by Kim Fay
With the labor strikes, there was no telling how soon another ship would leave the city, and so Irene was going to keep trying to find a solution, starting with searching Simone’s office. Busying herself with the task she had begun, she waited for Anne to gulp the foul-smelling tea and stretch out on the blanket, humming a Chinese love song until eventually, along with Simone, she fell asleep.
Just two doors down the hall, Irene felt as if she had traveled halfway around the globe only to end up back in her own office at the Brooke Museum. Simone’s cramped office was a shrine to Cambodia, its walls covered from floor to ceiling with yellow survey maps, its shelves an exhibition of statuettes—dozens of apsaras, made of bronze, of brass, of silver, of stone.
One was crafted from pounded tin, the kind of cheap trinket sold at souvenir stands. Another was carved from pink sandstone, glossy with handling and age—eight centuries old, Irene estimated from glancing at it. In the russet shadows beyond the reach of the kerosene lamp, a shelf held Étienne Aymonier’s archaeological inventory, the first systematic survey of the temples and one of the primary guides Irene had used in teaching herself the skill of classification. She pulled out the atlas from Auguste Pavie’s Indochina mission and opened it to the map she had studied back in Seattle when she first learned of the lost temple; it covered the ambiguous border area between Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos.
As Irene sat down at Simone’s desk, where Sappho Marchal’s Khmer Costumes and Ornaments was open to the inscription “To my dearest friend. Return home soon, Sappho,” a feeling of optimism rose in her. This room was proof of how meaningful Cambodia was to Simone.
Irene trailed her finger through a thick deposit of incense that lay like an anthill within a brass holder. Eager to know more about this woman whose passion for the Khmer seemed to equal hers, she tugged open the top desk drawer. She took out a bottle of Luminal that contained six tablets, and from beneath the bottle three sheets of stationery. She read, “Dear Louis, you are going to” and “Louis, this is” and “Louis, the time has.” She did not know who this might be.
Reaching in deeper, she removed a handful of clippings from Shanghai’s Municipal Government and Communist newspapers. She leafed through the articles, all of them about Roger. Strikes he had organized and riots he had incited. His attendance at the First National Congress with Sun Yat-sen the previous year, his work with Bolshevik military instructors, and his arrest after a French attaché was killed by a pipe bomb. He was released for lack of evidence, but the editorial tone of the North-China Daily News implied his guilt.
In dealing with Roger Merlin, Irene understood how cautious she must be, but still, he was just a man, and men were open to negotiation. They preferred it over ultimatums, as long as they thought they had won. It was easy enough to make a man think that he had won, and from what she had gleaned so far, this was all Roger wanted.
As she was putting the clippings back into the drawer, a headline caught her eye: FIRE DESTROYS SIMMS & CO. FLOUR MILL IN POOTUNG. Startled by the sudden presence of Mr. Simms’s name, she skimmed back through the papers, and redirecting her attention, she saw that according to the articles, Henry Simms owned a great many factories in Shanghai. He was mentioned more than any other industrialist, and always in relation to his business interests being under siege by the Kuomintang.
Irene had known that Shanghai had long been Mr. Simms’s second home. It had been his base before and after his time in Manila, where he met her parents, and she remembered him traveling to the city when she was a girl. She still had the picture postcards he’d sent of rickshaw coolies, and the petite pink robe he’d brought back for her from one of his trips. She also knew that he had investments all across the Orient, in shipping, importing, and exporting, and in tea and rubber plantations throughout Malaya and Vietnam, but they had never talked about any of this. The details of his financial empire had never extended into the sovereign state of art they shared—not until this moment. Irene felt chagrin at not having bothered to speculate about Mr. Simms’s dealings in Shanghai, and what these dealings could mean: that he and Roger Merlin were enemies.
Henry Simms had sent her to hire the wife of his enemy.
Mr. Simms’s story was as familiar to Irene as her own father’s. He had not gone from being a wheat farmer’s son in eastern Washington State to being one of the wealthiest men in the world simply by figuring out a few sharp business moves. He was a strategist, a mastermind. He did nothing that was not thoroughly planned, and as she clutched the brittle newspaper clippings, the possibility of something bigger than she had anticipated swelled, unformed, into the room.
Irene thrived on secrets and mysteries. She thrived on finding answers, and Mr. Simms knew this about her. It was not improbable that he had planned on her learning about his stake in Shanghai. He could even have known what he was getting her into with Simone, although if he did, Irene could not comprehend why he would have her seek out Roger Merlin’s unstable wife. But she was intrigued, as she felt sure she was meant to be.
Back in Anne’s office, Simone was still asleep, snoring softly. Near her on the floor, Anne gazed drowsily at the ceiling. “Tell me honestly why you don’t want me to do this,” Irene said, keeping her voice low as she stood in the doorway.
“It’s shameless to ask me questions when I’m in this state,” Anne protested.
“You won’t answer me if you’re sober.” The sun had passed the meridian, and the office was now layered in shade from the buildings across the alley. Still, the heat was ripe and full. Only one candle remained lit, its low flame sputtering in the pooling wax. “You’ve never opposed me before.”
Anne tipped her head to look up at Irene. “You’re going to steal the scrolls.”
Irene dropped her voice even further. “I’ve never said that.”
“Henry is financing your expedition. You didn’t have to.”
“Did you tell Simone about Mr. Simms?”
“If Roger finds out that Henry is involved … Even if she does make it to Cambodia with you … The scrolls, she’ll be devastated when you take them to America.”
“What about me? You know how much I need this.”
Anne’s movements were lethargic as she propped herself up against the base of the settee. “You’re crossing a line.” Her attempt at a firm tone was undermined by the effects of the poppy tea.
“I didn’t know that you believed there was a line. There didn’t seem to be one when you wanted me to help you find the empress dowager’s ring.”
Anne lifted her wrinkled hand into a crease of dusky light, illuminating the ring whose braid of gold framed a cinnabar carving of the character for Puyi, the name of the empress’s chosen successor, her great-nephew, the last emperor of China. The ring had disappeared upon the empress’s death, most likely spirited away by one of her handmaids. Irene recalled with pride how she had tracked it to a Serbian collector, Murat Stanić. Leveraging her request with knowledge about the location of Caesar’s Ruby, a pendant that had gone missing from the Romanov crown jewels, she’d convinced Stanić to deliver the ring to her rather than to Puyi, who was offering a sizable reward for it after his expulsion from the Forbidden City. “Irene, we’re not talking about a piece of jewelry,” Anne said. “This isn’t another statue or vase. This is a country’s history. Its heritage.”
“And I will make sure it’s protected. If I don’t discover it, it might be lost forever. If someone else discovers it, who knows what might happen to it? I’m not going to take the scrolls just for me, Anne. I have plans for them. They’ll be safe.”
“You’ve created a convenient argument.”
“It’s a true argument! I won’t hide the scrolls away in a private gallery. I intend to establish a museum around them. A place that will give them their due and give me mine. Can’t you understand why I need this? Why I need something bigger than a statue or vase? After the board of trustees—”
“Sweetheart, I know how hard this has been on you, but yo
u need to—”
“I deserve better. I deserve this. I need it.”
“Enough to jeopardize her safety?”
Irene studied Simone, who looked like a child, her knees pulled up to her flat chest. Despite the low light, the bruise on the side of her face was visible, a gray-green welt running the length of her jaw. Irene did not want to see anyone hurt, but she was almost thirty. She could not start over. She had worked too hard. She was too good at the life she had crafted for herself to let it slip away. “He hit her with a frying pan. If I can get her out of here, I’ll be doing her a favor.”
Alone in her hotel room, Irene took her map case from beneath the mattress, where she had tied the brown leather bag to a wooden slat for safekeeping. The stitching around one of the brass buckles was rubbed away, and the flap was stained with a water mark that looked like a continent drifting in a brown sea. She unhooked the buckles and removed the collection she kept inside. Carefully, she unfolded the topmost map, its creases as soft as old flannel. It was the first map her father had given her after her mother died. She laid it on the floor and beside it another, and then another, until she was standing in a patchwork sea of Cambodia, its landscapes embellished with indigo tigers and crimson Hindu gods.
As dusk passed quickly outside her window, the Cardamom Mountains lay partially hidden beneath the tangle of cotton bedspread that had slipped to the floor. Tonle Sap Lake streamed into the darkness beneath the writing desk. The thick vein of the Mekong River fractured the countryside, and tassels from the shade of the oil lamp cast patterns, like the frayed shadows of storm clouds, over the saffron fleck that marked the town of Stung Treng. Irene’s girlhood had been a succession of journeys, coursing through her imagination into this faraway country. She gazed down on those adventures, layered in a pentimento of remembrance.
Finding the lost temple was about more than taking back what was rightfully hers, and Irene was angry with Anne for not acknowledging this. Since she had left her job at the museum, she could see how her entire life had been leading her to the moment when Mr. Simms showed her the missionary’s diary. Now, in her hotel room in Shanghai, she sat down on the bed with it and skimmed the pages she had memorized and nearly worn through with rereading:
I have spent the past 27 days traveling north and east away from the awesome relic of a city called Ang Cor.
These words had been written one hundred years to the month before Irene’s arrival in Shanghai, and thirty-five years before Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist, claimed to be the first to have discovered Angkor Wat and announced it to the world. It was incredible to think that this missionary, Reverend Garland, had seen it—Ang Cor, he called it—before Mouhot and not mentioned it to a soul. Nor had he disclosed what he came upon a few days afterward.
Svai patted a fragment of wall and announced, “Musée.” … said what I can only crudely translate as “the king’s temple” … proudly declared that this temple contained the history of his savage people on ten copper scrolls.
Irene had laughed the first time she read the words: savage people. The Khmer were as far from being savage as the ancient Romans. More so, since the Romans had their gladiators and the practice of throwing Christians to lions. During the Khmer’s reign, from the ninth to the fifteenth century, they ultimately commanded a region of more than one thousand temples that spread from Siam into Laos and down to the South China Sea. Their bas-reliefs held up to the Greeks’ and Persians’, and they were masters of engineering with their massive system of public waterworks. Most important to Irene, they built the largest temple in the world, Angkor Wat, which alone encompassed five hundred acres. A million people had once lived there.
Then, after centuries of high civilization, the empire vanished. But even at its height it was unknown to the West, and by the time Mouhot came along, not a shadow of its brilliance was said to remain among the Cambodians, as the descendants of the Khmer were now called by the outside world. All that was left were miles and miles of temples, abandoned except for the monks who inhabited them.
When he first saw the ruins of Angkor Wat, Mouhot had written, “It is a rival to the temple of Solomon, and erected by an ancient Michelangelo. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome.”
What had happened to cause the entire Khmer civilization to disappear? Scholars devoted their lives to this question, and Irene had pored over the possibilities. Theories abounded, but the answer was still a Holy Grail, one that many, including Irene, feared would never be found, given the impermanence of Khmer record keeping.
The Khmer had chronicled their world using mulberry bark paper and stacked cords of palm leaves. These pages had disintegrated or had been destroyed in the hundreds of years since they were written. But copper scrolls. Irene could envision them, as Reverend Garland must have seen them, for she had studied such documents in the course of her career: metal scrolls that had been unrolled and flattened into the thinnest of tablets. Such objects could easily survive. They could still exist. And if these particular scrolls did, and if they contained Cambodia’s history, Irene was closer than anyone had ever come to discovering them.
From the pocket stitched into the back cover of the diary, she took out another map. Reverend James T. Garland’s map, drawn with the precision of a cartographer. Each distance on his route was noted, neatly penned along the jungle trails of northeast Cambodia, from the town of “Stun Tren” to a destination, marked with a blue X, near a village that he called “Ka Saeng” not far from the Lao border. Irene had reviewed the reverend’s calculations exhaustively, in Seattle and on the Tahoma crossing the Pacific Ocean and in this hotel room while waiting for Simone to come back from France, using her own maps for comparison. The starting point was the trading town of Stung Treng, at the confluence of the Mekong and Sekong Rivers. It was reachable by steamer from Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. The end point near Kha Seng lay in uncharted territory, but the reverend had recorded the names of villages on the way to it. The path was so clearly designated that it made Irene laugh. Could it really be that easy?
As she folded the map back into the diary, she removed a calling card that she had put into the pocket for safekeeping. It had the name of a business on it, “Rafferty’s Nightclub,” and printed in the corner was “Marc Rafferty, Prop.” She turned it over and once again read Mr. Simms’s cramped, back-slanted script: “If you need assistance of any kind, this is your man.” When Mr. Simms had given her the card, it was no surprise that he knew whom she should go to for guidance in Shanghai, considering his relationship with the city. Later, adrift on the ocean, she gave it little thought. But now, in light of what was happening with Simone … Mr. Simms did nothing without a purpose, no matter how incidental it seemed.
Looking out the window, where the haphazard angles of Shanghai’s rooftops were indiscernible in the blackout, Irene considered how nonchalantly Mr. Simms had first mentioned partnering with Simone Merlin, during the early stages of the planning for Irene’s journey. One evening he had summoned her to the study that nestled in the center of his manor’s top floor, a vault of a room where they had spent countless hours deep in discussion over the years. When Irene arrived, a fire was burning, mellowing the deep hue of the cherrywood walls into a rich rosy amber. Mr. Simms stood with his back to her, facing the only ornament in the room: three slabs of golden pink sandstone, fitted together one atop another, nearly six feet tall.
Their border was sculpted with sinuous florets that coiled around a carving of a divine apsara from Banteay Srei, the tenth-century Khmer temple known as the Citadel of Women. The goddess had arrived at the manor two years earlier, shrouded in secrecy since word had spread so quickly of her disappearance. Irene had been with Mr. Simms in the middle of the night when the apsara was delivered and pieced back together in this room. He had given no explanation as to why this antiquity, and only this one above all the others he owned, deserved to occupy the most secret space in his home, and she knew better than to ask. So there
the carving resided, undisturbed, chiseled into her sandstone alcove.
Standing beside Mr. Simms, waiting for him to explain why he had called for her, Irene gazed on the apsara. Despite all the time she had spent studying it, she never grew bored admiring the serpentine limbs, the placid set of the mouth, the flat cheekbones revealing the Hindu ancestry of the Indian traders who once trespassed through the Khmer territories on their way to China.
Finally, Mr. Simms asked, “Did I ever tell you how she was taken out of Cambodia?”
Irene nodded. “In coffins.”
“Clever, so very clever. And you know who took her?”
“Yes,” Irene said, easily playing her part in this conversation they’d had so many times before. “Roger and Simone Merlin.”
“I have been thinking about this woman: Simone. She might be just the right person to help you find the scrolls. What do you think?”
It had been as simple as that. But thinking back on it, Irene wondered if it really had been that simple. Picking up her maps and folding them with care, she slid each one into the case. She weighed new possibilities as she bathed and washed her hair, combing it out but not tying it up. It felt too good, cool and damp over her shoulders. She put on a sleeveless linen dress and a new pair of sandals she had bought at the Wing On department store, and then she went out into the city, to see if she could find out why Mr. Simms had so casually suggested that she might need assistance from Marc Rafferty.
