The Map of Lost Memories (20 page)

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. She 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.

“There was nothing uncertain in my asking to stay last night,” she said.

“I have never met anyone like you. I have never met a woman who knows so clearly what she wants.” The day’s heat had recoiled into the trapped hollows of the city, settling into this fugitive lane. “Who isn’t afraid of wanting.”

They emerged into the lamplit boulevard across from the Petit Hotel du Cap-Ferrat. The tall shutters of Irene’s room were open behind the branches of the mango tree, and she saw the gauze drapery of the canopy bed tumbling down. Marc’s face was flushed above the pale linen of his shirt. She touched her lips to the wisp of a scar on his cheekbone. “There is nothing uncertain about this either,” she said, and her mouth traveled over the lids of his closed eyes. He pulled her closer, and his eyelashes grazed her temple. Her hand traveled across his face, the uncharted territory of him. Her lips met his, and it was like reaching a still harbor at a journey’s end.

Rain trampled over the slope of the roof, waking Irene. Her skin flickered in the golden glow of candles burning down. Wax dripped into stalactites beneath the windowsill. Marc lay on his stomach, his long, muscled legs tangled in the white sheets, his back exposed. A dark circle on his shoulder caught her attention, and she examined the tattoo, a sharply etched compass rose. Pointing north, the spine of its emerald needle looked as if it pierced his skin. “What does it mean?” she asked.

He woke into the whisper of her question. “I killed the man who killed my wife.”

“You’re having a nightmare,” she said.

But as he shifted onto his side, his voice had the precision of one who is wide awake. “I would spend all day doing nothing but sitting in the
garden staring into the windows at the back of our house. It was like an abandoned stage. I could see the bassinet. And Lara’s dressing gown over a chair. That was why I killed him. For my daughter, who never slept in that wicker basket. For Lara, who never put that gown on again. For my life. A new life I was ready to begin once my daughter was born. And the sun kept rising, but there was never any heat. Just the white winter light of Shanghai and air as cold as it was that night when I found that bastard sucking on a pipe in an opium den on Soochow Creek.”

Irene laid her hand over the uneven beating of his heart, as if she could touch his grief and ease it. But even as he wrapped his fingers around hers, accepting her gesture of solace, his sorrow was inaccessible. She, of all people, understood this.

“I knew that I’d lost my way,” he said, each word a hard stone polished with bitterness. “Not when I pulled the trigger. That I took pleasure in. No, I lost my way long before, to have reached a place where I could take pleasure in doing such a brutal thing. After it was over, I got drunk. One day I woke up and realized that I’d been drunk for more than a year. I realized that I needed to be either dead or sober. I wasn’t ready to stop remembering them, so I quit drinking and discovered how empty a man’s life can be. Then one night I passed a tattoo parlor in Blood Alley. I thought, There must be a way to draw the poison out of my body. I chose a compass to help me stay my course. I’m lucky I’m not covered in tattoos. The pain was unambiguous. I wanted it to last forever.”

He was sitting up, and Irene leaned toward him, resting her forehead against his. “Is this the reason I will be sorry for being with you? Because you’ve killed a man?”

“No,” he said, quietly. “Irene, Henry Simms is my father.”

She opened her mouth to say
I don’t understand
, but that would not have been true.

“Whenever he was away from Shanghai, he sent letters,” Marc continued, “and when he was in Seattle he wrote about a girl who lived in a museum. She crept around his house searching for hidden treasures and danced like a young goddess when she thought no one was looking. I thought he just wanted to entertain me, and I was young myself. I didn’t understand that the girl was real. Of course, I knew about you later, but
it was still disconcerting when we met, as if a fable from my childhood had come to life. And when you told me that he loved you because he’d never had a child of his own, it was as if I was being told that I had never existed. You hadn’t heard of me, but I knew so much about you. I’ve been trying to figure out why.”

Irene slid her legs over the side of the bed and stared at Marc’s body cast in wavering shadow on the wall. It was as if with his confession a darkness within him had been freed and taken a shape of its own. “Have you? Figured it out?”

“No. We’ve never been close, but why would he keep me a secret from you?”

“He acquired priceless works of art and never told anyone.”

“He told you. He told you everything. Except about me.”

At the resentment in Marc’s voice, apprehension swept through Irene. “Is that why you came for me? If you can find a way to hurt me, then you can hurt him too?”

He shook his head. “When I heard about the overdose, when I thought something had happened to you, I realized that I want to keep knowing you.” He drew her in to him, his heartbeat soft against her back. “You’re a part of me.” He kissed the arc of her shoulder. “For some reason, he made sure that you’ve always been a part of me.”

In the scant middle-of-the-night light, Irene left Marc asleep in the bed and put on her dressing gown. Kneeling on the floor, she opened her satchel and piled her maps of Cambodia, all but the one drawn by Reverend Garland, beside her. Each of her maps was unique, not in the way the cartographer had shaped the country, or the locations of villages and mountains and rivers, but because it was its own adventure that she had undertaken as a girl. She had brought them with her because she thought she would need her childhood quests to help her find her way. How wrong she was. There was no trace of this new journey in the countless journeys she had taken so long ago.

She lifted the top map from the pile. The contours of its topography were faint over the countryside, and she was able to locate the smallest of
towns only because she had memorized their positions long before time faded the cinnamon ink. It was the map her father gave her right after her mother died. She rubbed her thumb along the threadbare border, where Cambodia washed into the Gulf of Siam.

She struck a match. Flame burst from the matchstick, and she watched as it burned down to the tip of her thumb and forefinger. She blew on the dart of fire, and it vanished, then reappeared as a fleur-de-lis of smoke. Behind her, Marc stirred. She lit another match. It faltered and expired. She lit a third.