by Kim Fay
The abbot was unresponsive.
The four of them had agreed that there were two potential benefits in being straightforward with the abbot about the scrolls. Ideally, though not realistically, he would tell them where to find the temple’s treasure. And if he did not do this, they hoped his reaction would at least give something away. But so far he had revealed nothing, and Irene felt as if her nerves were soldered to exposed electrical wires. “He doesn’t seem to understand,” she said to Simone. “Are you sure you’re using the correct words?”
“There is only one way for me to say copper scrolls in Khmer,” Simone said. “I can’t be any more precise.”
The abbot’s malarial skin drooped from his scrawny upper arms. His head looked scuffed with bristles of shorn gray hair. The only things about him that did not appear ancient were his eyes, and they gleamed as he spoke to Simone. “I don’t know of these scrolls Monsieur Ormond has sent you to protect. I have not heard of this history of the Khmer people. Perhaps you have come to the wrong temple.”
While Simone translated, any contrition Irene had felt about trying to con a monk was banished; she was certain that his apparent candor was as calculated as theirs. “How many white women come this way?” she asked with frustration. “Our mothers? That anthropologist we met at Ormond’s? He’s not even pretending to be shocked that we’re here. None of them are. Not a single one batted an eye when Simone started speaking Khmer, and no one’s the least bit insulted that the abbot is being addressed by a woman. They’ve been prepared for all of this.”
“Did you expect otherwise?” Simone asked.
“But don’t you see the real problem?” Irene said. “He doesn’t care that we know it. He’s that sure of himself. He’s not going to give anything away.”
“He doesn’t need to.” Marc kept his tone even and his smile benign, to counter the emotion in Irene’s voice, which had caught the abbot’s attention. “Now that he knows exactly what we’re searching for, he’s going to put his effort into keeping it from us. Meanwhile, we’ll watch him watch us. No doubt he’s sharp enough to keep his composure, but most of his monks are quite young. They’re too unworldly not to become careless at some point. It doesn’t matter how well they’ve been trained, boys are boys, and it’s these fellows he’s going to have trailing around after us.”
The abbot was conspicuously unperturbed by this side conversation that he could not follow. “Look at him. He doesn’t have anything to worry about,” Irene said. “He has a thousand places to hide the scrolls. We could dig around here for years and never find them.”
“Unfortunately, this is true,” Louis agreed, tugging at his string tie. It was the worse for wear, but he had still put it on out of courtesy to the abbot.
“That’s why we need to keep an eye on the boys,” Marc said. He plucked a cigarette from the lacquer tray being passed around by a novice. “If we’re vigilant, my bet is that one of them will lead us right to the last place they want us to find.”
“Let’s begin here,” Louis said, standing in the cleared doorway of the gopura, gazing at the innermost yard. He was armed with metal stakes and balls of twine, and surrounded by the rest of his surveying equipment, as well as the rescued crate that had contained it. Near him, two monks were investigating the remaining contents of the crate—a brass protractor with a lead plumb line, a Jacob’s staff for supporting a compass, and a clinometer for measuring elevation angles—touching each item with the universal curiosity of teenage boys.
“We’ll use ten-by-ten grids in these open areas and smaller grids inside,” Louis explained to Marc as he tossed him a stub of chalk. “I’ll measure the distances, and you mark them off. Simone, tell the boys we want them to run the string. You’re right, Rafferty, if we keep them close, we might be able to get something out of them.” He dug into the crate. “We should be able to grid this entire area by nightfall. Here, Irene, take this notebook. I want you to map our findings.”
“What are you doing?” Irene stared at the notebook as if it offended her. “We need to search for the scrolls!”
“We are searching for the scrolls. But my way. Not yours.” Louis spoke with the authority that his lifetime’s work in the Khmer temples had earned him. He handed the compass to Marc, who took it while looking questioningly at Irene. She knew he would put the compass down if she asked him to, but she was not interested in picking that kind of fight with Louis. She studied his face, dark and chapped from the sun. He had been tidy when they started out. He looked like a madman in comparison now, with unruly coils of brown hair springing out around his head. But he was in his element, with this unexplored temple awaiting him.
He continued, “Once we’ve charted the property, we’ll have a complete inventory of every place we’ve searched and every place that still needs searching. We’ll know what parts we can work at with crowbars and what will require elephants and pulleys. If we’re systematic, there won’t be an inch of this temple untouched.”
“If we’re systematic,” Irene said hotly, “we’ll be here for weeks plotting out the main complex. Ormond’s men will be here in days, if that. They might have even beaten us here, or the Brau could have warned the abbot after they ruined our camp. That would explain why the scrolls aren’t in the sanctuary. And why he’s so blasé.”
As she spoke, she could not stop thinking about what she had seen of the temple. Tree roots had taken hold of even the central structure’s substantial foundation. An entire hall was blocked by the fall of its corbeled doorway and a courtyard by the collapse of its own walls. For days she had been able to keep Mr. Simms’s deterioration in the back of her thoughts. There had been so much to distract her, but now, standing in this impossible temple in the bright light of day, she could think of nothing else. She simply did not have the kind of time Louis was asking for. A man’s will, no matter how determined, could hold out for only so long over a body that had already made its final decision.
She was aware of the keys hanging from the chain around her neck, the bracelet clinging to her wrist, and the watch in her pocket, diligently ticking each minute away. She had no argument with Louis’s methods. They were sound. But they served only his needs. “What if I never know what he sent me here to find?” she asked. “What if I don’t get the scrolls back to him before he dies?”
No one said what they were all surely thinking: If he isn’t already dead.
Instead, Louis said, “I don’t know what you want me to do, Irene. We know where the scrolls were, but they’re not there anymore. Either they’ve been carefully hidden, in which case we might never find them, or they’re stranded among all this stone, and we need to search inch by inch.”
“The monastery,” Simone blurted. “We need to figure out a way into the monastery. We should check the vihara and the chedi, and the abbot’s residence too.”
Adjusting the lens of Louis’s brass-trimmed Leica, Marc said, “I can do that if you want, Irene. I once searched the British consul’s home while he thought I was in my wine cellar hunting for an 1846 Meursault Charmes.” He did not say this proudly. His skill was merely one fact of many about his life. “I found what I was looking for too.”
Irene watched one of the teenage monks inspect a protractor, turning its arc of incised numbers around in the sunlight. How far away and impossible it seemed, the effort of calculating her way to the scrolls. Even though calculation was what she had always excelled at, it paled right now in the face of her instinct—not the rational instinct she had relied on in her past but an instinct that came on so quickly it poured a metal chill down her spine. “Look wherever you think you should,” she said. “Here, the monastery, I don’t care. I’m going back to the sanctuary.”
With sore, raw fingertips, Irene meticulously examined every polished inch of the pedestal that supported the bust of Jayavarman VII, but it was made from a solid block of rose-hued stone. She was hunting for anything they might have missed the day before, but with no luck. “I can’t find
any hidden panels or recesses,” she said to Simone, who was standing in the center of the sanctuary, hands on her hips, studying the floor-to-ceiling copper sheets layered over the high walls.
“I was hoping they were made up of smaller pieces,” Simone said, “but they’re not. It’s incredible. They’re single sheets. Far too big to fit the description of the scrolls. Besides,” she added, peering at the hammered fretwork of interlacing circles and foliage, “this isn’t script.”
A lantern hung from the ceiling, and in the light that fluttered like a golden breeze above their heads, Irene recognized the pattern that was typical of Khmer design. Hopefully, she asked, “Could it contain some kind of code?”
“I don’t see any irregularities.”
Marc had offered to come with Irene rather than snoop around the monastery, but she had decided in the end to have him stay with Louis, in case Louis happened to get lucky and stumble across the scrolls. In truth, as much as she wanted Marc at her side, she knew that if anyone was going to be with her when she found the scrolls, it should be Simone, no matter what her motives were. This journey had begun with her. It must end with her too—and perhaps, also, with the monk hunched outside the sanctuary door watching them. Resigned to the boy’s presence, Irene turned to Jayavarman VII as if he could provide counsel, but his eyes were closed, his internal gaze given over to the contemplation of eternity.
“Do you think the reverend misunderstood what he saw?” Irene asked, her patience shrinking.
“Let me see the diary again,” Simone said.
As if they were the allies Irene had hoped they would be the night they met in Anne’s apartment, they sat shoulder to shoulder on the stone-paved floor. With their backs against the pedestal and the book on Irene’s knees, they read:
The lantern’s flame rebounded inside the sanctuary, and I discerned a metallic glow. Svai plunged into the temple and returned with a flat metal scroll no larger than a sheet of writing paper, scored with the elaborate hybrid cuneiform of Sanskrit and Chinese characters I had seen on stone steles at Ang Cor. Svai said what I can only crudely translate as “the king’s temple” and then proudly declared that this temple contained the history of his savage people on ten copper scrolls.
Simone crawled forward, toward the copper wall in front of them. She pried her fingers into the seam between its bottom edge and the floor. The panel was half an inch thick and at least four yards high. She rapped the crowbar she had brought against one of the bolts that was driven through the copper and secured between the stacked stones of the wall. “There’s no way to misunderstand that.”
“I have to find them,” Irene whispered. “I have to—”
“Don’t!” Simone clipped the word so that it did not even echo off the walls.
The monk’s eyes widened, and he shifted into the darkness of the outlying room.
“I’ll tell you what you have to do,” Simone declared. “Stop thinking about him. No matter how soon you find the scrolls, you aren’t going to save his life. He is going to die. Pay attention to where we are right now, Irene. We’re overlooking something. Something obvious, I know it.” She stared at Irene, expectantly.
It unsettled Irene, to feel so muddled while Simone was acting so levelheaded. Her mind began to churn, trying to fit the pieces together and fill in the blanks. “My mother’s watercolor tablet,” she finally said, taking it from her map case. “There are paintings in it of this temple.”
Slowly, Simone turned the pages, passing images of Phnom Penh’s Royal Palace and Angkor Wat until she came to a rendering of the chedi from the monastery out back. She studied it, then continued through the book. She stopped again at the last page. “What’s this?” she asked.
A tall white building stood out against the yellowed tint that age had inflicted on the warped sheet of paper. Its roof was paved in green tiles, and its door was flanked by pedestals that upheld a pair of apsaras as tall as humans. It could have been an illustration for a children’s story. “My mother used to say this was where we would live if we were rich,” Irene explained. “It’s her dream house.”
Holding out a packet of Gitanes, Simone muttered, “My mother’s dream house was a tea plantation in the highlands of Java.”
Irene watched the shine from her cigarette pirouette on the copper walls. “At least three of these watercolors come from somewhere in this temple. I say we check each one.” Since the chedi would be the hardest to search and the dance pavilion was out in the heat of the yard, she chose the painting of a bas-relief, which they had seen in the eastern gallery, and said, “Let’s start here.”
The lower level of the central temple building contained a perimeter of roofed, open-air galleries, similar in their arcaded, wraparound layout to those at Angkor Wat. But instead of containing scenes of battles and myths, their walls were covered with an intricate stone tapestry of Buddhist imagery. Irene and Simone stood before a section depicting the Buddha’s enlightenment beneath the bodhi tree. It was exactly as Irene’s mother had painted it, down to the bedrock shades of purple and gray. Streaming along the wall on either side were more images of the Buddha among vines and gibbons, deer and birds, in an endless variety of classic postures. The details were so refined that the flames of the stone lamps carved around him seemed to catch fire in the late-morning light.
“What do you think?” Irene asked.
“I think we’re on the right track if what we’re doing is worth six of these little monks,” Simone said, watching as the orange-robed sprites emerged from the forest. They spread themselves out, but they were inept at behaving casually, especially the scruffy pair squatting with their backs pressed against the wall. “They’re like prisoners waiting for a firing squad. Poor things, stuck here with us women. The others are probably having a terrific time keeping an eye on Louis and Marc.”
Irene stepped closer to the seated monks and easily found what they were guarding. A crevice ran from floor to ceiling through a portion of the relief. The sun had edged up over the eave, leaving the gallery in ivory shadows, but as she looked closer she could see that the gap in the wall had been deliberately made, unlike the many ruptures forced by a tree root or fallen stone. The boys stared up at her, as uncertain of her as she was of them. “What do I do?” she asked Simone.
Simone knelt down in front of the boys and spoke, her voice as soft as a feather.
Even though they had heard her in conversation with the abbot, they stared at her incredulously. Between the dark rings around her eyes and the smears of iodine on her face, they must have thought she was a ghoul.
“What are you saying?” Irene asked.
“I’m not threatening them, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Irene knew beyond a doubt, she could feel it as strongly as the blister of the day’s heat, that the temple’s treasure was in that crevice. Why else would her mother have chosen to paint this segment of bas-relief and not any of the dozen others that encircled the temple? Fighting her impulse to grab the boys by their robes and fling them aside, she focused on the sculpted Buddha that was next to the monk with the wine-stain birthmark on his cheek.
The Master’s hands were held palm-up in his lap, and he was seated on a coiled cobra, which protected him as he meditated. But the Buddha only exacerbated Irene’s agitation. He was a reminder that she did not have one iota of his infinite patience. Her hummingbird pulse rapped so urgently against her temples that she could scarcely hear Simone’s murmured Khmer entreaties to the boys, who were nodding solemnly, as if in some kind of agreement, even though they appeared puzzled at the same time. She said to Irene, “I’m telling them that we know what they’re doing. We know what they’re protecting. We know it’s their job, but we too have a job, and if they don’t move away, we will step over them and go in. We have no choice.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s bad luck for a Buddhist to be stepped over, and especially for a monk to be stepped over by a woman. I would neve
r do such a thing, but I can’t think of anything else to tell them to make them move.”
Slowly, Simone approached the older boy, to give him a chance. When she was mere inches from him, he flinched and jumped up. He could not do it. He could not let a woman near him, no matter how important the object was that he had been charged with guarding. Not waiting to be challenged, or worse, tarnished, his fellow sentry scuttled away behind him.
Before the boys could change their minds or another young monk rushed in to take their place, Irene stepped into the space where they had been sitting and shone her flashlight through the gap, using her other hand to swat at the swarm of flies that stirred to life under the light. As the beam hovered in the darkness, she heard all of the boys talking at once, their words overlapping, getting louder until it sounded as if they were surrounding her.
She kept her eyes on the dark, narrow space.
“Can you see anything?” Simone asked.
“No, nothing.” But as she pulled the flashlight back, something metallic sparked. Irene probed the light through the gloom once again, but because of the angle, the flicker was elusive. “I need to get in there. Hold this.”
Simone took the flashlight, and Irene reached her arm inside and felt the open space behind the wall. Though her mind raced with visions of snakes and spiders and bats, she wedged her shoulder into the opening that any one of these monks could easily fit through. Small and malleable, Simone could probably slip into it as well. But there was no way Irene would let Simone get to the scrolls first if she could help it, so she straightened her spine and exhaled, making her body as narrow as possible. The trick would be to move quickly. Too slowly, and she would be stuck, as well as torture her wounds. With her arm already through, she rocked back and forth, back and forth, steadily shoving herself forward. As she tumbled inside, the monks gasped.