Alice smiled. So unconscious, so open about the fact that to him she was only a project asset, no more. At least he wasn’t like her other male clients, who usually started signaling, after a while, that they were attracted to her. Not to her, exactly, for they hardly knew her. No, her businessmen clients were excited by her because they were in a foreign country, and she was the only person they could talk to, and there was a certain magic in that. A kind of casting off and floating free. But this soft-faced late-forties American scientist was not going to put her through that. She could already tell.
The driver stopped alongside a low one-room mud-walled hut with a window full of food and cigarettes, drinks, matches, and dubbed Hong Kong videos. Spencer lumbered out and followed her in, ducking his head. "You are valuable to this expedition," he repeated, eyes widening at the tight walls packed to the ceiling with boxes and coolers and racks.
"I’m glad you think so," she said. "Speaking of which- I’d appreciate it if you could pay me the first installment of my fee before we leave Beijing. My bank is here, you see. Can you do that?"
"Yes." He hesitated and his face clouded. Reflexively he reached for his notebook, opened it as if to write. "I think I can," he said, without writing.
She straightened up from the cooler she’d been scanning and looked at him steadily. "What do you mean, you think you can?"
"Just that I don’t have the funds in hand yet-not today, I mean. But the money ought to come through before we’re ready to leave Beijing. No problem. That’s going to be a few more days anyway, isn’t it?"
"Of course-we have to get permits…"
"Right."
"So you mean you have someone in the States wiring you money or something?" Alice stopped and turned to the tiny, weather-beaten old woman in black clothes who had padded out from the back room and was standing expectantly by the counter. She smiled politely and fell into clear, unaccented Mandarin. "Elder sister, greetings. Forgive me. Trouble you to wait a moment."
The gray-headed woman nodded, little oblongs of jade gleaming in her ears.
Alice turned back to Spencer. "So you’re expecting a wire? Is that it?"
"No." He clutched his book. "Actually I’m still waiting to hear. I applied for a National Science Foundation grant for this project. I haven’t heard. I should have heard by now. But I haven’t."
She swallowed. "You came over here and hired me without funds?"
"No-no, well, not exactly. This grant is a sure thing, Alice. Peking Man is very, very big in the world of archaeology. Very important. The NSF Board met last week. Just hang on a few more days. So what are these in here-Cokes? I can’t believe it." He pulled one out and a puff of frosty smoke came with it. He peered at the bottle. "Canned in Singapore. You want one?"
"Yes," she said, distracted. "And get one for the driver too. Are you sure about this, Dr. Spencer?"
"Of course. And I told you not to call me that." He dug some renminbi out of his pocket and handed a few bills to the old lady. "Jesus," he whispered. "Look at her feet."
"They’re bound," Alice answered in English.
"My God." To him the little feet seemed hardly more than stumps, just three or four inches long, wrapped in black cloth shoes. Revulsion brought his abdomen shrinking back against his spine. "What did they have to do to turn her foot into that? "
"A lot. Though I personally find it fascinating." She bent to the old lady, who was counting out Spencer’s change. "Xiexie. "
"And look." Spencer’s eyes flitted over the tiny cement cubicle behind the counter, with bed and washstand. "She must live back there."
"Of course."
"Doesn’t it bother you?" He was ducking back out through the door after her. "I mean seeing this kind of life?"
"No. Why should it?" She turned her clear eyes on him, thinking how simple he was. "But it would bother me if you couldn’t pay me."
"Don’t worry." He popped open his can and took a long drink. "I can pay you."
They parked at the mouth of the canyon in the parking lot and gave their names to the single attendant, who confirmed that they could go past the fence and enter the cave. Using a series of metal rungs secured into the rock they climbed fifty feet or so up the canyon wall to the cut-out cave where Peking Man had been found. Below them, on the floor of the neglected gorge, disjointed Chinese tourists stepped over candy wrappers and cigarette butts, and gaped at the foreigners scaling the cliff above their heads.
"That was some climb," she said, damp with sweat, huddling in the cave mouth and peering back down the rungs they’d come up. "But the view…" She paused, drinking it in. Below, the leafy deep-green canyon, and beyond that the valley floor, with distant peasants moving in the fields. The scrolling clouds, the repeating green hills, the far-off roof of a temple. Vistas in China were so inexorably Chinese; they made so much that was in Chinese art seem inevitable. "So how did they find this site?" she asked him.
"It was like this. The local people were working a quarry, and they kept turning up fossils. Enough product found its way into the black market in Peking that the scientific community started noticing it. They tracked the influx to this valley." Spencer lay on his back, working himself inch by inch ever deeper into the narrow cleft. The French priest, the Canadians, the Germans and Chinese, who had scraped this out with trowels so many decades before, all of them were long dead. Maybe now it would be his turn, he thought hopefully, running his flashlight beam over the scarred dirt ceiling.
"So they just started digging and found Peking Man? Just like that?"
"No, it took years. They dug and dug through the late twenties, excavated huge sections of the canyon floor, you know, methodically, in a grid. They found a lot of stuff that was tantalizing but minor. Extinct animals. Pieces of bone and teeth that looked human. Or sort of human. They dug out a few sections of the canyon wall, like this one.
"And then in 1929 they decided to start closing down the site. They hadn’t found anything significant. It was time to move out. Most of the workers were already gone. It was the last day. One of the Chinese scientists climbs up in this cave to take a few final measurements. He hauls himself up and lies down and runs his hands over the ceiling like I’m doing now- no reason, you know, it’s an impulse, a crazy thing to do-but he feels something that doesn’t belong there, a bump, feels almost like part of a brainpan, but that’s impossible, a skull, how could there be a skull just protruding from the ceiling? And so he shouts for the others, the men that are left, and they all climb up and start digging. Imagine!"
She smiled at him; he had come alive for once, telling it. "You love archaeology, don’t you?"
"Yes. The long thread of human life, you know, it makes me feel connected." He clicked the flashlight off, closed his eyes, and ran his hands over the cave ceiling.
"Find anything?"
"No." He spread his hands as wide as he could over the rocky dirt, moved in slow arcs, covering it in sections, methodically, feeling everything. He let out a tiny laugh. "Just the past."
After a time they climbed down from the cave and made their way through the hot, cricket-buzzing trees to the top of the hill, where a small museum stood. It was a forgotten-looking brick building. They stepped inside to a dusty silence and an ancient fuwuyuan at the desk by the door.
"Okay." Spencer’s voice rang in the empty rooms. "When Teilhard got Peking Man back, he hid it somewhere. We have to think the way he thought. Take your time. Look at his pictures. Read the text. We have to know him, if we’re going to pull this off. Really know him."
They stopped at a clay bust of Peking Man. The steeply ridged forehead, the crashing, shallow chin, the matted hair. The eyes, which managed to capture a look at once cunning and subrational.
Alice bent over the label. "By Lucile Swan!"