The Map of Lost Memories (24 page)

“I’m sorry, Simone, I want to, I do, but—”

“
Mon Dieu
, that man is a nuisance!”

The Cambodian had returned to the railing, curling his fingers in a downward wave, beckoning. Simone went back to him. Marc and Irene looked uneasily at one another, like chastened schoolchildren. “I hope Louis sorts out our paperwork,” Marc said. “If this is what we’re in for, I don’t think I have the stamina for another week of waiting for the steamer to come around again.”

Irene watched a rickshaw sluggishly approaching Simone and the Cambodian. It was laden with the oiled canvas tarpaulins the expedition would need for protection from the rain. Irene was too far away to see what was wrong with them, only that Simone did not approve. “It’s frustrating, not having any contacts of my own for the rest of the supplies,”
she said. “It makes me nervous, having to rely on her so completely right now.”

“The way she’s behaving, it seems as if it’s about more than having a few pills taken away,” Marc said. “What else do you think is wrong?”

“Welcome to the rabbit hole. I could sit here guessing for a year and the only thing I’d know for sure is that whatever I concluded, if Simone is involved, I wouldn’t be right.”

Irene and Marc did not have to wait long to learn the reason for Simone’s ill temper. Halfway through dinner, in the middle of a discussion about the difficulties of river travel because of the lateness of the monsoons this season, Simone shushed Louis—“I think we’ve heard enough about rapids for tonight”—and leaned toward Irene. “I’ve been waiting all day for you to mention his name,” she said, her voice smudged by the two glasses of Bordeaux she’d had with her cassoulet. “In Saigon, when you learned that Henry Simms was here, I thought you were going to run all the way to Cambodia to find out what is going on. Now we’ve been here an entire day, he’s living in a villa less than a mile outside of town, and my contacts tell me you haven’t gone to see him.”

Instinctively, Irene scanned the dining room, but the Cambodian in the blue dress shirt was not skulking in one of the corners. “What else have your contacts told you?”

“That he’s nearly dead.”

Marc’s leg braced against Irene’s beneath the table. Her wariness slipped from the room’s depths to the open terrace doors, where large winged insects soared in, drawn to the apricot burn of the electric lamps. Light flickered with the shadows of thick, flapping moths and the uneven swing of the electric fans. A storm was approaching, and waiters dashed around the patio, bringing in cushions, candleholders, and plants.

“He has cancer,” Irene said.

Tonight, Simone had chosen to resemble an American flapper, in a dress that swayed with beaded fringe every time she moved. She had even found time to oil her hair into pin curls, and she twisted a lock around her finger as she said, “When you and I first met, Irene, I assumed you and
Henry simply had a business arrangement. Two people in the same circle whose paths crossed at the right time and who made a deal for the scrolls. Then you showed up in my hospital room with his son.”

“I’ve been waiting for you to bring that up,” Irene said.

Coolly, Simone appraised Marc. “In love, of all things, with Henry Simms’s son.”

Heat rushed to Irene’s face, and her eyes darted away from Marc’s. She had not been hiding her feelings for him—they were sharing the same hotel room, after all—but still she felt exposed. She held out her after-dinner cigarette to Louis, the only one she could face without embarrassment. “What do you want from me?” she asked Simone.

“Clarification. Let’s start with the story behind you and Henry Simms.”

There was obviously more to Simone’s challenge than finding out how Irene and Mr. Simms were bound to one another. Irene could hear her digging for something deeper. Watching Simone take a third glass of wine, thinking about how argumentative she had been all day, and knowing how distrustful she was of Mr. Simms, Irene felt her instincts tell her to make peace. And to tread cautiously.
My contacts
. They were in new territory. Simone’s territory. “All right,” she said, “if that’s what you need from me tonight.” She wished she had ordered something stronger than the Cointreau digestif in the tiny cordial glass before her. She drank the citrus-flavored liqueur in one gulp, as if it were a shot of whiskey. “I was kidnapped before I was born.”

Outside, beyond the patio, clouds approached low and fast, and the moonlight was obscured. The gramophone crackled with the wet electricity in the air.
Ain’t nobody’s business if I do
. There was a shift around the table, a collective movement toward Irene, who had never told this story to anyone. She had never had anyone to tell it to who would not be shocked or, more likely, horrified. But these people—Marc, Simone, and Louis—they might not even find it unusual.

“My parents were living in Manila,” she told them. “Whenever my father was away in a port, he scoured curio shops. He bought porcelain vases, terra-cotta statues, wood-block prints, whatever caught his eye, and sold it to dealers.” As thunder rumbled its deep-throated imitation of
the world’s end, she had to raise her voice to explain. “But he wasn’t an expert. He never wanted to be. He called himself a scavenger, and that was what he loved most about the hunt. The element of surprise.”

As Irene sifted through the details of her parents’ story, the rain fell, a thick wall toppling against the hotel. Although it lapped onto the terrace, threatening to flood the dining room, the louvered doors remained open. Waiters served wine, the front-desk madame worked the gramophone beside the dance floor, and the hotel’s Greek owner inhaled snuff with a turbaned guest. Despite the distraction of drunken conversations and raucous laughter competing with the storm, Marc, Simone, and Louis were intent on only one thing.

“Go on,” Marc urged.

“My father was on shore leave in Borneo when he learned about the death of a missionary who was said to collect tribal artwork. He asked to view it. There wasn’t much, some crude carvings of Jesus, the usual shrunken heads and bone pipes. But he did find a trunk of botanical drawings, a catalog of the flora of Sarawak. He thought it might be of interest to a university. When he got the trunk back to Manila, he discovered a false panel. He removed it and—”

The sky splintered, and thunder exploded through. A roar of approval flew up from the men and women in the dining room.

“He removed it and he found—”

The ground seemed to open deep beneath them, releasing a detonation from the earth’s core. The hotel shook. The lights went out. Through the pounding rain, the colonials cheered louder.

Irene felt a hand on hers. It was Louis, asking, “What did he find?”

Irene whispered, “What if it was Reverend Garland’s diary?”

Around the room, matches flared, and candles began to flutter. Kerosene lamps were lit, and as a waiter set one in the center of their table, their faces took on an eerie, quavering orange pallor.

“What are you talking about?” Simone asked.

With the fans stilled, the air grew heavy. Lightning stripped darkness from the sky. “The diary. What if that’s what my father found in the missionary’s trunk? He told me it was a book.”

“What kind of book?”

“I don’t know.
That damn book
. That’s all I ever heard him call it. I’d forgotten that it had belonged to a missionary.” Her mind raced, calculating. “If that missionary was Reverend Garland, that would mean my father found the diary before I was born. It could mean that Mr. Simms knew about it all the way back then, and not just after my father died.”

“Why would he have known?” Marc asked.

“And what does any of this have to do with the kidnapping?” Louis asked.

“Mr. Simms was also living in Manila then. That’s when he became friends with my parents,” Irene explained. “There was a gangster there too. An Englishman named Lawrence Fear.”

Simone sat forward. “Fear?”

“I know. A criminal named Fear. It sounds like something from a dime novel, doesn’t it?”

“What happened?” Simone asked, urgently. “What did he do?”

“My father had shown the book to one of the dealers he worked with, to find out what it was worth, and he figured the dealer must have told Fear. Fear had people fishing for information for him all over the Orient. When he learned of the book, he waited until my father was out of the house and sent his men for my mother. She was eight months pregnant with me, but that didn’t matter to them. They locked her up in a warehouse on one of the wharves. My father brought the book immediately, but something went wrong and Fear shot my mother. I remember the scar, above her breast.”

“Simms,” Louis prodded. “How does Simms fit in?”

“He went with my father to help. They knew they’d be searched, so they weren’t carrying guns. Mr. Simms killed Fear with an iron bar he’d found, and another man with Fear’s own gun before the rest ran away.”

“Everything he’s told me about you,” Marc said, dazed as he absorbed this loose scrap of his father’s history, “but he never said anything about this.”

“I was told that the book disappeared,” Irene said, “but what if that’s not true? What if my father kept it all those years until his death?”

“Why would he take it and not tell anyone?” Louis asked.

“I don’t know,” Irene said.

“Lawrence Fear.” Simone repeated the name, as if it were a foreign term she was trying to interpret.

As swiftly as it had blown into the city, the squall was moving on. The growl of thunder began to fade, and Irene contemplated the possibility that Reverend Garland’s diary and the book her father had found in the missionary’s trunk were one and the same. It didn’t make sense: If they’d had the diary, her father and Mr. Simms would have gone after the lost temple back then, and she could think of no reason why Mr. Simms would have her hunt for it again. Still, she could not shake the thought.

“I took you to Angkor Wat,” Simone murmured, fidgeting with the fringe of her dress. “I let you have that, because I really did think that, deep in your heart, you’re one of us.”

“Simone,” Louis said, with warning.

“Once she sees it, I thought, then I won’t have to convince her.” Simone drained her wineglass. “She’ll know. She’ll want their resurrection as much as I do. But I didn’t understand. This goes too far back for you. In the womb! Of course you’re like Henry Simms. Of course the opinions of men like him matter to you. You can’t help yourself. I knew this was going to be a struggle, but … And my mother. My mother! How does she even fit into this?”

Marc and Louis looked to Irene for an explanation, but Irene shook her head, silently letting them know that she had no idea why Simone was talking about her mother. Speechless, the three of them watched Simone as she began to whisper, “No.” Her head tipped from side to side, her dress shimmying as she repeated herself. “No!” she shouted, shearing conversation from the room.

“Simone?” Louis said, tentatively this time.

“What did she take?” Marc held up his hand, dismissing the rapidly approaching front-desk madame. “Simone, did you take anything tonight?”

“You’re still not well,” Louis said to her. “You shouldn’t have had so much to drink.”

The madame crossed her arms over her brick-house torso and planted herself a few feet away.

One of us
—it rustled into Irene’s thoughts.

“My mother, of all things,” Simone muttered.

“What about your mother?” Marc asked. When Simone did not respond, he said to Louis, “She’s almost delirious. This is more than too much to drink.”

Defiantly, Simone said, “They know they can trust me. They told me about … I know Simms intends to leave a fortune to L’École Française d’Extrême-Orient.” Breathing heavily, she turned to Louis. “You promised you wouldn’t tell her, and you did. Now you think you can trick me, as if this revolution—”

Louis caught Simone by the arm and lifted her from her chair. “It’s time to go.”

The agitation in Irene’s thoughts amplified as Simone’s words from the night on the steamer when they were sailing out of Hong Kong broke through.
There are reasons a revolution is necessary, Irene. I didn’t believe in it solely because he told me to.… I knew what I was doing. I have always known what I am doing
.

Simone mumbled, “If you think you can trick me into giving up the scrolls by funneling Simms’s money to me through some lackey pretending to work for the government—”

“Enough!” Louis pulled Simone away from the table.

The front-desk madame looked worriedly at the hotel owner, but the Brillo-haired Greek shrugged and took another whiff of his snuff.

Irene remembered Simone berating the official in the customs shed back in Saigon.
People like you are the reason I joined the Communists. You are the reason the French are going to lose Indochina
.

Simone struggled against Louis, and Marc stood. “Let me help you.”

“No.” Louis was much stronger than he appeared to be. Already, he had Simone halfway across the room.

Then there was today in the café.
Their time
will
come again
. Irene reached for a drink, but her hand was shaking, and the glass shattered as it hit the tile floor. “Shit.”

“What?” Marc asked. “What in the hell is going on?”

Incredulously, Irene said, “I think Simone wants the scrolls for the Communists.”

For her confrontation with Simone, Irene chose the one kind of place where she had always felt sure of herself. As she heaved open the front door of the Musée Albert Sarraut, she pressed her palms against the carvings on its surface, the same floral pattern found on stone pillars and lintels throughout the Khmer temples. Inside, a Cambodian slouched in a hammock. He opened one eye, halfway. It was not yet 7:00
A.M
. Her stare dared him to turn her away. He could not be bothered to confront a wild-eyed white woman at such an early hour and retreated back into his sleep.

Although the morning was already liquid with heat, the rose-hued vestibule was cool. Irene had never been inside a museum that was not cool, and she savored the familiar subterranean atmosphere.
She crossed the hall to the opposite door, and when she pushed it back, a reflection of sunlight pooled at her feet. It was as if someone had poured warm water over her sandals. She entered the courtyard. Simone had not yet arrived, and Irene was both relieved and amazed as she studied the galleries that framed the lotus ponds, four dark green water gardens that fanned out from a central gazebo. Unlike any museum she had ever been in, there was not a single interior wall to protect the centuries-old statues of Siva and Brahma, nor even screens to pull closed against the elements.