Chapter IV: Part 4

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.”

“Nothing like that,” Spade assured him. “As a matter of fact, I’m doing a little work for him. I’d tell you if he was wrong.”

“You’d better. Want me to kind of keep an eye on him?”

“Thanks, Luke. It wouldn’t hurt. You can’t know too much about the men you’re working for these days.”

* * * * *

It was twenty-one minutes past eleven by the clock over the elevator-doors when Joel Cairo came in from the street. His forehead was bandaged. His clothes had the limp unfreshness of too many hours’ consecutive wear. His face was pasty, with sagging mouth and eyelids.

Spade met him in front of the desk. “Good morning,” Spade said easily.

Cairo drew his tired body up straight and the drooping lines of his face tightened. “Good morning,” he responded without enthusiasm.

There was a pause.

Spade said: “Let’s go some place where we can talk.”

Cairo raised his chin. “Please excuse me,” he said. “Our conversations in private have not been such that I am anxious to continue them. Pardon my speaking bluntly, but it is the truth.”

“You mean last night?” Spade made an impatient gesture with head and hands. “What in hell else could I do? I thought you’d see that. If you pick a fight with her, or let her pick one with you, I’ve got to throw in with her. I don’t know where that damned bird is. You don’t. She does. How in hell are we going to get it if I don’t play along with her?”

Cairo hesitated, said dubiously: “You have always, I must say, a smooth explanation ready.”

Spade scowled. “What do you want me to do? Learn to stutter? Well, we can talk over here.” He led the way to the divan. When they were seated he asked: “Dundy take you down to the Hall?”

“Yes.”

“How long did they work on you?”

“Until a very little while ago, and very much against my will.” Pain and indignation were mixed in Cairo’s face and voice. “I shall certainly take the matter up with the Consulate General of Greece and with an attorney.”

“Go ahead, and see what it gets you. What did you let the police shake out of you?”

There was prim satisfaction in Cairo’s smile. “Not a single thing. I adhered to the course you indicated earlier in your rooms.” His smile went away. “Though I certainly wished you had devised a more reasonable story. I felt decidedly ridiculous repeating it.”

Spade grinned mockingly. “Sure,” he said, “but its goofiness is what makes it good. You sure you didn’t give them anything?”

“You may rely upon it, Mr. Spade, I did not.”

Spade drummed with his fingers on the leather seat between them. “You’ll be hearing from Dundy again. Stay dummied-up on him and you’ll be all right. Don’t worry about the story’s goofiness. A sensible one would’ve had us all in the cooler.” He rose to his feet. “You’ll want sleep if you’ve been standing up under a police-storm all night. See you later.”

* * * * *

Effie Perine was saying, “No, not yet,” into the telephone when Spade entered his outer office. She looked around at him and her lips shaped a silent word: “Iva.” He shook his head. “Yes, I’ll have him call you as soon as he comes in,” she said aloud and replaced the receiver on its prong. “That’s the third time she’s called up this morning,” she told Spade.

He made an impatient growling noise.

The girl moved her brown eyes to indicate the inner office. “Your Miss O’Shaughnessy’s in there. She’s been waiting since a few minutes after nine.”

Spade nodded as if he had expected that and asked: “What else?”

“Sergeant Polhaus called up. He didn’t leave any message.”

“Get him for me.”

“And G. called up.”

Spade’s eyes brightened. He asked: “Who?”

“G. That’s what he said.” Her air of personal indifference to the subject was flawless. “When I told him you weren’t in he said: ‘When he comes in, will you please tell him that G., who got his message, phoned and will phone again?’.”

Spade worked his lips together as if tasting something he liked. “Thanks, darling,” he said. “See if you can get Tom Polhaus.” He opened the inner door and went into his private office, pulling the door to behind him.

Brigid O’Shaughnessy, dressed as on her first visit to the office, rose from a chair beside his desk and came quickly towards him. “Somebody has been in my apartment,” she explained. “It is all upside-down, every which way.”

He seemed moderately surprised. “Anything taken?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. I was afraid to stay. I changed as fast as I could and came down here. Oh, you must’ve let that boy follow you there!”

Spade shook his head. “No, angel.” He took an early copy of an afternoon paper from his pocket, opened it, and showed her a quarter-column headed SCREAM ROUTS BURGLAR.

A young woman named Caroline Beale, who lived alone in a Sutter Street apartment, had been awakened at four that morning by the sound of somebody moving in her bedroom. She had screamed. The mover had run away. Two other women who lived alone in the same building had discovered, later in the morning, signs of the burglar’s having visited their apartments. Nothing had been taken from any of the three.

“That’s where I shook him,” Spade explained. “I went into that building and ducked out the back door. That’s why all three were women who lived alone. He tried the apartments that had women’s names in the vestibule-register, hunting for you under an alias.”

“But he was watching your place when we were there,” she objected.

Spade shrugged. “There’s no reason to think he’s working alone. Or maybe he went to Sutter Street after he had begun to think you were going to stay all night in my place. There are a lot of maybes, but I didn’t lead him to the Coronet.”

She was not satisfied. “But he found it, or somebody did.”

“Sure.” He frowned at her feet. “I wonder if it could have been Cairo. He wasn’t at his hotel all night, didn’t get in till a few minutes ago. He told me he had been standing up under a police-grilling all night. I wonder.” He turned, opened the door, and asked Effie Perine: “Got Tom yet?”

“He’s not in. I’ll try again in a few minutes.”

“Thanks.” Spade shut the door and faced Brigid O’Shaughnessy.

She looked at him with cloudy eyes. “You went to see Joe this morning?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She hesitated. “Why?”

“Why?” He smiled down at her. “Because, my own true love, I’ve got to keep in some sort of touch with all the loose ends of this dizzy affair if I’m ever going to make heads or tails of it.” He put an arm around her shoulders and led her over to his swivel-chair. He kissed the tip of her nose lightly and set her down in the chair. He sat on the desk in front of her. He said: “Now we’ve got to find a new home for you, haven’t we?”

She nodded with emphasis. “I won’t go back there.”

He patted the desk beside his thighs and made a thoughtful face. “I think I’ve got it,” he said presently. “Wait a minute.” He went into the outer office, shutting the door.

Effie Perine reached for the telephone, saying: “I’ll try again.”

“Afterwards. Does your woman’s intuition still tell you that she’s a madonna or something?”

She looked sharply up at him. “I still believe that no matter what kind of trouble she’s gotten into she’s all right, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “Are you strong enough for her to give her a lift?”

“How?”

“Could you put her up for a few days?”

“You mean at home?”

“Yes. Her joint’s been broken into. That’s the second burglary she’s had this week. It’d be better for her if she wasn’t alone. It would help a lot if you could take her in.”

Effie Perine leaned forward, asking earnestly: “Is she really in danger, Sam?”

“I think she is.”

She scratched her lip with a fingernail. “That would scare Ma into a green hemorrhage. I’ll have to tell her she’s a surprise-witness or something that you’re keeping under cover till the last minute.”

“You’re a darling,” Spade said. “Better take her out there now. I’ll get her key from her and bring whatever she needs over from her apartment. Let’s see. You oughtn’t to be seen leaving here together. You go home now. Take a taxi, but make sure you aren’t followed. You probably won’t be, but make sure. I’ll send her out in another in a little while, making sure she isn’t followed.”

11

THE FAT MAN

THE telephone-bell was ringing when Spade returned to his office after sending Brigid O’Shaughnessy off to Effie Perine’s house. He went to the telephone.

“Hello. . . . Yes, this is Spade. . . . Yes, I got it. I’ve been waiting to hear from you. . . . Who? . . . Mr. Gutman? Oh, yes, sure! . . . Now—the sooner the better. . . . Twelve C. . . . Right. Say fifteen minutes. . . . Right.”

Spade sat on the corner of his desk beside the telephone and rolled a cigarette. His mouth was a hard complacent v. His eyes, watching his fingers make the cigarette, smoldered over lower lids drawn up straight.

The door opened and Iva Archer came in.

Spade said, “Hello, honey,” in a voice as lightly amiable as his face had suddenly become.

“Oh, Sam, forgive me! forgive me!” she cried in a choked voice. She stood just inside the door, wadding a black-bordered handkerchief in her small gloved hands, peering into his face with frightened red and swollen eyes.

He did not get up from his seat on the desk-corner. He said: “Sure. That’s all right. Forget it.”

“But, Sam,” she wailed, “I sent those policemen there. I was mad, crazy with jealousy, and I phoned them that if they’d go there they’d learn something about Miles’s murder.”

“What made you think that?”

“Oh, I didn’t! But I was mad, Sam, and I wanted to hurt you.”

“It made things damned awkward.” He put his arm around her and drew her nearer. “But it’s all right now, only don’t get any more crazy notions like that.”

“I won’t,” she promised, “ever. But you weren’t nice to me last night. You were cold and distant and wanted to get rid of me, when I had come down there and waited so long to warn you, and you—”

“Warn me about what?”

“About Phil. He’s found out about—about you being in love with me, and Miles had told him about my wanting a divorce, though of course _he_ never knew what for, and now Phil thinks we—you killed his brother because he wouldn’t give me the divorce so we could get married. He told me he believed that, and yesterday he went and told the police.”

“That’s nice,” Spade said softly. “And you came to warn me, and because I was busy you got up on your ear and helped this damned Phil Archer stir things up.”

“I’m sorry,” she whimpered, “I know you won’t forgive me. I—I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“You ought to be,” he agreed, “on your own account as well as mine. Has Dundy been to see you since Phil did his talking? Or anybody from the bureau?”

“No.” Alarm opened her eyes and mouth.

“They will,” he said, “and it’d be just as well to not let them find you here. Did you tell them who you were when you phoned?”

“Oh, no! I simply told them that if they’d go to your apartment right away they’d learn something about the murder and hung up.”

“Where’d you phone from?”

“The drug-store up above your place. Oh, Sam, dearest, I—”

He patted her shoulder and said pleasantly: “It was a dumb trick, all right, but it’s done now. You’d better run along home and think up things to tell the police. You’ll be hearing from them. Maybe it’d be best to say ‘no’ right across the board.” He frowned at something distant. “Or maybe you’d better see Sid Wise first.” He removed his arm from around her, took a card out of his pocket, scribbled three lines on its back, and gave it to her. “You can tell Sid everything.” He frowned. “Or almost everything. Where were you the night Miles was shot?”

“Home,” she replied without hesitating.

He shook his head, grinning at her.

“I was,” she insisted.

“No,” he said, “but if that’s your story it’s all right with me. Go see Sid. It’s up on the next corner, the pinkish building, room eight-twenty-seven.”

Her blue eyes tried to probe his yellow-grey ones. “What makes you think I wasn’t home?” she asked slowly.

“Nothing except that I know you weren’t.”

“But I was, I was.” Her lips twisted and anger darkened her eyes. “Effie Perine told you that,” she said indignantly. “I saw her looking at my clothes and snooping around. You know she doesn’t like me, Sam. Why do you believe things she tells you when you know she’d do anything to make trouble for me?”

“Jesus, you women,” Spade said mildly. He looked at the watch on his wrist. “You’ll have to trot along, precious. I’m late for an appointment now. You do what you want, but if I were you I’d tell Sid the truth or nothing. I mean leave out the parts you don’t want to tell him, but don’t make up anything to take its place.”

“I’m not lying to you, Sam,” she protested.

“Like hell you’re not,” he said and stood up.

She strained on tiptoe to hold her face nearer his. “You don’t believe me?” she whispered.

“I don’t believe you.”

“And you won’t forgive me for—for what I did?”

“Sure I do.” He bent his head and kissed her mouth. “That’s all right. Now run along.”

She put her arms around him. “Won’t you go with me to see Mr. Wise?”

“I can’t, and I’d only be in the way.” He patted her arms, took them from around his body, and kissed her left wrist between glove and sleeve. He put his hands on her shoulders, turned her to face the door, and released her with a little push. “Beat it,” he ordered.

* * * * *

The mahogany door of suite 12–C at the Alexandria Hotel was opened by the boy Spade had talked to in the Belvedere lobby. Spade said, “Hello,” good-naturedly. The boy did not say anything. He stood aside holding the door open.

Spade went in. A fat man came to meet him.

The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown. His eyes, made small by fat puffs around them, were dark and sleek. Dark ringlets thinly covered his broad scalp. He wore a black cutaway coat, black vest, black satin Ascot tie holding a pinkish pearl, striped grey worsted trousers, and patent-leather shoes.

His voice was a throaty purr. “Ah, Mr. Spade,” he said with enthusiasm and held out a hand like a fat pink star.

Spade took the hand and smiled and said: “How do you do, Mr. Gutman?”

Holding Spade’s hand, the fat man turned beside him, put his other hand to Spade’s elbow, and guided him across a green rug to a green plush chair beside a table that held a siphon, some glasses, and a bottle of Johnnie Walker whiskey on a tray, a box of cigars—Coronas del Ritz—two newspapers, and a small and plain yellow soapstone box.

Spade sat in the green chair. The fat man began to fill two glasses from bottle and siphon. The boy had disappeared. Doors set in three of the room’s walls were shut. The fourth wall, behind Spade, was pierced by two windows looking out over Geary Street.

“We begin well, sir,” the fat man purred, turning with a proffered glass in his hand. “I distrust a man that says when. If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.”

Spade took the glass and, smiling, made the beginning of a bow over it.

The fat man raised his glass and held it against a window’s light. He nodded approvingly at the bubbles running up in it. He said: “Well, sir, here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding.”

They drank and lowered their glasses.

The fat man looked shrewdly at Spade and asked: “You’re a close-mouthed man?”

Spade shook his head. “I like to talk.”

“Better and better!” the fat man exclaimed. “I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously unless you keep in practice.” He beamed over his glass. “We’ll get along, sir, that we will.” He set his glass on the table and held the box of Coronas del Ritz out to Spade. “A cigar, sir.”

Spade took a cigar, trimmed the end of it, and lighted it. Meanwhile the fat man pulled another green plush chair around to face Spade’s within convenient distance and placed a smoking-stand within reach of both chairs. Then he took his glass from the table, took a cigar from the box, and lowered himself into his chair. His bulbs stopped jouncing and settled into flabby rest. He sighed comfortably and said: “Now, sir, we’ll talk if you like. And I’ll tell you right out that I’m a man who likes talking to a man that likes to talk.”

“Swell. Will we talk about the black bird?”

The fat man laughed and his bulbs rode up and down on his laughter. “Will we?” he asked and, “We will,” he replied. His pink face was shiny with delight. “You’re the man for me, sir, a man cut along my own lines. No beating about the bush, but right to the point. ‘Will we talk about the black bird?’ We will. I like that, sir. I like that way of doing business. Let us talk about the black bird by all means, but first, sir, answer me a question, please, though maybe it’s an unnecessary one, so we’ll understand each other from the beginning. You’re here as Miss O’Shaughnessy’s representative?”

Spade blew smoke above the fat man’s head in a long slanting plume. He frowned thoughtfully at the ash-tipped end of his cigar. He replied deliberately: “I can’t say yes or no. There’s nothing certain about it either way, yet.” He looked up at the fat man and stopped frowning. “It depends.”

“It depends on—?”

Spade shook his head. “If I knew what it depends on I could say yes or no.”

The fat man took a mouthful from his glass, swallowed it, and suggested: “Maybe it depends on Joel Cairo?”

Spade’s prompt “Maybe” was noncommittal. He drank.

The fat man leaned forward until his belly stopped him. His smile was ingratiating and so was his purring voice. “You could say, then, that the question is which one of them you’ll represent?”

“You could put it that way.”

“It will be one or the other?”

“I didn’t say that.”

The fat man’s eyes glistened. His voice sank to a throaty whisper asking: “Who else is there?”

Spade pointed his cigar at his own chest. “There’s me,” he said.

The fat man sank back in his chair and let his body go flaccid. He blew his breath out in a long contented gust. “That’s wonderful, sir,” he purred. “That’s wonderful. I do like a man that tells you right out he’s looking out for himself. Don’t we all? I don’t trust a man that says he’s not. And the man that’s telling the truth when he says he’s not I distrust most of all, because he’s an ass and an ass that’s going contrary to the laws of nature.”

Spade exhaled smoke. His face was politely attentive. He said: “Uh-huh. Now let’s talk about the black bird.”

The fat man smiled benevolently. “Let’s,” he said. He squinted so that fat puffs crowding together left nothing of his eyes but a dark gleam visible. “Mr. Spade, have you any conception of how much money can be made out of that black bird?”

“No.”

The fat man leaned forward again and put a bloated pink hand on the arm of Spade’s chair. “Well, sir, if I told you—by Gad, if I told you half!—you’d call me a liar.”

Spade smiled. “No,” he said, “not even if I thought it. But if you won’t take the risk just tell me what it is and I’ll figure out the profits.”

The fat man laughed. “You couldn’t do it, sir. Nobody could do it that hadn’t had a world of experience with things of that sort, and”—he paused impressively—“there aren’t any other things of that sort.” His bulbs jostled one another as he laughed again. He stopped laughing, abruptly. His fleshy lips hung open as laughter had left them. He stared at Spade with an intentness that suggested myopia. He asked: “You mean you don’t know what it is?” Amazement took the throatiness out of his voice.

Spade made a careless gesture with his cigar. “Oh, hell,” he said lightly, “I know what it’s supposed to look like. I know the value in life you people put on it. I don’t know what it is.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“Miss O’Shaughnessy?”

“Yes. A lovely girl, sir.”

“Uh-huh. No.”

The fat man’s eyes were dark gleams in ambush behind pink puffs of flesh. He said indistinctly, “She must know,” and then, “And Cairo didn’t either?”

“Cairo is cagey. He’s willing to buy it, but he won’t risk telling me anything I don’t know already.”

The fat man moistened his lips with his tongue. “How much is he willing to buy it for?” he asked.

“Ten thousand dollars.”

The fat man laughed scornfully. “Ten thousand, and dollars, mind you, not even pounds. That’s the Greek for you. Humph! And what did you say to that?”

“I said if I turned it over to him I’d expect the ten thousand.”

“Ah, yes, _if_! Nicely put, sir.” The fat man’s forehead squirmed in a flesh-blurred frown. “They must know,” he said only partly aloud, then: “Do they? Do they know what the bird is, sir? What was your impression?”

“I can’t help you there,” Spade confessed. “There’s not much to go by. Cairo didn’t say he did and he didn’t say he didn’t. She said she didn’t, but I took it for granted that she was lying.”

“That was not an injudicious thing to do,” the fat man said, but his mind was obviously not on his words. He scratched his head. He frowned until his forehead was marked by raw red creases. He fidgeted in his chair as much as his size and the size of the chair permitted fidgeting. He shut his eyes, opened them suddenly—wide—and said to Spade: “Maybe they don’t.” His bulbous pink face slowly lost its worried frown and then, more quickly, took on an expression of ineffable happiness. “If they don’t,” he cried, and again: “If they don’t I’m the only one in the whole wide sweet world who does!”

Spade drew his lips back in a tight smile. “I’m glad I came to the right place,” he said.

The fat man smiled too, but somewhat vaguely. Happiness had gone out of his face, though he continued to smile, and caution had come into his eyes. His face was a watchful-eyed smiling mask held up between his thoughts and Spade. His eyes, avoiding Spade’s, shifted to the glass at Spade’s elbow. His face brightened. “By Gad, sir,” he said, “your glass is empty.” He got up and went to the table and clattered glasses and siphon and bottle mixing two drinks.

Spade was immobile in his chair until the fat man, with a flourish and a bow and a jocular “Ah, sir, this kind of medicine will never hurt you!” had handed him his refilled glass. Then Spade rose and stood close to the fat man, looking down at him, and Spade’s eyes were hard and bright. He raised his glass. His voice was deliberate, challenging: “Here’s to plain speaking and clear understanding.”

The fat man chuckled and they drank. The fat man sat down. He held his glass against his belly with both hands and smiled up at Spade. He said: “Well, sir, it’s surprising, but it well may be a fact that neither of them does know exactly what that bird is, and that nobody in all this whole wide sweet world knows what it is, saving and excepting only your humble servant, Casper Gutman, Esquire.”

“Swell.” Spade stood with legs apart, one hand in his trousers-pocket, the other holding his glass. “When you’ve told me there’ll only be two of us who know.”

“Mathematically correct, sir”—the fat man’s eyes twinkled—“but”—his smile spread—“I don’t know for certain that I’m going to tell you.”

“Don’t be a damned fool,” Spade said patiently. “You know what it is. I know where it is. That’s why we’re here.”

“Well, sir, where is it?”

Spade ignored the question.

The fat man bunched his lips, raised his eyebrows, and cocked his head a little to the left. “You see,” he said blandly, “I must tell you what I know, but you will not tell me what you know. That is hardly equitable, sir. No, no, I do not think we can do business along those lines.”

Spade’s face became pale and hard. He spoke rapidly in a low furious voice: “Think again and think fast. I told that punk of yours that you’d have to talk to me before you got through. I’ll tell you now that you’ll do your talking today or you are through. What are you wasting my time for? You and your lousy secret! Christ! I know exactly what that stuff is that they keep in the sub-treasury vaults, but what good does that do me? I can get along without you. God damn you! Maybe you could have got along without me if you’d kept clear of me. You can’t now. Not in San Francisco. You’ll come in or you’ll get out—and you’ll do it today.”

He turned and with angry heedlessness tossed his glass at the table. The glass struck the wood, burst apart, and splashed its contents and glittering fragments over table and floor. Spade, deaf and blind to the crash, wheeled to confront the fat man again.

The fat man paid no more attention to the glass’s fate than Spade did: lips pursed, eyebrows raised, head cocked a little to the left, he had maintained his pink-faced blandness throughout Spade’s angry speech, and he maintained it now.

Spade, still furious, said: “And another thing, I don’t want—”

The door to Spade’s left opened. The boy who had admitted Spade came in. He shut the door, stood in front of it with his hands flat against his flanks, and looked at Spade. The boy’s eyes were wide open and dark with wide pupils. Their gaze ran over Spade’s body from shoulders to knees, and up again to settle on the handkerchief whose maroon border peeped from the breast-pocket of Spade’s brown coat.

“Another thing,” Spade repeated, glaring at the boy: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him. I don’t like him. He makes me nervous. I’ll kill him the first time he gets in my way. I won’t give him an even break. I won’t give him a chance. I’ll kill him.”

The boy’s lips twitched in a shadowy smile. He neither raised his eyes nor spoke.

The fat man said tolerantly: “Well, sir, I must say you have a most violent temper.”

“Temper?” Spade laughed crazily. He crossed to the chair on which he had dropped his hat, picked up the hat, and set it on his head. He held out a long arm that ended in a thick forefinger pointing at the fat man’s belly. His angry voice filled the room. “Think it over and think like hell. You’ve got till five-thirty to do it in. Then you’re either in or out, for keeps.” He let his arm drop, scowled at the bland fat man for a moment, scowled at the boy, and went to the door through which he had entered. When he opened the door he turned and said harshly: “Five-thirty—then the curtain.”

The boy, staring at Spade’s chest, repeated the two words he had twice spoken in the Belvedere lobby. His voice was not loud. It was bitter.

Spade went out and slammed the door.

12

MERRY-GO-ROUND

SPADE rode down from Gutman’s floor in an elevator. His lips were dry and rough in a face otherwise pale and damp. When he took out his handkerchief to wipe his face he saw his hand trembling. He grinned at it and said, “Whew!” so loudly that the elevator-operator turned his head over his shoulder and asked: “Sir?”

Spade walked down Geary Street to the Palace Hotel, where he ate luncheon. His face had lost its pallor, his lips their dryness, and his hand its trembling by the time he had sat down. He ate hungrily without haste, and then went to Sid Wise’s office.

When Spade entered, Wise was biting a fingernail and staring at the window. He took his hand from his mouth, screwed his chair around to face Spade, and said: “’Lo. Push a chair up.”

Spade moved a chair to the side of the big paper-laden desk and sat down. “Mrs. Archer come in?” he asked.

“Yes.” The faintest of lights flickered in Wise’s eyes. “Going to marry the lady, Sammy?”

Spade sighed irritably through his nose. “Christ, now you start that!” he grumbled.

A brief tired smile lifted the corners of the lawyer’s mouth. “If you don’t,” he said, “you’re going to have a job on your hands.”

Spade looked up from the cigarette he was making and spoke sourly: “You mean you are? Well, that’s what you’re for. What did she tell you?”

“About you?”

“About anything I ought to know.”

Wise ran fingers through his hair, sprinkling dandruff down on his shoulders. “She told me she had tried to get a divorce from Miles so she could—”

“I know all that,” Spade interrupted him. “You can skip it. Get to the part I don’t know.”

“How do I know how much she—?”

“Quit stalling, Sid.” Spade held the flame of his lighter to the end of his cigarette. “What did she tell you that she wanted kept from me?”

Wise looked reprovingly at Spade. “Now, Sammy,” he began, “that’s not—”

Spade looked heavenward at the ceiling and groaned: “Dear God, he’s my own lawyer that’s got rich off me and I have to get down on my knees and beg him to tell me things!” He lowered at Wise. “What in hell do you think I sent her to you for?”

Wise made a weary grimace. “Just one more client like you,” he complained, “and I’d be in a sanitarium—or San Quentin.”

“You’d be with most of your clients. Did she tell you where she was the night he was killed?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Following him.”

Spade sat up straight and blinked. He exclaimed incredulously: “Jesus, these women!” Then he laughed, relaxed, and asked: “Well, what did she see?”

Wise shook his head. “Nothing much. When he came home for dinner that evening he told her he had a date with a girl at the St. Mark, ragging her, telling her that was her chance to get the divorce she wanted. She thought at first he was just trying to get under her skin. He knew—”

“I know the family history,” Spade said. “Skip it. Tell me what she did.”

“I will if you’ll give me a chance. After he had gone out she began to think that maybe he might have had that date. You know Miles. It would have been like him to—”

“You can skip Miles’s character too.”

“I oughtn’t to tell you a damned thing,” the lawyer said. “So she got their car from the garage and drove down to the St. Mark, sitting in the car across the street. She saw him come out of the hotel and she saw that he was shadowing a man and a girl—she says she saw the same girl with you last night—who had come out just ahead of him. She knew then that he was working, had been kidding her. I suppose she was disappointed, and mad—she sounded that way when she told me about it. She followed Miles long enough to make sure he was shadowing the pair, and then she went up to your apartment. You weren’t home.”

“What time was that?” Spade asked.

“When she got to your place? Between half-past nine and ten the first time.”

“The first time?”

“Yes. She drove around for half an hour or so and then tried again. That would make it, say, ten-thirty. You were still out, so she drove back downtown and went to a movie to kill time until after midnight, when she thought she’d be more likely to find you in.”

Spade frowned. “She went to a movie at ten-thirty?”

“So she says—the one on Powell Street that stays open till one in the morning. She didn’t want to go home, she said, because she didn’t want to be there when Miles came. That always made him mad, it seems, especially if it was around midnight. She stayed in the movie till it closed.” Wise’s words came out slower now and there was a sardonic glint in his eye. “She says she had decided by then not to go back to your place again. She says she didn’t know whether you’d like having her drop in that late. So she went to Tait’s—the one on Ellis Street—had something to eat and then went home—alone.” Wise rocked back in his chair and waited for Spade to speak.

Spade’s face was expressionless. He asked: “You believe her?”

“Don’t you?” Wise replied.

“How do I know? How do I know it isn’t something you fixed up between you to tell me?”

Wise smiled. “You don’t cash many checks for strangers, do you, Sammy?”

“Not basketfuls. Well, what then? Miles wasn’t home. It was at least two o’clock by then—must’ve been—and he was dead.”

“Miles wasn’t home,” Wise said. “That seems to have made her mad again—his not being home first to be made mad by her not being home. So she took the car out of the garage again and went back to your place.”

“And I wasn’t home. I was down looking at Miles’s corpse. Jesus, what a swell lot of merry-go-round riding. Then what?”

“She went home, and her husband still wasn’t there, and while she was undressing your messenger came with the news of his death.”

Spade didn’t speak until he had with great care rolled and lighted another cigarette. Then he said: “I think that’s an all right spread. It seems to click with most of the known facts. It ought to hold.”

Wise’s fingers, running through his hair again, combed more dandruff down on his shoulders. He studied Spade’s face with curious eyes and asked: “But you don’t believe it?”

Spade plucked his cigarette from between his lips. “I don’t believe it or disbelieve it, Sid. I don’t know a damned thing about it.”

A wry smile twisted the lawyer’s mouth. He moved his shoulders wearily and said: “That’s right—I’m selling you out. Why don’t you get an honest lawyer—one you can trust?”

“That fellow’s dead.” Spade stood up. He sneered at Wise. “Getting touchy, huh? I haven’t got enough to think about: now I’ve got to remember to be polite to you. What did I do? Forget to genuflect when I came in?”

Sid Wise smiled sheepishly. “You’re a son of a gun, Sammy,” he said.

* * * * *

Effie Perine was standing in the center of Spade’s outer office when he entered. She looked at him with worried brown eyes and asked: “What happened?”

Spade’s face grew stiff. “What happened where?” he demanded.

“Why didn’t she come?”

Spade took two long steps and caught Effie Perine by the shoulders. “She didn’t get there?” he bawled into her frightened face.

She shook her head violently from side to side. “I waited and waited and she didn’t come, and I couldn’t get you on the phone, so I came down.”

Spade jerked his hands away from her shoulders, thrust them far down in his trousers-pockets, said, “Another merry-go-round,” in a loud enraged voice, and strode into his private office. He came out again. “Phone your mother,” he commanded. “See if she’s come yet.”

He walked up and down the office while the girl used the telephone. “No,” she said when she had finished. “Did—did you send her out in a taxi?”

His grunt probably meant yes.

“Are you sure she—Somebody must have followed her!”

Spade stopped pacing the floor. He put his hands on his hips and glared at the girl. He addressed her in a loud savage voice: “Nobody followed her. Do you think I’m a God-damned schoolboy? I made sure of it before I put her in the cab, I rode a dozen blocks with her to be more sure, and I checked her another half-dozen blocks after I got out.”

“Well, but—”

“But she didn’t get there. You’ve told me that. I believe it. Do you think I think she did get there?”

Effie Perine sniffed. “You certainly act like a God-damned schoolboy,” she said.

Spade made a harsh noise in his throat and went to the corridor-door. “I’m going out and find her if I have to dig up sewers,” he said. “Stay here till I’m back or you hear from me. For Christ’s sake let’s do something right.”

He went out, walked half the distance to the elevators, and retraced his steps. Effie Perine was sitting at her desk when he opened the door. He said: “You ought to know better than to pay any attention to me when I talk like that.”

“If you think I pay any attention to you you’re crazy,” she replied, “only”—she crossed her arms and felt her shoulders, and her mouth twitched uncertainly—“I won’t be able to wear an evening gown for two weeks, you big brute.”

He grinned humbly, said, “I’m no damned good, darling,” made an exaggerated bow, and went out again.

* * * * *

Two yellow taxicabs were at the corner-stand to which Spade went. Their chauffeurs were standing together talking. Spade asked: “Where’s the red-faced blond driver that was here at noon?”

“Got a load,” one of the chauffeurs said.

“Will he be back here?”

“I guess so.”

The other chauffeur ducked his head to the east. “Here he comes now.”

Spade walked down to the corner and stood by the curb until the red-faced blond chauffeur had parked his cab and got out. Then Spade went up to him and said: “I got into your cab with a lady at noontime. We went out Stockton Street and up Sacramento to Jones, where I got out.”

“Sure,” the red-faced man said, “I remember that.”

“I told you to take her to a Ninth-Avenue-number. You didn’t take her there. Where did you take her?”

The chauffeur rubbed his cheek with a grimy hand and looked doubtfully at Spade. “I don’t know about this.”

“It’s all right,” Spade assured him, giving him one of his cards. “If you want to play safe, though, we can ride up to your office and get your superintendent’s O K.”

“I guess it’s all right. I took her to the Ferry Building.”

“By herself?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Didn’t take her anywhere else first?”

“No. It was like this: after we dropped you I went on out Sacramento, and when we got to Polk she rapped on the glass and said she wanted to get a newspaper, so I stopped at the corner and whistled for a kid, and she got her paper.”

“Which paper?”

“The _Call_. Then I went on out Sacramento some more, and just after we’d crossed Van Ness she knocked on the glass again and said take her to the Ferry Building.”

“Was she excited or anything?”

“Not so’s I noticed.”

“And when you got to the Ferry Building?”

“She paid me off, and that was all.”

“Anybody waiting for her there?”

“I didn’t see them if they was.”

“Which way did she go?”

“At the Ferry? I don’t know. Maybe upstairs, or towards the stairs.”

“Take the newspaper with her?”

“Yeah, she had it tucked under her arm when she paid me.”

“With the pink sheet outside, or one of the white?”

“Hell, Cap, I don’t remember that.”

Spade thanked the chauffeur, said, “Get yourself a smoke,” and gave him a silver dollar.

* * * * *

Spade bought a copy of the _Call_ and carried it into an office-building-vestibule to examine it out of the wind.

His eyes ran swiftly over the front-page-headlines and over those on the second and third pages. They paused for a moment under SUSPECT ARRESTED AS COUNTERFEITER on the fourth page, and again on page five under BAY YOUTH SEEKS DEATH WITH BULLET. Pages six and seven held nothing to interest him. On eight 3 BOYS ARRESTED AS S. F. BURGLARS AFTER SHOOTING held his attention for a moment, and after that nothing until he reached the thirty-fifth page, which held news of the weather, shipping, produce, finance, divorce, births, marriages, and deaths. He read the list of dead, passed over pages thirty-six and thirty-seven—financial news—found nothing to stop his eyes on the thirty-eighth and last page, sighed, folded the newspaper, put it in his coat-pocket, and rolled a cigarette.

For five minutes he stood there in the office-building-vestibule smoking and staring sulkily at nothing. Then he walked up to Stockton Street, hailed a taxicab, and had himself driven to the Coronet.

He let himself into the building and into Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s apartment with the key she had given him. The blue gown she had worn the previous night was hanging across the foot of her bed. Her blue stockings and slippers were on the bedroom floor. The polychrome box that had held jewelry in her dressing-table-drawer now stood empty on the dressing-table-top. Spade frowned at it, ran his tongue across his lips, strolled through the rooms, looking around but not touching anything, then left the Coronet and went downtown again.

In the doorway of Spade’s office-building he came face to face with the boy he had left at Gutman’s. The boy put himself in Spade’s path, blocking the entrance, and said: “Come on. He wants to see you.”

The boy’s hands were in his overcoat-pockets. His pockets bulged more than his hands need have made them bulge.

Spade grinned and said mockingly: “I didn’t expect you till five-twenty-five. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”

The boy raised his eyes to Spade’s mouth and spoke in the strained voice of one in physical pain: “Keep on riding me and you’re going to be picking iron out of your navel.”

Spade chuckled. “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter,” he said cheerfully. “Well, let’s go.”

They walked up Sutter Street side by side. The boy kept his hands in his overcoat-pockets. They walked a little more than a block in silence. Then Spade asked pleasantly: “How long have you been off the goose-berry lay, son?”

The boy did not show that he had heard the question.

“Did you ever—?” Spade began, and stopped. A soft light began to glow in his yellowish eyes. He did not address the boy again.

They went into the Alexandria, rode up to the twelfth floor, and walked down the corridor towards Gutman’s suite. Nobody else was in the corridor.

Spade lagged a little, so that, when they were within fifteen feet of Gutman’s door, he was perhaps a foot and a half behind the boy. He leaned sidewise suddenly and grasped the boy from behind by both arms, just beneath the boy’s elbows. He forced the boy’s arms forward so that the boy’s hands, in his overcoat-pockets, lifted the overcoat up before him. The boy struggled and squirmed, but he was impotent in the big man’s grip. The boy kicked back, but his feet went between Spade’s spread legs.

Spade lifted the boy straight up from the floor and brought him down hard on his feet again. The impact made little noise on the thick carpet. At the moment of impact Spade’s hands slid down and got a fresh grip on the boy’s wrists. The boy, teeth set hard together, did not stop straining against the man’s big hands, but he could not tear himself loose, could not keep the man’s hands from crawling down over his own hands. The boy’s teeth ground together audibly, making a noise that mingled with the noise of Spade’s breathing as Spade crushed the boy’s hands.

They were tense and motionless for a long moment. Then the boy’s arms became limp. Spade released the boy and stepped back. In each of Spade’s hands, when they came out of the boy’s overcoat-pockets, there was a heavy automatic pistol.

The boy turned and faced Spade. The boy’s face was a ghastly white blank. He kept his hands in his overcoat-pockets. He looked at Spade’s chest and did not say anything.

Spade put the pistols in his own pockets and grinned derisively. “Come on,” he said. “This will put you in solid with your boss.”

They went to Gutman’s door and Spade knocked.

13

THE EMPEROR’S GIFT

GUTMAN opened the door. A glad smile lighted his fat face. He held out a hand and said: “Ah, come in, sir! Thank you for coming. Come in.”

Spade shook the hand and entered. The boy went in behind him. The fat man shut the door. Spade took the boy’s pistols from his pockets and held them out to Gutman. “Here. You shouldn’t let him run around with these. He’ll get himself hurt.”

The fat man laughed merrily and took the pistols. “Well, well,” he said, “what’s this?” He looked from Spade to the boy.

Spade said: “A crippled newsie took them away from him, but I made him give them back.”

The white-faced boy took the pistols out of Gutman’s hands and pocketed them. The boy did not speak.

Gutman laughed again. “By Gad, sir,” he told Spade, “you’re a chap worth knowing, an amazing character. Come in. Sit down. Give me your hat.”

The boy left the room by the door to the right of the entrance.

The fat man installed Spade in a green plush chair by the table, pressed a cigar upon him, held a light to it, mixed whiskey and carbonated water, put one glass in Spade’s hand, and, holding the other, sat down facing Spade.

“Now, sir,” he said, “I hope you’ll let me apologize for—”

“Never mind that,” Spade said. “Let’s talk about the black bird.”

The fat man cocked his head to the left and regarded Spade with fond eyes. “All right, sir,” he agreed. “Let’s.” He took a sip from the glass in his hand. “This is going to be the most astounding thing you’ve ever heard of, sir, and I say that knowing that a man of your caliber in your profession must have known some astounding things in his time.”

Spade nodded politely.

The fat man screwed up his eyes and asked: “What do you know, sir, about the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, later called the Knights of Rhodes and other things?”

Spade waved his cigar. “Not much—only what I remember from history in school—Crusaders or something.”