Wag the Dog Read online

  “Hi, Joe,” she says. “It makes me feel good that you’re here.”

  “Yeah. Beautiful house. Really nice.”

  “Thanks,” she says, looking me square in the eye.

  I look away. Things are not irrevocable. I can come to my senses, amend the report to say that after I arrived she asked me to look into all these other things. I can do that. Get back on track. “You’ll have to show me around,” I say. “Including the utility room and where the electrical is. That is, if you know.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “And go over the security system. I saw coming in, the CCTV. We’ll walk the perimeter together.”

  “The perimeter?”

  “Old habits,” I say. “Also, some clients like it when I talk that way. They like the idea that they’re getting security from a former Marine.”

  “I guess I like that too,” she says.

  “And is there anyone else”—I say this as casually as I can—I can’t believe this, my throat is dry—“living here. At present.”

  “Joe.” She says my name and pauses so I have to look at her and listen. “There’s no one.”

  “That’ll make it simpler,” I say.

  “Except Mrs. Mulligan,” she says. Of course, she’s right not to have included her when she first answered the question, because that’s not the question I was asking and she knows it.

  “And now we better find a place for you,” she says.

  “The traditional place for a chauffeur-bodyguard is an apartment over the garage. I bet this house has one.”

  “It does,” she says.

  “It looked like it.”

  “But I think you should stay in the house. There’s a bedroom upstairs.”

  “Where’s your room?”

  “Upstairs. Two doors down. Are you comfortable with that?”

  Two doors and a couple of yards between us. Was I comfortable with that? I was comfortable when she was out here on the beach with the rest of the rich people and I was in the Valley with the smog. Now that I know that there is a spare bedroom two doors down from hers where I’m welcome to park my bags and lay my head, there probably isn’t any place in the world far enough away for me to forget about it and sleep in peace. There’s only one place in the world that I’m going to be comfortable. “That’s fine,” I say.

  “Joe.” She comes close and puts a hand on my arm. “Whatever is going to be will be.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I say.

  “Is it?”

  “I got you both orange juice,” Mrs. Mulligan calls out. She sounds like something you would hear off a rocky coast on a foggy night.

  “Thank you, Mary,” Maggie says.

  The juice is a little cooler than room temperature. Sweet and full of flavors. It cuts through the dryness in my throat.

  “Thank you, Mary,” I say.

  “Have you decided yet where it is you’ll be sleeping?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll unpack your bags for you, but all things considered, I think you should carry them in from the car. You look like a strapping lad, although not so very tall.”

  I bring my suitcases into the house. Then the fiber cases. They’re locked and I tell Mary Mulligan to leave them alone. She’s unpacking my clothes, doing a very quick and neat job of it. “Will you look at these,” she says when she comes to the guns. “Are we on the beach in California or some back street in Belfast?”

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  “No,” she says, “from Roscommon in the middle of the country. It’s not as mean, but it’s often just as poor.”

  When we get downstairs, Maggie is on the telephone. She’s got her feet curled up beneath her on the sofa. I wait. When she’s done, I say, “I want to examine the perimeter.” I smile. She smiles back. Our first private joke.

  “I have to work,” she says. “That is to say I have to make phone calls and appear to be making idle chitchat while I desperately connive to keep up on who’s doing what film and who’s screwing whom out of what deal. Do you want me to share all the hot Hollywood gossip with you?”

  “That’s alright,” I say.

  “Mary can walk you around, or just make yourself free.”

  “Do you have anything scheduled today? Besides the phone calls.”

  “Dinner at Morton’s—Jesus, don’t you wish ‘in’ spots somehow equated with the quality of the food?”

  “I’ve never eaten at Morton’s,” I said. “Just so we both know who you’re talking to here, my idea of eating out is eating Mexican at a joint so cheap that even Mexicans can afford it.”

  “I’m sorry, Joe,” she says. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “—to remind me that you’re rich and I’m not. That you’re”—I look around at the twenty-two-foot-high living room with it’s unobstructed view of the ocean and its own indoor waterfall—“a movie star and I’m just a real person. That’s alright with me. I mostly know who I am. I don’t want you to forget.”

  “There are . . .” she giggles. It’s a girlish, fetching giggle. It’s entirely possible that everything about her is perfect. It is more likely that I am in that hormone-haze state of mind that puts the golden glow on my perceptions. Let me possess this woman for twenty years and I’m sure I’ll start to see her flaws and her warm and gushing laughter will begin to grate on my nerves. Bound to happen.

  “There are . . .?”

  “There are movies about exactly this situation. The rich woman and her chauffeur. If you want the movies to be your guide.”

  I am not on solid land here. Not by any means. I want to be. “Is that what you want? To play out a scene?”

  “You’re a serious guy, Joe. A real guy. That’s why I wanted you here. I better not forget it,” she says.

  “OK,” I say. Whatever all that meant.

  “I have to make these calls,” she says apologetically.

  “Just keep me informed of your schedule. I’ll work around you. That’s what I’m supposed to do. That’s what you hired me for.” And she had hired me. She’d signed a contract with the company for my services and received a set of price guidelines. That’s an implied contract in which the client is meant to understand that anything additional that we supply in equipment and manpower will be charged for and it is legal prior notification of the rates thereof. “Today I want to check the premises, work out whatever recommendations I’m going to make. This evening I’ll drive you to your dinner and home again. Unless you have requirements to the contrary. In the meantime, there’s a couple of hours in there where I’d like to grab some personal time. I run and do a couple of things to keep in shape. Though I know I don’t personally look it.”

  “You’re going to sit outside of Morton’s for two hours while we eat? Of course you are. Somehow . . . I didn’t . . . I’ve never had a personal chauffeur before. I’ve been chauffeured lots, of course. The studios are always sending limos. But the drivers, even when I’m polite and talk to them and find out their names and the names of their children and all those things I do to be charming and human, aren’t really . . . Of course, they’re people. But to me, they’re chauffeurs first, people second. This is confusing. To me you’re a person first.”

  “Thanks for saying that,” I say. I wonder at it—that’s the truth. I’ve worked with stars before. Stars are people that have their best-ever friends driving them around and polishing their automobiles and don’t think anything of having their best-ever friends sitting outside a restaurant for two or four or six hours doing nothing but vegetating. They figure their childhood best-ever friends ought to be grateful for any kind of job at all, let alone one that lets them hang out with the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, getting to gather the crumbs off the party cake. Don’t forget, the sun is a star, and the sun figures the planets exist for one purpose only, to move in circles around it.

  Mrs. Mulligan knows little more about the grounds than I do. She’s only been there a few days. There’s a wall a
ll the way around the house, including the beach side. The living room and the deck are both high enough that when you look out you look over the wall without even being aware of it.

  The front gate is an iron grille. The door to the beach is a reasonably solid wooden door. They are both hooked into the alarm system and the CCTV. They were, I automatically note, purchased from and are maintained by a different company from ours. There is no system that protects the wall itself. I could get over it in seconds. So could any other serious intruder. We have forms and checklists that guide us through this kind of survey. That information can be entered into a computer for analysis. This is really a sales tool and the analysis is adjusted to the client’s level of fear and ability to spend.

  The heaviest installations I’ve ever done were in Miami when I was on loan to that office for a six-month period in the mid-eighties. It was when it was all happening down there, drugs and guns and money, Marielitos and Colombians and Jamaicans, everyone watching Miami Vice and ready to go to war. We turned quite a few homes into electronically defended private fortresses with full system redundancies. Of course, those people had both the need and the will to kill.

  But the people in Maggie’s life—I got to figure their idea of killing someone is a back-stabbing phone call that murders their next picture deal. Sure, there are those among the rich and famous who get cranked up on their favorite recreational drugs and private brand of madness and hurt each other. But those people don’t come over the wall. They’re already inside the gate. This is not Miami and this is not Nam. I’m not going to be in a firefight here. Digging in with the mortars coming in over the wall. Calling in air support. The friendly fire comes in a lot fucking closer than it should.

  When I’m done with my inspection, I’m fairly grimy and sweaty anyway. I go up to my room and change into shorts and a T-shirt As I go out through the living room, Maggie is on the phone, preoccupied. She nods, barely, at me. I go out on the deck, down the exterior stairs, and out the back door, onto the beach.

  At home I’ve got to get in my car and drive to one of the parks or up on Mulholland or somewhere. Then drive home in my own sweat and if I get caught in traffic end up spending more time in the car than on my feet. It’s either that or run in the streets, breathing exhaust fumes. I run about six miles in the canyons, where it’s up and down. I figure to do eight to ten here, where it’s flat I can do more, and sometimes when I have to, I do.

  I look back. There’s Maggie. She’s out on the deck. She’s still on the phone, but she’s watching me.

  I run hard, trying to get her image away from my mind. She keeps walking in and out of my private screen and we play scenes together. Sometimes they’re about sex, sometimes about things more complicated than that. Eventually, eventually, I banish her and things go blank. Then the war comes, like it usually does when I run. That’s OK. Because it’s just pictures. No sound. No smells. You see, it’s not like a dream, which can terrify you, give you the cold sweats and wake you up screaming, screams in your ears, and your nostrils full of those peculiar odors of decimation. Burned bodies, the insides of bodies coming out of the sacks of their skin. No, it’s just a series of images. Just pictures. A game plan. Sometimes, when I get real deep into it, it turns into a kind of map, like a video game, where I can see the path that I need to take to come out alive. The path I did take. Around this mine, away from that booby trap, behind this tree, into that firefight. I try to show the way to others, but I can’t. Survival is a personal thing.

  By the time I get back, the sweat is flowing good and the pictures are gone. There’s just the beach and the houses of rich people all in a row. Maggie, standing on her deck, is watching me.

  When I get up there, she’s gone. Which makes me more comfortable. I do what I was going to do anyway—two hundred sit-ups, a hundred push-ups. I can do more. But to what purpose? I’m not even entirely sure why I settled on this routine. Why I choose to be fit. It’s not as if the Marines are going to call me back for another war.

  She’s there again when I’m done. She smiles at me.

  “I need a shower,” I say.

  The bathroom is as big as a kid’s bedroom. And this is the guest bath, not the master bath. I step into the shower and run it hot and full. The room steams up. The water pounds into my back. I wash. I wait for Maggie to open the door and enter through the mist. I wait in vain.

  I’m dry and dressed in time for Ray Matusow. He’s there to check the house for bugs. I could do it myself, but it’s more impressive and more expensive to have Ray come in. Plus, he’s better at it. One of the best in the business. I haven’t mentioned it to Maggie because if someone is listening—which is possible, but I don’t really expect so—why warn them? Some devices can be made passive and, if passive, possibly undetectable. There are essentially two methods of finding listening devices. One is an impedance test. Is there more resistance on a line than there should be? The other is a broadcast test. Make a noise; use a receiver or a set of receivers; at the same time sweep rapidly through all the appropriate frequencies and see if your noise is being transmitted.

  Ray is thorough. He checks all the phones. He pays special attention to all the places we normally would plant a listening post: the outlets, stereo, lamps, and any other electronics. He checks the cars. He spends four hours at it.

  “Clean,” he says.

  “Nice job. Thank you, Ray.” I say. One less thing for Maggie to worry about. And it means that if what I am so quickly becoming obsessed with comes to pass, we will have the privilege of doing it in privacy.

  She dresses for dinner. Does her hair and makeup.

  “Did you do all that to impress somebody?” I ask her.

  “All of them. We all watch each other.”

  “It’s working,” I say.

  “Thanks, Joe.”

  There are three cars in the garage. Her Porsche, the Seville, and my old Ford. We take the Porsche. Again, at Morton’s, she starts to apologize for my having to wait.

  “It’s the way things are,” I say.

  “You should be coming in with me,” she says, getting out of the car.

  When she’s out of earshot, I say, “Damn right.”

  She is subdued after dinner. We don’t say anything. She does smile at me. She turns on the radio. We get lucky. It’s Patsy Cline.

  Mary Mulligan does not appear to have waited up for us. That’s good. We feel alone in that big empty house. There’s even a moon over the water, a broken silver line, white foam.

  If I were writing this movie, I would be tall and thin and elegant. I would be Fred Astaire and I would take her in my arms and waltz her out on the deck and we would dance for each other and each other alone.

  But I’m short and I’m thick. Thick as a brick wall. She kisses me lightly on the lips. An “excuse me” kiss. An “I’m sorry” kiss. A “you’re sweet, but I’m not going to fuck you tonight” kiss. We all learned about that kiss very early. It’s not my favorite kiss. But I certainly do recognize it.

  She goes upstairs. I watch her go.

  Then I follow. For all my running and sit-ups and pushups, every one of my years weighs like the lead of an old man’s life around my ankles and the climb is an effort that leaves me short of breath. I undress, wondering what sort of fool I am.

  I can’t sleep. I try to review the events of the day in my mind. I go over it all. From the packing and the thoughts that drifted up from my groin and washed over my mind, to the drive over through the bad air of L.A., to the look of the house. The maid. The cars. The fresh-squeezed juice. The conversation, verbatim, with Maggie. The run. Ray, doing the sweep. Maggie Krebs, dressed for dinner, becomes Magdalena Lazlo, movie star. Ray, doing the sweep. There’s something about Ray doing the sweep. I don’t know what it is. I play it back again.

  Now it’s at least four in the morning. I’ve been tangled in my sheets and have kicked my covers off and tried to sleep in positions that I know won’t work, and the fact that Maggie is down
the hall pounds at my consciousness the way the waves work at the beach. So I say the hell with it. I open up fiber case kit 2 and take out my CMS-3. I’m going to go through the same drill Ray did and see if by re-creating it I can figure out what’s bothering me. And see if by occupying myself that way I can drive down the dreams of Maggie. I put on jeans and a T-shirt and go downstairs barefoot.

  I start with the phones. That’s the simplest.

  According to my CMS-3, there’s a tap on the phone.

  Chapter

  SIX

  THERE ARE TWO beds in the presidential quarters aboard Air Force One. When Barbara Bush isn’t traveling with her husband, the extra bunk belongs to Jim Baker.7

  “Bushie,”8Jim said, kicking off his shoes and leaning back against the pillows plumped up against the back of the bed, “I was back down in Houston other day . . .” They both liked to talk Texan. It was a macho bonding thing and significant in their synergy. “. . . and this old boy, he come up to me, and he says . . .” It was the start of a ribald story. They both liked ribald stories. But Lord, they had to be careful where they told them. If some hoot owl from the press ever overheard George Herbert Walker Bush say, “Question: Do you know why the good Lord gave women cunts? . . . Answer: So that men will talk to them,” before you know it every pussy-whipped liberal commentator would have his dick in a wringer howling about politically incorrect thinking, contempt for women, sexism, Sandra Day O’Connor, and whatnot.

  “You know what,” Bush said, “it’s the vision thing. Tell me the truth . . . you were . . . you know, with him and now you’re . . .” He meant, but did not say, “with me.” Baker understood. Bush did that a lot. Incomplete sentences. Half thoughts. Disconnected strands. Him was Ronald Reagan.

  Baker had started out in politics with George Bush. He managed Bush’s campaign when he ran against Ronald Reagan to become the Republican nominee back in 1980. Baker, sensing which way the wind would blow, and aiming at the vice presidential nomination for his boy, discouraged Bush from attacking his rival too energetically and then got him to withdraw sooner than he otherwise might have. The Reagan people were so impressed with Bush’s handler that they invited Baker to become Reagan’s chief of staff. He accepted. Just as Bush accepted the VP slot. In the Reagan White House, Baker had been a more powerful figure than Vice President Bush.