The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett Page A

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 alarmclock 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