Wag the Dog (31 page)

They had, from time to time, slept together. She didn't know if she was disappointed that it had not blossomed into love and marriage, or for that matter, into a genuinely passionate
affair. It may have been because her kids and just trying to live life, clean, neat, healthy and paid for, drained so much of her energy that she didn't have a great appetite for sex and romance, or that may have simply been her nature. Actually, if either of them was bothered by it, it was probably Beagle. He believed that nice, sensible, fair, and caring people came in packages that looked like Kitty and that packaging like Jackie's was almost invariably wrapped around a core self of narcissism, competitiveness, and obsessive self-involvement. He found it annoying and a little perverse that, once the moment of need was past and the pulse of lust satisfied, he just couldn't care for Kitty, that he needed someone more—dammit—Hollywood. Sexier, jazzier, better-looking, someone—and this really was disturbing—like his wife.

Kitty was getting on very well with her son. He seemed to take naturally to studying and school and had a bent for science that delighted his mother. He didn't do drugs and seemed to have bought the whole “Just say no” package, including tobacco and alcohol, that they preached in class nowadays. Only God knew if any of these redeeming qualities would continue through adolescence.

They certainly hadn't in her daughter Agnes, a whining girl who, in spite of all that her mother tried to teach her, thought it was a Barbie Doll world, where Ken would come along and give her,
give her,
a pink Corvette, just for having a plastic perfect body and big hair and wearing white high-heel near-leather booties.

Agnes cut school, went out with the sort of boys that make mothers sick with worry, smoked pot, and wanted to be an actress. Kitty fought it, but managed to live with it, telling herself that each thing was a phase, and that in a world that included AIDS, teen pregnancy, crack, and drive-by shootings, Agnes's behavior was pretty mild.

But then her daughter had come home with bigger breasts.

At first Kitty thought she was imagining it. Then she thought perhaps Agnes had had a growth spurt. Then she had a sickening fear that her daughter was pregnant. She tried to talk to Agnes about it. Agnes did what teenagers know how to do—she denied and denied and denied.

Kitty walked in on her daughter in the shower. Kitty swore it was an accident. She even possibly believed it. She saw the stitches, the ever-so-discreet incision, where Agnes had received a breast implant.

A mother-daughter battle royal ensued.

Agnes revealed that she had it done to further her career as an actress. Her breast size, she was certain, was all that stood between her and a series of major roles in film and television. She rattled off a list of names of actresses who'd had surgery and what parts had been changed.

She refused to tell her mother how she had paid for the surgery and this scared Kitty most of all. Where did a sixteen-year-old girl find the money to pay for breasts? Didn't they cost somewhere from a thousand to three thousand
each.
What insane doctor had done that to a child, without parental consent?

This was the most frightened Kitty had ever been as a mother. Her daughter had spiraled out of her control and she couldn't figure out how to bring her back. Beat her? Threaten to keep her locked in the house? Threaten to throw her out? All of those would just push Agnes to go and do more of whatever it was she had done to pay for the operation.

Where did parental control come from? Once it might have come from a culture that demanded that the child respect the parents. Television or rock 'n' roll or Dr. Spock or something had trashed that one. Now all that was left was force and dependence. How could she make Agnes dependent? The only thing she could think of was by becoming the girl's best avenue to an acting career.

And that was something she was in a position to do. The perfect position. Kitty was, after all, the personal secretary of one of the most successful and powerful directors in the business. More than that, she'd felt his lips on hers, pressed her naked flesh against his, been entered into. She had a
right
to ask. He would have to help her. Have to, to save her child.

On another level she was quite certain that John would be really annoyed—he usually was—when one of the staff pushed an actor or a script or something like that on him for
personal reasons. So she hesitated to approach him. Especially as he seemed so busy. So obsessed. She kept waiting for the right moment. Which never seemed to come. And the longer she was silent in her need, the angrier and more resentful she became.

It was a little after eleven in the morning—Kitty glanced at the clock on her desk—when John Lincoln wandered out of his video room.

He had it, but he didn't have it. It was logical. It practically screamed out to be done. Go back to Vietnam and win this time. What was wrong? He wished he had someone to talk to about it. Actually, he'd come out of the video room just to see a human face on a human being and—something. “You ever watch war movies?” he said to Kitty.

Kitty didn't want to talk about war movies. She didn't want to talk about anything that Beagle wanted to talk about. For once, just once, she wanted him to address her needs. She didn't quite know how to mention that.

She was such a regular person, Beagle thought. One of the most middle-American he knew. “What did you think of the war in Vietnam?” he asked.

“John. Mr. Beagle . . .”

He looked at her quizzically, full of inner puzzlement.

All she could do was blurt it out: “I want you to put my daughter in your next movie.” It lurched out like an order, a command. The way a mother orders a daughter to clean her room, not the way a secretary speaks to her boss.

“Huh?”

“It doesn't have to be a big part. Just a part.”

“Kitty, uh . . . ”

Her mouth trembled. She was afraid she was going to cry. Maybe if she'd said “I have a problem and I need your help,” he would have said, “Sure, let's see what we can do.” But she wasn't used to asking favors and didn't know how. Plus, she was ashamed that she couldn't control her daughter and ashamed of what her daughter had done to her own body
and she wanted to keep it private, a family secret. So what emerged was angry and demanding. “I want a part for my daughter in your next movie.”

“Look, I don't know what's wrong with you—”

“Are you going to do that for me or not?”

“There are no parts in my next movie,” he said, which was the simple truth.

“What a . . . ” She couldn't bring herself to say the words formed behind her lips—“crock of shit”—but the spirit was present in the silence.

“I didn't even know your daughter was an actress.”

“She is. And a very good one,” Kitty said, though she had no idea what made a good actress and expected, because she had a very low opinion of her daughter, that she was a terrible actress.

“I thought you said she was going to be a dental technician.”

“Well, she's not. She's an actress and I want you to give her a part.”

“I'm not using actresses or actors,” he said. “Only real people.”

“Well, well, then use her as a real person.”

Beagle, stuck in the literalism of the moment, couldn't think of anything else to say except, “No.”

“You're a . . . a . . . a thoughtless bastard. I hate you.”

“What the fuck has come over you?”

“Don't talk to me about fucking. You fucked me, you fucked me alright and I never, never asked a single thing from you until this minute, and you won't give me the time of day. You're a selfish shit. If you won't give my daughter a role—a walk-on, an extra, give her a screen test, just a goddamn screen test . . .”

“Uh . . .”

“If you won't, I quit.”

“There's no part to give her, you stupid woman,” Beagle said. “Didn't you hear me?”

“Then I quit.”

“So quit. Good-bye.” A bit stunned, aside from being
angry at this assault from nowhere, all Beagle could think was that perhaps he was wrong about the difference between plainly packaged women and the dazzlers, that being ordinary didn't improve a woman one bit. It was a dreary and depressing thought.

R
AY
M
ATUSOW COLLECTED
the most recent set of tapes that were keeping track of the home life of Katherine Przyszewski and her small brood.

Ray started at the office in the morning and spiraled outward through Los Angeles. The Przyszewskis were number four on his list of seven. Like Taylor and Sheehan, he did not yet know what the purpose of his work was, only the names of the people he was responsible for covering. Except for Joe and Maggie, they all worked directly for John Lincoln Beagle. Teddy Brody, day librarian. Luke Przyszewski, night librarian, no relation to Kitty, though Beagle had thought he must be because of his name, and hired him to please her. Beagle had thought the world of Kitty until this point of confusion. Carmine Cassella, projectionist. Seth Simeon, staff artist and designer. Maxwell Nurmberg and Morris Rosenblum, who were the electrical-engineer, computer whiz, tech-nerd, tinkering video mavens that had put together the ten-screen view system in Beagle's studio.

Somebody else, Ray didn't know who, handled Beagle himself, including his offices, his home, his child, and his wife, Jacqueline Conroy. Perhaps there was even a third to track the rest of the people employed at CinéMutt, Beagle's studio and research setup.

When he'd collected them all, he went home. That was his routine. He spot-checked the tapes, logged them, and then
copied them on a high-speed duping machine. Ray believed in redundancy. He'd had supervisors misplace material and clients ruin recordings and then turn to him and act like it was his fault. In the morning he'd bring the originals into the office, log them in there, then start again.

He was upset to discover that the last tape from the Przyszewski set seemed to run out in the middle of a conversation. He knew approximately what their daily dose of talk was and he'd had enough machines and tape to record three times that much. He played them back and listened enough to discover that Kitty had quit her job and had been home all day. Plus, she'd spent a lot of time talking to her daughter. Kitty told Agnes that she was going to find a new job where she could be of real help to Agnes's career, that her mother could help her, and would help her, more than anyone else in the world. There was no way that Ray could have anticipated those events. He would put in a couple more machines the next day. Meanwhile, he'd file a report that explained what had happened.

In the morning, when Ray drove into the office with the tapes from the day before and his report, he didn't notice that he was being followed. Just as he hadn't noticed it all day the day before.

The Return
was Beagle's name for the Vietnam scenario. It still didn't sit right.

Apocalypse Red
was a battle plan to go in and knock out the remains of the USSR.