The Map of Lost Memories (11 page)

“Is he alive?” Irene asked.

Simone held her fingers over his open mouth. They hovered there, splayed, searching for the suggestion of life. “There’s a hospital near the railway station,” she whispered. “It’s run by Swiss nuns. They’re discreet. It’s where I stayed after I lost the baby.”

The weary ghost of a far-off breeze crept around the car. It might have foreshadowed relief, but Irene had been in Shanghai long enough to know that the subtle shift in temperature was a promise that would not be kept. “What will we tell them?”

“He was already wounded,” Simone said, sounding uncertain. “We didn’t see him on the ground when you hit him with the car. It was an accident. We need to hurry. The hospital is half an hour away.” She stood. Dew left dark stains on her skirt. “I keep a blanket in the trunk. We can use it to carry him.” Focused on her plan, she ran behind the car.

Crouching beside Roger, Irene lifted his wrist. She pressed her fingers
into his skin, seeking a rhythm in the limp tendons, clinging to him as if he had thrown his arm out to save her from drowning in a cold, dark sea. Did she want Roger Merlin to live? No, she did not. But that was entirely different from wanting him to die.

She could not find a pulse.

The night was still dark. It felt as if it had been dark for years, as if the sun was never going to rise again. Using a candle, Irene found an aluminum pail and the pump outside the back door. She heated water on the stove in the small kitchen area, then dipped her dirty hands into the water and scrubbed them with a rag as hard as she could. When she finished, she gave the cloth to Simone, but Simone let it drop to the floor and held out her hands like a child. Irene took one in her own. It was cold and unyielding. She thought of Roger lying in the grass. Retrieving the letter opener from her pocket, she used it to scrape the blood from beneath Simone’s fingernails, while Simone’s tears dropped silently into the cooling water.

——

Irene was lying on a cot at the back of the bungalow. She was not awake, nor was she asleep, but somehow she had managed to detach herself from consciousness. She did not know how long she had been drifting or where she had gone, but she wanted to stay there, as far away as she could get from the events of the night. She tried to remain in this suspended place but was drawn out by the smell of coffee, her body betraying her as her stomach growled with craving. She stood. Her neck and back were sore from tension. Stretching, she walked to the coal stove, where a percolator simmered. She poured a cup of coffee and looked around the curtained room, at Roger’s desk, at the loose pages of his memoir. His life’s story interrupted, brought to an end in a way he could not have conceived. The coffee was gritty and too strong, but she relished it.

She found Simone sitting on the top step of the porch. The bungalow faced an unkempt field that was flanked by tall, leafy trees. The sky was hazy with morning mist, as the muffled rim of sunrise emerged over the horizon. Although Simone was gazing toward the front of the car, where Roger still lay, his body was not visible in the tall, sodden grass.

Irene wanted to offer solace, but she could think of nothing to say that would be of comfort. She could not imagine how Simone must feel, terrorized by her husband for so many years, and now faced with this. Finally, she asked, “Were you able to sleep?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

Irene sat down. “I understand.”

“What do we do now?”

“We have to leave Shanghai.”

“It will be too suspicious if I go away the day after he dies.” Simone sounded so defeated. Was it because Roger was dead, or because she was afraid that now she would never get back to Cambodia?

“Not if no one knows,” Irene said.

Simone fingered the torn hem of her skirt. “We’re going to have to leave him out here, aren’t we?”

The mist was dissolving, and the morning began to brighten. Irene
appraised Simone’s haggard expression and was sure that her own face was equally revealing. Even if they changed out of their muddy clothes and made themselves presentable, it did not seem that they could disguise their role in Roger’s death. She said, “If we go to the police, there will be questioning. You have every reason to want him dead. Good reasons, but that won’t matter. You’ll be one of the top suspects. There could be a trial, and you know what Shanghai is like. The government will take great pleasure in tormenting you. Roger’s put you through enough already. Besides, we don’t have time for all that. If we leave him here, it could take days, even weeks for him to be found.”

“Still, to buy a ticket to Cambodia on the day after he disappears.”

Irene was surprised by how logical Simone was being. Just as she was surprised by how clearheaded she felt. “I already bought two tickets for the
Lumière
. It’s leaving tomorrow.”

“How could you have known?”

“I didn’t. I bought them right when I arrived here. The
Lumière
was the first ship to Saigon I could book passage on.” Finishing off the thick, bracing remains of her coffee, Irene said, “We’re going to need an alibi for where we’ve been all night. For why I’m with you and why we’re going to Saigon. Anne will help us. Come on, we have to get out of here.”

Simone rose to her feet. She had aged a decade overnight. “Start the car,” she said. “I just need a minute.” When she emerged from the bungalow a few moments later, she was carrying a folder. Irene did not have to ask what it contained. She only hoped Simone would be smart enough to burn Roger’s memoir before they left Shanghai.

“She’s sleeping,” Anne said, returning a syringe to a leather medical case.

“What did you give her?” Irene asked.

“Morphine.”

“Isn’t that excessive?”

“She’s built up a tolerance to most everything else. Would you like something, darling? Song Yi brought back the loveliest hashish from Peshawar.” Anne glanced at her jade opium kit set out on the bookshelf among her collection of Qingbai porcelains. “Or I can make you a pipe?”

Irene was too afraid of where a drug might take her right now. Closer, rather than far enough away. “No, thank you.”

“How about some tea then?” Anne asked.

“Please.” Despite the bristling heat of the day, Irene was freezing. She had been cold from the moment, standing in Anne’s doorway, that she’d said the words aloud: “Roger is dead.” Anne had simply nodded, as if this was to be expected, and Simone had started crying again. Now, having cleaned up in Anne’s bathroom and put on a pair of her pajamas, Irene was suddenly aware of the chill crystallizing in her limbs, as it had when Roger pressed the gun to her cheek. She needed air. Sweltering, thawing air. She walked out to the balcony, followed by the green scent of boiling tea. Anne brought a steaming cup, wound in a napkin, and set the warm bundle on the railing.

“I’m having the hardest time walking back through this,” Irene said, keeping her voice low so as not to wake Simone, even though she was asleep in the bedroom with the door closed. “Not just last night but these past days in Shanghai, the last months in Seattle, I’m trying to get back, do you understand, before I lost my job, before my father died. There’s a path, there must be a path from here to there, but I can’t find it. I can’t make the connections.” She covered her face with her hands, as if doing so could block out the vision of what had happened. “He held a gun to my head.”

“I know you want to make sense of this,” Anne said, “but you can’t.”

The city was achingly quiet, with the soup and noodle vendors in the lanes below idle between the busy breakfast and lunch hours. Overhead, the damp sky hung low and unpolished. “I should feel awful about what we did to him,” Irene said, “but I don’t. What kind of person does that make me?”

Anne guided her into a wicker chair. “You must let this go.”

It seemed impossible to Irene that something like this could be
let go
, yet she felt as if she was going to be sick if she thought about it any longer, so she asked, “Where were you last night?”

Anne gazed beyond the balcony railing, down into the alley, where a shop leaned into the open shack next to it. A thin veil of sunlight reddened jars of snake wine and pickled duck eggs. She sank into a chair
beside Irene and tucked her feet up on the seat, covering her toes with the hem of her dressing gown. “Why don’t you tell me.”

“You were with us,” Irene answered.

“What were we doing?”

Irene had the strangest headache. The pain was new to her, a tightness that wrapped around her temples and pushed through to the backs of her eyes. She had to squint to bring the rooftops into focus. She had to breathe deeply in order to harness her thoughts. “Having a bon voyage drink. As far as you know, I came to Shanghai to talk to Simone about her father’s work on Khmer trading routes. Digging through the archives at the Brooke Museum, I discovered new research on the subject.”

In fact, this last part was true. While analyzing everything she had access to in relation to the reverend’s diary, Irene had come across a file of letters from a Swiss botanist. He had casually noted a trail of stone markers that he’d encountered during an exploration of Ratanakiri province. The location of these markers fit neatly into conclusions Simone’s father had drawn about commercial roads passing through northeast Cambodia. Because travel in even the most remote areas of French-controlled Indochina required a restrictive number of government-issued permits and requisitions, Irene had used all of this information to create a subterfuge—an expedition disguised as a scholarly search for historic trading routes. She added, “It’s your understanding that I came to Shanghai to ask Simone if I could study her father’s papers.”

“And that’s why the two of you are going to Cambodia?”

“Yes. After her parents’ death, she left all of his work with the museum in Phnom Penh.”

Anne reflected on this and then asked, “Why would Roger let Simone leave this time?”

“He was worried she might break down and do something that could harm the party. He had to pacify her, to keep her in line.”

“I assume you want me to let this be known?”

“Roger came to you.” Restless, Irene stood and retrieved the teacup from the railing, holding it tightly, savoring its heat. “Sending her to Cambodia was your suggestion.”

“No,” Anne said. “Roger would never come to anyone about Simone.
Not even me. I went to him because I was concerned about the cause. About the damage she could do if she was pushed too far.”

“Is this far-fetched?” Irene asked.

“No more far-fetched than anything else that happens in this city.”

Although Anne had put sugar in the tea, Irene could taste only its bitterness. The image of Roger, standing so close that she could smell the pipe smoke woven into the fabric of his shirt, sparked insistently at the edges of her thoughts. “Do you think he would have shot me?”

“Yes,” Anne said, with sympathy. “And he would have thought nothing of it.”

“Surely Mr. Simms must have known how dangerous Roger was.”

“That’s a reasonable assumption.”

“I can’t figure it out. Why is Simone worth putting my life in jeopardy?”

Anne looked back into the apartment. The bedroom door was still closed. “Have you told her you intend to take the scrolls out of Cambodia?”

Irene felt confined, hemmed in by the chairs and potted palms on the small balcony. “No.”

“Don’t you think she has earned the right to know? She killed her husband to save your life.”

“She killed her husband to save her own life,” Irene protested. “Anne, I have to get us on that ship tomorrow. I have to get us to Cambodia. I need your help, but if you’re about to give me an ultimatum—”

“What if I am?”

“Then I hope we will never need an alibi.”

“I only want you to think carefully about taking the scrolls out of Cambodia. If you are fortunate enough to find them, I want to know you’ve considered everything.”

“I might be caught.” Irene was frustrated that Anne would not let this go. “I might go to prison. I’ve thought about all of this.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Anne said, refusing to back down. “How are you going to explain what the scrolls are doing in Seattle? You want this discovery to be yours. You want everyone to know you found the scrolls in a lost temple in the jungles of Cambodia. But if
they’re in America, then everyone is also going to know you stole them. You might be forgiven. Probably even lauded. But what if you’re not? The Great War has changed what is acceptable. You know that. All of a sudden, ethics matter, laws are changing, and the Stars and Stripes are leading the way. You’re not thinking this all the way through.”

In order to achieve what she wanted, Irene could not just discover the scrolls and then leave them in Cambodia. She had to have them in her hands. Among the many lessons she had learned from her mistakes at the museum: She needed proof. Taking the scrolls back to America was the only way to make anyone pay attention to her. The only way to make the trustees understand how much they had underestimated her. “Don’t tell me I haven’t thought this through! Thinking things through is what I do best,” she insisted. She slammed the teacup onto the railing, and it cracked within its cloth wrapping. She looked defiantly at Anne.

“Oh, Irene.” Anne’s voice trembled. “I don’t want you to leave here angry with me. You know I’ll do anything I can to keep you out of harm’s way. I have contacts, resources, but I can’t protect you—”

“From myself?” Irene asked.

“I can’t protect you once you leave Shanghai, no matter how good your alibi.” She slipped her hand into the pocket of her robe and withdrew a gleaming object. She offered it on her outstretched palm.

Irene’s fingers closed around it, and she felt as if she had captured a small steel bird. She aimed the coral-handled pistol at the distant murk of the Whangpoo River. It felt harmless in her hand. So different from Roger’s revolver, the thought of which turned her body to liquid. The air around her had absorbed the river’s industrial stink of coal and rotting fish. Across the water she saw the smokestacks of the Pootung district factories. She wondered how many belonged to Mr. Simms. She asked, “Have you ever regretted coming here?”