Wag the Dog (64 page)

So everything is perfect except that I have been seeing some people that don't look quite right. But I'm not sure about that because this is Mexico, not a place that I know well enough to know who belongs and who doesn't. And of course Mexico is not one place. People are different in different parts. We're in Oaxaca,
in a resort hotel near Puerto Angel, about 300 miles down the coast from Acapulco.

The last thing we film is a night sequence on the beach. We get the final shot thirty minutes before sunrise.

The crew breaks out cases of beer and bottles of tequilla and big fat joints, Acapulco Gold, disco biscuits and pretty much whatever else they can think of. We light bonfires on the beach. Maggie gets high. More than high, flying. Which is fine. She's worked hard. Everyone's worked hard. Besides, it's Mexico.

I'm sober. Like a designated driver. Like I'm still on duty. I don't know why. I just am. The world sends me signals.

I told you I would tell you about one time that Maggie and I make love. Just one time. Because it's . . . cinematic. So if someone ever gets it in their head to make a movie of this—not the big movie, the war—my story and Maggie's. I don't know if it would play. If people would understand. If you'll understand. But I'll tell you. We leave the party. We go back to the room. Maggie makes me undress. She goes into the bathroom. She comes out wearing nothing but cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, carrying a box.

“A present for you,” she says.

I take it and open it. Inside are two original Colt Peacemakers and a gun belt that looks to be 100 years old or more, oiled leather that someone's kept meticulously all this time.

“They're beautiful.”

“They're loaded,” she says.

She makes me put the gun belt on. Then I lay down on the bed. I'm down in Mexico, wearing nothing but a pair of six guns with walnut grips, circa 1873. Magdalena Lazlo, naked except for her head and feet, is in love with me, and she is riding me for all she's worth. We have music on the CD player and it's turned up loud.

The door opens.

It's just as if I'd been expecting it. My 9mm is under the pillow, beneath my head. That's all right. The Peacemaker is in my hand, long and heavy. I sit up. I thumb the hammer back, as if it is what I do every day.

Bo Perkins comes through the door.

I hold Maggie to my chest. Her legs are still around me. There's a straight line down the barrel of the Peacemaker to that
spot in the center of Bo's forehead that some people believe is the third eye. I fire. The bullet goes where I know it will, like it's connected to him. Like it's on a wire. It's loud. The explosion echoes in the room.

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.

B
Y 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:

“What happened to Martin?” I asked.

“We find Hawk. 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.”