Black Tide (7 page)

Natural cleansing. Some time ago a man had made the decision that sent the
Petro Star
to these shores and its cargo to my home, that had sent the
Petro Star
here understaffed, with faulty equipment and a single hull and a crew that couldn't have handled a car wash. One man had done that, and I was not going to allow him to think that it was now only a problem of insurance agencies and repair bills. I made a tossing motion with my right hand and the ice cubes flew out of the glass and headed to the oily and salty water below me.

Except that so far he was doing a pretty good job of keeping himself hidden, and that did not make me happy.

So. In a month or two there were going to be congressional hearings in Porter on the spill, and maybe the mystery man's identity would be revealed then. And in the meantime…

Well. There was that matter Felix Tinios had brought up.

I set my empty glass down, brought up my knees and looked out to the lights of the Isles of Shoals on the dark waters, and I tried to think, though that oil stank so damn much.

Chapter Five

In the basement of the
Tyler Chronicle's
offices, the floor was damp and covered with mildew, and in one corner was a sump pump that clicked on every now and then as I worked. In another corner was a room with a closed door with a sign that aid, "Knock Before Entering or You'll Let All the Dark Out!" hat door belonged to the
Chronicle
's darkroom, and whoever as the newspaper's chief photographer this summer was in here his early Wednesday morning, listening to rock music and banging things around.

There was a smell of chemicals from the darkroom and wet paper and decay from the basement, and before me were homemade wooden shelves, which held bound copies of past issues of the
Tyler Chronicle.
Each volume was bound in blue leather, with gold lettering identifying the months and the year. Being here was silly in a way, for I'm sure I could have done a good enough job from home with my Apple Macintosh and its modem. Or I could have gone to the town's library --- the Gilliam Memorial Library --- and spent some time in the microfilm room, sitting in a comfortable chair instead of standing on dirty and wet concrete. And if I wanted to go to the very best at hand, I could have made the half-hour drive to the University of New Hampshire's library in Durham.

But I convinced myself that I was tired of looking at a computer screen, and I also convinced myself that I didn't want to race through blurry microfilm. I wanted the old newspapers in my hand, to look through the stories and get a feel of things, without having the barrier of a computer screen or a microfilm reader in the way.

Sure. Basically, I was doing what was called in my previous life a two-track search, back when I read for a living and wrote reports that had a circulation of less than a dozen. One track was what I was currently involved with, looking through the musty and heavy volumes of the
Tyler Chronicle
. The other track had occurred earlier, when I arrived at the paper's offices, intent on seeing Paula Quinn, but ending up only seeing her boss, Roland Grandmaison. Rollie had been at his desk up to his elbows in paper as usual --- and there was a scent of sour breath mints about him as I walked through. He had on a stained white dress shirt that was getting thin at the elbows, and a striped tie that was undone a bit at the frayed collars. What was left of his light brown hair was plastered to his freckled skull, and he looked up at me with moist eyes behind heavy-rimmed glasses as I came by and asked permission to look in the morgue.

Rollie had said yes and then, with pencil in hand, said, "You're looking for Paula, aren't you?"

"That I am."

He shook his head. "Girl's been keeping her own hours here lately." He marked up a piece of paper and looked at me and said, "Something's poorly with her, and I don't know what it is. I think she's getting dull here, but she don't give me the sign that she's ready to move on. I don't know. All I do know is that I hate dealing with other people's problems when I got a paper to get out. It makes a lousy job even worse."

"Just the joys of being an editor, Rollie," I said, and he grunted and I gathered that our conversation was over.

With that bit of cheery news, I went down the threadbare, carpeted stairs to the basement-cum-morgue, where I started going through the first bound volume from five years ago. Felix had id his concern was connected with a theft five years ago, and the
Chronicle
was as good a place as any to begin the search. While mostly covered the eastern end of Wentworth County it also carried stories from the Associated Press bureau out of Concord, the state capital. If the news had been as big as Felix had indicated, then it would have been reported in the
Chronicle.
Five years. I flipped through the pages, half remembering the old stories that popped up, about countries and political crises and obsolete borders that now belonged in the history books, remembering where I had been and where reading the newspaper every morning was a secret and fun ritual. Secret because newspapers weren't usually allowed at your desk --- except when it was specifically connected to a special project --- and fun because there was a tingle of joy in reading the stories and knowing how close he reporters were to getting the truth, or knowing with a smile how far off they were.

Old pleasures, now gone. I turned another page and found what I was looking for.

At the time five years ago my office was in a side basement, in a building in Virginia with five sides, and the office came with government-issue furniture, cubicle walls and no windows. The cubicles did not reach to the ceiling, so if you stood on a chair, you could see how your neighbor was doing. I had a computer terminal and an electric typewriter, and four special locked filing cabinets that were supposedly rated to withstand the blast of a ten-kiloton battlefield tactical nuclear weapon from one mile away. No personal decorations were allowed in our cubicles, but the people in my section managed to get around that in various ways. Calendars were allowed, and mine was a gorgeous one from the Planetary Society, with each month showing a color picture of a planet or moon in our solar system, the photos taken by either satellites or ground-based telescopes.

On the right side of my cubicle was another bank of filing cabinets, and my neighbor to the left was Carl Socha. I had just completed a research project on Indian and Pakistani civil defense agencies (with a special focus on how they were prepared to handle a nuclear exchange during a three-week ground war) that had taken almost a month, which was done in preparation for a meeting between someone in our department and someone across the river in D.C.  However, I had learned an hour ago that the meeting had been canceled due to some tiff over policy. There was little chance of it ever being rescheduled during this current Administration and the four numbered copies of my work had entered a shredding machine that morning. By now they were being converted into ash in another basement office in the same building.

I wasn't in the best of moods.

My desk was clear of work for the moment and I felt antsy, so I pulled my chair back, climbed up on it, and poked my head over the cubicle wall. Carl Socha was there, leaning back in his chair with his feet propped up on his desk, flipping through a magazine that had a smiling Soviet soldier on the cover. The magazine's title was in Cyrillic characters. Carl had on a tight red polo shirt and designer jeans, and in the fluorescent lights, his skin looked smooth and polished. He had taken off his shoes and socks and was letting a small electric fan cool his feet. He claimed that cooling his feet helped him to think, and since he was one of the best in our section, George Walker --- our section leader --- pretty much left him alone.

We were definitely an odd section compared with the others in this part of the building. Each of the other sections had an easily assigned title and task. There were Soviet experts and Soviet republic experts, people who could tell you the history of the Communist Party in Central America, and bright and earnest people in sections on Far East affairs who could talk you to for hours about the economic and military links between Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore.

Every now and then, though, there came through a research project that fell between the cracks, and that was the job for our section. George Walker, our section leader, didn't like his job and didn't particularly like us, and one reason was the name for our section: we didn't have one. We were just known by the letter and number that designated our room. We called ourselves the Marginal Issues Section, which suited us but didn't suit George Walker.

The people who made up the section were the ones who didn't quite fit in. I, for one, was bored after doing a project or two on the same subject. I needed to root around and try something different each time. My neighbor, Carl Socha, knew his Soviet history better than that of his home country, yet he kept butting heads with the orthodoxy in vogue during the current Administration. They thought they were punishing him by placing him here and making him my neighbor, and I think we confused them by becoming friends.

He was chewing gum as he flipped through the magazine and said, "What are you looking at, farm boy? Ain't you never seen someone read before?"

I rested my chin on the cubicle's metal top. ''Ah, such a life," said. "Remember how it was during orientation? After they swore us to secrecy and made us sign all those forms? A relaxing job, they said. Like spending all day in the library, the best library in the world. Do some writing here and there. Make a contribution to national security in the process. Grow and develop as a unique individual."

"Man didn't force you to do anything, son," Carl said, still looking at the magazine. "You entered on your own two feet. You knew what you were gettin' into. Me, when they told me how much I was gonna get paid for reading and writing, why I damn near had to change my underwear. Would have to be a moron not to take it up, and stay in it while you can."

"That's right, and I did the same thing," I said. "Reading and writing for a living. Almost sounded too good to be true. And what they didn't tell you was that after you spend days and weeks researching and preparing a report, your hours of effort can get trashed because one D.C. bonehead doesn't like the voting record of another D.C. bonehead. All for nothing. Carl, I could have submitted a hundred and twenty pages of cookie recipes for all the good it did."

"Still pissed?" he asked.

"Still pissed," I said.

Carl looked over his magazine, but didn't look at me. He glanced out into the central area of our offices, which had additional computer terminals, television sets continuously tuned to the four networks, plus monitors for ---- among others --- the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters and English language translations of Agence France-Presse, Tass, New China News Agency and the All India News Service.

"Well, then," Carl said. "Something's approaching which might change your attitude, son. Time to get down off your chair."

I did as he suggested, just as Cissy Manning came in, smiling and giving me a furtive wink. Her hair was long this summer, and since I liked red hair, I'd told her teasingly that it gave me more fun things to play with. The petty rules which ran our section went fairly deep and wide, but so far, thank God, they hadn't yet gotten down to the fashion level. Cissy wore a pleated skirt that was a couple of inches above her knees, charcoal-gray stockings and high-heeled shoes. She also had on a dark green silk blouse that highlighted her green eyes, and which was unbuttoned far enough so that when she bent down to kiss my nose, I made out the faint spread of freckles across her chest and the lace cup of a white bra. Remembering the last weekend we had shared together, on the Maryland coast, I blushed. That recent evening, fueled with a half-bottle of champagne, I had gone on a freckle hunt and after a lot of laughs and shrieks, I had lost count and shared an entirely pleasurable post-hunt repast with her.

"What are you up to?" she asked, sitting on the edge of my desk, swinging one shoe free from her foot.

"Trying to maintain my enthusiasm for this section, and having a hard time doing it," I said, sitting back in my chair.

''A lack of enthusiasm, Mr. Cole?" she asked in mock surprise. "You've always had a reputation in this office for a lot of enthusiasm."

And with every word of her last sentence, and with a wicked smile on her face, she pulled up the hem of her skirt until l could see a garter belt snap, holding up the charcoal gray stockings. Then she winked and dropped the hem of the skirt, and leaned forward again. By then I could have used Carl's fan for my face.

"Heard that your latest work has been de-atomized," she said, her voice low.

"You got it."

She looked behind her --- no doubt checking for eyewitnesses --- and then turned again and kissed me on the forehead and said, "I've got the latest Victoria's Secret catalogue at my place. Care to browse through it with me tonight, after a sinfully delicious meal? You know, in a couple of weeks, we're going out Nevada for our field re-qual training. This might be our last chance for some decadent living before we're out tramping through the sands."

"Is there a modeling session included?"

She jumped down from the desk. "What do you think, that a tease? Seven o'clock?"