“Do I have to tell you?”
“No, you don’t, because I can tell
“Did I?” The gun store was small and poky and smelled of oil. There were all kinds of hunting rifles arranged in cabinets behind the counter, not to mention pictures of anything that a visitor to Calais may want to kill: woodcock, ruffed grouse, black duck, mallard, blue-wing and green-wing teal.
“This is a 7.92 Gewehr Patrone 98 slug which was the standard ammunition of the Maschinengewehr 34 machine-gun designed by Louis Stange for the German Army in 1934. After the Second World War it was used by the Czechs, the French, the Israelis and the Biafrans, and a few turned up in Viet Nam, stolen from the French.”
“It’s a machine-gun bullet?”
“That’s right,” said Eddie, dropping it back in the palm of my hand with great satisfaction at his own expertise.
“So you wouldn’t use this to kill, say, a cow?”
“No. Unlikely.”
The next morning Chip a nd I opened the restaurant as usual and by 8 a.m. we were packed to the windows. Just before 9 a bl ack panel van drew up outsid e and two guys in white caps and overalls climbed out. They came down the sid e alley to the kitchen door and
knocked.
“Delivery from St. Croix Meats,” said one of them. He was a stocky guy with a walrus moustache and a deep diagonal scar across his mouth, as if he had been told to shut up by somebody with a machete.
“Sure,” said Chip, and opened up the freezer for him. He and his pal brought in a dozen cardboard boxes labeled Hamburger Patties.
“Always get your hamburgers from the same company?” I asked Chip.
“St. Croix, sure. Mr. Le Renges is the owner.”
“Ah.” No wonder Mr. Le Renges hadn’t wanted to talk to his supplier about the bullet: his supplier was him. I bent my head sideways so that I could read the address. US Route 1, Robbinstown.
It was a brilliantly sunny afternoon and the woods around Calais were all golden and crimson and rusty- colored. Velma drove us down US 1 with Frank and Nancy Sinatra singing
“I don’t know why you’re doing this, John. I mean, who cares if somebody found a bullet in their hamburger?”
“
It took us almost an hour to find St. Croix Meats because the building was way in back of an industrial park — a big gray rectangular place with six or seven black panel vans parked outside it and no signs outside. The only reason I knew that we had come to the right place was because I saw Mr. Le Renges walking across the yard outside with the biggest ugliest dog that I had ever seen in my life. I’m not a dog expert but I suddenly realized who had been advertising in
“What are you going to do now?” Velma asked me. There was a security guard on the gate and there was no way that a 289-pound man in a flappy white raincoat was going to be able to tippy-toe his way in without being noticed.
Just then, however, I saw the guy with the scar who had delivered our hamburgers that morning. He climbed into one of the black vans, started it up, and maneuvered it out of the yard.
“Follow that van,” I asked Velma.
“What for, John?”
“I want to see where it goes, that’s all.”
“This is not much of a date, John.”
“I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”
“Dinner and wild energetic love?”
“We could skip the dinner if you’re not hungry.”
We followed the van for nearly two-and-a-half hours, until it began to grow dark. I was baffled by the route it took. First of all it stopped at a small medical center in Pembroke. Then it went to a veterinarian just outside of Mathias. It circled back toward Calais, visiting two small dairy farms, before calling last of all at the rear entrance of Calais Memorial Hospital, back in town.
It wasn’t always possible for us to see what was happening, but at one of the dairy farms we saw the van drivers carrying cattle carcasses out of the outbuildings, and at the Memorial Hospital we saw them pushing out large wheeled containers, rather like laundry-hampers.
Velma said, “I have to get back to work now. My shift starts at six.”
“I don’t understand this, Velma,” I said. “They were carrying dead cattle out of those farms, but USDA regulations state that cattle have to be processed no more than two hours after they’ve been slaughtered. After that time, bacteria multiply so much that they’re almost impossible to get rid of.”
“So Mr. Le Renges is using rotten beef for his hamburgers?”
“Looks like it. But what else? I can understand rotten beef. Dozens of slaughterhouses use rotten beef. But why did the van call at the hospital? And the veterinarian?”
Velma stopped the car outside the motel and stared at me. “Oh, you’re not serious.”
“I have to take a look inside that meatpacking plant, Velma.”
“You’re sure you haven’t bitten off more than you can chew?”
“Very apt phrase, Velma.”
My energy levels were beginning to decline again so I treated myself to a fried shrimp sandwich and a couple of Molson’s with a small triangular diet-sized piece of pecan pie to follow. Then I walked around to the hospital and went to the rear entrance where the van from St. Croix Meats had parked. A hospital porter with greasy hair and squinty eyes and glasses was standing out back taking a smoke.
“How’s it going, feller?” I asked him.
“Okay. Anything I can do for you?”
“Maybe, I’ve been looking for a friend of mine. Old drinking buddy from way back.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Somebody told me he’s been working around here, driving a van.
Said they’d seen him here at the hospital.”
The greasy-haired porter blew smoke out of his nostrils. “We get vans in and out of here all day.”
“This guy’s got a scar, right across his mouth. You couldn’t miss him.”
“Oh you mean the guy from BioGlean?”
“BioGlean?”
“Sure. They collect, like, surgical waste, and get rid of it.”
“What’s that, ‘surgical waste’?”
“Well, you know. Somebody has their leg amputated, somebody has their arm cut off. Aborted fetuses, stuff like that. You’d be amazed how much stuff a busy hospital has to get rid of.”
“I thought they incinerated it.”
“They used to, but BioGlean kind of specializes, and I guess it’s cheaper than running an incinerator night and day. They even go round auto shops and take bits of bodies out of car wrecks. You don’t realize, do you, that the cops won’t do it, and that the mechanics don’t want to do it, so I guess somebody has to.”
He paused, and then he said, “What’s your name? Next time your buddy calls by, I’ll tell him that you were looking for him.”
“Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m staying at the Chandler House on Chandler.”
