The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett [36]
“Is he?”
“No.”
She sighed and leaned against him. “I awakened and you weren’t here and then I heard someone coming in. I was terrified.”
Spade combed her red hair back from her face with his fingers and said: “I’m sorry, angel. I thought you’d sleep through it. Did you have that gun under your pillow all night?”
“No. You know I didn’t. I jumped up and got it when I was frightened.”
He cooked breakfast—and slipped the flat brass key into her coat-pocket again—while she bathed and dressed.
She came out of the bathroom whistling En Cuba. “Shall I make the bed?” she asked.
“That’d be swell. The eggs need a couple of minutes more.”
Their breakfast was on the table when she returned to the kitchen. They sat where they had sat the night before and ate heartily.
“Now about the bird?” Spade suggested presently as they ate.
She put her fork down and looked at him. She drew her eyebrows together and made her mouth small and tight. “You can’t ask me to talk about that this morning of all mornings,” she protested. “I don’t want to and I won’t.”
“It’s a stubborn damned hussy,” he said sadly and put a piece of roll into his mouth.
The youth who had shadowed Spade was not in sight when Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy crossed the sidewalk to the waiting taxicab. The taxicab was not followed. Neither the youth nor another loiterer was visible in the vicinity of the Coronet when the taxicab arrived there.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy would not let Spade go in with her. “It’s bad enough to be coming home in evening dress at this hour without bringing company. I hope I don’t meet anybody.”
“Dinner tonight?”
“Yes.”
They kissed. She went into the Coronet. He told the chauffeur: “Hotel Belvedere.”
When he reached the Belvedere he saw the youth who had shadowed him sitting in the lobby on a divan from which the elevators could be seen. Apparently the youth was reading a newspaper.
At the desk Spade learned that Cairo was not in. He frowned and pinched his lower lip. Points of yellow light began to dance in his eyes. “Thanks,” he said softly to the clerk and turned away.
Sauntering, he crossed the lobby to the divan from which the elevators could be seen and sat down beside—not more than a foot from—the young man who was apparently reading a newspaper.
The young man did not look up from his newspaper. Seen at this scant distance, he seemed certainly less than twenty years old. His features were small, in keeping with his stature, and regular. His skin was very fair. The whiteness of his cheeks was as little blurred by any considerable growth of beard as by the glow of blood. His clothing was neither new nor of more than ordinary quality, but it, and his manner of wearing it, was marked by a hard masculine neatness.
Spade asked casually, “Where is he?” while shaking tobacco down into a brown paper curved to catch it.
The boy lowered his paper and looked around, moving with a purposeful sort of slowness, as of a more natural swiftness restrained. He looked with small hazel eyes under somewhat long curling lashes at Spade’s chest. He said, in a voice as colorless and composed and cold as his young face: “What?”
“Where is he?” Spade was busy with his cigarette.
“Who?”
“The fairy.”
The hazel eyes’ gaze went up Spade’s chest to the knot of his maroon tie and rested there. “What do you think you’re doing, Jack?” the boy demanded. “Kidding me?”
“I’ll tell you when I am.” Spade licked his cigarette and smiled amiably at the boy. “New York, aren’t you?”
The boy stared at Spade’s tie and did not speak. Spade nodded as if the boy had said yes and asked: “Baumes rush?”
The boy stared at Spade’s tie for a moment longer, then raised his newspaper and returned his attention to it. “Shove off,” he said from the side of his mouth.
Spade lighted his cigarette, leaned back comfortably on the divan, and spoke with good-natured carelessness: “You’ll have to talk to me before you’re through, sonny—some of you will—and you can