Wag the Dog (51 page)

Although New York City embarked on an extensive and possibly successful reform, the vast majority of those officers who had been “on the pad” virtually all their police lives retired in their own time, as if nothing had happened, to enjoy both the fruits of their corruption and their pensions.

It requires an act of willful blindness to imagine that it only happened in New York or that it only happens in big cities, never in small towns or at the state level, or nationally or internationally.

Back to Universal Security.

Can there be a business that acts as a surrogate for national-security agencies? The answer to that happens to be a documented yes. These may be owned—CIA proprietary companies—or financed or contracted.

The next step is more difficult. Would such an agency engage in murder, to use the harshest term? It is documented that the CIA has engaged in systematic and extensive assassination, as in Vietnam. There, much of the killing was done by surrogates. However, the surrogates were, for the most part, political entities. U.S. government agencies as well as private American companies have run a variety of police, intelligence, and army “training” programs in South and Central America. There is an incredible correlation of these programs, what you might call a through line, with the practice of police torture and assassination and the emergence of “death squads” and “disappearances.” That too is reasonably well documented and has even been the subject of, or implicit in, several feature films
(Missing, State of Siege, Under Fire, Salvador).
We are not interested in left-wing America-bashing here. These may be necessary and useful steps in the protection of society. Liberals can wince and whimper all they want, but the Viet Cong have told us—they did not like Phoenix.

Then there is the final step. Can there be a private security agency that, from time to time, kills people for commercial and/or political reasons? And which is competent—unlike, say, Ollie North—competent enough that we never, ever hear of them?

Paranoid fantasy or simple, logical realism?

 

 

 

¹⁰¹
William Safire, conservative pundit, onetime Nixon speechwriter, op-ed contributor, writes a column on language for the
New York Times Magazine
section. He is particularly fond of exploring the etymology of slang and new usages. In an article on euphemisms for murder he propounds, as matter of ontological reasoning, that the derivation of current slang strongly suggests a generation of more literate hit persons. “Intialize” and “crash” are computer references, “made redundant” is a Britishism, “deconstruction” is a term of literary criticism, and “consummation” “comes from Hamlet (III, 1): “To die: . . . 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd,” or, if not, at best expresses a certain literary pleasure in the playfulness of a sex-and-death pun.

¹⁰²
Japanese, synonymous with the Chinese word
chi,
as in
t'ai chi,
the inner strength or existence or power. Martial arts are designed to develop chi. “In this broadest sense
chi
means energy . . . the fundamental component of the universe, and also manifests itself within the bounds of the Earth. Mist, wind, and air contain much
chi
and so do human beings. Breath is
chi
. . . it is the vital force that keeps us alive. The Chinese believe that chi pulses through the body in a similar (but distinct) way as blood. . . . Acupuncture is [a] system for manipulating the flow of
chi”
Reid and Croucher,
The Fighting Arts
(Simon & Schuster, 1983). Originally published in GB as
The Way of the Warrior.

¹⁰³
British slang. The reference is to the Sloan Square area of London—very expensive, very posh.

¹⁰⁴
Are there companies in America, whose business is generally noncriminal, tied to the government or not, that kill people and then go on about their business?

Certain high-profile prosecutions—Boesky, Milken, Watergate, Iran-contra—tend to convince us that crime never pays, and that even the high and mighty are dragged down when they stray, that
the system worlds.

It is very important to the system that we believe in it.

When movies were subject to censorship, which they were in a very formal way from 1934 to 1968, by the Hays Office, one of the strictest rules—as strictly enforced as not letting ten-year-olds view close-ups of oral copulation—was that crime must not profit. If someone committed a crime on-screen, they had to be punished. Later, when TV came around, network codes of standards and practices had much the same requirement. For dramatic reasons we are always seeing stories about independent-minded cops who defy all institutional resistance to bring down the biggest of corrupt bigwigs.

However, for as long as criminology has been a field of study, it has always been haunted by the theory of “the competent criminal.” For obvious reasons criminologists (and psychologists and sociologists, etc.) only study
failed
criminals—that is, those persons whose criminal acts led to their conviction and to punishment. If there is a group of people out there who commit crimes and are not caught and live happily ever after, then criminology is not a study of criminals but of incompetents, bumblers, fuckups, and, should instead be called fuckupology.

In a sense the very definition of “criminal,” at least in America—“innocent until
proven guilty”
—says that a criminal is a person who commits an illegal act in such a bumbling or unlucky way that even a prosecution system as cumbersome and full of restrictions as ours can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

W
HEN
I
GET
back to the house, all I want to do is get those discs on the computer and read them. Steve is unhappy to be on guard duty. His son is elated to be holding a gun. I send them to the kitchen, for Mrs. Mulligan to get them something to eat. Maggie wants to talk. Fucking microphones. She doesn't want to hear country music either. Or Bartok or Bach or Dylan or Guns n' Roses or Miles Davis. She wants to talk about her
feelings.
I want to load the computer and find out what the hell we've got. Find out, maybe, at last, what's going on.

Maggie is not used to people getting killed.

We go into her office.

I put in the disc marked 1. It is a backup system called Smart Set. There are twenty-six discs. I start loading them. She wants to talk.

I stand up. I hold her. “Don't worry, baby,” I say. “I'm going to protect you. I'm going to take care of you.” You know, the usual shit a guy is supposed to say when a weak woman is shaking and weeping in his arms. But I have to get back to these discs. They killed the boy for what's on there. Now I'm going to know what it is. When I know it, then I've done what I set out to do. With that—I hope—we've got Hartman and Beagle and we can control the game.

It takes about fifteen minutes to get them all loaded in. There is an extra disc. When I put it in, I get a message on the screen that it is not an Apple disc. I figure it is a DOS disc. So I
open up the translation program. But even with that up and running the computer doesn't recognize the disc. I put it aside. Though naturally I am certain that it is
the
disc that contains the magic bit of information, the clue, the truth, the thing that everybody is chasing. Maggie tells me later that Hitchcock would have called it the MacGuffin.

In the meantime, until I can figure it out, I look at what we do have.

I pull a chair over so Maggie can sit beside me. That way I can hold her hand and
be with her.

“What are we doing, Joe?”

Brody had some games—which don't interest me. A series of computer programs that do computer things—speed up, manage, protect. He's got Prodigy and CompuServe. His phone book and date book are—as I suspected—in there. He's got check-balancing and tax-preparation programs. Then there are documents: film treatments, short stories, several screenplays, letters. It's going to take days to read.

“What about that boy? Shouldn't we be doing something? Going to the police?”

I decide that the best bet is the letters.

“Be patient. Stick with me, baby. I'm going to find our way out of this.” I punch up letter after letter. I am not a fast reader. I try to scan, find key words, sure enough, eventually “secret” with three exclamation points pops out at me.

Morning in America

American Century

American Storm

Pax Americana

Hope of the World

American Hero

The Reincarnation of John Wayne

The 7 Incarnations of John Wayne

 

As to my prospects—they are still still.

Don't tell
him
that. Lie for me. Make
him
think

I'm happy and prosperous. 'Twill give
him
nightmares. Am I joking?

“Poor boy,” Maggie says. “Poor, poor boy.”

“Damn,” I say. Is that it?

“Hold me, Joe. Put it away. Hold me.”

I don't want to. I want to do my job. I want to go through everything that Teddy Brody wrote down. I want to find someone who can figure out what the unidentifiable disc is. But I take her in my arms and I hold her. She buries her head against my chest and she's crying. Maggie's not used to people being killed. People don't get killed over movies.

“I think I'm going to be hysterical,” she says.

“It's OK.”

“No, really. It's awful. There's a joke in my mind. I'm trying to make a joke out of it.”

“What joke?”

“Stupid joke.”