Wag the Dog Read online

Page 17


  Sheehan, who was very fair, blushed. Once the tape had played long enough that everyone was quite sure what was going on, Taylor turned it off so as not to appear to be dwelling on it. He skipped tape 4. “More of the same,” he said. He put in 5: “This was recorded in the kitchen. In the morning they sent away the housemaid, Mary Mulligan.” The three men listened to Mrs. Mulligan being given time off. “After that they continued to have . . . intimacies.” Taylor took out tapes 6 to 11 but did not play them. His gesture indicated what they were.

  Hartman took tape 6 and spot-checked. The erotic mixed with the domestic. But there was a great deal more sex than housekeeping. He then played random pieces of number 9. It was also very stimulating. Sheehan, who spent a great deal of time on the road, had become a devotee of 900 numbers. This compared quite favorably, and knowing that one of the participants was a real movie star truly enhanced the effect. Although the females that he heard on the far end of the telephones had succulent voices, he always suspected that the husky and lubricious sounds were produced by hags, women who really looked like Margaret Hamilton,48Roseanne Barr, or worse, his wife. He determined to get copies of the Magdalena Lazlo tapes for his personal record of the case.

  Hartman stopped the tape and gathered the collection to him. “Are these the only copies?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Taylor said, lying. He’d made copies for himself. So had Ray Matusow, though Taylor didn’t know that. Other technicians along the line may have done so too.

  “I’d hate to have tapes all over town of Magdalena Lazlo having sex. Make sure they’re the only copies,” Hartman said. He knew that there were other copies. Just like he knew that techs at the motion-picture laboratories made personal copies of the better breast and beaver footage that passed their way, especially if it was brand-name breast and beaver. It was unstoppable. He didn’t care very much, except that when tapes did show up, it would give him an edge with U. Sec. Hartman collected edges. He looked at the last cassette, as if he expected Joe’s face to be on the outside, like an album cover. “This Broz, this happen to him a lot?”

  “No.”

  “Women normally fall all over him?”

  “I don’t think so,” Taylor said. “It’s never been an issue. I wouldn’t have thought so.”

  “I want to give you an overview,” Frank Sheehan said. “Which is very positive. Our security around Lincoln Beagle is intact and unbroached.”

  “He’s your guy,” Hartman said, referring to Broz. “You have a file on him?” Taylor gave him Joe’s personnel file. Hartman opened it. “Interesting,” he said aloud. “Marine Corps. Four tours in Vietnam. Two Purple Hearts with oak leaf clusters. Recommended Silver Star . . . wonder why he didn’t get it? Got two Bronze Stars. Then he went back to Nam as a civilian . . .”

  “Can I see that?” Sheehan said. He reached across the conference table and snatched the papers. There were certain things in the file that outsiders shouldn’t see. Taylor, he thought, had really fucked up. He should have dumped Taylor the last time they’d met. Sheehan scanned the page quickly. No, Taylor had not screwed the pooch; the files had been sanitized. “Oh, well, I see,” Sheehan said, deeply relieved. He pointed at a name on the page. “Apparently, he worked for a construction company over there. That’s what this company, Oceania-Americana was, a construction company.” To cover his relief he went on. “Peut-être le mal jaune. That’s what the French called it. Yellow fever. The combination of Western currency and les femmes Indochinoises was very enticing. Or it could have been just that there was a lot more money to be made over there than over here, for a guy like him.”

  “Now, as I understand it, you chose not to tell this Joe Broz about Maggie’s house being wired,” Hartman said. “Looks like a good decision.”

  Taylor looked over at Sheehan. The client, unconsciously or not, had just signed off on the one decision Taylor had made that was not by the book.

  Hartman was reasonably content. He had been able to distract, divert, or discourage everyone else who’d made more than casual inquiries. What the tapes said to him was that now Magdalena had a new dick to keep her body and mind occupied. “Actresses,” he sighed. Now it was just the usual, simple, bullshit problems. “Every time there’s a new husband or boyfriend, they get a new hairdo, change their wardrobe, and start asking for different kinds of parts. They all think they’re John Derek.49Or worse, the new Jon Peters. Watch. You’ll see.”

  It would be very wrong to assume that because Mel Taylor’s sexual life had bathetic episodes that he was a clown. Quite to the contrary. Taylor was astute, and as an agent of his country, or of his company, he was as ruthless and as dangerous as they required him to be. “You’re not suggesting we end surveillance just because they hopped in the sack, are you?” Taylor asked. He was as convinced by the tapes as the others. The only difference was that they wanted to be convinced and he didn’t. He still had one hole card and he wanted a chance to play it. Nobody could fake that much fucking and sucking with that much detail. Not without going mad in the process. But, dammit, Taylor wanted to check.

  “It sounds like they’re both pretty distracted,” Hartman said. “But no, you might as well continue.”

  “Is there a question of costs here?” Sheehan asked.

  “No,” Hartman replied. “Do whatever you have to do to get the job done.” That was easy for him to say. He had already arranged to pay for it with Other People’s Money.

  Good. Taylor’s hole card was the maid. When he’d gotten rid of Maria—not easy, since she’d held a valid green card for six years—he’d had a quiet word with the agency and had them put in an illegal. Mrs. Mulligan didn’t work for U. Sec. But she would soon. If she wanted to stay in America. “What do we do if Ms. Lazlo starts asking questions again?” Taylor asked. “Or if Broz does that for her?”

  Hartman paused a moment. He wanted to be very clear about this. Finally, he said, “I would like you to remember that Magdalena Lazlo is a woman of great value. Aside from her attributes as a human being—sensitive, creative, endearing in many ways—she makes a lot of money for a lot of people. That’s worth preserving. So we are talking about a careful and graduated response. Mr. Broz, of course, is entirely your concern. Finally, there is a bottom line: What Mr. Beagle is engaged in is vastly more important than either of them. It is to remain secret and protected at any cost. I don’t see how I can be any more precise and explicit than that.”

  Taylor looked to Sheehan. Sheehan asked, “When you say ‘at any cost’ . . . that’s uh . . . not a financial reference.”

  “I’m sorry that you don’t seem to get it,” the client said.

  “If we’re speaking of . . . ” Sheehan was flustered. He’d been more or less told by C. H. Bunker to do whatever the client needed. Also, U. Sec. did do the sort of things that they would deny doing even under the penalty of perjury. But Sheehan, and Taylor too, tended to think of Hartman as a bit of a lightweight since he was in what they thought of as a frivolous business. “If we’re speaking of illegal or uh . . . coercive measures, I don’t quite know what to say, if your implication . . .”

  Which was exactly what Hartman meant to say. Because they were getting closer to the next step, and the level of risk would take a significant step upward. But he damn well didn’t want to go on record, not with these clowns, of saying anything that explicit. “There is a bottom line,” Hartman repeated himself word for word, but slower. He didn’t like to repeat himself. “What Mr. Beagle is engaged in is vastly more important. It is to remain secret and protected at any cost.” Then he added, “If you have problems with that, resign the account now. If you don’t understand it, talk to C. H. Bunker. If you need to know that you’re on the side of truth, justice, and the American way, you can call the man whom you worked for in 1979.”

  Taylor didn’t get it. But Sheehan sat up straighten He all but saluted. “Yes, sir.” he said.

  “Is there anything else?” the client asked.

  “No, si
r,” Sheehan said.

  Hartman took the tapes and Joe Broz’s file with him. Sheehan and Taylor both walked him to the elevator where, just before the doors closed, Hartman said to Sheehan: “By the way, he spoke very highly of you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Sheehan said. He waited, listening to the cables rustling in the shaft. When he was certain Hartman was several stories away, he said to Taylor, “Those weren’t really the only copies of the tapes, were they?”

  “I’ll make you a set,” Taylor said. “What was all that about 1979?”

  “In ’79 I was still with the Company,”50Sheehan said. “In ’79, George Bush was our director.”

  48 The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

  49 Derek, once an actor, has been involved with a succession of beautiful women whom he groomed or helped groom to motion picture stardom. They include Ursula Andress and, most recently, Bo Derek.

  50 The CIA.

  Chapter

  TWENTY-ONE

  SHE COMES UP close, close enough for me to take her in my arms. “I will,” she says, “if you want me to. But don’t, if you can’t handle touching me.”

  “I can handle it.”

  She looks—what?—regretful, and steps into my arms. She puts her head gently on my shoulder. We move to the music. “Be patient with me,” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “You think they bought it?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m certain. I can feel it.” And I can. Even if we have to remember constantly that we’re on mike, the feeling is different. I am no longer the deer who sees the tiger. A strategy of positioning evades Reality and confronts through Illusion. Now, when the tiger sees me, he sees one of his own kind. Oh, perhaps not another big cat, but at least a jackal.

  Maggie starts to giggle. The music is still playing. We whisper underneath. “What?”

  “Mrs. Mulligan will be back tomorrow.”

  “I know that.”

  “Remember what we have to do.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “It was your idea. When we sat out there on the beach after you punched out poor, dear Jack Cushing.”

  “Tell me something, were you really going to go to bed with him or were you doing that to provoke me?”

  “I think we better do it in separate rooms,” she says.

  “OK. Let’s go.” I head for the stairs. Maggie walks beside me. The music is still loud enough that we can talk. If we whisper.

  She grabs me on the stairs. “Joe, it was your idea. Stop tormenting yourself. You said to me that the main thing was to set yourself free to investigate Beagle and Hartman and figure out what was going on, and I asked you if you could handle pretending to be my lover and you said yes.”

  “I know it was. But I thought we’d just do a couple of uh-uh-uhs and ohs, and like that. You know, a few minutes long. I didn’t think we’d be doing these long, intense—I don’t know what to call them—scenarios. Kinky scenarios.”

  “I told you I refuse to sound like the sound track to a low-rent porn film.”

  “Nobody in the history of world sex has ever taken as long as you take to fake an orgasm. That’s the virtue of fucking fake orgasms, they come quick.”

  “If I am going to pretend to be your lover for the benefit of a bunch of eavesdropping sleazeballs, probably including David Hartman, I’m going to make them eat their hearts out. I want to make them cry for wishing they were you. All of them. Arrogant pricks, listening in on me. And,” she says, “they are loving scenarios. Not kinky ones.”

  “OK, OK, come on, let’s do it.”

  The reasoning is very clear. What is Mary Mulligan going to think, after being sent away so we can be alone, and with all the noise and to-do and all the shopping, if the sheets are clean? The sheets have got to be stained. Even if she isn’t working for them, the story will be all over the streets in hours. Maggie’s a star. And that’s what the maids and chauffeurs and plumbers and electricians and doctors do—gossip about the stars. Maybe the story will be that it’s because she’s gay and is trying to cover up, or maybe it will be that it’s a desperate ploy to make Jack Cushing jealous, or maybe it’ll have something to do with gerbils—whatever the alleged reason, the story will be that we’re faking it. It’ll get back to U. Sec., and David Hartman, quick enough.

  She goes into her room. I keep walking down the hall to mine. It’s what I learned to do, back in ’67, when it was a matter of life and death. I don’t mean to jerk off, I mean to take care of the details. Leave nothing showing that shouldn’t show. Make sure everything that should be there appears to be there. When you’re setting ambushes or walking into them, that’s what makes the difference. The VC and NVA regulars, they were masters at it, because they didn’t have the firepower, like I don’t have the firepower, all they had was their minds—imagination and attention to detail.

  Why am I embarrassed? This is not the first time in my life I have masturbated. When we were thirteen, fourteen, we had circle jerks. Competitions to see who could do it quickest, shoot the most distance. It shouldn’t bother me, it really shouldn’t. Maggie’s doing more or less the same down in her room. Though a woman’s stains are far less distinctive than a man’s, there are still the smells. It may sound like I’m out there, but damn, I remember they could smell us and we could smell them. I could smell day-old rice. I could smell their rolled tobacco and I could tell when they smoked reefer. I could smell their body odor and the difference between an American fart and a Vietnamese fart. I don’t know that Mary Mulligan is going to look at sheets or close her eyes when she throws them in the wash. I don’t know that she’s going to sniff at them, but maybe she’ll notice the absence of smell. That’s the way I think.

  Maggie and I are each going to do our own sheet and then we’re going to switch.

  It’s making me crazy. I’m in love with her. I want to be making love to her, fucking her, having intercourse, sexual congress, becoming intimate, however the hell you want to say it, it’s what I want. We’ve been touching each other and gazing at each other in public. We’ve been talking dirty for two, three days now, creating scenes that I would pay to listen to. I’ve been living here for weeks. There she is, down the hall. I hear her giggle, like she’s embarrassed too, then some other noises, like she’s touching herself and—enjoying it. I am as hard and urgent as I’m ever going to get I feel like a fool, a sap, to be using my fist, when she’s right down the hall.

  I push away the damn sheet, get off the bed, and head down the hall.

  I walk into Maggie’s bedroom, fully erect. Determined. I’m going to take her and she’s going to like it. How can she not be as caught up in the game, or almost as caught up, as I am? What’s wrong with her? Why’s she holding back?

  I get on the bed and pull her to me. She goes limp. I kiss her. The female-corpse act. “What do you want to do?” she whispers. “Fuck me once while I play dead and never see me again? Or do you want to exercise some self-control and take a chance that it’s going to happen for real. And you can fuck me a thousand times with me fucking back. What are you going to do, Joe?”

  “Fuck you, Maggie,” I say loud enough for all the microphones to hear.

  If I was twenty, I probably would have fucked her. And thought it was the right thing to do. As a man. As a marine. But I’m not twenty. And she’s the most woman I’ve ever met. Outside of Vietnam. There’s a thirty-three-inch TV in the wall that operates from a console by the bed. I turn it on. Loud. It’s one of the movie channels. John Wayne is a cowboy. I say, “Dammit Maggie, it’s embarrassing.”

  “No. It’s not,” she says. “It shows wisdom and self-control. It’s probably ‘the way of the warrior’ not to be ruled by your dick.”

  Chapter

  TWENTY-TWO

  SHERIE WITH THE STARS

  Our very dear Maggie has got herself a new beau. It’s been a long, long dry spell. Congrats, Mags! No smoothie this time. She’s got a real guy’s guy and I guess she likes it
that way. So would I. He’s Joe Broz, a high-class security consultant. A detective as they used to say in the old days and I’ll refrain from anything that could be construed as a pun. That’s the only one of this year’s New Year’s resolutions I’ve been able to keep. We hear he’s a decorated vet and the sort who will fight for his lady love. So boys, you better not hang around too close; we wouldn’t want anyone’s nose bent out of shape. This one’s for real. You heard it here first . . .

  TAYLOR WANTS TO make me wait. I look out the window. The smog is particularly thick. From the forty-third floor you can look down on it. It’s a very strange effect. There are a few office buildings that stick up above it. They look like computer-designed island modules sticking up out of a gray-brown sea. Planes fly above the muck, dive into it and disappear.

  I turn around. Mel’s secretary is gazing at me with stars in her eyes. Her name is Bambi Ann Sligo. She looks a bit like Maggie Thatcher, iron-helmet hair and too tough to fuck. Everybody calls her Mrs. Sligo. Even Mel. She’s in her late forties, but so is Cher. This is that other kind of late forties, that entered middle age at twenty-nine, headed straight for the Barbara Bush look, and made it by thirty-six.

  I smile at her.

  “Oh, Mr. Broz,” she sighs.

  I nod, what you call condescendingly. Like I’m a star and she’s one of the little people that make it all possible. So I say, “Hi, Bambi, how you doing today?”

  “Oh, Mr. Broz,” she says. Like I’m one of her favorite movie stars. “I told Mr. Taylor that you were here and he will be right with you. I promise.”

  “Thanks, Bambi.” Big smile.

  She blushes. I sit down and open up one of the trades. Not Police & Security News—Hollywood Reporter. Bambi Ann pretends to do things on her desk while she makes covert glances at me. Do I have charisma by association? Mrs. Sligo has seen me pretty regularly for about twelve years now. She has never once acted like I made a blip on her radar screen. Now she needs to know: what does a person look like whose penis has been inside a real movie star?