Wag the Dog

by Larry Beinhart

  “David?” Joe said.

  “I don’t really have any secrets. John Lincoln wants his privacy but—”

  “However you want it, David,” Broz said emphatically, “that’s how I’ll play it. Deal?”

  The agent came out from behind his desk. He had a file in his hand. He looked thoughtful, serious, friendly. “Here’s the file they gave me on you.” He said it to Joe but handed it to Maggie. Then he looked back at Broz.

  “Deal,” the agent said.

  Joe nodded. He put the gun back in the holster. He put his arm around Maggie and they backed out.

  The next morning Hartman flew to Tokyo. He had two days of meetings there. He continued eastward. He stopped in New Delhi. Several Indian film producers wanted to speak to him about representing them and their product in America. He continued eastward. To Baghdad.

  Chapter

  FORTY-SIX

  LINC WAS HAVING a better time of it than he expected.

  Jackie was being sweet. As if they weren’t married. And she helped him with Dylan. She didn’t play setup games, or maneuver for catastrophe. She seemed to understand, and more importantly, accept, that a man’s attention span and tolerance for genuine infantalism is more limited than a woman’s. In other words, she let him play with Dylan until he was bored or stressed, than she pitched in to relieve him.

  The second day Linc decided to cook. He tried to pick a couple of good recipes. Their country kitchen, just remodeled for $42,950, not counting the hanging copper pots and the hand-painted tiles around the fireplace, had an entire set of bookshelves just for cookbooks. Actually, there were 148 of them. At first glance, they were very exciting. A sort of pornographie gour-mandaise. Image after image piled upon each other, each with its special demands and slightly incomprehensible instructions. Then there was the certainty that Jackie would hate whatever he made. Not just hate it, find a way to use it against him. He began to itch. His scalp and then his thighs. Then the itch moved around. It was a symptom—he was certain—of SASS, short attention span syndrome, a condition he’d read about only last month that he was now certain had ruled his childhood and affected his adulthood. It was SASS—possibly electrical, maybe chemical, could be glandular, but not psychological in the Freudian or Jungian neurotic sense—that made it difficult for him to deal with recalcitrant physical objects, with teachers who had wanted to teach him stuff he already knew, teachers who had wanted to teach him stuff they thought they knew but didn’t, with organizing closet space, filing, writing down his expenses every day, dumb fucks who wanted to talk about football as if it mattered.

  He hastily put the cookbooks away.

  Most men have two to six things they know how to make105and, except during the chemically altered state of fresh courtship when they can read and execute recipes right out of the cookbook on the very first go-round, that’s what they fall back on. Beagle could mix mayo with curry and canned tuna, he could make omelets and French toast, he had recently figured out rice, he knew how to grill meats and, by extension, fish. Oh, yeah, he could make a salad with packaged dressing and pasta with packaged sauce. He added his own stuff to the sauce so it didn’t have that totally store-bought quality and was proud of it.

  He asked Jackie what she thought of grilled fish, rice, and a salad. There were so many things that Jackie could have said: “I told you last week I’m on a diet of no rice, how could you forget?” “I bet you forgot that your son is allergic to that awful buttermilk dressing you always buy.” “I told you we’re eating dinner with Francis and his wife tonight, you never pay any attention to anything I say, do you?” “I hope you don’t burn the food, the way you always do.” “Don’t let the fish man see how little you know about shopping or he’ll sell you the stuff that’s old and smelly.” But she didn’t say a single one of those things. Or anything like them.

  She responded as if he said something reasonable and that cooking dinner was a sensible thing to do. She didn’t correct him at all. “Can we shop together?” she said. “That’ll be fun.”

  Beagle agreed. So they got in their Saab Turbo—their country car—packed up the baby backpack and the stroller, put Dylan in the baby seat, and went off to market together. They bought fresh produce, fresh herbs and spices, mahimahi—which used to be called dolphin, but everyone got tired of explaining that it wasn’t porpoise and it sounded more exotic and expensive anyway—some local chardonnay, a bit flinty, but coming into its own, and if one was truly objective about it, superior to the French. Nobody fought. Dylan was cute as the dickens. A bit like Dennis the Menace, but when it’s your kid, and you like each other, if only for the afternoon, that makes it adorable. So what if he pulled some wine bottles off the shelf—they didn’t break. He grabbed a peach at the fruit stand and flung it—it only bruised, it didn’t splatter, and no one was hurt. Good arm. And he banged on the lobster tank. It didn’t break, and if the lobsters minded, they weren’t going to live long enough to write a letter to their congressman. When he got cranky, which he did, they gave him a bottle and put him in the backpack on Beagle’s back, where he fell asleep. And wasn’t that adorable. Jackie made Beagle stop in front of a mirror and look at his son, head flopped sideways at an angle impossible for adults, totally casual, completely trusting, a snot bubble expanding from his nose, drool dripping on Da-da’s shoulder. It was heart-melting.

  When they got home, Maria, the country cook and housekeeper, made them a light lunch and put the groceries away so that Beagle could cook with them later. She would have fed Dylan in the kitchen—it was easier to clean—but his parents wanted their one and only son with them in the breakfast nook. When John Lincoln got frustrated trying to explain to Dylan why he shouldn’t fling food at grown-ups, Jackie took over and handled the situation.

  In the afternoon they strolled through the vineyards admiring all that they owned.

  John Lincoln cooked dinner. He made separate portions for Dylan and his nanny. They ate in the kitchen. Line wasn’t up to another experience like lunch quite so soon. Tomorrow he could try it again. Eating with the kid twice a day was pushing the outside of the envelope.

  Dinner was successful. Jackie seemed to actually like it and ate most of her portion and didn’t complain about anything, even his choice of wine. There was a fat moon when the sun went down, and a cool breeze. They strolled together, not talking. Not talking was the safest thing they could say to each other.

  Jackie had some Maui-Wowie, sensimilla, really fine and exotic stuff with blue tendrils—some incredibly potent herbal mutation, $500 an ounce, a real one-toke smoke. So they each took a hit or two and . . . yeah . . . they turned out the lights . . . lit a candle . . . some soft music and he . . . he reached out . . . he touched her . . . she didn’t flinch . . . or explain why she didn’t want him to touch her . . . and by golly, John Lincoln Beagle had sexual intercourse with his wife. It wasn’t any of your fancy fucking or inventive hinky-pinky Joy of Sex, Dr. Ruth strawberry gel and edible undies, but still! She even let him kiss her.

  105 There is no question that this is sexual stereotype. There is no question that there are many men who routinely cook, cook well, cook from cookbooks without flinching. Similarity, there are many women who can’t or don’t or won’t do those things. This particular stereotype has been studied “scientifically” (Food Industry Monthly, 11/89; Psychology Today, 9/88; Green Grocer; The Journal of the Retail Food Purveyor, 5/91), and in each case the hard marketing data states that a very large segment of the adult male population fit this profile.

  Chapter

  FORTY-SEVEN

  I CAN’T TELL you what a treat it is to make love without goddamn country music blasting. The window open and nothing but the sounds of the surf and of each other.

  After the Hartman confrontation I start tracing LDs and tearing them out. The next day I have a guy from Fleischer’s Audio Security in to double-check my work, and he does in fact find two microphones that I missed. I also invest in a Micron 28-40 which broadcast
s microwave and radio-wave interference patterns. It will prevent transmission from a wide variety of LDs to off-site listening ports, but don’t get one if you have a short-tempered neighbor with a satellite dish.

  That night we are alone for the first time since we met. The feeling of—relief I guess it is, relaxation or something—it’s like getting out of Vietnam, to Tokyo, Bangkok, Sydney, or Oahu for R&R. ’Cause the thing about Nam was there were no battle lines, so it never stopped. You’d be in a bar, a whorehouse, somebody throws a bomb or a grenade. In camp, if there were Vietnamese in the camp, mama-sans who did the laundry or mess boys or any of that, even ARVN troops, some of them were always some of Them.

  Of course, Maggie reads the file that Hartman gave her. She asks me if it’s true.

  Well, how true is a piece of paper, ever. Is it going to make her stop loving me? Does the record mean we’re over?

  She just wants to know if it’s true.

  Sure, it’s true. I went to Vietnam to kill people. Enemies of the United States of America, my country. An opposing army, that fights in a particular way. At first I’m there in uniform.

  It’s hard. War is supposed to be hard. It’s frightening and the commandments are broken and you find out if you’re a man and what kind. It’s the insects and the snakes and the wet, the skin fungus and the smell of unwashed bodies. The smell of shit and urine and sweat and fear. I became a sergeant and I liked it. More than like. It was what I was born for. The truth is, it didn’t really matter that it was the United States of America. If I’d been born for some other war, that probably would have been alright. Winning would have been good too. The whole war, I mean. I won most of my battles and I killed more of them than they killed of us and I kept my guys, my squad, and when I had a lieutenant would listen, safer than most, most of the time, and I made the enemy fear and respect us.

  Then there comes a time, things get out of hand. I get into a dispute with an officer and the easiest way to solve it is for me to leave the Marines. I’m thinking that the Marines are a career, that that’s my home. So that’s hard, but under the circumstances it’s a better deal than I have a right to expect. It’s Griff, Preston Griffith, who helps me find an out. If they’ll let me go, he’s got work for me. I can stay in Vietnam. I can fight.

  It’s a different kind of fighting. More like the VC’s way. It’s called Phunng Hoang, Phoenix. Dress like VC, eat like VC. They say we own the day, the VC owns the night. We take back the night from the VC. We are assassins.

  So I tell Maggie, yes, the file is true.

  She doesn’t leave me. She doesn’t grow frightened or angry and pull away. She presses her body next to mine. Moonlight comes in the window and she goes to sleep.

  I begin to look for someone who can tell me what the mystery disc is.

  We split up the material that we can read. Everything that Brody writes in his letters and his notes says that Beagle is working on a war movie or television series of some kind. This is more or less in accord with what everyone in town knows. In two days of reading we discover nothing that tells us significantly more than did the letter to his mother that I found on the first go-round, except that Teddy wrote a piece for Beagle about propaganda. There are several versions of it, each getting shorter and shorter.

  Of course, what Teddy couldn’t know was that someone would kill him rather than let him talk to me, or perhaps to any outsider. We—Universal Security—have done employee-departure cases before and we assume that an employee will talk to his new employer about what he did at his last place of employment, even—or especially—if those things are trade secrets or some other form of proprietary information.

  Had Teddy seen his assailant, that would not have told him what it told me. Bo Perkins was Phoenix. There were people who became affected by the power that they had. I won’t say that I didn’t. That I was pure or something. But there is a difference between loving war—the contest, the danger, the risk, the adrenaline rush, the feeling of power, the high feeling—and loving pain and death. In Phoenix it was possible to hurt, to torture, to kill for pleasure. It was possible. For some, that is a great temptation.

  The Dark Side—da-dum—like Darth Vader, once in a Galaxie, long, long ago . . .

  But that’s a movie and a kid’s story. It doesn’t tell you how dark the dark side is.

  Bo went over—maybe was always over—and he didn’t come back.

  The other thing, of course, that Teddy couldn’t know, very few people know, is that U. Sec. does work for the government. I mean secret work. Stuff that if you worked for the CIA you are supposed to inform somebody, like in Congress. And you’re supposed to see a special memo or order before you do it. Plus, there are certain things, like assassinations, that by law the CIA and the other security agencies of the United States, and there are quite a few, cannot do. It’s possible, though I don’t know, because it’s not the level where I operate, that U. Sec. may be, or maybe once was, a CIA proprietary.106

  Bottom line, Maggie said it—you don’t kill someone over a movie.

  You especially don’t send Bo Perkins unless it has been authorized at the highest level of invisible government.

  The thing is, if we write down the few simple things we know, it’s like an equation. Simpler than that even. Arithmetic.

  John Lincoln Beagle is working on a war movie.

  − Nobody gets murdered for a movie.

  = John Lincoln Beagle is working on a war.

  At this time I don’t think the answer is as simple and stark as that. That appears to be, on the face of it, insane. Beagle makes excellent films but—that’s insane. Yet the equation remains.

  Add to that the whole operation. The amount of surveillance—personnel, electronics, transcripts—someone is spending a tremendous amount of money.

  What I figure, at this point, is that Beagle is working on war propaganda. From the memo the kid wrote. Why would that be such a serious secret? No big deal. In Vietnam we built television stations to broadcast propaganda. Then when someone realized the Vietnamese didn’t have televisions, we gave them televisions. People do propaganda in war. In all sorts of forms. That’s OK, unless Beagle’s doing propaganda for a war that he knows will exist that nobody else knows about. It means that somebody has already decided that we’re going to have a war and they’ve hired Beagle to tell them how to present it. So they don’t fuck it up like they did Vietnam.

  Having just enough information to deduce this does us more harm than good. Hartman and Bunker, who are smarter than we, can figure out that I can figure it out. And sooner or later, that will be unacceptable. David Hartman tried to tell Maggie not to get involved, way back at the beginning. I don’t know that there is a way, anyway at all, to get uninvolved.

  “Tell me, Maggie, why? What do you want?”

  “A little power,” she says. “David could stop my career dead. Or more likely, when I get a little older and it’s easier to sell a younger piece of merchandise, he just won’t bother. Nobody cares. Bottom line. There isn’t a person in the world that cares for me and my career. Except you. Now. But you’re not David Hartman or Ray Stark or Mike Ovitz or Michael Eisner or David Geffen. That’s not self-pity, that’s a financial statement.

  “I’m lucky to be where I am. I understand that. But I also understand it could all go away. If I have something on David that gives me an edge, that gives me power over him for a change—I want it. That’s my truth. Now, are you going to fall out of love with me for that?”

  “No.”

  The last hope that there is some easy way is the disc. Three-and-a-half-inch floppy. Black plastic. Indistinguishable from any other Mac or DOS disc. No label.

  106 It may not be news to anyone anymore what CIA proprietaries are and that they exist. If it is, they are ostensibly private businesses secretly owned or funded by the CIA. They are more than fronts in that they really function as businesses. Some of them make a profit and need no subsidy. Some of them have been known to make money
for the Agency, which makes for very secret spendable funds. The most famous proprietary was Air America, an airline in Southeast Asia that flew agents and commandos and opium and cash and virtually anything else. When Ollie North wanted to send arms to Iran, he approached a CIA contact about a proprietary airline. This contact said, in essence, that Ollie didn’t need to make special arrangements so long as he could pay the normal air-freight rate. Just like any other customer.

  Chapter

  FORTY-EIGHT

  C. H. BUNKER CAME to much the same conclusion that Joseph Broz did.

  His arithmetic was slightly different But the sum was the same.

  John Lincoln Beagle is working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on a war movie.

  − Gates does not employ U. Sec. w/out “limits” for a movie.

  = John Lincoln Beagle is working on a war or, since that’s insane, something very like it.

  He thought a long time about firing Mel Taylor. He liked David Hartman’s logic. In the world as Bunker saw it, there were qualities far more mysterious than IQ and measurable education and whether actions were logically correct. Some people won, some lost. Some day the people measurers—the psychologists, sociologists, test writers—would realize they were measuring the wrong thing. They would make up fancy new words for winners and losers. Then they would think up fancy new standards to measure them. And they wouldn’t get that the measuring sticks were already in place and that everybody but them knew what they were—money and power.

  But even trickier than recognizing today’s winners and losers was figuring out how they would perform tomorrow. Or rather, what shape tomorrow would have, because the world changed, constantly, and the exact same things that won for you today would make you a loser in the new world you woke up to tomorrow morning.