The Map of Lost Memories (30 page)

Irene’s mind raced. Murat Stanić? Clothilde? How else would a
commissaire
in one of the farthest regions in the country know who they all were?

All of a sudden, Lisette laughed, a throaty, cigarette-singed trill. “Don’t let him bully you,” she said, as she removed a black record from its paper sleeve. “He knows you’re hunting for the temple. That’s all anyone comes up here hunting for. Bugs and that temple.”

The henna light from the oil lamps twitched against the gauze walls of the mosquito netting. Marc’s foot shifted slightly against Irene’s. From across the room, she felt Simone flinch. She forced herself not to panic while Louis asked, “A temple? There’s a temple around here?” His surprise sounded pathetically false. “What kind of temple? Is it worth looking for?”

Ormond guffawed, rubbing at a liver spot on his forearm. He pulled another bottle of wine from a box, where it had been packed in cloth embroidered with dainty English lavender. “Don’t you think if there was anything of value up here, it would already have been exploited? This isn’t the moon.”

Irene thought back to the thatched Stung Treng market that they had walked through on their way to Ormond’s. Along with typical local goods, such as palm oil and tight tubes of betel leaves, she had seen cheap Japanese fans and tins of Chinese pastes used to color a woman’s lips. Inhaling the reek of fermented fish, she had watched a matron bargain over a container of Joncaire Paris face powder, the round box patterned in aqua and gold, with the words
Un peu d’Orient
in coy, slanted script. A carton of Hatamen cigarettes, made in British factories in Shanghai, had lain near the trader’s feet. All of these goods came through from Laos, Siam, Vietnam, and Burma, as well as China, India, and Malaya.

Clothilde had known about the temple since she was a girl. This cat-eyed anthropologist knew about it. Ormond wasn’t admitting it, but he knew too, Irene was sure of it. And he was right. Stung Treng may have been a poor backwater, but how could anything of significance stay a secret when it lay so close to a crossroads such as this?

While Louis offered many assets to the expedition, lying on the spot was not one of them. Marc stepped in, taking control of the conversation. “I suppose there’s no harm in us having a look around while we’re here.”

Ormond eyed him with distrust. Then, so casually it was laughable, he said, “Do as you please. It doesn’t matter. You won’t make it past Leh. If you try, I can’t guarantee your safety. Tell them, Lisette,” he said, sternly.

The woman seemed confused. In coming to Ormond’s, she could not have been expecting anything more than a break in the monotony of
Stung Treng’s meager social life. “I’ve been studying Mon-Khmer dialects for almost a decade. I’ve traveled all over these provinces, but recently the village of Leh has become a fortress,” she explained with little conviction. Setting the gramophone record on the felt surface of the turntable, she continued, “There are rumors that the natives have discovered mineral deposits and are selling them to the Chinese. Gold, yes, I believe that’s what it is. Gold. The military is still trying to figure out what to do about the situation.”

“There’s nothing
to
do,” Simone said, quickly. “The deposits are theirs. They can sell them to whomever they like.”

Louis scowled at her. Now was not the time for proselytizing. But Irene had a feeling Simone was doing something different. If there was gold in these jungles, the government would not spend any time at all thinking about what it should do. It would swarm over the area, and Simone knew it. “With enough money, they could shift the power in this region.” She was diverting as only she could divert. “That would certainly affect your position, Monsieur Ormond.” Muddling as only she could muddle.

As if she had just remembered, Lisette added, “The villagers have guns.”

Raised in Shanghai, Marc knew how to steer a man. “As long as we’re talking clarity, Ormond, there’s something
I’m
not clear on. Have you even looked? If there’s a Khmer temple somewhere around here, wouldn’t that be prestigious for your district? For you? Isn’t this the sort of thing a man in your position hopes for?”

“One wonders if such a thing is feasible: a tribal council based on a unification of principles,” Simone expounded, distracting Ormond as he attempted to concentrate on Marc.

Irritably, Ormond said, “Yes, such glory for me and my forests. But what would my forests become? Every fortnight when the
Alouette
arrived, it would dump off more archaeologists, more fortune hunters. And tourists! Loud, insatiable tourists.” With undisguised fondness, he gazed out through the screen, where locals had gathered in the tall grass to watch the visiting foreigners. Or was it to admire their redheaded leader? Through the mosquito netting, the dark, hunched figures wavered like
figments of one’s imagination. “I have heard about what is happening at Angkor Wat,” he said. “The schoolmistress spinsters from Iowa and Lyons riding through the ruins on the backs of elephants. Phhttt.”

Interested to see what they could lead Ormond to reveal, Irene feinted around Marc to fuel his growing temper from another angle. She called upon the cheap but consistently surefire act of girlish innocence. “I’d be too curious,” she said, enthusiastically. “Aren’t you even a bit curious? After all, a Khmer temple all the way up here would be quite a find.”

Simone leaned toward Ormond and said with the tiresome vagueness that Irene continued to suspect was intentional, “It’s a fascinating thought, don’t you agree, a government system that combines the various local tribal principles?”

Regaining his composure and making his best effort to enter the game, Louis said to Irene, “To hell with old trade routes. This could be the discovery of the century. Do you realize what this could mean for us?”

“That’s what I’m think—”

“I know exactly what it could mean,” Ormond interrupted, violently tugging the cork from a bottle. “The last lost temple of Cambodia. The next Angkor Wat.” He waved the open bottle, and wine splashed to the floor. “Some say it’s deep in the Damrek Mountains, and others that it’s hidden in the Cardamom foothills. Well, well, what do you know, it’s right here in my own backyard. Ha! Why can’t people keep their grubby hands off this country!”

“That’s my feeling too,” Simone announced.

With a look of regret, Lisette turned up the gramophone, as if it could drown out the damage she had done by mentioning the temple. But as Ravel’s sad birds soared into the margins of the verandah, Ormond shouted over the music, panting, his expression stricken, “Why can’t you people leave my territory be!”

No one spoke. There was no need to. Ormond had given himself away. He was the reason no one got past Leh. Not because he greedily wanted the temple for himself, but because he wanted his remote kingdom left alone. It was this, Irene now knew, that explained how the scrolls could have been kept a secret for so long.

From the back porch of Ormond’s villa, where she was sitting with Mr. Simms, Irene watched the heat leaving the day in scalloped waves. Lapwings raced across sandbars, their velvet heads as dark as ravens’, and in the distance, the fawn shadows of women bathed in the river’s edge, flanked by a bank of mud and purple iris. With her departure only a few hours away, he had asked her to meet him alone. Now, he held out a brass pocket watch.

“I have already set it for you,” he said, in a rare state, drugged
and
comprehending. “I want you to wind it in the mornings and keep it with you at all times.”

Ready for the rest of the story, for the final pieces of the puzzle he was assembling, she examined the etching on the back of the watch, a ferocious
tiger swallowing a terrified horse. The blood that sprayed from the wounded animal was made of excellent-quality Chinese glass. “Didn’t I see this in the market yesterday?” she asked.

He smiled, sheepishly, as if he had rounded the corner of his old age and careened back into his younger self, caught with his hand dipping into a cookie jar or the collection of his old rival-pal Henry Huntington. “Today has been one of my better days. Clothilde had the boys fashion a palanquin for me. I looked quite regal riding through town.”

Even in a remote jungle trading post, on the threshold of death’s door, he could not resist the hunt for a treasure. They were physically wrenching, these blunt realizations of how much she was going to miss him. Irene felt a foreboding sense of grief at the thought of leaving him, even though he would be well taken care of while she was away. Clothilde had already consulted with the town doctor and chosen two local women to keep vigil. Lisette, the anthropologist, had offered to help as well.

“These are also for you,” Mr. Simms said, pressing a pair of keys into her palm.

“From the market too?”

“No, these I brought with me.” Strung like charms on a gold chain that could be worn around one’s neck, they were not door keys but keys to something much smaller, a jewelry or safe-deposit box perhaps. His withered fingers strayed from her palm to the carnelian bracelet on her wrist, the one that he had given her from the box her father left for him. “I’m glad you wear this. It might be helpful. In fact, I think it could be very helpful. Don’t take it off,” he instructed. “Oh, my sweet girl, I am putting all of my faith in you.” As twilight descended and the air grew thick with the odor of sodden roots trapped in the mudflats, Mr. Simms became pensive. “Tell me the truth, Irene, are you going to find them?”

“Am I going to …?” She’d thought he had summoned her to tell her at last what she was going to find. She had thought that was what he was leading to with his gifts. But he now appealed to her with a look of anticipation, his tone disconcertingly beseeching, as if she was the one who had possessed and withheld the answer all along. Dismayed, she laid her hand over his. “I am,” she said, for what was the point in expressing her doubts? She did not know how much longer Mr. Simms could fend off
death. In case she did not make it back in time, she would not be able to live with herself if she let him spend his last days without hope.

It seemed to take all of his effort simply to hold his head up, and as she looked at his shrunken posture, she understood that it was finally time to stop waiting for him to get better. It was time to stop believing that he was going to make everything clear, and to accept the situation as it was. Even if he lived until she returned, he might never again be lucid enough to explain himself, or to understand the outcome of her journey, whatever that might be. Now that the moment to embark had arrived, after all he had put her through, it turned out he was sending her into the jungle armed with nothing more than a bracelet, a watch, and a set of toy-box keys. As for the at-odds team he had assembled for her, their only unified act had been their half-baked manipulation of Ormond, which had resulted not in accord but instead in a new disagreement: How were they going to deal with the village of Leh?

“Like hell I’m going into that village without a gun,” Marc declared. “I didn’t leave a city filled with professional assassins to be killed by natives in loincloths. If they so much as snap an arrow at me, I’m defending myself.”

“We can’t just start shooting,” Simone argued. “It’s not ethical. They’re only protecting what’s theirs.”

“Ethical?” Irene asked, as she attempted to pull her boot out of a suction of mud on the side of the trail. “You stabbed your husband, and now you’re using his manifesto to start your own rival political party. And if we do make it past the village, you plan on taking the scrolls and selling them to the enemy. But now you’re telling me you’re concerned about ethics!”

They were three hours out of Stung Treng, beneath a moon so bright and high that Irene could see how bloodshot Simone’s eyes were from whatever pills she had taken, and from waking in the middle of the night. They’d had to leave at such an early hour because at this phase of the monsoon season, the storms were heaviest during the day. Nights were generally free from rain, and they were also cooler, so the plan was to
walk during the four or five hours before the sun ignited the morning. By eight it would already be too warm to continue. As it was, at this ungodly hour, the damp air was merely uncomfortable.

“For the Cambodians!” Simone said. “In the long run, I’m doing all of this for the Cambodians.”

“And nobody’s going to
just start shooting
,” Louis admonished, although as he said this his hand unconsciously touched the pistol in the holster at his hip. “All we’re saying is that we need to be armed and ready.”

“As for protecting what’s theirs,” Marc said, “according to our helpfully indiscreet anthropologist in Stung Treng, the villagers in Leh are members of the Brau tribe. Isn’t that right, Clothilde?”

Studying her, Simone said, “I’d be interested to know what you think their ethnicity has to do with any of this.”

Irene sensed that Simone was challenging the Cambodian woman, but Clothilde replied as if she thought Simone’s interest was genuine. “For the most part, the tribes in this district can understand one another. Our dialects are similar enough. Even someone who speaks fluent Khmer like you should be able to understand. But otherwise, there’s not much unity in this part of the country. Ormond’s coolies have no relation to the villagers in Leh. Xa comes from a distant Kreung village. Like most tribes in this region, if the Brau had any relationship with the ancient Khmer, they were probably captured as slaves.”

“If the villagers try to stop us, chances are it won’t be about the Brau protecting their own,” Marc added. “It will be about them following orders from Ormond.”

“But if any one of us is shot by a native,” Louis said, “there will be repercussions.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking,” Marc said. “If the villagers do have guns, it can only be because Ormond armed them. Most likely he did it so they can scare people off, since if they kill a European, he’ll have to punish them—the government will demand it, and if he won’t do it, they’ll send someone up here who will. Surely the village chief understands this. And Ormond’s not stupid. He must know that if he’s forced to punish them for following orders he gave them, there will be some kind of retaliation
against him. I think they might take a few potshots at us, but I doubt they’ll go all the way.” He paused and looked around, but beyond a fringe of trees, the surrounding wilderness was in shadows, and one could only guess at the dangers they masked. “This is getting tiresome. Irene, you need to decide. Let’s turn around, or let’s make a plan that we can all agree on and stop standing here like tiger bait.”