Lost in Translation

1

In the lobby of the Minzu Hotel, Second Night Clerk Huang glanced out through the great glass doors just as the foreign interpreter wheeled her bicycle past. He stared, fascinated. He knew what it meant when she left, late at night, wearing a short skirt. There were no secrets in China. He smiled and turned back to his computer.

Outside, Alice Mannegan pedaled down Changan Dajie. She flew past the cobbled sidewalks, the storefronts crowded with Chinese paizi, signboards in arty, propulsive italic characters: Happy Fortune and Flying Crane and Propitious Wind. Knives and shoes and beauty supplies, bicycle parts and baling wire, all screaming for attention.

But their metal shutters had clanged down for the night. The black-headed crowd was gone. In daytime the boulevard throbbed with renao life, but now the bubbling volcano of Pekingese and frantically jingling bike bells was silent. It still smelled like Beijing, though. The air was ripe, opulent, sewerish-and thick with history.

Beyond the low row of storefronts she glimpsed the squat, massive official buildings-the institutes and bureaus and administrations which lined the boulevard. Changan was the main spoke of Beijing’s wheel. Broad and straight, built for parades, it roared right to the heart of the capital, and of all China, the Forbidden City. The Danei, people used to call it. The Great Within. And now there it was: the massive ocher bulwarks, the medieval walls, closed, faceless; all qi pointing inward, to what was concealed, powerful, and endlessly complex. Its entrance was crowned with the huge red-cheeked portrait of Chairman Mao, smiling down from atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Alice turned, skirting Tiananmen Square. A breeze rustled leaves above her head and sent an empty fast-food container skipping across the pavement. She glanced right and left at the sound. No one.

She pedaled harder, the summer night wind silky on her face. Past the great stone Qianmen arch, then south on Qianmen Boulevard into the old Chinese City with its riot of shops, restaurants, theaters. She veered off the boulevard, through the tangle of narrow hutongs. She loved this ancient maze of dirt-packed lanes. To her this was the true heart of the capital, not the colossal high-walled palace behind her. Here in the gracefully repeating pattern of silvery stone walls and tile roofs, Alice sometimes felt China in her grasp. Sometimes. She turned again, right, then left. Now she crossed the familiar intersection, with the old capped-over stone well in the center. She steered into a brick-paved, stone-walled alley so narrow, her bicycle could barely pass. There. The Brilliant Coffee.

The neon sign screamed COFFEE in English, English being very fashionable in Beijing just now, but of course coffee had very little to do with the purposes of this establishment. She chained her bike to the crowded metal rack. There was one door, painted black, and a row of windows sealed over to make the place appear closed. There were no signs of life. But it was Friday night, almost midnight, and Alice knew better.

She pushed open the door. Instantly she was hit with the pounding, insistent karaoke bass and above that the roaring stutter of a smoking, chattering crowd. Hip, dazzlingly dressed Chinese, fresh out of their cultural confinement and keening to be part of the exploding yangqi, the now, crammed in shoulder to shoulder. Not a seat anywhere, she thought, looking around. Hardly a place to stand.

Across the low-ceilinged room she watched a slight man with a closely cropped black head and antique round glasses take the stage and begin belting a nineteen fifties R&B tune. He lurched from one foot to the other, out of time with the music, swinging the microphone stand from side to side as he shouted out each syllable.

She smiled. God, she loved Beijing. Tomorrow she would meet her new client. Tonight was free. She scanned the packed tables as the horns took off in a smart, prerecorded flourish.

A man slid into place beside her. He had wide shoulders, a deep waist, and black eyes flat in his head. "You await someone?" he said in Chinese.

"Wo zai deng, wo bu zai deng, " she shrugged, her intonation almost perfect. I’m waiting, but then again I’m not. "What about you?"

He smiled, pleased with her subtlety, and it warmed her all over, because it was an uncontrolled streak of pleasure that opened his ivory-colored face suddenly into something unprotected, almost innocent-though innocence, in a place like the Brilliant Coffee, would be impossible. People kept themselves well concealed in places like this. Which suited Alice fine.

He laughed softly. "I wait for you," he said. "And an outside person too. Imagine."

"Yes. An outside person." Behind his smile she caught the usual male reserve, the relaxed sense of his own racial superiority which always made her tremble with fear and hope and excitement.

"Please." He signaled with a sidelong glance, then turned and threaded through the crowd away from her, not leading her, not even looking back at her, but knowing she would follow. A waiter jostled past them with a full tray. She felt the Chinese eyes: Look, a Western woman in a short black dress, red hair, birdlike, freckled. She liked being noticed. It heightened the satisfaction of nights like these, nights she allowed herself because, after all, she was a woman and when there wasn’t real love in her life she needed, at least, some attention. Now-a miracle. The man was producing two empty chairs.

"How are you called?" He leaned close to shut out the wall of music.

She answered "Yulian," the Chinese name she currently used for these situations. Yulian was an old-fashioned name; it meant Fragrant Lotus. It was a name that rang on many levels. The bound feet had been called lotuses, and there was also that famous heroine of Chinese erotic fiction, the Golden Lotus.

These allusions were not lost on him. He pressed his mouth together in amusement. "I’m Lu Ming."

A hollow-chested young waiter with a sharp, acne-cratered face materialized. "Bai jiu," Lu Ming told him, slang for the steamroller 120-proof rice spirits popular in China. Then he turned to Alice: "Unless you’d rather have a"-he interrupted his Chinese to try to pronounce it the English way-"Coca-Cola?"

"Bai jiu ye xing," she answered. Good, she thought, rice spirits, one shot, maybe two. It was better to be high. "Good. Bai jiu."

The spirits arrived, clear liquid in two tiny glasses. Lu Ming toasted their friendship with a standard phrase, and then added, "Gan-bei," dry glass, and they both drained it and laughed. The fire burned through her stomach and rose instantly to her head. How long since she’d eaten?

"What are you doing in Beijing?" Lu Ming asked, circling his empty glass on the wet tabletop.

She paused. Sometimes she invented professions; tonight, on a whim, she decided to tell the truth. "I’m an interpreter."

"Trade?"

"Freelance. I’m about to start a job with an archaeologist. Something to do with Homo erectus."

"Eh?" he squinted.

"You know, Homo erectus, our ancestors, the missing link? Like Peking Man."

"You mean the ape-man?" he chortled, using the street word, yuanren. "I doubt very much if the Chinese people could be descended from the ape-man!"

"Well"-she tensed slightly at this prejudice-"I don’t know anything about it, really. I’m just a translator."

Still Lu Ming did not let it go. "But such an expedition must cost huge money!" He raised his hand in a two-fingered signal to the passing waiter. "And for what? For history? Eh, it’s a waste!" Two new, full glasses appeared in front of them. The music blasted away. "History is but a hobby. It’s for old men with no yang left."

"I like history," she said defensively. "I think old things are beautiful."

"What counts now and for the future is modernization. Commerce." He leaned into her. "Money."

"To money." She forced a smile. It was no use arguing with Chinese men. Especially if you were a woman. And a foreigner. Their probing interest in her-the free American mind, the direct laughter, the pale, willing body-always held the potential for an edge of contempt. If she could stay back from that edge, though, the excitement was unmatched. The two of them drank. "And you, Lu Ming? What do you do?"

"I’m in business," he said simply, as if no further explanation were needed of this most glorious word. Gracefully he withdrew a white card from his black jacket.

She glanced at the characters. "Lu Investment Consulting Group?"

He touched his forelock in mock salute.

"Well, Chairman Lu, to your profits." She smiled, pleased to see that there was now yet another tiny, full glass in front of her. "Gan-bei." They drank and gasped together. The booming room shuddered. "These must be good times for you," she said, rolling the empty glass between her palms. "The current leaders."

"Eh, it’s so. It’s because of old Deng Xiao-ping we have all this." He paused and with a rapid sweep of his eyes managed to include the frenzied crowd, the recorded tidal wave of guitar and saxophones, the rolling static of laughter, and, last and most pointedly, his square white business card half splashed now with rice brandy on the table. "Ta-de kai fang zheng che, liufang bai shi; danshi Liu-Si ye jiang yichou wannian, " The open door will hand down a good reputation for a hundred generations, but the Six-Four will leave a stink for ten thousand years.

"True," she said, recognizing the colloquial term Six-Four -shorthand for the Tiananmen incident, which had occurred on June fourth. Chinese liked to remember things by their numbers. "Do you think new leaders might change the situation?"

He lowered his voice, conjuring a bond between them. "It’s a mistake to think it matters who’s in charge. Of course the old leaders die. But then not much changes. The wolf just becomes a dog. Though as for the open door"-by this he meant China’s new liberalism-"I am sure it will remain as it is. They’ll never be able to close it." Under the table he placed his foot alongside hers, a gentle but insistent message. "You see," he said, and spread his hands disarmingly, "I care only for my personal success now. Completely selfish! But I’m educated. And-everyone agrees on this, Yulian-my heart is good. Therefore"-he leaned in and locked on her eyes- "will Yulian now go with me to some more peaceful place where friends can speak with their hearts at ease?"

Cigarette smoke, laughter, the throbbing bass swirled around her. Suddenly the Brilliant Coffee was a box of thunder, of unbearable noise. He really wants me, she thought with the familiar thrill. And then she hesitated.

He rubbed her foot with his. It was soft, he wore only a sock, when had he taken off his shoe? "Yi bu zuo, er bu xiu, " he whispered, Once a thing is begun, no one can stop it until it is finished.

He moved his foot away, not touching her now, only leaning close-but his entire body flamed with attention. Hers did too. She closed her eyes. Pretend, tonight. She felt a pull to the center of him, where surely lay entry to all China. "Weishenmo bu," she whispered finally, Why not.

He didn’t speak as they pedaled side by side through the mud-rutted lanes that coiled away from the Brilliant Coffee- she remembered this the next morning as she rode her bicycle back in the misty, unfurling dawn to the Minzu Hotel. He had smiled at her once, radiantly, but said nothing. It was like a Chinese man not to speak, not now, not when it was about to happen. They all had this magnificent reserve. She knew how this wall of reserve would come to an end, too, and she had been right: even now, pedaling hard through the early half-light of Wangfujing Boulevard, her thighs cramped with desire when she remembered the way the door had closed behind them in his apartment and he had turned to her, reached for her, and all in one motion carried her down with him to the floor where in an instant the verbal, astute, urbane man he had been at the Brilliant Coffee vanished and in his place was a purely physical being, urgently male, frantic to enter her.

Later, when they were lying naked under sheets by the open window, he asked her whether, since she was based in Beijing, they could be friends. She didn’t answer right away. This was the hard part for her. She loved it when they first touched her, and she would always cringe a little, pull back, savor the waves of shame and shyness and then, finally, surrender. That was the pleasure. But it always ended. The sex always ended and the talking came back, and with it the lines she could never seem to cross.

"Of course I couldn’t visit you at your hotel." He lit a cigarette and exhaled a blue cloud toward the ceiling. "It would cause too much talk. You’re waiguoren, an outside-country person. Not Chinese. But you could come here, at night."

Did he have to say all this? Though of course a lot of men talked too much, and unwisely, in the temporary state of total spread-legged candor which followed sex.

"Well?" he asked softly, fingers moving through her hair.

She guarded herself. "I know all about what you are saying."

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."

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."

Vice Director Han mulled this: Takeo Akabori, yes, a minor figure, in charge of handling Peking’s foreigners of neutral nationalities, if his memory served him right. But an interest in paleontology? In Peking Man? This he did not recall.

Now the blond man was speaking.

"Dr. Spencer wants to stress the research importance of these fossils," said the female interpreter. "Peking Man was the most coherent group of Homo erectus fossils ever found in Asia. If it were somehow recovered it could be used to resolve the most important disagreement in the study of human origins- the debate between the regional evolution theory and the out-of-Africa theory. When the remains were last seen, they included one hundred and fifty-seven teeth. Pieces of forty different individuals. All that is needed is one that is completely intact. By taking tissue from such a tooth plug, the scientists could analyze the creature’s DNA structure, and compare it with the DNA of modern Asians and modern Africans. This would be research of worldwide importance."

Worldwide importance? Han thought. Ke bu shi ma. If Peking Man were found, international interest would surely return to this once-preeminent Homo erectus site. As it was now, the new fossils they’d managed to unearth since 1941 were stuffed here and there, in dusty boxes, around Beijing. Unsorted, unlabeled, low priority. Recovery of Peking Man would change everything. But aloud, he parried, "You know, I have been searching back and forth the technical literature ever since I received Dr. Spencer’s letter." He paused and glanced away from them, out the window to the busy boulevard below. "Forgive me. I am ignorant! I do not find any citations from Adam Spencer of the University of Nevada at Reno. No articles, no references, no footnotes…"

The interpreter rendered this hesitantly. Vice Director Han observed the man’s discomfort when he put a reply to her. Eh, the childlike Americans, was there nothing they could conceal? It was obvious this man, making such careful notes in his benzi, was a minor figure from an inconsequential university.

She spoke. "Dr. Spencer does not contribute to the international journals. His work has only appeared in two journals: the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, and American Antiquity. His specialty is archaic desert cultures. In the last year, though, he has concentrated all his research on the recovery of Peking Man."

Vice Director Han nodded, but thought, preposterous! They would never recover Peking Man. Though what enormous face such a miracle would confer on the nation! The entire world would be reminded that China was not only, of course, the oldest continuous culture on earth but also-quite possibly-man’s point of origin. Ah, yes, the honor would be huge. But it would never happen. The bones had been missing too long.

He stroked his chin, staring out the window at the crowds on Xizhimenwai parting for a marching formation of green-clad, lockstep PLA soldiers, the kind of strong-arm show of force that had become so much more frequent in the capital since the Six-Four at Tiananmen Square. The soldiers stamped past and the milling crowd re-formed in their wake, the black-headed human tide of pedestrians and bicyclists that poured always through the streets.

He returned his attention to the room, reminding himself that there was another thing about Peking Man he should consider-that the Europeans had always wanted the fossils for themselves. Were not the museums of London, Paris, and Berlin filled with the treasures of China? A thrill of fear ran through Vice Director Han as he contemplated the chasm that had just split open in front of him. Peking Man was one of the country’s great cultural prizes. If these foreigners found it, they might spirit it out. Was that not more or less how things had gone before? Vice Director Han studied the polished surface of his desk and thought back. At the time of Peking Man’s disappearance it had been en route to the Museum of Natural History in New York, whence-wasn’t it so?-it would almost certainly never have been returned to China.

He allowed a silence to take shape and then drag out until it was vaporous, almost a visible coil in the air between them. The American man perched and craned. With great interest the vice director watched him exhibiting his waibiao-his impatience with his pen and notebook, his bluntness, his superior Western certainty that everything would, eventually, be done his way. As if that were the right way to do it.

The vice director could grant the permits, of course, if it seemed expedient. Did it? Should he? The project would fail, certainly. Though there was one facet of this American hypothesis that was irresistible to him-its potential for ruling out the distasteful possibility that the Chinese race might be descended from Africans. It would all be worth it just for that. And if Peking Man were by some miracle found, and he prevented the foreigners from stealing it, the face he personally would gain would be endless. Ah, yes. Endless.

Through these thoughts he noted that the foreign woman retained herself implacably. At least she had control, unlike the yellow-haired man. Interesting.

Another possibility: If he allowed the expedition he could send along his father’s second cousin, an archaeology professor from Huabei University. Then he could monitor things as closely as he liked.

And there was a final, even more delightful consideration -the Americans had money to spend.

"I will take this matter up with my colleagues," he told her, his Mandarin rich and educated but still trailing the liquid burr of the native Beijing-ren. "We will consider each aspect and discuss back and forth."

"Thank you. It’s a great trouble." Unconsciously she, too, was now rolling and drawing out her r-sounds, unable as always to check this chameleon quality of her Chinese-speaking. She invariably absorbed and replayed the other speaker’s accents.

"No trouble," he answered, hearing the local patina of her speech. Impressive. And she still sat cross-legged in a small calm. Where was her husband? Could she be unmarried? Strange. But he had heard enough. "So sorry, I have another appointment. Can you return next week? Maybe Tuesday? We’ll discuss this again."

"Ah. Tuesday." She pressed her lips together.

"I will need time to consult others. But in the meantime you should visit the Zhoukoudian site, where Peking Man was found. Tell me the day you choose. I will arrange for you to pass the tourist barriers."

"Ah." Now she smiled. It was obvious she understood this hint of positive inclination. She turned to the American. There was the bubble of English again, then her "Thank you. And regarding the research-Dr. Spencer says he is sure both sides will benefit."

"Both sides benefit," he repeated, and hid a surge of contempt. This was a thin Western fantasy. Pathetic. One side always won. The other lost. Win, that was the thing, and get the others to pay. Oh, yes, he looked at the American man with satisfaction, you’ll pay, vehicles and supplies and personnel at four times the rate we get normally, and it’s still nothing to you, money drips from your hands like water.

He glanced over at the brief redheaded woman, contained and watchful. And you, he thought, you can talk, but you don’t know so much and you are not Chinese. "May I say, Mo Ai-li, how pleasant it is to meet an outsider who really understands China. So many don’t. Really. You are an expert."

She looked at him, for an instant, unprotected. First he saw the quick confusion-should she believe he was sincere? Certainly not, he wasn’t-and behind that, in a frightened leap like a rabbit, snared quickly and then hushed behind her eyes before her control arose again and locked in around her, he saw her longing. It was only an instant, her eyes flicked away, but he saw it. This woman actually wanted to be Chinese!

"Thank you, Vice Director Han." She folded her freckled hands.

Through his well-crusted, many-lacquered shell, layered on through the childhood of world war, revolution, then the antirightist movements, the Great Famine, the Chaos, then _fi-nally the death of Mao, the gradual normalcy, through it all he felt a brief scratching flare of compassion for her dislocation. He noted this and pushed it aside. There would always be wildcat foreigners in China, running from their lives. There always had been, ever since the arrival of the first Jesuit missionaries five hundred years before. He had never understood it. But he was a busy man, with no time for reflection.

"Wish you good luck," he said brusquely, and ended the meeting.

After he heard the elevator door open for them, Vice Director Han pressed a small metal button, discreetly positioned on the side of his desk. Instantly his secretary appeared. She wore Western-style jeans, a glossy synthetic blouse, and a bright red false flower in her up-to-date, overpermed hair. "Sir?" She shut the door.

"First, get Commander Gao on the line. PLA, Beijing District Command." Commander Gao was his brother-in-law, but this relationship was not something he would mention to his secretary.

"Commander Gao? Oh. Yes, sir." She scribbled.

"I think we’ll have to have these waiguoren followed."

She nodded, pen poised.

"Next, contact Professor Kong Zhen at Huabei University. Archaeology Department. Tell him to come up to Beijing in the next few days." Kong Zhen was the vice director’s cousin.

"Yes."

"Last." He raised his eyes to meet hers. "Start a file on this interpreter, Mo Ai-li. I want to know her background, who she’s worked for, what her habits are. We don’t usually put translators under surveillance. But this one"-he stared out the window at the honking, squealing flood of traffic-"there’s something strange about her. When you see two faces, beware of three knives. Isn’t it so? She hides something beneath her surface. Yes. I’m sure of it."