by Kim Fay
“Has he been to the temple?”
“He gave me a house in Santa Barbara near my daughter, and he’s going to leave me enough money to live on for the rest of my life.” She raised the pipe to Mr. Simms’s lips. Fitfully, he inhaled. The opium glowed like a shard of melted amber, and a loamy odor coiled through the still air. “He tells me what he chooses to tell me, and I don’t ask for any more than that. I’m not sure if he’s been or not.”
“Does Murat Stanić know about the temple?”
Clothilde looked up at Irene, as if uncertain about how much she should admit. She said, “Henry is proud of how clever you are.”
“You were sitting with him in plain sight on the terrace of my hotel, and I happened to see you. That hardly makes me clever.” Irene wanted to ask Clothilde what she had revealed to Stanić, and how much he already knew. But if Clothilde was working with him, there was no reason for her to tell Irene the truth. “How much did he offer you to watch me?”
“Enough to make it worth my while. But there are some men a woman never wants to be associated with. Don’t let this trouble you, though. Henry knows all about it.”
Although Clothilde sounded sincere, it was too soon for Irene to decide if she was trustworthy. She asked, “Do you know how long Mr. Simms had been planning on coming over here?”
“As I said, he summoned me a few months back. He told me about the history and asked me to accompany him to Cambodia.”
This confirmed that Mr. Simms had intended to join the expedition all along. “But he’s not strong enough to go into the jungle with us, is he?”
“No,” Clothilde said. “He will wait in Stung Treng.”
“How do I know Stanić isn’t on his way? How do I know that once he gets here, you won’t tell him where we’ve gone?”
“I can hardly tell him when I’ll be with you. I’m going to guide you in, Irene.” Gently, Clothilde lifted one of Mr. Simms’s hands from where it had slipped over the edge of the bed. With great care, she moved it to a comfortable position and straightened the sleeve of his robe. “The reason I didn’t shave him today is that it was one of those days when even the touch of his razor would have been torture. Irene, my father died of cancer, in the middle of the jungle without a single pill. I still remember the constant agony of it. I couldn’t bear for Henry to be in that kind of pain. This is the kind of sickness that takes away a man’s control over every part of his being. I try different combinations of medicines every day, hoping one will have mercy on his body and his mind.”
As if to respond, Mr. Simms let out a low groan, but when he spoke, it was only to murmur, “Othello’s drowsy syrup.”
“Alouette, gentille alouette, alouette, je te plumerai.” Simone had worked her way to semiconsciousness and was singing the song of Canadian fur traders, softly in her opium sleep.
“You might feel better if you join them,” Clothilde suggested to Irene.
“Je te plumerai la tête …”
After all that Mr. Simms had done for Irene, she wanted to be the one to rescue him, to ease his misery, but there was only one thing that could save him tonight, and Clothilde was its master. As for Clothilde’s offer, Irene declined, feeling the sudden need to be alone with the staggering revelation: The temple did exist.
She left the cabin and leaned against the railing. It exists. This fact—not a theory, not a guess, not a hope, but a fact!—swept over her, stronger than any drug Clothilde could have offered her. Irene scarcely remembered returning to her cabin, and the next thing she knew, it was dawn, and she was shivering in her bunk, having slept as if dead with the door wide open to the night’s storm.
She blinked at the sunlight that seemed to be rising out of the earth, emanating from the unbroken green fringe of the banyan trees. Cormorants flapped through the mist. The temple exists. But panic gripped Irene as she realized it was not elation she felt at this thought. It was fear.
Yes, the temple was a fact, but the history was not even known to those who lived closest to it, if she were to believe Clothilde. As the Midas touch of a tropical day turned the river to gold, Irene fought visions of rich men and follies and wild-goose chases. Mr. Simms had never been such a man, but after seeing him last night, she could not help but question what his illness was turning him into.
Chapter 17
Second Chances
“If we have another night of hard rain, the captain thinks we can clear the rapids at Sambor without being towed and reach Stung Treng by late afternoon the day after tomorrow,” Irene said. “Once we arrive, there might not be any time to talk to him before we go. We’ll be starting into the jungle as soon as we finalize supplies. We need to do it here. I told Clothilde we’d come at four. She’s not going to give him anything. She says he should be lucid.”
“You don’t need me for this,” Marc said.
“He wants to see you.” Before Marc could protest, Irene held up her hand. “He hasn’t said it, but he does. Can’t you at least let your father have this?”
Marc propped his forearms on the railing, his hands hanging over the rippling, waterlogged tops of the cam xe trees floating in the river’s silver foam. It was the same submerged landscape as the day before, and the day before that. “I don’t want you to expect too much from me,” he said.
They were four days out of Phnom Penh, and Marc had still not been to see his father. He had not asked a single question about him, even though Irene sat with Mr. Simms for hours each day as he dozed. After a while the steamer had begun to feel like a hospital waiting room, but Irene no longer had time to wait. If all went well, the expedition would enter the jungle in just a few days. And before they did, Irene needed to know why Mr. Simms had brought her together with Simone and Marc, and how her mother and Simone’s fitted into the picture. She also wanted to see Marc with his father, to gauge, like the guide perched in the makeshift crow’s nest of the Alouette, what obstacles might lie ahead.
“I’d rather you expect more from yourself,” she said, unable to hold back her frustration. She tossed her cigarette into the Mekong River and led him to Mr. Simms’s cabin.
Unlike the previous days, the curtains were drawn back and the room bloomed with light. Mr. Simms was sitting up, not in bed but in a rattan armchair that Irene recognized from the captain’s quarters. He was shaven, and Clothilde had dressed him in a fresh linen suit, which matched the blue of his eyes. On the tray table where she usually laid out his opium kit, she had set a pitcher of citron pressé glistening over ice, as if this were nothing more than a typical afternoon social visit. Kissing his cheek, Irene observed him looking past her.
“Hello, Son. Thank you for coming,” he said. There was a vulnerability in his voice that Irene had never heard before.
Marc merely nodded, his expression firmly impassive. As Irene joined him on a settee that had been brought in from the dining room, Clothilde whispered to her, “Without the drugs he’s going to tire easily. Whatever you are here to do, please be quick about it.”
Clothilde was no longer wearing her green shoes. She was barefoot, and a lapis lazuli strand gleamed against her bare ankle. Irene wanted to resent her, but instead she felt nothing but gratitude as she recalled stumbling upon Clothilde bowed over a bucket outside Mr. Simms’s room, washing vomit from his pajamas in the middle of the night so no one would see. On deck, so that he would not see.
“Mr. Simms,” Irene said, “I need to ask you some questions.”
“It’s about time.” He grinned.
She wanted to joke with him, to enjoy his good humor, but she knew she shouldn’t keep him from his painkillers any longer than was necessary. “The book Lawrence Fear kidnapped my mother for. Was it Reverend Garland’s diary?”
“Yes,” he answered, his eyes returning to his son.
“And you knew about the diary all along. When you found it in the box my father left you, you weren’t surprised to see it, were you?”
“No, Irene, about that you are wrong. It was a t
remendous surprise.” He flinched as he spoke, as if the utterance of each coherent sentence caused its own sharp pang. “I thought the diary had disappeared the night we rescued your mother, taken by one of Fear’s men as they fled. I had no idea your father still had it.”
“Did you go looking for the scrolls? Before the kidnapping, I mean. With my parents and Simone’s mother?”
Mr. Simms fluttered his hand toward Clothilde, and she removed a thin twist of a cigarette from her pocket. As the sweet odor of hemp slipped onto the draft from the window, Irene was aware of the nauseating, underlying sickroom smell of menthol, musty sheets, and old age. Mr. Simms may have been costumed to resemble his old self, with his bespoke-tailored Savile Row suit and Patek Philippe pocket watch, but his palsied hands gave him away, as did the greediness with which he drew on the cigarette. The pain must have been excruciating for him to ask for relief in front of others, particularly in front of the girl he had always protected and the son he had not seen in years.
Marc placed his hand over Irene’s on the cushion between them, but she scarcely felt his touch. She was so afraid of losing Mr. Simms and not being able to reach him again. “What did you find at the temple?” she asked him.
“Not yet, Irene, not yet,” he murmured. “That is not where this story begins.” He smiled with appreciation as he inhaled. “I was still young when I fell in love with Katrin. I’d just set up my first factory in Shanghai.”
Irene asked, “Who’s Katrin?”
“My mother,” Marc said.
“It took me years to accept that she would never leave her husband,” Mr. Simms said. “She knew the disgrace of a scandal would have killed him, and her sense of duty was too great. I may have known my way around the business world, but I was inexperienced enough with women to believe that my heart was irreparably broken, so I left Shanghai. I traveled for a while and eventually settled in Manila. As you know, Irene, that’s where I met your parents. What you don’t know is that I moved there with a woman I’d met in Cambodia. Madeleine.” His gaze fell away from Marc, and Irene followed it to Simone, standing in the doorway.
“My mother.” Simone’s face was as stony as Marc’s as she asked, “You had a son with her, didn’t you?”
“It was too easy to lose a child back then. Fever, smallpox, polio,” Mr. Simms told Simone. “Nicolas went quickly, and I couldn’t look at Madeleine without wishing I were dead too. This time I truly did know the meaning of a broken heart, and for the second time in my life, I had to leave a woman in order to save myself. But I still loved her. And even though it wasn’t my fault, I felt guilty about Nicolas’s death. If I had never come into her life, she would never have had to experience the death of a child. When you were born, Simone, I began to send your mother money, as if that could keep you safe and make up for what had happened.”
“Are you …” Simone could not bring herself to finish the sentence.
“No, I’m not your father. After Nicolas died, your mother went back to her family in Cambodia, where she got married and had you. There was no longer anything left for me in Manila. The kidnapping frightened your parents, Irene, and they returned to Seattle. They were shaken by what could have happened, and they were ready to leave the Orient. I arranged for your father to be given a job at the museum, so he could still spend his time among the treasures he loved. And I made my way back to Shanghai. I had more than a dozen factories there by then. My business was thriving. I thought that because of my new grief, Katrin would no longer matter to me. But I can still remember what it felt like to open my door so many years later and find her back in my life, telling me that her husband was dead and holding the hand of a six-year-old boy.”
Mr. Simms’s attention moved back to Marc. “I knew you were my son the instant I saw you. You were like Nicolas in many ways. The color of your eyes, the shape of your smile. The way you would not say a word but instead clenched your fists when you wanted something badly. Second chances,” he declared. “Nonsense, that is what I had always thought of second chances. What is done is done. Then your father left me the diary, Irene. When I realized what had happened, my feelings changed. I wasn’t afraid of this second chance.” Breathing raggedly, he looked from Marc to Irene to Simone. “You are all my second chance.”
His skin was turning gray. The cigarette was not enough, and Clothilde anxiously fingered a brown bottle. Irene reached out for a pill and knelt in front of Mr. Simms. The neediness with which he took the dark bead grieved her. She smoothed the sparse hair away from his flushed brow.
“My girl,” he whispered, “my dear, dear girl. You are so good to me.”
Behind her, Irene heard the crack of glass against wood as Marc set his drink down too hard on the table, and she thought, This is what it is really about for us. It is not about whether I can live with his version of Mr. Simms but about if he can live with mine. This loving version that should have been his.
Again, she asked Mr. Simms, “Tell me one thing. What did you find at the temple?”
The old man leaned forward. “Nothing,” he said, gravely. “I found absolutely nothing.”
“A ruse?” Irene asked in disbelief.
“Yes, a ruse,” Simone said.
After leaving Mr. Simms’s cabin, Irene and Marc had followed Simone to the salon, where she had angrily relayed the situation to Louis before making her accusation. Irene said, “I suppose you think his story about our mothers is a ruse too.”
“What I think is that he’s trying to make me doubt the scrolls’ existence, so if you find them and tell me you didn’t, I will be more likely to believe you. But I know better. Just as I know you’re all opposed to me. Even you.” She glowered at Louis, who had yet to look up from the survey compass he was repairing with his penknife. “Simms is crafty, incredibly crafty.”
Irene was so tired of Simone. “You’re only here because Mr. Simms wanted to rescue you from Roger. He didn’t have to include you. You should feel grateful to him.”
“It’s all part of his plan,” Simone insisted.
“He’s on his deathbed.”
“I’m not certain of that.”
For a moment Irene thought, She can’t be serious, and then she saw that Simone was. She looked away, out the open window. Along the shoreline, brown water flowed uninterrupted over the muddy, root-tangled earth, corralling the steamer’s floating world. She felt trapped. Needing to establish some kind of logic, she said, “I know it must be a shock, finding out that he had a child with your mother, but you don’t really think he’s not sick. You can’t. All you have to do is look at him—”
“He’s not as sick as he wants us to think he is. And bringing that girl with him, as if having her here feeding him opium is enough to give his story credence.”
“Henry Simms is clearly dying,” Louis said, as if to himself, “and that girl is here because she knows her way around Stung Treng province. We’re lucky he brought her. She can take us straight to the temple.”
“Guiding you to the temple is my role,” Simone declared.
“Your role? Your role?” Louis’s voice was tight with restraint. “You are a drug addict, Simone, and the only role an addict has is to make life worse for everyone around her.”
Recently, Louis’s silences toward Simone had begun to feel ominous, and Irene had been wondering if he would eventually erupt. Now that moment was closing in, like the sudden approach of a monsoon.
“I don’t care what you think of me, what any of you think of me,” Simone said. “I’m here because my revolution is right, and right will have its justice in the end.”
“For God’s sake, Simone, I’ve had enough of your ideological rhetoric. You sound like an automaton.” Louis moved toward her, his knife clenched in one fist.
Marc stepped closer, ready to intervene.
But Louis stopped before he reached Simone. “No, that’s incorrect. You sound like your dead husband. And we both know the value of everything he had to say.”
; “And you’re so much nobler than me,” Simone accused, “chasing Irene around this boat with your architectural sketches for your institute at Angkor Wat. Babbling on about scholarship and the greater good of humanity, when we both know this is all about your career—”
“That’s enough,” Marc interrupted. “Irene, take Simone outside.”
But Louis persisted. “You used to be the most intelligent girl I knew. I never thought I would say this, but you’re the last thing the Cambodians need now. You can’t control your emotions. You’re dangerous to them.” Although he was furious with Simone, Irene could still hear the longing he felt, for the girl he had known before she’d been twisted by her parents’ deaths and Roger’s cruelties. “Selling the scrolls to the government? That’s the most idiotic idea you’ve ever had. I wish I could understand what happened to you.”
“I grew up.”
“It’s useless talking to you.” Louis snapped the penknife shut and shoved it into his pocket. “Rafferty, what’s your take on Simms’s story? Do you think the scrolls are up there?”
Caught off guard by the abrupt change of subject, Marc took out his rolling papers and worked a pinch of tobacco into a cigarette. As he smoked, he gave the room time to cool. A minute passed, and then another. Finally, he asked Irene, “How ill was Henry when your father died? Was he like this? In this degree of pain? Do you know how much morphine he was using?”
Irene shook her head. “None that I knew of. He tired more easily than usual, and he had moments when he clearly wasn’t feeling well, but he was nothing like he is now.”
“He’s sending us up here to finish some romantic quest, but I don’t believe he’s doing it just for sentimentality’s sake.” As Marc said this, defiance flashed across his face. “My best guess, based on what I know about him? When he launched you on this trip, Irene, he didn’t know how fast he was going to deteriorate, and he had a good reason to believe the scrolls are still up here.”