Augustino wasn’t at headquarters or the Tech Area. In the commissary, Joe heard the captain had been seen driving on Bathtub Row.

Bathtub Row had nothing but long afternoon shadows. No maids hanging clothes or walking babies. There were no sounds except for jays and the drifting shouts of a softball game on the ball field. Walking past Fermi’s cottage and Jaworski’s stone house, Joe remembered that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the early movie. Everyone with kids, even Kitty Oppenheimer, was at Snow White.

At the end of Bathtub Row a garden of poplars and spruces lent privacy to the Oppenheimer cottage. Augustino was coming out the kitchen door, and there was something about the way he moved that made Joe stop and watch. Augustino carried a small reel of white wire finer than the electrical wire used on the Hill. He let himself out the back garden gate and slipped into the trees.

A scooter still sat in the flower bed. The scooter looked rusted to the spot, and the flowers lay flat and dead. Joe knocked softly at the door. It was unlocked. The living room’s casement windows afforded sunlight that reflected off a hardwood floor and whitewashed stone walls. The furniture was Spanish rustic and rattan, an easy chair with a laurel pattern, stand-up ashtrays, serapes on the sofa, bookcases, Santiago pottery on the fireplace mantel. Nothing apparently out of the ordinary.

Kitty didn’t like maids reordering the bedroom. A four-poster stood over ashtrays, open books, loose butts, water glasses. There was a Picasso lithograph on the wall, a disheveled bookcase. No white wires along the baseboard.

The study had a Spanish fireplace in the corner, a desk of spreading papers, two ashtrays of cigarette butts and a third ashtray with two pipes, a meerschaum and a briar. Pictures of Krishna and a sailboat hung on the walls.

The nursery had been a sun porch and still had the yellow light of the porch. A crib at one end and a bed at the other, teddy bears on a throw rug, a case of children’s books with a top row of German novels. Kitty used a German nurse.

He returned to the living room and moved around the periphery, lifting chairs, tables, sofa. As he pulled out the bookcase, he saw the white wire that emerged from the border of the floor, rose almost invisibly up the whitewashed wall and led into the back of the case. He searched through the records on the bottom shelf: Bach, Beethoven, Fauré. He spilled out the books above: Austen, Unamuno, Jeune Fille Violaine, Thermodynamique, Upanishads, Interpretation of Dreams. Behind Freud was the microphone, a wire mesh button no larger than a dime. He snapped it off.