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without having seen anyone except two mechanics working on a car in a garage.
When he opened his apartment-door brigid o'shaughnessy was standing at the bend in the
passageway, holding cairo's pistol straight down at her side.
"He's still there," spade said.
She bit the inside of her lip and turned slowly, going back into the living-room. Spade
followed her in, put his hat and overcoat on a chair, said, "so we'll have time to talk," and went
into the kitchen.
He had put the coffee-pot on the stove when she came to the door, and was slicing a
slender loaf of french bread. She stood in the doorway and watched him with preoccupied eyes.
The fingers of her left hand idly caressed the body and barrel of the pistol her right hand still
held.
"The table-cloth's in there," he said, pointing the bread-knife at a cupboard that was one
breakfast-nook partition.
She set the table while he spread liverwurst on, or put cold corned beef between, the
small ovals of bread he had sliced. Then he poured the coffee, added brandy to it from a squat
bottle, and they sat at the table. They sat side by side on one of the benches. She put the pistol
down on the end of the bench nearer her.
"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 wouldn 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 me. 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 me 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 kemidov."
"How?"
"Oh, but that's not important," she objected, "and wouldn't help you"--she smiled
impudently--"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, what 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 time we 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 me the truth."
indignation had darkened her eyes to violet. "And that's why I came to you to get you to help me
learn where the falcon was."
"And suppose you'd got it? What then?"
"Then I'd have been in a position to talk terms with mr. floyd thursby."
Spade squinted at her and suggested: "but you wouldn't have known where to take it to
get more money than he'd give you, the larger sum that you knew he expected to sell it for?"
"I did not know," she said.
Spade scowled at the ashes he had dumped on his plate. "What makes it worth all that
money?" he demanded. "You must have some idea, at least be able to guess."
"I haven't the slightest idea."
He directed the scowl at her. "What's it made of?"
"Porcelain or black stone. I don't know. I've never touched it. I've only seen it once, for a
few minutes. Floyd showed it to me when we'd first got hold of it."
Spade mashed the end of his cigarette in his plate and made one draught of the coffee and
brandy in his cup. His scowl had gone away. He wiped his lips with his napkin, dropped it
crumpled on the table, and spoke casually: "you are a liar."
She got up and stood at the end of the table, looking down at him with dark abashed eyes
in a pinkening face. "I am a liar," she said. "I have always been a liar."
"Don't brag about it. It's childish." his voice was good-humored. He came out from
between table and bench. "Was there any truth at all in that yarn?"
She hung her head. Dampness glistened on her dark lashes. "Some," she whispered.
"How much?"
"Not--not very much."
Spade put a hand under her chin and lifted her head. He laughed into her wet eyes and
said: "we've got all night before us. I'll put some more brandy in some more coffee and we'll try
again."
Her eyelids drooped. "Oh, I'm so tired," she said tremulously, "so tired of it all, of myself,
of lying and thinking up lies, and of not knowing what is a lie and what is the truth. I wish i--"
she put her hands up to spade's cheeks, put her open mouth hard against his mouth, her
body flat against his body.
Spade's arms went around her, holding her to him, muscles bulging his blue sleeves, a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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