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 advertising. “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 dumbbells.
“…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 underside 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 doing the guessing, I was right about half the time. But this other 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 diagram for a full minute, which is quite a long pause in a conversation. And if his had been an electronic brain instead of the old fashioned 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 interest 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 livelihood, 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 overlapping 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 misguided genius that he found the solution in those sixty seconds of seething cogitation—a par for the problem which only the most razor-witted reader is likely to have equaled, although 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 contemptuous 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 doubled 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 conceded. “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. “B
ut that’s against the vow I made to my dear old grandmother 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 always 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.”
“I am probably nearing my dotage,” George Mason said, “but I still don’t see the catch.”
Simon reproduced the diagram he had drawn for Mr Way.
“It’s built right into the rules. As you see, there are two chips which you might call ‘doubles’—that is, if there’s an ‘X’ on one side there’s an ‘X’ on the other, or if it’s blank on one side it’s blank on the other. There’s only one chip that has two different sides. Now, the three chips are thrown into a hat and one is drawn at random. Therefore the odds are two to one that it’ll be a ‘double.’ So if you see a cross, you call a cross, and if you see a blank you call a blank, and two out of three times you’ll win. What you have to think of isn’t the chance of what could be on the other side, but the odds on which chip has been drawn. Your pal Tick was sharp enough to spot that.”
“Then why did he lose?”
“Because I cheated,” said the Saint proudly. “I changed the odds. Since he relies on his gift for figures instead of manual dexterity, I thought he might have a blind spot for physical hanky-panky—which I’m rather good at. I made him a bit blinder with his own technique of misdirection, rubbing it in about how there couldn’t be any funny juggling. But I was palming an extra chip with a cross on one side and blank on the other. I rung that in, so that there were two of that kind, and took out one of the doubles. Sometimes I changed them back, so he wouldn’t notice that there was one double that never showed up. But most of the time, the odds were the exact opposite of what he was counting on.” Simon began to peel layers off a thick bundle of green paper. “Now, it was about seven hundred dollars you lost, wasn’t it?”
“But we can’t take that,” Hilda objected, half laughing and half crying.
“Why not? It’s your money, isn’t it? And I made a small profit for myself. Besides, I only did it because I couldn’t let you pack up and go home before we got to know each other a lot better,” said the Saint.
THE WATER MERCHANT
“I’ll tell you what I think of Foreign Aid,” said the Saint, thoughtfully twisting the newspaper into the semblance of a short rope. “I think that if the Commies had assigned their best brains to inventing a gimmick that’d bleed America like a built-in leak in the economy, they couldn’t have come up with anything cleverer.”
“I don’t know about that,” Howard Mayne said. “But—”
“It saddles the poor squirming US taxpayer with an annual bill of buttons of dollars, for which he gets nothing but jobs for the gaggle of bureaucrats who administer it.”
“Perhaps, but—”
“The more advanced countries simply hate him a bit more, down inside, the way all proud people who are down on their luck react to being charity cases. The more backward ones simply insist more loudly that there must be no strings attached—which means that their bureaucrats want no check on how much of the gravy they can siphon off into their own pockets, while they personally take all the credit for what little trickles through to the populace, which is probably still out throwing rotten eggs at American ambassadors.”
“You’d better not let any Daily Worker correspondent hear you. He’d discover that you were an imperialist, colonialist—”
“I damn well am an imperialist colonialist,” Simon Templar agreed, warming to his subject. “I think the old British Empire, on the whole, was one of the best things this world has ever known. The good old colonialist went out into the wilderness and tamed a lot of unsanitary savages, brought them down out of trees or up out of mud huts, taught them to wash themselves and stop eating their elderly relatives for dinner, and with a few exceptions left them a hell of a lot better off than they would have made themselves in another three centuries, just in exchange for exploiting some natural resources that the benighted heathen didn’t know what to do with anyhow. So all they get for it is a lot of abuse, mostly from characters who wouldn’t know how to spell the word if it wasn’t for the education the wicked imperialists crammed into them. I think it’s an everlasting pity that more Englishmen didn’t have the guts to stand up and trumpet the facts, instead of being hustled into dropping their colonies like naughty boys caught with a fistful of stolen candy—by a lot of bloody-handed Russians, and sanctimonious Americans firmly settled in one of the biggest countries ever swiped from its aborigines.”
“You may be right,” Mayne said placatingly. “But I was talking about a matter of Domestic Aid. Just because I mentioned that there was some phony-sounding Arab in the background shouldn’t get us off on all these tangents.”
With his pleasantly ugly face and competent air, he looked like the very personification of the idealized detective familiar to every television watcher, and the fact that he was not playing such a part every week for a network sponsor was a commentary on the unpredictable hazards of acting as a profession rather than on his personal talent.
Mrs Sophie Yarmouth, his aunt, a determined woman who was also present, chimed in more forcefully, “Howard is right, Mr Templar. You’re only trying to dodge the issue. You set yourself up once as a guardian of society against racketeers and swindlers, so you have a duty to do something about them whenever a case is laid in your lap. Just as you did when you cleared up that affair that I got involved in.”
Because of his friendship with Howard Mayne the Saint had once recouped a ten thousand dollar investment that Mrs Yarmouth had once made with a good bunco artist, as has been recounted elsewhere in these chronicles. When he had phoned Mayne on this subsequent transit through Los Angeles, however, it had only been to invite himself for a sociable drink, with no suspicion that he might be drafted to bring succor to another sucker. But such inflictions were among the occupational overhead of the life he had chosen for himself, and sometimes they had to be accepted.
“Okay,” he said resignedly. “I’ll drop in on your poor relations from Texas on my way through La Jolla. Although trying to save an oil tycoon from being taken for a few grand, even if this proposition he’s interested in is a swindle, strikes me as almost as important a project as sending Foreign Aid to some Persian-Gulf Poobah who’s having trouble meeting the tab for a hundred-girl harem.”
Walt Jobyn, to do him justice even at the expense of flattery, could never have been seriously compared with the lord of a hundred-girl harem. He had quite enough to cope with in the person of his one lawful wedded wife, Felicity, a lady of Amazonian build and an equivalently positive personality, whose affectionate concern for his welfare had an intensity that might have made a strong man quail.
Mr Jobyn was not built on this heroic scale, having been a lean and often hungry cowboy until the barren section on which he was raising a few head of hamburger cattle had found itself in the very center of a circumference of deep holes which had been bored by an exploding contingent of oil-sniffing geologists. The fees he had been able to exact for letting other similar perforations be made in his land had thereafter relieved him of all financial problems other than those of making tax returns and finding ways to invest a residue which was still more than a spouse w
ith unlimited charge accounts could spend.
In spite of these frightful burdens, Mr Jobyn had not changed very much except in such superficial details as having cleaner fingernails and a wardrobe by Neiman-Marcus instead of Levi Strauss, and his reception of the Saint was as heartily hospitable as if he had been home on the range instead of in the lobby of the fanciest hotel in La Jolla, that self-styled jewel of the Southern California coast some ten miles above San Diego.
“I sure am glad to see yuh,” he said, giving Simon a powerful bony handshake, “I’ve read so much about yuh, I feel like I’d knowed yuh ever since I was a boy. And yet yuh don’t look that old.”
“I cheat,” said the Saint. “I take things like vitamins and exercise. And I’m too stupid to worry, which is what makes dignified gray hair and distinguished wrinkles.”
“Yuh look mighty good to me,” Jobyn said. “I wish I was stupid like you. Or Felicity didn’t think she was so smart. I’m hopin’ yuh’ll be able to straighten her out about this investment I’m thinkin’ of makin’. She’s been goin’ on at me so hard, I declare yuh might think I was figurin’ on buyin’ into a bawdyhouse instead of a legitimate business.”
They perched on stools at the bar, and Simon accepted a Peter Dawson. Jobyn tasted a straight shot and told the bartender to leave them the bottle.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “anyone ’ud think I wasn’t bright enough to spot a wooden nickel if it had termites crawlin’ all over it.”
“You sound very sure that this business is legitimate,” Simon said.
“O’ course I’m, sure,” Jobyn said pettishly. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be figurin’ on buyin’ into it. Ain’t nobody told yuh nothin’ about it?”
“All I know is that Mrs Yarmouth said you were on the point of being taken for a small fortune by some faker who claims to be able to get fresh water from the sea.”
“That’s the way Sophie would put it. She’s on Felicity’s side, naturally, being as they’re cousins. And if Felicity had her way about it, there wouldn’t be any satellites goin’ around the earth, because she’d’ve called anyone who said he could send a rocket into space a faker, just because nobody ever done it before. You wait till yuh meet Doc Nemford. You’ll see for yuhself he’s a real serious scientific fella.”
The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Page 10
