don’t hear of anything that I might be tempted to offer to my boys.”

  “I see. The same applies to the gay mags posing, I suppose?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But some of your men clients must be beyond the serious competition stage in the bodybuilding lark. I was thinking of people like Vince Haggarty, for example.”

  “Ye-es. I mentioned that.” (Cautiously.)

  “What’s to stop them, for example, accepting an offer from the blue film people?”

  “Nothing, except being taken off my books.”

  “Why should you object?”

  “Because of the grubby name it would give the agency if it was known that that was the sort of thing my clients did. The slightest hint of grime I keep at arm’s length. Because if it got around, the really serious, dedicated boys wouldn’t touch the Agency with a bargepole, and we’d lose out badly there. Quite apart from the interest you boys might start taking in us. I may say this is the first time we’ve ever been visited by the police. We’ve kept our hands absolutely clean.”

  “That’s good to hear. You say you know nothing about the porn film racket. Have you literally never heard of any of your clients being approached?”

  “They wouldn’t tell me if they had.”

  “Why not, if they refused?”

  “They know my feelings on the subject.”

  “How do you imagine they would approach likely people, if they couldn’t get them through you?”

  “How should I know? I tell you, I know as little about that crap as it’s possible to know. Through the magazines they pose for, maybe. Perhaps they’d hear about them on the Soho grapevine.”

  “Through Bob Cordle?”

  “Not if they told him what it was for. He was the straightest bloke in the world, was Bob.”

  “One of nature’s gentlemen?”

  “Oh, absolutely. He wouldn’t have touched anything in the porn line. He’d have felt like me about that. Straight as a die, he was, and generous? He’d have given you the top brick off the chimney.”

  I sighed, rather as the Devil must have sighed at all those hosannas and hallelujahs during his time among the upper angels. Still, I had to admit that Bob Cordle wasn’t the only perfect gentleman and parfit knight around in the body game. By his own account, Todd Masterman must have run him pretty close. It was quite edifying to learn how right the Romans were about the healthy mind going with the healthy body. Funny I’d never noticed it before.

  Chapter 12

  I DROVE BACK thoughtfully to the Yard, where I found, not to my surprise, that nothing of interest had turned up while I’d been away. Garry Joplin was around, having been doing routine slog among Susan Platt-Morrison’s circle—slog that had turned up little to the purpose. I decided to take him along on my next call.

  “Two always looks more impressive than one,” I said, “though whether I’m really going to get anywhere by overawing him, I don’t know.”

  “Overawing who?”

  “Phil Fennilow. I’ve really got very little concrete out of my two blokes today, but I can’t delay any longer confronting him with Denny Crabtree’s evidence. Whether he knew it or not, and I can’t make up my mind about that, the place was being used to make porn films.”

  “It wasn’t being used to make porn films when they were all shot,” pointed out Joplin, as we drove towards Windlesham Street. “He was doing perfectly routine
shots for Bodies.”

  “I don’t think that makes any difference. The hard porn element is part of the equation, whether or no. We know that one at least of his models had been approached about that kind of work. I want to find out whether Cordle was doing this with Phil’s knowledge—perhaps with Phil looking after the distribution—or whether it was a bit of freewheeling private enterprise on Cordle’s part . . . Here we are.”

  The police had long ago packed up their powders and pastes and cameras, and had left the Bodies office in its usual state, as a dingy oasis in the multi-lingual bustle of Soho. By now it was late afternoon, and Strip à la Wild West was beginning to attract the odd customer, urged in by a commissionaire-cum-bouncer. Soon the blanks would be firing and the whips cracking. The stairs up to the studio and Phil Fennilow’s office were grimy, the lino in places worn through to show the wood of the staircase. When we got to the top, however, I realized that all was not quite as usual.

  From Phil’s office, which I had snooped around on the first day of the case, was coming the sound of voices, and then a woman’s laugh, shrill but whole-hearted. Phil didn’t laugh—I couldn’t imagine Phil laughing—but perhaps he took the cigarette out of his mouth for a moment to smile. The tones of the voices suggested they were old friends, and easy in each other’s company. I walked forward and knocked on the door. Phil poked his head round when he opened it, blinked at us through his thick glasses, and then ushered us both in.

  “These are the cops I told you about,” he said. “This one’s the big chief.”

  The wielder of the laugh was a woman in her sixties, thin to the point of scrawniness, with oranged hair, beaky nose, and red talony fingernails. The general effect, though, was vital rather than horrendous, for her whole body had an electric charge, a brisk humanity, which I had heard coming through the laugh. She was expensively dressed, in clothes that suggested flair if not style. They boldly married purple and green, and the combination made it quite inevitable that you noticed her.

  “Mrs. Wittgenstein,” murmured Phil.

  She shook my hand and Garry’s, and noticed immediately my reaction to the name.