Rule #78: When you’re right, don’t gloat . . . too much.
We flew to Boston, into Logan Airport, three weeks later, Corinne and I. Langston drove us to the St. Louis Airport in the Toyota. When he remembered to, he was still limping a little for effect. I asked him, in terms of his ongoing efforts to woo Bao Yu, which was more effective: being a stoic survivor of a gunshot wound or being the best Chinese chef in St. Louis?
“Neither,” he said. “Turns out she likes my dimples.”
“Good thing the bullet didn’t get any further over, then,” Corinne said.
“Different dimples.”
On the plane, Corinne took the window seat. She plugged in ear buds from her phone and turned on the music app. I closed my eyes and dozed. I’d never been able to sleep on a plane. I could put myself into a kind of stupor, in which the noises around me blended into a low white noise that I found relaxing, the voices and the engine noises and the sounds of the flight attendants. I dozed for about half an hour. Then I tapped Corinne’s wrist. She was leaning against the bulkhead, eyes closed. She opened them and popped out both buds.
“What are you listening to?” I asked her.
“Antonio Soler.”
“Who?”
“Soler,” she repeated. “He was Spanish, Catalan. Harpsichordist, from the eighteenth century. He doesn’t get the attention he deserves.”
“He do any videos?” I asked.
“Watch,” she said. “I’ll do my imitation of someone ignoring you.” She put the ear buds back in and closed her eyes. I waited. About three minutes. Then I tapped her wrist again.
“What?” She tugged only one ear bud out this time and only opened one eye.
“I got Carlson’s explanation of how the Flying Ghosts found you—us—in Buffalo,” I said. “But how’d they find us in St. Louis?”
Corinne took out the other bud and sat up. “Ariadna. A few days after you left, a guy approached her when she left her office for lunch. She described him as Chinese, bald, young.”
“Bobby Chu.”
“Yes. He told her he had been dating me back in Montreal. Said we’d had an argument and that he’d been thinking about it and he’d been wrong and wanted to talk to me. I wouldn’t answer his phone calls; he’d come to Buffalo to try to get back together with me.”
“She believed that?”
“It sounded weird, she said.”
“But the guy knew who she was, knew she was your friend, knew you’d come to Buffalo. So how could his story not be straight? How could he know all that otherwise?”
“Right. He even knew where Ariadna worked. But she still didn’t want to give him any information without checking with me first. So, she just told him the truth. She told him I’d met someone, a laowai who was a Chinese chef, and that I was going to St. Louis to be with him.”
“And tracking down a prodigiously talented chef who was working in a Chinese restaurant in St. Louis would not have required the detective talent of the FBI.”
“Which also managed to find you—us.”
“So when Ariadna told you about meeting your so-called boyfriend—”
“I figured the Flying Ghosts were trying to get to me. So I told Ariadna not to say anything if they tried to contact her, to call the cops if they did, and I took off.”
“Which is why you’re weren’t at her apartment when I came to pick you up?”
“I checked into that motel,” she said. “And waited for you. Now can I get back to Antonio Soler?”
“Absolutely,” I said. She did.
I let it go for another five minutes. She’d closed her eyes again and was leaning back comfortably on the bulkhead again. The plane banked. I could see a long, silvery thread glittering in the sun, far below, with lots of green around it. I calculated the time, estimated our flight path. We were somewhere over New York. The path of the river and the landscape; it was the Mohawk River. The same one we’d driven along last winter. On our way to Buffalo. And everything else.
I tapped her on the wrist again.
“You’re pushing it,” she said. Only one bud came out again this time. And she kept her eyes closed.
“One more question.”
“Shoot.”
“How did Ariadna know you were going to St. Louis?” I asked. “When you said she told Chu the truth, that means you’d already told her you were planning to come to St. Louis. Even before Chu came along.”
She didn’t say anything.
“To be with me. So you’d already decided you couldn’t live without me?”
“Only one of many bad decisions I’ve made in my life.”
I settled back in my seat. “No,” I said, “it wasn’t.”
But she’d already pushed the bud back in and had returned to Soler.