Free The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay Page A

found it. A complete ruin. It’s the French who are restoring it. It’s because of the French that it will survive. And the French! They’re grabbing everything in Cambodia that they can for their mansions and museums back in France. Art, artifacts, they don’t hold still. That’s what’s amazing. They never have. They never will. Borders shift. Allegiances shift. Think about the spoils of war. Spain ransacked Peru. England plundered the Summer Palace during the Opium Wars. Audacious,” she murmured, shaking her head with admiration.
    Marc removed his hand and took up the stub of his cigarette. Irene felt dizzy. She had never talked like this, so openly, with a stranger. But he did not feel at all like a stranger, and it disconcerted her, how at ease she was with him. She watched him refill their glasses. The Scotch soaked in the gleam of the candle’s flame. “This temple you’re after,” he said. “Did a border shift? Is it the spoils of a war? How did it come your way?”
    “My father wasn’t old, not even seventy. I knew he wouldn’t live forever,but I never thought—” She had nearly finished her second drink, and although she wanted to blame the alcohol, she knew it was not the reason she was verging on maudlin. Clearing her voice of the emotion that inevitably overcame her when she spoke of her father, she said, “When my father died, last December, he left a box for Mr. Simms. It contained the diary of a missionary who wrote about finding a temple in Cambodia. A temple containing the history of the Khmer people on a set of copper scrolls. If what he writes is true, and if it’s all still up there, it could be the greatest discovery of this century.”
    “What was your father doing with the diary?” Marc asked.
    “That’s a part of the mystery. He was a bit of a treasure hunter before I was born. He spent years traveling around the Orient. He could have come across it in any number of places.”
    “Do you think he knew what it meant?”
    “He had to.”
    “How do you know he didn’t already try to find it?”
    “I don’t.”
    “He could have gone and found nothing.”
    Irene nodded. “That’s possible. But why wouldn’t he have told me?”
    “So you don’t know for certain if the scrolls are still there?”
    Irene fingered the smooth beads of the carnelian bracelet that had also come from the box her father left, and that she’d been wearing ever since Mr. Simms fastened it on her wrist. “They have to be there.”
    “Have to?”
    “If I can bring him this one last treasure before he dies, then I can repay him for—”
    “Dies?” Marc asked. “Who’s dying?”
    “Mr. Simms. He has cancer.”
    A gust banged a shutter closed, and the greyhound spooked, leaping toward the bandleader. A kerosene lamp sputtered, its flame expired, and the light collapsed around them. “I didn’t know.” Marc sounded as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Irene reached to take back his hand, but the greyhound barked, and the door swung open. The Filipina stumbled in, bedraggled, clutching a leash. Her dog was not with her. “The rain must have put out the fires,” she complained. “We were too late.But the champagne was divine. How can I make amends for being so naughty?”
    Two men in wet tuxedos pushed past her, followed by others. One called out, “Brandy for everyone!”
    For a second, Marc seemed annoyed. Then he stood up and called jovially to the bandleader, “Gregor, how about a tango for our friends?” He rounded the table and leaned over Irene, holding the room at bay as he pressed his mouth to her ear. “There is one thing you didn’t tell me. What are you doing in Shanghai if you’re on your way to Cambodia? It’s not on the path between Seattle and Phnom Penh.”
    If Marc had asked Irene to go home with him right then, she would have gone. But the bar was filling up again. That moment had passed. Catching her breath, she said, “I’m here to recruit Simone Merlin to