Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (14 page)

“Is he right?”

“Completely,” she said. “Embarrassingly. Which would normally be okay. But he's kind of an amateur gourmet. If you can teach me some basics—like, say, that cucumber recipe you fed me the other day—I might be able to change his opinion.”

We made plans for her to come in during the lull between lunch and dinner. I told Corinne about it the next afternoon when she was coming in to work the dinner shift.

“She's kind of driven, isn't she?” Corinne said. “She must have checked you out pretty thoroughly to know your ancestors came over on the
Mayflower.
”

“You mean that crack she made about me being the only Chinese chef who isn't Chinese?” When she nodded, I answered, “First, there are lots of non-Chinese who can cook Chinese food, obviously.”

“Just none as good as you are,” she said.

“Also obvious.”

“Or at least think you are.”

“And second,” I said, “My ancestors didn't come over on the
Mayflower.
”

“They probably waited until the butler and the maids could go over first and get the house in order, right?”

“I come from a modest past,” I said.

“Modesty must have worn off some time back,” Corinne said.

I let that slide. “She
is
an interesting person. She's also worried about us.”

“Why do you say that?” Corinne asked.

“She probably does have a gourmet boyfriend,” I said. “And she does want to learn to cook some Chinese food. But if she's here at the restaurant learning to cook, that's also a reason for her to be around the restaurant where we're both working, to keep an eye on us in case there's any trouble.”

Corinne pursed her lips. She had her hair pulled back and up into a loose bun. It made her look older. I saw Mr. and Mrs. Hsiang coming through the door. They'd already called ahead to plan a menu for a party of ten they'd invited.

“Then, too,” I said, “you heard her theory on us. She might just want to hang around to see if we do have all the makings of a love story.”

“Do we?” Corinne asked.

Before I had a chance to reply, she'd turned away to go greet the Hsiangs as they were seated. Which was just as well. Because I wasn't sure how I was supposed to answer that.

Rule #11: Timing is everything.

 

Snow sprinkled, drifting. Lazily. The flakes weren't coming down hard, like in a good snowstorm. Just kind of floating, working their way to the ground on their own good time. The dark air was so still that the flakes barely swayed at all as they came down, illuminated in a cone of light under the streetlight. I was thinking how much I enjoyed routine. I knew it wasn't supposed to be that way. Young guys, throwing off electric sparks of testosterone like a whip-cracking power line after a storm, are supposed to be jockish he-mannered dervishes of spontaneity. I considered myself as virile and adventurous as any other guy who might be ready to pose for a men's deodorant ad. I'd bounced out of New Hampshire and into this new place with what I thought of as fairly impressive aplomb. Devil-may-care spontaneity. I had to admit, though, I liked the ordinariness of a daily routine. Sleep late, get up, and practice
xing-i
in the alley with Langston. Then off to the Eastern Palace with Corinne, to cook and swear with Li and Jao-long until closing. Late dinner, usually eaten in the kitchen at the Eastern Palace or in the kitchen of one of the other places right around there. Then drive Corinne and myself back to our apartments, and off to bed to do the same thing all over again the next day. It was pleasant. Maybe a little boring if you thought about it too much. I didn't. I was happy.

Our apartments were close enough I'd park the Toyota on the street between the two. I went left, Corinne went right. We said goodbye. The front door to her building, inside an arched alcove, was so close that on a still night I could hear the metallic click when she pushed the key into the lock. It was a week after our conversation about Ms. Masterson and the matter of crushes, one night near the end of March, when we'd done just that, said goodbye after I drove us home from work. I walked toward my apartment next door. I didn't hear a click. I stopped, turned around, and started walking toward the entrance of her apartment building. Then I started to sprint.

One guy had Corinne pressed against the door. He was leaning against her. His forearm was pushed across her throat. Another guy was standing a couple of feet away. He was facing her with his back to the sidewalk. So neither of them noticed when I came up the walk behind them. I had on the running shoes I always wore in the kitchen. The treads were probably impregnated with enough grease to fry eggs in. It coated them, made them quiet. I'd already dropped my coat on the lawn. I could tell they were Chinese. It was dark; they weren't much more than silhouettes, outlined against the light from above the door to Corinne's building. There was something in the way they moved, though. The body language gave it away. It wasn't anything I could explain. Nothing obvious. A certain slackness in the shoulders, legs bent. There isn't some infallible sign for identifying Chinese people just by their outline from behind. Even so, I knew it.

Taking off my coat had been a gamble. It was the big, puffy insulated one I'd worn for three New Hampshire winters in school. The one I'd slept under that first night with Corinne in the Toyota. A heavy parka is a nice layer of protection between your flesh and a knife, if a villain happens to be carrying one. It can even be good padding against a punch, blunting the force. It would have slowed me down, though. Against two guys, I didn't want to be slow. By the time I was within range of the guy who wasn't holding Corinne, I could reach him with my outstretched hands. I did.

I grabbed both his shoulders from behind and dropped my own. I dropped them the way you would to close a car trunk lid that was almost shut but hadn't quite clicked closed. No power in my shoulders or arms, no windup. Just dropping, transferring my body weight through my relaxed arms. Not losing any power by tightening my muscles at all. Humans have a lot of balance to the front, with our feet spread out below. From behind, it's only the heels keeping us upright. And they roll back nicely when there's a pulling, jerking motion from behind. The guy went down. Hard.

I stepped past him even before he hit the ground. I heard his head snap back and make a dull
thwack
against the sidewalk. The other guy still had his left forearm pinning Corinne's throat, his right outstretched, his palm flat against the door. His weight was going forward, leaning against her. He was just turning at the sound of his colleague going down when I kicked in a hooking motion, raising my foot just far enough off the path to clear the ground. So the front of my ankle hit the front of his. His leg went out from under him. He was twisting and slipping, turning toward me, his arm coming off Corinne's neck as he tried to reach out to the ground that was coming up fast. I was close enough I didn't have to step at all. I brought my left hand up, palm open, like I was cradling a baby's head in it. Except I was hitting him with my open hand, right under the chin, at the top of his neck where it joined his head. A solid shot might have provided enough whiplash to mess up his vertebrae. Mine slipped off his jaw. Still, it hit with enough force that his head rocked back. His knees hit the ground. He pitched forward, onto his elbows. I punted into his midsection, aiming for the lowest part of his rib cage. He was wearing a jacket, a heavy one. Even so, the toes of my shoe made nice solid contact. I felt the impact. I heard him make a high-pitched squeal. I saw his face as he rolled away from me, expecting me to kick him again. I had been right. He was Chinese. I looked at the other guy. He was trying to sit up. It was going slowly. His head had taken a hard smack. He was Chinese too.

Corinne's key was still in the lock. I turned it and pushed the door open and shoved her inside, then followed. It would have been satisfying to have gone back and confronted the bad guys. Put my hands on my hips and snarled,
Ready for some more?
It's a great way to get shot. Just because you've brought your hands to a fight doesn't mean the other guy hasn't brought a gun. Even if they hadn't, two against one is not good odds. The door clicked shut behind us. It was thick, heavy oak. Except for a small round window, it was solid. I'd never given much consideration to how comforting a thick door can be. Then I was pushing Corinne up the stairs toward her apartment.

“Don't stop,” I said. She didn't. Neither did I.

I fished my phone out of my pants and called 911 as soon as we'd gotten into the apartment and I asked if she was okay. She nodded. “You sure?” I asked. She was. At least she said she was. She looked scared. Her eyes were wide and a little glazed. I could see her nostrils, still flaring in and out. She had all her color, though. I didn't think she was going to pass out. She was shaking. She jammed her hands into her coat pockets when she realized it.

Two patrol cars arrived, quickly. I went back downstairs to let the cops in when they rang the bell. The pulsing red lights from the cars at the curb had replaced the soft yellow streetlights. It was still snowing, a little harder. The flakes looked pinkish in the glare. The bad guys were gone.

“Whose coat?” one of them asked me, holding up mine, which he'd picked up off the lawn. I took it, and they came inside behind me. We all went up to Corinne's apartment.

I'd never been a victim of a violent crime before. In the strict sense, I guess, I still wasn't. Corinne was. For a victim, she was taking it well. The cops were helping. As soon as they met her, one of them got on his radio and said something in cop-ese, one of those sentences that have more numbers in it than words. Within a few minutes, while they were still taking down the initial information, a female officer showed up.

“Do you want to go someplace and talk alone?” she asked Corinne. Corinne shook her head. The officer had a soothing voice. She managed to sound solicitous and calm at the same time. Bao Yu was working that night and going to a party afterward. Langston had told me about it. He'd been invited too. (He still had what he called his “plan” for wooing Bao Yu. I thought “hope” might be a more accurate verb than “plan.”) While Corinne sat with the female cop in the living room and gave her statement, I went into the kitchen to put a kettle on the burner. One of the other cops followed me in.

“Tea,” I said. “It's sort of the universal lubricant for Chinese. When she gets finished talking with all of you, she's going to want some.”

While the water started hissing its way to a boil, we sat at the table and I told him about the excitement from my angle. If he was impressed by my near-superhuman fighting skills, taking on two guys, he didn't mention it. I kind of wanted him to be awed, to ask where I'd developed such incredible powers so I could be modest about it. He didn't. He asked if I carried a cell phone, and when I told him I did, he said, “Might be a good idea to call us before you wade into a situation like that. It could have been dangerous for you.”

“Think it would have been less dangerous for her if I'd called and waited for you?”

“No,” he said. “I'm just required to say that. I'd have been just as happy if you'd beaten them both to an ugly pulp.”

It took about an hour to fill out all the questionnaires and forms, for us to sign statements as to the particulars of the event, statements that we were offered medical help and didn't want it, and I think maybe a statement in there somewhere that we were not now nor had we ever been members of the Communist Party. I was tired and distracted. I had that lump in my stomach that comes from an adrenaline dump. I felt a little queasy. More than a little, actually. I wanted to go to the toilet in Corinne's apartment and see if something was going to come out from one end or the other. I didn't, though. It didn't seem like something the hero was supposed to be doing. And so far, I was giving myself some decent scores for heroics. I also knew the feeling would pass. Even so, that didn't make me feel too much better. After the cops finally left, Corinne and I sat on the couch and drank tea and held hands. After a while, when the tea had started to dissolve the lump inside me and the tiredness became almost overwhelming, I said, “I ought to leave so you can get some sleep.”

Corinne nodded. We both stood and walked to the door, still holding hands. We stood there for a second. She finally let go of my hand and put her arms around me. I could smell her hair. She'd taken it down from the bun she'd worn it in at the restaurant. It looked like it did the night I'd met her. Without the stocking cap. That night at the rest stop in New Hampshire seemed like a very long time ago.

“Come on,” she said. She took my hand. We went into her room and lay on her bed, still dressed. She let go of my hand to pull up the quilt that was folded at the bottom of the bed. She pulled it over us, then she lay back down beside me and rolled on her side. We wrapped our arms around one another.

“This is awkward, isn't it?” I said, after we'd both been quiet for a while.

“It is,” Corinne said. “But not as much as I thought it would be.”

“Had you given much thought to that?” I asked. “To what it would be like?”

“Wouldn't you like to know.”

“I would.”

“Well,” she said, “here's what I'd like to know. I want to know which of your rules applies to this.”

“This?”

“This. Right now. Right here.”

“Let me think about it for a second,” I said. I thought. Not about the rules, though. I thought about the fragrance of her hair, faint, but like the aroma of flowers that had been in a room recently, then taken away and were now just a perfumed memory. And the pulse I saw gently, steadily throbbing in the hollow of her throat. I thought about her hand, resting lightly on my stomach. I'd felt her fingers brush against me there. Twice. Then again. I thought about whether it was just a reflexive movement or if there was something deliberate about it. I thought about the whole length of her, stretched out beside me. I thought about my arm going to sleep under her head and about how much longer I could hold it there, and I decided I could probably hold it there a hell of a lot longer than I would have, until that moment, imagined. I thought about the pool of warmth around us that seemed like a space that was at the same time very, very small and simultaneously all the room I would ever need or want.