Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

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.

“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.