“Are you going to stake out the building tonight?”
“I’m going to do whatever they tell me. They’re going to get back to me. The S.A.C. is involved now. You stumbled into a big one.”
“We didn’t really stumble into it, and we don’t want to lose track of this caviar. If these two guys come down the elevator barehanded in the morning and drive off, you’ll go with them.”
“That’s right.”
“Can you get Ehrmann on the line?”
“No, he’s talking to my supervisor and my supervisor is talking to the S.A.C.”
Marquez had a pretty good idea how the fifty-six FBI field offices worked. Many decisions got made at the task force and supervisory level, and the S.A.C. got informed of the progress of operations and had to give approval for aspects, but he was also the bureaucracy fall guy if a fuckup had to be contained to a particular field office. That way the big guys back east were protected from blame. A great thing about the Bureau was if they really set out to make something happen, it went down fast, but most of the time when they started talking about supervisors and S.A.C.s you could forget about anything happening fast, particularly if you weren’t talking about Federal violations.
“You understand the problem,” the special agent said.
“Sure.”
The guys upstairs might be tied into Ehrmann’s larger investigation. They might go down on much larger violations than trafficking in illegal animal products. Sturgeon was very low on the list, but this special agent wasn’t going to say it. The agent took a phone call and stepped away. When he walked back over he said, “Ehrmann will explain when you get back to California.”
“These boxes may move tonight. How many people have you got?”
“We’ll handle it from here. I mean it. The word is your team is to pull out.”
“If it doesn’t move tonight, we’ll pull out at dawn.”
“You’re just going to make a problem for me and you.”
Marquez was nonconfrontational but adamant. More phone calls got made and then it was agreed to. What could it hurt? He told Shauf to get some sleep and then sat awake in his truck. At first light it was still drizzling and the streets were dark and wet. The streetlight near the van hummed. Marquez got out and walked around. He knocked on Shauf’s window and then went over to talk to the FBI before leaving.
Shauf followed him to the wharf. They found a place to eat, and Marquez ordered scrambled eggs with salmon and toast cooked dark and just barely touched with butter. Shauf ate a bagel and drank four cups of coffee. Then they woke up the team, and everyone headed south within an hour. As he left Seattle he saw the Olympic Range in his rearview, sunlight between the clouds reflecting off patches of snow high on the mountains. He drove slowly, fatigue heavy in him, and less than a hundred miles down the road he had to pull over and sleep.
Now he was driving again and approaching the Klamath River in southern Oregon. Ehrmann called and the reception was bad, but Marquez didn’t expect to learn anything. Ehrmann’s voice was dry, rasping, a cough interrupting sentences that crackled and stretched with the poor connection.
“We’re with her.”
“Is she in custody?”
“We’re not bringing her in.” Ehrmann coughed, and Marquez held the cell away from his ear. “We haven’t found your caviar.”
After hanging up, Marquez crossed the Klamath River, and the brief glimpse of the Klamath conjured memories of the largest die-off ever in the United States, thirty-two thousand Chinook salmon as a result of the ongoing struggle for water rights. Plenty of people on either side to tell you exactly why it happened and how the other side was in conspiracy to perpetrate a lie, but one truth that couldn’t be argued very far was that the fall run this year of Chinook was down twenty-five percent. The biologists guessed it would stay down at least another couple of years. That assumed normal rainfall and no more water diversions that killed the young.
But even that was hardly news anymore. Perhaps we’d grow accustomed to eating salmon raised in pens. Only 2 percent of the salmon sold now was wild, and the pen farmers who fed their salmon dye to color it for market and fought regulating the antibiotics in the feed, they’d eventually get it figured out, wouldn’t they? Salmon had once swum in every ocean, but it didn’t need to be wild as long as we could build farms, pack them in ocean pens, and choose flesh colors like paint chips.
Besides, trying to live in balance with these wild creatures was a hassle. Farmed salmon was cheaper, simpler, and the only way to meet the demand. Problems of funguses and lack of musculature from living in crowded pens, those were solvable. Perhaps growth hormones would speed up the time it took to get them to market and bring the price down further. That should please the shareholders, and look at what the chicken farm factories and hog operations had faced and solved. Eventually, no one would remember what wild salmon tasted like anyway, or maybe they’d finally get sold on the idea that farmed salmon tasted the same, or even better. It was just a matter of the right ad campaigns.
The Lacey Act passed in the early part of the twentieth century was still the one law game wardens could count on, the strongest measure ever passed in the States to protect wildlife, but it hadn’t come from Congress’s desire to achieve a balance with the wild. It passed out of fear that we’d lose everything at the current rate of slaughter. We’d lose what we believed we rightfully owned, and maybe that view was a big part of the problem. We didn’t really own the wild or the right to wipe out species. We’d beaten back our predators and just assumed the right to whatever we wanted with the rest of the creatures.
But fast forward a hundred years. A different battle was underway in the West for habitat and species survival. Whether it was economically feasible to preserve salmon runs for future generations, or fair to make hardworking businesses suffer to allow a species to survive, those were open questions. The debate wasn’t so much about how to live in balance with nature, but whether it was worth the effort, whether the wild meant anything to us.
Let it go, Marquez thought. You think too much and you’re beat. He put the Klamath behind him, remembering the rants of radio talk show hosts as the controversy was in full swing, radio hosts whose only real art was in turning issues needing discourse into venal political standoffs. It all took him down today. His usual resilience wasn’t there, and when another call came from Ehrmann he let it go to voice mail and only took calls from the team. He told everyone to break the drive in half, find a motel, and finish the drive tomorrow. But he kept driving. When he was still three or four hours out he called Maria.
“I’m going to be late, Maria.”
“How late?”
“I probably won’t get home until after 10:00.”
“Then I’m going to stay at Stacey’s again. I’m at Stacey’s, and I was going to leave pretty soon, but if you’re going to be that late I may as well stay here.” She sounded calm, said it without any attitude. “I’m here and working on my homework. I have another three hours of homework.”
“Okay, stay there tonight, but understand it’s not going forward this way. It’s not okay to move out.”
“I know everyone thinks I’m completely ungrateful, but Mom is the one who said the worst things.”
What he felt like saying was knock it off, Maria, grow up and come home. You’ve got a pretty good life, a lot better than what your mom or I had at your age. But he held back. He’d see her tomorrow. He made two other calls on the way home, one dependent on the other, the first to his ex-chief, Bell, to reconfirm, then a call to Ludovna.
“I’m calling to invite you over the day after tomorrow. What kind of vodka do you like?”