Wag the Dog Read online

  The minute he heard she’d been there, Taylor asked for the tapes of Magdalena Lazlo’s visit to U. Sec. He watched her walk down the hall—odd, jerky black and white moves—shot skip-frame to save tape; this was a document, not art. Stop tape. Roll back. Start over. He was holding off seeing her destination.

  It was the way he waited after dinner for his cigar. Teasing it. Finding this reason or that—positioning the ashtray; picking exactly the right one, not too dry; deciding whether to use a match or a lighter; pouring out the cup of decaf; watching his wife’s lips tighten in silent reproof—to delay the moment just a little longer.

  He frequented a Vietnamese mother-daughter massage team. Or so they claimed to be. He’d never asked for IDs and never ran a background check. That was what they said and they never spoke or acted as if they were anything else. He visited them once a week. Tuesdays, 5:30 to 7:00. They gave him a massage and hand job. Once they began, after he was out of his clothes and on the table and had a sip of brandy, about 5:38, it was their job to erect him and keep him that way—more or less—until his ejaculation one hour later. The ultimate exercise, he was proud to tell himself, in delayed gratification.

  Let her get closer. Stop. Rewind. Start over.

  Delayed gratification, Taylor felt, was the essential precept of civilization in the group or in the individual. It was—obviously—what had made the European races superior. The current decline of America and the rise of Japan was due, obviously, to forgetting that simple and essential lesson. Don’t eat your dessert until you deserve it. Don’t spend your money until you’ve earned it. Don’t take your pleasure until you’re stronger than pleasure and can prove it.

  Even closer. Stop. Rewind. Start over.

  Closer. Stop. No. Not in time. He’d gone one frame too far. She was turning into the cubicle of Joe Broz. Just like Taylor knew she would. He’d been holding his breath. Now he released it, feeling a bone-deep pleasure.

  The visual time code appeared on the lower left-hand corner of each frame. The reference was to the time of recording, not to lapsed tape time. Taylor went to the audiotape. Audio recording of U. Sec. employees was intermittent, not constant. Studies demonstrate that the threat that employees might be taped at any given moment controls behavior virtually as well as constant monitoring, yet is significantly more cost-effective.

  Except that in circumstances like this, you just might get caught with your pants down.

  Audio recording was monaural. The second track was used for a time code that, like the video, referenced the time of recording. It made search and identification infinitely quicker. Taylor entered the time displayed on the video image into the audiotape machine.

  Then he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He counted slowly backward. This was a technique he employed in his weekly sexual practice. He’d found it had great effect in quieting excitement. Sometimes he could get so deeply into it that the mother-daughter team had to use their every resource to keep him up.

  He opened his eyes. The time code said “14:28.16”—the system utilized a twenty-four-hour clock. The flashing red light said “ready.” He pushed the PLAY button on the audio machine with one hand. With the other hand he hit the PAUSE button on the video machine to release the videotape and create some semblance of synchronicity.

  He watched Magdalena Lazlo perch on the corner of Joe Broz’s desk. Like she was playing a scene from some old Marlene Dietrich film—or was that the impression he got because the video was a grainy black and white? Broz’s mouth was practically hanging open, and he looked, in Taylor’s opinion, about as bright as a backwoods Croatian bovine.

  “Hey, Joe,” Magdalena said. “You got two bits?”

  “Yeah.” Broz said. What repartee, Taylor thought.

  “Then why don’t you take me out and buy me a cup of Java?”

  “Maggie, there isn’t much that you could ask me that I wouldn’t do.”

  That was it? That was it? And they went off—where? And did what? And said what? Was there surveillance on her? A round-the-clock watch? He reached for the file with that feeling in the pit of his stomach that he hated. He opened the file. Of course, there wasn’t. Of course, he knew it. He had made himself the security officer on this case.

  Oh, they had discussed it in conference and the consensus was that this wasn’t the time for full surveillance, that it would be counterproductive because Lazlo was known to be egocentric and very reactive. But if they had missed something important and the operation went wrong, he could certainly forget about a promotion to Chicago. He might very well find himself back in Newark in charge of supermarket security personnel.

  Still, all was not doom and gloom.

  If it turned out that Magdalena Lazlo was still making waves over this John Lincoln Beagle thing and she had just involved Joe Broz in it, it meant that this time Joe was in it really deep. And Mel Taylor had been waiting for that far longer than for some little wait to take a hit of nicotine or to ejaculate. Mel Taylor had been waiting for Joe Broz to step in shit again for twenty years.

  Chapter

  FOUR

  THE “DON’T LOOK” story is one of the primal stories. God let Lot leave Sodom. God said, “Don’t look back.” Lot’s wife looked back and was turned to a pillar of salt. Orpheus went to hell to bring his wife back from the dead. Hades, god of the underworld said, “Don’t look back until you’re out.” Orpheus looked and he lost her. Pandora, the first woman on earth, had a box. She was warned to keep it closed, but she opened it and all the troubles of mankind came out. When a story is that pervasive and that basic, there is a reason. Every culture, in its collective wisdom, has a knowing that there are things that are not meant to be looked at. They appear, in the stories, as magic things or mythological things. But we all know that these stories are parables, teachings by example, which we hear in childhood, or at least in a childlike state of mind—learn at our mother’s knee, so that we can take them as general rules to carry with us, to guide us through our lives, so that we may survive.

  James Addison Baker III, secretary of state, was Texas-born and Princeton-educated. He knew his Bible and he was familiar with the classic pagan myths. A part of him responded to the atavistic warnings.

  But Baker was a Rational Man in a rational mode. To the extent that he acknowledged the supernatural, the paranormal, the mythological, in public or in private—exclusive of Christianity, of course—it was derisively. As in “Poor Lee, the drugs took him over the edge,” or “Hey, a brain tumor—you understand. He gives me this envelope like it’s Pandora’s box and says, ‘Don’t look!’ ”

  So of course he opened it upon stepping out of the sickroom door. This, at least, was efficient use of time. He still didn’t have his cellular phone, a state paper to read, an aide by his side to consult with or give orders to. The walk to the elevators and the ride down was the perfect 420 seconds in which to fit in Lee Atwater’s last memo, a dying man’s attempt to influence events from beyond the grave.

  He read, at first, in silence.

  James Baker was, and had been for a long, long time, a public man and automatically maintained a severe censorship over the most casual public utterances. It has been said that “Baker is incapable of expressing passion.” That “when you sit across from Baker, it is like looking at a length of black silk . . . stillness . . . occasionally . . . a rather wintry smile. He controls the conversation with perfect sentences, perfect paragraphs, perfect pages.”6

  He pushed the elevator button while still reading. When the elevator arrived and the doors hissed open, he stepped inside without looking up. He was aware that he was not alone. A green-gowned orderly and a patient on a rolling bed were there, as well as whatever surveillance and security systems were operating. And still he said, “Jesus fucking Christ.” It was sotto voce, but definitely audible. “Atwater’s fucking in-fucking-sane,” he said.

  Then he said, but not aloud, This is one piece of paper that must never, ever see the light of day. This m
ust be destroyed. He was right. All the walls that separated reasonable conduct from freedom to think, meaningful conduct from irrelevant actions, dangerous speaking versus necessary speculation, private versus public, had been breached. The military, for example, spent a lot of time producing “what if” scenarios. What do we do if “there is a Russian counter-counterrevolution and they launch missiles at Moldova, Ukraine, and Berlin”? If “there is violent civil unrest in the United States”? If “China goes to war with Japan”? Anyone with a grain of sense would consider that to be sensible speculation so that when the unthinkable does happen there is some sort of plan. But no! When one of those papers was leaked by some asshole liberal do-goodie, the media reacted as if the president was personally planning to open concentration camps to detain everyone who hadn’t voted for Richard Nixon back in 1968. When a man in power told a dirty joke or stuck his dick in the box of some foxy Pandora or expressed his exasperation with some person or group in ethnic terms, that was material that could destroy a career, even an entire regime. Especially if the other side had a Lee Atwater who knew how to use it. This memo, or whatever it should be called, was pure madness. To admit that anyone in this administration had ever even had the thoughts that Atwater had written down would destroy them all.

  Nevertheless, James Baker did not burn it, or tear it into tiny pieces and eat them, or head for the nearest shredder. He put the memo in his pocket. And kept it.

  6 Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman, The Fabulous Bush & Baker Boys, New York Times Magazine, 5/6/90.

  Chapter

  FIVE

  MAGGIE LIVES ON the beach. In Trancas, just up from Malibu. I live in Sherman Oaks. They’re both in America. That’s a joke.

  I got a visual for you. Me in my three rooms—bedroom, bathroom, and the room that’s everything else—packing. Two large suitcases. Because I’m moving to Maggie’s. I don’t know what exactly I’m in for, so I overpack. I hesitate over the guns. But for the same reason I pack my good suit and my swimming trunks, I take the Glock 17 with a shoulder holster, a Star 9-mm with an ankle holster and the little Beretta 92 that I can fit into a holster at the small of my back. All of them take 9-mm ammunition.

  I take my fiber-case kits. The company recommends that we bring them on assignment whenever possible. There are three standard kits. The DS—defense system—includes: the CMS-3, which detects RF bugs, carrier current, transmitters; the DL-1000, that’s a hand-held, take-anywhere bug detector, a hand-held weapons detector, telephone-line tracing set; and a telephone scrambler. Kit 2 contains more active systems, “for those times when it’s time to do it to them before they do it to you.” An EAR-200—you can listen through walls; a long-distance parabolic microphone; a vehicle-tracking device. Computer software to block access to your PC. A remote car starter—for the truly security-conscious; hey, there are people who need them, believe me. A Minox infrared camera with infrared flash; miniature microphones, transmitters, and recorders. The third kit has a stun gun, a stun baton, body armor briefcase inserts, and various mace systems.

  All this equipment impresses clients. That’s what the company marketing trainers tell us and in my experience it’s true. The kind of people who hire us are the kind of people who buy Mercedes and Porsches—they like the bells and whistles. Also, the equipment is a money-maker. Anything you use, you charge for. “You want me to check your phone lines, sir?” You take out a $3,000 CMS-3 and bill $150 an hour or part thereof for the use of it. They understand. You can also sell them the equipment. It’s like the Honda commercial—“the car that sells itself.” These are toys that people are longing for. Don’t you want to listen through walls? Hear what they’re saying when you leave the room? Know what your wife does when you’re not home? Do you know how macho it makes a guy feel to turn his briefcase, which is normally full of just paper and numbers, into a shield that will stop a .357 Magnum. That’s a $150 item. Field men like myself get a straight 10 percent on anything we sell.

  What I mean about it’s being a visual is how small and barren my place is. What’s there to look at? I do have one kind of interesting painting on the wall. It’s an original, oil, representational. It’s a woman holding a baby, standing in a California vineyard. When I came home from Nam, I brought back this kid’s stuff. The military has channels and facilities for that—of course they do. But this kid, Kenny Horvath, he was kind of a friend of mine—he died the day before my time was up. I brought his things home. His mother gave me the painting. Kenny painted it. The woman in the picture, she had been his girl. The baby had been his too. But she’d already moved on to another man, even before Kenny died. So that’s the one spot of color in the room.

  There’s a black and white photo of a woman on my desk. Funny that I keep it. The Purple Hearts are in the drawer. Two of them. One of my dad’s, one of mine. Different wars, but the medals and jewelry boxes they come in have remained the same.

  It’s a lonely room. I know that. I can even hear that kind of music they’d run underneath, hear it in my head.

  Then there’s the contrast. Maybe you show the car ride in between, maybe not. I wouldn’t. I’d just cut right to it.

  Even make it a sun-shining day. Back inland, toward L.A., there’s smog, but out here the sea breeze blows it clear. Pacific breakers are rolling in. A couple of kids out on boards. Playing hooky, they’re young enough they should be in school. There’s an old man walking a young dog. He tosses a stick. The dog runs. The old man remembers young legs, exuberance, joy. He is grateful that there is someone to perform those things for him. There’s a Malibu princess with her perfect personal-trainer body jogging along the water.

  There is just one line of houses between the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach. All have fences or walls and a metal gate at the entrance with closed-circuit TV and electronic locks. The building just south of Maggie’s is a Tudor mansion. The house to the north is a hacienda. Maggie’s house is California modern. It has a circular drive. The front yard is filled with thousands of dollars’ worth of cactus and desert plants. The front door is oversized and it’s made of some exotic wood. The fixtures are brass and the brass is polished. She’s replaced her maid.

  The new one opens the door. She’s expecting me. This too says something about Maggie.

  “Good day, Mr. Broz,” she says. She’s an older woman. Fifties I would guess. Irish, with a brogue. This one is an illegal, I find out later. But she doesn’t worry much about it. The border patrol isn’t about to snatch her off the street and deport her, nor is she going to be asked for her green card on a routine traffic stop, and she knows it.

  “You can call me Joe,” I say, looking around.

  “We’ll have to see about that,” she says.

  “OK,” I say. “What’s your name?”

  “Mrs. Mulligan,” she says.

  “Is there a Mr. Mulligan?”

  “There was, but he’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need. He isn’t missed. Not by me at any rate. You better make up your mind if you’re coming inside or just gazing at the place.”

  “I’ll come in. Thank you,” I say.

  “Not at all. Have a seat in the living room. The missus will be right out. Do you want some refreshment? You can have a drink, though to my way of thinking it’s a bit early for it. Or you can have some fresh-squeezed orange juice. The missus is big on fresh-squeezed juices. Vegetables as well as fruits. Or you can have water from six different countries, with or without bubbles. In Ireland it falls from the sky and it’s free.”

  “The juice sounds fine,” I say.

  “It’s a lot of work, but it’s my job,” she sighs. She leaves me there. I’m looking around. The living room is two stories high. Halfway up, around two and a half sides, is a railed walkway. There are several doors leading off to bedrooms. A stairway comes down one side. It is out from the wall and behind it the wall is made of stone or simulated stone with a waterfall. There are plants in the niches in the stone. Th
ere is a pool at the bottom, live fish in the pool.

  The fourth side, facing the beach, is mostly glass.

  Underneath the walkway there are other doors leading to still more rooms. A kitchen, a dining room, a screening room.

  There are two paintings on the walls. One is very French, made of dots of paint. The other looks like an old 3-D drawing combined with a painting. It looks like the picture of God and Adam from the Sistine Chapel, except Adam is Elvis and God holds a Coke bottle. I look closer and see that there is a pair of old-fashioned cardboard 3-D glasses available to view it in its full splendor. It’s an original by James Trivers.

  I feel like I’ve seen all of it, except the painting, before. Nothing mystical or déjà vu, but more like it’s been used as a location in a movie or on TV. Perhaps it was designed by a designer who also does sets, or by an architect inspired mostly by films about Hollywood.

  None of which is what I’m trying to understand by looking at the house.

  Then she comes in. Down from the upstairs room. Barefoot, jeans, cotton shirt. Easy, casual, perfect. The cotton shirt is a man’s-style shirt, but not a man’s shirt—it’s her shirt. Now I realize what it is I’m looking for—man signs. Is she living alone or not?

  This is supposed to be a professional relationship. But it’s not. What am I going to do when her lover shows up? If she comes back from a party with sleepover company? Or back from lunch for a matinee? Where am I going to put that?

  I’m a professional. I have been for a long time. But I stopped being a professional right at the beginning. On the beach. When I erased the tapes. Altered the record. Gave in to a client’s paranoia. Served her instead of the company. Made it worse by filing a false report. Why would I do that? Because she kissed me? Maybe it was even earlier, when she walked into my office, looking like a movie star—which is what she is—and delivering her lines like a scene from a film—which is what they were.