Wag the Dog (7 page)

All this equipment impresses clients. That's what the company marketing trainers tell us and in my experience it's true. The kind of people who hire us are the kind of people who buy Mercedes and Porsches—they like the bells and whistles. Also, the equipment is a money-maker. Anything you use, you charge for. “You want me to check your phone lines, sir?” You take out a $3,000 CMS-3 and bill $150 an hour or part thereof for the use of it. They understand. You can also sell them the equipment. It's like the Honda commercial—“the car that sells itself.” These are toys that people are longing for. Don't you want to listen through walls? Hear what they're saying when you leave the room? Know what your wife does when you're not home? Do you know how macho it makes a guy feel to turn his briefcase, which is normally full of just paper and numbers, into a shield that will stop a .357 Magnum. That's a $150 item. Field men like myself get a straight 10 percent on anything we sell.

What I mean about it's being a visual is how small and barren my place is. What's there to look at? I do have one kind of interesting painting on the wall. It's an original, oil, representational. It's a woman holding a baby, standing in a California vineyard. When I came home from Nam, I brought back this kid's stuff. The military has channels and facilities for that—of course they do. But this kid, Kenny Horvath, he was kind of a friend of mine—he died the day before my time was up. I brought his things home. His mother gave me the painting. Kenny painted it. The woman in the picture, she had been his girl. The baby had been his too. But she'd already moved on to another man, even before Kenny died. So that's the one spot of color in the room.

There's a black and white photo of a woman on my desk. Funny that I keep it. The Purple Hearts are in the drawer. Two of them. One of my dad's, one of mine. Different wars, but the medals and jewelry boxes they come in have remained the same.

It's a lonely room. I know that. I can even hear that kind of music they'd run underneath, hear it in my head.

Then there's the contrast. Maybe you show the car ride in between, maybe not. I wouldn't. I'd just cut right to it.

Even make it a sun-shining day. Back inland, toward L.A., there's smog, but out here the sea breeze blows it clear. Pacific breakers are rolling in. A couple of kids out on boards. Playing hooky, they're young enough they should be in school. There's an old man walking a young dog. He tosses a stick. The dog runs. The old man remembers young legs, exuberance, joy. He is grateful that there is someone to perform those things for him. There's a Malibu princess with her perfect personal-trainer body jogging along the water.

There is just one line of houses between the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach. All have fences or walls and a metal gate at the entrance with closed-circuit TV and electronic locks. The building just south of Maggie's is a Tudor mansion. The house to the north is a hacienda. Maggie's house is California modern. It has a circular drive. The front yard is filled with thousands of dollars' worth of cactus and desert plants. The front door is oversized and it's made of some exotic wood. The fixtures are brass and the brass is polished. She's replaced her maid.

The new one opens the door. She's expecting me. This too says something about Maggie.

“Good day, Mr. Broz,” she says. She's an older woman. Fifties I would guess. Irish, with a brogue. This one is an illegal, I find out later. But she doesn't worry much about it. The border patrol isn't about to snatch her off the street and deport her, nor is she going to be asked for her green card on a routine traffic stop, and she knows it.

“You can call me Joe,” I say, looking around.

“We'll have to see about that,” she says.

“OK,” I say. “What's your name?”

“Mrs. Mulligan,” she says.

“Is there a Mr. Mulligan?”

“There was, but he's dead.”

“I'm sorry.”

“No need. He isn't missed. Not by me at any rate. You better make up your mind if you're coming inside or just gazing at the place.”

“I'll come in. Thank you,” I say.

“Not at all. Have a seat in the living room. The missus will be right out. Do you want some refreshment? You can have a drink, though to my way of thinking it's a bit early for it. Or you can have some fresh-squeezed orange juice. The missus is big on fresh-squeezed juices. Vegetables as well as fruits. Or you can have water from six different countries, with or without bubbles. In Ireland it falls from the sky and it's free.”

“The juice sounds fine,” I say.

“It's a lot of work, but it's my job,” she sighs. She leaves me there. I'm looking around. The living room is two stories high. Halfway up, around two and a half sides, is a railed walkway. There are several doors leading off to bedrooms. A stairway comes down one side. It is out from the wall and behind it the wall is made of stone or simulated stone with a waterfall. There are plants in the niches in the stone. There is a pool at the bottom, live fish in the pool.

The fourth side, facing the beach, is mostly glass.

Underneath the walkway there are other doors leading to still more rooms. A kitchen, a dining room, a screening room.

There are two paintings on the walls. One is very French, made of dots of paint. The other looks like an old 3-D drawing combined with a painting. It looks like the picture of God and Adam from the Sistine Chapel, except Adam is Elvis and God holds a Coke bottle. I look closer and see that there is a pair of old-fashioned cardboard 3-D glasses available to view it in its full splendor. It's an original by James Trivers.

I feel like I've seen all of it, except the painting, before. Nothing mystical or déjà vu, but more like it's been used as a location in a movie or on TV. Perhaps it was designed by a designer who also does sets, or by an architect inspired mostly by films about Hollywood.

None of which is what I'm trying to understand by looking at the house.

Then she comes in. Down from the upstairs room. Barefoot, jeans, cotton shirt. Easy, casual, perfect. The cotton shirt is a man's-style shirt, but not a man's shirt—it's her shirt. Now I realize what it is I'm looking for—man signs. Is she living alone or not?

This is supposed to be a professional relationship. But it's not. What am I going to do when her lover shows up? If she comes back from a party with sleepover company? Or back from lunch for a matinee? Where am I going to put that?

I'm a professional. I have been for a long time. But I stopped being a professional right at the beginning. On the beach. When I erased the tapes. Altered the record. Gave in to a client's paranoia. Served her instead of the company. Made it worse by filing a false report. Why would I do that? Because she kissed me? Maybe it was even earlier, when she walked into my office, looking like a movie star—which is what she is—and delivering her lines like a scene from a film—which is what they were.

“Hi, Joe,” she says. “It makes me feel good that you're here.”

“Yeah. Beautiful house. Really nice.”

“Thanks,” she says, looking me square in the eye.

I look away. Things are not irrevocable. I can come to my senses, amend the report to say that after I arrived she asked me to look into all these other things. I can do that. Get back on track. “You'll have to show me around,” I say. “Including the utility room and where the electrical is. That is, if you know.”

“I know,” she says.

“And go over the security system. I saw coming in, the CCTV. We'll walk the perimeter together.”

“The perimeter?”

“Old habits,” I say. “Also, some clients like it when I talk that way. They like the idea that they're getting security from a former Marine.”

“I guess I like that too,” she says.

“And is there anyone else”—I say this as casually as I can—I can't believe this, my throat is dry—“living here. At present.”

“Joe.” She says my name and pauses so I have to look at her and listen. “There's no one.”

“That'll make it simpler,” I say.

“Except Mrs. Mulligan,” she says. Of course, she's right not to have included her when she first answered the question, because that's not the question I was asking and she knows it.

“And now we better find a place for you,” she says.

“The traditional place for a chauffeur-bodyguard is an apartment over the garage. I bet this house has one.”

“It does,” she says.

“It looked like it.”

“But I think you should stay in the house. There's a bedroom upstairs.”

“Where's your room?”

“Upstairs. Two doors down. Are you comfortable with that?”

Two doors and a couple of yards between us. Was I comfortable with that? I was comfortable when she was out here on the beach with the rest of the rich people and I was in the Valley with the smog. Now that I know that there is a spare bedroom two doors down from hers where I'm welcome to park my bags and lay my head, there probably isn't any place in the world far enough away for me to forget about it and sleep in peace. There's only one place in the world that I'm going to be comfortable. “That's fine,” I say.

“Joe.” She comes close and puts a hand on my arm. “Whatever is going to be will be.”

“Easy for you to say,” I say.

“Is it?”

“I got you both orange juice,” Mrs. Mulligan calls out. She sounds like something you would hear off a rocky coast on a foggy night.

“Thank you, Mary,” Maggie says.

The juice is a little cooler than room temperature. Sweet and full of flavors. It cuts through the dryness in my throat.

“Thank you, Mary,” I say.

“Have you decided yet where it is you'll be sleeping?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I'll unpack your bags for you, but all things considered, I think you should carry them in from the car. You look like a strapping lad, although not so very tall.”

I bring my suitcases into the house. Then the fiber cases. They're locked and I tell Mary Mulligan to leave them alone. She's unpacking my clothes, doing a very quick and neat job of it. “Will you look at these,” she says when she comes to the
guns. “Are we on the beach in California or some back street in Belfast?”

“Is that where you're from?”

“No,” she says, “from Roscommon in the middle of the country. It's not as mean, but it's often just as poor.”

When we get downstairs, Maggie is on the telephone. She's got her feet curled up beneath her on the sofa. I wait. When she's done, I say, “I want to examine the perimeter.” I smile. She smiles back. Our first private joke.

“I have to work,” she says. “That is to say I have to make phone calls and appear to be making idle chitchat while I desperately connive to keep up on who's doing what film and who's screwing whom out of what deal. Do you want me to share all the hot Hollywood gossip with you?”

“That's alright,” I say.

“Mary can walk you around, or just make yourself free.”

“Do you have anything scheduled today? Besides the phone calls.”

“Dinner at Morton's—Jesus, don't you wish ‘in' spots somehow equated with the quality of the food?”

“I've never eaten at Morton's,” I said. “Just so we both know who you're talking to here, my idea of eating out is eating Mexican at a joint so cheap that even Mexicans can afford it.”

“I'm sorry, Joe,” she says. “I didn't mean to—”

“—to remind me that you're rich and I'm not. That you're”—I look around at the twenty-two-foot-high living room with it's unobstructed view of the ocean and its own indoor waterfall—“a movie star and I'm just a real person. That's alright with me. I mostly know who I am. I don't want you to forget.”

“There are . . .” she giggles. It's a girlish, fetching giggle. It's entirely possible that everything about her is perfect. It is more likely that I am in that hormone-haze state of mind that puts the golden glow on my perceptions. Let me possess this woman for twenty years and I'm sure I'll start to see her flaws and her warm and gushing laughter will begin to grate on my nerves. Bound to happen.

“There are . . .?”

“There are movies about exactly this situation. The rich woman and her chauffeur. If you want the movies to be your guide.”

I am not on solid land here. Not by any means. I want to be. “Is that what you want? To play out a scene?”

“You're a serious guy, Joe. A real guy. That's why I wanted you here. I better not forget it,” she says.

“OK,” I say. Whatever all that meant.

“I have to make these calls,” she says apologetically.

“Just keep me informed of your schedule. I'll work around you. That's what I'm supposed to do. That's what you hired me for.” And she had hired me. She'd signed a contract with the company for my services and received a set of price guidelines. That's an implied contract in which the client is meant to understand that anything additional that we supply in equipment and manpower will be charged for and it is legal prior notification of the rates thereof. “Today I want to check the premises, work out whatever recommendations I'm going to make. This evening I'll drive you to your dinner and home again. Unless you have requirements to the contrary. In the meantime, there's a couple of hours in there where I'd like to grab some personal time. I run and do a couple of things to keep in shape. Though I know I don't personally look it.”