The Maltese Falcon quotes

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.

He said to Effie Perine: “Yes, sweetheart?”

Spade brought two wineglasses in from the kitchen, filled them and his own with Bacardi, gave one to each of his visitors, and sat down with his on the side of the bed. His face was placid and uncurious.

He raised his glass, and said, “Success to crime,” and drank it down.

Tom emptied his glass, set it on the floor beside his feet, and wiped his mouth with a muddy forefinger. He stared at the foot of the bed as if trying to remember something of which it vaguely reminded him.

“Maybe. And here’s something for you to not forget, sweetheart. I’ll tell it or not as I damned please.

It’s a long while since I burst out crying because policemen didn’t like me.

”

“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.

“As bad,” she said, “as could be.”

“I’m not heroic. I don’t think there’s anything worse than death.”

“It’s that as surely as we’re sitting here”—she shivered—“unless you help me.”

He took his fingers away from his mouth and ran them through his hair.

“I’m not Christ,” he said irritably. “I can’t work miracles out of thin air.”

He looked at his watch. “The day’s going and you’re giving me nothing to work with. Who killed Thursby?”

Spade thumped Cairo’s wallet with the backs of his fingers and said: “There’s nothing like five thousand dollars here. You’re betting your eyes.

You could come in and say you’d pay me a million for a purple elephant, but what in hell would that mean?

”

She sighed happily and sat on the walnut settee. Her face relaxed and her body relaxed. She smiled up at him with admiring eyes. “However did you manage it?” she asked more in wonder than in curiosity.

“Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken.”

“And you won’t get into trouble? Do sit down.” She made room for him on the settee.

After a moment in which she seemed confused almost to the point of tears she laughed and said: “Very well, then, Mr. Spade, I’m not at all the sort of person I pretend to be.

I’m eighty years old, incredibly wicked, and an iron-molder by trade.

But if it’s a pose it’s one I’ve grown into, so you won’t expect me to drop it entirely, will you?”

His habits for months past could be accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even of another woman in his life, though either was barely possible.

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

When he had reached this point in his story the telephone bell rang.

He rubbed it with his finger—well, affectionately—when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened.

He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.

”

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.

”

Then he took his face out of his hands, looked at the girl, grinned sheepishly, and said: “

Childish, huh? I know, but, by God, I do hate being hit without hitting back.

” He touched his chin with careful fingers. “Not that it was so much of a sock at that.” He laughed and lounged back on the sofa, crossing his legs. “A cheap enough price to pay for winning.”

Spade laughed. “I don’t know. You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.

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.”

She got up and stood at the end of the table, looking down at him with dark abashed eyes in a pinkening face.

“I am a liar,” she said. “I have always been a liar.”

“Don’t brag about it. It’s childish.” His voice was good-humored. He came out from between table and bench. “Was there any truth at all in that yarn?”

The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs.

As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown.

His eyes, made small by fat puffs around them, were dark and sleek. Dark ringlets thinly covered his broad scalp. He wore a black cutaway coat, black vest, black satin Ascot tie holding a pinkish pearl, striped grey worsted trousers, and patent-leather shoes.

“We begin well, sir,” the fat man purred, turning with a proffered glass in his hand.

“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.”

Spade took the glass and, smiling, made the beginning of a bow over it.

“Better and better!” the fat man exclaimed. “

I distrust a closemouthed 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.” He beamed over his glass. “We’ll get along, sir, that we will.” He set his glass on the table and held the box of Coronas del Ritz out to Spade. “A cigar, sir.”

The fat man sank back in his chair and let his body go flaccid. He blew his breath out in a long contented gust. “That’s wonderful, sir,” he purred. “That’s wonderful.

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.”

Spade chuckled.

“The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter,”

he said cheerfully. “Well, let’s go.”

“I wouldn’t,” Spade repeated. He was serene. “

My guess might be excellent, or it might be crummy, but Mrs. Spade didn’t raise any children dippy enough to make guesses in front of a district attorney, an assistant district attorney, and a stenographer.

”

“Why shouldn’t you, if you’ve nothing to conceal?”

“Everybody,” Spade responded mildly, “has something to conceal.”

“My guesses, for one thing.”

“I see,” Spade sneered. “

You don’t think I’m naughty. You just think I’m dumb.

”

Thomas, in a tone whose matter-of-factness did not quite hide excitement, said: “That opens another angle. Monahan’s friends could have knocked Thursby off for ditching Monahan.”

“Dead gamblers don’t have any friends,” Spade said.

“It opens up two new lines,” Bryan said. He leaned back and stared at the ceiling for several seconds, then sat upright quickly. His orator’s face was alight. “It narrows down to three things. Number one:

“Yes, sir, we were,” Gutman agreed, “but we were talking then. This is actual money, genuine coin of the realm, sir.

With a dollar of this you can buy more than with ten dollars of talk.

” Silent laughter shook his bulbs. When their commotion stopped he said more seriously, yet not altogether seriously: “There are more of us to be taken care of now.” He moved his twinkling eyes and his fat head to indicate Cairo.

“I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been through it all before and expect to go through it again. At one time or another I’ve had to tell everybody from the Supreme Court down to go to hell, and I’ve got away with it.

I got away with it because I never let myself forget that a day of reckoning was coming.

I never forget that when the day of reckoning comes I want to be all set to march into headquarters pushing a victim in front of me, saying: ‘Here, you chumps, is your criminal.’

‘Here, you chumps, is your criminal.’ As long as I can do that I can put my thumb to my nose and wriggle my fingers at all the laws in the book.

The first time I can’t do it my name’s Mud. There hasn’t been a first time yet.

This isn’t going to be it. That’s flat.”

“Like hell I must.” Spade flung his words out with a brutal sort of carelessness that gave them more weight than they could have got from dramatic emphasis or from loudness.

“If you kill me, how are you going to get the bird? If I know you can’t afford to kill me till you have it, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?”

Gutman cocked his head to the left and considered these questions. His eyes twinkled between puckered lids. Presently he gave his genial answer: “Well, sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill.”

Gutman cocked his head to the left and considered these questions. His eyes twinkled between puckered lids. Presently he gave his genial answer:

“Well, sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill.”

“Sure,” Spade agreed, “but they’re not much good unless the threat of death is behind them to hold the victim down. See what I mean? If you try anything I don’t like I won’t stand for it.

Spade too was all smiling blandness.

“That’s the trick, from my side,” he said, “to make my play strong enough that it ties you up, but yet not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgment.”

Gutman said fondly: “By Gad, sir, you are a character!”

Gutman’s sigh did not affect the benignity of his smile. He said to Spade:

“When you’re young you simply don’t understand things.”

Cairo had an arm around the boy’s shoulders again and was whispering to him. Spade grinned at Gutman and addressed Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “I think it’d be swell if you’d see what you can find us to eat in the kitchen, with plenty of coffee.