Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station Read online

  “But there was no need for that,” he told her gently.

  Startled, she said, “Oh?”

  “Your eyes speak for you, which is why I do this,” he said. “I think it is possible that you also follow The Way.”

  She had forgotten that he was Buddhist. “I seek,” she acknowledged softly, “but sometimes—oh, in very strange ways.”

  His smile was warm. “But there are no strange ways, xianben—only the search.”

  “Ah,” she said with a catch of breath, and for a long moment they gazed at each other and she was mute, deeply touched by a recognition, a tenderness between them. She said at last, very softly, “Thank you, Mr. Guo, and—please—may you have long life and double happiness.”

  He nodded and walked away, once again a sallow nondescript man, no doubt wearing an ironic smile for the comrades who moved eagerly toward him. She watched him hold up the atlas she’d given him, and as his neighbors drew close to examine it she left. Presently she was mounting the steps to the Drum Tower.

  Mr. Li was waiting at the entrance. “Where have you been?” he demanded. “Miss Bai has gone to search for you.”

  She only smiled at him, and moved past him.

  She found the others in the small Friendship Store at the top of the building, looking into glass cases at ancient relics displayed for sale. Not one of them looked up at her entrance, and she commended her silent partner for being so controlled and disciplined an actor. But although she too concentrated on the relics with control and discipline, her thoughts remained with Guo Musu and on that curious sense of meeting that she’d experienced with him. Nothing happens by accident, she thought, and she knew that she would not easily forget that moment of tenderness between them.

  And she had succeeded. Her job was done. She’d found and made contact with Guo Musu and there was exhilaration in this, and a sense of triumph.

  They attended Chinese Opera that evening. Mrs. Pollifax, tired from the suspense and from the tensions of finding Guo Musu, found Jenny and Peter extremely irritating. In spite of being several years older, it was Jenny who seemed to be succumbing to Peter’s hostile attitudes: they had moved from an early sharing of college jokes and anecdotes to a running patter of tactless criticisms of China that Mrs. Pollifax found deplorable. She had already overheard a few whispered flippancies about Mr. Li, and only that morning they’d been giggling about the questions Iris had asked at the cloisonné factory’s tea and briefing.

  Now it was the Shaanxi local opera that met with their unkind laughter.

  Mrs. Pollifax herself was entranced. The theater was shabby and the audience in dull work clothes, but the stage shone like a jewel with the brilliance of the costumes—color for the eye at last, she thought, as she feasted on it. Mr. Li had explained to them that the ancient tale was in serial form and had begun three nights ago; it would last four hours tonight, but they would depart at intermission. Mrs. Pollifax found no problems at all in following it: the gestures were stylized but the meaning of each one, coupled with the droll and vivid expressions on the actors’ faces needed no words of explanation. There was a marvelous humor in the story, and she laughed along with the audience without the slightest idea of what was being said.

  Jenny, however, was not content with this and demanded of Mr. Li a translation of every word spoken, after which she would repeat his explanation in a loud voice for the rest of them.

  “So this guy—the one in black,” she was saying, “has come down from heaven to avenge the death of—which one, Mr. Li?”

  “Get a load of the singing!” interrupted Peter, laughing. “Straight through the nasal passages, vibrating all the sinuses!”

  Jenny giggled. “Not to mention how the princess sniffles into her sleeves, the one in bright red?”

  Ugly Americans, thought Mrs. Pollifax sadly, and was about to speak to them when George Westrum surprised and impressed her by turning around and doing it first.

  “Look here,” he growled, “you’re not giving this a chance, and you’re being damned rude, too.”

  Mrs. Pollifax glanced around and saw that Jenny had the grace to blush but Peter’s face only turned cold and stony again. They stopped their chattering and Mrs. Pollifax returned to the opera, but something had gone out of the evening. She realized that the first rift had appeared in their group, and the embarrassment of it hung in the air, an embarrassment for themselves, for Mr. Li, for China, and for Peter and Jenny. It was not a comfortable way to feel, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and when they left at the intermission there were no comments about the opera on their way back to the hotel. The silence was awkward, and only Iris and Mrs. Pollifax called out good night to Jenny and Peter.

  She had been alone in her room for only a few minutes when the door opened, startling her. She turned her head to see Peter walk in without knocking and she was appalled at this breach of manners; not even the assumption that he might have come to apologize dampened her sense of outrage. She said angrily, “Whether you realize it or not, Peter, it’s customary to knock.”

  He stood there, arrogant, cold, and sulky. He closed the door behind him and without paying her words any attention he walked across the room and tucked the curtains more securely around the air-conditioner. Only then did he turn and say quietly, in a voice she’d never heard from him before, “I’ve come to ask if you made contact with Guo Musu today.”

  Mrs. Pollifax stared at him incredulously, “you?” she gasped. “You!”

  He stood silent, watching her, waiting.

  “You’re too young,” she flung at him. “You’re only twenty-two, how could you possibly be one of Cars—” She stopped.

  “One of Carstairs’ people,” he finished for her.

  She stared at him in shock, her mind spinning in an effort to adjust: not Joe Forbes, not Malcolm Styles, not George Westrum. She said, feeling her way toward something concrete, “You can’t possibly speak Chinese or—”

  “Fluently. Mandarin as well as several dialects.”

  “There was that grandmother—”

  “Oh yes, that grandmother,” he said with a faint smile. “Born in Kansas City, Missouri, actually, and the closest she’s come to China is Mah-Jongg.”

  “What’s more I’ve disliked you,” she told him angrily. “I didn’t realize how much until you walked in just now without knocking. Spoiled, sulky, unappreciative—”

  “That good, huh?”

  Mrs. Pollifax began to laugh. “I see … yes. All right—very good, and I’m acting like an idiot.” She held out her hand to him. “I’m sorry.”

  His handclasp was firm. “It was a shock for me when I first saw you too,” he conceded politely. “I won’t say where it was, but definitely it was a shock.”

  “That bad, huh?” she mimicked, smiling at him. “Then shall we start all over again before getting on with the job?”

  “If there is a job,” he said quietly. “Look, the suspense has been damn hard to handle, I didn’t see any barbershop at all near the Drum Tower.”

  She nodded. “Then I’m delighted to tell you that there was a barbershop and a Guo Musu, too.”

  “My God,” he said, staring at her. “Where?”

  “Hidden away in that maze of alleys.”

  “But were you able to—did he—”

  She nodded. “It’s in my purse, excuse me.”

  “What’s in your purse?”

  She reached across him to the bedside table, groped for the atlas and brought it out. “Page thirty-eight,” she said, opening it and handing it to him.

  He stared at it in amazement. “Where on earth did you get a Chinese atlas?”

  “In the department store this morning,” she told him. “Quite by accident. I pointed to what I thought would be a book of poems and they handed me this instead. It was a miracle.”

  As he leaned over page thirty-eight Peter’s face was no longer impassive. “It’s a miracle all right,” he said, and glanced up at her. “Have you looked at this? Guo’
s not only marked the location of the labor camp but he’s added notes.”

  “Notes?” she echoed, and Guo’s face returned to her again, and that moment of sharing, of knowing. “He did that for us, too?” she said, with a catch in her voice.

  “I’ll say!” He showed her the page, excited now. “He’s pinpointed the labor camp halfway between Urumchi, where we go tomorrow, and Turfan—just off the main highroad over the Tian Shan mountains. But what’s even more fantastic, he’s scribbled a footnote explaining the circle he’s drawn, he says it marks a Red Army barracks some six or eight miles from the labor camp.” He looked at her and shook his head. “How did you manage all this? You were missing for only about forty-five minutes this afternoon. I mean, you’re one hell of a surprise.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “No, I mean it,” he told her. “To get all this in minutes from an absolute stranger? Since reaching Xian I’ve been feeling damnably humbled, wondering how on earth I’d have managed it. I wanted to, you know, I insisted on doing it myself but Carstairs refused. This morning I realized I’d have behaved like a bull in a tea shop. Spoken Chinese probably, alarmed Guo Musu thoroughly, even given the whole show away and gotten nowhere. How did you do it?”

  “It’s probably why they sent me,” said Mrs. Pollifax modestly. “The Chinese do have a deep respect for their elders, after all, and I tend to look quite harmless.”

  He grinned. “That’s for sure—you fooled me. And now—” He hesitated, staring down at page thirty-eight. “It’s incredible but I think we’re in business at last. I can even get down to some serious planning now. Amazing.”

  She smiled at him. “Good—but did you by any chance search my suitcase last night?”

  He looked at her blankly. “Search your—why should I want to search your suitcase?”

  “Oh,” she said with a sinking heart. “It wasn’t you, then?”

  “No of course not.” Peter looked shocked. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh yes. Somebody did. Was yours?”

  He shook his head. “No, I take the usual precautions. I’d have known right away.” His brows drew together into a frown. “I don’t get it, who would do such a thing, and why? And why you?”

  “It was done very professionally,” she told him, “and it wouldn’t have been noticeable at all if I didn’t have my own way of packing, too. The lock wasn’t picked, and everything was left in order—but not the right order.” His scowl had turned into such a look of alarm that she added softly, “Don’t look so jarred, it was probably some sort of random security check.” She didn’t think at all that it was a security check, but she saw no point in worrying Peter just now when he had his plans to make. “In any case,” she told him cheerfully, “I think we should put it aside for the moment, there being other things to think about, don’t you agree? Which leads me to a question I’ve been waiting for some time to ask you. With enormous curiosity.”

  She had succeeded in distracting him; he smiled. “Be my guest and ask, but I’ll bet I know what it is.”

  She smiled back at him. “I’m sure you do: the one detail no one’s mentioned, and which didn’t seep through to me until too late to ask. You’re going to be escorting our friend Mr. Wang—X—out of the country, aren’t you.” She didn’t even bother to make it a question.

  He nodded.

  “Then as a bona fide member of a bona fide guided tour, allowed to visit China as a tourist, how are you ever going to manage to vanish from the tour and gain freedom for your very risky undercover work? I can’t believe that you’ll just bolt. You wouldn’t have a chance, would you?”

  He shook his head. “Not a chance in a million. No, there’ll be an accident.”

  “Accident,” she repeated, watching his face intently. “What kind?”

  “That’s up to me,” he told her. “I’ve a few ideas boiling around in my head but it depends on a lot of factors like terrain and circumstances and timing. I’ll be killed,” he added casually.

  “Killed,” she repeated, and waited.

  “In such a way there’ll be no trace of a body,” he explained, adding soberly, “and it’s growing on me fast that your help is going to be very much needed.”

  “I see,” she said musingly. “Yes, it would have to be that, of course. The only way to vanish into China.”

  “Yes—become a non-person. Without the Sepos in hot pursuit. A dead person.”

  She shivered. “Not easy.”

  “No.”

  “And from the vitamins and dried food I’m carrying I deduce you’ll be heading for the mountains?”

  He nodded. “There’s been the feeble hope that another route might open up, but I don’t think it will.”

  “Very high mountains,” she said quietly. “And cold ones. Surely not through Tibet?”

  “No, we can head around the Taklamakan desert toward Khotan and a pass over the Karakaroms.”

  “The very thought chills me,” she admitted. “Literally as well as figuratively.”

  He nodded. “That’s where I’ll need your help, too; you can help me find warm clothing and carry some of it in your suitcase when mine’s full.”

  “Like what?” she asked, and reached for paper and pencil, glad to move her thoughts toward the practical.

  He frowned as he concentrated. “What I did smuggle in is small stuff. I’ve got thermal underwear, two heavy ski masks rolled up, fake papers, and a heavy sweater. The windbreaker jacket I brought has a second one zipped inside it. I’ve knives, flashlights and batteries, a good compass hidden in my camera, topographical maps, complete medicine kit right down to snake serum, and two collapsible canvas bags for water—”

  “Plus the chocolate I brought, the dried foods, and vitamins—”

  “Yes. And now what’s needed is more of the big stuff. Blankets and sheepskins—anything that can be cut into vests and coats. We’re heading tomorrow into nomad country where there ought to be sheepskins in the bazaars or Friendship Stores. Buy whatever you find, you can refuse to have it mailed home for you until we get to Beijing, make up some sort of story, rope whatever you find to the outside of your suitcase and keep it with you.”

  “Right,” she said crisply, noting this down on paper.

  “In the meantime,” he added with a crooked smile, “I have my Mao cap and jacket, and they were very nearly top priority, believe me, because I shall have to become as Chinese as a native soon.”

  “How on earth did you learn fluent Chinese at such an age?” she asked. “It’s unexpected.”

  “Very weirdly,” he told her. “When I was into my freshman year at Harvard—yeah, Harvard,” he admitted with a grin, “I started out hanging around bars in Chinatown in Boston. Coincidence? I don’t know. And I began picking up the language bit by bit—with an ease that staggered me. Coincidence? I don’t know. By the time I graduated from Harvard I could read and write Mandarin, and was already into dialects, and it’s not true, either, that I’ve just finished my senior year. I’m in graduate school now—their Far Asian studies department—or was, until I took off to get in shape for this.”

  “And Carstairs?”

  He grinned. “No, it was Bishop. I met him in a Chinatown bar in Boston, or perhaps—who knows?—he arranged to meet me there because he’d heard of me. A setup maybe.”

  She smiled. “Quite possibly. And here we are.”

  “Yes. And now I have this,” he said, looking down at the atlas with astonishment. “I’ll take it along to my room and figure kilometers from the map I brought, and do some calculations.”

  “Did anyone see you come into my room?” asked Mrs. Pollifax, remembering her searched suitcase, and still uneasy about it.

  He shook his head. “The hall was empty.” He thought a minute. “If anyone’s in the hall when I make my exit I’ll say I came to borrow a drinking glass. But tell me first—I’m curious—what was Guo Musu like?”

  She told him, describing the barbershop and their meeting, an
d as she talked she became aware of several quick, perceptive glances directed at her, as if he understood much more than she was saying, and for this she was grateful.

  When she had finished he nodded. “I wish I could have talked with him. It’s been terribly frustrating,” he added, with a rush of boyish candor. “The opera tonight, for instance. I really hated Jenny’s running commentary when I could understand every word for myself, and I came near to hating her for demeaning it. I’ve also overheard and understood everything that Mr. Li and Miss Bai talk about together, and I feel like a bloody eavesdropper. Mr. Li,” he said ruefully, “doesn’t think very highly of me either.” He stood up. “I’ll go along now and study this map more closely.”

  Rising too she said, “It might be a good idea for us to become a shade friendlier inside the group. In case we’re seen talking together, as we’ll surely have to do from time to time.”

  “Good,” he said, with a grin. “I’ll begin sitting next to you at meals occasionally, and show signs of thawing. And look,” he added almost shyly, “you’ve been great. I’m awfully glad to have finally met you. Really met you, I mean.”

  She smiled at him warmly. “That goes for me, too.” As he moved to open the door she said, “Hold it a moment,” and ducked into her bathroom. “Your water glass,” she reminded him.

  He whistled. “You really are a pro! I forgot, damn it.” And glass in hand he made his exit.

  They drove the next morning to the tomb of China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang, and if this had once promised to be the highlight of sightseeing for her, Mrs. Pollifax now found it difficult to think of anything but Peter’s visit to her room last night.

  For one thing, the very magnitude of the job that he’d been given nearly overwhelmed her: to devise his own death, to rescue a stranger from a labor camp and then travel what had to be hundreds of miles over desert and cruel mountain passes seemed incredible. The man whom Peter had been sent to rescue had to be very important indeed, she was thinking, and here, too, she decided there must be a great deal that Carstairs had not told her.