by Kim Fay
Chapter 4
A Place Like This
It was dark among the quiet streets of Shanghai’s French quarter. With the calling card as her guide, Irene stood in front of a metal gate and sought an indication that she had come to the right place. Candles lay along the rim of the high brick wall, but the descent of thin, flickering light did not reveal any kind of sign. Suddenly, shrieking and jazz swelled from within, and the gate crashed open. It was as if a bomb had exploded, catapulting people onto the sidewalk. Women in high-heeled evening sandals stumbled against one another. A swarthy man fell and was crushed as the crowd trampled over him. But everyone was laughing. The men wore tuxedos. A woman tripped past, peacock feathers sprouting from her gem-encrusted hair, howling as if she had heard the world’s dirtiest joke.
“Bosch would have loved painting this city.”
The man who spoke was tucked into a fold of shadow behind Irene. He must have been standing there all along.
“Did you say Bosch?” she asked.
“A Flemish artist,” he said.
“I know who he is. Fifteenth century. Temptation and morality.”
He nodded appreciatively. “Don’t forget deadly sins.”
“And the torments of hell.”
“So you can understand how well Shanghai would have suited him.” The man’s accent was European but not traceable to a specific country, as was the case with many who had lived a long time in the Orient. He squinted at the chaos of people bursting out of the nightclub. “A riot has broken out in the Chapei district. The damn fool Chinese are torching their own warehouses. I hear that the view is spectacular from the roof of the Palace Hotel.”
A teenage Filipina shoved through the crowd. She yanked a spangled leash, and an Italian greyhound skittered over the cobbled walkway behind her. “I stole a bottle of Veuve,” she squealed to the man as she waved the champagne above her head. “I’ll make it up to you later, sugar. Boy, oh boy, will I!”
A burgundy Rolls-Royce led a parade of cars toward the British Settlement and the rooftop view from the Palace Hotel. Only Irene and the man remained behind. He stooped down, picked up a purple feather boa, and carried it into the courtyard. As she followed him, he asked, “You’re not going to join the fun?”
Willows draped their leaves over pools of candlelight. A yellow ginkgo had been overturned, and its ceramic pot was shattered. Jade ashtrays littered the wrought-iron tables. Irene noticed a sign hanging from a post: RAFFERTY’S. She said, “It doesn’t seem like much fun to me.”
“A smart woman. I like that.” The man smiled. “Actually, I started the rumor. I don’t have the patience I used to. I’m leaving Shanghai, and everyone and his mistress wants to bid me bon voyage. Each of my patrons likes to think I’m his best friend, simply because I don’t divulge the repugnant secrets he lets slip when he’s acting as if he’s too tight to know better. I am tired of these people.”
“Are you Marc Rafferty?”
He paused, examining her, taking in her perspiring skin and her pale blue dress, which seemed loose at first but would be discovered to deliberately skim the slight curves of her body if one looked closely enough. “I am. And who are you?”
In the light filtering down from an upstairs window, she returned his appraisal, taking in his unconventional collarless shirt and loose Oriental trousers. He was tall, and his body had substance without being heavy. His eyes were deep set, and his dark blond hair curled over his ears in the humidity. He would have been too handsome if his face had not been hardened by a look of tired reproach. Worried that she had chosen a bad time to come to him, she said, “My name is Irene Blum.”
His expression instantly softened, and he laughed. “How about that? And I thought I’d lost the ability to be taken by surprise.”
“You know who I am?” she asked.
“What brings you to me?”
“Henry Simms gave me your name.”
Marc considered this. “Why?”
Irene held out the calling card.
He stepped closer and read the note on the back of it. “Do you? Need assistance with anything?”
“I must, if he anticipated it.”
“This is true.”
“Then you know him well, I take it?”
Marc looked as if he did not understand the question. But he merely said, “Well enough,” as he swept the boa across a tabletop, clearing the debris of ash and cigarette butts onto the ground. “It’s going to rain soon. It’s one of the few things I will miss about Shanghai. The way the air grows static like this right before a storm, and then when you think you can’t bear the tension any longer, the rain comes and you’re rescued, again. Come in. Have a drink.”
He led Irene into a room tentative with candlelight. The walls were built of rough gray stone, like those in a cellar. In one corner five band members slouched around their instruments, obscured by the smoke of their cigarettes. A gaunt greyhound, identical to the poor creature dragged by the Filipina, was tethered to a microphone stand. Pacing, it drew its leash tight each time it reached the front row of tables. The air smelled of hot wax and citrus perfume, cardamom and sweat.
Marc brought a bottle of whiskey to a table scarcely large enough for two. “I don’t have ice,” he apologized. He waited for her to take a drink before raising a candle and holding it near her chin. “You don’t look like a temple robber,” he said.
This was the last thing Irene had expected Marc Rafferty to say. “Why would you think I’m a temple robber?”
“Henry told me. Are you denying it?”
She was astonished that Mr. Simms would confide in this man about her expedition, and at the same time, she was thankful that he had anticipated how much she would need someone to confide in. “No,” she said, “I’m not.”
“That’s a bold thing to admit.”
Irene was aware of his leg near hers beneath the table. “I’ve kept a lot of secrets,” she said, “but never one as big as this. And never in a place where I didn’t have someone to talk with about it.” She remembered what Simone had said in Anne’s office about being lonely. “It catches me off guard, how alone it can make me feel. I don’t know you, but for some reason it’s comforting that you know what I’m doing. I am going to raid a temple,” she said, recklessly, savoring the words spoken aloud.
“Loneliness,” Marc murmured. “It’s a funny creature here in Shanghai. There are so many people, and everyone is poking into everyone else’s business all the time, and still no one really knows anything about you. You don’t realize how alone you’ve been until a rare moment when you aren’t.”
The room was a cocoon, muggy and impermeable. It flustered her, how familiar the low tenor of Marc’s voice felt. “You said that you’re leaving. Where do you plan to go from here?” she asked.
“First, Saigon, to visit my aunt.”
“I’m going to Saigon too. I’m on my way to Cambodia.”
“I’ll be en route to Amsterdam. My cousin owns a coffeehouse on the Keizersgracht. He’s asked me to run it for him. It’s time for me to go home.”
“How long have you lived in Shanghai?”
“All my life.”
“But you call Amsterdam home?”
“My mother was born there. Her family is still there.” He rolled the bottle of whiskey between his palms. “Shanghai hasn’t been home to me since my wife was killed.”
“I’m sorry.” It was only as Marc shifted his leg away that Irene realized how drawn she was to him. She shouldn’t have gulped the entire glass. She should have had dinner. She felt light-headed. Clearly it had been too long since she had been with a man. The nearness of Marc’s leg, that was all it had taken. Self-conscious, she stood. “How much do I owe you for the drink?”
“Stay,” he said, smoothing out a cigarette paper. He took a pouch from his pocket and dropped a pinch of tobacco into the center of the paper, working it into a narrow spine. “My life in Shanghai, it has made me ill-equipped for normal convers
ation.” He lit the cigarette and handed it across the table. The tip was moist where he had held it in his mouth. He lit another for himself. “You can’t know what a place like this will do to a person until it has done it to you. It deceives, and then it corrupts, and then it’s too late.” He inhaled, harboring the smoke deep in his lungs. The reddened ash reflected in his pupils. “What if I’m not satisfied serving coffee to gray-haired shopkeepers and plump housewives in a neighborhood café? What if I miss the need to keep a gun hidden beneath my pillow? I have four bodyguards, Irene. Four thugs whose sole job is to protect me from being kidnapped or worse. What the hell kind of life is that for a man to have grown accustomed to?”
Irene was surprised to find her thoughts drifting to her first boyfriend, a ruddy university student who had sprinted around athletic fields and confused it with achievement. And then there had been the aging art critic when she was twenty-three, with his sea captain mustache and predictable attempts to seduce her with mah-jongg and chop suey. Even her brief affairs, when the solitude of her heart had gotten the best of her, had never stirred this kind of lightning-quick emotion within her. “You’re asking the wrong person.” She sat back down. “I’m a temple robber, remember?”
He smiled. “So you say.”
“Stranger still, so you’ve been told. I wonder, why would Mr. Simms tell you that about me? And why would he give me your name unless he really believed I would need something from you? What kind of help could I need?”
“I know Shanghai well,” Marc said. “Information is my stock-in-trade. Perhaps there’s something you need to know about the city. Or …” Irene’s hand was resting on the table. He reached out with the lightest of touches, as if he was making sure she was real. “Maybe if you tell me about Henry and you, tell me how you ended up here, I can figure it out.”
She gazed around. The bartender was napping on a stool. Inside an orbit of smoke, the band members continued to puff on their cigarettes. After being discarded in Seattle, after being rejected by Simone and disapproved of by Anne, Irene was eager for this attention Marc was giving her. “Mr. Simms never kept secrets from me,” she said. “Even when I was young, I knew about the hidden rooms in his manor. I knew how he acquired the objects in them. I knew about the clandestine deals and the crates arriving in the middle of the night. His trust meant everything to me. So many people thought it was their right to tell me what was appropriate for a girl without a mother. I hated it. Irene, that is not appropriate! But Mr. Simms, he didn’t think of me as a child, and by the time I became an adult, I couldn’t imagine my life without him.” The memory of Mr. Simms’s rapid deterioration in the month before she left Seattle nearly brought tears to her eyes. Softly, she said, “I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like …”
“Can’t imagine what what’s going to be like?”
Outside, the rain pounded as if it were being dragged down by an underground force. Wind blew leaden raindrops through a broken window, and the storm was cold, metallic in the air. Candlelight trembled on the walls. The bartender wound the gramophone, as if Rhapsody in Blue could even out the ragged tempo of the storm. Keeping her eyes on the table, Irene turned her palm upward, so that her fingertips brushed Marc’s.
He did not pull away. Quietly, as if it mattered to him that they were not overheard, he asked, “Why did he take such an interest in you?”
Shaking off thoughts of Mr. Simms’s illness, she said, “He has no children. No one to pass his legacy to.”
Marc’s hand tensed against hers, and she felt the heat in her face, the skip in her pulse where his fingers lay over her exposed wrist. “There must be more to it than that,” he said.
“I’m like him. I have always loved the chase. The unattainable. I’m too intense, I can’t help it, I know that about myself. And I have the heart of a thief.” She laughed because it sounded so cloak-and-dagger. “Thief is too dirty a word, though. You can’t just go into someone’s home and take a painting. You can’t just go into a museum and walk away with a statue. But the painting, the statue, it has to get into the home or museum somehow. That’s where it interests me.”
His cigarette burning down in the ashtray, Marc leaned forward. He was absorbing her words the way Mr. Simms did, and she felt as if she could tell him, as she could Mr. Simms, anything.
“Who does it all really belong to anyway?” she asked. “Whoever gets to it first. The natives don’t care. They have no idea how to preserve their own antiquities. Look at the state of Angkor Wat when Mouhot found it. A complete ruin. It’s the French who are restoring it. It’s because of the French that it will survive. And the French! They’re grabbing everything in Cambodia that they can for their mansions and museums back in France. Art, artifacts, they don’t hold still. That’s what’s amazing. They never have. They never will. Borders shift. Allegiances shift. Think about the spoils of war. Spain ransacked Peru. England plundered the Summer Palace during the Opium Wars. Audacious,” she murmured, shaking her head with admiration.
Marc removed his hand and took up the stub of his cigarette. Irene felt dizzy. She had never talked like this, so openly, with a stranger. But he did not feel at all like a stranger, and it disconcerted her, how at ease she was with him. She watched him refill their glasses. The Scotch soaked in the gleam of the candle’s flame. “This temple you’re after,” he said. “Did a border shift? Is it the spoils of a war? How did it come your way?”
“My father wasn’t old, not even seventy. I knew he wouldn’t live forever, but I never thought—” She had nearly finished her second drink, and although she wanted to blame the alcohol, she knew it was not the reason she was verging on maudlin. Clearing her voice of the emotion that inevitably overcame her when she spoke of her father, she said, “When my father died, last December, he left a box for Mr. Simms. It contained the diary of a missionary who wrote about finding a temple in Cambodia. A temple containing the history of the Khmer people on a set of copper scrolls. If what he writes is true, and if it’s all still up there, it could be the greatest discovery of this century.”
“What was your father doing with the diary?” Marc asked.
“That’s a part of the mystery. He was a bit of a treasure hunter before I was born. He spent years traveling around the Orient. He could have come across it in any number of places.”
“Do you think he knew what it meant?”
“He had to.”
“How do you know he didn’t already try to find it?”
“I don’t.”
“He could have gone and found nothing.”
Irene nodded. “That’s possible. But why wouldn’t he have told me?”
“So you don’t know for certain if the scrolls are still there?”
Irene fingered the smooth beads of the carnelian bracelet that had also come from the box her father left, and that she’d been wearing ever since Mr. Simms fastened it on her wrist. “They have to be there.”
“Have to?”
“If I can bring him this one last treasure before he dies, then I can repay him for—”
“Dies?” Marc asked. “Who’s dying?”
“Mr. Simms. He has cancer.”
A gust banged a shutter closed, and the greyhound spooked, leaping toward the bandleader. A kerosene lamp sputtered, its flame expired, and the light collapsed around them. “I didn’t know.” Marc sounded as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Irene reached to take back his hand, but the greyhound barked, and the door swung open. The Filipina stumbled in, bedraggled, clutching a leash. Her dog was not with her. “The rain must have put out the fires,” she complained. “We were too late. But the champagne was divine. How can I make amends for being so naughty?”
Two men in wet tuxedos pushed past her, followed by others. One called out, “Brandy for everyone!”
For a second, Marc seemed annoyed. Then he stood up and called jovially to the bandleader, “Gregor, how about a tango for our friends?” He rounded the table and leaned over Irene, ho
lding the room at bay as he pressed his mouth to her ear. “There is one thing you didn’t tell me. What are you doing in Shanghai if you’re on your way to Cambodia? It’s not on the path between Seattle and Phnom Penh.”
If Marc had asked Irene to go home with him right then, she would have gone. But the bar was filling up again. That moment had passed. Catching her breath, she said, “I’m here to recruit Simone Merlin to help me find the temple. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the problem you’re supposed to help me with. If you know this city so well, tell me, why has she refused to go with me?”
Marc’s brow furrowed with concern. “Because her husband is the most dangerous man in the Orient.”
Chapter 5
Hope and Futility
The following morning Irene waited for Simone in her office for nearly two hours, but the younger woman did not appear. Anne had told Irene that Simone often spent time out at the racecourse or in the layette section of the Sincere department store on Nanjing Road, but she was in neither of those places either. Irene even tried the Huxinting teahouse, a pagoda set on pilings in the center of a small man-made lake in Shanghai’s Chinese quarter. It was known for its gatherings of Kuomintang. Sitting at an upstairs table at one of the windows hoping that Simone might show up, she sipped her tea and tried to pass the time categorizing the peasants on the paths encircling the water—old matrons grilling flakes of silver fish over beds of coal, grandfathers writing their life stories on the pavement in chalk for money, and middle-aged women hobbling on their bound “lotus feet.” All around the lake, scraps of laundry hung limp from wooden poles that extended from the open windows of the tenement houses. Irene sorted through the faded shades of blue and brown fabric, but her heart wasn’t in it. There was no sign of Simone, and the day was drawing to a close.
Finally, as the wet late afternoon heat wrung itself out of the soupy sky, and the chance of simply happening upon Simone dwindled, Irene admitted to herself why she was wasting such valuable time. She was afraid of Roger Merlin. After hearing the stories of his violent temper and Marc Rafferty’s warning, and having seen what Roger had done to Simone with a frying pan, Irene wanted to avoid him.
