Crime Fraiche (18 page)

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Authors: Alexander Campion

BOOK: Crime Fraiche
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CHAPTER 32
I
t was like nothing he’d ever seen. The fields were as moist and green as the lettuce in fancy supermarkets after the sprayer had gone off. And the cows! Snowy white with pink noses like in a book for little children. The whole setup looked like some TV ad for yogurt, not a place where you were going to sweat and get dirt under your nails. What the hell had Commissaire Le Tellier dreamed up this time?
The endless swelling emerald hills made him sleepy. He nodded with the swaying of the bus, his head sinking lower and lower. A murmur woke him. There it was. A fancy stone archway with the name of the place—Elevage Vienneau—in big iron letters on the top. But the bus kept on going and turned only after half a mile or so, into a deeply potholed, narrow road running beside a crumbling cement wall that had been stained black over the years by the exhaust of passing cars. It pulled up with a loud airbrake fart at an ugly cement gateway. C
ITÉ
O
UVRIÈRE—
workers’ compound—it said on a faded wooden sign with the paint coming off in chips. Below, black painted iron doors had red rust running down in streaks like drying blood.
Everyone on the bus got off and ducked through a small opening in one of the portals. Inside, the world reverted to the familiar. Two long darkened stucco buildings glared at each other, their tiny windows squinting like gang members squaring off for a street fight. The reedy ululation of popular Arab tunes blaring from multiple boom boxes mingled with the singsongy lilt of high-pitched conversations in French-Arab patois. If it weren’t for the desperate feel of a prison yard, it could have been his childhood home in the Paris projects.
He tramped up three flights of stairs to the room they had told him would be his and opened the door. A man, lying on one of the two beds, reading a newspaper in Arabic, jumped up on the defensive. But when he saw it was only another Maghrebian, and not a
blanc
with authority, he relaxed and fell back on the bed.
“
Salaam aleikom,
��� Momo greeted him respectfully.
“
Labess,
” Momo’s new roommate drawled in reply with studied cool, stretching out to show how laid back he was, while slowly going over Momo from top to bottom. “So, my brother, this is the best job you could find?”
After exchanging names, Momo treated Mustafa to the epic he had prepared, about finding himself out of work in Paris and having a friend who had a cousin who had a brother-in-law who had once worked at the élevage, and who had given him a name to call, who, wonderfully, had hired him over the phone and told him which train to take. It was a lot less than he had been making in Paris when he had been working but a lot more than when he had not. But he was going to have a roof over his head and his belly was going to be full and he’d have some money to send to his
bled
in Algeria, right? Momo hoped he hit just the right note of dumb naïveté and hopefulness.
Mustafa snorted and said, “You’ll see what you’ll see,” assuming the role of older cousin, cynical and protective. He watched Momo closely as he unpacked the few dingy secondhand work clothes he had purchased in a dismal back alley of the Marché aux Puces the day before. “Your hands look like they’ve never seen a day’s work, but there’s too much sun in your face for you to have been behind bars in the
cabane
. So what were you doing before the genius brother-in-law of the cousin of the friend told you to come here,
mon frère?
”
Momo launched into the backstory of his epic: he had worked in his cousin’s tiny convenience store in the Twentieth Arrondissement. “That job was the best,
mon pote,
” Momo said with carefully constructed earnestness. “I got to run the till because I can speak French. So no hard work. Just sitting on a stool all day. I’m sure going to miss that.”
“You’re not wrong there,” the roommate said with a cynical twist of his mouth.
Just as Momo was prepared to embroider his epic, he was cut off by a warbling wail, just like the air-raid sirens in black-and-white World War II war movies.
“
La bouffe
—dinner!” announced the roommate. “It’s shit, but you get to eat as much as you want. They’ll lose money with you,” he laughed admiringly.
During the meal Momo discovered that the workforce consisted of two distinct groups, Maghrebians and Turks. The Turks were in a distinct minority and sat by themselves in a tight enclave in a corner of the long-tabled refectory. A clear sign of the dominance of the Maghrebians, the meal was North African, a thin lamb tagine poured over mounds of couscous. By the time dinner was over, Momo’s reintegration into the world of his childhood was complete. He found himself thinking in Arabic and was no longer irritated by the constant touching and prodding. He even bridled at the colonial arrogance of the French, feeding their former subjects mutton, even as they worked on a beef ranch, in the mistaken belief that was all Arabs ate.
After the meal Mustafa, ever the protective big brother, invited Momo to go with his new pals to an Arab café a few streets from the workers’ gate. Momo begged off. Mint tea in a seedy bistro was not going to do it for him that night. What it was going to take was a whole lot of cigarettes and booze, two things his fellow workers sure as hell were not going to take kindly to.
Back in the room, he squeezed his shoulders through the narrow window and leaned out, confident that he would be undisturbed for at least a couple of hours and, with the room light out, was invisible from the courtyard. He lit a cigarette and cupped it in his hand, relishing the rush as the smoke went as deep into his lungs as he could get it. The one thing you really learned in the police was how to smoke on a stakeout without being seen. Leaving the cigarette on the sill, he squirmed back in, extracted Commissaire Le Tellier’s now half-full bottle of Calvados from his bag, put it on the little ledge, and twisted his torso back out the window. Who else would have given him a bottle of really good stuff?
It was hard to think of her as a bigwig commissaire. What the hell was she up to this time? He didn’t mind long nights, he didn’t mind getting shot at, but he really minded not having a friend to talk to. He pulled the cork, lifted the bottle, swallowed twice, grimaced, and waited for the alcohol to join the nicotine in a sinuous belly dance. The cool air felt good. The world took a quarter turn. He felt good too. He was doing something he should be doing. Something worthwhile. A sense of peace descended over him like a warm blanket.
He knew he was going to be able to sleep.
Of course, sleep raised another little problem. Commissaire Le Tellier had told him he couldn’t take his tricolor police card with him. That made sense. It was likely enough that someone would go through his stuff. But she also told him not to take a piece. Sure. Why not just leave his dick at home, too? He took the last swig of Calvados in the bottle and jiggled his left foot, relishing the feel of the gun holstered to his ankle. He had paid for the Smith and Wesson 340PD out of his own pocket, and the damn thing had cost close to a month’s salary. And then he had shelled out another bucketful of cash for the rubber grip with the laser aimer. All he had to do was squeeze the grip a little and a red laser dot would tell him where the bullet would hit. Good thing, too, because one shot was all he was going to get. It was a real bastard of a gun. It fired a .357 Magnum, and the scandium alloy frame and titanium barrel were so light, the recoil felt like a truck had slammed into your hand.
He’d had enough to drink to find the thought of him kneeling next to Mustafa for morning prayer, heads on the floor, unshod, as the Qur’an required, with his 340PD strapped to his ankle, hugely funny.
Momo flopped on the bed belly down, pulled the holster off his ankle with a loud Velcro scratch, put it under his pillow, clunked the empty bottle of Calvados in his bag, shot it under the bed, and passed out.
CHAPTER 33
M
ercifully, even though it was essentially a Maghrebian meal, coffee figured prominently in the refectory breakfast. Momo passed on everything else—the mint tea, the white yogurt with puddles of acidy whey, the sliced country bread, the slightly rancid butter, the runny red jam—and concentrated on getting as much coffee, black and very sugary, into his system as quickly as he could. It didn’t help much with his headache. If he had been in his apartment, a shot of Cognac and a couple of cigarettes would have done the trick, but as things were, he had to make do with the coffee.
Just as he thought he might be beginning to feel better, a big
blanc
came into the refectory, moving a lot of air, as they said. He was not as big as Momo, but almost. He looked around, singled out Momo, and strode up to the table.
“Benarouche,” he boomed with the false friendliness of a small-town politician canvassing for votes in a supermarket. “All rested up? Your bed as soft as could be? Ready for some hard work? You bet you are,” he said, clapping Momo on the back.
He pulled out a chair with his foot, spun it around, and sat with his arms crossed over the back. Conversations ceased in a radius of twenty feet.
“My name is Martel. I’m your foreman.”
Momo mumbled, “Oui, monsieur,” with all the subservience the situation seemed to require.
Martel nodded, eying Momo in cold appraisal.
“I’m going to put you on the kill floor. Big guy like you can be useful there. You’re going to back up your roommate for the first week, until you get the hang of it, and then you’re going to be on your own. Think you can handle that?”
Just as Momo muttered another “Oui, monsieur,” Martel barked out an earsplitting “Mustafa!” Momo’s headache shot up several notches and began to throb aggressively.
Mustafa trotted up eagerly, his cool-guy demeanor of the previous night volatilized.
“Mustafa, Mohamed here is going to be on your detail. Show him the ropes. I want him to learn fast. Someone his size is just what we need to deal with the skittery ones that hold up the line. You come see me on Friday and report on how he’s doing. Got it?”
Before the “Oui, monsieur” was half said, Martel marched out purposefully, looking neither left nor right.
Ten minutes later Mustafa led Momo toward a large iron-fenced corral. The morning’s encounter had made him chatty. “I learned the work of the abattoir in a much smaller place than this. Every day there was a fuckup. The corral was too small and the chute was a piece of crap. The steers were always bucking and trying to get out. Here you could fall asleep doing the job. You’ll like it, if you have a strong stomach.”
About a hundred brilliant white steers stood with the massive placidity of bovines, half dozing in the early morning sunshine, flicking at flies with their ears. Two workers leaned against the railing, chatting quietly. As Momo and Mustafa came up, they exchanged a lackadaisical “
Labess.
”
“This all there is today?” Mustafa asked.
“Not too many made the weight for slaughter. It’s going to be a day at the beach.” The hand laughed happily.
“Let’s get going. They want Momo to see how the corral works before he goes inside,” Mustafa said.
One of the men walked over to a circular pen at a corner of the corral. With its two partitions attached to a post in the center, it looked like a giant revolving door. He pushed one of the partitions through a quarter turn, creating an opening to the corral. The other man, still at the rail at the opposite end, produced a two-foot length of broomstick with some shreds of a white plastic garbage bag tied to the end. He climbed up on the fence and waved his makeshift flag back and forth slowly. Without showing any real fear, the steers edged slowly away. In a few seconds, ten of them had eased into the pie-shaped open section in the circular pen. The first man pushed the partition slowly back, shutting the steers in, and rotated the other partition, revealing the entrance into a long, funnel-shaped cement walled walkway.
Very quietly, in a coaxing tone, the hand encouraged the steers. “
Allez, allez,
” he said in French, making encouraging flapping gestures with his hands.
Mustafa laughed. “Don’t let the
blanc
catch you talking to the cattle in Arabic. They don’t like that. It makes the meat taste rotten.” They all laughed uproariously.
The steers complacently walked around the semicircle and entered the walkway. The hand pushed a gate shut behind them.
“See?” said Mustafa. “They’re happy. They think they’ve turned around and are going back where they came from. In that other place I was, we’d have the bull prods out already and we’d all be yelling and banging the rails. We’d have a good fuckup in the making.”
The steers shuffled down the walkway—which became progressively narrower, until the sides almost touched their flanks, gently forcing them to walk single file—and stopped in front of a closed steel door in the wall of the abattoir.
“Time for you and me to get to work,” Mustafa said. He led Momo through a door in the abattoir building and around to the other side of the steel door that held back the steers.
“This is the kill floor.” He pulled a lever and the door slowly pivoted open. When the first steer walked in, he shut it again. “We’ll do just one so you see how it works. Then we’ll open the gate and let the rest of them through.”
Encouraged by Mustafa, who shook another white garbage bag on a stick, the steer ambled slowly through the extension of the chute. A center divider had been built into the floor, inclining gently upward so after a few feet it reached the animal’s brisket. A motorized rubber conveyor belt on the top of the divider lifted the steer a few inches off the ground and moved it forward. When the steer first noticed that it was no longer advancing under its own steam, it glanced around nervously but, looking down, saw the floor just beneath its hooves and calmed immediately, to all appearances enjoying the ride.
Twenty feet down the line another gate opened, admitted the steer, and closed with a quiet click. The conveyor stopped.
“Now we move fast,” Mustafa said.
He pushed a big yellow button on a console, and with a violent hiss of compressed air, two stainless-steel panels closed around the steer’s neck and a third pushed its head up. Mustafa grabbed a round yellow cylinder about the size of a large flashlight hanging on a chain from the ceiling and pressed it against the crown of the steer’s head. There was a sickening thunk and the steer went limp, its head resting on the plate and its body held up by the center divider. The whole thing had taken less than two seconds.
“Is it dead?” Momo asked.
Mustafa shook his head, reached down, found a chain, looped it twice around the animal’s hind leg, snapped on a catch, and pushed another button. The steer was lifted into the air and began traversing the room, twitching and writhing slightly, until it went through a door of curtained plastic strips and disappeared.
Mustafa held up the yellow cylinder in front of Momo’s face and pushed a button. The device jumped and a black tube around the chain writhed. “The stunner. Works with compressed air. A six-inch bolt jumps out and goes into the steer’s head.” He pushed the button again for effect. “Too fast for you to see. Do it right, the steer’s knocked out but still alive. Do it wrong, it’s dead and the blood won’t drain out, or it’s conscious and you get to see a belly dance on a chain.” He laughed cynically.
“What happens in the next room?” Momo asked.
“The steer gets turned into steaks. There are a lot of
frères
in there, bleeding, skinning, and butchering. Those are the guys who make the big money. You have to be here a long time before they let you do that work.”
Momo felt slightly nauseous. He blamed the Calvados.
“We need to get started. You work the stunner and put the leg chain on. I’ll work the entry gate and the head restraints. I’ll help you if you get in trouble.” Mustafa pushed the button for the trap to the outside chute, and the steers began ambling in, unsuspecting, at their tranquil bovine pace.
The day was endless. Momo made a number of mistakes, the consequences of which were unthinkable. Halfway through, the foreman came by and said in his politician’s bellow that Momo was learning all right but would have to work faster. It took almost the whole shift to get through the small herd in the corral. At first Momo thought he would never be able to stomach it and longed for a drink. He bitterly regretted having finished Commissaire Le Tellier’s Calvados the night before. After a while he found he could escape the kill floor by locking his mind on the challenge of sneaking out of the compound to get his hands on a decent bottle of Scotch. That made it almost bearable.

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