Even the Wicked

"Maybe he is," I agreed, "but since I don't have a clue what he's saying it can't get on my nerves."

"You ever heard of the mute, Newt?"

"Not the same. You need the crowd noise, need to hear the punches land."

"These two ain't landin' many."

"Blame the one in the blue shorts," I said. "He's not working hard enough to establish the left jab."

He did enough to win the four-round prelim, though, getting a decision and a round of perfunctory applause from the crowd. Next on the card was a ten-round welterweight bout, a classic matchup of quick light-hitting youth against a strong puncher a couple of years past his prime. The old guy—I think he was all of thirty-four—was able to stun the kid when he landed a clean shot, but the years had slowed him some and he missed more often than he connected. In return, the kid peppered him with a barrage of blows that didn't have much on them.

"He pretty slick," TJ said, after a couple of rounds.

"Too bad he doesn't have a punch."

"He just keep at you, wear you down. Meanwhile he pilin' up the points. Other dude, he be tirin' more with each round."

"If we understood Spanish," I said, "we could listen to the announcer saying pretty much the same thing.

If I were betting this fight I'd put my money on the old guy."

"Ain't no surprise. You ancient dudes has got to stick together.

You think we need any of this here?"

"This here" was the line of goods in the Gehlen catalog. The Gehlen Company is an outfit in Elyria,Ohio , offering electronic espionage equipment, gear to bug other people's phones and offices, gear to keep one's own phones and offices bug-free. There's a curiously bipolar quality to the whole enterprise; they are, after all, promoting half their line as a defense against the other half, and the catalog copy keeps changing philosophical horses in midstream. "Knowledge is power,"

they assure you on one page, and two pages later they're championing

"your most basic right—the right to personal and corporate privacy."

Back and forth the argument rages, from "You have a right to know!" to "Keep their noses out of your business!"

Where, you have to wonder, do the company's sympathies lie?

Given that their namesake was the legendary German intelligence chief, I figured they'd happily sell anything to anybody, committed only to increasing their sales and maximizing their profits. But would any of their wares increase my sales or boost my profits?

"I think we can probably get by without it," I told TJ.

"How we gonna catch Will without all the latest technology?"

"We're not."

" 'Cause he ain't our problem?"

"Not as far as I can tell."

"Dude's the whole city's problem. All they talkin' about, everywhere you go. Will this and Will that."

"He was the headline story in the Post again today," I said, "and they didn't have any news to back it up, because he hasn't done anything since last week. But they want to keep him on the front page to sell papers, so the story was about how the city's nervous, waiting for something to happen."

"That's all they wrote?"

"They tried to put it in historical context. Other faceless killers who've caught the public imagination, like Son of Sam."

"Be a difference," he said. "Wasn't nobody cheerin' for Son of Sam." He flicked a finger at an illustration in the Gehlen catalog. "I like this here voice-changin' telephone, but you see them all over now. They even got them at Radio Shack. This might be a better one, the price they charge for it. Ones at Radio Shack is cheaper."

"I'm not surprised."

"Will could use this here, if he was to start makin' phone calls

'stead of sendin' letters."

"Next time I see him, I'll pass along the suggestion."

"I almost bought me one the other day."

"What for? Haven't you got enough of a repertoire of voices?"

"All I got is accents," he said. "What this does is change the pitch."

"I know what it does."

"So you can sound like a girl, or a little kid. Or if you was a girl to begin with you can sound like a man so's perverts won't be talkin' dirty to you. Be fun to fool around with somethin' like that, only be like a kid with a toy, wouldn't it? One, two weeks and you used up all the newness out of it and be tossin' it in the closet and askin' your mama to buy you somethin' else."

"I guess we don't need it."

He closed the catalog and set it aside. "Don't need none of this," he said. "Far as I can see. You want to know what we need, Reed, I already told you that."

"More than once."

"A computer," he said. "But you don't want to get one."

"One of these days."

"Yeah, right. You just afraid you won't know how to use it."

"It's the same kind of fear," I said, "that keeps men from jumping out of planes without parachutes."

"First thing," he said, "you could learn. You ain't that old."

"Thanks."

"Second thing, I could work it for you."

"A passing ability with video games," I said, "is not the same thing as being computer literate."

"They ain't necessarily that far apart. You 'member the Kongs?

Video games is where they started at, and where they at now?"