I hung up and ran back downstairs. Call me strange, but I tend to carry latex surgical gloves around in my pocket, be cause it’s my business to touch so many nasty things. I put them on before I did any touching.
Good. She hadn’t been too freaked out to lock the door when she left.
No signs of struggle. The gas chromatograph was still turned on. I could smell organic solvents in here, the same ones we didn’t like big corporations to use, and something else too: an oily, foul odor, mixed in with the marine stench of the lobsters. I recognized it. Some of the lobsters I’d gotten off Gallagher’s boat had smelled that way. In fact that was the reason they’d given them to me. Big enough to sell, but they stank too bad. They had come from the entrance to the Inner Harbor.
Just for the hell of it, I locked the door. And that made me think, wait a minute. Tanya had gotten home half an hour ago? And it would have taken her at least half an hour to get home. So whatever was bothering her had taken place an hour ago. But the spray paint on the door was a lot fresher than that.
I opened the door again and checked out the graffiti. It was shitty work. The stuff on the barge had been carefully done. This was done in a hurry, and done badly, with lots of drips and runs.
Spray paint is messy. It throws a fog of paint into the air. Standing in the doorway, I could see a penumbra of paint mist fading out across the white floor. And right in front of the door the red was interrupted by a pair of white ovals where no paint had fallen—shadows cast by the graffitist’s feet. The shadows were pointytoed, but bigger than a woman’s feet.
When he’d walked away, he’d gotten paint mist on the soles of his shoes, and tracked it down the hallway some distance. They were faint tracks, but they’d been made by dress shoes.
That was charming. The Pöyzen Böyzen now had yuppies working for them. So that’s how they afforded those Back Bay condos.
Just as important, Tanya hadn’t left any tracks. She’d cleared out of there before the graffitist had.
So I went back into the lab. What had freaked her out so bad? Something she’d seen during the analysis?
I approached the workbench. Slowly. This reminded me of when you hear a rat trap go off in the middle of the night, and when you go down in the morning you know you’re going to find something really unpleasant. You just don’t know when or where it’s going to hit you.
Whatever had set Tanya off wasn’t obvious. Not two-headed monsters, no parasites squirming loose on the bench. Hell, that wouldn’t have bothered her anyway. She was a biochemist, a scientist, and she had listened to a full recitation of my relationship crimes. Nothing could gross her out.
She was about halfway through dissecting one of Gallagher’s big stinky lobsters. She’d removed the legs and tail and pried back the shell around the body to expose the liver. The bug was sprawled out on its back under a hot light, and the odor was billowing out of it like smoke from a fire.
Had she gotten the liver out? Hard to tell. Something was definitely wrong down in there.
No, she hadn’t. There was hardly any liver left. It had necrosed—a fancy word for died. Rotted away, inside the body, leaving just a puddle of black stuff. Surrounded by blobs of yellowy material, vesicles or sacs of something that I’d never seen inside a lobster before. Some kind of toxin that the liver had desperately tried to remove from the lobster’s system, killing itself in the process. I found a ballpoint pen and poked one of the sacs; something greasy poured out and a wave of the oily scent rose up into the light.
There used to be a plant in Japan that made oil out of rice. The oil had to pass through a heat exchanger to cool it down. In other words, it flowed over a bunch of pipes that had a colder fluid running through them. The cold fluid was a polychlorinated biphenyl. A PCB.
If you’re an engineer, and you’re not very bright, it’s easy to love polychlorinated biphenyls. They are cheap, stable, easy to make and they take heat very well. That’s why they end up in heat exchangers and electrical transformers. It’s how they got into that machine in Japan and, when the pipes started to leak, it’s how they got into a lot of rice oil.
Unfortunately, rice oil is for human consumption, and as soon as human beings enter the equation, PCBs no longer look very good. If we were robots, living in a robot world with robot engineers, we could get away with using them, but the problem with humans is that they have a lot of fat in their bodies and PCBs have this vicious affinity for fat. They dissolve themselves in human fat cells and they never leave. They are studded with loose chlorine atoms that know how to break up chromosomes. So when that heat exchanger started leaking, the city of Kusho, Japan started to look like the site of a Biblical plague. Newborn babies came out undersized and dark brown. People started to waste away. They developed a fairly disgusting skin rash called chloracne—the same one Tom had gotten in Vietnam—and they felt very sick.
Now the plague had come to Boston Harbor.
15
A person might wonder why I, Sangamon Taylor, didn’t run out and go home and scrub myself raw like Tanya did. It had nothing to do with male/female issues, or personal bravery or any of that crap. It had to do with how we viewed ourselves. Tanya was pure as the Antarctic snow. She wore a gas mask when she rode her bicycle. She was born vegetarian, the child of hippies. She didn’t smoke and she didn’t drink; her worst vice was mushrooms—organically grown mushrooms. When she’d looked down into that puddle of PCBs, she’d gotten the first whiff of her own mortality, and she didn’t like it.
We all owe a toxic debt to our bodies, and sooner or later it comes due. Cigarettes or a chemical-factory job boost that debt to the sky. And though Tanya had hardly any debt at all, when she figured out she was staring at PCBs, smearing them on her skin, breathing them into her lungs, she probably felt like all her carefulness had been erased. All that tofu was for nought. Suddenly she was up there with the I.V.-drug abusers.
I have no illusions about my own purity. I avoid the really bad stuff, I use common sense. I refuse to work with the nastier solvents and I don’t inhale my cigars. But I could look at those PCBs and say, okay, I’m poisoned, maybe if I give up cigars and ride my bike a little more I can pay off this debt.
You don’t get PCB poisoning from the air anyway. You get it by eating the stuff.
When I thought of that, I thought of Gallagher and his crew. Those bastards lived on lobsters. I had to get in touch with them right away. Easy enough.
The tough part was this. Where were the PCBs coming from? I was used to finding trace amounts just about everywhere. Basco had put lots of them into the Harbor. But I’d never actually seen the stuff before; just detected it with exquisitely sensitive instruments. To actually stand there and watch it running through a lobster’s viscera like melted butter—that was a fucking nightmare. Unheard of. Somebody had to be dumping it into the Harbor by the barrel load.
First things first, so I got myself decently protected and wrapped the lobsters up in many layers of PCB-proof plastic, marked it as hazardous waste, and left it there for the time being. I wasn’t normally in the business of disposing of hazardous waste and wasn’t sure how to begin. Scrubbed the counter down and locked the place up, then went to a different lab and hosed myself off. Finally got Tanya on the phone; she was jittery as hell, but laughing a little now. I tried to tell her she was okay as long as she hadn’t been licking her fingers, but with her background she knew more about it than I did. I asked her to put Debbie on.
“Yeah?”
“We have a big thing coming up. A huge thing. Would you like to work on it?”
“Sure.”
“And sometime, if I can find some time, I would like very much, more than I can really say here at this pay phone, to, like, take you to dinner or something of that nature.”
“Well, you have my number,” she said.
And you’ve got mine, I refrained from saying. And then what? How could I explain the Pöyzen Böyzen thing?
“Gotten any weird messages on your phone lately
?”
“Have you been doing that?”
“What?”
“Putting that awful music on our phone machine?”
“No. That’s being done by some—some assholes. Heavy-metal fans.”
“What do they want?”
Actually, that was a damn good question. What did these guys want? If they wanted to scare me, it was working. But what did they want to scare me into? Thugs can be so nonspecific.
“They’re pissed about something. Something to do with Spectacle Island. And the lab.”
“Drugs?”
“There you go.” Spectacle Island—specifically, that old barge—would be a great place to process drugs. A nice, abandoned, lawless zone, only minutes from downtown.
Bart had said that PCP was very hip among the Pöyzen Böyzen drones. PCP was easy to make—even a metalhead could manufacture it by the fifty-five-gallon drum. And I could detect it, by the wastes and smell it generated. No wonder they didn’t want me taking samples out there.
“You want to know exactly what happened?” I said. “Those poor idiots overheard me saying I was hunting for PCBs, and they thought I said PCP!”
“Great. So you’ve got a band of dustheads after you?”
“No. We have a band of dustheads after us.”
“That’s great. I’ll never take another shower.”
I refrained from offering showering privileges at my place. Without being her official boyfriend, there wasn’t much I could do.
Reassuring was my best bet, but I wasn’t. I wanted Debbie and Tanya as scared as I was, because that way they’d be careful. “Watch your ass. I have stuff to do.”
“Going to call the cops?” she asked.
“About what—the PCBs?”
“No, the PCP.”
“Uh, no. Look, the angel dust is weird and exciting; the PCBs are ten times as important. So right now I’m thinking about the PCBs. Sorry.”
Went to a bank machine and took out a hundred dollars. I’m not sure why. Called Bartholomew and told him where I was going, just in case. And had an idea.
“How’d you like to become a Pöyzen Böyzen fan?”
“I have to anyway. Amy is.”
“Oh. Is that your woman?” Amy was his new girlfriend. Hadn’t met her face to face, but I’d heard her in the next room, late at night; the second loudest copulater I’d ever heard.
“Yeah. Have you guys met?”
“Indirectly. Well, go hang out with the hard core if you can, okay? The young ones—teenagers. Shit, I’ll even subsidize it.”
“But teen Böyzen heads are like two-legged cockroaches or something.”
“So bring some Raid. Come on, you’re the social critic, right? This is it, man.”
“We’ll see.”
Then I headed for Fenway Park, only a few blocks away. Everything in Boston’s only a few blocks away. It was approaching dusk and the wind was coming up, with something cold and wet behind it. The baseball game probably wouldn’t make it to the seventh inning. Tonight it was going to rain like hell—the first Nor’easter of the fall.
When I was almost there, I walked by another phone booth, saw its white pages fluttering in the wind and remembered Dolmacher. Formerly of Basco and presently of Biotronics, a subsidiary of Basco, he was now my prime suspect. “I’m in the book—look me up,” he’d said. So I did. I knew for damn sure he wasn’t about to tell me anything, but if I hit him with a frontal assault, and he was his emotionally retarded self, I’d know he was totally ignorant. If he went into adrenaline overdrive and called me a terrorist, I’d know Basco was involved. So I dropped a dime on Dolmacher and let the phone ring twelve times.
“Hello?”
“Dolmacher, this is S.T.”
“Hi!” He sounded terribly cheerful, and a cheerful Dolmacher was almost unbearable. It meant that his work was going wonderfully. “I just got in the door from work, S.T.”
“Dolmacher, just tell me one thing. Why is the floor of the Harbor, right off Castle Island Park, a lake of solid PCBs this evening?”
He laughed. “You’re taking too many of those hallucinogenic alkaloids, Sangamon. Better get a real job.”
I hung up—he didn’t know shit—then I bought a bleacher ticket and ran around to the dark side of Fenway Park.
A toxic crime had been committed. I had witnesses and an address. The witnesses were bleacher creatures, and the address was underwater. First I had to see those witnesses, and it was easy to track them down. Like dolphins, Townies communicate with high-pitched sonar; “Heyyy, Maaahk! I’ll meet ya at the Aaahk afta da geem!”
“Mr. Gallagher,” I said.
“Heyyy, S.T.! Heyyy, guys, look who’s here! It’s the invironmintle!”
“Heyyy, S.T., how ya doin?”
“Barrett grounded out, Horn flew out, now it’s 0 and 2 on Dewey. He’s swinging for the bleachers, that stupid bastard.”
“Look. Those oily-smelling lobsters. You haven’t been eating any, have you?”
“Shit no. Tried it once but they taste awful. When you gonna do something about that, S.T.? That whole area there, it’s for shit now.”
S. T., when are you going to stop pollution? “Which area?”
Gallagher looked around at his buddies and they all threw out rough descriptions: “Right out there, you know.” “South of the airport.” “North of Spectacle Island.” “Right off Southie.”
“Since when?”
“Month or two.”
“Look, Rory. I gotta tell you something. I know sometimes you guys give me shit, you think I’m kind of flaky, but I’m telling you that shit is dangerous. I’m not talking about maybe getting cancer in twenty years, I’m talking about croaking next week. Don’t eat those lobsters. I want you to go find all the other lobstermen and tell them not to use that area.”
Gallagher took me seriously until I got to the last part, then his face turned even redder and he laughed. “Hell, S.T., no one uses it anyway. They all found the same thing we did. But shit, it’s a big area, I got no business telling people not to use it.”
Fenway Park turned on its lights. I knew Gallagher was right. He couldn’t personally embargo half the harbor. Maybe I could get through to the state authorities. But the last time I’d done that, I had to dress up in a Santa Claus suit. What was the drill this time, Bozo the Clown?
I had my back to the field, standing with one foot propped up on the bleacher. I felt a big guy beside me, trying to get past, so I moved aside and he scrunched through. It was a hot prestorm afternoon and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. This was kind of unfortunate, since he had a skin condition.
Now, a lot of people have skin conditions. Especially fair complexioned people who work under the hot sun, around salt water, for a living. This guy who sat down next to Rory was blanketed by a rash of little blackheads, so small and close together that they looked like a five o’clock shadow. I was trying not to stare, but that’s no good when the person you’re staring at is a little touchy.
“You got a problem?” he asked.
“Nope. Sorry.”
What was I going to do, demand a close examination right there under the lights? The guy was gripping a large, fresh brew in his left hand and I saw a wedding band.
“Just remember, Rory,” I said, real loud, loud enough for even this guy to understand. “The oily lobsters. Those things are poison. Especially for kids and pregnant women. Throw ‘em away and go eat a Big Mac or something. Eat too many of those things, you get a skin rash and it’s downhill from there.”
I turned around and left. “What was he talking about?” said the guy with chloracne.
It was time to mobilize GEE’s PR machine, phone all my media connections and make a lot of noise about oily lobsters. Had to contact some kind of health authority too. Maybe Dr. J. could spread the word. So I phoned the ER.
“What’s the word?” he said.
“Chloracne.”
“Whoa!”
“Look out for it.
Tell your colleagues. Fishermen, Southeast Asians, anyone who eats fish from the Harbor.”
“What’s the source?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going to find them, and then I’m going to blow them away.”
“Nonviolently.”
“Of course. Gotta run.”
“Thanks for the tip, S.T.”
Back at the Zodiac I replaced the vital parts and buzzed over to the MIT docks, where I tied up and jogged over to the office.
No one was around. Probably at the Sox game, in better seats. I got the Darth Vader Suit and an air tank, a supply of sample containers—peanut butter jars—and some binoculars with big wide light-gathering lenses. Until the rain came, the light diffusing off the city should be enough to navigate by. Took a huge nautical-rescue strobe that we keep around just because it’s powerful and irritating, and on the way back to the Zode I picked up a couple of gyros and a six-pack.
When I got to the water between Spectacle Island and South Boston—the address of the crime—the sky was blue in the east and black in the west. I had no interest in wasting time. I was tired as hell, all alone, the wind was coming up, the temperature dropping, and below me was a sea of poison. I struggled into the scuba gear, double-checked when I remembered that I’d done it wrong once off Blue Kills, peeled on the Darth Vader mask, turned on the big strobe, and dove.
This kind of work is a pain in the ass, and taking actual samples off the bottom is a last resort. That was the whole purpose of Project Lobster. The lobsters, I’d hoped, would tell me where to concentrate my efforts. This afternoon it had paid off in a big way and now I had to follow through.
It was hard to figure: how had that lobster found so much PCB on the Harbor floor, here? If he’d been hanging out along the shore of some Basco property, or under one of their pipes, I could understand. But down here, there was nothing.
When I got to the scene of the crime, though, and flashed my spotlight, I was reminded that “nothing” is a relative term. Humans have been flinging garbage into Boston Harbor for three and a half centuries. I was standing in the foothills of Spectacle Island itself, staring around at everything from Coke cans to wrecked trawlers. Maybe, if I spent hours cruising the bottom, I’d find a cluster of fifty-five-gallon drums, thrown overboard by some corporation with too many PCBs on its hands. If I could do that, and trace them back to the owner, I could go ahead and paint their logo on the prow of my Zodiac. I already had two logos there and was eager to become an ace.
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