This takes place on Thursday, the morning of August 2.
At that time I don’t know what that means. Later in the day, I hear the news. Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait. George Bush is in Aspen with Maggie Thatcher. In the afternoon or the evening, I don’t know which, he makes a statement. “We’re not ruling any options in. And we’re not ruling any options out.”
Hartman has decided he can’t take a chance on our staying alive. The faces I’ve been seeing are like the faces of the death squad guys down in El Salvador. Nobody I know, they were careful about that. Probably guys who used to work with Bo and Chaz. I don’t know why Bo didn’t wait for backup. He should’ve waited. He should’ve known he couldn’t take me alone. No matter what I was doing.
You want to know all the thoughts and strategic considerations and what it was like and all of that? Or you want to know what happened? Bottom line.
Chapter
SIXTY-ONE
BY THEN IT was early evening of the third day. I wanted the story done with. I said, “I have some questions. But they’ll wait. Why don’t you finish it.”
“Tommy and Catherine come with us,” Joe said. “I try to tell them to stay away. I tell them twice. That’s warning enough. Then I accept their help. An hour after Bo comes in, we’re gone. Heading inland. We make it to the Gulf Coast, to Veracruz. We check into a cheap hotel. Lots of cheap hotels in Mexico. I speak Spanish so I go down to the docks. I figure, maybe the way out of this is by boat. Catherine goes out to get some food. Her Spanish is fair, and she’s a lot less recognizable than Maggie.
“I was wrong. Not about that. About the whole fucking thing.”
He stopped talking. He just looked at me. “Tell me. Tell me where I went wrong. Where I could have stopped it. Can you tell me?”
“No,” I said.
He took another drink. Straight from the bottle. He had a head like a rock. He shoved the bottle at me. I felt obliged to take a sip. I still don’t understand liquor. I get a headache before I get drunk, I get naseuous before I get mellow. I’m susceptible to other things. A matter of metabolism I suppose.
“What the fuck was I supposed to do?’
“What happened?” I asked.
“It’s Monday. The sixth day of August. I find a boat. I do it right. Like I’m shopping quality and price and reliability. Not like I need a man to smuggle four people out of Mexico.”
Joe looked at me. Eyes bloodshot.
“Oh, fuck it. I go back to the hotel. They’re both dead. Shot to pieces. Tommy and Maggie.”
Joe drank some more. “What else is there to say.”
“Then what happened?”
“I wait for Catherine. I owe it to her. I grab her and we get on the boat. Sometime the next morning, I pick up some Texas station on the radio, get the news. The night before, after Maggie’s killed, you can check it out, the President holds a press conference. You gotta figure they think that was me with her, with Maggie, not Tommy. Now I’m using my imagination. No way to know if I’m right or wrong. What I imagine happened is this.
“It’s a go. I don’t know why August second, I don’t care, but that’s when it went down. So maybe the President or somebody says to Hartman are you sure, are you sure that no one knows but us three or four or five, whatever it is. Hartman says, “Just let me make double sure, before you go out on a limb. There’s this one situation, I wasn’t going to shut it down unless I had to.”
“Or maybe I don’t give Hartman enough credit. Maybe he was truly Machiavellian. Maybe he said to himself, three months earlier, this situation is out of control. Let me agree to a truce. Regroup. Meantime, I’ll put Maggie in the movie. Then when it’s shot, that’s when I’ll take her out. Mysterious death, her last picture, probably double, triple the grosses. Sakuro dead before her, do a whole thing, the curse of the Ninja, you can milk that for years.
“Or now that he’s face-to-face with the reality Hartman suddenly realizes how much of a risk we are. He can’t tolerate that. He calls Sheehan or Bunker . . .”
“Not Taylor?” I say. Figuring Taylor was finally out for screwing up.
“Fuck no, Taylor’s dead.”
“I didn’t realize that.”
“I told you that,” he said belligerently. But he hadn’t.
“No. You didn’t say anything about it.”
“Didn’t I say that I told Taylor that if he ever touched Maggie, I would kill him?”
“Yeah. You said that.”
“See, I told you,” Joe said.
“Not everybody carries out every threat.”
He stood up and walked across the room. He looked out the window into the woods. The leaves were thick and dark green. “It’s always cool like this, back here?”
“Yes,” I told him. It is. It’s just an old box of a building. Circa 1916 I think, but it’s got high ceilings, low hanging eaves, and it’s shaded by large, old hardwood trees.
“You’re lucky.”
“Yes.”
“You believe in karma?”
“I don’t know.”
“Payback? Fate? If I had let Taylor walk away . . .”
“What?”
“Would Maggie be alive?”
“I got a really strange idea for you,” I said. “If you want to hear it.”
“Sure.”
“Maybe you can walk away from it all. I don’t know. I’ve never done what you’ve done. There’s a Zen monastery, just down the road, in Mt. Tremper. Maybe they can help you with the kind of pain you feel. If I’m out of line saying that . . .”
“No. It’s a good thing to say.”
I sat in silence. I waited. I didn’t know what to say. Like I said, he scared me. Doing my local crime reporter thing, I’ve been down to the jail and I’ve talked to some guys, and I know some cops who say they’ve killed people. But Joe Broz was the only person I ever met who was what Joe was. Or claimed to be. Truly, all I wanted was to handle it right and have him leave in peace. And leave my family in peace. I’m not, myself, a violent man.
If, somehow, I helped him with his pain and to find a road that would take him past it, I would have felt good about that. I’m not a spiritual person, but I suspect that from where he was the only way out is through some sort of spiritual experience, giving yourself to Christ or to the Buddha or some such.
Maybe I’m romanticizing it. There must be lots of people who kill who go on happily ever after, eating, drinking, loving spouses and children, mistresses and friends. Clearly Joe was telling me that he had been one.
I did not decide to do this book until much later. When I did, in an effort to understand more of war than I do, one of the books I read was The Face of Battle: A Study of Agin-court, Waterloo and the Somme, by John Keegan. I came across this passage and when I did, there was—not a shock—a moment of recognition and a relief, I guess, that what I had met existed:
“ ‘Of course, killing people never bothered me,’ I remember a greyhaired infantry officer saying to me, by way of explaining how he had three times won the Military Cross in the Second World War. In black and white it looks a horrifying remark; but to the ear his tone implied, as it was meant to imply, not merely that the act of killing people might legitimately be expected to upset others but that it ought also to have upset him; that through his failure to suffer immediate shock or lasting trauma, he was forced to recognize some deficiency in his own character or, if not that, then regrettably, in human nature itself. Both were topics he was prepared to pursue, as we did then and many times afterward. He was, perhaps, an unusual figure, but not an uncommon one. Fiction knows him well, of course, a great deal of Romantic literature having as its theme the man-of-violence who is also the man of self-knowledge, self-control, compassion, Weltanschauung. He certainly exists in real life also, and as often in the army as elsewhere, as the memoirs of many professional soldiers—though few successful generals—will testify.
“What happened to Martin?” I asked.
“We find H
awk. Through Kim and the dojo, actually. Martin and I go to where he’s been seen. We tag him for a while. This is before we go to do the picture. Hawk, his real name is Howard Furness Dudley. He goes to a shopping center, the second night, late. He parks his car and goes into a drugstore. He buys Turns, rolling papers, and some KY . . .”
“How do you know what he buys?”
“I look in the bag after.”
“OK.”
“We wait. We step out. Martin in front of him. Me behind. I wait until Howard sees Martin, that’s the point, right? And Martin is ready to shoot. Then I do it.”
“You did it?”
“The kid needs to know that he would do what has to be done. On the other hand I know what Steve would’ve wanted. That’s what I tell Martin. It doesn’t matter if I do one more, but maybe it matters if Martin does his first one. Steve would’ve thought so. Also, I get them out of L.A. Cost me a lot of money, too.”
“Your money or Maggie’s?”
“Mine. Funny thing, being a single guy, not wanting much, I actually made good money at U. Sec. and kept a lot of it. I used mine. I owed Steve. So, August sixth. What’s today?”
“The twelfth.”
“Six days ago, they kill Maggie and a guy they think is me. Call the States, two words: it’s done. Next press conference, it’s all different. Did you hear it? It must’ve been on the evening news here.”
“No.”
“They, the press guys, ask Bush about war—a military option, is what they say. He says his options are wide open. Now they are. Because now there’s no one to say that it’s a movie. What’s he going to do? they ask him. ‘Just wait. Watch. And learn. This will not stand. This will not stand. This aggression against Kuwait.’ Those are his exact words. I heard all this on the radio. Out on the boat. Catherine cried a lot. For Tommy and for Maggie too.”
“You, did you cry?”
“I drink,” he said.
“You said something about never being an alcoholic. Like your father.”
“I never have been. But there is a time and a place.”
“I guess so.”
“I’m drunk now,” he said. “Can you tell?”
“Not really. But then I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you sober.”
“No. I guess not.”
“You still haven’t told me, what are you doing here.”
“There’s thousands of miles of coastline in the Gulf, Brownsville to the Keys. It’s a good chance. The boat put in by Matagorda.”
“Where’s that?”
“Texas. I steal a car. Go down to Corpus Christi. We very calmly go to a motel and check in. Park around the back. I make a couple of phone calls. There’s an early flight to Atlanta. We’re on it. I tell Catherine, go to L.A. Go back to work, like it never happened. We sit apart on the plane, like we don’t know each other. Which turns out to be good thing, because in Atlanta I see some guy looking at me like he’s looking for someone who looks like me.
“I hit the men’s room. Change jacket, put on a hat. Stuff tissue’s in my cheeks like Brando in the Godfather. I get out of there and go to the next terminal. The first flight I see, it’s to Newark. Fine. I take it. It’s going away from L.A. I get on alright. By now I have another problem. I have a tooth that’s abcessing. It hurts like hell. I’m swallowing aspirin and drinking. But I know I have to do something about it before I do much about anything else.
“I ask the guy in the seat next to me, if he knows a good dentist in New York. Or Newark. Whatever. He says yes and gives the name of his dentist. Bruce Milner. He says use his name, say its an emergency and Bruce’ll take care of me.
“I call this Milner, he says come on by, he’ll slip me in. While I’m sitting in his waiting room, waiting, you come in. You show him the new edition of your last book, the British edition, Foreign Exchange, right. I remember you, from talking to you about maybe an option on another book. And then you talk to Milner about working for the newspaper. Crime reporting. So when Milner is examinin’ me, I ask him about you. I find out he’s got a summer house, weekend house near you. I think maybe it’s a good idea that I disappear for a few days. Also maybe I should tell my story to someone. I kept the secrets,” Joe said. “But they didn’t keep their word. Did they?”
“No. They didn’t.”
“Taylor and Howard “the Hawk” Dudley, they’re the first people I ever killed.”
“What?”
“I meant personally. Not as a soldier. In a secret army I’m still a soldier.”
“And the Ninja.”
“See with Taylor and Dudley, my business with them was over. It’s supposed to stop when the war is . . . even for a truce. I did wrong. That’s the part that was wrong. Finish the bottle with me. Two more swallows and another dead soldier.” He was on his second of the day.
“No. That’s alright.”
“Doesn’t show, does it?”
“No.”
“You want to know how drunk I am?”
“Sure,” I said. I was always very agreeable around Joe. He certainly had me convinced he was dangerous.
“I’ll tell you something . . . tell you something . . . that I . . . I lied to Maggie once. One time. One Goddamn time. When she asks about . . . I tell her, my father, that he breaks his hand on my head. I tell it like . . . like that’s the end. No. That’s the middle . . . what happens is, he’s too drunk too feel any pain. Too fucking drunk to feel any pain. He just gets madder. He comes after me. At the staircase. He comes at me. I . . . He misses me and . . . He comes at me, see, staircase behind me, I got a sideslip move. He just, he just goes down. Down the staircase.
“His neck . . . God protects fools and drunks, not this time. He breaks his neck. That was the first. First man I killed.”
There’s a bed in the corner of the room. Joe walked slowly over to it and fell down on it. He passed out. Even though it was summer, I put the cover on him. Then I went home and tried to explain to my wife why I wasn’t sharing more of the child-care burden. I promised that the crazy man would be gone the next day.
He was up early. Which surprised me. He was right, he had a head like a rock. He asked me if I ran. I said yes, some. He asked how far. I told him two miles, sometimes three. He asked if it was possible to run to the top of the mountain above my house. I told him that if he took Camelot Road, which is a dirt road, over to Meade Mountain Road, that would take him to another dirt road that went to the top of Overlook Mountain. He asked if I’d ever run it. I said I’d thought of it, but all told it would be about four, four and a quarter miles up, then the same coming back: eight and a half miles, about ten yards of it flat.
He said let’s do it. I let him talk me into it. It was hot and we broke into a sweat pretty quick. I could smell the whiskey poisons coming out of him. Halfway up he staggered into the woods and threw up. “That’s better,” he said and picked up the pace.
I had never run that far. It may sound like no big thing, but his being there carried me along and it felt like a gift of some kind. I was, if only in a small way, a stronger person after that. I still make that run from time to time and it is quite glorious.
When we got back down the mountain he did his pushups and sit-ups. I let him use the shower and such.
“The car I came in,” he said, “it’s stolen. I think we should drive it somewhere, then I’ll ask you to take me to the bus station.”
“You’re a pushy guy,” I said.
“Yeah.”
That’s what we did.
“You believe my story?” he said at the bus station.
“Good story. One of the best.”
“Think about it.”
“Where you going now?”
“I made a promise. I told him, that’s what I do.”
“I don’t know whether to wish you luck,” I said.
“I loved her,” he said. “I’d just as soon die. I loved her that much.”
A week or so later a package came UPS. There were two items
in it. A box of discs and a very fat manuscript. The screenplay was labeled The World’s Greatest Caper: An Original Screenplay, by Ed Pandar. All but one of the discs operated on my Macintosh. They belonged to someone named Teddy Brody.
I still did not seriously think of doing the bizarre story that Joe Broz told me. As I said, I was trying to become less political, soften the edge, do some straight husband-wife, middle-class, or upper-middle-class, murder story. With lawyers. Lawyers are selling big. Scott Turow, John Grisham.
Then four things happened.
One: as I watched the war on TV I felt that I was watching what Teddy had written to his mother was scribble II-2-√, which I deciphered as WWII-2-The Video. It was a strange feeling, given that Joe had told me about it before it happened.
Still I didn’t act.
Two: I had given the UNIX disc to friends at Teatown Video in Manhattan. I’d forgotten about it almost completely when their chief engineer called me some three months later. He had a printout. It was a section, I believe, of John Lincoln Beagle’s multiscreen thought process. A Rosetta stone to how his mind worked, how he planned a war of images.
Three: the BNI scandal broke. That was the story about how money had been funneled to Hussein through an Atlanta branch of an Italian bank. This was right out of Ed Pandar’s screenplay.
Four: I ran out of money. And I still didn’t have my imitation Turow book happening.
So I decided to write what Joe Broz told me.
As I said, he told me everything in the first person, from his point of view. From the notes and the tapes, I basically organized and edited it down. Then I extrapolated and interpolated what Beagle and Hartman and Bush and Baker and Atwater would have done if Joe’s story were true. The memo is as he recited it to me and he claimed that he’d memorized it verbatim. It certainly makes a terrific amount of sense, and it is persuasive. Obviously the discs helped a lot, with Teddy Brody’s part in the story, and also with Beagle and what he did. The agent, the director, the movie star, and so forth, are all fictitious names. As for Joe Broz, Joe was his first name, and since he was of Croation ancestry I gave him the real name of Marshall Tito, the WWII partisan leader who kept Yugoslavia together for thirty-five years.
Wag the Dog Page 43