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in recording the mice running around inside the baseboards, you dig? A table lamp, so it’s up where
people talk.” He brushed the wires. “The red and yellow ones connect to the lamp cord, lamp cord’s
plugged into the wall. The bug’s dead until someone turns on the lamp. When they do, bingo, you’re
off to the races.”
“This other thing is the mike?”
“Yep, and for American-made it’s a good one. Now—you see the other two wires? The blue and
green ones?”
“Uh-huh.”
He opened the cardboard box with the Japanese writing on it, and took out a reel-to-reel recorder.
It was bigger than a pack of Sadie’s Winstons, but not by much.
“Those wires hook up to this. Base unit goes in the lamp, recorder goes in a bureau drawer, maybe
under your wife’s scanties. Or drill a little hole in the wall and put it in the closet.”
“The recorder also draws power from the lamp cord.”
“Naturally.”
“Could I get two of these Echoes?”
“I could get you four, if you wanted. Might take a week, though.”
“Two will be fine. How much?”
“Stuff like this ain’t cheap. A pair’d run you a hundred and forty. Best I can do. And it would have
to be a cash deal.” He spoke with a regret that suggested we had been having a nice little technodream
for ourselves, but now the dream was almost over.
“How much more would it cost me to have you do the installation?” I saw his alarm and hastened
to dispel it. “I don’t mean the actual black-bag job, nothing like that. Just to put the bugs in a couple
of lamps and hook up the tape recorders—could you do that?”
“Of course I could, Mr.—”
“Let’s say Mr. Doe. John Doe.”
His eyes sparkled as I imagine E. Howard Hunt’s would when he first beheld the challenge that
was the Watergate Hotel. “Good name.”
“Thanks. And it would be good to have a couple of options with the wires. Something short, if I
can place it close by, something longer if I need to hide it in a closet or on the other side of a wall.”
“I can do that, but you don’t want more than ten feet or the sound turns to mud. Also, the more
wire you use, the greater the chance that someone’ll find it.”
Even an English teacher could understand that.
“How much for the whole deal?”
“Mmm . . . hundred and eighty?”
He looked ready to haggle, but I didn’t have the time or the inclination. I put five twenties down
on the counter and said, “You get the rest when I pick them up. But first we test them out and make
sure they work, agreed?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“One other thing. Get used lamps. Kind of grungy.”
“Grungy?”
“Like they were picked up at a yard sale or a flea market for a quarter apiece.” After you direct a
few plays—counting the ones I’d worked on at LHS, Of Mice and Men had been my fifth—you learn a
few things about set decoration. The last thing I wanted was someone stealing a bug-loaded lamp
from a semi-furnished apartment.
For a moment he looked puzzled, then a complicitous smile dawned on his face. “I get it. Realism.”
“That’s the plan, Stan.” I started for the door, then came back, leaned my forearms on the transistor
radio display case, and looked into his eyes. I can’t swear that he saw the man who had killed Frank