Shit, maybe they really were on to something. Maybe they'd come up with a way to clean up toxic waste. If so, wonderful. But for some reason the thought bugged the hell out of me.
Maybe I was the only one who was supposed to be a hero. Maybe that was my real problem. If Dolmacher and his grinning, musclebound boss found a perfect way to clean up toxics while I was still sitting hairy and grubby in a Zodiac, riding my bicycle to work, where would it leave me? Left behind and worthless. Meanwhile, Biotronics was pulling some kind of bad cop/good cop drama on me. Scare me and my friends shitless, then, when I figure it out, smile a lot and invite me over for a meeting.
There had also been a series of messages from Rebecca, which they hadn't saved, but they were all the same: I'm trying to get in touch with you, asshole, why don't you call back? So the next time I was in the office I gave her a call.
“How's the wounded warrior?”
Rebecca always had to call me by epithets: the Granola James Bond, the wounded Warrior.
“What do you mean?”
“Pride, S.T. I'm talking about your pride. Last time I talked to you...”
“Oh yeah. The Case of the Disappearing PCBs. Yeah, that one still smarts a little. But I had a good time in Buffalo.” I briefed her on it.
“Been following the Pleshy campaign?”
“That reminds me. They're buying Boner. Big merger, you know. Rumors of insider trading.”
“Let's talk about it. And about the article - remember?”
So we made an appointment. I wasn't sure about the article yet. It might be some fun, in the fish-in-a-barrel department. But then, every once in a while I took a shot at political credibility. A couple of surprisingly well-known local pols have come to me to write policy statements on hazardous waste issues. If I got in the habit of banishing The Groveler in the alternative press, they might shy away from me.
While I was gone, someone had put some clippings on my desk about that jackass Smirnoff. The Terrorist Boy Scouts had held their first meeting and invited all the local press, one or two of whom had shown up. Smirnoff had issued a statement, a rambling statement, just what I'd expect, alternately heaping shit on GEE's head for being too conservative and praising our direct-action techniques. One of the clippings had a photograph, and I could see the back of a member's head, staring up adoringly at Smirnoff, and I was just positive it was Wyman, the guy who had shifted into reverse on the freeway. So I tried to get ahold of him for a while, but he had moved out of his old place and no one knew where he was.
“He's very secretive,” his old roommate explained, “because the FBI is after him.”
“Big fucking deal,” I said, miffing the hell out of his unindicted coconspirator.
I spent the rest of the afternoon writing letters and press releases denouncing the likes of Smirnoff and his idol, Boone, and explaining, in very short sentences, the differences between us and them. Then I trashed them, had the computer wipe them out. They'd never see print, because we don't talk about people like Smirnoff, we just ignore them.
I did have some fun during that first week back. No big actions on the way, no court appearances, no wrecked cars. I mixed up a shitload of papier-maché and added a new mountain to my train set. I hocked a few more shares of my old Mass Anal stock and bought an antique locomotive. Bartholomew and Debbie and Tess and Laurie and I played a few hundred badminton games after work.
But the most fun of all was when Esmerelda sent me a copy of a photo from the July 13, 1956, Boston Globe, second page of the Business section. It was a picture of Alvin Fleshy, back in his squirrelly, young-engineer days, in fiasco's main facility on Alkali Lane. I recognized the building just by its size: it was their big Chloralkali plant. Same process that had ruined Niagara. They made a lot of chemicals, so they needed a lot of power. They needed equipment that could handle the power fast. That meant big equipment and lots of it - huge transformers. Many transformers, each the size of a two-car garage.
“NEW EQUIPMENT FOR BASCO. Alvin Fleshy, Senior Engineer, supervises as modern equipment is installed in fiasco's Everett facility. The equipment will be used in the production of industrial and agricultural chemicals.”
Which will be sprayed over most of Vietnam, I mentally added. But the caption didn't matter; I was looking at the photo. Anyone could see that we weren't dealing with just any “equipment” here. We were talking whopping transformers. They were being lowered through holes in the roof.
The fact that fiasco bought a bunch of new transformers in 1956 was not interesting to me. What was interesting was that they had had to get rid of some old transformers to make room for the new ones. And all of them had probably been full of PCBs, hundreds of thousands of gallons of the bad stuff, fiasco had been having PCB problems for years, but nothing of that magnitude.
Fleshy had stashed away a lakeful of toxic waste somewhere, and he'd been keeping it under his belt for thirty years. I wonder if he thought about it at night. I wonder what the stockholders would say when I informed them of it, sent them copies of this photograph.
Suppose they'd taken those transformers and just dumped them on the floor of the Harbor somewhere. Or taken them to one of their lots and covered them with dirt. Sooner or later they'd bust open and then all hell would break loose. It might take a long time - say, thirty years. But it would happen.
And they'd know about it. They'd be sitting there, waiting, worrying. Maybe worrying enough to cover the site with some goons in a Cigarette.
Pure speculation. But it might explain the lobster. Unfortunately, it didn't explain the disappearing PCBs.