Wag the Dog (25 page)

It would be very wrong to assume that because Mel Taylor's sexual life had bathetic episodes that he was a clown. Quite to the contrary. Taylor was astute, and as an agent of his country, or of his company, he was as ruthless and as dangerous as they required him to be. “You're not suggesting we end surveillance just because they hopped in the sack, are you?” Taylor asked. He was as convinced by the tapes as the others. The only difference was that they wanted to be convinced and he didn't. He still had one hole card and he wanted a chance to play it. Nobody could fake that much fucking and sucking with that much detail. Not without going mad in the process. But, dammit, Taylor wanted to check.

“It sounds like they're both pretty distracted,” Hartman said. “But no, you might as well continue.”

“Is there a question of costs here?” Sheehan asked.

“No,” Hartman replied. “Do whatever you have to do to get the job done.” That was easy for him to say. He had already arranged to pay for it with Other People's Money.

Good. Taylor's hole card was the maid. When he'd gotten rid of Maria—not easy, since she'd held a valid green card for six years—he'd had a quiet word with the agency and had them put in an illegal. Mrs. Mulligan didn't work for U. Sec. But she would soon. If she wanted to stay in America. “What do we do if Ms. Lazlo starts asking questions again?” Taylor asked. “Or if Broz does that for her?”

Hartman paused a moment. He wanted to be very clear about this. Finally, he said, “I would like you to remember that Magdalena Lazlo is a woman of great value. Aside from her attributes as a human being—sensitive, creative, endearing in many ways—she makes a lot of money for a lot of people. That's worth preserving. So we are talking about a careful and graduated response. Mr. Broz, of course, is entirely your concern. Finally, there is a bottom line: What Mr. Beagle is engaged in is vastly more important than either of them. It is to remain secret and protected at any cost. I don't see how I can be any more precise and explicit than that.”

Taylor looked to Sheehan. Sheehan asked, “When you say ‘at any cost' . . . that's uh . . . not a financial reference.”

“I'm sorry that you don't seem to get it,” the client said.

“If we're speaking of . . . ” Sheehan was flustered. He'd been more or less told by C. H. Bunker to do whatever the client needed. Also, U. Sec. did do the sort of things that they would deny doing even under the penalty of perjury. But Sheehan, and Taylor too, tended to think of Hartman as a bit of a lightweight since he was in what they thought of as a frivolous business. “If we're speaking of illegal or uh . . . coercive measures, I don't quite know what to say, if your implication . . .”

Which was exactly what Hartman meant to say. Because they were getting closer to the next step, and the level of risk would take a significant step upward. But he damn well didn't want to go on record, not with these clowns, of saying anything that explicit. “There is a bottom line,” Hartman repeated himself word for word, but slower. He didn't like to repeat himself. “What Mr. Beagle is engaged in is vastly more important. It is to remain secret and protected at any cost.” Then he added, “If you have problems with that, resign the account now. If you don't understand it, talk to C. H. Bunker. If you need to know that you're on the side of truth, justice, and the American way, you can call the man whom you worked for in 1979.”

Taylor didn't get it. But Sheehan sat up straighten He all but saluted. “Yes, sir.” he said.

“Is there anything else?” the client asked.

“No, sir,” Sheehan said.

Hartman took the tapes and Joe Broz's file with him. Sheehan and Taylor both walked him to the elevator where, just before the doors closed, Hartman said to Sheehan: “By the way,
he
spoke very highly of you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Sheehan said. He waited, listening to the cables rustling in the shaft. When he was certain Hartman was several stories away, he said to Taylor, “Those weren't really the only copies of the tapes, were they?”

“I'll make you a set,” Taylor said. “What was all that about 1979?”

“In '79 I was still with the Company,”
⁵⁰
Sheehan said. “In '79, George Bush was our director.”

 

 

 

⁴⁸
The Wicked Witch of the West in
The Wizard of Oz
(1939).

⁴⁹
Derek, once an actor, has been involved with a succession of beautiful women whom he groomed or helped groom to motion picture stardom. They include Ursula Andress and, most recently, Bo Derek.

⁵⁰
The CIA.

S
HE COMES UP
close, close enough for me to take her in my arms. “I will,” she says, “if you want me to. But don't, if you can't handle touching me.”

“I can handle it.”

She looks—what?—regretful, and steps into my arms. She puts her head gently on my shoulder. We move to the music. “Be patient with me,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“You think they bought it?”

“Yes,” I say. “I'm certain. I can feel it.” And I can. Even if we have to remember constantly that we're on mike, the feeling is different. I am no longer the deer who sees the tiger.
A strategy of positioning evades Reality and confronts through Illusion.
Now, when the tiger sees me, he sees one of his own kind. Oh, perhaps not another big cat, but at least a jackal.

Maggie starts to giggle. The music is still playing. We whisper underneath. “What?”

“Mrs. Mulligan will be back tomorrow.”

“I know that.”

“Remember what we have to do.”

“Oh, shit.”

“It was your idea. When we sat out there on the beach after you punched out poor, dear Jack Cushing.”

“Tell me something, were you really going to go to bed with him or were you doing that to provoke me?”

“I think we better do it in separate rooms,” she says.

“OK. Let's go.” I head for the stairs. Maggie walks beside me. The music is still loud enough that we can talk. If we whisper.

She grabs me on the stairs. “Joe, it was your idea. Stop tormenting yourself. You said to me that the main thing was to set yourself free to investigate Beagle and Hartman and figure out what was going on, and I asked you if you could handle pretending to be my lover and you said yes.”

“I know it was. But I thought we'd just do a couple of
uh-uh-uhs
and
ohs,
and like that. You know, a few minutes long. I didn't think we'd be doing these long, intense—I don't know what to call them—scenarios. Kinky scenarios.”

“I told you I refuse to sound like the sound track to a low-rent porn film.”

“Nobody in the history of world sex has ever taken as long as you take to fake an orgasm. That's the virtue of fucking fake orgasms, they come quick.”

“If I am going to pretend to be your lover for the benefit of a bunch of eavesdropping sleazeballs, probably including David Hartman, I'm going to make them eat their hearts out. I want to make them cry for wishing they were you. All of them. Arrogant pricks, listening in on me. And,” she says, “they are loving scenarios. Not kinky ones.”

“OK, OK, come on, let's do it.”

The reasoning is very clear. What is Mary Mulligan going to think, after being sent away so we can be alone, and with all the noise and to-do and all the shopping, if the sheets are clean? The sheets have got to be stained. Even if she isn't working for them, the story will be all over the streets in hours. Maggie's a star. And that's what the maids and chauffeurs and plumbers and electricians and doctors do—gossip about the stars. Maybe the story will be that it's because she's gay and is trying to cover up, or maybe it will be that it's a desperate ploy to make Jack Cushing jealous, or maybe it'll have something to do with gerbils—whatever the alleged reason, the story will be that we're faking it. It'll get back to U. Sec., and David Hartman, quick enough.

She goes into her room. I keep walking down the hall to mine. It's what I learned to do, back in '67, when it was a matter of life and death. I don't mean to jerk off, I mean to take care of the details. Leave nothing showing that shouldn't show. Make sure everything that should be there appears to be there. When you're setting ambushes or walking into them, that's what makes the difference. The VC and NVA regulars, they were masters at it, because they didn't have the firepower, like I don't have the firepower, all they had was their minds—imagination and attention to detail.

Why am I embarrassed? This is not the first time in my life I have masturbated. When we were thirteen, fourteen, we had circle jerks. Competitions to see who could do it quickest, shoot the most distance. It shouldn't bother me, it really shouldn't. Maggie's doing more or less the same down in her room. Though a woman's stains are far less distinctive than a man's, there are still the smells. It may sound like I'm out there, but damn, I remember they could smell us and we could smell them. I could smell day-old rice. I could smell their rolled tobacco and I could tell when they smoked reefer. I could smell their body odor and the difference between an American fart and a Vietnamese fart. I don't know that Mary Mulligan is going to look at sheets or close her eyes when she throws them in the wash. I don't know that she's going to sniff at them, but maybe she'll notice the absence of smell. That's the way I think.

Maggie and I are each going to do our own sheet and then we're going to switch.

It's making me crazy. I'm in love with her. I want to be making love to her, fucking her, having intercourse, sexual congress, becoming intimate, however the hell you want to say it, it's what I want. We've been touching each other and gazing at each other in public. We've been talking dirty for two, three days now, creating scenes that I would pay to listen to. I've been living here for weeks. There she is, down the hall. I hear her giggle, like she's embarrassed too, then some other noises, like she's touching herself and—enjoying it. I am as hard and urgent as I'm ever going to get I feel like a fool, a sap, to be using my fist, when she's right down the hall.

I push away the damn sheet, get off the bed, and head down the hall.

I walk into Maggie's bedroom, fully erect. Determined. I'm going to take her and she's going to like it. How can she not be as caught up in the game, or almost as caught up, as I am? What's wrong with her? Why's she holding back?

I get on the bed and pull her to me. She goes limp. I kiss her. The female-corpse act. “What do you want to do?” she whispers. “Fuck me once while I play dead and never see me again? Or do you want to exercise some self-control and take a chance that it's going to happen for real. And you can fuck me a thousand times with me fucking back. What are you going to do, Joe?”

“Fuck you, Maggie,” I say loud enough for all the microphones to hear.

If I was twenty, I probably would have fucked her. And thought it was the right thing to do. As a man. As a marine. But I'm not twenty. And she's the most woman I've ever met. Outside of Vietnam. There's a thirty-three-inch TV in the wall that operates from a console by the bed. I turn it on. Loud. It's one of the movie channels. John Wayne is a cowboy. I say, “Dammit Maggie, it's embarrassing.”

“No. It's not,” she says. “It shows wisdom and self-control. It's probably ‘the way of the warrior' not to be ruled by your dick.”