The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  “Such as?” Stanić asked, sounding almost bored. His show of indifference at the pending death of one of his greatest competitors was impressive.

  “The tsar’s treasures,” Irene said.

  “There’s more where Caesar’s Ruby came from?”

  After Lenin had nationalized the Romanov palaces, imperial possessions began to filter into the collecting underworld. Then the Soviets started plundering relics from churches, museums, and private homes, with Trotsky calling it famine relief to avoid criticism. Irene had followed this rupture in history with fascination, for she could not help comparing the House of Romanov to the kingdom of the ancient Khmer. So this was how an entire civilization’s treasures could vanish completely.

  “What do you want?” she asked. “Raphael’s Alba Madonna? The Wedgwood dinner service commissioned for Catherine the Great?”

  “This is all quite interesting.” Stanić called for the bill, and while he paid for their breakfast, he asked, “Tell me, why has Henry Simms come all this way to die?”

  The question jolted Irene, and she turned her attention to the street, where the morning’s commerce was well under way. Rice, fish sauce, and egg sellers made their rounds, baskets atop their heads, clay jars hanging from bamboo poles over their shoulders. At the surrounding tables, businessmen began folding their newspapers, preparing to ease into another day of work. Irene sought an answer, but there was nothing she could say that would not cause a hitch in her voice. She had no choice but to remain silent.

  “Apparently, I’ve gone too far,” Stanić said, but without apology. As he stood and returned his wallet to his jacket pocket, he once again studied Irene, but this time his look was not prurient. If she had not known of his ego, if she had not been on guard, she could have let herself believe that he considered the two of them equals. Nodding at the touring car that had pulled up to the terrace, he said, “I’m off to Phnom Penh. It would not do for me to be in the area and not pay my respects to Henry. Please stay in touch, Irene.”

  Getting to her feet, she said, “Naturally.”

  “And my dear, once Henry is gone, you can always work for me.” His gaze roved the length of her body. “After all, I am not a half-wit like those men at the Brooke. I do appreciate what you are able to do.”

  Although Irene had learned nothing concrete from Stanić, she felt it had been worthwhile to go to him. He needed to know that she was aware of him, and that she would be keeping her eye on him, just as he would be keeping his on her. She was still concerned by how much he might know that he was not telling her, but she had to set this worry aside for the time being. When she arrived back at the hotel, she asked the concierge if Simone and Louis had come down for breakfast yet.

  The burly Frenchwoman glowered. Her fleshy forearms lay as if wearily abandoned on the counter behind which she stood. “There was a ferocious argument last night,” she reported, with the vicious pleasure that a certain type of person takes in gossip. “You did not hear it? I nearly called the authorities, but Madame Merlin left. She has not come back.”

  “Did she take her luggage?”

  The concierge shook her head.

  Irene climbed the steps two at a time, running down the hall to her room, but the diary and her maps were locked in the bureau where she had left them. The bedsheets were on the floor where she had kicked them during her restless night, and her new outfit was in a heap on the armchair. Relieved, she pushed at the shutters to let in air, balmy with the syrup of tropical flowers. Stepping out onto her balcony, she caught sight of Louis below, slumped on a stone bench among the rosebushes in the garden. He did not seem to see her as he blinked up into the sunlight cresting over the roof of the hotel.

  She was down in the garden as quickly as she had been up to her room. Standing over him, she asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s sleeping.” His voice was hoarse. “After they pumped her stomach, the doctor gave her a sedative.”

  “Pumped her stomach?”

  As Irene said this, she realized that minus the jacket, Louis was still wearing his suit from the night before. His eyes were bloodshot, his shirt was untucked, and he was scarcely recognizable as the man she’d had drinks with at the Continental. He massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, and when he replied, it was as if saying the words took all of his effort. “Simone overdosed on phenobarbital last night.”

  Overdosed? “What … how?” Irene stammered, afraid to know what he meant by this. “Is she going to be all right?”

  Louis reached for Irene’s hand. Whether to calm her or steady himself, she couldn’t have said. “The doctor assured me she will be fine.”

  Around the base of a rosebush, fallen petals lay like pink snow. Above, the magnolias were swollen with heat and light. “A person who overdoses on pills is not fine.”

  “I know.” His eyes filled with tears, and he did not attempt to hide them as Irene would have.

  She released his hand and sat down on the bench beside him. Their shoulders touched, and she felt him shudder as he caught his breath. “What happened?” she asked.

  “We had a fight,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “We used to want the same things, but now … I didn’t know how much she’d changed. I didn’t know how much it all really means to her.”

  “What are you talking about? The temple?”

  Louis shook his head. “We fought, and she left. She must have gone straight to the Majestic and checked in to a room there. Sometime during the night a porter saw water trickling out from under her door. They found her in the bathtub. She was unconscious.” His words faded. “She could have drowned.”

  Nausea pressed into the back of Irene’s throat. “She didn’t.” She said this as if it were a command. She lit a cigarette. “Do you think it was an accident?”

  “Do you think it was deliberate?” Louis asked, startled.

  Irene recalled the Luminal she’d found in Simone’s desk in Shanghai. “I don’t know.”

  “There was a time when she wanted to find the Khmer’s history more than anything else, when the history would have been enough for her. When we were young, we talked about it endlessly. To hell with Sherlock Holmes. The Khmer were the greatest mystery story we’d ever been told. But a mystery without an ending. We were half-crazed by it. Everywhere we went, we wondered about it. Was the maid at the governor-general’s residence the descendant of a princess? Was the debonair old man who repaired shoes at the market a descendant of the last king? They were all out there among us, they had to be. Their world was our entire life. I don’t know if you can understand such a thing as this, Irene, but—”

  “I can.” Envy rushed through her. To have someone who shared your past. “I do.”

  “Did Simone tell you how I fell in love with her?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “I was nine years old. She was only six.”

  As he stared straight ahead, Irene observed the outline of his thin nose, the light brown shading of stubble along his tensed jaw.

  “We’d ridden out to Ta Prohm with Monsieur Commaille, and while we were climbing around the ruins, we found a grove of pansy butterflies. Hundreds of them filled the air. If you stood perfectly still, they would land on you. I can see Simone, her entire body fluttering with blue and green. Even Monsieur Commaille had never seen such a thing. He called it extraordinaire. As a man whose life was shaped around the Khmer temples, he did not use this word lightly. A week later, she gave it to me for my birthday. The entire grove, as if it was hers to give. Think of it, at six years old. She even painted a sign: LOUIS LAFONT BUTTERFLY GARDEN. Sometimes when I missed her, I would drive out to the grove and spend the night.”

  “Are you still in love with her?”

  “We had always known that we were going to be married. Then her parents died.” He lifted his shoulders, rising out of his reminiscence. “It was terrible for everyone. She did the only thing that made sense to her
at the time.”

  “You’re generous.”

  “I’m realistic. I have to be. I know that I alone am not enough anymore to make her happy. I know that if you hadn’t come along with the temple, she never would have left him. She couldn’t have. But I never imagined that she wanted to leave him for …”

  “What?” Irene asked, her thoughts turning to Monsieur Boisselier’s cryptic comment about Simone’s first love. If it wasn’t Louis, she was baffled as to what it could be. “Please, tell me what she wants.”

  But Louis began to cry again, not the undone weeping of a woman but the stifled, resistant sadness particular to men. Irene let him take her hand once more, let him trust her so he might keep on trusting her, as the moist warmth of the garden spun around them like a cocoon.

  Chapter 12

  The Compass Rose

  Plane trees flanked the pathway leading from the road to the hospital, their branches joining to form a vault of flickering sea green leaves overhead. Irene and Louis followed Simone’s physician, the grizzled Dr. Kessler, through a shadowed corridor. Although the sun was as potent as usual at this midmorning hour, the passage delivered them into the protection of a large courtyard, surrounded by a gallery of patios, all shielded by latticed partitions. Irene tread cautiously over the raised roots snarled between two camphor trees. As they walked, Dr. Kessler said, “She’s been asking for you.” He could have been speaking to either of them. He nodded to the patio in the farthest corner. As they started toward it, he put a hand on Louis’s shoulder. “May I speak with you for a moment?”

  Reluctantly, Louis stopped. Irene wanted to hear what the doctor had to say, but the moment she had stepped into the hospital, the horror of what had nearly happened convulsed through her. Struck by how thankful she was that Simone was alive, she left Louis with the doctor and hurried across the courtyard to the open doorway of Simone’s room.

  Glossy green shutters hugged the tall windows. Above the bed, a rosewood cross hung askew, while on a chest of drawers, a tin image of the Buddha resided on an areca wood altar. Simone was sitting up, her narrow shoulders engulfed by pillows. She wore a nightdress with a crocheted collar that was the same sickly beige color as the walls. A thin blanket was pulled over her lap. Her skin was more pallid than usual, and deep lines of exhaustion pursed the corners of her mouth.

  She blinked at Irene, and Irene stared back, unblinking, afraid to speak. She did not understand the fury that was enveloping her.

  “I like my doctor,” Simone said. “He’s a German. The French go about things in a roundabout way, but the Germans, they know how to be direct.”

  “How dare you … We killed your husband.” Irene was appalled by her inability to stop the words. “I didn’t do that, I didn’t save you, I didn’t help you escape from Shanghai, for this, this … I don’t even know what this is!”

  “Are you through with me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Now that Simms is here.” Simone’s voice shrank to a pitiful whisper. “You don’t need me anymore, do you?”

  “You’re crazy. After all the time I spent getting you out of Shanghai. After all the time I’ve lost because of you. My God, Simone, I already told you, I didn’t know he was coming.”

  “Stop shouting at me. This was devastating. Worse than I imagined.”

  A new fear came over Irene. Simone’s contradiction, to be so frail and yet to have survived so much, had once been interesting. Now it felt only dangerous. “What kind of person imagines something like this?”

  “It was an accident, Irene. An accident. I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t been sleeping since we left Shanghai. And Louis and I, we fought. He’s so selfish! I had a drink and took some pills, and then I couldn’t remember if I’d taken any pills, and I was wide awake, it was making me crazy, the thoughts, such awful thoughts, so I took more, but two, only two, I swear to you, I was careful, I was.” A fan stirred the air from above, but Simone’s face was slick with sweat; even the roots of her hair were wet.

  Irene’s gaze rose up the wall to the ceiling, where dark patches of mold made the room look as if it had been scorched. After everything Simone had been through, Irene wanted to feel sympathy for her. She wanted to believe that the closeness they’d shared on the steamer had not been part of a con. But she just couldn’t be sure how much of Simone’s despair was genuine, and how much was calculated. “Are you deliberately making this journey difficult for me?” she asked.

  “Dr. Kessler said the bottles were empty, the pills and the wine too, but I don’t remember drinking all the wine. Why would I do that? Even when Roger was at his worst, I never wanted to die.”

  Or maybe Simone did not intend anything she did, and the real risk she posed was in the unconsciousness of her actions. “But you just told me you imagined it,” Irene said.

  “That’s different from wanting it. You don’t know what it’s like, not to be able to sleep.”

  Irene could still feel those hollow hours, two o’clock and three and then four, the sky gradually lightening outside her window. “Don’t tell me what I don’t know. Stop presuming that I don’t know anything, who’s following us, the threats to us. That I don’t know about your telegrams to Louis.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You decided the moment I told you about the temple that you’d find a way to escape from Roger. You probably even knew you were going to kill him. The minute I opened my big mouth at Anne’s party, you started planning how you’d take the scrolls for yourself with Louis’s help.”

  “That’s not true. That’s not at all what I want.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me about Louis when we were in Shanghai?”

  “What if the scrolls have been found?” Simone’s eyes were glassy, and her face was even paler than when Irene had arrived. “What if that’s why Simms is here? What if that’s why Stanić is here? Maybe, even, what if they’ve made some kind of deal? Between the two of them they can make the scrolls vanish, and that will ruin everything. The scrolls are our only hope. Don’t you see, Irene, I couldn’t let you take them back to America.”

  So, Simone had known this all along. “Of course you couldn’t. If that’s what I was going to do, which it wasn’t.” Holding fast to her lie, Irene sat on the edge of the bed. “Besides, Mr. Simms isn’t making any deals with Stanić. His deal is with me, to help me, and that’s that.”

  “I wasn’t always like this,” Simone murmured. “I wasn’t always desperate. In the beginning, it was obvious to me what was necessary. And I wanted to trust you, Irene, I really did. I wanted to believe that ultimately you would see that we wanted the same thing from the scrolls. But now Henry Simms is here. You understand, don’t you?”

  Troubled, Irene said, “No, I don’t.”

  Simone turned her head away. “I should have known.”

  As Irene and Louis sat vigil with Simone, the late afternoon swelled with sunlight thick and golden as honey. Then the light paled and night collapsed over Saigon. The sudden absence of daylight deflated the hospital room.

  It was six o’clock, that hour of demarcation peculiar to the equator. A young nurse arrived with broth and rice. Irene noted her starched white gown and bare, flat feet. Nothing, not a single thing, was congruous on this side of the world. Dr. Kessler followed with a sedative, saying, “Madame Merlin will sleep well through the night.”

  “I’ll stay with her,” Louis said.

  “It’s not allowed.”

  “I will stay anyway.”

  Dr. Kessler did not protest further. He had stated the hospital’s policy. Apparently, enforcing it was not his job. He bid them good night, and Irene said to Louis, “I’ll be back first thing in the morning.” Although she wanted to stay and keep an eye on Simone, she could no longer bear being in the room, frustrated as she was with having lost another day and with Simone’s irresponsibility. That Simone and Louis had scarcely spoken to one another did not help Irene’s discomfort. S
he could feel the pressure of their need to follow their argument through to its end. Maybe, if they made their peace, Irene could glean some information from Louis, since it didn’t seem worth it to try with Simone anymore. “I’ll be at the hotel,” she told him.

  In the calm of the courtyard, Irene allowed herself to deflate. Above the rustling trees, the sky was held in place by a trellis of stars. She stood for a moment, inhaling deeply, as if she could find rejuvenation in the scent coming from the eucalyptus that grew in ceramic containers against the sides of the building. As if, simply by breathing in, she could clear her head. She couldn’t. Clarity would never again be as simple as a few deep breaths.

  In the near dark, Irene carefully navigated the channel of trees back out to the road. When she reached the sidewalk, she saw Marc leaning against a streetlamp. After last night, she had thought she would never see him again. Hurrying toward him, she blurted, “You came,” as if he had climbed the Himalayas to reach her. Dropping her gaze, she saw half a dozen boot-crushed cigarette stubs on the ground around him.

  “When I first heard the news,” he said, “I thought it was you. I thought the two of them had done something to you.”

  Irene was pleased that he would care about this. “Instead, it was Simone being an idiot,” she replied.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded, glancing away from him, up the street to where a dozen rickshaw drivers huddled in a semicircle tossing dice against the curb. “How did you find out?”

  “It’s the gossip in every café on the Rue Catinat.” He moved away from the lamppost, held out his hand, and took hers. “I’m sorry I asked you to leave last night.”

  “There’s no need to—”

  “I am uncomfortable with uncertainty.” He turned away and led her into a narrow, canopied lane.

  As Irene passed rough wooden walls, the faint lamplight from the road faded and then disappeared altogether, and sight was replaced by sound—the scrape of their shoes over the uneven path. To speak in such a darkness was to speak as if her words would evaporate the moment they touched the still air. As if they could never be retrieved and held against her in a moment of vulnerability.