That was fine with me. If he wanted to show people how their toxic waste was passing under their homes, let him.
In fact, I couldn't figure out what the hell he was thinking. Why did he want to emphasize that? I started flipping through one of their press packets and found the same map, with their underground pipe highlighted. Exactly what they didn't want people to know.
Then the bastard drygulched me. He almost nailed me to the wall.
“By plugging up the diffuser at the end of this pipe, the GEE people are running the risk that the pipe will burst, somewhere back in here . . .” (pointing to a residential neighborhood) “.. . and release these compounds into the soil. This should lay to rest any misconceptions about their concern for the people of Blue Kills. What these people are, pure and simple, is t-”
“What he's saying,” I shouted, stepping up behind him and holding a salad bowl in the air, “is that this pipeline...”
I pointed to the map “... that's carrying tons of toxic waste under people's homes, is so fragile, so shoddily made and poorly maintained, that it's weaker than a contraption made from a salad bowl and a toilet part that we just whipped up on the spur of the moment.”
I could see the guy deflate. He refused to turn around. “And if these compounds are as safe as he says, why is he worried about them getting into the soil? Why does he equate that threat with terrorism? That should tell you how safe it really is.”
And, finally, I got to deliver my traditional coup de grace, namely, handing the flack a glass tumbler full of the awful black stuff and inviting him to drink it.
Sometimes I feel sorry for flacks. They don't have a clue about chemistry or ecology or any of the technical issues. They just have an official line they're told to repeat. My job is to get them fired. The first few times I did this, I felt great, like an avenging angel. Now I try to co-opt them. I go easy. I don't blow their brains out on-camera unless they get sleazy, attacking me or GEE. I've been responsible for a lot of people getting fired - security guards, PR flacks, engineers - and that's the most troublesome part of my job.
Zodiac
11
THE COPS SHOWED UP. All kinds of cops. Blue Kills cops, state police, coast guardsmen. It didn't much matter because we'd already plugged ninety-five of the holes.
All the cops stood in knots on the beach and argued about jurisdiction. What they came up with was this: several state troopers and Blue Kills policemen took a coast guard boat out to the Blowfish - which a trooper boarded, just to show the flag - and then their boat escorted us way around to the north and into a dock that was part of Blue Kills proper, not Blue Kills Beach.
It was a fun trip. The wind had come up and the Blue Kills cops, on that dinky CG boat, spent most of it doubled over the side, chucking their donuts. On the Blowfish, I chatted with Dick, the state trooper, a pretty affable guy of about forty. He asked me a lot of questions about the plant and why it was dangerous and I tried to explain.
“Cancer happens when cells go crazy and don't stop multiplying. That happens, basically, because their genetic code has gotten screwed up.”
“Like nicotine or asbestos or something.”
I glanced up and saw Tom Akers sidling over in our direction, listening to the conversation.
“Yeah. Nicotine and asbestos have some way of altering your genes. Genes are just long stringy molecules. Like any other molecule, they can have chemical reactions with other molecules. If the other molecule happens to be, say, nicotine, the reaction will break or damage the gene. Most of the time it won't matter. But if you're unlucky, the gene will be changed in just the wrong way....” “And you get the Big C.”
“Right.” I couldn't help thinking of Dolmacher - the world's biggest carcinogen - cracking genes up there in Boston. “The thing is, Dick, that for a chemist it's pretty obvious, just looking at any molecule, whether it's going to cause cancer or not. There are certain elements, like chlorine, that are very good at breaking apart your genes. So if you're dumping something into the environment that has a lot of available chlorine on it, you have to be a jerk not to realize it's cancer-causing.”
“But you can never prove it,” Tom said, sounding kind of sullen.
“You can never prove it the way you can prove a case in court. That's why the chemical corporations can get away with so much. Someone gets a tumor, it's impossible to trace it back to a particular chlorine atom that came from a molecule that was discharged by such-and-such a plant. It's all circumstantial, statistical evidence.”
Dick said, “So this stuff coming out of this pipe down here-”
“Some of it has chlorine on it. Also there are some heavy metals coming out, like cadmium, mercury, and so on. Everyone knows they're toxic.”
“So why does the EPA allow these guys to do it?”
“To dump that stuff? They don't.”
“What do you mean?”
“The EPA doesn't allow it. It's against the law.”
“Wait a minute,” Dick said. I could see the methodical cop mind at work; I could see him writing up an arrest report. “Let's take this from the top. What these guys are doing is against the law.”
“Exactly.”
“So how come we're arresting you?”
“Because that's the way of the world, Dick.”
“Well, you know, a lot of people around here . . .” he leaned forward, though nobody was even close to us “... are on your side. They really like what you're doing. Everyone's known that these guys were dumping poison. And people are sick of it.” He leaned even closer. “Like my daughter for example. My seventeen-year-old daughter. Hey! That reminds me! You got any stuff on this boat?”
“What do you mean?” I thought he was talking about drugs.
“Oh, you know, bumper stickers, posters. I'm supposed to get some for my daughter, Sheri.”
I took him down below and we redecorated Sheri's room with big posters of adorable mammals.
“How about stuffed animals? You got any stuffed animals?” Then his eyes went wide and he glanced away. “Sorry. I didn't mean that as a joke.”
For a second I didn't catch the reference. Then I figured that he was talking about an incident a couple of weeks before when a van of ours, completely jammed with stuffed penguins, had caught fire on the Garden State Parkway. Our people got out, but the van burned like a flare for three hours. Plastic is essentially frozen gasoline.
“Yeah, we're a little short.”
I got some coffee for Dick and we hung out in the cockpit watching Blue Kills approach, watching the cops on the CG boat do the technicolor yawn. “How long you staying in Jersey?” he asked.
“Couple days.”
“You know, Sheri just thinks you guys are great. She'd love to meet you. Maybe you could come by for dinner.” We fenced over that issue for a while - God help me, getting involved with an underage Jersey state trooper's daughter - and then Dick and his friends busted us and took us to jail.
We were each allowed one phone call. I used mine to order a pizza. We'd already notified the national office of GEE, down in Washington, and they had dispatched Abigail, the attack lawyer. She was on her way now, probably in a helicopter gunship.
By the time our mug shots and fingerprints were taken and we'd exchanged business cards with our new cellmates, it was eight in the evening and I just wanted to sleep. But Abbey showed up and sprang us.
“It's a totally awful, bogus bust,” she explained, dragging on a cig and massaging her aluminum briefcase. “Jurisdiction is totally coast guard, because it all happened offshore. You were working out of the town of Blue Kills Beach. But the cops who busted you were from Blue Kills. So it's just a total fuck-up. And the charges will probably be dropped anyway.”
“The charges are-”
“Sabotaging a hazardous-waste pipeline.”
I looked at her.
“Honest to God. That's actually a crime in New Jersey. I do not make this up,” she said.
“Why do you t
hink they'll drop the charges?”
“Because that will force the company to go into court and testify that this pipeline is carrying hazardous waste. Otherwise, it's not a hazardous-waste pipeline, is it?”
When I got out to the Omni I sat there for a while with the seat leaned back, dozing, waiting for them to let Debbie out of girl jail. The phone rang.
“GEE?” said an old voice.
“Yeah.”
“I want to talk to ST.”
“Speaking.”
And that was all it took. The guy just started to ramble. He talked for fifteen minutes, didn't even pause to see if I was still connected. He didn't tell the story very coherently, but I understood pretty clearly. He'd worked at the plant, or ones like it, for thirty-two years. Saved up money so he and his wife could buy an Airstream and drive around the country when they retired. He went on and on about that Airstream. I learned about the color scheme, what kind of material the kitchen counters were made of, and how many pumps it took to flush the toilet. I could have rewired that trailer in the dark by the time he was done describing it.
Now he had a form of liver cancer.
“Hepatic angiocarcinoma,” I said.
“How'd you know?” he said. I let him figure it out.
His doctor said it was a very rare disease, thought it seemed to be pretty common around Blue Kills. This guy knew three other people who had died of it. All of them had the same job he did.
“So I just thought you might like to know,” he said, when he'd finally come around to this point, when he was ready to drive the knife home, “that those bastards have been dumping waste solvents into a ditch behind the main plant for thirty year. They're still doing it every day. The supervisors do it now so the workers don't know about it. And I just know they're scared shitless that someone like you is going to find out.”
A guy in a suit had materialized right outside the Omni. When I suddenly noticed him it was like waking up from a dream. For a second I thought he was a hit man, thought I was going to die. Then he pressed a business card up against the glass. He wasn't a hit man or a rent-a-dick or a PR flack. He was an assistant attorney general from a particular state or commonwealth somewhere between Maine and the Carolinas. His last name wasn't necessarily Cohen, but Cohen is what I'll call him.
I reached around and unlocked the passenger-side door. Then I tried to think of a way to end this phone conversation. What do you say to a guy in those circumstances? He was halfway between this world and the next, and I was a twenty-nine-year-old guy who likes to watch cartoons and play ski-ball. He wanted Justice and I wanted a beer.
This assistant A.G. was polite, anyway. He stood outside the passenger door as long as I kept talking. The old guy gave me exhaustive directions on how to find this ditch. It would involve sneaking onto the plant grounds in the middle of the night, avoiding security cops here and here and here, going one hundred yards in such-and-such direction, and drilling. We would have to backpack a soil corer all the way in.
All of this was slightly more illegal than what I was used to. Besides, that trench wasn't a secret. Others had already spilled the toxic information to the media. The neighborhood plague of birth defects and weird cancers had already been noticed; red thumbtacks had already gone up on the map, splattering away from the trench like blood from a bullet. In a couple of months the first suit would be filed. That trench was going to be an issue for the next ten years. There was a pretty good chance it would drive the corporation into bankruptcy.
“I just hope you can use this because I want those son of a bitches to dry up and fall into the ocean.” And on and on, more and more profane, until I hung up on him.
Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would never suspect why they got cancer. They'd chalk it up to God or probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom.
It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are swimming in it, and I get to float around on the surface, on my Zodiac, announcing that they're in trouble. What I really want to do is make a difference. But I'm not sure if I have, yet.
Cohen rapped on the window glass. I motioned him in, but I didn't move my seat to the upright position. I just lay there while he got in, and tried to remember all the crimes I had committed in Cohen's particular state/commonwealth. None in the last six months.
“Phoning home to Mom?”
“Not exactly. Hey, look, Cohen, our lawyer's inside, okay? I have nothing to say to you.”
“I'm not here to prosecute you.”
When I looked him in the face, he nodded in the direction of a Cadillac that was aswarm with suits from the company. “I want to prosecute them.”
“Shit. Four different kinds of cops, now five, all arresting different people. I need a scorecard.”
“Could you prove in court that someone like that was violating the law?”
“I can run a chemical analysis that proves it. But any chemist can do that. You don't need me.”
“Why are you laughing?”
“Because this is unbelievable. I just get sprung from jail and now....”
“You have a pretty low opinion of law enforcement in my state, don't you?”
A delicate question. “A lot of laws get broken there, let's put it that way.” But that was a dodge. Of course I had a low opinion. I'd seen this before. GEE draws attention to a problem and suddenly the cops - particularly the category of cops who have to be reelected - are on the ball.
“It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture.”
“I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that.”
“Well, I wouldn't say it in public. But we don't need this image problem.”
“Sounds like strategy and tactics, man, like some important up-for-reelection type sat down with a chart, in the Statehouse maybe, and said: 'Item number two, this toilet-of-the-United-States business. Cohen, get out there and bust some corporate ass.'”
Cohen was nice enough to give me a bitchy little smile. “If that's how you want to view it, fine. But real life is more complicated.”
I just sneered out the windshield. After I've gotten the date and done the work for them, ecocrats love to give me some pointers on real life. If it makes them feel better, I don't care.
“We want to prosecute these people,” Cohen continued, “but getting evidence is hard.”
“What's so hard about it?”
“Come on, Mr. Taylor, look at it from a cop's point of view. We aren't chemists. We don't know which chemicals to look for, we don't know where or how to look. Infiltration, sampling, analysis, all those activities require specialists - not state troopers. You're very scornful, Mr. Taylor, because for you - with your particular skills - for you all those things are easy. You can do them with your eyes closed.” “Holy shit, is this going where I think it is?” It was. Cohen wanted me to break into a fucking chemical plant in the middle of the night, with cops! a warrant, in his home state, and get samples. Me, I was far too tired to hear this bizarre stuff. I desperately needed cold beer and loud rock and roll. So Cohen went on and on, about how I should think this over, and then I found myself sitting alone in the Omni, leaned back in the reclining seat with Debbie's Joan Jett tape blasting on the stereo - I'm in love with the modem world / I'm in touch, I'm a modern girl - drawing stares from the company suits, wondering if I'd just dreamed the whole thing.
Zodiac
12
BACK IN BOSTON, we worked out a settlement with Fotex. They had just lost their most vicious negotiator, my oldest and wiliest enemy in this business, who had toppled off a rusty catwalk into an intake pond, been sucked into a big pipe, shredded into easily digestible bits by rotating kni
ves and processed into toxic sludge. I guessed it was suicide. This Fotex deal was a big hassle since Wes, who runs the Boston office, was using the Omni for a business trip through northern New England. I had to ride my bike to and from their goddamn plant, way up north in the high-chemical-crime district and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.
Someone had donated an old computer system, a five-terminal CP/M system about ten years old. Boston already had a Computer Museum, but we were neck-and-neck with them as a showcase of obsolete machinery. Old used computers are economically worthless and we pick them up for little or nothing. Usually they're good enough for what we want to do: telecommunications, printing up mailing lists, slowly crunching a few numbers.
Debbie and I took a vacation up to Quebec City and then over to Nova Scotia for a couple of days. I had a terrible time.
“If we get up now-” I said one night at about 3:00 A.M., looking at my digital nerd-watch.
“-and roll up the tent real fast,” she continued, and by this time I was already embarrassed, but she kept going, “and jump into the car and drive all night, we could reach the ferry that runs down to the states, and be in Boston, wallowing in sludge, within twenty-four hours.”
“Yeah.”
“Instead of being out here on the beach, listening to the waves, relaxing and screwing,” she continued.
“We aren't screwing,” I pointed out, but suddenly we were. Debbie insisted on following the rhythm of the waves. Typical duck-squeezer sex: slow, frustrating, in tune with nature. Fortunately there was a trawler out there somewhere, maybe a mile out, and when its wake attacked the beach, the waves started piling in on top of each other, blending into one fast pounding whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. I burst the zipper out of my sleeping bag, Debbie kicked a pot of cold hot chocolate out into the sand, and for a while we just lay there, half tumbled out onto the beach, feeling the cold and the warmth on opposite sides, and I said to hell with the damn ferry. Every so often I got some hint that this woman really wanted me, and it was scary. When she wanted other things she was so crafty and effective.