Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

She
hoped so. Bishop had said, ”You’ll find many surprising changes happening
there, but they’ve been taking place very cautiously, very slowly.” She
lingered a moment gazing at the open door, trying to imagine what lay behind
its innocent facade, and then she turned and hurried away, made uneasy by a
vague sense of foreboding.
    ”What did he say that building was?” asked George Wes-trum, catching up
with her.
    ”People’s Security Bureau.”
    ”Oh, cops. By the way, did you know Malcolm writes kiddies’ books?”
    The tone of his voice, she thought, would not have surprised Malcolm.
”Yes, very fine ones,” she told him. ”Perhaps your children—are you married,
George?”
    He shook his head. ”Never had children, been a widower for years. Tell
me why in hell a man would write children’s books? Hasn’t he grown up yet?”
    Mrs. Pollifax glanced at George’s baseball cap, tilted boyishly at the
back of his head, and smiled. ”Do any of us?” she asked dryly. ”And should
we—completely?”
    He didn’t hear her; he said abruptly, ”There’s Iris Damson up ahead.
Doesn’t realize it’s almost time to be heading for the bus. Excuse me, I’ll
just hurry along and tell her.”
    She watched him march briskly toward Iris, passing Joe Forbes
photographing workers mixing cement, then Peter and Jenny taking pictures of
each other, and Malcolm aiming his camera at children playing. She smiled,
thinking George Wes-trum was showing very definite signs of becoming addicted
to Iris.
     
    In late afternoon they reached the airport, where they said good-bye to
Mr. Tung. Because there were no reserved seats on the plane, not even for
foreigners, there was a mad dash across the tarmac once the plane was
announced, and the group found themselves widely dispersed throughout the small
two-engine prop plane. Mrs. Pollifax settled herself into an aisle seat with
two men in Mao jackets beside her, and realized, now that she had sampled a
little of China, it was time she began considering just how she was going to
approach Comrade Guo Musu in his barbershop near the Drum Tower in Xian. She
found that no inspiration occurred to her at all; she had no idea what the Drum
Tower might be, and not even her wildest flights of imagination could conjure
up the appearance of a barbershop, which in China would scarcely announce
itself with a striped barber pole. It troubled her, too, that so far the tour
appeared to be arranged to prevent even the most accidental of encounters with
the Chinese, and up against these frustrations she began to reflect instead on
just which member of the group might be her coagent. One of them —one person
on this plane —knew what Xian meant, and why she was here.
    One person, she reflected, and again asked, who? Which one?
     
    From where he sat on the plane he could just see the back of Mrs.
Pollifax’s head several seats down the aisle, and as the plane lifted he
wondered what she was thinking about as they took flight to Xian, and to Guo
Musu, and he wondered how in hell she was going to extract information from a
total stranger, given so little time and the watchful eye of Mr. Li. Once again
he shook his head over Carstairs’ choice,- they had a very tight schedule, and
if she failed in this contact it was highly doubtful that he would ever find
the labor camp by himself. The distances were too vast, and their time too
painfully limited.
    He had programmed himself not to think ahead, but separated from the
others now, with two native Chinese between him and the window, he allowed his
mind to wander a little from the discipline he’d imposed upon it. He already
knew how tough his assignment was going to be, and how the rescue of X—if it
could be accomplished—was only the beginning of it. It brought a curious
feeling to know so much intellectually about China and to apply this knowledge
on arrival to the country’s reality: it felt positively schizophrenic, for
instance, to be listening with half his mind to the conversation between the
two Chinese next to him, to understand every word they said yet pretend that he
didn’t.
    In Guangzhou he’d been sorely tempted to
buy a newspaper, a copy of Zhong Guo Qing Nian Bao —the China Youth
Daily —which he was accustomed to reading weeks late, in America . This
he had resisted, allowing himself only a glance at its headlines. The two men
on his right were discussing production figures. They were both foremen in a
factory