Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

was the first evidence that
he’d given of being aware of the shifting alliances.
    They moved across the compound in procession, Malcolm walking silently
beside Iris, Joe Forbes and Jenny with Mr. Li. Peter, falling in at the rear
with Mrs. Pollifax, said in a low voice, ”I’m in shock.”
    ”Accept, accept,” she murmured.
    ”But—why did she do it?”
    ”I don’t know,” she told him. ”I just don’t know, Peter, but it’s
becoming terribly important that we talk in private soon. I think there could
be more shocks ahead. Where’s Sheng Ti now?”
    ”On his way by bus to Urumchi, I hope. I suppose you mean you’re worried
about what Sheng told us—that we were followed last night into the desert?”
    ”Yes.”
    He said with a frown, ”You realize we have only Sheng’s word for that,
don’t you? You and I haven’t seen anyone, we have no proof. He could have made
it up to hide the fact that he followed us himself.”
    ”Possibly,” she conceded.
    ”But in any case,” he added, his face lightening, ”tomorrow’s the day
for visiting the Kazakhs up in the grasslands, and at some point during the day
I expect to vanish, which will take care of anybody’s lurking curiosity.” With
this confident statement he held the screen door open for her to enter the
dining room.
    This time George did not capture the enviable spot in front of the one
working fan; he did not join them at all for breakfast.
     
    Mrs. Pollifax, with dampened towel wrapped around her head, forced
herself to concentrate on sight-seeing for the next hours. There was nothing
else to do, she decided: she was experiencing a sense of events moving
inexorably now toward their conclusion and without any way to alter or color
them. That word inexorable again, she thought with a shiver. X was
hiding in his cave at the edge of the Tian Shan mountains, while Sheng Ti was
somehow making his way to Urumchi, armed with his coveted ID papers at last;
they too would head for Urumchi again toward the end of this day, and Peter had
reminded her that in only thirty or so more hours he planned to disappear. In
the meantime they had been mysteriously followed into the desert last night—she
did not share Peter’s skepticism about Sheng’s tale—and Mr. Li had known Peter
was gone. If one of the members of the tour group had told Mr. Li of Peter’s
absence, she could no longer believe that it was Iris. Iris had provided cover
for Peter at a rather staggering cost.
    Sticks and stones may break my bones, she
thought, reflecting on that cost to Iris... a good name is rather to be
chosen than great riches... Why had Iris leaped to protect Peter? What did
she know, and how? She discovered as they embarked on their sight-seeing that
she was carefully avoiding Iris, going to great lengths to neither walk with
her, speak to her, nor catch her eye, and then to her chagrin she noticed that
Iris was going out of her way to avoid her, too. It was as if each of them knew
something about the other they didn’t care to acknowledge, but what had Iris been doing outside her room at one o’clock in the morning?
    Since there was no answer available to her—because she wasn’t even sure
just now of the question—Mrs. Pollifax philosophically gave herself up to the
moment, and to their excursion into the desert to see the Thousand-Buddha
Caves. This was not at all difficult: they had arrived at the heart of the Silk Road and it was an incredible countryside, totally
emptied of colors to which the eyes were accustomed. It was a land of
beige—beige, terra-cotta, cream, tan, and dusty gray, set into a valley of
surrealistic shapes: harsh angles cut into sandstone cliffs, mesas pleated and
wrinkled by wind and sun, and jagged tawny mountains climbing in tiers to a
heat-seared washed-out sky. Nothing moved, nothing appeared to live except the
shapes, which had a life of their own.
    Yet it felt neither unfriendly nor desolate. The sense of space was
glorious, and the palette of earth colors were as warm as if they’d been
toasted by the nearly-suffocating sun. Leaving the bus for the caves Mrs.
Pollifax looked down in astonishment on an oasis of bright green, long and
narrow like a knife-slit between the jagged sandstone hills, a miraculous
ribbon of green threaded by a canal carrying sparkling water down from the
mountains. Standing on the cliff overlooking this oasis Mrs. Pollifax was
transfixed. In her mind’s eye she saw a long line of camels, horses,