The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  Still, Mr. Simms was silent, but Irene saw the rapture that shone in his clear blue eyes, the same look that crossed his face whenever he was preparing to make one of his illicit acquisitions.

  “I want to be the one to find it,” she told him, “and you think I can do it, don’t you? That’s why you didn’t force Lundstrom to give me the job. You knew if I got the curatorship, I might not go. You want me to search for this history.”

  “I have thought of nothing else since I opened that box,” he finally responded. “The scrolls are going to be the summit of my collection. My swan song. And you, my dearest Irene, will be the one to bring them to me.” In the firelight, Mr. Simms’s age and illness slipped away, and he was a young man again, vigorous, ready to conquer the world. “If you are lucky, you experience one great adventure in your life.”

  “Have you had yours?” she asked.

  “I have been very fortunate. I have had several incredible adventures,” he assured her, his eyes focused on the diary. “May I give you some advice?”

  Irene nodded, eagerly.

  “The one thing to remember about an adventure is that if it turns out the way you expect it to, it has not been an adventure at all.”

  Chapter 3

  In Yellow Babylon

  While waiting for Simone Merlin to return from France, Irene had fallen in love with Shanghai. Occupied by the French, British, Americans, and Japanese, each with their own self-governed district, it contained the entire world. Walking among its rickshaws, trams, and Buick touring cars, its Tudor manors and Spanish-style villas, she might come across a haggard Russian prostitute fighting with a pair of Chinese singsong girls over an English sailor. And a few steps farther on, she could encounter an old Cantonese man dragging a wheelbarrow full of pink baby bonnets, or Japanese courtesans dancing to a German-Jewish band in front of a nightclub in broad daylight.

  Although Shanghai was a heady concoction of the unfamiliar, Irene was attracted to more than its vitalizing jumble. She was also captivated by the challenge it presented. As she explored, she found herself cataloging all that she saw, the way she had done with the artifacts at the Brooke Museum and in Mr. Simms’s collections. Files opened in her mind, and within them grew lists. From Sikh policemen with their dark hair bound in crisp turbans to Chinese ladies wearing cutwork leather pumps from Italy, the inhabitants of the city could fill a volume. And the shops, selling theater costumes and Hershey’s cocoa and lotus root. What a pleasure it was to group them into categories by what they sold: canaries chrysanthemums larks mice chopsticks dice incense mangoes inkpots flies. Every day her lists grew as she moved through the wide boulevards of the French Concession, fertile with peonies and magnolia trees, or the Chinese quarter, with its narrow lanes of dumpling stalls, fortune-tellers, and toddlers peeing in gutters through the slits in their pants.

  Shanghai was a worthy test for Irene’s skills. It felt as if the city were a scrambled, unbounded collection that she had been commissioned to sort, put there to help heal her injured belief in her talent. For ten years she had been doing more than just classifying objects known. She had been pursuing and locating and systemizing objects lost or stolen and hidden away. She had taught herself to analyze rumors as if they were scientific evidence. She had learned how to track the sales of art and the travels of men, and to use calculations to fill in the blanks. She worked with the laws of probability. She put pieces together, every way possible, over and over until they fit. She used her instinct. She had exceptional instinct. Mr. Simms admired this about her.

  More than any expert Irene had met, Mr. Simms had mastered the intricacies of dealing in art. He understood an object’s worth, not solely its dollar value but how that value could be manipulated into emotional currency, and he shared this knowledge with her. It was under his tutelage that Irene learned how to appraise an owner as well as an artifact, and to use her appraisals to round up information and sort through it until she found an answer, most often the location of an object that had gone missing. It was what she did best—figuring out—and it was what she was doing now in Shanghai, the day after Anne’s party. If she could collect enough information, she would be able to deduce what Simone wanted, what she needed, and how to convince her to come to Cambodia.

  Because Irene always paid attention, subtly eavesdropping wherever she was, she already knew which bars in Shanghai were good for what: French wine, the best jazz, White Russian bodyguards, Siamese virgins. To build a foundation on which to construct theories, local gossip was essential, and for Shanghai’s gossip, the Yellow Babylon was the top choice. As she made her way to this nightclub, dusk faded, leaving the streets burnished, lit by lanterns since the electricity had been cut because of the strikes.

  It was the cocktail hour. The room felt sullen with heat, Shalimar, and the masculine reek of cigars. Candles hung like pendants in glass jars from the ceiling, above a dozen tables bunched up at the rim of an empty stage. Irene surveyed the crowd. She dismissed those who regarded her with disinterest. She sought the one—there was always one—who eyed her, a newcomer, greedily. The house rumormonger. A watering hole staple.

  She approached the table in the back corner, occupied by an older woman who had fair European skin and tilting Asiatic eyes. She wore loops of pearls, and her hair was powdered, as if she had traveled to Shanghai from the eighteenth century. A blue macaw was perched on the back of her chair.

  “May I join you?” Irene asked.

  The woman smiled, as if she had been waiting all day for a stranger to come along. “Please, my dear, have a seat.”

  “I’m Irene Blum.”

  “Countess Eugénie. A pleasure to meet you. What would you like to drink?”

  “Scotch.”

  “Excellent.” This too was said as if an expectation had been met. Signaling to a waiter, she asked, “What brings you to the Yellow Babylon, Irene?”

  “The revolution,” Irene said. “Communism in China.” There was nothing to be gained in tiptoeing around. As she had long ago discovered, the more candid she was, the more callow and less suspect she seemed. “I’m wondering why a foreigner would want to be involved in it. Why would he care?”

  The countess laughed. “Good Lord, darling, I have no idea.”

  “Is it a romantic notion?”

  “Romantic? Chinamen are murdered in the streets in the name of the cause. The cause! What a ridiculous term. Factories are burned to the ground to make an ideological point. If you ask me, it’s a nuisance more than anything else.”

  The waiter brought a decanter. His pour was generous, but Irene did not pick up her glass. She asked, “Does this revolution need Simone Merlin?”

  The countess clapped. “Oh dear, you’re not a very good spy.”

  Irene let this remark stand, unchallenged.

  The countess winked, and Irene knew the story would travel around Shanghai, about the American spy asking after the wife of Roger Merlin. But as Irene also knew, tales spread by women like this countess were always taken with a grain of salt. While this meant that few would believe the countess, it also meant that Irene must be judicious in acting on anything she confided. “How delightful. I assumed this was going to be another dull night of opium and jazz. Do you smoke? Would you like a pipe?”

  “Another time,” said Irene, not letting on that she had never smoked opium before. She didn’t want to seem that callow. “Do you know Simone?”

  “Everyone in Shanghai knows of her.”

  “What do you think she gains from this revolution?”

  The countess was nearly giddy with this distraction from her usual evening out. “To the Chinese, Simone is a queen. It must feel quite satisfying to be treated like royalty.”

  “What else?”

  The countess rolled her eyes. “I suppose she could have some innate sense of justice.”

  “Altruism?”

  “The average Chinaman does live a miserable life in this city,” the countess said, as if this were a secret
. “I treat mine well, but I’m an exception.”

  “Do you think Simone’s beliefs could have anything to do with loyalty to her husband?”

  “Daggers to that detestable man!” The countess leaned over the table conspiratorially. “Last year she tried to leave him. She headed overland, poor ninny. He caught up with her in Wuchow and nearly beat her to death. Officially, she was kidnapped and attacked by Municipal Government thugs. It was terrific fuel for the cause. The riot lasted almost two days. Lily, over there at that table with the colonel, she’s a nurse. She’s the one who treated Simone. Lily,” she called out. “Lily, dear, come over here and meet my new friend, Irene.”

  Lily was at least fifty, and her efforts with makeup could not hide her jaundiced skin—a distinguishing feature, Irene had learned, among alcoholics in the city. Her tight dress did not suit her barrel of a body. Her ankles were beefy, and she stumped toward them on stilt-heeled shoes, carrying a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarillo fitted into an amber holder in the other. “Well, well,” Lily drawled dramatically. “What has the cat dragged in?” From her pursed expression, it was evident that all other women were competition.

  “Oh, Lily, behave. Irene has come to perk up the evening. She’s a spy.”

  “Who for?”

  “The enemy, of course.” Irene answered and gave her best lighthearted grin.

  “Who cares?” said the countess. “Sit down and tell her about Simone Merlin.”

  Lily slowly raised an eyebrow. She eased into the chair beside Irene and reached her arms across the table for the macaw. The macaw snapped at the cigarillo, but Lily pulled back, giving the bird a sip of champagne instead. “Don’t be naughty, President Coolidge. I haven’t forgotten what you did to my Persian carpet. So, what would you like to know, Irene the spy?”

  “Did Simone’s husband nearly beat her to death?”

  “She told me he did. Having been in such a situation myself, I believe her. Women lie about many things, but that is rarely one of them. It’s too humiliating to make up. Besides, Roger Merlin is a cur.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He doesn’t care about the Chinese people.”

  The countess was amused. “You don’t care about the Chinese people, Lily.”

  “True,” Lily said, “but I don’t go around pretending to help them. If I feel like kicking one, I do it. And I never feel bad about it afterward.”

  “You think he’s a phony?” Irene asked.

  “I think his ego puts Napoleon’s to shame.”

  “Why would he care if Simone left him?”

  Lily studied Irene as if she were stupid. She leaned toward her, and the stench of spoiled gardenia perfume leaked from her pores. “He is a man, darling.”

  “Still, she’s not his prisoner,” Irene said, annoyed.

  “I think after she lost the baby, she gave up any hope of getting away from him.”

  “There was a baby?” the countess asked. “Darling, you never told me about a baby.”

  “Really? I thought I had.”

  “You know you didn’t tell me.”

  “My dear countess, I wouldn’t keep something like that from you.”

  “Just as I would never keep from you that your colonel has a predilection for lithe young factory workers.”

  “What happened?” Irene asked, turning the conversation back before it could detour.

  Glancing unhappily at the colonel, Lily said, “Simone was pregnant when she tried to leave Roger.”

  The countess gasped.

  Stunned, Irene asked, “He beat her while she was pregnant?”

  “I sat with her in the hospital for six days,” Lily said. “He hit her to rid her of that baby girl. You can be sure of it by the way he did it.”

  “How awful.” Irene’s thoughts grew dark with this gruesome vision. Sickened by the helplessness and pain Simone must have felt, she had to force herself to continue. “Do you know where she was going?”

  “I’m not enjoying this conversation anymore,” Lily said. “It’s too depressing for a Sunday, even in Shanghai.” She flicked her cigarillo onto the floor.

  The countess sighed. “I must admit, I have never cared for Simone. But a baby changes things. Poor, dear girl.”

  Lily stood and said to Irene, “Cambodia, my fair-haired American spy. That is where Simone was going when he caught up with her. But I have a feeling this comes as no surprise to you.”

  “I don’t care about anything else,” Simone declared. “You can talk to whomever you want about whatever you want, except my baby.”

  Irene looked up to see Simone standing in the doorway of Anne’s office. It was late Monday morning. After her evening with the countess and Lily, she had not slept well, and she was now attempting to clear her head by helping Anne grade a collection of Yangshao pottery.

  “This is my city,” Simone continued. “How dare you come into it as if it’s yours for the asking. As if my life is yours for the taking. If you wanted to know more about me, why didn’t you walk down the hall and ask me? My office is always open.”

  Irene was caught off guard by how rapidly gossip traveled through Shanghai, so much faster than she had expected. The electricity was dead, the air was sopping, and she spoke as she rarely did, without thinking. “How did you end up at the mercy of a man like that? How could you let such a thing happen?”

  “Let such a thing happen?” Simone’s anger disintegrated into bewilderment.

  Seated in the open window, Anne reproached, “Irene, that’s offensive.”

  “You’re right, I’m sorry.” Irene realized that she was allowing her feelings about what the museum trustees had done to her overlap with what Roger had done to Simone. She smoothed the documents on the desk in front of her, rubbing her palm across the top sheet, smearing the ink with her sweat. “But, Simone, will he really chase you down if he knows someone is watching? If you’re with me?”

  Simone stepped into the room, her face shielded by the shadow of her wide-brimmed black hat. Her green Chinese-style blouse was paired with black stovepipe trousers that might have come from a man’s suit, making her look as if she had just walked off a vaudeville stage. “It won’t matter who is there.”

  Behind Anne, sunlight reflected into the alley’s chasm and glanced off scraps of faded laundry drying on a railing opposite. “Darling, if Simone doesn’t want to go, let her be.”

  “Let her be?” Irene asked with disbelief. “How can you of all people say that? You left your husband because you no longer wanted to be a housewife. This is so much worse!”

  “My reasons were far more complicated,” Anne rebuked. “You know that. You have always known that. In any case, Thomas was not a threat to my life.”

  “That’s all the more reason for you to leave him,” Irene said to Simone. “You shouldn’t have to live with such fear. I can help you. This could be your opportunity to escape him.”

  “Let’s change the subject,” Anne said. “This is far too complex a problem to discuss in this kind of heat. Summertime in Shanghai makes things seem worse than they actually are.”

  Simone frowned as she crossed the room to the settee. “You blame everything on the heat.”

  “People are far less volatile in cooler climates.”

  “Hardly, Anne,” Irene said. “The Wobblies are rioting in Seattle.”

  Simone took off her hat and rested her head on the arm of the settee. She moved deliberately, tipping her head to one side to reveal her right earlobe, split into a V. A bruise bloated her jaw and cheek. “Irene, I think you should know, I did tell my husband about your offer. A frying pan makes quite the weapon. He is resourceful, n’est-il pas?”

  “Oh, darling.” Anne was on her feet, making her way to Simone.

  “I told him I have an opportunity to go in search of a lost temple. Then I made the mistake of telling him how much I want this.” Her fingers trembled over the scab on her ear. Perspiration beaded on her face. “I never knew
I could be this lonely.”

  “Hush.” Anne folded Simone into her arms and stroked her hair. “It will rain soon, I promise.”

  As Irene watched them, it occurred to her that loneliness is not about what happens when you are alone but about what happens when you are with others. It is about how willing you are to open your heart and allow another to get close to you. At least Simone was letting Anne hold her and console her. Irene could not remember the last time someone had held her that way. Not even her father or Mr. Simms.

  Anne said, “Irene, please fetch the thermos on the shelf behind my desk.”

  Simone smiled. “To sleep, perchance to dream.”

  Irene handed the thermos to Anne, who removed the lid and filled it with a soupy, gray liquid. Simone drank, and then Anne filled the lid again and offered it to Irene, saying, “I will lay out some cushions for you.”

  Irene took the cup. Its contents smelled vile. “What is it?”

  “I make it myself.” Anne retrieved a pair of pillows and a blanket from the cupboard. “I buy the poppies from the one-eyed mandarin behind Jardine’s.”

  As Anne spread out a knitted afghan, Irene’s mind was drawn back to her childhood, to her bed of quilts on the Brooke Museum’s floor.

  “It does wonders,” Anne said. “Every ache, every pain, every melancholy thought inside you, gone, faded away. Better than Bayer. Much nicer than a psychoanalyst. For some reason I always feel worse when I leave a session with mine.”

  A candle had burned down in a jade ashtray on the desk, and the still blades of the fan cast an indolent shadow on a patch of wall near the ceiling. As attractive as it was, the idea of escaping into such an easy sleep, Irene was more tempted by the thought of Simone’s office down the hall. She hoped Simone had left the door open, since she was not adept at picking locks. Handing the lid back to Anne, she said, “No, thank you.”

  Retreating from the tragedy that was her life, Simone curled onto her side. She was so different from the person Irene had thought she would find, and part of her wanted to send a telegram to Mr. Simms and inform him that he had made a bad decision in choosing Simone to help her. But to fail at what she had come to Shanghai to do would be too painful in the wake of her humiliation in Seattle. Besides, it would take time to find another person who knew Cambodia and the Khmer as well as Simone did. Mr. Simms had trusted Irene to fulfill his dying wish. Time was one thing she did not have, especially since the next available passage from Shanghai to Indochina was sailing in three days.