Underworld

'Maybe we're trying to spare ourselves a certain amount of embarrassment,' Sims said.

The tremor had hit at cocktail time when I was standing in the hospitality suite with a number of colleagues, who peered over their drinks in the slow lean of the world. The room whistled and groaned. I worked at controlling the look on my face, waiting for the situation to define itself. It was not a mild shock. It was in the middle fives, we later learned, a five point four, and I felt justified in my sense of potential alarm, seeing the crack in the restaurant wall when we sat down to lunch.

'You think what, it's a drug shipment? Disguised as toxic waste? Because I hear rumors too.'

'Tell me about it,' Sims said.

He sat across the table, meat face and wide body, the jut underlip, the odd little unlobed ears, round and perfectly worked, the tiny mannered ears of a sprite child.

'I'm eager to hear your version,' he said, a trace of sweet condescension in his voice.

'One, it's a heroin shipment, which makes no sense. Two, it's incinerator ash from the New York area. Industrial grade mainly. Twenty million pounds. Arsenic, copper, lead, mercury.'

'Dioxins,' Sims said agreeably, biting into the middle of his mesquite-grilled beef.

Four couples took the round table nearby and Sims and I observed a pause. We wanted to be amused and slightly derisive. These were swingers, of course, dressed assertively, in the third person, and they leaned back in sequence when the boy poured water.

'They take time out for lunch. I respect that,' Sims said.

'I hear things about the ship.'

'The ship keeps changing names. 'Vbu hear that?'

'No, I don't.'

'The ship left a pier on the Hudson River with one name, I don't know what it was but it got changed three months later off the West African coast. Then they changed it again. This was somewhere in the Philippines.'

'Enormous quantities of heroin, I hear. But why would heroin get shipped from the U.S. to the Far East? Makes no sense.'

'Makes no sense,' Sims said. 'Except it ties in with another rumor. You know this rumor?'

'I don't think so.'

'Mob-owned.'

He liked saying this, he rounded out the words, popped his eyes a little.

'What's mob-owned?'

'The company that owns the ships we lease. The mob has a lot of involvement in waste carting. So why not waste handling, waste shipment, waste everything?'

'There's a word in Italian,' I said.

'Maybe it's not just the shipping company. Maybe it's our company. We're mob-owned. They're a silent partner. Or they own us outright.'

He liked saying this even more. Not that he believed it. He didn't believe it for half a second but he wanted me to believe it, or entertain the thought, so he could ridicule me. He had a hard grin that mocked whatever facile sentiments you might be tempted to shelter in the name of your personal conspiracy credo.

'There's a word in Italian. Dietrologia. It means the science of what is behind something. A suspicious event. The science of what is behind an event.'

'They need this science. I don't need it.'

'I don't need it either. I'm just telling you.'

'I'm an American. I go to ball games,' he said.

'The science of dark forces. Evidently they feel this science is legitimate enough to require a name.'

'People who need this science, I would make an effort to tell them we have real sciences, hard sciences, we don't need imaginary ones.'

'I'm just telling you the word. I agree with you, Sims. But the word exists.'

'There's always a word. There's probably a museum too. The Museum of Dark Forces. They have ten thousand blurry photographs. Or did the Mafia blow it up?'

This is where Sims laughed, showing a mouth crisscrossed with cheddar.

I checked the round table. Two of the women smoked. Two of the women wore studded western vests. One was nearsighted, sticking her head in the menu, and one had an accent I couldn't place. All the women were ornamented, decked in chains, bracelets and breastpins, in hoop earrings with bead pendants, jewelry with a hammered look, a pounded look, and one chewed a carrot stick and talked about her kids.

'You know Italian?' he said.

'I studied Latin for a while. In school, then on my own, pretty intensively. And dabbled in German and Italian.'

'My wife is German,' he said. 'Met her when I was stationed there.'

'A GI with a swagger.'

'That pretty much says it. Except I was Air Force.'

'She speaks German around the house?'

'A little bit. Yeah. Quite a lot.'

'You understand?'

'I better understand,' he said.

The men wore broad-collared print shirts unbuttoned to the thorax. The men were all hair. Not the protest hair of the sixties of course. Chest hair, mustaches, brushy sideburns, great heads of Hollywood hair-real hair that resembled toupees in bad taste, wish-fulfilling rugtops, sort of spit-curled and heavily surfed.

Big Sims called for the check.

'But we like our jobs, don't we, Nick? Whoever owns the ships we use.'

'I like my job.'

'I like my job.'

His sport coat was draped over the back of his chair, too broad to fit snugly over the palmettes that adorned the top rail. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt with a dark tie and a tie clip shaped like a scimitar.

He gave me a tight-eyed look.

'Want to go to a Dodger game?'

'No,' I said.

It did not seem surprising, all these ghost-ship stories, even if they were only elusive hearsay, because we'd been told the night before that waste is the best-kept secret in the world. This is what Jesse Detwiler said, the garbage archaeologist who'd addressed the massed members about an hour after the tremor-an address that did not go down well with the grilled squab and baby Zen vegetables.

Our faces showed a pristine alertness, back there at cocktail time, when the room shook around us. It was a look that trailed a self-awareness in its wake, a sheepish sense of our own glimpsed fear, of being caught unaware, just before we gained control, and this is the face that traveled through the suite, above the vodka tonics, creating an ironic bond among the managers, in the indoor wind.

We saw Detwiler in the lobby after we paid the bill. Sims went over and collared him, literally, got him in a headlock and mock-pummeled his shaved dome. They were acquaintances, it seemed, and the three of us made a date to drive out to a landfill that Sims had designed, a massive project still in development.

A man and woman walked across the lobby and I watched her carefully. Maybe it was the hip-sprung way she moved, high-assed and shiny, alert to surfaces, like a character in a B movie soaked in alimony and gin. I went over and checked the schedule of events on the easeled board near the revolving doors, registration and coffee, licensing laws, spent fuel storage, all the topics and speakers in movable white type, ten to twelve and two to five and on into the night, and I thought about the swingers and their arrangements.

Whiz Co was a firm with an inside track to the future. The Future of Waste. This was the name we gave our conference in the desert. The meeting was industry-wide but we were the firm that provided the motive force, we were the front-runners, the go-getters, the guys who were ready to understand the true dimensions of the