The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett [18]
Joel Cairo awakened slowly. His eyes opened first, but a full minute passed before they fixed their gaze on any definite part of the ceiling. Then he shut his mouth and swallowed, exhaling heavily through his nose afterward. He drew in one foot and turned a hand over on his thigh. Then he raised his head from the chair-back, looked around the office in confusion, saw Spade, and sat up. He opened his mouth to speak, started, clapped a hand to his face where Spade’s fist had struck and where there was now a florid bruise.
Cairo said through his teeth, painfully: “I could have shot you, Mr. Spade.”
“You could have tried,” Spade conceded.
“I did not try.”
“I know.”
“Then why did you strike me after I was disarmed?”
“Sorry,” Spade said, and grinned wolfishly, showing his jaw-teeth, “but imagine my embarrassment when I found that five-thousand-dollar offer was just hooey.”
“You are mistaken, Mr. Spade. That was, and is, a genuine offer.”
“What the hell?” Spade’s surprise was genuine.
“I am prepared to pay five thousand dollars for the figure’s return.” Cairo took his hand away from his bruised face and sat up prim and business-like again. “You have it?”
“No.”
“If it is not here”—Cairo was very politely skeptical—“why should you have risked serious injury to prevent my searching for it?”
“I should sit around and let people come in and stick me up?” Spade flicked a finger at Cairo’s possessions on the desk. “You’ve got my apartment-address. Been up there yet?”
“Yes, Mr. Spade. I am ready to pay five thousand dollars for the figure’s return, but surely it is natural enough that I should try first to spare the owner that expense if possible.”
“Who is he?”
Cairo shook his head and smiled. “You will have to forgive my not answering that question.”
“Will I?” Spade leaned forward smiling with tight lips. “I’ve got you by the neck, Cairo. You’ve walked in and tied yourself up, plenty strong enough to suit the police, with last night’s killings. Well, now you’ll have to play with me or else.”
Cairo’s smile was demure and not in any way alarmed. “I made somewhat extensive inquiries about you before taking any action,” he said, “and was assured that you were far too reasonable to allow other considerations to interfere with profitable business relations.”
Spade shrugged. “Where are they?” he asked.
“I have offered you five thousand dollars for—”
Spade thumped Cairo’s wallet with the backs of his fingers and said: “There’s nothing like five thousand dollars here. You’re betting your eyes. You could come in and say you’d pay me a million for a purple elephant, but what in hell would that mean?”
“I see, I see,” Cairo said thoughtfully, screwing up his eyes. “You wish some assurance of my sincerity.” He brushed his red lower lip with a fingertip. “A retainer, would that serve?”
“It might.”
Cairo put his hand out towards his wallet, hesitated, withdrew the hand, and said: “You will take, say, a hundred dollars?”
Spade picked up the wallet and took out a hundred dollars. Then he frowned, said, “Better make it two hundred,” and did.
Cairo said nothing.
“Your first guess was that I had the bird,” Spade said in a crisp voice when he had put the two hundred dollars into his pocket and had dropped the wallet on the desk again. “There’s nothing in that. What’s your second?”
“That you know where it is, or, if not exactly that, that you know it is where you can get it.”
Spade neither denied nor affirmed that: he seemed hardly to have heard it. He asked: “What sort of proof can you give me that your man is the owner?”
“Very little, unfortunately. There is this, though: nobody else can give you any authentic evidence of ownership at all. And if you know as much about the affair as I suppose—or I should not be here—you know that the means by which it was taken from him shows that his right to it was more valid than anyone else’s—certainly more valid than Thursby’s.”
“What about his daughter?” Spade asked.
Excitement opened Cairo’s eyes and mouth, turned his face red, made his voice shrill.