The Map of Lost Memories (6 page)

The countess gasped.

Stunned, Irene asked, “He beat her while she was pregnant?”

“I sat with her in the hospital for six days,” Lily said. “He hit her to rid her of that baby girl. You can be sure of it by the way he did it.”

“How awful.” Irene’s thoughts grew dark with this gruesome vision.
Sickened by the helplessness and pain Simone must have felt, she had to force herself to continue. “Do you know where she was going?”

“I’m not enjoying this conversation anymore,” Lily said. “It’s too depressing for a Sunday, even in Shanghai.” She flicked her cigarillo onto the floor.

The countess sighed. “I must admit, I have never cared for Simone. But a baby changes things. Poor, dear girl.”

Lily stood and said to Irene, “Cambodia, my fair-haired American spy. That is where Simone was going when he caught up with her. But I have a feeling this comes as no surprise to you.”

“I don’t care about anything else,” Simone declared. “You can talk to whomever you want about whatever you want, except my baby.”

Irene looked up to see Simone standing in the doorway of Anne’s office. It was late Monday morning. After her evening with the countess and Lily, she had not slept well, and she was now attempting to clear her head by helping Anne grade a collection of Yangshao pottery.

“This is my city,” Simone continued. “How dare you come into it as if it’s yours for the asking. As if my life is yours for the taking. If you wanted to know more about me, why didn’t you walk down the hall and ask me? My office is always open.”

Irene was caught off guard by how rapidly gossip traveled through Shanghai, so much faster than she had expected. The electricity was dead, the air was sopping, and she spoke as she rarely did, without thinking. “How did you end up at the mercy of a man like that? How could you let such a thing happen?”

“Let such a thing happen?” Simone’s anger disintegrated into bewilderment.

Seated in the open window, Anne reproached, “Irene, that’s offensive.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry.” Irene realized that she was allowing her feelings about what the museum trustees had done to her overlap with what Roger had done to Simone. She smoothed the documents on the
desk in front of her, rubbing her palm across the top sheet, smearing the ink with her sweat. “But, Simone, will he really chase you down if he knows someone is watching? If you’re with me?”

Simone stepped into the room, her face shielded by the shadow of her wide-brimmed black hat. Her green Chinese-style blouse was paired with black stovepipe trousers that might have come from a man’s suit, making her look as if she had just walked off a vaudeville stage. “It won’t matter who is there.”

Behind Anne, sunlight reflected into the alley’s chasm and glanced off scraps of faded laundry drying on a railing opposite. “Darling, if Simone doesn’t want to go, let her be.”

“Let her be?” Irene asked with disbelief. “How can you of all people say that? You left
your
husband because you no longer wanted to be a housewife. This is so much worse!”

“My reasons were far more complicated,” Anne rebuked. “You know that. You have always known that. In any case, Thomas was not a threat to my life.”

“That’s all the more reason for you to leave him,” Irene said to Simone. “You shouldn’t have to live with such fear. I can help you. This could be your opportunity to escape him.”

“Let’s change the subject,” Anne said. “This is far too complex a problem to discuss in this kind of heat. Summertime in Shanghai makes things seem worse than they actually are.”

Simone frowned as she crossed the room to the settee. “You blame everything on the heat.”

“People are far less volatile in cooler climates.”

“Hardly, Anne,” Irene said. “The Wobblies are rioting in Seattle.”

Simone took off her hat and rested her head on the arm of the settee. She moved deliberately, tipping her head to one side to reveal her right earlobe, split into a V. A bruise bloated her jaw and cheek. “Irene, I think you should know, I did tell my husband about your offer. A frying pan makes quite the weapon. He is resourceful,
n’est-il pas
?”

“Oh, darling.” Anne was on her feet, making her way to Simone.

“I told him I have an opportunity to go in search of a lost temple.
Then I made the mistake of telling him how much I want this.” Her fingers trembled over the scab on her ear. Perspiration beaded on her face. “I never knew I could be this lonely.”

“Hush.” Anne folded Simone into her arms and stroked her hair. “It will rain soon, I promise.”

As Irene watched them, it occurred to her that loneliness is not about what happens when you are alone but about what happens when you are with others. It is about how willing you are to open your heart and allow another to get close to you. At least Simone was letting Anne hold her and console her. Irene could not remember the last time someone had held her that way. Not even her father or Mr. Simms.

Anne said, “Irene, please fetch the thermos on the shelf behind my desk.”

Simone smiled. “To sleep, perchance to dream.”

Irene handed the thermos to Anne, who removed the lid and filled it with a soupy, gray liquid. Simone drank, and then Anne filled the lid again and offered it to Irene, saying, “I will lay out some cushions for you.”

Irene took the cup. Its contents smelled vile. “What is it?”

“I make it myself.” Anne retrieved a pair of pillows and a blanket from the cupboard. “I buy the poppies from the one-eyed mandarin behind Jardine’s.”

As Anne spread out a knitted afghan, Irene’s mind was drawn back to her childhood, to her bed of quilts on the Brooke Museum’s floor.

“It does wonders,” Anne said. “Every ache, every pain, every melancholy thought inside you, gone, faded away. Better than Bayer. Much nicer than a psychoanalyst. For some reason I always feel worse when I leave a session with mine.”

A candle had burned down in a jade ashtray on the desk, and the still blades of the fan cast an indolent shadow on a patch of wall near the ceiling. As attractive as it was, the idea of escaping into such an easy sleep, Irene was more tempted by the thought of Simone’s office down the hall. She hoped Simone had left the door open, since she was not adept at picking locks. Handing the lid back to Anne, she said, “No, thank you.”

Retreating from the tragedy that was her life, Simone curled onto her
side. She was so different from the person Irene had thought she would find, and part of her wanted to send a telegram to Mr. Simms and inform him that he had made a bad decision in choosing Simone to help her. But to fail at what she had come to Shanghai to do would be too painful in the wake of her humiliation in Seattle. Besides, it would take time to find another person who knew Cambodia and the Khmer as well as Simone did. Mr. Simms had trusted Irene to fulfill his dying wish. Time was one thing she did not have, especially since the next available passage from Shanghai to Indochina was sailing in three days.

With the labor strikes, there was no telling how soon another ship would leave the city, and so Irene was going to keep trying to find a solution, starting with searching Simone’s office. Busying herself with the task she had begun, she waited for Anne to gulp the foul-smelling tea and stretch out on the blanket, humming a Chinese love song until eventually, along with Simone, she fell asleep.

Just two doors down the hall, Irene felt as if she had traveled halfway around the globe only to end up back in her own office at the Brooke Museum. Simone’s cramped office was a shrine to Cambodia, its walls covered from floor to ceiling with yellow survey maps, its shelves an exhibition of statuettes—dozens of
apsaras
, made of bronze, of brass, of silver, of stone.

One was crafted from pounded tin, the kind of cheap trinket sold at souvenir stands. Another was carved from pink sandstone, glossy with handling and age—eight centuries old, Irene estimated from glancing at it. In the russet shadows beyond the reach of the kerosene lamp, a shelf held Étienne Aymonier’s archaeological inventory, the first systematic survey of the temples and one of the primary guides Irene had used in teaching herself the skill of classification. She pulled out the atlas from Auguste Pavie’s Indochina mission and opened it to the map she had studied back in Seattle when she first learned of the lost temple; it covered the ambiguous border area between Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos.

As Irene sat down at Simone’s desk, where Sappho Marchal’s
Khmer
Costumes and Ornaments
was open to the inscription “To my dearest friend. Return home soon, Sappho,” a feeling of optimism rose in her. This room was proof of how meaningful Cambodia was to Simone.

Irene trailed her finger through a thick deposit of incense that lay like an anthill within a brass holder. Eager to know more about this woman whose passion for the Khmer seemed to equal hers, she tugged open the top desk drawer. She took out a bottle of Luminal that contained six tablets, and from beneath the bottle three sheets of stationery. She read, “Dear Louis, you are going to” and “Louis, this is” and “Louis, the time has.” She did not know who this might be.

Reaching in deeper, she removed a handful of clippings from Shanghai’s Municipal Government and Communist newspapers. She leafed through the articles, all of them about Roger. Strikes he had organized and riots he had incited. His attendance at the First National Congress with Sun Yat-sen the previous year, his work with Bolshevik military instructors, and his arrest after a French attaché was killed by a pipe bomb. He was released for lack of evidence, but the editorial tone of the
North-China Daily News
implied his guilt.

In dealing with Roger Merlin, Irene understood how cautious she must be, but still, he was just a man, and men were open to negotiation. They preferred it over ultimatums, as long as they thought they had won. It was easy enough to make a man think that he had won, and from what she had gleaned so far, this was all Roger wanted.

As she was putting the clippings back into the drawer, a headline caught her eye:
FIRE DESTROYS SIMMS & CO
.
FLOUR MILL IN POOTUNG
. Startled by the sudden presence of Mr. Simms’s name, she skimmed back through the papers, and redirecting her attention, she saw that according to the articles, Henry Simms owned a great many factories in Shanghai. He was mentioned more than any other industrialist, and always in relation to his business interests being under siege by the Kuomintang.

Irene had known that Shanghai had long been Mr. Simms’s second home. It had been his base before and after his time in Manila, where he met her parents, and she remembered him traveling to the city when she was a girl. She still had the picture postcards he’d sent of rickshaw coolies, and the petite pink robe he’d brought back for her from one of his
trips. She also knew that he had investments all across the Orient, in shipping, importing, and exporting, and in tea and rubber plantations throughout Malaya and Vietnam, but they had never talked about any of this. The details of his financial empire had never extended into the sovereign state of art they shared—not until this moment. Irene felt chagrin at not having bothered to speculate about Mr. Simms’s dealings in Shanghai, and what these dealings could mean: that he and Roger Merlin were enemies.

Henry Simms had sent her to hire the wife of his enemy.

Mr. Simms’s story was as familiar to Irene as her own father’s. He had not gone from being a wheat farmer’s son in eastern Washington State to being one of the wealthiest men in the world simply by figuring out a few sharp business moves. He was a strategist, a mastermind. He did nothing that was not thoroughly planned, and as she clutched the brittle newspaper clippings, the possibility of something bigger than she had anticipated swelled, unformed, into the room.

Irene thrived on secrets and mysteries. She thrived on finding answers, and Mr. Simms knew this about her. It was not improbable that he had planned on her learning about his stake in Shanghai. He could even have known what he was getting her into with Simone, although if he did, Irene could not comprehend why he would have her seek out Roger Merlin’s unstable wife. But she was intrigued, as she felt sure she was meant to be.

Back in Anne’s office, Simone was still asleep, snoring softly. Near her on the floor, Anne gazed drowsily at the ceiling. “Tell me honestly why you don’t want me to do this,” Irene said, keeping her voice low as she stood in the doorway.

“It’s shameless to ask me questions when I’m in this state,” Anne protested.

“You won’t answer me if you’re sober.” The sun had passed the meridian, and the office was now layered in shade from the buildings across the alley. Still, the heat was ripe and full. Only one candle remained lit, its low flame sputtering in the pooling wax. “You’ve never opposed me before.”

Anne tipped her head to look up at Irene. “You’re going to steal the scrolls.”

Irene dropped her voice even further. “I’ve never said that.”

“Henry is financing your expedition. You didn’t have to.”

“Did you tell Simone about Mr. Simms?”

“If Roger finds out that Henry is involved … Even if she does make it to Cambodia with you … The scrolls, she’ll be devastated when you take them to America.”

“What about me? You know how much I need this.”

Anne’s movements were lethargic as she propped herself up against the base of the settee. “You’re crossing a line.” Her attempt at a firm tone was undermined by the effects of the poppy tea.

“I didn’t know that you believed there was a line. There didn’t seem to be one when you wanted me to help you find the empress dowager’s ring.”

Anne lifted her wrinkled hand into a crease of dusky light, illuminating the ring whose braid of gold framed a cinnabar carving of the character for Puyi, the name of the empress’s chosen successor, her great-nephew, the last emperor of China. The ring had disappeared upon the empress’s death, most likely spirited away by one of her handmaids. Irene recalled with pride how she had tracked it to a Serbian collector, Murat Stanić. Leveraging her request with knowledge about the location of Caesar’s Ruby, a pendant that had gone missing from the Romanov crown jewels, she’d convinced Stanić to deliver the ring to her rather than to Puyi, who was offering a sizable reward for it after his expulsion from the Forbidden City. “Irene, we’re not talking about a piece of jewelry,” Anne said. “This isn’t another statue or vase. This is a country’s history. Its heritage.”