The Saint to the Rescue (12 page)

Mr. Diehl’s petulant baby face, grubby and
scorched and
sweat-streaked, puckered slowly but exactly like the face
of
a spoiled child about to burst into tears. It was an expression
that the
Saint had seen before. He hoped he would see it
many times again.

65

T
HERE
is a
story, which may be apocryphal, about a certain
bookmaker (of the
horsey, not the literary, variety) who
was making a long trip
by car when towards nightfall he
happened upon a hostelry which displayed an
ordinary sign
bearing a most unusual name,
The Even Steven.

To a man in his business, this quaint
appellation was of
course doubly intriguing; and since it was in the middle
of
a particularly bleak and desolate stretch of country, and he
had no
idea how much farther he might have to drive to
find a meal and a bed,
he quickly decided to stop there for
the night and satisfy his curiosity at
the same time. The
proprietor soon explained the peculiar designation of the
place.

“It’s very simple, really. You see, my
name actually is
Steven Even. So I just decided to turn it around and call
this
The Even Steven.
I
thought it might get a few folks
puzzled
enough to stop and ask questions, and sometimes it does.
Like
yourself.”

“That’s a pretty smart way to use the
luck of a name,”
said the bookie appreciatively. “I bet it
brings you a lot of
business.”

Mr. Even, a dour and dejected type of
individual, seemed
glad to have someone to talk to.

“It hasn’t brought me so much
luck,” he said. “The folks
who stop don’t stay long. There’s not
much gaiety around
here, as you could see. In fact, there’s not another soul
lives
closer than thirty miles away, whichever way you go. Makes
it pretty
lonely for me, a widower. And worse still for my daughters. Three of the
loveliest girls you ever set eyes on,
should have their pick of boy friends.
But the nearest lads
would have to drive thirty miles to pick ‘em
up, thirty more
to take ‘em to a movie, thirty miles to bring ‘em home,
and
thirty back themselves. That’s more ‘n they got time to do
even for
beauties like these. The girls are getting so frus
trated they’re about
ready to do anything for a man.”

The bookie made sympathetic noises, and
listened to more
in the same vein until hunger obliged him to change the
subject to that of food. An excellent home-cooked dinner
was served
to him by a gorgeous blonde who introduced
herself as Blanche
Even; and when he was surfeited she
still kept pressing him to ask for
anything else he wanted.

“A toothpick, perhaps?” he
suggested.

She brought it, and said: “Would you like
me to sit and
talk to you for a while?”

“Thank you,” he said politely,
“but I’ve had a long day and
I feel like closing the book.”

He went to his room, and had just started to
undress when
there was a knock at the door and an absolutely
breath-taking
brunette came in.

“I’m Carmen Even,” she said.
“I just wanted to see if
you’d got everything you want.”

“I think so, thank you,” he said
pleasantly. “I do a lot of
traveling, so I pack very
systematically.”

When he had finally convinced her and got rid
of her,
he climbed in between the sheets and was preparing to read
himself to
sleep over the
Racing Form
when the door opened
again to admit an
utterly stupefying redhead in a negligee
to end all negligees.

“I’m Ginger Even,” she announced.
“I wanted to be sure
your bed was comfortable.”

“It is,” he assured her.

“I hope you’re not just being
tactful,” she insisted. “May
I try it myself?”

“If you must,” said the bookie
primly. “I will get out while you do it.”

When she had gone, he settled down with a sigh
of relief
and was about to put out the light at last when the door
burst open
once more and the proprietor himself stomped in,
glowing with
indignation.

“What’s the matter with you?” he
roared. “I got to listen
all night to my daughters moaning an’ wailing,
the most lusciousest gals in this county, because they all try to show
you
hospitality an’ you won’t give one of ‘em a tumble.
Ain’t us Evens good
enough for you?”

“I’m sorry,” said the transient.
“But I told you when I
registered, I’m a professional bookmaker. I
only lay Odds.”

Mr. Theocritus Way, this chronicler, must now
hasten to
establish, was not the bookie immortalized in the
foregoing
anecdote. He was, however, a man who had concentrated on
the subject
of Odds with an almost comparably classic single-mindedness.

Indeed, one of his oldest but perennially
profitable dis
coveries in the field was directly tied to the same
numerical
quibble between Odds and Evens. At any bar where he
might be
chumming for potential suckers, when the inevitable
dispute eventually
arose as to who should buy another drink, he would promptly suggest that they
match for it. The mark
could hardly refuse this, and would take from
his pocket the
conventional single coin. Mr. Way would then say, with
a
skillfully intangible sneer: “The hell with that penny-
matching
stuff. That’s how some guys got rich making dou
ble-headed coins.
Let’s play Monte Carlo Match.”

He always had some high-sounding name,
suggestive of
authenticity and tradition, for the games that he
invented.

“What’s that?” the innocent would
ask.

Mr. Way would haul out a handful of small
change, which
he jingled noisily in his closed fist to leave no doubt
that it
was a fair quantity.

“I got a mess of chickenfeed here,”
he would explain, with
labored patience for such ignorance. “You
grab a stack from
your own pocket. We slap it all on the bar—two stacks.
Sup
pose your stack turns out to be an odd number, and the total
of our two
stacks is also an odd number, you win. Suppose
you got an odd number,
and the total of us two is even,
you lose. Or vice versa. That’s one bet you
can’t fix, because
neither of us knows how many coins the other’s going to
have.”

The mark might win or lose the first time, on
this fair fifty-fifty basis. Mr. Way rather liked him to win, because
that made
it somewhat easier to insist on another match
for money instead of
drinks. And one game easily led to an
other, and another, for increasing
stakes. If the dupe insisted
on them taking turns as matcher, Mr. Way
would take his
honest fifty-fifty chance. But after the first time, the
victim
never had a chance to match the total of their combined hands in oddness
or evenness.

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, any 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 con
temporaries 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 flypaper into the
middle-aged maturity
where his path crossed the Saint’s,
which is the only encounter this short
story is seriously con
cerned with.

However, in contradiction of some recent
propaganda which
purports to attribute all adult crime to the cancerous
frus
tration 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 engi
neering, 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 antag
onized 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 thirtyfive 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% 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.