“You want a small wireless listening device? Fine. I got a bunch in that glass case right over there to your left. They’re called transistor radios. I stock both Motorola and GE, but the Japanese make the best ones.” He stuck out his lower lip and blew a lock of hair off his forehead. “Ain’t that a kick in the behind? We beat em fifteen years ago by bombing two of their cities to radioactive dust, but do they die? No! They hide in their holes until the dust settles, then come crawling back out armed with circuit boards and soldering irons instead of Nambu machine guns. By 1985, they’ll own the world. The part of it
“So you can’t help me?”
“Whattaya, kiddin? Sure I can. Silent Mike McEachern’s always happy to help fill a customer’s electronic needs. But it’ll cost.”
“I’d be willing to pay quite a bit. It could save me even more when I get that cheating bitch into divorce court.”
“Uh-huh. Wait here a minute while I get something out of the back. And turn that sign in the door over to CLOSED, wouldja? I’m going to show you something that’s probably not… well, maybe it
“I’m guessing not.”
My guide to sixties-era electronica reappeared with a weird-looking gadget in one hand and a small cardboard box in the other. The printing on the box was in Japanese. The gadget looked like a dildo for pixie chicks, mounted on a black plastic disc. The disc was three inches thick and about the diameter of a quarter, with a spray of wires coming out of it. He put it on the counter.
“This is an Echo. Manufactured right here in town, son. If anyone can beat the sons of Nippon at their own game, it’s us. Electronics is gonna replace banking in Dallas by 1970. Mark my words.” He crossed himself, pointed skyward, and added, “God bless Texas.”
I picked the gadget up. “What exactly is an Echo when it’s at home with its feet up on the hassock?”
“The closest thing to the kind of bug you described to me that you’re gonna get. It’s small because it doesn’t have any vacuum tubes and doesn’t run on batteries. It runs on ordinary AC house current.”
“You plug it into the wall?”
“Sure, why not? Your wife and her boyfriend can look at it and say, ‘How nice, someone bugged the place while we were out, let’s have a nice noisy shag, then talk over all our private business.’”
He was a geek, all right. Still, patience is a virtue. And I needed what I needed.
“What do you do with it, then?”
He tapped the disc. “This goes inside the base of a lamp. Not a floor lamp, unless you’re interested 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 techno-dream 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.”
