She considered. "So the Japanese got it."
"Well, that’s what the Americans thought. Not the Chinese! Some of them still think the Americans conspired to steal it. Of course"-he spread his hands-"that’s silly."
Now she swallowed back an ache of sexual awareness, for the gesture brought washing over her and twining back around her the ivory arms and legs of Lu Ming. He had spread his hands that way, in the Brilliant Coffee. You see, Yulian, I amcompletely selfish- Not that Dr. Spencer, a white man, had the same effect on her. White men never had that effect on her. Though he was nice, this archaeologist. She liked him. "So." She pushed food around on her plate. "What do you think happened to Peking Man? And what does it have to do with Teilhard de Chardin?"
Conspiratorial pleasure flickered in his eyes. "I think Teilhard got the bones back in the last days of the war."
"You’re kidding."
"And I think he hid them here in China."
"What!"
"It’s true. Listen." He strained forward. "My grandfather was this famous geologist. Henry Bingham. Taught at Stanford, knew Teilhard well. Teilhard came to Stanford a couple of times, you know. Anyway, Teilhard told him he was getting Peking Man back. Swore him to secrecy."
"Your grandfather told you this?"
"Yes."
"And did he tell you what Teilhard did with Peking Man?"
"That he didn’t know. He got only hints. But I’ve studied the whole picture-Teilhard’s letters, diaries, books of philosophy-and I think the bones were hidden out in northwest China. Somewhere in the desert."
"Incredible." She laid her chopsticks on the table, pushed back her plate. A silence fell between them, one that was instantly filled by the dining room’s clatter of dishes and its multilingual well of voices.
Then their waitress was there. "Chibao-le?" she barked, Are you finished?
"Eh." Alice glanced up, nodded. "Suanrzhang?" she murmured.
"You speak great Chinese," he marveled, closing his notebook and slipping it into his pocket.
"That! I was just asking for the bill."
"No, you do." He turned serious. "There is one thing I’ve been wondering about you. May I ask-I’ve been thinking- ever since we talked on the phone-you’re not any relation, are you? To Horace Mannegan? The congressman?"
She hesitated and he saw her face pinch in ever so slightly.
"So he is your father! I thought he might be. After all- the ’Alice Speech.’ The firebombing. You know, I have a little girl named Alice. I mean, your name is Alice."
"Yes." She closed her eyes against the naked free-fall.
"So you’re the Alice." He reached over and squeezed her arm. "Man. Rough on you. Wasn’t it? Growing up with that. Those three little girls who were killed…" He shook his head sympathetically.
Oh, yes. Alice knew the deaths of those three girls. Knew their smiling school before-pictures, the ones in all the papers, soft brown eyes and shy expressions and plastic barrettes. Knew the TV-news images of their parents screaming.
It was the thing that seemed to have been frozen around her forever. The warm evening, the crowd packed into the stadium to listen to her father’s acceptance speech to Congress. She remembered huddling with her small hands covering her ears as the throng whooped and cheered his every word, their arms waving and punching the hot air. "My little girl sit next to a colored boy in school? Never!" She felt his powerful grip around her waist, the whoosh as she was lifted off the ground and waved like a ceremonial flag. "This is my little girl named Alice. The prettiest little girl in the world!" She remembered her panic, her torn, jumbled breathing that didn’t let her form the words Stop-please-then the staccato burst of flashbulbs and it was over. She was dropped back down on the chair. Then the crowds streamed out, poured into the streets of the Fourth and Fifth wards, where the blacks lived. Hands that had applauded now brandished ax handles and Coke bottles filled with gasoline.
People always remembered her name after that. When the smoke cleared and the charred houses had been hosed down and the three girls were carried away in bags, her name had been found, scrawled in chalk on the soot-blackened sidewalks: Alice.
"Yes," she told him softly over her pounding heart, "I’m the same Alice. But I was only a small child then, and I prefer not to get into it. I mean, now you know. But let’s just leave it there."
"No problem," he said, stabbed with embarrassment. "Look, I’m sorry. And hey. If I were you I’d spend my whole damn life in China too. Really. I understand."
"I doubt you do," she managed. "But thanks."
The waitress returned and left the check. Alice slid it across the table to Spencer. "One thing," she told him. "Nobody knows me as Alice Mannegan here. I use a Chinese name -Mo Ai-li. It’s easier."
"You want me to call you that? Mo-"
"Mo Ai-li. No. You don’t have to. Call me Alice." She pushed back from the table and stood up. "After all. You’re a foreigner too."
Vice Director Han of the IVPP, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, leaned his blocky frame back in his teakwood desk chair. His office was plain and functional but the furniture was dark old wood, solid, and good antique brush-paintings hung on the walls. Outside the windows roared the mighty flow of Xizhimenwai, the stream of trucks and carts and cars, people and bicycles, the wall of voices and horns and the mechanical clamor of a city under construction. The vice director surveyed the American Ph.D. Crude and washed out and covered with curly yellow hair. So outsidelike.
And with him this copper-headed interpreter, who went, in Chinese, by the professional name Mo Ai-li. Mo Loving and Upright. A good name, old fashioned; she had some taste, clearly. Of course she was still a foreigner, she had that manic aggressive look in her eyes that they all had. Though she was easier to look at, small and less-a fleeting purse of his lips- less flamboyantly shaped than most of the outside women.
"Vice Director Han," she was saying, translating closely behind the blond man’s English. "We need permits. In 1923, in the Northwest, the French priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin discovered the first buried Late Paleolithic site in East Asia. This is the site called Shuidonggou, in Ningxia Province. Teilhard de Chardin loved the northwestern deserts. He always longed to return there. Dr. Spencer says it is critical to begin searching at this site in northern Ningxia, and in the desert around it called"-she turned and asked the man for the name again-"called the Ordos."
"Those areas are closed."
"We know. Thus it is we ask for permits."
They are more than closed, he thought, annoyed. They are full of missile bases, gleaming nuclear prongs concealed in caves and aimed at Russia. And not only missile bases-forced labor camps. Aloud he said: "The Peking Man remains were excavated here, at Zhoukoudian, just outside the city. They were never in that part of China. Never sent there for exhibition. Never studied there." He coughed meaningfully.
She nodded. Then the two talked in their broken and bumped-up English. "Still,"-she returned to Chinese-"this scientist believes that the French priest may have recovered Sinanthropus at the end of the Japan War and sent it out there."
"May I ask why he believes this?"
"Because his grandfather was a friend of the priest. The priest confided in his grandfather that he had been befriended by a Colonel Akabori, an officer in the occupation force and an amateur paleontologist. Teilhard was anti-Japanese, like a lot of the French trapped in Peking during that period, but Akabori appears to have been offering him something-Peking Man."