by Unknown
“Now, Wilmer,” Gutman said, and turned to Spade. His face and voice were under control. “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 our discussing it any further, as you can see for yourself.”
“I can’t see it for myself,” Spade argued, “and you haven’t made me see it.” 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 one, but it’s better than nothing. Want to hear it?”
“Most assuredly.”
“Give them Cairo.”
Cairo hastily picked his pistol up 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 looked as if he did not believe he could have heard what he had heard. He asked: “Do what?”
“Give the police Cairo.”
Gutman seemed about to laugh, but he did not laugh. Finally he exclaimed: “Well, by God, sir!” in an uncertain voice.
“It’s not as good as giving them the punk,” Spade said. “Cairo’s not a gunman, and he carries a .38, while Jacobi and Thursby were cut down by larger bullets. That means we’ll have to go to some trouble framing him, but that’s better than giving the police nobody.”
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 calmly:
“You people want the falcon. I’ve got it. I’m asking for a fall-guy as part of my price. As for Miss O’Shaughnessy”—his dispassionate glance moved to her white perplexed face for a moment 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 talk it over with you.”
The girl put her hands to her throat, uttered a short, strangled cry, and edged 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 any price.”
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 or 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 just what they can and can’t afford and let their emotions carry them away.”
Spade 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 not strong enough to make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgment.”
Gutman said fondly: “By Gad, sir, you’re 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. There was no change in her eyes: they did not lose their numb, fearful 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 continued: “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 with 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 his small wiry body writhed futilely against them.
Words came out of the squirming group: fragments of the boy’s incoherent speech—“right … go … —— … smoke”—Gutman’s, “Now, now, Wilmer!” repeated many times; Cairo’s, “No, please, don’t,” and “Don’t do that, Wilmer.”
Wooden-faced and 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 stood partly in front of him, talking to him soothingly, still holding one of his arms.
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 sank forward. Gutman began a desperate, “Hey! Y—” Spade drove his right fist against the boy’s chin.
The boy collapsed against Gutman’s great round belly as Cairo dropped his other arm. Cairo sprang at Spade, clawing at his face with the curved stiff fingers of both hands.
Spade blew his breath out sharply 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 grimly at him, grunted, “——! You’re a darb,” and cuffed the side of his face with a big open hand, knocking Cairo 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 stiff 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 unconscious boy in the rocking chair, and stood looking down at him w
ith troubled eyes in an uncertainly puckered face. Cairo was on his knees beside the chair, chafing one of the boy’s limp hands.
Spade leaned over and felt the boy’s chin with his fingers. “Nothing broken,” 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 the boy’s 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 grayish and his eyes were troubled. He did not look at Spade. He looked at the floor and he 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 uneasily on the rug and said nothing.
Spade said: “And the other angle to it is that you’ll either say yes right now or I’ll turn the falcon and the whole —— 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 wearily: “You can have him.”
Spade said: “That’s swell.”
CHAPTER XIX
THE RUSSIAN’S HAND
he boy lay on his back on the sofa, a small figure that was, except for its breathing, altogether corpse-like 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 trouser 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. “That part of it 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 have 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 little 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 your answer is out we’ll give you to the police with your boy-friend.”
“Oh, I say, Mr. Spade,” Gutman protested, “that isn’t—”
“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 any loose ends hanging around.” He scowled at Gutman and exclaimed irritably: “—— ——! 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, what’s the answer?”
“You give me no choice.” Cairo’s narrow shoulders moved in a hopeless shrug. “I come in.”
“Good.” Spade 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. We’ve got plenty of time to arrange things.”
Gutman cleared his throat.
“Where is it?” he asked, and then hastily explained: “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 now 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.”
“An excellent idea,” 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 turn him over to the authorities.”
“You don’t have to duck,” Spade said. “It’ll be airtight.”
“That may be, sir, but nevertheless we’ll feel a lot 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 how and where 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 was 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 squawking 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 guns. It’s a very simple matter for the police department experts to determine that the bullets that killed the men were fired from those guns. 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 that 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, Mr. Spade,” he 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 to
o 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, sir, in not letting you alone from the very first. By Gad, I do!”
Spade moved his cigarette carelessly. “You haven’t done so bad. You’re staying out of jail and you’re getting the falcon. What do you mean?” He put his cigarette into a corner of his mouth and said around it, “Anyhow, you know where you stand now. Why did he kill Thursby?”
Gutman stopped rocking his chair. “Thursby was a notorious gunman, and Miss O’Shaughnessy’s ally. We knew that removing him in just that manner would make her stop and think that perhaps she would do better to patch up her differences with us, 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 wabbled.
“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 then know that she had left the falcon with Captain Jacobi in Hongkong, to be brought over on the Paloma while they took a faster boat, still we didn’t think for a minute 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, certainly we 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 followed. 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.”