THE MALTESE FALCON by Dashiell Hammett

Dundy, the first of the three into the hiving-room, moved swiftly to Cairo’s side, put a hand on his own hip under his overcoat, a hand on the Levantine’s wrist, and growled: “What are you up to here?”

Cairo took the red-smeared hand from his head and flourished it close to the Lieutenant’s face. Uncovered by the hand, his forehead showed a three-inch ragged tear. “This is what she has done,” he cried. “Look at it.”

The girl put her feet down on the floor and looked warily from Dundy, holding Cairo’s wrist, to Tom Polhaus, standing a little behind them, to Spade, leaning against the door-frame. Spade’s face was placid. When his gaze met hers his yellow-grey eyes glinted for an instant with malicious humor and then became expressionless again.

“Did you do that?” Dundy asked the girl, nodding at Cairo’s cut head.

She looked at Spade again. He did not in any way respond to the appeal in her eyes. He leaned against the door-frame and observed the occupants of the room with the polite detached air of a disinterested spectator.

The girl turned her eyes up to Dundy’s. Her eyes were wide and dark and earnest. “I had to,” she said in a low throbbing voice. “I was all alone in here with him when he attacked me. I couldn’t–I tried to keep him off. I–I couldn’t make myself shoot him.”

“Oh, you liar!” Cairo cried, trying unsuccessfully to pull the arm that held his pistol out of Dundy’s grip. “Oh, you dirty filthy liar!” He twisted himself around to face Dundy. “She’s lying awfully. I came here in good faith and was attacked by both of them, and when you came he went out to talk to you, leaving her here with this pistol, and then she said they were going to kill me after you left, and I called for help, so you wouldn’t heave nie here to be murdered, and then she struck me with the pistol.”

“Here, give me this thing,” Dundy said, and took the pistol from Cairo’s hand, “Now let’s get this straight. What’d you come here for?”

“He sent for me.” Cairo twisted his head around to stare defiantly at Spade. “He called me up on the phone and asked me to come here.”

Spade blinked sleepily at the Levantine and said nothing.

Dundy asked: “What’d he want you for?”

Cairo withheld his reply until he had mopped his bloody forehead and chin with a lavender-barred silk handkerchief. By then some of the indignation in his manner had been replaced by caution. “He said he wanted–they wanted–to see me. I didn’t know what about.”

Tom Polhaus lowered his head, sniffed the odor of chypre that the mopping handkerchief had released in the air, and turned his head to scowl interrogatively at Spade. Spade winked at him and went on rolling a cigarette.

Dundy asked: “Well. what happened then?”

“Then they attacked me. She struck me first, and then he choked me and took time pistol out of my pocket. I don’t know what they would have done next if you hadn’t arrived at that moment. J dare say they would have murdered me then and there. When he went out to answer the bell he left her here with the pistol to watch over me.”

Brigid O’Shaughnessy jumped out of the armchair crying, “Why don’t you make him tell the truth?” and slapped Cairo on the cheek.

Cairo yelled inarticulately.

Dundy pushed the girl back into the chair with the hand that was not holding the Levantine’s arm and growled: “None of that now.”

Spade, lighting his cigarette, grinned softly through smoke and told Tom: “She’s impulsive.”

“Yeah,” Tom agreed.

Dundy scowled down at the girl and asked: “What do you want us to think the truth is?”

“Not what he said,” she replied. “Not anything he said.” She turned to Spade. “Is it?”

“How do I know’?” Spade responded. “I was out in the kitchen mixing an omelette when it all happened, wasn’t I?”

She wrinkled her forehead, studying him with eyes that perplexity clouded.

Tom grunted in disgust.

Dundy, still scowling at the girl, ignored Spade’s speech and asked her: “If he’s not telling the truth, how come he did the squawking for help, and not you?”

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