Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (12 page)

I had looked forward to being alone with my thoughts, but by the time I'd driven through Cleveland, still in northern Ohio, I realized that rather than being alone, the Toyota was actually getting pretty crowded with all those thoughts, and I was relieved when my phone buzzed and I pulled off onto an exit to answer it.

It was Corinne. I wondered why she wasn't still at her friend Ariadna's apartment. I was wondering about a lot of other things, though. That one would have to wait. I followed her directions to a motel.

On the way back to St. Louis, Corinne and I stopped at another motel, this one about sixty miles north of Columbus, right on the interstate. It was tricked out with gingerbread, made to look like someone had decided that what mid-Ohio really needed along the road was a Swiss chalet. The Toyota performed admirably. Its thirst for oil didn't appear too much worse. I kept a couple of plastic bottles under the front seat though, just in case it developed a sudden craving.

“This is the second date night you've taken me to a motel,” Corinne said from the bathroom. She was combing her hair. I could see her reflection in the mirror. I was sprawled on the bed in a pair of sweatpants and a Boston College T-shirt. I was reading from a brochure I found on the nightstand about the local attractions in this part of Ohio. It turned out there weren't many.

“Actually,” she said, leaning over and poking her head around the door so she could see me, “do you realize that every night we've been together since you picked me up, we've slept together?”

“We didn't sleep together at your friend's apartment,” I said. “Or at my parents' house.”

“We were under the same roof,” she said, her voice coming from the other side of the bathroom. “That's close enough.”

I let it go. I hadn't been around her all that much, but I'd already decided Corinne Chang had a strange sense of humor. Then, too, there were some other things I wanted to talk about more.

She came in and tugged down the covers on her bed. She had on a yellow T-shirt that came all the way to her thighs. I wasn't sure about the color of her panties. I was pretty sure the bra wasn't there at all.

She got in and reached over, clicked off the light between us, and we lay there. I had my arms folded back behind my head, looking at the ceiling. I tried to think a little less about her breasts and a little more about what we needed to talk about. I focused on the task. I did pretty well, especially considering the perkiness of the distraction. Distractions.

“Remember that afternoon we were driving across New York,” I said, “and you said ‘Okay, I give'? And then you asked me who I was?”

“Yep.”

“And I told you?”

“Yep,” she repeated. “You told me to some extent. I still don't know any of Tucker's Rules past the first three.”

“Okay,” I said. “Now it's my turn: I give. Who the hell are you, Wenqian?”

I rolled over and clicked on the lamp between our beds. She rolled over and looked at me, blinking in the sudden light. She'd left her hair down. Part of it fell over her left eye. I got up and sat in the chair over by the window. The heater in the room would have been humming if it had been working correctly. Instead, it was making a low, dull drone, like a jet taking off very far away. It was a little louder in the silence.

“How did you know my Chinese name?”

“There was a punk Chinese guy who came up to me when I was getting ready to leave your friend's apartment,” I said. “He asked if I knew Wenqian. I didn't know who he was talking about. I thought he might just have been setting me up to hustle me or mug me. Just making up some name to distract me and give him a chance to get closer. If I had thought about it, it wouldn't have helped. I would have never figured there would be any way I'd just happen to run into someone from Buffalo who just happened to know that you were in town. He meant you, though, didn't he?”

Corinne nodded without looking at me. She'd pushed the covers down and was sitting with her back to the bedstead, her knees drawn up. She produced a red scrunchie-thing and pulled her dark hair back into a ponytail.

“You didn't tell him where I was?” she asked, still not looking at me.

“I told you,” I said. “I didn't know what he was talking about.”

“So what did you tell him?”

“I punched him,” I said. She jerked her head in my direction. “I thought he was just talking, trying to get close enough to me to pull out a gun or a knife, to rob me.”

“What happened then?”

“He went down,” I said. “But then he started talking. He asked me if I thought ‘she' was going to get away with it. If I thought ‘they' were just going to give up. And he told me it didn't really matter much if somebody died in the process. So, yeah, I'm a little slow, but I've figured out who ‘she' is. Want to tell me who ‘they' are?”

She closed her eyes and was still for a minute, then she nodded. “Yes. But what happened after that?”

“Okay, so I'm staying with my friend in St. Louis,” I went on. “Working at a restaurant. And you'll never guess who walks into the kitchen the other day to have a chat with me.”

She looked up, and I saw a flicker of concern on her face. “The guy?”

“No, but that's a good guess,” I said. I filed away her reaction. She knew Mr. Bald Warm-up Suit. She had some reason to be afraid of him. Or afraid for me. Which didn't make me feel any better. “It was an FBI agent,” I said. “Wanna guess what she wanted to talk about?”

Corinne shook her head. She was staring straight ahead again. Her skin, in the light of the bedside lamp, was almost bronze, tight and smooth across her cheekbones.

“She wanted to know if I knew the whereabouts of a Miss Corinne Chang,” I said.

Corinne didn't say anything. I let it hang in the air for a minute.

“Now we're at the part of the movie,” I said after a while, “where I say, ‘Whatever is going on with you—and now especially that I seem to be involved—we need to go to the cops,' and you tell me some good reason why we can't go to the cops.”

Corinne folded her hands and put them under her chin, like she was praying, staring straight ahead. “I can't think of a good reason,” she said. “But supposing we do. What am I supposed to tell them?”

“What do they want to know?” I asked.

Corinne shrugged.

“You don't have any idea?”

“I have lots of ideas.”

For the next hour, while a cold wind in the cold dark outside rattled the motel windows, I sat in a chair near the window, my legs propped up on a table, while Corinne sat on the bed with hers crossed beneath her and told me some of them.

Rule #95: When you're already lost and clueless, it's best not to clutter things with any more information that's as likely to be superfluous as not.

 

We met with Ms. Masterson the morning after the Toyota got us to St. Louis, at a sandwich shop near the FBI's offices in Clayton, a suburb a few miles from downtown St. Louis. It was where lots of government offices and other businesses that preferred clean streets and safety over city squalor and random crime were located. Corinne ordered a sweet roll while we waited for her.

“You're not going to believe this,” Corinne said. “But I've been craving a sweet roll ever since I saw you eat that one at the rest stop, back in New Hampshire.”

“Can't expect this one to measure up,” I said. “The cellophane wrapper imparts a plasticky undercurrent of flavor profile you just can't get anywhere else.”

“Along with that special aging that takes place when they sit in that machine for a month or so.”

I nodded.

Even so, she did some work on it. Corinne was halfway through the roll when Ms. Masterson came in. She was wearing a dark green skirt and jacket with a white blouse. She looked like any of the other office workers in the place getting a late breakfast, sitting at booths and tables, studying the laptops in front of them. I introduced Corinne. Ms. Masterson sat at our table, across from me and next to Corinne.

“Show her your badge,” I said.

Ms. Masterson looked at Corinne. “You want to see my badge?”

“Pass,” Corinne said.

“You should,” I said. “It's pretty neat.”

Both of them ignored me.

“You're Corinne Chang,” Ms. Masterson said, pulling a small notebook from her purse, flipping it open and scanning it. Her hands looked strong. Her fingers were thick. Not fat. But powerful. I was willing to double down on my bet that she'd played field hockey in college.

“Born March fourteenth, nineteen eighty-eight?” she said, reading off the pad.

“Yes.”

“And you have been living for the past five years in Montreal?”

“I have.”

“You worked as a gem sorter for a diamond company there? Wing Sung Jewelry Importers?”

Corinne nodded. “It's not a retail company. We sold diamonds wholesale, along with a few other gems. We sold to larger jewelry stores all over Canada. Some parts of the U.S.”

“Wing Sung?” I said. “Cantonese?” Corinne nodded. I did too, more slowly.

“What's that mean?” Ms. Masterson asked.

“Cantonese—they're mostly in southern China—and Mandarin speakers—they're dominant in the rest of the country—don't always get along so well.” I didn't add that for many Mandarin-speaking Chinese in the northern part of China, Cantonese people, from the southern part of the country, are thought of the way a lot of New Yorkers would tend to think of Appalachian hillbillies, as slightly uncouth and unsophisticated country cousins. It was a snobbery that went back a long way in Chinese history.

“That's true,” Corinne said. “But if you want to work in the diamond trade for Chinese, you'd better learn to get along with Cantonese.”

“Which you did?” Ms. Masterson asked.

“Sure,” Corinne answered. “I even managed to get along with him”—she tilted her head in my direction—“for four or five days.”

“You cannot think of me as being worse than Cantonese,” I said, feigning surprise. I didn't think Corinne had any prejudices against Cantonese. Most Chinese Americans of her generation wouldn't. I was working for a Cantonese guy, Mr. Leong, at the Eastern Palace, and I never heard much anti-Cantonese sentiment from the northern Chinese I worked with. I was just amusing myself. Corinne went along with it.

“At least they're Chinese,” she said to me in Mandarin.

“Okay,” Ms. Masterson went on, as if she hadn't heard our exchange, “so why did you leave Wing Sung?”

“The company went out of business,” Corinne said.

“That's an understatement,” Ms. Masterson said.

“It is.”

I wondered what that was all about. I had begun, I realized, to think about Corinne Chang as something of a jigsaw puzzle that needed assembling. I had assembled a few pieces. Maybe some of the edges of the puzzle were done. Those were always the easy part. I was missing a lot more of the pieces in the middle of the puzzle, though. I didn't think this was a good time to try to put any new ones in place. I kept my mouth shut. Tucker's Rule #95: When you're already lost and clueless, it's best not to clutter things with any more information that's as likely to be superfluous as not.

“Do you have some idea why we want to talk to you?” Ms. Masterson asked Corinne.

Corinne nodded. I wondered if she needed a lawyer. I wondered if you're supposed to ask about getting a lawyer. I wondered if Corinne had the right to remain silent. I wished I'd watched more of those cop shows my roommate Toby was always watching back at Beddingfield. Former roommate. Mostly, though, I wondered where the hell all this was going. So I just sat and listened. Rule #95 was still in play.

“The FBI has been asked by the Canadian police to help out in an investigation of the Wing Sung company,” Ms. Masterson said. “There's a strong possibility the case may cross, ah, jurisdictional boundaries.”

Corinne took a deep breath, then let it out. Then she started telling the story. I'd heard it earlier, back in the motel in Ohio.

“I came to work one morning,” she said. “It was a Friday. I'd been working at Wing Sung for almost five years. It was the same routine. Mr. Sung, the owner, was always there first. He opened up. The shop was on the third floor of the Mercantile Mart, in the Central Business District. Do you know that area, by any chance?”

“I've been there,” Ms. Masterson said. I wondered why she'd have been to Montreal. I tried to work it into my theory about her having been a field hockey player in college. Maybe they had a big tournament in Montreal. Maybe there were some pieces in her puzzle that needed work. I decided I was too busy on the Corinne puzzle, though, to spend a lot of time on another one.

“So I get there, go up, and the door's locked,” Corinne said. “And there's a sign in the window, saying that Wing Sung Jewelry Importers is no longer in business.”

“That's it?” Ms. Masterson said. “No forwarding address on the sign, no telephone number? No nothing?”

“No nothing,” Corinne said.

“What did you think?”

“I thought it was a joke,” Corinne said. “I actually thought for a second or two that I was having a dream. It was like getting up in the morning and walking to your bathroom and finding it wasn't there anymore.”

Corinne told Ms. Masterson what she'd told me that night back in Ohio. She used her key to get into the building. Everything was still in place, she said. Desks for Mr. Sung and two assistants? Check. Stacks of invoices in baskets on top? Check. Her forceps, viewing loupe, and notebooks, all in place on the counter in the back room where she worked, under a big skylight to let in the natural light? Check. The inventory, kept, she said, in a bedroom closet–size vault? Checked out. As in gone. Faded away. Departed the premises.