He smiled. "Mingbai jiu hao," he whispered back happily, I’m glad you understand.
She let his words trail off. In a few minutes he slept.
She moved away from him in the strange bed. And the next morning, when she rose in the half-light and tied on her antique Chinese stomach-protector and zipped up her black dress, and he whispered to her from the bed to write down where he could get in touch with her, she wrote just the characters for the phony name, Yulian, and a fictional Beijing number.
Sometimes, when she got up and dressed before dawn, the men didn’t ask for her number. They would watch her go without a word. They seemed to know better than to say anything to her at all.
After a spotty and insubstantial sleep, Dr. Adam Spencer dragged his sluggish forty-eight-year-old body out of bed. It was only five A.M. but he was all out of sync and there was no way, his first night in China, he was going to be able to sleep anymore. So he shaved, tugged on his clothes, then pulled his son’s photo from his wallet and looked at it for a minute. He was trying not to think about the fact that it was midafternoon back home in Nevada. And in California, where his son now lived. He replaced the photo and surveyed himself in the mirror. Bone tired, his blond hair straggly, but still pretty fit and not bad looking, in a middle-aged, soft-faced kind of way. He knew his reflection well, his plain gray eyes and his cheeks that seemed to have no bones under them and his round mouth, which had once been boyish; he had been used to himself for a long time.
He sat down in a scuffed armchair, flicked on a puddle of yellow lamplight, and paged through one of the many books by Teilhard de Chardin he had brought-this one a volume of the great man’s letters from China-forced down a cup of hot, iron-tasting tea, and began to make notes in his habitual blue pocket notebook. After a time he switched off the light and wandered to the window to part the curtains. A faint gray dawn was rising over the city. Changan Boulevard, the Boulevard of Long Peace, was waking up: here came rumbling what looked like an Army truck, and there, half real in the mist, was a clopping mule-drawn cart.
And there-what was that?
He pressed his forehead to the glass. God, it was a Western woman on a bicycle! He squinted through the glass.
She wheeled quickly across the parking lot and disappeared alongside the building. In a moment she emerged on foot. He could see she was delicately built. She glanced furtively from one side to the other, and then darted inside.
Gone. He stared down at the parking lot, narrowed his eyes, wondering.
He was to meet his interpreter in the hotel restaurant at seven-thirty. He sat down and glanced through the mostly Chinese menu, flush with the thrill of finally being here. It had taken more than a year to make it happen. First studying everything published about China’s northwestern deserts, reading all that was available in English and even scraping together the money to have some of the Chinese stuff translated. Retracing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s desert expeditions of more than seventy years before. Reviewing the whole career of Father Teilhard, who had been an important paleontologist in his time and then, after his death, become famous for his books of transcendent Christian philosophy. Sifting clues out of his books, his published letters and diaries. All of it sparked by the secret Spencer’s grandfather-in his own youth a well-known geologist, a friend of Teilhard’s-had confided to him, the grandson, shortly before he died. Gradually seeing how the puzzle fit. Then writing the grant proposal. Getting leave from the university. Finding the interpreter.
He was startled by the sound of a chair scraping over the floor, and then: "You’re Dr. Spencer?"
He looked up and swallowed. The red-haired woman.
She was dressed in blue jeans now, and a simple cropped T-shirt, but it was her. Unmistakably. The hair was tucked behind her ears and she had a pleasingly freckled, high-cheeked little face with moss-colored eyes.
"Good morning," she said, and stuck out her hand. "Zaochen hao. I’m Alice Mannegan."
"Adam Spencer." They shook. Her hand felt small and fine-boned. "Sorry, I’m a little surprised." He smiled apologetically. "Because I saw you this morning."
"Saw me?"
"Before dawn. That was you, wasn’t it? Coming back to the hotel on a bicycle?"
She paused and looked at him. Something indecipherable ran across her face. "Yes. That was me."
"Well." He bit back any more questions. "Anyway."
"Anyway." She sat down, beckoned a waitress, and ordered food in rapid Chinese. She centered her plate and dark wood chopsticks on the tablecloth. "Your flight was okay?"
"It was fine. Thanks. It’s great to be in China."
"Oh, yes-I love China." Her face lit; for a moment everything about her seemed to lock happily together. "I love it, the sense of the past, the civilization, the language. And it could hardly be any more different from"-she paused- "America."
"You don’t like America."
She moved her shoulders.
"But you grew up there?"
"That doesn’t mean I liked it. Anyway, welcome." She settled against the back of her chair. "Now tell me about this job."
"Okay. Right." He took out his notebook and set it open on the table, uncapped a cheap ballpoint. "Do you know the work of Teilhard de Chardin?"
"Teilhard de Chardin-yes, a little. The Jesuit. I think it was in college I read The Phenomenon of Man. Actually I haven’t read him in years. Though he did live in China for a long time. I guess you know that."
"Yes." He made a note. "And I guess you know he was a famous paleontologist as well as a theologian. That’s what got him exiled to China. The essays he wrote about evolution were a little too real for the Vatican. Their idea of the origin of man was Adam and Eve. Period."
"Well." Alice smiled slightly. "Teilhard knew too much to go along with that."
"Right. So they sent him off to China. Lucky for archaeology, I guess-because he found some of the first early-man sites in Asia." Spencer leaned back from the table in mock fear as the waitress downloaded a precariously balanced pyramid of steaming dishes. "You order all this?" His face fell open at the shockingly yellow eggs, the soup, and slick green piles of pickled vegetable.
"Don’t worry. It’s cheap. They just devalued the renminbi again." She scooped up fried pea sprouts and a tangle of tiny silvery fish, mounded them on her plate with white pillows of steamed bread. She felt good from the night before. Hungry. Alive. Exalted. Later she knew the feeling of being stuck would creep back, but for now-she flashed the American archaeologist a smile. "So, you were saying. Evolution."
Spencer stared. God, she could really pack it in for someone so tiny. "Yes. Teilhard did some great work here. He found some important Late Paleolithic sites, especially in the far northwest. Then in 1929 he started working with the group that uncovered Peking Man here, outside the city."
"Oh, yes," she said. "Peking Man."
"It was one of the most important Homo erectus finds in the history of archaeology, a whole hominid settlement. At a time when people were still questioning the theory of evolution, suddenly here were these bones-obviously a human predecessor. Half man, half… something. And now we get to our research, Alice, because that’s what I’ve come to China to look for-Peking Man. Sinanthropus."
"It’s missing?"
"Don’t you know? It disappeared during the Second World War. It’s never been found."
She stopped chewing, eyebrows in a half lilt. "Really."
He nodded. "By 1941 China was dangerous. The Japanese had occupied Peking since ’37 and were gradually swallowing up the rest of the country. So the foreigners crated up the bones-they were priceless, you know, a really comprehensive find-to send to the Museum of Natural History in New York." He put his chopsticks down, excited. "But just as the fossils were to be shipped out, hidden in the luggage of this American naval officer, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Suddenly America was in the war. Ships leaving Peking for the States were blockaded. The few U.S. troops here were quickly overwhelmed. The naval officer who was going to carry Peking Man to New York was hauled off to a prison camp down in Shanghai. Months went by. Finally he got his luggage back. But guess what? The bones had been removed."