The Saint to the Rescue (16 page)

“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 affabil
ity 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 char
acter 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.”

The connoisseur of hazards was already moving
over to
the table.

“Okay, what’s the game?”

“Well, you drop the three chips into a
bag, or a box—or
a hat.” Simon did that. “You shake ‘em up under
the table,
where nobody can see what happens to them. Then if it’s
your turn,
you pick out any one of ‘em, without looking.
Go on, you try it.
You take it out and slam it on the table,
so that anyone can see
what’s on the top side—whether it’s
marked or not—but nobody knows what’s
on the under side.
Then you try to guess what’s underneath, an X or
nothing.”

Mr. Way thoughtfully turned over the chip he
had put
down. Simon spilled out the other two beside it. The little
man picked
them up and examined them. A newcomer would
have wondered why
anyone ever called him Loud Mouth.

“Here’s how this chap explained it to
me,” said the Saint,
reaching for his pen and a handy piece of
ash-tray adver
tising. “And it might help you to visualize it
quicker. Let’s
pretend we can see both sides of these chips at once.
I’ll draw
both sides of each chip and tie them together. Here’s the
one with a cross on both sides, for a start… .”

He drew it, followed by two similarly
attenuated dumb
bells.

“… and the one with a cross on one
side only,
 
and
the double-blank.
Now, as this chap says first, anyone can see there are three crosses and three
blanks, altogether, so
if you just shut your eyes and guessed what
side was down—
or up, for that matter—you’d have an even chance.”

“Yeah, if you’re guessing—”

“But suppose you’re looking. Suppose the
chip on the table
shows a cross. Then you know it can only be one of these
first two,
don’t you? In other words, the under side is either a cross—or a blank. An even
chance… . On the other hand,
if the side that’s up is blank, you know the
chip must be one of these second two. So the bottom either has a cross

—or it doesn’t. Again, it’s fifty-fifty. Or
it
seems
to be.”

“What d’ya mean, it
seems?”

“Well, that’s what was bothering me.
Because when I was d
oing the guessing, I was right about half the time. But
this o
ther chap guessed right much more often than not. I lost
quite a
packet playing with him. So I’ve started wondering
if I was unlucky, or
whether there’s some trick to it that
I haven’t seen. I’m sure that the
crosses were all exactly alike,
and there was nothing on the chips that you
could find by
feeling them—I thought of that. And the way we played, he
couldn’t have done any sleight of hand. But if it’s legitimate,
why go
through such a complicated business to set up an
even chance?”

Mr. Way fiddled with the chips and frowned
over the dia
gram for a full minute, which is quite a long pause in a
conversation.
And if his had been an electronic brain instead of the oldfashioned variety,
one would have sworn that one
could feel the churning incandescence of his
tubes.

It had been manifest from the start, to his
practically
single-minded instincts, that some deceit was involved.
But
the same ingenuous presentation which had caught his inter
est had also
effectively nipped off any branch lines of thought
which might have led
towards mechanical props or common
legerdemain. He knew that he was
confronting some subtle
trick of skillful misdirection from the same
family as those
which had long provided him with a fairly painless liveli
hood, but a
trick which he had somehow failed to master
before. It had given
him a twinge of professional jealousy
to discover that some cheesy
plagiarist must be exploiting a
colorable imitation of his own method in
positively over
lapping territory; but this pang had been rapidly
alleviated
by more constructive thoughts of the profits he might
derive
from swiping this Dong Hai routine for his own repertoire.
All he
needed was to twig the trick, and’ he even had a self-
confessed pushover
already set up and waiting for the shove.

It may be cited as some kind of testimonial
to his mis
guided genius that he found the solution in those sixty
sec
onds of seething cogitation—a par for the problem which only
the most
razor-witted reader is likely to have equaled, al
though in this case no
abstruse mathematics whatever’ were
involved. Perhaps it was only the
gigantic blatancy of the
logical pitfall that made it so hard for a
devious mind to see.

But when it did dawn on him like a blast of
lightning,
it was purely to the credit of Mr. Way’s personal
discipline
that he did not emit a screech of triumph like the orgasm
of a banshee, or even exhibit the faintest furtive smugness.
He merely
wagged his head, with a disillusioned and con
temptuous weariness.

“There’s nothing wrong with the game,
bud,” he said. “The
only thing wrong is that some bum sports
always think
they’ve been robbed if they don’t win.”

“But why go to all that trouble to
invent a game like that
when you might as well flip a coin?”

“Don’t ask me, my friend. Maybe these
mandarins were too
rich to carry small change. Maybe the concubines would’ve
been offended about being flipped for. Maybe they got bored
with
flipping coins and had to think up something different.
How do any
betting games get started?”

“But an even chance—”

“What’s more complicated than a roulette
table? And yet
half the people you see in a casino are playing the even
chances—red
and black, odds and evens, high and low. It
just seems more
glamorous, or something, to do it that way.
I could get bored
with tossing heads and tails myself. I’m
a sucker for a new
game. Why don’t we try this one? This time, you might be lucky. That’d prove it
was on the level.”

“I could use a bit of luck,” Simon
grumbled, declining the gibe. “How much d’you want to play for? Would five
bucks
be too high for you?”

“I thought you,told me you’d lost a
packet,”
sneered Mr.
Way. “How long did it take you, at those prices? Or
how
much do you call a packet? Most times, I’d say that any bet
less than
a ten-spot wasn’t worth the effort; but if you’re
strapped—”

“Okay,” said the Saint. “Make
it ten dollars.”

He scraped the chips into his hat and shook it
under the
table.

“Who goes first?”

“After you,” said Mr. Way.

Simon brought out a chip and slapped it down.
When he
took his hand off it, it revealed a penciled X.

“Blank,” said the Saint, and turned
it over.

The other side was blank. Mr. Way pulled out
his roll,
peeled off a bill, and handed it over. Simon threw the
chip
back in his hat and passed it to Mr. Way under the table.
Mr. Way
took out a chip, laid it down, and exposed a cross.

“Another cross,” he said, turning it
over.

He was wrong. The other side was blank again.

On the next draw, Simon showed a blank,
called for a
cross, but turned up another blank. Mr. Way also picked
a blank,
called it blanks back-to-back, and lost—when the
chip was turned over,
it showed an X on the other side.

Mr. Way paid off with equanimity. He was
betting on a
cast-iron percentage, and he could afford to wait for the
dividends.

Several plays and some three hundred dollars
later he was
still waiting. He had won a few times, but not nearly so
often as
his opponent. That was when, convinced that the
laws of probability
could not be defied indefinitely, he made
the utterly
amateurish mistake of suggesting that they should
double the stakes to
speed up the action.

The Saint let himself be cajoled and insulted
into that with
the most irritating reluctance, and had soon taken another
five hundred and forty dollars of Mr. Way’s cash. They dou
bled the
stakes again, and Simon won another forty dollars
on his correct guess
and another forty on the little man’s
incorrect one.

“This can get damn monotonous, after
all,” Mr. Way con
ceded. “Let’s try some other game.”

“But I’m just getting lucky at this
one,” Simon protested.
“Don’t be discouraged because I’m having
a winning streak.
Let me have my fun. It probably won’t last long.”

Mr. Way thumbed through the very thin sheaf of
currency
that was still left to him.

“You’ll have to take my check, then. I
don’t have any
more folding stuff on me—”

“I’m terribly sorry, dear boy,”
said the Saint earnestly.
“But that’s against the vow I made to my
dear old grand
mother on her death-bed. I can see her now, with the
setting
sun lighting up her nose and her poor tired trembling fingers
hardly able
to hold on to the gin bottle. ‘Promise me,’ she
burped, ‘that whatever
the bet is, you’ll never take any
chiseling bastard’s IOU. Always make
‘em lay it on the line,
son,’ she said, and—”

“I’m just wondering,” snarled Mr.
Way, “if I should have
‘ another look at those chips.”

“Help yourself,” said the Saint
aggrievedly. “But don’t
forget, you were the one who said that some bum
sports al
ways think they’ve been robbed if they don’t win.”

What Tick Way had to contribute to the
remainder of the debate is perhaps largely unsuited to verbatim quotation.

“But how did you
do
it?”
pleaded Hilda Mason.

“I simply conned him into playing
strictly by the odds,”
said the Saint. “With a mentality like
his, he was wide open.”