“Yeah, and the electrons are their ammunition. They ride up and down the river - your bloodstream - and slip into your cells and shoot up your chromosomes. The difference between that and table salt is that table salt is inorganic, ionic chlorine - soldiers without a boat, with no ammunition - and this other stuff is organic, covalent chlorine - bad stuff.”
Tom sat back, raised his eyebrows. “Well then, if you think I'm going to go down there, forget it.”
“Look, that's fine, and I don't blame you, but let me just say that I'm as paranoid as anyone and I went down there. I'm pretty sure we can do this without getting contaminated.”
“I'll do other diving but I won't go to the bottom. I got enough of this shit in my body already.”
“Fair enough.”
I phoned Esmerelda. After this was over we'd have to give her an honorary membership in the group. If GEE was like the Starship Enterprise, then I was Scotty and she was Spock.
We had an extremely pleasant chat about her granddaughter's brand new pink dress, which had involved roughly a hundred man-hours of shopping, and about the weather and the Sox. Standing in the library, she spoke quietly, and I always found my own voice dwindling to a whisper during these conversations. It was like talking to an important Japanese warlord. You had to hem and haw and nibble around the edges for a few hours, just to be polite, before you got to the point.
“There's some kind of intern working there, a woman, working with The Weekly?”
“Yes. She had a little trouble threading the microfilm machines but now she's doing just fine.”
“If someone ever invents a self-threading microfilm machine, half you guys are going to be out of a job. No offense to you.”
“How can I help you, ST.?”
“If that woman comes up with anything really interesting, could you shoot me a copy?”
“About Mr. Fleshy?”
“You know it.”
“Anything in particular?”
“Oh, I don't know. Something with photos in it. That always makes them nervous. Would you mind?”
“Certainly not. Is there anything else?”
“No. Just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Have fun, ST.” That's how she always said goodbye to me. She must have some queer ideas about my job.
The next day we organized, and the day after that we did it. With another diver from the Boston office I swam around scooping muck into sample jars. We'd hand them off to Tom, who'd relay them up to the Zodiac, where Debbie was waiting. That way we wouldn't have to decompress every time we had a full load of samples. Debbie was our navigator, using landmarks on shore to judge our position and mark down roughly where each sample came from. We could plot the results later on. If the PCB concentration increased sharply in one direction, that would give us a clue as to where the source was. If we were really lucky, we'd be able to track it down, probably to a few barrels on the bottom.
The ultimate success would be to find some barrels with PCB still in them, and to get some photos. We couldn't salvage them ourselves, but the EPA probably could and, more important, they probably would. We could save the Harbor a lot of grief and we might find evidence that would lead us to the criminals.
I didn't want Debbie sitting out there alone on a Zodiac. We knew the Poyzen Boyzen people had a boat, and they seemed to know a hell of a lot about who we were and where we hung out. So we looked through our donor list and found a couple of yacht owners, then convinced them that it really would be fun to spend a day bobbing around in the Harbor, showing the flag. We hoisted another Toxic Jolly Roger, persuaded Tanya's black-belt squeeze to join up, and ferried a few media people out from Castle Island Park. Rebecca came, as did the starving freelancer and the reporter from the Globe. So far it was background.
We started roughly where I'd taken my first sample and worked our way outwards, covering about half a square mile of the Harbor floor. We ended up with thirty-six peanut butter jars full of raw sewage, and some very sore muscles.
There's one advantage of hanging out with groovsters: they give good massage. A couple of hours of massage, beer, nitrous oxide, and Stooges after a day of diving - nothing could beat it.
The next day we began to run the samples and got semi disastrous results. Disastrous for me - we weren't reading any PCBs at all. This was unbelievable - there had to be contamination inside the machine-and the whole operation went on hold for two days while I took the gas chromatograph apart, piece by piece, cleaned each one, and put it back together. Pure joy.
Then I started to test the samples again. No one had stuck around for the two days of cleaning, so by this time I was working alone. No matter, I got exactly the same goddamn results. The level of PCBs in these samples was no different from those taken anywhere else in the Harbor.
As we headed south, in the direction of Spectacle Island, the concentration dropped rapidly - not what I'd expected - and to the north of Spectacle we couldn't get any PCB readings at all. It was totally virgin.
The Granola James Bond, the Toxic Spiderman, had fucked up. I'd overreacted to some oily lobsters, seen a guy with excema and called it chloracne. Then I'd gotten a bad sample, or run it wrong, and rushed the gig.
It was hard to believe, but I had no choice. The only other possibility was that the culprits had somehow hoovered up the PCBs while I was shuffling papers. But that kind of a Cecil B. De Mille operation would have cost billions.
It happens. Seen from the laboratory, the universe looks a lot more complicated than it does in your neat mental blueprints. But this time it really burned my ass. Debbie could have helped, but I didn't give her a chance. To be lonely and pissed feels better. So after I'd gone through the burning embarrassment, the denial and the anger, I got down into some serious depression.