Wag the Dog (36 page)

⁷⁵
Electronic surveillance sounds high-tech, and on a certain level it is. But it is also terribly labor-intensive and full of awkward physical problems—like where do you put the tape recorders where they can receive signals, either hardwire or broadcast, so that they are secure and can be serviced on a regular basis. Apartment and office buildings offer any number of locations in service areas. Private homes on individual lots in residential neighborhoods, especially those that are security-conscious, are vastly more difficult. One solution is to park a vehicle near the site of the LDs and put the tape recorders in the vehicle, called a VD, vehicle drop. Places like Beverly Hills where there is virtually no street parking, create an even greater dilemma. Technology has some answers: microwave broadcasting permits a narrow-band directional signal; satellite uplinks are also possible.

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U. Sec. actually has two armed-response services. The main one, offered commercially, is, like much else in life, semifictional. It is actually a referral service that calls the police to inform them that there is a break-in and to rush right over. Police are armed. It is, therefore, an armed response. U. Sec. will also supply private armed response. This creates a variety of legal problems, which vary from state to state, most of them ones of liability, so it's extremely expensive with a lot of money going to the insurance company.

T
AYLOR WANTED TO
meet in the Cube. Although his first meeting there had been sort of fun, Hartman considered the Cube an affectation.

They met at RepCo. Mike Ovitz and CAA had gone totally modernist—gray suits on the agents and a building by I. M. Pei—in effect making the statement “We are business persons running a corporation, not fast-talking comic-strip Jews with gold chains like Sib Kibitz in
Doonesbury
.” Hartman felt he had topped Ovitz with his dramatic re-creation of the Harvard Club, a Georgian Revival cathedral of capitalism, including the historic three-story-high main hall, with its towering windows and walk-in fireplace. Air-conditioning kept the hall, and the other rooms that had hearths, cool enough for charming and aromatic fires—oak and mesquite—even during Los Angeles summers.

“A week ago, as you know, Katherine Przyszewski, Beagle's personal secretary, quit her job,” Taylor said. “The day before yesterday, Ray Matusow, who installed and maintains the listening post at the Przyszewski residence, was mugged while he was making his rounds. Today, Katherine Przyszewski calls Joe Broz to ask for a job.”

“Do they connect?” Hartman asked.

“Exactly,” Taylor said. “Do they connect?”

“What does that mean?” Hartman asked.

“There are no accidents,” Taylor said.

“How much does she know?” Hartman asked.

Sheehan said, “She doesn't seem to know much.” Sheehan wanted to reassure the client.

“It's hard to know how much she knows,” Taylor said. He wanted to make sure the case stayed alive and that if there were any chance of nailing Joe Broz, he didn't miss it.

“We've reviewed her home tapes and her job tapes,” Sheehan said. “And it seems pretty clear that she doesn't know much. About the project.”

“She could know more than she thinks she knows,” Taylor said.

“Like what?” Hartman asked.

“I didn't hear anything,” Sheehan said, “that revealed anything to me.”

“That remark about real people,” Taylor said, although actually he didn't know if the remark had significance. It could have been just something the director had come up with as an excuse not to give some bimbo a part. “That could mean something to somebody, puts it together with something else.”

Hartman kept a poker face and his voice indifferent. “What remark about real people?”

“Beagle said he was only using real people in his next movie,” Taylor said.

“That's it?” Hartman asked.

“There are no accidents,” Taylor said. “Matusow, he's responsible for watching nine people. Two days after he's mugged, one of them, one of the three or four people closest to Beagle, the classic disaffected ex-employee, suddenly calls the guy I pick as the number-one troublemaker in the deck. That's what I see.”

“Where was Broz when the mugging took place?” Hartman asked.

Not a question that Taylor wanted to hear. Because he didn't know. Not for sure. The operative watching Broz had lost him. However, Mel had decided, if asked, to make the information another piece of evidence rather than an admission of failure. “Broz ducked the surveillance that morning.”

“Just keep it simple,” Hartman said. “See to it that she doesn't meet with Broz.”

Propaganda that looks like propaganda is third-rate propaganda.

 

 

F
INDING THE MATERIAL
was not the hardest thing for Teddy Brody to do. Staying up all night, speed reading, marking passages, taking notes, was not all that much of a strain either. Breaking his date with Sam, from Anaheim, who was a fitness instructor at Best Bods in the summer and a ski instructor at Steamboat Springs in the winter, didn't bother Teddy much. While he responded to the body thing—a hot bod is, after all, a hot bod—it was not what he was searching for. After all, in the age of AIDS, genital warts, herpes, condoms, hand jobs, and mutual masturbation, how much better was a bod than a video or a dream?

Teddy had anticipated that cutting the material down to size would be the hardest part of all. One page was astounding brevity for someone who'd graduated college with honors. Let alone a Yalie. It meant more than choosing. It meant shutting up about his choices: simply saying things and letting them hang there, unexplained, unexplicated, neither proving them nor expanding on their implications, trusting the reader to understand them all by himself. That had required a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. But once done, it turned out not to have been difficult at all.

The really hard thing—it froze him for hours, gave him stage fright, touched him as deep as the fear of defecating in his pants in public—was quoting without attribution.
⁷⁷
My God! in old academia that was plagiarism! University chancellors were fired for having done it once, twenty years earlier. A presidential candidate—that is to say, someone presumed to be a professional liar—had to quit his campaign for doing it. And yet Teddy knew that Beagle didn't want footnotes. He didn't care from whence the thoughts came. In CinéMutt it didn't matter. It was clutter. Intellectual litter. The quote from Lodge, and the date, being the exception, because that was part of the point; that we'd used the same themes for three or four wars now and it seemed to work every time. When he handed in his thesis—naked, every word taken from someone else with no recognition, ruthlessly, with cynical abandon—he felt a sense of graduation. He didn't even have to wait for his grade. Beagle had, by the very asking, taught him something important and deep, and made him a better man. Now Brody had the potential for success in Hollywood.
At last,
he thought,
I can steal.

The sense of empowerment was so potent that the minute Teddy handed the propaganda paper in the idea for his screenplay entered his mind. He knew exactly where he was going to steal the plot, the structure, and the characters and exactly how he was going to reinvent them to make his version fresh and original.
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The minute he got home he sat down to write a treatment.
The first draft was done in a matter of hours. By morning he had revised it, run it through spell check, reread it, retyped the corrections, and printed it out. He brought it with him to work.

Beagle had had the single page—pithy and enigmatic as strategy by Sun Tzu or prophecy by I Ching—overnight. Teddy Brody waited, impatiently, for Beagle's arrival in the morning, for his blessing or his curse. And when—if—Beagle praised it, that would be the moment. The moment to say,
“I
have a treatment—would you read it?”

Beagle had sat bolt upright at 5:00
A.M
. It was dark outside, not even a predawn gray, but still crisp black, and stars too. He was wide awake. He thought it was inspiration when that happened, but it was his liver. That's not to say he didn't have insights and fresh concepts in the early hours, but it was the sluggishness in his liver that woke him.

The new woman—Beagle told himself he'd have to make a point of remembering her name—had made another stupid mistake. The sort of mistake Kitty would never make. In an excess of zeal she'd gone out and bought a present for John Lincoln to give to Dylan, even though she didn't know what she was doing. She'd bought a little football and a little helmet. Beagle thought it was cute. Kitty would have known better. Jackie climbed the walls when she saw it. She nailed John's hide to the door. All the sins of the male race apparently had something to do with football. It brought on war, killing, wife beating, beer guzzling, belching, and the national overindulgence in junk food.