Lost in Translation Page 0,21

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!"

"Yes. She was a talented artist. And she could give form to Teilhard’s visions." He paused, examining the sculpture. "It’s not surprising. She was practically inside him."

But not really, Alice reminded herself. She couldn’t have all of him. So close—but no farther. Because he was already taken, in a way.

They stopped in front of the huge, grainy 1929 excavation photos. The dig, which covered much of the canyon floor in addition to the openings higher up the rock walls, was shown all in black-and-white, marked off in squares and full of European and Chinese men leaning on shovels. Teilhard was easy to pick out. He was taller than everyone else, falcon faced, with hooded eyes frozen in a glance at the camera.

"You notice he wears plain clothes?" Spencer said. "He never dressed like a priest, not once he got to China."

"Is that Lucile?"

"That’s her."

She peered at the photo. Lucile Swan was strong looking, small, and buxom; she stood half behind Pierre Teilhard de Chardin of the Society of Jesus. Lucile looked frankly into the camera, her gaze intelligent. She had old-fashioned braids twined around her heart-shaped face, but in her eyes was a world of experience. Alice smiled. This was a woman who stood easily among the men. "How long did she stay in Peking?"

He thought. "She hung on through the war, by hiding in the French Legation. Then she got out, went home. She died in New York—let me see—in ’65."

There was something about Lucile’s position in the picture, behind the priest, which formed a scraping stone of sadness in Alice’s middle. The fate of the thing was all there to see, Pierre with a shovel and eyes piercing the camera, Lucile behind him, self-contained. She loved him, she couldn’t live without him, she couldn’t fully have him. Oh, yes. Alice understood.

She stared into Lucile’s face. "I want to look at this for a while," she whispered.

Spencer nodded and drifted away. She contemplated the frozen pointillist images until they became gray shades of meaninglessness, with only Teilhard’s sharp gaze still there, boring through her. Did you love her? she thought intently, memorizing his jutting face. Or did you use her for what you wanted and discard the rest?

When the picture was taken Lucile, wearing the demure dress of a European peasant, had been the same age Alice was now. Why did pictures of women in history make them look so much older than they were? Or did Alice now look this old? Alice glanced down at her own blue jeans. Face it, she thought, I’m thirty-six. And Lucile was just like me. Adrift in China. Lonely, for years. Then in love again, finally, but with a man already committed to the Church. Stuck outside herself, outside love. Empathy flooded Alice’s modern heart.

Some minutes had passed when Spencer coughed discreetly. She walked over to where he stood near the museum’s entrance and he handed her a book from the display shelf.

"It’s the book I told you about," he said. "Their correspondence."

She looked down. The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan. She felt a smile tugging at her face.

"I’ll buy it for you."

"No, I’ll buy it." She smiled: solidarity.

"Si-shi ba kuai," the old man said in a thin voice. His spotted hands trembled as he accepted the money and counted out the change. "Are you foreign guests interested in the French priest?" he asked, glancing up through small round glasses of hammered gold. His blood-cracked eyes, almost completely shrouded over, still radiated intelligence.

"Very interested, elder uncle," Alice answered. "This outside person is an archaeologist. He is researching Peking Man."

"Can I help you in some humble way? I worked for the survey as a boy."

"What!" Alice translated for Spencer.

"Yes." He inclined his snow-white, sparsely fringed head toward the blown-up excavation photographs. "At first I was an apprentice, hauling rocks. But the head of the survey, Dr. Black, trained me. I continued working there until—until the situation grew unstable."

Alice saw