The Saint to the Rescue (14 page)

“I’m not late, am I?” she said.

“Not one second,” he smiled.
“And I’d allowed for half an
hour. Which gives us time for just one
family-style drink
together.”

“I accept with pleasure,” said her
father, sinking into an
other chair. “But I assure you, that’s as
long as you’ll be
stuck with me. I only came this far to keep Hilda company
in case
you happened to be late. I brought her up according
to the oldfashioned
doctrine that punctuality is the most inexpensive of grand gestures; but one
can’t count on every
one else having the same philosophy.”

Simon ordered the drinks from a waiter who was
already w
aiting, fortunately, for more customers were beginning to
s
eep in. But the room was still populated sparsely enough f
or Mr.
Way’s discordantly jeering voice to snag the attention
of the newcomers as
it rose in raucous triumph a few minutes
later.

“October! Here’s another guy born in
October! And he’s only Number Five. Now who says I didn’t prove my point?”

“What is this all about?” George
Mason asked.

Simon gave him a factual synopsis, untrimmed
with any
personal comment, and Mason shook his head.

“The man must be out of his mind. Or
else he’s got money
to burn and he’d rather burn it than admit he’s
wrong.”

The group that was gravitating towards the
noise focus
of the bar evidently shared this opinion, and furthermore
had no scruples about taking advantage of either contingency.
Nor were
they discouraged by the accident that had cost
them a few dollars on
the first sampling of nativities.

“Any fool can be lucky,” growled the
good bridge player
who had been finessed into becoming spokesman for the op
position.
“But that doesn’t prove he’s right. If you want to
convince
me the odds are what you say, you’d have to win
two out of three
times. With six total strangers.”

“You think you aren’t strangers?”
squawked Mr. Way.
“You think one of you is my stooge? I’d really hate
to have
such a dishonest mind as to even think that. Or to be such
a bad
loser as to say it. But don’t make any cracks about backing down until we see
who’s doing it. You want to try
this again twice more, or two hundred times,
I’ll give you
the same odds.”

“There aren’t that many people
here—”

“Then we go out and ask any six guys in
the street. And
you pick ‘em. Or easier still, we send out to the office
for
something like
Who’s Who—
they must have a copy in a joint
like this.
You name any six names, so long as they aren’t
your
ancestors.
Or shut your eyes and pick ‘em with a pin.
Just show me the color
of your money first!”

The debate progressed without any diminution
of tem
perature towards the next inevitable showdown.

“If I’d known bars were such fun,”
Hilda said, “I’d have lied about my age long before this.”

“You probably did, anyhow,” said
her father tolerantly.
“Only you were afraid to try it on the
fancy places, which
are much less willing to be fooled than certain others,
I’m
told.”

“I wonder who told you.”

The Saint grinned.

“I must hear more about this,
George,” he murmured.
“Some time when the child isn’t fanning
us with its big shell-
pink ears. Right now, I honestly hate to
drink and run, but
we’re stuck with the program I sold her. At this hour,
it’ll be mostly a crawl down to the very end of the Beach for
Joe’s
immortal stone crabs. And from there, it’s another long
haul over
to Coral Gables and this show she wanted to see.
Until the millennium
when it dawns on theatrical producers
that an eight-fifteen curtain is the
ideal time to ensure a
hostile and dyspeptic reception from anyone
who also likes
a nice peaceful dinner—”

“Don’t worry about me, my boy,”
said Mr. Mason expansively. “I shall stay here for a little while and
improve my education.”

“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:

“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:

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 con
cluded. “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 avail
able 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 bar
gain
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 in
stead 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 back
ground, 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.