The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Read online

  “Just don’t pay any padded tuition fees,” said the Saint frivolously.

  It was not until after he had ordered their stone crabs at Joe’s, with a bottle of Willm Gewurtztraminer, and they were toying with cigarettes and Dry Sack while they waited, that he realized that he might have been a little too flippant.

  “I only hope Papa doesn’t get into anything silly,” Hilda said.

  “Is he likely to?” asked the Saint. “He seems a long way from being senile, to me.”

  “He does like a little gamble, though. And he can’t forget that he was an insurance company statistician for thirty years. Of course that’s only a glorified kind of bookkeeping, but he sometimes thinks it makes him an authority on anything to do with figures. He might have a hard time staying out of that argument in the bar.”

  “That shouldn’t get him in any serious trouble…Well, I admit I hadn’t thought of it that way. It sounded like a typical barroom argument, with nobody really knowing the score. They were all talking through their hats, I may tell you. Let’s find out what the odds really are.”

  He turned a menu over, took out a ball-point pen, and began jotting.

  “Do you really know how to work it out?” she asked.

  “I don’t let on to everyone, but I had one of those dreary old out-dated educations. Lots of gruesomely hard study, and no credits at all for football, fretwork, or folk dancing. But I think I can figure it the text-book way.”

  “You’ll have to tell me. I even flunked Domestic Science.”

  “They must have tested you in the wrong domicile. But this is how you have to look at it. The first guy can be born in any month, as somebody said. When were you born?”

  “April.”

  “Okay. Then the second guy has eleven months to choose from, that’ll lose for Loud Mouth back there.”

  “That sounds right.”

  “So the second guy was born in May. Now up comes the third guy. He has two months to dodge, out of twelve. On any of the other ten, he still wins from Loud Mouth.”

  “Even I can follow that. So it leaves the fourth man nine months, and the fifth man eight months, and the sixth man seven months. But—”

  “Now according to the Law of Probabilities in my school book, and don’t ask me who made it or why it works that way, to find the odds against all those things happening in succession, you don’t add them up, you have to multiply them. Like this.”

  He had written: “11/12 x 10/12 x 9/12 x 8/12 x 7/12.”

  “Don’t forget that eight-fifteen curtain,” Hilda said.

  “It’s not so hard as all that.”

  He made a few quick cross-cancellations to simplify the problem, did a little rapid arithmetic, and ended up with the fraction: 385/1728.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “But how does it give you the odds?”

  “It means that theoretically, out of any 1728 batches of six people, there should only be 385 batches in which two of ’em weren’t born in the same month—meaning where Loud Mouth would lose his bet. 385 from 1728 leaves 1343. So the odds are 1343 to 385, which…”

  The Saint made another swift calculation, and whistled.

  “It comes out at almost three and a half to one,” he concluded. “And everybody thought Loud Mouth was nuts to be offering two to one—only a bit more than half the honest odds! A fellow could make a career out of being so crazy!”

  Her face fell for a moment, in transparent anxiety, before she forced herself to suppress the thought.

  “Well, after all, it’s not so different from the kind of statistics that insurance companies worry about, is it?

  Papa probably knows the correct way to work it out, just like you did.”

  “I hope so,” said the Saint, but for the rest of the evening only the superficial part of his attention was completely available to the conversation, the entertainment, or even the notable charms of his companion.

  Now that he had belatedly been obliged to think seriously about it, his fateful instinct for chicanery and the fast double-shuffle could recognize the loud and unlovable gamecock of the Interplanetary Hotel’s Spaceship Room as a probable charter member of an ancient fraternity, with a new angle. But the most interesting novelty was not the switch from the stereotyped con man’s beguiling suaveness to Mr Way’s crude art of alienation, but the upper-class mathematics on which the nasty little man had based his act. This was an artifice that Simon Templar had never met before, and he seriously wondered if it might not prove too tricky even for him.

  He had even graver doubts when he saw the obnoxious operator again the next day. Wandering up to the Futuramic Terrace in search of a long cooling potion after a couple of hours of swimming and sunning himself on the beach, he spotted the little man sitting at one of the tables by the pool, unselfconsciously exposing as much of his bulbously misproportioned physique as could not be contained in a pair of garishly flowered Hawaiian shorts, and holding forth to a pimpled and sulky-mouthed young man and two tough-looking middle-aged women with the unmistakable air of dames who had never yet lost an elbowing contest at a bargain counter.

  The table, like all others on the terrace, sported a cloth patterned in red, white, and blue stripes about three inches wide, and Mr Way was flipping cigarettes a foot or two into the air so that they fell on it at various random angles.

  “In Pakistan, where it’s practically the national game, they call it Tiger Toss—from the board they play on, which has black and yellow stripes. And they use carved ivory sticks instead of cigarettes. But the measurements are relatively just the same: the sticks are exactly as long as the stripes are wide. Like on this cloth, the stripes happen to be just as wide as one of these cigarettes is long. See?”

  He demonstrated.

  “Then you toss a stick, or a cigarette, onto the board, or the cloth, and see how it lands. It has to spin in the air and turn over so there’s no chance of controlling it. If it comes down completely inside a stripe, you win. If it falls across a dividing line, you lose. Like this…But wait till you hear the catch.”

  The Saint waited, at a diffident distance towards the background, but no farther off than other patrons or passers-by whose attention had been caught and held by Mr Way’s provocatively high-decibel style of conversation.

  “The pitch they give the peasants is that this is the rajah’s way of distributing charity so as to do the most good. You know—if you give a rupee to every starving slob, they’ll all be just as hungry again tomorrow, but playing Tiger Toss, the lucky ones could make a pot of money. And the guy who’s running the game—who’s got a concession from the rajah, of course—shows ’em how easy it is. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘even if a stick falls at right angles to the pattern, there’s still room for it inside a stripe. And the more it falls at an angle, the more room there is.’ ” Mr Way illustrated the fact with a cigarette. “ ‘Until if it was parallel with the stripes, there’d be room for eight or nine of ’em to lie in there side by side without touching the dividing line,’ says this official gypper. But they never got me to play. No, sir.” Mr Way’s insufferably malevolent stare swung around him like a scythe. “Before I’d buy a tale about a philanthropic rajah, I’ll believe in a big-hearted Shylock.”

  Without giving anybody time to draw a deep breath, he picked up another cigarette and went on, “Right away, I can see how anybody with a grain of sense would look at it. Either the stick gotta fall at right angles to the stripes—like this—or it doesn’t. It’s as simple as that. One or the other. A fifty-fifty chance. And once it falls like this, square across the stripe, if it’s only a hair off of dead center, see, it has to touch the line or cross over the next stripe. Now, there’s so little chance it’ll fall dead center, one in a million maybe—you can forget it. So it still boils down to whether it falls square or not.”

  “Now wait a minute, smarty-pants,” riposted one of the women, in an almost equally strident voice. “If that’s what you call using a grain of sense, saying it’s fifty-f
ifty if it falls this way or two hundred other ways—”

  “At least, there are ninety degrees in a right angle,” corrected the pouty young man. “So if you said eighty-nine other—”

  “Are you ribbing me, trying to sound like those other benighted heathens?” snarled Mr Way, “Or if that’s what you call your intelligent opinion, would you back it up with any more than hot air?” Even from his attenuated costume he was able to produce a wad of currency which he slammed on the table with a vehemence that almost equaled a slap in the face. “You want to bet even money with me? I’ll say the cigarettes touches the line, you can do the tossing, and we’ll see who comes out ahead. And I’ll fade anyone else who wants to come in.”

  Simon adroitly evaded the contentious bantam’s challenging eye, and drifted on to find himself a vacant table, where he asked a mildly befogged waiter for a Pimm’s Cup, a pencil, and a piece of paper. “When all these items were finally delivered, he sipped the cold ambrosial drink and went soberly to work with the other articles. By that time, a “Tiger Toss” school was in full and audible session on the other side of the terrace, with Mr Way the self-appointed banker daring all and sundry to prove themselves as ignorant as the credulous Pakistanis.

  The techniques of bogus backgrounding, Machiavellian misdirection, and a gadfly approach that could be relied on to make almost anyone but a lower-case saint too furious to think straight, were the same as the night before. But the specific probability problem, shorn of the artistic camouflage, Simon soon found, would be unscientifically called a snorter.

  Since it is not the purpose of this story to double as a first primer of higher mathematics, which it may already have started to sound like, the reasoning by which the Saint solved this rather interesting equation must be omitted from the present text. To anyone who has not set at least one foot in the mystic realm of trigonometry it would be meaningless. Those who have studied such subjects, of course, may recognize it at once under the name of Buffon’s Problem. The Saint took much longer to wring the correct answer out of his rusty recollections, and when he had done it he had even more respect for the perverse astuteness of Mr Way.

  It was quite comforting to persuade himself that such comparatively small-time improbity was not worthy of his serious attention, and that the types who paid Mr Way for improving their education would not be mortally hurt by the fees, but this consolation was short-lived. Chronologically, it lasted about two minutes, until his reverie was cut short by Hilda Mason’s voice beside him.

  “Well, here’s the man who knows his arithmetic.”

  Simon turned and jumped up, grinning.

  “I was starting to worry about you, not seeing you on the beach, all morning, I was afraid I’d shown you one night club too many.”

  “I did sleep a bit late…And then, Papa and I had a lot to talk about when I got up.”

  George Mason was with her, in a gaily checkered terry-cloth robe that failed to obscure a certain haggardness in his amiably inflated presence.

  “Like a dutiful daughter, she is understating the fact that I made a fool of myself last night,” he said, lowering himself into the next seat. “After you left me, I was inveigled into expressing my views on that birthday bet. Unfortunately, my reasoning seems to have been erroneous. Hilda has been telling me how you worked it out, which I now remember is the proper method—but I’m afraid this is a little late. Somehow I managed to lose almost two hundred dollars to Mr Way on various names chosen at random from Who’s Who and other directories. And then, somehow, we began playing this game of Tiger Toss, which I see he is still at.”

  The girl glanced across the terrace, and down again to the scratch-pad on which Simon had been trying his creaky computations.

  “Were you just working that one out?” she asked.

  “Yes. And I have a headache which only another Pimm’s will cure.”

  “Tell us the answer.”

  “I can do that, but don’t ask me to explain it. It’s a bit more complicated than the birthday deal. If you don’t want to be bludgeoned with a lot of double-talk about sine curves and spandrels, you’ll have to take my word for it that the theoretical odds are almost exactly seven to four against the stick, or the cigarette, falling cleanly inside a stripe.”

  There was the kind, of silence which is tritely called pregnant.

  “And I was playing him for even money,” Mason said somberly. “It honestly looked like an even bet to me, because…Well, my stupid reasons aren’t very important, are they? However, they cost me another hundred and fifty dollars. And by that time, I had imbibed a trifle more than I’m used to—enough, I fear, to make me somewhat reckless. When he offered to let me match him for double or quits, in some simple variation he calls Monte Carlo Match, I was optimistic enough to accept. As a result, I may not be much wiser, but I am some seven hundred dollars poorer.”

  “And so,” Hilda said, “this is our last day here.”

  She was much too young to show the same gray deflation as her father, but young enough for an excessive brightness of eye to be betrayed by a slight unsteadiness of lip.

  “Does it make all that difference?” Simon asked.

  “It does to us. You see, we’re not quite like the usual people who come to these places. With a job like his, and a family to bring up, Papa could never afford it. But he always promised me that when all the others were safely on their own—I’m the youngest—and the time came for him to retire, we’d have one tremendous splurge and see what it felt like to be millionaires for a couple of weeks. And I held him to it, although I’ve got a secretarial job now and I’ll pay him back for my share eventually. I thought he should have it for once in his life, before he settles down to scraping along on his pension. But we don’t really belong here, and since this has happened we’ve got to be sensible.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” said the older man defiantly. “Things like this have happened to millionaires, too. And I am still not so broke that I can’t insist on you being my guest for lunch.”

  The Saint nodded slowly.

  “No millionaire could do more, George.”

  “There’s nothing else we can do, is there?” Hilda asked wistfully.

  “Not legally,” Simon said. “You haven’t been swindled—technically. Nobody sold you the MacArthur Causeway, or a submerged piece of real estate. You could accuse someone of cheating at cards, but how would you accuse them of cheating at figures, the way Loud Mouth does it? A difference of opinion is what makes bets, and how would you convince a cop who has to do his own arithmetic on his fingers that Loud Mouth is taking an unfair advantage? And even if you could charge him with illegal gambling, you wouldn’t get any bounty on his hide. All you can do is remember that you were taken by one of the most original artists I’ve come across for a long time, if that makes you feel any better. And don’t look at me with those big fawn’s eyes, Hilda, because I’m on vacation, too.”

  But although she instantly stopped looking at him like that, he knew that his protestation was as hollow as it had always been, since the very first time he had tried to stick to it.

  He also wished he could stop being stuck with such preposterous projects. For the one thing that he had been most solidly convinced of by his strenuous figuring was that in any straight mathematical tussle with the talented Mr Way he would have about the same prospects as a rheumatic water buffalo in a greyhound race.

  He thought that if there were laws against wicked old men taking advantage of trusting young girls, there should also be laws against young girls and old men trusting merely middle-aged bandits to rescue them from grades of wickedness that a college professor might have been puzzled to cope with.

  In spite of which, and with no obtrusive sign of having racked his brain and paced his room for two hours in search of an answer, he was in the Spaceship Room again before four-thirty, ensconced at a strategic corner table that was still within easy speaking distance of the bar. From there he espied Mr Way’s blust
ery approach from the lobby, and by the time the percentage player strutted in, he was intensely absorbed in an eye-catching experiment.

  On the table-top, he had laid out three ordinary poker chips. These he was shuffling around into various small patterns, sometimes turning one over and rearranging them, occasionally closing his eyes and fumbling for one at random, and turning it over and staring at it and finally shuffling the pattern again. All of this was done with a scowl of agonized concentration, and an air of frustrated bafflement, which were an almost deafening invitation to any other solitary customer in need of a conversational gambit.

  Tick Way, with a hypertrophied affinity for brain-teasers to augment his common human curiosity, resisted the bait perhaps 39.65 per cent less seconds than an average target might have held out. Thus he was comfortably ahead of anyone else to turn from his bar stool, after he had been served, and boldly accept the hook.

  “What in hell,” he demanded, with his distinctive kind of bumptious bonhomie, “are you playing at, buddy?”

  “I’m glad you asked me that…chum,” said the Saint, without even regurgitating. “You might be able to help me work this out. I’ve heard you talking about this sort of thing a couple of times, and it sounded to me as if you knew more about figures than most people.”

  “I probably do,” admitted Mr Way, with the most affability he was capable of. “What’s bothering you?”

  “It’s this silly game,” said the Saint. “A chap showed it to me in the club car, on the train coming down here. He told me it was something the rich mandarins used to play in China, for concubines—Dong Hai, or something like that, he called it. You’re supposed to have three plaques like this, all exactly the same. One of them has some Chinese character painted on both sides. The second has the identical character on one side only. And the third is blank on both sides. Instead of Chinese characters, we just made an ‘X’ with a pencil, the way I’ve marked these.”