“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 dollars?”
“Oh, much more than that,” she said. “They didn’t pretend that they were sharing equally with me. They were simply hiring nie 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 ICemidov.”
“How?”
“Oh, but that’s not important,” she objected, “and wouldn’t help you”–she smiled impudenthy–“and is certainly none of your business.”
“This was in Constantinople?”
She hesitated, nodded, and said: “Marmora.”
He waved his cigarette at her, saying: “Co ahead, w’hat 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 tinie w’e 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 nie the truth.” Indignation had darkened her eyes to violet. “And that’s why I canie to you to get you to help me learn where the falcon was.”