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 goddamned 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 corpselike 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.
Brigid O’Shaughnessy stood in an angle made by table and wall. One of her hands was flat on the table, the other to her breast. She pinched her lower lip between her teeth and glanced furtively at Spade whenever he was not looking at her. When he looked at her she looked at Cairo and the boy.
Gutman’s face had lost its troubled cast and was becoming rosy again. He had put his hands in his trousers-pockets. He stood facing Spade, watching him without curiosity.
Spade, idly jingling his handful of pistols, nodded at Cairo’s rounded back and asked Gutman: “It’ll be all right with him?”
“I don’t know,” the fat man replied placidly. “That part will have to be strictly up to you, sir.”
Spade’s smile made his v-shaped chin more salient. He said: “Cairo.”
The Levantine screwed his dark anxious face around over his shoulder.
Spade said: “Let him rest awhile. We’re going to give him to the police. We ought to get the details fixed before he comes to.”
Cairo asked bitterly: “Don’t you think you’ve done enough to him without that?”
Spade said: “No.”
Cairo left the sofa and went close to the fat man. “Please don’t do this thing, Mr. Gutman,” he begged. “You must realize that—”
Spade interrupted him: “That’s settled. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Coming in? Or getting out?”
Though Gutman’s smile was a bit sad, even wistful in its way, he nodded his head. “I don’t like it either,” he told the Levantine, “but we can’t help ourselves now. We really can’t.”
Spade asked: “What are you doing, Cairo? In or out?”
Cairo wet his lips and turned slowly to face Spade. “Suppose,” he said, and swallowed. “Have I—? Can I choose?”
“You can,” Spade assured him seriously, “but you ought to know that if the answer is ‘out’ we’ll give you to the police with your boyfriend.”
“Oh, come, Mr. Spade,” Gutman protested, “that is not—”
“Like hell we’ll let him walk out on us,” Spade said. “He’ll either come in or he’ll go in. We can’t have a lot of loose ends hanging around.” He scowled at Gutman and burst out irritably: “Jesus God! is this the first thing you guys ever stole? You’re a fine lot of lollipops! What are you going to do next—get down and pray?” He directed his scowl at Cairo. “Well? Which?”
“You give me no choice.” Cairo’s narrow shoulders moved in a hopeless
