She herself had slept well, but on waking, and realizing that this was Thursday and grasslands day, her appetite had completely vanished. They were to spend the day in the mountains, with a picnic at midday, and under ordinary circumstances this would have sounded delightful.
Today, however, was not an ordinary circumstance. She ate three roasted peanuts, nibbled at a hard-boiled egg, and then excused herself. Peter, following her down the hall, caught up with her and said in a low voice, “You were right, Sheng’s really okay.”
“He’s with X?”
He nodded. “They hit it off right away—a pair of bloody nonconformists, those two.”
She said quickly, “Peter—”
“Mmmm?”
She stopped to face him, wanting him to know much more than she dared to say to him in words just now. “Peter, listen and hear me, it’s important. No matter how successful today proves to be, don’t relax your guard. Be careful!”
He said impatiently, “Of course I’ll be careful.”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand, Peter, I don’t mean just careful, I mean you must expect—I don’t know what—but assume—” She hesitated. “Assume that something could be wrong, very wrong.”
The amused skepticism in his eyes died away in the face of her urgency. “All right,” he said quietly. “I’ll accept that, I’m hearing you.”
“Good luck,” she told him and entered her room, realizing that her major fear now was that Peter’s sleight-of-hand, whatever it might be, might backfire and there be a corpse after all: Peter’s.
“Let go,” she told herself. “This is his problem, not yours. Let go …”
Once again they climbed into the minibus following breakfast, but this time they headed for the mountains surrounding Urumchi, climbing slowly, exchanging terra-cotta and dust for the green of spruce and fir trees. They passed a Red Army barracks, and Mrs. Pollifax wondered if this could be the one that Guo Musu had checked on their map; if so they must be quite near the labor camp from which X had been so surprisingly removed already. They turned right, stopping at a checkpoint—a hut from which a man emerged to examine Mr. Li’s credentials—and then they headed up the narrow dirt road, passing a scattering of yurts on the hillside, surrounded by browsing sheep and goats. Already the air had become cooler, and Mrs. Pollifax drew on a sweater. The meadows grew more and more tilted and the trees moved in closer until after several miles of climbing the forest hugged the road. The bus slowed, they passed a shadowy glen lined with picnic tables and then came out upon a wild and forbidding area dominated by a waterfall.
Why it felt so forbidding Mrs. Pollifax didn’t know, but certainly it did not strike her as hospitable. The waterfall was spectacular, as high as a three-story building, and its water fell like a silver curtain to the rocks below, making all the appropriate sounds, but there was no sun here, the mountain rose steeply on the left, like a wall, and the narrow paths cut out of the earth held puddles of water from the fall, and looked slippery and dangerous.
Mr. Li, showing it to them proudly, said, “This is where we picnic after the horsemanship of the Kazakhs. We stop to leave the beer here in the mountain stream to cool it for you.” Mr. Kan was already unloading cartons from the bus and carrying them one by one toward the water.
“Will they be safe?” asked Jenny.
Mr. Li laughed. “Oh yes! On weekends there are many students here from the university, but today, no.” He added as an afterthought, “Very dangerous walking here, the rocks extremely slippery. Only two weeks ago a student fell from above and was killed.”
Mrs. Pollifax’s gaze sharpened and she glanced quickly at Peter. She thought, This is where it will happen, then, this is where Peter disappears. A shoe, a jacket left behind, some indication of a fall … Peter was staring intently at the rocks and at the rushing water, his eyes narrowed, his face expressionless.
“But for now,” said Mr. Li, gesturing them back into the bus, “the show of horsemanship please. Too early for lunch!”
Herded into the bus they set out again, and soon met with open space that slowly widened and broadened until they drove up and into a breathtaking expanse of green meadowland that stretched as far as the eye could see, lined on either side by mountain ridges. Mrs. Pollifax felt at once a sense of relief to see the sky again, and the sun. She heard Malcolm say, “This resembles Switzerland—it’s amazing!”
Perhaps, yes, thought Mrs. Pollifax, except that several yurts occupied this end of the long stretch of meadow, and the faces of the men approaching the bus were swarthy and high-cheekboned and they wore blue Mao jackets and scuffed boots. Mr. Li conferred with them, announced that the demonstration would begin very shortly, pointed to elevated areas along the meadow, and suggested that they stroll there and wait.
“Stroll and wait,” repeated Iris, grinning as she jumped down from the bus. “Have we been doing anything but?”
“Travel fatigue,” suggested Malcolm sympathetically. “We’ll all get our so-called second wind in a day or two and be off and running.”
“Well, that will beat strolling and waiting,” teased Iris.
Mrs. Pollifax said nothing; the picnic area and the waterfall had added a sense of oppression to the anxiety with which she’d begun her day, and she felt that her entire being had given itself over to waiting, waiting for Peter to engineer his disappearance. I must stop watching him, she thought, and seeing how cheerful he looked she felt almost cross with him. They reached one of the more inviting knolls and sat or sprawled on the grass while off to their right, in the distance, the Kazakhs began to group with their horses, talking and laughing among themselves.
“It looks terribly macho,” said Iris suspiciously, watching them.
Joe Forbes had brought out a pair of binoculars and was peering through them. “Two of them are women, though,” he told her, “and hooray, they’re going to begin now.”
The demonstration began, and proved so superb that Mrs. Pollifax almost forgot about Peter for the next half an hour: the Kazakhs galloped down the meadow to show off their splendid mounts, then held several good-natured races, followed by a game of tug-of-war over the pelt of a sheep. This, explained Mr. Li, had in older days been tug-of-war over a live sheep, but this they were spared.
“Terrific horses,” Peter said. “Wouldn’t mind trying one of them myself.” It was the first time Mrs. Pollifax had heard him speak since they’d left Urumchi.
“Oh could we?” breathed Iris eagerly. “I’ve ridden all my life!”
Mr. Li looked shocked. “Oh—impossible,” he said flatly.
Iris said, “The show’s over, do let’s try! Mr. Li, come along and translate for us, okay?”
Mrs. Pollifax lagged behind as the others surged down the slope to meet with the Kazakhs; she was beginning to feel bored and restless, which she knew to be the result of her rising suspense: since she found suspense difficult to deal with she simply wanted this day to be gotten through as straightforwardly and quickly as possible, and to see it interrupted by this distraction rather annoyed her. It seemed pointless and tedious, but of course she and horses had never enjoyed a warm or comfortable relationship. By the time she joined the group in the meadow she saw that Mr. Li’s translating, and Iris and Peter’s eagerness, had produced an effect: Peter was being allowed to mount one of the horses, a Kazakh holding on to the bridle. Cautiously the horse and Peter were led up and down the meadow and then with a laugh and a shout the Kazakh released them both and Peter effortlessly, joyously, cantered back to them on his own.
They all cheered his performance and the Kazakhs, huddled and watching, grinned their approval.
“Terrific!” shouted Iris. “Me next?”
“How about me?” asked Forbes.
Peter, still mounted, grinned down at Mrs. Pollifax. “Somebody give her a horse,” he told them. “Group leader and all that. C’mon, we’ll all take your picture, Mrs. Pollifax, what d’ye say? Ask for a horse for her, Mr. Li.”
Mrs. Pollifax, laughing, shook her head. “No thanks!”
“Try,” said Malcolm, as a horse was led over to her. “You can show your grandchildren the picture and—”
“Just sit on it,” Peter told her. “C’mon, be a sport.”
Mrs. Pollifax winced, recalling certain past incidents with horses and then decided to swallow her reluctance and opt for the role of Good Sport. Both Malcolm and Forbes boosted her into the saddle and there she sat, very stiffly, with Peter on his horse beside her and holding the reins for her.
“See? You’ve done it,” he told her. “Not bad, is it? Take her picture fast!” he called to Malcolm.
He leaned over and adjusted something on the saddle of Mrs. Pollifax’s horse, except that whatever adjustment he made did not appear to please her horse. It snorted, reared in alarm and took off—there was no other word for it, her horse took off like a jet plane in ascension—so fast there was neither time for Mrs. Pollifax to breathe or to scream, the problem of survival being immediate and consuming as she struggled to stay mounted on this huge creature gone mad.
Down the length of the meadow they flew, she and the horse joined together by only the most fleeting of contact: Mrs. Pollifax hanging on in desperation, each thundering jolt an assault on her spine, her hands groping for the elusive reins, for the horse’s mane, then for his neck, for any accessory available as an anchor to keep her from being tossed into the air and then to the ground. Behind her she heard shouts, Peter’s voice, and almost at once the sound of Peter on horseback in pursuit. The words he shouted were unintelligible, blotted out by the pounding of horse’s hoofs.
Mrs. Pollifax prayed: that she would not fall off the horse … that she would fall off, but gently … that Peter would reach her quickly and bring her to a halt. But the horror of it was that the horse had only one direction now in which to go, and that was straight ahead and up—up the steep and wooded ridge ahead of them—and—“Oh God,” she prayed as the horse raced in among the trees and without faltering began to climb, so that instead of crouching near his neck she was suddenly sliding backward now, her hands clutching his mane, which—she thought wildly—was scarcely a way to soothe or to appease him. Up they went at a 90-degree angle, the crazed horse slowing a little but not, felt Mrs. Pollifax, from any change in his determination to destroy her, and certainly not from repentance, but due entirely to the steepness of the hillside.
Now, she thought as he slowed—now is the time to jump. To fall off.
It was at this moment of resolution that she discovered her right foot was entangled in a stirrup. She shook her foot impatiently but it refused to be freed; she dared not look down at her foot, it felt irrevocably captured, and then the moment of possibility had passed, they arrived at the top of the ridge and Mrs. Pollifax caught a fleeting glimpse of what lay ahead and abandoned all hope.
What lay ahead was down … down through forest to miles and miles of flat desert intercepted only by one deep slice cut out of the earth—a small canyon, too broad to cross—and inside of her she screamed. Screamed for Cyrus, for Peter, for some magical hope that was beyond her. She saw her life pass in front of her, prepared herself to relinquish it, and in one giddy moment foresaw their end. Down the ridge they plunged at breakneck speed, Mrs. Pollifax thrown forward again, fighting to keep from sliding in and under the horse’s neck, her foot still entangled. They reached the bottom of the mountain and the horse’s hoofs struck the hard flat surface of the desert. Lifting her eyes Mrs. Pollifax looked ahead and saw now that the deep cut in the earth contained a boiling racing mountain stream and that the horse was going to leap that canyon and that he was not going to make it. Nor would she.
And all because she had mounted a horse to have her picture taken …
In one last desperate frenzy Mrs. Pollifax applied herself to disentanglement. Hanging on recklessly by one hand to the horse’s mane she slid her other hand down to the tangled stirrup, tugged, shifted, wrenched, and miraculously felt her foot slip free. Lifting her leg over the horse’s back she sat side-saddle for a fleeting second and then she kicked herself off and away from the horse, flew high into the air and went down.
She struck the ground hard, instinctively breaking the fall with her left hand, and lay there stunned, feeling the blessedness of the earth beneath her. After a moment she lifted her head, found her neck intact, rolled over on the ground and stared at her left hand lying inert on the pebbles beside her. Odd, she thought, wondering vaguely why she could neither lift it nor feel it as an appendage. She was still staring at it when Peter rode up to her, flung himself from his horse and ran to her side.
“My God, are you hurt?” he cried. “Believe me, it wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
Wasn’t supposed to be like this … what an extordinary thing for him to say, she thought.
“Mrs. Pollifax, are you all right?”
“It’s my left hand,” she told him. “It just lies there. Otherwise,” she added with a return of spirit, “I’m basically fine. Perhaps a little in shock, perhaps a little dazed. Yes, definitely a little dazed.” She placed her right hand underneath her left one and lifted it. Cradling it and supporting it, she sat up. “But what,” she demanded, “happened to that damn runaway horse?”
Peter said, “Can you stand up?”
“Of course I can stand up, just give me a minute.”
“But I can’t give you a minute,” he cried despairingly. “I can’t, damn it—this is where I disappear, don’t you see? Oh damn it, Mrs. Pollifax—Emily—I’m sorry, believe me I’m sorry. I stuck a burr under that horse’s saddle so that he’d run away with you, poor devil. Except I was so sure I’d catch him long before the top of the mountain. I thought—oh hell, we don’t have time. I never expected this, can you ever forgive me? Is your wrist broken?”
“Probably,” she said calmly. “Where are the others?”
“I told them I could handle it—bring you back okay—but heaven only knows how much time we have before they—”
“Yes,” she said, and told herself that she could put all this together and recover later; she could even understand the sense of what he’d done. “Help me up,” she said, giving him her good hand. “I thought it was going to be the waterfall. What happened to that horse?”
He groaned as he helped her to her feet. “I feel like a murderer, he crashed down into the river. It’s got horrible currents, it’s the same one I had to cross to reach X’s camp. I haven’t looked but I saw the horse go down. Heard him, too, it was ghastly.”
She nodded. “And now you disappear too?”
“Yes, supposedly drowned in this river and swept away while trying to rescue you but of course I was really going to backtrack into the mountain to the cave.”
She nodded. “Then it’s a very good thing the horse met with such an accident, I really have nothing personal against him but it will fill out the picture. Yes, definitely it supports your being drowned and swept away.”
Peter looked at her in astonishment. “You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that; am I in shock too, I wonder? But I can’t leave you like this. Does your hand hurt? It’s swelling already.”
Standing, she gave a shaky laugh. “Of course you can leave me like this. Yes my wrist hurts, but mostly it feels numb, as if a spring has broken inside—a very interesting feeling, actually, but never mind that. For heaven’s sake, Peter, where’s your professionalism? Go!”
Behind them a pleasant and very familiar voice said, “Nobody’s going anywhere, at least not without me.”
They wheeled to see Joe Forbes standing several paces behind them, still smiling, still looking affable except that in his hand he held a small snub-nosed efficient pistol. Far behind him at the foot of the hillside she saw a horse tethered to a tree and guessed it was his. Neither had heard him approach over the pebbles and gravel of the desert floor.
“So you’re the one,” she said, nodding.
“The one what?” demanded Peter. �
�What the hell’s the matter with you, Forbes, pointing a gun at us, have you lost your mind?”
“Don’t,” Mrs. Pollifax told him. “We’ve been working for the Russians without knowing it, Peter. I’ve suspected this ever since Sheng told us we were followed into the desert. It’s been a trap, Peter.”
“Trap!” he cried. “You mean Carstairs—”
“Carstairs doesn’t know. The Russians simply leaked the information and sat back to watch us do all the dirty work, and now I believe you’re meeting your first KGB man, Peter. Take a long look.”
Peter stared at Forbes in horror. “KGB! You?”
“Held in abeyance,” said Mrs. Pollifax. “A ‘sleeper,’ I believe they’re called. Wonderful credentials, very American, too. Waiting for you to locate and free Wang, after which he was supposed to snatch the prize from you at the last minute and run with it to Moscow. The Russians never planned any attempt to free Wang, we were to do the job for them.”
Forbes said dryly, “Only one thing wrong with that, Mrs. Pollifax—not Forbes was to snatch—is to snatch the prize. Right now.” He made circular motions with his gun, directing her to move to one side. “It’s Peter I have business with—get away from him.”
“No,” said Mrs. Pollifax, feeling all her senses giddily heightened by pain. “No I’m not going to move. Not one inch, thank you. You can’t possible expect Peter to tell you where Wang is.”
Forbes smiled a lethal smile. “No, but he’s going to show me where he is. I speak Chinese better than I let on, and I know the Sepos are searching these mountains for a prisoner who’s missing from a labor reform camp somewhere nearby. Somehow you got him out and hid him, and I want him.” He waved his gun menacingly again. “We’re running out of time and—”
“Yes that is a problem for you,” said Mrs. Pollifax cheerfully. “The lack of time. How are you going to handle that?”
He gave her a pleasant glance that held touches of a sneer in it. “Shut up,” he said, and turned to address Peter. “Either both of you go with me now, taking me to Wang Shen—both of you—or I’ll kill your friend Mrs. Pollifax here and now. In front of you, so that you can watch her die.”
Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station Page 16