The Saint to the Rescue (13 page)

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 other
wise hocusing cards
and dice, to say nothing of the sleights
of hand (for which he
himself had no natural aptitude what
ever) 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 mod
ern 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 ad
vantage 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 jampacked
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 debut
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
ponder
ing 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 after
noons which the Chamber of Commerce sweeps
furiously
under the rug, but which stubbornly re-manufacture them
selves 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 $50 daily rent
on a mini
mum room. Mr. Way hit the bar (or the Spaceship Room, as
the brochures called it) at a shrewdly calculated 4.25
p.m., 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
always 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 reason
ing 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 con
versational
subject that was already more intrinsically stimu
lating 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 de
fensively. “You’re a good bridge
player—how would
you
fig
ure 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 mathe
matical
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 sus
ceptible. 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 bril
liantly original facet of his art was in his development
of a
natural gift for making himself detestable. In a few scintil
lating
minutes, he could inspire the mildest citizen with
seductive thoughts of
mayhem. But since he was too ludi
crously puny for the average man to
punch in the nose,
most of them sublimated this healthy impulse into a
willing
ness, indeed an eagerness, to take it out of his noisily prof
fered
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 chron
icler 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 phenome
non which in Miami
Beach in the season was not merely epochal but had also made the Saint’s casual
campaign al
most effortless.