12/5/95

One Bugged Journalist

Itג€™s humiliating. Why isnג€™t anyone trying to wiretap me?

    With all these wiretapping scandals involving some of the most important newspapermen in the country, it has become a humiliating embarrassment to call myself a journalist.
    It's an embarrassment, because no one's wiretapping me.
    What am I supposed to tell my family, that no one cares about what I'm scheming to write? That my competitors aren't willing to risk imprisonment by infiltrating my most private conversations?
    This won't do.   
    Perhaps what they need is an anonymous tip. Well, don't quote me, but to whom it my concern I'm planning shocking revelations of Kupat Holim, the frozen-chicken industry, a shadowy makolet, a certain Palestinian leader, a supermarket that shall remain nameless, several leading religious leaders, and a set of triplets whose identity I categorically refuse to reveal. (For more information, please bug 02-315678).
    For a while, I thought I was being wiretapped. I immediately called the police, who put me through to the Serious Crimes Division, who laughed when I explained that I was a famous journalist at The Jerusalem Post who was being victimized by illegal surveillance. They had never even heard of the Post, and they had to ask me to spell my name, which really punched a hole in my credibility.
    Eventually they consented to send over a couple of police cadets to check out the complaint. Turns out I was being eavesdropped, by the Post proofreader, with whom I share a line at the news desk. She happened one afternoon to pick up the phone just as I was receiving data for a shopping list from my wife, and cut in to remind me that there was only one "m" in "cinnamon." 
    Under the circumstances, I had to drop the charges.

IF I WAS to have any chance of getting off the back page of the Magazine and onto the front page of the newspaper, it was clear I'd have to bug or be bugged; be published about or perish.
    And I knew just the person to help: Dick J. Delaney, two-bit, washed-up, nisht-geferlach private-eye. (He ain't much, but he's the only dick I know.)
    His third-floor firetrap on Aristoboulus Street was even seedier than the last time I wrote about him. It had gotten so bad that a cockroach living behind the toilet had died of embarrassment. Business was so poor that Delaney found he didn't need more than one paper clip, and sold the rest for scrap metal. Saving on coffee, he made do with a cup of brown water that spluttered fresh out of the tap every morning. To break the monotony of worklessness, he spent much of the day collecting dandruff flecks in an old gin bottle.
    I walked through the door. "Got a job for you," I announced.
    He looked up at me and scoffed. "You couldn't possibly pay my rate."
    He was right. His rate, unchanged since 1953, was two lira an hour. Where could one find lira nowadays?
    "I'll cut a barter deal with you, Delaney; you work for me, and I'll pay you in advertising space in my newspaper." At the rate he charged, I calculated, and at the rate we charged, I'd have him working 15 years before he earned enough space to advertise the first letter of his name.
    He glared at me through narrowed eyes, and asked me which newspaper I worked for. I told him. He asked if I might by some chance happen to be Orbaum. Aha, I thought, recognition at last. You bet, I said, he in person. He threw his typewriter at me.
    "You! You created this stinking mess I'm in, you made me what I am, and now you have the gall to come begging for help? Get out! Go invent some slick whiz with a computer and a secretary and a shag rug and let him skulk around for you."
    "You know," I said patronizingly, "I could make you an instant success. Work for me, Delaney, I'll make it worth your while."
    He swallowed hard. "Please, have a seat. My, uh, secretary over here will open a file."
    Delaney's new secretary, a competent pensioner named Shlomo, entered my    
    "No!" The slick detective hammered a fist on his desk. "That's not what I had in mind!"
    I shrugged.
     Delaney's new secretary, a competent yet lusciously slinky blonde named Ursula, crossed her silken, lithe legs and, gazing at me with an expression of profound gratitude, entered my particulars into her state-of-the-art computer.
    Delaney invited me to discuss the case in the privacy of his newly redecorated conference room. He sprung up from his mahogany desk and tripped on the shag rug. Ursula tittered.
    He looked at me balefully. "Was that really necessary?"

"SO," SAID the gumshoe, "what's bugging you?"
    "Not what," I said, "who."
    "Alright then, who's bugging you?"
    "Nobody." I gave him the full poop. "So I want you to get out your wiretapping kit -- I'll supply you with the finest equipment available -- and dig up some dirt I can bury somebody with. And for good measure," I said with a devious leer, "Bug me, too. Find someone to hire you to get some lowdown on me."
    "Is that all?"
    "No, there's more. Then get yourself arrested, implicate me, turn state's evidence to get yourself out of jail, get every photojournalist in town down to the lock-up to catch me smiling while being dragged in by two grim-looking policemen, and, finally, make sure every newspaper in the country runs the pictures on Page One by promising every newspaper an exclusive. If it helps, you can mention that I'm also under suspicion of threatening to frame you, blow up your car and kidnap your secretary for ransom."
    "And then what?"
    "My publisher will bail me out."
    "Are you sure he will?"
    Hmm...

DELANEY RAN into a problem. (I suspect it was a tactic to milk me for a few extra lirot.) It seemed that the only person in the business interested in having me bugged me was an accounting clerk in a Tiberias weekly, and then only if I was willing to pay for the privilege. Really! Has this profession sunk to such a moral low? And how would I explain that on my expense sheet?
    Finally, a breakthrough. Delaney had found both a perpetrator and a victim. I was on my way!
    Sure enough, every thought, every idea I had was making its way right back to me, as if ... as if someone was listening in. And Delaney fed me inside dope from someone clearly tuned in to my wavelength. It was uncanny: somebody was beating me to my own hunches, and at the same time I was getting a leg up on some poor sap whose every instinct was ... was ....
    DELANEY!"
    "Mr. Delaney is not in at the moment," Ursula said sultrily, "May I take a message?"
    "Yeah, tell him this: you're fired; Shlomo's taking your place, and I'm editing out the computer and the shag rug."
    "I see," Shlomo wheezed. "And what might be the problem, sir?"
    "The problem might be that Delaney pulled a fast one on me. You know who he wiretapped for me? Me! And can you guess who's wiretapping me? Me! He's got me bugging myself, stealing my own ideas, eavesdropping on my own thoughts. My imagination is being fed imaginations by, to and from a product of that very imagination. You tell him this, Shlomo: either Delaney gets some results, or he's going to be the sorry victim of character assassination."
    One has to know how to deal with such types as Delaney. An ugly threat here, nasty intimidation there. In his case, all I had to do was pull out the rug from under him, for one morning someday soon, on Page One of every journal in the land, will be a headline that, though precisely the opposite of what I had plotted, will not be entirely objectionable:
    Journalist Found to be Free
        of Wiretapping Suspicions