Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (33 page)

My mother asked how it was that when they left for Indonesia, I had been a senior at Beddingfield College in New Hampshire with one semester to go until graduation, and when they had returned, I was working as a chef in a Chinese restaurant in St. Louis.

“I've been a chef for a long time,” I said. “You know that.”

My mother said that, in point of fact, she was less interested in how I came to be cooking professionally in St. Louis and more in how and why I had left Beddingfield. I told her it was a long story. She told me she had time. “Me too,” my father said. He looked over at Corinne, who was sitting in her own chair, barefoot, her knees tucked under. She was wearing shorts, and her legs looked very good.

“Do you know anything about this?” my mother asked Corinne. Corinne told them she'd met me after Beddingfield. My father asked where. Corinne's eyes danced. She leaned forward and lifted her glass from the table. Not entirely successfully, she tried to keep a grin off her face as she said very clearly, “He picked me up at a highway rest stop.”

“You've been waiting a long time to use that line, haven't you?” I asked.

“Very long,” she replied. She sat back in her chair, took a sip of her lime rickey, and smiled again. At me. My mother examined a dribble of condensation that ran down the side of her glass. My father looked out across the street in front of the house. Both of them, I was relieved to see, were also trying to hide smiles.

Then my father cleared his throat. “I suppose,” he said to Corinne, “it is not a coincidence that you have the same name as a Corinne Chang who is mentioned prominently in an e-mail I received recently from an FBI field officer in St. Louis, a woman named Masterson.”

Corinne sat back. “That's a reasonable assumption.”

“She gave me quite an entertaining report,” my father said, then corrected himself, “not a report exactly. Or officially. Just informally sharing some information from one government agent to another, retired one.”

“I bet it was,” I said.

“Was what?” my father said.

“Entertaining.”

He looked at me. “So . . . Just what the hell happened?”

I started to say that it was, like Beddingfield, a long story. But I stopped myself. If I said that, it might remind them both that I hadn't explained anything about Beddingfield and my premature departure from the halls of academia. So instead, I put my glass down on the wicker table and sat back and got to it.

“It all started because I really wanted a cinnamon bun, and I'd been driving awhile, and there was a rest stop, right around Littleton. Did you know”—I interrupted myself—“what Littleton was originally called? I'll give you a hint. It's from a Saxon word that means ‘cheese farm.'”

Even with my hint, my parents didn't know. But I kept talking and got back to Corinne's story. Like the story about Beddingfield, I'd save the Littleton anecdote for later.

Rule #94: When the rules don't cover it, improvise.

 

I gave Corinne the Special Tucker Tour of Andover. We drove by Andover High School, which looked like it always had. We went to a couple of the Chinese restaurants where I'd worked. We had dinner with the Wu family. Langston's mother wanted to know if he was seeing anyone, and we told them about Bao Yu. We didn't mention the gunshot wound to his ass.

Mostly, though, we sat around at my house and read and went for walks in the evening. After life in the Eastern Palace, it was like a slow decompression period, like coming up from a deep dive in the ocean, taking it easy, resurfacing gradually. I cooked for her and my parents. After a couple of days, I asked her if there was anything she'd like to do.

“I want to go back to the Shaker place,” Corinne said.

We borrowed the car again and set out the next morning. It was full, glorious summer now. The Mass Turnpike was a strip of asphalt meandering through brilliant, dark emerald hills. I told Corinne we were passing through the land of the Nipmucks, the Indians who'd originally lived in this part of Massachusetts.

“You have an impressive command of obscure facts,” she said.

“Hey,” I said, “I'm not the one who listens to eighteenth-century Catalan harpsichordists.”

We got to Pittsfield and ate lunch at a joint there called Hot Harry's Fresh Burritos. I suggested splitting the Super Burrito, and Corinne asked if I was feeling okay and if so what was wrong with the Monster Burrito (Double Meat & Double Cheese!)? And I thought that if I hadn't been before, I just might be falling in love. Then we went to Hancock and out to the village, where we paid our admission. When we'd been there last, in the middle of winter, we'd had the place to ourselves. Today there were at least three dozen cars in the lot, along with a couple of school buses.

“Come on,” she said. She took my hand.

We walked through the central part of the village and then over into the yard behind the Shakers' meetinghouse. It is a little removed from the rest of the village. It was quieter there. To the side of the house, a dirt trail cut into a thicket of maples. We followed the path, Corinne leading me, until she stopped, under the green canopy of the maples, at three granite boulders. They'd probably been sitting in that spot since a team of horses had dragged them there to clear the nearby field, when the Shakers were still working the land here. There were some smaller stones scattered around too. Corinne stepped over to one, about the size of a football. She squatted down. With her top pulled up above her waist, I could see the smooth brown of her lower back, and the top of her panties. Black.

She pulled at the stone and flipped it over, and then she had something in her hand. A clear bag, like what you'd put sandwiches in for a picnic. She straightened and handed it to me. Inside, I could see a piece of folded paper, light blue.

“Be careful when you open it,” she said. “Real careful.”

I was. I took the folded paper from inside and started to pull it open. Corinne interrupted me. She put one hand under mine, holding it, then brushed aside my other, the one that was unfolding the paper, and finished the job herself.

I was suddenly aware that my heart was beating. Fast.

“I'm guessing there's about a quarter-zillion dollars' worth of diamonds in here,” I said. “But then again, you're the expert.”

“Good eye,” Corinne said. “Although your estimate is off by a little. It's more like about sixty-five thousand dollars. Give or take.”

“Give or take,” I said. “Which for some reason Sung didn't take when he cleaned out the rest of his own supply?”

“I think he may have forgotten about these,” Corinne said. “They were a private stash he had. He must have been fairly distracted at the time.”

“How did you know about them?”

“He showed them to me one day, not too long after I started working there,” she said. “I think he had some vague designs about getting into my pants, and he thought it would impress me.”

“Did it?”

“He kept it taped under the desk in his office,” she said, ignoring my question. “He said it was a ‘rainy-day fund' he could liquidate in case he needed money unexpectedly. He'd been putting aside diamonds, one from this consignment, another from that, for a long time. He did enough volume that it wouldn't have shown up in the accounts.”

“How do things like diamonds not show up in accounts? It's not like filching some staples or rubber bands.”

“Wholesalers in the diamond business deal in hundreds of thousands of stones,” she said. “They'll send an extra one or two along to a distributor like the Wing Sung company. And distributors' inventories are constantly fluid, anyway. It isn't that hard, unless you're greedy about it, to slowly take one here and there and keep it off the books.”

“So the day you showed up and he was gone,” I said, “you figured out what had happened?”

“I guessed; that was all.”

“And you remembered the stash here . . .” I lifted the packet. The diamonds caught the afternoon light and twinkled like the sky's brightest stars. “And checked to see if it was still there.”

“I did,” she said. “It was.”

“And you hid it here the day we visited?”

“Oh, no, Nancy Drew,” she said. She held my hand again and used her other to fold the packet closed again. “I came down here and hid them, then went to New Hampshire and waited for you to come along.”

“Complicated plan.”

“Qi wo!”
she hissed. “Of course I put it here the day you took me. What do you think?”

It was quiet. A little breeze riffled the maple leaves over our head. A catbird made a raw, mewling call.

“Technically speaking,” I said, “these belong to the Flying Ghosts.”

“Technically speaking,” Corinne said. “Although since they weren't in the regular inventory, Ping and the Ghosts wouldn't have known about them in the first place. They couldn't have known these diamonds were missing since they didn't know Sung had them.”

“
Had
them.”

“True,” she said. “However, since they are—what's the expression the prosecuting attorney used back in St. Louis? IGG?”

“Ill-gotten gains.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Since they are ill-gotten gains, and since Ping and several others of the Flying Ghosts are right now distracted by arrests and upcoming prosecutions, they are probably not in a position to accept receipt of them. So my conclusion is . . .”

“Finders, keepers?” I said.

“Unless there is a Tucker's Rule that covers this sort of situation.”

“This one's in kind of a gray area, I have to admit.”

She took the blue envelope from my hand and slid it back into the plastic pouch, then tucked it into the front pocket of my pants.

“You trust me with these?” I asked.

“I'm thinking we might want to use them to make an investment,” she said. We started walking back to the main part of the village. Out of the shade of the maples, the sun was bright.

“Investment in what?” I asked.

She looped her arm through mine. “Well,” Corinne said, “I've been to this part of Massachusetts twice now and it's lovely and all, but have you noticed one thing that's missing?”

“What?”

“There doesn't seem to be a good Chinese restaurant anywhere around here.”

D
AVE
L
OWRY
is the restaurant critic for
St. Louis Magazine
and writes regularly for a number of magazines on a wide variety of subjects, many of them related to Japan and the Japanese martial arts. He is the author of numerous nonfiction books.