Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

followed?”
    ”You can bet on it,” he told her grimly.
    ”Good. What about your plans for the grasslands, for zero hour
tomorrow?” she asked, and discovered that the word tomorrow chilled her.
    He turned and looked at her as they gained the lobby, and she saw that
his eyes were distant and cold, as opaque as they had been when she first met
him in Hong Kong . He said curtly, ”I don’t
think that you ought to know.”
    She didn’t take this as a rebuff, she merely nodded, understanding the
need in him now to withdraw and to build up that lonely austere strength that
was familiar to her from her own experience. One couldn’t share, not in this
business, not with other lives at stake, and perhaps, she reflected, it was
this experience of altered selfness that was the meaning behind all of her own
adventures: a sense of bringing to each moment every strength and resource
hidden inside of herself as well as the discovery of new ones: a sense of life
being so stripped to its essence that trivia and inconsequentials fell away. It
was very akin to a mystical experience, as she had realized long ago.
    And so she only nodded. There would be no more sharing unless Peter
found that he could afford it; Turfan was behind them, they were agents, and
Peter the cold professional that she would never be. With equal crispness she
said, ”Right— just let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
    He stopped and looked at her. ”There’s one thing you can do, yes. With
your experience in people, you trust Sheng Ti? Really trust him?”
    She said simply, ”Yes.”
    Peter nodded. ”Then I’ll take him with me tonight to the cave and let
him hide there with X.”
    ”Very good,” she said. ”And I’ll leave my contribution of food for them
both in your room when I go to dinner.”
     
    Due to their long drive back from Turfan it was a late dinner that
evening, and for Mrs. Pollifax it was made even later by Mr. Li detaining her
in the lobby as the others walked into the dining room.
    He said, ”There is this matter of Iris Damson and Peter Fox last night.
As group leader, Mrs. Pollifax—”
    ”Yes?” she said without expression.
    ”It is most uncomfortable, and as group leader—”
    ”It was uncomfortable, wasn’t it,” she agreed, and remembering
that the best defense was an offense she asked with great innocence, ”However
did you come to learn that Peter wasn’t in his room? Who was it who told you?”
    A curtain immediately dropped over Mr. Li’s shiny black young eyes, and
Mrs. Pollifax realized that she was experiencing oriental inscrutability,- it
did exist after all. She remembered that in Chinese society it wasn’t the
individual that mattered but the people. As group leader Mr. Li would expect
frank information from her, he would assume her proprietary interest in the
group as a mass while certainly not giving anything in return. He said again,
stubbornly, ”As group leader—”
    She smiled at him. ”As group leader, Mr. Li, I insist we go in for
dinner. Believe me, I’ll do everything in my power to make things less
uncomfortable for you, but on an empty stomach, no.”
    He looked suitably young and chagrined at this subtle reprimand for
detaining her, but she also sensed in him an iron determination to probe and to
bring order because this was his group, his tour, his responsibility. He was
troubled by the implications of that confrontation in the grape arbor —as I
am, too, she thought, entering the dining hall and taking her seat with the
others, but not for the same reasons. The dinner had already begun. She
grasped a spicy dumpling with her chopsticks and looked around the table at the
others, studying each one carefully, seeing them all as likable, explainable,
good people and to all appearances precisely what they seemed to be and said
they were.
    As I am too, she thought with a rueful smile.
    There was Malcolm, so debonair with his guardsman’s moustache and
quizzical brows, his talking mice, and his psychic talent: she disliked very
much the thought that he might be dissembling, but he could very well be the
cleverest of them all. Her glance moved to Joe Forbes, bearded, smiling and
affable; she had met her share of college professors with that same innate
blandness of personality, as if the world of academics stifled contact with the
outside world and preserved them in aspic. And there was Iris... Iris had
already proven herself a remarkably good actress when she had lied for