Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

Farrast picked up the kris and examined it.

“This’ll make a nice souvenir,” he said.

“You earned it,” said the Saint, who could seldom withhold approbation when it was due. “When I saw him pull it I thought he had you, but you handled him like a commando.”

Farrast looked pleased with himself, rather than with the compliment.

“I told you I could take care of myself.”

They went outside again. All three Malays had disappeared.

“Two of ’em are on their way back to the village to tell the story right now,” Farrast said. “I don’t think the pawang’ll have much prestige left when they’ve finished. In fact, I’ll be surprised if he ever shows his face in Pahang again.”

“Unfortunately,” Simon remarked, “you didn’t get a chance to ask him who he was taking orders from, after all.”

“Probably it doesn’t matter much now.”

Farrast squinted up at a haze of dust drifting around the shoulder of the hill. “Those kranis have brought the truck in,” he said. “I hope for their sakes it was full of wood.”

He started to walk briskly up towards the distillation building, and the Saint tagged quietly along. Farrast swung his cane as if he was enjoying the feel of his recent use of it in retrospect, and would be happy to repeat the experience. His lower lip began to tighten and protrude again.

The truck had pulled into the loading area in front of the ovens, where the cage-like carts received their cargoes of raw wood. The two kranis were heaving billets from the truck into the last car of a row of previously filled ones. They were Tamils, and they had started the day in white shirts and trousers as befitted their position as supervisors of common labor, but now their clothes were soiled and soaked with sweat. They did not look at Farrast or the Saint, but went on working steadily, with masks of undying resentment on their thin-featured black faces.

Farrast measured the size of the load they were handling with his eye, and seemed disappointed that he could find no fault with it.

“I’ve good news for you,” he said in English. “I think I’ve fixed the pawang and you’ll have all your men back tomorrow morning. But I don’t want this to happen again. So to make sure you remember what happens when you let ’em get out of hand, I’m going to let you fill in for ’em for the rest of the day. After you finish loading that train we’ll run it in and start cooking, and you can try yourselves out as stokers. Then this afternoon we’ll go back to the coils and tanks that your men were supposed to clean. Between you, you ought to be able to make up some of the time that’s been lost. And I’m going to watch you do it. Unless you’d rather go back to India and look for another job.”

The two men stood still for long enough to appraise him with inscrutable faces of sweat-glazed jade, and then stolidly resumed their work.

“Those two speak English as well as I do,” Farrast said carelessly, “but they still need a bit of educating.”

He found himself a place in the shade, sat down, and played with the captured kris.

Simon Templar lighted a cigarette and wandered idly around, finding what he could to interest himself. Farrast was plainly no casual conversationalist, and was content to glower intermittently at the toiling kranis and watch for the next excuse to lay a verbal lash across their backs. Simon found himself liking Farrast not one particle better, even though the man had surprised him with a demonstration of physical courage and capability of no insignificant order. It was a revelation that a form of genuine respect could be so sharply limited.

The Saint endured Farrast’s inexorable dourness until his last three cigarettes were smoked and he could stand it no longer, and then he said, “Eve must still be wondering what happened. I’ll go back and tell her how you smote the ungodly, hip and thigh.”

“Go ahead,” Farrast said curtly, and glanced at his watch. “I’ll be along soon for tiffin.”

Eve Lavis was sitting on the verandah with the Maugham book open on her lap. She looked up at Simon with eager but restrained concern.

“What happened? You’ve been such a long time.”

“I know, I should have come back before. I was watching them getting ready to run a load of wood through the cook-shop. The pawang was taken care of long ago.”

He gave her a sufficiently graphic account of one of the few brawls in which he had ever been an entirely superfluous spectator.

“Farrast was terrific,” he said. “I can be very frank now, and admit that I hadn’t expected that much from him. You know how one tends to think that a guy who makes a lot of threatening noise, which Farrast is rather inclined to, won’t be half so tough when the time comes to deliver. This was an eye-opener. Maybe he was a bit brutal, but he was quick as lightning and he was all guts.”

“I can’t blame you for not liking him. He’s been quite boorish with you — I can’t think why.”

“We haven’t exactly become bosom pals yet.” Simon acknowledged tolerantly. “But I’ll give him a testimonial any day for courage. It gave me a rather different slant on his character. You can tell a hell of a lot about a man’s character from a few minutes like those.”

“You’ve probably had lots of practice.”

“All right, from the criminal point of view: suppose Farrast had an enemy, or someone he wanted to get rid of. Farrast would probably challenge him to a fight, or at least give him some token chance to defend himself. Suppose Farrast were a murder suspect. I might believe it if they said he met the victim face to face and shot him down. I wouldn’t believe that he slowly poisoned him to death.”

She stared at him, her eyes widening fractionally.

“What an extraordinary thing to say!”

“Why? Poisoning is the most cowardly kind of murder. No killer feels as sure as a poisoner that he can’t be caught. And it’s the easiest thing to do to someone who trusts him. Even the lowest gangsters have hardly ever sunk to using poison. The victim doesn’t even have a chance to duck.”

“No, no,” she said, with the nearest he had yet seen her come to impatience. “I mean, why would you ever think of Charles as a murderer?”

Simon grinned.

“Force of habit,” he said blandly. “I think of all sorts of people like that. It’s like a game. And maybe the stuff I’ve been reading set me off again.”

It was a moment more before the shadow of a frown ironed itself out of her forehead and she looked down at the book.

“Oh, yes, I read your story, and I went on and read several others.”

He lighted a cigarette.

“What did you think of it?”

“It wasn’t bad. And nobody’s poisoned in it, either.”

“That’s true.”

“I still can’t imagine what Vernon has on his mind.”

“Maybe he has his own views on what the policeman in the story ought to have done, or would have done according to regulations, and he wants to have an argument with me.”

“But what could the policeman do?”

Simon shrugged.

“Damn if I know. In that particular case, I don’t even know what I’d do myself. It was such a private, almost humane little murder.”

“I thought you’d be understanding about that.”

“I might be. But a callous murder for profit is something else. For instance, take the Bluebeard type. I met one of those not too long ago, in England. He married one woman after another, taking care they had money or insuring them if they didn’t, murdered them in a number of ingenious ways, and after a decent interval went on the woo for the next. It was a completely cold-blooded business operation.”