The Map of Lost Memories (7 page)

“And I will make sure it’s protected. If I don’t discover it, it might be lost forever. If someone else discovers it, who knows what might happen to it? I’m not going to take the scrolls just for me, Anne. I have plans for them. They’ll be safe.”

“You’ve created a convenient argument.”

“It’s a true argument! I won’t hide the scrolls away in a private gallery. I intend to establish a museum around them. A place that will give them their due
and
give me mine. Can’t you understand why I need this? Why
I need something bigger than a statue or vase? After the board of trustees—”

“Sweetheart, I know how hard this has been on you, but you need to—”

“I deserve better. I deserve
this
. I need it.”

“Enough to jeopardize her safety?”

Irene studied Simone, who looked like a child, her knees pulled up to her flat chest. Despite the low light, the bruise on the side of her face was visible, a gray-green welt running the length of her jaw. Irene did not want to see anyone hurt, but she was almost thirty. She could not start over. She had worked too hard. She was too good at the life she had crafted for herself to let it slip away. “He hit her with a frying pan. If I can get her out of here, I’ll be doing her a favor.”

Alone in her hotel room, Irene took her map case from beneath the mattress, where she had tied the brown leather bag to a wooden slat for safekeeping. The stitching around one of the brass buckles was rubbed away, and the flap was stained with a water mark that looked like a continent drifting in a brown sea. She unhooked the buckles and removed the collection she kept inside. Carefully, she unfolded the topmost map, its creases as soft as old flannel. It was the first map her father had given her after her mother died. She laid it on the floor and beside it another, and then another, until she was standing in a patchwork sea of Cambodia, its landscapes embellished with indigo tigers and crimson Hindu gods.

As dusk passed quickly outside her window, the Cardamom Mountains lay partially hidden beneath the tangle of cotton bedspread that had slipped to the floor. Tonle Sap Lake streamed into the darkness beneath the writing desk. The thick vein of the Mekong River fractured the countryside, and tassels from the shade of the oil lamp cast patterns, like the frayed shadows of storm clouds, over the saffron fleck that marked the town of Stung Treng. Irene’s girlhood had been a succession of journeys, coursing through her imagination into this faraway country. She gazed down on those adventures, layered in a pentimento of remembrance.

Finding the lost temple was about more than taking back what was
rightfully hers, and Irene was angry with Anne for not acknowledging this. Since she had left her job at the museum, she could see how her entire life had been leading her to the moment when Mr. Simms showed her the missionary’s diary. Now, in her hotel room in Shanghai, she sat down on the bed with it and skimmed the pages she had memorized and nearly worn through with rereading:

These words had been written one hundred years to the month before Irene’s arrival in Shanghai, and thirty-five years before Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist, claimed to be the first to have discovered Angkor Wat and announced it to the world. It was incredible to think that this missionary, Reverend Garland, had seen it—
Ang Cor
, he called it—before Mouhot and not mentioned it to a soul. Nor had he disclosed what he came upon a few days afterward.

Irene had laughed the first time she read the words:
savage people
. The Khmer were as far from being savage as the ancient Romans. More so, since the Romans had their gladiators and the practice of throwing Christians to lions. During the Khmer’s reign, from the ninth to the fifteenth century, they ultimately commanded a region of more than one thousand temples that spread from Siam into Laos and down to the South China Sea. Their bas-reliefs held up to the Greeks’ and Persians’, and they were masters of engineering with their massive system of public waterworks. Most important to Irene, they built the largest temple in the world, Angkor Wat, which alone encompassed five hundred acres. A million people had once lived there.

Then, after centuries of high civilization, the empire vanished. But
even at its height it was unknown to the West, and by the time Mouhot came along, not a shadow of its brilliance was said to remain among the Cambodians, as the descendants of the Khmer were now called by the outside world. All that was left were miles and miles of temples, abandoned except for the monks who inhabited them.

When he first saw the ruins of Angkor Wat, Mouhot had written, “It is a rival to the temple of Solomon, and erected by an ancient Michelangelo. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome.”

What had happened to cause the entire Khmer civilization to disappear? Scholars devoted their lives to this question, and Irene had pored over the possibilities. Theories abounded, but the answer was still a Holy Grail, one that many, including Irene, feared would never be found, given the impermanence of Khmer record keeping.

The Khmer had chronicled their world using mulberry bark paper and stacked cords of palm leaves. These pages had disintegrated or had been destroyed in the hundreds of years since they were written. But copper scrolls. Irene could envision them, as Reverend Garland must have seen them, for she had studied such documents in the course of her career: metal scrolls that had been unrolled and flattened into the thinnest of tablets. Such objects could easily survive. They could still exist. And if these particular scrolls did, and if they contained Cambodia’s history, Irene was closer than anyone had ever come to discovering them.

From the pocket stitched into the back cover of the diary, she took out another map. Reverend James T. Garland’s map, drawn with the precision of a cartographer. Each distance on his route was noted, neatly penned along the jungle trails of northeast Cambodia, from the town of “Stun Tren” to a destination, marked with a blue
X
, near a village that he called “Ka Saeng” not far from the Lao border. Irene had reviewed the reverend’s calculations exhaustively, in Seattle and on the
Tahoma
crossing the Pacific Ocean and in this hotel room while waiting for Simone to come back from France, using her own maps for comparison. The starting point was the trading town of Stung Treng, at the confluence of the Mekong and Sekong Rivers. It was reachable by steamer from Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. The end point near Kha Seng lay in uncharted territory, but the reverend had recorded the names of villages on the way
to it. The path was so clearly designated that it made Irene laugh. Could it really be that easy?

As she folded the map back into the diary, she removed a calling card that she had put into the pocket for safekeeping. It had the name of a business on it, “Rafferty’s Nightclub,” and printed in the corner was “Marc Rafferty, Prop.” She turned it over and once again read Mr. Simms’s cramped, back-slanted script: “If you need assistance of any kind, this is your man.” When Mr. Simms had given her the card, it was no surprise that he knew whom she should go to for guidance in Shanghai, considering his relationship with the city. Later, adrift on the ocean, she gave it little thought. But now, in light of what was happening with Simone … Mr. Simms did nothing without a purpose, no matter how incidental it seemed.

Looking out the window, where the haphazard angles of Shanghai’s rooftops were indiscernible in the blackout, Irene considered how nonchalantly Mr. Simms had first mentioned partnering with Simone Merlin, during the early stages of the planning for Irene’s journey. One evening he had summoned her to the study that nestled in the center of his manor’s top floor, a vault of a room where they had spent countless hours deep in discussion over the years. When Irene arrived, a fire was burning, mellowing the deep hue of the cherrywood walls into a rich rosy amber. Mr. Simms stood with his back to her, facing the only ornament in the room: three slabs of golden pink sandstone, fitted together one atop another, nearly six feet tall.

Their border was sculpted with sinuous florets that coiled around a carving of a divine
apsara
from Banteay Srei, the tenth-century Khmer temple known as the Citadel of Women. The goddess had arrived at the manor two years earlier, shrouded in secrecy since word had spread so quickly of her disappearance. Irene had been with Mr. Simms in the middle of the night when the
apsara
was delivered and pieced back together in this room. He had given no explanation as to why this antiquity, and only this one above all the others he owned, deserved to occupy the most secret space in his home, and she knew better than to ask. So there the carving resided, undisturbed, chiseled into her sandstone alcove.

Standing beside Mr. Simms, waiting for him to explain why he had called for her, Irene gazed on the
apsara
. Despite all the time she had spent
studying it, she never grew bored admiring the serpentine limbs, the placid set of the mouth, the flat cheekbones revealing the Hindu ancestry of the Indian traders who once trespassed through the Khmer territories on their way to China.

Finally, Mr. Simms asked, “Did I ever tell you how she was taken out of Cambodia?”

Irene nodded. “In coffins.”

“Clever, so very clever. And you know who took her?”

“Yes,” Irene said, easily playing her part in this conversation they’d had so many times before. “Roger and Simone Merlin.”

“I have been thinking about this woman: Simone. She might be just the right person to help you find the scrolls. What do you think?”

It had been as simple as that. But thinking back on it, Irene wondered if it really had been that simple. Picking up her maps and folding them with care, she slid each one into the case. She weighed new possibilities as she bathed and washed her hair, combing it out but not tying it up. It felt too good, cool and damp over her shoulders. She put on a sleeveless linen dress and a new pair of sandals she had bought at the Wing On department store, and then she went out into the city, to see if she could find out why Mr. Simms had so casually suggested that she might need assistance from Marc Rafferty.

It was dark among the quiet streets of Shanghai’s French quarter. With the calling card as her guide, Irene stood in front of a metal gate and sought an indication that she had come to the right place. Candles lay along the rim of the high brick wall, but the descent of thin, flickering light did not reveal any kind of sign. Suddenly, shrieking and jazz swelled from within, and the gate crashed open. It was as if a bomb had exploded, catapulting people onto the sidewalk. Women in high-heeled evening sandals stumbled against one another. A swarthy man fell and was crushed as the crowd trampled over him. But everyone was laughing. The men wore tuxedos. A woman tripped past, peacock feathers sprouting from her
gem-encrusted hair, howling as if she had heard the world’s dirtiest joke.

“Bosch would have loved painting this city.”

The man who spoke was tucked into a fold of shadow behind Irene. He must have been standing there all along.

“Did you say Bosch?” she asked.

“A Flemish artist,” he said.

“I know who he is. Fifteenth century. Temptation and morality.”

He nodded appreciatively. “Don’t forget deadly sins.”

“And the torments of hell.”

“So you can understand how well Shanghai would have suited him.” The man’s accent was European but not traceable to a specific country, as was the case with many who had lived a long time in the Orient. He squinted at the chaos of people bursting out of the nightclub. “A riot has broken out in the Chapei district. The damn fool Chinese are torching their own warehouses. I hear that the view is spectacular from the roof of the Palace Hotel.”

A teenage Filipina shoved through the crowd. She yanked a spangled leash, and an Italian greyhound skittered over the cobbled walkway behind her. “I stole a bottle of Veuve,” she squealed to the man as she waved the champagne above her head. “I’ll make it up to you later, sugar. Boy, oh boy, will I!”

A burgundy Rolls-Royce led a parade of cars toward the British Settlement and the rooftop view from the Palace Hotel. Only Irene and the man remained behind. He stooped down, picked up a purple feather boa, and carried it into the courtyard. As she followed him, he asked, “You’re not going to join the fun?”

Willows draped their leaves over pools of candlelight. A yellow ginkgo had been overturned, and its ceramic pot was shattered. Jade ashtrays littered the wrought-iron tables. Irene noticed a sign hanging from a post:
RAFFERTY’S
. She said, “It doesn’t seem like much fun to me.”

“A smart woman. I like that.” The man smiled. “Actually, I started the rumor. I don’t have the patience I used to. I’m leaving Shanghai, and everyone and his mistress wants to bid me bon voyage. Each of my patrons
likes to think I’m his best friend, simply because I don’t divulge the repugnant secrets he lets slip when he’s acting as if he’s too tight to know better. I am tired of these people.”

“Are you Marc Rafferty?”

He paused, examining her, taking in her perspiring skin and her pale blue dress, which seemed loose at first but would be discovered to deliberately skim the slight curves of her body if one looked closely enough. “I am. And who are you?”

In the light filtering down from an upstairs window, she returned his appraisal, taking in his unconventional collarless shirt and loose Oriental trousers. He was tall, and his body had substance without being heavy. His eyes were deep set, and his dark blond hair curled over his ears in the humidity. He would have been too handsome if his face had not been hardened by a look of tired reproach. Worried that she had chosen a bad time to come to him, she said, “My name is Irene Blum.”