Hotel

"Here you fry at .."

"Three hundred and sixty degrees; the best temperature - for kitchens and the housewives too."

"So while the smoke-point remains about three hundred and sixty, the fat will do its job. Below that, it ceases to."

"That is true, monsieur. And the fat it will give food a bad flavor, tasting rancid, as today."

Facts, once memorized but rusty with disuse, stirred in Peter's brain. At Cornell there had been a course in food chemistry for Hotel Administration students. He remembered a lecture dimly . . . in Statler Hall on a darkening afternoon, the whiteness of frost on window panes. He had come in from the biting, wintry air outside. Inside was warmth and the drone of information fats and catalyzing agents.

"There are certain substances," Peter said reminiscently, "which, in contact with fat, will act as catalysts and break it down quite quickly."

"Yes, monsieur." Andre Lemieux checked them off on his fingers. "They are the moisture, the salt, the brass or the copper couplings in a fryer, too much 'eat, the oil of the olive. All these things I have checked. This is not the cause."

A word had clicked in Peter's brain. It connected with what he had observed, subconsciously, in watching the deep fryer being cleaned a moment earlier.

"What metal are your fry baskets?"

"They are chrome." The tone was puzzled. Chromium, as both men knew, was harmless to fat.

"I wonder," Peter said, "how good the plating job is. If it isn't good, what's under the chrome and is it - in any places - worn?"

Lemieux hesitated, his eyes widening slightly. Silently he lifted one of the baskets down and wiped it carefully with a cloth. Moving under a light, they inspected the metal surface.

The chrome was scratched from long and constant use. In small spots it had worn away entirely. Beneath scratches and worn spots was a gleam of yellow.

"It is brass!" The young Frenchman clapped a hand to his forehead. "Without doubt it has caused the bad fat. I have been a great fool."

"I don't see how you can blame yourself," Peter pointed out. "Obviously, long before you came, someone economized and bought cheap fry baskets.

Unfortunately it's cost more in the end."

"But I should have discovered this - as you have done, monsieur." Andre Lemieux seemed close to tears. "Instead, you, monsieur, you come to the kitchen - from your paperasserie - to tell me what is haywire here. It will be a laughing joke."

"If it is," Peter said, "it will be because you talked about it yourself.

No one will hear from me."

Andre Lemieux said slowly, "Others they have said to me you are a good man, and intelligent. Now, myself, I know this is true."

Peter touched the folder in his hand. "I'll read your report and tell you what I think."

"Thank you, monsieur. And I shall demand new fry baskets. Of stainless steel. Tonight they will be here if I have to hammer someone's head."

Peter smiled.

"Monsieur, there is something else that I am thinking."

"Yes?"

The young sous-chef hesitated. "You will think it, how you say, presumptuous. But you and I, Monsieur McDermott - with the hands free - we could make this a hot-shot hotel."

Though he laughed impulsively, it was a statement which Peter McDermott thought about all the way to his office on the main mezzanine.

9

A second after knocking at the door of room 1410, Christine Francis wondered why she had come. Yesterday, of course, it had been perfectly natural for her to visit Albert Wells, after his brush with death the night before and her own involvement. But now Mr. Wells was being adequately cared for and, with recovery, had reverted to his role as an ordinary guest among more than a thousand and a half others in the hotel. Therefore, Christine told herself, there was no real reason to make another personal call.

Yet there was something about the little elderly man which drew her to him. Was it, she wondered, because of his fatherliness and her perception, perhaps, of some of the traits of her own father to whose loss she had never quite adjusted, even after five long years. But no!

The relationship with her father had been one of her reliance on him.

With Albert Wells she found herself protective, just as yesterday she had wanted to shield him from the consequences of his own action in choosing the private nursing arrangement.

Or maybe, Christine reflected, she was, at this moment, just plain lonely, wanting to offset her disappointment in learning she would not meet Peter this evening, as they had both planned. And as to that - had it been disappointment, or some stronger emotion on discovering that he would be dining, instead, with Marsha Preyscott?