The Maltese falcon by Dashiell Hammett

car in a garage.
    When he opened his apartment-door Brigid O'Shaughriessy 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 ees. 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 wouhdn'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 coining 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, hooking 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 monkeywrench 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 nie. 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