Free The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay

had sprinted around athletic fields and confused it with achievement. And then there had been the aging art critic when she was twenty-three, with his sea captain mustache and predictable attempts to seduce her with mah-jongg and chop suey. Even her brief affairs, when the solitude of her heart had gotten the best of her, had neverstirred this kind of lightning-quick emotion within her. “You’re asking the wrong person.” She sat back down. “I’m a temple robber, remember?”
    He smiled. “So you say.”
    “Stranger still, so you’ve been told. I wonder, why would Mr. Simms tell you that about me? And why would he give me your name unless he really believed I would need something from you? What kind of help could I need?”
    “I know Shanghai well,” Marc said. “Information is my stock-in-trade. Perhaps there’s something you need to know about the city. Or …” Irene’s hand was resting on the table. He reached out with the lightest of touches, as if he was making sure she was real. “Maybe if you tell me about Henry and you, tell me how you ended up here, I can figure it out.”
    She gazed around. The bartender was napping on a stool. Inside an orbit of smoke, the band members continued to puff on their cigarettes. After being discarded in Seattle, after being rejected by Simone and disapproved of by Anne, Irene was eager for this attention Marc was giving her. “Mr. Simms never kept secrets from me,” she said. “Even when I was young, I knew about the hidden rooms in his manor. I knew how he acquired the objects in them. I knew about the clandestine deals and the crates arriving in the middle of the night. His trust meant everything to me. So many people thought it was their right to tell me what was appropriate for a girl without a mother. I hated it.
Irene, that is not appropriate!
But Mr. Simms, he didn’t think of me as a child, and by the time I became an adult, I couldn’t imagine my life without him.” The memory of Mr. Simms’s rapid deterioration in the month before she left Seattle nearly brought tears to her eyes. Softly, she said, “I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like …”
    “Can’t imagine what what’s going to be like?”
    Outside, the rain pounded as if it were being dragged down by an underground force. Wind blew leaden raindrops through a broken window, and the storm was cold, metallic in the air. Candlelight trembled on the walls. The bartender wound the gramophone, as if
Rhapsody in Blue
could even out the ragged tempo of the storm. Keeping her eyes on the table, Irene turned her palm upward, so that her fingertips brushed Marc’s.
    He did not pull away. Quietly, as if it mattered to him that they were not overheard, he asked, “Why did he take such an interest in you?”
    Shaking off thoughts of Mr. Simms’s illness, she said, “He has no children. No one to pass his legacy to.”
    Marc’s hand tensed against hers, and she felt the heat in her face, the skip in her pulse where his fingers lay over her exposed wrist. “There must be more to it than that,” he said.
    “I’m like him. I have always loved the chase. The unattainable. I’m too intense, I can’t help it, I know that about myself. And I have the heart of a thief.” She laughed because it sounded so cloak-and-dagger. “
Thief
is too dirty a word, though. You can’t just go into someone’s home and take a painting. You can’t just go into a museum and walk away with a statue. But the painting, the statue, it has to get into the home or museum somehow. That’s where it interests me.”
    His cigarette burning down in the ashtray, Marc leaned forward. He was absorbing her words the way Mr. Simms did, and she felt as if she could tell him, as she could Mr. Simms, anything.
    “Who does it all really belong to anyway?” she asked. “Whoever gets to it first. The natives don’t care. They have no idea how to preserve their own antiquities. Look at the state of Angkor Wat when Mouhot