Wag the Dog Page 21

  If it went fast enough—find them, go to war, win the war, get them out, and get it over with—no one would have time to argue about it.

  It seemed to be the answer. Plant some POWs in Nam. Go in not with some half-assed Chuck Norris commando raid or Rambo one-man band, but with the whole of the United States Army, Air Force, Marines, and Navy. Not piecemeal. Not escalation. All together—bigger than D-Day, better than the Inchon landing—march straight into Hanoi, grab some Commies, try ’em for war crimes, shoot ’em, announce we won, and have a parade. It would work. Joy. Delirium. Days of triumph, crowns of glory.

  Why wasn’t Beagle happy with it? What was wrong with it?

  Katherine Przyszewski was thirty-eight years old. She was divorced and a single mother. Her daughter was sixteen, her son was ten. Outside of the film business, away from Hollywood, far away, somewhere off in reality like Erie, Pennsylvania, or Fort Smith, Arkansas, or Eau Claire, Wisconsin, she would have been considered a very attractive woman. She had real red hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. But between work and her children she didn’t have time to go to the health club daily. While her job at CinéMutt, as Beagle’s personal secretary, paid very well by her standards, her standards did not even imagine thrice-weekly sessions in her own home with her own personal trainer. She therefore had neither a washboard tummy nor buns of steel. She had had nothing surgically altered or implanted, therefore she had laugh lines around her eyes and her merely average-sized breasts, made only of flesh, sagged when she stood and flattened when she lay on her back.

  Beagle liked her. She was competent, very calm at the office, and had no aspirations to be an actress. Or producer or screenwriter or director or anything whatsoever in the movie end of the movie business. She didn’t think making coffee, making restaurant reservations, sending his clothes to the cleaners, getting his car inspected, or buying gifts for his wife, were vile, deviant, and degrading acts of sexism. In short, she helped make the life part of his life simpler. She, in turn, liked her job, liked her boss, and liked the pay.

  They had, from time to time, slept together. She didn’t know if she was disappointed that it had not blossomed into love and marriage, or for that matter, into a genuinely passionate affair. It may have been because her kids and just trying to live life, clean, neat, healthy and paid for, drained so much of her energy that she didn’t have a great appetite for sex and romance, or that may have simply been her nature. Actually, if either of them was bothered by it, it was probably Beagle. He believed that nice, sensible, fair, and caring people came in packages that looked like Kitty and that packaging like Jackie’s was almost invariably wrapped around a core self of narcissism, competitiveness, and obsessive self-involvement. He found it annoying and a little perverse that, once the moment of need was past and the pulse of lust satisfied, he just couldn’t care for Kitty, that he needed someone more—dammit—Hollywood. Sexier, jazzier, better-looking, someone—and this really was disturbing—like his wife.

  Kitty was getting on very well with her son. He seemed to take naturally to studying and school and had a bent for science that delighted his mother. He didn’t do drugs and seemed to have bought the whole “Just say no” package, including tobacco and alcohol, that they preached in class nowadays. Only God knew if any of these redeeming qualities would continue through adolescence.

  They certainly hadn’t in her daughter Agnes, a whining girl who, in spite of all that her mother tried to teach her, thought it was a Barbie Doll world, where Ken would come along and give her, give her, a pink Corvette, just for having a plastic perfect body and big hair and wearing white high-heel near-leather booties.

  Agnes cut school, went out with the sort of boys that make mothers sick with worry, smoked pot, and wanted to be an actress. Kitty fought it, but managed to live with it, telling herself that each thing was a phase, and that in a world that included AIDS, teen pregnancy, crack, and drive-by shootings, Agnes’s behavior was pretty mild.

  But then her daughter had come home with bigger breasts.

  At first Kitty thought she was imagining it. Then she thought perhaps Agnes had had a growth spurt. Then she had a sickening fear that her daughter was pregnant. She tried to talk to Agnes about it. Agnes did what teenagers know how to do—she denied and denied and denied.

  Kitty walked in on her daughter in the shower. Kitty swore it was an accident. She even possibly believed it. She saw the stitches, the ever-so-discreet incision, where Agnes had received a breast implant.

  A mother-daughter battle royal ensued.

  Agnes revealed that she had it done to further her career as an actress. Her breast size, she was certain, was all that stood between her and a series of major roles in film and television. She rattled off a list of names of actresses who’d had surgery and what parts had been changed.

  She refused to tell her mother how she had paid for the surgery and this scared Kitty most of all. Where did a sixteen-year-old girl find the money to pay for breasts? Didn’t they cost somewhere from a thousand to three thousand each. What insane doctor had done that to a child, without parental consent?

  This was the most frightened Kitty had ever been as a mother. Her daughter had spiraled out of her control and she couldn’t figure out how to bring her back. Beat her? Threaten to keep her locked in the house? Threaten to throw her out? All of those would just push Agnes to go and do more of whatever it was she had done to pay for the operation.

  Where did parental control come from? Once it might have come from a culture that demanded that the child respect the parents. Television or rock ’n’ roll or Dr. Spock or something had trashed that one. Now all that was left was force and dependence. How could she make Agnes dependent? The only thing she could think of was by becoming the girl’s best avenue to an acting career.

  And that was something she was in a position to do. The perfect position. Kitty was, after all, the personal secretary of one of the most successful and powerful directors in the business. More than that, she’d felt his lips on hers, pressed her naked flesh against his, been entered into. She had a right to ask. He would have to help her. Have to, to save her child.

  On another level she was quite certain that John would be really annoyed—he usually was—when one of the staff pushed an actor or a script or something like that on him for personal reasons. So she hesitated to approach him. Especially as he seemed so busy. So obsessed. She kept waiting for the right moment. Which never seemed to come. And the longer she was silent in her need, the angrier and more resentful she became.

  It was a little after eleven in the morning—Kitty glanced at the clock on her desk—when John Lincoln wandered out of his video room.

  He had it, but he didn’t have it. It was logical. It practically screamed out to be done. Go back to Vietnam and win this time. What was wrong? He wished he had someone to talk to about it. Actually, he’d come out of the video room just to see a human face on a human being and—something. “You ever watch war movies?” he said to Kitty.

  Kitty didn’t want to talk about war movies. She didn’t want to talk about anything that Beagle wanted to talk about. For once, just once, she wanted him to address her needs. She didn’t quite know how to mention that.

  She was such a regular person, Beagle thought. One of the most middle-American he knew. “What did you think of the war in Vietnam?” he asked.

  “John. Mr. Beagle . . .”

  He looked at her quizzically, full of inner puzzlement.

  All she could do was blurt it out: “I want you to put my daughter in your next movie.” It lurched out like an order, a command. The way a mother orders a daughter to clean her room, not the way a secretary speaks to her boss.

  “Huh?”

  “It doesn’t have to be a big part. Just a part.”

  “Kitty, uh . . . ”

  Her mouth trembled. She was afraid she was going to cry. Maybe if she’d said “I have a problem and I need your help,” he would have said, “Sure, let’s see what we can do
.” But she wasn’t used to asking favors and didn’t know how. Plus, she was ashamed that she couldn’t control her daughter and ashamed of what her daughter had done to her own body and she wanted to keep it private, a family secret. So what emerged was angry and demanding. “I want a part for my daughter in your next movie.”

  “Look, I don’t know what’s wrong with you—”

  “Are you going to do that for me or not?”

  “There are no parts in my next movie,” he said, which was the simple truth.

  “What a . . . ” She couldn’t bring herself to say the words formed behind her lips—“crock of shit”—but the spirit was present in the silence.

  “I didn’t even know your daughter was an actress.”

  “She is. And a very good one,” Kitty said, though she had no idea what made a good actress and expected, because she had a very low opinion of her daughter, that she was a terrible actress.

  “I thought you said she was going to be a dental technician.”

  “Well, she’s not. She’s an actress and I want you to give her a part.”

  “I’m not using actresses or actors,” he said. “Only real people.”

  “Well, well, then use her as a real person.”

  Beagle, stuck in the literalism of the moment, couldn’t think of anything else to say except, “No.”

  “You’re a . . . a . . . a thoughtless bastard. I hate you.”

  “What the fuck has come over you?”

  “Don’t talk to me about fucking. You fucked me, you fucked me alright and I never, never asked a single thing from you until this minute, and you won’t give me the time of day. You’re a selfish shit. If you won’t give my daughter a role—a walk-on, an extra, give her a screen test, just a goddamn screen test . . .”

  “Uh . . .”

  “If you won’t, I quit.”

  “There’s no part to give her, you stupid woman,” Beagle said. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “Then I quit.”

  “So quit. Good-bye.” A bit stunned, aside from being angry at this assault from nowhere, all Beagle could think was that perhaps he was wrong about the difference between plainly packaged women and the dazzlers, that being ordinary didn’t improve a woman one bit. It was a dreary and depressing thought.

  Chapter

  TWENTY-SIX

  RAY MATUSOW COLLECTED the most recent set of tapes that were keeping track of the home life of Katherine Przyszewski and her small brood.

  Ray started at the office in the morning and spiraled outward through Los Angeles. The Przyszewskis were number four on his list of seven. Like Taylor and Sheehan, he did not yet know what the purpose of his work was, only the names of the people he was responsible for covering. Except for Joe and Maggie, they all worked directly for John Lincoln Beagle. Teddy Brody, day librarian. Luke Przyszewski, night librarian, no relation to Kitty, though Beagle had thought he must be because of his name, and hired him to please her. Beagle had thought the world of Kitty until this point of confusion. Carmine Cassella, projectionist. Seth Simeon, staff artist and designer. Maxwell Nurmberg and Morris Rosenblum, who were the electrical-engineer, computer whiz, tech-nerd, tinkering video mavens that had put together the ten-screen view system in Beagle’s studio.

  Somebody else, Ray didn’t know who, handled Beagle himself, including his offices, his home, his child, and his wife, Jacqueline Conroy. Perhaps there was even a third to track the rest of the people employed at CinéMutt, Beagle’s studio and research setup.

  When he’d collected them all, he went home. That was his routine. He spot-checked the tapes, logged them, and then copied them on a high-speed duping machine. Ray believed in redundancy. He’d had supervisors misplace material and clients ruin recordings and then turn to him and act like it was his fault. In the morning he’d bring the originals into the office, log them in there, then start again.

  He was upset to discover that the last tape from the Przyszewski set seemed to run out in the middle of a conversation. He knew approximately what their daily dose of talk was and he’d had enough machines and tape to record three times that much. He played them back and listened enough to discover that Kitty had quit her job and had been home all day. Plus, she’d spent a lot of time talking to her daughter. Kitty told Agnes that she was going to find a new job where she could be of real help to Agnes’s career, that her mother could help her, and would help her, more than anyone else in the world. There was no way that Ray could have anticipated those events. He would put in a couple more machines the next day. Meanwhile, he’d file a report that explained what had happened.

  In the morning, when Ray drove into the office with the tapes from the day before and his report, he didn’t notice that he was being followed. Just as he hadn’t noticed it all day the day before.

  Chapter

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The plot of all war movies is the same: the viewer survives.

  —Jay Hyams, War Movies

  The Return was Beagle’s name for the Vietnam scenario. It still didn’t sit right.

  Apocalypse Red was a battle plan to go in and knock out the remains of the USSR.

  It was, in his mind’s eye, incredibly cinematic. Real David Lean wide-screen stuff. Dr. Zhivago and Reds. The sweeping movement of massed armies across the flat, stark-white steppes. Tanks, rockets, the sky filled with combat aircraft, the firing of guns, vivid bursts of color on a palette of snow. If Coppola was Italian opera as cinema, this would be Russian opera. Grander, vaster, and infinitely more profound.

  It was also very problematical. However disorganized the Russians were, they still had nukes. Beagle’s wife and all their friends were incredibly concerned about ecology and nuclear proliferation. Beagle did not want to turn out to be Dr. Strangelove, a madman willing to bring on the first nuclear winter or set off the doomsday machine.

  He turned to the screens. Black on black.

  Maybe terrorists were the way to go. If the librarians had done their job, and they were pretty good, he could access material by subject matter. He began with news footage. Just tossing it up on whatever screen was open, viewing randomly, getting a sense. The terrorists were mostly Arabs. Beagle watched CBS graphics of the bombing of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie. Achille Lauro footage. A plane on the ground in Egypt, terrorists and hostages inside. Innocent bystanders dead at an airport.

  Movies: Counterattack by the Delta Force, by Navy Seals, by Commandos, by the FBI, by Chuck Norris, Interpol, Vietnam vets, by Bruce Willis, by bionic bimbos.64

  Teddy Brody, in the back room, wondered what the hell Linc was up to. It had been war movies, war movies, and war footage. Now this. Teddy had been making notes and charting the films. And he started reading about them. Of the fifty-odd books that he’d read, the one that most intrigued him was The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre, by Jeanine Basinger, because it had a formula for such films. Maybe, if he followed the formula, he could write a script. Maybe that script would be the one that Beagle was searching for. That was the whole point of this damn job. To find a way up and out.

  But now, terrorists?

  That could work with the Basinger formula. The combat film was always the story of a small squad of diverse people—reflecting the dictates of political correctness of the period—who manage to overcome their differences to work together to achieve a common—patriotic, obviously—objective.65Of course, that could work with a Commando team against the terrorists. That was obvious. He didn’t know why he’d even hesitated over it.

  Beagle wrote a note on a yellow pad: Scenario: “The president is kidnapped by terrorists.” 66

  This had a certain appeal. Beagle had learned not to let his imagination be incarcerated by cost or practicality. Still, it seemed to him that with this reality shit, getting the cooperation of a foreign country prepared to enter into a war with the United States, with the United States scripted to win, might be difficult. But having the president participate in, or fake, his own kidnapping would be
a piece of cake. How could he refuse? It was all being done for the benefit of his reelection.

  Then the waiting. The drama of not knowing. Whip the country into hysteria. Then the ransom demands. Do we bow to ransom? Do we stand on principle? Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute! The negotiations. Deliberately dragged out. While, secretly, the Delta Force (or Navy Seals, or Vegas Bimbos or even the FBI) is maneuvering to burst in on them and they rescue Bush in a perfectly timed and executed . . .

  What a thought! Have the terrorists execute Bush! Then Dan Quayle becomes president, declares War on Terrorism. Not like the War-on-Drugs war. But real war where we go in and obliterate entire cities. Search and destroy. If they want to hide in Libya, invade Libya. Syria. Anywhere they tried to hide!

  Obviously, the client was not going to go for that. Bush had to stay alive. But that’s what he needed—an incident that would kick the whole affair into higher gear. If the Delta Force rescued the president, then what? Then it became a police matter. Measured force. Investigations, waiting, arrests, and years later—long after Bush won or lost his reelection—a trial. Probably in Italy, where the terrorists would only get ten years anyway and then be traded to Libya after eighteen months for a boatload of oil and support for the lira. Or would the American public be outraged enough—that is to say, could the American public be whipped up to a sufficient frenzy—that they would be willing to go to war?

  What if they took Bush and Quayle? Delta Force rescues Bush, but the terrorists kill Quayle.

  That was a happening concept.

  Bush, in anger and grief, leads the nation—the nations, plural, of the West—in a Holy Crusade against terrorism. So that no wife need grieve like Madilyn? (Marilyn? he made a note to check). So that no child (he was sure Quayle had children) would be left fatherless, ever again. Image: orphan, little, fending for himself, looking for help. No. Try: little girl, curly hair, sweet face, crying herself to sleep at night—waiting for a Daddy who would never return. Nice, nice.