“There’s nothing said about the bird in Lady Francis Verney’s Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Seventeenth Century, to be sure. I looked. And it’s pretty certain that Sir Francis didn’t have the bird when he died in a Messina hospital in 1615. He was stony broke. But, sir, there’s no denying that the bird did go to Sicily. It was there and it came into the possession there of Victor Amadeus II some time after he became king in 1713, and it was one of his gifts to his wife when he married in Chambéry after abdicating. That is a fact, sir. Carutti, the author of Storia del Regno di Vittorio Amadeo II, himself vouched for it.
“Maybe they–Amadeo and his wife–took it along with them to Turin when he tried to revoke his abdication. Be that as it may, it turned up next in the possession of a Spaniard who had been with the army that took Naples in 1734–the father of Don José Monino y Redondo, Count of Floridablanca, who was Charles III’s chief minister. There’s nothing to show that it didn’t stay in that family until at least the end of the Carlist War in ’40. Then it appeared in Paris at just about the time that Paris was full of Carlists who had had to get out of Spain. One of them must have brought it with him, but, whoever he was, it’s likely he knew nothing about its real value. It had been–no doubt as a precaution dnring the Carlist trouble in Spain–painted or enameled over to look like nothing more than a fairly interesting black statuette. And in that disguise, sir, it was, you might say, kicked around Paris for seventy years b private owners and dealers too stupid to see what it was under the skin.”
The fat man paused to smile and shake his head regretfully. Then he went on: “For seventy years, sir, this marvelous item was, as you might Say, a football in the gutters of Paris–until 1911 when a Greek dealer named Charilaos Konstantinides found it in an obscure shop. It didn’t take Charilaos long to learn what it was and to acquire it. No thickness of enamel could conceal value from his eyes and nose. Well, sir, Charilaos was the man who traced most of its history and who identified it as what it actually was. I got wind of it and finally forced most of the history out of him, though I’ve been able to add a few details since.
“Charilaos was in no hurry to convert his find into money at once. He knew that–enormous as its intrinsic value was–a far higher, a terrific, price could be obtained for it once its authenticity was established beyond doubt. Possibly he planned to do business with one of the modern descendents of the old Order–the English Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the Prussian Johanniterorden, or the Italian or German langues of the Sovereign Order of Malta–all wealthy orders.”
The fat man raised his glass, smiled at its emptiness, and rose to fill it and Spade’s. “You begin to believe me a little?” he asked as he worked the siphon.
“I haven’t said I didn’t.”
“No,” Gutman chuckled. “But how you looked.” He sat down, drank generously, and patted his mouth with a white handkerchief. “Well, sir, to hold it safe while pursuing his researches into its history, CharilaoS had re-enamelled the bird, apparently just as it is now. One year to the very day after he had acquired it–that was possibly three months after I’d made him confess to me–I picked up the Times in London and read that his establishment had been burglarized and him murdered. I was in Paris the next day.” He shook his head sadly. “The bird was gone. By Gad, sir, I was wild. I didn’t believe anybody else knew what it was. I didn’t believe he had told anybody but me. A great quantity of stuff had been stolen. That made me think that the thief had simply taken the bird along with the rest of his plunder, not knowing what it was. Because I assure you that a thief who knew its value would not burden himself with anything else–no, sir–at least not anything less than crown jewels.”