Gutman, looking as if he could not believe he had heard what he had heard, asked: “Do what?”
“Give the police Cairo.”
Gutman seemed about to laugh, but he did not laugh. Finally he exclaimed: “Well, by Gad, sir!” in an uncertain tone.
“It’s not as good as giving them the punk,” Spade said. “Cairo’s not a gunman and he carries a smaller gun than Thursby and Jacobi w’ere shot with. ‘We’ll have to go to more trouble framing him, but that’s better than not giving the police anybody.”
Cairo cried in a voice shrill with indignation: “Suppose we give them you, Mr. Spade, or Miss O’Shaughnessy? How’ about that if you’re so set on giving them somebody?”
Spade smiled at the Levantine and answered him evenly: “You people want the falcon. I’ve got it. A fall-guy is part of the price I’m asking. As for Miss O’Shaughnessy”–his dispassionate glance moved to her white perplexed face and then back to Cairo and his shoulders rose and fell a fraction of an inch–“if you think si-ic can be rigged for the part I’m perfectly willing to discuss it w’ith you.”
The girl put her hands to her throat, uttered a short strangled cry, and moved farther away from him.
Cairo, his face and body twitching with excitement, exclaimed: “You seem to forget that you are not in a position to insist on anything.”
Spade laughed, a harsh-i derisive snort.
Gutman said, in a voice that tried to make firmness ingratiating: “Come now, gentlemen, let’s keep our discussion on a friendly basis; but there certainly is”–he was addressing Spade–“something in ‘what Mr. Cairo says. You must take into consideration the–”
“Like hell I must.” Spade flung his words out with a brutal sort of carelessness that gave them more weight than they could have got from dramatic emphasis or from loudness. “If you kill me, how are you going to get the bird? If I know you can’t afford to kill me till you have it, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?”
Gutman cocked his head to the left and considered these questions. His eyes twinkled between puckered lids. Presently he gave his genial answer: “Well, sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill.”
“Sure,” Spade agreed, “but they’re not much good unless the threat of death is behind them to hold the victim down. See what I mean? If you try anything I don’t like I won’t stand for it. I’ll make it a matter of your having to call it off or kill me, knowing you can’t afford to kill me.”
“I see what you mean.” Gutman chuckled. “That is an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides, because, as you know, sir, men are likely to forget in the heat of action where their best interest lies and let their emotions carry them away.”
Spade too was all smiling blandness. “That’s the trick, from my side,” he said, “to make my play strong enough that it ties you up, but yet not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgment.”
Gutman said fondly: “By Cad, sir, you are a character!”
Joel Cairo jumped up from his chair and went around behind the boy and behind Gutman’s chair. He bent over the back of Gutman’s chair and, screening his mouth-i and the fat man’s ear with his empty hand, whispered. Gutman listened attentively, shutting his eyes.
Spade grinned at Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Her lips smiled feebly in response, but there was no change in her eyes; they did not lose their numb stare. Spade turned to the boy: “Two to one they’re selling you out, son.”
The boy did not say anything. A trembling in his knees began to shake the knees of his trousers.
Spade addressed Gutman: “I hope you’re not letting yourself be in– fluenced by the guns these pocket-edition desperadoes are waving.”
Gutman opened his eyes. Cairo stopped whispering and stood erect behind the fat n-ian’s chair.
Spade said: “I’ve practiced taking them away from both of them, so there’ll be no trouble there. The punk is–”
In a voice choked horribly by emotion the boy cried, “All right!” and jerked his pistol up in front of his chest.