The Radio Red Killer. Richard A. Lupoff
you need your rights. I just want to find out how Robert Bjorner died, and why, and who was responsible for his death. And since you told me you weren’t sorry he was dead, I think you’ll be able to tell me some other things that might be helpful.”
Sun Mbolo laid two fingers against her cheek, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “How much do you know about KRED, Sergeant Plum?”
“Not much. I’ll confess, it isn’t my favorite station. You used to have a nice jazz show on Sundays but that seems to be gone now.”
“You do not know the history of this radio station?”
“Not the foggiest.”
“I could give you a brochure.” When Marvia nodded, she swung around in her chair and reached up to a wooden shelf and extracted a pamphlet. She held it across the desk to Marvia. “In brief, the station was founded in nineteen forty-seven by four Berkeley liberal intellectuals. They actually went on the air the following year. A couple of professors from the University of California, both were war veterans. World War Two was only over a couple of years. Another was a fledgling playwright. The fourth was a woman. A feminist activist.” Mbolo smiled faintly. “She was far ahead of her time.”
Marvia let her continue.
“The founders did not like what was happening to radio. There was no television on the air, that was yet to come. But they felt that there was too much commercialism, the music was vulgar, the educational potential of the great electronic medium was being wasted on greedy exploitation and—their term—fascistic authoritarianism.”
She waited for Marvia to comment. Marvia turned the brochure over in her gloved hands. “Very Berkeley. Who were these founders?”
Again a thin smile flittered across Mbolo’s so-thin face. “There are pictures in the brochure, but I can tell you their names, I have them committed to memory. Peter D’Alessandro, Ruth Rosemere, Isaac Eisenberg, and Jared Kingston. They used their last initials and petitioned the FCC for one of the first FM broadcast licenses on the Pacific Coast.”
Marvia found the page with photos of the four founders. Reorder them and you got Kingston, Rosemere, Eisenberg, D’Alessandro. KRED.
“But they did not want to glorify themselves,” Mbolo resumed. “The official motto of the station was Keep Radio Educational and Democratic. In fact, that is still our credo.”
Marvia looked up. “I thought it was Kay-Red. As in left-wing.”
“It was that as well.”
Mbolo was interrupted by a knock at the door. Marvia Plum swung around in her chair. Officer Gutierrez had his knuckle to the glass pane. Marvia signaled him to enter.
“We’ve got everybody’s statement, Sergeant, and the IDs are all kosher. They’re kind of restless. They want to get out of that room.”
“Okay, let ’em go.”
Gutierrez pulled the door shut behind him.
“You were saying, Ms. Mbolo—”
“No, you were saying you thought Kay-Red was a left-wing appellation. It was that too. I was not born at the time. Neither were you, I would think. But the old-timers—they say that when the Cold War broke out, the founders were shocked. They believed in the worldwide struggle against Fascism and imperialism, the United Nations, and so forth. They were appalled by the Berlin airlift, and outraged by the Korean War.”
Marvia wondered what to do with this. It was all history. It could hardly have any connection with the Bjorner murder—or could it? Sometimes if you let them talk they came around to the point and told you wonderful things. She decided to let Mbolo continue.
“For the next forty years, KRED opposed the Cold War. It supported the Guzman regime in Guatemala and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, denounced the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Vietnam War, US intervention in Nicaragua.”
“But nothing about the Hungarian Revolution, Prague Spring, Poland?” Marvia’s years in Germany flashed past. She hadn’t been a political soldier. She’d joined the military police, won corporal’s stripes, got pregnant, got married, got her discharge, had her baby and divorced her husband. In that order.
But she’d seen the Berlin Wall, she knew something about conditions in Europe toward the end of the Cold War.
“They clucked their tongues,” Mbolo said, “and regretted the necessity. But it was Western aggression that forced Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev to do the things they did.”
“And you were questioned by the Dirgue in Ethiopia?” Marvia prompted.
“My people were Falasha. Beta Esrael.”
“Jews?”
“Most of us are in Israel now, but my family—the Dirgue didn’t like us. We were coffee merchants. In Gonder. The local Party boss decided we were rich Jews, hiding gold in our house. We were arrested, my whole family. I was the only one who survived. I walked all the way from Gonder to Djibouti. I was able to get political asylum and come to America. I studied at the university and—It is strange, is it not? Here I am.”
“What about KRED?”
“I took the job because I love radio. I used to listen to it all the time in Gonder. I volunteered here, then I was hired, and now I am station manager. I had to hide how much I hated the Communists, is that not strange? But the Cold War is over now, and I am trying to return KRED to its roots. Three of the founders are dead. The last survivor—we like to have him back for a special observance once a year, but he is nearly ninety now, and probably will be unable to handle it much longer. But if they were alive I would want them to be proud of KRED.”
“And that’s why you didn’t like Bob Bjorner.”
For the first time, Sun Mbolo’s face showed anger. “He was the ultimate apologist. For the most vicious of crimes. For everything. For Stalin, for Ceausescu, even Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Yes, and Mengistu. He tried to justify the Dirgue. He knew I was from Ethiopia but he did not know I am Beta Esrael.”
Marvia said, “Do you have any idea who would want to kill him?”
Mbolo shook her head slowly, left and right. “There was disagreement here in the station. Those who wanted to keep the old political line. Keep fighting the Cold War—in the name of Fraternal Socialist solidarity. And those who wanted to return to the founders’ ideal. Keep Radio Educational and Democratic. Those others have no concept of democracy. They think democracy means agreeing with them. Bjorner was one of the worst. Sincere enough, I think, in his own way. But totally convinced that he was objectively and incontrovertibly correct. Ergo, anyone who disagreed with him was wrong. He made many people very angry with him here at KRED but I do not think any of them would kill him.”
“Someone killed him, Ms. Mbolo.”
“You are sure of that?”
Marvia ignored the question. “Where were you when he died?”
“When did he die?”
Marvia couldn’t help smiling. She’d been to a strip show in Weisbaden with a gang of her pals. They’d seen a pair of German comics doing classic American burlesque routines complete with baggy pants and heavy accents. Heinrich Schmidt und Otto Umlaut, whatever. “Meine nahm ist Muckin’ Futch,” one of the comedians would say, “Das ist meine nahm und dot’s vot I gedt, Too Muckin’ Futch.”
This cookie Sun Mbolo was that, too, Marvia decided. She was Too Muckin’ Futch.
After some more fencing Mbolo was able to account for her afternoon. Marvia would have to collect the statements the uniforms had got from everyone else in the station from the time of Bjorner’s arrival to the time of his death, and do a mix-and-match with them. She’d want a report from Edgar Bisonte’s office in Oakland, and the sooner the better.
And she’d want to check out Bjorner’s home and family