"I know. But, I don"t know."

After a double portion of chocolate ice-cream with vanilla-flavored wafers I walked back to Tony"s where the lunchtime session was just finishing. "Mr. Le Renges still here?" I asked Oona.

"He went over to St. Stephen. He won"t be back until six, thank G.o.d."

"You don"t like him much, do you?"

"He gives me the heeby-jeebies, if you must know."

I went through to Mr. Le Renges" office. Fortunately, he had left it unlocked. I looked in the wastebasket and the bullet was still there. I picked it out and dropped it into my pocket.

On my way back to the Calais Motor Inn a big blue pick-up truck tooted at me. It was Nils Guttormsen from Lyle"s Autos, still looking surprised.

"They brought over your transmission parts from Bangor this morning, John. I should have her up and running in a couple of days."

"That"s great news, Nils. No need to break your a.s.s." Especially since I don"t have any money to pay you yet.

I showed the bullet to Velma.

"That"s truly weird, isn"t it?" she said.

"You"re right, Velma. It"s weird, but it"s not unusual for hamburger meat to be contaminated. In fact, it"s more usual than unusual, which is why I never eat hamburgers."

"I don"t know if I want to hear this, John."

"You should, Velma. See-they used to have federal inspectors in every slaughterhouse, but the Reagan administration wanted to save money, so they allowed the meatpacking industry to take care of its own hygiene procedures. Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle, that"s what they call it-SIS-C."

"I never heard of that, John."

"Well, Velma, as an ordinary citizen you probably wouldn"t have. But the upshot was that when they had no USDA inspectors breathing down their necks, most of the slaughterhouses doubled their line speed, and that meant there was much more risk of contamination. I mean if you can imagine a dead cow hanging up by its heels and a guy cutting its stomach open, and then heaving out its intestines by hand, which they still do, that"s a very skilled job, and if a gutter makes one mistake floop! everything goes everywhere, blood, guts, dirt, manure, and that happens to one in five cattle. Twenty percent."

"Oh, my G.o.d."

"Oh, it"s worse than that, Velma. These days, with SIS-C, meat-packers can get away with processing far more diseased cattle. I"ve seen cows coming into the slaughterhouse with abscesses and tapeworms and measles. The beef sc.r.a.ps they ship out for hamburgers are all mixed up with manure, hair, insects, metal filings, urine and vomit."

"You"re making me feel nauseous, John. I had a hamburger for supper last night."

"Make it your last, Velma. It"s not just the contamination, it"s the quality of the beef they use. Most of the cattle they slaughter for hamburgers are old dairy cattle, because they"re cheap and their meat isn"t too fatty. But they"re full of antibiotics and they"re often infected with E. coli and salmonella. You take just one hamburger, that"s not the meat from a single animal, that"s mixed-up meat from dozens or even hundreds of different cows, and it only takes one diseased cow to contaminate thirty-two thousand pounds of ground beef."

"That"s like a horror story, John."

"You"re too right, Velma."

"But this bullet, John. Where would this bullet come from?"

"That"s what I want to know, Velma. I can"t take it to the health people because then I"d lose my job and if I lose my job I can"t pay for my automobile to be repaired and Nils Guttormsen is going to impound it and I"ll never get back to Baton Rouge unless I f.u.c.king walk and it"s two thousand three hundred and seven miles."

"That far, hunh?"

"That far."

"Why don"t you show it to Eddie Bertilson?"

"What?"

"The bullet. Why don"t you show it to Eddie Bertilson. Bertilson"s Sporting Guns and Ammo, over on Orchard Street? He"ll tell you where it came from."

"You think so?"

"I know so. He knows everything about guns and ammo. He used to be married to my cousin Patricia."

"You"re a star, Velma. I"ll go do that. When I come back, maybe you and I could have some dinner together and then I"ll make wild energetic love to you."

"No."

"No?"

"I like you, John, but no."

"Oh."

Eddie Bertilson was one of those extreme pains-in-the-a.s.s-like people who note down the tailfin numbers of military aircraft in Turkey and get themselves arrested for espionage. But I have to admit that he knew everything possible about guns and ammo and when he took a look at that bullet he knew directly what it was.

He was small and bald with dark-tinted gla.s.ses and hair growing out of his ears, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt with greasy finger-wipes on it. He screwed this jeweler"s eyegla.s.s into his socket and turned the bullet this way and that.

"Where"d you find this?" he wanted to know.

"Do I have to tell you?"

"No, you don"t, because I can tell you where you found it. You found it amongst the memorabilia of a Viet Nam vet."

"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: woodc.o.c.k, 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 Something Stupid on the radio.

"I don"t know why you"re doing this, John. I mean, who cares if somebody found a bullet in their hamburger?"

"I care, Velma. Do you think I"m going to be able to live out the rest of my life without finding out how an American cow got hit by a Viet Cong machine-gun?"

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 The Quoddy Whirlpool for somebody to walk their Presa Canario.

"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 carca.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses 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."