The Maltese Falcon

by Dashiell Hammett

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

Spade said: “Miss Wonderly’s sister ran away from New York with a fellow named Floyd Thursby. They’re here. Miss Wonderly has seen Thursby and has a date with him tonight. Maybe he’ll bring the sister with him. The chances are he won’t. Miss Wonderly wants us to find the sister and get her away from him and back home.” He looked at Miss Wonderly. “Right?” “Yes,” she said indistinctly.

A telephone-bell rang in darkness.

out. In the notch between boulder and slope Miles Archer lay on his back. Two men stood over him. One of them held the beam of an electric torch on the dead man. Other men with lights moved up and down the slope.

“He was supposed to be tailing a fellow named Floyd Thursby,”

“Thursby was shot down in front of his hotel just thirty-five minutes after you left Burritt Street.”

“Tom says you were in too much of a hurry to even stop for a look at your partner.” Tom growled apologetically: “Well, damn it, Sam, you did run off like that.”

give you ten minutes to get to a phone and do your talking to the girl. I give you ten minutes to get to Thursby’s joint—Geary near Leavenworth—you could do it easy in that time, or fifteen at the most. And that gives you ten or fifteen minutes of waiting before he showed up.” “I knew where he lived?” Spade asked. “And I knew he hadn’t gone straight home from killing Miles?” “You knew what you knew,” Dundy replied stubbornly. “What time did you get home?”

“She thinks I shot Miles,” he said. Only his lips moved. “So you could marry her?”

“The police think I shot Thursby,” he said. “Who is he?” she asked, separating a cigarette-paper from the packet, sifting tobacco into it. “Who do you think I shot?” he asked. When she ignored that question he said: “Thursby’s the guy Miles was supposed to be tailing for the Wonderly girl.”

“She arrived last Tuesday, registering from New York. She hadn’t a trunk, only some bags. There were no phone-calls charged to her room, and she doesn’t seem to have received much, if any, mail. The only one anybody remembers having seen her with was a tall dark man of thirty-six or so. She went out at half-past nine this morning, came back an hour later, paid her bill, and had her bags carried out to a car. The boy who carried them says it was a Nash touring car, probably a hired one. She left a forwarding address—the Ambassador, Los Angeles.”

“Mr. Spade, I’ve a terrible, terrible confession to make.” Spade smiled a polite smile, which she did not lift her eyes to see, and said nothing. “That—that story I told you yesterday was all—a story,” she stammered, and looked up at him now with miserable frightened eyes. “Oh, that,” Spade said lightly. “We didn’t exactly believe your story.” “Then—?” Perplexity was added to the misery and fright in her eyes. “We believed your two hundred dollars.” “You mean—?” She seemed to not know what he meant. “I mean that you paid us more than if you’d been telling the truth,” he explained blandly, “and enough more to make it all right.”

“The hell of it is, Miss—Is your name Wonderly or Leblanc?” She blushed and murmured: “It’s really O’Shaughnessy—Brigid O’Shaughnessy.” “The hell of it is, Miss O’Shaughnessy, that a couple of murders”—she winced—“coming together like this get everybody stirred up, make the police think they can go the limit, make everybody hard to handle and expensive. It’s not—”

“Am I to blame for—for last night?” Spade shook his head. “Not unless there are things I don’t know about,” he said. “You warned us that Thursby was dangerous. Of course you lied to us about your sister and all, but that doesn’t count: we didn’t believe you.” He shrugged his sloping shoulders. “I wouldn’t say it was your fault.”

“You won’t need much of anybody’s help. You’re good. You’re very good. It’s chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get into your voice when you say things like ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’”

Spade looked at his hat and asked: “What happened last night?” “Floyd came to the hotel at nine o’clock, and we went out for a walk. I suggested that so Mr. Archer could see him. We stopped at a restaurant in Geary Street, I think it was, for supper and to dance, and came back to the hotel at about half-past twelve. Floyd left me at the door and I stood inside and watched Mr. Archer follow him down the street, on the other side.” “Down? You mean towards Market Street?” “Yes.” “Do you know what they’d be doing in the neighborhood of Bush and Stockton, where Archer was shot?” “Isn’t that near where Floyd lived?” “No. It would be nearly a dozen blocks out of his way if he was going from your hotel to his.

“More than idle curiosity made me ask that, Mr. Spade I am trying to recover an—ah—ornament that has been—shall we say?—mislaid. I thought, and hoped, you could assist me.”

Cairo smiled and took a short compact flat black pistol out of an inner pocket. “You will please,” he said, “clasp your hands together at the back of your neck.”

His face while he smoked was, except for occasional slight and aimless movements of his lower lip, so still and reflective that it seemed stupid; but when Cairo presently moaned and fluttered his eyelids Spade’s face became bland, and he put the beginning of a friendly smile into his eyes and mouth.

“I am prepared to pay five thousand dollars for the figure’s return.”

Spade. I am ready to pay five thousand dollars for the figure’s return,

“I have offered you five thousand dollars for—”

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—

Her eyes were cobalt-blue prayers.

“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment.

His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

Brigid O’Shaughnessy smiled at him and said: “But I haven’t got the falcon.” Cairo’s face was darkened by a flush of annoyance. He put an ugly hand on either arm of his chair, holding his small-boned body erect and stiff between them. His dark eyes were angry. He did not say anything. The girl made a mock-placatory face at him. “I’ll have it in a week at the most, though,” she said. “Where is it?” Cairo used politeness of mien to express skepticism. “Where Floyd hid it.” “Floyd? Thursby?” She nodded. “And you know where that is?” he asked. “I think I do.” “Then why must we wait a week?” “Perhaps not a whole week. Whom are you buying it for, Joe?” Cairo raised his eyebrows. “I told Mr. Spade. For its owner.” Surprise illuminated the girl’s face. “So you went back to him?” “Naturally I did.”

The girl glanced at the pointing finger and made an impatient motion with her head. “Or me,” she said, “or you.” “Exactly, and shall we add more certainly the boy outside?” “Yes,” she agreed and laughed. “Yes, unless he’s the one you had in Constantinople.” Sudden blood mottled Cairo’s face. In a shrill enraged voice he cried: “The one you couldn’t make?”

“There’s talk going around that you and Archer’s wife were cheating on him.” Spade laughed. “That sounds like something you thought up yourself.” “Then there’s not anything to it?” “Not anything.” “The talk is,” Dundy said, “that she tried to get a divorce out of him so’s she could put in with you, but he wouldn’t give it to her. Anything to that?” “No.” “There’s even talk,” Dundy went on stolidly, “that that’s why he was put on the spot.”

A voice in Spade’s living-room screamed: “Help! Help! Police! Help!” The voice, high and thin and shrill, was Joel Cairo’s. Lieutenant Dundy stopped turning away from the door, confronted Spade again, and said decisively: “I guess we’re going in.” The sounds of a brief struggle, of a blow, of a subdued cry, came to them.

Dundy scowled down at the girl and asked “What do you want us to think the truth is?” “Not what he said,” she replied. “Not anything he said.” She turned to Spade. “Is it?” “How do I know?” Spade responded. “I was out in the kitchen mixing an omelette when it all happened, wasn’t I?”

Dundy, still scowling at the girl, ignored Spade’s speech and asked her: “If he’s not telling the truth, how come he did the squawking for help, and not you?”

Spade bowed to the girl. “Miss O’Shaughnessy,” he said, “may I present Lieutenant Dundy and Detective-sergeant Polhaus.” He bowed to Dundy. “Miss O’Shaughnessy is an operative in my employ.” Joel Cairo said indignantly: “That isn’t so. She—” Spade interrupted him in a quite loud, but still genial, voice: “I hired her just recently, yesterday. This is Mr. Joel Cairo, a friend—an acquaintance, at any rate—of Thursby’s. He came to me this afternoon and tried to hire me to find something Thursby was supposed to have on him when he was bumped off. It looked funny, the way he put it to me, so I wouldn’t touch it. Then he pulled a gun—well, never mind that unless it comes to a point of laying charges against each other. Anyway, after talking it over with Miss O’Shaughnessy, I thought maybe I could get something out of him about Miles’s and Thursby’s killings, so I asked him to come up here. Maybe we put the questions to him a little rough, but he wasn’t hurt any, not enough to have to cry for help. I’d already had to take his gun away from him again.”

“It was that in losing his head and slugging me he overplayed his hand. If I’d mixed it with him then he couldn’t’ve backed down. He’d’ve had to go through with it, and we’d’ve had to tell that goofy story at headquarters.”

My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery. It’s all right with me, if you’re sure none of the flying pieces will hurt you.”

“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?”

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.

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 hand cradling her head, its fingers half lost among red hair, a hand moving groping fingers over her slim back. His eyes burned yellowly.

He did not find the black bird. He found nothing that seemed to have any connection with a black bird.

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second “you.”

“I distrust a man that says when. If he’s got to be careful not to drink too much it’s because he’s not to be trusted when he does.”

“I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously unless you keep in practice.”

said: “Now, sir, we’ll talk if you like. And I’ll tell you right out that I’m a man who likes talking to a man that likes to talk.” “Swell. Will we talk about the black bird?” The fat man laughed and his bulbs rode up and down on his laughter. “Will we?” he asked and, “We will,” he replied.

I do like a man that tells you right out he’s looking out for himself. Don’t we all? I don’t trust a man that says he’s not. And the man that’s telling the truth when he says he’s not I distrust most of all, because he’s an ass and an ass that’s going contrary to the laws of nature.”

“You’d be with most of your clients. Did she tell you where she was the night he was killed?” “Yes.” “Where?” “Following him.” Spade sat up straight and blinked. He exclaimed incredulously: “Jesus, these women!”

She saw him come out of the hotel and she saw that he was shadowing a man and a girl—she says she saw the same girl with you last night—who had come out just ahead of him. She knew then that he was working, had been kidding her. I suppose she was disappointed, and mad—she sounded that way when she told me about it.

The boy raised his eyes to Spade’s mouth and spoke in the strained voice of one in physical pain: “Keep on riding me and you’re going to be picking iron out of your navel.” Spade chuckled. “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter,” he said cheerfully. “Well, let’s go.”

“What do you know, sir, about the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, later called the Knights of Rhodes and other things?” Spade waved his cigar. “Not much—only what I remember from history in school—Crusaders or something.” “Very good. Now you don’t remember that Suleiman the Magnificent chased them out of Rhodes in 1523?” “No.” “Well, sir, he did, and they settled in Crete. And they stayed there for seven years until 1530 when they persuaded the Emperor Charles V to give them”—Gutman held up three puffy fingers and counted them—“Malta, Gozo, and Tripoli.” “Yes?” “Yes, sir, but with these conditions: they were to pay the Emperor each year the tribute of one”—he held up a finger—“falcon in the acknowledgment that Malta was still under Spain, and if they ever left the island it was to revert to Spain. Understand?