The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [99]
“We just don’t believe that there is only one way to think.”
“Exactly.”
“I have a correct thought,” Neal said.
“What is it?”
“Let’s go out for dinner tonight. Can you arrange it?”
“I do not have money,” Wu said unabashedly.
“I do,” Neal said. Mr. Frazier had come to China loaded.
“I think that your thought is a correct one, then,” Wu answered. “Would you like to eat at the Hibiscus?”
“Wherever you say.”
“It is the best.”
“The Hibiscus it is.”
But before the Hibiscus, there was more touring. They hit the Cultural Palace, the People’s Market, and the River View Pavilion, where an enormous terrace overlooked the Min River. It seemed to Neal that they were covering the entire city, putting shoe leather to every public place; the whole scene reminded him of a fisherman who casts his lure all over the pond, hoping for the big fish to strike.
But that’s okay, he thought, because I’m going to be the first bait in history that catches both the fish and the fisherman.
“Chengdu is the best place to eat in China,” Wu said. He had tossed back more than one maotai. “And the Hibiscus is the best place to eat in Chengdu.”
Neal wouldn’t argue with that. The decor wasn’t much; in fact, it looked like any Chinese restaurant you might wander into in Providence, Rhode Island, if you were more interested in getting laid than in getting moo goo gai pan. You walked in a narrow doorway off the street into a minuscule lobby. A door to the right led to a large dining room packed with round tables with plastic covers. Neal started through that door, but Wu explained that the room was only for Chinese citizens; foreign guests ate in private dining rooms upstairs.
“What’s the difference?” Neal asked.
“Privacy.”
Yeah, right. Privacy and the prices. Not that he really cared, the Chinese having given him the money to be Mr. Frazier in the first place.
So they climbed the stairs to a room about the size of a large den. There were three tables, but only one of them had been set. A white linen tablecloth set off the black dishes, and black enameled chopsticks with blue and gold cloisonne were set on the plates. Linen napkins were rolled in black rings, and small black china cups completed the setting. The walls had been whitewashed recently, and several charcoal sketches of bamboo leaves and hibiscus blossoms on framed rice paper had been hung. The plank floor had been painted in black enamel, and someone had gone to some trouble to carry out a “theme” with limited means. Neal didn’t think the rat that scurried across the shiny floor was part of the theme, but he pretended not to notice it and took his seat in the black wooden chair offered by the waiter. Anyway, he thought, nobody from New York had any right to be picky about rats in restaurants.
And rats always seem to know the best places, because the food was fantastic. The banquet started with a single cup of a tea that Neal had never tasted before, followed by a shot of maotai. Neal could see that Wu wasn’t much a drinker, because his face turned scarlet and he had to work hard to suppress a coughing fit. Neal hadn’t had a taste of booze in four months, and it felt good—like getting a letter from an old friend.
The drinks preceded a parade of hors d’oeuvres: pickled vegetables, small mantou with meat centers, dumplings filled with pork, and several other items that Neal didn’t recognize and was afraid to ask about. Wu exercised the proper protocol by selecting the best tidbits and putting them on Neal’s plate, a task that became more complicated as the shots of maotai went south. The last appetizers were the little pastries of red bean paste that Neal remembered from Li Lan’s dinner.
Then came the main courses: sliced duck, chunks of twice-cooked pork, a whole fish in brown sauce, steamed vegetables, a bowl of cold noodles in sesame sauce … the courses interspersed with small bowls of thin broth that cooled the mouth and cleared the palate. Somewhere in there, two or three more maotais sacrificed their