Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

she asked abruptly.
    He shook his head. ”Peter’s my name but not Fox.” He glanced down at his
luminous digital watch and said, ”We’ve been in transit exactly fifty-five
minutes, I think it’s time we stop and look for a place to hide all this gear.”
    She looked around her at the low, hunchbacked surrealistic mountains off
to their left. They had to be sandstone, she thought, to have been whipped into
such frenzied, angry shapes by wind and rain, and to have created the gulleys
and earth cleavages among which they were riding now. ”It’s certainly a good
place to hide things, but however will you find your cache again?”
    ”By compass, by noting distance and direction of travel, and by making a
map of the shapes and contours. C’mon,” he said, bringing the cart to a halt.
”I really need your help, we’ve only a few minutes to do this. You pick
the place. Take the flashlight.”
    Mrs. Pollifax said sharply, ”No, Peter, no flashlight.”
    Startled he asked, ”Why?”
    ”I don’t know.” She stepped down from the cart, gave the donkey an
absent pat on its flanks and moved off the road toward three jagged rocks about
six feet high. ”I think here,” she called.
    Peter was already lifting out his dufflebag. She went back and retrieved
her own bulky package and when she joined Peter she could see him nod in the
dim light. ”Good,” he said, and bringing out his knife he worked away at
enlarging a hole under one of the rock formations. Into this he pressed the
small items: vitamins, melons, two filled water pouches, the dried fruit, and
the socks, finally sealing the gap with a stone. On the surface between two of
the rocks he laid out the bulkier items—the two pairs of boots and the
sweaters—and then covered them over with the sheepskins and at last the rug.
With his knife he scraped enough dust from the earth to scatter over the rug
until it looked a part of the earth.
    ”Not bad,” commented Mrs. Pollifax. ”But let’s not linger. Please .”
    He gave her a sharp glance, found several loose stones to weigh down the
rug and nodded. ”Okay, let’s go. We’ll both pace off the distance to the road,
okay?”
    They each found it to be fifty-two feet.
    ”You drive while I make notes,” he told her, handing her the reins. ”Or
at least what notes I can manage without a light. I don’t understand you, why
not a light?”
    ”Not yet—later, but not here,” she told him, surprised by the depth of
her unease. With some difficulty she turned the donkey around on the road and
they began their return into town. She noticed that Peter worked over his notes
like an artist, glancing up, holding out his arm to measure and to squint,
writing and drawing sketches into his notebook until at last he lighted a match
inside cupped hands and checked his compass. ”I hope you’re not implying that
someone’s been watching us,” he said.
    To cover the strange flash of alarm that she’d experienced she said
lightly, ”Let’s just say I’d hate to see you and X reach that cache and find
nothing. You’ll be coming to it from where?”
    ”Not from Turfan,” he said and pointed over his shoulder.
”We’ll start out from the cave in the mountains and head southwest, bypassing
Turfan, and after rescuing our sheepskins we’ll move south toward the Bagrach
Kol, or Lake Bosten,” he explained. ”Then we’ll roughly follow the oases towns
along the desert, keeping at a distance from them, naturally.”
    ”Yes,” she said, and was silent, feeling her dread for both him and X.
    They reentered Turfan, driving down the same broad road, the cart
intruding only lightly on the deep silence of the night. When they reached the
corner of the Guesthouse wall Sheng Ti appeared suddenly out of the shadows,
advanced toward them, put a finger to his lips counseling silence, and spoke
directly to Peter in a low voice.
    It needed a moment for Mrs. Pollifax to realize that Sheng Ti was
speaking to Peter in Chinese. She said in alarm, ”What is this? Why does he
speak to you in —”
    ”He heard me greet that damn cyclist in Chinese,” Peter said grimly, and
swore. ”What is it, Sheng, what’s the matter?”
    Sheng no longer troubled to speak English, he was obviously agitated,
his voice breathless, his gestures quick.
    Peter turned to look at Mrs. Pollifax. ”How did you know?”
    ”Know what?”
    ”Sheng says we were followed on foot by someone from the Guesthouse.
Very stealthily, very secretly.