Chapter II: Part 2

He stopped talking because she had stopped listening and was waiting for him to finish.

“Mr. Spade, tell me the truth.” Her voice quivered on the verge of hysteria. Her face had become haggard around desperate eyes. “Am I to blame for—for last night?”

Spade shook his head. “Not unless there are things I don’t know about,” he said. “You warned us that Thursby was dangerous. Of course you lied to us about your sister and all, but that doesn’t count: we didn’t believe you.” He shrugged his sloping shoulders. “I wouldn’t say it was your fault.”

She said, “Thank you,” very softly, and then moved her head from side to side. “But I’ll always blame myself.” She put a hand to her throat. “Mr. Archer was so—so alive yesterday afternoon, so solid and hearty and—”

“Stop it,” Spade commanded. “He knew what he was doing. They’re the chances we take.”

“Was—was he married?”

“Yes, with ten thousand insurance, no children, and a wife who didn’t like him.”

“Oh, please don’t!” she whispered.

Spade shrugged again. “That’s the way it was.” He glanced at his watch and moved from his chair to the settee beside her. “There’s no time for worrying about that now.” His voice was pleasant but firm. “Out there a flock of policemen and assistant district attorneys and reporters are running around with their noses to the ground. What do you want to do?”

“I want you to save me from—from it all,” she replied in a thin tremulous voice. She put a timid hand on his sleeve. “Mr. Spade, do they know about me?”

“Not yet. I wanted to see you first.”

“What—what would they think if they knew about the way I came to you—with those lies?”

“It would make them suspicious. That’s why I’ve been stalling them till I could see you. I thought maybe we wouldn’t have to let them know all of it. We ought to be able to fake a story that will rock them to sleep, if necessary.”

“You don’t think I had anything to do with the—the murders—do you?”

Spade grinned at her and said: “I forgot to ask you that. Did you?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Now what are we going to tell the police?”

She squirmed on her end of the settee and her eyes wavered between heavy lashes, as if trying and failing to free their gaze from his. She seemed smaller, and very young and oppressed.

“Must they know about me at all?” she asked. “I think I’d rather die than that, Mr. Spade. I can’t explain now, but can’t you somehow manage so that you can shield me from them, so I won’t have to answer their questions? I don’t think I could stand being questioned now. I think I would rather die. Can’t you, Mr. Spade?”

“Maybe,” he said, “but I’ll have to know what it’s all about.”

She went down on her knees at his knees. She held her face up to him. Her face was wan, taut, and fearful over tight-clasped hands.

“I haven’t lived a good life,” she cried. “I’ve been bad—worse than you could know—but I’m not all bad. Look at me, Mr. Spade. You know I’m not all bad, don’t you? You can see that, can’t you? Then can’t you trust me a little? Oh, I’m so alone and afraid, and I’ve got nobody to help me if you won’t help me. I know I’ve no right to ask you to trust me if I won’t trust you. I do trust you, but I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you now. Later I will, when I can. I’m afraid, Mr. Spade. I’m afraid of trusting you. I don’t mean that. I do trust you, but—I trusted Floyd and—I’ve nobody else, nobody else, Mr. Spade. You can help me. You’ve said you can help me. If I hadn’t believed you could save me I would have run away today instead of sending for you. If I thought anybody else could save me would I be down on my knees like this? I know this isn’t fair of me. But be generous, Mr. Spade, don’t ask me to be fair. You’re strong, you’re resourceful, you’re brave. You can spare me some of that strength and resourcefulness and courage, surely. Help me, Mr. Spade. Help me because I need help so badly, and because if you don’t where will I find anyone who can, no matter how willing? Help me. I’ve no right to ask you to help me blindly, but I do ask you. Be generous, Mr. Spade. You can help me. Help me.”

Spade, who had held his breath through much of this speech, now emptied his lungs with a long sighing exhalation between pursed lips and said: “You won’t need much of anybody’s help. You’re good. You’re very good. It’s chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get into your voice when you say things like ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’”

She jumped up on her feet. Her face crimsoned painfully, but she held her head erect and she looked Spade straight in the eyes.

“I deserve that,” she said. “I deserve it, but—oh!—I did want your help so much. I do want it, and need it, so much. And the lie was in the way I said it, and not at all in what I said.” She turned away, no longer holding herself erect. “It is my own fault that you can’t believe me now.”

Spade’s face reddened and he looked down at the floor, muttering: “Now you are dangerous.”

Brigid O’Shaughnessy went to the table and picked up his hat. She came back and stood in front of him holding the hat, not offering it to him, but holding it for him to take if he wished. Her face was white and thin.

Spade looked at his hat and asked: “What happened last night?”

“Floyd came to the hotel at nine o’clock, and we went out for a walk. I suggested that so Mr. Archer could see him. We stopped at a restaurant in Geary Street, I think it was, for supper and to dance, and came back to the hotel at about half-past twelve. Floyd left me at the door and I stood inside and watched Mr. Archer follow him down the street, on the other side.”

“Down? You mean towards Market Street?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what they’d be doing in the neighborhood of Bush and Stockton, where Archer was shot?”

“Isn’t that near where Floyd lived?”

“No. It would be nearly a dozen blocks out of his way if he was going from your hotel to his. Well, what did you do after they had gone?”

“I went to bed. And this morning when I went out for breakfast I saw the headlines in the papers and read about—you know. Then I went up to Union Square, where I had seen automobiles for hire, and got one and went to the hotel for my luggage. After I found my room had been searched yesterday I knew I would have to move, and I had found this place yesterday afternoon. So I came up here and then telephoned your office.”

“Your room at the St. Mark was searched?” he asked.

“Yes, while I was at your office.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t mean to tell you that.”

“That means I’m not supposed to question you about it?”

She nodded shyly.

He frowned.

She moved his hat a little in her hands.

He laughed impatiently and said: “Stop waving the hat in my face. Haven’t I offered to do what I can?”

She smiled contritely, returned the hat to the table, and sat beside him on the settee again.

He said: “I’ve got nothing against trusting you blindly except that I won’t be able to do you much good if I haven’t some idea of what it’s all about. For instance, I’ve got to have some sort of a line on your Floyd Thursby.”

“I met him in the Orient.” She spoke slowly, looking down at a pointed finger tracing eights on the settee between them. “We came here from Hongkong last week. He was—he had promised to help me. He took advantage of my helplessness and dependence on him to betray me.”

“Betray you how?”

She shook her head and said nothing.

Spade, frowning with impatience, asked: “Why did you want him shadowed?”

“I wanted to learn how far he had gone. He wouldn’t even let me know where he was staying. I wanted to find out what he was doing, whom he was meeting, things like that.”

“Did he kill Archer?”

She looked up at him, surprised. “Yes, certainly,” she said.

“He had a Luger in a shoulder-holster. Archer wasn’t shot with a Luger.”

“He had a revolver in his overcoat-pocket,” she said.

“You saw it?”

“Oh, I’ve seen it often. I know he always carries one there. I didn’t see it last night, but I know he never wears an overcoat without it.”

“Why all the guns?”

“He lived by them. There was a story in Hongkong that he had come out there, to the Orient, as bodyguard to a gambler who had had to leave the States, and that the gambler had since disappeared. They said Floyd knew about his disappearing. I don’t know. I do know that he always went heavily armed and that he never went to sleep without covering the floor around his bed with crumpled newspaper so nobody could come silently into his room.”

“You picked a nice sort of playmate.”

“Only that sort could have helped me,” she said simply, “if he had been loyal.”

“Yes, if.” Spade pinched his lower lip between finger and thumb and looked gloomily at her. The vertical creases over his nose deepened, drawing his brows together. “How bad a hole are you actually in?”

“As bad,” she said, “as could be.”

“Physical danger?”

“I’m not heroic. I don’t think there’s anything worse than death.”

“Then it’s that?”

“It’s that as surely as we’re sitting here”—she shivered—“unless you help me.”

He took his fingers away from his mouth and ran them through his hair. “I’m not Christ,” he said irritably. “I can’t work miracles out of thin air.” He looked at his watch. “The day’s going and you’re giving me nothing to work with. Who killed Thursby?”

She put a crumpled handkerchief to her mouth and said, “I don’t know,” through it.

“Your enemies or his?”

“I don’t know. His, I hope, but I’m afraid—I don’t know.”

“How was he supposed to be helping you? Why did you bring him here from Hongkong?”

She looked at him with frightened eyes and shook her head in silence. Her face was haggard and pitifully stubborn.

Spade stood up, thrust his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and scowled down at her. “This is hopeless,” he said savagely. “I can’t do anything for you. I don’t know what you want done. I don’t even know if you know what you want.”

She hung her head and wept.

He made a growling animal noise in his throat and went to the table for his hat.

“You won’t,” she begged in a small choked voice, not looking up, “go to the police?”

“Go to them!” he exclaimed, his voice loud with rage. “They’ve been running me ragged since four o’clock this morning. I’ve made myself God knows how much trouble standing them off. For what? For some crazy notion that I could help you. I can’t. I won’t try.” He put his hat on his head and pulled it down tight. “Go to them? All I’ve got to do is stand still and they’ll be swarming all over me. Well, I’ll tell them what I know and you’ll have to take your chances.”

She rose from the settee and held herself straight in front of him though her knees were trembling, and she held her white panic-stricken face up high though she couldn’t hold the twitching muscles of mouth and chin still. She said: “You’ve been patient. You’ve tried to help me. It is hopeless, and useless, I suppose.” She stretched out her right hand. “I thank you for what you have done. I—I’ll have to take my chances.”

Spade made the growling animal noise in his throat again and sat down on the settee. “How much money have you got?” he asked.

The question startled her. Then she pinched her lower lip between her teeth and answered reluctantly: “I’ve about five hundred dollars left.”

“Give it to me.”

She hesitated, looking timidly at him. He made angry gestures with mouth, eyebrows, hands, and shoulders. She went into her bedroom, returning almost immediately with a sheaf of paper money in one hand.

He took the money from her, counted it, and said: “There’s only four hundred here.”

“I had to keep some to live on,” she explained meekly, putting a hand to her breast.

“Can’t you get any more?”

“No.”

“You must have something you can raise money on,” he insisted.

“I’ve some rings, a little jewelry.”

“You’ll have to hock them,” he said, and held out his hand. “The Remedial’s the best place—Mission and Fifth.”

She looked pleadingly at him. His yellow-grey eyes were hard and implacable. Slowly she put her hand inside the neck of her dress, brought out a slender roll of bills, and put them in his waiting hand.

He smoothed the bills out and counted them—four twenties, four tens, and a five. He returned two of the tens and the five to her. The others he put in his pocket. Then he stood up and said: “I’m going out and see what I can do for you. I’ll be back as soon as I can with the best news I can manage. I’ll ring four times—long, short, long, short—so you’ll know it’s me. You needn’t go to the door with me. I can let myself out.”

He left her standing in the center of the floor looking after him with dazed blue eyes.

* * * * *

Spade went into a reception-room whose door bore the legend _Wise, Merican & Wise_. The red-haired girl at the switchboard said: “Oh, hello, Mr. Spade.”

“Hello, darling,” he replied. “Is Sid in?”

He stood beside her with a hand on her plump shoulder while she manipulated a plug and spoke into the mouthpiece: “Mr. Spade to see you, Mr. Wise.” She looked up at Spade. “Go right in.”

He squeezed her shoulder by way of acknowledgment, crossed the reception-room to a dully lighted inner corridor, and passed down the corridor to a frosted glass door at its far end. He opened the frosted glass door and went into an office where a small olive-skinned man with a tired oval face under thin dark hair dotted with dandruff sat behind an immense desk on which bales of paper were heaped.

The small man flourished a cold cigar-stub at Spade and said: “Pull a chair around. So Miles got the big one last night?” Neither his tired face nor his rather shrill voice held any emotion.

“Uh-huh, that’s what I came in about.” Spade frowned and cleared his throat. “I think I’m going to have to tell a coroner to go to hell, Sid. Can I hide behind the sanctity of my clients’ secrets and identities and what-not, all the same priest or lawyer?”

Sid Wise lifted his shoulders and lowered the ends of his mouth. “Why not? An inquest is not a court-trial. You can try, anyway. You’ve gotten away with more than that before this.”

“I know, but Dundy’s getting snotty, and maybe it is a little bit thick this time. Get your hat, Sid, and we’ll go see the right people. I want to be safe.”

Sid Wise looked at the papers massed on his desk and groaned, but he got up from his chair and went to the closet by the window. “You’re a son of a gun, Sammy,” he said as he took his hat from its hook.

* * * * *

Spade returned to his office at ten minutes past five that evening. Effie Perine was sitting at his desk reading _Time_. Spade sat on the desk and asked: “Anything stirring?”

“Not here. You look like you’d swallowed the canary.”

He grinned contentedly. “I think we’ve got a future. I always had an idea that if Miles would go off and die somewhere we’d stand a better chance of thriving. Will you take care of sending flowers for me?”

“I did.”

“You’re an invaluable angel. How’s your woman’s intuition today?”

“Why?”

“What do you think of Wonderly?”

“I’m for her,” the girl replied without hesitation.

“She’s got too many names,” Spade mused, “Wonderly, Leblanc, and she says the right one’s O’Shaughnessy.”

“I don’t care if she’s got all the names in the phone-book. That girl is all right, and you know it.”

“I wonder.” Spade blinked sleepily at Effie Perine. He chuckled. “Anyway she’s given up seven hundred smacks in two days, and that’s all right.”

Effie Perine sat up straight and said: “Sam, if that girl’s in trouble and you let her down, or take advantage of it to bleed her, I’ll never forgive you, never have any respect for you, as long as I live.”

Spade smiled unnaturally. Then he frowned. The frown was unnatural. He opened his mouth to speak, but the sound of someone’s entrance through the corridor-door stopped him.

Effie Perine rose and went into the outer office. Spade took off his hat and sat in his chair. The girl returned with an engraved card—_Mr. Joel Cairo_.

“This guy is queer,” she said.

“In with him, then, darling,” said Spade.

Mr. Joel Cairo was a small-boned dark man of medium height. His hair was black and smooth and very glossy. His features were Levantine. A square-cut ruby, its sides paralleled by four baguette diamonds, gleamed against the deep green of his cravat. His black coat, cut tight to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips. His trousers fitted his round legs more snugly than was the current fashion. The uppers of his patent-leather shoes were hidden by fawn spats. He held a black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of _chypre_ came with him.

Spade inclined his head at his visitor and then at a chair, saying: “Sit down, Mr. Cairo.”

Cairo bowed elaborately over his hat, said, “I thank you,” in a high-pitched thin voice and sat down. He sat down primly, crossing his ankles, placing his hat on his knees, and began to draw off his yellow gloves.

Spade rocked back in his chair and asked: “Now what can I do for you, Mr. Cairo?” The amiable negligence of his tone, his motion in the chair, were precisely as they had been when he had addressed the same question to Brigid O’Shaughnessy on the previous day.

Cairo turned his hat over, dropping his gloves into it, and placed it bottom-up on the corner of the desk nearest him. Diamonds twinkled on the second and fourth fingers of his left hand, a ruby that matched the one in his tie even to the surrounding diamonds on the third finger of his right hand. His hands were soft and well cared for. Though they were not large their flaccid bluntness made them seem clumsy. He rubbed his palms together and said over the whispering sound they made: “May a stranger offer condolences for your partner’s unfortunate death?”

“Thanks.”

“May I ask, Mr. Spade, if there was, as the newspapers inferred, a certain—ah—relationship between that unfortunate happening and the death a little later of the man Thursby?”

Spade said nothing in a blank-faced definite way.

Cairo rose and bowed. “I beg your pardon.” He sat down and placed his hands side by side, palms down, on the corner of the desk. “More than idle curiosity made me ask that, Mr. Spade. I am trying to recover an—ah—ornament that has been—shall we say?—mislaid. I thought, and hoped, you could assist me.”

Spade nodded with eyebrows lifted to indicate attentiveness.

“The ornament is a statuette,” Cairo went on, selecting and mouthing his words carefully, “the black figure of a bird.”

Spade nodded again, with courteous interest.

“I am prepared to pay, on behalf of the figure’s rightful owner, the sum of five thousand dollars for its recovery.” Cairo raised one hand from the desk-corner and touched a spot in the air with the broad-nailed tip of an ugly forefinger. “I am prepared to promise that—what is the phrase?—no questions will be asked.” He put his hand on the desk again beside the other and smiled blandly over them at the private detective.

“Five thousand is a lot of money,” Spade commented, looking thoughtfully at Cairo. “It—”

Fingers drummed lightly on the door.

When Spade had called, “Come in,” the door opened far enough to admit Effie Perine’s head and shoulders. She had put on a small dark felt hat and a dark coat with a grey fur collar.

“Is there anything else?” she asked.

“No. Good night. Lock the door when you go, will you?”

Spade turned in his chair to face Cairo again, saying: “It’s an interesting figure.”

The sound of the corridor-door’s closing behind Effie Perine came to them.

Cairo smiled and took a short compact flat black pistol out of an inner pocket. “You will please,” he said, “clasp your hands together at the back of your neck.”

5

THE LEVANTINE

SPADE did not look at the pistol. He raised his arms and, leaning back in his chair, intertwined the fingers of his two hands behind his head. His eyes, holding no particular expression, remained focused on Cairo’s dark face.

Cairo coughed a little apologetic cough and smiled nervously with lips that had lost some of their redness. His dark eyes were humid and bashful and very earnest. “I intend to search your offices, Mr. Spade. I warn you that if you attempt to prevent me I shall certainly shoot you.”

“Go ahead.” Spade’s voice was as empty of expression as his face.

“You will please stand,” the man with the pistol instructed him at whose thick chest the pistol was aimed. “I shall have to make sure that you are not armed.”

Spade stood up pushing his chair back with his calves as he straightened his legs.

Cairo went around behind him. He transferred the pistol from his right hand to his left. He lifted Spade’s coat-tail and looked under it. Holding the pistol close to Spade’s back, he put his right hand around Spade’s side and patted his chest. The Levantine face was then no more than six inches below and behind Spade’s right elbow.

Spade’s elbow dropped as Spade spun to the right. Cairo’s face jerked back not far enough: Spade’s right heel on the patent-leathered toes anchored the smaller man in the elbow’s path. The elbow struck him beneath the cheek-bone, staggering him so that he must have fallen had he not been held by Spade’s foot on his foot. Spade’s elbow went on past the astonished dark face and straightened when Spade’s hand struck down at the pistol. Cairo let the pistol go the instant that Spade’s fingers touched it. The pistol was small in Spade’s hand.

Spade took his foot off Cairo’s to complete his about-face. With his left hand Spade gathered together the smaller man’s coat-lapels—the ruby-set green tie bunching out over his knuckles—while his right hand stowed the captured weapon away in a coat-pocket. Spade’s yellow-grey eyes were somber. His face was wooden, with a trace of sullenness around the mouth.

Cairo’s face was twisted by pain and chagrin. There were tears in his dark eyes. His skin was the complexion of polished lead except where the elbow had reddened his cheek.

Spade by means of his grip on the Levantine’s lapels turned him slowly and pushed him back until he was standing close in front of the chair he had lately occupied. A puzzled look replaced the look of pain in the lead-colored face. Then Spade smiled. His smile was gentle, even dreamy. His right shoulder raised a few inches. His bent right arm was driven up by the shoulder’s lift. Fist, wrist, forearm, crooked elbow, and upper arm seemed all one rigid piece, with only the limber shoulder giving them motion. The fist struck Cairo’s face, covering for a moment one side of his chin, a corner of his mouth, and most of his cheek between cheek-bone and jaw-bone.

Cairo shut his eyes and was unconscious.

Spade lowered the limp body into the chair, where it lay with sprawled arms and legs, the head lolling back against the chair’s back, the mouth open.

Spade emptied the unconscious man’s pockets one by one, working methodically, moving the lax body when necessary, making a pile of the pockets’ contents on the desk. When the last pocket had been turned out he returned to his own chair, rolled and lighted a cigarette, and began to examine his spoils. He examined them with grave unhurried thoroughness.

There was a large wallet of dark soft leather. The wallet contained three hundred and sixty-five dollars in United States bills of several sizes; three five-pound notes; a much-visaed Greek passport bearing Cairo’s name and portrait; five folded sheets of pinkish onion-skin paper covered with what seemed to be Arabic writing; a raggedly clipped newspaper-account of the finding of Archer’s and Thursby’s bodies; a post-card-photograph of a dusky woman with bold cruel eyes and a tender drooping mouth; a large silk handkerchief, yellow with age and somewhat cracked along its folds; a thin sheaf of Mr. Joel Cairo’s engraved cards; and a ticket for an orchestra seat at the Geary Theatre that evening.

Besides the wallet and its contents there were three gaily colored silk handkerchiefs fragrant of _chypre_; a platinum Longines watch on a platinum and red gold chain, attached at the other end to a small pear-shaped pendant of some white metal; a handful of United States, British, French, and Chinese coins; a ring holding half a dozen keys; a silver and onyx fountain-pen; a metal comb in a leatherette case; a nail-file in a leatherette case; a small street-guide to San Francisco; a Southern Pacific baggage-check; a half-filled package of violet pastilles; a Shanghai insurance-broker’s business-card; and four sheets of Hotel Belvedere writing paper, on one of which was written in small precise letters Samuel Spade’s name and the addresses of his office and his apartment.

Having examined these articles carefully—he even opened the back of the watch-case to see that nothing was hidden inside—Spade leaned over and took the unconscious man’s wrist between finger and thumb, feeling his pulse. Then he dropped the wrist, settled back in his chair, and rolled and lighted another cigarette. His face while he smoked was, except for occasional slight and aimless movements of his lower lip, so still and reflective that it seemed stupid; but when Cairo presently moaned and fluttered his eyelids Spade’s face became bland, and he put the beginning of a friendly smile into his eyes and mouth.

Joel Cairo awakened slowly. His eyes opened first, but a full minute passed before they fixed their gaze on any definite part of the ceiling. Then he shut his mouth and swallowed, exhaling heavily through his nose afterward. He drew in one foot and turned a hand over on his thigh. Then he raised his head from the chair-back, looked around the office in confusion, saw Spade, and sat up. He opened his mouth to speak, started, clapped a hand to his face where Spade’s fist had struck and where there was now a florid bruise.

Cairo said through his teeth, painfully: “I could have shot you, Mr. Spade.”

“You could have tried,” Spade conceded.

“I did not try.”

“I know.”

“Then why did you strike me after I was disarmed?”

“Sorry,” Spade said, and grinned wolfishly, showing his jaw-teeth, “but imagine my embarrassment when I found that five-thousand-dollar offer was just hooey.”

“You are mistaken, Mr. Spade. That was, and is, a genuine offer.”

“What the hell?” Spade’s surprise was genuine.

“I am prepared to pay five thousand dollars for the figure’s return.” Cairo took his hand away from his bruised face and sat up prim and business-like again. “You have it?”

“No.”

“If it is not here”—Cairo was very politely skeptical—“why should you have risked serious injury to prevent my searching for it?”

“I should sit around and let people come in and stick me up?” Spade flicked a finger at Cairo’s possessions on the desk. “You’ve got my apartment-address. Been up there yet?”

“Yes, Mr. Spade. I am ready to pay five thousand dollars for the figure’s return, but surely it is natural enough that I should try first to spare the owner that expense if possible.”

“Who is he?”

Cairo shook his head and smiled. “You will have to forgive my not answering that question.”

“Will I?” Spade leaned forward smiling with tight lips. “I’ve got you by the neck, Cairo. You’ve walked in and tied yourself up, plenty strong enough to suit the police, with last night’s killings. Well, now you’ll have to play with me or else.”

Cairo’s smile was demure and not in any way alarmed. “I made somewhat extensive inquiries about you before taking any action,” he said, “and was assured that you were far too reasonable to allow other considerations to interfere with profitable business relations.”

Spade shrugged. “Where are they?” he asked.

“I have offered you five thousand dollars for—”

Spade thumped Cairo’s wallet with the backs of his fingers and said: “There’s nothing like five thousand dollars here. You’re betting your eyes. You could come in and say you’d pay me a million for a purple elephant, but what in hell would that mean?”

“I see, I see,” Cairo said thoughtfully, screwing up his eyes. “You wish some assurance of my sincerity.” He brushed his red lower lip with a fingertip. “A retainer, would that serve?”

“It might.”

Cairo put his hand out towards his wallet, hesitated, withdrew the hand, and said: “You will take, say, a hundred dollars?”

Spade picked up the wallet and took out a hundred dollars. Then he frowned, said, “Better make it two hundred,” and did.

Cairo said nothing.

“Your first guess was that I had the bird,” Spade said in a crisp voice when he had put the two hundred dollars into his pocket and had dropped the wallet on the desk again. “There’s nothing in that. What’s your second?”

“That you know where it is, or, if not exactly that, that you know it is where you can get it.”

Spade neither denied nor affirmed that: he seemed hardly to have heard it. He asked: “What sort of proof can you give me that your man is the owner?”

“Very little, unfortunately. There is this, though: nobody else can give you any authentic evidence of ownership at all. And if you know as much about the affair as I suppose—or I should not be here—you know that the means by which it was taken from him shows that his right to it was more valid than anyone else’s—certainly more valid than Thursby’s.”

“What about his daughter?” Spade asked.

Excitement opened Cairo’s eyes and mouth, turned his face red, made his voice shrill. “_He_ is not the owner!”

Spade said, “Oh,” mildly and ambiguously.

“Is he here, in San Francisco, now?” Cairo asked in a less shrill, but still excited, voice.

Spade blinked his eyes sleepily and suggested: “It might be better all around if we put our cards on the table.”

Cairo recovered composure with a little jerk. “I do not think it would be better.” His voice was suave now. “If you know more than I, I shall profit by your knowledge, and so will you to the extent of five thousand dollars. If you do not then I have made a mistake in coming to you, and to do as you suggest would be simply to make that mistake worse.”

Spade nodded indifferently and waved his hand at the articles on the desk, saying: “There’s your stuff”; and then, when Cairo was returning them to his pockets: “It’s understood that you’re to pay my expenses while I’m getting this black bird for you, and five thousand dollars when it’s done?”

“Yes, Mr. Spade; that is, five thousand dollars less whatever moneys have been advanced to you—five thousand in all.”

“Right. And it’s a legitimate proposition.” Spade’s face was solemn except for wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “You’re not hiring me to do any murders or burglaries for you, but simply to get it back if possible in an honest and lawful way.”

“If possible,” Cairo agreed. His face also was solemn except for the eyes. “And in any event with discretion.” He rose and picked up his hat. “I am at the Hotel Belvedere when you wish to communicate with me—room six-thirty-five. I confidently expect the greatest mutual benefit from our association, Mr. Spade.” He hesitated. “May I have my pistol?”

“Sure. I’d forgotten it.”

Spade took the pistol out of his coat-pocket and handed it to Cairo.

Cairo pointed the pistol at Spade’s chest.

“You will please keep your hands on the top of the desk,” Cairo said earnestly. “I intend to search your offices.”

Spade said: “I’ll be damned.” Then he laughed in his throat and said: “All right. Go ahead. I won’t stop you.”

6

THE UNDERSIZED SHADOW

FOR half an hour after Joel Cairo had gone Spade sat alone, still and frowning, at his desk. Then he said aloud in the tone of one dismissing a problem, “Well, they’re paying for it,” and took a bottle of Manhattan cocktail and a paper drinking-cup from a desk-drawer. He filled the cup two-thirds full, drank, returned the bottle to the drawer, tossed the cup into the wastebasket, put on his hat and overcoat, turned off the lights, and went down to the night-lit street.

An undersized youth of twenty or twenty-one in neat grey cap and overcoat was standing idly on the corner below Spade’s building.

Spade walked up Sutter Street to Kearny, where he entered a cigar-store to buy two sacks of Bull Durham. When he came out the youth was one of four people waiting for a street-car on the opposite corner.

Spade ate dinner at Herbert’s Grill in Powell Street. When he left the Grill, at a quarter to eight, the youth was looking into a nearby haberdasher’s window.

Spade went to the Hotel Belvedere, asking at the desk for Mr. Cairo. He was told that Cairo was not in. The youth sat in a chair in a far corner of the lobby.

Spade went to the Geary Theatre, failed to see Cairo in the lobby, and posted himself on the curb in front, facing the theatre. The youth loitered with other loiterers before Marquard’s restaurant below.

At ten minutes past eight Joel Cairo appeared, walking up Geary Street with his little mincing bobbing steps. Apparently he did not see Spade until the private detective touched his shoulder. He seemed moderately surprised for a moment, and then said: “Oh, yes, of course you saw the ticket.”

“Uh-huh. I’ve got something I want to show you.” Spade drew Cairo back towards the curb a little away from the other waiting theatre-goers. “The kid in the cap down by Marquard’s.”

Cairo murmured, “I’ll see,” and looked at his watch. He looked up Geary Street. He looked at a theatre-sign in front of him on which George Arliss was shown costumed as Shylock, and then his dark eyes crawled sidewise in their sockets until they were looking at the kid in the cap, at his cool pale face with curling lashes hiding lowered eyes.

“Who is he?” Spade asked.

Cairo smiled up at Spade. “I do not know him.”

“He’s been tailing me around town.”

Cairo wet his lower lip with his tongue and asked: “Do you think it was wise, then, to let him see us together?”

“How do I know?” Spade replied. “Anyway, it’s done.”

Cairo removed his hat and smoothed his hair with a gloved hand. He replaced his hat carefully on his head and said with every appearance of candor: “I give you my word I do not know him, Mr. Spade. I give you my word I have nothing to do with him. I have asked nobody’s assistance except yours, on my word of honor.”

“Then he’s one of the others?”

“That may be.”

“I just wanted to know, because if he gets to be a nuisance I may have to hurt him.”

“Do as you think best. He is not a friend of mine.”

“That’s good. There goes the curtain. Good night,” Spade said, and crossed the street to board a westbound street-car.

The youth in the cap boarded the same car.

Spade left the car at Hyde Street and went up to his apartment. His rooms were not greatly upset, but showed unmistakable signs of having been searched. When Spade had washed and had put on a fresh shirt and collar he went out again, walked up to Sutter Street, and boarded a westbound car. The youth boarded it also.

Within half a dozen blocks of the Coronet Spade left the car and went into the vestibule of a tall brown apartment-building. He pressed three bell-buttons together. The street-door-lock buzzed. He entered, passed the elevator and stairs, went down a long yellow-walled corridor to the rear of the building, found a back door fastened by a Yale lock, and let himself out into a narrow court. The court led to a dark back street, up which Spade walked for two blocks. Then he crossed over to California Street and went to the Coronet. It was not quite half-past nine o’clock.

* * * * *

The eagerness with which Brigid O’Shaughnessy welcomed Spade suggested that she had been not entirely certain of his coming. She had put on a satin gown of the blue shade called Artoise that season, with chalcedony shoulder-straps, and her stockings and slippers were Artoise.

The red and cream sitting-room had been brought to order and livened with flowers in squat pottery vases of black and silver. Three small rough-barked logs burned in the fireplace. Spade watched them burn while she put away his hat and coat.

“Do you bring me good news?” she asked when she came into the room again. Anxiety looked through her smile, and she held her breath.

“We won’t have to make anything public that hasn’t already been made public.”

“The police won’t have to know about me?”

“No.”

She sighed happily and sat on the walnut settee. Her face relaxed and her body relaxed. She smiled up at him with admiring eyes. “However did you manage it?” she asked more in wonder than in curiosity.

“Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken.”

“And you won’t get into trouble? Do sit down.” She made room for him on the settee.

“I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble,” he said with not too much complacence.

He stood beside the fireplace and looked at her with eyes that studied, weighed, judged her without pretense that they were not studying, weighing, judging her. She flushed slightly under the frankness of his scrutiny, but she seemed more sure of herself than before, though a becoming shyness had not left her eyes. He stood there until it seemed plain that he meant to ignore her invitation to sit beside her, and then crossed to the settee.

“You aren’t,” he asked as he sat down, “exactly the sort of person you pretend to be, are you?”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” she said in her hushed voice, looking at him with puzzled eyes.

“Schoolgirl manner,” he explained, “stammering and blushing and all that.”

She blushed and replied hurriedly, not looking at him: “I told you this afternoon that I’ve been bad—worse than you could know.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “You told me that this afternoon in the same words, same tone. It’s a speech you’ve practiced.”

After a moment in which she seemed confused almost to the point of tears she laughed and said: “Very well, then, Mr. Spade, I’m not at all the sort of person I pretend to be. I’m eighty years old, incredibly wicked, and an iron-molder by trade. But if it’s a pose it’s one I’ve grown into, so you won’t expect me to drop it entirely, will you?”

“Oh, it’s all right,” he assured her. “Only it wouldn’t be all right if you were actually that innocent. We’d never get anywhere.”

“I won’t be innocent,” she promised with a hand on her heart.

“I saw Joel Cairo tonight,” he said in the manner of one making polite conversation.

Gaiety went out of her face. Her eyes, focused on his profile, became frightened, then cautious. He had stretched his legs out and was looking at his crossed feet. His face did not indicate that he was thinking about anything.

There was a long pause before she asked uneasily:

“You—you know him?”

“I saw him tonight.” Spade did not look up and he maintained his light conversational tone. “He was going to see George Arliss.”

“You mean you talked to him?”

“Only for a minute or two, till the curtain-bell rang.”

She got up from the settee and went to the fireplace to poke the fire. She changed slightly the position of an ornament on the mantelpiece, crossed the room to get a box of cigarettes from a table in a corner, straightened a curtain, and returned to her seat. Her face now was smooth and unworried.

Spade grinned sidewise at her and said: “You’re good. You’re very good.”

Her face did not change. She asked quietly: “What did he say?”

“About what?”

She hesitated. “About me.”

“Nothing.” Spade turned to hold his lighter under the end of her cigarette. His eyes were shiny in a wooden satan’s face.

“Well, what did he say?” she asked with half-playful petulance.

“He offered me five thousand dollars for the black bird.”

She started, her teeth tore the end of her cigarette, and her eyes, after a swift alarmed glance at Spade, turned away from him.

“You’re not going to go around poking at the fire and straightening up the room again, are you?” he asked lazily.

She laughed a clear merry laugh, dropped the mangled cigarette into a tray, and looked at him with clear merry eyes. “I won’t,” she promised. “And what did you say?”

“Five thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

She smiled, but when, instead of smiling, he looked gravely at her, her smile became faint, confused, and presently vanished. In its place came a hurt, bewildered look. “Surely you’re not really considering it,” she said.

“Why not? Five thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

“But, Mr. Spade, you promised to help me.” Her hands were on his arm. “I trusted you. You can’t—” She broke off, took her hands from his sleeve and worked them together.

Spade smiled gently into her troubled eyes. “Don’t let’s try to figure out how much you’ve trusted me,” he said. “I promised to help you—sure—but you didn’t say anything about any black birds.”

“But you must’ve known or—or you wouldn’t have mentioned it to me. You do know now. You won’t—you can’t—treat me like that.” Her eyes were cobalt-blue prayers.

“Five thousand dollars is,” he said for the third time, “a lot of money.”

She lifted her shoulders and hands and let them fall in a gesture that accepted defeat. “It is,” she agreed in a small dull voice. “It is far more than I could ever offer you, if I must bid for your loyalty.”

Spade laughed. His laughter was brief and somewhat bitter. “That is good,” he said, “coming from you. What have you given me besides money? Have you given me any of your confidence? any of the truth? any help in helping you? Haven’t you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else? Well, if I’m peddling it, why shouldn’t I let it go to the highest bidder?”

“I’ve given you all the money I have.” Tears glistened in her white-ringed eyes. Her voice was hoarse, vibrant. “I’ve thrown myself on your mercy, told you that without your help I’m utterly lost. What else is there?” She suddenly moved close to him on the settee and cried angrily: “Can I buy you with my body?”

Their faces were a few inches apart. Spade took her face between his hands and he kissed her mouth roughly and contemptuously. Then he sat back and said: “I’ll think it over.” His face was hard and furious.

She sat still holding her numbed face where his hands had left it.

He stood up and said: “Christ! there’s no sense to this.” He took two steps towards the fireplace and stopped, glowering at the burning logs, grinding his teeth together.

She did not move.

He turned to face her. The two vertical lines above his nose were deep clefts between red wales. “I don’t give a damn about your honesty,” he told her, trying to make himself speak calmly. “I don’t care what kind of tricks you’re up to, what your secrets are, but I’ve got to have something to show that you know what you’re doing.”

“I do know. Please believe that I do, and that it’s all for the best, and—”

“Show me,” he ordered. “I’m willing to help you. I’ve done what I could so far. If necessary I’ll go ahead blindfolded, but I can’t do it without more confidence in you than I’ve got now. You’ve got to convince me that you know what it’s all about, that you’re not simply fiddling around by guess and by God, hoping it’ll come out all right somehow in the end.”

“Can’t you trust me just a little longer?”

“How much is a little? And what are you waiting for?”

She bit her lip and looked down. “I must talk to Joel Cairo,” she said almost inaudibly.

“You can see him tonight,” Spade said, looking at his watch. “His show will be out soon. We can get him on the phone at his hotel.”

She raised her eyes, alarmed. “But he can’t come here. I can’t let him know where I am. I’m afraid.”

“My place,” Spade suggested.

She hesitated, working her lips together, then asked: “Do you think he’d go there?”

Spade nodded.

“All right,” she exclaimed, jumping up, her eyes large and bright. “Shall we go now?”

She went into the next room. Spade went to the table in the corner and silently pulled the drawer out. The drawer held two packs of playing-cards, a pad of score-cards for bridge, a brass screw, a piece of red string, and a gold pencil. He had shut the drawer and was lighting a cigarette when she returned wearing a small dark hat and a grey kidskin coat, carrying his hat and coat.

* * * * *

Their taxicab drew up behind a dark sedan that stood directly in front of Spade’s street-door. Iva Archer was alone in the sedan, sitting at the wheel. Spade lifted his hat to her and went indoors with Brigid O’Shaughnessy. In the lobby he halted beside one of the benches and asked: “Do you mind waiting here a moment? I won’t be long.”

“That’s perfectly all right,” Brigid O’Shaughnessy said, sitting down. “You needn’t hurry.”

Spade went out to the sedan. When he had opened the sedan’s door Iva spoke quickly: “I’ve got to talk to you, Sam. Can’t I come in?” Her face was pale and nervous.

“Not now.”

Iva clicked her teeth together and asked sharply: “Who is she?”

“I’ve only a minute, Iva,” Spade said patiently. “What is it?”

“Who is she?” she repeated, nodding at the street-door.

He looked away from her, down the street. In front of a garage on the next corner an undersized youth of twenty or twenty-one in neat grey cap and overcoat loafed with his back against a wall. Spade frowned and returned his gaze to Iva’s insistent face. “What is the matter?” he asked. “Has anything happened? You oughtn’t to be here at this time of night.”

“I’m beginning to believe that,” she complained. “You told me I oughtn’t to come to the office, and now I oughtn’t to come here. Do you mean I oughtn’t to chase after you? If that’s what you mean why don’t you say it right out?”

“Now, Iva, you’ve got no right to take that attitude.”

“I know I haven’t. I haven’t any rights at all, it seems, where you’re concerned. I thought I did. I thought your pretending to love me gave me—”

Spade said wearily: “This is no time to be arguing about that, precious. What was it you wanted to see me about?”

“I can’t talk to you here, Sam. Can’t I come in?”

“Not now.”

“Why can’t I?”

Spade said nothing.

She made a thin line of her mouth, squirmed around straight behind the wheel, and started the sedan’s engine, staring angrily ahead.

When the sedan began to move Spade said, “Good night, Iva,” shut the door, and stood at the curb with his hat in his hand until it had been driven away. Then he went indoors again.

Brigid O’Shaughnessy rose smiling cheerfully from the bench and they went up to his apartment.

7

G IN THE AIR

IN HIS bedroom that was a living-room now the wall-bed was up, Spade took Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s hat and coat, made her comfortable in a padded rocking chair, and telephoned the Hotel Belvedere. Cairo had not returned from the theatre. Spade left his telephone-number with the request that Cairo call him as soon as he came in.

Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact voice that was devoid of emphasis or pauses, though now and then he repeated a sentence slightly rearranged, as if it were important that each detail be related exactly as it had happened.

At the beginning Brigid O’Shaughnessy listened with only partial attentiveness, obviously more surprised by his telling the story than interested in it, her curiosity more engaged with his purpose in telling the story than with the story he told; but presently, as the story went on, it caught her more and more fully and she became still and receptive.

A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half an hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.

Flitcraft had inherited seventy thousand dollars from his father, and, with his success in real estate, was worth something in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars at the time he vanished. His affairs were in order, though there were enough loose ends to indicate that he had not been setting them in order preparatory to vanishing. A deal that would have brought him an attractive profit, for instance, was to have been concluded the day after the one on which he disappeared. There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going. His habits for months past could be accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even of another woman in his life, though either was barely possible.

“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”

When he had reached this point in his story the telephone-bell rang.

“Hello,” Spade said into the instrument. “Mr. Cairo? . . . This is Spade. Can you come up to my place—Post Street—now? . . . Yes, I think it is.” He looked at the girl, pursed his lips, and then said rapidly: “Miss O’Shaughnessy is here and wants to see you.”

Brigid O’Shaughnessy frowned and stirred in her chair, but did not say anything.

Spade put the telephone down and told her: “He’ll be up in a few minutes. Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles—that was his first name—Pierce. He had an automobile-business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season.”