Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Neal Stephenson
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Copyright
In Boston, two centuries after the Tea Party, harbour dumping is still a favourite local sport, only these days it’s major corporations piping toxic wastes into the water. Environmentalist and professional-pain-in-the-ass Sangaman Taylor is Boston’s latter-day Paul Revere, spreading the word from a 40–horsepower Zodiac raft. Embarrassing powerful corporations in highly telegenic ways is the perfect method of making enemies, and Taylor has a collection that would do any rabble-rouser proud.
After his latest exploit, he’s wanted by the FBI, possibly by the Mafia, and definitely by a group of Satanist angel-dust heads who think he’s looking for a PCP factory, not PCB contamination. Pretty soon dodging bullets is the least of Taylor’s problems – because somewhere out there are an unhinged genetic engineer and a lab-concocted bacterium that could destroy all ocean life – and that’s just for starters.
Frightening, funny, fast and furious, Zodiac is thrilling speculative fiction torn straight from today’s headlines, the author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon at his brilliant best.
Neal Stephenson is the author of the novels Quicksilver, The Confusion, Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, WA.
Snow Crash
The Diamond Age
Cryptonomicon
Quicksilver
The Confusion
To Ellen
A mere acknowledgements doesn’t fully reflect the contribution made by Marco Paul Johann Kalotofen; a spot on the title page would be more fitting.
In the category of plain old, but deserved, acknowledgements, it should be mentioned that the hard-boiled fiction of James Crumley got me going on this project; people who like this one should buy his books. Joe King put me on the hard-boiled trail with a well-timed recommendation. Jackson Schmidt read and corrected the manuscript with an attention to fine detail I would not have expected even if I had been paying him. My agents, Liz Darhansoff, Abby Thomas, and Lynn Pleshette, gave useful suggestions and then scorched the earth with their zeal, despite blaming me for a sudden aversion to eating lobsters and swimming in the Hudson. Gary Fisketjon edited it closely and intelligently, once again proving his more-than-casual acquaintance with the novel – a 250-year-old art form.
Jon Owens, Jon Halper, Jackson Schmidt, Steve Horst, and Chris Doolan all said or did things that got blended in. My wife, Dr. Ellen Lackermann, helped with the medical research, and refrains from becoming too despondent over my spending eight to sixteen hours a day welded to a Macintosh. Finally, Heather Matheson read the manuscript and told me that the main character was an asshole – confirming that I was on the right track.
Down by the river,
Down by the banks of the River Charles
That’s where you’ll find me
Along with lovers, muggers and thieves
Well I love that dirty water,
Oh Boston, you’re my home.
– THE INMATES
ROSCOMMON CAME AND laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about the time I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the shoulder of some freeway. My landlord and I have an arrangement. He charges me and my housemates little rent — by Boston standards, none at all — and in return we let him play fast and loose with our ecosystems. Every year at about this time he destroys my garden. He’s been known to send workmen into the house without warning, knock out walls in the middle of the night, shut off the water while we shower, fill the basement with unidentified fumes, cut down elms and maples for firewood, and redecorate our rooms. Then he claims he’s showing the dump to prospective tenants and we’d better clean it up. Pronto.
This morning I woke to the sound of little green pumpkins exploding under the tires of his station wagon. Then Roscommon stumbled out and tore down our badminton net. After he left, I got up and went out to buy a Globe. Wade Boggs had just twisted his ankle and some PCB-contaminated waste oil was on fire in Southie.
When I got back, bacon was smoldering on the range, filling the house with gas-phase polycyclic aromatics – my favorite carcinogen by a long shot. Bartholomew was standing in front of the stove. With the level, cross-eyed stare of the involuntarily awake, he was watching a heavy-metal video on the TV. He was clenching an inflated Hefty bag that took up half the kitchen. Once again, my roommate was using nitrous oxide around an open flame; no wonder he didn’t have any eyebrows. When I came in, he raised the bag invitingly. Normally I never do nitrous before breakfast, but I couldn’t refuse Bart a thing in the world, so I took the bag and inhaled as deep as I could. My mouth tasted sweet and five seconds later about half of an orgasm backfired in the middle of my brain.
On the screen, poodle-headed rockers were strapping a cheerleader to a sheet of particle board decorated with a pentagram. Far away, Bartholomew was saying: “Pöyzen Böyzen, man. Very hot.”
It was too early for social criticism. I grabbed the channel selector.
“No Stooges on at this hour,” Bart warned, “I checked.” But I’d already moved us away up into Deep Cable, where a pair of chaw-munching geezers were floating on a nontoxic river in Dixie, demonstrating how to push-start a comatose fish.
Tess emerged from the part of the house where women lived and bathrooms were clean. She frowned against the light, scowling at our bubbling animal flesh, our cubic yard of nitrous. She rummaged in the fridge for some homemade yoghurt. “Don’t you guys ever lay off that stuff?”
“Meat or gas?”
“You tell me. Which one’s more toxic?”
“Sangamon’s Principle,” I said. “The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide – a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol – nine. Past that, you’re talking lots of atoms.”
“So?”
“Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what they’ll do. It is my understanding, Tess, that you’ve been referring to me, as a ‘Granola James Bond’.”
Tess didn’t give a fuck. “Who told you about that?”
“You come up with a cute phrase, it gets around.”
“I thought you’d enjoy it.”
“Even a horse’s ass like me can detect sarcasm.”
“So what would you rather be called?”
“Toxic Spiderman. Because he’s broke and he never gets laid.”
Tess squinted at me, implying that there was a reason for both problems. Bart broke the silence. “Shit, man, Spiderman’s got his health. James Bond probably has AIDS.”
I went outside and followed Roscommon’s tire tracks through the backyard. All the pumpkins were destroyed, but I didn’t care about these decoys. What could you do with a pumpkin? Get orange shit all over the house? The important stuff – corn and tomatoes – were planted up against fences or behind piles of rubble, where his station wagon couldn’t reach.
We’d never asked Roscommon if we could plant a garden out here in the Largest Yard in Boston. Which, because it wasn’t supposed to exist, gave him the right to drive over it. Gardens have to be watered, you see, and water bills are included in our nominal rent, so by having a garden we’re actually ripping him off.
There was at least an acre back here, tucked away in kind of a space warp caused by Brighton’s irrational street pattern. Not even weeds knew how to grow in this field of concrete and brick rubble. When we started to garden, Bartholomew and Ike and I spent two days sifting through it, putting the soil into our plot, piling the rest in cairns. Other piles were scattered randomly around the Largest Back Yard in Boston. Every so often Roscommon would dynamite another one of his holdings, show up with a rented dump truck, back across the garden, through the badminton net, and over some lawn furniture, and make a new pile.
I just hoped he didn’t try to stash any toxic waste back there. I hoped that wasn’t the reason for the low rent. Because if he did that, I would be forced to call down a plague upon his house. I would evacuate his bank accounts, burn his villages, rape his horses, sell his children into slavery. The whole Toxic Spiderman bit. And then I’d have to become the penniless alter ego, the Toxic Peter Parker. I’d have to pay real Boston rent, a thousand a month, with no space for badminton.
Peter Parker is the guy who got bit by the radioactive spider, the toxic bug if you will, and became Spiderman. Normally he’s a nebbish. No money, no prestige, no future. But if you try to mug him in a dark alley, you’re meat. The question he keeps asking himself is: “Do those moments of satisfaction I get as Spiderman make up for all the crap I have to take as Peter Parker?” In my case, the answer is yes.
In the dark ages of my life, when I worked at Massachusetts Analytical Chemical Systems, or Mass Anal for short, I owned your basic VW van. But a Peter Parker type can’t afford car insurance in this town, so now I transport myself on a bicycle. So once I’d fueled myself up on coffee and Bart’s baco-cinders – nothing beats an all-black breakfast – and read all the comics, I threw one leg over my battle-scarred all-terrain stump-jumper and rode several miles to work.
Hurricane Alison had blown through the day before yesterday, trailed by hellacious rainfall. Tree branches and lakes of rainwater were in the streets. We call it rainwater; actually it’s raw sewage. The traffic signal at Comm Ave and Charlesgate West was fried. In Boston, this doesn’t lead to heartwarming stories in the tabloids about ordinary citizens who get out of their cars to direct traffic. Instead, it gives us the excuse to drive like the Chadian army. Here we had two lanes of traffic crossing with four, and the two were losing out in a big way. Comm Ave was backed up all the way into B.U. So I rode between the lanes for half a mile to the head of the class.
The problem is, if the two drivers at the front of the line aren’t sufficiently aggressive, it doesn’t matter how tough the people behind them are. The whole avenue will just sit there until it collectively boils over. And horn honking wasn’t helping, though a hundred or so motorists were giving it a try.
When I got to Charlesgate West, where Comm Ave was cut off by the torrent pouring down that one-way four-laner, I found an underpowered station wagon from Maine at the head of one lane, driven by a mom who was trying to look after four children, and a vintage Mercedes in the other, driven by an old lady who looked like she’d just forgotten her own address. And half a dozen bicyclists, standing there waiting for a real asshole to take charge.
What you have to do is to take it one lane at a time. I waited for a twenty-foot gap in traffic on the first lane of Charlesgate and just eased out into it.
The approaching BMW made an abortive swerve toward the next lane, causing a ripple to spread across Charlesgate as everyone for ten cars back tried to head east. Then he throbbed to a halt (computerized antilock braking system) and slumped over on his horn button. The next lane was easy: some Camaro-driving freshman from Jersey made the mistake of slowing down and I seized his lane. The asshole in the BMW tried to cut behind me but half the bicyclists, and the biddy in the Benz, had the presence of mind to lurch out and block his path.
Within ten seconds a huge gap showed up in the third lane, and I ate it up before Camaro could swerve over. I ate it up so aggressively that some Clerk Typist II in a Civic slowed down in the fourth lane long enough for me to grab that one. And then the dam broke as the Chadian army mounted a charge and reamed out the intersection. I figured BMW, Camaro, and Civic could shut their engines off and go for a walk.
Pedestrians and winos applauded. A young six-digit lawyer, hardly old enough to shave, cruised up from ten cars back and shouted out his electric sunroof that I really had balls.
I said, “Tell me something I didn’t know, you fucking android from Hell.”
The Mass Ave Bridge took me over the Charles. I stopped halfway across to look it over. The river, that is. The river and the Harbor, they’re my stock in trade. Not much wind today and I took a big whoof of river air in my nostrils, wondering what kind of crap had been dumped into it, upstream, the night before. Which might sound kind of primitive, but the human nose happens to be an exquisitely sensitive analytical device. There are certain compounds for which your schnozz is the best detector ever made. No machine can beat it. For example, I can tell a lot about a car by smelling its exhaust: how well the engine is tuned, whether it’s got a catalytic converter, what kind of gas it burns.
So every so often I smell the Charles, just to see if I’m missing anything. For a river that’s only thirty miles long, it has the width and the toxic burdens of the Ohio or the Cuyahoga.
Then through the MIT campus, through the milling geeks with the fifty-dollar textbooks under their arms. College students look so damn young these days. Not long ago I was going to school on the other side of the river, thinking of these trolls as peers and rivals. Now I just felt sorry for them. They probably felt sorry for me. By visual standards, I’m the scum of the earth. The other week I was at a party full of Boston yuppies, the originals, and they were all complaining about the panhandlers on the Common, how aggressive they’d become. I hadn’t noticed, myself, since they never panhandled me. Then I figured out why: because I looked like one of them. Blue jeans with holes in the knees. Tennis shoes with holes over the big toes, where my uncut toenails rub against the toeclips on my bicycle. Several layers of t-shirts, long underwear tops, and flannel shirts, easily adjustable to regulate my core temperature. Shaggy blond hair, cut maybe once a year. Formless red beard, trimmed or lopped off maybe twice a year. Not exactly fat, but blessed with the mature, convex body typical of those who live on Thunderbird and Ding-Dongs. No briefcase, aimless way of looking around, tendency to sniff the river.
Though I rode through MIT on a nice bike, I’d sprayed it with some cheap gold paint so it wouldn’t look nice. Even the lock looked like a piece of shit: a Kryptonite lock all scarred up by boltcutters. We’d used it to padlock a gate on a toxic site last year and the owners had tried to get through using the wrong tools.
In California I could have passed for a hacker, heading for some high-tech company, but in Massachusetts even the hackers wore shirts with buttons. I pedalled through hacker territory, through the strip of little high-tech shops that feed off MIT, and into the square where my outfit has its regional office.
GEE, the Group of Environmental Extremists. Excuse me: GEE International. They employ me as a professional asshole, an innate talent I’ve enjoyed ever since second grade, when I learned how to give my teacher migraine headaches with a penlight. I could cite other examples, give you a tour down the gallery of the broken and infuriated authority figures who have tried to teach, steer, counsel, reform, or suppress me over the years, but that would sound like boasting. I’m not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass. But I will take money for it.
I carried my bike up four flights of stairs, doing my bit for physical fitness. GEE stickers were plastered on the risers of the stairs, so there was always a catch phrase six feet in front of your eyes: SAVE THE WHALES and something about the BABY SEALS. By the time you made it up to the fourth floor, you were out of breath, and fully indoctrinated. Locked my bike to a radiator, because you never knew, and went in.
Tricia was running the front desk. Flaky but nice, has a few strange ideas about phone etiquette, thinks I’m all right. “Oh, shit,” she said.
“What?”
“You won’t believe it.”
“What?”
“The other car.”
“The van?”
“Yeah. Wyman.”
“How bad?”
“We don’t know yet. It’s still sitting out on the shoulder.”
I just assumed it was totalled, and that Wyman would have to be fired, or at least busted down to a position where he couldn’t so much as sit in a GEE car. A mere three days ago he had taken our Subaru out to buy duct tape, and in a parking lot no larger than a tennis court, had managed to ram a concrete light-pole pedestal hard enough to total the vehicle. His fifteen-minute explanation was earnest but impossible to follow; when I asked him to just start from the beginning, he accused me of being too linear.
Now he’d trashed our one remaining shitbox van. The national office would probably hear of it. I almost felt sorry for him.
“How?”
“He thinks he shifted into reverse on the freeway.”
“Why? It’s got an automatic transmission.”
“He likes to think for himself.”
“Where is he now?”
“Who knows? I think he’s afraid to come in.”
“No. You’d be afraid to come in. I might be afraid. Wyman won’t be afraid. You know what he’ll do? He’ll come in fresh as a daisy and ask for the keys to the Omni.”
Fortunately I’d taken all the keys to the Omni, other than my own, and hammered them into slag. And whenever I parked it, I opened the hood and yanked out the coil wire and put it in my pocket.
You might think that the lack of coil wire or even keys would not stop members of the GEE strike force, Masters of Stealth, Scourge of Industry, from starting a car for very long. Aren’t these the people who staged their own invasion of the Soviet Union? Didn’t they sneak a supposedly disabled, heavily guarded ship out of Amsterdam? Don’t they skim across the oceans in high-powered Zodiacs held together with bubble gum and bobby pins, coming to the rescue of innocent marine mammals?
Well sometimes they do, but only a handful have those kind of talents, and I’m the only one in the Northeast office. The others, like Wyman, tend to be ex-English majors who affect a hysterical helplessness in the face of things with moving parts. Talk to them about cams or gaskets and they’ll sing you a protest song. To them, yanking out the Omni’s coil wire was black magic.
“And you got three calls from Fotex. They really want to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“The guy wants to know if they should shut their plant down today.”
The day before, talking to some geek at Fotex, I’d mumbled something about closing them down. But in fact I was going to New Jersey tomorrow to close someone else down, so Fotex could keep dumping phenols, acetone, phthalates, various solvents, copper, silver, lead, mercury, and zinc into Boston Harbor to their heart’s content, at least until I got back.
“Tell them I’m in Jersey.” That would keep them guessing; Fotex had some plants down there also.
I went back to my office, cutting across a barnlike room where most of the other GEE people sat among half-completed banners and broken Zodiac parts, drinking herbal teas and talking into phones:
“500 ppm sounds good to me.”
“Don’t put us on the back page of the Food section.”
“Do those breed in estuaries?”
I wasn’t one of those GEE veterans who got his start spraying orange dye on baby seals in Newfie, or getting beaten senseless by Frog commandos in the South Pacific. I slipped into it, moonlighting for them while I held down my job at Mass Anal. Partly by luck, I broke a big case for GEE, right before my boss figured out what an enormous pain in the ass I could be. Mass Anal fired, GEE hired. My salary was cut in half and my ulcer vanished: I could eat onion rings at IHOP again, but I couldn’t afford to.
My function at Mass Anal had been to handle whatever walked in the door. Sometimes it was genuine industrial espionage – peeling apart a running shoe to see what kinds of adhesives it used – but usually it amounted to analyzing tap water for the anxious yuppies moving into the center of Boston, closet environmentalists who didn’t want to pour aromatic hydrocarbons into their babies any more than they’d burn 7-Eleven gasoline in their Saabs. But once upon a time, this guy in a running suit walked in and got routed to me; anyone who wasn’t in pinstripes got routed to me. He was brandishing an empty Doritos bag and for a minute I was afraid he wanted me to check it for dioxins or some other granola nightmare. But he read my expression. I probably looked skeptical and irritated. I probably looked like an asshole.
“Sorry about the bag. It was the only container I could find on the trail.”
“What’s in it?”
“I’m not sure.”
Predictable answer. “Approximately what’s in it?”
“Dirt. But really strange dirt.”
I took the Doritos bag and emptied it out all over the comics page of the Globe. I love the comics, laughing out loud when I read them, and everyone thinks I’m a simpleton. The runner let out kind of a little snort, like he couldn’t believe this was how I did chemistry. It looks impressive to pour the sample into a fresh Pyrex beaker, but it’s faster to spread it out over Spiderman and Bloom County. I pulled the toothpick out of my mouth and began to pop the little clods apart.
But that was just for the hell of it, because I already knew what was wrong with this dirt. It was green – and purple and red and blue. The runner knew that, he just didn’t know why. But I had a pretty good idea: heavy-metal contamination, the kind of really nasty stuff that goes into pigments.
“You jogging in hazardous waste dumps, or what?” I asked.
“You’re saying this stuff’s hazardous?”
“Fuck, yes. Heavy metals. See this yellow clump here?” Gotta be cadmium. Now, cadmium they tested once as a poison gas, in World War I. It vaporizes at a real low temperature, six or seven hundred degrees. They had some people breathe that vapor.”
“What does it do?”
“Gangrene of the testicles.”
The jogger inhaled and shifted his pair away from my desk. One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I’ve lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.
“Where?”
“Sweetvale College. Right on campus. There’s a wooded area there with a pond and a running trail.”
I, a B.U. graduate, was trying to imagine this: a college campus that had trees and ponds on it.
“This is what it looks like,” the guy continued, “the dirt, the pond, everything.”
“Colored like this?”
“It’s psychedelic.”
Despite being a chemist, I refuse psychedelics these days on the grounds that they violate Sangamon’s Principle. But I understood what he was getting at.
So the next day I got on my bike and rode out there and damned if he wasn’t right. At one end of the campus was this weedy patch of forest, sticking out into a triangle formed by some of the Commonwealth’s more expensive suburbs. It wasn’t used much. That was probably just as well because the area around the pond was a heavy-metal sewer, and I ain’t talking about rock and roll. Rainbow-colored, a little like water with gasoline floating on it, but this wasn’t superficial. The colours went all the way down. They matched the dirt. All the colors were different and – forgive me if I repeat myself on this point – they all caused cancer.
From my freshman gut course in physical geography at Boston University, I knew damn well this wasn’t a natural pond. So the only question was: what was here before?
Finding out was my first gig as a toxic detective, and the only thing that made it difficult was my own jerk-ass fumbling in the public library. I threw myself on the mercy of Esmerelda, a black librarian of somewhere between ninety and a hundred who contained within her bionic hairdo all knowledge, or the ability to find it. She got me some old civic documents. Sure enough, a paint factory had flourished there around the turn of the century. When it folded, the owner donated the land to the university. Nice gift: a square mile of poison.
I called GEE and the rest was history. Newspaper articles, video bites on the TV news, which didn’t look that great on my black-and-white; state and federal clean-up efforts, and a web of lawsuits. Two weeks later GEE asked me to analyze some water for them. Within a month I was chained to a drum of toxic waste on the State house steps, and within six, I was Northeast Toxics Coordinator for GEE International.
My office was the size of a piano crate, but mine nonetheless. I wanted a computer on my desk, and none of the other GEE honchos would risk sharing a room with one. Computers need electrical transformers, some of which are made with PCBs that like to vaporize and ooze out of a computer’s ventilation slots, causing miscarriages and other foul omens. The boss gave me his office and moved into the big barnlike room.
The same people barely noticed when Gomez, our “office manager,” started painting the walls of that office. By doing so he exposed them to toxic fumes millions of times more concentrated than what I was getting from my computer. But they didn’t notice because they’re used to paint. They paint things all the time. Same deal with the stuff they spray on their underarms and put into their gas tanks. Gomez wanted to paint my office now, but I wouldn’t let him.
Esmerelda, ever vigilant, had shot me a bunch of greasy xeroxes from the microfilm archives. They were articles from the Lighthouse-Republican of Blue Kills, N.J., a small city half-way down the Jersey Shore which was shortly to feel my wrath. It was the kind of newspaper that was still running Dennis the Menace in the largest available size. A Gasoline Alley, Apartment 3-G, and Nancy kind of paper.
The articles were all from the sports section. Sports, as in hunting and fishing, which take place outdoors, which is where the environment is. That’s why environmental news is in the sports section.
Esmerelda had found me four different articles, all written by different reporters (no specialist on the staff; not considered an important issue) on vaguely environmental subjects. A local dump leaching crap into an estuary; a freeway project that would trash some swamp land; mysterious films of gunk on the river; and concerns about toxic waste that could be coming from a plant just outside of town, operated by a large corporation we shall refer to as the Swiss Bastards. Along with the Boston Bastards, the Napalm Droids, the Plutonium Lords, the Hindu Killers, the Lung Assassins, the Ones in Buffalo, and the Rhine-Rapers, they were among the largest chemical corporations of a certain planet, third one out from a certain mediocre star in an average spiral galaxy named after a candy bar.
Each of the articles was 2500 words long and written in the same style. Clearly, the editor of the Lighthouse-Republican ruled with an iron hand. Local residents were referred to as Blukers. Compound sentences were discouraged and the inverted-pyramid structure rigorously followed. The PR flacks who worked for the Swiss Bastards were referred to by the old-fashioned term “authorities,” rather than the newer and sexier “sources.”
My only worry was that maybe this editor was so fucking old and decrepit that he was already dead, or even retired. On the other hand, it seemed he was a dyed-in-the-wool “sportsman,” a type traditionally long-lived, unless he’d spent too much time sloshing around in a particular toxic swamp. Esmerelda, accustomed to my ways, had sent a xerox of the most recent masthead, which didn’t show any changes. The senior sports editor was Everett “Red” Grooten and the sports-page editor was Alvin Goldberg.
Raucous laughter probably sounded from my office. Tricia hung up on Fotex’s PR director and shouted “S.T., what are you doing in there?” Called the florist and had them send the usual to Esmerelda. Cranked up my old PCB-spitter and searched my files. “Fish, marine, sport, Mid-Atlantic, effects of organic solvents on.” “Estuaries, waterfowl populations of, effects of organic solvents on.” These were old boilerplate paragraphs I’d written long ago. Mostly they referred to EPA studies or recent research. Every so often they quoted a “source” at GEE International, the well-known environmental group, usually me. I directed the word processor to do a search-and-replace to change “source” to “authority.”
Then I pulled up my press release about what the Swiss Bastards were pumping into the waters off Blue Kills, which my gas chromatograph and I had discovered during my last trip down there. Threw it into the center of the piece and them composed a hard-hitting topic sentence in basic Dick-and-Jane dialect, no compound sentences, announcing that Bluker sportsmen might be the first ones to feel the effects of the “growing toxic waste problems” centered on the Swiss Bastards’ illegal dumping. Hacked it all into an inverted-pyramid shape, and ended up with 2350 words. Put on a final paragraph, the lowly capstone of the pyramid, mentioning that some people from GEE International, the well-known environmental group, might be dropping by Blue Kills any day now.
Opened up my printer and put in a daisy wheel that produced a typeface that went out of style in the Thirties. Printed the article up on some unpretentious paper, stuck it in an envelope along with some standard GEE photos of dead flounder and two-headed ducks, suitable for the Lighthouse-Republican’s column width. Federal Expressed it to one Red Grooten at his home address, because I had this idea that maybe he didn’t stop by the office all that often.
WYMAN CALLED. WYMAN, the Scourge of Cars. He wanted the keys to the Omni so that he could drive to Erie, Pennsylvania to see his girlfriend, who was about to leave for Nicaragua. For God’s sake, she could be bayoneted by contras and he’d never see her again.
“Where’s the van, Wyman?”
“I’m not telling you until I get the keys to the Omni.”
So I hung up and called the Metro Police, who told me: on the shoulder, westbound lanes, Revere Beach Parkway, near the bridge over the Everette River. Due to be towed at any moment. I hung up when they asked for my name, grabbed my toolbox and headed out.
Gomez heard the wrenches crashing against the insides of the toolbox, fired the last half of his whole-wheat croissant into the “noncompostable nonrecyclables” wastebasket, where it belonged, and intercepted me at the top of the stairs. “Got a job?”
“Sure. What the fuck, come on.”
A lot of people out there simply adore GEE. One of them had donated this car to us – in fact, she’d done better. In Massachusetts, the insurance can run away over a thousand bucks a year, so this fine lady was lending us the Omni, no strings attached, and paying the insurance as well. We didn’t even know who she was.
Normally an Omni is a piece of shit, an econobox with a 1.6-liter engine. But for a higher sticker price you can get an Omni GLH, which has aerodynamic trim and 2.2 liters and, for a few hundred more, an Omni GLH Turbo, which has all of that plus a turbocharger. GLH, by the way, stands for Goes Like Hell. Honest. When the blower is singing, the engine puts out as much power as a small V8. Add big fat racing tires and alloy wheels and you have yourself a poor man’s Porsche, the most lethal weapon ever developed for the Boston traffic wars. Sure, spend three times as much and you could get a car that goes a little faster, but who is seriously going to thrash a vehicle that costs that much? Who’ll risk denting it? But if it’s an Omni, who cares?
I popped in the coil wire, a detail that Gomez richly appreciated – he made sure I knew it too – and we blew out of there. First we had to unload a lot of junk from out of the back to make room for what we were going to strip off the van: the two containers of hydraulic cement had to go. If I felt the urge to plug a pipe between here and Everett, I’d have to fulfill it later. The big, long roll of nylon banner material, the rappelling harness and climbing ropes, an extra outboard-motor gas tank, a Zodiac inflation pump, and the traveling chemistry lab we jettisoned. The laptop computer for tapping into the GEE International databases. The $5000 gas chromatograph. My big magnets. The Darth Vader Suit. We packed it all into the trunk of Gomez’s Impala so we wouldn’t have to haul it up to the fourth floor.
We’d hired Gomez after I’d inadvertently gotten him canned from his previous job as a minimum-wage rent-a-cop at one of the state office buildings. Unfortunately for his breed, I make my living by making people like him look like jerks. For weeks we’d been trying to make an appointment with a honcho in the state environmental agency, and he wouldn’t even answer our letters.
Shortly before Christmas, I dressed up in a Santa Claus outfit and had Tricia and Debbie (one of our interns) dress up as elves. I forged an ID card, complete with a mug shot of Saint Nick and an address at the North Pole, stuffed my Santa sack full of GEE leaflets, and we blew right past Gomez; he was really in the Christmas spirit. We hit on an Untergruppen-secretary who passed us on up to an Übergruppen-secretary, then three floors up to a Sturmband-secretary, then ten more floors on up to Thelma, the Übersturmgruppenführer-secretary, and that poor lady didn’t even blink. She led us right into Corrigan’s office, the place we’d been trying to penetrate for three months, without even the courtesy of a nasty letter.
“Ho ho ho,” I said, and I was sincere.
“Well, Santy Claus!” said Corrigan, that poor jackass. “What you got there?”
“I’ve got a surprise for you, you naughty boy! Ho ho ho!” In the comer of my eye I could see beams of high-energy light sweeping down the hall as the Channel 5 minicam crew stormed past Thelma’s vacant desk.
“What kind of surprise,” he said. I upended my pillowcase and treated him to a propaganda blizzard just as the camera-man centered his crosshairs on Corrigan’s forehead. We not only got him to agree to a meeting, but also got the agreement broadcast throughout the Commonwealth – just about the only way to make an environmental appointee keep his word. Corrigan hasn’t been very nice to me since then, but I did make Thelma’s Christmas card list.
Anyway, Gomez got fired for accepting my fake ID. We ended up hiring him to do jobs here and there around the office. Nothing illegal. When it came to finding things that needed fixing or painting he was an enterprising guy. To watch him find loose stair treads and peeling paint was to see free enterprise in action. Not unlike my own job.
The van was right where Wyman had left it, in the dirtiest, the most dangerous, the most crime-ridden neighborhood in Boston. I’m not talking about crack dealers, tenements, or minority groups here. The neighborhood isn’t Roxbury. It’s the zone around the Mystic River where most of New England’s heavy industry is located. It’s split fifty-fifty between Everett and Charlestown. I spend a lot of my time up here. Most of the “rivers” feeding into the Mystic are drainage ditches, no more than a couple of miles long. The nation’s poisoners congregate along these rivers and piss into them. In my Zodiac I have visited them personally, smelled their yellow, brown, white, and red waters, and figured out what they’re made of.
We could see Wyman’s footprints wandering out across the mud flats next to the Everett River, heading for a side street that might lead him to a telephone. I already knew the name of the street: Alkali Lane. We could see the place where he got a whiff of something, maybe, or got close enough to read the name of the street, then spun around the loped back to the nontoxic shoulder, obsessively wiping his Reeboks on the dead ragweed. From there, he’d hitchhiked.
Gomez stripped the van in much the same way that a Sioux would dismantle a buffalo. I just concentrated on getting the wheels off, with their brand-new, six-hundred-dollar set of radials that Wyman was going to abandon – a free gift from GEE to a randomly chosen junkyard. I also made sure we got our manhole-lifting tool, which is to me what a keychain is to a janitor. Gomez got the battery, electronic ignition box, cassette player, sheepskin, jack, lug wrenches, tire chains, half case of Ray-Lube, spare fan belt, alternator, and three gallons of gasoline. He was going after the starter when I officially pronounced the van dead.
We took the license plates so we could prove to the insurance company that we weren’t driving it anymore, and then I removed the Thermite from the glove compartment. It’s wise to keep some handy in case you need to weld some railroad rails together. The van’s serial number was stamped on its parts and body in three places, all of which I’d noted down, so I put Thermite on each and ignited them with my cigar. Instant slag. Like a Mafia hitter chopping the fingertips off a corpse.
The identification numbers were still smoking as we climbed back into the Omni. But immediately a vehicle pulled up behind us, a Bronco II with too many antennas and a flashing light on the roof.
“Fucking rent-a-cop,” Gomez said. From being one himself, he’d become sensitized to the whole absurd concept.
I walked back so I could read the sign on the Broncos door: BASCO SECURITY. I knew them well. They owned everything on Alkali Lane and most of the Everett River. In fact, if you stepped off the shoulder of the parkway, you were on their property. Then your shoes would dissolve.
“Morning,” said the rent-a-cop, who, like Gomez, was young and skinny. They never had the authority belly of a true Boston cop.
“Morning,” I said, sounding like a man in a hurry, “Can I help you?”
He was looking at a picture of me from what looked startlingly like a dossier. Also included were photographic representations of my boss, and of a jerk named Dan Smirnoff, and one I hadn’t seen in a while, a fugitive named Boone.
“Sangamon Taylor?”
“You got a warrant somewhere? Hey! You aren’t a real cop at all, are you?”
“We got some witnesses. A bunch of us security guards been over there on the main building, watching you here. Now, we know this van.”
“I know, we’re old pals.”
“Right. So we recognizes it when it stopped here last night. And we watched you stripping it. And maybe fucking with the VIN?”
“Look. If you want to hassle me, just go to your boss and say, ‘pH’. Just tell him that.”
“P-H? Isn’t that something they put in shampoo?”
“Close enough. Tell him ‘pH thirteen’. And for your sake, get a different job. Don’t go out there, into those flats, patrolling around. You understand? It’s dangerous.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, highly amused. “Big criminal element down there.”
“Exactly. The board of directors of Basco. The Pleshy family. Don’t let them kill again.”
Back at the Omni, Gomez said, “What’d you tell him?”
“pH. Went here last week and tested their pH and it was thirteen.”
“So?”
“So they’re licensed for eight. That means they’re putting shit into the river that’s more than two times the legal limit.”
“Shit, man,” Gomez said, scandalized. That was another good thing about Gomez. He never got jaded.
And I hadn’t even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of Basco’s pipe was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed. The difference between pH 13 and pH 8 was five, which meant that pH 13 was ten to the fifth power – a hundred thousand times – more alkaline than pH 8. That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they’ll pass you off as a flake. You can’t get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken. But if I say “More than twice the legal limit,” they get comfortably outraged.
I HAD GOMEZ drop me off in Harvard Square so I could eat birdseed and tofu with a reporter from The Weekly. Ditched my cigar. Then I went in to this blond-wood extravaganza, just off the square, allowed the manager to show me her nostrils, and finally picked out Rebecca sitting back in the corner.
“How’s the Granola James Bond?”
I nearly unleashed my Toxic Spiderman rap but then remembered that some people actually admired me, Rebecca among them, and it was through admiration and James Bond legends that we got things like free cars and anonymous toxic tips. So I let it drop. Rebecca had picked the sunniest corner of the room and the light was making her green eyes glow like traffic lights and her perfume volatilize off the skin. She and I had been in the sack a few times. The fact that we weren’t going to be there in the near future made her a hundred thousand time – oops – more than twice as beautiful. To distract myself, I growled something about beer to a waiter and sat down.
“We have—” the waiter said, and drew a tremendously deep breath.
“Genesee Cream Ale.”
“Don’t have that, sir.”
“Beck’s.” Because I figured Rebecca was paying.
“The specialty is sparkling water with a twist,” Rebecca said.
“I need something to wash the Everett out of my mouth.”
“Been out on your Zode?”
“Zodiac to you,” I said. “And no, I haven’t.”
We always began our conversations with this smart-assed crap. Rebecca was a political reporter and spent her life talking to mushmouths and blarney slingers. Talking to someone who would say “fuck” into a tape recorder was like benzedrine to her. There was also an underlying theme of flirtation – “Hey, remember?” “Yeah, I remember.” “It was all right, wasn’t it?” “Sure was.”
“How’s Project Lobster?”
“Wow, you prepared for this interview. It’s fine. How’s the paper?”
“The usual. Civil war, insurrection, financial crisis. But everyone reads the movie reviews.”
“Instead of your stuff?”
“Depends on what I’m digging up.”
“And what’s that?”
She smiled, leaned forward and observed me with cunning eyes. “Pleshy’s running,” she said.
“Which Pleshy? Running from what?”
“The big Pleshy.”
“The Groveler?”
“He’s running for president.”
“Shit. End of lunch. Now I’m not hungry.”
“I knew you’d be delighted.”
“What about Basco? Doesn’t he have to put all that crap into a blind trust?”
“It’s done. That’s how I know he’s running. I have this friend at the bank.”
The Pleshy family ran Basco – they’d founded the company – and that made them the number one polluters of Boston Harbor. The poisoners of Vietnam. The avant-garde of the toxic waste movement. For years I’d been trying to tell them how deep in shit they were, sometimes pouring hydraulic cement into their pipes to drive the point home.
This year, the Pleshy-in-charge was Alvin, a.k.a. the Groveler, an important member of the team of management experts and foreign policy geniuses that brought us victory in Vietnam.
Rebecca showed me samples of his flacks’ work: “Many environmentalists have overreacted to the presence of these compounds . . .” not chemicals, not toxic waste, but compounds “. . . but what exactly is a part per million?” This was followed by a graphic showing an eyedropper-ful of “compounds” going into a railway tank car of pure water.
“Yeah. They’re using the PATEOTS measuring system on you. A drop in a tank car. Sounds pretty minor. But you can twist it the other way: a football field has an area of, what, forty-five thousand square feet. A banana peel has an area of maybe a tenth of a square foot. So the area of the banana peel thrown on the football field is only a couple of parts per million. But if your field-goal kicker steps on the peel just as time is expiring, and you’re two points down . . .”
“PATEOTS?”
“Haven’t I told you about that?”
“Explain.”
“Stands for Period At The End Of This Sentence. Remember, back in high school the hygiene pamphlets would say, ‘a city the size of Dallas could get stoned on a drop of LSD no larger than the period at the end of this sentence.’ A lot easier to visualize than, say, micrograms.”
“What does that have to do with football?”
“I’m in the business of trying to explain technical things to Joe Six-pack, right? Joe may have the NFL rulebook memorized but he doesn’t understand PCBs and he doesn’t know a microgram from cunnilingus. So a microgram is about equal to one PATEOTS. A part per million is a drop in a railway tank car – that’s what the chemical companies always say, to make it sound less dangerous. If all the baby seals killed last year were laid end to end, they would span a hundred football fields. The tears shed by the mommy seals would fill a tank car. The volume of raw sewage going into the Harbor could fill a football stadium every week.”
“Dan Smirnoff says you’re working together now.”
Some beer found its way into my sinuses. I had to give it to Rebecca: she knew her shit.
Smirnoff was the whole reason for this conversation. All this crap about Pleshy and tank cars was just to get me loosened up. And when I went into my PATEOTS rap, she knew I was ready to be goosed in the ‘nads. How many times had I given her my patented PATEOTS rap? Two or three at least. I like a good story. I like to tell it many times. By now she knew: talk to S.T. about eyedroppers and tank cars and he’ll fly off the handle. Once I got flying on any toxic theme, she could slip in one tough question while my guard was down, watch my hairy and highly expressive face for a reaction, and glimpse the truth. Or find a basis for all her darkest suspicions.
“Smirnoff’s one of these people I have to have contact with. Like a prison guard has to have contact with a certain number of child molesters.”
“You’d put him in that category?”
“No, he’s not crafty enough. He’s just pissed off and very full of himself.”
“Sounds familiar.”
“Yah, but I have a reason to be arrogant. He doesn’t.”
“Patti Bowen at NEST says . . .”
“Don’t tell me. Smirnoff went to her and said, ‘Hey, I’m putting a group together, a direct-action group, more hard-hitting than GEE, and Sangamon Taylor is working with me.”
“That’s what Patti Bowen said.”
“Yeah, well Smirnoff got ahold of me the other day – you understand, I just hung up on the bastard, because I don’t want the FBI to even imagine him and me on the same line – so he tracked me down in the food co-op when I was cutting fish. And he said, ‘Patti Bowen and me are working together on a hard-hitting direct-action group, nudge nudge wink wink.’ So I waved my boning knife at him and said, ‘Listen, pusswad, you are toxic, and if you ever call me, ever call GEE, ever come within ten feet of me again, I’ll take this and gut you like a tuna.’ Haven’t heard from him since.”
“Is that your position? That he’s a terrorist?”
“Yeah.”
Rebecca started writing that down, so I added slowly and distinctly, “And we’re not.”
“So he’s the same as Hank Boone, in your opinion.”
I had to squirm. “Morally, yes. But no one’s really like Boone.”
Boone had this thing about whaling ships. He liked to sink them. He was a founder of GEE and hero of the Soviet invasion, but he’d been kicked out seven years ago. Off the coast of South Africa he had filled a Zodiac full of C-4, lit the fuse, pointed it at a pirate whaler, and jumped off at the last minute. The whaler went to the bottom and he went to hide out in some weepy European social democracy. But he kept dropping out of sight and whaling ships kept digging craters on the floors of the seven seas.
“Boone’s effective. Smirnoff is just pathetic.”
“You admire Boone.”
“You know I can’t say that. I sincerely don’t like violence. Honest to God.”
“That’s why you threatened Smirnoff with a knife.”
“Second-degree. It’s premeditated violence I can’t stand. Look. Boone isn’t even necessary. The corporations have already planted their own bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses.”
Rebecca sat back with those green eyes narrowed to slits, and I knew some sort of profound observation was coming down the pipeline. “I didn’t think you were scared of anything, but Smirnoff scares you, doesn’t he?”
“Sure. Look, GEE rarely does illegal things and we never do violent things. The worst we do is a little property damage now and then – and only to prevent worse things. But even so, we’re bugged and taped and tailed. The FBI thinks I’m Carlos the fucking Jackal. And we never talk about anything over the phone. Regular professionals. But that clown Smirnoff is trying to organize an openly terroristic group – over the fucking telephone! He’s about as shrewd as your brain-damaged Lhasa Apso. Shit! I wonder if we could sue him for defamation, just for mentioning our name.”
“I’m not a lawyer.”