Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

firmly. ”Believe me, it will be best for both of you. After all, it will be
a very small tour group,” he said, ”and we want you to treat everyone openly
and equally. After you’ve visited the Drum Tower in Xian—Guo’s barbershop is in its shadow—your coagent will contact you.”
    Bishop watched her struggle with this, and then he turned his head and
glanced at Carstairs and saw that his face had suddenly tightened. Bishop
guessed what he was thinking; a moment later Carstairs proved it by saying in a
surprisingly harsh voice, ”There’s one other instruction for you, Mrs.
Pollifax. If anything unusual happens on this trip— no matter what —I expect you to get that tour group the hell
out of the country, you understand?”
    Mrs. Pollifax smiled. ”Which means, of course, that you’re expecting
something unusual to take place?”
    Carstairs gave her an unforgiving glance that was totally unlike him,
and when he spoke again his voice was cool. ”On the contrary, we trust it will
be happily uneventful, and I believe that will be all for now, Mrs. Pollifax.
Bishop can fill you in on the missing details and give you a visa application
to fill out, and for this perhaps you wouldn’t mind waiting out in his office
for him? In the meantime we’re delighted, of course that you’re taking this
on.”
    He didn’t look at all delighted; he looked rather like a man who had
just swallowed a fish bone and was going to choke on it, and deep inside of him
Bishop chuckled: it had finally happened, he had simply underestimated the time
it would take for Carstairs to realize all the things that could go wrong, and
how devilishly fond he was of Mrs. Pollifax. Ah well, thought Bishop cheerfully, I’ve already passed through it and been inoculated, I’ll just have to
shore him up.
    Watching Mrs. Pollifax leave the office he waited for the door to close
behind her and then he moved to a panel on the right wall with a mirror set
into it. ”You can come out now,” he told the man who had been listening and
observing from the other side.
    The man who walked out to join them looked furious. ”Good God,” he said,
”you’re sending her} I’ve
nothing against the woman personally, but if that’s who you’re sending with me
into China —”
    ”The perfect reaction,” Bishop told him imperturbably. ”Do sit down and
let us tell you about Mrs. Pollifax—bearing in mind, I hope, that your
reactions are exactly the same that we trust China’s security people will
experience, too.”…
     
    Mrs. Pollifax, returning to New
Jersey , felt that her cup was running over. It had
been startling enough to fly off that morning from Teterboro in a small private
plane—how surprised her neighbors would be to know of that!—but this adventure
paled now beside the fact that she was actually going to visit China. She was
remembering the loving report on China that she’d written in fifth
grade, and the triumph of the jacket she’d given it: gold chopstick letters on
dark green construction paper. Land of Pearl Buck, too, she thought
dreamily—how many times had she seen the film The Good Earth !—and of judge Dee mystery novels, emperors and
empresses and palaces and Marco Polo and silk. They all swam together happily
in her mind.
    But what felt the most amazing coincidence of all was the class in
Chinese art that she’d taken during the past winter,- it was true that she
still had a tendency to confuse the Shang, Zhou, Han, Tang, and Sung dynasties,
but the professor had so frequently referred to treasures destroyed during
Mao’s Cultural Revolution that she had looked up a great many things about
modern China as well, accumulating names like The Long March, The Great Leap
Forward, the Hundred Flowers, the Cultural Revolution—which certainly appeared
to be anything but kind to culture—and the Lin-Confucius Campaign. Now she was
going to see China for herself, which only proved how astonishing life could be.
    She happily overtipped the cab driver, and reaching the seclusion of her
apartment tossed coat and hat to the couch, adjusted the curtains to give her
geraniums the last of the day’s sunshine, and put water on to boil for tea.
Only then did she spread out the brochures and maps and Hints to Travelers that Bishop had
given her, but it was his page of notes that interested her the most: there was
the name Guo Musu to be memorized, and a tourist’s map of Xian cut out of a
brochure, with an X penciled in