Wag the Dog (56 page)

A third vehicle cruised restlessly the nine miles between the two. Partly to check on the others. Partly because Mel Taylor was sure that Broz was going to make a move and he wanted to be there. He knew about Hawk and Steve Weston and Steve's son, and there was a white guy too. He didn't know the white guy's name yet. But he would. Soon. He didn't know what, exactly, they were up to, but he figured he would know that soon too. If Broz somehow did pull something, Taylor had some countermoves.

T
HE CORNERSTONE OF
the White House was laid on October 13, 1792. It was completed in 1800, the first public building in the new capital of the new country. It was built to reflect the spirit of the great experiment upon which the country was embarking. The leaders of this new creation were adamant about avoiding even the trappings of monarchy and so it was definitely not to be a palace. Yet they wanted something fine and noble and expressive of their ideals.

In spite of time and weather, fire and smoke, additions and reconstructions, the mortal flaws and human frailties of its occupants, the White House remains an elegant expression of the aspirations that motivated the age of revolution and rationalism.

The cab that inconspicuously carried David Hartman in from Dulles International Airport offered the passenger a series of views of the White House before it brought him to the entrance gate. He'd seen them all, as we all have, countless times, in movies and on television, on the news, in newspapers, in magazines, in cartoons and comics. Still, it had an impact. Hartman didn't know if that was a result of some aesthetic that infused the setting or it was because he was about to enter the seat of the Imperium as a player.

It was one of those days when the president had a lot of meetings. Nothing earth-shattering or especially newsworthy but very busy. They slipped David in a little before 9:00
A.M.
The president's appointment calendar would show “Sec. of
Com. & D. Hartman.” There would be memos that the subject discussed was the importance of entertainment software as the number-two export of the nation, just after aviation. There was nothing in the memos to indicate that the commerce secretary left almost immediately and that Hartman stayed.

When he was alone with the president, Hartman explained what Saddam Hussein wanted. He wanted access to Western arms and arms technology. He wanted money. Up front, even before they had a deal. Neither of those, Hartman suggested, should be a deal breaker. It wasn't a lot of money. At least not yet. A few billion dollars. And it didn't have to appear in the budget.

Bush was relieved by that. The whole budget fantasy was out of hand. It was a fictoid or factoid ten times the size of a balloon in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. There was nothing that anyone said about it that seemed to actually connect with reality, yet every time it went up, everyone made a lot of noise.

The money would go to Saddam as a loan. “We don't even have to make the loan,” Hartman said. He'd already lined up several Swiss and Italian bankers happy to do that. “We just have to guarantee it.” David was going to get a couple of points from both sides. Banking was an exciting new vista. “I would suggest the Department of Agriculture,” Hartman said. He was virtually quoting Pandar's screenplay. “Guarantee the loans for agricultural credits. That looks like the money goes to our farmers—which it very well might—Iraq does have to buy butter as well as guns. It's obscure and wholesome at the same time.”

Then he got to the main items. Win, lose, or draw, Saddam wanted a guarantee of his personal survival; his country intact, at least to its current borders; sufficient military force to maintain those borders as well as to suppress any attempt at a coup or any attempt at rebellion by dissident minorities. Actually, Saddam had compared his need for armed forces to keep the Kurds in line to the way America used its armed forces to keep blacks in line. He had said it in a buddies kind of way, a remark designed to engender camaraderie, one put-upon head of state to another. It was an unfortunate correlation, but understandable, since an Iraqi would see the police,
the Army, the national police, and the National Guard as single facets of one force, not as distinct entities in the way that Americans do. Nonetheless, Hartman didn't think the insight would help and didn't pass the comparison on.

There were, finally, some smaller points. One—the worldwide price of oil should rise. It didn't have to be abrupt, but it had to be certain. Two—Saddam wanted direct access to the media—world media means American media—right through the whole war. He wanted to be able to get on TV at prime time and deliver his message to the American people, to the Arab people, to the world.

Hartman had already consulted with Beagle about the second item on a scrambled line from the U. Sec. office in Rome.

Beagle had fallen in love with the idea. “It's totally Capraesque,” Beagle said. Frank Capra had been in charge of creating America's propaganda films during World War II. His sources for the footage with which he created images of the Japanese and the Germans as monsters were their own films. Both people had been proud of their blitzkriegs and swift conquests, their sense of racial pride and purity. They worked very hard and with great success, especially the Germans, to get those feelings on film. Capra was delighted by the idea of using their own tools against them.
¹⁰⁸

“Give it to him,” Hartman said to the president. “Saddam's understanding of television is worse than Michael Dukakis's. He's from another century. Trust me. The more he uses TV, the more he'll harm himself. Beagle loves it. He visualizes seeing Saddam strut, with his stormtroopers, through the burning ruins of a conquered country.”

In the California hills Magdalena Lazlo awoke, before dawn, sky just turning light, with an empty space beside her. She reached out, knowing he wasn't there, and put her hand on the pillow where his head had rested. A sentimental gesture. It felt so good to have a man to miss.

Holding that mood close, arms held so as to literally cradle it to her breasts, she slipped into a robe and went down toward the kitchen. On the way downstairs she heard noises. She felt chilled and the feeling—holding dreams of a protector-lover against her body—left her quick as a ghost in the daylight. But then a beat, a moment, after that, she smelled the aroma of coffee brewing. And other smells. Bacon in the pan, bread in the toaster. Then the sound of a black man speaking softly and laughing.

She moved silently so that she could look and listen without being seen. She didn't know, at first, what prompted that. Then she realized she wanted to see a father with his son. She wondered about herself and touched her belly. She had used birth control, on and off, since she'd been sexually active. But not always. She did not get pregnant easily. If she did, there would have been more than one accident by now. There hadn't been. Even with her husband. Was that why it had been so easy for her to say “Yes, come inside,” that she wasn't really afraid, at least not of pregnancy and its consequences—interrupted career, stretch marks, sagging breasts and belly, widening of the hips, squaring off of the buttocks, and responsibility? And of course that companion that then clings to you for twenty or thirty years. She should have been afraid—she pushed her hair back with her fingers—it was madness not to be afraid, of the other thing. The disease. Was that a matter of sheer denial? Or was it that other streak in her, the one that meant it when she said “Let it be birth or death with us,” liked it that way, because otherwise it didn't seem worth doing.

She had a name for that part of herself. The way some men have pet names for their penises and for the same reasons, because the part often led the whole and the person took pride in where the piece took them, stupid and dangerous places included. Mary Magdalene was her obvious but secret name for that side of herself, and Maggie liked to let Mary out in front of the camera, the sainted whore, saucy, wicked, vulnerable, dangerous. Dangerous to herself most of all. It was that quality, that sense of working without a net, that gave her performances magic. Not the craft, not the cheekbones, not the tits. Daring to
be ugly, rude, pathetic, stupid, scared, domineering, vicious, a bitch, a cunt, an ice maiden, a saint, daring to find the line in the air that could not be sustained and sustaining it.

Martin Joseph Weston, eighteen, looked over toward the door and saw her standing there, her robe pulled tight at the waist, her hair tousled with sleep, just finger combed, and nothing on her feet, and it was all he could do not to whistle and say things that went down just fine in the streets in L.A. but which he knew would just sound all wrong here in this ultrafresh other world. Then she smiled at him. It was a shy smile, like she was intruding on their house and was worried what they would think of her. And he fell in love with her, his heart truly stricken.

His father wanted to laugh out loud just looking at the look on his son's face. But he knew how dumb and tender a boy's pride is in puberty, especially in front of his father and a Goddess. So Steve just said, “Morning, Miss Lazlo, how do you like your eggs?”

She said good morning to Steve and to Martin, told them to call her Maggie. She didn't want the eggs or the bacon, but if there was enough coffee, she'd take some of that and a piece of toast off the unsliced loaf of sourdough rye. Steve poured her the coffee. She took it black, as most women whose shape is their fortune do. He put a slab of bread, beside his, in the toaster oven. Maggie sat down at the table by Martin. He already had soft-scrambled eggs, a thick hunk of Canadian bacon, and toast in front of him. But with her that close he had the unsavory feeling that he didn't quite know how to eat right and that chewing would make him look like a dog. “So this is what you looked like when you went into the Marines,” Maggie said to Steve.

“Spittin' image.”

“You were a good-looking boy.”

“You bet. Had all the young girls just chasing me all over Macon. It was different in them days. A girl got pregnant, you was expected to marry her. Made you cautious. A little bit. And they didn't have this AIDS thing.”

“Come on,
Dad.”

Steve slid his eggs out of the pan onto the plate next to the
ham. He took the toast, Maggie's and his own, from the oven, found a plate for hers, and buttered them both. There was a fancy jar of ginger marmalade in the refrigerator that'd caught his eye. He got that, plus the two plates, utensils, and his own cup of coffee, and sat down at the table.

“You were with Joe, in Vietnam.”

“Um-hmm.”

“Will you tell me about it?”

“What do you want to know?”

“There's this man, Taylor. He hates Joe. Do you know why?”

“Joe didn't tell you?”

“I didn't ask him.”

“Well, if he didn't tell you . . .”

“I just didn't ask. Steve”—She gave him a look that asked for help in a special kind of way—“I love Joe. Please.”

In the early dawn two men from the Sacramento office of Universal Security sat in a van. One poured himself a cup of coffee from a thermos. The other climbed out to take a leak off in the brush. Nothing had happened all night long. It's hard to watch nothing. But it's easier than digging ditches.

In the early dawn Joe, Dennis, and Hawk watched the house from three different positions. Joe to the east and Dennis to the north were hidden among the rows of grapes. Hawk, to the south, was in the shadow of some apricot trees.

Dylan, who normally woke with the dawn, stood up in his crib and cried for attention. The nanny came and picked him up. From where he was, Joe could see when she turned on the light and then saw her pass, in silhouette, holding the boy, in front of the window.

They were the first ones up. Nanny got Dylan his bottle. Then she let out the dogs.

“Once Joe got to be sergeant, he could run things,” Steve said. “With him running things, everythin' starts to get better. People stop dying. We stop losing guys to booby traps and all of
that. And ambushes. Nobody ambushes Sergeant Joe Broz. It's like he's got one of them sixth senses or mystical powers. But he don't. He used to explain it to me. How he done it. And to Joey. Joey was his bes' friend, from where he come from. They's like this, Joe and Joey. He had a whole set of rules for ambushes: terrain, expectations of the enemy and such like. And they worked.