The Map of Lost Memories (5 page)

“But the first recorded sighting of Angkor Wat occurred in the eighteen sixties,” Irene said. “If this man was there in 1825, why—”

“Keep reading.”

Irene looked up, astounded. “Is this what I think it is? This man saw the history? It exists?”

“It seems so.”

“What if it’s still there? But it would have to be there. If someone had taken it, we’d know. If anyone would know, we would. Oh, my God, we have a clue. The first real clue to finding out what happened to the Khmer civilization!” Irene was disoriented by the severe pounding of her pulse. Not just in her chest and wrists, it beat its wings into the corners of the room like a trapped bird. “You’ve had that box for two weeks. Why haven’t you shown the book to me until now?”

Mr. Simms refilled their glasses. Together they drank while she stared at him in wonder, and he—a man who always knew what to say—seemed to be at a loss for words.

“And why did my father leave it to
you?
” she persisted. “He knew how much something like this would mean to me.”

But Mr. Simms did not answer, and Irene’s attention was drawn back to the diary. “All this time I’ve let the Khmer come to me,” she said. “Whenever I thought about going to Cambodia, it was as a curator. I would visit Angkor Wat and then spend time doing research at the museum in Phnom Penh. I’ve been waiting for so long for their history to be found, but I never dreamed it might be found by me. Unearthing the Khmer’s history could buy me a place, a position that could never be ignored.” Standing up, she declared, “I want to go. To Cambodia.”

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.”

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.”