The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  Chapter 26

  The Coming Night

  The expedition set off on its return to Stung Treng with a new sense of purpose, and Irene with a new urgency. All she could concentrate on with each step was her hope that Mr. Simms was still alive. Walking through the cool breach of dawn and into each day, they stopped only when the heat became too intense or the rains too hard, and they made good time, despite Marc’s broken ribs and Simone’s diminished emotional state.

  Although Simone seemed to accept the decision that the scrolls were going to be used to anchor a new type of study of Khmer history, she was withdrawn as plans were being made. With her broken wrist tied up in a sling, she would gaze off into the trees, silent while the others discussed how they would deal with their discoveries in stages, beginning with the official claiming and cataloging of the King’s Temple and the library.

  As they talked, Irene could picture the coming months—the massive levers and pulleys being transported deep into the jungle, the recruiting of highland villagers for labor and the corralling of elephants for brute strength, the temple’s yards filling with plane tables and bearded scholars in khaki trousers, trailing measuring tapes. Louis would supervise, Marc would follow Louis’s lead, and on the hill above them, Irene would work with Simone and Loung to translate and index Jayavarman VII’s history. It would be the first full accounting of a Khmer king’s life, from birth to death. There was nothing else like it, and only one thing more valuable: the scrolls. As for these, the group felt it necessary to keep them hidden for the time being, until they could figure out a way to prevent them from being confiscated by the government.

  The box with the nine scrolls was packed into a trunk and secured to the oxcart with a chain and three padlocks. Irene had one key, Louis the second, and Simone the third. Someday they might trust one another fully, but for now, hacksaws and any other tools that could break the chains or undo the locks were inside the trunk with the scrolls. Their goal, while they undertook their work at the temple, was also to attempt to solve the treasure map, despite the missing piece.

  Irene had told no one, not even Marc, the extent of what her mother’s diary had revealed or about her hunch that Mr. Simms was in possession of the last scroll. She wasn’t sure why, but a part of her still needed to hold on to this last secret, even if it was only for a little while longer.

  As they approached the village of Leh once again, they braced themselves for the worst, hiding the trunk in a copse off the trail, chained to a tree. But when they delivered the wounded Brau with his slowly healing leg, the chief greeted them stoically, as if he had never seen them before. Departing unharmed, intact, they could only guess that a village scout had told Ormond how the expedition had defied the chief’s orders, and Ormond in response had sent word back to leave them alone—accepting, as Loung had, the inevitable.

  This assumption was confirmed when they reached Ormond’s villa, four days after leaving the temple. He was waiting for them at his front gate, watching through a pair of tinted spectacles as they plodded up the road from town. His brocade sarong seemed to have faded in their absence, and his torso was flabbier than ever. “How long before the stampede begins?” he asked.

  The noon sun blistered the earth, drawing the suffocating smell of wild lilac into the air. Roasting inside her filthy clothing, Irene cast this question aside. “Is he still alive?”

  “He’s a tough old man.”

  At this brusque reassurance, Irene felt as if she might break down. Quickly, she changed the subject. “Do you know what’s up there?”

  Ormond regarded the worse-for-wear trunk bound to the oxcart, surrounded by Louis, Simone, Marc, Clothilde, and even Xa and Kiri. Surely he noticed Clothilde’s hand resting on the gun at her hip. “I never cared about what was up there.” He looked toward his villa, where his two red-haired houseboys sat on the verandah playing chess. Watching them, Ormond’s eyes showed his understanding of how aggressively his realm was under siege, as the world around it shrank with the production of every new wireless telegraph, steamship, and assembly-line car. Sweeping his arm out to encompass the life he had made for himself, he said, “I only cared about protecting what is mine.”

  Despite how impatient Irene was to see Mr. Simms, it did not feel right to barge in on him when he was not prepared for her. Because none of the women who had been left to take care of him would know how to give him the dignity he needed this day, Clothilde offered to get him ready for Irene.

  After bathing in a thatched stall beside the villa, Irene made her way to an upstairs bedroom, where she opened a satchel she had left in Stung Treng for safekeeping. Behind the dressing screen, beneath the beady black glare of a Cambodian rhino whose head hung on the wall, she pressed the Annamite costume she had bought in Saigon, and then slipped it on. The lotus-bud sleeves caped her sunburned arms, and as she fastened the Chinese button knots up the sides of the tunic, her cuts stung from having been washed and freshly bandaged. Still, it felt wonderful to be wearing clean clothes.

  Stepping out into the room, she was startled to see Simone in the window seat, her wet hair dripping onto her shoulders. Simone’s wrist was wrapped in a strip of new cotton, and she had changed into a white blouse and denim trousers. She would have looked completely recovered were it not for the red marks on one side of her face from the blow of the scroll. Irene peered over her shoulder and saw that Simone was gazing down at Marc and Louis, seated in chairs near the river. On the shore in front of them, black-bellied terns nested on rocks, and golden weavers foraged in the reeds. Through the stipple of sunlight and shadow, the men seemed to be watching a storm roll across the treetops in the distance. Irene could easily imagine what they were talking about. For these past few days, Louis had spoken of nothing other than what would be needed for studying the temple. As he worked on his lists of trundle wheels and Gunter’s chains, he would be muttering to Marc, “Caproni, yes, definitely a few of Caproni’s men for the plaster casts.”

  Marc and Louis were not alone. One of them must have fashioned a hat out of a palm leaf, because Kiri was attempting to force May-ling to wear it. As Simone observed the boy chasing the poor gibbon into a stand of gaunt trees, she asked, “What do you plan to do with him, once he’s yours?”

  Irene stepped back from the window. “What do you mean?”

  “Are you going to adopt him?”

  With her good hand, Simone was tapping her fingers against her thigh, and Irene offered her a cigarette to stop the jittering. “He has a father.”

  “But you are going to take care of him?” Simone asked.

  “Marc and I have been discussing it, what it could mean, raising him, teaching him about his country’s past. It’s not much, it’s not a revolution, but it could be a start—a young, educated Cambodian man who understands his relationship to his history.”

  “You’ve certainly changed.” Behind Simone, swollen white clouds hung low in the platinum sky. Her tone was sullen as she asked, “And why not? You’re getting what you want. Even Louis’s esteem.”

  “I’m giving up the one thing I came here for.”

  “Status doesn’t matter to you anymore, at least not in the way it used to, so it doesn’t count.”

  Whether or not this was true Irene did not yet know, but she saw no point in trying to discuss it with Simone. She checked the gold-leafed clock on the wall. Clothilde had told her to come to Mr. Simms’s room at five. There was still some time left, enough to ask one of the many questions that had amassed in her thoughts on the trek back to Stung Treng. “Simone, how long had you been planning your own revolution?”

  Simone flicked ash out the window. “I don’t think you’re going to like my answer.”

  “When have I ever liked your answers?”

  At this Simone smiled. “I’ve already told you, eventually I saw that Roger’s way of doing things was wrong. More than wrong. Dishonorable. I was involved enough in the party to see how change could be made differently. The process didn�
��t have to be so violent, so damaging. But …” She hesitated. “Honestly, more than anything, I wanted out. I wanted to go home. Then we killed Roger, and I had to have done that for something more than simply wanting my life back the way it had been.”

  “So your idea for a nationalist revolution came after he died?”

  “I couldn’t have murdered my own husband because I wanted to run back to my childhood sweetheart and spend the rest of my life poking around the temples.” Simone stamped out her cigarette and began rolling the stub back and forth between her fingers. “I couldn’t have left Louis and given my life to that wretched man, loved such a wretched man, for nothing.”

  Simone’s defiance on the Lumière, her harsh words about Louis, her convoluted maneuverings in Saigon and Phnom Penh—it dazed Irene to think that all of this had been to justify the death of her husband. “It wasn’t for nothing, Simone. We’re going to do something meaningful for Cambodia. I’m going to do something meaningful with all the time I’ve spent studying the Khmer, and as crazy as it sounds, it’s because of you. You forced me to look at this country in a different way.” Irene’s voice shook as she said, “As for Roger, he was more than just a wretched man. He was dangerous, and not only to you. If he’d managed to get into a position of real power, he could have destroyed thousands of lives.”

  Simone’s voice was barely audible. “I know.”

  Watching her anxiously crumble the remains of her cigarette, Irene asked, “Do you even want to be a part of what we’re planning to do?”

  Simone looked away from Irene, back outside, down at Louis and Marc, who were now playing some kind of game with Kiri and the gibbon. Sunlight sparked through the clouds, catching in the outbreaks of orange tiger lilies that burned like wildfires in the green dusk of the banyan trees. “It’s going to take me a while to get my bearings, but yes, I do. Or I think I do. I’m still not sure how trustworthy my thoughts are.”

  Hearing this, Irene could imagine another aspect of their future: the foursome working together at the King’s Temple, building a collective reputation, so that when they were ready to reveal the scrolls to the world, their intentions would be taken seriously and their claim would not be denied. She could envision Simone grappling with the guilt she felt about wanting what she had gotten, and herself constantly wondering if Simone was going to come across a bottle of phenobarbital one day and find the temptation too great. Always there would be the fear that Simone would stumble over one of her emotional trip wires and sabotage the group in some unexpected way.

  And yet, against all reason, Irene was glad Simone was not going to disappear. They were not the kind of women who would keep in touch, arranging reunions over cups of Earl Grey in the palm-studded courtyards of the Raffles or the Metropole. If they parted ways, chances were Irene would never see Simone again. Simone might never have another chance to salvage herself, and Irene did not want to miss the opportunity, no matter how slim, to know her as the woman she’d once had the potential to be.

  The clock chimed. It was time. Irene examined herself in the mirror that stood in a wooden frame in the corner. She hadn’t thought to get her hair cut since her father died, and it was longer than it had ever been. Taming its sun-bleached strands into a chignon at the nape of her neck, she considered how far in the past it seemed, when looking attractive had mattered to her as much as it did now.

  Mr. Simms had always taken pleasure in how well she kept herself, and although her face was mottled with insect bites, her browned skin emphasized her high cheekbones and the bright blue of her eyes. It pleased her to still be worthy of his admiration. She said to Simone, “I have to go.”

  Having torn the last of the cigarette to shreds, Simone started to disassemble a new one. “You must suspect he has the missing scroll. Why haven’t you said anything about it?”

  Irene took a deep breath. “I haven’t changed completely,” she answered.

  “Good,” Simone said. “I’m glad to hear that.”

  Mr. Simms’s ground-floor bedroom at the back of Ormond’s villa could not be reached from within the house. As Irene walked around on the path outside, a light wind shook the leaves in the mango trees. On Mr. Simms’s porch, hanging from a wire, a lantern was already burning, a porous wing of light that was pointless without the backdrop of a black night. When Irene reached the screen door, Clothilde stepped outside. Her eyes were swollen and red, and she stared at Irene like a lost child.

  Resisting her own sadness was taking all of Irene’s strength. She had nothing remaining for Clothilde. Without speaking, Irene left her on the porch and entered the bedroom. The medicinal odor was sickeningly familiar, immediately bringing to mind the ampoules of morphine split open during the final hours of her father’s life. Frail Japanese cranes were etched into a glass lamp, and in the dimness of the room, her eye was first caught by what appeared to be a flock of transparent birds taking flight across the walls. Then she saw the bed. Marooned in its middle was Mr. Simms, propped against a stack of pillows.

  To Irene’s relief, Clothilde had been able to dress him in his robe of black Qing silk. But as Irene sat down on the edge of the mattress, she was dismayed by how colorless his skin had become. His blue eyes had faded to gray and were lifeless as stones. She brushed her lips over his concave cheek, and she could have been kissing a corpse were it not for his meager, ragged breathing. Forcing herself not to recoil from the musty heat of his withered body, she whispered, “We found the temple and the library. All of it is still up there. I can show you the scrolls. Mr. Simms, I know how the story ends!”

  He did not respond.

  Irene lay down beside him, careful not to touch him, for Clothilde had told her earlier that the arsenal of drugs was no longer enough. His pain was beyond alleviation. Irene had never been so physically close to him, and she was overwhelmed by his presence, despite how diluted it was. Putting her mouth to his ear, she gave him the answers the two of them had sought for so long, murmuring to him about a king’s opulent lifestyle, depleted resources, Siamese invasions, and shifts in trade to the sea.

  “No massive earthquake?” he mumbled.

  “What did you say?”

  “No giants thrashing the temples down?” he said with a slight smile.

  He wasn’t rambling. He was aware. She sat up and leaned over him. “Where is it?” she asked. “Please, tell me where it is.”

  “No grand finale,” he sighed.

  “The last scroll. Do you have it? Do you know what it is? There’s a map, it’s a map to the king’s last treasure.” She rushed to tell him everything in this split second when he might be able to comprehend it.

  “No matter how magnificent the story is, it always ends.” A cough shuddered his chest. “No blaze of glory.” Phlegm rattled in his throat. “Just a dying light.”

  “Do you understand what I’m saying?” Irene asked.

  But his gaze lit upon her without acknowledgment before jumping onward, searching the trellis of frangipani that climbed the porch, the fire-polished beads of her tunic. His words grew muffled. She turned away, shutting her throat against the sobs. She wanted desperately to share this with him. For him to congratulate her, cherish her, tell her how beautiful she was, live forever. Live long enough at least to see his journey all the way through.

  She was so used to the jungle that she could smell how near nightfall was, sweeping against the thick veneer of the day’s heat. A sheen of soft light spread its liquid mercury across the room. Irene made herself look again at Mr. Simms, whose attention was drawn to the last of the sun crawling across the floor. Together they watched as the pale yellow trail inched toward the bureau, its top scattered with needles and vials. A bottom drawer was hanging open. The light wound up the bureau’s claw foot, prowling into the drawer, and as a flash of copper struck the air, Mr. Simms drew in his breath, fast and sharp. Irene glanced at him, but it did not seem to be pain that had caused his small convulsion. She followed his eyes back to the drawer.

>   From inside the house, the soft melody of “Clair de Lune” drifted down from an open window. Outside, the landscape was dissolving into the coming night. Mr. Simms’s eyes were closed. Irene pressed her lips to his brow, and he did not wince. Whispering “Thank you,” she got up and went to the bureau to receive the tenth scroll.

  For my gramps,

  Woodrow “Buck” Ethier

  Acknowledgments

  In the course of writing this novel, I was fortunate to have received the advice and encouragement of many generous people. I would like to thank the following for their individual contributions: Connie Brooks, for graciously reading countless versions of this novel and providing invaluable moral support. Alexandra Machinist, the most magnificent agent in the world, for finding this novel, believing in it, and pushing me to the finish line. Janet Brown, Beth Branco, Blair Mastbaum, Jen Bergmark, Colette Sartor, Jenny Fumarolo, and Jessica Barksdale Inclan, for reading and offering insights along the way. Susanna Porter, my terrific editor, for providing the perfect balance of give and take, and for giving me the classic editing experience I have dreamed of since childhood. Priyanka Krishnan and many others at Ballantine/Random House for helping guide this book through its final stages. Suzie Doore at Hodder & Stoughton and Whitney Lee at the Fielding Agency for enthusiastically giving Irene and her cohorts a chance to travel the world. John Rechy, for inspiring me to start this novel. Andy Brouwer, for invaluable advice on jungle exploring and temple hunting. Lisa Okerlund, for beginning this journey with me in the sixth grade with the Shona and April Lewis mysteries. My great aunt, for sharing her name, strength, and spirit with Irene. And my gramps, for telling me my first stories and giving me Shanghai.

  I used countless resources for researching this novel, and of those I would like to note: Angkor, by Dawn Rooney; Angkor and the Khmer Civilization, by Michael D. Coe; Shanghai, by Harriet Sergeant; and Silk Roads, by Axel Madsen.