Rule #74: No matter how bad your day, it can always get worse if someone points a gun at you.
Corinne told me about the threatening phone calls the night the guy came by in a car and pointed a gun at me.
Yes. Rule #18: When it’s going too good, something’s coming along to change things. When you’re strolling down a sidewalk and someone pulls up in a car and sticks a gun in your face, that’s very certainly in the realm of Rule #18.
Almost a week after the end of the contest, I was walking from the Asian grocery store back to the restaurant. The same walk I’d taken to get the carp for the judges. The same path I’d been on when I got the first carp to make the dish for Ms. Masterson. I was a regular on that route. I went by Dr. Luo’s clinic. I veered off to my right to open the door for an old Chinese lady who was struggling with it. Without stopping, I looked in the window of a tiny shop that made and sold fresh tofu, from scratch, every day. A couple of women stood at the counter, buying bricks of smooth tofu made earlier in the morning. I heard the car approaching from behind, slowing, and pulling over to the curb. I kept walking. The car came up so the front passenger window was even with me. It was rolled down. A guy stuck his head out, holding a gun, an automatic of some kind. He’d turned the automatic on its side, like they do in movies about modern-day gangsters who don’t know how to shoot.
He spoke in Mandarin. It was badly accented with the flavor of a low-class Hong Kong upbringing—mixed with what he must have thought made him sound like a ghetto gang member.
“Woei, ji bai!” he said.
I concentrated on him, on what he was saying, instead of on the gun. I really badly wanted to concentrate on the gun. The insults weren’t going to do too much damage. That gun, on the other hand . . . But I tried to ignore it. If he was going to shoot me, he’d have done it and moved on. Or maybe he just wanted to see me sweat. Maybe he wanted me to beg, and then he’d kill me. Either way, it was better to think about what he was saying and to watch his facial expressions and not to focus on that small, efficient-looking black hole of the barrel. He had thick, full eyebrows, like a couple of hairy black caterpillars were resting on his forehead.
“Hongkie,” I said.
“What?” He said.
“You’re a Hongkie,” I said. “You said ‘woei, ji bai’ instead of ‘wei, ji bai,’ like most mainland Chinese would have. You’re from Hong Kong.”
“Yeah, you think you’re pretty fucking smart,” the driver said in English. He leaned forward over the steering wheel so he could see me. His hair was so slick with some kind of oil that there was a luster to it. It was almost blue-black. It looked dyed. A curl hung down on his forehead, as if it had just fallen there. It had probably taken him ten minutes in the mirror with a comb to get it that way. He moved his head slowly, as if he didn’t want to disturb the whole effect.
I kept looking at his partner, Eyebrows. Eyebrows with the gun. I was fairly sure these were the same two who’d jumped Corinne outside her door that night. They looked younger now that I was seeing them in daylight. Since I’d come up on them from behind at her door, I’d seen them mostly from the back. They were thin to the point of being skinny. Eyebrows was wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt, and I could see the ropy veins in his forearms. They both had poufy pompadour hair, like Chinese gang members. They both looked jittery. I wondered if they were using crack or something else to keep them wired. Chinese gangs like selling heroin; it was, for the moment at least, their preferred stock in trade. But gang members used other drugs, meth or crack. If this pair was wired with meth, that was just one more fun factor in the equation. Someone’s pointing a gun at you and he’s just crispy enough to make him a little unbalanced. Or a lot. Nice.
“I’m not too fucking smart,” I said. “I’m the one standing here with a bag of longan fruits, and you guys are the ones with the gun.”
Eyebrows said something to the Curl that I didn’t catch. Then he spoke to me again.
“You wonder why we don’t tiu that slut?” “Tiu” was young-tough-guy slang for “screw.” In this case, he meant it as something more felonious. The other word he used was “jian huo,” another Hokkien street slang expression. He was still holding the gun sideways. He was still pointing it at me.
Common sense said Eyebrows wasn’t going to shoot me. Then again, common sense didn’t have all its vital organs about four feet from the barrel of that gun. I tried to keep my breathing steady. I focused on the exhalations. All I knew about guns was stuff I’d heard my father say, usually when he was making fun of the way they were used in crime shows on TV. Even so, I knew that at this range, even if he was stupid and nervous, or jittery on crack, he’d have to work hard to miss me.
“You’re smart enough to know why we aren’t rubbing her,” he said. The Curl leaned over, again to speak across the inside of the car to me, again turning his head slowly so his ’do wasn’t threatened.
“She gonna tell us where they are,” he said. “Yeah.”
Eyebrows smiled. His mouth smiled, at least. His eyes didn’t. They looked like snake eyes. Cold. Reptilian.
“Probably not,” I said.
The smile broke. His forehead crinkled, just a little.
“Probably,” I said, “you’ll do something stupid. You’re scared, both of you, because you haven’t gotten whatever it is you’re supposed to get already. And if you screw up much more, you’re going to get squeezed by your White Fan”—I used the Mandarin expression for their boss—“and so you’ll panic. Do something stupid. And either get caught or . . .”
Eyebrows was trying to take it all in. He didn’t look like he assimilated information quickly.
“Or?” he said.
“Or you’ll mess up again,” I said. “Like you did that night outside the apartment.”
The look on his face, which he tried too late to hide, told me it had been him. Them.
“Shheeet,” he drawled out. “You talkin’ trash.”
I couldn’t tell if it was his accent or if he was trying to sound like a gangbanger. I just stood there, looking at him. The weight of the gun had pulled his hand down. The weight of having to think probably distracted him a little too. The weapon was pointing to about my knees now. He looked straight ahead, then back at me, trying for a contemptuous sneer. He couldn’t pull it off. He jerked the gun up and pulled it back inside the car.
“Let’s go,” he muttered. The Curl slammed the gearshift out of neutral and managed to squeal the tires as they pulled away—then the car abruptly swerved, just missing a produce delivery truck that had pulled into the center lane in front of them.
I looked around. Cars kept going by. One of them, a candy-apple red Honda, slowed and turned into the parking lot behind me, which Dr. Luo shared with the tofu shop. The driver, a young Chinese woman, looked briefly at me, wondering, I guess, what I was doing just standing there, a plastic bag hanging from my fist, looking around stupidly in the middle of the morning. The little bell on Dr. Luo’s office door jangled. An old Chinese woman, different from the one who’d gone in, came out and looked up at me and smiled. A cloud passed over the sun, still low in the sky. Life went on. I could taste something warm and metallic in my mouth. I felt like someone had reached inside me, grabbed my stomach with both hands, and twisted. I wondered what the right thing to do was after having been threatened with a gun. I didn’t know if there was an appropriate response. But I did the only thing I could have right at that moment. Stiff-legged, I walked into the narrow alley between Dr. Luo’s clinic and the next building. I sat down. If anyone had been watching, they would probably have said I was not so much sitting as I was falling. The brick wall of the clinic was at my back. I was grateful for it; if it hadn’t been there, I would have probably been lying on the ground instead of sitting. My hands shook. I put them in my lap, which didn’t help. I put them on the ground on either side of me, pressing my palms hard enough into the rough, gritty concrete to make them sting.
There was a feeling of unreality about it all. A gun? I’d actually had a gun stuck in my face? I looked around. The morning was still bright. Cars kept going by on the street. It was the same normal day it had been ten minutes ago. Except someone had threatened me with a gun.
I slapped my palms together and rubbed them to get off the grit, then rubbed my face, my elbows resting on my bent knees. Two choices, I thought. Sit here and quiver awhile and feel the tides of fear that are washing over me in sickening waves. Or get up and walk back to the restaurant. Screw it, I thought, staring between my knees. It’s a good day to sit and feel sorry for myself.
“Young man!” The voice cut into my thoughts. I looked up. It was a Chinese face looking back, from a couple of yards away. A woman. Old enough that her hair was past gray and more white. She was well dressed, in a skirt and blouse, with a thick yellow sweater on, and a necklace with a teardrop piece of jade hanging from it.
“You cannot be sitting around in an alley like that! This is a decent neighborhood,” she said briskly. “We do not tolerate this sort of behavior.”
It put things in perspective. “Yes,” I said, then picked up my bag of longan fruits and pushed off the wall and stood. “But you know what happens.”
“What happens when?” she said. She was perfectly straight, her posture erect. She’d turned herself so her right hand, holding her purse, was turned away from me.
“What happens when you allow laowai to start moving into the neighborhood,” I said. “Place just goes to hell.”
I walked around her, staying far enough away so she wouldn’t feel threatened, and went to work.
“Will you come in for a minute?” Corinne asked.
I did. She put a kettle on the stove and got out a teapot and a couple of cups. It was close to midnight. It had been busy at the Palace. It felt good to sit. A chef’s working career isn’t much longer than a professional athlete’s. The long hours standing, bending over or squatting to get pots or food stored on low shelves, the hours, the heat of the kitchen—they begin to add up. I was a long way from having to think about that. Even so, I could feel the muscles in my lower back slowly start to unclench as I relaxed in Corinne and Bao Yu’s apartment kitchen.
“I’ve been getting some calls,” she said. “Threatening ones.” She sat down opposite, poured both cups full, then pushed one across the table to me.
“Funny you should mention that,” I said.
“You’ve gotten some calls too?”
I shook my head. “They were a little more direct.” I told her about the two in the car. And the gun.
“Were you scared?”
“You’ve done my laundry before, remember?” I asked her.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Well,” I said, “Trust me. I don’t think you’d have wanted to have washed my underwear after that.”
She told me about the calls she’d been getting on her cell phone. A voice she didn’t recognize told her that she needed to be careful, that people were watching her, that something bad could happen to her in the near future.
“They think I have the inventory. The diamonds.”
“But you don’t?”
“Sure I do,” Corinne said. “That’s why I’m working ten-hour shifts as a waitress, listening to wrinkly old Chinese businessmen proposition me. And that’s how I’m able to afford these upscale digs.” She fanned her hands over the tiny kitchen.
“The question was rhetorical.”
She looked at me and didn’t say anything.
“We need to tell Agent Masterson,” I said. “About the encounter I had this morning and about the phone calls.”
She took a sip of tea and continued to look at me over the cup. “Has it occurred to you that our relationship is built largely on someone trying to hurt me?”
“We have a relationship?”
“If you’ll recall,” she said, “I asked you pretty much the same question not that long ago. Your answer was not exactly forthcoming.”
“No, no,” I said. “You asked if I was attracted to you. I answered straight up. Being attracted to someone isn’t the same as having a relationship. If it were, Langston and Bao Yu would already be the Hottest Couple of the Year instead of just now going out together for the first time.”
Corinne tilted her head. A thick strand of her hair dropped down. It lay along her neck just for a second, and I could see it coil, with an inky shimmer, in the kitchen light.
“You’re an interesting person,” she said.
I picked up my teacup. It was so hot, I had to hold it with my fingertips. I didn’t say anything because, really, what can you say when someone says you’re interesting? Agree and you sound like a pompous jerk. Disagree and it sounds like you’re just trying to get them to talk more, to tell you more about why they think you’re interesting. And that comes with its own potential for pompous jerkiness. Better just to shut up.
“Are you scared now?” she asked.
“A little bit.” I took a sip of the tea, sucking in just a little with a lot of air to cool it. Chinese drink tea so hot it can blister paint. It was just short of boiling. I sat back in the chair, rubbed my face, and realized I was tired. Part of it was the adrenaline dump from the morning. I’d had someone point a gun at me and threaten me. It was a new experience. It wasn’t one I thought I could ever get used to.
“Mostly, though,” I said, “I’m getting pissed. I don’t like being scared. So after I’m scared for a while, being scared turns to being angry.”
“I haven’t ever seen you angry,” she said.
I put my cup of tea back on the table. “You will,” I said. “Probably. And then maybe you’ll think I’m really interesting.”