Chương 185: The Scores

The corridor out to the main stage had never been that long. With every step Chris could hear his own heart going. He could feel Ethan and Kira drawn tight beside him, both of them breathing carefully. When they came back out under those lights, the noise in the building shut off as though somebody had thrown a switch. Every eye in the place was on them and on the English team across the floor. The air had almost set. Mario Benini came to the center of the stage.

There was a great deal on his face — admiration, feeling, and a trace of the difficulty of being a judge.

"What we tasted today was not ten dishes." His voice went through the whole arena.

"What we tasted was ten human lives. The warmth of a childhood. The hunger to survive. The sweetness of a first love. The grief of a goodbye. And comfort found in the middle of being alone."

"Both teams answered those five memories at the highest level, each in their own way. England, with formidable learning, rigorous method and technique nobody can fault, reconstructed history and culture for us with complete precision. Every dish they made was a perfect object fit to be exhibited in a museum." He paused and turned to Arthur, who inclined his head slightly and accepted it.

"And Team USA." He turned back.

"They chose a more dangerous and a harder road. They did not reconstruct. They answered. They used their own hearts to feel those memories, and understand them, and hold them. Their dishes may not be standard. Some of them break the rules outright. They have souls." The room went tighter still. Everyone had heard what this was: a last confrontation between perfect technique and a true soul.

"I will now announce the scores for the Ultimate Banquet." Benini drew a breath, and the huge screen behind him lit. It split in half — England on the left, the United States on the right — with the five dishes listed below.

"Scores will be revealed dish by dish. Each judge marks each dish out of ten, for a maximum of fifty. The championship goes to the higher total across all five." Every heart in the building came up.

"Dish one, answering memory card one. The grandmother's hand-cut pasta." Under England's title — The Imperfect Hand — the numbers began. 9. 8. 9. 7. 9. 8. 9. 9. 9. 7. Total: 48. 9. A frightening number. The hall broke open. Every judge on the panel had concluded that England's dish was as far as technique and cultural reconstruction could go. Nothing moved on Arthur's face, but the corner of his mouth lifted a fraction. Then the Americans. Warm Memory. 9. 5. 9. 9. 9. 4. 9. 5. 9. 6. Total: 47. 9. One point.

Every American supporter in the building felt it drop. Behind from the first dish. Ethan's fist closed.

"Dish two, answering memory card two. The wartime black bread." England: Energy in the Dark. 9. 9. 9. 8. 9. 9. 10. 9. 8. Total: 49. 4. And that ten had come from Schmidt, the German judge. The place erupted. England had taken another impossible number. The Americans: The Force of Life. 9. 2. 9. 5. 9. 3. 9. 8. 9. 4. Total: 47. 2. Running totals: England 98. 3, the United States 95. 1. The gap had opened to 3. 2. Ethan had gone pale. Kira's lips pressed together. Chris felt himself sinking.

He'd known the strategy was a gamble. He hadn't expected the panel to reward technical perfection this heavily. Had he actually been wrong?

"Dish three, answering memory card four. The father's fish soup." Ethan's dish. Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. England: Tradition, Elevated. Arthur had used the best French clarification technique in existence to produce a fish consommé as clear as crystal. 9. 7. 9. 6. 9. 8. 9. 7. 9. 7. Total: 48. 5. Another enormous score. Now everything was on Ethan. Could that plain-looking, clumsy bowl of soup get anything at all? The Americans: Father's Soup.

The numbers came up one at a time. 9. 9. The first one straightened everybody's spine. Benini. 9. 8. 9. 9. 10. That last one was Schmidt, and it was his second perfect score of the day. One score still hadn't appeared. Ethan had stopped breathing. 9. 0. Madame Dubois. Technically, she found the soup too simple. Total: 48. 6. The Americans had taken the round by a tenth of a point. Ethan nearly came off the floor; Chris got a hand on him. Running totals: England 146. 8, the United States 143. 7. Still 3. 1 behind.

Hope was very thin.

"Dish four, answering memory card five. The bowl of congee in a foreign country." Chris's dish. England had built an Energy Porridge from rice and several grains — nutritionally balanced, texturally layered — with several elegant Japanese side dishes alongside it. 9. 5. 9. 4. 9. 5. 9. 2. 9. 6. Total: 47. 2. A relatively ordinary high score. Akiko Tanaka had given it only 9. 2; she felt the dish was too full, and had lost the atmosphere that belongs to congee. An opening. Chris's heart started moving.

Now his own bowl of rice and water. Team USA:"Empty." The first score, from Benini: 9. 0. He clearly hadn't understood it. Second, Schmidt: 9. 1. Third, Emily: 9. 2. None of them high. The American supporters felt the floor go. That was it. Chris's palms had gone wet. Then the fourth. Madame Dubois: 9. 8. She appeared to have tasted, in that bowl, a purity French cooking has always chased. One score left, and it was the one that mattered. The owner of the card. Akiko Tanaka.

Every eye in the building was on a flashing question mark. Time stopped. Then a number came up, slowly. 10. A clean, flawless, perfect score. After half a second of silence the arena came apart.

"Empty" finished on 47. 1. Still a tenth below England's dish — but that perfect ten, from the one person whose memory it was, went into everybody like adrenaline. Running totals: England 194. 0, the United States 190. 8. Gap 3. 2. One dish left. Kira's apple pie. Every eye turned to her. The quiet girl who barely spoke had become the last hope of the American team.

"Final dish, answering memory card three. The first-love apple pie." England: Sweet Geometry. They had deconstructed an apple pie with molecular technique and reassembled it into a crystalline geometric dessert. 9. 8. 9. 8. 9. 9. 9. 0. 9. 8. Total: 48. 3. That 9. 0 was Madame Dubois. She found the dish cold, and without feeling in it. England's final total locked at 242. 3. To win, the Americans needed more than 48. 3 plus 3. 2 — 51. 5. Which was impossible. Fifty was the maximum. The competition was over. Silence.

Ethan's shoulders came down. The light went out of Kira's eyes. Chris looked at a number he couldn't reach and felt something enormous and useless rise in him. Had they lost, after all of it? The compère's voice came into the quiet.

"We will now reveal the score for the American team's final dish. Normandy." The numbers began. Benini: 9. 8. Schmidt: 9. 7. Emily: 9. 9. Akiko Tanaka: 9. 8. Four scores, and they were already a miracle. Last, Madame Dubois. A number came up on the screen in bright red. 10. Kira's total: 9. 8 plus 9. 7 plus 9. 9 plus 9. 8 plus 10 — 49. 2. The American final total: 190. 8 plus 49. 2 — 240. 0. England: 242. 3. They had lost. An enormous sigh went up out of the American supporters. Chris closed his eyes. Lost.

In the end, they'd lost. And then, in the second before the result was announced, Madame Dubois picked up the microphone in front of her.

"I request that my score be changed." There was a tremor in her voice, and it was extraordinarily clear. The hall froze. Benini was thrown too.

"Madame Dubois — under the rules, a score cannot be altered once submitted."

"I know." She stood. She was looking at Kira, and at a plate of apple pie that had barely been touched.

"But I have just made a mistake. The ten I gave was a score given by a judge. It was based on my assessment of that dish's technique, its invention, and its execution."

"But." She drew a breath.

"Today's theme is the Ultimate Banquet. We are not only judges. We are also the people eating."

"And as an ordinary person eating — a person who, forty years ago, under an apple tree in Normandy, ate an apple pie exactly like that one, rough, and slightly burnt — that dish is not a ten to me." She paused, and said the sentence that turned the entire arena to stone.

"It is priceless."

"I ask to exercise the right of the diner, and not the right of the judge. I ask to give my own honest assessment of a memory that has been perfectly answered." Benini and the other three judges conferred urgently for a few seconds. Then Benini nodded.

"We respect your decision. What is your final score?" Madame Dubois didn't answer. She simply pressed the last button on the unit in front of her. Her 10 disappeared from the screen. In its place came a symbol nobody in the hall had seen before. A gold trophy. The mark of a champion.

"What… does that mean?" Even the compère had lost his footing.

"It means," said Benini, and there was something shaken in his voice, "that under the rules of the Ultimate Banquet, when a judge believes a dish has answered their own memory perfectly and irreplaceably, they may cast the Champion's Vote. That vote adds five bonus points directly to that team's score." Five points. Kira's total went from 49. 2 to 54. 2. The American final total went from 240. 0 to 245. 0. 245. 0 against 242. 3. They were in front.

In the last second, in the most unlikely way anyone could have imagined, the whole thing had turned over. For one moment after the announcement the world stopped. Then:"We won — WE WON!" Ethan got there first. He let out a sound like an animal, grabbed Chris and lifted him bodily off the floor. Kira stood where she was with the tears coming down like a broken string of beads. She had both hands over her mouth and her whole body was shaking.

Chris, up in the air in Ethan's arms, looked at a crowd going insane and at Kira crying and at that blinding 245. 0 on the screen, and his mind went completely blank. Won? Had they actually won? Were they world champions? The thought went through him like lightning. Something enormous came up out of him that he had no name for, and it took every piece of his reason and his composure with it. He didn't know whether he wanted to cry or laugh.

He simply put everything he had left into one long roar at the ceiling, and let all of it out." AAAH—!" The compère's voice went out through the speakers over all of it.

"Ladies and gentlemen! Please congratulate—""Your new champions of the Global Culinary Champion League—"" Team USA!"