BRIGID

SPADE returned to the living-room and sat on an end of the sofa, elbows

on knees, cheeks in hands, looking at the floor and not at Brigid

O’Shaughnessy smiling weakly at him from the armchair. His eyes were

sultry. The creases between brows over his nose were deep. His nostrils

moved in and out with his breathing.

Brigid O’Shaughnessy, when it became apparent that he was not going to

look up at her, stopped smiling and regarded him with growing

uneasiness.

Red rage came suddenly into his face and he began to talk in a harsh

guttural voice. Holding his maddened face in his hands, glaring at the

floor, he cursed Dundy for five minutes without break, cursed him

obscenely, blasphemously, repetitiously, in a harsh guttural voice.

Then he took his face out of his hands, looked at the girl, grinned

sheepishly, and said: “Childish, huh? I know, but, by God, I do hate

being hit without hitting back.” He touched his chin with careful

fingers. “Not that it was so much of a sock at that.” He laughed and

lounged back on the sofa, crossing his legs. “A cheap enough price to

pay for winning.” His brows came together in a fleeting scowl. “Though

I’ll remember it.”

The girl, smiling again, left her chair and sat on the sofa beside him.

“You’re absolutely the wildest person I’ve ever known,” she said. “Do

you always carry on so high-handed?”

“I let him hit me, didn’t I?”

“Oh, yes, but a police official.”

“It wasn’t that,” Spade explained. “It was that in losing his head and

slugging me he overplayed his hand. If I’d mixed it with him then he

couldn’t’ve backed down. He’d’ve had to go through with it, and we’d’ve

had to tell that goofy story at headquarters.” He stared thoughtfully at

the girl, and asked: “What did you do to Cairo?”

“Nothing.” Her face became flushed. “I tried to frighten him into

keeping still until they had gone and he either got too frightened or

stubborn and yelled.”

“And then you smacked him with the gun?”

“I had to. He attacked me.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing.” Spade’s smile did not hide his

annoyance. “It’s just what I told you: you’re fumbling along by guess

and by God.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, face and voice soft with contrition, “Sam.”

“Sure you are.” He took tobacco and papers from his pockets and began to

make a cigarette. “Now you’ve had your talk with Cairo. Now you can talk

to me.”

She put a fingertip to her mouth, staring across the room at nothing

with widened eyes, and then, with narrower eyes, glanced quickly at

Spade. He was engrossed in the making of his cigarette. “Oh, yes,” she

began, “of course—” She took the finger away from her mouth and

smoothed her blue dress over her knees. She frowned at her knees.

Spade licked his cigarette, sealed it, and asked, “Well?” while he felt

for his lighter.

“But I didn’t,” she said, pausing between words as if she were selecting

them with great care, “have time to finish talking to him.” She stopped

frowning at her knees and looked at Spade with clear candid eyes. “We

were interrupted almost before we had begun.”

Spade lighted his cigarette and laughed his mouth empty of smoke. “Want

me to phone him and ask him to come back?”

She shook her head, not smiling. Her eyes moved back and forth between

her lids as she shook her head, maintaining their focus on Spade’s eyes.

Her eyes were inquisitive.

Spade put an arm across her back, cupping his hand over the smooth bare

white shoulder farthest from him. She leaned back into the bend of his

arm. He said: “Well, I’m listening.”

She twisted her head around to smile up at him with playful insolence,

asking: “Do you need your arm there for that?”

“No.” He removed his hand from her shoulder and let his arm drop down

behind her.

“You’re altogether unpredictable,” she murmured.

He nodded and said amiably: “I’m still listening.”

“Look at the time!” she exclaimed, wriggling a finger at the alarm-clock

perched atop the book saying two-fifty with its clumsily shaped hands.

“Uh-huh, it’s been a busy evening.”

“I must go.” She rose from the sofa. “This is terrible.”

Spade did not rise. He shook his head and said: “Not until you’ve told

me about it.”

“But look at the time,” she protested, “and it would take hours to tell

you.”

“It’ll have to take them then.”

“Am I a prisoner?” she asked gaily.

“Besides, there’s the kid outside. Maybe he hasn’t gone home to sleep

yet.”

Her gaiety vanished. “Do you think he’s still there?”

“It’s likely.”

She shivered. “Could you find out?”

“I could go down and see.”

“Oh, that’s—will you?”

Spade studied her anxious face for a moment and then got up from the

sofa saying: “Sure.” He got a hat and overcoat from the closet. “I’ll be

gone about ten minutes.”

“Do be careful,” she begged as she followed him to the corridor-door.

He said, “I will,” and went out.

* * * * *

Post Street was empty when Spade issued into it. He walked east a block,

crossed the street, walked west two blocks on the other side, recrossed

it, and returned to his building without having seen anyone except two

mechanics working on a car in a garage.

When he opened his apartment-door Brigid O’Shaughnessy was standing at

the bend in the passageway, holding Cairo’s pistol straight down at her

side.

“He’s still there,” Spade said.

She bit the inside of her lip and turned slowly, going back into the

living-room. Spade followed her in, put his hat and overcoat on a chair,

said, “So we’ll have time to talk,” and went into the kitchen.

He had put the coffee-pot on the stove when she came to the door, and

was slicing a slender loaf of French bread. She stood in the doorway and

watched him with preoccupied eyes. The fingers of her left hand idly

caressed the body and barrel of the pistol her right hand still held.

“The table-cloth’s in there,” he said, pointing the bread-knife at a

cupboard that was one breakfast-nook partition.

She set the table while he spread liverwurst on, or put cold corned beef

between, the small ovals of bread he had sliced. Then he poured the

coffee, added brandy to it from a squat bottle, and they sat at the

table. They sat side by side on one of the benches. She put the pistol

down on the end of the bench nearer her.

“You can start now, between bites,” he said.

She made a face at him, complained, “You’re the most insistent person,”

and bit a sandwich.

“Yes, and wild and unpredictable. What’s this bird, this falcon, that

everybody’s all steamed up about?”

She chewed the beef and bread in her mouth, swallowed it, looked

attentively at the small crescent its removal had made in the sandwich’s

rim, and asked: “Suppose I wouldn’t tell you? Suppose I wouldn’t tell

you anything at all about it? What would you do?”

“You mean about the bird?”

“I mean about the whole thing.”

“I wouldn’t be too surprised,” he told her, grinning so that the edges

of his jaw-teeth were visible, “to know what to do next.”

“And that would be?” She transferred her attention from the sandwich to

his face. “That’s what I wanted to know: what would you do next?”

He shook his head.

Mockery rippled in a smile on her face. “Something wild and

unpredictable?”

“Maybe. But I don’t see what you’ve got to gain by covering up now. It’s

coming out bit by bit anyhow. There’s a lot of it I don’t know, but

there’s some of it I do, and some more that I can guess at, and, give me

another day like this, I’ll soon be knowing things about it that you

don’t know.”

“I suppose you do now,” she said, looking at her sandwich again, her

face serious. “But—oh!—I’m so tired of it, and I do so hate having to

talk about it. Wouldn’t it—wouldn’t it be just as well to wait and let

you learn about it as you say you will?”

Spade laughed. “I don’t know. You’ll have to figure that out for

yourself. My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable

monkey-wrench into the machinery. It’s all right with me, if you’re sure

none of the flying pieces will hurt you.”

She moved her bare shoulders uneasily, but said nothing. For several

minutes they ate in silence, he phlegmatically, she thoughtfully. Then

she said in a hushed voice: “I’m afraid of you, and that’s the truth.”

He said: “That’s not the truth.”

“It is,” she insisted in the same low voice. “I know two men I’m afraid

of and I’ve seen both of them tonight.”

“I can understand your being afraid of Cairo,” Spade said. “He’s out of

your reach.”

“And you aren’t?”

“Not that way,” he said and grinned.

She blushed. She picked up a slice of bread encrusted with grey

liverwurst. She put it down on her plate. She wrinkled her white

forehead and she said: “It’s a black figure, as you know, smooth and

shiny, of a bird, a hawk or falcon, about that high.” She held her hands

a foot apart.

“What makes it important?”

She sipped coffee and brandy before she shook her head. “I don’t know,”

she said. “They’d never tell me. They promised me five hundred pounds if

I helped them get it. Then Floyd said afterward, after we’d left Joe,

that he’d give me seven hundred and fifty.”

“So it must be worth more than seventy-five hundred dollars?”

“Oh, much more than that,” she said. “They didn’t pretend that they were

sharing equally with me. They were simply hiring me to help them.”

“To help them how?”

She lifted her cup to her lips again. Spade, not moving the domineering

stare of his yellow-grey eyes from her face, began to make a cigarette.

Behind them the percolator bubbled on the stove.

“To help them get it from the man who had it,” she said slowly when she

had lowered her cup, “a Russian named Kemidov.”

“How?”

“Oh, but that’s not important,” she objected, “and wouldn’t help

you”—she smiled impudently—“and is certainly none of your business.”

“This was in Constantinople?”

She hesitated, nodded, and said: “Marmora.”

He waved his cigarette at her, saying: “Go ahead, what happened then?”

“But that’s all. I’ve told you. They promised me five hundred pounds to

help them and I did and then we found that Joe Cairo meant to desert us,

taking the falcon with him and leaving us nothing. So we did exactly

that to him, first. But then I wasn’t any better off than I had been

before, because Floyd hadn’t any intention at all of paying me the seven

hundred and fifty pounds he had promised me. I had learned that by the

time we got here. He said we would go to New York, where he would sell

it and give me my share, but I could see he wasn’t telling me the

truth.” Indignation had darkened her eyes to violet. “And that’s why I

came to you to get you to help me learn where the falcon was.”

“And suppose you’d got it? What then?”

“Then I’d have been in a position to talk terms with Mr. Floyd Thursby.”

Spade squinted at her and suggested: “But you wouldn’t have known where

to take it to get more money than he’d give you, the larger sum that you

knew he expected to sell it for?”

“I did not know,” she said.

Spade scowled at the ashes he had dumped on his plate. “What makes it

worth all that money?” he demanded. “You must have some idea, at least

be able to guess.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea.”

He directed the scowl at her. “What’s it made of?”

“Porcelain or black stone. I don’t know. I’ve never touched it. I’ve

only seen it once, for a few minutes. Floyd showed it to me when we’d

first got hold of it.”

Spade mashed the end of his cigarette in his plate and made one draught

of the coffee and brandy in his cup. His scowl had gone away. He wiped

his lips with his napkin, dropped it crumpled on the table, and spoke

casually: “You _are_ a liar.”

She got up and stood at the end of the table, looking down at him with

dark abashed eyes in a pinkening face. “I am a liar,” she said. “I have

always been a liar.”

“Don’t brag about it. It’s childish.” His voice was good-humored. He

came out from between table and bench. “Was there any truth at all in

that yarn?”

She hung her head. Dampness glistened on her dark lashes. “Some,” she

whispered.

“How much?”

“Not—not very much.”

Spade put a hand under her chin and lifted her head. He laughed into her

wet eyes and said: “We’ve got all night before us. I’ll put some more

brandy in some more coffee and we’ll try again.”

Her eyelids drooped. “Oh, I’m so tired,” she said tremulously, “so tired

of it all, of myself, of lying and thinking up lies, and of not knowing

what is a lie and what is the truth. I wish I—”

She put her hands up to Spade’s cheeks, put her open mouth hard against

his mouth, her body flat against his body.

Spade’s arms went around her, holding her to him, muscles bulging his

blue sleeves, a hand cradling her head, its fingers half lost among red

hair, a hand moving groping fingers over her slim back. His eyes burned

yellowly.

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