Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

fun,” breathed Iris, her eyes shining.
    Already the lights were being extinguished all over the park; nothing
was wasted, it was nine o’clock, the television screen was dark, the park
emptying. They walked out onto the avenue where the small garish lamps of the
vendors shone like fireflies in the darkness. People lingered, chatting, under
the dim light of the occasional streetlamp, some strolling in pairs, some
hurrying home, a few on bicycles.
    ”Now which way did we come?” asked Iris.
    ”Oh—down that road,” Mrs. Pollifax said, pointing.
    Jenny shook her head. ”Uh-uh, that’s where we saw George taking
pictures, don’t you remember? So we take the other street.”
    Mrs. Pollifax expressed her doubt. ”I really don’t think so.”
    ”But I’m known for my bump of direction,” Jenny insisted. ”Really
I am... trust me!”
    ”We’ll trust you,” Iris told her gravely.
    They reached, eventually, the broad avenue on which they had expected to
find the People’s Hotel, but there was no hotel. Instead they met with a sea of
people strolling down the center of a road in a silence broken only by the
shuffling sounds of their feet. There were no cars. As they continued walking
there was no hotel, either. They were looked at with curiosity,- a few turned
to stare.
    ”Still confident?” Mrs. Pollifax asked Jenny.
    ”Oh yes,” said Jenny, and then spoiled such assertiveness by pausing to
say to a young man, ”Do you speak English?”
    He smiled, shook his head, and hurried on. So did they, but after three
more blocks Mrs. Pollifax’s skepticism had turned into alarm; she decided the
time had come to try that universal language of the hands. She stopped two men,
and laid her head on her hands in a manner that she hoped denoted sleep.
”Ho-tel?” she asked. ”Hotel?”
    The two men nodded happily and turned to point in the direction ahead of
them.
    ”Xiexie,” she said, bowing.
    But another block still produced no hotel, and Mrs. Pollifax began to
picture them sleeping in a doorway for the night, began to look down narrow
alleys and into mysterious entrances that led to wooden doors, speculating on
how long a tourist might be lost in Xian, and longing passionately for a real
bed.
    It was Iris who next said, ”I don’t see a damn thing ahead resembling a
hotel. Let me try.”
    ”But I’m supposed to have such a good bump of direction,” wailed Jenny.
    ”Well, coming to China has dislocated it, I think,” said Mrs. Pollifax.
    ”Ho-tel?” asked Iris, stopping three men and repeating Mrs. Pollifax’s
symbol for sleep.
    At once Iris drew a crowd; they became surrounded by faces made dim and
unearthly in the near-darkness, faces marveling at Iris’ height, a few women
tittering behind their hands; it turned into a party, and a few minutes later a
dozen of the young men escorted them half a block farther, smiling and
murmuring ”hotel” and pointing, and there—at last—was the hotel, with its
sentry and its gate.
    Bows, thank yous, and smiles were exchanged, they passed through a
deserted lobby, mounted stairs, and Mrs. Pollifax entered her small hot room
with its chuckling air-conditioner. The temperature had dropped only a few
degrees and she found the twenty-five-watt light in the lamp depressing.
Kneeling beside her suitcase she unlocked and opened it to return the camera
she’d extracted from it before walking to the park, and suddenly became very
still, the movement of camera to suitcase arrested.
    Her suitcase had been opened and searched while she was gone.
    A long time ago she had worked out a formula for packing, and although
efficiency had been only a minor reason for this she had automatically
continued to pack in a certain way even when there was no necessity for
caution. She had felt there was no need for caution on this trip, but
apparently she had been wrong. Her suitcase had been unlocked very expertly,
and very professionally and discreetly searched, but whoever had done the job
couldn’t possibly have known of her packing formula. When she had snatched the
camera from her suitcase after dinner her bright red pajamas had as usual been
folded up with the pajama bottoms underneath the pajama tops—that was the
important detail—and her toothbrush and comb tucked into their folds. Now the
pajama bottoms were on top, and both toothbrush and comb had vanished somewhere
into her suitcase.
    Now this, thought Mrs. Pollifax, abruptly sitting down on the
floor, is a pretty