"And what about me?" She stopped dead on the sidewalk and challenged him with her eyes. "I don’t want to have to leave China. I told you that before! This is my home." China, home: it was at least one thing about herself, one thing she was willing to say, which was profoundly true.
"But why would you have to leave China?" His voice grew still with bewilderment. "We haven’t done anything wrong. And we won’t either."
She sighed. "I know-"
"Alice," Spencer interjected. "Look! He’s leaving."
She craned over the crowd and saw the man talking on a cell phone; then, snapping it shut, he turned and evaporated into the crowd.
"I’ll be damned." Dr. Spencer chewed his lip.
She turned back to him. "Look, Adam. I’m having second thoughts about all this. There are people following us, you haven’t got the money to pay me-"
"I’ll get the money, don’t worry about that. As far as their following us-I don’t know what that’s all about. But I know one thing. You’ve been stuck doing basically the same thing for a long time. Right? And this is the most interesting job you’ve had in years. Right?"
"Well…" She had to agree. "Right."
"So this is one of those times when life is just handing you something, telling you what to do, which way to go. So enjoy it. It’ll be fun. I guarantee. I can’t guarantee we’ll find the goddamn thing, but it’ll be interesting. Then if we do find it- if we do-the payoff’s huge."
"Huge how? What?"
"Attention galore. A moment on the world stage."
She considered. "Is that why you want it?"
His face changed. "No. Not really. It’s more for myself, my son-my dreams, you know. I’m forty-eight, I’ve been teaching for a long time. I need a second wind."
"And finding Peking Man will give you that?"
"God, yes," he said. "It’ll change my life."
She shrugged, knowing all too well how easy it was to long for a different life, how hard it was to find one’s way there.
"But, Alice…" He frowned. "We don’t even have permits. Is there any chance we won’t get permits?"
"Of course there’s a chance."
"How much?"
"I don’t know. I get the feeling what we’re asking for is not easy for the vice director to give. Couldn’t you see it in his composure, the way he sat? I don’t know why. Sure, it’s a closed area we want to go to, but China is full of closed areas and foreigners can usually apply to visit them when important research is involved."
"Should we"-he searched his mind-"should we bribe him?"
"Not openly, never, oh no. Most un-Chinese. But if things look like they’re not going well, a gift could be considered."
"How do we assess that?"
"We don’t. We wait. He’ll make a move. When he does we think as the Chinese think, and make the correct move in response." She studied Spencer. Was the correct move for her this job, with this pudgy-faced, aging blond American? She didn’t know yet. But she did know he was right-she was in a rut. And the project was interesting. They turned onto Ladder Lane. Tizi Hutong. "Ah, look," she said. "Mr. Zhang."
The old man came toward them, shaking his own hands in the old way. "Welcome you to see where the French priest lived. Regrettably my friend had to leave, but he left the gate open for us."
They stepped over the raised sill and into a quiet courtyard framed by curving tile roofs and a square of inward-facing, half-glassed rooms. "The old Chinese name for such a house is si-he yuan," Alice explained to Spencer. "That means ’four-box courtyard.’ A si-he yuan gave people privacy and a sense of their own inner world. In old China-"
"I don’t really care about old China," Adam said. "Where was Teilhard’s room?"
Alice bit back her words. He was desperate to find his one precious relic of ancient man, yet seemed indifferent to the recent past. It was a pity. Here on the back streets of Beijing the past was never far away. Close your eyes and you could just see the long-gowned gentlemen browsing bookstalls; the hawkers crying out in slushy Pekingese the names of their medicines and toys and candied crab-apples and roasted ears of corn; the ricksha pullers jockeying for position in the mud ruts, close up to the streaming, jostling pedestrians; and all around them silk banners snapping in the wind from gateposts, declaiming family news of weddings, the new year, births and funerals. She turned to Mr. Zhang. "Do you know which room the priest occupied?"
"Yes. In the back court. Follow me."
As they walked, his old steps shuffling quietly beside her, he asked, "Have you read the priest’s books?"
"Yes, elder brother. But many years have flown and I am just starting to read them again. I find his idea of the spiral of growth-that total forward movement-so interesting now. Somehow, when I was a student, it didn’t ring deeply to me. Now it does."
"Ke bu shi ma, " he agreed. "I, too, have sometimes gained hope for the future from his essays." He paused, perhaps wondering whether to say more. "Sometimes in the bad years I would come here to this house and stand in the priest’s room. Do you know why I did this? Because here he formulated his ideas. Here he wrote at night-while by day he sifted the dirt at Zhoukoudian. Eh, foreign miss, you cannot imagine the excitement in those days at Zhoukoudian. After the ape-man was discovered."
"I think I can," she said in a low voice, glancing over at Adam Spencer, who walked beside her, his eyes round and wide with anticipation, his hands clutching his book and pen. "Here," she told Adam when the old man stopped and pointed to a half-open door. "Teilhard’s room."
She stood back and let Spencer push his way inside. He flipped on a dim yellow bulb. "There’s nothing here," he said, voice strangled with disappointment.
The room was bare. No furniture, no cupboards, nothing.
"It was an office for thirty or forty years after the Jesuits left," Mr. Zhang explained. "Since then it has not been used."
"Did Teilhard leave anything?" Spencer asked. "Papers, books?"
Alice translated and Mr. Zhang shook his head. "Nothing. But I tell you, if you stand just so"-he turned his frail, graceful body toward the windows-"you can still sense the essence of the man! Go on," he urged Alice. "Translate. Tell the foreign scientist to try."
Alice looked dubiously at Adam Spencer, who was pacing the room like a frustrated animal, holding his notebook, scanning the bare walls continuously as if they might suddenly yield something if he looked at them long enough.
"Sorry, Mr. Zhang. I don’t think the American scientist is interested in Teilhard’s essence. You’re sure there are no records, pictures, anything?"
"None."
"Nothing remains," she translated for Spencer, inside thinking: But everything is here, isn’t it? Because this is where his vision was born. Dimly she knew there was something important in all this for her. "Sorry, Adam," she said.
"It’s okay," he sighed. "Let’s go."
Adam Spencer lay on his bed, studying the direct-dial instruction card, in eight languages, which had been placed on his nightstand. Outside line, international operator, country code… His eyes moved down to the rate listing and he swallowed uncomfortably. Expensive.
But he had to call. His longing for his son had grown so overwhelming that it seemed, these last few days, he was almost choking on it. It was a longing fraught with dread and apprehension, one that had started the day he and Ellen had told Tyler they were separating. He still remembered the child’s frozen, color-drained face, looking up from his handheld electronic game. And then the long horrible moment in which Tyler, his heart split apart, did not know whose arms to rush into. Adam and Ellen swore they wouldn’t make the boy choose between them. But they had, almost immediately, because she moved back to California. And Tyler had gone with her.
Adam swallowed hard, picked up the phone, and jabbed out the code for collect, then pressed a 510 area code, the San Francisco area, the East Bay. He listened to it ring.