“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.