Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station (19 page)

Very tactfully she said, “I’ll think about it now, you can think about it later.” It had needed all of her will power to concentrate on Sheng Ti and his situation when instead she had wanted to cry out to Peter,
If what I think is true then someone in our tour group is here to find Wang, too. They’ve known who you are from the beginning and they’ve searched suitcases until they identified me as your cover because they knew just what to look for and they found it in mine: that preposterous hoard of dried foods and vitamins. Peter, don’t you see what this means?

In silence Peter and Sheng escorted her back to the compound and around the wall to the corner where they had scaled it earlier; she was boosted over it to creep stealthily to her window, where she removed the screen and climbed back into her room, securing the window behind her. For a moment she stood in the darkness, her mind checking and rechecking the thoughts that had dazed her during the last forty-five minutes, but her conclusion remained the same: someone in their tour group could be working for the Russians, and she and Peter could be in grave danger.

Hearing a faint sound beyond her door she tiptoed across the room and quickly opened it just in time to see a shadowy figure pause by the door next to hers, open it, enter and close it softly.

But that was Iris’ room, she remembered, and she thought, “Iris?” and then in astonishment,
“Iris?
”

By the luminous dial on her bedside clock it was half-past one in the morning but Mrs. Pollifax did not feel like sleeping. She sat in the darkness for a long time, not enjoying her thoughts or speculations at all.

M
rs. Pollifax awoke with a start to discover that both heat and daylight had arrived and that she had fallen asleep across her bed, still in the costume of the previous night. The huge electric fan was wheezing from exhaustion. Walking into the bathroom to wash her face she was confronted by a mirror over the washbasin that reflected a strange slant-eyed woman; she hastily disengaged the tape hidden under her hair and watched Emily Pollifax emerge again. The sense of pending heat was oppressive; she felt vaguely worried still, and jaded from those worries; she had not slept well. She stood on the slatted shower platform while a thin stream of lukewarm water poured over her, and she wondered what Cyrus was doing now. At this exact moment. He seemed very far away.

Having dressed in her thinnest and coolest clothes she walked out to the grape arbor to sit down and face her day. Putting her head back she gazed into the tightly laced green leaves above her and at the clusters of pale green seedless grapes grown in Turfan, Mr. Li had said, for fifteen hundred years. Presently a door in the long line of rooms opened and Malcolm emerged, glanced around, and strolled over to join her.

“I scarcely recognize you without a wet towel around your head,” he said dryly.

“After breakfast,” she promised him.

He nodded. “Breakfast in that incredibly hot little room with two fans, one of which doesn’t work, and George Westrum manages to find the only place where the working fan stirs any air.”

“Courage,” she told him, “it’s only half-past seven. Except—where is everyone?”

Two doors opened simultaneously: George Westrum emerged from his and Iris from hers; they smiled, greeted each other and walked together toward them. Jenny came next, followed by Joe Forbes, and then Peter hurried out looking surprisingly fresh and bright eyed. They sat or sprawled under the grapes, their conversation desultory and idle as they waited for Mr. Li.

He joined them looking both serious and somewhat anxious, so that their greetings did not extract from him his usual beaming smile.

“What’s up for today?” asked Forbes.

Mr. Li nodded. “We spend most of today in Turfan, of course. This morning we visit the Thousand-Buddha Caves, also an ancient tomb, and following lunch we look forward to Jiaohe—ancient city—and then return to Urumchi.” He hesitated and then turned to look at Peter. “You were not in your room last night, Mr. Fox.”

Mrs. Pollifax’s heart skipped a beat.
Oh dear
, she thought in dismay.

“I beg your pardon,” Peter said coldly.

“You were not in your room all night,” Mr. Li repeated firmly.

“And how the hell would you know that?” asked Peter, rallying, while the others listened in astonishment.

“Because I looked in—there are no keys, as you know. I looked in and went back many times to look. You were not in your room all night.”

Mrs. Pollifax thought,
I’ve got to stop this; I’ve got to think of something …

“I don’t know what business it is of yours,” Peter told him.

“It is the business of myself and China Travel Bureau,” he said formally. “I am responsible. You were not in your room, you were not anywhere in this compound. I have to ask,
where did you go?
”

They had all frozen into a tableau staring mesmerized at Peter, who stared back at Mr. Li; they had been made uncomfortable by some unknown quality in Mr. Li’s voice, and by the rising suspense of a long silence that Iris broke at last by speaking.

“Actually,” said Iris in a calm voice, “Peter spent the night with me. In my room. All night.”

Every head swiveled toward Iris, and George Westrum gasped. Mrs. Pollifax looked quickly at Iris and then her glance moved to George who was staring incredulously at Iris, his mouth open; she saw that his face had turned white, as if he’d been struck.
How strange this is
, thought Mrs. Pollifax,
all of us simply sitting here and watching
.

Peter said, “Iris—”

“It’s quite true,” she said with a lift of her jaw. “He was with me.”

George leaned forward, his eyes cold with anger and
disgust. “You
slut
,” he said, biting the words through his teeth and he rose to his feet and stalked out of the arbor, his back rigid.

His words seemed to reverberate, or was it the hate behind them, wondered Mrs. Pollifax—oh those tight thin lips, she thought, this had been there all the time. Even Mr. Li looked stricken. In an embarrassed voice he said to Peter, “If that is—I didn’t—”

Malcolm said pleasantly, “Surely it’s time for breakfast now, don’t you think?” He stood and walked across the arbor to stand casually behind Iris’ chair, and Mrs. Pollifax loved him for this. Iris herself sat very still, a flush on either cheekbone, her head high.

“Yes indeed,” said Joe Forbes, as if coming out of a trance, and jumped to his feet.

Iris looked around, her face without expression, her glance resting lightly on Mrs. Pollifax, and then she too stood up.

Jenny, staring at her, said, “Well of all the—!”

Mrs. Pollifax heard herself say firmly, “I think we’ve had enough.”

Jenny gave her a hostile glare and turned to Joe Forbes. “
Poor
George,” she said dramatically.

“Poor
Jenny
,” he said lightly. It was the first evidence that he’d given of being aware of the shifting alliances.

They moved across the compound in procession, Malcolm walking silently beside Iris, Joe Forbes and Jenny with Mr. Li. Peter, falling in at the rear with Mrs. Pollifax, said in a low voice, “I’m in shock.”

“Accept, accept,” she murmured.

“But–why did she do it?”

“I don’t know,” she told him. “I just don’t know, Peter, but it’s becoming terribly important that we talk in private soon. I think there could be more shocks ahead. Where’s Sheng Ti now?”

“On his way by bus to Urumchi, I hope. I suppose you mean you’re worried about what Sheng told us—that we were followed last night into the desert?”

“Yes.”

He said with a frown. “You realize we have only Sheng’s word for that, don’t you? You and I haven’t seen anyone, we have no proof. He could have made it up to hide the fact that he followed us himself.”

“Possibly,” she conceded.

“But in any case,” he added, his face lightening, “tomorrow’s the day for visiting the Kazakhs up in the grasslands, and at some point during the day I expect to vanish, which will take care of anybody’s lurking curiosity.” With this confident statement he held the screen door open for her to enter the dining room.

This time George did not capture the enviable spot in front of the one working fan; he did not join them at all for breakfast.

Mrs. Pollifax, with dampened towel wrapped around her head, forced herself to concentrate on sight-seeing for the next hours. There was nothing else to do, she decided: she was experiencing a sense of events moving inexorably now toward their conclusion and without any way to alter or color them. That word
inexorable
again, she thought with a shiver. X was hiding in his cave at the edge of the Tian Shan mountains, while Sheng Ti was somehow making his way to Urumchi, armed with his coveted ID papers at last; they too would head for Urumchi again toward the end of the day, and Peter had reminded her that in only thirty or so more hours he planned to disappear. In the meantime they had been mysteriously followed into the desert last night—she did not share Peter’s skepticism about Sheng’s tale—and Mr. Li had known Peter was gone. If one of the members of the tour group had told Mr. Li of Peter’s
absence, she could no longer believe that it was Iris. Iris had provided cover for Peter at a rather staggering cost.

Sticks and stones may break my bones
, she thought, reflecting on that cost to Iris … 
a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches
 … Why had Iris leaped to protect Peter? What did she know, and how? She discovered as they embarked on their sight-seeing that she was carefully avoiding Iris, going to great lengths to neither walk with her, speak to her, nor catch her eye, and then to her chagrin she noticed that Iris was going out of her way to avoid her, too. It was as if each of them knew something about the other they didn’t care to acknowledge, but what
had
Iris been doing outside her room at one o’clock in the morning?

Since there was no answer available to her—because she wasn’t even sure just now of the question—Mrs. Pollifax philosophically gave herself up to the moment, and to their excursion into the desert to see the Thousand-Buddha Caves. This was not at all difficult: they had arrived at the heart of the Silk Road and it was an incredible countryside, totally emptied of colors to which the eyes were accustomed. It was a land of beige—beige, terra-cotta, cream, tan, and dusty gray, set into a valley of surrealistic shapes: harsh angles cut into sandstone cliffs, mesas pleated and wrinkled by wind and sun, and jagged tawny mountains climbing in tiers to a heat-seared washed-out sky. Nothing moved, nothing appeared to live except the shapes, which had a life of their own.

Yet it felt neither unfriendly nor desolate. The sense of space was glorious, and the palette of earth colors were as warm as if they’d been toasted by the nearly-suffocating sun. Leaving the bus for the caves Mrs. Pollifax looked down in astonishment on an oasis of bright green, long and narrow like a knife-slit between the jagged sandstone hills, a miraculous ribbon of green threaded by a canal carrying
sparkling water down from the mountains. Standing on the cliff overlooking this oasis Mrs. Pollifax was transfixed. In her mind’s eye she saw a long line of camels, horses, donkeys slowly moving up this trackless valley to arrive at this oasis with its glacier-fed running water, so incongruous in the midst of the heat and sun and desert. In her imagination she could hear the tinkle of camel bells and voices calling to one another in the exotic languages of the Silk Road. If they were leaving China, they would be heading for Persia, India, Russian Turkestan, the camels laden with silk, furs, ceramics, jade, iron, lacquer, and bronze; if entering China they would be bringing gold and precious stones, asbestos and glass, wool and linens, and—perhaps most significant of all—the religion of Buddhism.

“Yes,” she whispered, “this is
it
, this is what I came to see, what I hoped to feel.” And she stood lost in the magic of it until Mr. Li’s call to her broke the spell.

They lunched back at Turfan in the small hot room with its malfunctioning fans, with George again seizing the one promising spot for air, Mrs. Pollifax’s returning cheerfulness was not altogether shared by the others, however; subtly they had now formed themselves into two camps. Although there was not the slightest acknowledgment of it by gesture, glance, or word, Mrs. Pollifax and Malcolm had tacitly united to protect Iris, and Peter along with her. The others, thought Mrs. Pollifax dryly, were being far more obvious in their allegiances, and in the case of Jenny even strident. Jenny had come into her own: she now had George and Joe Forbes in attendance, and although her voice was shrill all of her elfin charm had returned. Like a Lady Bountiful she offered everyone the raisins she’d bought in the bazaar the day before, not even affronted when Mrs. Pollifax and Peter refused them. George’s baseball cap had taken on a more cocky angle, but his face remained a mask of tight-lipped coldness: he seethed with
anger. Joe Forbes appeared to observe Jenny as if she were a precocious child, but Mrs. Pollifax thought that he was enjoying very much being in the center of things for a change.