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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 fucking walk and it’s one thousand nine hundred and sixty miles.’
    â€˜That far, hunh?’
    â€˜That far.’
    â€˜Why don’t you show it to Eddie Bertilson?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜You think so?’
    â€˜I know so. He knows everything about guns and ammo. He used to be married to my cousin Patricia.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜No?’
    â€˜I like you, John, but no.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    Eddie Bertilson was one of those extreme pain-in-the-ass-like people who note down the tail-fin 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 immediately what it was.
    He was small and bald with dark-tinted glasses and hair growing out of his ears, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt with greasy finger-wipes on it. He screwed his jeweler’s eyeglass into his socket and turned the bullet this way and that.
    â€˜Where’d you find this?’ he wanted to know.
    â€˜Do I have to tell you?’
    â€˜No, you don’t, because I can tell you where you found it. You found it amongst the memorabilia of a Vietnam vet.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜This is a seven point nine two Gewehrpatrone ninety-eight slug which was the standard ammunition of the Maschinengewehr thirty-four 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 Vietnam, stolen from the French.’
    â€˜It’s a machine-gun bullet?’
    â€˜That’s right,’ said Eddie, dropping it back in the palm of my hand with great satisfaction at his own expertise.
    â€˜So you wouldn’t use this to kill, say, a cow?’
    â€˜No. Unlikely.’
    The next morning Chip and I opened the restaurant as usual and by eight a.m. we were packed to the windows. Just before nine a black panel van drew up outside and two guys in white caps and overalls climbed out. They came down the side alley to the kitchen door and knocked.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Sure,’ said Chip, and opened up the freezer for him. He and his pal brought in a dozen cardboard boxes labeled Hamburger Patties.
    â€˜Always get your hamburgers from the same company?’ I asked Chip.
    â€˜St Croix, sure. Mr Le Renges is the owner.’
    â€˜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 One, 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 One with Frank and Nancy Sinatra singing Something Stupid on the radio.
    â€˜I don’t know why