by Ross Pennie
He ached with envy when he thought of the ties that linked Ned Krooner and his brothers. Admittedly, Morty said so little Hamish could only guess what was going on inside his head, but Lanny was the fiercest advocate a man could ask for. He protected Ned like a guard dog. As a child, Hamish had prayed in vain for a sibling, someone to understand his torment when his dad called him a sissy for singing in the choir and his mother locked herself in the bathroom until he promised not to quit. After he left home, he had yearned for a partner, someone who would know him inside out. Even delight in his foibles.
He inspected his sandwich. Life as the only child of bickering parents had been as desolate as the slice of shrivelled turkey between his fingers. He thought of Max. Zol made his son popcorn, took him swimming, and poured his apple juice into a wineglass. Max was one lucky kid, and all that warm attention from his father hadn’t made him mouthy.
Hamish finished his sandwich, tossed the empty juice can into the recycling bin, and made his way back to the lab. He washed all the traces of mayo and mustard from his hands — and with them the pointless reflections that crept up on him whenever he was too exhausted to keep such thoughts at bay. What could not be changed had to be endured, like all those Sundays wasted trying to please his melancholic mother. He donned his white coat, and approached his workbench to complete the DNA detection. As he picked up a pipette, he felt the wave of adrenaline that always rose with the final steps of an experiment. He never knew when a late-night result would turn into a dazzling revelation.
He steeled himself for a peek at the readouts. His thumbs went up. All three tests had given a clear and proper reading, even the sample spiked with barbecue sauce. The ethyl ether had dissolved away the inhibitor. Wonderful. This project just might turn out to be fruitful after all.
His head spun with the groundbreaking possibilities the test might bring to diagnostic laboratories — in hospitals, in agriculture, in the food industry. But frustration swamped him when he took a closer look. Hell’s bells. He’d mixed up the specimens. He’d consumed so many cups of green tea his shaky hands must have spilled one sample into another. What else could explain finding cat tissue in all three of them?
Could he have contaminated the test tubes? Surely not. He’d prepared each one separately and washed his hands in between.
He sat at his desk and rubbed his head. It was late, he was exhausted, and a jackhammer pounded at his temples. But there was no way he was going home until he straightened out this mess. He opened his binder and reviewed the operating procedure step by step.
He’d followed the instructions exactly. No doubt about it.
He looked again at his results.
The sample of cat muscle showed only cat. Good.
The Krooner sausage, spiked with barbecue sauce and treated with ethyl ether, gave a clear reading. Great. But the sample was positive for both pork and cat. Not good.
The Krooner sausage that had no sauce also gave a clear reading. Good. But it, too, was positive for both pork and cat. Terrible.
While his heart raced and the turkey sandwich somersaulted in his belly, he retrieved Lanny Krooner’s remaining sausages from the refrigerator. The red and white packet with its bold logo and smartly printed label looked entirely professional. He had opened it himself and was sure it hadn’t been tampered with. But there was no doubt about it: now, in the lab, those “pure pork” sausages contained traces of cat meat. He pictured Lanny standing in his kitchen, carving up the bloodied corpses of stray kittens and dropping them into his sausage machine.
He clenched his teeth, triple-wrapped the sausages in biohazard bags, and returned them to the refrigerator. He flooded his hands with disinfectant soap, scrubbed, rinsed with a lakeful of water, dried carefully, then donned a pair of heavy rubber gloves and spent almost an hour scouring the sinks, the benches, and all his equipment.
When he was satisfied that everything was as clean as humanly possible, he dialled Brenda McEwen’s number. She answered cheerfully, and their chat was brief and enlightening. He hung up and checked the clock. Nearly one o’clock. He was exhausted, but there was no point in going home to bed. He’d never fall asleep.
He stared at the phone. Should he call Zol? Now that Brenda had confirmed his suspicions, surely it wouldn’t be right to wait until morning to break the news to Zol? Brenda hadn’t minded the late hour. Neither would Zol. With tomorrow’s deadline looming, he’d be thrilled at these developments.
Zol picked up on the fifth ring and answered with a grunt.
“Hi, it’s Hamish. I found another link. It could be the one.”
“Let’s have it.” The sleepy tone disappeared from Zol’s voice.
“Remember the sausages Natasha listed on her computer? Escarpment Pride, pure pork? She found a package of them in Vanderven’s freezer. And in Rita Spinelli’s. Kenyon Cheung told me that he and Owen bought them all the time. I don’t know about Delia Smart.” He paused to give Zol a moment to process before he charged on. “And the best part? I just found out that Hugh McEwen ate them, too. Brenda forgot to mention them before.”
“You called his wife — at this hour?” Zol asked.
“She didn’t mind. Doesn’t sleep much these days.”
The line was quiet except for a strange, low-pitched rumble. Probably the cat on Zol’s bed, purring next to him.
“I’m not going to let you twist me up any more,” Zol said. Hamish could hear him rubbing the stubble on his chin and cringed at the noise. His father used to scratch at his five o’clock shadow and make that same sandpapery sound whenever he was angry.
“First it was the chocolates,” Zol continued, clearly steamed, “and now it’s these sausages. There are no damn prions in either of them. For God’s sake, Hamish, Danesh Patel and Tonya were vegetarians. And pigs don’t get CJD.”
“But, Zol, those sausages are . . . are tainted.”
“With what?”
“Cat meat.”
“You mean chicken gizzards and pigs’ cheeks? Not exactly poisonous.”
Hamish held his breath, then spoke distinctly into the phone: “Not cat food, cat tissue. I’m talking muscle, lymph nodes, maybe even bone marrow.” His eyes strayed to the refrigerator where the sausages lay triple-bagged in heavy plastic. He hoped he’d secured them well enough. “They’re made up near Campbellville by the brother of a patient of mine. He gave me a package the day before yesterday. They’re called Escarpment Pride Viennese sausages.”
“I know the ones. A hot item at Four Corners. But what makes you think — at one in the damn morning — that they’re tainted?”
“I used them in a mitochondrial DNA test I’m developing for bacterial diagnosis. They’re pork sausages all right — but laced with cat meat. I just completed the latest run in the DNA amplifier and —”
“I’m too sleepy to understand how you could ever find cat tissue in pork sausages when you’re looking for bacteria. But it can’t be relevant. Not to our investigation. Two of our cases were vegetarians. And cats don’t get CJD.”
Cory purred into the telephone.
“You can’t be sure of that,” Hamish said. “Sheep, elk, and other animals get prion brain disease. Why not cats?”
“If those sausages contained prions, half of Hamilton would have CJD by now. Your theory is ridiculous.”
Hamish froze as that awful word boomed in his ear. His father used to say he looked ridiculous in his choir gown with its frilly collar. The passing years had not diminished the sting.
“I can’t tell Peter Trinnock,” Zol continued, “that we’ve traced our CJD to a yokel up in Campbellville making sausages out of stray cats. He’d think I’d lost it completely. Besides, it looks like I’ve found the prions.”
“Where?”
“Too early to say.”
The rejection hit Hamish like a punch in the stomach. “I thought,” he said, trying to catch his breath, “I thought we were a team.”
“And look where it’s got us. Saus
ages made out of cats, for God’s sake. For sale in Hamilton’s finest gourmet supermarket. No, I don’t buy it.” Zol scrubbed again at his stubble. “I’ve got Colleen working on a lead that makes a lot more sense.”
Flames of humiliation scorched Hamish’s throat. Anger stiffened his jaw. Colleen? What did a private investigator know about basic science and field epidemiology? Only science was going to solve this case. He tried to speak, but all his larynx would release was a croak. When he tried again, out came the old grinding whisper. “Then stuff your investigation. It’s . . . it’s none of my business anyway.”
It made him seethe — his research ridiculed, his larynx seizing again, thousands of lives hanging in the balance because Zol was besotted by that woman.
Hamish hung up and coughed into his fist. What time did trial lawyers go to bed? Kenyon Cheung knew first-hand what was at stake. Could they share a nightcap?
Never mind. He was not going to risk a second rejection tonight.
On his way out the door the next morning, Zol fished two packages of Escarpment Pride sausages from the fridge and tossed them into the garbage bin. He’d bought them only two days ago at Four Corners. It seemed like a waste of perfectly good meat. But there was no way he could face them, even though Hamish’s idea about cat meat mixed in with pork sausage had to be one of the most outlandish things Zol had ever heard. He did have a nagging feeling there was something waiting to be discovered at Four Corners Fine Foods. He decided to stop there on the way to the office.
He paced up and down the aisles of Four Corners, inspecting the shelves he knew by heart. He started with the stacks of apricot and cherry jams imported from the emerging economies of Slovenia and Croatia. Did those jars contain prions? A qualified no. What about the panettone from Padua, the apple cakes from Amsterdam, the shortbreads from Scotland? Surely not, unless the baked goods contained beef tallow instead of the butter promised on the labels. He examined the coffee beans from Brazil, Kenya, and the South Pacific. Papua New Guinea was famous for its kuru, a form of CJD transmitted by cannibalism, but surely it was safe to drink their coffee. Wasn’t it? How about the tinned beef from Argentina, the cocktail sausages from Poland, the duck-liver pâté from France? If prions were running loose around the planet, they’d be impossible to trace.
The eagle on a packet of Escarpment Pride sausages glared at him from the meat cooler as though guarding a secret. He leaned in to read the fine print on the wrapper and his cellphone vibrated against his hip. He jumped backward and grabbed the phone from its holder.
The incoming call carried an unfamiliar area code. From somewhere outside North America. He considered pressing Ignore to cut off the call, but thought better of it. “Zol Szabo here.”
“Hello Zol.”
Damn. If he’d known it was Francine, he wouldn’t have answered. She was the last complication he needed right now.
“Zol?”
“Yes, Francine. Isn’t it early for you to be out of bed?”
“What do you mean? It’s three o’clock.”
“Three? Where are you?”
“Spain.”
“Oh.”
She was probably at another ashram. She’d lived at a string of them for the last six years, since Max was ten months old.
“I’m coming to Toronto and I wanna see Max.”
“When?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“That doesn’t give me much time to make any arrangements.”
“Swami Sivananda said that time is just a figment of the narrow mind.”
Whatever.
“I’m gonna stay at my friend Allie’s. Max can come to her place. Give you a break for the weekend.”
“I don’t need a break. Not from Max. And he doesn’t do sleep-overs.”
“For Chrissake Zol, I’m his mother. I wanna see him. It’s been friggin’ ages.”
The ashrams and the yoga hadn’t done much for her mouth. “More than three years, Francine.”
“That’s not my fault.”
Nothing ever was.
“You can have a supervised visit for six hours, just like you’re entitled to.”
“That’s not fair.”
He stared at a display of leeks, asparagus, and artichokes at the far end of the aisle. From that distance it looked like a patchwork portrait, the bearded face of one of her swamis. “That’s what the judgement says.”
“I don’t care about that,” she said.
“I’ll have to contact a social worker and book a supervisor for the visit.” It had been so long, he couldn’t remember exactly whom to call.
“I don’t need a goddamn supervisor to see my own child.”
“Tell me when you’ll be in Toronto and I’ll make the arrangements.”
“I told you. A couple of weeks.”
“I need to know the date.”
“Don’t be such a tight-ass. I don’t do dates. Swami said they inhibit the fluidity of the human spirit.”
He rolled his eyes. “Does Allie know when you’re coming?”
“She’s cool.”
“Have her call me.” He cleared his throat. “Anything else?”
“How’s Max’s arm? Is it still, uh, you know?”
“Yeah, it’s still spastic, Francine. Cerebral palsy doesn’t go away.”
She had always hated the distortion of Max’s arm and would never touch his hand.
“He doesn’t mind,” he added. “And neither do his friends.” At least not at this stage amid the innocence of grade two. And maybe the Extendo-Tox would help when Max finally got in to see Dr. Margolis.
Zol’s resentment flared. He was facing the case of a lifetime and a looming deadline, but he kept getting ridiculous calls that threatened to derail him. First Hamish, then Francine. “I gotta go,” he said, and ended the call.
If he did hear from Allie, he’d tell Max about the visit and arrange for a supervisor. If not, he’d know that Francine had cashed in her ticket for a few hundred grams of dope.
CHAPTER 16
Zol drummed on the top of his desk while his coffee grew cold beside a jar stuffed with pens and paper clips. His notebook was crammed with a thousand facts that amounted to nothing. He’d scrounged the Internet, then trolled the stacks at the university’s medical library, skimming every reference he could find on gelatin, prions, and CJD. He found editorials speculating that prions could make their way into gelatin from the boiled-up bones of mad cows. But in every study, gelatin came up clean. And no scientist had ever linked CJD to candies or confections of any kind.
How could you get a prion disease without being exposed to meat, gelatin, or animal by-products? At first, the meat-free diets of two of the CJD victims had seemed to complicate the puzzle. Now they felt like a godsend. Even if Hamish was right about Max’s favourite sausages being spiced up with cat meat (Zol couldn’t help but picture Cory’s cousins on the chopping block), sausages of any kind couldn’t be the source of the epidemic. Tonya and Danesh would never have touched them. He fished two loonies from the top drawer of his desk and weaved the coins through his fingers. What other source of prions might be lurking in the fridges and cupboards of Hamilton? The source wasn’t animal, and not likely to be mineral. Was it vegetable? How safe were peas and corn, carrots and eggplants?
He breathed deeply, calmed just a little by the cadence of the coins moving in symmetry across his fingers. His hands froze in mid-air. The loonies teetered between his fourth and fifth digits.
Where did Four Corners get the asparagus he’d seen on display that morning? Certainly not locally, not in November. Asparagus was a spring crop. It must have come from a country where the seasons were reversed, maybe Chile. How much did he know about Chile? How trustworthy was their government these days? Was it honest enough to report every case of BSE over a territory stretching hundreds of kilometres at the bottom of the world? Thousands of mad cows could be pooping all over Chile, and the rest of the world might never know it. Farmers could be spre
ading prion-infected manure onto their cash crops — artichokes, asparagus, potatoes, even zucchinis. Zol began to imagine prions swarming over his dinner plate, swimming in a glass of his favourite Maipo Valley red. He looked up with a start at the sight of Anne at his door.
“Mrs. Woolton’s here, Dr. Szabo. Should I show her in?”
He slipped the loonies into his blazer pocket and ran a hand through his hair. “Um . . . sure,” he said, straightening his blazer as he rose. “Of course.”
“It was easier than I thought,” Colleen said once they had settled at a small round table by the window. “It always amazes me how people reveal the most personal details to a perfect stranger on the telephone.”
The jasmine on her skin had lifted his spirits already. “We were due for a break,” he said.
She flipped through her notepad. “Excuse the scribbles. I didn’t take the time to make picture-perfect notes like Natasha’s. But the information is all here.”
“No problem,” he said, pulling his pen from his pocket. “I’ll tabulate while you talk. Shoot.”
“I’ll start with the family practice — two women, Dr. Isabelle Graham and Dr. Patricia Brunton. Only one of our cases is on their books — Rita Spinelli. She last saw Dr. Brunton on August twelfth. Was diagnosed with depression and prescribed medication — fluoxetine. The receptionist already knew that Rita had been killed in a traffic accident, and volunteered that the woman was otherwise well, came in for her Pap tests, was allergic to penicillin.”
