Lost in Translation Page 0,84

to get the whole thing over with. Quickly she counted out the sum to which they had agreed.

He pocketed the money. "Good health. Long life."

"Bici, " she whispered, The same to you.

Guo Wenxiang slipped into an unmarked doorway in a back alley of the Chinese quarter, and knocked softly. He’d walked here casually, making many unnecessary turns, twisting and changing his route, entering buildings where he knew no one and standing in dark hallways, then leaving again quietly by other doors.

He was sure there was no one behind him. But in China there almost always was. He knew this well.

So as Guo knocked now, he glanced nervously around. The man who lived in this apartment had been a guard years ago at Camp Fourteen, the women’s camp on the other side of the mountains. Camp Fourteen had been a cluster of ocher huts on the flat, silty plain that spread out below the purple wall of the Helan Shan. By all accounts evil attended it. There were women who died of illness and malnourishment. Other women lost their health, and whatever remained of their humanity. It was said of this man, this former guard, that he had seen everything, and knew everything, but that it angered him when people asked him about it. Hua you shuo huilai, it was also said that after a few cups of wine his mouth loosened and his memories flowed. Guo held a bottle of Red Crane sorghum spirits tightly against his chest, waiting.

When the door was opened four men stood there, none of them the man he was looking for. Something was not right. He took a step back. "I’m sorry," he said. "I’m seeking the Honorable Chen. Perhaps he is not at home."

"Eh, but he is. He awaits you."

Guo pivoted to dart away, but a powerful hand clamped his wrist, and then another. "Don’t go," one of the men said cruelly, pulling him in and latching the door behind him.

A cold fatalism settled over Guo. He knew better than to show fear. And meanwhile he had his wits, and should he not deploy every power he had? Sometimes, the legends told, a man could prevail at times like this through words alone. Guo marshaled himself, sharpening his intelligence. He was prepared to speak—

But they were already advancing toward him.

Spencer and Kong were bent over a table in the back room of the Bureau of Cultural Relics, examining the mountain of microliths Kong had collected near the Shuidonggou site. Sorting them, grading them, packing them. Cobbles, flakes, hammerstones, points, and scrapers. From the Neolithic, pottery shards and beads.

"You see this?" Spencer examined a powerfully shaped stone scraper. "Beautiful. Late Paleolithic. Twenty-five, thirty thousand years." He placed it in one of the piles.

A secretary burst in with a sheaf of fax papers. "Datongle."

"Haode. " Kong took the papers. He scanned them at once, then turned his smile on Spencer. "Qianzheng!" He indicated the pages. "Visa! Visa!" He managed to get the word in English.

"Oh! Oh, my God! The visas for Eren Obo?" Spencer took the pages and grinned at them.

"Tai hao-le!"

"And what’s this?" Spencer pointed to the rest of the pile of fax pages. "Is this the literature search from your graduate student?"

But Kong only went off in a stream of Mandarin. Nevertheless his hand holding the pages aloft told Spencer they were practically the first scholars out here, the first since Teilhard. There’d been no surveys on archaic hunter-gatherer sites out here, no organized attempts to locate and date and describe and excavate anything besides Shuidonggou. No coherent picture at all of the nomadic foragers, or their transition to the Neolithic with its advent of settled life and agriculture. Nothing published—just the stuff on Shuidonggou itself.

Because, Christ, Spencer thought, they haven’t even looked! They don’t even know where to look. But I know. I know from the years of surveying back home. I know exactly where ancient people lived in this kind of terrain. Winters they lived in the alluvial fans, the creek margins—then in the summer they might have gone up in the mountains. Just like in the American West. Only, in America you’re lucky if you find a handful of intact sites in your whole career....

"Yanjiu jihui bu shao, " Kong exclaimed happily, tossing down the fax. His cellular phone rang and he pulled it off his belt and clicked it on. "Wei! Wei!"

Spencer sat, listening to Kong’s rapid Chinese, allowing his mind to drift. The opportunities in archaic desert cultures here