Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station

see.”
    She wondered what time it was and how many hours had passed since she
had stumbled toward the woods and had been met by the Kazakh horsemen. She
dimly recalled being lifted up behind one of them and carried back to the long
meadow where she had been delivered to Mr. Li and placed at once in the bus.
There had been what seemed an interminable wait after that, until finally Mr.
Li arrived with the others and told them stiffly that they must return to Urumchi
now, there had been a bad accident and both Mr. Fox and Mr. Forbes were dead.
She remembered that Jenny had screamed and then gone into hysterics until
Malcolm slapped her face. She remembered Iris examining her wrist and giving
her two aspirin and a bottle of warm beer with which to wash them down, and
then Mr. Li had insisted that no one talk. After leaving the others at the
hotel she had been driven to the hospital in a gray car with curtains at the
windows—another shanghai car—and now she was being driven in still another gray
car to the security police.
    Not the same car, she decided, for there had been a cigarette hole
burned in the upholstery of the other one; either the hole had been mended
during her hour at the hospital or it was a different car, and she wondered why
it mattered, but the smallest things seemed to be of vast importance just now,
they kept her from being afraid.
    My zero hour, she thought numbly. Peter had experienced his and
acquitted himself, and this was hers, and this was why Bishop had been afraid
for her, except that no one had known that she would have a broken wrist and
feel so oddly dazed for this interrogation.
    She was ushered into still another spartan room: a table, several
folding chairs, and bare walls except for the ubiquitous photographs of Lenin,
Chou, and Mao. It was very similar to all the other rooms they’d been ushered
into, but there would be no tea-and-briefings here. The man sitting at the
table looked incredibly young; an older man stood looking out of the window,
his back to her; he wore a charcoal gray Mao uniform, while the young man
facing her was in khaki, with two pockets in his tunic. She remembered that
Peter had told her pockets were the only sign of rank in the PLA... which
Peter had told her... The thought of Peter brought tears back to her eyes;
she allowed them to remain, not hiding them, recalling—ironically—that they
were appropriate for this occasion, if for the wrong reason.
    She glanced at Mr. Li, who had taken the chair farthest away from her,
as if to disassociate himself completely. He looked pale and rather miserable
and she realized they must have been giving him a hard time. She thought
drearily, I’m going to have to fight for his future, too.
    Her interrogator was keeping her waiting as he shifted a number of
papers in front of him. Where Mr. Li’s face was round, this young officer’s
face was long and narrow. The horror of it, she realized, was that Peter and X
and Sheng might already have been found, either in their cave or near it, and
these two men know this. Certainly they must already have begun the search for
Peter’s body... Was the water deep enough to hold a body captive? If Peter had
miscalculated, would the very absence of a body lift their suspicions about his
death? At what point, she wondered, might they begin to search the mountain
slopes instead?
    If they knew too much, then every word that she spoke would be a
recognizable lie, and they did not like spies here. Chinese jails... oh,
Cyrus, she thought bleakly, and wished with all her heart that she wasn’t
so tired, wished that a broken wrist would radiate violent pain instead
of this strange numbing ache that was exhausting her by its subtlety and
consistency. It was hot in this closed-up dusty room, too, and the shock—”I’ve
got to stop thinking like this,” she told herself sternly. ”Think of Cyrus...
dear Cyrus... or Bishop. Or Carstairs. Or geraniums.” Anything except what had
happened back there by the stream, and of what could have gone wrong.
    She wished the man by the window would turn around, but he remained
obdurately at the window, his back to her.
    The young officer put aside his sheaf of papers and looked at her. He
said without expression, ”I am most sorry that such a tragedy has occurred. I
must ask you questions and discover how such a thing happened and who is to
blame.”
    She said politely, ”It has been—for all of us—a tragic loss, a terrible
one, and I don’t