Wag the Dog

by Larry Beinhart

  “Yes,” Taylor said.

  “Hmm. You might consider . . . video.” He changed topics without changing inflection. “There was a knapsack with documents?”

  Taylor, prepared, offered the papers to Bunker. Bunker ignored the outstretched hand. However, Sheehan, sitting beside Bunker, took them. “Can you tell from the material what John Lincoln Beagle is working on?”

  “No. I couldn’t,” Taylor said.

  Sheehan scanned the material as if he could find something there that Taylor hadn’t. Bunker didn’t speak until Sheehan finished reading and shook his head.

  “There’s more,” Taylor said. He had another stack of papers, over four hundred pages. “Everything that was in Brody’s computer.” Once again Bunker acted like he had no need to touch material objects and Sheehan took the pages.

  “Have you decided the nature of the project?” Bunker asked.

  “No, sir,” Taylor said. “But I haven’t had a chance to read all of that yet.”

  “Hmm.”

  Sheehan had taken a speed-reading course. It had brought a significant boost in his paperwork productivity. Taylor hadn’t weeded the product. Nor should he have. Something significant might appear disguised as a short story, in a love letter, or hidden inside a game.

  Taylor said, “Not knowing what the job is about makes the job difficult, sir.”

  Sheehan, reading one of Teddy’s personal letters, gave a grimace of distaste. “Faggot,” he said aloud.

  “Umm,” Bunker said, in his legendary baritone, to Taylor, or Sheehan, or to his own musing thoughts. It was too bad that John Huston had died before Carter Hamilton Bunker. No one else could ever play the old man with the right combination of assurance, roguery, guile, self-satisfied cunning, and authority. Maybe Nicholson, when he got older, if he got old and lean instead of old and fat, which seemed unlikely.

  Bunker had promised to be there by three-thirty. Hartman wanted to establish who was who—even beyond having made the old man fly two thousand miles—and to express displeasure. He felt thirty minutes of waiting would be about right.

  Hartman had a thirty-minute practice session with Sakuro Juzo scheduled for three o’clock in the exercise room attached to the office. This suited Hartman very nicely. He could have Sakuro stay and stand guard over the inner office, where he would be facing Bunker and his team while they waited, giving them that unblinking way-of-the warrior stare the whole time. The stare expressed great ki102and many strong fighters withered simply by looking upon it.

  When the group from U. Sec. arrived, Sakuro was in place, looking deadly and inscrutable. Frank Sheehan approached Fiona, David Hartman’s secretary. Fiona, who claimed to have been raised in the same crowd of Sloan Rangers103as Fergie and Di, and had the accent to prove it, which made her one of the highest-paid secretarial twits on the West Coast, said, “Please take a seat. Mr. Hartman will be with you shortly.”

  “How shortly,” Frank said.

  “I rilly cahn’t say,” Fiona said.

  “My dear gal,” C. H. Bunker said, “would you be so kind as to inform me if there is a fire in the hearth?”

  “In the main hall? Do you mean?”

  “Yes, in the main hall.”

  “Of course there is. There is always a fire in the main hall.”

  “Then tell the estimable Mr. Hartman that I shall await him there. At his . . . um . . . leisure.” Creaking and wheezing, he shuffled out.

  It was a very satisfying room, a spiritual cousin of his own library. Obviously, it was vastly larger and semipublic, nonetheless it had the same we-own-the-world-and-we’re-quite-comfortable-about-it attitude. After all, the original had been built for Harvard men in the plutocratic twenties.

  Sheehan knew that C. H. liked to sit close to the fire. He pulled one of the high-backed leather chairs close enough that the old man would feel the warmth. Bunker sat down with pleasure and Sheehan gave him a cigar and a leatherbound copy of Bleak House. Bunker seemed to carry nothing, Sheehan had brought both in his briefcase. A steward, at the sight of the cigar, rushed over to inform C. H. that he was in California, a no-smoking zone. But there was something so—so like God as played by John Huston about him that instead the steward took a book of matches from his jacket pocket, struck one, and held it to the tip of the Havana.

  “Just a little soda, please,” Bunker said. “Thank you.”

  Upstairs, Hartman knew what he thought about the situation but wasn’t sure what he felt. Initially, his reaction was that this was a fuckup. On the other hand—and this feeling crept up on him during the hours that passed while he waited for Bunker to arrive—there was something very potent in what had happened. A man had been killed to keep his—David Hartman’s—secrets. This was power. Even if it had been a bit unnecessary, still, nothing else that he had ever done or been involved with had the sheer absoluteness of this. It was almost intoxicating. No—intoxication implied disorientation, befuddlement, loss of acuity. On the contrary, when he had practiced kendo with his sensei, he had experienced clarity and centeredness. He had truly felt his ki for the first time. There had been other times when he thought he had felt it, but in retrospect, now that he’d felt it for real, the other times had been wishful thinking. It was the feeling of having been raised higher on the mountain, where few go.

  This event opened a door for him and through that door he had a glimpse of what he was becoming: maker of war, shaper of human destinies. The paths to power wend through strange forests—his the Hollywood scrub of deals, ancillary right and 10 percent off the top—before they emerge past the tree line in the jagged peaks above the clouds where the air is thin and pure, where only the strongest arrive, and when they do, they can see across the world. A mythic feeling. Say it in a whisper: they who make the ascension, literally have the power of the gods.

  The peculiar result of this panoramic exaltation was that he no longer knew what he wanted from the meeting. That was really strange. Hartman always knew what he wanted. That was one of the keys to his success. Oh, someone’s head was going to roll, just so it was understood that he made heads roll. But what did he want? The assurance that no mistake would ever happen again? Or, having tasted blood . . .?

  Bunker, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted to find out what this project was about. Gates, over at the NSC, hadn’t given him a clue. He’d just given this peculiar person—this Hollywood agent—carte blanche. Bunker would, he was certain, win in the end. He almost always did. In the meantime, he loved the infinite detail and endless narrative pace of Charles Dickens. Reading Dickens made Bunker feel like he had all the time in the world. Which he did not.

  Frank Sheehan knew what he wanted. He was pretty sure someone was going to get the ax. His goal was damage control—limit the damage to one person and make sure that the one person was not himself. He didn’t think that would be too difficult to do. He had the steward bring him a martini with an olive. He examined the papers that had been printed from Teddy Brody’s computer. Mel would get points for getting hold of it right away, and printing it out so expeditiously, but not enough to get him off the hot seat. Happily for Sheehan, who knew that someone had to sit there.

  Taylor knew what he wanted. He wanted to save his job. Once again it came back to Joe Broz. If he could show that Broz was a danger—difficult for Taylor to do because Taylor didn’t know this damn secret—then any measure, however extreme, as killing Teddy Brody was extreme, was justified. If Broz was assumed to be an innocent party, then Taylor had made an expensive mistake. It wasn’t a moral question—hey, it wasn’t nice that the kid was dead, but people die in the course of things: war, traffic, playing cops and robbers, having sex, and overeating too—but one of efficiency and of costs. Covering up a killing was expensive. Though oddly enough, if you thought about it, consummations almost never had blowbacks. It was the diddly-squat that led to blowbacks, from Watergate to Iran-contra: break-ins, money transfers, cash receipts, lying under oath, keeping memos of thi
ngs that should never have been written anywhere, people taping their own confidential conversations and forgetting that they’d done so.

  Taylor sat, Taylor sweated, Taylor plotted.

  Sheehan came across several letters that made reference to what Brody thought John Lincoln Beagle was up to. He handed them to C. H. Bunker, who reacted as if they were an intrusion, but who took them and perused them nonetheless.

  Done, the old man tossed them at the fire. The draught blew them back toward the room. Taylor picked them up. He read them. They just talked about making films and miniseries. It didn’t make sense that he’d been told to stop someone, at all costs, on the off chance that they were going to reveal this chatter about movies.

  Fiona Alice Victoria Richmond, once of Knightsbridge, before Daddy lost it all and Mummy disgraced herself, knew, from birth, that keeping people waiting had nothing to do with how long business took, but with rank and position and attitude. So she let Hartman know how Bunker had finessed the gesture.

  As a result, the steward told C. H. Bunker that “Mr. Hartman will see you now,” in fifteen minutes rather than the intended thirty. Bunker rose and handed the boy his cigar as if it were a fine tip, which, if half a ten-dollar cigar is worth five dollars, it was.104

  It is clear that both casual and organized illegal activity constantly goes on in a successful way. There are obviously practitioners of illegal acts who manage to go about their business quietly and regularly, who encounter the criminal-justice system little more than do straighter members of society.

  Anyone who lived in New York in the sixties was a witness to the drama of Serpico and the Knapp Commission. The point is not that corruption was exposed. The point is that it proved that the department was corrupt systemwide and had been so for at least several generations of police. They were involved in gambling, extortion, loan sharking, prostitution, narcotics, racketeering, murder. Thousands of people knew about it and participated in it without exposure.

  Although New York City embarked on an extensive and possibly successful reform, the vast majority of those officers who had been “on the pad” virtually all their police lives retired in their own time, as if nothing had happened, to enjoy both the fruits of their corruption and their pensions.

  It requires an act of willful blindness to imagine that it only happened in New York or that it only happens in big cities, never in small towns or at the state level, or nationally or internationally.

  Back to Universal Security.

  Can there be a business that acts as a surrogate for national-security agencies? The answer to that happens to be a documented yes. These may be owned—CIA proprietary companies—or financed or contracted.

  The next step is more difficult. Would such an agency engage in murder, to use the harshest term? It is documented that the CIA has engaged in systematic and extensive assassination, as in Vietnam. There, much of the killing was done by surrogates. However, the surrogates were, for the most part, political entities. U.S. government agencies as well as private American companies have run a variety of police, intelligence, and army “training” programs in South and Central America. There is an incredible correlation of these programs, what you might call a through line, with the practice of police torture and assassination and the emergence of “death squads” and “disappearances.” That too is reasonably well documented and has even been the subject of, or implicit in, several feature films (Missing, State of Siege, Under Fire, Salvador). We are not interested in left-wing America-bashing here. These may be necessary and useful steps in the protection of society. Liberals can wince and whimper all they want, but the Viet Cong have told us—they did not like Phoenix.

  Then there is the final step. Can there be a private security agency that, from time to time, kills people for commercial and/or political reasons? And which is competent—unlike, say, Ollie North—competent enough that we never, ever hear of them?

  Paranoid fantasy or simple, logical realism?

  101 William Safire, conservative pundit, onetime Nixon speechwriter, op-ed contributor, writes a column on language for the New York Times Magazine section. He is particularly fond of exploring the etymology of slang and new usages. In an article on euphemisms for murder he propounds, as matter of ontological reasoning, that the derivation of current slang strongly suggests a generation of more literate hit persons. “Intialize” and “crash” are computer references, “made redundant” is a Britishism, “deconstruction” is a term of literary criticism, and “consummation” “comes from Hamlet (III, 1): “To die: . . . ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d,” or, if not, at best expresses a certain literary pleasure in the playfulness of a sex-and-death pun.

  102 Japanese, synonymous with the Chinese word chi, as in t’ai chi, the inner strength or existence or power. Martial arts are designed to develop chi. “In this broadest sense chi means energy . . . the fundamental component of the universe, and also manifests itself within the bounds of the Earth. Mist, wind, and air contain much chi and so do human beings. Breath is chi . . . it is the vital force that keeps us alive. The Chinese believe that chi pulses through the body in a similar (but distinct) way as blood. . . . Acupuncture is [a] system for manipulating the flow of chi” Reid and Croucher, The Fighting Arts (Simon & Schuster, 1983). Originally published in GB as The Way of the Warrior.

  103 British slang. The reference is to the Sloan Square area of London—very expensive, very posh.

  104 Are there companies in America, whose business is generally noncriminal, tied to the government or not, that kill people and then go on about their business?

  Certain high-profile prosecutions—Boesky, Milken, Watergate, Iran-contra—tend to convince us that crime never pays, and that even the high and mighty are dragged down when they stray, that the system worlds.

  It is very important to the system that we believe in it.

  When movies were subject to censorship, which they were in a very formal way from 1934 to 1968, by the Hays Office, one of the strictest rules—as strictly enforced as not letting ten-year-olds view close-ups of oral copulation—was that crime must not profit. If someone committed a crime on-screen, they had to be punished. Later, when TV came around, network codes of standards and practices had much the same requirement. For dramatic reasons we are always seeing stories about independent-minded cops who defy all institutional resistance to bring down the biggest of corrupt bigwigs.

  However, for as long as criminology has been a field of study, it has always been haunted by the theory of “the competent criminal.” For obvious reasons criminologists (and psychologists and sociologists, etc.) only study failed criminals—that is, those persons whose criminal acts led to their conviction and to punishment. If there is a group of people out there who commit crimes and are not caught and live happily ever after, then criminology is not a study of criminals but of incompetents, bumblers, fuckups, and, should instead be called fuckupology.

  In a sense the very definition of “criminal,” at least in America—“innocent until proven guilty”—says that a criminal is a person who commits an illegal act in such a bumbling or unlucky way that even a prosecution system as cumbersome and full of restrictions as ours can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

  Chapter

  FORTY-FOUR

  WHEN I GET back to the house, all I want to do is get those discs on the computer and read them. Steve is unhappy to be on guard duty. His son is elated to be holding a gun. I send them to the kitchen, for Mrs. Mulligan to get them something to eat. Maggie wants to talk. Fucking microphones. She doesn’t want to hear country music either. Or Bartok or Bach or Dylan or Guns n’ Roses or Miles Davis. She wants to talk about her feelings. I want to load the computer and find out what the hell we’ve got. Find out, maybe, at last, what’s going on.

  Maggie is not used to people getting killed.

  We go into her office.

  I put in the disc marked 1. It is a backup system called Smart Set. There are twenty-six
discs. I start loading them. She wants to talk.

  I stand up. I hold her. “Don’t worry, baby,” I say. “I’m going to protect you. I’m going to take care of you.” You know, the usual shit a guy is supposed to say when a weak woman is shaking and weeping in his arms. But I have to get back to these discs. They killed the boy for what’s on there. Now I’m going to know what it is. When I know it, then I’ve done what I set out to do. With that—I hope—we’ve got Hartman and Beagle and we can control the game.

  It takes about fifteen minutes to get them all loaded in. There is an extra disc. When I put it in, I get a message on the screen that it is not an Apple disc. I figure it is a DOS disc. So I open up the translation program. But even with that up and running the computer doesn’t recognize the disc. I put it aside. Though naturally I am certain that it is the disc that contains the magic bit of information, the clue, the truth, the thing that everybody is chasing. Maggie tells me later that Hitchcock would have called it the MacGuffin.

  In the meantime, until I can figure it out, I look at what we do have.

  I pull a chair over so Maggie can sit beside me. That way I can hold her hand and be with her.

  “What are we doing, Joe?”

  Brody had some games—which don’t interest me. A series of computer programs that do computer things—speed up, manage, protect. He’s got Prodigy and CompuServe. His phone book and date book are—as I suspected—in there. He’s got check-balancing and tax-preparation programs. Then there are documents: film treatments, short stories, several screenplays, letters. It’s going to take days to read.

  “What about that boy? Shouldn’t we be doing something? Going to the police?”

  I decide that the best bet is the letters.

  “Be patient. Stick with me, baby. I’m going to find our way out of this.” I punch up letter after letter. I am not a fast reader. I try to scan, find key words, sure enough, eventually “secret” with three exclamation points pops out at me.