The Saint Around the World

1

Simon Templar stayed at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore for sentimental reasons. Although more modern and more luxurious caravanserais had been built in the many years since he had last been there, the Raffles was one of the places that was simply synonymous with Singapore to him, as it always will be to the real Far East hands from away back. And as to why that one particular place had won out over two others almost equally traditional, Major Vernon Ascony had a theory.

“I just looked at the name on the front and felt sure you couldn’t have resisted it,” Ascony said.

“Since you couldn’t possibly have been thinking of A. J. Raffles, the immortal Amateur Cracksman of fiction,” said the Saint, “I wonder what there can be about me that reminds you of Sir Stamford Raffles, the illustrious pioneer and Empire builder, whose name is commemorated on so many landmarks of this romantic city.”

Major Ascony permitted the vestige of a smile to stir under the shadow of his closely clipped mustache.

“Nothing, old chap. Positively not one single thing.”

“And why were you trying to find me anyway?” Simon inquired.

“I’m with the Police,” Ascony said, and modestly refrained from specifying that he was an Assistant Commissioner.

The Saint sighed.

“One day I’m going to have this printed on a card,” he said. “But if you’ll accept it verbally, I can save you a lot of time. No, I am not here to stir up any trouble. No, I am not looking for any crime or criminals. Yes, I am just an ordinary tourist. Of course, if something irresistibly intriguing happens under my nose, I can’t promise not to get involved in it. But I don’t intend to start anything.”

“What made you decide to come here? This is a bit off your beat, isn’t it?”

“It wasn’t always. As a matter of fact, one of my first big adventures started not far from here, though it came to a head in England. But that was an awful long time ago. And the other day, out of the blue, I had a sudden crazy belt of nostalgia: I just had to come back and see how much the place had changed. I hadn’t anything else in mind for a couple of weeks, and BOAC flies here awful fast. I remember the first time — it took me six weeks on a freighter from Lima.”

Ascony proffered his cigarette case, and Simon accepted one.

“How about a drink?”

“I’d like it,” Simon said.

They sat down at a table on the terrace overlooking the bustling Esplanade, and a soft-footed “boy” came quickly to dust it off.

“A Stengah, or something fancier?”

“Peter Dawson will be fine.”

“Dua,” ordered the Major. He rubbed his mustache thoughtfully. “I suppose you’ve already noticed a lot of difference?”

“Quite a bit,” Simon grinned. “The plumbing, especially. And air conditioning, yet. And no more rickshaws.”

“Yes, there’ve been a few improvements. But a lot of things are worse, too.”

“I’ve heard about that. You’re pretty high on the Russian list of places to make trouble in.”

“It’s not too bad right here. We’ve had a few nasty riots, but nothing so far that we couldn’t handle. But it’s a bit rugged for the blokes up-country sometimes.”

“You’ve still got those Red guerrillas? I thought a namesake of mine cleaned ’em out.”

“General Templer? Only he spelt it with an ‘E.’ You know, when he was sent here, one of the London papers ran a headline about ‘The Saint Goes to Malaya.’ And people used to ask him if he was any relation of yours. I never found out whether it really amused him or not.”

“I thought the manager gave me an odd look when I registered.”

Ascony nodded.

“Templer — Sir Gerald, I mean — did a darn good job. But there are still a few too many of those lads at large, with guns hidden away that we dropped to ’em during the occupation, and others that they captured when the Japs gave up. Every now and again they go on a rampage and shoot up a mine or a plantation, so the chaps up there still have to keep armed guards and barricade themselves in at night.”

“Sort of like Africa with the Mau Mau?”

“Sort of. Or like America with the Redskins, judging from what I’ve seen in the pictures.”

The boy returned and served them their highballs.

“Well, cheers,” Ascony said.

“Cheerio,” said the Saint accommodatingly.

Ascony drank, put down his glass, and lighted another cigarette.

“I suppose you wouldn’t be interested in seeing that sort of thing,” he remarked.

His tone was impeccably casual, so that it would have seemed embarrassingly hypersensitive to attempt to read into it a challenge or a sneer. Yet something deep inside the Saint prickled involuntarily.

“I hate to miss it,” he replied. “But I don’t suppose the Chamber of Commerce is featuring it as part of a guided tour.”

“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 with 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.

“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 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.”

“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.

He heard Farrast walk heavily past and open a door further down the verandah, and then he heard him through the partition wall. Farrast, then, had the adjoining room to his, and the other wing of the house would be the master suite. The wall was not much of a sound insulator. Simon heard Farrast moving about, opening drawers and closets, getting ready for bed, and presently the fall of his slippers and the creak of springs.

The Saint put out his cigarette, took off his shorts, lay down quietly, and turned out the lamp. But for some time he lay with his hands behind his head and his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling.

When two people have slept together, there is a kind of transmutation between them which, no matter how carefully they behave, without a single false step that could be specifically pinpointed, can reveal the fact to a sensitized intuition as baldly as if it were branded on them. The Saint dozed.

Presently, he judged it was about half an hour later, he was wide awake again, and the sound that had aroused him was still clear in his recollection. It had been the creak of a board outside on the verandah. Instinctively he dropped one hand to the butt of the automatic which he had tucked under the edge of the mattress, but he made no other movement, and made himself breathe regularly and heavily. And after a few seconds he heard the almost inaudible scuff of stealthy footsteps moving away. That was when he let go the gun again, for his preternaturally acute hearing told him that the feet were shod. It was hard to follow them very far: the surrounding night crowded in on his ears with its competing antiphony of innumerable frogs and insects and small beasts of unimaginable variety, a background orchestration that you could forget entirely until you wanted to listen for something else and then it seemed to swell up into deafening volume. But after a while he heard, with unmistakable clarity, the soft turning of a latch, and perhaps felt rather than heard, conducted through the joists of the building, the muffled closing of a door, far down in the other wing of the house.

He went to sleep.

When he woke up again it was as if his brain had not stopped working. It was daylight enough to read, and he reached out at once for the book on the bedside table. He could not wait any longer to find out what Major Ascony had wanted him to read in it. But it was a very thick book, and to work through it from the first page in the hope of coming upon something that might fit in would be a marathon task.

He riffled the pages methodically in search of a clue, and suddenly came to one that was turned down at the upper corner. It was a very neat turn-down, no bigger than the diagonal half of a postage stamp, but it was the only one in the volume, and it was on the first page of a story. He had a feeling that Ascony might almost have measured it with a micrometer, making it just big enough not to be overlooked permanently, but small enough not to be found prematurely.

The story was called “Footprints in the Jungle.” As he started on it he had a vague recollection of having read it before, and as he went on it all came back to him. It was about a woman whose lover, with her encouragement, murdered her husband, and then married her.

4

When he went out on the verandah he carried the book with him. Eve Lavis was sitting at the coffee table in the living area, sipping a cup of tea. She looked up with a ready smile and said, “Good morning. Did you sleep all right?”

“Like a baby. No, that’s wrong. Babies wake up at ungodly hours, bawling their heads off. I didn’t.”

She was wearing light tan jodhpurs and a pastel yellow shirt, and her ash-blonde hair was pulled plainly back and tied with a yellow ribbon on the nape of her neck. It made her look even younger than the day before. Her gray eyes were clear and unshadowed.

“I don’t need to ask you how you feel,” he said. “You look merely wonderful.”

“I can’t help that. But I’m afraid it shocks you.”

“It shouldn’t. I ought to know better than anyone that death seems a little less important each time you see it.”

“You mean that this isn’t the first husband I’ve lost and I’m getting hardened to it.”

“Well, Ascony did mention the doctor. But he didn’t go into any details.”

“Dr Quarry,” she said. “Donald Quarry. He committed suicide.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

“I don’t mind. You’re curious, aren’t you? It’s natural. I was on a cruise boat that stopped here. It suddenly came over me that if I had to make one more sightseeing trip with the same crowd of people saying the same things about everything I’d go out of my mind. I decided to drive out to the Golf Club and ask if they’d let me play a round and be by myself for the first time for weeks. But I met Donald on the first tee and we played the round together, and then we had drinks, and he asked me to dinner, and it was something at first sight, I suppose, and when the cruise boat went on I wasn’t on it. We were married for two years. And then he did an operation that went wrong and his patient died. I don’t know why, but he got very depressed and thought he was no good any more, and soon afterwards he took a shot of morphine and put himself to sleep. I think I cried a little that time.”

Simon looked down the hill, across the railroad tracks to the dense greenness that reached back towards a horizon of blue haze. The damp air still had a deceptively spring-like freshness.

“The first time is always the worst, isn’t it?” he said.

“You really do understand,” she said.

“If you won’t accuse me of going back on our pact, Mrs Lavis, I think you may be the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met.”

She was pleased, and did not pretend to hide it.

“I’m glad you came here,” she said. “And I think you could drop the ‘Mrs Lavis’ stuff. Do you mind if I call you Simon?”

“I was waiting for a chance to suggest it, Eve.”

She put a hand on the teapot to test its temperature.

“Would you like a cup of tea? It’s still hot.”

“I’d rather have breakfast. I’m the horribly healthy type.”

She glanced at a clock across the room.

“We’ll give Charles another five minutes, and then I’ll ring for it, whether he’s here or not.”

He was still trying to visualize her in bed with Farrast. There was nothing prurient about the effort, it was more like an exercise in abstract mathematics. Intellectually, he had no doubt left that his assumption was correct, but to translate it into a picture that he could believe emphatically was a form of confirmation that eluded him. Could that invulnerable air-conditioned poise really melt in the warm confusion of sex, abdicating its pedestal to lie with a cheaply handsome spoiled wilful and surely less than fascinating mortal like Charles Farrast?

“Isn’t he up yet?” Simon asked.

“Good heavens, yes. We literally get up at the crack of dawn here. Ketchil makan, and out to get the coolies started at six o’clock. Then back to breakfast after everything’s running.”

He still had the book in his hand as he sat down beside her, and he put it down on the table in front of him.

“I didn’t know how long it might be till breakfast, and I didn’t know I’d have better company,” he explained.

She leaned a little towards him to look at the title.

“Maugham,” she said. “I don’t think I know that one. Is it new?”

“No, it’s a collection. Ascony lent it to me.”

“Vernon? I never thought of him as the bookish type.”

“He said there was a story in it that he’d like to get my reaction to.”

“Really? Which one?”

“A thing called ‘Footprints in the Jungle.’  ”

She passed him a tin of cigarettes and took one herself.

“What’s it about?”

“Well, Maugham never does go in for very sensational plots, and this one certainly isn’t the newest one in the world. It’s about a woman whose husband is murdered, supposedly by robbers, and soon afterwards she marries his best friend, and the presumption is that they were the ones who actually arranged to knock off Hubby.”

She took a light from the match he held, without a wrinkle in her smooth brow. She was enjoying a civilized conversation, nothing more.

“It isn’t exactly original, is it?”

“It’s all in the writing. He makes you see them as quite ordinary people that you might meet anywhere, instead of monsters out of another world.”

“But I wonder why Vernon wanted your opinion of it.”

“The inside story is supposedly told by a police chief,” he said. “The policeman finds enough evidence to be fairly convinced that they did it, but he also knows that he could never get enough to stand any chance of convicting them. So he’s never done anything about it.”

She met his gaze with level untroubled eyes. “I wonder if Vernon has a problem of that kind and can’t make up his mind what to do. But I can’t imagine Vernon not being able to make up his own mind about anything. But of course, if he didn’t have enough evidence, there’s nothing he could do anyway, is there?”

Simon shrugged.

“He didn’t tell me anything, and I didn’t read the story until this morning.”

“I’ll have to read it myself.” She glanced at the clock, and stood up. “Let’s not starve ourselves any longer.”

She went to the dining table and rang the silver hand-bell that stood in front of her place, but they had hardly settled themselves when Farrast stomped up the front steps and shouldered blusterily through the screen door. “Sorry if I’m late,” he said perfunctorily.

He sailed a terai hat into an armchair as he marched through to the table and sat himself down heavily, his boots scraping the floor. He had the kind of complexion on which sunburn never loses all its redness, and it seemed more inflamed now, perhaps because he was warm. His khaki shirt was already wilted and clinging.

“Trouble?” Eve Lavis asked.

“Plenty,” Farrast said. “And I’m going to make more.”

“You’ll be able to do it better with a good breakfast under your belt,” she said practically.

It was a good breakfast, staunchly British, with bacon and eggs and sausages and toast and marmalade and strong tea to wash it down, as was to be expected, for that is one tradition on which no proper Colonial even in the remotest outpost of the Empire would make any concession to local cuisine. At other meals he may without protest eat bird’s-nest soup or stewed buffalo hump, and may even become an addict of semi-incandescent curries, but breakfast under the British flag is incorruptible from Hampstead to Hong Kong.

After the boy had finished serving and gone out, and they had started eating, Farrast said, “I went down to the plant. The krani was there, but no men. They were supposed to clean out a couple of the stills. I waited twenty minutes. Then I loaded him in the jeep and drove out where they were last cutting wood. The other krani was there, with a truck, but no men. I gave it another ten minutes. Nobody showed up. So you know what I did? I made the kranis pick up a saw and start cutting wood themselves. I said if they couldn’t get their crews on the job, the only way they could earn their pay was by doing it themselves.”

“Do you think that was wise, Charles?” Mrs Lavis asked. “You want to keep them on your side.”

“You told me last night to show who was boss,” Farrast answered belligerently. “If the kranis had been tougher themselves, perhaps we’d never have had this trouble. This ought to teach ’em a lesson. I told ’em not to come in till they could bring the truck full of wood, which is all we need to complete a batch that’s waiting to be baked. And then I hiked off to the Malay village.”

“By yourself?”

“No, I had a friend with me.” He drew his revolver, held it up for a moment, and thrust it back in the holster. “I was just hoping somebody would start something, so I’d be given a chance to use it. But when I got there there wasn’t a grown man in sight. They’d all sneaked off into the bush when they heard me coming. Except the penggulu.”

“Poor old man! I hope you didn’t hurt him.”

“I made him show me the pawang’s hut. I threw everything out of it that was movable, his personal possessions as well as his charms and concoctions — broke everything that was breakable, and trampled the whole shebang into the mud. Then I told him to see that all the men saw it when they came back, and he could ask ’em how they thought the pawang’s magic could be any good if I could do that to him. And I told him to give the pawang a message, in front of plenty of witnesses, that I dared him to show his face anywhere around the estate, because wherever I found him I’d give him a public thrashing.”

Eve Lavis buttered some toast.

“Well, that ought to lead to a showdown,” she said. “What do you think, Simon?”

“I don’t see how the pawang can help losing face if he doesn’t do something about it,” said the Saint. “On the other hand, if he does something, it’s liable to be something unhealthy for Charles.”

“Don’t worry about me, Templar,” Farrast said. “I’m pretty handy at taking care of myself.”

Mrs Lavis frowned thoughtfully.

“I can’t help wondering if we aren’t missing the target,” she said. “You said yourself that the pawang must have gone over to the Reds. Doesn’t that mean there must be a bigger Commie agent somewhere around here who’s giving him his orders. If you could find him, you’d get the trouble out by the root.”

“Perhaps Templar can detect him,” Farrast said.

“I’ll think about it,” Simon said amiably. “But with, your local knowledge you’d do it better. I think Eve’s got something, though.”

“Well,” Farrast said grudgingly, “if I catch that pawang I’ll see what I can beat out of him.”

They had finished eating and were smoking cigarettes at the table when one of the guards came up the verandah steps and knocked on the frame of the screen door. Farrast got up and went over there, and the guard spoke briefly.

“He says the pawang and a couple of his pals are in the Chinese shop across from the station,” Mrs Lavis translated to Simon.

Farrast returned to pick up his hat, and also a stout Malacca cane.

“This is what I’ve been looking forward to,” he said grimly.

Simon folded his napkin and stood up.

“Would you like me to come with you?” he asked.

“Suit yourself.”

Farrast opened the door and went out. Simon followed him.

The tropical day was getting into its stride, and as they stepped out from under the shade of the roof the sun hit them through a mugginess that was almost palpable. Farrast marched down the hill in ominous silence, the set of his jaw proclaiming one implacable preoccupation. But at the gate in the fence that ringed the upper part of the hill he stopped the guard and told him to wait there.”

“Jaga baik-baik, tuan,” the guard said, and Farrast glared at him as if the man had insulted him by merely urging him to be careful.

They went on down past the plant and the warehouse and across the station platform, without another word being spoken until they had crossed the tracks. Then Farrast stopped a few yards from the open entrance of the store and looked carefully to left and right, as though satisfying himself that he was not walking into an ambush.

He said, “You can come in with me if you like. But don’t interfere unless you’re quite sure that I’ve had it. I’m the fellow who’s got to go on running this show. They’ve got to be afraid of me all by myself, and not thinking they can start up again as soon as you’ve left.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” murmured the Saint. Farrast went in, and Simon followed again and stepped off to one side, keeping his back to the wall.

There were three Malays gathered around an antique pinball machine at the rear of the shop. Two of them, with bottles in their hands, were watching and boisterously encouraging the third, who was playing. But as Simon and Farrast walked in they abruptly stopped laughing, one of them muttered a warning, and they stepped back a little. The one who was playing seemed to pay no attention. He remained huddled closely over the machine, without looking around, concentrating intently on his shot. He could only have been the pawang, though he was dressed no differently from the others, in a much-mended shirt and a sarong.

Farrast strode straight over to him, without hesitation, his boots thudding on the bare floor in defiant announcement of his approach, but the third Malay did not move until Farrast grasped his shoulder. Then the pawang turned, like a twisting snake, and a kris flashed in his hand at waist level where he must have been holding it all the time under cover of his crouch at the machine. Simon saw the glint of the wicked wavy-bladed knife, but the Malay was so quick and Farrast was so close to him that even the Saint could have done nothing about it. But Farrast himself must have been anticipating the attack in precisely the way it happened, and he was countering it almost before it started, pushing the Malay back and bringing his already lifted cane down in a vicious cracking blow on the man’s wrist which undoubtedly broke a bone. The knife fell to the ground and Farrast put his foot on it. Then he grasped the pawang by the collar and began to rain merciless blows with the stick on his back and buttocks.

The pawang’s attempt had been made and foiled so instantaneously that it hardly seemed like an interruption at all, and his two putative sycophants were left winded and dumbfounded by the speed with which their prospective hero had been disarmed and reduced to squirming impotence. Simon kept them under close observation, but it was obvious that their role had been meant to be that of witnesses and admirers, and that they had no ambition to join the fray after the tables had been so catastrophically turned on their champion. They watched open-mouthed, until with a scream and a still more violent plunge the pawang tore himself free, leaving half his patched shirt in Farrast’s hand, and raced out of the shop like a terrified cur; and then, as Farrast turned speculatively towards them, they sidled around behind a counter with increasing velocity that culminated in a panic-stricken bolt for the door.

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.”

“And you couldn’t have any sympathy for him.”

“I helped to get him hanged,” said the Saint.

She closed the book and put it on the table, and studied him again with those sober and profound gray eyes.

“I like you very much,” she said. “You know exactly what you believe and what you’d do about it. If we got to know each other better we might disagree about lots of things, but we’d always speak the same language.”

He knew it for as open a promise of eventually more than friendship as any strumpet’s moist mouth and skilfully disarranged skirt, but it was made with such queenly dignity and for such a discreetly indefinite future that even at her last husband’s funeral it would have been in perfect taste.

“Coming from you, Eve,” Simon said quietly, “I take that as a rare compliment.”

Farrast came tramping up the steps and kicked the screen door open with an exuberant toe.

“Well, Eve,” he said, “should I put in for a raise?”

She stood up, her face lighting with eager appreciation.

“Simon told me all about it,” she said. “You must have been wonderful.”

“I told you I’d do it,” Farrast said, flinging down his hat and cane. “And the two kranis are learning how much better it is to keep other people working than have to do it yourself. When the Malays come back tomorrow morning, everything will be running like clockwork again.”

He was flushed and hot, but the satisfaction of meting out punishment seemed to have finally put him in a good humor.

“I’m going to have a drink,” he announced, and went to the sideboard.

Eve turned to the Saint.

“Aren’t you thirsty?”

“I could use a cold beer, if you have one.”

“Of course.”

She rang the bell on the dining table, and the houseboy came in, took the order, and went out again. Farrast raised his glass.

“Excuse me if I don’t wait,” he said. “Cheerio.”

He drank deeply, putting down two-thirds of the highball at one long draft. As he lowered the glass, a strange expression came over his face, and quickly turned into a dreadful grimace. He retched and choked, and then doubled up as if he had been hit in the solar plexus. The glass fell from his hand as he clutched his stomach, and then his knees buckled under him.

Eve Lavis gave an inarticulate cry.

Simon sprang forward and rolled Farrast over. Farrast’s muscles were cramped in knotted rigidity, his teeth were clenched, and his lips drawn back from them in a horrible grin. The color of his face was darkening towards purple. Simon tried to force the mouth open so that he could physically induce vomiting, but he knew it was no use.

5

“Those devils,” Mrs Lavis said, in a clear unnatural voice.

Charles Farrast was finished. Technically there might still have been a flutter of pulse or breath to quibble about, but he was dead beyond human reversing. Nevertheless, the Saint went on trying for a few seconds, stubbornly reluctant to give up.

He heard Eve’s footsteps cross the room, pause, and then pass quickly behind him. The rear screen door slammed.

Simon looked up, puzzledly. And then from the direction of the cook’s quarters out back he heard a man’s wordless yell, which was instantly cut off by the first of two crashing shots.

The Saint took off from the floor like a sprinter from a crouch, plunged through the rear door, and raced down the covered alley outside, his automatic already out in his hand.

He saw Eve Lavis through the first doorway he came to, and a moment later, as he braked his headlong rush, the picture was completed. The room was a sort of serving pantry, with china cabinets and an icebox. On a table in the center stood an empty beer bottle, and a freshly filled glass on a Benares tray. The houseboy lay on the floor, quite still, with his eyes rolled upwards and two holes marring the front of his immaculate white jacket. Mrs Lavis held her revolver still pointing at him, as though considering whether to fire it again.

“I knew it,” she said in a flat mechanical tone. “I knew it. It came to me one-two-three. It couldn’t have been anyone else. And then if he poisoned the whisky he could have been slowly poisoning Ted all that time, and perhaps he didn’t have ulcers at all. And then if he was poisoning people like that why should he stop there? I could see it all in a flash. I grabbed my gun and ran out here. I caught him red-handed. Just as I thought, he was pouring something into your beer. And when he saw that I’d seen him, he picked up that knife. Look.”

Her gun pointed at a small brown bottle on the floor by the houseboy’s feet, and a kitchen knife near his right hand.

There was a faint scuffling sound from the back of the building, and Eve Lavis turned abruptly and hurried out of the door. Simon went after her. A fat Chinese and a little woman were galloping wildly away down a stretch of slope. From their clothes and appearance, they could only have been the cook and the amah.

Eve raised her revolver.

“I’ll kill them all,” she said coldly.

Simon caught her wrist in a grip of steel.

“You don’t know that they had anything to do with it,” he said. “The boy was the one you caught in the act. They’re probably just scared to death.”

He took the gun away from her without much difficulty. She struggled only very briefly, until her complete helplessness against his strength was obvious. Then she became still, and presently sagged a little against him.

“I’ll be good,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Come back to the house,” he said.

As he took her through the rear door again she averted her eyes from the body of Farrast on the floor. Simon let her go, and took a napkin to lay over the man’s congested face. She sat down in a chair and put her hands over her eyes, but it was a rigid gesture suggestive of intense concentration rather than collapse.

Other footsteps came pell-mell to the front of the verandah. The uniformed guard appeared at the top of the steps, with the staring faces of the two kranis a little below and behind him. Simon went and let them in. He recalled what Farrast had said about the Tamils having learned English, and was grateful that he did not have to struggle through a narrative in halting Malay. He stated what he had seen for himself, and what Mrs Lavis had told him, lucidly and concisely; and one of the kranis translated it for the guard. Mrs Lavis did not move or speak.

Then Simon led them through to the back and showed them what was in the serving pantry.

He said to the elder krani, “Tell the guard he is to stay here. He must not go in or touch anything. He is to stand at the door, and he is not to let anyone in for any reason — not even myself or the Memsahib. When he is tired, one of the other guards will take his place. This will go on until the police get here.”

He returned to the house with the two Tamils, and nodded at the body by the sideboard.

“One of you help me take him to his room.”

One of them did so, the other going along to open the door. When they came back, Mrs Lavis was still sitting where they had left her. The only difference was that she had dropped her hands to the arms of the chair. Simon went to a small desk that stood against one wall, found a sheet of paper, and wrote on it briefly but carefully.

“Send this to Major Ascony in Singapore on the railway telegraph. If he can’t come himself, he’ll have someone sent on the next train from Kuala Lumpur or Ipoh.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do it at once,” Mrs Lavis said.

“Yes, Mem.”

The kranis went out.

Simon paced thoughtfully back, picked up the round yellow tin of cigarettes from the coffee table, and chose one from it.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs Lavis said. “I went off the deep end for a few minutes. I won’t do it again.”

Her face was again stoically controlled, her eyes dry and clear and unwavering.

“That’s all right,” he said. “The stiff upper lip can get slightly petrified if it never lets up.”

“It was just too much,” she said. “Ted swore by that boy Ah Fong. It was so true what you said about poisoning, how mean it is. To think that Ah Fong could have been bringing him poisoned food and drinks day after day, watching him suffer and waste away, all the time pretending to be so sympathetic…”

“You’re quite sure he was doing that?”

“If Ted was being poisoned, it’ll show in an autopsy, won’t it?”

“Probably.” Simon looked around for a match. “But if Ah Fong took so long over your husband, being so subtle, and trying to make it look like natural causes, why did he suddenly decide to knock off Farrast in one dose that nobody could mistake for anything but what it was?”

“Remember what Charles did to the pawang. It was a setback to the whole Red operation in this district. They were furious, and desperate. They had to show the Malays at once that nobody could beat up a Commie and get away with it. And they’d have given it to you at the same time just because you’d been with Charles.”

“But it wasn’t at the same time. Ah Fong saw Farrast mixing a drink when he took the order for my beer. Why would he think it was any use poisoning the beer, when Farrast would have started his drink before I got mine, and after what happened to him I obviously wouldn’t drink anything?”

“He must have hoped that Charles would wait for you. Or at least he mightn’t have expected Charles to drink so fast. Did you notice how he gulped down most of that drink without stopping? If he’d sipped it like anybody else, there might have been plenty of time for you to get your beer and take a good swig at it before the poison hit Charles.”

Simon lighted his cigarette at last, and took a long drag deep into his lungs. He let the smoke out slowly, looking at her quietly through it. He wanted to print her on his memory like that, sitting with her hands folded placidly in her lap, the dainty symmetries of her figure subtly rounding her blouse, the patrician composure of her intelligent upturned face framed against the silver-ash softness of her hair, all the astounding proud loveliness of her as it had become familiar to him feature by feature. He had never known anyone like her, and he was not likely to again.

“It’s no good, Eve,” he said. “It’s clever, but it won’t sell.”

The lift of her finely delineated eyebrows was only a flicker.

“I don’t understand.”

He held the spent match above an ashtray, corrected its position with an estimating eye, and dropped it for a dead-center hit.

“I’m sure,” he said, “that you poisoned the whisky. “Then, when I was trying to do something for Farrast — as you knew in advance I certainly would be — you rushed out to the pantry and shot Ah Fong. You had the poison bottle in your pocket all ready to drop beside him, and it only took another second to snatch a knife out of a drawer and throw that down beside him too. Who’d make a better fall guy than a Chinese houseboy who was too dead to be able to even try to deny anything?”

For the first time he saw her statuesque calm jarred by a temblor of shock. But even then it was mere as if she winced over a breach of good manners that he had been guilty of.

“I don’t think that’s very funny,” she said primly.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Then the heat must have done something to you.”

“I’m only wondering,” he said, “what would have happened if I’d decided to join Farrast in a stengah. Would you have let me die with him, and framed the houseboy a trifle differently but still shot him before the police got here? Or would you have delayed me, or upset my glass, and saved me somehow so that I could still be a witness? I’m afraid that’ll always torment me. You’ll never tell me, or if you did, I wouldn’t believe you.”

She laughed, a little faint brittle sound.

“You’re very charming,” she said. “And would you care to tell me what you think I did it for? Am I a Communist agent?’

“That’s one thing I’d never suspect you of. I’m certain you’re strictly in business for yourself. You did it mainly to cover up the poisoning of your husband.”

“Oh. I did that too?”

“Both of them, as a matter of fact.”

Her eyes widened momentarily.

“This is fascinating. It’s a good job I’m not the hysterical type, otherwise I think I’d be screaming.”

“Would you like me to run through it from the beginning?”

“You might as well. I couldn’t be any more baffled than I am now.”

He sat on the arm of a chair and reached over to ease the cylinder of ash off the end of his cigarette.

“I’ll only go back as far as the things I’ve heard about,” he said reflectively. “You were on a world cruise. I’ve no doubt it was a speculative investment. A cruise of that length is expensive enough to guarantee some fairly well-to-do passengers, and ships are renowned incubators of romance. But for some reason that trip wasn’t paying off: by the time you got to Singapore you’d methodically investigated all the prospects, and the right man or the right situation just wasn’t aboard. So you weren’t merely bored — you figured you might still get something out of it by doing some prospecting in port. That’s why you ducked the sightseeing tour and went to the Golf Club. And that’s where you met Donald Quarry, a doctor with an excellent practice, and it was no problem at all for you to knock him dizzy.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course, he was only a stepping-stone. Even a very successful doctor could hardly make enough money to be more than that, to a really ambitious woman. But he was an entree to local society, and a splendid meal ticket until something better came along. And in due course you met Ted Lavis — one of the richest and most successful business men in these parts. So Quarry had to be disposed of. That wasn’t hard. You only had to wait until one of his patients died, which happens regularly even to the best doctors, and then start whispering to your friends about how morbidly depressed he was in spite of the brave front he tried to keep up. Once that idea had been well planted, it was easy for you to steal some morphine from his supplies and switch it for any other shots that he might be taking. And you already knew you could blitz Lavis as soon as it wouldn’t look too blatant — in fact, you’d probably had him on his knees already.”

“After all, there’s not so much competition in these outlandish places.”

“I think you could get almost any man you wanted, anywhere. And you’ve always known it. But you wanted position and money with him. You were heading for the top. Lavis was a prize. You might have been satisfied with him for a long time. But as Farrast said to me, maybe he really was more lucky than brilliant. Anyhow, he suddenly lost everything, in an amazingly stupid way. You were not only disgusted with him for letting you down, but you were convinced that he was a goose who’d never lay another golden egg. Slow poisoning disguised as intestinal troubles was a neat and plausible way to get rid of him. And meanwhile Charles Farrast had shown up on the scene, with a legacy of eighty thousand pounds waiting for him only a few months away.”

“While you’re building up this fantastic story,” she said, and now she was patiently coping with a rather tiresome lunatic, “you ought to explain why I have to murder my husbands instead of simply divorcing them.”

Simon drew at his cigarette again meditatively.

“I will if you like,” he said. “You have a fetish about tidiness and correctness, and a phobia about any kind of emotion — both carried to psychopathic extremes. You couldn’t bear to have your reputation soiled with the kind of nastiness you’d have to admit to give them cause to divorce you, and you’d have died rather than go through the scenes that would have been necessary to make them agree to let you divorce them. Murder, to you, was so much less messy.”

She took a cigarette from the tin near her.

“Give me a light, please,” she said.

He struck a match and leaned forward with it. She put her cigarette in the flame and brought it to a steady glow.

“Thank you,” she said, and took the cigarette from her mouth to exhale with an absolutely smooth and tremorless movement.

Her luminous gray eyes dwelt on him with tremendous absorption, while he lighted another cigarette for himself.

“Now,” she said, “about Vernon Ascony.”

“He must have thought all along that there was something not quite kosher about Quarry’s suicide,” said the Saint. “Then, when Ted Lavis was taken sick — not long after losing most of his money — his hunch got stronger. But there was nothing that he could prove, no action that he could take. And he might even be totally wrong. Then I happened to show up in Singapore, and he had a brainstorm. If I spent a little time up here, and there was anything funny going on, I might be able to spot it — if I was looking.”

“And the Maugham story was to make sure you looked.”

“It wasn’t an exact parallel, of course — but that would scarcely have been possible. It was close enough. And maybe it was even better, because if necessary Ascony could always invent some other case and deny that he had you in mind at all… He probably had another angle too. He knew you’d recognize who I was, and he figured you might think I was part of a trap, and that might panic you into making a fatal mistake. Which it did.”

She frowned.

“You mean like finishing Ted off in a hurry before you got here and saw him? Naturally you wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t.”

“That was only the start of it, anyway. The important thing is that it gave you a scare when Ascony asked if he could send me, but you were more scared of making it look worse if you tried to get out of it. After a little verbal fencing, and reading the Maugham story this morning, you were sure you were in trouble. So was I, but it was still mostly intuition. And at first I couldn’t decide what was Farrast’s part in the deal. Not even when I heard him go to your bedroom last night.”

She half closed her eyes, with a little shudder of distaste.

“Really,” she said, “are there any lengths you won’t go to?”

“Oh, I don’t think you invited him. Not last night, I mean. You’d never be as crude as that. But he could be. And I’m guessing that started you thinking that he was expendable. But after I saw him in action this morning I’d never buy him as a poisoner, and I said so, and you realized it was no use playing with that idea. So you went ahead with Plan B.”

“I’m quite certain two people never had a conversation like this before,” she said. “But since we’re doing it, you’d better finish. What was this fatal mistake I made?”

Simon picked up the gun he had taken from her a little earlier — it was in its holster slung over the other arm of the chair on which he had thoughtfully perched himself — and toyed with it idly.

“The Ah Fong job was the first one you’ve ever had to do in a hurry,” he said. “And anyhow I got out there too quickly for you to have been able to set the stage with your usual care. That’s why I posted a guard at the pantry door and told him that nobody, not even me — or you — was to go in there or move anything. I’m betting that when the cops go to work they’ll find your fingerprints on the knife Ah Fong was supposed to have attacked you with—”

“Why shouldn’t my fingerprints be on a knife in my own house?”

For the first time her voice seemed to rise a little. “And on the poison bottle beside him—”

“I snatched it out of his hand!”

“I mean only your fingerprints.”

There was an absolute silence.

The Saint had shifted his eyes from her before he spoke, and he did not move them back.

A very long time, an eternity, seemed to pass. His cigarette burned down between his fingers, and he put it out.

At last Eve Lavis said, in a very cool, very even voice, “Would you mind if I had a drink?”

He still did not look at her. It was as if an iron hand closed on his heart. Perhaps after all he was an incurable romanticist. In spite of all the statistics, he preferred to think of crime as men’s business. A beautiful woman should be a damsel in distress, for a knight errant to rescue, or a heroine, to ride squarely side by side with him. No man should ever have to meet one like Eve, so lovely and so damned.

“No,” said the Saint. “Help yourself.”

She stood up, and crossed to the sideboard. He heard her over his shoulder, and the clink of glass and the soft splash of liquid. It made no difference now that the four murders that he knew of were almost certainly not the only ones she had done, that she had very likely started long before she reached Singapore. There was a fathomless pain and anger in him that would never be wholly stilled.

“This,” she said, “is to the only man who ever turned me down.”

He did not turn his head, he could not, even when he heard her fall.