We shook hands; Navarre’s palm was moist with sweat. Seraut walked him back to his laboratory. Then he escorted me down the corridor, toward the main entrance. “What was your name?” he asked as we walked. “I didn’t get it before.”

“Eric Truell. I work with Mr. Bowman.”

We stopped near the door and waited for Arthur, who soon emerged from the bathroom looking embarrassed. “Whoa!” he said. “I’m sorry, fellas.”

He shook the Frenchman’s hand vigorously. “Thank you again, Monsieur Seraut. I will tell Michel Bézy about our visit. He will be grateful, as I am, for your help. Best of luck here. À bientôt.”

He strolled off jauntily, back toward the gate. He maintained an amiable patter of conversation as we retraced our steps and transited the campus. When we were outside the gate, he turned to me.

“I don’t want to know any details, but I trust this is all in a good cause.”

“The best,” I said, smiling.

I looked at him, dressed in his fine tailored suit, his sharp eyes scanning the pavement, that princely demeanor intact on the other side of the world from home, playing every point to win. Arthur Bowman was the real thing.

30

30

Bowman wanted to disappear for a little while; stay away from the China World Hotel for a few hours; go to some tourist attraction so we could say we had just stopped off at Qinghua on our way there. He proposed the Great Wall, but that would take the rest of the day, and I had my interview with Alain Peyron that afternoon. We settled on the Lama Temple, a Buddhist monastery near the university. We wandered through the gaily painted buildings, looking at happy Buddhas, mischievous Buddhas, Buddhas past, present and future. Arthur quickly exhausted his patience, but he wasn’t yet ready to go back to the China World, so we stopped at my hotel to eat lunch and pick up my tape recorder.

I was decompressing. I felt as if I had been through a bizarre rite of passage. I had accomplished a task I had been dreading, and I knew in my heart that I had done something important, and that by any ordinary measure I had done something good. My life had intersected momentarily with history, and I had been an actor, not a watcher.

Arthur did not share my sense of release. If anything, he was becoming more tense. He ordered the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu and then, peevishly, sent it back. I asked him if he had any suggestions for what I should ask Peyron. “Ask him whatever you want, but he won’t say anything useful. The only reason he’s seeing you is that he wants to know what you’re doing.”