Doppelgangers (8 page)

He wondered what the effect would be, every time he caught sight of himself, to see this rather beaten, weary object looking at him. Surely, to his divided thought, it would act as a steady suggestion to further discouragement. He feebly thrust his tongue across the toothless gum of his upper front jaw trying to make the cheek take a less dismal fold. In vain; the cheek was far too loose and empty to be filled; it simply made a grotesque grimace. They had removed all the bicuspids as well as canines and incisors. Only the molars were left—like some degenerate ruminant, he thought dismally. They had not been content just to let his face fall in. With their hateful mutilations, they had added skin and flesh, making his mouth and cheeks and lips too big for even the support of the teeth which he had had. He would be a scarecrow even when they should give him back his teeth. For some reason they had wished to break his vanity, evidently, perhaps to make him a better, more selfless, agent, and so kill two birds with one stone, make him disappear, the handsome young agent whom one of the Bull's agents might now know by sight, and also to ruin in him the last vestige of self-love so that he might become their slave for life. They had just mutilated him, as lecherous tyrants turned men into eunuchs to guard their harems. He must give up looking at himself.

Well, it was time to be keeping his appointment, and he was tired of waiting, for he no longer had any will to strike out for himself; there was no longer any sense in such a thought. He had been making his way all the time easily to the destination, and, sure enough, there was the great façade of the office just across the boulevard. As the lights flashed a clear-way for pedestrians, he walked over.

At the door the man scarcely looked at him as he took his card. He was shown straight up to a small booth in a vast office room and he was scarcely seated before a clerk came in with a small file and began at once, “A situation has been found for you at 46832 Avenue 23 west. You will be there for interview at 2
P.M
., please. Refer to us if anything should need correction. That is all for today. Your registration fee, as you know, is deducted from your first six months' pay by monthly installments. Good morning.” And the door was being held open for him to pass through. “This is a memo of the address and notification that you are sent by us. That is your serial number on our books.”

As he went out, he realized that his name had never been asked and the whole arrangement must show some clear understanding between this huge agency and the Mole. But again curiosity was dead in him. He no longer found that secret agent's secret pleasure of watching the other agent when neither must betray to the other that they both know. He did not look at the youth who repeated the formulae, but passed out, only nodding to show his assent and taking the card held out while the card he had carried was taken from him.

He went and lunched comfortably. There, too, Alpha had shown his power to understand the new anthropology. He had made his people into gourmets. They were taught to appreciate food and to think about it as a large part of their living. The most stable civilizations, said one of the new history books, have always made a great art out of each sense—and no sense is so sane as taste, the appetite for food; every fanatic has been forced to confess that without a taste for food you cannot be healthy. One of the wisest of the old statesmen, Talleyrand, said eating is the one pleasure that can be enjoyed three times a day and with skill can be made each time to last an hour. The most stable civilization of the past, that of China, evolved the most elaborate cuisine and menus. So men were taught how to eat well, discriminately, healthily, appreciatively, slowly and at their ease. Yes, he had forgotten how good food could be and how well the Alpha crew ran their world and knew it. They had taken his looks but not his palate, and the dishes he chose could all be dealt with by his remaining teeth. To do justice to one of the middle menus took all the time he had till his appointment would be due after he had walked off the comfortable weight of food.

He went out into the early afternoon light and headed for the address. As he came up with the numbers on his card and was scanning the buildings, one of the sidewalkers, as they were called—the smartly uniformed public informationists, as was their official name—came up to him and asked if he could be of service, took his card, and showed him the entrance he needed. He felt sure that was a check-up but he had evidently passed the test. Under the guise of incessant courtesy and helpfulness, these public servants, most people knew who troubled to understand, were the first line of Alpha's informants. It used to be said when people, in the first novelty, used still to joke about Alpha's innovations, that information please worked two ways and that though you mightn't know it you always gave away more than you took in.

III

THE AMBUSH

He entered the outer office and found to his surprise that he was quickly led through into a large kitchen and beyond that into another small interview room. He waited there for a moment, and then a large, red-faced man entered, actually wearing the chef's traditional costume. He flung himself in the chair at the desk and held out his hand for the card, looked from it to the face, and then remarked, “Well, I hope they told you I have a temper like my fires. I believe in hot fires for cooking and an equally hot temper for scullions.” It was a breezy opening, so breezy that the natural reaction of the old-time agent in him made him think the part well acted on the whole though perhaps a little on the obvious side.

“What's wrong with your mouth?” was also just the same formula of forthrightness.

He replied, “I was getting a new set and found the changes were more expensive than I had thought. You see, I was changing my job and so my pay had run down. I have to wait till I can earn enough for them.”

There was no further question as to why he was out of work and where he had last been at work. Of course these big employment agencies took that task of inquiry and references off the hands of the employers now. Still he might have asked, and, though it was a relief that he had not, still a mind trained to suspect clues in everything asked itself, Was this an oversight? Was the man really as roughly bland as he seemed? Or was it a deliberate avoidance, because this new employer of his was himself still rather new to the niceties of dissimulation? A practiced hand would never first play the part of the bluff, open-hearted downrighter and then avoid an obvious question which, playing his part, he ought to ask. The “Well, be here sharp at four; I like to get my dinners well under way by six,” was well enough done to seem possibly the real thing.

“Your name is Anwerp, but that's too fancy for this level. All my underlings have a series of names—the last in the job you're taking over was José so you'll be José. You're good at pastry and you'll have plenty of that work—the tables I serve like that—but you'll have to turn your hand to anything. I'm often rushed, and my orders may come at any time for very varying amounts; be sure I'll work you hard and take nothing from you but hard and willing work.”

He turned in again that evening. He had bought his cook's clothes when he went out. He was kept till after midnight. The dinners that were being served evidently weren't for many people. The cook apparently worked for a clientele who lived in houses not far away but not in this stack of buildings. The meals were put in insulated containers, sealed up, and fetched away by housemen who came for them. He made, of course, no inquiries as to who the cook's employers were. The cook was in fair spirits and had plenty of assistance. Beside himself there were three others. They paid absolutely no attention to him. For all they cared, evidently, he might be the José who had been there before. He was simply a name for a pair of hands.

But over one dinner the old chef became anxious, then irritable, and finally explosive. He thought it must be because perhaps they were behind schedule with it. Certainly there must have been some hitch. The actual supplies were delivered late, a delivery man rushing down and depositing a series of sealed cartons while on his heels marched in the two men who were to fetch it. They looked over the still unpacked food but didn't make any remark about unpunctuality or, indeed, say anything. They were dressed in plain uniforms which might have been those of chauffeurs, their only concession to the public rule of color in everything being that the tint was lemon yellow. They stood about with their hands behind them watching with a patient interest the cook's efforts to get on with his job. One propped himself by the stoves and looked on at every action the cook was taking, evidently making the master nervous. The other stood by the big table where the food was being prepared. They seemed to be the type of well-trained servant who is so bored with his own job—and does it so perfectly on schedule—that he has time to watch with a detached interest the incompetent way other men carry on their tasks. Their eyes flitted over every activity of the five men with a faint impression of superiority. Nothing seemed to escape them and yet nothing seemed worth more than a moment's cursory glance. At last the things were ready, for this meal wasn't an elaborate one. The two lemon-colored onlookers took possession, saw 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.

“What 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:

“Don'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.

“Put 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, here's something that may help your conscience. You might have a job where you'd have to kill your own poultry and other meat. Well, what I've shown you will help your fine feelings. All you've got to do is to touch the animal on that spot with a very fine sharp skewer and it flops. You can kill a sheep or indeed an ox that way and the flesh is as good as if you'd cut its throat. For I suppose you are merciful and not just a mollycoddle about blood. When it's dead you open its throat, hang it up, and death has been so quick and central that the blood drains away almost as clean and quickly as though it had died from the cutting of its arteries.

“All you have to do is to get the animal to lower its head to some fodder if it is a big one, so that it opens the cervical vertebrae, push your skewer between the two top ones, and that drives the point in close to the medulla oblongata and so its breathing stops. Yes, a cook should know the outlines of anatomy. We were taught it at our cuisine school, and quite rightly. That spot saves a lot of trouble. Have been told it would work just as well with a man—all animals have it as their Achilles heel—a bit high up, but as long as one knows what one is looking for the name doesn't matter, does it?”