"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 kinds 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 beat 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 colors 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.