Harbor. And while they're there, they do a very convenient thing for me called bioconcentration. They eat food and shit it out the other end, but part of it stays with them, usually the worst part. A trace amount of, say, PCBs in their environment will show up as a much higher concentration in their livers. So when I get a lobster and figure out what toxins it's carrying, I have a pretty good idea of what's on the floor of the Harbor in its neighborhood.

Once I get my data into the computer, I can persuade it to draw contour maps showing the dispersion pattern of each type of toxin. For example, if I'm twisting Basco's dick at the moment, I'll probably look at PCBs. So the computer draws all the land areas and blacks them out. Then it begins to shade in the water areas, starting out in the Atlantic, which is drawn in a beautiful electric blue. You don't have to look at the legend to know that this water is pure. As we approach Boston, the colors get warmer, and warmer. Most of the harbor is yellow. In places we see rings of orange, deepening toward the center until they form angry red boils clustered against the shore. Next to each boil I write a caption: "Basco Primary Outfall." "Basco Temporary Storage Facility." "Basco-owned Parcel (under EPA Investigation)." "Parcel Owned by Basco Subsidiary (under EPA Investigation)." Translate this into a 35-mm slide, take it to a public hearing, draw the curtains and splash it up on a twenty-foot screen- wild, an instant lynch mob. Then the lights come up and a brand-new Basco flack comes out, fresh from B.U. or Northeastern, and begins talking about eyedroppers in railway tank cars. Then his company gets lacerated by the media.

This is the kind of thing I think about when buzzing around, looking for Gallagher the lobsterman.

Sometimes I had this daydream where a big-time coke runner from Miami got environmentally conscious and donated one of his Cigarette boats. It wasn't going to happen- not even coke dealers were that rich. But I thought about it, read the boating magazines, dreamed up ways to use one. And right now on the channel between Charlestown and Eastie, two miles north, I could see a thirty-one foot Cigarette just sitting there on the water. It's kind of like what my Zodiac would look like if it had been built by defense contractors: way too big, way too fast, a hundred times too ex-pensive. The larger models have a cabin in front, but this didn't even have that comfort. It was open-cockpit, made for nothing in the world but dangerous speed. I'd seen it yesterday, too, sitting there doing nothing. I wondered if it would be terribly self-important if I attributed its presence to mine. The worst Fotex plant was up that way, and maybe they were anticipating a sneak attack.

Implausible. If their security was that good, they'd know that our assault ketch, the Blowfish, was off the coast of New Jersey, homing in on poor unsuspecting Blue Kills. Without it we didn't have enough Zodiacs, or divers, to stage a pipe-plugging raid on Fotex. So maybe this was some rich person working on a suntan. But if he owned a boat that could do seventy miles an hour, why didn't he take it off that syphilitic channel? He was on the Mystic, for God's sake.

I caught up with the Scoundrel off the coast of Eastie, not far from the artificial plateau that made up the airport. These guys were the first to join Project Lobster, and hence my favorites. Initially none of the lobstermen trusted me, afraid that I'd ruin their business with my statements of doom. But when the Harbor got really bad, and people started talking about banning all fish from the area, they started to see I was on their side. A clean Harbor was in their own best interests.

Gallagher should have been extra tough, because I had a tendency to rag on the subject of Spectacle Island. This was not a true island but a mound of garbage dumped in the Harbor by an ancestor of his, a tugboat operator who'd been lucky enough to get the city's garbage-hauling concession in the 1890s. But, as Rory explained many times and loudly, those were the Charlestown Gallaghers, the rich, arrogant, semi-Anglicized branch. Sometime back in the Twenties, some Gallagher's nose had gotten splintered in a wedding brawl or something, thus creating the rift between that branch and Rory's-the Southie Gallaghers, the humble farmers of the sea.

"Attention all crew, we have a long-haired invironmintl at ten o'clock, prepare to be boarded," Rory called, his Southie accent thick as mustard gas. All these guys talked that way. Their "ar" sounds could shatter reinforced concrete.

I'd been to a couple of games with them; we'd sit up there in the bleachers and inhale watery beer and throw cigars to the late, lamented Dave Henderson. They couldn't not be loud and boisterous, so they gave me shit about my hair, which didn't even come down to my collar. I could take a few minutes of this, but then I needed to go to a nice sterile shopping mall and decompress.

"Aaaay, we got some beauties for you today, Cap'n Taylor, some real skinny oily ones.".

"Going to the game tonight, Rory?"

"A bunch of us are, yeah. Why, you wanna go?"

"Can't. Going to Jersey tomorrow."

"Jersey! Sheesh!" All the buys on the boat went "sheesh!" They couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to go to that place.

They tossed me a couple of half-dead lobsters and showed me where they'd trapped them on the chart. I jotted the locations down and put the bugs on ice. Later, when I got back, I'd have to dismantle them and run the analysis.

We traded speculation on what Sam Horn might do against the Yanks. These guys were Negro-haters all, and their heroes were gigantic black men with clubs, a contradiction I wasn't brave enough to point out.

I went to handle the most depressing part of my job. Poor people get tired of welfare cheese after a while and start looking for other sources of protein. For example, fish. But poor people can't charter a boat to go out and catch swordfish, so they fish off docks. That means they're looking for bottom fish. Anyone who knows about Boston Harbor gets queasy just at the mention of bottom fish, but these people were worried about kwashiorkor, not cancer. Three-quarters of them were Southeast Asian.

So a month ago I'd typed up a highly alarming paragraph about what these particular bottom fish would do to your health, especially to the health of unborn children. Tried to make it simple: no chemical terms, no words like "carcinogenicity." Took it to the Pearl, which is my hangout, and persuaded Hoa to translate it to Vietnamese for me. Took it to an interpreter at City Hospital and got her to translate it into Cambodian. Had a friend do it in Spanish. Put them all together on a sign, sort of a toxic Rosetta Stone, made numerous copies and then made a few midnight trips to the piers where they like to do this fishing. We put the signs up in prominent places, bolted them down with lag screws, epoxied those screws into place and then chopped the heads off.

And when I came around the curve of the North End, bypassing a few hundred stalled cars on Commercial Street, riding the throttle high because I had miles to go before I'd sleep, I saw the same old pier, all hairy with fishing poles. It looked like one of those shadows you see under a microscope, with cilia sticking out all over to gather in food, healthy or otherwise.

Somehow I didn't figure these guys were sportsmen. They weren't of the catch-and-release school, like those geezers on TV. They were survivalists in a toxic wilderness.

The old etiquette dies hard. I grew up in a family that liked to fish, and I couldn't bring myself to break up the party. I backed off on the throttle when I was far away, and coasted to a safe distance where I wouldn't scare off any of those precious shit-eaters under the pier. Circled it slowly, looking at the fishermen, and they looked back at me. The name of my organization was writ large in orange tape on the side of the Zodiac. I wondered if they were reading it, and making the connection with those threatening signs just above their heads.