Festival of Fear (3 page)

At the rear of the restaurant was a copper bar with an open grill, where a spotty young guy in a green apron and a tall green chef's hat was sizzling hamburgers and steaks.

A red-headed girl in a short green pleated skirt sashayed up to me and gave me a 500-watt smile, complete with teeth braces. ‘You prefer a booth or a table, sir?'

‘Actually, neither. I have an appointment to see Mr Le Renges.'

‘He's right in back . . . why don't you follow me? What name shall I say?'

‘John.'

Mr Le Renges was sitting in a blood-red leather chair with a reproduction antique table beside him, on which there was a fax machine, a silver carriage-clock, and a glass of seltzer. He was a bony man of forty-five or so with dyed-black collar-length hair which he had combed with something approaching genius to conceal his dead-white scalp. His nose was sharp and multifaceted, and his eyes glittered under his overgrown eyebrows like blowflies. He wore a very white open-neck shirt with long 1970s collar-points and a tailored black three-piece suit. I had the feeling that he thought he bore more than a passing resemblance to Al Pacino.

On the paneled wall behind him hung an array of certificates from the Calais Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Maine Restaurant Guide and even one from Les Chevaliers de la Haute Cuisine Canadienne.

‘Come in, John,' said Mr Le Renges, in a distinctly French-Canadian accent. ‘Sit down, please . . . the couch, perhaps? That chair's a little—'

‘A little
little
?'

‘I was thinking only of your comfort, John. You see my policy is always to make the people who work for me feel happy and comfortable. I don't have a desk, I never have. A desk is a statement which says that I am more important than you. I am
not
more important. Everybody who works here is of equal importance, and of equal value.'

‘You've been reading the McDonald's Bible. Always make your staff feel valued. Then you won't have to pay them so much.'

I could tell that Mr Le Renges didn't quite know if he liked that remark. It was the way he twitched his head, like Data in
Star Trek
. But I could also tell that he was the kind of guy who was anxious that nobody should leave him without fully comprehending what a wonderful human being he was.

He sipped some seltzer and eyed me over the rim of the glass. ‘You are perhaps a little
mature
to be seeking work as a burger chef.'

‘Mature? I'm positively overripe. But I've been working in the upper echelons of the restaurant trade for so long, I thought it was time that I went back to basics. Got my hands dirty, so to speak.'

‘At Tony's Gourmet Burgers, John, our hygiene is second to none.'

‘Of course. When I say getting my hands dirty – that's like a metaphor. Food hygiene, that's my specialty. I know everything there is to know about proper cooking times and defrosting and never picking your nose while you're making a Caesar salad.'

‘What's your cooking experience, John?'

‘I was a cook in the Army. Three times winner of the Fort Polk prize for culinary excellence. It made me very good at home economics. I can make a pound and a half of ground beef stretch between two platoons of infantry and a heavy armored assault force.'

‘You're a funny guy, John,' said Mr Le Renges, without the slightest indication that he was amused.

‘I'm fat, Tony. Funny goes with the territory.'

‘I don't want you to make me laugh, John. I want you to cook burgers. And it's “Mr Le Renges” to you.'

He took me through to the kitchen, which was tiled in dark brown ceramic with stainless-steel counters. Two gawky young kids were using microwave ovens to thaw out frozen hamburger patties and frozen bacon and frozen fried chicken and frozen French fries. ‘This is Chip and this is Denzil.'

‘How's it going, Chip? Denzil?'

Chip and Denzil stared at me numbly and mumbled, ‘'Kay, I guess.'

‘And this is Letitia.' A frowning, dark-haired girl was painstakingly tearing up iceberg lettuce as if it were as difficult as lacemaking.

‘Letitia's one of our
challenged
crew members,' said Mr Le Renges, resting one of his hairy tarantula hands on her shoulder. ‘The state of Maine gives us special tax relief to employ the challenged, but even if they didn't I'd still want to have her here. That's the kind of guy I am, John. I've been called to do more than feed people. I've been called to enrich their lives.'

Letitia looked up at me with unfocused aquamarine eyes. She was pretty but she had the expression of a small-town beauty queen who has just been hit on the head by half a brick. Some instinct told me that Tony Le Renges wasn't only using her as an iceberg lettuce tearer.

‘We take pride in the supreme quality of our food,' he said. Without any apparent sense of irony he opened a huge freezer at the back of the kitchen and showed me the frozen steaks and the frost-covered envelopes of pre-cooked chili, ready for boiling in the bag. He showed me the freeze-dried vegetables and the frozen corn bread and the dehydrated lobster chowder (just add hot water.) And this was in Maine, where you can practically find fresh lobsters waltzing down the street.

None of this made me weak with shock. Even the best restaurants use a considerable proportion of pre-cooked and pre-packaged food, and fast food outlets like McDonald's and Burger King use nothing else. Even their scrambled eggs come dried and pre-scrambled in a packet.

What impressed me was how Mr Le Renges could sell this ordinary, industrialized stuff as ‘wholesome, hearty food, lovingly cooked in our own kitchens by people who really care' when most of it was grudgingly thrown together in giant factories by minimum-wage shift-workers who didn't give a rat's ass.

Mr Le Renges must have had an inkling about the way my mind was working.

‘You know what our secret is?' he asked me.

‘If I'm going to come and cook here, Mr Le Renges, I think it might be a good idea if you told me.'

‘We have the best-tasting burgers anywhere, that's our secret. McDonald's and Burger King don't even come
close
. Once you've tasted one of our burgers, you won't want anything else. Here – Kevin – pass me a burger so that John here can try it.'

‘That's OK,' I told him. ‘I'll take your word for it. I had a sandwich already.'

‘No, John, if you're going to work here, I insist.'

‘Listen, Mr Le Renges, I'm a professional food hygienist. I know what goes into burgers and that's why I never eat them. Never.'

‘What are you suggesting?'

‘I'm not suggesting anything. It's just that I know for a fact that a proportion of undesirable material makes its way into ground beef and I don't particularly want to eat it.'

‘Undesirable material? What do you mean?'

‘Well,
waste products,
if you want me to be blunt about it. Cattle are slaughtered and disemboweled so fast that it makes it inevitable that a certain amount of excrement contaminates the meat.'

‘Listen, John, how do you think I compete with McDonald's and Burger King? I make my customers feel as if they're a cut above people who eat at the big fast-food chains. I make them feel as if they're discerning diners.'

‘But you're serving up pretty much the same type of food.'

‘Of course we are. That's what our customers are used to, that's what they like. But we make it just a little more expensive, and we serve it up like it's something really special. We give them a proper restaurant experience, that's why they come here for birthdays and special occasions.'

‘But that must whack up your overheads.'

‘What we lose on overheads we gain by sourcing our own foodstuffs.'

‘You mean you can buy this stuff cheaper than McDonald's? How do you do that? You don't have a millionth of their buying power.'

‘We use farmers' and stockbreeders' cooperatives. Little guys, that the big fast-food chains don't want to do business with. That's why our burgers taste better, and that's why they don't contain anything that you wouldn't want to eat.'

Kevin came over from the grill with a well-charred burger patty on a plate. His spots were glowing angrily from the heat. Mr Le Renges handed me a fork and said, ‘There . . . try it.'

I cut a small piece off and peered at it suspiciously. ‘No shit?' I asked him.

‘Nothing but one thousand percent protein, I promise you.'

I dry-swallowed, and then I put the morsel in my mouth. I chewed it slowly, trying not to think about the manure-splattered ramps of the slaughterhouses that I had visited around Baton Rouge. Mr Le Renges watched me with those glittering blowfly eyes of his and that didn't make it any more appetizing, either.

But, surprisingly, the burger actually tasted pretty good. It was tender, with just the right amount of crunchiness on the outside, and it was well seasoned with onion and salt and pepper and the tiniest touch of chili, and there was another flavor, too, that really lifted it.

‘Cumin?' I asked Mr Le Renges.

‘Aha. That would be telling. But you like it, don't you?'

I cut off another piece. ‘OK, I have to confess that I do.'

Mr Le Renges whacked me on the back so that I almost choked. ‘You see, John? Now you know what I was talking about when I told you that I was called to enrich people's lives. I keep small farmers in business, and at the same time I give the people of Calais a very important community venue with the best food that I can economically serve up. Well, not only Calais. I have Tony's Gourmet Burgers in Old Town and Millinocket and Waterville and I've just opened a new flagship restaurant in St Stephen, over the river in Canada.'

‘Well, congratulations,' I coughed. ‘When do you want me to start?'

I dreamed that I was sitting by the window of Rocco's restaurant on Drusilla Lane in Baton Rouge, eating a spicy catfish poboy with a cheese fry basket and a side of brown gravy. I had just ordered my bread pudding when the phone rang and the receptionist told me in a clogged-up voice that it was five fifteen in the morning.

‘Why are you telling me this?' I asked her.

‘You asked for an alarm call, sir. Five fifteen, and it's five fifteen.'

I heaved myself up in bed. Outside my window it was still totally dark. It was then that I remembered that I was now the
chef de petit dejeuner
at Tony's, and I was supposed to be over on North Street at six a.m. sharp to open up the premises and start getting the bacon griddled and the eggs shirred and the coffee percolating.

I stared at myself in the mirror. ‘Why did you do this to yourself?' I asked me.

‘Because you're a nit-picking perfectionist who couldn't turn a blind eye to three mouse droppings at the Cajun Queen Restaurant, that's why. And they probably weren't even mouse droppings at all. Just capers.'

‘Capers schmapers.'

It was so cold outside that the deserted sidewalks shone like hammered glass. I walked to North Street where Chip had just opened up the restaurant.

‘Morning, Chip.'

‘Yeah.' He showed me how to switch off the alarm and switch on the lights. Then we went through to the kitchen and he showed me how to heat up the griddle and take out the frozen bacon and the frozen burgers and mix up the ‘fresh squeezed' orange juice (just add water.)

We had only been there ten minutes when a young, mousy-haired girl with a pale face and dark circles under her eyes came through the door. ‘Hi,' she said. ‘I'm Anita. You must be John.'

‘Hi, Anita,' I said, wiping my fingers on my green apron and shaking hands. ‘How about a cup of coffee before the hordes descend on us?'

‘OK, then,' she blinked. From the expression on her face I think she must have thought I said ‘whores.'

But they were hordes all right, and once they started coming through that door they didn't stop. By a quarter after seven every booth and every table was crowded with businessmen and postal workers and truckers and even the sandy-haired cop who had first flagged me down as I walked into town. I couldn't believe that these people got up so early. Not only that, they were all so
cheerful
, too, like they couldn't wait to start another day's drudgery. It was all, ‘Good morning, Sam! And how are you on this cold and frosty morning!' ‘Good morning, Mrs Trent! See
you
wrapped up warm and toasty!' ‘Hi, Rick! Great day for the race – the human race!' I mean, please.

They not only looked hearty and talked hearty, they ate hearty, too. For two hours solid I was sizzling bacon and flipping burgers and frying eggs and browning corned-beef hash. Anita was dashing from table to table with juice and coffee and double orders of toast, and it wasn't until eight that a sassy black girl called Oona came in to help her.

Gradually, however, the restaurant began to empty out, with more back-whacking and more cheery goodbyes, until we were left with nobody but two FedEx drivers and an old woman who looked as if she was going to take the next six months to chew her way through two slices of Canadian bacon.

It was then that one of the FedEx drivers put his hand over his mouth and spat into it. He frowned down at what he had found in his burger and showed it to his friend. Then he got up from the table and came over to the grill, his hand cupped over his mouth.

‘Broken my darn tooth,' he said.

‘How d'you do that?' I asked him.

‘Bit into my burger and there was
this
in it.'

He held up a small black object between his finger and thumb.

I took it from him and turned it this way and that. There was no doubt about it, it was a bullet, slightly flattened by impact.

‘I'm real sorry,' I said. ‘Look, this is my first day here. All I can do is report it to the management and you can have your breakfast on us.'