The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  Still, Louis remained impassive. “That’s not an area associated with the Khmer,” he said. “With or without this map, you’re making quite a leap, assuming there is anything of significance up there.”

  Irene thought of all the times that she had stayed silent about her skills, and how her silence had eventually been her downfall. She may have been filled with dread, but she would not let Louis Lafont think she was an amateur.

  “Have you spent any time studying Simone’s father’s research on Khmer trade routes?” she asked. “If you follow the patterns he laid out toward Laos, you’ll find a network of trails that ends abruptly north of Kratie, right at the river. At the Brooke, I came across letters from a botanist who found stone markers in Ratanakiri province. When I connected his findings with Simone’s father’s and the steles that were discovered by Garnier’s expedition, the path went directly through the location where the missionary claims he found the scrolls.”

  Irene now had Louis’s full attention. The realization that she might know what she was talking about was visible on his face. He said, “Truffaut spent months in that area. He didn’t come across a temple.”

  “I examined his maps. He didn’t visit Kha Seng. That’s where the temple is said to be.”

  “I have been working toward this discovery my entire career,” Louis told her as he lit a Gauloise. “You’ve never been to Cambodia, and somehow you claim to have figured it out. How can such a thing be possible?”

  “Henry Simms’s greed,” Simone said. “That’s how it’s possible.”

  “Henry Simms? What do you mean?” Louis asked.

  “He’s financing my expedition,” Irene said. There was no point in hiding this fact.

  Louis frowned. “That explains what he’s doing in Phnom Penh.”

  It was as if a charge had been detonated, and Irene could hear only a ringing in her ears. “What are you talking about?” she asked as sound slowly returned—the orchestra, the shouting newspaper boys, the neighboring conversations.

  “He arrived two weeks ago.”

  Above the tables, webs of cigarette smoke drifted in a stench of stale liquor and overcooked meats. “No, he didn’t,” she said.

  Louis was confused. “I saw him.”

  “I knew it, Irene.” With alarming speed, Simone’s elation contorted into anger, and she hissed, “I knew you and Simms were plotting something.”

  “You didn’t know he was here?” Louis asked Irene.

  “He’s sick,” Irene said, staring into her empty glass as if it were a lens onto the day she had left for Shanghai. She could see Mr. Simms in his car on the dock, a moment when he had not known she was watching, his expression unguarded and grim from the disease that was devouring him. “He’s too sick to travel. He wouldn’t come all this way unless something was wrong.”

  “What could be wrong?” Louis asked.

  “Who else did you tell?” Irene demanded of Simone. “You told Louis. Who else? This is your fault, I know it is.”

  “Irene, calm down,” Louis said. “Besides the three of us and Henry Simms, does anyone else know about this temple?”

  Irene watched a crowd erupting from the Municipal Theater, men in white suits and women in white gowns, tripping like ghosts down the stairs. She saw a flicker of blue, a flash of green—a fan of peacock feathers in the hair of an olive-skinned young woman. She remembered that night in Shanghai, the night she had felt so alone. “Yes,” she said, getting up from the table. “Someone else knows.”

  Chapter 11

  The Butterfly Garden

  Through a high wrought-iron gate, Irene saw a watchman lying in a hammock strung between the trunks of two young magnolia trees. She raised the latch and opened the gate slowly. Despite her care, it creaked, but the man did not stir. Carefully skirting past him, she knocked lightly on the front door of the bungalow belonging to Marc Rafferty’s aunt. No one answered. She knocked a bit louder. Still no answer. She could have woken the watchman and asked him to fetch Marc, but she was afraid he would shoo her away at this late hour and tell her to come back in the morning. She tried the door. It was unlocked.

  The front room was decorated with oil paintings, delftware, and lace, mementos of a Europe that had been left behind, but when Irene inhaled, she smelled the same musty undercurrent that lingered in every other building she’d been inside in Shanghai and Saigon. She stepped into the hall and peered past its closed doors. A light was on at the end, and she made her way to the back of the house, to a closed verandah that was misted over by a mesh screen to keep out mosquitoes. Beyond, in the garden, Marc emerged from a shadowed pathway. She saw by the glow of lanterns strung through the trees that he was dressed like a Hindu, in loose white trousers and a collarless kurta shirt.

  If he was surprised to see her, he didn’t show it, pausing at the head of the path, framed in the smoke wafting off a bamboo torch. Irene had come here impulsively, walked in uninvited, and as she stood at the open door of the verandah, she could think of only one thing: She wanted nothing more than to take shelter in this stranger. She did not like that she had to remind herself why she had sought him out.

  “The local style suits you,” Marc said. “You look lovely.”

  Before her thoughts could stray any further, she asked, “Did you know that Mr. Simms is in Phnom Penh?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  Puzzled, he took one of his hand-rolled cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit it. “When Henry Simms is in Indochina, it’s not a secret.”

  “It was to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I found out tonight from Louis Lafont.”

  “I assumed you knew when we met in Shanghai. I assumed you planned to meet him in Cambodia. What’s wrong? Come down here and tell me what’s happened.”

  Although Irene was keeping her distance, as she reached the bottom of the porch steps, she was close enough to see the dark flecks in the green of Marc’s eyes, shining in the lantern light filtering down through the branches. He was even more handsome than she remembered, looking relaxed now that he was far from Shanghai, and she had to force herself to stay on track. “Are you after the scrolls?”

  He laughed. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Someone else must be hunting for them. There’s no other reason for Mr. Simms to come all this way. Not in his condition. You know the Orient. If there’s a threat to my expedition, what do you think it is?”

  Marc drew on his cigarette. “I must admit, it is odd that Murat Stanić has showed up in Saigon. The last I heard he was in South America. He could be reason to worry. But if I had to place a bet? I’d put my money on Simone.”

  Irene had a strange feeling he was telling her something she should already have known. “Why?”

  An errant palm frond bowed over the eave of the verandah. It scraped against the silk panel of one of the Japanese lanterns, and Marc’s eyes darted around at the sound. From the quickness of his reaction, Irene could tell that he was always on the alert. Tossing his cigarette to the ground, he walked back into the felt shadows of the garden. As Irene caught up to him along the pathway of rippled paving stones, he said, “The first thing Simone did the morning after you met her at Anne’s party was send a telegram to Lafont.”

  “What did it say?”

  “That she would be in Cambodia soon. That her time had come. That history was hers for the taking.”

  Irene’s stomach buckled at the thought of Simone’s carelessness. “Did she mention the temple?”

  “No, not directly, but after I met you, I figured that was what she was talking about.”

  “Marc, how were you able to read her telegrams?”

  “That was my life in Shanghai. I watched, I listened, I kept track—of letters, telegrams, telephone calls. Comings and goings. Only in the Orient can a man make a career, gain respect even, from such activities. Nothing happened in Shanghai that I didn’t know about. Love affairs could have been my stock-in
-trade if I had any interest in ruining lives that way, but my specialty was politics, the back alley dealings. The Communists’ infiltration of the Municipal Government. The government’s infiltration of the Communists. That sort of thing.”

  “What did you do with all of it?”

  “Bartered with it. But mainly I sold it.”

  Marc stopped walking, staring into the dark contours at the far end of the garden, while beside him Irene thought about how similar they were, using the currency of illicit knowledge to build their lives. But he had been given recognition and even acclaim for his skill, while she had been rewarded with nothing at all. “Why would Simone write something that incriminating to her former lover in a telegram? Surely Roger was having her watched.”

  “I was the one he paid to watch her.”

  “You too?”

  “I take it you met Boisselier on the ship?”

  Irene nodded. “Why didn’t you tell Roger about the telegram?”

  “Roger Merlin didn’t deserve to be handed his wife that easily. But the truth is that I have protected her for years for what she could give me: insight about the party. I rarely used it. It would have been traced right back to her. But I needed it, I needed to know everything so that what I did use had currency. And it wasn’t one telegram. She sent four the week she met you. She was in a frenzy. I remember one sentence in particular. ‘We must protect what is rightfully ours.’ She must know that you’re going to take the scrolls back to America.”

  “So she contacted Louis to help her stop me.” Irene glanced down at a wooden worktable piled with clusters of cut wisteria. “I don’t blame them. I’d do the same.” Picking up a branch, she dug her thumbnail into its soft bark, peeling its leaves. “Do you think Mr. Simms found out about her telegrams? Do you think that’s why he’s here?”

  “You told Simone about the temple not even three weeks ago, but to reach Cambodia by now, he would have had to leave Seattle long before that.” Removing the bare stem from Irene’s hands, he placed it back on the worktable. “You do present me with quite a mystery.”

  “It’s my fault he’s come all this way. He would do anything to help me. He knows what this means to me.”

  “You trust him completely, don’t you? You trust he doesn’t have plans for the scrolls that you don’t know about.”

  It was painful, this constant expanding of her uncertainties. “I would be a fool to say I’m sure of anything at this point.”

  “You don’t seem like a fool to me.”

  “Do you think I’m a match for Simone and Louis?”

  He lifted her wrist and laid it over his open palm, as if testing its strength. He pressed gently, his thumb resting against her pulse. “I don’t know.”

  As her gaze took refuge on the glimmer of a lantern hanging in the trees, she let her fingers close over his. “Ask me to stay the night.”

  He stepped back. “I’ll do what I can to help you figure this out, but you need to go.”

  Mortified by her miscalculation, she said, “I didn’t … I thought—”

  “I don’t want you to be sorry, and if you stay …”

  She could feel the weight of her hands, set free from his, hanging at her sides. “I’m not a girl. I won’t expect anything from you.”

  “I wish it were that easy.”

  That night as Irene tried to sleep, the thin cotton sheet felt like rough canvas, but when she kicked it off, the breeze from the fan became a thousand moths fluttering across her body. Staggering out of bed, she switched off the fan. The humidity expanded, pressing her down into the mattress and leaving her in a damp web of fatigue. For a few precious moments she nearly fell asleep, only to be roused by the graze of one leg against the other. As dawn came with the whir of passing rickshaws, she felt raw with humiliation, not only from Marc’s rejection but from an inescapable understanding—she was not as cunning as she had always believed herself to be.

  She would confront Simone about the telegrams, but it was too early, and besides, before she did so, there was one other thing she must do. Marc was right. Murat Stanić should have been in Bolivia. His interest in pre-Columbian civilizations was as predatory as his passion for the Khmer. Irene had heard that the moment news surfaced about a series of stone idols unearthed from the Akapana pyramid dig, Stanić had headed to the Southern Hemisphere. If anyone was going to raid that site, it would be him. Yet now he was in Indochina, arriving at the same time as Mr. Simms. In the insular world of treasure hunters, there were no coincidences. She should have been suspicious the moment she heard Stanić was in Saigon. She had to make up for this misstep. Before leaving for Cambodia with Simone and Louis, she would talk to him. She knew better than to ask outright if he knew about her temple, but she could prompt him and read between the lines.

  Irene made the short walk back to the terrace of the Continental, where men of importance in Saigon took their morning coffee and newspaper. Predictably, Stanić was among them, his plump, balding head bowed over the day’s edition of Le Courrier Saigonnais. She stood beside his table, wearing her best naïve smile. When he noticed her, she said, “I believe we’ve met. You probably don’t remember, but—”

  “Pasadena,” he said. “Huntington’s estate. The night Isadora Duncan danced on the lawn.” Even though his interest was in very young Oriental girls, he regarded her sleeveless dress with appreciation, as she had known he would. She had chosen the straight sheath to emphasize the slightness of her figure, and had pulled her hair back into a plait, as an adolescent girl might. She was not wearing lip rouge.

  “How could I forget Henry Simms’s secret weapon?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  He grinned. His back teeth were capped in gold. “The ring you wanted. The empress dowager’s ring that you traded me for the location of Caesar’s Ruby. You said you were an intermediary, but I keep track of people. I know what you’ve been doing at the Brooke.”

  Despite her distaste for Stanić, Irene was flattered.

  “Please, join me,” he said.

  Stanić was a revolting man, with his perverse predilections, but none of this could be allowed to matter right now. Irene sat down. She had no appetite, but she ordered coffee and a croissant. At least the air was not yet laden with heat, even though the nighttime hues of the terrace’s amber lamplight had been replaced by the bright morning sun.

  “So,” he said, “let me guess. Simone Merlin is searching for something, and you and Simms want it.”

  Irene was unsurprised that he had made the first move. Catching an opponent unawares was essential, and she was pleased that he considered her one, for this meant his intentions—or at least the fact that he had intentions—were out in the open. She could deny or she could feint. Denial would be the easy way out, but it was a novice’s move. And what better opportunity to perfect her lie? To parry with Monsieur Boisselier had been satisfying, but to dupe Stanić would be an achievement.

  “Simone and I have been collaborating on Khmer trading routes,” she said. “We’re hoping to find a road through Tonkin into China, a path that connects Angkor Wat directly to the Forbidden City. But a few months back, I began to suspect that she’s using our studies for other means. Some of her routes are off the probable paths we’ve determined,” Irene said, purposely vague. “It’s as if she’s looking for something else.” Having edged her way toward an accusation that might nudge him into divulging what, if anything, he was scheming, she went on, “I’ve been told that you came to Saigon to make a deal with Simone.”

  His hand twitched on the table. He frowned as he asked, “A deal for what?”

  The coffee had invigorated Irene, pulling her out of the groggy aftermath of her sleepless night. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  In Stanić’s line of work, it was essential that a man keep his composure. He regained his quickly. “What makes you think that I’m interested in anything Simone Merlin has?”

  Irene looked out at the barefoot A
nnamite soldiers drilling in the square in front of the theater. “Something lured you here. You should be in Bolivia right now.”

  With a frankness that was necessary for entrapment, Stanić explained, “You had never left the country, Irene. When my people told me that you and Henry Simms were on your way to Indochina, the possibilities were too intriguing for me to ignore.”

  How degrading. Even Stanić had known about Mr. Simms’s travel plans. Irene could feel a stalemate brewing, and she decided to try a different tack. “Since you know so much about me, you must have heard that the Brooke decided it no longer needs me. That it could replace me simply because I don’t have a Ph.D. behind my name. I want them to regret that decision, and for that I need a discovery valuable enough to make them acknowledge my worth. If Simone does happen to find something that could help me achieve this goal, keep in mind that I would pay a great deal for it.”

  “Why don’t you deal directly with her?”

  It seemed that he believed her bluff, but Irene knew it was never smart to feel sure of oneself with such men, whose lives revolved on an axis of deceit. His question may have been innocent, or he may have been trying to trip her up, and she had already stumbled too many times on this journey. Carefully, she answered, “I plan to, but I am sure she will want to sell to the highest bidder.”

  “And you don’t think you can outbid me?”

  “With money, maybe not. But I have many other things you might want.”

  From the way he appraised her, Irene saw why he had earned his lecherous reputation. “And what would they be?” he asked.

  She closed her mind to what he might be thinking about her and forged ahead, steeling herself against the fact she was about to reveal. “Henry Simms is very sick. Soon I will inherit his entire estate.” There was no way for Stanić to know that this was a lie. She had inventoried Mr. Simms’s treasures for dispersal to museums, galleries, and rival collectors around the world. It would be his beyond-the-grave coup, exposing the extent of his illicit acquisitions. “I might be willing to give you the pick of his collection.”