Old Poison (25 page)

We followed the path to a wide gravel road,
and the road to a complex of three enormous Quonset huts. Each of
the three buildings had both a large door for vehicular traffic and
a small one for people. Lucille punched a number into the security
box beside the people door. When she got a green light, she put a
key in the lock and opened it.

“Once you get clearance, you will get your
own security code. For now, you’ll have to get someone to let you
in. You will be able to work in buildings one and two, but three is
for high-clearance science staff only.”

As we stepped into the building, I saw a
dozen or so cargo containers, all open. A couple containers were
almost full, but most of the rest had been haphazardly emptied into
messy unorganized piles around the building. I also noticed that
Folger had joined us and stood just inside the door.

With the dismay only a librarian could
understand, Lucille began explaining the mess contained in these
buildings.

“The employees weren’t allowed to pack their
own stuff. In fact, we weren’t even told the plant was moving. We
went home on Thursday for a four-day weekend, and when we returned
on Tuesday morning, the place had been emptied out, except for the
personnel office. Of course there had been rumors . . .”

She paused and eyed Folger. Her expression
contained a mixture of distaste and knowledge I suspected she
intended to keep to herself.

“No one would give us an explanation for the
unannounced relocation of the plant. We were simply offered a
choice of moving to Costa Rica, taking a generous severance, or an
early retirement. Take it or leave it.”

Now I understood why the container I had
been locked in contained employment records. It wouldn’t have been
packed out until all the terminations and transfers had been
completed. That was of little help now, but it was nice to be able
to solve at least one of the little mysteries in this case.

Folger abandoned his military stance, turned
his head to the side, and seemed to be straining to hear our
conversation. Finally he took up a position closer to us.

“Movers stuffed anything and everything in
boxes. The few boxes that were labeled were usually mislabeled; so,
for the last two months, everyone has simply ripped through the
containers. Once they had perfected the mix-master system of order,
they called me back out of retirement to . . . how was it Jim put
it? Oh, yes, to set up the new library. After a week here, I told
him I’m just too old for this.”

As we walked among the piles of boxes, she
began to show me where she had started her organizing, and it
became apparent that she expected me to take over the job. I hated
to burst her bubble, but I had to explain my purpose here.

“I’m sorry, Lucille, I’m not here to take
over the library. I’m just here to set up a records retention
program so the departments will know what to keep, shred, and
scan.”

She studied me a moment, and I could imagine
what her forty years of experience thought of an outsider waltzing
in and instantly determining such basic organization. She took it
well, with no more than a sigh and a shrug, then launched into an
outline of company departments and a list of department heads.

During most of this, I listened quietly,
taking notes while our shadow, Mr. Folger, made no attempt to hide
his interest in what was said. It was when Lucille began to explain
the company history that I saw his first nervous twitch.

Lucille explained, “You see you are really
dealing with two companies here. Once upon a time there was a
wonderful man named Macdonald Duffy. Mac owned a small petroleum
company back east, and he gave it the name of Blue Morpho because
the swirling colors in gasoline reminded him of the Blue Morpho
butterfly. Mac refined his own gas and used ethanol as an anti
knock instead of lead. That’s what caused his downfall.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

Lucille was jarred from her monologue and
took a moment to respond. “You know, the lead in gasoline.

“All I know about lead in gasoline is that
they took it out a few years ago because it contributed to smog.
What does that have to do with this plant?

“Well, I can see I will have to go back and
tell you the wonderful, secret history of lead.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see
Folger reaching for his radio.

Lucille noticed it too and said under her
breath, “There’s a bit of paranoia around here on the subject of
lead. I don’t know if I can find them in this mess, but I have
several books and articles you should read if you want to really
understand this.”

She picked her way through the sea of boxes
with the unerring certainty of a spawning salmon, pulled the lid
from a box and rummaged through the contents. “There you are,” she
declared. Librarians do amaze me. She handed me an article, “The
Secret History of Lead,” by Jamie Lincoln Kitman, from an old issue
of
The Nation
magazine. “Here’s a good short history to give
you the overall picture.

Folger turned his face away from us and
spoke quietly but urgently into his radio. Lead might be gone from
gasoline, but paranoia seemed to still exist at Blue Morpho. As
Lucille began her story, I wondered what response this was going to
bring from Woods.

* * * * *

Under the hostile surveillance of our
watchdog, Folger, Lucille began with a question that I knew she
would soon answer. “How do you suppose lead got into gasoline in
the first place?”

I shrugged. “Does it come out of the earth
that way?”

“No. Lead, a known poison, was put into
gasoline as an anti-knock fuel additive. It stopped knocking and
raised the octane. ”

Like the good student, I asked a leading
question. “But back then they didn’t know it was poison?”

She took a deep sigh and glanced sideways at
Folger, then back to my face. For a brief moment I was afraid she
would decide not to talk with me on this subject. Then she pointed
toward the far end of the room.

“Over in that corner is where I’ve started
piling material for the engine design and development department.
They have promised to send someone down to collect it today.”

As we walked toward the pile of boxes, she
spoke in a normal tone of voice but low volume. “Of course they
knew it was poison; in fact, it is one of the oldest known poisons.
The Greeks and Romans wrote about its deadly effects over three
thousand years ago. The particular form of lead they used in
gasoline, tetraethyl was first identified in 1854, but it wasn’t
used commercially for sixty-some years, because science knew it was
deadly.”

“What does it do?”

She laughed. “You mean other than kill you?
It’s a potent neurotoxin, odorless, colorless and tasteless.
Possible symptoms associated with lead poisoning include blindness,
brain damage, kidney disease, convulsions, cancer, hypertension,
strokes, heart attacks, and miscarriage. Children are the most
quickly damaged, with lowered IQs, reading and learning
disabilities, impaired hearing, reduced attention span,
hyperactivity, and behavioral problems. I sometimes wonder if the
increased incidence of attention deficit disorder isn’t due to the
increased amounts of lead.”

‘How much has lead increased?’

“During the leaded-gas era an estimated
seven million tons of lead was burned in gasoline in the United
States alone, and it’s still in use in most of the Third World
countries. This stuff doesn’t go away. It doesn’t break down over
time. It doesn’t vaporize. It never disappears. It’s in our soil,
our air, our water, our food supply, our bodies. It’s estimated
that modern man’s exposure to lead is three hundred to five hundred
times greater than natural pre-leaded-gasoline levels.”

“If all this was known, how could the
government allow it?

She smiled a mirthless smile and glanced at
Folger who was again mumbling into his radio. Quietly she said,
“Mr. Duffy’s opinion was that it was due to what he called three
sacred Ps: Profit, Power and Perpetuation. Supposedly, lead was
added to gas because it stopped engine knock, but Duffy already had
what he believed was an excellent anti-knock that wasn’t so lethal.
It was plain old ethyl alcohol, or ethanol. You know, like the
grain alcohol they can make in stills. It was plentiful, renewable,
easy to make, and it not only stopped engine knock, but could have
been an alternative fuel. Before the Civil War alcohol lit our
lamps, and later it powered two of the first internal combustion
engines. It produced higher engine compression without smoke or
disagreeable odors. Henry Ford even built his first car to run on
it and predicted it would be the fuel of the future. Duffy figured
there was just one little problem with ethanol: No one could patent
alcohol and any idiot could make it in his back yard.”

I laughed. “So you could fuel your car from
the backyard still. That would have changed a few oil industry
fortunes. Didn’t health officials do anything?”

“In this country we make the manufacturers
of a product responsible for the safety testing of their own
product, you know, like tobacco companies, drug companies and food
companies. Mr. Duffy thought that was like setting the fox to watch
the hen house. But for seventy-five years those who claimed lead
was a health hazard were ignored, and all attempts at independent
testing, regulation, or oversight were defeated. Use of lead
expanded until almost every gallon of gasoline sold in the world
contained lead. The corporations that produced it made billions of
dollars.

We heard the sputter of Folger’s radio and
realized he had crossed the room and was just on the other side of
a container. We only caught a word or two before he either turned
down the volume or moved off.

“Well, look at this. What’s this box doing
here? Give me a hand, Dolores. These records are from the emissions
control research department. I have those piled over there.”

We hoisted the box between us and headed
across the end of the room. On the way we could see Folger walking
back toward the door, radio to his ear. Lucille laughed quietly. In
an undertone she said, “Did I mention the paranoia around here?” We
set the box down and stood where we could keep an eye on
Folger.

“I doubt that we will finish this story in
much detail this morning. To make the story short, through the late
twenties and early thirties Duffy’s little company of Blue Morpho
Petroleum tried to hold its own against Jim Marko’s Marko Oil. They
each had gas stations in the same major cities along the east
coast. Marko used a lead formula and Blue Morpho was one of the
last companies standing that still used ethanol. Lead interests
were determined to wipe Duffy out.

“It was like urban war, and Marko used every
trick imaginable. He fought Duffy at the banks and blocked his
money supply; fought him in the courts with constant legal
harassment that cost him millions; fought him in congress with
legislation to make alcohol production either illegal or too
expensive to be viable. He also fought him at the pump. If Marko
couldn’t drive Duffy’s dealers out of business with low prices he
strong armed them out. Marko, who drank like a fish, even became a
strong supporter of Prohibition and lobbied for higher taxation on
Duffy’s alcohol distillery. During Prohibition he used to call
federal enforcement regularly and report that Duffy was shipping
his alcohol to the mob to make booze. He wasn’t, but it cost him a
small fortune to prove it each time.”

“But Blue Morpho must have survived all
these years?”

“Only in name. In 1933 there was an
explosion at one of Duffy’s gas stations in Laurel, Maryland, where
he lived. It killed his wife and almost killed his son Douglas. Mac
knew the explosion was set by Marko, but couldn’t prove it. The
death of his wife was the final blow. Duffy could fight no more and
made Marko a deal. Marko could have Blue Morpho Petroleum if he
just left Duffy alone. After Blue Morpho in Maryland sold to Marko,
Duffy moved to California and set up his new firm of California
Automobile Research Facility. He spent the rest of his life trying
to develop and patent a fuel that would replace gasoline.”

All of a sudden I was very alert. “A fuel
that would replace gasoline?”

She hesitated for some moments, then looked
right in my eyes and said each word with a deliberate pause for
precise delivery of both words and message.

“He could have succeeded too, but he had a
conscience. He wouldn’t produce a fuel that would damage health or
environment.”

Zing! It was like all the extraneous bits of
information, all the people I had met in this weird case, all the
seemingly unconnected ideas, suddenly slipped into place like
puzzle pieces locking into a finished picture. At that moment I
knew, no mater how incredible it might seem, that Evelyn Lilac’s
Red 19 was real. Did that give credence to the diary? No, I
couldn’t go that far. It didn’t matter whether her information came
from Martians or from someone inside the Blue Morpho. Red 19 was
real, and Duffy had discarded it as deadly.

“Holy Shit!” I whispered. Then asked,
“Duffy’s dead?”

She nodded again. “For many years. His
daughter, Catherine ran the plant until she died in 1999.”

“Who owns the research plant now?”

“The stockholders of Marko’s Blue Morpho
Petroleum bought it after Catherine died. They didn’t care about
the research, of course, but Duffy had branched out to keep enough
money coming in to continue his research. Other departments in the
company are quite lucrative. We provide design, development and
testing services for engine, vehicle and component manufacturers.
After the California Automobile Research Facility was sold and once
again became part of Blue Morpho Petroleum, we added several
government contracts with the army and air force for fuels and
lubricants research.”