The Pearl Diver Read Online Free PDF Page A

era, those fans were more in use in countries like Singapore or Malaysia. There might have been ceiling fans of that style in more tropical parts of Japan, like Okinawa, but in the old days, Okinawa wasn’t even part of Japan. I’d have to research whether that style of fan was in use—”
    “Oh, there’s no need for that.” Marshall sighed heavily. “It’s too late to make major changes. I had such hopes for this place, what it could be, and now we’re opening in thirty days without so much as tableware. Not to mention staff. I’m still trying to get line cooks. In fact, I have interviews scheduled there in about an hour. Hey, why don’t you ride over there with me? While Jiro and I are interviewing staff, you could look around and get some ideas of what I need.”
    “All right,” I said, pausing at the door. “Oh, I almost forgot to ask you something. It was a word I didn’t understand when you were talking about the lunch service.”
    “Fire away.”
    “What’s a tuchis ?”
    Marshall laughed for a full minute before saying, “ Tuchis is Yiddish for ‘ass.’”
    Feeling like one, I got into his Mercedes.
     
    Bento was housed in an old brick building on H Street, more on the edge of Chinatown although it was technically within the boundaries of Penn Quarter, the faded section of downtown that was coming back because of a number of hip new restaurants. I hadn’t beenin Washington’s Chinatown since my college years, when I’d occasionally driven with a carful of other hungry Asian studies majors for dim sum. It seemed as if a lot of the Chinatown restaurants had evaporated since my day. There was no shortage of Starbucks cafes, though. Starbucks was strange. In Kendall’s suburban neighborhood of Potomac, Starbucks was full of blond power moms like herself; but in my neighborhood, it was solely inhabited by Spanish-speaking men. I would have liked to scope out the situation in the Chinatown Starbucks, but Marshall seemed impatient.
    “Chinatown doesn’t seem very—Chinese—anymore,” I said to Marshall. It seemed that all over H Street and Fifth, drugstores and Irish bars had replaced the small restaurants I remembered.
    “The rents went up,” Marshall said. “It’s going upscale. If we could only drive out the gangs, it’d be perfect.”
    Now there was something I could comment on. “In San Francisco, there were some gang wars when I was really young. There was a shoot-out in a Chinese restaurant that decimated the restaurant business in Chinatown for a few years.”
    Marshall looked at me. “I’m not anticipating a shoot-out in Bento, but there’s hostility from our neighbors. I don’t know if having a real Japanese chef is the problem—because of the grudge the Chinese still bear against Japan since the war—or if it’s just plain competition.”
    “What’s happened so far?”
    “Another restaurant owner tried to keep me from putting in a parking area out behind our kitchen. No matter that it freed up more space for street parking—he didn’t want me having anything he didn’t have.”
    I didn’t comment on that, because it seemed pretty minor league to me, but concentrated on the building’s facade. The restaurant site was typical of the early-twentieth-century Washington vernacular, a redbrick, four-story building. It was built on a corner, and it had especially charming moldings, Gothic peaks over the windows and doors. There was a boarded-up building of the same vintage next to it, made of the same brick but with a peeling white-paint overlay. Ashingle flapping outside confirmed that Kendall’s husband, Win, was indeed handling its real estate transaction. You could see through the windows in this building to the peeling wallpaper and scuffed wooden floors. Marshall and Jiro’s building had its windows covered in brown paper, so nobody from the outside could peek in.
    For good reason, I discovered when I went inside. The place was in an utter shambles: