The Maltese Falcon (24 page)

“Yes, but—” Gutman began, and stopped to look at the boy.

The boy advanced from the doorway, walking stiff-legged, with
his legs apart, until he was between Gutman and Cairo, almost in the center of the floor. He halted there, leaning forward slightly from the waist, his shoulders raised towards the front. The pistol in his hand still hung at his side, but his knuckles were white over its grip. His other hand was a small hard fist down at his other side. 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. He said to Spade in a voice cramped by passion: “You bastard, get up on your feet and go for your heater!”

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.”

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.”