Spade & Archer: the prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The maltese falcon

by Joe Gores

  "There's nothing funny about it." Spade did not seem offended by the fat man's laughter, nor in any way impressed. He spoke in the manner of one reasoning with a recalcitrant, but not altogether unreasonable, friend. "It's our best bet. With him in their hands, the police will--"

  "But, my dear man," Gutmau objected, "can't you see? If I even for a moment thought of doing it-- But that's ridiculous too. I feel towards Wilmer just exactly as if he were my own son. I really do. But if I even for a moment thought of doing what you propose, what in the world do you think would keep Wilmer from telling the police every last detail about the falcon and all of us?"

  Spade grinned with stiff lips. "If we had to," he said softly, "we could have him killed resisting arrest. But we won't have to go that far. Let him talk his head off. I promise you nobody'll do anything about it. That's easy enough to fix."

  The pink flesh on Gutman's forehead crawled in a frown. He lowered his head, mashing his chins together over his collar, and asked: "How?" Then, with an abruptness that set all his fat bulbs to quivering and tumbling against one another, he raised his head, squirmed around to look at the boy, and laughed uproariouslY. "What do you think of this, Wilmer? It's funny, eh?"

  The boy's eves were cold hazel gleams under his lashes. He said in a low distinct voice: "Yes, it's funny--the son of a bitch."

  Spade was talking to Brigid O'Shaughnessy: "How do you feel now, angel? Any better?"

  "Yes, much better, only"--she reduced her voice until the last words would have been unintelligible two feet away--"I'm frightened."

  "Don't be," he said carelessly and put a hand on her grey-stockinged knee. "Nothing very bad's going to happen. Want a drink?"

  "Not now, thanks." Her voice sank again. "Be careful, Sam."

  Spade grinned and looked at Gutman, who was looking at him. The fat man smiled genially, saying nothing for a moment, and then asked: "How?"

  Spade was stupid. "How what?"

  The fat man considered more laughter necessary then, and an explanation: "Well, sir, if you're really serious about this--this suggestion of yours, the least we can do in common politeness is to hear you out. Now how are you going about fixing it so that Wilmer"--he paused here to laugh again--"won't be able to do us any harm?"

  Spade shook his head. "No," he said, "I wouldn't want to take advantage of anybody's politeness, no matter how common, hike that. Forget it."

  The fat man puckered up his facial bulbs. "Now come, come," he protested, "you make me decidedly uncomfortable. I shouldn't have laughed, and I apologize most humbly and sincerely. I wouldn't want to seem to ridicule anything you'd suggest, Mr. Spade, regardless of how much I disagreed with you, for you must know that I have the greatest respect and admiration for your astuteness. Now mind you, I don't see how this suggestion of yours can be in any way practical--even leaviug out the fact that I couldn't feel any different towards Wilmer if he was my own flesh and blood--but I'll consider it a personal favor as well as 'a sign that you've accepted my apologies, sir, if you'll go ahead and outline the rest of it."

  "Fair enough," Spade said. "Bryan is like most district attorneys. He's more interested in how his record will look on paper than in anything else. He'd rather drop a doubtful case than try it and have it go against him. I don't know that he ever deliberately framed anybody he believed innocent, but I can't imagine him letting himself believe them innocent if he could scrape up, or twist into shape, proof of their guilt. To be sure of convicting one man he'll let half a dozen equally guilty accomplices go free--if trying to convict them all might confuse his case.

  "That's the choice we'll give him and he'll gobble it up. He wouldn't want to know about the falcon. He'll be tickled pink to persuade himself that anything the punk tells him about it is a lot of chewing-gum, an attempt to muddle things up. Leave that end to me. I can show him that if he starts fooling around trying to gather up everybody he's going to have a tangled case that no jury will be able to make heads or tails of, while if he sticks to the punk he can get a conviction standing on his head."

  Gutman wagged his head sidewise in a slow smiling gesture of benign disapproval. "No, sir," he said, "I'm afraid that won't do, won't do at all. I don't see how even this District Attorney of yours can link Thursby and Jacobi and Wilmer together without having to--"

  "You don't know district attorneys," Spade told him. "The Thursby angle is easy. He was a gunman and so's your punk. Bryan's already got a theory about that. There'll be no catch there. Well, Christ! they can only hang the punk once. Why try him for Jacobi's murder after he's been convicted of Thursby's? They simply close the record by writing it up against him and let it go at that. If, as is likely enough, he used the same gun on both, the bullets will match up. Everybody will be satisfied."

  "Yes, but--" Gutman began, and stopped to look at the boy.

  The boy advanced from the doorway, walking stiff-legged, with his legs apart, until he was between Gutman and Cairo, almost in the center of the floor. He halted there, leaning forward slightly from the waist, his shoulders raised towards the front. The pistol in his hand still hung at his side, but his knuckles were white over its grip. His other hand was a small hard fist down at his other side. The indelible youngness of his face gave an indescribably vicious--and inhuman--turn to the white-hot hatred and the cold white malevolence in his face. He said to Spade in a voice cramped by passion: "You bastard, get up on your feet and go for your heater!"

  Spade smiled at the boy. His smile was not broad, but the amusement in it seemed genuine and unalloyed.

  The boy said: "You bastard, get up and shoot it out if you've got the guts. I've taken all the riding from you I'm going to take."

  The amusement in Spade's smile deepened. He looked at Gutman and said: "Young Wild West." His voice matched his smile. "Maybe you ought to tell him that shooting me before you get your hands on the falcon would be bad for business."

  Gutman's attempt at a smile was not successful, but he kept the resultant grimace on his mottled face. He licked dry lips with a dry tongue. His voice was too hoarse and gritty for the paternally admonishing tone it tried to achieve, "Now, now, Wilmer," he said, "we can't have any of that. You shouldn't let yourself attach so much importance to these things. You--"

  The boy, not taking his eyes from Spade, spoke in a choked voice out the side of his mouth: "Make him lay off me then. I'm going to fog him if he keeps it up and there won't be anything that'll stop me from doing it."

  "Now, Wilmer," Gutman said and turned to Spade. His face and voice were under control now. "Your plan is, sir, as I said in the first place, not at all practical. Let's not say anything more about it."

  Spade looked from one of them to the other. He had stopped smiling. His face held no expression at all. "I say what I please," he told them.

  "You certainly do," Gutman said quickly, "and that's one of the things I've always admired in you. But this matter is, as I say, not at all practical, so there's not the least bit of use of discussing it any further, as you can see for yourself."

  "I can't see it for myself," Spade said, "and you haven't made me see it, and I don't think you can." He frowned at Gutman. "Let's get this straight. Am I wasting time talking to you? I thought this was your show. Should I do my talking to the punk? I know how to do that."

  "No, sir," Gutman replied, "you're quite right in dealing with me."

  Spade said: "All right. Now I've got another suggestion. It's not as good as the first, but it's better ti-ian nothing. Want to hear it?"

  "Most assuredly."

  "Give them Cairo."

  Cairo hastily picked up his pistol from the table beside him. He held it tight in his lap with both hands, Its muzzle pointed at the floor a little to one side of the sofa. His face had become yeBowish again. His black eyes darted their gaze from face to face. The opaqueness of his eyes made them seem flat, two-dimensional.

  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.

  Gutman flung a fat hand out at the boy's wrist, caught the wrist, and bore it and the gun dow-n while Gutman's fat body was rising in haste from the rocking chair. Joel Cairo scurried around to the boy's other side and grasped his other arm. They wrestled with the boy, forcing his arms down, holding them down, while he struggled futilely against them. Words came out of the struggling group: fragments of the boy's incoherent speech--"right ... go . . . bastard . . . smoke"--Gutman's "Now, now, Wilmer!" repeated many times; Cairo's "No, please, don't" and "Don't do that, Wilmer."

  Wooden-faced, dreamy-eyed, Spade got up from the sofa and went over to the group. The boy, unable to cope withi the weight against him, had stopped struggling. Cairo, still holding the boy's arm, stood partly in front of him, talking to him soothingly. Spade pushed Cairo aside gently and drove his left fist against the boy's chin. The boy's head snapped back as far as it could whuie his arms were held, and then came forward. Gutman began a desperate "Here, what--?" Spade drove his right fist ag ainst the boy's chin.

  Cairo dropped the boy's arm, letting him collapse against Gutman's great round belly. Cairo sprang at Spade, clawing at his face with the curved stiff fingers of both-i hands. Spade blew his breath out and pushed the Levantine away. Cairo sprang at him again. Tears were in Cairo's eyes and his red lips worked angrily, forming words, but no sound came from between them.

  Spade laughed, grunted, "Jesus, you're a pip!" and cuffed the side of Cairo's face with an open hand, knocking him over against the table. Cairo regained his balance and sprang at Spade the third time. Spade stopped him with both palms held out on long rigid arms against his face. Cairo, failing to reach Spade's face with his shorter arms, thumped Spade's arms.

  "Stop it," Spade growled. "I'll hurt you."

  Cairo cried, "Oh, you big coward!" and backed away from him.

  Spade stooped to pick up Cairo's pistol from the floor, and then the boy's. He straightened up holding them in his heft hand, dangling them upside-down by their trigger-guards from his forefinger.

  Gutman had put the boy in the rocking chair and stood looking at him with troubled eyes in an uncertainly puckered face. Cairo went down on his knees beside the chair and began to chafe one of the boy's limp hands.

  Spade felt the boy's chin with his fingers. "Nothing cracked," he said. "We'll spread him on the sofa." He put his right arm under the boy's arm and around his back, put his left forearm under the boy's knees, lifted him without apparent effort, and carried him to the sofa.

  Brigid O'Shaughnessy got up quickly and Spade laid the boy there. With his right hand Spade patted the boy's clothes, found his second pistol, added it to the others in his left hand, and turned his back on the sofa. Cairo was already sitting beside the boy's head.

  Spade clinked the pistols together in his hand and smiled cheerfully at Gutman. "Well," he said, "there's our fail-guy."

  Gutman's face was grey and his eyes were clouded. He did not look at Spade. He looked at the floor and did not say anything.

  Spade said: "Don't be a damned fool again. You let Cairo whisper to you and you held the kid while I pasted him. You can't laugh that off and you're likely to get yourself shot trying to."

  Gutman moved his feet on the rug and said nothing.

  Spade said: "And the other side of it is that you'll either say yes right now or I'll turn the falcon and the whoie God-damned lot of you in."

  Gutman raised his head and muttered through his teeth: "I don't like that, sir."

  "You won't like it," Spade said. "Well?"

  The fat man sighed and made a wry face and replied sadly: "You can have him."

  Spade said: "That's swell."

  XIX.

  The Russian's Hand

  The boy lay on his back on the sofa, a small figure that was--except for its breathing--altogether corpselikc to the eye. Joel Cairo sat beside the boy, bending over him, rubbing his cheeks and wrists, smoothing his hair back from his forehead, whispering to him, and peering anxiously down at his white still face.