Doppelgangers by H. F. Heard

everything bestowed in its special container, and carried the whole off.
    When they were gone, after a little while another houseman came in for another dinner, but this one was practically ready, with the usual good timing which a good chef understands as well as his own breathing. The cook’s temper, which had been edged by this incident, however, was not mollified, and till the day ended, on the verge of the small hours of the next, he remained thunderous, with lightninglike explosions of irritability over the least thing.
    José, as he had come to think of himself, thought a little about the cook. Why this failure to have that meal ready in time? Did it link up with that little hiatus when this seemingly unguarded man didn’t ask where he, José, had been before he became José? It was too soon to say, and one of the things that secret agents know is never to forget clues and yet never to try to make sense of them, to force them into sense before they fit in of themselves.
    He still kept himself from coming or trying to come to any conclusions, still less from thinking of framing any questions, when two nights later the same thing occurred—the same failure of the supplies to arrive in time for a particular dinner, the arrival of the two men in yellow, their quiet, silent patience, their idling onlooking at the cook and his staff’s nervous hurry to get the food ready against time and under that cold and evidently contemptuously careless inspection. He had been there for a couple of weeks and these particular men had come perhaps four or five times and always with the same apparent unexpectedness. They would walk in and the cook seemed always taken aback and had to rush to prepare. Yet he seemed to know what dishes were wanted. He must, then, have been told earlier in the day, but evidently the hour was not specified: Of course, that would tease a good chef—but still, was the matter as simple as that?
    While he was still thinking this over, in the way that a chess player will play out problems to himself that are no part of any actual game but just because he has the chess mind, another small incident occurred in the kitchen that certainly gave him one more fact, but one that made the puzzle-problem more complicated, not simpler. The three other assistants were out one afternoon. He and the chef were alone and the old man had seated himself, after some fuming, on a stool near his stoves and was watching him as he took some lobsters from their containers and laid them on the table. They were, of course, still fully alive as they were drawn out from the damp seaweed in which they were wrapped. The pot was ready with boiling water and he was just picking them up by that one place whereby a live lobster can be held and not bite you, just at the end of the head-carapace, when the cook came forward, fussing.
    â€œWhat are you going to do with the creatures—put them into the boiling water? Don’t you know that that spoils the flavor? That they must be put in cold water with the same salt content as seawater, and then the water must rise to boiling point?”
    His, “Cruel, that?” was answered by a queer look, half of interest, half of assurance and a kind of “I told you so” expression. But the words gave the lie to such a notion:
    â€œDon’t be a fool, and don’t answer back! Learn your job; thought they said you knew it!”
    While this fuming went on, the portly figure had twirled round, snatched a set of fine skewers from where they hung on the wall, and, selecting the smallest of these, a fine rustless-steel stiletto, the chef seized with dexterity one of the lobsters and immediately drove the needle-pointed bodkin up behind the head-carapace. The claws which had been waving about flopped onto the table.
    â€œPut it into the pot, and here, do the same with the others, and if you’re too mealy-mouthed and delicate to stand cooking as it’s taught,