Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

The arrangements have been made. At nine
we will notify security police, of course.”
    At nine o’clock when they filed out to the waiting bus, still
speculating on Peter’s absence, they were met by a sleek gray limousine pulling
up in front of the hotel, a ”shanghai car” as they were called, bearing white curtains
at the windows to conceal its occupants. It looked very official and very
menacing: They’ve arrested Peter, thought Mrs. Pollifax with a sinking
heart. A gentleman in a soft gray Mao uniform climbed out of the car, followed
by a smiling Peter.
    ”Hi,” Peter called out cheerfully. ”Sorry I’m late, everybody —went for
an early morning jog and got lost until Mr. Sun rescued me. Very high official,
speaks American!”
    An early jog, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and her gaze moved to his
outfit, the pants rolled to his knees, legs bared down to his running shoes,
Mao jacket tied around his waist, and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words mozart lives.
    Beautiful, she thought, paying tribute to Peter’s
resourcefulness. Heaven only knew what he’d had to discard to present such a
picture, but if one overlooked the absence of his ubiquitous blue jeans, he was
the perfect jogger, face flushed, eyes bright, and even in China they must
have heard of the American passion for jogging. She felt a leap of excitement,
the very same feeling that overtook her at sight of one of her pelargoniums breaking through the earth: Peter, too, was blooming. He’d carried it off.
Somehow. The tension had snapped; Mr. Sun was speaking benevolently to Mr. Li
and Mr. Kan ,
who looked both pleased and honored, and Peter, giving Mrs. Pollifax a broad
impish grin, dashed into the hotel to wash his face.
    Several minutes later as he walked up the aisle of the bus he leaned
over and whispered in Mrs. Pollifax’s ear. ”You what?” she gasped.
    He nodded, grinning his triumph. ”The job’s done. Quite a night!”
    ”But how—what—”
    ”Later,” he said. ”Collect food, X will need it when we get back.
Collect everything,” he added and looked up as Iris and George walked down the
aisle. Glancing at his watch he said, ”Now I’ve got four hours to sleep—talk to
you later.” He continued to the rear of the bus and promptly stretched out
across four seats. Jenny, following, looked affronted and abruptly sat down
next to Joe Forbes.
    X found... X already freed, thought Mrs. Pollifax in
astonishment. What could have happened, and how could it have happened? What
had taken place during this endless night?
    The bus began to move—they were off to Turfan—and Mrs. Pollifax’s
thoughts moved with it: backward and then forward but no matter where they went
they returned to the fact that Wang had been removed from the camp and hidden.
How pleased Carstairs would be, she thought; how pleased she felt for
Peter... suddenly it had been done, and she was smiling as she glanced
out of the window at the hulk of an old bus they were passing, and then rough
adobe houses with pale blue wooden doors.
    ”What does that sign say?” she heard George call to Mr. Li, pointing.
    ”It says, ‘Protect our Motherland and Heighten Alertness,’ ” he
called back.
    As if to illustrate its message Mrs. Pollifax glanced up at a distant
hill—they were leaving Urumchi behind now—and saw anti-aircraft guns
silhouetted against the sky, and posts strung with barbed wire. Against
Russian invasion, she reflected, but it looks as if the Soviets won’t
find Wang now. He’s ours.
    Now they were passing fields of yellow rapeseed, with clusters of
commune huts in the distance. Off to their right the mountain range they
followed had the shape and color of sand dunes, strange and surreal to the eye,
and then the road straightened and was lined with poplar trees on either side,
closing out the mountains. They began to meet trucks carrying laborers to the
fields, but there was smaller traffic, too: handmade carts that hugged each
side of the road and were put together out of wood with large old rubber tires
for wheels, some pulled by one or two horses, some pulled by a man between the
shafts. The poplars thinned and then vanished as they emerged into flat
treeless country, and here Mrs. Pollifax became aware of the stone-lined
irrigation trenches parallel to the road, with here and there women washing
clothes in the water.
    But having purred with satisfaction for a contented interval, Mrs.
Pollifax’s thoughts now approached certain new