Leslie Charteris - The Saint to the Rescue

“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 pregnant.

“And I was playing him for even money,” Mason said somberly. “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 dollars. 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 difference 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 remember 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 preposterous 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 wickedness 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 intensely 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 patterns, sometimes turning one over and rearranging them, occasionally 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 customer 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 per cent 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 boldly accept the hook.

“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 affability 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 character 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.