The Map of Lost Memories (38 page)

“If you didn’t want the scrolls, this temple would be enough for you, wouldn’t it?”

“More than enough.”

“And if you don’t find them?” Marc asked.

Irene refused that possibility. “Once I find them, I’ll know what to do with them, and once I know what I’m going to do with them, I’ll know how my old life ends and how this new one begins.”

“Are you thinking about
not
taking them back to America?”

Irene was still adjusting to her new and fluctuating feelings for Cambodia. This country that she had thought she knew so well from afar was a place of contradictions and uncertainties, fresh challenges and possibilities, now that she was here. The Brooke Museum, that awful day when she had stood in front of the board of trustees—it all seemed like such a distant memory, cold and faded when compared to this lush, overheated part of the world. “I’m not sure what I’m thinking anymore,” she said. “All I know is that when you’ve wanted one thing for so long, it feels as if you’re betraying yourself to even consider changing your mind.”

“I understand that,” Marc said, brushing his lips over her sunburned
forehead. “I had never wanted to meet you. Then you walked into my bar. After we talked that first night, I knew I was going to betray myself. I was going to betray the promise I’d made to turn my back on you if you ever appeared in my world. Somehow I felt it would be worth any pain that would come with having you in my life.” Carefully, he wrapped his arm around her and held her to him. “I was right.”

Irene knew he would always struggle with his feelings about her relationship with Mr. Simms, but at this moment, his confession assured her that they could overcome them. She rested against him, and beneath the roughness of his shirt, she could feel the laces that bound his ribs. His hand lay softly over the bandages clinging to her sides. The jungle had encroached upon the two of them, as it had on the temple’s ruins, and she was aware of how their wounds had become an abiding part of who they were.

While the fog thinned in the growing heat, light rose in the sky. With it came a deep thundering, and Irene and Marc watched as the auburn flash of gibbons stampeded through the canopy of the trees, swinging from branch to branch, howling their exhilaration to the sun as it slowly emerged.

Louis and Simone met Irene and Marc at the dance pavilion at eight o’clock, the time they had agreed upon when discussing a plan of action over the campfire the night before. From what they had been able to discern before darkness fell, the temple grounds encompassed acres, and the temple itself consisted of dozens of structures. Aside from the sanctuary, there was no single logical place to look for the scrolls. If there had been, Irene would have started searching at dawn. But since it would be a waste of time to approach this randomly, they decided to begin their reconnaissance, and assess the situation, by paying their respects to the temple abbot.

The abbot’s presence in this remote place had come as a surprise to Marc, but Irene and the others knew that long before Jayavarman VII reclaimed the Khmer Empire for its people, he had been influenced by his wife’s devout Mahayana Buddhist beliefs. It was not unusual to find an
active monastery in a temple that bore the Buddha’s image, no matter how far-flung that temple was. Even Angkor Wat had been inhabited by monks when Henri Mouhot discovered it.

Leaving one coolie in camp to watch over the Brau, whose leg was slowly healing, Xa had joined the other remaining porters, supervising the transfer of equipment over the bridge to the temple. Clothilde had gone with Kiri and May-ling in tow to visit her aunties in Kha Seng. And so it was that their meager, dirty, bloody, and broken-boned foursome carried the offerings of tobacco and gold-leafed Buddhist images to the back of the temple’s walled property, where huts of wood and palm thatch were built among stone pavilions. As they waited for the abbot, novitiates in topaz robes loitered in twos and threes, holding taffeta parasols aloft to protect themselves from the sun. The boys studied the foreigners openly, while out of the corner of her eye Irene noted the
chedi
, a bell-shaped edifice that spiraled toward the sky. She knew it was devoted to religious relics and would be an ideal hiding place for the scrolls. But she couldn’t see into it from where she stood, nor could she edge closer to it without every one of the attentive young monks heeding her move.

When the old abbot arrived,
sampeahs
were performed, heads bowing toward the dirt at his bare feet. They were invited to join him in his open-walled
sala
, where he sat cross-legged on a reed mat. They were all tense in their impatience to start hunting for the scrolls, and Simone spoke rapidly through the ritual of asking after the abbot’s health and the health of his followers. Irene noticed that a new sense of confidence came across in Simone’s demeanor, reflecting the strength that seemed to build in her with every hour she remained sober. Simone was visibly self-assured as she explained, in the formal Khmer used by religious orders, the same story they had told the chief of Leh: They were scholars, and Ormond had enlisted them to retrieve the scrolls and keep them from being exploited by the government.

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.