Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves

by Dave Lowry

  “Buffalo in March,” I said. “Sounds attractive. I’ve been to Buffalo in January. How’s it different?”

  “The snow is a more charming shade of gray,” she said. Then she paused. I waited. “I need a ride.”

  “Where to?”

  “I heard there was some good Chinese food in St. Louis,” she said. “I was thinking about coming there to try it.”

  I wanted to ask why she didn’t get a flight. Or even buy a ticket on a bus. Or why she wanted to come to St. Louis. I wanted to ask. I didn’t. It didn’t seem like the right time for a long conversation. Especially after what she said next.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t have any right to ask you to come get me. You don’t even know me. But I don’t have anyone else I can ask.”

  Then I finally heard it. Tension in her voice. No panic. But there was some anxiety. I heard, in my head, the Warm-up Suit back in Buffalo. You think she going to get away with this?

  There was another reason I didn’t ask her any of the questions that were bouncing around in my head. There are times when you have to make your call quickly. Even a second’s hesitation is deadly. That was definitely one of my rules. It’s #4. When you shouldn’t hesitate, don’t. “Don’t you think my girlfriend is outstandingly hot?” a guy asks you, and if you don’t answer instantly, if you don’t say without any hesitation, “Yeah, she’s really good-looking,” even if she has a face that could make a freight train take a dirt road, you are going to be immediately in a place in your friendship with that guy that’s never going to be the same. This was one of those times. Either be gallant and step up or never hear from Corinne Chang ever again. My call to make. But it was going to have to be made now.

  “Hey,” I said. “You do have a right to ask me to come. Remember when I promised if you ever needed a big, sensitive, but manly American guy to rescue you, I’d be there?”

  “I’m not at a rest stop, though,” she said. Even through the phone, I could hear the relief in her voice.

  “I can be flexible,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve seen you sleep in the front seat of a Toyota.”

  16

  Rule #33: When cooking pork in a wok, it’s 80 percent done when the pink disappears.

  I asked for a few days off. I expected Mr. Leong to go through the roof. He took it well, though. A lot better than I thought he would. He didn’t actually throw anything. It was some personal business, I told him. “No problem,” he said. Which struck me as odd because in the time I’d been working there, Mr. Leong’s perspective on what constituted a problem had a fairly wide latitude. A piece of pork fat that fell on the floor could send him into a fifteen-minute harangue about wasting good food through such carelessness—or as he put it, “You guys no care, you no pay for food. Food costs. You know? Food not free.”

  “Where you go?” he asked me when I told him I needed a few days away.

  “I go get friend,” I said.

  “Friend boy? Friend girl?”

  “Friend girl,” I said. “But not girlfriend.”

  “No problem,” he said again. “But you not come back, I find you cook someone else, I cut you into pieces.” He held up a thumb and forefinger pinched closely together to demonstrate the size of the pieces he had in mind.

  I promised I wouldn’t cook anyone else.

  “You come back,” he said. “You, me, we have something to talk about.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.

  “I’m taking off for a couple of days,” I told Langston. The sun was out; even at midmorning, it was warm enough that I could feel dampness on the back of my T-shirt. We’d been pushing each other back and forth across the alley. We were changing up our rhythm spontaneously, stopping, speeding up, unexpectedly putting pauses in the movements to keep the sparring from becoming choreographed and routine. Except for Mrs. Trahn, who lived with her husband in an apartment on the first floor and who always came back from a walk this time of day, studiously ignoring us as she went past, we were alone.

  We were both in much better shape than the first time we’d practiced together. We stopped now not because we were too winded but because we were both working the lunch shifts at our kitchens. We went back upstairs to the apartment.

  “Why are you taking off work?” Langston asked. “You never take off work. The kitchen at the Eastern Palace is your Fortress of Solitude.”

  I told him about Corinne. I told him about the magical meeting Corinne and I had at that rest stop in New Hampshire. I told him about dropping her off at her friend’s apartment in Buffalo. I didn’t mention the part about punching out the Chinese punk who asked me if I was a friend of Wenqian’s. Or the threats he made.

  “What are you going to do with her when you get her here?” Langston asked.

  “I haven’t figured that one out yet,” I admitted. “Might be that I don’t have to do anything with her. Maybe she’s just decided to relocate to St. Louis.”

  “Yeah,” Langston said. “I can see that.” He didn’t say anything else. I was grateful. He changed the subject.

  “Leong say something to you about anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Said he’d cut me into pieces if I didn’t come back,” I said. “But that seems pretty ordinary for him.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He said there was something he wanted to talk to me about when I did come back. You have any idea what that’s all about?”

  The side of Langston’s mouth twitched up. “I’ll let him tell you.”

  I would like to have thought that I hadn’t given Corinne Chang a lot of my mental attention. That would have been less than accurate. I’d thought about her since I’d last seen her in Buffalo. I’d thought about the way she’d looked at me when we’d said goodbye. I’d thought about the four things I knew about her: (1) The puffy noises she made in her sleep. (2) The way she could listen. (3) The fact she was almost certainly lying when she said she was just taking some time off from her job. (4) The color of her underwear.

  I also thought about the conversation I had with her jerk boyfriend on the phone. Or ex-boyfriend. I wasn’t sure about that, either.

  I had thought about it all. The only conclusion I’d reached was that the black bra and panties should definitely be higher on the list than in the place I’d put them.

  17

  Rule #41: While there might not be any good reasons to go to Buffalo, there could conceivably be a reason to go back.

  Two days later, I picked up Corinne at a motel outside Buffalo.

  The drive, from St. Louis across Illinois and Indiana, is not chock-a-block with scenic distractions. Which was good, because as I drove, I had enough distractions going on inside. I’d been busy since Corinne and I had parted. This was the first time I had a chance to be alone with my thoughts.

  I wondered why I’d been so quick to agree to make this trip. I wondered if it had anything to do with the way Corinne had looked sleeping on the passenger’s seat as we drove across New York. I thought it might. I made a list of the other people in my life for whom I would be out on the highway to Buffalo. That didn’t take too long. I thought about guys I’d known, a few in high school, a few more in college, who had gotten involved with what Toby, my Beddingfield roommate, used to call “trouble drains.”

  Trouble drains were people—girls—who, while attractive and fun to be with, had a way of constantly being in crises or troubling situations. And what was worse, they had a way of sucking the people around them—especially boyfriends—right into the swirling vortex of that trouble. Get too close to a trouble drain, Toby insisted, and sooner or later you’d be caught in the swirl. It started slowly, he theorized. So slowly that you were just circling around imperceptibly until it was too late, and then you were spinning, spinning out of control and heading right down that drain.

  I thought about the threatening call I’d intercepted on Corinne’s cell phone when I was busy mindin
g my own business. About the way her friend Ariadna had looked away when the subject of why Corinne was in Buffalo came up. I lost my train of thought, thinking about the black bra and panties, but I brought it back on track. The Bald Warm-up Suit. The sound of her voice when she’d called to ask me to come get her. I rapped on the steering wheel and watched Illinois, then Indiana, then Ohio go past, cold and gray. I wondered if I was scared and decided maybe just a little, although I preferred, I decided, the word “concern” instead. I wondered if I was thinking of Corinne in a way I had not previously thought about most girls I had known.

  I had looked forward to being alone with my thoughts, but by the time I’d driven through Cleveland, still in northern Ohio, I realized that rather than being alone, the Toyota was actually getting pretty crowded with all those thoughts, and I was relieved when my phone buzzed and I pulled off onto an exit to answer it.

  It was Corinne. I wondered why she wasn’t still at her friend Ariadna’s apartment. I was wondering about a lot of other things, though. That one would have to wait. I followed her directions to a motel.

  On the way back to St. Louis, Corinne and I stopped at another motel, this one about sixty miles north of Columbus, right on the interstate. It was tricked out with gingerbread, made to look like someone had decided that what mid-Ohio really needed along the road was a Swiss chalet. The Toyota performed admirably. Its thirst for oil didn’t appear too much worse. I kept a couple of plastic bottles under the front seat though, just in case it developed a sudden craving.

  “This is the second date night you’ve taken me to a motel,” Corinne said from the bathroom. She was combing her hair. I could see her reflection in the mirror. I was sprawled on the bed in a pair of sweatpants and a Boston College T-shirt. I was reading from a brochure I found on the nightstand about the local attractions in this part of Ohio. It turned out there weren’t many.

  “Actually,” she said, leaning over and poking her head around the door so she could see me, “do you realize that every night we’ve been together since you picked me up, we’ve slept together?”

  “We didn’t sleep together at your friend’s apartment,” I said. “Or at my parents’ house.”

  “We were under the same roof,” she said, her voice coming from the other side of the bathroom. “That’s close enough.”

  I let it go. I hadn’t been around her all that much, but I’d already decided Corinne Chang had a strange sense of humor. Then, too, there were some other things I wanted to talk about more.

  She came in and tugged down the covers on her bed. She had on a yellow T-shirt that came all the way to her thighs. I wasn’t sure about the color of her panties. I was pretty sure the bra wasn’t there at all.

  She got in and reached over, clicked off the light between us, and we lay there. I had my arms folded back behind my head, looking at the ceiling. I tried to think a little less about her breasts and a little more about what we needed to talk about. I focused on the task. I did pretty well, especially considering the perkiness of the distraction. Distractions.

  “Remember that afternoon we were driving across New York,” I said, “and you said ‘Okay, I give’? And then you asked me who I was?”

  “Yep.”

  “And I told you?”

  “Yep,” she repeated. “You told me to some extent. I still don’t know any of Tucker’s Rules past the first three.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Now it’s my turn: I give. Who the hell are you, Wenqian?”

  I rolled over and clicked on the lamp between our beds. She rolled over and looked at me, blinking in the sudden light. She’d left her hair down. Part of it fell over her left eye. I got up and sat in the chair over by the window. The heater in the room would have been humming if it had been working correctly. Instead, it was making a low, dull drone, like a jet taking off very far away. It was a little louder in the silence.

  “How did you know my Chinese name?”

  “There was a punk Chinese guy who came up to me when I was getting ready to leave your friend’s apartment,” I said. “He asked if I knew Wenqian. I didn’t know who he was talking about. I thought he might just have been setting me up to hustle me or mug me. Just making up some name to distract me and give him a chance to get closer. If I had thought about it, it wouldn’t have helped. I would have never figured there would be any way I’d just happen to run into someone from Buffalo who just happened to know that you were in town. He meant you, though, didn’t he?”

  Corinne nodded without looking at me. She’d pushed the covers down and was sitting with her back to the bedstead, her knees drawn up. She produced a red scrunchie-thing and pulled her dark hair back into a ponytail.

  “You didn’t tell him where I was?” she asked, still not looking at me.

  “I told you,” I said. “I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “So what did you tell him?”

  “I punched him,” I said. She jerked her head in my direction. “I thought he was just talking, trying to get close enough to me to pull out a gun or a knife, to rob me.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He went down,” I said. “But then he started talking. He asked me if I thought ‘she’ was going to get away with it. If I thought ‘they’ were just going to give up. And he told me it didn’t really matter much if somebody died in the process. So, yeah, I’m a little slow, but I’ve figured out who ‘she’ is. Want to tell me who ‘they’ are?”

  She closed her eyes and was still for a minute, then she nodded. “Yes. But what happened after that?”

  “Okay, so I’m staying with my friend in St. Louis,” I went on. “Working at a restaurant. And you’ll never guess who walks into the kitchen the other day to have a chat with me.”

  She looked up, and I saw a flicker of concern on her face. “The guy?”

  “No, but that’s a good guess,” I said. I filed away her reaction. She knew Mr. Bald Warm-up Suit. She had some reason to be afraid of him. Or afraid for me. Which didn’t make me feel any better. “It was an FBI agent,” I said. “Wanna guess what she wanted to talk about?”

  Corinne shook her head. She was staring straight ahead again. Her skin, in the light of the bedside lamp, was almost bronze, tight and smooth across her cheekbones.

  “She wanted to know if I knew the whereabouts of a Miss Corinne Chang,” I said.

  Corinne didn’t say anything. I let it hang in the air for a minute.

  “Now we’re at the part of the movie,” I said after a while, “where I say, ‘Whatever is going on with you—and now especially that I seem to be involved—we need to go to the cops,’ and you tell me some good reason why we can’t go to the cops.”

  Corinne folded her hands and put them under her chin, like she was praying, staring straight ahead. “I can’t think of a good reason,” she said. “But supposing we do. What am I supposed to tell them?”

  “What do they want to know?” I asked.

  Corinne shrugged.

  “You don’t have any idea?”

  “I have lots of ideas.”

  For the next hour, while a cold wind in the cold dark outside rattled the motel windows, I sat in a chair near the window, my legs propped up on a table, while Corinne sat on the bed with hers crossed beneath her and told me some of them.

  18

  Rule #95: When you’re already lost and clueless, it’s best not to clutter things with any more information that’s as likely to be superfluous as not.

  We met with Ms. Masterson the morning after the Toyota got us to St. Louis, at a sandwich shop near the FBI’s offices in Clayton, a suburb a few miles from downtown St. Louis. It was where lots of government offices and other businesses that preferred clean streets and safety over city squalor and random crime were located. Corinne ordered a sweet roll while we waited for her.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Corinne said. “But I’ve been craving a sweet roll ever since I saw you eat that one at the rest stop, back in New Hamp
shire.”

  “Can’t expect this one to measure up,” I said. “The cellophane wrapper imparts a plasticky undercurrent of flavor profile you just can’t get anywhere else.”

  “Along with that special aging that takes place when they sit in that machine for a month or so.”

  I nodded.

  Even so, she did some work on it. Corinne was halfway through the roll when Ms. Masterson came in. She was wearing a dark green skirt and jacket with a white blouse. She looked like any of the other office workers in the place getting a late breakfast, sitting at booths and tables, studying the laptops in front of them. I introduced Corinne. Ms. Masterson sat at our table, across from me and next to Corinne.

  “Show her your badge,” I said.

  Ms. Masterson looked at Corinne. “You want to see my badge?”

  “Pass,” Corinne said.

  “You should,” I said. “It’s pretty neat.”

  Both of them ignored me.

  “You’re Corinne Chang,” Ms. Masterson said, pulling a small notebook from her purse, flipping it open and scanning it. Her hands looked strong. Her fingers were thick. Not fat. But powerful. I was willing to double down on my bet that she’d played field hockey in college.

  “Born March fourteenth, nineteen eighty-eight?” she said, reading off the pad.

  “Yes.”

  “And you have been living for the past five years in Montreal?”

  “I have.”

  “You worked as a gem sorter for a diamond company there? Wing Sung Jewelry Importers?”

  Corinne nodded. “It’s not a retail company. We sold diamonds wholesale, along with a few other gems. We sold to larger jewelry stores all over Canada. Some parts of the U.S.”