He followed her. A tiny room, a low ceiling, every surface covered with the hand-chiseled wooden molds, each cut and carved to produce a scallop-edged cake the size of a hockey puck, imprinted in intricate relief with beasts and flowers and lucky characters.
"You shi ma?" said a young girl who had been sitting in the shadows by the counter.
"Mei you, " Alice answered automatically. She was moving slowly around the room, squinting, examining the molds.
"You like old stuff, don’t you?" Adam asked her.
"I love it. Look at this one!" She touched one with a carving of a fairy in fluttering robes.
"Why don’t you buy one?" He took a mold off the wall and studied it. "They’re beautiful."
"Oh, no." She looked startled. "I never let myself buy things. I can’t carry stuff like this around."
"It’s a trade-off. If it expresses your inner…"
But she was already nodding to the girl, pushing wide the bell-jangling door, heading back out to the sidewalk. "Just a little break." She unfolded her map and scrutinized the grid packed with tiny characters.
He waited, thinking how odd she was, absorbing the shade and the comforting, cooling rustle of an acacia tree growing up from the sidewalk, until she put the map away and started walking again. Then Spencer registered something peripherally: a man who’d been leaning against a building some paces back straightened at the same moment and began walking, after them, dodging easily through the moving crowd, keeping a calibrated distance.
"I know it sounds insane," he told her. "But you know what? I think someone’s following us."
She looked sharply up at him from the corner of her eye.
"Is this possible?" he asked.
She quickened her pace. "Of course it’s possible. Just keep walking."
"Has it happened to you before?"
She shook her head. "It’s usually diplomats and journalists they trail, not people like me. I almost always work for businessmen, and business they leave alone. But Adam? Follow me."
She stepped abruptly to the side, turned, and walked briskly through an open courtyard packed with stalls and food vendors and walking, standing, eating, shouting Chinese. He scrambled after. She feinted to the left, threaded through a momentary gap in the crush of people, slipped through a door in a stone wall, and led him through an indoor dining room. It was walled in white tile, with a black-and-white tile floor, loaded with tables, all full. "There," she said, and pointed to a half-lit corridor off the clanging kitchens.
They slipped into the little hall, sank into the shadows, and watched the door. Workers in blue coats and tight-fitted white caps bumped past them, trays high, steam billowing, their guttural Pekingese bouncing on the narrow walls. Just a few beats, and then there he was, the man, moving against the crowd outside the restaurant door. His eyes searched the crush of people. He glanced into the restaurant, hesitated, then slipped on, out of sight.
"Nice work, Bond." She winked at Spencer, stepped back into the light. "Come on, let’s cut over and go up Dongsi Beidajie. He’ll come back to Wangfujing to look for us. But we won’t be there."
"You seem pretty good at this. People follow you a lot?"
She grinned. "Once or twice over the years. But writers get followed all the time-anybody associated with a paper or a news service, forget it. Somebody’s always on them, listening to their phone, opening their mail. It’s just standard paranoid PRC procedure. So there’s kind of a running competition among journalists living in Beijing. You know-what you did yesterday to elude your tail."
"But this is just archaeology."
Her smile faded. "Right. Obviously something about what you’re doing scares them. What, I don’t know."
"Is it possible that they could, what, arrest us? I know that sounds crazy-"
"Not so crazy. In the fifties and sixties, even early seventies, some of the Westerners who’d stayed around after the revolution were arrested. There were Americans and Europeans who languished in prison for years. But nowadays it’s the kai fang, the open door. You do something bad, they just deport you. And they don’t let you come back."
"That would ruin my project!"
"Your project-what about my life? It would ruin everything for me! I live here, don’t forget. But you have to break some serious laws for that to happen. And we’re not planning to break any laws. Are we?" She looked hard at him. "Are we, Dr. Spencer?"
"No! No, of course not. And don’t call me that."
"So long as you promise. I like you, I like your project. But I’m not getting deported for you."
He straightened and solemnly held up his right hand. "Very well. I, Adam Spencer, swear-"
"Okay, okay." She let her mouth curve up again. "Enough."
They moved over to Dongsi Beidajie, walked on, and found the Jesuit House up a terraced set of broad, shallow steps, cobbles overgrown with tufted grass. Formerly Ladder Lane. Now-Alice checked the book, and then her map: there, People’s Northeast Small Lane Eight. She smiled. A lucky number in Chinese. Eight, ba. It sounded like fa, which meant "to get rich." Enormous good luck to get an address with an eight in it. "Look," she said, and stopped by a wall with a round gate, "the house is still here."
Through a crack in the gate they could see a stone courtyard with rooms opening onto it, peonies and locust trees in ceramic urns, bright cloth fluttering behind open windows, a single bicycle leaning. A breeze ruffled their hair and the tendril leaves of the trees above their heads, a soft wind, the longed-for kiss of the Beijing summer.
She knocked.
They stood in silence a minute. No one came out. Nothing but the moon gate of thick, ancient red wood, the stone walls, the eaves with their swooping Chinese tiles.
"This was the Jesuit residence?" she asked.
"Yes," he said while he wrote. "I’ve researched his life here. You wanna know? Okay. He got up every day; they said mass. He went to work at the Peking Union Medical College, where the China Geological Survey was housed-that’s because both the college and the survey were run on Rockefeller money. At five o’clock every day he left the survey and went to Lucile’s house. They talked, and dined, and spent the evening together."
Alice peeked through the closed gate. "You know where she lived?"
"No. In his letters to her he refers to her place as Da Tian Shui Qing, but I don’t know if that’s the name of the street or just what he called her house."
"Without seeing the characters I can’t be sure, but it sounds like it might mean ’Great Heaven and Clear Water’- probably an old hutong name." She searched through her guidebook’s index, frowned. "No. Not in here. So-they spent the evenings together?"
"Right. Talking, studying, reading. Weekends, they would go with other foreigners on excursions. Picnics in the Western Hills. Visits to temples. To the seaside."
"Then she was always with him." Alice’s eyes softened.
"Yes." He was staring through the hole at the inside of the compound. "She was his muse. She listened to his ideas, retyped his manuscripts, translated things from French to English and back again."
"But weren’t most of his books published much later?"
"True." He grinned, pleased with her intelligence. "The Jesuits didn’t permit him to publish much during his lifetime- essays mostly-almost all his books came out after his death. Think how he felt."
"God, you’re right. Like a failure."
"But at least he had her."
"And she accepted him."
"Right, she stuck by him. Even though she never got the thing she always wanted from him," Spencer added.
Of course, Alice thought, but she didn’t say it: the total commitment of his heart, his mind, his body. Pierre could love Lucile, could care about her and be close to her-as long as he never became her lover. Whereas she, Alice, entered the sexual heart of China all the time-but only the sexual heart. Which way mattered more?