The Map of Lost Memories (43 page)

“I’m not going to make it that easy for you.” Irene bowed forward as if she were going to
sampeah
to Simone. “Hold the gun to my head.”

“What?” Simone asked.

With calm certainty, Irene repeated, “Hold the gun to my head.”

“You’re trying to trick me,” Simone said.

“Do it.”

“Irene, don’t test her,” Louis called out. “Simone, please, there’s no reason for it to come to this.”

“If what she really wants is her revolution,” Irene said, “I’m the least of her obstacles. If she can’t shoot me, then she’s not going to get very far.”

Marc did not protest, and Irene loved him more for not preventing her from doing what she had to do.

She said, “I won’t give you the scrolls, Simone. I will fight you for them, and you will have to shoot me. Prove it. Prove that
this
is what you want more than anything else. More than even my life. Try to take the scrolls from me.”

Despite her broken wrist, Simone clutched the pistol’s handle in both hands and raised it. Her voice was deep with anger. “You can’t talk me out of them.”

The muzzle brushed Irene’s forehead like a kiss.

Shivering, Irene did her best to keep steady. “I don’t intend to talk you out of anything. I’m not that stupid. Or that clever.” Keenly aware of Simone’s finger resting unreliably against the trigger, Irene reached for the box. She was terrified, and yet somehow this made her even more determined. She unfastened the latches and reached inside.

She watched Simone’s face behind the pistol’s gray silhouette as she
removed a scroll from the box and bolted the lid once again. Simone must have tried to ready herself for this moment, but she had craved it for too long; she was incapable of stifling the elation in her eyes. Irene held out the sheet of copper. Simone did not move. Gripping the pistol tightly with her arms raised, she could not take the scroll without making herself vulnerable.

“Put it on the ground,” Simone ordered.

“No.”

“Now!”

“No,” Irene said. “Not until you tell me what you really want. Say it, Simone, admit it.”

Simone pressed the gun so hard into Irene’s forehead that Irene felt it bruising the bone. Simone’s face was red with anger as she hissed, “You don’t think I have it in me.”

Fighting the urge to draw back, Irene said, “I don’t think you’re like your husband, if that’s what you mean.”

“This is different.”

“That’s exactly what we said when we killed him, to absolve ourselves of what we’d done.”

Simone’s fury shook the gun, and the muzzle slid sideways.

Irene dodged in the other direction.

Fumbling, Simone’s hands sought to right the gun, and in that moment Irene swung the scroll as hard as she could into the side of Simone’s face. The pistol fired into the starlit sky. Marc and Louis leapt forward to hold Simone down, but there was no need. She collapsed to the ground, lying perfectly still, just as her husband had in the tall grass of the Chinese countryside.

Irene knew the scroll was not heavy enough to have really hurt Simone. The death that was taking place before them was not physical. Still, she pressed her thumb against Simone’s throat. The pulse was quick and very much alive. Irene whispered, “No one wants to give the Khmer their pride back more than you do. No one will ever want that more than you do. But it’s not selfish, Simone, to want the scrolls for yourself too.”

Simone opened her eyes, and as she stared toward the Southern Cross, Irene watched her armor fade away.

Irene slipped the strap of the box from her shoulder. She was thinking about how naturally Marc had immersed himself in studying the Khmer since he had met her. She was thinking about Louis’s sincere desire to give the Cambodians access to their own history. She was thinking that there was no guarantee any of them could protect the scrolls from the government, or looters, or the museums of Paris and Seattle. But with enough money, Mr. Simms’s money, as much as she could beg from him, and with the four of them on the scrolls’ side, each in his own peculiar way, who better to try?

“Here,” she said to Louis, holding out the box.

He stared at it but did not take it.

“A chance for real preservation and scholarship,” she said. “That is what you want, isn’t it?”

He nodded, his expression revealing his amazement.

Kiri had crept down from the porch, followed by Clothilde and Loung. They stood at the edge of the yard, where moonlight filtered through the lace of lime trees. A cotton batting of clouds drifted over the sky. Irene reached for Marc’s hand. She said, “I’m ready to want that too.”

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.”