Bodies (16 page)

“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 thought.

“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.

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 Nittachi 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.”

After that opening interview, there was a bit of a fallow period for Charlie. But six days later he was called by nail-varnish-and-mascara at the Form Divine Office, and sent off to stand in for someone whose form divine had been hit by 'flu. It was a television advertisement for a crunchy breakfast food of doubtless minimal nutritional value, but the advertising agency wanted to play up the health angle. Charlie and ten or twelve others cavorted around energetically in front of a number of stunning backdrops, wearing a variety of sporting gears, and Charlie said he enjoyed it very much, except that it was difficult to cavort energetically when carrying a bowl of Cornimunch. Later he did a session for a Hackney District Council poster in which he was supposed to be a sports teacher with a multi-racial class. The fees for these jobs were not large. Todd Masterman, phoning him at the gym, said that everyone was pleased with his work, and he (Todd) felt sure that something else would come up before very long.