“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 anymore?”
“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 an 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 t
hat 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.”
“They can’t possibly fall for that nonsense!”
“I’m afraid they do, my dear. These are jungle Malays, remember, not like the ones you were used to in Singapore. They’re as superstitious as any savages.”
“Then we’ll just have to sell them a better fairytale, Charles.”
“If I catch that pawang around tomorrow,” Farrast said darkly, “I’m going to take a stick to him, and let ’em see if his spells can do anything about that.”
The boy had been bringing in plates of soup and lighting candles on the dining table, and now he stood waiting patiently beside it. Mrs Lavis put down her empty glass and turned to the Saint again.
“Are you ready?” she said, and put her hand under his arm, so that he had to escort her to the table as formally as if they were going into a ceremonial banquet.
The soup was chicken. The main dish after it was steamed chicken, to accompany which the boy passed a platter on which was a great mound of rice smothered with successive sprinklings of fried onions, grated coconut, and chopped hard-boiled egg. The rice when dug into proved to be liberally mixed with peanuts and raisins.
“I hope you like it,” Mrs Lavis said. “We’re terribly limited in the supplies we can get here, and I can’t stand curry more than once a week, though we usually seem to have it at least twice. But we must stop boring you with all our problems.”
“That’s what I came for,” said the Saint cheerfully. “And I’ve been wanting to taste this dish again for more years than I want to count. I’ll make a deal with you. If you don’t want us fussing over you, will you stop apologizing to me?”
Her face lighted with a more spontaneous smile than he had seen on it yet.
“You’re absolutely right. I promise I won’t do it again.”
Thereafter the conversation was as unstrained as it could be amongst a threesome of whom one was a virtual stranger. Even Farrast relaxed from the dour mood which had started to overtake him sufficiently to ask some questions about London, which he had not seen for four years. But he drank another highball with his meal, and his face seemed to become a little ruddier and shinier, while in repose the sullen cast of his brow became more pronounced and a surly undertone always seemed ready to edge into his voice. Simon diagnosed him as a man of uncertain and violent temper who had probably made no little trouble for himself with it in his time, and was careful to avoid being drawn into any argument.
Eve Lavis became more of an enigma to him as the time went on. In every technical detail she was a perfect hostess. She was unfailingly ready with the anticipation, the interjection, or the explanation that would save the stranger from an instant’s embarrassment or perplexity or a feeling of being left out. Yet that very perfection of poise and graciousness might have made someone less relaxed than the Saint uncomfortably conscious of his own gaucheness. She was a good and appreciative listener, and yet her complete attentiveness could seem exacting, as if she required in return that what the speaker was saying should be informative or intelligent or witty enough to justify the attention she gave it. There was no suggestion that she would cease to be polite if you failed to measure up to her, but her politeness could be more crushing than anyone else’s open contempt. The proof that she could live up to her own standards was in the fact that Simon had to keep reminding himself that her husband had died that morning and been buried that afternoon.
The Saint had been trying to guess her age. She wore no make-up except lipstick, but not even the closest scrutiny would support a guess as high as thirty. The combination of such poise and self-control with such youth was almost frightening, and yet at the same time strangely exciting.
After dinner they adjourned to the front part of the breezeway for coffee, and Mrs Lavis was pouring it when a sound of footsteps and voices approaching made them all silent in sudden tension. In a moment she resumed pouring without a tremor, but her eyes had flicked once to the holster on the arm of her chair, and Simon had a feeling that thereafter she could have drawn the gun without looking.
Farrast stood up, with a hand on the revolver tucked in the waist fold of his sarong, and went to the front door, standing up to it with legs truculently apart and his face close to the screen to see out better. The Saint rose quietly and moved only a little to the side, so that if it were needed the gun in his hip pocket would be less obstructed.
One of the rifle-carrying guards came into the overflow of light at the foot of the steps. With him was a very old Malay, wearing nothing but a sarong drawn up under his protruding ribs. The old man hung back as they approached and squatted down, tucking the sarong between his skinny legs.
The guard looked up and said, “Tabeh, tuan. Itu penggulu mau chakap Mem.”
“You talk to him, Charles,” Mrs Lavis said. “It’s better if they have to talk to a man.”
She put down the coffee pot and picked up a cigarette. Simon struck a match for her.
“It’s the penggulu—headman of the village where our labor comes from,” she said.
The penggulu had stood up again and was talking lengthily in a plaintive singsong. When his mouth was open it showed only three teeth, with no apparent relationship between them.
“Can you understand him?” Mrs Lavis asked.
“My Malay’s pretty rusty,” said the Saint. “Just a few words come back to me now and then.”
“At the moment he’s just saying how wonderful my husband was and how sorry he is for me.”
Farrast said something impatient, promptingly, and the penggulu launched out on another extensive speech.
“Now he’s getting to the point,” Mrs Lavis said. She listened with her head bent, staring at the end of her cigarette when she was not putting it to her mouth. “His people have got out of hand, they don’t respect him anymore, they mock him when he tries to assert his authority…They don’t want to work for us anymore. He would like to make them work, but he is a feeble old man and they laugh at him…The pawang has taught them to do this…The pawang has told everyone that if they go on working for us the guerrillas will come after them, and the demons will haunt them, and none of them will escape. The pawang—”
Farrast roared in sudden anger, “Mana bulih!”
“And that,” Mrs Lavis said, “is what I think Americans mean when they yell ‘For Christ’s sake!’ ”
Simon grinned.
“That’s one phrase I do remember.”
Farrast was still shouting indignantly in Malay, and no interpreter was needed to convey the idea that he was profanely inquiring whether the penggulu was a man or a mouse and why the hell didn’t he get another pawang.
The penggulu heard him out respectfully, and then embarked on another long quavering apologia.
Farrast turned his head.
“What shall I tell him, Eve?”
“You should know better than I, Charles,” she said steadily. “You’re in charge now. Make your own decision.”
Farrast turned again with his under lip jutting. He interrupted the old man with another tirade in Malay, but this one had a harsher finality. Mrs Lavis stirred her demi-tasse and drank some of it.
Farrast swung around on his heel and rejoined them at the coffee table. He picked up his cup, deliberately keeping his back turned to the steps. The penggulu stood outside still looking up, mumbling despondently. After a moment the guard unslung his rifle and prodded the penggulu with it, not un-gently. The old man turned slowly and shuffled away into the darkness, with the guard following him.
“Well, that ought to settle something,” Farrast said.
“What did you say to him?” Simon asked.
“I told him that I’d expect a full crew on the job tomorrow, and if I didn’t get it I’d come looking for the pawang and personally beat him to a pulp, and he could tell his precious pawang that with my compliments.”
Mrs Lavis finished her coffee.
“I hope that was right,” she said impersonally, and stood up. “I think I’ll go to bed now, if you’ll excuse me. It’s been a long day, and I was up most of last night.”
She gave Simon a friendly smile all to himself.
“I’ll see you at breakfast,” she said. “And I hope you sleep well.”
“Goodnight,” said the Saint, hardly capable of being amazed any more. “And the same to you.”
Farrast made another of his trips to the sideboard.
“Care for a nightcap?” he asked shortly. “We don’t stay up late here. Have to get up too early in the morning.”
“I don’t think so, thanks,” Simon said pleasantly. “I wouldn’t mind catching up on some sleep myself.”
“Night-night, then,” Farrast said.
“See you tomorrow.”
The Saint sauntered away to his room.
He stripped down to his shorts, brushed his teeth, and then lighted a last cigarette, enjoying the taste of it on his freshened palate. He paced soundlessly up and down the polished hardwood floor in his bare feet, trying to put his impressions in some sort of order.
He had met an extraordinary woman and a more ordinary man of a type that he felt he could easily learn to dislike. But beyond observing and trying to analyze them as personalities, he did not know what he should have been looking for. It was frustrating that he had arrived just too late to form his own impression of the third member of the triangle. He thought of it unconsciously as a triangle, and only after he had done so was aware that his intuition had already drawn one conclusion.
The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series) Page 20
