“Six traps empty, Herbie, could be pretty important to Neddie. The price of lobster keeps going down, and he needs every one of them pots to be full. The bay’s just about fished out. He’s probably lucky if he finds something in one of every four or five pots.”
“But that wasn’t it,” I insisted. “He wasn’t disappointed — he was mad. And he spit over the side of the boat again. Then he looked at me and said, ‘That Gussie Murphy, he’s been at my traps again, and if I weren’t a good Catholic I’d be telling God and all the saints what they can do with the likes of him.’ ”
“Neddie said that?”
“Or something like it. He said he knew it was Mr. Murphy who’d been raiding his traps and that you people, I mean the police, aren’t doing anything about it.”
“Herbie, he’s been complaining about Gus Murphy for twenty years.”
I shrugged. “Anyhow, we went out a little farther. There was a real thick fog coming right off the canal. Mr. Hacker knew the way, though, and I kept checking for his colors. He’s a real good seaman, Jake, he knew every marker and rock along the way. But as he steered the boat I could hear him cursing Mr. Murphy, calling him some real bad names. Funny how politics can do that, right, Jake?”
“Politics?”
The doughnuts had made me thirsty; I had the juice box to my lips. “Mr. Hacker said it was politics, or maybe I just got the feeling it was. He kept saying...” I glanced over carefully at Jake. Another change had come over him: suddenly he had this strange, confused look on his face. “Damn that man and his bloody politics.”
“He said that?” Jake didn’t look at me. He was tapping his hand on the car door now, almost nervously, and frowning as we drove through the thick scrub pine woods that stretched from there to the point. The road was private from here on, but Jake, being a cop, probably didn’t care.
“He did.”
“He said that? He said bloody politics.”
“It’s just an expression, isn’t it? Mr. Hacker and Mr. Murphy, they’re both Irishmen, aren’t they?”
“Finish your story,” Jake said in a sort of cold, detached way.
“It was hard to find anybody’s buoys in that fog, but finally we did. We came up with six more empty traps and no lobsters. It was in the seventh pot, the last one, that we found the arm. Mr. Hacker thought it was bait at first, then he swore and dropped it on the deck.”
“What did he do then?” Jake asked, but he was like an automaton speaking. His mind was definitely somewhere else.
“Called the Coast Guard on his radio, then the state police, I guess.”
“You guess.” That elicited a small laugh, but it was cold, too. “Yeah, guess my department’s not high on Neddie’s list of people to call.”
“I haven’t been much help, have I?” I asked as I dropped the juice box and the third, half-eaten doughnut back in the wax-paper bag.
“I don’t know, Herbie.” And that sounded oddly enigmatic, coming from Jake. “Maybe you have.”
“Who was that?”
I paused too long, my answer not quick enough. “Jake... he’s my mother’s boyfriend.”
But Oscar was sharp, nearly as sharp as my old friend Mr. Hornton. With a shake of his pony-tailed head and a glare of his piercing blue eyes, he replied, “He’s a cop.”
“Yeah, but he’s my mother’s boyfriend, too.” I sighed and dumped my knapsack onto a chair.
“Hell, Herbie, are you digging up dead bodies again?” was Oscar’s response as he walked away from me to the work table in the middle of the room. On it sat what looked like an extremely sophisticated batter’s helmet, one with a gridwork of wires around the base. He smiled at me, picked up the thing, then plopped it on his head and sat down at a computer console.
But I was sharp, too; I knew what it was he was playing around with, something he’d been bragging about for weeks, something his older brother at M.I.T. had been working on. Oscar liked to talk about his brother Tony, and how every big electronics outfit from Boston to Tokyo was anxious to “pick his brain.” Now here was Oscar, with a virtual reality helmet on his head, probably stolen or “borrowed” from Tony.
“What are you doing with that?” I asked, hoping to deflect his attention from Jake and the fact that he had walked me in to the science building. I was also hoping to forget some of it myself, if only for a little while. I hadn’t liked the way Jake had grabbed my shoulder in the hall outside, said, “Seriously, Herbie, you’ve got to keep quiet about this. If the media got hold of this, it would ruin months of important police work.”
“You can count on me, Jake,” I had told him with all sincerity. It wasn’t until Jake had nodded at me, then at Oscar in the doorway to the lab, and turned to go that I had a funny feeling, a feeling that Jake had been talking in the past tense.
Past tense? It would ruin months of important police work? Like the investigation that someone — but not Jake — was starting on now? Or some other important police work? Some important police work done in the past?
“Isn’t all this stuff top secret or something?” I asked Oscar as my mind ticked away to this morning. Neddie Hacker and Gussie Murphy’s feud. Little Brucie Hacker, built like a small sumo wrestler, tucked away in county jail for beating up his girlfriend. Liam O’Reilly and his arm, and just where was the rest of him? And why had that part of him, a part that was so readily identifiable, been stuck in a lobster pot? Belonging to Neddie? But which was usually hauled up by Little Brucie?
And why was Jake acting so funny about all this? Why had he reacted so strangely to parts of my story?
“This junk?” Oscar said, answering my question. “Nah, this is just kid stuff, an early version of the real thing my brother’s working on. He let me take this to kick around with. It’s just a toy.”
I doubted that. It was no toy, and probably Oscar had just helped himself — as he’d been known to do before when he visited the amazing Tony. The institute probably didn’t even know he had it with him, or that he’d “borrowed” a couple of their computers and, from the look of it, had jury-rigged them together in order to make the helmet run or work or function, or whatever the right verb was when talking about virtual reality helmets.
“What does it do?” I asked Oscar, trying like heck to get my mind on something else for a little while.
“What does it do? Most people would ask how does it work,” Oscar laughed.
“How does it work?”
He laughed again. “If I can run this program right, I’ll be mountain climbing, Herb my man! Imagine that? Mountain climbing, but without any of the dangers. Oh, I’ll fall, all right, or feel a sense of falling, or dangling off a catchwire, but I’ll never hit the bottom or get scraped or bruised, and best of all, I’ll never get hurt or killed.”
“Then what’s the point?” I asked.
“What?”
I guess I asked the wrong — or right — question because Oscar pulled off the helmet, set it down, and spun all the way around in his chair to look at me.
“Don’t you see, Herbie? Don’t you understand? This is the future! The ultimate experience! In the future all of us — anyone at all — will be able to, say, go skin-diving and never have to worry about drowning, or... or...” Oscar was a terrible stammerer when he got excited, “or spelunking and not worry about a cave-in or getting lost, or... or this one, the program I got from Tony. If I can get the bloody thing to work.” He turned away, frowning, hand falling on a manual of some sort.
Bloody?
Bloody politics?
“There’ll be no danger, Herbie,” Oscar went on. “No sport or experience that can be denied anyone. Hey? Won’t that be great?”