Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (24 page)

“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.”

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.

I knew about some of it. It was something that revealed itself slowly in Chinese restaurant kitchens. Most of it meant more to Langston than it did me. Langston's great-grandfather had been a bigtime silk merchant in Shanghai back in the thirties. His warehouses were looted when the Japanese invaded in 1937; the Wu family barely made it out of the city. They left China, went first to Malaysia, which turned out not to be such a great step because the Imperial Japanese Army was heading in the same direction. The Wu family spent the rest of the war as prisoners of the Japanese. Langston's grandfather went to Taiwan after the war, and later his father came to the United States to go to college. He never went back to Asia. Langston and his two sisters were both ABCs—American-born Chinese.

“Yeah, one big happy family,” he said. “Just slightly dysfunctional.”

“Slightly?”

We wandered around. Under a stand of pines, there was a demonstration of
taiji.
It was average. The demonstrators knew the movements. They didn't have any
jing
in them, though, none of the crackling energy that elevates
taiji
from a form of gentle exercise into a fighting art.
Taiji
was a kind of moving meditation for them, a pleasant exercise. They “pushed hands,” facing off and rolling, deflecting, and pushing in, arms interlocked, like graceful dancers. But they didn't have the soft, concealed, explosive power of real
taiji
experts. A troupe of lion dancers paraded by, twisting, turning, crouching under the long silk trail of the “lion,” its gaudy red and gold head snapping its jaws and jerking to and fro to the sound of drums and cymbals from dancers gathered around it.

“Have we had about all the fun we can stand?” Langston asked after we'd been there and looked around for a while. We'd left the crowd and were sitting side by side at one of the rows of metal picnic tables that had been assembled under a dining tent. I had nearly finished a paper boat of fried rice in front of me. It was okay. It wasn't as good as what I could have made. It wasn't even as good as Ms. Masterson's first efforts.

“Agreed,” I said. I tossed the last couple of bites of the rice into a trash can at the end of the table. “We just have to find Corinne.”

“Found,” Corinne answered. She'd come up from behind us and slid onto the bench beside me.

“I assume I am easy to spot in this crowd,” I said to her.

“Not really,” she said. “Look around. There are more of your kind around here than there are of mine.”

“My kind?”

“Laowai.”

“I meant that I must be easy to find because of my rugged good looks and suave demeanor.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “That's what I meant by ‘your kind.' The rugged-good-looks, suave-demeanor kind.”

“There is no ‘kind' of that,” I said. “I am unique.”

“Listen,” Langston said. “Love to hang around here all afternoon eating pork fried rice and listening to your witty repartee, but, instead, how about we head home?” He'd gone out the night before with Bao Yu. I hadn't gone to bed until after two in the morning, and he still wasn't home yet. I assumed things were going at least okay between the two of them.

“Fine,” I said.

“It isn't repartee,” Corinne said. “It's flirt talk.”

I saw a head and shoulder duck back behind the flap of the Chinese Students Association tent. Maybe twenty yards away from us. It was the movement that caught my eye. It was too quick, too jerky. It didn't fit the rhythm of the rest of the festival. Nobody moves that way in a big crowd. I stared at the place where it disappeared. The head didn't reappear.

“Let's go,” I said. I'd parked down the hill from the festival. The tents, the music, the crowds, were all between us and the Toyota. The easy thing to do would have been to turn to the left and follow the sidewalk down the slope, then cut back across at the foot of the hill, along the street where I'd parked. Instead, I went straight, with Corinne and Langston beside me, into the festival, aiming for the tent where I'd seen the head and shoulders duck back out of sight.

I was fairly sure I recognized the head. It was time to find out if I was right.

 

The three of us plunged right into the heart of the festival.

Langston had known me a long time. So maybe he could sense something in the way I was walking. Maybe he just knew something was up. It was hard to tell with Langston. He and Corinne were following me. I could feel him move over to my left side.

“Shenme shi qing?”
he asked, very quietly, staying close to me so Corinne didn't hear. “What's up?”

“Not sure,” I said, “but it will be interesting to find out.”

Corinne took a couple of quick strides and caught up with me on my right. Without looking, I reached for her hand. She didn't say anything. She hadn't known me all that long. Three months or so. Maybe, though, she knew, too, that something was up. She didn't ask questions. She just kept walking with me, kept beside me.

I kept the pace slow, leisurely. Like the three of us were just wandering through the festival, enjoying ourselves. We stopped and looked at the booths displaying Chinese crafts, intricate paper cutouts, calligraphy, cheap ceramic tea sets. Trying to look as casual as I could, I stepped away from Langston and Corinne and fished my phone from my pocket and hit Ms. Masterson's number.

“Remember where we were at Forest Park yesterday?” I said when she answered. She did.

“We're there now. So are the two guys who pulled the gun on me.”

“You're sure?”

“No,” I said, “but I'm going to find out.”

“Just stay where you are,” she said. “I'm just passing the Parkway entrance to the park; I'm on my way. Stay on the phone.”

I kept the phone in one hand, took Corinne's hand with the other, and angled the three of us toward the tent where I'd seen the head pop around then jerk back. When we reached the tent, I went past it, looking straight. I didn't bother to look around for anyone. Whoever it was I'd seen—or thought I'd seen—I didn't think they'd still be there. I was looking for somebody else. It didn't take too long to find him. Benjamin Ma was the cook at the Hunan Wok. He was walking toward us with his girlfriend beside him, a busty redhead who was almost half a foot taller. I lifted my chin without breaking stride.

“Hey, Ben,” I said, “how's it going?”

“Not bad,” he said, continuing to walk in the other direction. I turned my head as they both walked by, trying to make the movement as natural as I could.

“You going to be at the Palace after work tomorrow?” I said to Ben's back. He pivoted, still walking, and stuck his thumb up. I looked past him. I saw the Curl and Eyebrows. Hanging back, trying to stay in the crowd. But it was them. It was the Curl's head I'd seen from around the corner of the tent. They were following us. I tried just to glance, to keep my head turned to Ben so it wasn't obvious I was looking at them. I wasn't sure it had worked. Eyebrows was wearing a tan hoodie, big and bulky, and a pair of jeans with sneakers. The Curl had on the same jeans and sneakers, with a T-shirt and a red-striped cotton dress shirt over it, unbuttoned. It didn't look like there was any way the Curl could be concealing a gun. That hoodie, though, I thought, was a perfect way to cover one in Eyebrows' waistband.

I slowed my pace enough so Langston could come up beside me.

“Just keep walking,” I said, loud enough so they could both hear me. “And don't look back. There are a couple of guys following us.”

Langston didn't say anything.

Corinne said, “Okay.”

“They're the same guys who jumped you outside your apartment,” I said to Corinne. “The same guys who stopped their car and pushed a gun in my direction.”

Langston made a “hmm” sound. And didn't say anything else. Neither did Corinne. She squeezed my hand. When I glanced over at her, I saw her lips pressed together tightly. She looked straight ahead. I liked that. She didn't say
What're we going to do?
or get panicky. She just kept walking. I'd expected Langston's reaction. His “hmm” was to let me know he heard, he understood, and he was thinking about our options. I was thinking about them too.

I looked around as we walked. I didn't see any cops. If I had, I realized, it wasn't going to help. What was I going to do? Ms. Masterson had told us she would give the police the description of the two. But they'd threatened me in one of the suburbs of St. Louis City. City and suburb police departments don't always communicate. I didn't have any guarantee that city cops I might find would have any idea of what I was talking about. And by the time I explained it, the two would be gone. They could disappear into the crowd, keep an eye on us, then make their move when we finally did leave. I didn't like the option. It wasn't good. It was the best one I could think of, though. And, I admitted to myself, I was tired of this. I didn't have to push it now. And maybe it wasn't fair to Corinne and Langston that I would. Even so, I'd had enough. I lifted my phone.