The Maltese Falcon Page 6

  “You aren’t,” he asked as he sat down, “exactly the sort of person you pretend to be, are you?”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” she said in her hushed voice, looking at him with puzzled eyes.

  “Schoolgirl manner,” he explained, “stammering and blushing and all that.”

  She blushed and replied hurriedly, not looking at him: “I told you this afternoon that I’ve been bad—worse than you could know.”

  “That’s what I mean,” he said. “You told me that this afternoon in the same words, same tone. It’s a speech you’ve practiced.”

  After a moment in which she seemed confused almost to the point of tears she laughed and said: “Very well, then, Mr. Spade, I’m not at all the sort of person I pretend to be. I’m eighty years old, incredibly wicked, and an iron-molder by trade. But if it’s a pose it’s one I’ve grown into, so you won’t expect me to drop it entirely, will you?”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” he assured her. “Only it wouldn’t be all right if you were actually that innocent. We’d never get anywhere.”

  “I won’t be innocent,” she promised with a hand on her heart.

  “I saw Joel Cairo tonight,” he said in the manner of one making polite conversation.

  Gaiety went out of her face. Her eyes, focused on his profile, became frightened, then cautious. He had stretched his legs out and was looking at his crossed feet. His face did not indicate that he was thinking about anything.

  There was a long pause before she asked uneasily:

  “You—you know him?”

  “I saw him tonight.” Spade did not look up and he maintained his light conversational tone. “He was going to see George Arliss.”

  “You mean you talked to him?”

  “Only for a minute or two, till the curtain-bell rang.”

  She got up from the settee and went to the fireplace to poke the fire. She changed slightly the position of an ornament on the mantelpiece, crossed the room to get a box of cigarettes from a table in a corner, straightened a curtain, and returned to her seat. Her face now was smooth and unworried.

  Spade grinned sidewise at her and said: “You’re good. You’re very good.”

  Her face did not change. She asked quietly: “What did he say?”

  “About what?”

  She hesitated. “About me.”

  “Nothing.” Spade turned to hold his lighter under the end of her cigarette. His eyes were shiny in a wooden satan’s face.

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

  “He offered me five thousand dollars for the black bird.”

  She started, her teeth tore the end of her cigarette, and her eyes, after a swift alarmed glance at Spade, turned away from him.

  “You’re not going to go around poking at the fire and straightening up the room again, are you?” he asked lazily.

  She laughed a clear merry laugh, dropped the mangled cigarette into a tray, and looked at him with clear merry eyes. “I won’t,” she promised. “And what did you say?”

  “Five thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

  She smiled, but when, instead of smiling, he looked gravely at her, her smile became faint, confused, and presently vanished. In its place came a hurt, bewildered look. “Surely you’re not really considering it,” she said.

  “Why not? Five thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

  “But, Mr. Spade, you promised to help me.” Her hands were on his arm. “I trusted you. You can’t—” She broke off, took her hands from his sleeve and worked them together.

  Spade smiled gently into her troubled eyes. “Don’t let’s try to figure out how much you’ve trusted me,” he said. “I promised to help you—sure—but you didn’t say anything about any black birds.”

  “But you must’ve known or—or you wouldn’t have mentioned it to me. You do know now. You won’t—you can’t—treat me like that.” Her eyes were cobalt-blue prayers.

  “Five thousand dollars is,” he said for the third time, “a lot of money.”

  She lifted her shoulders and hands and let them fall in a gesture that accepted defeat. “It is,” she agreed in a small dull voice. “It is far more than I could ever offer you, if I must bid for your loyalty.”

  Spade laughed. His laughter was brief and somewhat bitter. “That is good,” he said, “coming from you. What have you given me besides money? Have you given me any of your confidence? any of the truth? any help in helping you? Haven’t you tried to buy my loyalty with money and nothing else? Well, if I’m peddling it, why shouldn’t I let it go to the highest bidder?”

  “I’ve given you all the money I have.” Tears glistened in her white-ringed eyes. Her voice was hoarse, vibrant. “I’ve thrown myself on your mercy, told you that without your help I’m utterly lost. What else is there?” She suddenly moved close to him on the settee and cried angrily: “Can I buy you with my body?”

  Their faces were a few inches apart. Spade took her face between his hands and he kissed her mouth roughly and contemptuously. Then he sat back and said: “I’ll think it over.” His face was hard and furious.

  She sat still holding her numbed face where his hands had left it.

  He stood up and said: “Christ! there’s no sense to this.” He took two steps towards the fireplace and stopped, glowering at the burning logs, grinding his teeth together.

  She did not move.

  He turned to face her. The two vertical lines above his nose were deep clefts between red wales. “I don’t give a damn about your honesty,” he told her, trying to make himself speak calmly. “I don’t care what kind of tricks you’re up to, what your secrets are, but I’ve got to have something to show that you know what you’re doing.”

  “I do know. Please believe that I do, and that it’s all for the best, and—”

  “Show me,” he ordered. “I’m willing to help you. I’ve done what I could so far. If necessary I’ll go ahead blindfolded, but I can’t do it without more confidence in you than I’ve got now. You’ve got to convince me that you know what it’s all about, that you’re not simply fiddling around by guess and by God, hoping it’ll come out all right somehow in the end.”

  “Can’t you trust me just a little longer?”

  “How much is a little? And what are you waiting for?”

  She bit her lip and looked down. “I must talk to Joel Cairo,” she said almost inaudibly.

  “You can see him tonight,” Spade said, looking at his watch. “His show will be out soon. We can get him on the phone at his hotel.”

  She raised her eyes, alarmed. “But he can’t come here. I can’t let him know where I am. I’m afraid.”

  “My place,” Spade suggested.

  She hesitated, working her lips together, then asked: “Do you think he’d go there?”

  Spade nodded.

  “All right,” she exclaimed, jumping up, her eyes large and bright. “Shall we go now?”

  She went into the next room. Spade went to the table in the corner and silently pulled the drawer out. The drawer held two packs of playing-cards, a pad of score-cards for bridge, a brass screw, a piece of red string, and a gold pencil. He had shut the drawer and was lighting a cigarette when she returned wearing a small dark hat and a grey kidskin coat, carrying his hat and coat.

  Their taxicab drew up behind a dark sedan that stood directly in front of Spades street-door. Iva Archer was alone in the sedan, sitting at the wheel. Spade lifted his hat to her and went indoors with Brigid O’Shaughnessy. In the lobby he halted beside one of the benches and asked: “Do you mind waiting here a moment? I won’t be long.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” Brigid O’Shaughnessy said, sitting down. “You needn’t hurry.”

  Spade went out to the sedan. When he had opened the sedan’s door Iva spoke quickly: “I’ve got to talk to you. Sam. Can’t I come in?” Her face was pale and nervous.

  “Not now.”

  Iva clicked her teeth togeth
er and asked sharply: “Who is she?”

  “I’ve only a minute, Iva,” Spade said patiently. “What is it?”

  “Who is she?” she repeated, nodding at the street-door.

  He looked away from her, down the street. In front of a garage on the next corner an undersized youth of twenty or twenty-one in neat grey cap and overcoat loafed with his back against a wall. Spade frowned and returned his gaze to Iva’s insistent face. “What is the matter?” he asked. “Has anything happened? You oughtn’t to be here at this time of night.”

  “I’m beginning to believe that,” she complained. “You told me I oughtn’t to come to the office, and now I oughtn’t to come here. Do you mean I oughtn’t to chase after you? If that’s what you mean why don’t you say it right out?”

  “Now, Iva, you’ve got no right to take that attitude.”

  “I know I haven’t. I haven’t any rights at all, it seems, where you’re concerned. I thought I did. I thought your pretending to love me gave me—”

  Spade said wearily: “This is no time to be arguing about that, precious. What was it you wanted to see me about?”

  “I can’t talk to you here, Sam. Can’t I come in?”

  “Not now.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  Spade said nothing.

  She made a thin line of her mouth, squirmed around straight behind the wheel, and started the sedan’s engine, staring angrily ahead.

  When the sedan began to move Spade said, “Good night, Iva,” shut the door, and stood at the curb with his hat in his hand until it had been driven away. Then he went indoors again.

  Brigid O’Shaughnessy rose smiling cheerfully from the bench and they went up to his apartment.

  7

  G IN THE AIR

  In his bedroom that was a living-room now the wall-bed was up, Spade took Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s hat and coat, made her comfortable in a padded rocking chair, and telephoned the Hotel Belvedere. Cairo had not returned from the theatre. Spade left his telephone-number with the request that Cairo call him as soon as he came in.

  Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell the girl about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact voice that was devoid of emphasis or pauses, though now and then he repeated a sentence slightly rearranged, as if it were important that each detail be related exactly as it had happened.

  At the beginning Brigid O’Shaughnessy listened with only partial attentiveness, obviously more surprised by his telling the story than interested in it, her curiosity more engaged with his purpose in telling the story than with the story he told; but presently, as the story went on, it caught her more and more fully and she became still and receptive.

  A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half an hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.

  Flitcraft had inherited seventy thousand dollars from his father, and, with his success in real estate, was worth something in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars at the time he vanished. His affairs were in order, though there were enough loose ends to indicate that he had not been setting them in order preparatory to vanishing. A deal that would have brought him an attractive profit, for instance, was to have been concluded the day after the one on which he disappeared. There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going. 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.

  “He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”

  When he had reached this point in his story the telephone-bell rang.

  “Hello,” Spade said into the instrument. “Mr. Cairo?… This is Spade. Can you come up to my place—Post Street—now? … Yes, I think it is.” He looked at the girl, pursed his lips, and then said rapidly: “Miss O’Shaughnessy is here and wants to see you.”

  Brigid O’Shaughnessy frowned and stirred in her chair, but did not say anything.

  Spade put the telephone down and told her: “He’ll be up in a few minutes. Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles—that was his first name—Pierce. He had an automobile-business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season.”

  Spade had not been told very definitely what to do when he found Flitcraft. They talked in Spade’s room at the Davenport. Flitcraft had no feeling of guilt. He had left his first family well provided for, and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he could make that reasonableness clear to Spade. He had never told anybody his story before, and thus had not had to attempt to make its reasonableness explicit. He tried now.

  “I got it all right,” Spade told Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway, it came out all right. She didn’t want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her—the way she looked at it—she didn’t want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around.

  “Here’s what had happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger—well, affectionately—when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

  Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

  It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

  “He went to Seattle that afternoon,” Spade said, “and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around a
nd then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new saladrecipes. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

  “How perfectly fascinating,” Brigid O’Shaughnessy said. She left her chair and stood in front of him, close. Her eyes were wide and deep. “I don’t have to tell you how utterly at a disadvantage you’ll have me, with him here, if you choose.”

  Spade smiled slightly without separating his lips. “No, you don’t have to tell me,” he agreed.

  “And you know I’d never have placed myself in this position if I hadn’t trusted you completely.” Her thumb and forefinger twisted a black button on his blue coat.

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

  “But you know it’s so,” she insisted.

  “No, I don’t know it.” He patted the hand that was twisting the button. “My asking for reasons why I should trust you brought us here. Don’t let’s confuse things. You don’t have to trust me, anyhow, as long as you can persuade me to trust you.”

  She studied his face. Her nostrils quivered.

  Spade laughed. He patted her hand again and said: “Don’t worry about that now. He’ll be here in a moment. Get your business with him over, and then we’ll see how we’ll stand.”

  “And you’ll let me go about it—with him—in my own way?”

  “Sure.”

  She turned her hand under his so that her fingers pressed his. She said softly: “You’re a God-send.”