Wag the Dog (50 page)

Then he reported in to the client. That was at 1:00. Hartman listened and hung up. At 1:01 he called C. H. Bunker in Chicago.

Once Bunker had aspired to being peripatetic. He loved going on missions at a moment's notice, leaping from a sleek companion in a rumpled bed in the dark of night to speed to wherever the game was afoot. He had dreamed for decades of the private jet that he did eventually acquire and he had looked forward to a life of being whisked from action station to action station. He had created a worldwide empire of security services, in part so that he would have to do just that. But he had grown old. So old that his age made noises—joints that creaked and popped, breath that wheezed, little groans and grunts that accompanied actions as simple as putting on his shoes or even a shirt. Now he liked the big old mansion by Lake Michigan with its formal dining room and real library and nursery room full of toys for when the grandchildren came to visit, he liked the servants who knew his comforts and whims and rhythms. He didn't like to travel. Not anymore and certainly not in a rush.

Even if you discount the speed by pointing out that he did not travel commercial but on a company jet that was kept on standby and took off at his convenience and that he picked up two hours by traveling west, the fact that the old man got to Los Angeles by 3:00
P.M.
signaled two things loud and clear: David Hartman and Operation Dog's Bark were of the utmost importance—red flag, ultra, total alert—and someone's job was on the line for having created a situation for which Old Man Bunker had to leave his hearth.

Sheehan traveled with him. Taylor met them at the airport with a stretch limo. It had a bar and a television. The television stayed off. Bunker had a Scotch and soda, a single malt very weak, as if just the whiff of the barley was enough to make his cells sigh and ease themselves of the pain of life. He sat in back. Taylor sat facing him. There was a telephone on the jet, but Bunker did not like discussing sensitive matters over broadcast technologies, even with scramblers at both ends and his own experts telling him that his communications were secure. So Taylor briefed him while they rode in the big car. It had bulletproof windows.

Taylor had recommended that they meet in the Cube. Clients loved the uncomfortable glamour and high cost of it. It bewildered Taylor that Hartman didn't want to meet there. And
it made him unhappy. The Cube was a profit center and having the meeting there would have been a point, even a point and a half, in Taylor's favor—the client may be unhappy but we're making money off him even as we try to turn him around—and he certainly felt that he was going to need every point he could get.

“Just give me the facts, Taylor. No explanations. No excuses.”

Taylor told it without obvious editorials, but from his point of view, which was that stopping Brody—once he got the intercept order—was his total priority. Nobody said, “Intercept, but only if you can do it in a certain way with certain people.” He had used the resources available and achieved what he understood to be his mission.

Bunker asked if Joe Broz had seen Perkins. Taylor said he didn't think so. Bunker asked if Broz had seen Taylor. Taylor said yes.

“I enjoyed the recordings of Joseph and of Magdalena Lazlo very much,” the old man said. He spoke slowly, as always, with a certain formality and a definite baritone richness. “Very much. Are there more?”

“Yes,” Taylor said.

“Hmm. You might consider . . . video.” He changed topics without changing inflection. “There was a knapsack with documents?”

Taylor, prepared, offered the papers to Bunker. Bunker ignored the outstretched hand. However, Sheehan, sitting beside Bunker, took them. “Can you tell from the material what John Lincoln Beagle is working on?”

“No. I couldn't,” Taylor said.

Sheehan scanned the material as if he could find something there that Taylor hadn't. Bunker didn't speak until Sheehan finished reading and shook his head.

“There's more,” Taylor said. He had another stack of papers, over four hundred pages. “Everything that was in Brody's computer.” Once again Bunker acted like he had no need to touch material objects and Sheehan took the pages.

“Have you decided the nature of the project?” Bunker asked.

“No, sir,” Taylor said. “But I haven't had a chance to read all of that yet.”

“Hmm.”

Sheehan had taken a speed-reading course. It had brought a significant boost in his paperwork productivity. Taylor hadn't weeded the product. Nor should he have. Something significant might appear disguised as a short story, in a love letter, or hidden inside a game.

Taylor said, “Not knowing what the job is about makes the job difficult, sir.”

Sheehan, reading one of Teddy's personal letters, gave a grimace of distaste. “Faggot,” he said aloud.

“Umm,” Bunker said, in his legendary baritone, to Taylor, or Sheehan, or to his own musing thoughts. It was too bad that John Huston had died before Carter Hamilton Bunker. No one else could ever play the old man with the right combination of assurance, roguery, guile, self-satisfied cunning, and authority. Maybe Nicholson, when he got older, if he got old and lean instead of old and fat, which seemed unlikely.

Bunker had promised to be there by three-thirty. Hartman wanted to establish who was who—even beyond having made the old man fly two thousand miles—and to express displeasure. He felt thirty minutes of waiting would be about right.

Hartman had a thirty-minute practice session with Sakuro Juzo scheduled for three o'clock in the exercise room attached to the office. This suited Hartman very nicely. He could have Sakuro stay and stand guard over the inner office, where he would be facing Bunker and his team while they waited, giving them that unblinking way-of-the warrior stare the whole time. The stare expressed great ki
¹⁰²
and many strong fighters withered simply by looking upon it.

When the group from U. Sec. arrived, Sakuro was in place, looking deadly and inscrutable. Frank Sheehan approached Fiona, David Hartman's secretary. Fiona, who claimed to have been raised in the same crowd of Sloan Rangers
¹⁰³
as Fergie and Di, and had the accent to prove it, which made her one of the highest-paid secretarial twits on the West Coast, said, “Please take a seat. Mr. Hartman will be with you shortly.”

“How shortly,” Frank said.

“I rilly cahn't say,” Fiona said.

“My dear gal,” C. H. Bunker said, “would you be so kind as to inform me if there is a fire in the hearth?”

“In the main hall? Do you mean?”

“Yes, in the main hall.”

“Of course there is. There is always a fire in the main hall.”

“Then tell the estimable Mr. Hartman that I shall await him there. At his . . . um . . . leisure.” Creaking and wheezing, he shuffled out.

It was a very satisfying room, a spiritual cousin of his own library. Obviously, it was vastly larger and semipublic, nonetheless it had the same we-own-the-world-and-we're-quite-comfortable-about-it attitude. After all, the original had been built for Harvard men in the plutocratic twenties.

Sheehan knew that C. H. liked to sit close to the fire. He pulled one of the high-backed leather chairs close enough that the old man would feel the warmth. Bunker sat down with pleasure and Sheehan gave him a cigar and a leatherbound copy of
Bleak House.
Bunker seemed to carry nothing, Sheehan had brought both in his briefcase. A steward, at the sight of the cigar, rushed over to inform C. H. that he was in California, a no-smoking zone. But there was something so—so like God as played by John Huston about him that instead the steward took
a book of matches from his jacket pocket, struck one, and held it to the tip of the Havana.

“Just a little soda, please,” Bunker said. “Thank you.”

Upstairs, Hartman knew what he thought about the situation but wasn't sure what he
felt.
Initially, his reaction was that this was a fuckup. On the other hand—and this feeling crept up on him during the hours that passed while he waited for Bunker to arrive—there was something very potent in what had happened. A man had been killed to keep
his
—David Hartman's—secrets. This was power. Even if it had been a bit unnecessary, still, nothing else that he had ever done or been involved with had the sheer
absoluteness
of this. It was almost intoxicating. No—intoxication implied disorientation, befuddlement, loss of acuity. On the contrary, when he had practiced kendo with his sensei, he had experienced clarity and centeredness. He had truly felt his ki for the first time. There had been other times when he
thought
he had felt it, but in retrospect, now that he'd felt it for real, the other times had been wishful thinking. It was the feeling of having been raised higher on the mountain, where few go.

This event opened a door for him and through that door he had a glimpse of what he was becoming: maker of war, shaper of human destinies. The paths to power wend through strange forests—his the Hollywood scrub of deals, ancillary right and 10 percent off the top—before they emerge past the tree line in the jagged peaks above the clouds where the air is thin and pure, where only the strongest arrive, and when they do, they can see across the world. A mythic feeling. Say it in a whisper: they who make the ascension, literally have the power of the gods.

The peculiar result of this panoramic exaltation was that he no longer knew what he wanted from the meeting. That was really strange. Hartman always knew what he wanted. That was one of the keys to his success. Oh, someone's head was going to roll, just so it was understood that he made heads roll. But what did he want? The assurance that no mistake would ever happen again? Or, having tasted blood . . .?

Bunker, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted to find out what this project was about. Gates, over
at the NSC, hadn't given him a clue. He'd just given this peculiar person—this Hollywood agent—carte blanche. Bunker would, he was certain, win in the end. He almost always did. In the meantime, he loved the infinite detail and endless narrative pace of Charles Dickens. Reading Dickens made Bunker feel like he had all the time in the world. Which he did not.

Frank Sheehan knew what he wanted. He was pretty sure someone was going to get the ax. His goal was damage control—limit the damage to one person and make sure that the one person was not himself. He didn't think that would be too difficult to do. He had the steward bring him a martini with an olive. He examined the papers that had been printed from Teddy Brody's computer. Mel would get points for getting hold of it right away, and printing it out so expeditiously, but not enough to get him off the hot seat. Happily for Sheehan, who knew that someone had to sit there.

Taylor knew what he wanted. He wanted to save his job. Once again it came back to Joe Broz. If he could show that Broz was a danger—difficult for Taylor to do because Taylor didn't know this damn secret—then any measure, however extreme, as killing Teddy Brody was extreme, was justified. If Broz was assumed to be an innocent party, then Taylor had made an expensive mistake. It wasn't a moral question—hey, it wasn't nice that the kid was dead, but people die in the course of things: war, traffic, playing cops and robbers, having sex, and overeating too—but one of efficiency and of costs. Covering up a killing was expensive. Though oddly enough, if you thought about it, consummations almost never had blowbacks. It was the diddly-squat that led to blowbacks, from Watergate to Iran-contra: break-ins, money transfers, cash receipts, lying under oath, keeping memos of things that should never have been written anywhere, people taping their own confidential conversations and forgetting that they'd done so.

Taylor sat, Taylor sweated, Taylor plotted.

Sheehan came across several letters that made reference to what Brody thought John Lincoln Beagle was up to. He handed them to C. H. Bunker, who reacted as if they were an intrusion, but who took them and perused them nonetheless.

Done, the old man tossed them at the fire. The draught blew them back toward the room. Taylor picked them up. He read them. They just talked about making films and miniseries. It didn't make sense that he'd been told to stop someone, at all costs, on the off chance that they were going to reveal this chatter about movies.

Fiona Alice Victoria Richmond, once of Knightsbridge, before Daddy lost it all and Mummy disgraced herself, knew, from birth, that keeping people waiting had nothing to do with how long business took, but with rank and position and attitude. So she let Hartman know how Bunker had finessed the gesture.

As a result, the steward told C. H. Bunker that “Mr. Hartman will see you now,” in fifteen minutes rather than the intended thirty. Bunker rose and handed the boy his cigar as if it were a fine tip, which, if half a ten-dollar cigar is worth five dollars, it was.
¹⁰⁴

It is clear that both casual and organized illegal activity constantly goes on in a successful way. There are obviously practitioners of illegal acts who manage to go about their business quietly and regularly, who encounter the criminal-justice system little more than do straighter members of society.

Anyone who lived in New York in the sixties was a witness to the drama of Serpico and the Knapp Commission. The point is not that corruption was exposed. The point is that it proved that the department was corrupt
systemwide
and had been so for at least
several generations
of police. They were involved in gambling, extortion, loan sharking, prostitution, narcotics, racketeering, murder.
Thousands
of people knew about it and
participated
in it without exposure.