The Map of Lost Memories (29 page)

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.”

During the final day of the voyage, the sky was claustrophobically low, and the river, though rising from the monsoon rains, remained thick with boulders and marsh. Irene could not fathom how the captain would steer the steamer, but as late morning passed into early afternoon, he negotiated the braided waters at the frenzied direction of the pilot until at last she saw it, the confluence of the Mekong River with its sleek bronze tributary the Sekong. It was just past this junction that the colonial outpost of Stung Treng had been built, on the foundation of a primitive hill tribe village, on a passage between India and China.

This was one of the few legitimate sections of an ancient Khmer trade route that Irene had incorporated into her bluff about the purpose of the expedition, a still-used byway through which gold, ivory, kingfisher feathers, and rhinoceros horn had once traveled. Otherwise, this no-man’s-land was considered to be as lacking in Khmer heritage as the European continent. It was easy for Irene to appreciate this belief as Stung Treng came into view. The town’s strand of shabby stucco buildings showed their dirt in the afternoon sun, and at the end of the unimpressive main street, shacks were propped up on crooked stilts within groves of tall, taut sugar palm trees.

Locals in odd combinations of Oriental and Occidental attire began to gather on the embankment, hazy in the reflection of sunlight off the water. As the steamer approached, Irene made out a white pith helmet worn by a large, bulky European, who was using a cane to whack his way through the crowd. Coolies dropped into the river with thick mooring lines tight between their teeth, while the man in the helmet loomed above them. He wore a white dinner jacket, unbuttoned with nothing beneath it, revealing the flab of his chest coated in a moss of rust-colored hair. He had tied a maroon sarong around his fat waist, and on his feet Irene saw that he wore two-toned, wingtip dress shoes.

“Benoit Ormond,” Simone said, coming up behind Irene.

“The
commissaire
?”

Observing him press a finger to his nostril and blow snot to the ground, Simone said, “You can see how fortunate the natives are to have his civilizing influence.”

The
commissaire
for each district in Indochina was its gatekeeper, and this one would fulfill the expedition’s requisitions for oxcarts, horses, porters, and a camp cook, as well as give final approval for the travel permits issued in Phnom Penh. Irene had been worried that the
commissaire
of Stung Treng would find their arrival suspicious. After all, they were not the usual assembly of explorers. But looking at Ormond, who had transferred his attention to scratching his buttocks with his cane, she felt that he would not find much out of the ordinary. This should have eased her mind, but instead she wondered what it meant, that the French saw no need to entrust the guardianship of this territory to someone more serious.

“Fine, fine, this is all in order. I’ll put the boys to work on the oxcarts in the morning.” Ormond waved the expedition’s documents at a Cambodian youth whose reddish mop of hair matched his. “They’ll be loaded and ready to go with the horses and oxen by nightfall. And you can take my guide, Xa. The best in the region.” He leaned back in his chair and held out his empty glass. “Boy, bring me another bottle. Three weeks without wine waiting for the
Alouette
. Damn the rains. A Frenchman without his
vin rouge
. Is there any greater tragedy?”

Ormond had invited the expedition for dinner at his mildewing villa at the far end of Stung Treng, on a bluff hanging over the Sekong River. Having made their way through spicy fish stew, too much wine, and a gummy rice pudding, they were now settling into the screened verandah. Mr. Simms and Clothilde were not with them, but they had been joined by a middle-aged anthropologist named Lisette, who had been living in the province
for longer than I care to remember, darlings, how delightful to have fresh faces in our little settlement
. After nearly a week on the river, Irene welcomed how firm the earth felt beneath her. She was relaxed, or as relaxed
as one could feel on the brink of what might turn out to be the most important archaeological discovery of the century.

As Irene passed Marc to take a seat in the circle of chairs that Ormond had haphazardly arranged, she brushed her fingers along his upper arm. She was wearing an amethyst sheath, clinging to her beneath a sheer mantle of the same glassy color. She’d had it especially made for museum receptions, modeled after one of her favorite paintings, Erté’s
Moonlight
. On the steamer Simone had warned her that after a few days in the jungle, her feet would be septic, her face a rash of insect bites, and her dignity, along with her modesty, all but gone. Irene wanted to be beautiful for Marc tonight, so he would have something to envision once the jungle took hold of her.

Irene was not the only one wearing formal clothes. Louis and Marc were also dressed, each in his own style, as if for an evening in Shanghai, and Simone’s maroon, velvet-lined robe matched her low boots. Perhaps these efforts to appear civilized were an instinctive attempt to foster peace. Irene hoped so, for they could not afford an argument in front of Ormond like the one that had occurred on the steamer.

“Shall we listen to music?” Lisette asked. She had used kohl to give herself the eyes of an Asiatic, and with her salt-and-pepper hair, she looked like a Siamese cat.

“Mmm, indeed, I am in the mood for Ravel,” Ormond said. And then to the room in general, “I hope you will pardon my ignorance, but I’m still not quite clear on what you’re doing up here.”

“We’re investigating Khmer trade routes,” Louis said in a professional tone, as he began to explain the pretext Irene had invented to justify their journey. “Particularly from the periods of Suryavarman the Second and Jayavarman the Seventh. We hope to give scholars a new way of understanding the region’s historic mercantile systems.”

“We have photographs we’d like you to look at,” Irene added. “Markers from the Royal Road.”

How ideal it would be if there were similar stones in this area. How tedious it was to have to sit through this evening. Catching Marc watching her, Irene wished they could go to their room, a real room in Ormond’s villa with a real bed—a luxury after the discomfort of the
steamer’s hard, narrow berths. She wished they were already deep into the jungle. She wished she knew if the scrolls existed. She was a bit light-headed from eagerness and anxiety and alcohol. She set her glass aside.

“Fascinating stuff,” Ormond said, without interest. “There’s always someone up here chasing after something. Glow-in-the-dark centipedes. Savages to study. Did you see the article in
National Geographic
on the Moi? Why do Americans have such a fascination with bare breasts?” He threw a half-eaten dinner roll at another young houseboy, who had fallen asleep in the corner. With a start, the boy resumed operating the punkah, tugging the rope back and forth so that the wide sailcloth fan swept the air overhead. “The real point of my question is that I don’t understand what the assistant curator of the Angkor Wat temples, Henry Simms’s son, Roger Merlin’s widow, and a young lady from the Brooke Museum are doing in my province.” He uncorked a bottle and took a whiff. “Bah, piss of cat! Another one spoiled!”

Irene did not have to look at the others to know that they were instantly alert.

“And that girl,” Ormond said, “the Cambodian. I remember when Clothilde was a penny prostitute working the Chinese traders here in Stung Treng.”

Attempting nonchalance, Irene said, “She doesn’t work for pennies anymore.”

In his sea captain’s jacket and a sarong that was possibly made from damask curtains, Ormond—no fool, it turned out, despite his appearance—looked around, expectantly. “And for the pièce de résistance, you plan to leave a dying man in my house while you go in search of these trade routes of yours. And not any dying man. The notorious Henry Simms.”