by Kim Fay
“Not to me.”
Blinking in the direction of her husband, who was declaring that the Chinese needed foreigners to show them how to rid themselves of foreign rule, Simone reached for a rattan fan that had been left on the railing. As she waved it, stirring the air, the scent of boiled ginger floated across the balcony. “I was a girl when I left. Only eighteen. I couldn’t predict how hypocritical Roger’s version of a revolution would become.”
Irene was not political, but she wasn’t ignorant either. She knew about Communists, and not just how they raided the tsar’s palaces, scattering Botticellis and Rembrandts to pay for their rebellion. She also knew they controlled the Kuomintang and wanted to take over Shanghai, and China altogether if they could manage it. But this did not interest her, despite the role she knew the Merlins played in this situation. “Do you want to go back to Cambodia?” she asked.
“I miss it.”
“What do you miss most?”
“To stand in Angkor Wat is to be humbled,” Simone said. “A temple that served as an entire city, the pinnacle of Khmer civilization, abandoned for centuries, but still, it is …” She eyed her husband warily through the slats in the louvers. “It is …”
As if facing a mirror, Irene recognized Simone’s guarded expression. “You can trust me.”
“It is holy.”
Irene heard this, holy, as if it were a password. “I’m going to Cambodia in search of a lost temple. I’m going to search for the history of the Khmer.” She had not planned to blurt this out, and she paused, rubbing her collar between her thumb and forefinger.
“Go on,” Simone urged.
The inquisitive look on Simone’s face was encouragement enough, and Irene continued, “I have a diary that belonged to a missionary. It indicates that he found a written history of the empire.”
“Anyone who has ever studied the Khmer talks of such a finding.”
“Dreams of it,” Irene corrected her. “Do you dream of it?”
“I’m not sure anymore.” Simone shifted, and with her back to the yellow light shining down from a torch at the end of the balcony, her face was hidden by its own shadow.
“I want to hire you to help me find the scrolls.”
Simone’s voice lurched. “Scrolls?”
“You’ve heard of them, haven’t you?”
“I’ve heard the rumors, like everyone else.”
“This is more than a rumor. I have a map.”
Simone grazed the fan against her cheek. “Why did you come to me?”
“You took the bas-relief from Banteay Srei. You know how to do this sort of thing.”
“How do you know about … Oh yes, you would know. You work at the Brooke. Are you going to take the scrolls for the museum?”
“Actually, I worked at the Brooke. There was a … a falling-out. So no, I won’t be taking the scrolls back there. I want them for me, to study, and I don’t plan on taking them anywhere.” This wasn’t true, but Irene could not tell Simone so. She could not risk anyone knowing that she was going to take the scrolls to America as the centerpiece for a new institution—one in which she was in charge. “But I’ll still need secrecy. You know what would happen if a single word of this got out. If anyone knew we’d found the key to a lost civilization, we’d have every archaeologist and treasure hunter out there after us.”
“Naturally.”
“I’ve heard so much about you. How you learned Sanskrit from temple rubbings while you were a girl. That you read fluently in Pali and Khmer.” Irene could not hide her envy, for the only other language she knew was French. “I want you to translate the scrolls for me. I want you to tell me what happened to the Khmer Empire.” Her fingers clenched the balcony railing. “We will be the first Westerners to know.”
“When I was a child,” Simone said, “I wrote stories about how I was going to discover new temples. My father thought I should be a novelist. I wrote the lectures I would one day present to geographical societies around the globe, and I even designed the dress I would wear on my tour. It would be made of Khmer silk, with ivory buttons carved into the shape of the rosettes that are found on the temple walls.”
The wistful moan of a conch horn rose from a junk down on the river. Irene’s beloved job was gone. Her father was dead not even a year, and Henry Simms—the man who had sent her on this quest—was dying. Soon she would have no one left, no one who understood her. But she felt this woman understood. “Then you will come with me?”
Simone looked out at Roger, slouched on Anne’s old chaise, his shoes digging insolently into a red velvet bolster. He raised his glass in the direction of the balcony. She said, “I’m sorry, Irene.”
“What do you mean?”
“You cannot begin to know how sorry I am.”
“Sorry about what?”
“I can’t go. Not now.” Disgusted, Simone said, “Especially not now. Not on the eve of my husband’s revolution.”
“But you sailed all the way to France to raise money for the strikes. I’m authorized to offer you fifty thousand dollars, but I can get more. Name your price.”
“If only this were about money.”
“Fifty thousand dollars is not only money. It’s a fortune.”
“I told you what happened on the ship. Roger will not let me leave him. He’s on the cusp of making history.”
“How long will it take?”
Simone tossed the fan on the chair beside her. “Irene, this is a revolution, not a barroom brawl. Sun Yat-sen is dead, and the parties are splintering. The power struggles alone are enough to drive Roger mad, and if he goes any madder than he already is—”
“You want this revolution more than you want the scrolls?” Irene asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“What I want has not mattered for a long time.” Quickly, Simone walked back into the apartment.
Simone had called Angkor Wat holy. She called her husband’s revolution hypocritical.
“Wait,” Irene said. “I don’t understand.”
But rather than explain, Simone returned to Roger, perching on the arm of his chair and affectionately setting one hand on the nape of his neck.
The night seemed to shift, as if Shanghai were settling down into its foundation. A fitful cool struggled to press in from the distant East China Sea. Irene heard propellers thrashing against the black Whangpoo River. And she wondered what in the hell had just happened, while below in the dark a melon had been split, its sweetness clinging to the humid air.
Chapter 2
The Upper Hand
Six months earlier, in January, Irene sat in her office at the Brooke Museum of Oriental Art in Seattle, looking around at the objects that had accumulated over the years. She ran her hand lovingly along the edge of the drafting table that served as a desk, laid flat and stacked with her latest assignment, an inventory of John Thomson’s 1866 photographs of Angkor Wat. She admired the three French oak filing cabinets, hand-me-downs that had drifted in from other parts of the building as her need for more space in which to store correspondence and collection catalogs grew. Above them on the wall was her favorite item in the room, the first thing she had put in this storage-space-turned-office when she claimed it for herself a decade ago: a framed watercolor her mother had painted of the filigreed stone walls of the Khmer temple of Banteay Srei.
Irene remembered how it had hung in such solitude back when she was starting out, before her passion for Khmer studies outgrew the room, dominating all other projects she worked on for the museum’s various departments. Out of necessity, she found herself pinning her maps of Cambodia with one edge over the top of the other, and cramming statues of deities from Khmer archaeological sites wherever she could fit them on the pair of overflowing bookshelves, until one day she walked in and noticed that the office resembled a neglected curio shop. Usually, she was organized, meticulous, and every night as she left for home, she told herself she would tidy up the next day. But with each new day at the museum there was
always something more important to do.
Now she would have no choice, for soon she would need to gather up all of her belongings and move them into Professor Howard’s spacious office at the end of the museum’s second floor. She smiled at the thought of this prospect, and it was the first time she could recall smiling since the day after Thanksgiving, when she had found her father slumped on their sofa, his gaze viscous, his speech slurred, his memory of her already gone, two excruciating weeks before his body was finally destroyed by the stroke that had annihilated his mind.
Even though the office was steamy with warmth from the overheated radiator in the corner, Irene shivered against this recurring vision. Then she banished it. Her father had been so proud of all that she had achieved, and he would have hated for her anguish over his death to mar this one thing she wanted more than any other.
It had been a year since Professor Howard turned seventy and began discussing his retirement. A year filled with anticipation and meetings as he and Irene planned her transition into his place. He had met with the board of trustees no fewer than three times, championing her, as she had hoped he would, paying her back for all that she had done since she’d started working for him. She’d brought the museum to international attention while allowing him to take the credit, to keep his pride—biding her time, satisfied to know that once she took over, her expertise and influence would gradually become public knowledge.
Last week, Professor Howard had formally announced his retirement, and yesterday he’d told Irene that the trustees wanted to meet with her today at three. There could be only one reason for this. It still amazed her, that before the age of thirty she was going to reach her life’s goal of becoming the first female head curator of a major American museum. Euphoria gripped her as she heard footsteps coming down the corridor.
Professor Howard leaned into her open doorway. He was, as always, disheveled, his shirt half-untucked and his wispy, grizzled hair in need of a cut. He smiled. “They’re here.”
Irene grinned back, and when she reached him, she squeezed his hand.
“You’ve been generous to an old scholar all these years,” he said, tightening his fingers around hers. “You deserve this.”
Together they hurried up the back stairs, not just out of excitement but to escape the freezing cold of the hallways. In a jersey dress and matching cardigan, Irene was not attired for January. In general during the winter months, she wore heavy wool skirts and sweaters to work, but today it was essential to look the part she was about to take—slightly Continental, with a vague bohemian professionalism she had discovered that men admired in women who dealt in art.
When Irene and the professor entered the small boardroom, the trustees were already seated at the end of the U-shaped table, with their backs to a pane window that revealed the dingy winter gloom over Portage Bay. On the downward side of middle age, the three men were nearly interchangeable, timber and shipping barons who wore the excess of their prosperity in buffed fingernails and plump jowls, their well-tended paunches not quite hidden inside expensively tailored suits. Encircled by murals of Seattle’s Klondike gold rush boom, in which they had figured prominently, they rose from their leather chairs and tipped their gray heads to acknowledge Irene’s arrival.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Lundstrom,” she said, “Mr. Quinn, Mr. Ferber.”
It was only as Irene finished addressing the men that she noticed another one standing off to the side. He was tall and broad, with his hair greased down like Valentino’s. Even though he was Irene’s age, he was dressed in the style popular with boys on college campuses around the country, in a dark jacket that contrasted with his baggy, cream-colored Oxford trousers. What was Marshall Cabot doing here? She glanced at the professor, but he was clearly as surprised as she was by Marshall’s presence. Although she had known the trustees since she was a girl, she could not read their expressions.
Carl Lundstrom cleared his throat. “Irene, I believe you know Marshall.”
A hint of strain in Mr. Lundstrom’s tone turned Irene’s curiosity to unease. Indeed, she did know him. Marshall had studied art history at the Sorbonne, and had written his master’s thesis on archival techniques. His time at Paris’s Musée Indochinois du Trocadéro had been spent researching casts and plans brought back by the de Lagrée mission from Angkor Wat. It was research that Irene had cataloged for him the previous year, when he held a small exhibition of Khmer artifacts at his Cabot Gallery in Manhattan.
“Yes,” she said to Mr. Lundstrom. “Marshall and I met last year at Mr. Doheny’s estate. During the trip the professor and I took to consult with the Los Angeles museum when it started acquiring Chinese art. Hello, Marshall.”
“Dear Irene,” Marshall said, with the entitled bonhomie of a man who has made a place for himself in life, “don’t forget what a great help you were to me when the war broke out.” He told the trustees, “Shipping art to New York through enemy submarines was risky business.”
Mr. Lundstrom nodded knowingly. “Irene has always been a great help. I’m certain the two of you will make a formidable team. Irene, we have good news for you. Marshall has done us the honor of agreeing to curate the Brooke Museum.”
Irene stared at him. “But that’s my job. You can’t give him my job.” She tried to think as a sound like the sea rushed into her ears. She turned to Professor Howard. “You told me …”
“I don’t understand,” he muttered.
Firmly, Mr. Lundstrom said, “Irene, you must be aware of our position. You have no credentials. And to be fair, as a woman—”
“As a woman?” Fighting to hold back tears, Irene forced the modest, coaxing smile she had employed to her advantage so many times over the years. “As a woman, I was able to befriend Charlotte Grant. That friendship is the reason we are the only museum in America with a complete re-creation of court life in imperial China. Florence Levy,” she went on, unable to calm the tremor in her voice, “she has done an exceptional job as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. And Belle da Costa Greene has no formal training, but ever since she took over the Pierpont Morgan Library, Mr. Morgan scarcely makes a move without consulting her first.”
“Before you say anything more,” Mr. Lundstrom interrupted, “you should know that this decision is made.”
“Carl,” said Professor Howard, emerging from his initial bewilderment to address Mr. Lundstrom, “you and I spoke about this just last week.”
“We spoke about Irene’s value to the museum, Thomas. There’s no denying that. You’re essential, dear girl,” Mr. Lundstrom said to Irene. “Marshall will surely benefit from your assistance as he settles in.”
Suddenly, Irene felt as heavy as the granite clouds outside. Hanging low over the charcoal water, they pressed down on the last of the day, crushing the evergreen trees on the hill that rose from the bay’s opposite shore. Dear God, what had she been thinking? Only now—looking at Marshall Cabot, whose nonchalance made it clear that he had been prepared for this scene—could she see how naïve she had been, maneuvering in the background, trusting that she would be rewarded for her hard work and expertise, not ignored for her lack of prestige. But even if she too had gone to the Sorbonne, published monographs, and owned a gallery, Marshall Cabot would still have one advantage, and with this understanding, her distress became desperation.
Around her, the room began to quiver, and the ship laden with Yukon gold on the wall behind Marshall sputtered on the outskirts of her blackening vision. She pressed one hand down on the end of the table as the floor rolled beneath her. “I was grateful to you during the war,” she said urgently to Professor Howard, as if he were the one who could fix all of this. “I really was, for giving me a start. For giving me the chance to work here. I knew why you did it, I never once deluded myself, I knew it was because the men were gone, but I didn’t care. I was happy doing anything just to be here. Filing, typing letters. But soon I was doing more than that. Tell them I did much more than that.”
P
rofessor Howard’s face was so pinched that he seemed to be in physical pain. “I did, Irene. They know. They’ve always known.”
“They can’t have known. If they did, they wouldn’t have …” Appealing to the trustees, she said, “I spent every spare second of my time sorting things out. You must remember what it was like before I came here. Artifacts were just piled in the corners of galleries. I went through every piece of paperwork, I tracked down provenances and past sales, I put it all in order. I’ve given my life to the Brooke Museum, to its reputation.”
Irene’s throat burned, and it took all of her strength to resist the insistent push of tears. Was that what they were waiting for, as they watched her so impassively, for her to break down and prove their point, that a woman was too emotional for a job of such importance? “You told me what a fine curator I’d make. You let me think …” She could hardly believe it, that after all she had accomplished, these men had so little regard for her. Who did they think they were, sitting there pretending they didn’t damn well know the Brooke Museum had been wallowing in obscurity until she came along? Ashamed and angry at being pushed into betraying the professor in such a way, she declared, “I’m the only reason this museum has a reputation. I put it on the map.”
“Irene, that is why I’ve so looked forward to working with you.” Marshall spoke in a tone of conciliation. “Let me take you to dinner tonight at the Olympic. We can discuss all of this reasonably over a bottle of wine. Colleague to colleague.”
“That’s a fine idea,” Mr. Lundstrom said, sounding relieved.
The other two men nodded, and Irene was horrified to realize that they had assumed she would accept this situation.
Her words came out in a rush. “I couldn’t agree with you more, Marshall.” And although she knew she should stop talking, she recklessly went on. “We have so much to discuss. For example, I’m sure you still wonder how forty Duanfang ritual vessels could have been put on a ship in China and then disappear without a trace by the time that ship reached America. I believe they were intended for your gallery, isn’t that right?”