Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves

by Dave Lowry

  “Might not be against the law,” I said. “But I’m assuming the Flying Ghosts will not be so complacent about it.”

  “No,” he said. “They won’t. That’s where it will be, as I said, a different story. We’ll extradite all three back to Canada immediately. Ping is under investigation there, along with his organization, for a number of crimes.”

  “What about his bodyguard?” I asked.

  “He’ll go too,” Carlson said. “On crutches. You did a number on him.”

  “Was his ankle broken?”

  “No,” the lieutenant said. “But it was pretty banged up. How exactly did you do that?”

  “I got lucky,” I said. Which was true. “What about Sung? Does he go back too?”

  “Sung we’ll take back as a material witness. Once we get him there, we’re going to explain to him that his future, unless he cooperates with us in the investigation of the Flying Ghosts, will likely not be a carefree one.”

  “And the pair who shot Langston,” I asked. “What about them?”

  “They did break U.S. law,” Mr. Shannon said. “We have them for the shooting in the park. Attempted homicide on your friend Mr. Wu.”

  Langston is going to enjoy that, I thought. I wondered if Bao Yu had seen his wound yet.

  “We also like them for the murder of Bobby Chu,” Mr. Shannon went on. “And since they’re not U.S. citizens and constitute a flight risk, they’re going to be here for a while.”

  “Will Ping help them?” Ms. Masterson asked.

  “Ping’s lawyer informs me that Ping is denying he has anything to do with them,” Mr. Shannon said.

  “Dicey play on Ping’s part,” I said. “Ping cuts them loose; what’s to keep them from turning on Ping?”

  “Nothing,” Lieutenant Carlson said. “But they still won’t do it.”

  “A murder and an attempted homicide,” I said. “That’s got to be some serious time. They’re not going to give up Ping and their fellow Flying Ghosts to get some leverage?”

  “Unlikely,” Lieutenant Carlson said. “The Ghosts are all they’ve got. They’re going to prison either way is how they’ll figure it. They can either go as members of the Flying Ghosts, which carries some status, at least in their eyes. Or they can go in as losers who sold out their own gang.”

  “Not a tough choice,” Mr. Shannon said.

  “Right,” the lieutenant said. “And Ping knows it.”

  “What’s it do for morale in the gang, though?” Corinne asked. “How much loyalty can you inspire among your crew if they know that any of them, if they screw up, will get cut loose, left hung out to dry like these two?”

  Lieutenant Carlson shrugged. “Players at the level of those two are easy to replace. They all know the rules.”

  “Crappy life,” I said.

  “True,” the lieutenant said. “But in a gang like the Flying Ghosts, they have a kind of family; they have a sense of purpose, even if it’s only selling drugs, being enforcers, or doing the kind of low-level stuff they do. It is crappy. But in their eyes, it’s marginally less crappy than the kind of life they think they could have without being in the gang.”

  “So,” Mr. Shannon said. He pushed back his chair and crossed his legs and folded his hands behind his head. “Some bad guys go to jail. And some badder guys go back to Canada.”

  “Where they’re out of our hair,” Ms. Masterson said.

  “We’ve got a few we can send your way in return,” Lieutenant Carlson said.

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” I said. “How did the Flying Ghosts know Corinne was in Buffalo? How’d they know where she went after she left Montreal?”

  “Organizations like the Flying Ghosts deal in and rely on information to a considerable degree,” the lieutenant said. “If they’re involved with a legitimate business like the Wing Sung company, they make it a priority. They’d have known everything about Miss Chang and all the other employees there. Her cell phone number”—I thought of the call I’d intercepted to Corinne’s phone back in Andover—“her professional and personal background. They’d have known about her parents—”

  “Who are dead,” Corinne said.

  “I’m sorry,” Carlson said, then went on, “and her friends. Any kind of information like that allows them leverage for blackmail or for control, if they need it.”

  “They knew about my friend in Buffalo,” Corinne said. It wasn’t a question. “They knew if I left Montreal, that’d be where I was likely to go.”

  The lieutenant nodded. “Easy to get your friend’s address. Easy to send one of their soldiers to find you there.”

  The waitress appeared and asked if anyone wanted anything. I looked out the window of the shop. The clouds that had been covering the sky for the past few days were finally breaking.

  “I’ll have a cinnamon bun,” I said. Corinne added another to the order, and Ms. Masterson said she was good for one, as well—and so did Mr. Shannon and Ms. Martin-Lourdes. Lieutenant Carlson hesitated and asked Corinne if cinnamon buns were as good as the bun pommes in Montreal. Corinne said not quite, but they were still pretty good, so he ordered one too. We ate them and watched people go by on the sidewalk outside. It was pleasant. It was as nice as things had been in a long time, not including the two nights before with Corinne. That was in a whole different category of nice.

  “So,” Ms. Masterson said. “Any other questions from either of you?” She looked at Corinne, then me.

  “Now that you mention it,” I said. “Do you remember this TV show back in the seventies, where this guy was living with two women . . .”

  45

  Rule #78: When you’re right, don’t gloat . . . too much.

  We flew to Boston, into Logan Airport, three weeks later, Corinne and I. Langston drove us to the St. Louis Airport in the Toyota. When he remembered to, he was still limping a little for effect. I asked him, in terms of his ongoing efforts to woo Bao Yu, which was more effective: being a stoic survivor of a gunshot wound or being the best Chinese chef in St. Louis?

  “Neither,” he said. “Turns out she likes my dimples.”

  “Good thing the bullet didn’t get any further over, then,” Corinne said.

  “Different dimples.”

  On the plane, Corinne took the window seat. She plugged in ear buds from her phone and turned on the music app. I closed my eyes and dozed. I’d never been able to sleep on a plane. I could put myself into a kind of stupor, in which the noises around me blended into a low white noise that I found relaxing, the voices and the engine noises and the sounds of the flight attendants. I dozed for about half an hour. Then I tapped Corinne’s wrist. She was leaning against the bulkhead, eyes closed. She opened them and popped out both buds.

  “What are you listening to?” I asked her.

  “Antonio Soler.”

  “Who?”

  “Soler,” she repeated. “He was Spanish, Catalan. Harpsichordist, from the eighteenth century. He doesn’t get the attention he deserves.”

  “He do any videos?” I asked.

  “Watch,” she said. “I’ll do my imitation of someone ignoring you.” She put the ear buds back in and closed her eyes. I waited. About three minutes. Then I tapped her wrist again.

  “What?” She tugged only one ear bud out this time and only opened one eye.

  “I got Carlson’s explanation of how the Flying Ghosts found you—us—in Buffalo,” I said. “But how’d they find us in St. Louis?”

  Corinne took out the other bud and sat up. “Ariadna. A few days after you left, a guy approached her when she left her office for lunch. She described him as Chinese, bald, young.”

  “Bobby Chu.”

  “Yes. He told her he had been dating me back in Montreal. Said we’d had an argument and that he’d been thinking about it and he’d been wrong and wanted to talk to me. I wouldn’t answer his phone calls; he’d come to Buffalo to try to get back together with me.”

  “She believed that?”

  “It sound
ed weird, she said.”

  “But the guy knew who she was, knew she was your friend, knew you’d come to Buffalo. So how could his story not be straight? How could he know all that otherwise?”

  “Right. He even knew where Ariadna worked. But she still didn’t want to give him any information without checking with me first. So, she just told him the truth. She told him I’d met someone, a laowai who was a Chinese chef, and that I was going to St. Louis to be with him.”

  “And tracking down a prodigiously talented chef who was working in a Chinese restaurant in St. Louis would not have required the detective talent of the FBI.”

  “Which also managed to find you—us.”

  “So when Ariadna told you about meeting your so-called boyfriend—”

  “I figured the Flying Ghosts were trying to get to me. So I told Ariadna not to say anything if they tried to contact her, to call the cops if they did, and I took off.”

  “Which is why you’re weren’t at her apartment when I came to pick you up?”

  “I checked into that motel,” she said. “And waited for you. Now can I get back to Antonio Soler?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. She did.

  I let it go for another five minutes. She’d closed her eyes again and was leaning back comfortably on the bulkhead again. The plane banked. I could see a long, silvery thread glittering in the sun, far below, with lots of green around it. I calculated the time, estimated our flight path. We were somewhere over New York. The path of the river and the landscape; it was the Mohawk River. The same one we’d driven along last winter. On our way to Buffalo. And everything else.

  I tapped her on the wrist again.

  “You’re pushing it,” she said. Only one bud came out again this time. And she kept her eyes closed.

  “One more question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “How did Ariadna know you were going to St. Louis?” I asked. “When you said she told Chu the truth, that means you’d already told her you were planning to come to St. Louis. Even before Chu came along.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “To be with me. So you’d already decided you couldn’t live without me?”

  “Only one of many bad decisions I’ve made in my life.”

  I settled back in my seat. “No,” I said, “it wasn’t.”

  But she’d already pushed the bud back in and had returned to Soler.

  46

  Rule #67: Fried clams always make things better.

  My parents picked us up at Logan. I was curious to see how they would handle Corinne. I was betting they would have some things they were curious about too. Like how I’d spent the winter and spring. They didn’t bring it up. Not at all. I would have been mildly astonished if they had. In my family—in a lot of WASPy New England families—trivial stuff might get talked about for hours. Important stuff, though? With important stuff, you waited.

  They were gracious to Corinne. They didn’t hug her. Or me, for that matter. Corinne was about to learn that the Chinese have nothing on New Englanders when it comes to lack of demonstrations of public affection. Even so, I could tell right from the start that they liked her.

  We didn’t go home. We went through the Ted Williams Tunnel and across what is officially called the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge but that some people around Boston call the Buckner Bridge, because its wide-open support uprights look like the wide-open legs of the Red Sox player Bill Buckner, who back in 1986 let a ball roll through his legs that would have won the World Series for the Sox if he had stopped it. New Englanders also have long memories. And hold long grudges.

  We got out on 128 and went north, leaving the interstate for a winding road that follows right along the coast, toward Essex, Massachusetts. We went to Woodman’s Clams, where, legend has long had it, fried clams were invented. My father bought dinner. Mesh baskets sagging and clattering with steamed clams. A couple of paper tubs, piled high with golden, crusty fried clams and French fries. We sat up on the top deck, overlooking the estuary that’s right behind Woodman’s parking lot. Corinne, as we would say in Massachusetts, tucked in. She ate like she’d been eating Ipswich clams all her life. She swished the steamers in the warm broth to wash grit from them, then dunked them in melted butter and ate them. Again, my parents didn’t say anything. But I knew they were pleased. The Chinese think that being able to eat their cuisine is a sign a person is civilized. New Englanders think the same about eating steamed clams. She did just as well with the fried ones.

  While we ate, my parents told us about the Indonesian sea and the boat and the people they’d met. After my mother showed him how to bring them up on their new digital camera, my father showed me photos of their trip. Then, stuffed to the point of discomfort and beyond, we drove to Andover and home. Or what had been home for a long time. I hauled Corinne’s bag up to the room she’d stayed in last time and brought my own up to my room. My mother made a pitcher of lime rickeys. Not the alcoholic kind. The kind made with soda and crushed limes that are only drunk right around Boston. Woodman’s Clams and lime rickeys in the same evening. They must have been happy to have me there. We sat out on the front porch, in white wicker easy chairs that spent every season but summer in the back of the garage. And then, finally, as the sun was dropping far enough to give the first sign that evening was on its way, they brought up the subject of my recent adventures.

  My mother asked how it was that when they left for Indonesia, I had been a senior at Beddingfield College in New Hampshire with one semester to go until graduation, and when they had returned, I was working as a chef in a Chinese restaurant in St. Louis.

  “I’ve been a chef for a long time,” I said. “You know that.”

  My mother said that, in point of fact, she was less interested in how I came to be cooking professionally in St. Louis and more in how and why I had left Beddingfield. I told her it was a long story. She told me she had time. “Me too,” my father said. He looked over at Corinne, who was sitting in her own chair, barefoot, her knees tucked under. She was wearing shorts, and her legs looked very good.

  “Do you know anything about this?” my mother asked Corinne. Corinne told them she’d met me after Beddingfield. My father asked where. Corinne’s eyes danced. She leaned forward and lifted her glass from the table. Not entirely successfully, she tried to keep a grin off her face as she said very clearly, “He picked me up at a highway rest stop.”

  “You’ve been waiting a long time to use that line, haven’t you?” I asked.

  “Very long,” she replied. She sat back in her chair, took a sip of her lime rickey, and smiled again. At me. My mother examined a dribble of condensation that ran down the side of her glass. My father looked out across the street in front of the house. Both of them, I was relieved to see, were also trying to hide smiles.

  Then my father cleared his throat. “I suppose,” he said to Corinne, “it is not a coincidence that you have the same name as a Corinne Chang who is mentioned prominently in an e-mail I received recently from an FBI field officer in St. Louis, a woman named Masterson.”

  Corinne sat back. “That’s a reasonable assumption.”

  “She gave me quite an entertaining report,” my father said, then corrected himself, “not a report exactly. Or officially. Just informally sharing some information from one government agent to another, retired one.”

  “I bet it was,” I said.

  “Was what?” my father said.

  “Entertaining.”

  He looked at me. “So . . . Just what the hell happened?”

  I started to say that it was, like Beddingfield, a long story. But I stopped myself. If I said that, it might remind them both that I hadn’t explained anything about Beddingfield and my premature departure from the halls of academia. So instead, I put my glass down on the wicker table and sat back and got to it.

  “It all started because I really wanted a cinnamon bun, and I’d been driving awhile, and there was a rest stop, right around Lit
tleton. Did you know”—I interrupted myself—“what Littleton was originally called? I’ll give you a hint. It’s from a Saxon word that means ‘cheese farm.’”

  Even with my hint, my parents didn’t know. But I kept talking and got back to Corinne’s story. Like the story about Beddingfield, I’d save the Littleton anecdote for later.

  47

  Rule #94: When the rules don’t cover it, improvise.

  I gave Corinne the Special Tucker Tour of Andover. We drove by Andover High School, which looked like it always had. We went to a couple of the Chinese restaurants where I’d worked. We had dinner with the Wu family. Langston’s mother wanted to know if he was seeing anyone, and we told them about Bao Yu. We didn’t mention the gunshot wound to his ass.

  Mostly, though, we sat around at my house and read and went for walks in the evening. After life in the Eastern Palace, it was like a slow decompression period, like coming up from a deep dive in the ocean, taking it easy, resurfacing gradually. I cooked for her and my parents. After a couple of days, I asked her if there was anything she’d like to do.

  “I want to go back to the Shaker place,” Corinne said.

  We borrowed the car again and set out the next morning. It was full, glorious summer now. The Mass Turnpike was a strip of asphalt meandering through brilliant, dark emerald hills. I told Corinne we were passing through the land of the Nipmucks, the Indians who’d originally lived in this part of Massachusetts.

  “You have an impressive command of obscure facts,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said, “I’m not the one who listens to eighteenth-century Catalan harpsichordists.”

  We got to Pittsfield and ate lunch at a joint there called Hot Harry’s Fresh Burritos. I suggested splitting the Super Burrito, and Corinne asked if I was feeling okay and if so what was wrong with the Monster Burrito (Double Meat & Double Cheese!)? And I thought that if I hadn’t been before, I just might be falling in love. Then we went to Hancock and out to the village, where we paid our admission. When we’d been there last, in the middle of winter, we’d had the place to ourselves. Today there were at least three dozen cars in the lot, along with a couple of school buses.