"The Maltese Falcon" by Dashiell Hammett

She advanced slowly, with tentative steps, looking at Spade with cobalt-blue eyes that were both shy and probing.

The embarrassment that had gradually been driven away by Spade’s ingratiating smiles and nods and assurances was pinkening her face again.

“Oh, he’s thirty-five years old, perhaps, and as tall as you, and either naturally dark or quite sunburned. His hair is dark too, and he has thick eyebrows. He talks in a rather loud, blustery way and has a nervous, irritable manner. He gives the impression of being—of violence.”

When he returned to his desk Archer nodded at the hundred-dollar bills there, growled complacently, “They’re right enough,” picked one up, folded it, and tucked it into a vest-pocket.

Not far from the tunnel’s mouth a man was hunkered on his heels before a billboard that held advertisements of a moving picture and a gasoline across the front of a gap between two store-buildings.

His shoes, knees, hands, and chin were daubed with brown loam.

His face was placid and uncurious.

His eyes became narrow and sultry.

Tom groaned, but said nothing articulate.

He grimaced again and bent his head for a surreptitious look at the watch on his wrist.

Then she leaned over and took the tobacco-sack and the papers from his inert fingers.

She smiled a bit wryly.

Spade went through the St. Mark’s long purplish lobby to the desk and asked a red-haired dandy whether Miss Wonderly was in.

The girl picked up a slip of paper from her desk and read the memorandum penciled on it: “She’s at the Coronet, on California Street, apartment one thousand and one. You’re to ask for Miss Leblanc.”

Her face had become haggard around desperate eyes.

“I want you to save me from—from it all,” she replied in a thin tremulous voice.

Her face was wan, taut, and fearful over tight-clasped hands.

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.’ ”

His yellow-grey eyes were hard and implacable.

He held a black derby hat in a chamois-gloved hand and came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps.

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.

Though they were not large their flaccid bluntness made them seem clumsy.

Cairo’s face was twisted by pain and chagrin.

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.

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...

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’s smile was demure and not in any way alarmed.

His voice was suave now.

Spade’s face was solemn except for wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

The youth loitered with other loiterers before Marquard’s restaurant below.

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

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

He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.

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.

Spade said, “That again!” with mock resignation.

Cairo used politeness of mien to express skepticism.

When his gaze met hers his yellow-grey eyes glinted for an instant with malicious humor and then became expressionless again.

His smile and manner were amiably composed.

Joel Cairo said indignantly: “That isn’t so. She—” Spade interrupted him in a quite loud, but still genial, voice: “I hired her just recently, yesterday. This is Mr. Joel Cairo, a friend—an acquaintance, at any rate—of Thursby’s. He came to me this afternoon and tried to hire...

There was no vitality in his smile, but he held it fixed on his face.

Before his fist could come up Tom Polhaus had pushed himself between the two men, facing Spade, encumbering Spade’s arms with the closeness of his barrel-like belly and his own arms.

Dundy’s fists were clenched in front of his body and his feet were planted firm and a little apart on the floor, but the truculence in his face was modified by thin rims of white showing between green irises and upper eyelids.

She stopped frowning at her knees and looked at Spade with clear candid eyes.

Spade mashed the end of his cigarette in his plate and made one draught of the coffee and brandy in his cup.

To the eye there was nothing furtive about his going in: he entered boldly and directly.

Every piece of clothing was tested by hands that felt for telltale bulges and ears that listened for the crinkle of paper between pressing fingers.

Neither the youth nor another loiterer was visible in the vicinity of the Coronet when the taxicab arrived there.

“Not a single thing. I adhered to the course you indicated earlier in your rooms.”

His mouth was a hard complacent v.

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.

His bulbs stopped jouncing and settled into flabby rest.

“Mr. Spade, have you any conception of how much money can be made out of that black bird?”

He stared at Spade with an intentness that suggested myopia.

“That was not an injudicious thing to do,” the fat man said, but his mind was obviously not on his words.

His bulbous pink face slowly lost its worried frown and then, more quickly, took on an expression of ineffable happiness.

His face had lost its pallor, his lips their dryness, and his hand its trembling by the time he had sat down.

Wise’s words came out slower now and there was a sardonic glint in his eye.

“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?”

The boy struggled and squirmed, but he was impotent in the big man’s grip.

Well, sir, that’s exactly what they did, and they hit on the happy thought of sending Charles for the first year’s tribute, not an insignificant live bird, but a glorious golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels in their coffers.

...up three fingers—“references that can’t be to anything else but this jeweled falcon. In J. Delaville Le Roulx’s Les Archives de l’Ordre de Saint-Jean there is a reference to it—oblique to be sure, but a reference still. And the unpublished—because unfinished at the time of his death—supplement to Paoli’s Dell’ origine ed instituto del sacro militar ordine has a...

...there of Victor Amadeus II some time after he became king in 1713, and it was one of his gifts to his wife when he married in Chambéry after abdicating. That is a fact, sir. Carutti, the author of Storia del Regno di Vittorio Amadeo II, himself vouched for it. “Maybe they—Amadeo and his wife—took it along with them...

He knew that—enormous as its intrinsic value was—a far higher, a terrific, price could be obtained for it once its authenticity was established beyond doubt.

Spade essayed his sixth step.

Spade ran more cold water on his handkerchief and, holding it to his temple, stood in front of her and dictated the story of the falcon as he had heard it from Gutman, from Charles V’s grant to the Hospitallers up to—but no further than—the enameled bird’s arrival in Paris at the time of the Carlist influx.

His bathroom-cabinet was stocked with cosmetics—boxes, cans, jars, and bottles of powders, creams, unguents, perfumes, lotions, and tonics.

He read the list slowly and when he had finished he underscored Hongkong with a fingernail, cut the list of arrivals from the paper with his pocket-knife, put the rest of the paper and Cairo’s sheet into the wastebasket, and returned to his office.

Malice glittered in Spade’s eyes.

A lathy youth with salient ears ushered Spade into the District Attorney’s office.

When he said, “How do you do, Spade?” his voice was resonant with latent power.

The one to whom Spade said, “Hello, Thomas!” was a sunburned stocky man of thirty in clothing and hair of a kindred unruliness.

Spade’s face retained its puzzled look.

“It narrows down to three things. Number one: Thursby was killed by the gamblers Monahan had welshed on in Chicago. Not knowing Thursby had sloughed Monahan—or not believing it—they killed him because he had been Monahan’s associate, or to get him out of the way so they could get to Monahan, or because he had refused to lead them to Monahan. Number two: he was killed by friends of Monahan. Or number three: he sold Monahan out to his enemies and then fell out with them and they killed him.”

“You mean if it might incriminate me?”

“Well, I’ve got better grounds than that, or grounds that suit me better. My clients are entitled to a decent amount of secrecy. Maybe I can be made to talk to a Grand Jury or even a Coroner’s Jury, but I haven’t been called before either yet, and it’s a cinch I’m not going to advertise my clients’ business until I have to.

He suspected one of his cashiers and a doorman of colluding to defraud him.

“Sam Spade,” she said, “you’re the most contemptible man God ever made when you want to be. Because she did something without confiding in you you’d sit here and do nothing when you know she’s in danger, when you know she might be—”
Spade’s face flushed.

“I don’t know. It was discovered in the hold, aft—in the rear basement—late this morning. The chances are it got started some time yesterday. They got it out all right, though it did damage enough. Nobody liked to talk about it much while the Captain’s away. It’s the—”
The corridor-door opened.

As she stood there—hands on a corner of the desk—watching him pull the rope loose and push aside brown paper, excitement began to supplant nausea in her face.

17 SATURDAY NIGHT
Carrying the parcel lightly under his arm, walking briskly, with only the ceaseless shifting of his eyes to denote wariness, Spade went, partly by way of an alley and a narrow court, from his office-building to Kearny and Post Streets, where he hailed a passing taxicab.

“That’s fine,” he said in a crisp voice, dropping his monotone.

He went to John’s Grill, asked the waiter to hurry his order of chops, baked potato, and sliced tomatoes, ate hurriedly, and was smoking a cigarette with his coffee when a thick-set youngish man with a plaid cap set askew above pale eyes and a tough cheery face came into the Grill and to his table.

Her face was haggard, distraught, shaken by the tremors that shook her from head to foot.

The appearance of Gutman and his companions seemed to have robbed her of that freedom of personal movement and emotion that is animal, leaving her alive, conscious, but quiescent as a plant.

When their commotion stopped he said more seriously, yet not altogether seriously: “There are more of us to be taken care of now.”

“I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been through it all before and expect to go through it again. At one time or another I’ve had to tell everybody from the Supreme Court down to go to hell, and I’ve got away with it. I got away with it because I never let myself forget that a day of reckoning was coming. I never forget that when the day of reckoning comes I want to be all set to march into headquarters pushing a victim in front of me, saying: ‘Here, you chumps, is your criminal.’

“They’re not asleep, Gutman. They’re lying low, waiting. Try to get that. I’m in it up to my neck and they know it. That’s all right as long as I do something when the time comes. But it won’t be all right if I don’t.”

He breathed through his mouth, his round effeminate chest rising and falling, while he gaped at Spade.

He spoke in the manner of one reasoning with a recalcitrant, but not altogether unreasonable, friend.

Gutman wagged his head sidewise in a slow smiling gesture of benign disapproval.

The indelible youngness of his face gave an indescribably vicious—and inhuman—turn to the white-hot hatred and the cold white malevolence in his face.

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.”

Spade addressed Gutman: “I hope you’re not letting yourself be influenced by the guns these pocket-edition desperadoes are waving.”

She pinched her lower lip between her teeth and glanced furtively at Spade whenever he was not looking at her.

His voice, like his smile, was frankly rueful.

And when he turned into the alley he ran right plumb smack into Captain Jacobi running away with the falcon under his arm.

Spade was patient but resolute.

Brigid O’Shaughnessy, in the armchair, dozed, listened to the fat man’s comments, and carried on wide-spaced desultory conversations with Spade.

His face became turgid with hot blood.

“You bungled it!” he screamed at Gutman.

He described the boy minutely.

“What of it? I should trust you? You who arranged that nice little trick for—for my predecessor, Thursby? You who knocked off Miles, a man you had nothing against, in cold blood, just like swatting a fly, for the sake of double-crossing Thursby? You who double-crossed Gutman, Cairo, Thursby—one, two, three? You who’ve never played square with me for half an hour at a stretch since I’ve known you? I should trust you? No, no, darling. I wouldn’t do it even if I could. Why should I?”