always be reinvented. She, too, could become someone else. Eventually. Or so she’d told herself all these years.
"Your Frenchman," said the Leader. He threw a loose, lubricated wave at the letter, which was propped now at an odd angle against a soy sauce bottle next to the wine.
"Teilhard, my good friend!" called Spencer. "Turn my life around!"
Alice did not translate anymore. No one seemed to care.
"The Frenchman," the Leader repeated, but in a different voice, an insistent voice which commanded their attention. Silence settled. He continued: "The Frenchman went to the lamasery during his visit. To the baisi. It is recorded. This is a sacred place, high up a canyon."
They stared.
"What?" Alice managed.
"Kuyuk will take you there tomorrow."
But just then the doors flew open and the girls in the shiny red lipstick bore in the lamb, still whole except for the head, slow-roasted out in the open air to a dark crackly caramel. The smell was round, pitched, monumental. The men who’d been lounging around the edge bolted from their seats now, and with instant, sinuous grace produced long and copiously decorated daggers from within their clothes. They fell on the meat in a circle. Slices dropped into their hands and were carried to plates.
She whispered to Spencer what the Leader had said about Teilhard visiting a lamasery. He leaned over, intent on her English, eyes fixed in a glassy stare at the steaming meat in front of him. Then his face broke open in an unfettered smile.
"This is it," he whispered, writing the three words in his notebook as he said them to her. She watched him underline them.
He’s drunk, she thought, but he might be right. We might actually find the damn thing.
"I have a toast," Spencer announced, pushing away from the table and standing with exaggerated care. He held his wine cup in front of him. Then he dipped two fingers in the wine and tossed the drops on the floor. "To the earth!" he cried. He dipped again and flicked drops into the air. "To the sky!" The third time, he wet his fingers and drew them across his own forehead. "To the ancestors!" he finished.
There was a stunned silence, broken by a thundering cheer as the Mongols leapt to their feet and drank. "The American!" they called, hoisting their cups. "The American!"
The Leader drank, beaming. "How do you know this toast of ours?"
"Books!" Spencer cried happily. He raised his cup and drank. "History, letters, memoirs of foreigners who have come here."
"Impressive," Alice grinned, toasting him.
They all fell to eating lamb, which was lean and long-cooked and fell apart perfectly in their mouths. When she pushed her plate back she was aware of Lin’s gaze and risked a glance at him. He was watching her quite openly, as if there was nothing to hide. He smiled, a smile that seemed magically to target only her.
She smiled back.
"Now!" called the Leader with a hearty clap, and one of the knife men was back in a spinning instant to the table.
On the Leader’s signal the man used a quick pirouette of his hand to disengage the glistening suet oblong of the lamb’s tail. He deftly cut off a long, paper-thin slice, and bore it to Alice on his open brown palm.
"All Mongols must do this." The Leader laughed.
"Oh, I can’t," she said, affecting retreat. It was an accepted ploy in Chinese manners. Women could excuse themselves from any excess by saying, simply, that they could not. As if they were physically unable. This invoked the female frailty that Chinese society, despite the fact that it no longer actually bound the feet of pampered girls, still found endlessly compelling.
Lin smiled at her Chinese decorum and looked away. Whether his smile was one of affection or amused superiority, she could not tell.
"Then to the American scientist," insisted the Leader.
The brown man, his planar face creased by a smile, carried the lamb fat to Spencer.
"To be a man, you must." The Leader smiled.
"All right!" Spencer slapped the table with his palm.
"You should take it all in one gulp," Alice whispered in Spencer’s ear, repeating what the knife wielder was declaiming in Chinese. "Don’t stop. This is a manhood thing. Don’t look back."
He nodded, an intimate glance to her, they were confederates, the Americans.
The Mongol pushed the tip of his middle finger right up against Adam Spencer’s pale Caucasian lip. He tilted the blond head back with his other hand, as if in baptism, and then the white slab, with a sickening