Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves

by Dave Lowry

  “I’ve been getting some calls,” she said. “Threatening ones.” She sat down opposite, poured both cups full, then pushed one across the table to me.

  “Funny you should mention that,” I said.

  “You’ve gotten some calls too?”

  I shook my head. “They were a little more direct.” I told her about the two in the car. And the gun.

  “Were you scared?”

  “You’ve done my laundry before, remember?” I asked her.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Well,” I said, “Trust me. I don’t think you’d have wanted to have washed my underwear after that.”

  She told me about the calls she’d been getting on her cell phone. A voice she didn’t recognize told her that she needed to be careful, that people were watching her, that something bad could happen to her in the near future.

  “They think I have the inventory. The diamonds.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “Sure I do,” Corinne said. “That’s why I’m working ten-hour shifts as a waitress, listening to wrinkly old Chinese businessmen proposition me. And that’s how I’m able to afford these upscale digs.” She fanned her hands over the tiny kitchen.

  “The question was rhetorical.”

  She looked at me and didn’t say anything.

  “We need to tell Agent Masterson,” I said. “About the encounter I had this morning and about the phone calls.”

  She took a sip of tea and continued to look at me over the cup. “Has it occurred to you that our relationship is built largely on someone trying to hurt me?”

  “We have a relationship?”

  “If you’ll recall,” she said, “I asked you pretty much the same question not that long ago. Your answer was not exactly forthcoming.”

  “No, no,” I said. “You asked if I was attracted to you. I answered straight up. Being attracted to someone isn’t the same as having a relationship. If it were, Langston and Bao Yu would already be the Hottest Couple of the Year instead of just now going out together for the first time.”

  Corinne tilted her head. A thick strand of her hair dropped down. It lay along her neck just for a second, and I could see it coil, with an inky shimmer, in the kitchen light.

  “You’re an interesting person,” she said.

  I picked up my teacup. It was so hot, I had to hold it with my fingertips. I didn’t say anything because, really, what can you say when someone says you’re interesting? Agree and you sound like a pompous jerk. Disagree and it sounds like you’re just trying to get them to talk more, to tell you more about why they think you’re interesting. And that comes with its own potential for pompous jerkiness. Better just to shut up.

  “Are you scared now?” she asked.

  “A little bit.” I took a sip of the tea, sucking in just a little with a lot of air to cool it. Chinese drink tea so hot it can blister paint. It was just short of boiling. I sat back in the chair, rubbed my face, and realized I was tired. Part of it was the adrenaline dump from the morning. I’d had someone point a gun at me and threaten me. It was a new experience. It wasn’t one I thought I could ever get used to.

  “Mostly, though,” I said, “I’m getting pissed. I don’t like being scared. So after I’m scared for a while, being scared turns to being angry.”

  “I haven’t ever seen you angry,” she said.

  I put my cup of tea back on the table. “You will,” I said. “Probably. And then maybe you’ll think I’m really interesting.”

  32

  Rule #51: If you can’t be tough or smart, at least try to be interesting.

  I called Ms. Masterson the next morning, Friday, after Langston, Corinne, and Bao Yu all piled into the Toyota with me and drove to Forest Park.

  “Where are you?” she asked. I told her.

  “I’ll be there in half an hour,” she said.

  She was. We were easy to find. Forest Park is one of the largest urban parks in the United States, bigger, in fact, than Central Park. I was told this the third day I was in St. Louis. St. Louisans are proud of the place. It’s a sprawling big square of green, very close to the center of the city. Ballparks, open meadows, and acres of woods there have stayed like they were two centuries ago, while the city grew up all around it. Spacious as it is, there still aren’t that many places where several dozen Chinese and Chinese Americans can hide. Even if they tried. Which this crew didn’t. They, along with a few laowai like me, swarmed all over the grassy, shaded lawn to the south of the Art Museum. The Park Board workers had already put up the tents, arranged in a wide, open rectangle. Some park workers were unloading a pickup truck full of plywood sheets and metal support poles; the plan was to turn it into a portable stage for all the performances for the festivities that were about to unfold.

  “What’s going on?” Ms. Masterson asked. I’d seen her park her car in the Art Museum lot, in a space with a sign reading RESERVED FOR MUSEUM BOARD MEMBERS.

  “Chinese Festival,” I said. “All weekend. Folk dancing, food, acrobatics, drumming, food; there’s a calligraphy booth where you can have your name written in Chinese, a big parade with the lion dancers. Did I mention the food?”

  “How’s the food?”

  I shrugged. “About what you’d expect. Has to be pretty Americanized to sell well. Egg rolls, fried rice—stuff like that.”

  “So if it isn’t all that great, how come you’re talking about it?”

  “Sometimes I like Americanized Chinese food,” I said. “That gloppy sweet sauce, everything fried, way too salty. Gotta have it now and then.”

  “Can’t saying something like that get you thrown out of the Traditional Chinese Chefs Union?”

  “Probably. I’m behind in my dues, anyway.”

  “Where’s Corinne?” she asked.

  I tilted my head toward the parking lot. “She just went to get some of the rope they’re using to hang up the lanterns and streamers,” I said. “She’s with Langston. She’ll be right back.”

  “Got time to have a little talk?”

  “I think I can work you in. I’m really just here as a token anyway.”

  We walked right across the street from where the setup was going on, to a low concrete wall that served as a bench. Off to our left was a three-times larger-than-life statue of Louis IX, who gave the city its name despite the fact he’d been dead for about five hundred years before the first settlers came here. We looked down a steep, long hill and out over the whole eastern half of Forest Park and off further in the distance, over the downtown part of the city. The view was grand, a landscape unfolding out that reached to the end of the park, nearly half a mile away.

  “I told them they were probably already in trouble with their White Fan.” I’d given Ms. Masterson a play-by-play of the street-side encounter with Eyebrows and the Curl the day before. “And I said it’d cause them to do something stupid and get caught.”

  “Did they know what you were talking about?”

  I shrugged. “I’m not really up on Hong Kong street slang or Chinese gang slang. ‘White Fan’ is a title, sort of like an underboss. He’d be the person those two would report to. If they screw up, he’ll be the one who comes down on them. But the word might be dated. Maybe there’s a new term for it.”

  “They got the picture, though,” Ms. Masterson said. “You provoked them.” She shook her head. “They were pointing a gun at you, and you stood there and provoked them.”

  “I’m impetuous.”

  “Really?”

  “No,” I said. “I was being sarcastic. I’m not impetuous at all.” I thought, just for a second, about picking up Corinne at that rest stop. Well, except for that. Or for listening to the call left on her cell phone. Or for driving all the way back to Buffalo to pick her up when I could have just sent her the money for a plane ticket. But mostly I wasn’t impetuous. Honest.

  “I’m just getting tired of having these people threatening me, threatening Corinne. It’s distracting. It
sucks up energy, worrying about it.”

  “This is kind of serious, Tucker,” Ms. Masterson said. She was sitting beside me. It was clear, the sky bright, deep blue. I could see the Arch way off on the horizon.

  “Kind of?”

  “Very serious, actually,” she said. “I just know you have a penchant for understatement, and I wanted to cater to it. It’s also a good policy when explaining to civilians about the potential for danger that they not be unduly alarmed.”

  “How can you tell if they’re unduly alarmed?” I asked.

  “In your case,” she said, “I guess you might get so excitable that you’d actually fold your arms across your chest or something theatrical like that. You’re an interesting case, Tucker.”

  I thought it might be a little precious for me to observe aloud that she was the second woman in less than twenty-four hours who had made that observation. So I kept it to myself. Because again, how do you reply? I did, though, allow myself a moment to enjoy it. Being “interesting” isn’t maybe quite as rewarding as if she’d called me “mysterious.” Or “enigmatic.” Then again, Corinne hadn’t called me anything like that, either. I’d settle for “interesting.” I was still mulling over the possibilities of other adjectives I might like to be called when she spoke again.

  “Think about how tough this is for me,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’ve been ruminating on that,” I said. “Keeps me awake nights.”

  She sighed. “I want to cause you enough worry to be concerned, but not so much I cause you a lot of undue anxiety.”

  “Exactly how much anxiety is due in situations like this,” I asked her, “before it becomes undue?” I told her what I’d told Corinne the night before.

  “So,” she said. “At the risk of sounding like your counselor, what are you feeling about all this?”

  “I’m scared,” I said. “I don’t like being scared. I can handle it for so long before getting scared turns into getting angry.”

  “I have that feeling about you,” she said. “You seem like the kind of person who’s easygoing, doesn’t get too upset about much. But when you get pushed, find yourself being driven into a corner, then you get angry.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. There was only so much me-talk I could take.

  I’d turned sideways on the concrete wall to face Ms. Masterson and so I could also see across the street to find Corinne. I spotted her at the same time she saw me. She came over and sat down beside me.

  “Anything you can tell me about the two with the gun?” Ms. Masterson asked.

  “They’re from Hong Kong, probably originally from Hokkien,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “The guy asked me if I wondered why they didn’t tiu Corinne,” I said. “He stuck the word in there; it came out like he didn’t mean it. I think he was nervous, trying to sound tough. So he automatically went back to the Hokkien dialect.”

  “What’s ‘tiu’?”

  “Literally it means to screw,” I said. “But in that context, he was using it as a term of aggression, asking me if I understood why they hadn’t killed her.”

  “So we’re looking for people from Hong Kong but with roots in—where was it?”

  “Hokkien,” I said.

  “That should narrow it down,” Corinne said.

  Ms. Masterson looked at her.

  “There are several hundred million Chinese who speak Hokkien,” Corinne said. “It’s the native dialect in Fujian, a big part of southern China. It’d be like looking for a killer and trying to narrow it down to only those Americans who speak with a southern accent.”

  “Here’s the part I don’t get,” Ms. Masterson said. “Why would these guys be trying to scare you?” she asked.

  “I’m not really an authority on Chinese gang mentality,” I said. “But at least partly it’s a macho thing, I’d guess. They started it by making a run at me. The guy back in Buffalo.”

  “Rest his soul,” Ms. Masterson said.

  “You were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Corinne said.

  Which would again be a good way to define our relationship, I thought about saying, but I knew Ms. Masterson wouldn’t know what I was talking about, so I kept it to myself and kept going.

  “If—what was his name?”

  “Bobby Chu,” Ms. Masterson said.

  “If I hadn’t happened to be outside there on the sidewalk that morning,” I said, “and if young Mr. Chu had gotten to Corinne first, they probably wouldn’t have had any interest in messing with me.”

  “You’re not the primary target here,” Ms. Masterson agreed. “But now they have to include you because otherwise they feel like you’re going to be between them and Corinne?”

  “Right,” I said. “And if they had gotten to her first, Ms. Chang here, being a shy and fragile Oriental flower, would have wilted and told Chu whatever he wanted to know.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Ms. Masterson said. “Funny you mention that.” She shifted around on the ledge so she faced Corinne.

  “What exactly did he want to know?” she asked. “What did the two men at your apartment door want to know, the same two who are now pointing guns at your beloved here and who are, we can safely presume, calling to chat you up with threatening messages?”

  “You’ve asked me that before,” Corinne said.

  “I have,” Ms. Masterson replied. “And you still haven’t given me an answer that’s going to help me out.”

  Corinne looked out at the skyline. “You can figure it out,” she said. “They think somehow I have the inventory—or I know where it is.”

  Ms. Masterson shifted back. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at Corinne. I wondered who was going to crack first. Either Ms. Masterson was going to say, And do you have it or know where it is? Or Corinne was going to say, I don’t, without Ms. Masterson asking. It was a good matchup. FBI agent toughness versus about three thousand years of Chinese stoicism.

  Ms. Masterson broke. I’d have bet on that. “So, is there anything you can tell me concerning the whereabouts of those diamonds that might be useful in, you know, saving your life? Do you have them, by any chance?”

  “Sure,” Corinne said. “I already explained this to Tucker. I’ve got them. I’m worth millions. I just enjoy working in a Chinese restaurant in St. Louis, living in a tenement, and hanging out with the White Devil here.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I take exception to that.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s a perfectly lovely apartment you’re in.”

  From the grassy area where the festival was being set up, someone started banging a hammer against a metal pole, making a clanging, tinny noise. Ms. Masterson stood up and straightened her dress.

  “Well,” she said. “I’m going to give your description of the two in the car to the police in University City and to the police in St. Louis as well. They’ll be on the alert for the car and these two. That’s about all I can do right now.”

  She continued, “This is going to be an exciting story to tell your children one day. All about how you met and fell in love and had to dodge Chinese gang members and try to solve the mystery of missing Montreal diamonds. But . . .” She paused. I looked up at her. “But try to be as careful as possible, so you can survive long enough to actually have those kids.”

  33

  Rule #55: Sometimes being tough isn’t anything more than knowing when and where to run.

  The world smells different in the spring. It also smells different in St. Louis than where I had always smelled spring before. Maybe it was just that in St. Louis there was a longer time to experience it. I was used to the short and icy springs of New England. Spring, back in Andover and up in New Hampshire during my stay at Beddingfield, was a hiccup between winter and summer. Springtime in New England was a one-night stand. Here, in the Midwest, spring had kept promising and flirting and an infatuation developed. In the end, though, spring delivered here. The
world was green and fresh, the air cottony soft, warm, with the aroma of what seemed like a whole botanical garden of new flowers on it.

  Now, a day after our conversation with Ms. Masterson, the earthy smells of spring were mixed with the sweet, oily aroma of sizzling egg rolls. And smoky fried rice. The sharp, meaty fragrance of pork being seared, glistening in its own succulent fat. That unmistakable perfume of soy sauce hitting a hot griddle that could make my mouth start to water even if I was completely full. Langston and I stood at the edge of it all. Corinne was somewhere in the crowd. She had volunteered to work an afternoon shift at a booth sponsored by the Chinese Business Association that was handing out information for new immigrants. How to re-up their visa status, get medical care, sign up for English classes.

  The day before, the same grassy lawn by the Art Museum had been filled with volunteers decorating tents and hooking up propane tanks to fuel wok rings set into portable tabletops. Now it teemed with festival-goers. They were lined up a dozen deep and more at the food booths. On the stage, a troupe of Chinese drummers pounded out a vibrating, bassy concert we could hear even though we were only on the edge of the festival grounds. On the stone ledge where Corinne, Ms. Masterson, and I had been sitting yesterday, a family was arranged, a mother and father balancing paper plates of glistening brown fried noodles on their laps, feeding three young kids, who, in between slippery bites of the noodles, were gnawing on skewers of grilled chicken.

  “All kinds of ethnic fun,” Langston said.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “One happy family.”

  Everybody’s got ethnic festivals. Street fairs to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, church parking lots that turn into weekend celebrations of Polish sausage and polka, Italian American days. The Chinese have them too. One difference is that at Chinese festivals, there’s often a certain electricity. It’s an undercurrent that buzzes and hums, unnoticed unless you’re sensitive to the vibrations. That happens, I guess, when you bring together a bunch of people who are ethnically and genetically pretty close to being exactly the same, but who are simultaneously separated by ideologies as different as Hong Kong brashness and Taiwanese nationalism. Toss in some political conflicts between groups, some of which go back to the time when people were carving their thoughts on bone, and it gets even more interesting. The Taiwanese keep immigrants from mainland China at a cool distance. Han Chinese, the biggest ethnic group from the mainland, have a tendency to look down on Chinese minorities like the Hakka. There are subtle slights, rivalries, the echoes of long-ago disputes. All of it is invisible to the average non-Chinese attending one of these festivals.