The Maltese Falcon - (14)

Spade smiled at the boy. His smile was not broad, but the amusement in it seemed genuine and unalloyed.
    The boy said: “You bastard, get up and shoot it out if you’ve got the guts. I’ve taken all the riding from you I’m going to take.”
    The amusement in Spade’s smile deepened. He looked at Gutman and said: “Young Wild West.” His voice matched his smile. “Maybe you ought to tell him that shooting me before you get your hands on the falcon would be bad for business.”
    Gutman’s attempt at a smile was not successful, but he kept the resultant grimace on his mottled face. He licked dry lips with a dry tongue. His voice was too hoarse and gritty for the paternally admonishing tone it tried to achieve. “Now, now, Wilmer,” he said, “we can’t have any of that. You shouldn’t let yourself attach so much importance to these things. You—”
    The boy, not taking his eyes from Spade, spoke in a choked voice out the side of his mouth: “Make him lay off me then. I’m going to fog him if he keeps it up and there won’t be anything that’ll stop me from doing it.”
    “Now, Wilmer,” Gutman said and turned to Spade. His face and voice were under control now. “Your plan is, sir, as I said in the first place, not at all practical. Let’s not say anything more about it.”
    Spade looked from one of them to the other. He had stopped smiling. His face held no expression at all. “I say what I please,” he told them.
    “You certainly do,” Gutman said quickly, “and that’s one of the things I’ve always admired in you. But this matter is, as I say, not at all practical, so there’s not the least bit of use of discussing it any further, as you can see for yourself.”
    “I can’t see it for myself,” Spade said, “and you haven’t made me see it, and I don’t think you can.” He frowned at Gutman. “Let’s get this straight. Am I wasting time talking to you? I thought this was your show. Should I do my talking to the punk? I know how to do that.”
    “No, sir,” Gutman replied, “you’re quite right in dealing with me.”
    Spade said: “All right. Now I’ve got another suggestion. It’s not as good as the first, but it’s better than nothing. Want to hear it?”
    “Most assuredly.”
    “Give them Cairo.”
    Cairo hastily picked up his pistol from the table beside him. He held it tight in his lap with both hands. Its muzzle pointed at the floor a little to one side of the sofa. His face had become yellowish again. His black eyes darted their gaze from face to face. The opaqueness of his eyes made them seem flat, two-dimensional.
    Gutman, looking as if he could not believe he had heard what he had heard, asked: “Do what?”
    “Give the police Cairo.”
    Gutman seemed about to laugh, but he did not laugh. Finally he exclaimed: “Well, by Gad, sir!” in an uncertain tone.
    “It’s not as good as giving them the punk,” Spade said. “Cairo’s not a gunman and he carries a smaller gun than Thursby and Jacobi were shot with. We’ll have to go to more trouble framing him, but that’s better than not giving the police anybody.”
    Cairo cried in a voice shrill with indignation: “Suppose we give them you, Mr. Spade, or Miss O’Shaughnessy? How about that if you’re so set on giving them somebody?”
    Spade smiled at the Levantine and answered him evenly: “You people want the falcon. I’ve got it. A fall-guy is part of the price I’m asking. As for Miss O’Shaughnessy”—his dispassionate glance moved to her white perplexed face and then back to Cairo and his shoulders rose and fell a fraction of an inch—“if you think she can be rigged for the part I’m perfectly willing to discuss it with you.”
    The girl put her hands to her throat, uttered a short strangled cry, and moved farther away from him.
    Cairo, his face and body twitching with excitement, exclaimed: “You seem to forget that you are not in a position to insist on anything.”
    Spade laughed, a harsh derisive snort.
    Gutman said, in a voice that tried to make firmness ingratiating: “Come now, gentlemen, let’s keep our discussion on a friendly basis; but there certainly is”—he was addressing Spade—“something in what Mr. Cairo says. You must take into consideration the—”
    “Like hell I must.” Spade flung his words out with a brutal sort of carelessness that gave them more weight than they could have got from dramatic emphasis or from loudness. “If you kill me, how are you going to get the bird? If I know you can’t afford to kill me till you have it, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?”
    Gutman cocked his head to the left and considered these questions. His eyes twinkled between puckered lids. Presently he gave his genial answer: “Well, sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill.”
    “Sure,” Spade agreed, “but they’re not much good unless the threat of death is behind them to hold the victim down. See what I mean? If you try anything I don’t like I won’t stand for it. I’ll make it a matter of your having to call it off or kill me, knowing you can’t afford to kill me.”
    “I see what you mean.” Gutman chuckled. “That is an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides, because, as you know, sir, men are likely to forget in the heat of action where their best interest lies and let their emotions carry them away.”
    Spade too was all smiling blandness. “That’s the trick, from my side,” he said, “to make my play strong enough that it ties you up, but yet not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgment.”
    Gutman said fondly: “By Gad, sir, you are a character!”
    Joel Cairo jumped up from his chair and went around behind the boy and behind Gutman’s chair. He bent over the back of Gutman’s chair and, screening his mouth and the fat man’s ear with his empty hand, whispered. Gutman listened attentively, shutting his eyes.
    Spade grinned at Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Her lips smiled feebly in response, but there was no change in her eyes; they did not lose their numb stare. Spade turned to the boy: “Two to one they’re selling you out, son.”
    The boy did not say anything. A trembling in his knees began to shake the knees of his trousers.
    Spade addressed Gutman: “I hope you’re not letting yourself be influenced by the guns these pocket-edition desperadoes are waving.”
    Gutman opened his eyes. Cairo stopped whispering and stood erect behind the fat man’s chair.
    Spade said: “I’ve practiced taking them away from both of them, so there’ll be no trouble there. The punk is—”
    In a voice choked horribly by emotion the boy cried, “All right!” and jerked his pistol up in front of his chest.
    Gutman flung a fat hand out at the boy’s wrist, caught the wrist, and bore it and the gun down while Gutman’s fat body was rising in haste from the rocking chair. Joel Cairo scurried around to the boy’s other side and grasped his other arm. They wrestled with the boy, forcing his arms down, holding them down, while he struggled futilely against them. Words came out of the struggling group: fragments of the boy’s incoherent speech—“right . . . go . . . bastard . . . smoke”—Gutman’s “Now, now, Wilmer!” repeated many times; Cairo’s “No, please, don’t” and “Don’t do that, Wilmer.”
    Wooden-faced, dreamy-eyed, Spade got up from the sofa and went over to the group. The boy, unable to cope with the weight against him, had stopped struggling. Cairo, still holding the boy’s arm, stood partly in front of him, talking to him soothingly. Spade pushed Cairo aside gently and drove his left fist against the boy’s chin. The boy’s head snapped back as far as it could while his arms were held, and then came forward. Gutman began a desperate “Here, what—?” Spade drove his right fist against the boy’s chin.
    Cairo dropped the boy’s arm, letting him collapse against Gutman’s great round belly. Cairo sprang at Spade, clawing at his face with the curved stiff fingers of both hands. Spade blew his breath out and pushed the Levantine away. Cairo sprang at him again. Tears were in Cairo’s eyes and his red lips worked angrily, forming words, but no sound came from between them.
    Spade laughed, grunted, “Jesus, you’re a pip!” and cuffed the side of Cairo’s face with an open hand, knocking him over against the table. Cairo regained his balance and sprang at Spade the third time. Spade stopped him with both palms held out on long rigid arms against his face. Cairo, failing to reach Spade’s face with his shorter arms, thumped Spade’s arms.
    “Stop it,” Spade growled. “I’ll hurt you.”
    Cairo cried, “Oh, you big coward!” and backed away from him.
    Spade stooped to pick up Cairo’s pistol from the floor, and then the boy’s. He straightened up holding them in his left hand, dangling them upside-down by their trigger-guards from his forefinger.
    Gutman had put the boy in the rocking chair and stood looking at him with troubled eyes in an uncertainly puckered face. Cairo went down on his knees beside the chair and began to chafe one of the boy’s limp hands.
    Spade felt the boy’s chin with his fingers. “Nothing cracked,” he said. “We’ll spread him on the sofa.” He put his right arm under the boy’s arm and around his back, put his left forearm under the boy’s knees, lifted him without apparent effort, and carried him to the sofa.
    Brigid O’Shaughnessy got up quickly and Spade laid the boy there. With his right hand Spade patted the boy’s clothes, found his second pistol, added it to the others in his left hand, and turned his back on the sofa. Cairo was already sitting beside the boy’s head.
    Spade clinked the pistols together in his hand and smiled cheerfully at Gutman. “Well,” he said, “there’s our fall-guy.”
    Gutman’s face was grey and his eyes were clouded. He did not look at Spade. He looked at the floor and did not say anything.
    Spade said: “Don’t be a damned fool again. You let Cairo whisper to you and you held the kid while I pasted him. You can’t laugh that off and you’re likely to get yourself shot trying to.”
    Gutman moved his feet on the rug and said nothing.
    Spade said: “And the other side of it is that you’ll either say yes right now or I’ll turn the falcon and the whole God-damned lot of you in.”
    Gutman raised his head and muttered through his teeth: “I don’t like that, sir.”
    “You won’t like it,” Spade said. “Well?”
    The fat man sighed and made a wry face and replied sadly: “You can have him.”
    Spade said: “That’s swell.”
    19
    THE RUSSIAN’S HAND
    THE boy lay on his back on the sofa, a small figure that was—except for its breathing—altogether corpselike to the eye. Joel Cairo sat beside the boy, bending over him, rubbing his cheeks and wrists, smoothing his hair back from his forehead, whispering to him, and peering anxiously down at his white still face.
    Brigid O’Shaughnessy stood in an angle made by table and wall. One of her hands was flat on the table, the other to her breast. She pinched her lower lip between her teeth and glanced furtively at Spade whenever he was not looking at her. When he looked at her she looked at Cairo and the boy.
    Gutman’s face had lost its troubled cast and was becoming rosy again. He had put his hands in his trousers-pockets. He stood facing Spade, watching him without curiosity.
    Spade, idly jingling his handful of pistols, nodded at Cairo’s rounded back and asked Gutman: “It’ll be all right with him?”
    “I don’t know,” the fat man replied placidly. “That part will have to be strictly up to you, sir.”
    Spade’s smile made his v-shaped chin more salient. He said: “Cairo.”
    The Levantine screwed his dark anxious face around over his shoulder.
    Spade said: “Let him rest awhile. We’re going to give him to the police. We ought to get the details fixed before he comes to.”
    Cairo asked bitterly: “Don’t you think you’ve done enough to him without that?”
    Spade said: “No.”
    Cairo left the sofa and went close to the fat man. “Please don’t do this thing, Mr. Gutman,” he begged. “You must realize that—”
    Spade interrupted him: “That’s settled. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Coming in? Or getting out?”
    Though Gutman’s smile was a bit sad, even wistful in its way, he nodded his head. “I don’t like it either,” he told the Levantine, “but we can’t help ourselves now. We really can’t.”
    Spade asked: “What are you doing, Cairo? In or out?”
    Cairo wet his lips and turned slowly to face Spade. “Suppose,” he said, and swallowed. “Have I—? Can I choose?”
    “You can,” Spade assured him seriously, “but you ought to know that if the answer is out we’ll give you to the police with your boy-friend.”
    “Oh, come, Mr. Spade,” Gutman protested, “that is not—”
    “Like hell we’ll let him walk out on us,” Spade said. “He’ll either come in or he’ll go in. We can’t have a lot of loose ends hanging around.” He scowled at Gutman and burst out irritably: “Jesus God! is this the first thing you guys ever stole? You’re a fine lot of lollipops! What are you going to do next—get down and pray?” He directed his scowl at Cairo. “Well? Which?”
    “You give me no choice.” Cairo’s narrow shoulders moved in a hopeless shrug. “I come in.”
    “Good,” Spade said and looked at Gutman and at Brigid O’Shaughnessy. “Sit down.”
    The girl sat down gingerly on the end of the sofa by the unconscious boy’s feet. Gutman returned to the padded rocking chair, and Cairo to the armchair. Spade put his handful of pistols on the table and sat on the table-corner beside them. He looked at the watch on his wrist and said: “Two o’clock. I can’t get the falcon till daylight, or maybe eight o’clock. We’ve got plenty of time to arrange everything.”
    Gutman cleared his throat. “Where is it?” he asked and then added in haste: “I don’t really care, sir. What I had in mind was that it would be best for all concerned if we did not get out of each other’s sight until our business has been transacted.” He looked at the sofa and at Spade again, sharply. “You have the envelope?”
    Spade shook his head, looking at the sofa and then at the girl. He smiled with his eyes and said: “Miss O’Shaughnessy has it.”
    “Yes, I have it,” she murmured, putting a hand inside her coat. “I picked it up. . . .”
    “That’s all right,” Spade told her. “Hang on to it.” He addressed Gutman: “We won’t have to lose sight of each other. I can have the falcon brought here.”
    “That will be excellent,” Gutman purred. “Then, sir, in exchange for the ten thousand dollars and Wilmer you will give us the falcon and an hour or two of grace—so we won’t be in the city when you surrender him to the authorities.”
    “You don’t have to duck,” Spade said. “It’ll be air-tight.”
    “That may be, sir, but nevertheless we’ll feel safer well out of the city when Wilmer is being questioned by your District Attorney.”
    “Suit yourself,” Spade replied. “I can hold him here all day if you want.” He began to roll a cigarette. “Let’s get the details fixed. Why did he shoot Thursby? And why and where and how did he shoot Jacobi?”
    Gutman smiled indulgently, shaking his head and purring: “Now come, sir, you can’t expect that. We’ve given you the money and Wilmer. That is our part of the agreement.”
    “I do expect it,” Spade said. He held his lighter to his cigarette. “A fall-guy is what I asked for, and he’s not a fall-guy unless he’s a cinch to take the fall. Well, to cinch that I’ve got to know what’s what.” He pulled his brows together. “What are you bellyaching about? You’re not going to be sitting so damned pretty if you leave him with an out.”
    Gutman leaned forward and wagged a fat finger at the pistols on the table beside Spade’s legs. “There’s ample evidence of his guilt, sir. Both men were shot with those weapons. It’s a very simple matter for the police-department-experts to determine that the bullets that killed the men were fired from those weapons. You know that; you’ve mentioned it yourself. And that, it seems to me, is ample proof of his guilt.”
    “Maybe,” Spade agreed, “but the thing’s more complicated than that and I’ve got to know what happened so I can be sure the parts that won’t fit in are covered up.”
    Cairo’s eyes were round and hot. “Apparently you’ve forgotten that you assured us it would be a very simple affair,” Cairo said. He turned his excited dark face to Gutman. “You see! I advised you not to do this. I don’t think—”
    “It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference what either of you think,” Spade said bluntly. “It’s too late for that now and you’re in too deep. Why did he kill Thursby?”
    Gutman interlaced his fingers over his belly and rocked his chair. His voice, like his smile, was frankly rueful. “You are an uncommonly difficult person to get the best of,” he said. “I begin to think that we made a mistake in not letting you alone from the very first. By Gad, I do, sir!”
    Spade moved his hand carelessly. “You haven’t done so bad. You’re staying out of jail and you’re getting the falcon. What do you want?” He put his cigarette in a corner of his mouth and said around it: “Anyhow you know where you stand now. Why did he kill Thursby?”
    Gutman stopped rocking. “Thursby was a notorious killer and Miss O’Shaughnessy’s ally. We knew that removing him in just that manner would make her stop and think that perhaps it would be best to patch up her differences with us after all, besides leaving her without so violent a protector. You see, sir, I am being candid with you?”
    “Yes. Keep it up. You didn’t think he might have the falcon?”
    Gutman shook his head so that his round cheeks wobbled. “We didn’t think that for a minute,” he replied. He smiled benevolently. “We had the advantage of knowing Miss O’Shaughnessy far too well for that and, while we didn’t know then that she had given the falcon to Captain Jacobi in Hongkong to be brought over on the Paloma while they took a faster boat, still we didn’t for a minute think that, if only one of them knew where it was, Thursby was the one.”
    Spade nodded thoughtfully and asked: “You didn’t try to make a deal with him before you gave him the works?”
    “Yes, sir, we certainly did. I talked to him myself that night. Wilmer had located him two days before and had been trying to follow him to wherever he was meeting Miss O’Shaughnessy, but Thursby was too crafty for that even if he didn’t know he was being watched. So that night Wilmer went to his hotel, learned he wasn’t in, and waited outside for him. I suppose Thursby returned immediately after killing your partner. Be that as it may, Wilmer brought him to see me. We could do nothing with him. He was quite determinedly loyal to Miss O’Shaughnessy. Well, sir, Wilmer followed him back to his hotel and did what he did.”
    Spade thought for a moment. “That sounds all right. Now Jacobi.”
    Gutman looked at Spade with grave eyes and said: “Captain Jacobi’s death was entirely Miss O’Shaughnessy’s fault.”
    The girl gasped, “Oh!” and put a hand to her mouth.
    Spade’s voice was heavy and even. “Never mind that now. Tell me what happened.”
    After a shrewd look at Spade, Gutman smiled. “Just as you say, sir,” he said. “Well, Cairo, as you know, got in touch with me—I sent for him—after he left police headquarters the night—or morning—he was up here. We recognized the mutual advantage of pooling forces.” He directed his smile at the Levantine. “Mr. Cairo is a man of nice judgment. The Paloma was his thought. He saw the notice of its arrival in the papers that morning and remembered that he had heard in Hongkong that Jacobi and Miss O’Shaughnessy had been seen together. That was when he had been trying to find her there, and he thought at first that she had left on the Paloma, though later he learned that she hadn’t. Well, sir, when he saw the notice of arrival in the paper he guessed just what had happened: she had given the bird to Jacobi to bring here for her. Jacobi did not know what it was, of course. Miss O’Shaughnessy is too discreet for that.”
    He beamed at the girl, rocked his chair twice, and went on: “Mr. Cairo and Wilmer and I went to call on Captain Jacobi and were fortunate enough to arrive while Miss O’Shaughnessy was there. In many ways it was a difficult conference, but finally, by midnight we had persuaded Miss O’Shaughnessy to come to terms, or so we thought. We then left the boat and set out for my hotel, where I was to pay Miss O’Shaughnessy and receive the bird. Well, sir, we mere men should have known better than to suppose ourselves capable of coping with her. En route, she and Captain Jacobi and the falcon slipped completely through our fingers.” He laughed merrily. “By Gad, sir, it was neatly done.”
    Spade looked at the girl. Her eyes, large and dark with pleading, met his. He asked Gutman: “You touched off the boat before you left?”
    “Not intentionally, no, sir,” the fat man replied, “though I dare say we—or Wilmer at least—were responsible for the fire. He had been out trying to find the falcon while the rest of us were talking in the cabin and no doubt was careless with matches.”
    “That’s fine,” Spade said. “If any slip-up makes it necessary for us to try him for Jacobi’s murder we can also hang an arson-rap on him. All right. Now about the shooting.”
    “Well, sir, we dashed around town all day trying to find them and we found them late this afternoon. We weren’t sure at first that we’d found them. All we were sure of was that we’d found Miss O’Shaughnessy’s apartment. But when we listened at the door we heard them moving around inside, so we were pretty confident we had them and rang the bell. When she asked us who we were and we told her—through the door—we heard a window going up.
    “We knew what that meant, of course; so Wilmer hurried downstairs as fast as he could and around to the rear of the building to cover the fire-escape. And when he turned into the alley he ran right plumb smack into Captain Jacobi running away with the falcon under his arm. That was a difficult situation to handle, but Wilmer did every bit as well as he could. He shot Jacobi—more than once—but Jacobi was too tough to either fall or drop the falcon, and he was too close for Wilmer to keep out of his way. He knocked Wilmer down and ran on. And this was in broad daylight, you understand, in the afternoon. When Wilmer got up he could see a policeman coming up from the block below. So he had to give it up. He dodged into the open back door of the building next the Coronet, through into the street, and then up to join us—and very fortunate he was, sir, to make it without being seen.
    “Well, sir, there we were—stumped again. Miss O’Shaughnessy had opened the door for Mr. Cairo and me after she had shut the window behind Jacobi, and she—” He broke off to smile at a memory. “We persuaded—that is the word, sir—her to tell us that she had told Jacobi to take the falcon to you. It seemed very unlikely that he’d live to go that far, even if the police didn’t pick him up, but that was the only chance we had, sir. And so, once more, we persuaded Miss O’Shaughnessy to give us a little assistance. We—well—persuaded her to phone your office in an attempt to draw you away before Jacobi got there, and we sent Wilmer after him. Unfortunately it had taken us too long to decide and to persuade Miss O’Shaughnessy to—”
    The boy on the sofa groaned and rolled over on his side. His eyes opened and closed several times. The girl stood up and moved into the angle of table and wall again.
    “—coöperate with us,” Gutman concluded hurriedly, “and so you had the falcon before we could reach you.”