Wag the Dog (39 page)

They'd done this sort of thing before. But they still talked it through. They would start moving, with Chaz at the wheel, as soon as Kitty opened the front door, cruising toward her. Then Bo, who had a sweet voice and a kind of wimpy look, would say, “Excuse me, miss, can you help me. I think we're lost.” She'd stop. He'd get out of the car with a map in his hand. By the time she saw the gun, he'd be right up close to her. Chaz, who already had a boner thinking of her, would have the back door flung open. Bo would hustle her in.

She'd be alive when they were done. There would be no permanent visible damage to her body. But she probably wouldn't talk to anyone for a long, long time.

When the commands stopped coming from the control room, Teddy Brody got restless. He really, truly expected Beagle to say something, anything, about his one-page propaganda piece. Actually, he didn't expect Beagle to say “something, anything,” he expected Beagle to praise him, give him recognition, and give him the opening to say, “Please sir, won't you read my treatment.”

Teddy squeezed between a pair of monitors and peered through a gap where one of them was mounted. The control
room was empty. Video monitors playing, no one watching. There, in a corner of the console, looking neglected, was a single sheet of paper that might or might not have been his essay on propaganda. His heart sank.

He decided to enter the control room. He'd never done that, except the first day of his employment when he was taken on a tour of CinéMutt so that he would see how his humble efforts in the back room came to fruition in the director's room. For that matter, he hadn't entered any room, uninvited, since he was six. Or was it seven. Or eight. Or five. He'd blocked it out. What was it that he'd blocked out? Something came over him when he put his hand on the knob of the connecting door. A terrible fear that he felt in his bowels. More specific than that, in his sphincter. He knew that what he'd seen was his parents having sex. Not an unusual thing for a child to stumble on. Why so traumatic? What was it about those tears that so troubled him. Tears. There had been tears and rage. He turned the knob. The door swung open on perfect silent hinges. There was no one—no vision—no tyrant—no rage—no tears—waiting for him inside. Just an empty room with a lot of video screens running silent, flickering colors out in the air where they quickly dimmed for failure to find reflective surfaces.

He was in. And he knew, in his heart, that he was right to enter. He was a good boy. Too good. This was not a world where propriety and politeness, punctilious honesty and genuine respect, were the tools to achieve success—if there ever was such a world. Anywhere. Ever. It was a place where knowledge was power, even stolen knowledge, especially stolen knowledge. Where you told people what they wanted to hear—not the truth—because who wanted truth? That was for private moments with yourself, if you liked mirrors that were mean and ugly. Where a stolen screen credit was better than no credit and the only rule for plagiarism was to be certain that you had better lawyers and trickier accountants than whomever you stole from. Goddammit, it was time for him to grow up or get out. Go—not home, never home—but some halfway house for losers, like a university.

He walked, silent feet on silent carpet, to the console. He
saw his paper there. No grade on it. He'd expected one. Dumb reflex. He saw Beagle's meager notes—the titles.

There was a bottle of sparkling wine in the CinéMutt kitchen. Beagle thought he deserved a champagne toast to himself. He called home, to speak to his wife. But she wasn't in. He went out in the reception area and . . . well, there was a stranger. Kitty was so great. Used to be so great, before she went bonkers. At least he could have celebrated with her and she would have acted happy about it even if he couldn't tell her what exactly they were drinking to.

The obvious person to call was David Hartman. After all, David was the one other person in the world who knew.

Hartman took the call.

“I am standing here, sparkling wine in hand. And you should be too. Because I have figured it out,” Beagle said.

On the other end of the line Hartman leaned back and closed his eyes and sighed with relief. That was the hell of the job. Waiting for the damn talent to do whatever it was they did. It always took as long as it took. “I'll open a bottle over here,” Hartman said, “and I'll drink to you over the phone.” Beagle waited while Hartman went away. When he came back, they clinked their glasses against their respective telephones. While Hartman looked through his appointment calendar to see who he would have to dump to see Beagle that day, or tomorrow morning at the latest, he remembered that this business about the secretary was bothering him.

“Line, this Przyszewski woman, your secretary, was she any good?” Hartman had an idea about placing her somewhere safe, where he could keep tabs on her and not have U. Sec. do whatever it did.

“She was great.”

“Really?”

“Kitty, yeah. Until she went nuts.”

“What happened?”

“She asked me to give her daughter a part in my next movie. That got my back up, or it would've, it usually does, but there aren't any parts anyway. So I said that and she lost it.”

“Would you have her back?”

“Sure. I'd love her back. If she were sane, of course.”

“Why don't you do this,” Hartman said. “Call her up. Tell her you called me and I said RepCo would represent her daughter. We'll give the kid an agent. Kitty'll be happy, you'll be happy, and we can all go on about our business.”

“Done,” Beagle said.

Then they figured out when they could meet.

Chaz saw Kitty's door open. He smiled and put one hand on his crotch. He was thick and pulsing in anticipation. Bo, who noticed the gesture, laughed. Chaz's game was not strictly what Bo would have done if he were alone, but he got a kick out of the fear and pain parts.

Kitty came out. Chaz put the car in motion.

Inside the house, the phone rang. Agnes picked it up.

“Hi, is Kitty there?”

“Who's this?”

“This is Line.”

“I don't think she wants to talk to
you
”, Agnes said, rude and virtuous, playing it the way she'd seen it done on prime-time soaps.

“Well, I was hoping I could talk her into coming back to work.”

“Too bad,” Agnes said. “I don't think she wants to come back.”

Outside, as Kitty moved toward her car, Chaz and Bo pulled up to just about where they thought the snatch should take place.

“Is this Agnes?” Beagle asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you know RepCo?”

Of course she did. She was an L.A. kid. “Of course I do,” Agnes said.

Bo held his map in front of his face and put on his baffled and helpless expression.

“Well, I'm good friends with Dave Hartman, head of RepCo, and, um, well I talked to him about you and he said
RepCo would be happy to represent you, if you want to give it a try.

Bo rolled down the window. “Uh, excuse me, miss,” he called out to Kitty. “We sure are lost here.”

Kitty looked at her watch. She had a minute to spare to help out a lost stranger and still make the job interview in plenty of time. “What were you looking for?” she asked.

Let her take one step closer, then Bo would get out of the car, holding a map and a piece of paper. “Let me show you the address,” he said. The map would cover the gun. The trick of it was to get 'em close to the car. They'd see the gun, be shocked, be in the car before they had a chance to scream or run or fight. And it'd be done.

“Mom, Mom, come quick,” Agnes yelled from the doorway.

Kitty hesitated.

“Hurry, Mom, hurry.”

“Excuse me,” Kitty said to the stranger and, thinking her daughter was in some sort of trouble, by the urgency in her voice, she dashed back to her house, leaving Chaz and Bo behind.

After Beagle spoke to Kitty, she called Mr. Broz and canceled. If Mr. Broz was disappointed, he concealed it well. She didn't know, of course, how deeply disappointed Chaz and Bo were. They thought they'd have another shot at her. But after Beagle spoke to Hartman and Hartman called Taylor, they were pulled off the job. Chaz, now that he'd seen her, was downright brokenhearted.

 

 

 

⁸⁶
A
similar list can be found in John Laffey,
The World in Conflict 1991: War Annual
5 (Brassey's). In the few years since publication of the series began, the number of wars seems to be relatively constant.

“M
Y FATHER WAS
a sonuvabitch,” I say to Maggie. “What difference does it make?”

“Just making conversation,” she says.

“Just making conversation—that's talking about what's gonna happen to the Lakers without Magic, without Pat Riley, without Kareem. That's making conversation. What was
your
father like? When was the first time you got laid?”

“You're angry,” she says. “You're an angry man underneath that . . . pose you have.”

“I'm a regular guy, is all,” I say. “There are lots of fathers out there . . . or used to be—steel town, mill town, work hard, drink hard, teach their sons: life's hard.”

“Alright, Joe,” she says. “Don't tell me about your father. What was your mother like?”

I have my shoes and my shirt off. “I got to change,” I say. “If I'm gonna run before we go to the party.” I walk away from her and upstairs. I get into my room—I still have a separate room where I keep my clothes and actually sleep. I pretend about the sleeping but not about the clothes. It's one thing for a woman to make room for a man in her bed, another to give up space in her closets. I get into my room, I unbuckle this damn three-hundred-dollar belt—I can't figure out what makes it worth three hundred dollars, I just can't, never will—unbutton, unzip, drop my pants. When I turn around, she's there. She's looking at me.

“So many scars,” she says.

“What do you want from me?”

“Are you going to run?”

“I'm gonna run,” I say. I reach into my bureau and grab a pair of running shorts, quick. Why should she watch the hardening of my cock? She already knows how much power she has over me. But she is staring at me. Looking me over. Seeing the arousal. I know she is. “You don't get out of here,” I say, “I'm gonna . . .” I don't say
Fuck you.
I
'm going to fuck you. And once it starts, it'll never stop or it'll be all over.
The microphones are listening.

“Maybe I'll run with you,” she says, turns, and walks into her room.

I get a shirt on, then head out. I have no intention of waiting for her. I just want to get the hell out of there. The investigation is going nowhere. I thought we had something with Kitty Przyszewski, but she slipped away. It's a stupid case anyway. Who cares what John Lincoln Beagle is up to. It's just another goddamn movie. His wife and kid hate him. That's common gossip by now. Husband and wife are each only waiting for a point of advantage to file for divorce. If I blow off this idiocy with Maggie today, and go back to U. Sec., where I belong, by tomorrow I'll probably be right back on Beagle, but this time for his wife. Or the other way around, on her for him. The line running around town on Jacqueline Conroy is, “The bitch knows the golden rule of Hollywood—always fuck up.” Certainly, every name she is linked to—Patrick Swayze, Kevin Costner, and Madonna
⁸⁷
—indicates a strong upwardly mobile orientation. Maggie and I and Mrs. Mulligan, each of us, separately, has heard that John Lincoln had been doing it with his receptionist and that he wanted to do it with her daughter too. The mother was so upset that she quit. But Beagle called and promised her daughter a part in his next picture so she came back.

The rumors about their sex lives, accurate or not, are that specific and quick to circulate. Yet there's not one word about what that picture might be.

Maggie's left the door open. I take care not to look. As I get past, her voice caresses my back. “Wait for me. Please.” I don't want to. Really, I don't. But I stop. I don't want to turn and look. Let me turn into a statue of salt if
I
look. Let one of us remain in hell forever if I look.