Bodies

by Robert Barnard

  “I don’t think that would be wise,” I said. “Too public. Anyway, there might be money in this for you, so I don’t see why I should feed you as well. Any objections to coming here, New Scotland Yard?”

  “I’ve been in crumbier joints than that. I can make myself at home anywhere. I’m on till half-past five. Some time around six suit you?”

  “Perfect.”

  Charlie’s method of making himself at home when he arrived was to sit on my desk. It was his way, I imagine, of asserting that he was not there as a suspect. He made a slightly intimidating figure, while I told him what I guessed about Vince Haggarty’s activities. He took it in very quickly.

  “I get the picture,” he said, eventually. “What exactly did you get out of this Crabtree character?”

  “A mixture of fact and fiction, so far as I can judge. He admits that he made a short porn film—part of a larger one—in the Bodies studio. There was all sorts of stuff about not knowing the people involved—real cloak and dagger stuff, which I can’t say I believe. According to him, it was a straight sex film, with the sex simulated—or stimulated, as he called it. I’m keeping an open mind as to whether I believe that or not.”

  “And what about Todd Masterman? Beyond that he seems to be covering up for Vince, and what I told you I’d overheard in the shower, you haven’t got much to connect him with all this yet?”

  “No. Nothing at all concrete.”

  “Which is where I come in, I suppose?”

  “Bright boy.”

  I’d been intending to approach the matter obliquely, and had worked out various ploys, but he was too quick for me. He shrugged deprecatingly.

  “It was obvious.”

  “Of course we’ve got our own people we could use. But I couldn’t provide cover for them anything like as good as your cover, which is completely genuine.”

  “I didn’t see anything very remarkable in the body line on the way up here,” said Charlie disparagingly.

  I got all defensive.

  “You’ve no idea of the talent we can rustle up, to send into the gay clubs. But if you’re willing—”

  “Oh, I’m willing.”

  “About payment: we’ve got special funds for operations like this, depending on how much is involved.”

  “I should damned well hope so,” said Charlie. “Though I admit the whole thing promises to be interesting as well. How are you suggesting I go about it?”

  “As I see it, the first thing is to approach Todd Masterman. Say you’ve heard he acts as agent for people with good bodies. You’re not a muscleman, not a competition type, but you look good, and you’re black, which is an advantage these days. You wonder whether there’s any work he could send your way, in ads, modeling, that kind of thing. Probably you could even run to a bit of acting, if something came up?”

  “Sure I could.”

  “If I’m right about the kind of thing they’re going to direct your way, it’s not going to be the sort of acting that you need an Actor’s Equity card for. Say you’ve heard about him from some people at the gym, which is true enough.”

  “What if he’s not interested?”

  “No harm done, from our point of view. End of operation, small fee paid. But if he is . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “Then try to turn the conversation at some point on to a personal level: about yourself and your interests.”

  “Why?”

  “I want you if you get the chance to tell him about something that you want very much—not to be the first black prime minister, or whatever, but something that involves money. Not fantastic money, but some sort of attainable sum.”

  Charlie got up, and walked around the room, clearly trying to imagine the interview and his part in it, acting it out, thinking forward to what line he would take.

  “Think of anything?”

  “I’m not that interested in money, to tell the truth. Things tie you down too much. What I want is an interesting life—which is why I’m doing this for you. The gym is becoming a drag: all those guys and chicks looking at themselves in the mirrors. Still, I can imagine wanting something real bad. Would a good stereo sound wrong, do you think? Or what about a really powerful motorbike?”

  “That sounds ideal. All the right macho connotations.”

  “How do you want me to handle the approach?”

  “We’re jumping the gun a bit—”

  “But I presume that’s what you’re expecting: someone to approach me with an offer?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping. Not immediately, that would be too crude, and tie it in too obviously with Masterman. Though when I talked to him and to Haggarty I kept it very general—not a trace of accusation, I think they still feel pretty secure. But in fact, if you do get an approach, then we can be pretty sure that Masterman is involved. Well, how do you think it would be best to play it? Fairly cool, I’d say. Take a lot of time to consider it. Drive a pretty hard bargain.”

  “Do I keep any money that comes my way?”

  “If it goes that far.”

  “I’ll drive a hard bargain.”

  “Say you’ve never done anything like that before, never even thought about it. You’ve no moral objections, but still, you were brought up a good churchgoing lad—”

  “I wasn’t,” said Charlie. “Still, I know plenty that were . . . ”

  “Play it by ear: the main thing is not to jump at it. There’s few that do that, I’d guess, so they’ll expect to do a bit of wheedling and bargaining. Obviously you’ll want to know the sort of work that’s involved . . . Gradually coming to give them the impression that you’re open to pretty much everything, provided the price is right.”

  “Then getting the details of when and where.”

  “Right. So that we can make the decision whether we bust them then and there, or let it go for a bit. We may well find their plan is to send you gently down the slippery slope, before they land you up in something really nasty.”

  “Well, let it ride for a bit, can’t you?” said Charlie, with ferocious geniality. “I’m not going to get many chances of being in films.”

  “Certainly the longer you go, the more information you might come across as to who’s involved,” I said. “But somehow I don’t think you’ll find the work quite as jolly fun as you think, after a while.”

  “By ‘who’s involved’ you don’t just mean the actors or models, or whatever you call them, I suppose?”

  “No. Though I do want to find out as much as possible about them too. We might find that among them are the willing, like you, and the less willing too: ones who are forced into pretty nasty things for the money, or tempted into them by lies. There’s a potential behind it: where the money comes from, how the distribution is handled.”

  “Whether Todd Masterman is in it, and who else?”

  “Yes. And, less important, who is in it with Vince Haggarty on the production side. Very few, I suspect. I don’t get the impression that these are productions with any great professional polish, though again Denny Crabtree could be lying about that. The approach to you could be made by Vince Haggarty, or it could be one of his underlings who does it. Have you come across Haggarty?”

  Charlie frowned and shook his head.

  “Not that I know of, though I’ve heard the name. Must train at some other gym.”

  “Or maybe his training period was before your time.” I got out the four-year-old copy of Bodies which I had borrowed from Phil’s office. “This was him in his day. The body’s thickened out quite a bit. The best way of identifying him will be by the teeth—terrible teeth.”

  “Never seen him before,” said Charlie. “But I should recognize him. Is that the lot? Anything we haven’t covered?”

  “Not that I can think of.”

  “When shall I go along to Todd Masterman’s? Tomorrow?”

  “No reason why not.”

  “And how do I report to you? Shall we meet as usual in the Knossos?”

  I thou
ght.

  “I suppose we could. Windlesham Street is not going to be an area these boys are going to hang around at the moment. Keep in constant touch, by telephoning, or by coming round. Here, I’ll write down my home address and telephone as well. As soon as something starts happening, we’ll meet in the Knossos, some time outside rush hour . . . twelve, two, or early evening.”

  “Well, well,” said Charlie, turning at the door of my office and cheerily waving his hand. “Into the valley of death. Hope to see you soon.”

  And that was the last I saw of him for some days.

  Those days were filled full enough, but not with things that would be of interest to you. Books sometimes give the impression that a policeman is allowed to concentrate one hundred percent on the one case he has in hand. Would that were the case. He always has several in hand, and he juggles with his time as best he can. Even in a matter so important—and publicity-worthy—as a quadruple murder, other things, other cases, other meetings, intrude. Lots of routine was done on the Bodies case by lots of constables and sergeants, while I was giving my mind to these other matters. But in fact we all of us felt as if we were marking time.

  It’s true I was phoned by Todd Masterman, who said he was writing a letter of condolence to Wayne Flushing’s father—a likely story!—and he wondered whether there were any developments. I was guarded and noncommittal, but I made sure we chatted on, and in the course of the chat I loosened up, and let slip a mention of a (mythical) jealous lover of Susan Platt-Morrison’s. Todd Masterman could hardly keep the cheerfulness out of his voice from then on. He was convinced I’d let slip the way my mind was working. It may well be, I thought, as I put the phone down, that he regards this conversation as giving him the all clear.

  Whether or no, three days later I got the message from Charlie that he’d had an approach.

  Chapter 14

  I HEARD FROM CHARLIE in various ways over the next week and a half. He would ring from phone-boxes, once he sent a note, and a couple of times he called in at the flat and told me everything in résumé form while horsing around with my son Dan on his shoulders, somehow making the living-room seem very small. What follows is pieced together from all those various accounts.

  Charlie called at the Form Divine Agency the day after he had talked to me at Scotland Yard. The Agency seemed to be very much as I had experienced it, though the girl in the outer office was putting on mascara instead of nail polish. Once again she said that Todd Masterman was very busy, but quite by chance it turned out that he did have a few minutes when he had finished with his present client. (It is perhaps significant that though Charlie was in there with him for half an hour or more, there was no one waiting in the office when he left.) Charlie sat around, passing the time of day with the dumb blonde, but he didn’t get anything out of her, possibly because there was nothing in her. Eventually Todd’s client came out, a female weight-lifter whom Charlie knew by sight and avoided by repute. After waiting a decorous minute or two the dumb blonde had phoned through (though she could just have raised her voice) to Todd’s office to say there was this young man there, and of course she knew he was frightfully busy but could he fit him in? Todd, in his graciousness, said he would, and Charlie was shown in.

  He sat in the chair I’d sat in, with Todd propping his paunch up on the other side of the desk, and he launched into his spiel. He had heard from the guys at the gym that Todd was a fantastic agent, and put a lot of modelling work their way, and though he, Charlie, was not in the competitive bodybuilding lark, he felt he had a pretty good body that would look well in advertisements, or modelling sports gear or underclothes, and he felt he had a good personality that would come over if there were any small acting parts going . . . In short, Charlie sold himself, as I was sure he would be able to.

  Todd Masterman nodded during all this, and looked at Charlie appraisingly. At the end of the spiel he thought for a moment. He told Charlie to stand up and take his shirt off. Then he came round to the other side of the desk, felt his biceps, pinched at his thighs to make sure he wasn’t spindle-shanked, and generally gave Charlie an agreeable sense of being back in the slave market in the deep South. Then he told him to sit down again, and they talked.

  “It’s certainly true,” Todd Masterman said, “that there’s openings for a well-built chap like you who isn’t a muscleman. For example, say I’m getting models together for a sports equipment brochure: the guy who advertises the weights—he ought to be a body builder; but the guy who poses in the football shorts or the tennis gear shouldn’t be. Get me?”

  “Sure,” said Charlie.

  “Same with advertisements for ordinary products. They may demand a muscleman. If they do, it’s often for a fairly jokey sort of advertisement—unfair on the boys, and many of them don’t like it, but there it is. For the general public there’s something slightly funny about bodybuilding. More often what they want is a pretty fit-looking individual that the ordinary man or woman can identify with. That’s where you might come into the picture. You could well be right for that sort of ad.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Charlie.

  “You have the advantage of being black.”

  “It’s nice to be wanted.”

  “It’s a pity the abolition of the Greater London Council has meant a cut-down in their advertising. They were very hot on using the minorities—the ethnic minorities, the sexual minorities, the disabled.”

  “I’d be quite happy to play a black homosexual in a wheelchair,” said Charlie craftily. He swore he saw a flicker in Masterman’s eye at that point.

  “Trouble is, most of the blacks in the advertisements tend to be cast as graduates and professional people—doctors and solicitors and businessmen. The whites are the roadworkers and dustmen and dockers.”

  “Couldn’t they have a black roadworker just now and then?”

  “No, no. That would be stereotyping.”

  “Perhaps I could be a very well-built solicitor.”

  “Anyway, with luck there’ll still be some of that sort of ad around, even after the abolition. The various local authorities will get together and promote it. And with the vegetarian and health food fad growing all the time, the demand for healthy, sporty-looking models is constantly on the increase . . . Then there’s the pure modelling. You wouldn’t object to modeling underwear?”

  Charlie shrugged.

  “Heavens, no. I wear it, why should I object to modelling it?”

  “I just like to know. Some of the people on my books have odd kinds of . . . scruples.”

  He smiled fatly at Charlie, but left the subject there. He pushed himself back once more in his chair, and they began to talk generally. He asked about Charlie’s background, where he grew up, how he had come to work at Jim’s Gym, whether that was the sort of work he aimed to do for the rest of his life, what he was interested in. Charlie answered all of this quite truthfully, indulging in a judicious bit of heightening only when he felt it might be useful. The gym, he said, was a good job, he’d enjoyed it a lot for the first year or eighteen months, but now it was beginning to get that bit repetitious.

  “A bit lacking in excitement, zing, know what I mean? I’m beginning to feel the need of a bit of variety, something to add a bit of spice to the everyday.”

  “I see what you mean . . . And you think modelling might give you that?”

  “I think it would. I think I could do it pretty well, too. I’m . . . versatile.”

  “I’m sure you are. And I suppose the money would come in useful?”

  “Money always comes in useful, man!”

  “What does money mean, specially, to you? What have you got your eye on?

  “Well, I’m beginning to feel I need to be a bit more mobile. I live in London, but there’s a whole lot of things going on that I miss out on because the bus and the tube are such drags. I’ve got my eye on a motorcycle. Used to have an old crock, when I was seventeen or so, but it fell to pieces. Now I’ve got my eye on a Nit
tachi 500—Japanese job, just out in a new model. That’s got real power—it’s a real smooth, classy job . . . ”

  “And so on, and so on,” said Charlie to me, when he reported back later. “I did everything except say that I wanted to feel its power surging between my legs.”

  “You did well to restrain yourself,” I said. “Though it’s remarkable how much of the D. H. Lawrence stuff people will accept without laughing themselves silly. Was that pretty much the end of the interview?”

  “More or less. He clapped me on the shoulder, said he was sure he’d be able to find something for me, though I mustn’t be too optimistic at first, then he took my home phone number—he’d got that of the gym—and that was pretty much that.”

  “Was there any solemn warning against getting involved with anything dubious?”

  “Sorry—yes, there was. That was earlier. He just said that he wouldn’t be recruiting me for anything on the nose, as he put it, and if I’d take his advice I wouldn’t go in for it. That sort of thing does you no good in the legit trade, he said.”

  “Not quite so strong as he told me he made it,” I commented. “What were your impressions of the man, as a whole?”

  Charlie thought for a bit.

  “He was very matey, very cheery—hail-fellow, lots of ho-ho laughing, and all that kind of thing . . . But I didn’t like him . . . He worried me a lot.”

  “Oh?”

  “There was this slave-market element, like I told you, about the whole interview. OK—I’m black, I’m sensitive to that. But if I’d been white, the slave-market element would have been there. Buying flesh, sizing it up, like he was trading in it. Then there was the man himself . . . ”

  “What was it that worried you?”

  “There was all this laughter, like he was everyone’s favourite uncle. But when we did all that stuff about stereotypes, I was pissing myself laughing inside, but he didn’t think it funny. Wasn’t conscious it had a funny side. I found that creepy. I think the only way you could run an agency like that would be if you found the whole business a bit of a laugh. But he is fairly stupid, or at least without a sense of humour, and I started wondering what he was getting out of it. Why he was in that business at all.”