Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station (20 page)

After lunch they were off again to see the ruins of the city of Jiaohe, but they were growing accustomed now to the desert, to its tawny shades of cream and beige, to the far horizons and to the hints of Turkish influence as they passed through Turfan: the boots, the occasional sash around the waist, the kerchiefs worn around the head by the women, the higher slant of cheekbones, and rounder eyes.

“The city of Jiaohe,” explained Mr. Kan, taking up the small hand microphone in the bus and looking very serious, “was once the location of the royal court of Che-shi. It is sixteen hundred years old, having flourished in the year
A
.
D
. 200. This was very important communication center on the ancient Silk Road. Of such strategy—and importance, too, as you will see by its locale.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Jenny.

“It is built on steep cliff with ravines all around.”

“What happened to it?” asked Malcolm.

“It was destroyed by roving bands in fourteenth century.”

“Roving bands?”

“Muslims. Genghis Khan maybe. Nobody knows. It
died
.” He snapped his fingers and smiled.

“More ruins,” sniffed George, looking very warm and flushed from the heat.

“Looks like some sort of dried-up maze,” Joe Forbes said, as they swung past the solitary caretaker’s house and headed up the dusty road to the top of a broad mesa.

“But a child’s maze,” said Iris eagerly, her head craned to look. “People lived where, Mr. Kan?”

“You will see,” he told her. “In small rooms—oh very dark, very small—inside walls.”

The bus came to a stop, the doors opened, and they met
with desert heat again. Iris at once strolled off with Mr. Kan, who talked earnestly to her, delighted by her questions and her interest, but Mrs. Pollifax wondered if Iris didn’t attach herself to him to avoid the others. Peter lingered to ask directions of Mr. Li, and George and Jenny moved off together. It was Malcolm who caught up with Mrs. Pollifax as they approached the walls that opened into a vista of lanes and alleys.

“Hot,” she said, turning to smile at him.

“Very. Your towel dried out already?”

“I’ve timed it,” she said. “It turns damp inside of ten minutes and dry in half an hour. Yes, it’s now dry. You’ve been very thoughtful about Iris, by the way.”

“Not at all,” said Malcolm calmly. “I have plans for Iris—I intend to marry her, except I do rather hope she won’t go around being so quixotic in the future.”

Mrs. Pollifax beamed at him appreciatively. “Malcolm, you’re wonderful,” she told him. “I’m truly happy to have met you and I feel that I shall forever love your talking mice. You and Iris are a marvelously improbable combination, but now that I think of it terribly
right
. You wouldn’t insist she stop falling over chairs or that she cut her hair?”

He smiled. “What, and lose that awkward flash of hands every few minutes? Not on your life.”

“When did you decide all this?” she asked.

“Well, there’s that psychic bit,” he explained. “I had a nearly overwhelming reaction to her when I first saw her, which—as you may remember—was as she popped out from under a table in Hong Kong. I felt as if I’d been hit over the head, frankly. It took some time to understand what had happened, but there it was.… In any case I found her so funny, earnest, and unique that it scarcely needed any help from the psyche, although it’s been very pleasant knowing all this time—really
knowing
—that she
wasn’t going to marry George, no matter how ardent he proved to be.”

“But what about Iris and
Peter
?” she suggested mischievously.

He laughed and steered her to the left, down a slope toward a more intricate arrangement of walls. “Surely you know
that
was a lot of hogwash.”

“George didn’t,” she reminded him.

“Well, George is a nerd, of course. He has excellent taste in women, but obviously he goes after form rather than content or he’d never have believed Iris for an instant. He has a small mind.”

“Have you mentioned any of this to Iris?” she inquired.

“Good Lord no,” he said, looking appalled. “Not being psychic she couldn’t possibly know what I do. On the other hand,” he added with a chuckle, “we have avoided each other assiduously for a week—suspiciously so—and I do hope I don’t sound macho if I say there has been an intense awareness between us.”

“I have been—not unaware,” she told him, remembering the electricity she’d felt between them in Xian, at the tombs. “You’re being very tactful, then.”

“Oh, no, just giving her time,” he said, and suddenly stopped.

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Pollifax, alarmed by the look on his face.

He had become immobile, his head turned as if to listen to something she couldn’t hear. He said, “I heard—thought I heard—”

She said sharply, “Malcolm, are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, yes—let’s keep walking.”

“What did you hear?”

He shook his head. His face had paled, he looked strained, but seeing her concern he managed a smile. “I’m fine, honestly. No problem.”

Mrs. Pollifax was already fumbling in her purse for the smelling salts she carried with her. “No problem except that frankly you look awful. Here.” She held out the small vial to him.

He grasped both her arms and the smelling salts and propelled her into an open space. “Look at all the shards lying around,” he pointed out. “An archaeologist’s delight.”

“And note the signs in English suggesting no one remove any. Malcolm, what’s wrong?”

He placed both hands over his ears. “I’m trying, I’m trying, except that covering my ears doesn’t help, I can still hear them.” He reached for her smelling salts and unscrewed the cap. “This won’t help either,” he said fiercely. “I still hear them. Voices wailing in despair, the same lamentations I felt—heard—at Auschwitz, except here there are no screams, just unbearable despair. Something very sad happened here,” he said, looking around them at the sun-baked empty mesa.

“I wonder what,” she said, her gaze following his, believing him, believing that what he heard was something lingering here from the past.

“Not violence—that’s the strange thing,” he said. “Just weeping and wailing, lamentations, and a terrible sadness.”

“Malcolm let’s get out of here,” she told him. “You do look horrid, you know.”

Peter, following down the path and coming upon them said, “What is it, something wrong?”

“Malcolm.”

Peter stared. “My God he looks absolutely wiped out.”

They helped him to his feet and slowly retraced their route back to the bus. As soon as they left the walls behind them Malcolm straightened and lifted his head, the color returning to his face. “It’s okay, I feel better now,” he told them both.

“The heat,” Peter said, nodding. “I’ll go and tell Mr.
Kan that it’s bothering you. Sit and take deep breaths.” He hurried off to look for the guide, filled with an energy that defied the heat and promised well for his desert travels, thought Mrs. Pollifax as she turned back to Malcolm.

“I always thought it must be quite fascinating to be psychic,” she told him. “An added dimension to life, you might say. Now I see that it has its hazards and its price.”

He gave her a twisted smile. “Hell sometimes. Sorry about this, you won’t mention it to anyone?”

“You notice I didn’t,” she said dryly.

“Good of you not to assume I’d gone off my rocker. Hearing voices is one of the first signs, they tell me.”

“You seem surprisingly sane to me,” she said firmly, thinking that if he should be their KGB agent, he was at least a sane one. “When it happens in a ruin that’s six thousand years old … Auschwitz, too?”

He nodded unhappily. “They had to carry me out. Most humiliating experience in my life. On a stretcher.”

“Let’s talk of something else,” she announced. “I think we should. Iris, for instance? Or the heat? Or—” She suddenly wondered if he sensed or “saw” anything about her, or about Peter, and for just a moment felt endangered and uneasy.

The moment passed. Mr. Li, hurrying toward them in the heat, called out, “I have sent Mr. Kan to find all our people, the young lady Jenny is very sick.”

Mrs. Pollifax sighed. “And a four-hour trip back to Urumchi ahead of us? As group leader, Mr. Li, I do think we must
go
.”

Both Iris and Mr. Kan appeared from among the walls supporting a very white-faced Jenny between them. “Cramps,” Iris explained, and accepted Mrs. Pollifax’s smelling salts. Jenny was installed in the bus on the rear seat and a paper bag produced for her. Joe Forbes and George Westrum strolled in from a different corner of the
city with Peter herding them like a shepherd rounding up a flock. The bus started, and Mrs. Pollifax took one last look at Jiaohe dreaming in the hot golden sun in its sadness.
What did happen to you
, she asked silently, and knew that she would always wonder.

Once again as they entered Urumchi they passed the anti-aircraft guns silhouetted on the hills outside the city, and the huge sign
PROTECT OUR MOTHERLAND
,
HEIGHTEN ALERTNESS
. Threading their way through the sprawling town they passed several factories belching sinister yellow vapors, and then as they approached the wooded driveway leading to their hotel Mrs. Pollifax looked from her window and saw Sheng Ti.

He was sitting by the road at the entrance, watching the oncoming bus with great interest. She saw his intelligent eyes focus on Peter, and then on her, and she quietly lifted one hand to him, and smiled. Somehow he had made his way to Urumchi. He was here.

The bus turned into the drive and Mrs. Pollifax, taking stock, found herself grateful, and almost happy. Sheng Ti had arrived to join Peter. They were back in Urumchi, and it was gratifying to realize that she no longer need wear a wet towel wrapped around her head and look like a beserk Arab. She was bearing leftover food from their meals in Turfan, all of it conscientiously, if wetly, stuffed into her suitcase, and behind her in the bus Jenny had fallen asleep at last after being actively ill a number of times.

But most of all, she thought as she looked back on Turfan, she knew that she would not easily forget her trip into the desert with Peter. They both carried back with them the ramifications of that night—the knowledge that someone had been watching them—but for herself she knew that she would never forget that sense of leaving time behind them for a few hours, of moving effortlessly,
slowly, into another century. It had diminished barriers and touched them both so that perhaps the closeness she’d shared with Peter was the most important part of the memory, and what had moved her most of all.

And because of this she decided not to tell him of her suspicions, not to burden him with them yet. They drew up to the hotel, and it was Mr. Kan and Mr. Li who went to the back of the bus to look after Jenny. Mrs. Pollifax, leaving the bus with Peter, whispered to him, “You saw Sheng Ti on the street out there?”

“I sure did.” He nodded. “I’m really pleased. He made it.”

“Do you go off with food for X tonight?”

He nodded.

She had to say it. “You’ll be terribly sure you’re not followed?”

“You can bet on it,” he told her grimly.

“Good. What about your plans for the grasslands, for zero hour tomorrow?” she asked, and discovered that the word
tomorrow
chilled her.

He turned and looked at her as they gained the lobby, and she saw that his eyes were distant and cold, as opaque as they had been when she first met him in Hong Kong. He said curtly, “I don’t think that you ought to know.”

She didn’t take this as a rebuff, she merely nodded, understanding the need in him now to withdraw and to build up that lonely austere strength that was familiar to her from her own experience. One couldn’t share, not in this business, not with other lives at stake, and perhaps, she reflected, it was this experience of altered selfness that was the meaning behind all of her own adventures: a sense of bringing to each moment every strength and resource hidden inside of herself as well as the discovery of new ones: a sense of life being so stripped to its essence that
trivia and inconsequentials fell away. It was very akin to a mystical experience, as she had realized long ago.

And so she only nodded. There would be no more sharing unless Peter found that he could afford it; Turfan was behind them, they were agents, and Peter the cold professional that she would never be. With equal crispness she said, “Right—just let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

He stopped and looked at her. “There’s one thing you can do, yes. With your experience in people, you trust Sheng Ti? Really trust him?”

She said simply, “Yes.”

Peter nodded. “Then I’ll take him with me tonight to the cave and let him hide there with X.”

“Very good,” she said. “And I’ll leave my contribution of food for them in your room when I go to dinner.”

Due to their long drive back from Turfan it was a late dinner that evening, and for Mrs. Pollifax it was made even later by Mr. Li detaining her in the lobby as the others walked into the dining room.

He said, “There is this matter of Iris Damson and Peter Fox last night. As group leader, Mrs. Pollifax—”

“Yes?” she said without expression.

“It is most uncomfortable, and as group leader—”

“It was uncomfortable, wasn’t it,” she agreed, and remembering that the best defense was an offense she asked with great innocence, “However did you come to learn that Peter wasn’t in his room? Who was it who told you?”

A curtain immediately dropped over Mr. Li’s shiny black young eyes, and Mrs. Pollifax realized that she was experiencing oriental inscrutability; it did exist after all. She remembered that in Chinese society it wasn’t the individual that mattered but the people. As group leader
Mr. Li would expect frank information from her, he would assume her proprietary interest in the group as a mass while certainly not giving anything in return. He said again, stubbornly, “As group leader—”

She smiled at him. “As group leader, Mr. Li, I insist we go in for dinner. Believe me, I’ll do everything in my power to make things less uncomfortable for you, but on an empty stomach, no.”