Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (22 page)

“It's because we aren't ready?”

“It's because it'd be too obvious. And worse, it'd be too predictable.”

“And you do not like being predictable, do you?” she said. “It's one of the rules, isn't it?”

“Rule Number Twenty-Three.”

“So you'd be willing to give up a night of”—she widened her eyes a couple of times in rapid succession—“you know, just to avoid being predictable?”

“I didn't say anything about ‘giving up'; I just said not right now.”

I kept looking at her. I realized it was one of the few times I'd looked at her square on. Almost all our conversations had taken place driving somewhere or while we were working, with our attention divided. We hadn't had many face-to-face conversations. It felt a little weird. Not bad. But different.

“I feel concerned about this,” she said.

“How so?” I asked.

“We promised Mr. Leong we wouldn't engage in flirt talk,” Corinne said. “And I think this definitely qualifies as flirt talk.”

“Nope,” I said. “This is well beyond flirt talk.”

We held hands and didn't say anything for a while. After she closed the door, I walked over to my place. For the first time since I'd lost the mile race back in the sixth grade, I thought about Addie McDaniel without feeling regret over those three seconds.

Rule #18: When things seem to be going too well, there's usually something that's going to change things.

 

Langston came home a couple of hours after I did that night. I could tell he felt self-conscious about having won. I could tell mainly because he didn't mention it. Langston would complain about having lost at something for at least a couple of years. He still occasionally brought up the Monopoly game we'd played, one that went on most of a summer just before our freshman year at Andover High. He still insisted I'd won only because of a string of dice rolls that put him on Park Place, which I owned, three consecutive times around the board. When he won at something, though, he never wanted to talk about it. Normally, I'd go along with it. He might be uncomfortable losing. He was squirming, though, at winning. I felt sorry for him. I couldn't let this one go, though.

“So,” I said, after he'd come in and slouched into the big chair he'd rescued from an eviction down the street and which he insisted was real leather. “The best Chinese chef in St. Louis. Sitting right here in my presence.”

“Yeah,” he said dismissively, “I'm great. But get this—” He grinned. “So we're having a celebration at the restaurant afterward, and Bao Yu comes because I'd invited her, and I say, ‘Okay, so now that I'm officially the best Chinese chef in St. Louis, is there any chance you'd be willing to go out with me?'”

“You actually asked her out?” I said. “After months of pining for her from afar?”

“Oh yeah,” Langston said. He ran his hand through his hair. It stood up at the crazy angles it always did unless he combed it into submission. “Not only did I actually ask her out,” he said. “I did it in front of Janet Shen, that waitress at Din Ho, who was standing there with her.”

“So what'd Bao Yu say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

He shook his head. “Not a word.” His smile—I didn't think it was possible—got bigger. “But Janet, standing right there, says, ‘Of course she'll go out with you. She'd have gone out with you six months ago, you dumbass, if you'd asked her.'”

We sat and talked for a while, and then I went to bed. I lay there and stared up at the ceiling, hands behind my back. I could still feel the warm skin of Corinne's hand. I felt happy for Langston. I thought that, all things considered, things were going not that bad.

Tucker's Rule #18: When things seem to be going too well, there's usually something that's going to change things.

Rule #74: No matter how bad your day, it can always get worse if someone points a gun at you.

 

Corinne told me about the threatening phone calls the night the guy came by in a car and pointed a gun at me.

Yes. Rule #18: When it's going too good, something's coming along to change things. When you're strolling down a sidewalk and someone pulls up in a car and sticks a gun in your face, that's very certainly in the realm of Rule #18.

Almost a week after the end of the contest, I was walking from the Asian grocery store back to the restaurant. The same walk I'd taken to get the carp for the judges. The same path I'd been on when I got the first carp to make the dish for Ms. Masterson. I was a regular on that route. I went by Dr. Luo's clinic. I veered off to my right to open the door for an old Chinese lady who was struggling with it. Without stopping, I looked in the window of a tiny shop that made and sold fresh tofu, from scratch, every day. A couple of women stood at the counter, buying bricks of smooth tofu made earlier in the morning. I heard the car approaching from behind, slowing, and pulling over to the curb. I kept walking. The car came up so the front passenger window was even with me. It was rolled down. A guy stuck his head out, holding a gun, an automatic of some kind. He'd turned the automatic on its side, like they do in movies about modern-day gangsters who don't know how to shoot.

He spoke in Mandarin. It was badly accented with the flavor of a low-class Hong Kong upbringing—mixed with what he must have thought made him sound like a ghetto gang member.

“Woei,
ji bai!”
he said.

I concentrated on him, on what he was saying, instead of on the gun. I really badly wanted to concentrate on the gun. The insults weren't going to do too much damage. That gun, on the other hand . . . But I tried to ignore it. If he was going to shoot me, he'd have done it and moved on. Or maybe he just wanted to see me sweat. Maybe he wanted me to beg, and then he'd kill me. Either way, it was better to think about what he was saying and to watch his facial expressions and not to focus on that small, efficient-looking black hole of the barrel. He had thick, full eyebrows, like a couple of hairy black caterpillars were resting on his forehead.

“Hongkie,” I said.

“What?” He said.

“You're a Hongkie,” I said. “You said
‘woei
,
ji bai'
instead of
‘wei, ji bai,'
like most mainland Chinese would have. You're from Hong Kong.”

“Yeah, you think you're pretty fucking smart,” the driver said in English. He leaned forward over the steering wheel so he could see me. His hair was so slick with some kind of oil that there was a luster to it. It was almost blue-black. It looked dyed. A curl hung down on his forehead, as if it had just fallen there. It had probably taken him ten minutes in the mirror with a comb to get it that way. He moved his head slowly, as if he didn't want to disturb the whole effect.

I kept looking at his partner, Eyebrows. Eyebrows with the gun. I was fairly sure these were the same two who'd jumped Corinne outside her door that night. They looked younger now that I was seeing them in daylight. Since I'd come up on them from behind at her door, I'd seen them mostly from the back. They were thin to the point of being skinny. Eyebrows was wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt, and I could see the ropy veins in his forearms. They both had poufy pompadour hair, like Chinese gang members. They both looked jittery. I wondered if they were using crack or something else to keep them wired. Chinese gangs like selling heroin; it was, for the moment at least, their preferred stock in trade. But gang members used other drugs, meth or crack. If this pair was wired with meth, that was just one more fun factor in the equation. Someone's pointing a gun at you
and
he's just crispy enough to make him a little unbalanced. Or a lot. Nice.

“I'm not too fucking smart,” I said. “I'm the one standing here with a bag of
longan
fruits, and you guys are the ones with the gun.”

Eyebrows said something to the Curl that I didn't catch. Then he spoke to me again.

“You wonder why we don't
tiu
that slut?”
“Tiu”
was young-tough-guy slang for “screw.” In this case, he meant it as something more felonious. The other word he used was
“jian huo,”
another Hokkien street slang expression. He was still holding the gun sideways. He was still pointing it at me.

Common sense said Eyebrows wasn't going to shoot me. Then again, common sense didn't have all its vital organs about four feet from the barrel of that gun. I tried to keep my breathing steady. I focused on the exhalations. All I knew about guns was stuff I'd heard my father say, usually when he was making fun of the way they were used in crime shows on TV. Even so, I knew that at this range, even if he was stupid and nervous, or jittery on crack, he'd have to work hard to miss me.

“You're smart enough to know why we aren't rubbing her,” he said. The Curl leaned over, again to speak across the inside of the car to me, again turning his head slowly so his 'do wasn't threatened.

“She gonna tell us where they are,” he said. “Yeah.”

Eyebrows smiled. His mouth smiled, at least. His eyes didn't. They looked like snake eyes. Cold. Reptilian.

“Probably not,” I said.

The smile broke. His forehead crinkled, just a little.

“Probably,” I said, “you'll do something stupid. You're scared, both of you, because you haven't gotten whatever it is you're supposed to get already. And if you screw up much more, you're going to get squeezed by your White Fan”—I used the Mandarin expression for their boss—“and so you'll panic. Do something stupid. And either get caught or . . .”

Eyebrows was trying to take it all in. He didn't look like he assimilated information quickly.

“Or?” he said.

“Or you'll mess up again,” I said. “Like you did that night outside the apartment.”

The look on his face, which he tried too late to hide, told me it had been him. Them.

“Shheeet,” he drawled out. “You talkin' trash.”

I couldn't tell if it was his accent or if he was trying to sound like a gangbanger. I just stood there, looking at him. The weight of the gun had pulled his hand down. The weight of having to think probably distracted him a little too. The weapon was pointing to about my knees now. He looked straight ahead, then back at me, trying for a contemptuous sneer. He couldn't pull it off. He jerked the gun up and pulled it back inside the car.

“Let's go,” he muttered. The Curl slammed the gearshift out of neutral and managed to squeal the tires as they pulled away—then the car abruptly swerved, just missing a produce delivery truck that had pulled into the center lane in front of them.

I looked around. Cars kept going by. One of them, a candy-apple red Honda, slowed and turned into the parking lot behind me, which Dr. Luo shared with the tofu shop. The driver, a young Chinese woman, looked briefly at me, wondering, I guess, what I was doing just standing there, a plastic bag hanging from my fist, looking around stupidly in the middle of the morning. The little bell on Dr. Luo's office door jangled. An old Chinese woman, different from the one who'd gone in, came out and looked up at me and smiled. A cloud passed over the sun, still low in the sky. Life went on. I could taste something warm and metallic in my mouth. I felt like someone had reached inside me, grabbed my stomach with both hands, and twisted. I wondered what the right thing to do was after having been threatened with a gun. I didn't know if there was an appropriate response. But I did the only thing I could have right at that moment. Stiff-legged, I walked into the narrow alley between Dr. Luo's clinic and the next building. I sat down. If anyone had been watching, they would probably have said I was not so much sitting as I was falling. The brick wall of the clinic was at my back. I was grateful for it; if it hadn't been there, I would have probably been lying on the ground instead of sitting. My hands shook. I put them in my lap, which didn't help. I put them on the ground on either side of me, pressing my palms hard enough into the rough, gritty concrete to make them sting.

There was a feeling of unreality about it all.
A gun? I'd actually had a gun stuck in my face?
I looked around. The morning was still bright. Cars kept going by on the street. It was the same normal day it had been ten minutes ago. Except someone had threatened me with a gun.

I slapped my palms together and rubbed them to get off the grit, then rubbed my face, my elbows resting on my bent knees.
Two choices,
I thought.
Sit here and quiver awhile and feel the tides of fear that are washing over me in sickening waves. Or get up and walk back to the restaurant. Screw it,
I thought, staring between my knees.
It's a good day to sit and feel sorry for myself.

“Young man!” The voice cut into my thoughts. I looked up. It was a Chinese face looking back, from a couple of yards away. A woman. Old enough that her hair was past gray and more white. She was well dressed, in a skirt and blouse, with a thick yellow sweater on, and a necklace with a teardrop piece of jade hanging from it.

“You cannot be sitting around in an alley like that! This is a decent neighborhood,” she said briskly. “We do not tolerate this sort of behavior.”

It put things in perspective. “Yes,” I said, then picked up my bag of
longan
fruits and pushed off the wall and stood. “But you know what happens.”

“What happens when?” she said. She was perfectly straight, her posture erect. She'd turned herself so her right hand, holding her purse, was turned away from me.

“What happens when you allow
laowai
to start moving into the neighborhood,” I said. “Place just goes to hell.”

I walked around her, staying far enough away so she wouldn't feel threatened, and went to work.