The Saint to the Rescue (15 page)

“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
says,
‘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 be
lieve 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-fifty
if it falls
this way or two hundred other ways—”

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

“Are you ribbing me, trying to sound
like those other be
nighted 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
cigarette 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 challeng
ing eye, and drifted on to find himself a vacant table,
where
he asked a mildly befogged waiter for a Pimm’s Cup, a pen
cil, and a
piece of paper. When all these items were finally
delivered, he sipped
the cold ambrosial drink and went so
berly 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 recog
nize 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 preg
nant.

“And I was playing him for even
money,” Mason said som
berly. “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 dol
lars. 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 differ
ence 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 re
member 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 pre
posterous 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 wicked
ness 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
blustery approach from the lobby; and
by the time the percentage player
strutted in, he was in
tensely 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
pat
terns, sometimes turning one over and rearranging them, oc
casionally
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 cus
tomer 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% 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 baldly accept the hook.