Bodies Read online

  “You won’t believe this,” he said, as he got in, and put the window down to talk, “but though I’ve seen some bodies in my time, this one will be the first that’s dead.”

  “You surprise me,” I said. “By the look of some of those in there I’d have said you would have seen several.”

  “Are you joking, man? They’re all fit men and women. They all make it to the ambulance!”

  Chapter 6

  THE GREEK RESTAURANT nearly opposite the Bodies office was called the Knossos, and its proprietor was Mr. Aristid Leonides, late of Famagusta. I remembered it—and him—well, though I had not actually eaten there since the days of the Vice Squad investigation. I peered through the door into a murky interior and saw that it was half full of men with melancholy moustaches, some of them with their families. It looked like an audition for a remake of Zorba. It is said to be a good sign when you find compatriots of the proprietor eating in his restaurant, though I do sometimes wonder if the Greek, Italian and Chinese restaurateurs don’t arrange to eat in this or that restaurant serving their respective cuisines on a turn-and-turn about basis, to give their places a reputation with the British. Anyway, all these portly men with their boisterous families certainly gave the place atmosphere, and the proprietor, Mr. Leonides, came bustling forward on his little patent leather shoes, beaming and sweating in the way proprietors have. I think he dimly remembered me, and at my request I was shown to the loneliest corner of the room.

  “There will be three,” I said. Then I took out my identification and showed it to him. “Police. I wonder if I could ask you one or two questions?”

  Mr. Leonides studied it for ten or twelve seconds, no emotion showing on his impassive face. Then he said:

  “Too high up for licensing regulations. Is it this business opposite?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that. But just wait a bit. Elena!” He called to his wife, and she came and took over his place near the door. A dark-eyed girl perhaps just into her teens came and sat at the cash register, but he shooed her back behind the scenes.

  “Is too young,” he explained. “We don’t want no trouble with the police.”

  “I’m not aiming to give you trouble,” I said, “All I want is any information you can give me.”

  That, it seemed, was very little. Living in the vicinity of Strip à la Wild West you got accustomed to the sounds of shots, and you certainly didn’t notice if the shots came at the wrong point in the hour. Who was to know if they had changed their starting time, or their act? It wasn’t the sort of place that he would think of patronizing. Yes, he did sometimes stand around the doorway if business was slow, and yes, he would sometimes have noticed Bob Cordle or Phil Fennilow, or some of the models, coming and going across the way. But it was a quite idle notice, and he couldn’t say whether it was Monday or Thursday he saw them, let alone precisely at what time.

  “Didn’t they ever come in here, these people?” I asked him.

  “Sure they come in here, now and again. Not the man who run it, this Fennilow, I never had him in here, but Cordle and the models—sometimes together, sometimes on their own.”

  “Impressions of them?”

  “Cordle—he was a lovely man. One of the best. Always friendly, sympathetic, no hassle, no complaints. I feel real sad about the way he got killed. They must have been gunning for one of the others. The models? Some lovely girls. Real lovely. Some a little bit—you know—tart. But not all. Some real good-educated girls there was among them.”

  “I know,” I said. “I have a very good-educated corpse on my hands. What about the men?”

  He screwed up his mouth and flung out his hands in a gesture of skepticism.

  “The men, they was a bit different. Some was just good-looking, like the women, but it’s different in a man, isn’t it? And then there was the muscle boys. Always wanting salad with no oil, or special stuff it wasn’t worth my while to go to the trouble of cooking. “What’s in that?” they say all the time—as if I know! You think I keep track of what’s in all these things? My Elena’s an artist, not an accountant. She don’t note everything down, is different every night. No, some of those boys there are a real pain in the neck.”

  We were interrupted by the arrival of Joplin and Charlie. Mr. Leonides got up with a perceptible sigh of relief, and began bustling them into chairs around my table.

  “You gentlemen all police? You all gentlemen from Scotland Yard?”

  “I should sink so low,” said Charlie, sliding himself into his seat. He did not look happy. I had the impression that if Charlie could have gone pale, he would have.

  “It was him,” said Joplin. “Wayne Flushing is his name. Or was.”

  “That was not a nice sight,” said Charlie. I shoved the menu at him, and he took it to take his mind off the sight.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  “Within reason,” I said.

  “Just what is it you want from me for this bribe?” he asked, after we’d all ordered.

  “Just talk. Talk about the people at the gym. I’ll throw in a few questions now and then, but at the moment I’m at the stage of not knowing exactly what questions to ask. Just chat about the sort of people who come, what they do, how they live, what their problems are. Talk for your lunch.”

  Charlie sat thinking for a bit as the proprietor fussed around with our bottle of wine. He was obviously trying to get his life-style sorted out in his own mind. When Mr. Leonides went away, he began with himself.

  “I got the job because the bosses—the ones in the City, or their underlings—thought the Soho gym was likely to be a pretty tough place, and they wanted someone who looked as if he might be dangerous in an argy-bargy.”

  “And are you dangerous when the need arises?”

  “Try me some time when you’re not on duty. Of course I can take care of myself. I’ve had to. And I’ll take care of anyone who doesn’t believe it. But the point is, it’s quite unnecessary. With ninety-five per cent of the customers, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of their ever wanting to get in a fight.”

  “And the other five per cent?”

  “I’ll come on to them later, if you want. I thought you were interested in the body boys, like Wayne. You’ll have seen today a fair cross section of our clients. There are the middle-aged who want to torture themselves back into shape: perhaps because they fear death is just around the corner if they go from one enormous business nosh-up to another without doing anything energetic in between, or because some girl or other has suggested they’re not coming up to scratch in some way or another—anyway, there’s that sort of person. And their fat wives. And some girls with the keep-fit craze: they’re harmless enough, and often quite pleasant. And then there are the body boys.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, the last thing they want is a bit of barney with anyone. Might get a bruise, or break their skin some place, or even strain one of those beautiful muscles. They’re in love with themselves and their bodies, and their bodies have to be perfect—flawless diamonds. They are the most docile people on earth. Sheep are aggressive compared to them.”

  “You’d think they’d want to use all that splendid muscle-power,” said Joplin, apparently mystified.

  “They don’t want to use it, they want to show it. It’s like having a fabulous collection of old cars, and never taking any of them out on the road.”

  “Right. I get the message,” I said. “Now, what about them personally? What sort of people are they?”

  “Well, you saw Wayne’s pal, Jerry Greave. Did he strike you as the world’s greatest brain?”

  “No. Still, I wasn’t expecting all of them to be candidates for Mastermind.”

  “No. Fair enough. It was the particular sort of dimness I was trying to get at.”

  “Something—naive?” I suggested. “Almost simple-minded? That wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting.”

  “That’s it. Naive. Silly, rather than s
tupid. Blinkered.” Charlie wagged a big finger in my direction as he began tucking into a plateful of lamb. “Most of them are quite unconscious of anyone else in the world, or any other point of view, and can’t believe that anyone else can be less interested in their bodies than they are themselves.”

  “That sort of tunnel vision can be dangerous. One of the most dangerous things there is.”

  “That’s right. And I could imagine one of them . . . blundering into something. Quite unconscious of the danger. Because they’re in a grown-up world without being quite grown-up themselves. Get me?”

  “I get you. It sounds right, it sounds interesting. I wonder about them morally.”

  Charlie made a derisive gesture with his large hands, which were now wielding a knife and fork.

  “You mean sex. Policemen always mean sex when they say that.”

  “Well, let’s start with sex anyway. Are they likely to get themselves into anything dubious morally?”

  “Well, there are the ones with the Sunday School morality. That’s probably part of the never-growing-up thing. Then there are ones who wouldn’t even be able to think on that level—their bodies are all they think about, and no abstract idea, however childish, can find a footing. And then there’s the ones that work out some kind of ’code’ for themselves—the code centering around the needs of their training, the cult of the body, the proper use of the little bits of time they have left over from training, diets, contests, what have you.”

  “Which of these types would you say Wayne was?”

  Charlie shrugged.

  “Didn’t know him well enough to say. Rather on a par with his pal Jerry, I would guess, though perhaps not quite so staggeringly naive. I would imagine they both are rather in the personal code category, though what kind of code that would be I’m not sure. It might be a question of what they’re asked to do, mightn’t it?”

  “What are these people asked to do?” asked Joplin. I think there was a degree of salacious interest in his inquiry. He had never been connected with the Vice Squad. He still thought there was something glamorous and exciting about the wilder reaches of the sex trade.

  “That I don’t know all that much about,” said Charlie. “Anything I know I’ve picked up in conversation, and the fact is that the models and the glamour boys don’t go in much for conversation. For the models it’s a quick workout and off. For the muscle-boys it’s practically perpetual workouts, going from weights to expanders to thigh-developers, or whatever. You notice how twitchy poor old Jeremy got, after only five minutes away from it?”

  “You’ve never been asked to do anything . . . dubious yourself, then?”

  “No, I have not been asked to flash my prick for the gay mags. If only they knew about me! Actually, I suppose I would do it if the price was right, so I shouldn’t be superior.”

  “That’s one of the things they’re asked to do, is it?”

  “Sure. And the equivalent for girls. The price for that would be quite a bit higher than for any modeling they might do for Bodies. Then there’s the fladge market—posing with whips and chains and whatnot—open to both sexes, with lots of permutations. Permutations are important in this thing: you’ve got male and female, straight and bent, and black and white. Then there are the leather people, the rubber people, the child market.”

  “Are all of those still more profitable?” Joplin asked.

  “Don’t know. Haven’t heard that much about it, frankly. My guess is that it’s all that bit too way out—fairly small market, so perhaps not quite so rewarding as, say, the queer picture mags.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, films, I believe. Particularly quickies for the video market. Not that I’ve heard a great deal about them. My guess is that they prefer to employ out-of-work actors. Lots of them around, and I’d suspect these model people would tend to be wooden. Ask them to do much more than stand around with a frozen smile on their faces and they’d become an embarrassment. But certainly there are porn films being made all the time, and some of the people we’re talking about could be involved in them.”

  “You think any of these people who posed for Bob Cordle would have been willing to do any of these things that you’ve been talking about?”

  Charlie shook his head emphatically.

  “No, no. Certainly not. Sorry if I’ve given the wrong impression. I was talking very generally. There’d be two reasons why most of the musclemen who are currently in the competitive bodybuilding lark would have fought shy of the things I’ve been talking about. One is that Sunday School morality I mentioned: it would not have been good clean stuff, nor healthy—not even flashing your prick for the gay mags. Most of them might have looked wistfully at the money, but they would have said no.”

  “And the other reason?”

  “Well—another aspect of the same thing. The sport is very conscious of its image. It’s used to being thought slightly ridiculous. It doesn’t want to be thought sleazy as well. It’s a clean-cut, clean-minded, clean-living world, the world of bodybuilding—that’s the message. No, anyone who starts appearing in, say, sex films, of whatever sort, is going to get seen and talked about. Someone in the sport is going to go along to one of those little cinema clubs—because not all of them are really that clean-minded—and the word is going to get around. I don’t suppose there is any bodybuilding equivalent of being drummed out of the regiment—your posing briefs being stripped off you at a public ceremony, for example—but I’m pretty sure that sort of activity would do your career no good at all. It would be less dangerous to sell sex. What they wouldn’t want is to be photographed doing it.”

  “I get you.”

  “What these people are concerned about above all is titles, publicity, recognition within their own very small world.”

  “What you’re saying, then, is that by and large these people wouldn’t be seen dead—sorry!—pictured in any of the nastier porno publications, or in cheapie sex films?”

  Charlie thought for a bit, messing around with the last of his pudding.

  “By and large. There’ll always be rogue elephants. And I’m talking about while they’re active in the championship world. Remember that that’s a pretty short life. When it’s over, you’ve still got a lot of life left, and you’ve got to find something to do with it. I could imagine that some of them would take on anything that was offered them, after their competing days were over. And I could imagine some who would enjoy it, too. What I was talking about was the active and enthusiastic ones.”

  “Like Wayne Flushing?”

  “Oh yes. Wayne was both of those things.”

  “You mentioned the five percent that you might have trouble with at the gym. I suppose those are mostly the thugs and heavies around the place?”

  “Right. And the pimps. Chuckers-out at the clubs, bodyguards to pretty unpleasant characters, types who can be used to lean on respectable citizens, screw protection money out of them. But I don’t need to tell you. Obviously you lot have to know the place. Anyway, that type does come into the gym now and then. Mostly they don’t make much trouble—not there—but trouble is still their business, and it can follow them around.”

  “Any of them got any connection with Bob Cordle?”

  “I thought this Cordle was a nice guy,” protested Charlie. “Everybody said so.”

  “So many people say so, that I’m beginning to feel suspicious,” I said.

  “Well, I never heard of any connection. But then, I never met Cordle. I’m taking his character on trust. Some of them are just plain heavy—a work-out once a week doesn’t change that. But there are a few he could have used, though it depends on his priorities: along with the body beautiful he’d have to take the mug ugly. They are not attractive, these guys, as a rule.”

  Charlie was beginning to get restive I could see.

  “I got to get back,” he said, drinking the last of his wine.

  “Won’t young Anatomy Lesson hold the fort for you?”

>   “Yeah, but I’ll have to hand over part of my wages, and my wages are not high.”

  I signalled to the proprietor, who was in a huddle with his wife and dark-eyed daughter round the cash desk. The restaurant was now three-quarters empty, the lunch-hour all but over. Charlie had been expansive. I said to him as I settled up the bill:

  “Will you keep your ear to the ground? Pass on any whispers?”

  “What am I—stool pigeon or Baker Street irregular? I suppose if I do hear anything, you know my lunch-hour. But I doubt if I will. They don’t talk much, those boys.”

  “This thing could just be the something that loosens their tongues,” I said. “I suspect there are a hell of a lot of frightened individuals. Who might they talk to, if not to other people in the gym?”

  Charlie spread his hands out again.

  “Wives, loved ones, families? Their agent, if they’ve got one. Have you got a list of the people who posed for Bodies?”

  Joplin drew from his pocket the much-fingered red notebook of Bob Cordle.

  “Cordle’s list, with Christian names and telephone numbers.”

  “You could do worse than ring around and see if any of them have taken unexpected trips out of the capital. Or if any of them sound shifty—you must be used to judging that. I suspect the first instinct of many of them will be to get the hell out of London, or to lie very low indeed. If, of course, they have anything to hide.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “You’ve been a great help. Tell me, is it true you’ve had a soft spot for the police since they took in your dad, or was that just irony?”

  “What’s irony? Some kind of vitamin supplement? OK, OK, I know what irony is. He was my stepfather, actually. My real dad’s identity is a mystery on a par with the Mary Celeste. He—the stepfather—used to knock my mother around something horrible. I started weight training so as to be able to take him on, and I was just about to do it when you took him for a case of robbery with violence. That’s when I decided, against all the evidence, that the police had their uses.”