The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “I could arrange it.” Ascony said, and Simon knew then that he had given Ascony precisely the opening that Ascony wanted.

  Simon said, “Is it worth all that trouble to get me out of town?”

  The police official’s infinitesimal smile was permitted to make its tiny diffident movement under the scrubby mustache.

  “I won’t deny that I’ll have a load off my mind when you leave. But I do have another ulterior motive. You could be quite a godsend to a pal of mine up there, while you’re having a spot of fun for yourself. Chap by the name of Lavis. A real good egg. Has a place up in Pahang, miles from anywhere, in one of the worst areas.”

  “What makes you think I’d be a godsend to him?”

  “He’s been having a rather rough time—ulcers, and fever on top of it. He ought to be in the hospital, actually, but he won’t leave the plant. I can’t blame him, in a way. You see, up till about a year ago he was doing very well for himself, in fact he was one of the most successful business men in Malaya, and then one day his partner simply skipped out with every penny he could raise on their assets. It was a shocking business. Ted Lavis was practically wiped out overnight. This plant up in Pahang was about all he managed to salvage, and he’s trying like the devil to make a go of it, but if anything happened to it he’d really be sunk. He’s got a white assistant, of course, and the usual native foremen and guards, but with Lavis himself laid up and his wife having to nurse him it’s no picnic for anybody.”

  “His wife’s there with him?”

  “Naturally, old chap. A stunning woman—used to be married to a doctor here. The assistant’s a bit of a bounder, in my private opinion. But you’ll see for yourself. How does it appeal to you?”

  Simon was used to the unconventional hospitality of the tropics, but he knew that Major Ascony must have something more in mind than mere friendliness. But since Ascony was obviously not planning to put any cards on the table, the Saint decided to play along with equal inscrutability.

  He said blandly, “I’d love it, if you think they’d put up with me.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be glad to. I’ll send them a wire at once.” Ascony signed the chit which the boy had tucked under the ashtray, and stood up. He seemed to be a very decisive man, in his own way. “Sorry I have to run along now, but I’ll ring you first thing in the morning.”

  Simon waited fatalistically to see what the call would bring. He was sampling his ketchil makan, the ritual eye-opener of tea and buttered toast without which the Englishman in the East Indies is not supposed to have the strength to get dressed for breakfast, when the telephone rang.

  “Mrs Lavis wired back that they’ll be delighted to have you,” Ascony said. “The train leaves in a couple of hours. I hope that isn’t rushing you too much. If I can get away, I’ll drop by the station and see you off.”

  With an odd sensation that he was already on an express train hurtling towards some unrevealed rendezvous with destiny, Simon dressed and breakfasted and re-packed the few things he had taken from his bag.

  He was just settling himself in the corner of a first-class compartment when Major Ascony came along the platform, looking very military in a crisply laundered uniform with a swagger stick tucked under his arm, and stopped by the open window.

  “Ah, there you are, Templar. I see you made it.”

  “That’s a relief,” said the Saint seriously. “I wasn’t altogether sure that I was here myself.”

  The Major looked a trifle puzzled, but disciplined himself to suppress it.

  “You shouldn’t have anything to worry about on the trip,” he said. “They haven’t wrecked a train for ages.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve always wanted to be in a good train wreck.”

  “Give my best to Teddy and Eve, will you? And tell ’em I mean to come up myself the first chance I have to take a few days off.”

  “I will.”

  There was a blowing of whistles and a rising tempo of shouts and jabbering around the second- and third-class carriages as the train crew struggled to separate the travelers from the farewell deputations and pack the former on board so that the train could start. Ascony handed a book through the window.

  “Thought you might like something to read on the trip.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “Not at all. You can return it when you come back.”

  It was a bulky volume entitled Altogether, by W. Somerset Maugham, and a glance inside showed that it was a collection of short stories.

  “I believe I’ve read some of these before,” Simon said.

  “Well, you get more out of some of ’em the second time, I think. Besides, it’s more fun to read ’em right where they’re supposed to have happened. Might give you a feeling about some things, if you know what I mean.”

  “They’re almost historical now, aren’t they?” said the Saint, trying not to sound captious. “Maugham was here long before even my last time, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, I dare say he was. But human nature doesn’t change much.”

  The whistling and shouting and jabbering reached a crescendo, and the train gave an authoritative clattering jolt and began to creep forward. Ascony strolled along with it for a few steps, beside the window.

  “There’s one story especially I’d like to get your reaction to,” he said.

  “Which one?”

  “You’ll come to it. Hope you have a good time. So long, old chap.”

  And merely by ceasing to walk, with a cordial gesture that was half wave and half salute, Ascony made an incontestable exit, being left behind in a moment as the train drew away from him.

  2

  Simon did little reading on the trip, for he had barely started to turn the pages of the book when he was sociably conscripted by three planters in search of a fourth for bridge. Then there was lunch, the inevitable curry, and afterwards almost everyone fell into a doze, and the Saint himself found it lazily easy to fall in with the custom of the country. He awoke with one of the Malay guards shaking him gently by the shoulder, as he had been enjoined to do, and saying “The next stop will be Ayer Pahit, tuan.”

  During such opportunities as he had had to let his mind wander, he had tried to figure what could lie behind Major Ascony’s peculiar behavior, and had had conspicuously negative success. He was reasonably certain that Ascony was not dreaming that the Saint would personally solve the problem of the Red guerrillas, when a prolonged and large-scale military operation had not completely succeeded in eradicating them. It had to be something much less far-fetched and more limited than that. But the only further assumption that seemed safe was that it must be something involving the personalities he was going to meet, and Simon stepped out on the platform not quite literally like an outlaw entering a hostile city, but with a similar feeling of keeping his weight lightly on his toes and his eyes alert for more than the ordinary visitor would see. Almost as soon as he stepped off the Malay guards clambered aboard again with their rifles slung, some of them riding on the engine, and the train tooted its whistle and was off again with its usual disjointed preliminary lurch. As it pulled out it revealed on the other side of the tracks a half-dozen, atap-thatched ramshackle buildings, one of which had double doors wide open and from what could be seen of its murky mysteriously cluttered interior appeared to be a combined general store and saloon, and behind those buildings was the solid jungle, crowding in on them obtrusively as if it actively resented the few square yards that they had usurped from it and was impatient to absorb them again; this was all that could be called the village, if it could be dignified even by that name. On the side of the tracks where the Saint stood was the Lavis estate, the center and only reason for existence of the settlement called Ayer Pahit or its railway station, which consisted of a ten-foot-square wooden hut at the side of the platform. Close behind that was a very large corrugated iron shed like a warehouse, and a little farther back still was a large rectangular building of smoke-streaked concrete topped wit
h an incomprehensible tangle of pipes, with an incongruously modern and industrial look to it. The concrete building was set right into the side of a cleared hill that rose away from the railroad. A little above it were two long stark buildings like barracks, recognizable as coolie quarters, and much further up was what had to be the manager’s house, also of wood and atap, but set up on pilings and with a long shady screened verandah running the whole length of it. Even the big house was not on the very hilltop, but some thirty feet below it, the crest itself being taken up with something with square low white walls which at first sight looked like a kind of fortification but which Simon reminiscently identified as the top of a water storage tank. There were a couple of small individual cottages, probably for native foremen, on the flanks of the hill between the barracks and the big house, and for background again the dense dark green all-smothering jungle.

  Simon took in the essential topography with one deliberate panoramic survey before he lowered his gaze to explore the vicinity of the platform. He saw a handful of idlers of the nondescript and seemingly purposeless kind who can be found hanging around every wayside railroad station on earth, and two smart-looking young Malays in khaki shorts and shirts who carried Lee-Enfield rifles and who at first he thought must be guards left over from the train until he realized from their rather more informal uniforms that they must be constabulary attached to the estate; and then he saw Eve Lavis coming towards him from the hut that served as a station office, and for a definite time thereafter he had no eyes for anything else.

  Ascony had called her “stunning,” but the cliché was not truly descriptive at all. She was not an impact, she was an experience, which, from being more gradual was all the more enduring in its effect. His first impression of her, foolishly it seemed at the time, was one of coolness. Even at a little distance he noticed that the plain white skirt and shirt that she wore had a crackling fresh look, and yet the holster belt with a revolver hanging low on the right side did not look as if it had just been put on. She had very fine ash-blonde hair of the natural kind which often looks almost gray, yet in spite of the sweltering humidity there was nothing dank or bedraggled about it. As she came closer still he saw that her wide-set level eyes were another gray, clear and cool as mountain lakes under a clouded sky.

  The experience continued to build impressions into an inevitable structure. He had only observed at first that her figure appeared to be pleasantly normal in size and proportions; it became a conviction later that the only right word for it was “perfect.” Because it was so perfectly without deficiencies or exaggerations it was not immediately striking, but after a while you were aware of it as the most symmetrical and shapely and desirable body that a woman could have. In the same way her face was not beautiful with the startling prettiness that snaps heads around and evokes reflex whistles. You became fascinated one by one with the broad brow, the small chiseled nose, the delicately contoured cheekbones, the wide firm-lipped mouth that opened over small teeth like twin rows of graduated pearls, the strong chin, and the smooth neck that carried it with queenly poise, and presently you felt that you were looking at Beauty itself made carnal in one assemblage of wholly satisfying features.

  “You must be Mr Templar,” she said. “I’m Eve Lavis.”

  She put out her hand, and it was as cool and dry as she looked, so that the Saint was aware of the stickiness that even his superbly conditioned body had conceded to the heat.

  “I’m a fairly housebroken guest,” he said. “I never smoke in bed, and I seldom shine my shoes with the bath towels. Sometimes I don’t even wear shoes.”

  “I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” she said. “I was sending a wire to Vernon—the railway ticker is our telegraph station. I told him you got here all right.”

  The reversal of ordinary sequence, that she had waited to complete a telegram and mention his arrival before even greeting him, renewed and redoubled the sense of abnormal coolness that had first struck him. Yet there was nothing chilly or unfriendly about her manner. He had a sudden sharply-etched feeling that it was only her way of doing things, a disconcertingly direct and practical way.

  “Shall we go up to the house?” she said. “The boy will take your bag.”

  She beckoned a Chinese who had been patiently waiting, who took the Saint’s suitcase and hurried away with it straight up the hill. Mrs Lavis started to walk in an easier direction, and Simon fell in step beside her. The two Malay guards followed at a discreet distance.

  “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 ovens 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.”

  3

  By six o’clock it was tolerably cool. The houseboy had asked “Tuan mau 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.