Don Winslow - The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

Neal could barely swallow.

“Lan,” Olivia scolded, “you’ve hardly eaten a thing!”

Lan sat down, effortlessly stabbed a pot sticker, swished it in a generous amount of peppercorn sauce, and popped it into her mouth.

“It is very bad,” she said, and then devoured another one.

“Is very good,” Pendleton told her. “Uhhh… hen hao.”

“Very good!” she said. “You are learning Chinese.”

Neal watched Pendleton blush-actually blush-with pleasure. This guy is in love, he thought, major league.

“More beer,” Pendleton said awkwardly, aware that the Kendalls were beaming at him. He brought back two handfuls of Tsingtao bottles and passed them around.

The beer was ice cold and tasted great along with the hot mustard and the hotter peppercorn. Neal drank it in long draughts and practiced with his chopsticks as Tom Kendall and Bob Pendleton talked about feeding the roses in the garden out back. Li Lan popped back into the kitchen and emerged with another dish: a whole smoked sea bass on a platter. She showed them how to use their chopsticks to pry the white flesh off the bones, and it took a long time, another beer, and another round of ludao to finish off the fish.

As they were celebrating their conquest with more cups of wine, Olivia Kendall said, “So, Neal, tell us about your work.”

Well, Olivia, I’m a rent-a-rat who has lied his way into your house in order to threaten your friends.

“It’s very boring, really,” he said.

“Not at all.”

“Well,” he said, reaching through the haze of wine, beer and food to try to recall his notes, “primarily I’m interested in the political subtext contained in Qing Dynasty paintings as an effort to subvert the ruling foreign Manchus.”

Okay?

“And how do you pursue this research? What are the sources?” Tom Kendall asked.

Et tu, Tom?

“Museums mostly,” he said. “Some books, doctoral dissertations… the usual.”

He wondered if he sounded as stupid to them as he did to himself. Come on, Neal, end this. Just tell them that you wouldn’t know a Qing Dynasty painting if it was tattooed on your left testicle. Get it over with.

“You have looked at the pictures at the De Young Museum?” Lan asked.

The De Young Museum… San Francisco.

“Oh, yes,” he answered. “Superb.”

He looked at Pendleton and asked, “Now, what do you do?”

A pathetic desperation effort, Neal thought.

“I’m a biochemist,” Pendleton said.

“Where?”

Pendleton pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. His lips edged into a small smile as he answered, “I’m between jobs right now. So I’m abusing the hospitality of these good people.”

“Nonsense,” Tom said quickly. “Bob is the official Kendall Household Adviser on Rose Fertilization.”

“You’ve done a wonderful job,” Olivia said. “Now if you could just think of a way to kill the weeds…”

“Not my line, I’m afraid. I only know how to make stuff grow.”

“You can keep your present position for as long as you want,” said Kendall.

“The pay isn’t so hot,” Pendleton said, “but the food is great, the beer is cold, and the company…”

Pull the trigger, Neal. Pull it now.

“The company is sublime,” Neal said.

Yeah, it is, he thought as he finished off his cup of wine. You cultivate loneliness like a flower in your garden, you treat people like weeds that need to be torn away, and here is a world where people love eating together, talking together… love being with each other. A world you’ve imagined but never experienced. Until now. Until this evening. Talk about abusing the hospitality of good people…

“Chicken with peanuts and dried red peppers,” he heard Li Lan saying, and he looked up to see her set down a steaming plate.

“The peppers are not for eating,” she continued, “just for flavor.”

The chicken dish stoked the dormant flames in Neal’s throat and brought tears to his eyes. Every bite was hotter and more delicious than the last and made the wine taste sweeter and cooler.

He watched Li Lan gracefully take the half-peanuts with her chopsticks and feed them to Pendleton, and he felt simultaneously touched and jealous. Let him go, he thought. Let him go and let yourself go. You can start over. Take the rest of your money out of the bank and stay here. Apply to Berkeley. Or Stanford. Or become the Official Kendall Household Adviser on Eighteenth-Century English Literature. You must be getting drunk. Getting drunk? You are drunk. With wine, with beer, with great food, with soft lights, with… you’re drunk.

“Oh, God, more?” he heard Olivia groan in mock despair as Li Lan brought out a plate of broccoli, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, and mushrooms in bean sauce.

“Your show ends tomorrow?” he asked Lan as he munched on a crisp stem of brocolli.

“Yes,” she answered sadly.

“It was very successful,” said Olivia.

“Then where do you go?” Neal asked.

She didn’t answer. You could cut the tension with a chopstick, Neal thought.

“Home,” she said quietly.

“Hong Kong?” Neal asked.

She looked straight at him. “Yes. Home. Hong Kong.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” Olivia said. “It makes me sad.”

What about you, Dr. Bob? thought Neal. Does this mean you’re going home, too?

“I have a toast to propose!” said Tom. “Fill up your cups!”

Olivia poured out the wine.

Tom lifted his cup and scanned the table, looking each of them in the eye, then said, “To beauty-the beauty of Lan’s art, the beauty of the crops that grow through Robert’s knowledge, and the beauty of friendship.”

Neal drained his cup as a stupid question came to him: Had Judas liked the wine at the Last Supper?

Neal had never liked being naked. People didn’t get naked in New York, not outdoors, anyway, and they sure as hell didn’t shuck their clothes in public in England. But it was hot-tub time, and his hosts insisted that he join them. They didn’t use bathing suits in Marin County, and he was undercover-so to speak-so he surrendered his clothing in exchange for a promised towel and robe and then slid into the deepest part of the hot tub. He was grateful for the dim blue lighting on the deck, and more grateful that it was only Pendleton who joined him at first.

“I’m not a hot-tub kind of guy,” Neal said.

“Neither am I.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“I wanted to talk with you and know I’m not being recorded.”

Great, Neal thought. You sure fooled them.

“So, did the company send you?” Pendleton asked.

Neal thought about saying something clever like “What company?” or “Huh?” but decided that the old game was up and he might as well get it over with.

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I thought. Lan says that you don’t know anything about Chinese painting.”

“I just know what I like.”

If Pendleton thought the joke was funny, he disguised it pretty well.

“What does the company want?” he asked.

“They want you back.”

Jesus, this is stupid, Neal thought. Sitting here up to my chin in steaming water, half in the bag, trying to persuade another naked man to go back to work. I have to get a real job.

“I’m not going back,” Pendleton said. His thin chest puffed out in determination.

“What’s the problem?”

Perspiration had slid Pendleton’s glasses down his nose, and he pushed them back up again. Then he said, “You’ve seen her.”

Yeah, Doc. I’ve seen her all right. I wish I hadn’t.

“Look, Doc, they allow love in North Carolina.”

“To a Chinese woman?”

Come on, Doc, Neal thought. Lighten up. Join us in the 1970s. What’s the big deal?