The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett Page B

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