things in his time.'
Spade nodded politely.
The fat man screwed up his eves and asked: '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 r 530 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—'faleon in acknowledgment that Malta was still under Spain, and if they ever left the island it was to revert to Spain. Understand? He was giving it to them, but not unless they used it, and they couldn't give or sell it to anybody else.'
'Yes.'
The fat man looked over his shoulders at the three closed doors, hunched his chair a few inches nearer Spade's, and reduced his voice to a husky whisper: 'Have you any conception of the extreme, the immeasurable, wealth of the Order at that time?'
'If I remember,' Spade said, 'they were pretty well fixed.'
Gutman smiled indulgently. 'Pretty well, sir, is putting it mildly.' His whisper became lower and more purring. 'They were rolling in wealth, sir. You've no idea. None of us has any idea. For years they had preyed on the Saraeens, had taken nobody knows what spoils of gems, precious metals, silks, ivories—the cream of the cream of the East. That is history, sir. We all know that the Holy Wars to them, as to the Templars, were largely a matter of loot.
'Well, now, the Emperor Charles has given them Malta, and all the rent he asks is one insignificant bird per annum, just as a matter of form. What could be more natural than for these immeasurably wealthy Knights to look around for some way of expressing their gratitude? Well, sir, that's exactly what they did, and they hit on the happy thought of sending Charles for the first year's tribute, not an insignificant live bird, but a glorious golden falcon encrusted from head to foot with the finest jewels in their coffers. And—remember, sir—they had fine ones, the finest out of Asia.' Gutman stopped whispering. His sleek dark eyes examined Spade's face, which was placid. The fat man asked: 'Well, sir, what do you think of that?'
'I don't know.'
The fat man smiled complacently. 'These are facts, historical facts, not schoolbook history, not Mr. Wells's history, but history nevertheless.' He leaned forward. 'The archives of the Order from the twelfth century on are still at Malta. They are not intact, but what is there holds no less than three'—he held up three fingers—'referenees that can't be to anything else but this jeweled falcon. In J. Delaville Le Roulx's Les Archives de l'Ordre de Saint-Jean there is a reference to it—oblique to be sure, but a reference still. And the unpublished—because unfinished at the time of his death—supplement to Paoli's Dell' origine ed instituto del sacro militar ordine has a clear and unmistakable statement of the facts I am telling you.'
'All right,' Spade said.
'All right, sir. Grand Master Villiers de l'Isle d'Adam had this foothigh jeweled bird made by Turkish slaves in the castle of St. Angelo and sent it to Charles, who was in Spain. He sent it in a galley commanded by a French knight named Cormier or Corvere, a member of the Order.' His voice dropped to a whisper again. 'It never reached Spain.' He smiled with compressed lips and asked: 'You know of Barbarossa, Redheard, Khair-ed-Din? No? A famous admiral of buccaneers sailing out of Algiers then. Well, sir, he took the Knights' galley and he took the bird. The bird went to Algiers. That's a fact. That's a fact that the French historian Pierre Dan put in one of his letters from Algiers. He wrote that the bird had been there for more than a hundred years, until it was carried away by Sir Francis Vernev, the English adventurer who was with the Algerian buccaneers for a while. Maybe it wasn't, but Pierre Dan believed it was, and that's good enough for me.
'There's nothing said about the bird in Lady Francis Verney's Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Seventeenth Century, to be sure. I looked. And it's pretty certain that Sir Francis didn't have the bird when he died in a Messina hospital in 1615. He was stony broke. But, sir, there's no denying that the bird did go to Sicily. It was there and it came into the possession there of Victor Amadeus II some time after he became king in 1713, and it was one of his gifts to his wife when he married in Chambйry after abdicating. That is a fact, sir. Carutti, the author of Storia del Regno di Vittorio Amadeo II, himself vouched for it.
'Maybe they—Amadeo and his wife—took it along with them to Turin when he tried to revoke his abdication. Be that as it may, it turned up next in the possession of a Spaniard who had been with the army that took Naples in 1734—the father of Don Josй Monino y Redondo, Count of Floridablanca, who was Charles III's chief minister. There's nothing to show that it didn't stay in that family until at least the end of the Carlist War in '40. Then it appeared in Paris at just about the time that Paris was full of Carlists who had had to get out of Spain. One of them must have brought it with him, but, whoever he was, it's likely he knew nothing about its real value. It had been—no doubt as a precaution dnring the Carlist trouble in Spain—painted or enameled over to look like nothing more than a fairly interesting black statuette. And in that disguise, sir, it was, you might say, kicked around Paris for seventy years b private owners and dealers too stupid to see what it was under the skin.'
The fat man paused to smile and shake his head regretfully. Then he went on: 'For seventy years, sir, this marvelous item was, as you might Say, a football in the gutters of Paris—until 1911 when a Greek dealer named Charilaos Konstantinides found it in an obscure shop. It didn't take Charilaos long to learn what it was and to acquire it. No thickness of enamel could conceal value from his eyes and nose. Well, sir, Charilaos was the man who traced most of its history and who identified it as what it actually was. I got wind of it and finally forced most of the history out of him, though I've been able to add a few details since.
'Charilaos was in no hurry to convert his find into money at once. He knew that—enormous as its intrinsic value was—a far higher, a terrific, price could be obtained for it once its authenticity was established beyond doubt. Possibly he planned to do business with one of the modern descendents of the old Order—the English Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the Prussian Johanniterorden, or the Italian or German langues of the Sovereign Order of Malta —all wealthy orders.'
The fat man raised his glass, smiled at its emptiness, and rose to fill it and Spade's. 'You begin to believe me a little?' he asked as he worked the siphon.
'I haven't said I didn't.'
'No,' Gutman chuckled. 'But how you looked.' He sat down, drank generously, and patted his mouth with a white handkerchief. 'Well, sir, to hold it safe while pursuing his researches into its history, CharilaoS had re- enamelled the bird, apparently just as it is now. One year to the very day after he had acquired it—that was possibly three months after I'd made him confess to me—I picked up the Times in London and read that his establishment had been burglarized and him murdered. I was in Paris the next day.' He shook his head sadly. 'The bird was gone. By Gad, sir, I was wild. I didn't believe anybody else knew what it was. I didn't believe he had told anybody but me. A great quantity of stuff had been stolen. That made me think that the thief had simply taken the bird along with the rest of his plunder, not knowing what it was. Because I assure you that a thief who knew its value would not burden himself with anything else—no, sir—at least not anything less than crown jewels.'
He shut his eyes and smiled complacently at an inner thought. He opened his eyes and said: 'That was seventeen years ago. Well, Sir, it took me seventeen years to locate that bird, but I did it. I wanted it, and I'm not a man that's easily discouraged when he wants something.' His smile grew broad. 'I wanted it and I found it. I want it and I'm going to have it.' He drained his glass, dried his lips again, and returned his handkerchief to his pocket. 'I traced it to the home of a Russian general—one Kemidov—in a Constantinople suburb. He didn't know a thing about it. It was nothing but a black enameled figure to him, but his natural contrariness—the natural contrariness of a Russian general—kept him from selling it to me when I made him an offer. Perhaps in my eagerness I was a little unskillful, though not very. I don't know about that. But I did know I wanted it and I was afraid this stupid soldier might begin to investigate his property, might chip off some of the enamel. So I sent some—ah—agents to get it.
