"How's Project Lobster?"

"Wow, you prepared for this interview. It's fine. How's the paper?"

"The usual. Civil war, insurrection, financial crisis. But everyone reads the movie reviews."

"Instead of your stuff?"

"Depends on what I'm digging up."

"And what's that?"

She smiled, leaned forward and observed me with cunning eyes. "Pleshy's running," she said.

"Which Fleshy? Running from what?"

"The big Fleshy."

"The Groveler?"

"He's running for president."

"Shit. End of lunch. Now I'm not hungry."

"I knew you'd be delighted."

"What about fiasco? Doesn't he have to put all that crap into a blind trust?"

"It's done. That's how I know he's running. I have this friend at the bank."

The Fleshy family ran Basco-they'd founded the company-and that made them the number one polluters of Boston Harbor. The poisoners of Vietnam. The avant-garde of the toxic waste movement. For years I'd been trying to tell them how deep in shit they were, sometimes pouring hydraulic cement into their pipes to drive the point home.

This year, the Pleshy-in-charge was Alvin, a.k.a. the Groveler, an important member of the team of management experts and foreign policy geniuses that brought us victory in Vietnam.

Rebecca showed me samples of his flacks' work: "Many environmentalists have overreacted to the presence of these compounds..." not chemicals, not toxic waste, but compounds "... but what exactly is a part per million?" This was followed by a graphic showing an eyedropper-ful of "compounds" going into a railway tank car of pure water.

"Yeah. They're using the PATEOTS measuring system on you. A drop in a tank car. Sounds pretty minor. But you can twist it the other way: a football field has an area of, what, forty-five thousand square feet. A banana peel has an area of maybe a tenth of a square foot. So the area of the banana peel thrown on the football field is only a couple of parts per million. But if your field-goal kicker steps on the peel just as time is expiring, and you're two points down ..."