Free Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station by Dorothy Gilman Page A

shook her head. “Uh-huh, that’s where we saw George taking pictures, don’t you remember? So we take the other street.”
    Mrs. Pollifax expressed her doubt. “I really don’t think so.”
    “But I’m
known
for my bump of direction,” Jenny insisted. “Really I am … trust me!”
    “We’ll trust you,” Iris told her gravely.
    They reached, eventually, the broad avenue on which they had expected to find the People’s Hotel, but there was no hotel. Instead they met with a sea of people strolling down the center of a road in a silence broken only by the shuffling sounds of their feet. There were no cars. As theycontinued walking there was no hotel, either. They were looked at with curiosity; a few turned to stare.
    “Still confident?” Mrs. Pollifax asked Jenny.
    “Oh yes,” said Jenny, and then spoiled such assertiveness by pausing to say to a young man, “Do you speak English?”
    He smiled, shook his head, and hurried on. So did they, but after three more blocks Mrs. Pollifax’s skepticism had turned into alarm; she decided the time had come to try that universal language of the hands. She stopped two men, and laid her head on her hands in a manner that she hoped denoted sleep. “Ho-tel?” she asked. “Hotel?”
    The two men nodded happily and turned to point in the direction ahead of them.
    “Xiexie,”
she said, bowing.
    But another block still produced no hotel, and Mrs. Pollifax began to picture them sleeping in a doorway for the night, began to look down narrow alleys and into mysterious entrances that led to wooden doors, speculating on how long a tourist might be lost in Xian, and longing passionately for a real bed.
    It was Iris who next said, “I don’t see a damn thing ahead resembling a hotel. Let me try.”
    “But I’m supposed to have such a good bump of direction,” wailed Jenny.
    “Well, coming to China has dislocated it, I think,” said Mrs. Pollifax.
    “Ho-tel?” asked Iris, stopping three men and repeating Mrs. Pollifax’s symbol for sleep.
    At once Iris drew a crowd; they became surrounded by faces made dim and unearthly in the near-darkness, faces marveling at Iris’ height, a few women tittering behind their hands; it turned into a party, and a few minutes later a dozen of the young men escorted them half a block farther, smiling and murmuring “ho-tel” and pointing,and there—at last—was the hotel, with its sentry and its gate.
    Bows, thank yous, and smiles were exchanged, they passed through a deserted lobby, mounted stairs, and Mrs. Pollifax entered her small hot room with its chuckling air-conditioner. The temperature had dropped only a few degrees and she found the twenty-five-watt light in the lamp depressing. Kneeling beside her suitcase she unlocked and opened it to return the camera she’d extracted from it before walking to the park, and suddenly became very still, the movement of camera to suitcase arrested.
    Her suitcase had been opened and searched while she was gone.
    A long time ago she had worked out a formula for packing, and although efficiency had been only a minor reason for this she had automatically continued to pack in a certain way even when there was no necessity for caution. She had felt there was no need for caution on this trip, but apparently she had been wrong. Her suitcase had been unlocked very expertly, and very professionally and discreetly searched, but whoever had done the job couldn’t possibly have known of her packing formula. When she had snatched the camera from her suitcase after dinner her bright red pajamas had as usual been folded up with the pajama bottoms underneath the pajama tops—that was the important detail—and her toothbrush and comb tucked into their folds. Now the pajama bottoms were on top, and both toothbrush and comb had vanished somewhere into her suitcase.
    Now this
, thought Mrs. Pollifax, abruptly sitting down on the floor,
is a pretty kettle of fish, and completely unexpected
.
    Who
, she