MAGGIE LIVES ON the beach. In Trancas, just up from Malibu. I live in Sherman Oaks. They’re both in America. That’s a joke.
I got a visual for you. Me in my three rooms—bedroom, bathroom, and the room that’s everything else—packing. Two large suitcases. Because I’m moving to Maggie’s. I don’t know what exactly I’m in for, so I overpack. I hesitate over the guns. But for the same reason I pack my good suit and my swimming trunks, I take the Glock 17 with a shoulder holster, a Star 9-mm with an ankle holster and the little Beretta 92 that I can fit into a holster at the small of my back. All of them take 9-mm ammunition.
I take my fiber-case kits. The company recommends that we bring them on assignment whenever possible. There are three standard kits. The DS—defense system—includes: the CMS-3, which detects RF bugs, carrier current, transmitters; the DL-1000, that’s a hand-held, take-anywhere bug detector, a hand-held weapons detector, telephone-line tracing set; and a telephone scrambler. Kit 2 contains more active systems, “for those times when it’s time to do it to them before they do it to you.” An EAR-200—you can listen through walls; a long-distance parabolic microphone; a vehicle-tracking device. Computer software to block access to your PC. A remote car starter—for the truly security-conscious; hey, there are people who need them, believe me. A Minox infrared camera with infrared flash; miniature microphones, transmitters, and recorders. The third kit has a stun gun, a stun baton, body armor briefcase inserts, and various mace systems.
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 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.”
“You’re going to sit outside of Morton’s for two hours while we eat? Of course you are. Somehow . . . I didn’t . . . I’ve never had a personal chauffeur before. I’ve been chauffeured lots, of course. The studios are always sending limos. But the drivers, even when I’m polite and talk to them and find out their names and the names of their children and all those things I do to be charming and human, aren’t really . . . Of course, they’re people. But to me, they’re chauffeurs first, people second. This is confusing. To me you’re a person first.”
“Thanks for saying that,” I say. I wonder at it—that’s the truth. I’ve worked with stars before. Stars are people that have their best-ever friends driving them around and polishing their automobiles and don’t think anything of having their best-ever friends sitting outside a restaurant for two or four or six hours doing nothing but vegetating. They figure their childhood best-ever friends ought to be grateful for any kind of job at all, let alone one that lets them hang out with the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, getting to gather the crumbs off the party cake. Don’t forget, the sun is a star, and the sun figures the planets exist for one purpose only, to move in circles around it.
Mrs. Mulligan knows little more about the grounds than I do. She’s only been there a few days. There’s a wall all the way around the house, including the beach side. The living room and the deck are both high enough that when you look out you look over the wall without even being aware of it.
The front gate is an iron grille. The door to the beach is a reasonably solid wooden door. They are both hooked into the alarm system and the CCTV. They were, I automatically note, purchased from and are maintained by a different company from ours. There is no system that protects the wall itself. I could get over it in seconds. So could any other serious intruder. We have forms and checklists that guide us through this kind of survey. That information can be entered into a computer for analysis. This is really a sales tool and the analysis is adjusted to the client’s level of fear and ability to spend.
The heaviest installations I’ve ever done were in Miami when I was on loan to that office for a six-month period in the mid-eighties. It was when it was all happening down there, drugs and guns and money, Marielitos and Colombians and Jamaicans, everyone watching Miami Vice and ready to go to war. We turned quite a few homes into electronically defended private fortresses with full system redundancies. Of course, those people had both the need and the will to kill.
But the people in Maggie’s life—I got to figure their idea of killing someone is a back-stabbing phone call that murders their next picture deal. Sure, there are those among the rich and famous who get cranked up on their favorite recreational drugs and private brand of madness and hurt each other. But those people don’t come over the wall. They’re already inside the gate. This is not Miami and this is not Nam. I’m not going to be in a firefight here. Digging in with the mortars coming in over the wall. Calling in air support. The friendly fire comes in a lot fucking closer than it should.
When I’m done with my inspection, I’m fairly grimy and sweaty anyway. I go up to my room and change into shorts and a T-shirt As I go out through the living room, Maggie is on the phone, preoccupied. She nods, barely, at me. I go out on the deck, down the exterior stairs, and out the back door, onto the beach.
At home I’ve got to get in my car and drive to one of the parks or up on Mulholland or somewhere. Then drive home in my own sweat and if I get caught in traffic end up spending more time in the car than on my feet. It’s either that or run in the streets, breathing exhaust fumes. I run about six miles in the canyons, where it’s up and down. I figure to do eight to ten here, where it’s flat I can do more, and sometimes when I have to, I do.
I look back. There’s Maggie. She’s out on the deck. She’s still on the phone, but she’s watching me.
I run hard, trying to get her image away from my mind. She keeps walking in and out of my private screen and we play scenes together. Sometimes they’re about sex, sometimes about things more complicated than that. Eventually, eventually, I banish her and things go blank. Then the war comes, like it usually does when I run. That’s OK. Because it’s just pictures. No sound. No smells. You see, it’s not like a dream, which can terrify you, give you the cold sweats and wake you up screaming, screams in your ears, and your nostrils full of those peculiar odors of decimation. Burned bodies, the insides of bodies coming out of the sacks of their skin. No, it’s just a series of images. Just pictures. A game plan. Sometimes, when I get real deep into it, it turns into a kind of map, like a video game, where I can see the path that I need to take to come out alive. The path I did take. Around this mine, away from that booby trap, behind this tree, into that firefight. I try to show the way to others, but I can’t. Survival is a personal thing.
By the time I get back, the sweat is flowing good and the pictures are gone. There’s just the beach and the houses of rich people all in a row. Maggie, standing on her deck, is watching me.
When I get up there, she’s gone. Which makes me more comfortable. I do what I was going to do anyway—two hundred sit-ups, a hundred push-ups. I can do more. But to what purpose? I’m not even entirely sure why I settled on this routine. Why I choose to be fit. It’s not as if the Marines are going to call me back for another war.
She’s there again when I’m done. She smiles at me.
“I need a shower,” I say.
The bathroom is as big as a kid’s bedroom. And this is the guest bath, not the master bath. I step into the shower and run it hot and full. The room steams up. The water pounds into my back. I wash. I wait for Maggie to open the door and enter through the mist. I wait in vain.
I’m dry and dressed in time for Ray Matusow. He’s there to check the house for bugs. I could do it myself, but it’s more impressive and more expensive to have Ray come in. Plus, he’s better at it. One of the best in the business. I haven’t mentioned it to Maggie because if someone is listening—which is possible, but I don’t really expect so—why warn them? Some devices can be made passive and, if passive, possibly undetectable. There are essentially two methods of finding listening devices. One is an impedance test. Is there more resistance on a line than there should be? The other is a broadcast test. Make a noise; use a receiver or a set of receivers; at the same time sweep rapidly through all the appropriate frequencies and see if your noise is being transmitted.
Ray is thorough. He checks all the phones. He pays special attention to all the places we normally would plant a listening post: the outlets, stereo, lamps, and any other electronics. He checks the cars. He spends four hours at it.
“Clean,” he says.
“Nice job. Thank you, Ray.” I say. One less thing for Maggie to worry about. And it means that if what I am so quickly becoming obsessed with comes to pass, we will have the privilege of doing it in privacy.
She dresses for dinner. Does her hair and makeup.
“Did you do all that to impress somebody?” I ask her.
“All of them. We all watch each other.”
“Thanks, Joe.”
There are three cars in the garage. Her Porsche, the Seville, and my old Ford. We take the Porsche. Again, at Morton’s, she starts to apologize for my having to wait.
“It’s the way things are,” I say.
“You should be coming in with me,” she says, getting out of the car.
When she’s out of earshot, I say, “Damn right.”
She is subdued after dinner. We don’t say anything. She does smile at me. She turns on the radio. We get lucky. It’s Patsy Cline.
Mary Mulligan does not appear to have waited up for us. That’s good. We feel alone in that big empty house. There’s even a moon over the water, a broken silver line, white foam.
If I were writing this movie, I would be tall and thin and elegant. I would be Fred Astaire and I would take her in my arms and waltz her out on the deck and we would dance for each other and each other alone.
But I’m short and I’m thick. Thick as a brick wall. She kisses me lightly on the lips. An “excuse me” kiss. An “I’m sorry” kiss. A “you’re sweet, but I’m not going to fuck you tonight” kiss. We all learned about that kiss very early. It’s not my favorite kiss. But I certainly do recognize it.
She goes upstairs. I watch her go.
Then I follow. For all my running and sit-ups and pushups, every one of my years weighs like the lead of an old man’s life around my ankles and the climb is an effort that leaves me short of breath. I undress, wondering what sort of fool I am.
I can’t sleep. I try to review the events of the day in my mind. I go over it all. From the packing and the thoughts that drifted up from my groin and washed over my mind, to the drive over through the bad air of L.A., to the look of the house. The maid. The cars. The fresh-squeezed juice. The conversation, verbatim, with Maggie. The run. Ray, doing the sweep. Maggie Krebs, dressed for dinner, becomes Magdalena Lazlo, movie star. Ray, doing the sweep. There’s something about Ray doing the sweep. I don’t know what it is. I play it back again.
Now it’s at least four in the morning. I’ve been tangled in my sheets and have kicked my covers off and tried to sleep in positions that I know won’t work, and the fact that Maggie is down the hall pounds at my consciousness the way the waves work at the beach. So I say the hell with it. I open up fiber case kit 2 and take out my CMS-3. I’m going to go through the same drill Ray did and see if by re-creating it I can figure out what’s bothering me. And see if by occupying myself that way I can drive down the dreams of Maggie. I put on jeans and a T-shirt and go downstairs barefoot.
I start with the phones. That’s the simplest.
According to my CMS-3, there’s a tap on the phone.