The Maltese Falcon Page 12

  “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 the 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 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.”

  “Very good. Now you don’t remember that Suleiman the Magnificent chased them out of
Rhodes in 1523?”

  “No.”

  “Well, sir, he did, and they settled in Crete. And they stayed there for seven years until 1530 when they persuaded the Emperor Charles V to give them”—Gutman held up three puffy fingers and counted them—“Malta, Gozo, and Tripoli.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, sir, but with these conditions: they were to pay the Emperor each year the tribute of one”—he held up a finger—“falcon in the acknowledgment that Malta was still under Spain, and if they ever left the island it was to revert to Spain. Understand? He was giving it to them, but not unless they used it, and they couldn’t give or sell it to anybody else.”

  “Yes.”

  The fat man looked over his shoulders at the three closed doors, hunched his chair a few inches nearer Spades, and reduced his voice to a husky whisper: “Have you any conception of the extreme, the immeasurable, wealth of the Order at that time?”

  “If I remember,” Spade said, “they were pretty well fixed.”

  Gutman smiled indulgently. “Pretty well, sir, is putting it mildly.” His whisper became lower and more purring. “They were rolling in wealth, sir. You’ve no idea. None of us has any idea. For years they had preyed on the Saracens, had taken nobody knows what spoils of gems, precious metals, silks, ivories—the cream of the cream of the East. That is history, sir. We all know that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.

  “Well, now, the Emperor Charles has given them Malta, and all the rent he asks is one insignificant bird per annum, just as a matter of form. What could be more natural than for these immeasurably wealthy Knights to look around for some way of expressing their gratitude? 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. And—remember, sir—they had fine ones, the finest out of Asia.” Gutman stopped whispering. His sleek dark eyes examined Spade’s face, which was placid. The fat man asked: “Well, sir, what do you think of that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The fat man smiled complacently. “These are facts, historical facts, not Schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells’s history, but history nevertheless.” He leaned forward. “The archives of the Order from the twelfth century on are still at Malta. They are not intact, but what is there holds no less than three”—he held 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 clear and unmistakable statement of the facts I am telling you.”

  “All right,” Spade said.

  “All right, sir. Grand Master Villiers de l’Isle d’Adam had this foot-high jeweled bird made by Turkish slaves in the castle of St. Angelo and sent it to Charles, who was in Spain. He sent it in a galley commanded by a French knight named Cormier or Corvere, a member of the Order.” His voice dropped to a whisper again. “It never reached Spain.” He smiled with compressed lips and asked: “You know of Barbarossa, Redbeard, Khair-ed-Din? No? A famous admiral of buccaneers sailing out of Algiers then. Well, sir, he took the Knights’ galley and he took the bird. The bird went to Algiers. That’s a fact. That’s a fact that the French historian Pierre Dan put in one of his letters from Algiers. He wrote that the bird had been there for more than a hundred years, until it was carried away by Sir Francis Verney, the English adventurer who was with the Algerian buccaneers for a while. Maybe it wasn’t, but Pierre Dan believed it was, and that’s good enough for me.

  “There’s nothing said about the bird in Lady Francis Verney’s Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Seventeenth Century, to be sure. I looked. And it’s pretty certain that Sir Francis didn’t have the bird when he died in a Messina hospital in 1615. He was stony broke. But, sir, there’s no denying that the bird did go to Sicily. It was there and it came into the possession 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 to Turin when he tried to revoke his abdication. Be that as it may, it turned up next in the possession of a Spaniard who had been with the army that took Naples in 1734—the father of Don José Monino y Redondo, Count of Floridabianca, who was Charles Ill’s chief minister. There’s nothing to show that it didn’t stay in that family until at least the end of the Carlist War in ’40. Then it appeared in Paris at just about the time that Paris was full of Carlists who had had to get out of Spain. One of them must have brought it with him, but, whoever he was, it’s likely he knew nothing about its real value. It had been—no doubt as a precaution during the Carlist trouble in Spain—painted or enameled over to look like nothing more than a fairly interesting black statuette. And in that disguise, sir, it was, you might say, kicked around Paris for seventy years by private owners and dealers too stupid to see what it was under the skin.”

  The fat man paused to smile and shake his head regretfully. Then he went on: “For seventy years, sir, this marvelous item was, as you might say, a football in the gutters of Paris—until 1911 when a Greek dealer named Charilaos Konstantinides found it in an obscure shop. It didn’t take Charilaos long to learn what it was and to acquire it. No thickness of enamel could conceal value from his eyes and nose. Well, sir, Charilaos was the man who traced most of its history and who identified it as what it actually was. I got wind of it and finally forced most of the history out of him, though I’ve been able to add a few details since.

  “Charilaos was in no hurry to convert his find into money at once. 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. Possibly he planned to do business with one of the modern descendants of the old Order—the English Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the Prussian Johanniterorden, or the Italian or German langues of the Sovereign Order of Malta—all wealthy orders.”

  The fat man raised his glass, smiled at its emptiness, and rose to fill it and Spade’s. “You begin to believe me a little?” he asked as he worked the siphon.

  “I haven’t said I didn’t.”

  “No,” Gutman chuckled. “But how you looked.” He sat down, drank generously, and patted his mouth with a white handkerchief. “Well, sir, to hold it safe while pursuing his researches into its history, Charilaos had re-enameled the bird, apparently just as it is now. One year to the very day after he had acquired it—that was possibly three months after I’d made him confess to me— I picked up the Times in London and read that his establishment had been burglarized and him murdered. I was in Paris the next day.” He shook his head sadly. “The bird was gone. By Gad, sir, I was wild. I didn’t believe anybody else knew what it was. I didn’t believe he had told anybody but me. A great quantity of stuff had been stolen. That made me think that the thief had simply taken the bird along with the rest of his plunder, not knowing what it was. Because I assure you that a thief who knew its value would not burden himself with anything else—no, sir—at least not anything less than crown jewels.”

  He shut his eyes and smiled complacently at an inner thought. He opened his eyes and said: “That was seventeen years ago. Well, sir, it took me seventeen years to locate that bird, but I did it. I wanted it, and I’m not a man that’s easily discouraged when he wants something.” His smile grew broad. “I wanted it and I found it. I want it and I’m going to have it.” He drained his glass, dried his lips again, and returned his handkerchief to his pocket. “I traced it to the home of a Russian general—one Kemidov—in a Constantinople
suburb. He didn’t know a thing about it. It was nothing but a black enameled figure to him, but his natural contrariness—the natural contrariness of a Russian general—kept him from selling it to me when I made him an offer. Perhaps in my eagerness I was a little unskillful, though not very. I don’t know about that. But I did know I wanted it and I was afraid this stupid soldier might begin to investigate his property, might chip off some of the enamel. So I sent some—ah—agents to get it. Well, sir, they got it and I haven’t got it.” He stood up and carried his empty glass to the table. “But I’m going to get it. Your glass, sir.”

  “Then the bird doesn’t belong to any of you?” Spade asked, “but to a General Kemidov?”

  “Belong?” the fat man said jovially. “Well, sir, you might say it belonged to the King of Spain, but I don’t see how you can honestly grant anybody else clear title to it—except by right of possession.” He clucked. “An article of that value that has passed from hand to hand by such means is clearly the property of whoever can get hold of it.”

  “Then it’s Miss O’Shaughnessy’s now?”

  “No, sir, except as my agent.”

  Spade said, “Oh,” ironically.

  Gutman, looking thoughtfully at the stopper of the whiskey-bottle in his hand, asked: “There’s no doubt that she’s got it now?”

  “Not much.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  The fat man set the bottle on the table with a bang. “But you said you did,” he protested.

  Spade made a careless gesture with one hand. “I meant to say I know where to get it when the time comes.”

  The pink bulbs of Gutman’s face arranged themselves more happily. “And you do?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  Spade grinned and said: “Leave that to me. That’s my end.”

  “When?”

  “When I’m ready.”

  The fat man pursed his lips and, smiling with only slight uneasiness, asked: “Mr. Spade, where is Miss O’Shaughnessy now?”