Wag the Dog

by Larry Beinhart

  But then they get past it and go back to sounding good together. Not like new lovers but not like they’re going to get divorced tomorrow.

  At dinner Line tells Jackie that he’s happy that they’re trying and it’s working and he thanks Jackie. “I love my son,” he says. “And I loved you. We lost our way. I’m sorry. It’s partly my fault, I know. We can find our way back. To loving each other. I’m starting to feel it.”

  “Thank you for saying that,” Jackie says. “It’s important to me too. How things work out between us is very important.”

  There’s silence for a while. I hear some small sounds. I can’t figure out exactly what they’re doing, then I realize they’re smoking some reefer. Jackie giggles. Line makes some smug noises. They leave the room. I pick them up again in the bedroom. Jackie urges him to take another toke. “I’m going to make this special for you. I’m going to put you in orbit.” A little later she says, “No one knows you like I know you, John Lincoln, and no one can make love to you like I can.” I only have audio, not video, but I think what she does is tie him up and then start to tease him and rub his body with oils. She announces that she is going to take a long time, so I ask Maggie to take over and I go downstairs and brew some fresh coffee. When it’s done, I go back upstairs with cups for both of us and some brandy too. “This is very strange,” Maggie says, “listening to them like people listened to us.”

  “Is it?

  “Yeah, we made some mistakes.”

  “We did?”

  “We were too aware of the microphone. This is much more . . . incoherent. And boring. Those tapes we made, those are exciting. I bet there’s a whole underground market for them.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “If they were real, maybe it would.”

  “It really doesn’t?”

  “That’s what I do. I show parts of my body. I make orgasm faces and orgasm noises. That has to be included in the act. The trick is . . . ”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve done different things at different times. I’ve always wanted to do the Jane Fonda scene. From Klute. Where she looks over the guy’s shoulder at her watch.”

  “Why? Is that the truth?”

  “If it were, would that confuse you?”

  “Yes.”

  So Jackie does the kind of number on John Lincoln that you dream about getting in a good Bangkok whorehouse with the beads and the whole thing. And when he does make it, Beagle screams. A real howl. It’s pretty impressive. Then there’s silence for a long time. He’s in outer space, floating. When he comes to, he says so, and how amazing it is.

  Then he says, “What’s this?”

  “You have been served, John Lincoln Beagle,” Jackie says. Which is what you’re supposed to say when you serve papers on someone. We assume that she has just done so. It would be a comic scene if we could see it.

  “Huh?”

  Maggie’s cracking up. She doesn’t have to say, “I told you so.”

  “I’m divorcing you.”

  “What?”

  “Do I have to spell it out?”

  “Wha . . . Why? . . . I thought . . . Dylan . . . What . . . you just did.”

  “I wanted to be sure you knew what you were missing.”

  “Jackie—”

  “Go to hell, John Lincoln—”

  “What’d I do wrong?”

  “What did you do wrong? What did you do wrong? Where the hell have you been for six months? Huh?”

  “Working.”

  “On what?”

  “A movie.”

  “What movie?”

  “You know I can’t tell you.”

  “Well then, you know I can’t be married to you and you know you can’t see your son.”

  “Can we talk about this in the morning?”

  “Talk to yourself in the morning. I’ll be gone. As will your son. And if you try to stop us or interfere, I will have you arrested for assault.”

  “Come on, come on, I’m not gonna assault you.”

  “Bye.”

  “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “What can I do to make it right?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’ve been working on, but is there a part in it for me?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Of course not—”

  “Jackie—”

  “That’s OK, you don’t have to put me in your mystery movie. But did you ever think of anyone but yourself? Did you ever pick up the phone to your friend Hartman and remind him that one hand washes the other. That if you want to put some other bitch in your movie, which is fine by me—-you don’t direct women very well, do you? That the other bitch’s husband or father or whatever, might find a role for me?”

  “What I’ve been working on—”

  “So go to hell.”

  “If you understood—”

  “Just remember, to see your son—”

  “—what I’m really doing—”

  “—you better be very, very nice—”

  “—is reality. I’m planning a real—”

  “—and very generous.”

  “—thing. A real thing.”

  “A real thing. Great,” Jackie says.

  “I am. A war. A real war.”

  “Just like a divorce.”

  Beagle picks up the phone and dials. “I’ll prove it to you.”

  “Hello?”

  “Kitty,” Beagle says.

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “I want you to remember . . .” Jackie says.

  “I don’t know,” Beagle says. “You have to go to the office.”

  “Now?”

  “Now,” Beagle says.

  “I want you to remember what you’re missing.”

  “It’s after eleven,” Kitty says. “It’s eleven-eleven.”

  “You have to go right now. In my desk . . .”

  “And I want you to remember that what you’re missing, the next guy is getting.”

  “Hold on,” Beagle says. “I’m gonna prove it to you. I have a secret memo. Just wait . . . Kitty?”

  “Yes?”

  “Good-bye,” Jackie says.

  “In my desk. In my personal drawer.”

  “Your personal drawer . . .”

  “Yes. In Correspondence. In letters from my mom.”

  “Letters from your mom?”

  “Yes. You’ll find a memo. It says ‘YEO’ at the top. I want you to go to the office and fax it here.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She hangs up.

  Beagle calls for Jackie. He goes through the house calling Jackie. I keep switching channels. I lose him, then find him.

  Finally, he comes back to the bedroom. He dials the phone again.

  “Hello?” It’s Kitty.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Who?”

  “Jackie.”

  “Oh.”

  “She had the car packed. Ineke and Dylan were in the car already. I guess. And they left.”

  “Ineke?”

  “The nanny?”

  “Oh.”

  “So don’t bother about the fax.”

  “I won’t.”

  Chapter

  FIFTY-FOUR

  KATHERINE PRZYSZEWSKI STARTED to scream when the man with the rubber mask over his face pointed the gun at her. But then he said, “Please don’t scream. We really don’t want to hurt you.” The voice belonged, definitely, to a white man, and that relaxed her. “It’s just a movie,” he said, and he seemed to smile inside his Ronald Reagan mask. Then she noticed that he was nicely dressed—clean jacket, neatly pressed pants, and very clean. Even his fingernails were clean.

  There were three of them. Two of the novelty-store masks were presidents. The third was Dan Quayle.

  The clock on her desk said 11:11 A.M.

  “Show me Beagle’s desk,” he said. “Please.” />
  She felt terribly disloyal doing it, but he had the gun and she had her children to support, so she did. One of the others came with them. He opened the drawers and found the correspondence file. He went to “M” and found “Mother.” Kitty noticed that he had gloves on. He took out a single piece of paper and gave it to the man with nice fingernails.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  They took her back to her office.

  “No one’s gotten hurt,” the one with the nice nails said. “Think of it like a video for Bloopers and Practical Jokes. You can call the police if you want. But don’t scream. That would create a problem.”

  “All right,” she said.

  She called the police when they left. But as she reported the crime, it seemed like there wasn’t much of a crime to report. A piece of paper from a file marked “Mother.” A detective came anyway because it was CinéMutt and the police were always excited to do anything that brought them in contact with the entertainment industry. He was an older man, in his fifties, and seemed very kind. She said the file might be important because Beagle had called her the night before and asked about it.

  There was something simpatico between them. Either because he found her attractive or because he understood that she’d been traumatized, he asked her if she wanted to go out for a nice bowl of soup or something. It was lunchtime and she didn’t have company for lunch so she said yes. It was a modest place. Suitable for a police officer on the city payroll. There was something wise and very tolerant in his eyes, so she decided to share something with him that had been bothering her. “Every time I look at the clock, every time something happens . . . I know it’s silly. I mean, what would it mean, but what happens is that it’s always eleven-eleven. One, one, one, one. It’s like it’s telling me something.”

  “It is,” the detective said.

  “It is?”

  “But are you ready to listen?”

  “Sure. I guess.”

  “It’s going to sound strange,” he said.

  “That’s alright.”

  “There were aliens . . .”

  “Aliens?”

  “Yes. They built the pyramids. And those strange shapes that you can only see from the sky in Peru. There’s a lot of evidence.”

  “Yes. I saw that. On television.”

  “There’s a lot of evidence. Things that just can’t be explained away.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “I could give you books to read. If you want. Chariots of the Gods? And there’s We Are Not the First.”

  “If you just gave me the names, I could even get them myself. Through the office. We get a lot of material. Books, videos, for research.”

  “Some of them were left behind, some of the aliens, when the others departed. And they had children.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yes. Yes I do,” the police officer said.

  “What . . . what happened to them?”

  “In order to survive they had to mingle themselves with humans and eventually they lost most, almost all, the knowledge of the stars. But still they were different. Are different. There had to be some subtle way—a sign—to make the children known to each other. And even to themselves.”

  “And the sign is?”

  “The sign is 11:11.”

  “You too? It happens to you?”

  “Eleven-eleven,” the detective said.

  Kitty told herself it was L.A. weirdness, New Age nonsense. Come on, aliens} She was a sensible person. Practical by nature. Yet the idea filled a void. It made her feel special. It explained so many things about why she was better than most people. The detective told her they had a group, a whole organization with their own place, like a church, but not a church. He gave her his card and said she could call and he would take her to the next gathering. She liked that, the sound of it, gathering.

  Happy, she called Beagle and told him what had happened, the robbery, not about eleven-eleven. She couldn’t believe how upset he was. Even after she told him that the robber had said to think of it like Bloopers and Practical Jokes.

  A less arrogant man than Beagle might have tried to hide the fact that he had kept a copy of the memo, which he was not supposed to have done, and that it had been stolen, and would hope that the storm would never come. But to be a great director—possibly to be a major feature-film director of any sort—you need the ability to make big mistakes, mistakes worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars, a million or two, or even blow the whole forty million, and be able to say, “Yeah, so? What’s next?”

  Beagle immediately called Hartman.

  Hartman didn’t waste time getting angry at Beagle. John Lincoln was his director and he was going to need him. Hartman called Sheehan. Sheehan, who was much smoother than Taylor, said with great aplomb: “That’s good news, sir. Now we’ve uncovered a weak spot and exposed an enemy. The operation is not concluded, but it appears to be functioning successfully.”

  “You knew this was happening?”

  “We are very good at our job, sir,” Sheehan said, shucking and jiving for all he was worth, which was quite a bit, actually. “Even Mel Taylor, though he could use more polish with clients.”

  Chapter

  FIFTY-FIVE

  I DON’T HAVE precognition. I did not know what I would learn listening to Beagle. But it seemed reasonable that it might take me back to L.A. Once I was certain that Taylor was recording and I was listening live, I figured that would give me a twelve-to twenty-four-hour jump on him. Especially if I could get past his watchers.

  Rapidity is the essence of war: take advantage of the enemy’s unreadiness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack unguarded spots.

  —Sun Tzu

  I leave Steve, Martin, and Hawk to guard Maggie. I go crosscountry by mountain bike, across Maggie’s property, across the neighbor’s property, and then out on the county road that runs more or less parallel to the one that goes to our driveway. That way I evade the two guys in the van watching our driveway and I don’t have to worry about the car cruising between them and the watchers near Beagle’s property.

  Once I’m out on the road, I have a ten-mile ride to a small local airstrip. There’s a pay phone there. I call Dennis from the airport and give him my ETA, and he calls the other two, Paul Dressier and Kim Tae Woo, a cousin of Sergeant Kim. Dennis meets me at the airport. He has the masks and jackets for us to wear.

  By 11:10 A.M. we’re at CinéMutt. Tae Woo walks up to the guard and speaks to him in Korean. The guard is confused. Then Dressier marches in and starts talking to the guard. The guard tells Woo to wait and turns to Paul. Paul asks him where Kitty’s office is. The guard tells him. Tae Woo steps behind the guard, puts a hand on each side of the guard’s neck and presses until the guard passes out. It is done very deftly. They slide the guard under his desk. Tae Woo puts on the guard’s hat and sits in his place. Dennis and I enter. All of us, except Tae Woo, put on masks. We go into Kitty’s office. It goes perfectly. It’s all over by 11:20.

  By noon we’re at the airport I’m certain that I’ve pulled it off before Taylor has a chance to react. But he will react. So I take them with me. With the three guys I already have, that will be seven of us against whoever Taylor cares to send—Otis and Perkins or Hartman’s Ninjas. I think it will be enough.

  By 4:30 we’re five hundred miles away. Back in Napa. No need to hide our return. We go back to the house by cab. When we get inside, I find Steve lying on the kitchen floor. He’s facedown. There’s blood on the floor and what looks like a bullet hole in his back. Martin and Hawk are gone. Maggie’s gone.

  Chapter

  FIFTY-SIX

  STEVE IS DEAD. When Martin comes back, he drops his bags of groceries. They split and spill. Dennis picks them up. Greens and smoked pork and yam and ribs and a bunch of other stuff. Steve was going to cook some soul food for everybody. Sent Martin away to do the shopping. Martin was embarrassed about that. When Steve talked about black-e
yed peas and corn bread, Hawk talked about California wines versus the French, nouvelle cuisine and the better chefs on the Left Coast. He doesn’t want to believe Hawk did it. He wants to believe one of us, the whites or the Korean, did it. But with Maggie gone, it sorts itself out.

  “I’m gonna kill him,” the boy says.

  “Alright,” I say.

  “You know what he said?”

  “Hawk?”

  “No. My father. Is he really dead?”

  “Yes. About half an hour, I think.”

  “You an expert?”

  “Not a doctor . . . but yeah, I guess.”

  “That’s what they call the entry wound?”

  “Yeah, in the back. If we roll him over, the exit wound, it’ll be bigger.”

  “Did I tell you what he said?” Martin says.

  “No.”

  “Never trust a nigger calls hisself Hawk and dresses like a pimp.”

  The phone rings. I pick it up. It’s a woman. She asks for Maggie. When I say Maggie’s not here, she asks if I’m Joe Broz. I say yes. She identifies herself as Barbra Streisand’s secretary and wants to know if Maggie got her screening copy of the The Prince of Tides. “It’s under consideration for an Oscar in several categories,” she says. “In a way, a vote for it is a vote for women in the industry. I know that’s important to Maggie.” I agree with her that it is, tell her we’ve received our copy; and hang up.

  “Are you gonna help me?” Martin says.

  “What?”

  “Waste the motherfucker. Are you gonna help me or not? He was your friend, wasn’t he? Or doesn’t that matter with you people?”

  “You really want him?”

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  “Can you do it? When the time comes; will you be able to do it?”

  “You try me. I’m gonna waste the motherfucker, motherfucker gon’ die.”

  The phone rings.