Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

kettle offish, and completely unexpected.
    Who, she wondered, could have done this{ She could
not believe it had been a worker in the hotel; opening a locked suitcase
without leaving behind so much as a scratch was an art denied to the average person.
    The police? But Mr. Li had handled Customs, and at the border no one had
felt any need to question her about her remarkable supply of vitamins and dried
fruit.
    Her mysterious coagent? But whoever he was there seemed no need for him
to investigate her; he had the advantage of knowing who she was, as well as
what she’d brought with her.
    What a bewildering finish to a delightful evening, she thought, and realized that she felt thoroughly jarred by this. I
don’t understand it, she reflected, and I don’t like it. It’s almost as
if — But she did not allow herself to complete that thought, and hastily
drew out her pajamas.

Chapter F ive
     
    M ay we see the sketches you did last evening in the park?” Mrs. Pollifax
asked Malcolm at breakfast.
    He said ruefully, ”I ended up giving them all away to my audience. We
certainly attract crowds, don’t we?”
    He smiled across the table at Iris, who flushed as usual but managed one
of her radiant smiles in return.
    ”Quite a schedule today,” commented Joe Forbes, spearing a peanut
between his chopsticks.
    ”Yes indeed,” she said. Miss Bai had pinned to the dining room wall a
calendar of events for their stay in Xian, presented in flawless calligraphy,
but to Mrs. Pollifax the most important news was that after trips to the Bell Tower and to the Wild Goose Pagoda, they were going to visit the Drum Tower .
    For the Drum Tower Mrs. Pollifax still had no plans. How very easy and
natural the assignment had seemed to her when she was sitting in Carstairs’
office in Langley Field, Virginia ,
and how very different it looked now that she was in Xian! She had absolutely
no idea what obstacles were going to greet her, or even whether she would be
able to find Guo Musu’s barbershop. She dared not ask about a barbershop near
the Drum Tower or she would be shown it—if it
existed—in the company of Mr. Li or Miss Bai. She had finally accepted the fact
that she could assemble no strategy whatever in advance, which was not the
happiest way to approach such an important moment, or the Drum Tower either, or
Guo Musu if he could be found, but Mrs. Pollifax had a great deal of faith:
something would occur to her. A miracle would take place.
    Yes, definitely a miracle, she told herself firmly.
    In the meantime they were going to visit Ban Po Village this morning,
which would please Iris, and a department store, which would please Jenny’s
desire for Mao cap and jacket, and Mrs. Pollifax tried to pretend that it
pleased her too, that this was a perfectly normal day with the afternoon of no
particular significance, and that her suitcase had not been searched the night
before.
    At Ban Po Village they were ushered into a briefing room and seated at a
long table with a tea cup placed squarely in front of each chair, and while
they sipped hot tea the resident guide delivered facts to them, translated into
English by Miss Bai... the site discovered accidentally in 1953... the
foundations of forty-five houses with remarkably preserved pottery and tools...
in existence from 6080 b.c. to 5600 b.c.... evidence of its being a matriarchal society...
    Released from the tyranny of the briefing, Mrs. Pollifax considered
those facts. She decided that facts could not possibly describe the drama of
workmen starting to build a factory here and discovering instead the remains of
an eight-thousand-year-old village. Strolling along the walkways of the
building that sheltered the excavation, she tried to come to grips with eight
thousand years of time and failed. Eight thousand was only a number, there was
simply no way to cope with such aeons, but what did come to her—like a
lingering fragrance across the years—was the intelligence at work here: the
intricately worked out trenches between the houses, the playful designs etched
into pottery, the burial of dead children in huge egg-shaped pottery urns, as
if to return them, she thought, to the embryo from which they’d entered life.
It gave her a pleasant feeling of pride in the human race. She wondered what
archaeologists in the year a.d. 10,000 would find when they uncovered the relics of the twentieth
century; would there, she wondered, be any signs of intelligence remaining? or
only