The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  The official was furious. He folded Simone’s paperwork and shoved it back to her. “Since I am merely a powerless bureaucrat, perhaps it would be best to leave you in the hands of the inspector. Come with me.”

  “You can’t detain us,” Simone protested, refusing to follow. “This is my birthplace. What are you gaping at?” The woman Irene had called an Alsatian brood cow was grinning at Simone’s misfortune as one of the agents stamped her passport. “This is not a carnival. This is my life.”

  Simone’s voice plunged dangerously, and Irene quickly saw that she was no longer feeling courageous. She was panicking, terrified of not being let in, of being exiled back to Shanghai. Irene took her by the elbow and ushered her after the official, into a hot cubicle of a room that contained only a bench running along one wall. The official stood in the center with his arms crossed over his chest. He said, “I will let you know when the inspector arrives. He should not be more than an hour or two.”

  Irene was exasperated. Roger was dead. She and Simone had paid their dues. Without even bothering to cajole the man, she held out the second envelope she had prepared.

  He said, “I have already turned down one bribe today.”

  “It can’t hurt to have a look.”

  He raised his chin, refusing.

  Irene opened the envelope herself. As she fanned the bills out, the official was unable to hide his interest. This was a small fortune—the amount she would have given Monsieur Boisselier, had he known to ask for it. She could see the man debating. Folding the money back into the envelope, she walked toward him. She slipped the envelope into his jacket pocket. Without a word, he left the room.

  “What if it’s too late?” Simone asked, fussing with the trim on her robe. “What if this is too much for him?”

  Irene was troubled by how easily Simone had fallen into a state of agitation, but there was no time to ask who him was or to calm her down. If the official’s anger had a chance to smolder, who knew how long he would keep them confined? “Come with me,” Irene said.

  “Where?”

  “Saigon.”

  Taking Simone’s arm, Irene guided her back to the counter, where she smiled politely at a young English couple who had reached the head of the line. “Pardon me, but we weren’t quite finished.” She set Simone’s maroon-covered Union Française Indochine passport down in front of the offending official.

  The man lowered his eyes. A bead of sweat slid down his cheek and dropped onto the paper, blurring the ink. Beyond the counter the shed swarmed with coolies, grunting with the effort of lifting and stacking luggage. The air smelled of sweat and cowhide. With measured slowness, the official pressed the black stamp into the page so hard that the approval was illegible.

  Before he could retract his decision, Irene grabbed the passport and gave it to Simone. She waited for her own to be stamped, and then she followed after the red phoenix that rose up the back of Simone’s robe. As she watched Simone step into the margin of sunlight coming through the open door, a prickle of wet heat swooped over her skin—the quick, voluptuous fever that comes before a person faints.

  This is it, she thought. The moment I enter this city, Cambodia is less than a day away.

  ——

  Simone walked quickly past the mounds of hat cases, valises, and Louis Vuitton wardrobe trunks, heading for the fence that separated the customs yard from the waiting crowds. She wrapped her fingers around the timber slats and peered into the street. With relief she said, “There he is, right there.”

  Simone spoke as if Irene should know what she was talking about. Methodically, Irene examined the crowd. Beyond the cluster of colonials, the border of half-naked rickshaw drivers shifted in expectation of fares to come. Farther out, drivers of Peugeots and Chevrolets smoked and chatted to one another. Irene did not recognize anyone. “Who?” she asked.

  “Over there, by the woman in the red hat.”

  Next to the matron, a man was leaning against the trunk of a plane tree. He was young, in his late twenties at the most, his body lean in a typical tropical suit. He was separated enough from the crowd so Irene could see that below the cuffs of his white pants, he wore heavy boots with thick soles more suited to the wilderness than to the city. “Who is he?”

  Simone’s face was flushed. “Louis Lafont.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” Simone laughed. “Really.”

  The assistant curator of the Conservation d’Angkor, Louis Lafont was an expert on anastolysis, the process of dismantling a structure for study and then returning it to its original form. Without his work, Irene never would have understood the architectural techniques of the Khmer. “My God, what’s he doing here?”

  “I asked him to meet me.”

  Heat rose off the pavement, and in places the sunlight was so bright on the sidewalk that Irene expected to hear it sizzle. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What if he didn’t come, Irene? It would have been too embarrassing. You would have thought I was a fool.”

  “Why?” But the moment she asked this, Irene recalled Monsieur Boisselier’s words about Simone’s first love. Then she immediately thought, No, too easy. If there was one thing she had learned in the last few weeks, it was that nothing about Simone was easy.

  Oblivious to Irene’s question, Simone rushed out of the customs shed. The instant she emerged, her blue robe billowing, the two French reporters swung around in her direction. Louis saw her and darted through the snag of cars and rickshaws. Even before he reached her, he was holding out his arms. As she fell into them, the air clicked with a camera’s shutter.

  “Lafont! Hey, Lafont, over here!” shouted the taller of the reporters, a swarthy man whose tone was as insolent as the tilt of his hat. “Is it true that you threatened Roger Merlin’s life when Madame Merlin broke off her engagement with you?”

  Simone had mentioned nothing about being engaged, nor had she said a single thing about Louis Lafont the night she and Irene had confessed their lives to each other on the Lumière.

  “Madame Merlin,” called the second reporter, using his compact bulk to push past the first. “Chiang Kai-shek himself has said you once told his wife you wanted to hire an assassin to kill your husband.” With an attitude as conciliatory as the other’s was impertinent, he asked, “Would you like to comment on this?”

  “Who has not wanted to hire an assassin to kill my husband at some time or another, you unoriginal little …” Simone searched for just the right word and then spat it out with venom. “Hack!” Although the insult continued, it was muffled as Louis pressed Simone into the backseat of a silver and black sedan.

  Cringing at Simone’s imprudence in rising to the reporters’ bait, Irene struggled against the congestion that was growing around the car. In her attempt to skirt it, she was caught in a flurry of sailors whose voices rang with accents from around the world. Red pom-poms flopped on their military caps as they scurried toward their ships near the barracks farther down the waterfront. Elbowing through them, trying to reach the sedan before the gendarme, whom she had spotted pushing past the two reporters, Irene started to panic. How were they going to slip into the jungle undetected with so many people watching them? Beyond a cluster of nosy onlookers, she saw the gendarme shove a paper at Louis and heard Louis firmly declare, “The commissaire can wait until tomorrow. Madame Merlin needs her rest.”

  Irene managed to get to the car and climb into the front passenger seat, beside an Annamite driver who already had the motor running. As she slammed the door shut, Louis said, “Tuan, take us to the hotel.”

  The swarthy reporter in the hat noticed Irene. “Mademoiselle,” he yelled through the closed window as he grabbed onto the side-view mirror. “For you.” He was waving a handful of piastre notes. “For an exclusive interview about your time on the ship with Roger Merlin’s widow.”

  “Ignore that lout. Whatever he offers, I’ll double it,” bartered the shorter, more mannerly newshound.

  “I c
an make you famous,” promised his rival as the car pulled away, wrenching the mirror from his hand.

  Despite the inescapable curiosity of the passengers on the Lumière, Irene had felt sheltered on the ship. But here on land, it was as if she had become part of an exhibit, captured and displayed. The small triumph with the customs officer faded into exhaustion, and she wanted all of this to go away. The gendarme wielding the summons from the commissaire. The reporters with their insistent accusations. The mystery of Simone’s “first love” followed by the unexpected appearance of Louis Lafont, who would most certainly want to know why they were going into the jungle. To bluff him with her story about an ancient Khmer trading route would be an interesting challenge, but she did not have the energy to think about that right now.

  As the docks receded, Irene rolled her window down, but the air felt as if it were being pushed through a furnace. It was that merciless equatorial hour that circled around noon like a vulture, when no alternative, not even hiding in a dark room with an electric fan, could bring the kind of relief a person needed, a relief that reached one’s core.

  Beneath the sun-speckled tunnel of tamarind boughs that arched all the way to the cathedral, the Rue Catinat was deserted. In Seattle, midnight to dawn were the silent hours. In the tropics it felt as though the days were turned inside out. Irene gazed at silhouettes of hammocks that looked as if they had been painted into shaded doorways. There was not a single European on the street, and the Orientals seemed to have collapsed wherever they had been standing when the sun reached its apex. In an open-faced shop beside a stack of raw silks, a Hindu slept atilt on his haunches. Underneath a plate-glass window displaying a beaded black gown, a naked child lay sprawled facedown on the sidewalk. He wasn’t even on a mat, and if Irene had not become accustomed to such sights in Shanghai, she would have thought the boy was dead.

  The car passed the palatial residence of the governor-general and traveled into what Irene knew from having studied the city’s maps was the neighborhood of Cirque Sportif. Here, villas were set back from the boulevard, as the homes of the wealthy always are. The chauffeur drew the car up to the Petit Hotel du Cap-Ferrat. Like shoals of amethyst fish, bougainvillea swam up the walls. One of the lower balconies was tangled in the branches of a mango tree, and Irene could imagine the sanctuary of the room behind it.

  A soup seller sat near the gates, asleep in a patch of shade. His sloped woven hat shielded his face, and his palm-leaf fan had fallen to the ground. Steam simmered from the clay pot at his side. After more than a week on the Lumière, far from the tang of an Oriental street, Irene felt the urge to be enveloped in spice. While Louis helped Simone from the car, Irene walked over to the vendor. Breathing in the scent of fish drifting on a current of lemongrass and star anise, she felt her strength begin to return. And it amazed her that somehow, despite how this part of the world wearied her, it also gave her sustenance—just to stand in the middle of it, sheltered from the midday sun by the flaming petals of a coral tree.

  As Irene’s and Simone’s baggage was delivered to the hotel, Louis apologetically explained that he was obligated to attend a meeting and dinner with Murat Stanić, one of the conservation’s patrons. Once he was gone, Irene wasted no time in asking Simone why he had been waiting for her here in Saigon. But as Simone watched him drive away, she refused to answer. For the better part of the afternoon, she brooded on the window seat in Irene’s room while Irene tried not to think about the latest delay: having to wait for Simone to be questioned by the police.

  Finally, Simone roused herself and declared that she wanted to show Irene the teahouses and gambling parlors in the Chinese district of Cholon, places she had skipped out of boarding school to visit when she was a girl. But all the while, as their electric trolley passed autobuses, rickshaws, and boats stacked with paddy, plying the putrid canals, she complained about Stanić, who had arrived unexpectedly in Saigon the day before.

  “That man. Bah! So annoying,” she declared, stepping down from the trolley and onto a raised wooden sidewalk where traders wearing red fezzes changed money from open booths. “He would appear on the day of my reunion with Louis. He has always been a nuisance. A pedophile too, you know. He gets his girls from the local orphanages.”

  “I know. Everyone knows,” Irene said, as irritated with Simone as Simone was with Stanić.

  A Serb, Stanić belonged to the exclusive coterie of men, Henry Simms included, whom every archaeologist and museum curator feared for what they might purloin, but ultimately needed for what they were willing to finance. He happened to be the man with whom Irene had negotiated to obtain the empress dowager’s ring for Anne. He was also funding two of Louis’s most important restoration projects. Irene knew Louis could not afford to ignore Stanić’s dinner invitation. “You seem to forget, Simone, he makes Louis’s work possible,” she said.

  Simone marched around a woman serving pressed pork out of baskets that hung like scales from the ends of a bamboo pole. Indignantly, she said, “There was a time when Louis would not have put me second even if God Himself had invited him to dinner.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question. Why couldn’t you have waited to see Louis until after we found the temple?”

  “I had my first bowl of shark-fin soup in that restaurant,” Simone evaded, pointing across the street. “And I learned how to play mah-jongg right next door.” She stopped in front of a shop set into a row of balconied, French-style buildings. Its wooden plaque read OPIUM MERCHANT in six languages. The odor swelling from the open door gave the air a sweet, drunken tilt. Through shreds of smoke, Irene saw an old man, his skeletal chest bare, lying with his head on a majolica pillow as he waited for an ivory pipe that was being prepared above an open flame by a boy no older than ten. Gazing in with longing, Simone said, “Perhaps we should take a little rest.”

  “Answer my question.”

  Stubbornly silent, Simone moved on, into a lane that felt narrower than it actually was because of all the men and women, children and grandparents, crowding out of their homes as the sun went down. The air was clouded with a vapor, from incense, fowl roasting on charcoal braziers, and yet more opium dens. Eventually, she entered a pharmacy. Its windows were stacked with dark brown pods and swallows’ nests, and in the center of it all rested the jawbone of a tiger. As Irene followed Simone inside, she caught her breath against the rank peat smell of old mushrooms and wet grass that came from the baskets.

  Simone reached into one of the containers and held out a scaly tuber that resembled a piece of ginger. “Turmeric,” she said. “If you make a paste of this, it’s good for the skin. Helpful for jaundice.”

  Irene took it from Simone and put it back in the bin. “You can’t ignore me.”

  Doing just that, Simone greeted the shopkeeper in Mandarin. He returned her greeting with a slight lowering of his whiskered chin. He was indifferent to her knowledge of his language, and to her odd black suit with its magenta cravat and stovepipe trousers, funneled into a pair of button-up Victorian boots. While she talked he retrieved twigs and petals from jars and basins until a dozen piles lay on the counter, like a collection amassed by a boy after a day spent exploring in the woods.

  Simone pointed to one of the piles. “This is for insect bites, for the itch. And it’s an antiseptic. This one here, it’s for fungus. You will not recognize your feet after the first few days in the jungle, but this will help more than any of the creams you can purchase from a Western doctor.” She picked up a fernlike lace of dried leaf. “Sweet wormwood for malaria. Louis has had malaria. He’ll take quinine since he doesn’t have the faith in Chinese medicine that I have, but I will bring this anyway. He doesn’t have to know what I put in his tea.”

  Irene tried to grasp what Simone was saying. “What are you talking about?”

  Simone supervised as the shopkeeper bundled each mound into its own brown paper packet. “Once you’ve had malaria, it never goes away, but there are precautions you can—”


  “Louis is going with us?”

  “Of course.”

  “Absolutely not! No!”

  “What do you mean, no?” Simone asked with indignation. “We need him.”

  “What in the hell have you done?”

  With her back to the shopkeeper, Simone said, “I thought you’d be thrilled. You have no practical experience. He can make this much easier for us.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Anyone can make lists, Irene.”

  Ambushed by Simone’s scorn, Irene frantically searched for an argument to prove her wrong. “You saw me with Roger. He believed me, Simone. He believed that story I told him.”

  “Then he pulled out a gun.”

  “And the customs agent. He took that money. It was easy. I have enough money to buy off every official in Indochina. I can give you an envelope for the commissaire tomorrow if you need it.”

  Simone extended a banknote toward the shopkeeper. She murmured “xie xie” and swept her purchases into her leather shoulder bag. Tugging at Irene’s sleeve, she hurried outside. “You can’t say things like that in public. Half of them only pretend they don’t speak English, and half of that lot work for the government. Everyone is watching everyone. And let me tell you something, Irene, each time you give someone a bribe, you create suspicion. If you’re handing out money wherever you go, it becomes evident that you have something to hide. Can’t you see that Louis will give us legitimacy?”

  Irene jerked free and sidestepped a black pool of blood hemorrhaging from the threshold of the butcher’s shop next door. She dodged past the lacquered duck carcasses hanging off hooks from the eaves, and looked away from the nauseating sight of varnished pigs, sitting on an outdoor tabletop like children’s toys from a horror tale. “Men appropriate everything,” she said. “They take it all as if they have a right to it, but not this. Not this time! I won’t let Louis have what’s mine.”

  Taking refuge in front of a sundries shop, where sidewalk shelves were stacked with turbans and bamboo calendars, Simone retrieved her Gitanes from her pocket. She held out the blue packet, but Irene’s eyes were burning and her throat was singed from all the smoke in the air. “You didn’t even ask me,” she said, shaking her head.