by Rick Cook
Remember this the next time you’re not sure you understand the menu....
I don’t see why we couldn’t have gone to Fillipo’s,” Gary Farber grumbled. “They have wonderful pasta.”
“Talk about sending coals to Newcastle,” said his wife, Joan, whose taste for culinary novelty considerably exceeded his. “Professor Sforza can get good pasta at home. We ought to show him something that’s what Seattle food is all about.”
Which is why they had settled on a sushi bar down in the International District with a reputation for the best chefs, direct from Japan. They dutifully waited in the ground floor lounge for over an hour until they were called and had climbed the narrow stairs to the second floor dining room with a magnificent view of the Space Needle and seating for perhaps a dozen people at the scrubbed pine bar. Now their grinning host directed them to three narrow stools squeezed in among the others.
Joan Farber turned to their guest. “You have sushi in Italy, don’t you, professor?”
Professor Pietro Sforza shrugged. “In Italy, not so good. We prepare it differently.”
“Well, you’re in for a treat tonight,” Gary Farber told his guest. “Tomi has the best sushi chefs in Seattle.”
“On the West Coast,” their host corrected with a grin.
“What’s your special tonight, Tomi?”
“Very special indeed.” A machine-gun burst of Japanese to the sushi chef, who bowed briskly and set to work.
While Joan concentrated on the chef’s preparations, Gary and Professor Sforza continued their conversation on their mutual interest. Gary was a petroleum geologist and Professor Sforza was an invertebrate paleontologist. The fields overlapped considerably, so most of the discussion was unintelligible to Joan. She bore the stereo technobabble with the good humor that comes from fifteen years of marriage and watched the chef turning something unappetizing and slimy-looking into a work of art. With a final flourish, the chef presented his creation to Joan with a bow.
Whatever it was looked and smelled delicious. It was some kind of shellfish with the tail curled over upright on the plate and delicately glazed with a soy and citrus sauce. While the professor and her husband continued their conversation, Joan picked up her chopsticks and sampled the creation.
“Oh, this is wonderful!” Joan Farber exclaimed around the morsel. “It’s so wonderfully sweet. Here, honey, you have to try this.”
Her husband didn’t even look at the creation on her plate. “I’ll stick with the shrimp, thanks.”
Joan made a face at him. “Coward. Here, professor, try this.” She passed the plate across her husband to where their guest was sitting.
Professor Sforza smiled as he took the plate. Then he looked at it and his eyes bugged out. His face turned ashen and his mouth began to move soundlessly.
“Are you choking?” Gary asked.
“This . . . this . . .” Then he lapsed into Italian, getting faster and louder all the time. “Cretino!” Professor Sforza gasped. “Che avete fatto?” He yelled. “Questo é un peccatto!” He jumped up and thrust the plate of sushi under the chef’s nose. “Citrullo! Avete fatto un spaglio. Non é giusto! Strunzo!”
Professor Sforza’s command of educated Italian had failed him and he was yelling in his native Calabrese. The chef had no idea what he was saying, but he knew his creation was being insulted. So he started yelling back in his Hokkaido dialect of Japanese, which no one in the restaurant understood either.
The plate Professor Sforza was waving under the chef’s nose was jiggling so much that Dr. Farber had trouble seeing what was on it. Finally he got a half glimpse of what it was. His mouth dropped open and he grabbed the professor’s arm in both hands so he could get a better look. Then he started yelling too.
Tomi tried to intervene, but no one paid any attention to him. So he started yelling in a mixture of English and Osaka dialect Japanese. Meanwhile, Joan Farber was trapped with her husband on one side, Professor Sforza on the other and Tomi behind her. She was so embarrassed she quietly folded up and slipped under the counter.
When the police came pounding up the stairs the argument was still going full blast. They looked at the situation, listened to the mixture of Italian, two dialects of Japanese, and Dr. Farber’s incoherent English and did the logical thing—which was to arrest everyone. All of the participants went peacefully, if not quietly. However, the booking officer was somewhat nonplussed when Professor Sforza insisted on checking the remains of the sushi as property and demanded a separate receipt for it.
Tim Valdez hadn’t been in Tomi’s that night. In the first place, his taste for sushi was mitigated by his extensive knowledge of bivalve, arthropod, and cephalopod parasites. In the second place, he couldn’t afford the trendiest new sushi bar in Seattle on his salary as a paleontology postdoc. In the third place, he’d spent the weekend hiking a particularly promising piece of Miocene beach recently exposed by a road cut. All of which meant he was blissfully ignorant when he arrived at work Monday morning.
His ignorance—and his bliss—lasted about as long as it took him to exchange greetings with George McDermott, the dinosaur specialist who shared his office.
“Hi, George. What’s happening?”
“Just this,” George said, pushing a small greenish object across the desk to Tim. There was an odd quality to his voice, Tim thought, as if his necktie was too tight.
Tim squinted. “What is it?”
“You’re our invertebrate guy, you tell me.”
Tim squinted some more but didn’t move to pick the object up. He prided himself on his ability to identify trilobites. “Looks like the cephalon of an Isotelus of some sort. If it’s ‘maximus,’ it’s a juvenile. Nice fossil.”
“It’s not a fossil,” his colleague said in a strangled voice.
“A replica?” Tim leaned forward to pick the thing up off the desk. His first thought was that it was unusually light. Thin plastic? Then he looked more closely, his eyes bugged and his mouth dropped open.
“What is this thing?” he yelped.
“You’re our invertebrate guy,” George repeated. “You tell me. I will tell you this. That is chitin and it is not pressed, formed, or otherwise manufactured—as least, not so far as I can tell after most of two days examining it under a microscope. There were shreds of tissue clinging to it when it was brought in.”
“Where in God’s name did you find this?”
George made a grimace that might have passed for a smile in bad light. “That,” he said, “is the unbelievable part.”
* * * *
Two days later they got a visitor. She was nearly as tall as Tim. Her light brown hair was cut short and streaked with lighter highlights. Her eyes were startlingly blue in a tanned face and her nose was sunburned.
“Sally Lund, Fish and Wildlife,” she said without preamble. “I understand you’ve got an exotic invertebrate here that came out of the Sound.”
“Well,” Tim temporized. “We think it came out of the Sound.”
“But you’re not sure? It’s a matter of jurisdiction. If it came out of the Sound, we’ve got an interest. Otherwise it goes to the state.”
“Yes, but, I mean, well . . . Fish and Wildlife?”
“So what did you expect? Some hard-eyed guys in suits with guns in shoulder holsters?”
Actually, that was exactly what Tim had been expecting. But graduate school is a great place to learn to keep your mouth shut—if not most of the rest of the social graces.
“Have you got the specimen?”
Wordlessly, Tim pushed over the clear plastic box holding the carapace. The woman flipped open the box and delicately removed the item from its foam cradle.
“What is it?”
“It’s an Isotelus,” George put in helpfully. “That’s an arthropod.”
“What’s its habitat?”
“It’s benthic,” Tim said, feeling odd about using the present tense. “It’s a detritus feeder in shallow water.”
“No, I mean where does it occur naturally?”
“Ohio.” George was being helpful again. “Southwestern Ohio, actually.”
“You mean it’s a freshwater species?”
“No,” Tim said. “As far as we know, they’re saltwater forms. At least, they’re found in saltwater faunal assemblages.”
Sally Lund gave Tim a long, hard look. “You mean this thing lives in the ocean and it’s from Ohio?”
“Well,” Tim said apologetically, “the only other ones we know of are middle Ordovician.”
“That’s about 450 million years ago,” the ever-helpful George added.
Sally Lund closed her notebook with a snap. Then she sighed, sat down, and regarded the two paleontologists.
“Why don’t you guys just tell me about this from the beginning?”
Forty-five minutes and two cups of George’s excellent coffee later, the woman slouched back in her chair and tapped the carapace thoughtfully with her forefinger. Tim noticed she bit her nails.
“What are the chances there are more of these things out there?” Sally Lund asked.
“We can only hope,” Tim said.
She made a face. “You may hope. If there’s a population, much less a breeding population, the paperwork on my end will be enormous.” She looked at the specimen again.
“Well,” Sally said judiciously. “I think we can safely assume this thing didn’t come from the Pike Place Market.”
Tim hadn’t thought about it at all, but now that she mentioned it, that did seem like a safe assumption.
“That means it was a direct sale,” Sally went on, “and that probably means pirates.”
Tim had a vision of a figure in a cocked hat and an eye patch resting a peg leg on a treasure chest full of trilobites. “Pirates,” he repeated.
“Oyster pirates.”
“Oyster pirates?” Tim repeated.
Sally looked at him sharply. “Is there an echo in here?” Tim flushed.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s a New Englandism. Term of the trade, you might say. Goes back to the days when shellfish beds were privately owned and some folks weren’t too choosy about where they tonged. Today it means anyone who collects shellfish without worrying about the legalities. Oysters, clams, abalone, sea urchins, whatever they can get that will bring a good price.”
“Don’t the restaurants know the shellfish are pirated?”
The tall woman grinned mirthlessly. “Not so’s you can prove it.”
“What will you do now?”
“Now I start checking for trendy restaurants serving unusual seafood. There can’t be more than a couple of hundred suspects in Seattle.”
“So once we’ve found restaurants serving this stuff, what then?”
“Then we go dumpster diving,” Sally said. “And I do mean ‘we.’ I need someone who can identify this stuff.” She made a face. “Besides, I want someone to remind me this isn’t a hallucination.”
“Why not check the kitchens?”
“Because by now, the word’s out that we’re talking to the restaurant owner and anyone who’s got any of this stuff has put it down the disposal. Sort of the restaurants’ version of ‘shoot, shovel, and shut up.’“ She looked at Tim. “Bring rubber gloves.”
* * * *
One thing about fossils is they don’t smell. Tim had never appreciated that aspect of his chosen profession until he started pawing through garbage, trying to separate the truly exotic from the merely unusual from the simply disgusting.
A check of the dumpster behind the sushi restaurant turned up two more trilobites of different species. The dumpster behind another restaurant on Sally’s list contained a half-dozen ammonite shells and several clumps of cup-like shells Tim identified as belonging to an extinct oyster-like animal called a rudist. There were also the remains of a couple of very suspicious teleost fish (one served almondine, one in a tomato sauce).
“This is absurd,” Tim said as he looked over the collected remains. “There are museums and collectors who would have paid thousands of dollars—no, tens of thousands—for these specimens.”
Sally shook her head. “The pirates would have had to know who to go to. Not like driving your truck up behind a restaurant and unloading a couple of baskets of shellfish. These guys are creatures of habit and none of them are what you’d call the brightest clams in the bushel.
“Now, come on. They’re bringing the restaurant owner in for questioning and I want you at the party.”
Tomi Shinbura, accompanied by his lawyer, was already in the interrogation room when they arrived at the FBI office.
“What precisely, is my client charged with?” the lawyer asked as soon as the introductions were made.
The government lawyer looked at Sally. “Dealing in exotic animals.”
“Wait a minute,” Tomi said. “Those things are not on the controlled list.”
“Of course they’re not on the controlled list!” Tim almost shouted. “They’re extinct!”
“If they’re extinct,” Tomi’s lawyer said blandly, “how could my client possibly have served them in his restaurant?”
Before Tim could think of an answer, Sally cut in. “Their status is going to change real fast.”
“But you can’t charge my client retroactively,” the lawyer said.
“Yeah,” Tomi said, gaining courage from the exchange. “Who do you think you are, anyway?”
Sally leaned over the table until their noses almost touched. “I,” she said slowly, “am an agent of the United States government. Just like the Immigration and Naturalization Service. You know, the people who check on folks like your fancy sushi chefs. Not to mention your dishwashers and busboys.” She let that sink in while she sat down again. “We also have a real tight working relationship with the local health department. Especially where selling dangerous seafood is concerned.”
“Those things weren’t dangerous!” Tomi protested.
Sally smiled evilly. “Prove it.”
“This is blatant harassment!” the lawyer put in. “My client and I are leaving right now.” He rose, but Tomi put a hand on his arm. “Hold on, Ian,” he said calmly. “I think the lady’s done threatening and she’s ready to start bargaining.”
The lawyer looked at Sally appraisingly. “Immunity for my client on any and all charges that might arise out of, or be discovered, in the course of this matter. In return you get full cooperation.” Sally nodded to the government lawyer and Shinbura’s lawyer nodded to his client, then sat down again.
“Now,” Sally started, “where did you get this stuff?”
“I don’t know his name. Some guy with an old pickup truck. Shows up every so often with a couple of baskets of stuff.”
Sally looked at him hard.
“Okay, okay. I think his name is Jimmy Harker.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Couple of weeks ago. For three or four weeks, he was regular as clockwork. Then last week, nothing. Not a peep. Those things we were serving Friday night were the last ones in the tank.”
“Didn’t you try to contact him?”
The Japanese-American shrugged. “How? It’s not like he gave me a business card or anything.”
Further questioning produced a description of the pirate and his truck, several repetitions of the story, and not much else.
“What now?” Tim asked as they came out of the federal building.
“Now we find Jimmy Harker.”
“You know him?”
“He’s come my way once or twice before. I know where he usually hangs out and who his friends are.”
“Today?”
“Naw. These guys are out late at night or at oh-dark-thirty. We’ll try tomorrow morning. I’ll pick you up about four.”
From context, Tim guessed she meant four am.
At ungodly o’clock the next morning, Sally turned up at Tim’s house in her tan uniform, complete with a very businesslike 9mm automatic in a well-worn belt holster.
“Expecting trouble?” Tim asked mildly.
“Not if I can prevent it,” Sally said.
The official truck was a pale green Suburban with a noticeable list to starboard and rust nibbling at its fenders. “Best one in the garage,” Sally told him as he yanked the door open. From the way she said it, Tim wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not.
* * * *
Traffic was light at this time of the morning and Sally expertly steered through the twisting maze of streets that took her down to the bay at various points. Finally they spotted a rusted-out blue pickup truck parked off to the side of the road next to a particularly noisome mud flat.
The black mud stank of things dead and incompletely decayed. In another few million years, Tim thought, this would be a nice bed of fine-grained black shale, holding the fossilized remnants of old tires and beer cans. He wondered how future paleontologists would determine the taxonomy of fossil tires.
A man wearing waders was standing in the middle of the muck. Tim wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d seen him drop something as they came up.
“Sonny Dupree?” Sally called out.
“Who wants to know?”
“Fish and Wildlife. Come on out here so we can talk.”
“What if I don’t want to?” the man called back.
“Then I’ll have to shoot you.”
He gave a snaggle-toothed grin. “You do that and you’ll have to wade out here to get me.”
Sally wrinkled her nose. “Nah, I’ll just gut-shoot you and wait until the tide carries you in.”
Tim was pretty sure she was kidding. Snaggle-tooth apparently had his doubts. At least he waded out of the water and scrambled up on the bank without further comment
“We’re looking for Jimmy Harker.”
A shrug. “Ain’t seen him around recently.”
“What about Bill Fontaine or Joey Putnam?”
“Ain’t seen them either.”
“I hear Jimmy’s found some new stuff that’s real popular with the high-class places.”
“Yeah,” Dupree said, grinning. “I hear Jimmy’s business is real good.”
“You know where he’s been catching that good business?” Sally asked sharply.
He shook his head. “No idea. Someplace new.”
“You believe him?” Tim asked as they climbed back into the pickup.
Sally concentrated on starting the truck with the apparently mandatory dose of profanity. “That Harker hasn’t been around? Yeah, that’s likely. He made a big haul and he’s off drinking it up somewhere. He’ll turn up in a couple of weeks when his money runs out and they throw him out of whatever whorehouse he’s holed up in. About Harker not telling? Sure. These guys don’t trust each other when they hit a rich patch.” The truck lurched over a bump and she pulled a quick shift that made the gears grind in protest. “That he doesn’t know where Harker was getting the stuff? I’m not so sure. Pirates spy on each other a lot and word is Dupree’s found something too.”
* * * *
Sally and Tim spent the rest of the day checking out mud flats, bars, and topless joints, looking for the names on the list Sally’s informants had put together. Three of the other five names weren’t to be found and the other two swore, convincingly, they were involved with the “new stuff.”
“You know, there’s something funny here,” Tim said as Sally drove him back to his place. “Bill Fontaine is going great guns selling this stuff, then he drops out of sight. Joey Putnam starts up and goes away after a few weeks. Then Harker steps in and after a few weeks, he vanishes. Plus we’ve got two or three other guys whose names we don’t know, but who don’t match the description of either Harker, Putnam, or Fontaine, and they haven’t been seen for a while, either.”
“I told you, these guys aren’t real stable. Give them some money and they’re not going to work until it’s all spent. Besides, just because we can’t find them doesn’t mean they aren’t around.”
“I wonder if we should put more effort into finding them? I mean, check the registrations on their vehicles, or something.”
Sally snorted. “Most of these guys don’t bother to transfer title on the junkers they drive. I told you, they don’t want to be found and as long as they’re off drinking away their money someplace higher-class than the dives they usually frequent, they’re damn hard to find. Hell, I’ll bet half of them have outstanding warrants anyway.”
They drove on a bit in silence, except for the noise from the Suburban’s leaky muffler.
“What’s your next move?”
“We’re going to follow him when he heads out tomorrow.”
“We?”
“I need you to identify this stuff if we catch Dupree with the goods.”
“Oh,” Tim said, stifling a yawn.
“Not that bad, is it? Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee on the way home.”
* * * *
Sally, and the ratty green Suburban, showed up at Tim’s door just before dawn the next morning. Tim was already dressed and outfitted for the day with a fanny pack, water bottle, and a jungle knife in a canvas sheath.
“What the hell is that?” Sally asked, pointing to the two-foot-long knife hanging from Tim’s belt.
“It’s a Belize pattern machete.”
“You think we’re going into the damn jungle?”
“You think there’s much difference between a jungle and the local second growth?” Tim retorted. “The only difference is the stuff here has more thorns and Belize doesn’t have poison oak.”
“Well, come on, George of the Jungle.” With that, she jerked open her door and climbed into the truck. Tim followed, feeling really silly about the machete. He thought about taking it back inside, but Sally was already backing the truck out of the parking space.
* * * *
Dupree lived in a group of ramshackle apartments down by the waterfront. Sally parked at the end of the street and waited for Dupree’s truck to drive off.
“How do you know he’s going fishing today?”
“Because it’s getting toward the end of the week and those fancy restaurants want to stock up for the weekend. Now there he goes.” It’s hard to be inconspicuous in something as big as a Suburban, especially when it’s a rusty government green with a failing muffler, but Sally hung well back and Dupree apparently wasn’t paying attention. Their quarry led them south again, paralleling the Sound as the road ran through a mixed commercial and industrial district. Tim settled in for a long trip, figuring they wouldn’t reach their destination until they left civilization—if you could call this “civilization”—well behind.
Dupree had other ideas. Tim saw the ruby glow as his brake lights added to his tail lights and the pickup moved over to the side of the road without signaling a turn.
“He’s turning off,” Tim said urgently. “You’re going to lose him.”
Sally shook her head. “I know where that road goes and this isn’t exactly a stealth vehicle. We’ll find a spot further along to pull off and double back on foot.”
A few hundred yards down the road, Sally pulled into the parking lot of a Burger King. Leaving the truck, she led Tim down a narrow path through the undergrowth. They pushed through the brush and followed another trail that led along the top of a bank. Through the trees Tim could catch an occasional glimpse of the Sound and a more frequent sight of the backs of other commercial buildings.
Sally moved easily along a footpath littered with fast food wrappers and less appetizing detritus as it wound among bushes, brambles, and head-high saplings.
They topped a small rise and looked down at an asphalt-paved alley with Dupree’s truck parked in the middle of it. There was a metal grate, perhaps four feet by five, in the middle of the asphalt. Sally pulled him down behind some bushes while Dupree was preoccupied with lifting and dragging the grating aside
“That’s a storm drain!” Tim whispered, scandalized.
“It used to be a creek, before they paved it over,” Sally whispered back.
“They get shellfish out of there?”
“They get shellfish wherever they can find them. Now shut up, will you?”
Dupree unloaded a bunch of stuff from his truck and stashed it in the weeds beside the alley. Then he got back in and with a roar and cloud of blue smoke took off down the alley. A few minutes later he walked back down the road to the grate and his hidden equipment.
“Oyster tongs,” Sally whispered. “And crab pots.”
“Figures,” Tim whispered back. “Trilobites probably filled crabs’ ecological niche.” Sally put a hand on his arm to quiet him and they watched as Dupree used the tongs to reach into the storm drain and stir the muck at the bottom.
“This is wrong,” Tim whispered urgently. “You don’t find rudists and trilobites in the same place.”
“He does. Now shut the hell up.”
There was a splash, as if Dupree had brought something to the surface and then lost it off the tongs. Something big.
“We’ve seen enough,” Sally said. “Come on.” She started down the hillside with Tim following.
They were almost to the bottom of the hill when there was a hoarse yell. Dupree was staggering back from the storm drain, clutching frantically at a rope wrapped around his body and leading back to the drain. Tangled in his own crab pots? Tim thought. But the rope was much too thick, hawser-like.
It wasn’t a rope, Tim realized. It was a tentacle. Something had hold of the oyster pirate and was trying to drag him into manhole.
Without thinking, Tim rushed toward the struggling man, who was inexorably being pulled closer to the hole. He tugged his machete loose, swung it over his head, and brought it down hard on the tentacle. It was like striking a piece of rubber hose, but the tentacle jerked and twisted under the blow. He struck again and again. The third blow severed the tentacle and left it writhing on the pavement.
Dupree was on all fours, backing away from the hole and gasping for breath. Sally and Tim each took a shoulder and dragged him back well away from the grate. Then they looked back at the cut-off tentacle still twisting and flopping madly.
“Baiting the trap,” Sally said hoarsely. “When you fish for crabs, you put fish guts or something in the trap to attract them.” She looked at him. “And if you knew crabs could communicate you’d be very sure to take them only when there were no other crabs around.”
Tim shuddered. “Jesus.”
* * * *
In the following six weeks, extensive searches of the drain brought up nothing but sewage-contaminated mud, a few worms, and a pale, anemic specimen of an undeniably modern crayfish. The tentacle turned out to belong to a cephalopod, family unidentified, but probably closer to an octopus than anything else.
The hard-eyed men with the neat suits and shoulder holsters apparently talked to their Italian equivalents because Professor Sforza never said anything. There was a brief craze in Seattle sushi shops for serving shrimp concoctions with plastic additions that looked like a trilobite carapace. Tim suspected strongly that was at the suggestion of those same hard-eyed men.
Three weeks later Sally moved into Tim’s hilltop house. They seem quite happy with each other.
And both of them have acquired a sudden, vengeful, taste for octopus.
Copyright © 2010 Rick Cook