The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett [75]
Spade addressed Gutman: “I hope you’re not letting yourself be influenced by the guns these pocket-edition desperadoes are waving.”
Gutman opened his eyes. Cairo stopped whispering and stood erect behind the fat man’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 down 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 with 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 while his arms were held, and then came forward. Gutman began a desperate “Here, what—?” Spade drove his right fist against 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 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 left 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 fall-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 whole God-damned lot of you in.”
Gutman raised his head and muttered