Spade nodded politely.
The fat man screwed up his eves and asked: “What do you know, sir, about the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, later called the Knights of Rhodes and other things?”
Spade waved his cigar. “Not much–only what I remember from history in school–Crusaders or something.”
“Very good. Now you don’t remember that Suleiman the Magnificent chased them out of Rhodes in 1523?”
“No.”
“Well, sir, he did, and they settled in Crete. And they stayed there for seven years, until r 530 when they persuaded the Emperor Charles V to give them”–Gutman held up three puffy fingers and counted them– “Malta, Gozo, and Tripoli.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, sir, but with these conditions: they were to pay the Emperor each year the tribute of one”–he held up a finger–“faleon in acknowledgment that Malta was still under Spain, and if they ever left the island it was to revert to Spain. Understand? He was giving it to them, but not unless they used it, and they couldn’t give or sell it to anybody else.”
“Yes.”
The fat man looked over his shoulders at the three closed doors, hunched his chair a few inches nearer Spade’s, and reduced his voice to a husky whisper: “Have you any conception of the extreme, the immeasurable, wealth of the Order at that time?”
“If I remember,” Spade said, “they were pretty well fixed.”
Gutman smiled indulgently. “Pretty well, sir, is putting it mildly.” His whisper became lower and more purring. “They were rolling in wealth, sir. You’ve no idea. None of us has any idea. For years they had preyed on the Saraeens, had taken nobody knows what spoils of gems, precious metals, silks, ivories–the cream of the cream of the East. That is history, sir. We all know that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.
“Well, now, the Emperor Charles has given them Malta, and all the rent he asks is one insignificant bird per annum, just as a matter of form. What could be more natural than for these immeasurably wealthy Knights to look around for some way of expressing their gratitude? Well, sir, that’s exactly what they did, and they hit on the happy thought of sending Charles for the first year’s tribute, not an insignificant live bird, but a glorious golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels in their coffers. And–remember, sir–they had fine ones, the finest out of Asia.” Gutman stopped whispering. His sleek dark eyes examined Spade’s face, which was placid. The fat man asked: “Well, sir, what do you think of that?”
“I don’t know.”
The fat man smiled complacently. “These are facts, historical facts, not schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells’s history, but history nevertheless.” He leaned forward. “The archives of the Order from the twelfth century on are still at Malta. They are not intact, but what is there holds no less than three”–he held up three fingers–“referenees that can’t be to anything else but this jeweled falcon. In J. Delaville Le Roulx’s Les Archives de l’Ordre de Saint-Jean there is a reference to it–oblique to be sure, but a reference still. And the unpublished–because unfinished at the time of his death–supplement to Paoli’s Dell’ origine ed instituto del sacro militar ordine has a clear and unmistakable statement of the facts I am telling you.”
“All right,” Spade said.
“All right, sir. Grand Master Villiers de l’Isle d’Adam had this foothigh jeweled bird made by Turkish slaves in the castle of St. Angelo and sent it to Charles, who was in Spain. He sent it in a galley commanded by a French knight named Cormier or Corvere, a member of the Order.” His voice dropped to a whisper again. “It never reached Spain.” He smiled with compressed lips and asked: “You know of Barbarossa, Redheard, Khair-ed-Din? No? A famous admiral of buccaneers sailing out of Algiers then. Well, sir, he took the Knights’ galley and he took the bird. The bird went to Algiers. That’s a fact. That’s a fact that the French historian Pierre Dan put in one of his letters from Algiers. He wrote that the bird had been there for more than a hundred years, until it was carried away by Sir Francis Vernev, the English adventurer who was with the Algerian buccaneers for a while. Maybe it wasn’t, but Pierre Dan believed it was, and that’s good enough for me.