Chinese Cooking for Diamond Thieves (4 page)

 

We crossed the line between New Hampshire and Massachusetts a little after ten. I didn't get off the highway until we were at Methuen. My passenger was quiet, watching the scenery.

“Ever been to this part of Massachusetts before?” I asked. She shook her head.

“Ever been to Massachusetts period?”

“Nope.”

“Pity,” I said.

I pulled off just outside Andover and went to a market at Shawsheen Village. At the meat counter, I got a plastic-wrapped chunk of pork belly. Most people in this part of Massachusetts use pork belly, chopped into bitsy pieces, to flavor clam chowder. So lots of stores carry it. I added some knobs of fresh ginger, two heads of broccoli and one of garlic to my basket. Unless my parents had raided my stash in the pantry, I was fairly certain I could find whatever else I needed there. She followed me around, hands in her coat, watching, not saying anything.

“You need anything?” I asked.

“I'll meet you at the checkout,” she said.

When she did, she put a package of tampons on the checkout conveyor belt. She could have separated from me when we came in the store and bought them discreetly. But she didn't seem embarrassed or shy about it. Maybe she was just doing it to—what?—shock me? I'd seen girls do that before: deliberately use language “nice girls” weren't supposed to use or whip off a shirt in front of you to change—stuff that seemed like it was meant to prove some kind of point. I thought this was sort of like guys in school who take up smoking because they think it makes them look older or tougher. On the other hand, maybe she just needed the tampons and she didn't really care one way or the other.

 

It's funny how you don't see your house the same way other people see it. I'd grown up there. It was my home. I never thought much more about it than that. I knew it was bigger than some homes. It sure wasn't a mansion, though. We pulled into the driveway. I heard a low whistle beside me.

“Nice how you've obviously got the slave quarters out of sight of the main house here at the plantation,” she said.

“It's not a plantation,” I said. “It's a cross-gabled Victorian. With shingle siding.”

“What it is,” she said, “is big. It's also beautiful,” she added quickly, like she thought I might be offended at being accused of growing up in a big house. I wasn't.

“Do your parents own the Internet?” she asked. “Or some small country? Like Denmark?”

“My parents,” I said, “specifically my mother, specifically her great-grandfather, worked on the Boston & Maine Railroad, as a conductor. He had a lot of time on his hands while the trains were running, so he hung out in the mail car. He came up with a way that made it faster for trains to transfer mail from the mail car to the station. The train didn't even have to stop to make the transfer. He came up with some hooks and poles so they could just switch out as the trains came running by. He sold the idea to the train company. He sold it to a lot of other train companies. He made a lot of money. He built this house, back in the twenties. My mother inherited it.”

“So will you inherit it?” she asked.

“Probably.” Although after the way I'd left Beddingfield, maybe the will would be changed.

“Maybe this is a little forward of me,” she said, “but would you consider marrying me?”

“Maybe later,” I said. “First let's go inside and make sure the domestic staff haven't been stealing from our Rembrandt collection again.”

Rule #21: It's not quite as weird if the person doing your laundry knows your name.

 

My parents didn't own any Rembrandts. We had a couple of Fitz Hugh Lane landscapes hanging on the walls—or seascapes to put it more accurately. In one a long schooner tilts across the horizon sailing out from Rocky Neck Beach over in Gloucester. In the other, a ship hull lies on its side, careened at Brace's Rock. I liked the way Lane had captured the light in his paintings. It looked like it was coming from inside the paintings themselves. I used to study them when I was a kid. I finally narrowed down the times of the day they had been painted, just by looking at the color and the slant of the light. Mostly, though, there were family photographs on the walls. Nothing had been disturbed. No one had been in the house for at least a couple of weeks, not since my parents had left.

We dropped our stuff in the hallway between the kitchen and the living room, and I took her upstairs to the extra bedroom.

“I'm going to get to work on dinner in a minute,” I said. “Make yourself at home.”

“I will,” she said. “I'll do some laundry if that's okay. You have anything that needs to go in?”

“Just my entire wardrobe.” I showed her the laundry room in the basement and left her with the intimidating pile of clothes that had accumulated since I'd left the dorm at Beddingfield. Walking back upstairs, I thought about all my dirty underwear in that pile. It wasn't
that
dirty. It wasn't gross. Nothing organic was actually growing on anything. Or at least if it was, it wasn't flourishing. It was just that no one except my mother and I had ever done my laundry before. I turned around at the top of the basement stairs and went back down until I was near the bottom. She was squatting over two piles she'd made of both our stuff, sorting it by color. She squatted like a lot of first-generation Chinese, flat-footed instead of on the balls of her feet like a Westerner would.

“Listen, I said. “If you'd prefer not to do my laundry, I can get to it later.” She looked over her shoulder at me. “I mean, it's a little personal, I guess, having someone I just met doing my laundry. Especially considering I don't even know your name.”

“Okay.”

I retraced my steps back up the stairs and went into the kitchen. As I was pulling the rice cooker off the shelf in the pantry, I heard her come up to the top of the steps. She stuck her head around the doorway.

“My name's Corinne,” she said. “Corinne Chang. So now is it okay if I do your laundry?”

“Absolutely.”

Cooking, after I hadn't done it for a while, was like slipping into a warm bath. It was that relaxing. Maybe in some ways even more relaxing than a soak. My cold rolled-steel wok was still sitting on one burner of the stove, just where I'd left it when I'd been home for Christmas. My parents never used it. I think they left it out on the stove, though, to remind them of me. It had a deep, rich black patina from having been used so long. I turned on the burner. I found my cleaver in the knife drawer, the blade tucked inside the cardboard sheath I made to protect the edge. The round slab of a tree trunk that functioned as a cutting board was on a shelf under the cupboards. I chopped the broccoli for steaming, then shredded the onions and sliced the ginger into papery slices that gave off a sharp perfume I realized I'd missed. I wished Corinne was here to watch. It isn't easy to slice ginger thinly with a big Chinese-style cleaver. I was cutting the slices so finely that light would have shown through if I'd held them up to a window. I'd spent a lot of time perfecting that skill. But apparently she'd finished packing the washing machine and had gone into the library. When I glanced in there, she was curled up in my father's overstuffed chair, looking at a book on early American marine painting.

I sliced the square of pork belly into two pieces, then used butcher's twine to tie them like little birthday presents, with a bow around each. The wok was starting to send up thin drifts of smoke. I drizzled oil into it and swirled it around, then slid the porky presents in. They burst into a satisfying sizzling hiss; clouds of smoke and steam billowed up, reminding me to turn on the overhead fans before the fire alarm was triggered.

While the pork was browning, I found my clay pot. Its sandy outer surface was chocolate dark with use; inside there was a creamy smooth finish that came from having cooked so many meals. Its handle felt in my hand just like the cleaver had. It was like shaking hands with an old friend. I got a couple of clumps of rock sugar from the pantry and tossed them in the pot, adding a gurgle of light soy sauce and another of the dark, and a generous dollop of Shiaoxing cooking wine. The pork had tanned nicely by now. The surfaces of both pieces were crispy, golden brown, with little delicious-looking bubbles forming. The sweet scent of hot pork fat filled the kitchen, mixing with the starchy aroma of the rice from the automatic cooker. I drained the pork, then added it to the clay pot, along with the ginger and onions; put the top on; and set the whole thing on the burner, turning the flame down to low. Done. All it needed was about three hours in the pot. What I needed was a shower to wash off the accumulated grit of everything between here and Beddingfield. And maybe a nap. Tucker's Rule #39: There's usually time, if you plan life well enough, for a nap.

I was never an overachiever. Even so, I managed to get in both.

Rule #14: Knowing what you don't need to know is at least as important as knowing what you do need to know.

 

The diary's right there. Somebody left it. You'll get it back to them, of course. But take a look first, skim through a few pages? Peek in the medicine cabinet when you're using the bathroom in someone's house? It's just natural curiosity. It isn't like you're prying into state secrets. What are you going to find out? The diary's author has a crush on someone? You suspect that anyway. The owners of the house are using some kind of birth control? Does that really come as a surprise?

You're just taking a harmless peek into someone's private life. That's the sort of thing you tell yourself. Just before you open the diary. Or the cabinet door. Except me.

I don't tell myself any of that to justify any snooping I might contemplate. I don't look at other people's stuff. It isn't that I'm not curious. I am. More than most. It's just that I read Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story “Young Goodman Brown” when I was a freshman in high school. Goodman's a trusting young guy, believing the best in everyone, and then, wandering around out in the woods one night, he comes across some kind of kinky cult, where all the town's upstanding citizens, including his own wife, are about to start a bizarre ritual. And suddenly he's waking up, all alone out in the woods, and he doesn't know if what he saw was real or just a bad dream. And he spends the rest of his life bitter and cynical. It made a big impression on me. That's when I came up with Tucker's Rule #14: Knowing what you don't need to know is at least as important as knowing what you do need to know. And Rule #14a: It might even be more important.

That's why, when Corinne's cell phone started buzzing, I didn't have the slightest intention of answering it. An hour had passed since I'd gone down for the nap. Before I did, I'd heard the door to the room I'd shown her close just as I was drifting off. I assumed she'd gone in there and done the same. She was still in there.

Buzzzzz.

Showered clean, wearing my best Boston College sweatpants and a fresh shirt, and feeling much better after my nap, I was walking right by it when it went off. Corinne's phone.

Buzzzz.

It wasn't exactly one of my rules, more like a Tucker's Rule addendum, but I always figured I wasn't going to get into any kind of trouble by
not
answering a phone. Especially when it wasn't my own.

Buzzzz.

Minding one's own business is an often-neglected, little-appreciated quality in a person. As I said, I pride myself on not sticking my nose where it doesn't belong. Yeah. Sure. You bet. Which is why I'd approached Corinne in the first place, back at that New Hampshire rest stop. And why she was now sleeping in my parents' house. And why I was taking her a couple of hundred miles without knowing the reason why. Mind. Your. Own. Business. Words to live by.

I picked up the phone and hit
RECEIVE
.

“I know where you are,” the voice said in Mandarin. “You and I need to have a little talk. You know what it's about.”

There was silence. The voice was obviously waiting for Corinne to answer. I answered instead with a sickly sweet politeness that's almost impossible to duplicate in English. I answered as if I were a court eunuch receiving a visitor to some princess at the imperial court in the Forbidden City.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I regret to inform you that the young lady is not at this moment receiving calls.”

“Who are you?” the voice snapped, like a dog growling when you get too close to its food bowl. “You need to tell the woman who owns this phone that she's in a lot of trouble, and it's not going to get any better until she's talked to me!”

“Might I inquire as to the nature of your business with the young woman in question?”

“Who are you?” the voice repeated.

“I am her social secretary and confidant,” I said. “Might I inquire as to your name and your position?”

“My name? My name?” He wasn't sounding any friendlier. “My name is this: I'm the guy who has some questions she'd better be answering if she knows what's good for her.”

“I see.” My mind was racing. Hard to tell how old the voice was. My first thought was Corinne must have some seriously screwed-up boyfriend.

“If you will leave your name and number,” I said, “I will alert her, at the earliest opportunity, to your efforts to contact her.”

“I'm not leaving you shit,” the voice said, “except this: If you're involved with her, you're in trouble. You like trouble? You think she's going to be worth the trouble that's coming?”

I didn't say anything.

“You hear me? You still there?”

I was. But then I pressed
END
.
I just stood there, phone in hand. The guy sounded like a jerk. Just as I could sound more obsequious and slimier when speaking Chinese than I could in English, it was also possible for him to sound even jerkier speaking Chinese. The intonation, the way the words are put together—you can come across like an arrogant ass in Mandarin if you want to. This guy sounded good at it. It irritated me. I didn't know why. Maybe it was because I was only a couple of steps away from putting together a really great meal and I didn't want the mood spoiled. Maybe it was something else.