The Saint Around the World (24 page)

“I may as well point out the sights as we pass them,” she said. “Did Vernon tell you anything about what we do here?”

“Not very much,” Simon admitted. “He did mention a plant, but I wasn’t too clear whether it grew or made things.”

“Vernon can be terribly vague. It’s a wood distillation plant.”

“I’m still not much wiser.”

“You might call it charcoal making. But when you do it the modern way, the by-products are actually worth more than the charcoal, so we call it wood distillation. The coolies cut wood in the jungle, and bring it down here in trucks.”

“They were passing the rectangular concrete building, and as they turned a corner Simon saw rows of sooty wheeled cages, like skeleton freight cars, on short lengths of track which ran into black tunnels in the base of the building. There were heavy iron doors that could close the tunnels. Some of the vans were piled high with logs of all sizes, and others were still empty.

“The wood goes in those cars, and they go into the overs and get baked. When it comes out, it’s charcoal.”

They climbed a stairway to the roof of the building, where the confusion of pipes was.

“The smoke goes through various distillations, and it’s separated into creosote and light wood oils and wood alcohol. It’s all very scientific and industrial, but once the plant’s built almost anybody can run it.”

“If only the guerrillas leave them alone, you mean,” Simon remarked.

From the roof of the building, another flight of steps led up to rejoin the steeply graded road that coiled up past the coolie quarters to the house above.

“Yes,” she said calmly. “They couldn’t steal anything that’d be worth much to them, but they’d get horribly drunk on the alcohol and then anything could happen.”

Just beyond the barracks one of the Malays overtook them to open the gate in a nine-foot fence topped with barbed wire which crossed the road and stretched straight around the hill.

“You’re now in our inner fortress,” she said. “It’s locked at night, and patrolled, and we’ve got floodlights we can turn on, and if the Commies try to attack we can put up quite a fight. But I hope there won’t be any of that while you’re here.”

“I’m not worried,” said the Saint. ”I’ve seen it in the movies. The good guys always win.”

She did not even seem to be hot when they reached the house and she led the way up the steps to the screen door in the center of the verandah. A little way along one wing of the verandah she opened another door, disclosing a bedroom where the Chinese boy was already unpacking the Saint’s bag.

“This is your room,” she said. “I hope you’ll be comfortable.” There was an automatic in a shoulder holster which the boy had taken out of the suitcase and placed neatly on the bedside table. Mrs. Lavis picked it up, examined it cursorily, and handed it to the Saint. “I don’t want to sound jittery, but while you’re here you ought to get in the habit of not letting this out of reach.”

Simon weighed the gun in his hand.

“I hope I won’t be just a nuisance to you,” he said.

“Not a bit,” she said. “I expect you’d like to have a shower and freshen up. Charles Farrast is out with the coolies now, but they’ll be knocking off soon. We always meet on the verandah for stengahs at six. And whatever you’ve seen in the movies, we don’t usually dress for dinner.”

“Major Ascony sent you the usual greetings,” Simon remembered, “and he said he’d be coming to see you as soon as he could get away for a few days.”

“That’ll be nice.”

“He told me about your husband having been ill. How’s he coming along?”

She turned in the doorway.

“My husband died early this morning, Mr. Templar. That’s what I was sending Vernon the wire about. We buried him shortly before you got here. In the tropics you have to do that, you know.”

iii

By six o’clock it was tolerably cool. The houseboy had asked “Tuan man mandi?” and Simon recalled enough of the language to nod. The boy came back with an enamel pail of hot water and carried it down into the bathroom, a dark cement-walled compartment under the pilings. Simon stood on a grating and soaped himself with the hot water, and then turned on the shower, which ran only cold water which was not really cold. Even so, it was an improvement on the kind of facilities he had encountered on his first trip up-country, when the cold water was in a huge earthenware Ali Baba jar and you rinsed off by scooping it out with an old saucepan and pouring it over your head. Arrayed in a clean shirt and slacks he felt ready to cope with anything. Or he hoped he could.

The communal part of the verandah, where he had entered, ran clear through the depth of the building from front to back, forming a wide breezeway which in effect bisected the house into two completely separate wings of rooms. Through the screen door at the back Simon could make out dim outlines of the cook’s quarters and kitchen—a separate building, as is the local practice, connected to the rear of the house by a short covered alleyway. At that end of the breezeway there was a table already set for dinner, but the front three-quarters of the area was furnished as a living-room. A man was mixing a drink at the sideboard. He turned and said: “Oh, you must be Templar. My name’s Farrast.”

They shook hands. Farrast had a big hand but only a medium firm grip. He was almost as tall as the Saint, and seen by himself he would have been taken to have a good powerful physique, but next to the Saint he looked somewhat softer and noticeably thicker in the waist. He was good-looking, but would have looked better still with a fraction less flesh in his face. He had a thin pencil line of mustache and sideburns whose length was a little too plainly exaggerated to be an accident.

“Stengah?” Farrast said.

“Thanks.”

Farrast poured for him. He wore a tee shirt and a native sarong, which the old-timers used to affect for informal evening comfort; but he could not have been past his middle thirties.

They moved towards the front of the verandah with their glasses.

“This is a hell of a time for me to land here,” Simon said. “Mrs. Lavis should have wired and put me off.”

“That’s what I told her,” Farrast said. “But the plant has to keep running, and it’s not a bad idea to have another white man around, just in case anything happened to me. That was her argument, anyhow.”

“She’s certainly got herself under control,” Simon said. “She must have been with me for half an hour, giving me the two-bit tour and playing the perfect hostess, before she even mentioned that her husband had died and you’d just buried him.”

“That would be just like her.”

“What sort of a guy was he?”

“A nice fellow.”

Simon noted to himself that he did not say “One of the best” or any of the other stereotyped superlatives that might have been expected in the circumstances. He made no comment; but even Farrast seemed to realize that such grudging restraint might be unduly conspicuous, and added: “Made a frightful mess of everything, though. I expect Ascony told you.”

“The way I heard it,” said the Saint, “he was unlucky enough to be robbed by his partner.”

“Unlucky, yes. But he was supposed to be a smart business man. How smart is a fellow who gives anyone—anyone at all—a blank check on everything he owns, and trusts to luck the other fellow won’t be tempted? If you ask me, he must have been pretty lucky to make that much money in the first place.”

“You didn’t believe he was going to make a comeback, then?”

“From a place like this? Not in a thousand years. It’s a nice little business, but it couldn’t ever put him back where he dropped from. When you come right down to it, popping off the way he did was probably the kindest thing that could have happened to him.”

Farrast lifted his glass and drained it.

“You must have been very fond of him,” said the Saint expressionlessly, “to have stuck with him like that.”

Farrast gave him an odd uncertain glance.

“A job’s a job,” he said, and went back to the sideboard to pour another drink. “What will Mrs. Lavis do now?”

“Sell the place, if she has any sense. And the buyer won’t get me with it.”

“It wouldn’t be a job any more?”

“If you want to know all about it,” Farrast said, “I don’t have to worry much longer about jobs. In about three more months I’ll have a birthday, and I’ll come into eighty thousand quid that my old man left in trust for me, and then it’s goodbye to this stinking jungle and home to England and the life of a country squire for me.”

There was a rustle of skirts along the verandah, and then Eve Lavis was with them. She had put on a very plain cotton dress, cut low but not indiscreetly low in front, with a single strand of pearls around her neck, but with her face and figure and bearing she looked ready to receive royalty. The only incongruous touch was her gun belt; but she was not wearing it, she carried it with her and hung it over the arm of a chair.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have been out here first to introduce you.”

“We managed,” said the Saint.

“How do you feel, Eve?” Farrast asked.

“I feel fine, Charles,” she said evenly. “Make me a gin pahit, will you?”

Her face was smoothly composed, and her cool gray eyes were dry and bright with no trace of redness or puffiness.

“Is your room all right, Mr. Templar?” she said. “I’m afraid the plumbing’s not quite what you’re used to; but you should have seen it when Ted and I first came here.”

“Everything’s fine,” he said. “I’m only sorry I had to come at such an unfortunate time.”

“It isn’t a bit unfortunate. I couldn’t help hearing the end of your conversation just now. Of course I’m going to sell the place. But it won’t fetch anything like its value if it isn’t a going concern. So we’ve got to keep it running, exactly as if nothing had happened. And having you here will be good for our morale. Sometimes it’s good for people to have to keep up appearances.”

Farrast brought her a wineglass half full of pink fluid and an ice cube. She took it and glanced at the Saint’s glass.

“Will you help yourself whenever you’re ready, Mr. Templar?” she said. “Don’t wait to be asked. I want you to feel absolutely at home.”

“Thank you,” said the Saint.

“Charles,” she said, “Mr. Templar never even met Ted, you know. So he hasn’t suffered any bereavement whatever. So there’s no reason why he should have to pretend he’s in mourning. For that matter, it isn’t your personal tragedy either. Now I’ll feel much better if you’ll both avoid lowering your voices when I’m around and acting as if I were a kind of bomb that’s liable to explode. I assure you I won’t, if you’ll only stop being so damned concerned about me.”

“Right-o, Eve,” Farrast said. “If that’s how you want it.”

There was a light flush on his cheeks and his complexion had become faintly shiny.

Eve Lavis looked at the Saint and at Farrast and at the Saint again. The shift of her eyes was not as pointed as the description sounds, but to the Saint’s almost psychic perception it was startlingly clear that in her cool detached way she had made a comparison, and the fact that her gaze returned last to him and stayed on him had a very direct implication. Farrast turned and went back to the sideboard and could be heard replenishing his glass again.

“And what kind of justice is the Saint going to bring to Ayer Pahit?” she asked.

“I don’t think Major Ascony expects me to do that,” Simon said lightly.

“Have you known him long?”

“No. In fact, only since yesterday.”

“He said in his wire that he’d just met you, and he thought we’d like you, but I didn’t know if he was kidding.”

“Would that be his idea of kidding?”

“It might be. He likes to do mysterious things. After all, even I recognized your name, so he must know all about you. I didn’t think he’d send you here without some reason.”

“I told him I was trying to keep out of mischief, but I put in some time up and down the peninsula a long while ago, when at least there were no guerrillas to worry about, and I was curious to see what it was like today.”

The houseboy came in and began to light the lamps, and they moved idly towards the front of the verandah.

“We’ll show you the rest of the place tomorrow,” she said. “Not that there’s much to see. But no guerrillas, I hope.”

Looking down the hill, he could still see the barracks below as blocks of blackness.

“Your coolies seem to be barricaded in already,” he remarked. “I suppose being outside the fence they’re more nervous.”

“No, they’re not there at all. Those quarters were built for the Chinese who used to work here. But most of them were scared away when the trouble started, and you couldn’t be sure that those who wanted to stay weren’t in league with the Reds. Most of the guerrillas are Chinese, you know, but most of the Malays hate the Commies. The only Chinese we have now are the cook and the boy and an amah, and Ted had had them for years. We’re using Malay laborers, from a village a mile away. They don’t get half as much work done, but we feel a lot safer with them.”

“I wouldn’t go on saying that too loud,” Farrast put in.

He had sat down on a sofa with his feet up on the coffee table and was flipping over the pages of an old Illustrated London News.

“Why?” Eve Lavis turned. “Is anything wrong?”

“It’s been getting worse for several days,” Farrast said. “Every day a few more of ‘em haven’t been showing up, and the ones that do come have been more jittery. Even the excuses are half-hearted. When I got back to the woodcutting gang this afternoon after—after the funeral, more than half of ‘em had gone home. Just dropped their tools and wandered off as soon as my back was turned.”

“Couldn’t the krani stop them?”

“They wouldn’t pay any attention to him. They only accept him as a foreman when they can see me standing behind him. He said the pawang had been talking to them.”

“That’s their sort of witch-doctor,” Mrs. Lavis explained to Simon.

“I think the Commies have converted him, or they’ve bought him,” Farrast said. “Anyway, he’s been spouting a mixture of propaganda and mumbo-jumbo. His latest yarn is that the spirits have taken sides against the white colonizers, as witness the way Ted was struck down, and anyone who works for us is due to fall under the same curse.”