Zodiac Read online

  “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.

  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 halfway 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 sloshi
ng 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 then 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.

  2

  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 Everett 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 way 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 Sturm band-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 corner 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 cameraman 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 Siou
x would dismantle a buffalo. I just concentrated on getting the wheels off, with their brand-new, six-hundred-dollar set of radiais 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 Bronco’s door: BASCO SECURITY. I knew them well. They owned every thing 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.