The Maltese Falcon (12 page)

“But that’s all. I’ve told you. They promised me five hundred pounds to help them and I did and then we found that Joe Cairo meant to desert us, taking the falcon with him and leaving us nothing. So we did exactly that to him, first. But then I wasn’t any better off than I had been before, because Floyd hadn’t any intention at all of paying me the seven hundred and fifty pounds he had promised me. I had learned that by the time we got here. He said we would go to New York, where he would sell it and give me my share, but I could see he wasn’t telling me the truth.” Indignation had darkened her eyes to violet. “And that’s why I came to you to get you to help me learn where the falcon was.”

“And suppose you’d got it? What then?”

“Then I’d have been in a position to talk terms with Mr. Floyd Thursby.”

Spade squinted at her and suggested: “But you wouldn’t have known where to take it to get more money than he’d give you, the larger sum that you knew he expected to sell it for?”

“I did not know,” she said.

Spade scowled at the ashes he had dumped on his plate. “What makes it worth all that money?” he demanded. “You must have some idea, at least be able to guess.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

He directed the scowl at her. “What’s it made of?”

“Porcelain or black stone. I don’t know. I’ve never touched it. I’ve only seen it once, for a few minutes. Floyd showed it to me when we’d first got hold of it.”

Spade mashed the end of his cigarette in his plate and made one draught of the coffee and brandy in his cup. His scowl had gone away. He wiped his lips with his napkin, dropped it crumpled on the table, and spoke casually: “You
are
a liar.”

She got up and stood at the end of the table, looking down at him with dark abashed eyes in a pinkening face. “I am a liar,” she said. “I have always been a liar.”

“Don’t brag about it. It’s childish.” His voice was goodhumored.
He came out from between table and bench. “Was there any truth at all in that yarn?”

She hung her head. Dampness glistened on her dark lashes. “Some,” she whispered.

“How much?”

“Not—not very much.”

Spade put a hand under her chin and lifted her head. He laughed into her wet eyes and said: “We’ve got all night before us. I’ll put some more brandy in some more coffee and we’ll try again.”

Her eyelids drooped. “Oh, I’m so tired,” she said tremulously, “so tired of it all, of myself, of lying and thinking up lies, and of not knowing what is a lie and what is the truth. I wish I—”

She put her hands up to Spade’s cheeks, put her open mouth hard against his mouth, her body flat against his body.

Spade’s arms went around her, holding her to him, muscles bulging his blue sleeves, a hand cradling her head, its fingers half lost among red hair, a hand moving groping fingers over her slim back. His eyes burned yellowly.

Beginning day had reduced night to a thin smokiness when Spade sat up. At his side Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s soft breathing had the regularity of utter sleep. Spade was quiet leaving bed and bedroom and shutting the bedroom-door. He dressed in the bathroom. Then he examined the sleeping girl’s clothes, took a flat brass key from the pocket of her coat, and went out.

He went to the Coronet, letting himself into the building and into her apartment with the key. To the eye there was nothing furtive about his going in: he entered boldly and directly. To the ear his going in was almost unnoticeable: he made as little sound as might be.

In the girl’s apartment he switched on all the lights. He searched the place from wall to wall. His eyes and thick fingers moved without apparent haste, and without ever lingering or fumbling or going back, from one inch of their fields to the next, probing, scrutinizing, testing with expert certainty. Every drawer, cupboard, cubbyhole, box, bag, trunk—locked or unlocked—was opened and its contents subjected to examination by eyes and fingers.
Every piece of clothing was tested by hands that felt for telltale bulges and ears that listened for the crinkle of paper between pressing fingers. He stripped the bed of bedclothes. He looked under rugs and at the under side of each piece of furniture. He pulled down blinds to see that nothing had been rolled up in them for concealment. He leaned through windows to see that nothing hung below them on the outside. He poked with a fork into powder and cream-jars on the dressing-table. He held atomizers and bottles up against the light. He examined dishes and pans and food and food-containers. He emptied the garbage-can on spread sheets of newspaper. He opened the top of the flush-box in the bathroom, drained the box, and peered down into it. He examined and tested the metal screens over the drains of bathtub, washbowl, sink, and laundry-tub.

He did not find the black bird. He found nothing that seemed to have any connection with a black bird. The only piece of writing he found was a week-old receipt for the month’s apartment-rent Brigid O’Shaughnessy had paid. The only thing he found that interested him enough to delay his search while he looked at it was a double-handful of rather fine jewelry in a polychrome box in a locked dressing-table-drawer.

When he had finished he made and drank a cup of coffee. Then he unlocked the kitchen-window, scarred the edge of its lock a little with his pocket-knife, opened the window—over a fire-escape—got his hat and overcoat from the settee in the living-room, and left the apartment as he had come.

On his way home he stopped at a store that was being opened by a puffy-eyed shivering plump grocer and bought oranges, eggs, rolls, butter, and cream.

Spade went quietly into his apartment, but before he had shut the corridor-door behind him Brigid O’Shaughnessy cried: “Who is that?”

“Young Spade bearing breakfast.”

“Oh, you frightened me!”

The bedroom-door he had shut was open. The girl sat on the side of the bed, trembling, with her right hand out of sight under a pillow.

Spade put his packages on the kitchen-table and went into the bedroom. He sat on the bed beside the girl, kissed her smooth shoulder, and said: “I wanted to see if that kid was still on the job, and to get stuff for breakfast.”

“Is he?”

“No.”

She sighed and leaned against him. “I awakened and you weren’t here and then I heard someone coming in. I was terrified.”

Spade combed her red hair back from her face with his fingers and said: “I’m sorry, angel. I thought you’d sleep through it. Did you have that gun under your pillow all night?”

“No. You know I didn’t. I jumped up and got it when I was frightened.”

He cooked breakfast—and slipped the flat brass key into her coat-pocket again—while she bathed and dressed.

She came out of the bathroom whistling
En Cuba.
“Shall I make the bed?” she asked.

“That’d be swell. The eggs need a couple of minutes more.”

Their breakfast was on the table when she returned to the kitchen. They sat where they had sat the night before and ate heartily.

“Now about the bird?” Spade suggested presently as they ate.

She put her fork down and looked at him. She drew her eyebrows together and made her mouth small and tight. “You can’t ask me to talk about that this morning of all mornings,” she protested. “I don’t want to and I won’t.”

“It’s a stubborn damned hussy,” he said sadly and put a piece of roll into his mouth.

The youth who had shadowed Spade was not in sight when Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy crossed the sidewalk to the waiting taxicab. The taxicab was not followed. Neither the youth nor another
loiterer was visible in the vicinity of the Coronet when the taxicab arrived there.

Brigid O’Shaughnessy would not let Spade go in with her. “It’s bad enough to be coming home in evening dress at this hour without bringing company. I hope I don’t meet anybody.”

“Dinner tonight?”

“Yes.”

They kissed. She went into the Coronet. He told the chauffeur: “Hotel Belvedere.”

When he reached the Belvedere he saw the youth who had shadowed him sitting in the lobby on a divan from which the elevators could be seen. Apparently the youth was reading a newspaper.

At the desk Spade learned that Cairo was not in. He frowned and pinched his lower lip. Points of yellow light began to dance in his eyes. “Thanks,” he said softly to the clerk and turned away.

Sauntering, he crossed the lobby to the divan from which the elevators could be seen and sat down beside—not more than a foot from—the young man who was apparently reading a newspaper.

The young man did not look up from his newspaper. Seen at this scant distance, he seemed certainly less than twenty years old. His features were small, in keeping with his stature, and regular. His skin was very fair. The whiteness of his cheeks was as little blurred by any considerable growth of beard as by the glow of blood. His clothing was neither new nor of more than ordinary quality, but it, and his manner of wearing it, was marked by a hard masculine neatness.

Spade asked casually, “Where is he?” while shaking tobacco down into a brown paper curved to catch it.

The boy lowered his paper and looked around, moving with a purposeful sort of slowness, as of a more natural swiftness restrained. He looked with small hazel eyes under somewhat long curling lashes at Spade’s chest. He said, in a voice as colorless and composed and cold as his young face: “What?”

“Where is he?” Spade was busy with his cigarette.

“Who?”

“The fairy.”

The hazel eyes’ gaze went up Spade’s chest to the knot of his maroon tie and rested there. “What do you think you’re doing, Jack?” the boy demanded. “Kidding me?”

“I’ll tell you when I am.” Spade licked his cigarette and smiled amiably at the boy. “New York, aren’t you?”

The boy stared at Spade’s tie and did not speak. Spade nodded as if the boy had said yes and asked: “Baumes rush?”

The boy stared at Spade’s tie for a moment longer, then raised his newspaper and returned his attention to it. “Shove off,” he said from the side of his mouth.

Spade lighted his cigarette, leaned back comfortably on the divan, and spoke with good-natured carelessness: “You’ll have to talk to me before you’re through, sonny—some of you will—and you can tell G. I said so.”

The boy put his paper down quickly and faced Spade, staring at his necktie with bleak hazel eyes. The boy’s small hands were spread flat over his belly. “Keep asking for it and you’re going to get it,” he said, “plenty.” His voice was low and flat and menacing. “I told you to shove off. Shove off.”

Spade waited until a bespectacled pudgy man and a thin-legged blonde girl had passed out of hearing. Then he chuckled and said: “That would go over big back on Seventh Avenue. But you’re not in Romeville now. You’re in my burg.” He inhaled cigarette-smoke and blew it out in a long pale cloud. “Well, where is he?”

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.”

“People lose teeth talking like that.” Spade’s voice was still amiable though his face had become wooden. “If you want to hang around you’ll be polite.”

The boy repeated his two words.

Spade dropped his cigarette into a tall stone jar beside the divan and with a lifted hand caught the attention of a man who
had been standing at an end of the cigar-stand for several minutes. The man nodded and came towards them. He was a middle-aged man of medium height, round and sallow of face, compactly built, tidily dressed in dark clothes.

“Hello, Sam,” he said as he came up.

“Hello, Luke.”

They shook hands and Luke said: “Say, that’s too bad about Miles.”

“Uh-huh, a bad break.” Spade jerked his head to indicate the boy on the divan beside him. “What do you let these cheap gunmen hang out in your lobby for, with their tools bulging their clothes?”

“Yes?” Luke examined the boy with crafty brown eyes set in a suddenly hard face. “What do you want here?” he asked.

The boy stood up. Spade stood up. The boy looked at the two men, at their neckties, from one to the other. Luke’s necktie was black. The boy looked like a schoolboy standing in front of them.

Luke said: “Well, if you don’t want anything, beat it, and don’t come back.”

The boy said, “I won’t forget you guys,” and went out.

They watched him go out. Spade took off his hat and wiped his damp forehead with a handkerchief.

The hotel-detective asked: “What is it?”

“Damned if I know,” Spade replied. “I just happened to spot him. Know anything about Joel Cairo—six-thirty-five?”

“Oh, that one!” The hotel-detective leered.

“How long’s he been here?”

“Four days. This is the fifth.”

“What about him?”

“Search me, Sam. I got nothing against him but his looks.”

“Find out if he came in last night?”

“Try to,” the hotel-detective promised and went away. Spade sat on the divan until he returned. “No,” Luke reported, “he didn’t sleep in his room. What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Come clean. You know I’ll keep my clam shut, but if there’s anything wrong we ought to know about it so’s we can collect our bill.”