The Map of Lost Memories (16 page)

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 can 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.

“I’m asking you now. I’m asking you to be reasonable. Think about our situation. Two women, one whose husband has recently been murdered, traveling alone into the jungle. What would we be doing other than running away? Irene, Louis is respected in Indochina. He’s a trusted colleague. He has carte blanche access to every corner of Cambodia. He can come and go as he pleases and take whoever he wants with him. I don’t understand your resistance. Did you really think we could do this on our own?”

“Yes,” Irene said. “I did.”

“What would give you that kind of assurance?”

“You.”

“Me?” Simone sounded surprised. “Why?”

Irene was dismayed by the sudden doubt she felt. She coughed against the smoke that surrounded her, but this didn’t clear the uncertainty from her voice. “You’re an expert.”

“I’m an expert on Khmer hydroengineering. On Sanskrit. On the
Ramayana
and
Mahabharata
and Marxism and labor leadership. I’m unquestionably an expert on bad marriages. But on finding lost treasures? Roger and I took a bas-relief
once
because we had the chance to pay off the debts for our newspaper.” Simone turned away from Irene and surveyed the wares piled on the plank shelves. She touched the laces on a pair of white Keds tennis shoes and muttered, “Fakes. The Chinese can copy anything. Don’t ever buy a Waterman pen in Cholon.” She dug her hand into a tub of slippers, a jumbled bouquet of fire red poppies embroidered onto blue silk, and pulled out a pair. “We need Louis more than you can know. I didn’t want to tell you this, but I suspect Monsieur Boisselier was sent by Roger. Roger could have told him about the temple.”

“I know.”

Simone’s grip on the slippers tightened. “How?”

“I asked him who he was working for.”

Simone laughed. “You don’t know how anything is done here. No one asks questions like that.”

Irene was slowly regaining her footing. “I did, and he told me that Roger hired him.”

“You think you’re quite shrewd, don’t you? In that case, you should understand why we need Louis.”

Unfortunately, Irene could see the logic of including him. She could even see the necessity. But his presence would make it harder than ever to get the scrolls out of Cambodia. “I shouldn’t have showed you the map,” she said. The trust she had felt in Simone on the ship was dissolving. “Now that you know where the temple is, I have no choice.”

She waited for Simone to deny this, but Simone’s attention was diverted by a trio of singsong girls trotting past. With their colored stockings, satin mules, and black satin trousers that came barely below the knee, they had drawn the clucking disapproval of the old woman guarding the merchandise. Simone just gave the shopkeeper a few coins for the slippers she was holding. “For you,” she said, offering them to Irene without looking at her. Quickly, she began walking back to the trolley.

The following morning, Irene sat at Brodard’s restaurant on the Rue Catinat, drinking café au lait and jabbing at a poached egg. Simone was at the police station. She had insisted on going alone, and there was no telling what she would say or do if she was pushed. If this was not enough to worry about, once this wasted day was done, Irene would be having dinner with Louis Lafont.