The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Page 8

  Whenever the other was trying to “match,” Mr Way simply took care to have some odd number of coins in his own stack. Therefore if the mug also had an odd number, the total had to be even, if the mug had an even number, the joint total had to be odd. Stated this way, an intelligent reader will see that the stupe would have had the same fifty-fifty chance of finding somebody with a right foot growing naturally on his left leg. But it was a gimmick which had paid Mr Way more cash dividends than Albert Einstein ever earned from the Theory of Relativity.

  The fond parent who had him baptized Theocritus was only another of the human race’s uncounted casualties to misguided optimism. Even in his tenderest years, his contemporaries declined to accord him even the semi-dignified contraction of “Theo.” They abbreviated him swiftly and spontaneously to “Tick.” The record does not show whether this was initially due to his instinct for stretching credit to the snapping point whenever he was supposed to do the paying, to his physically insignificant stature, or to his extraordinarily irritating personality, or to a combination of all three. But the monicker clung to him like fly-paper into the middle-aged maturity where his path crossed the Saint’s, which is the only encounter this short story is seriously concerned with.

  However, in contradiction of some recent propaganda which purports to attribute all adult crime to the cancerous frustration of the growing boy, it must be instantly said that “Tick” Way consistently collected above-average grades, and revealed an especial talent for mathematics. But instead of being thus inspired to think of a career in science or engineering, his temperament had been impressed only by the magnificent possibilities of pigeon-plucking that were opened up by the magical craft of figures.

  In his middle forties he was still a runt, barely topping five feet in his built-up shoes, but broad and thick-set and now somewhat paunchy, a strutting little rooster of a man with all the aggressiveness with which the small ones are prone to over-compensate for their unimpressive size, and a toughly amorphous face which looked as if he had antagonized more than one person whose resentment was too convulsive to be conveyed without physical amplification. But if he was doomed by his chromosomes to be forever unformidable in a fight, he had a grasp of the immutable laws of probability that might have frightened an insecurely wired electronic brain.

  For “Tick” Way, the comparatively obvious percentages of dice were teen-age stuff. He had nothing but contempt for the half-sharp crapshooters who knew that the true odds were three to one against a natural on the first roll, two to one against making a point of ten, and thirty-five to one against making it the hard way—only because they had read the figures in a book. He could work out all those simple chances in his own head and even knew how to project them into the more elaborate calculation which ends up showing that the shooter has only a 49.3 per cent chance of passing when he takes the dice.

  The higher complexities of poker were not much harder for him. He did not have to memorize the odds of twenty-three to one against drawing two cards to make a flush, or ninety-seven to one against drawing three that would turn a pair into a full house. He could even prove on paper the paradoxical theorem that when holding two pairs against an opponent who you are sure has threes, you have a better chance of taking the pot if you discard your smaller pair and buy three new cards than if you timidly trade your maverick for just one that you hope will fill the hand.

  Mr Way had long since relegated such overworked games to the category of minor pastimes or last resorts. For one thing, he had also learned a few things about the mechanical methods of loading, shaving, switching, marking, and otherwise hocusing cards and dice, to say nothing of the sleights of hand (for which he himself had no natural aptitude whatever) in their manipulation, which could nullify the most comprehensive theoretical calculations. For another, he had found that a discouraging percentage of even the most verdant greenhorns had been forewarned through the modern media of Sunday newspaper supplements, paperback fiction, B pictures and television, of the hazards of playing games with strangers. And thirdly, the relatively fractional edge that a brain with a built-in slide rule might give him in conventional gambling was too small and laborious in the payola to satisfy his driving ambitions. He would prefer to cash in any day on some proposition in which his advantage could be measured not in fractions, but in fat round numbers.

  Simon Templar first saw him in action at the bar of the Interplanetary Hotel in Miami Beach. Every season during this era of seemingly endless expansion saw the opening of some gleaming new caravanserai which aspired to be the “hotel of the year”—bigger, grander, gaudier, more modern, more luxurious, and more expensive than all the jam-packed hundreds of other palaces to which it added its opulence—which for a few dizzy months would skim the cream of the traffic before it yielded to the hotel of next year which was even then in the girder stage on the adjoining lot. The period of this story is fatally pinpointed by the mere mention of the Interplanetary Hotel, which obviously staked its début on the fact that solemn citizens who once automatically dismissed science fiction as a form of juvenile escapism were currently pontificating about rockets to the moon and pondering the legal tricks that might have to be invoked to grab off the largest hunk of the lunar market. The entrepreneurs of this palatial pub had already nailed their seats on the bandwagon by having the lobby laid out on the lines of some futuristic concept, of a space port, decorating the main dining room with symbols aimed at striking a happy compromise between astronomy and astrology, branding their plushier accommodations with such labels as “The Martian Suite” or “The Venusian Suite,” and barely stopping short of putting Plexiglas bubble helmets on the bellboys. And for that season, at least, they were assured of entertaining the loudest, lushest, most ostentatious fugitives from the northern, snows who were likely to get washed up on that excessively upholstered strand. The ideal subjects, in fact, for Mr Way’s studiously honed technique.

  This was one of those rare but reliable drizzling gray afternoons which the Chamber of Commerce sweeps furiously under the rug, but which stubbornly re-manufacture themselves a few times every winter—the kind of day which makes even the stiffest isolationists tend to unbend in the common misery of being done out of most of the highly advertised amenities while paying the same fifty dollar daily rent on a minimum room. Mr Way hit the bar, or the Spaceship Room, as the brochures called it, at a shrewdly calculated 4:25 pm, when the patrons were mostly solitary and vaguely disgruntled males, and few enough to be individually aware of each other and surreptitiously absorbing every audible word even if they spoke none themselves. The first bartender recognized him as an obstreperous but lavish tipper, and greeted him with the perfect blend of obsequiousness and familiarity. “Hi, Tick. What’s new today?”

  “I dunno, Charlie. Gimme the usual—double.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A quick and expert pouring and mixing.

  “Y’know, Charlie, there are some guys in this world so stupid, I sometimes wonder how they ever learned to keep on breathing.”

  “I hear plenty of ’em gasping, but who did you have in mind?”

  “Just a little while ago, I get in the damnedest argument with some thick-skulled bartender.”

  “You should stay out of those low-class bars, Tick.”

  “Yeah? Well, it all starts from talking about this place.” Mr. Way’s voice was deliberately pitched to carry to all corners of the room, and it had the timbre of one who was not only unabashed by an audience but welcomed one. “Somehow this gets us on to astrology, see, which it seems this dope kind of goes for. So I’m only trying to show him how dumb he is. ‘Look at it this way,’ I tell him. ‘There’s only twelve signs to be born under like there are twelve months in the year. But if you read those horoscopes, any day, they’re the same for everybody born under the same sign. Now take any six guys sitting down to a poker game. You can bet two to one there’ll be at least a couple of ’em born in the same month,’ I says, ‘but would you bet there’ll alwa
ys be a couple who’ll have exactly the same luck and win or lose the same amount?’ And you know what this jerk wants to argue about? Not about the intelligent reasoning I’m giving him. No. He wants to pick on my figures, and have it that it’s only a fifty-fifty chance there’ll be two guys born in the same month.”

  The bartender stayed where he was, polishing glasses. At that hour he had time to chat, before the feverish cocktail rush started, and Mr Way’s obliquely insulting gambit had inevitably given him a controversial attitude towards a conversational subject that was already more intrinsically stimulating than most of the topics that get bandied across a bar.

  “That doesn’t sound so unreasonable, Tick. Let’s see, if—”

  “You want to take his side, Charlie, I’ll save you the brain fever. ‘People are getting born every day, all over the world,’ says this moron. ‘So there must be about the same number born every month. Now suppose you divide the year in half, six months to a half. You take six guys. Either they get born in one half or the other. So it’s fifty-fifty.’…Now I ask you, Charlie, what sort of logic is that?”

  “It makes a certain amount of sense,” said the bartender stubbornly. “After all—”

  Mr Way turned to the nearest listener, who had obviously been following the entire conversation, and offered him a smirking invitation to join the fun.

  “Go on,” he said. “Tell him that’s why he’ll be a bartender all his life.”

  “Okay, you tell me, Mr. Jacobs,” said the bartender defensively. “You’re a good bridge player—how would you figure the odds in a deal like that?”

  “I don’t think your colleague was so stupid,” said the newly appointed umpire deliberately. “He’s just a fraction off. As I heard it, the condition was that two of these six men had to be born in the same month. Well, let’s go with him up to a point, that five of them were born in five different months. You want to find the chances of the sixth man being born in one of those same five months. Well, anyone can see he’s got five to choose from that’ll do it, the other seven months of the year, he misses. So the exact odds are seven to five against him.”

  Mr Way regarded him with a baleful sneer.

  “There must be something about bars that gets into people,” he announced disgustedly. “Now I’ll tell you the right and scientific answer. Any man’s got the same chance of being born in one month as any other, hasn’t he? So let’s take any month—January. Give the first man a shot at it. Either he’s born in January or he isn’t. It can only be yes or no. Heads or tails. There’s the fifty-fifty chance. Let’s say he makes it. So give the second man a shot. Either he hits January or he misses. Heads or tails again. And the same for the third guy, and so on. So for these five guys in a row to all miss being born in January is like you tossing a coin and having it come down heads five times running. Sure, it can be done, but I’ll bet two to one against it any time you want to play.”

  There was barely an instant’s silence, sustained only by incredulous second-thinking, for nobody there was a mathematical prodigy, and then the first derisive retort became a fugue which became a chorus.

  “You call that scientific?”

  “Perhaps I’m stupid, but—”

  “If that’s what you mean by logic—”

  “All right,” retorted Mr Way, even more loudly and offensively. “Anyone who calls anyone else crazy should have the guts to back up his opinion. I’ll back mine with good green money.” He hauled out a roll of bills and slammed one on the counter. “I’ll still lay ten bucks to five that out of any six men here, two were born in the same month.”

  The erstwhile referee sucked his cigar for a moment, and said slowly, “Well, if that’s your attitude, and you want to pay ten to five on something that any fool can see should get you seven to five against, I guess I can bear to take it.”

  He was backed up by a respectable clamor of others who wanted a piece of this self-evident bonanza.

  It was almost a classic example of the technique which had sustained Tick Way throughout his dubiously solvent life. First, the proposition to arouse the interest of a vast curious and inherently disputatious section of mankind, presented at a cold-bloodedly chosen hour when they would be most susceptible. Second, the channeling of their first thoughts into a fallacious pattern that they would soon adopt as their own, forgetting that he was the one who implanted it. Third, the presentation of a contrary theory so apparently absurd that the most mediocre intellect would reject it. And throughout and overall, a display of objectionable cockiness that was guaranteed to strangle the noblest impulse to show him his error kindly and disinterestedly.

  For Mr Way was not one of those ingratiating swindlers who work on the softer side of their prey. The most brilliantly original facet of his art was in his development of a natural gift for making himself detestable. In a few scintillating minutes, he could inspire the mildest citizen with seductive thoughts of mayhem. But since he was too ludicrously puny for the average man to punch in the nose, most of them sublimated this healthy impulse into a willingness, indeed an eagerness, to take it out of his noisily proffered bankroll.

  The fact that Simon Templar was not among the first of those who volunteered to fade him may have been due not so much to the Saint’s mastery of theoretical figures as to his appreciation of live ones, and particularly the specimen who chose that moment to make her entrance.

  It should be superfluous, after that sentence, for this chronicler to expatiate at much length upon the proportions and attractions of Hilda Mason, which in cold truth were not intrinsically different from those of any other girl who gets herself into these stories. They were, however, striking enough for him to have judged her at once to be the most interesting girl on the Interplanetary Hotel beach on the first day he cased it, with an outstanding chance of defending that title against all comers from plenty of other beaches and for quite a few orbits. Let it be on the record that she had light brown hair and light brown eyes and was almost criminally young and glowing, and that the puffy balding-gray man with her who looked easily old enough to be her father proved on investigation to be her father—a phenomenon which in Miami Beach in the season was not merely epochal but had also made the Saint’s casual campaign almost effortless.

  “I’m not late, am I?” she said.

  “Not one second,” he smiled. “And I’d allowed for half an hour. Which gives us time for just one family-style drink together.”

  “I accept with pleasure,” said her father, sinking into another chair. “But I assure you, that’s as long as you’ll be stuck with me. I only came this far to keep Hilda company in case you happened to be late. I brought her up according to the old-fashioned doctrine that punctuality is the most inexpensive of grand gestures, but one can’t count on everyone else having the same philosophy.”

  Simon ordered the drinks from a waiter who was already waiting, fortunately, for more customers were beginning to seep in. But the room was still populated sparsely enough for Mr Way’s discordantly jeering voice to snag the attention of the newcomers as it rose in raucous triumph a few minutes later.

  “October! Here’s another guy born in October! And he’s only Number Five. Now who says I didn’t prove my point?”

  “What is this all about?” George Mason asked.

  Simon gave him a factual synopsis, untrimmed with any personal comment, and Mason shook his head.

  “The man must be out of his mind. Or else he’s got money to burn and he’d rather burn it than admit he’s wrong.”

  The group that was gravitating towards the noise focus of the bar evidently shared this opinion, and furthermore had no scruples about taking advantage of either contingency. Nor were they discouraged by the accident that had cost them a few dollars on the first sampling of nativities.

  “Any fool can be lucky,” growled the good bridge player who had been finessed into becoming spokesman for the opposition. “But that doesn’t prove he’s right. If you want to convince me the odds a
re what you say, you’d have to win two out of three times. With six total strangers.”

  “You think you aren’t strangers?” squawked Mr Way. “You think one of you is my stooge? I’d really hate to have such a dishonest mind as to even think that. Or to be such a bad loser as to say it. But don’t make any cracks about backing down until we see who’s doing it. You want to try this again twice more, or two hundred times, I’ll give you the same odds.”

  “There aren’t that many people here—”

  “Then we go out and ask any six guys in the street. And you pick ’em. Or easier still, we send out to the office for something like Who’s Who—they must have a copy in a joint like this. You name any six names, so long as they aren’t your ancestors. Or shut your eyes and pick ’em with a pin. Just show me the color of your money first!”

  The debate progressed without any diminution of temperature towards the next inevitable showdown.

  “If I’d known bars were such fun,” Hilda said, “I’d have lied about my age long before this.”

  “You probably did, anyhow,” said her father tolerantly. “Only you were afraid to try it on the fancy places, which are much less willing to be fooled than certain others, I’m told.”

  “I wonder who told you.”

  The Saint grinned.

  “I must hear more about this, George,” he murmured. “Some time when the child isn’t fanning us with its big shell-pink ears. Right now, I honestly hate to drink and run, but we’re stuck with the program I sold her. At this hour, it’ll be mostly a crawl down to the very end of the Beach for Joe’s immortal stone crabs. And from there, it’s another long haul over to Coral Gables and this show she wanted to see. Until the millennium when it dawns on theatrical producers that an eight-fifteen curtain is the ideal time to ensure a hostile and dyspeptic reception from anyone who also likes a nice peaceful dinner—”

  “Don’t worry about me, my boy,” said Mr Mason expansively. “I shall stay here for a little while and improve my education.”