Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (18 page)

“So where are we going again?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Across the river,” I said.

“Which one?” she asked. “The Mississippi and the Missouri; they're both right here. I can't keep them straight.”

“Mississippi,” I said. “It separates Missouri from Illinois. Didn't you have geography in school?”

“Yes,” she said. “But appearing not to know as much as a man makes a woman more appealing.”

“Says who?”

She opened the cupboard and took out two teacups.

“It was in the
Girls' Manual
we all got issued at birth.”

 

We both had the day off. I hadn't left town since I'd gone to Buffalo, and I wanted to give the Toyota some exercise. And I'd heard about some fish markets over in Illinois that were worth investigating. We set out, the two of us.

The Mississippi carved the border between Illinois and Missouri a few million years ago. As it did, the current left behind bluffs on the Illinois side. Giant ones. Some of them are more than twenty stories tall, towering over the river. The highway Corinne and I took was called the Great River Road. And it was. Pretty great. The bluffs were limestone. They reared up like chalky white palisades, with just enough room at their base for the road, the river flowing right along directly on the other side. Eagles soared and wheeled overhead. The sun was dancing on the rippling, chocolate brown water. It was nice to be driving again like this, out on a highway instead of in town. The Toyota was humming. I'd added about a quart of oil the night before to keep it that way.

In a little riverside town, we stopped at a small café where the booths were situated beside aquariums. Sitting down, diners could look right into them. A snapping turtle the size of a car tire sat on the bottom, slowly rotating his giant dinosaur head and looking dully at us, staring, unblinking. He was alive, I thought, probably before my grandfather was born. A silvery school of catfish glided past. Outside on the lawn where we'd parked, there were long, tubular wire-mesh fish traps that had probably caught some of them. I looked at the catfish while Corinne studied the menu.

“Fried catfish,” she read. “Fried crappie. Fried buffalo—buffalo?”

“It's a kind of fish, not the mammal,” I said. A solitary catfish nosed over and looked me over through the aquarium glass that separated us. It was almost big enough to consider me on its own menu.

“Fried frog legs, fried turtle.” She stopped. “Do you think the salads are fried as well?”

We both had the catfish, and Corinne ordered a bowl of turtle soup. Neither of us took a chance on salad. She dipped her spoon in the soup bowl when it came and took a bite, looking over at the glass wall of the aquarium beside us. The same snapping turtle was still sitting there, staring off at something in the distance I couldn't see. I could have fit both my fists into its mouth with room for a few extra fingers.

“Your brother is delicious,” Corinne said to the turtle, speaking Mandarin.

When I turned to look at her, she was holding the spoon out for me, giving me a taste. Her eyes were dark and big. I opened my mouth, and she put the spoon in. Then she went back to her bowl for more. Although I wasn't sure it was the best turtle soup I'd ever tasted, I was reasonably sure it was a spoonful of soup I would remember for a while.

Lunch done, we took the road a little farther north, toward a sign marked
FERRY LANDING
and pointing toward the river. As we pulled into the gravel lot, we watched a deckhand on the ferry toss a hawser cable back to shore. We'd driven across the Alton Bridge; I thought it would be fun to go back to St. Louis the other way, on the ferry.

“They'll be back in twenty minutes,” said a tall man. He had ambled around the side of a squat blue concrete block building beside the gravel drive that led to the ferry dock. He was wearing a woolen knit cap that, given its color, was probably designed to distinguish him from a deer. He yanked at the building's door, giving it a swift jerk when it stuck. From the outside, the place looked like it could have withstood a direct bomb blast. The lettering above the door was faded and had begun to flake.
TERRY'S BOAT SUPPLIES & FRESH FISH
. When I opened the door with the same jerk he'd applied to shake it loose from the frame, the aroma came out to meet us: it smelled like the bottom of a fishing boat. Inside there were fish everywhere. Catfish, big-headed buffalo, slim little perch, crappie, some others I didn't recognize. They were all lined up on metal trays, glistening on snowbanks of ice. There were a couple of dozen carp, all longer than my arm span. With their thick, horny-looking scales, they looked like they were wearing armor.

“I didn't think Americans ate carp,” Corinne said softly. We were walking around looking at the catch.

“Some do,” I said. “It's popular in some parts of the South. Some urban blacks eat it. It's kind of a specialty dish.”

“Weird.”

It was. In Chinese cuisine, carp is prepared in hundreds of different ways. To the Chinese, not eating carp would be like not eating chicken to Americans. The carps' eyes were still shiny wet and bulging. They'd been caught that morning, probably, and were still fresh. The scales were green at the edges, with a delicate pink tinge inside. I gently poked the flank of one. Firm. Meaty. We wandered up and down the rows of tables, looking at the catch for a while. A woman was leaning against the counter at the front, watching a small TV.

“You see anythin' you like, you let me know,” she said without looking at us. The man in the flaming orange cap disappeared through another door behind the counter, carrying a length of hose he'd lugged off a shelf.

“You want to get on the next ferry,” he said, suddenly coming back out again. “It's almost here.” We did, and it was.

We drove the Toyota up on the dock and onto the ferry, nosing it into a space near the bow. I obeyed the sign to be sure it was in
PARK
. Along with a couple pickup trucks, we crossed back over the Mississippi. Corinne and I stood at the railing and watched the roiling, cloudy brown water that frothed and chopped around the ferry's hull slicing through the current, and landed on the Missouri side, at the edge of what looked like miles and miles of open, rolling farmland. Most of the fields were bare, the colors umber and tan. It was the earth in the last couple of seasonal seconds before spring. I could see some fields that had already been turned over for seeding. The freshly tilled dirt was rich, deep black. Before we docked, I asked one of the dockhands for directions back to St. Louis, and once landed, we were off.

Even though we were less than twenty miles from St. Louis, this was farmland, rural, open, the fields rolling, separated by rows of dark, squat trees. There weren't many houses. We glimpsed a few, off in the distance.

“What happens when the river floods?” Corinne asked. “Aren't all these farms underwater?”

I pointed to a house on stilts, off the highway and almost concealed in a thicket of trees. “The people in those, I guess, just sit it out and wait for the water to go down. But the others?” I shrugged. “I guess they get wet.”

We drove on another mile without saying anything until Corinne spoke again.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Fire away.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

“No,” I said. For some reason, that spoonful of soup she'd offered me and ladled into my mouth came to mind. Along with the memory of her eyes looking at me as she did.

“That was fast,” she said. “You didn't have to think about it.”

“I have some rules to determine if I'm in love,” I said. I felt a quick, hot flush and the sudden desire to be out of my jacket. I glanced at the heater dial in the Toyota. It was set where it had been all day, on low. It just suddenly seemed to be working a lot harder.

“Some rules,” she said. “Imagine that.”

“And I've yet to be in a situation where the necessary criteria were established.”

“You're kind of a starry-eyed romantic, aren't you?” Corinne said.

We kept driving. The sun was still above the horizon. It had fleshed out some streaky clouds, turning them pink. The light was soft, almost creamy. After a while, she said, “Can I ask you another question?”

“Absolutely.”

“One completely unrelated to the previous one?”

“Go,” I said.

“Are you even in the slightest attracted to me?”

I was fortunate. The stretch of road we were on was straight. I wasn't sure I could have navigated any bends or turns at that moment. The heater again suddenly seemed to have cranked up all on its own.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Of course I am attracted to you.”

“Are you attracted to me as much as Langston is attracted to Bao Yu?” she asked.

“Steel isn't attracted to a magnet as much as Langston is attracted to Bao Yu.”

“Didn't answer the question.”

“You would be surprised how attracted to you I am,” I said. “And I, being a cool and distant sort, very much into my image of—we talked about this whole thing before—being completely in control, I would be embarrassed and uncomfortable if you did know how attracted I am.”

“Interesting,” Corinne said.

“It is,” I said. “However . . .”

“However?”

“Yes,” I said. “However. There is often a ‘however' in life.”

“One of Tucker's Rules?”

“Number fifty-seven: ‘There is often a “however” in life.'”

We drove awhile, neither of us saying anything. Both of us thinking lots of things. At least, I was. Some of them I'd thought about before, in vague ways. Others, like the thoughts I'd had that night on Corinne's bed lying next to her, were pretty well defined.

“So,” she said, “what's the ‘however'?”

“However,” I said. “I get the feeling there's something you're not telling me.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw her shrug. “Lots of things I haven't told you,” she said. “Lots of things you haven't told me about you. I don't even know how many rules you have.”

“That's not what I'm talking about,” I said.

“Look,” she said. “Didn't you have to watch the videos in junior high school, the ones about dating and stuff?” She changed her voice, suddenly sounding like those silky-smooth counselor types who narrate the kind of videos probably every kid in the country has had to suffer through. “You're growing up and you're starting to interact with each other in more ‘grown-up' ways. Pretty soon, you'll start thinking about spending more time with friends of the opposite sex, time alone together. It's a way of learning to relate to one another, to learn about each other. It's an important time in your life, and it can be fun as well, if you remember to be careful and keep your clothes on at all times.”

I had a sudden urge to stop the car, pull off the road, and start asking questions. I was already making a list of them. I wanted to start with the reason she left, once her job—and her boss—disappeared like they did, and how she ended up at a rest stop in New Hampshire. I wanted to know what she was doing in Seattle. Then I'd work my way down to just who the hell that body was I'd looked at the other day and what kind of connection she had with it. Him. There were questions I had a feeling she had answers for, some she might share with me and others I was afraid she wouldn't. Maybe that was why I kept driving and kept my mouth shut.

She was quiet after that, all the way until we made it to the interstate that would take us back into St. Louis.

“It takes time, Tucker,” she finally said.

“I guess,” I said. Because I didn't know what else to say.

It was almost dark when we got home. I didn't have any answers. Still, the day hadn't been a total loss. I had tasted that soup off her spoon. And I had a dish for the contest.

Rule #15: A rub of fresh ginger on a wok heated until it smokes will sanitize it; few other problems in life are so easily solved.

 

“His name was Bobby Chu,” Ms. Masterson said. “He was a member of a gang called the Flying Ghosts.”

We were sitting at a table at the Eastern Palace, Ms. Masterson, Corinne, and me. The restaurant didn't open for lunch for another half-hour. Ms. Masterson came to the kitchen door, and Tuan, a new dishwasher we'd hired, heard her knock and let her in. She wasn't dressed for a cooking lesson. We didn't have one scheduled anyway. I took her into the dining area where Corinne and Bao Yu were both folding napkins. Bao excused herself. Ms. Masterson and I sat down.

“You ever hear of the Flying Ghosts?” Ms. Masterson asked.

I shook my head, but Corinne nodded. “Sure. They're kind of small, but they're in Montreal and other cities in Canada. Probably in this country too.”

“Ever run into them?”

“How much do you know about Chinese gangs?” Corinne asked her.

“A little,” Ms. Masterson said. “Not a whole lot.”

Corinne pushed a stack of napkins to the side and folded her hands on the table. “There are Chinese gangs in every big city in the United States and Canada.”

“They're like the Mafia,” Ms. Masterson said. “They run gambling, drug smuggling—and people smuggling—and prostitution, right?”

“And they offer ‘protection' for businesses,” Corinne said. “Pay them a monthly percentage of your profits, and nothing bad happens to your shop or your business. No mysterious fires or vandalism.”

“They're called tongs, right?” Ms. Masterson said.

“That word is Cantonese,” Corinne said. “It literally means a ‘hall.' But that's not exactly it. It's more like a meeting place, clubhouse, something like that. In the early days, when the Chinese were immigrating to this country, they became essentially slave labor to build the railroads—” She glanced at me as if I were personally responsible for this.