The Saint Around the World (25 page)

“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 in to 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 hardboiled 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 breeze-way 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 pengglulu 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 any more, they mack him when he tries to assert his authority … They don’t want to work for us any more. 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 praeter-naturally 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.

iv

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-blond 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.”