Chương 153: Arthur's Visit

The American team had just settled on their bold tactic — chaos against order — and the whole room was still riding the high of a decision with no way back, when somebody knocked lightly at the training-kitchen door. All three of them froze. At that hour, nobody should have been coming here but them. Chris crossed the floor and opened it, and the man standing outside was the last person he expected. He was tall, in a well-cut white chef's jacket with the Union Jack embroidered on it in silver thread.

His blond hair was short and combed to an exact part, and his eyes were an ice blue. Standing there, he had the quality of a precision instrument — a scalpel, calm to the point of coldness. Arthur Campbell. The captain of Team England.

"Chris White." His voice was level, with no rise or fall in it at all, the English pure London.

"I think we should meet." Something dropped in Chris's chest. Why would this man come to him? A show of force? A fishing trip? He stepped aside and let Arthur in. Ethan and Kira saw who it was and went guarded at once. Ethan moved to Chris's shoulder without thinking about it, like an animal over its food. Kira drifted back to her own station without any visible reaction, and her knives were at her hand. Arthur seemed not to register the tension in the room at all.

His gaze went across the kitchen and settled, finally, on the whiteboard, wiped clean.

"So you're ready," he said mildly.

"We're always ready." Chris answered without deference and without heat. He tried to read something off Arthur's face, but the face was a well-made mask and gave up nothing.

"I'm not here to provoke you." Arthur said it as though he'd read the thought.

"Only out of respect for a finals opponent. Raphaël called me after the match. He rates you very highly." At Raphaël's name, the guard in Chris eased a little.

"He mentioned you to me too," Chris said.

"He told me you were harder to deal with than he is." The corner of Arthur's mouth moved for the first time, very slightly. It could not be called a smile. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"Raphaël has always been sentimental," he said.

"He keeps insisting that cooking needs emotion, needs story, needs all those things you can't hold. Our teacher taught us that. Raphaël learned half of it."

"Our teacher, Maître Corbin, spent his life pursuing one summit, and it was not innovation and it was not feeling. It was reproducible perfection." Something close to religious devotion came into his eyes.

"He believed the greatest moment of a dish is not the moment it is created. It is the moment it can be recreated perfectly for the thousandth time, the ten-thousandth time — so that every guest, at any hour, in any place, receives the identical and absolute experience. That is the end point of cooking. It is industry. It is science. It is the highest form of art." Chris understood at last. It wasn't that Arthur had no philosophy of cooking. His philosophy was an anti-philosophy.

He had taken cooking out of personal artistic creation and elevated it to the level of industrial production.

"So when you replicate those classic dishes, it's homage to that perfection," Chris said.

"No." Arthur shook his head.

"We're demonstrating that every so-called work of genius is, underneath, a program that can be broken open and rerun. What we do is run the program — and execute it better than the originator did, without human error and without the interference of feeling." Both Ethan and Kira looked physically uncomfortable.

"What about the soul of the food?" Kira couldn't hold it in. Arthur's eyes moved to her, and for the first time something stirred behind the ice blue, the way a man looks at a species he can't classify.

"Soul?" he said.

"What is that? Is it data that can be quantified? What is its flavor-molecule structure? What is its optimal cooking temperature? If it cannot be defined, cannot be measured, cannot be reproduced — then it does not exist in my kitchen." Kira had nothing to answer with. The entire world she took pride in did not, by Arthur's logic, exist. Chris drew a breath. There was no point arguing any of this. They were two computers on different operating systems; the languages didn't meet anywhere.

"Thanks for coming, Arthur." Chris decided to end it.

"We understand your position. We'll see you on the floor."

"Of course." Arthur nodded; he seemed to feel he'd said enough as well. He turned to go, and stopped at the door.

"Oh — one thing." He looked back, in that same flat unrippled tone.

"I forgot to mention. The rules of the final carry a few special surprises every year. I hope your story and your feeling are equal to them." Then he pulled the door open and went out, and his back disappeared at the end of the corridor. The kitchen was dead silent. Arthur's visit had done more damage than any provocation could have. He hadn't flexed anything. He had simply stated his view of the world, calmly, and it was enough to put a hairline crack in the confidence the American team had built an hour ago.

"That guy…" Ethan held it for a long moment and then got it out.

"That guy is insane."

"No. He isn't insane." Chris shook his head, and his expression was very grave.

"He's a believer. He genuinely thinks everything he does is the highest truth of cooking. That kind of man is more dangerous than any opponent." And what had that last line meant? The final will have special rules… A shadow settled over Chris's mind. The chaos tactic they'd designed was built on the assumption of standard competition rules. If the rules themselves changed, would the disaster they'd so carefully engineered turn into a real one — the kind you can't take back?