She gratefully pulled herself onto the shelflike rear of the cart, smiled at the driver, and waved good-bye to Peter, thinking how confident and thoughtful he was becoming—and also quite dear, she added, startled by this realization. How unbelievable this would have seemed to her in Hong Kong and Canton, or even in Xian when he was being irresponsible and hostile, and with this there came a strange feeling, not unfamiliar to her, that all of this had been intended to happen, and that her meeting with Peter held a significance that was not apparent to her yet. She was delivered to the entrance of the Guesthouse, gave the driver a handful of feng, and returned to face the heat of her room, passing Jenny and Forbes seated talking under the luxurious grape arbor. She felt only a little giddy as she examined her treasures from the bazaar and put them away but when she left her room for lunch and sightseeing she wore a dripping wet towel wound around her head. She did not plan to nearly faint again under Turfan’s sun, and if her day had just been extended by a cart ride into the country with Peter, it would at least be cooler by night.
There were no keys to the rooms here, so that when Peter knocked softly on her door at ten that night he followed this by quickly slipping inside. Speaking in a low voice he said, “We can leave by your window.” He was carrying his dufflebag and he placed it now on her bed. “What do you have?” he asked.
“A second padded quilted jacket from Xian,” she told him crisply. “In Urumchi I bought two sheepskin vests, one small blanket, and of course, there are the vitamins and dried foods I carried with me. And to fit all this into my suitcase,” she reminded him, “I had to leave almost everything behind in Urumchi except my pajamas. Even,” she added sternly, “my hairbrush.”
“I’ll lend you mine,” he said dryly. “How are you carrying it all?”
“Rolled up in a bundle.” She pointed to it sitting on the floor beside the chair.
“And may one ask what’s happened to your two lower front teeth?” he asked with interest.
“Ah,” she remarked happily, “that was a dental bridge. I noticed an old lady in the bazaar this morning with missing teeth, and I thought it would add an authentic note to my disguise.” She knotted the plain cotton kerchief around her head, patted her cotton jacket and leaned over to adjust the buckles on her cloth shoes. “Shall we go?”
Peter unlatched the screen, removed it, helped her over the sill and followed, replacing the screen behind them. In single file they stole up the path in the darkness, passing the lighted rooms of the others and coming to a stop at a certain place in the wall where the top had crumbled, releasing the pointed shards of glass embedded in its cement to repel intruders. Tossing both dufflebag and bundle over the wall, they were soon outside the compound and moving toward the street’s corner.
The cart was waiting with Sheng Ti beside it. A fuzzy moon dimly illuminated his features; he gave them and their luggage a glance that unsettled Mrs. Pollifax by its thoughtful speculations. He said, “I go with you?”
Peter smiled and shook his head. “No, we’ll be okay. Back in two hours.”
“I did not steal it,” Sheng added, his eyes running curiously over Mrs. Pollifax’s cloth shoes, pants, and quilted jacket.
“Good,” Peter said and tossed their baggage into the rear, handed Mrs. Pollifax up to the seat with a flourish and squeezed in beside her.
Sheng Ti handed him the reins. “Zaijian,” he said, and stepped back into the shadow of the wall.
The donkey moved, the cart lurched, the wheels gave one outraged groan and they were underway; when Mrs. Pollifax glanced back Sheng Ti had vanished. A lone cyclist pedaled toward them in the darkness and called out a greeting; Peter returned it, slipping easily and gratefully into Chinese. “But I think we stop now and make our eyes slant before we run into anyone else,” he said, and pulled up beside a vacant stretch of wall.
“What a peculiar contraption,” said Mrs. Pollifax when he shone his flashlight once and very quickly, after inserting it under her hair.
“The amazing thing is that it doesn’t hurt and it can’t be seen—and now you are a true Han,” he told her, and she saw the flash of his smile in the faint moonlight.
Slowly they proceeded down the road and out of Turfan, occasionally meeting cyclists as they returned from work or pedaled to work, the pale moon etching black shadows of walls and trees across the darkness of the road. A dog barked. A voice was heard from behind a wall. Other than the clip-clop of the donkey’s hoofs and the movement of the wheels there was only the silence of the desert around them.
“How absolutely beautiful to be free for a couple of hours!” said Peter with a happy sigh.
Since Mrs. Pollifax was already experiencing this same reaction—a sense of elation at being out and into the space around her and free of Mr. Li, Mr. Kan, and the tour group—she said with feeling, “Pure bliss! It’s safe to speak English now?”
He gestured around them at the empty pale countryside. “Who’s to hear?”
And so they began to talk. Of families. Of what they had left behind to come to China. Of the desert. “The Taklamakan desert,” Peter told her, “has been called a hungry and ravenous monster. It’s considered far more treacherous than the Gobi, it eats people and cities, swallowing them whole.”
“Cities?” she said incredulously.
He nodded. “Entire cities that flourished in the days of the Silk Road. They find them now and then, the archaeologists, and there are probably more treasures buried there still than you or I could ever imagine, as well as the bones of men and animals caught in its violent dust and earth storms.”
She shivered. “We’re not on the desert yet, are we?”
“No, and won’t be. Only its rim.”
“And you and X—you won’t cross it, will you?”
“No—skirt it.”
As they talked, their voices low in keeping with the rhythm of the plodding donkey and the clouded moon binding them in its spell, she thought and spoke of Cyrus.
“Why don’t you marry him?” asked Peter bluntly.
“If we get out of it—if I get out of this in one piece, I intend to,” she announced with a firmness that startled her. “It seems to me now that I hesitated—oh, for all the wrong reasons. Foolish ones.”
“Someone said that if the heart is engaged—”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “And mine is. I hesitated, wanting to be sure, feeling—oh feeling that life would be different, changed, if I married, and that I might have to give up—all this.”
“All this,” murmured Peter, and suddenly smiled. “So you’re an adventurer, too!”
“Yes—no—yes, of course I am,” she admitted, laughing. “But what I overlooked—”
“Yes?” he asked curiously.
“What I overlooked,” she said simply, “is change … Meeting Carstairs and becoming useful to him changed me so that nothing was or ever could be the same again.” Like a kaleidoscope, she thought, remembering that simile following her first adventure. “But meeting Cyrus also changed me so that nothing will or can be the same ever again. Nothing. Not even this,” she added ruefully. “Which is what I didn’t see clearly until now.”
“You’re not sorry you came?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Oh no! There were things I had to learn, as you can see. Important things. Even at my age!”
He said with a sigh, “I think my parents stopped learning a long time ago, which made me a misfit, a changeling, and restless. A very conventional middle-class family, except they did send me to Harvard where I didn’t belong either but—”
“But where you learned to speak Chinese.”
“Yes. Funny, isn’t it? It came so easily to me, without any classes or lessons at all, as if I’d spoken and read it before and it was already etched in my subconscious waiting to be rediscovered. You must know the very Eastern theory that we’ve lived many lives; can you believe in that at all?”
“Easily,” she said, nodding. “For a long time I’ve found
it a very supportive, meaningful explanation for the curious things that happen to people: the tragedies, the uncanny rescues, and coincidences in life.” She laughed suddenly. “And Cyrus has a rather mandarin look about him; he’s a large man and very American, but there’s an oriental cast to his eyes that drew me from the beginning. Just as I’ve been drawn to the country of China itself,” she added meditatively.
“Think we’ve known each other before?” asked Peter, with a chuckle.
She thought without saying it aloud: yes it’s possible, why else do I feel so connected with you—suddenly and inexplicably—and so alarmed about what lies ahead for you? There’s an understanding between us, unspoken but familiar, that I’ve experienced only with Tsanko and with Cyrus. Aloud she said quietly, “It’s quite possible, yes. A sense of fatefulness—of stars crossing—happens rather frequently to me these days. I lived a very prosaic life, you see, and then suddenly I too met Carstairs, and I’ve often wondered if this strange new life was waiting for me all the time during those years I lived so quietly. I’ve wondered,” she added softly, “how much choice we really do have about some of the large events in our lives. Is Peter Fox your real name?” she asked abruptly.
He shook his head. “Peter’s my name but not Fox.” He glanced down at his luminous digital watch and said, “We’ve been in transit exactly fifty-five minutes, I think it’s time we stop and look for a place to hide all this gear.”
She looked around her at the low, hunchbacked surrealistic mountains off to their left. They had to be sandstone, she thought, to have been whipped into such frenzied, angry shapes by wind and rain, and to have created the gulleys and earth cleavages among which they were riding now. “It’s certainly a good place to hide things, but however will you find your cache again?”
“By compass, by noting distance and direction of travel, and by making a map of the shapes and contours. C’mon,” he said, bringing the cart to a halt. “I really need your help, we’ve only a few minutes to do this. You pick the place. Take the flashlight.”
Mrs. Pollifax said sharply, “No, Peter, no flashlight.”
Startled he asked, “Why?”
“I don’t know.” She stepped down from the cart, gave the donkey an absent pat on its flank and moved off the road toward three jagged rocks about six feet high. “I think here,” she called.
Peter was already lifting out his dufflebag. She went back and retrieved her own bulky package and when she joined Peter she could see him nod in the dim light. “Good,” he said, and bringing out his knife he worked away at enlarging a hole under one of the rock formations. Into this he pressed the small items: vitamins, melons, two filled water pouches, the dried fruit, and the socks, finally sealing the gap with a stone. On the surface between two of the rocks he laid out the bulkier items—the two pairs of boots and the sweaters—and then covered them over with the sheepskins and at last the rug. With his knife he scraped enough dust from the earth to scatter over the rug until it looked a part of the earth.
“Not bad,” commented Mrs. Pollifax. “But let’s not linger. Please.”
He gave her a sharp glance, found several loose stones to weigh down the rug and nodded. “Okay, let’s go. We’ll both pace off the distance to the road, okay?”
They each found it to be fifty-two feet.
“You drive while I make notes,” he told her, handing her the reins. “Or at least what notes I can manage without a light. I don’t understand you, why not a light?”
“Not yet—later, but not here,” she told him, surprised by the depth of her unease. With some difficulty she turned the donkey around on the road and they began their return into town. She noticed that Peter worked over his notes like an artist, glancing up, holding out his arm to measure and to squint, writing and drawing sketches into his notebook until at last he lighted a match inside cupped hands and checked his compass. “I hope you’re not implying that someone’s been watching us,” he said.
To cover the strange flash of alarm that she’d experienced she said lightly, “Let’s just say I’d hate to see you and X reach that cache and find nothing. You’ll be coming to it from where?”
“Not from Turfan,” he said and pointed over his shoulder. “We’ll start out from the cave in the mountains and head southwest, bypassing Turfan, and after rescuing our sheepskins we’ll move south toward the Bagrach Kol, or Lake Bosten,” he explained. “Then we’ll roughly follow the oases towns along the desert, keeping at a distance from them, naturally.”
“Yes,” she said, and was silent, feeling her dread for both him and X.
They returned to Turfan, driving down the same broad road, the cart intruding only lightly on the deep silence of the night. When they reached the corner of the Guesthouse wall Sheng Ti appeared suddenly out of the shadows, advanced toward them, put a finger to his lips counseling silence, and spoke directly to Peter in a low voice.
It needed a moment for Mrs. Pollifax to realize that Sheng Ti was speaking to Peter in Chinese. She said in alarm, “What is this? Why does he speak to you in—”
“He heard me greet that damn cyclist in Chinese,” Peter said grimly, and swore. “What is it, Sheng, what’s the matter?”
Sheng no longer troubled to speak English, he was obviously agitated, his voice breathless, his gestures quick.
Peter turned to look at Mrs. Pollifax. “How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“Sheng says we were followed on foot by someone from the Guesthouse. Very stealthily, very secretly. And seeing this he followed that person, whoever it was, and thus trailed all of us into the desert.”
At the ramifications of what Sheng had said Mrs. Pollifax gasped, “One of the guides?”
Peter turned back to Sheng. “No—no, Sheng says not a native, he is sure of this. He says this person wore some kind of cloak, so it could have been a man, it could have been a woman—I asked him—but he is certain it was a foreigner, very definitely, because of the way this person walked and acted.”
She drew in her breath sharply, remembering her searched suitcase and realizing that it had never been far from her mind. Something is wrong, she thought. Terribly wrong.
She accepted Sheng’s judgment, acknowledging his shrewdness and his street wisdom. “Where is this person now?” she asked.
“Back in the Guesthouse.”
She turned her attention to Sheng Ti, realizing that he must be dealt with first of all. “What does he think or suspect about all this?” she asked. “Does he perhaps expect money to not speak of this to anyone?”
Peter spoke to Sheng in Chinese. “He says he wishes to talk with us alone somewhere about why we carry baggage out of the city and return without it. He feels that he alone saw the baggage we carried—which is probably reassuring if I ever find time to think about it. He also wishes to know why I concealed my speaking Chinese so well, and why suddenly you have two teeth missing and dress like a Chinese woman.”
“Yes,” she said. “Where can we talk?” But she was thinking, Someone in this tour group knows about Peter and me. Someone among them knows why we’re here. How could this have happened? Who else would know about Wang? Who else would even be interested in Wang?
“Not far,” Peter was saying. “You think we can trust Sheng?”
“For the moment I think we have no choice,” she said dryly, but in examining her initial reactions to Sheng she added, “I believe we can trust him, yes, but in any case I have a brown belt in karate.”
Peter laughed. “Wouldn’t you know! Okay—he says we leave the cart and walk.”
She thought, There is no one—absolutely no one—who could know about Wang or be interested in him.
Except the Russians, she remembered in horror.
Carstairs had said, “One of our agents who works for the Soviets—a double-agent, needless to say—has brought us information of X’s existence and of the Soviets’ interest in him.”
Had brought them information on X’s existence
…
Information that came solely from the Russians, who badly wanted Wang for themselves … The same Russians who supposedly had plans to abduct Wang later in the summer …
Supposedly …
But what if instead, knowing themselves persona non grata in China, they chose to leak their information to the CIA and let the Americans find Wang for them instead? Let an American agent enter China and find the labor camp, find and release Wang and then … and then … Oh God, she thought in horror, could Peter and I be walking into a trap?
They were following Sheng through narrow alleys, turning left and then right; he stopped now beside an abandoned irrigation ditch spanned by a crumbling bridge. Sheng led them under the bridge and gestured to them to sit down.
Peter said in surprise, “He says he sleeps here, this is his home.”
They squatted, knees touching. Sheng had been eating garlic which made for a powerful atmosphere; he was also anxious, and this too contributed an odor so that they hunched together in a cloud of garlic, sweat, and dusty earth. “But why is this his home?” asked Mrs. Pollifax. “Why doesn’t he have a unit like everyone else?”
Peter began to speak to Sheng, and Sheng replied at length, and while they talked Mrs. Pollifax’s mind flew back to Carstairs’ mysterious counteragent. If all the information came from the Russians and they were being followed … She shivered a little, exploring the idea of herself and Peter being mere pawns because if her theory was correct and if the Russians were masterminding this operation, then it would be a member of the KGB who had been planted in the tour group.
To watch them. To snatch Wang for the Soviets once he was free.
And Carstairs doesn’t know, she thought, trembling at the prospects should her suspicions be right. He doesn’t even guess and there’s no way to communicate, to tell him that possibly … maybe …
Peter turned to her and said, “He tells me that he’s twenty-six years old and he’s hei jen—it translates as being one of the ‘black persons,’ living without registration and without a ration card or employment. He lives off friends or steals and sells things in the black market.”
Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station Page 13