Leslie Charteris - The Saint to the Rescue

This was one of those rare but reliable drizzling gray afternoons which the Chamber of Commerce sweeps furiously under the rug, but which stubbornly re-manufacture themselves 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 fifty dollar daily rent on a minimum room. Mr Way hit the bar, or the Spaceship Room, as the brochures called it, at a shrewdly calculated 4:25 pm, 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 reasoning 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 conversational subject that was already more intrinsically stimulating 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 defensively. “You’re a good bridge player — how would you figure 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 mathematical 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 susceptible. 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 brilliantly original facet of his art was in his development of a natural gift for making himself detestable. In a few scintillating minutes, he could inspire the mildest citizen with seductive thoughts of mayhem. But since he was too ludicrously puny for the average man to punch in the nose, most of them sublimated this healthy impulse into a willingness, indeed an eagerness, to take it out of his noisily proffered 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.