WHEN I GET back to the house, all I want to do is get those discs on the computer and read them. Steve is unhappy to be on guard duty. His son is elated to be holding a gun. I send them to the kitchen, for Mrs. Mulligan to get them something to eat. Maggie wants to talk. Fucking microphones. She doesn’t want to hear country music either. Or Bartok or Bach or Dylan or Guns n’ Roses or Miles Davis. She wants to talk about her feelings. I want to load the computer and find out what the hell we’ve got. Find out, maybe, at last, what’s going on.
Maggie is not used to people getting killed.
We go into her office.
I put in the disc marked 1. It is a backup system called Smart Set. There are twenty-six discs. I start loading them. She wants to talk.
I stand up. I hold her. “Don’t worry, baby,” I say. “I’m going to protect you. I’m going to take care of you.” You know, the usual shit a guy is supposed to say when a weak woman is shaking and weeping in his arms. But I have to get back to these discs. They killed the boy for what’s on there. Now I’m going to know what it is. When I know it, then I’ve done what I set out to do. With that—I hope—we’ve got Hartman and Beagle and we can control the game.
It takes about fifteen minutes to get them all loaded in. There is an extra disc. When I put it in, I get a message on the screen that it is not an Apple disc. I figure it is a DOS disc. So I open up the translation program. But even with that up and running the computer doesn’t recognize the disc. I put it aside. Though naturally I am certain that it is the disc that contains the magic bit of information, the clue, the truth, the thing that everybody is chasing. Maggie tells me later that Hitchcock would have called it the MacGuffin.
In the meantime, until I can figure it out, I look at what we do have.
I pull a chair over so Maggie can sit beside me. That way I can hold her hand and be with her.
“What are we doing, Joe?”
Brody had some games—which don’t interest me. A series of computer programs that do computer things—speed up, manage, protect. He’s got Prodigy and CompuServe. His phone book and date book are—as I suspected—in there. He’s got check-balancing and tax-preparation programs. Then there are documents: film treatments, short stories, several screenplays, letters. It’s going to take days to read.
“What about that boy? Shouldn’t we be doing something? Going to the police?”
I decide that the best bet is the letters.
“Be patient. Stick with me, baby. I’m going to find our way out of this.” I punch up letter after letter. I am not a fast reader. I try to scan, find key words, sure enough, eventually “secret” with three exclamation points pops out at me.
Dearest Mother
. . . our work of course is secret!!! Da-dum! We have all taken oaths. Never to speak a word of what we do to Outsiders. A strange Xenophobia, I think, Ciné-Mutteteers against the world. Though I must tell you, Mother, that here in Hollywood—the new au courant is LaLaLa—it is not unusual. CAA is mad for secrecy. More CIA than CAA. RepCo is demonic about it. Anyone who speaks of—or leaks—agency business is summarily fired! Ipso-presto, no appeal! Stripped of his leased Porsche and car phone at high noon on Sunset Boulevard. So what does everyone do all day? They traffic in secrets. Gossip is coin of the realm. It brings out the Queen, or at least the Lady in Waiting in everyone, chatter, chatter, chatter.
Yet our little crew must be loyaler than most, for I hear nothing, nothing, nothing of what our Beagle doth shoot. Or plan to shoot, actually. For since I’ve come, he shoots—nothing, nada, rien, zip, zilch, not foot of film nor field of video. I wouldst weep for the frustration of it. Had not he beat all the weeps out of me, long, long ago.
He plans—what does he plan? What does he plan? What does that endless review of footage, of war, devastation, destruction, fire, flames, pyrotechnic of death, portend?
I think, from the shape of le montage des montages which he creates and re-creates and re-creates—I, humble slave in the bowels of the techie bibliothèque, racing from VCR to laser disc and back to the stacks to make it all happen—he is planning the epic to end all epics, or—as so oft happens in this sadly diminished day of ours—a miniseries to end all miniseries. I am guessing here—totally, wildly guessing—but I think what he’s planning is the video equivalent of one of those awful John Jakes saga series books, except that this will not cover a mere single war, but all wars. Or all 20th-century American wars. Maybe with a multigeneration connection, the son of the son of the son of the son of the bitch. I use the word bitch in only its canine form, this bitch being the dog of war. Sorry about that. Ought I to have erased it? Too vulgar? Too punnish? To punish the punnish.
I came across a piece of paper. This is my other evidence. Across the top it said—I have to get better at the grafix program to re-create it, it was handwritten, but it sort of said: scribble-II-2-√ which part I don’t understand. But under that was a series of what I take to be possible titles:
Morning in America
American Century
American Storm
Pax Americana
Hope of the World
American Hero
The Reincarnation of John Wayne
The 7 Incarnations of John Wayne
As to my prospects—they are still still.
Don’t tell him that. Lie for me. Make him think
I’m happy and prosperous. ’Twill give him nightmares. Am I joking?
“Poor boy,” Maggie says. “Poor, poor boy.”
“Damn,” I say. Is that it?
“Hold me, Joe. Put it away. Hold me.”
I don’t want to. I want to do my job. I want to go through everything that Teddy Brody wrote down. I want to find someone who can figure out what the unidentifiable disc is. But I take her in my arms and I hold her. She buries her head against my chest and she’s crying. Maggie’s not used to people being killed. People don’t get killed over movies.
“I think I’m going to be hysterical,” she says.
“It’s OK.”
“No, really. It’s awful. There’s a joke in my mind. I’m trying to make a joke out of it.”
“What joke?”
“Stupid joke.”
“What?”
“It’s one thing to be killed for a movie. But for a miniseries? . . . It’s not funny.”
“No.”
“Now that I said it, it’s not. It’s so sad.”
Suddenly, it’s real simple. People don’t get killed for movies. Or miniseries. So it’s not a movie. I’m playing this wrong. Way wrong.
“Maggie, listen to me. This is out of hand. We have to get some things straight. I want you to call David Hartman.”
“Why? What?”
“Trust me. Do it. We’re going to end this. Now. Call him and get in to see him as soon as we can.” Microphones are listening. We’re being watched. In the morning Ray Matusow will pick up the tape of what we did today. Then it will go to transcription services. Mel Taylor will have it in the afternoon. Hartman sometime thereafter, if it’s interesting. Or titillating.
Maggie dials. I listen on the extension. “Fi, it’s Maggie. I need to see David.”
“Oh, dear, you do know the sort of shed-ule he keeps.”
“It’s urgent Fi, figure out some way I can see him today.”
“I simply cahn’t do it.”
“What about tomorrow.”
“He’s leaving the country for a week. It’s not going to be possible.”
“Who’s he in with?” Maggie asks, figuring there are some people she simply outranks on the Hollywood scale. “Come on, Fi, who’s he seeing today? Help me, Fi, and I will tell you what Fergie really did at that party in New York last month.”
“I assure you, Maggie, that while you may have been at the party, I have already heard reports that include the color of her underdrawers, not to be vulgar. However, since you are a dear and do give me a bit of good gossip from time to time, I will tell you. Right now he is in with Sakuro, and you know how he is about his kendo. After that he has a meeting with C. H. Bunker.”
“Who,” Maggie asks, “is OH. Bunker?”
“I don’t know, but he is terribly important.”
I gesture Maggie to cut off the conversation.
“Thanks, Fi,” she says.
“Nothing of it. I really am sorry I couldn’t do more for you. He’ll be back in a week.”