"Get on with you," I said. "You heard me."
"You didn't say anything.
You're just a big tease." She put a thumb up and bit it.
It was a curiously shaped thumb, thin and narrow like an extra finger, with no curve in the first joint.
She bit it and sucked it slowly, turning it around in her mouth like a baby with a comforter.
"You're awfully tall," she said. Then she giggled with secret merriment.
Then she turned her body slowly and lithely, without lifting her feet.
Her hands dropped limp at her sides. She tilted herself towards me on her toes. She fell straight back into my arms.
I had to catch her or let her crack her head on the tessellated floor.
I caught her under her arms and she went rubber-legged on me instantly. I had to hold her close to hold her up.
When her head was against my chest she screwed it around and giggled at me. "You're cute," she giggled. "I'm cute too."
I didn't say anything.
So the butler chose that convenient moment to come back through the French doors and see me holding her.
It didn't seem to bother him.
He was a tall, thin, silver man, sixty or close to it or a little past it.
He had blue eyes as remote as eyes could be.
His skin was smooth and bright and he moved like a man with very sound muscles.
He walked slowly across the floor towards us and the girl jerked away from me.
She flashed across the room to the foot of the stairs and went up them like a deer.
She was gone before I could draw a long breath and let it out.
The butler said tonelessly: "The General will see you now, Mr. Marlowe."
I pushed my lower jaw up off my chest and nodded at him.
"Who was that?"
"Miss Carmen Sternwood, sir."
"You ought to wean her. She looks old enough."
He looked at me with grave politeness and repeated what he had said.
2
We went out at the French doors and along a smooth red-flagged path that skirted the far aide of the lawn from the garage.
The boyish-looking chauffeur had a big black and chromium sedan out now and was dusting that.
The path took us along to the side of the greenhouse and the butler opened a door for me and stood aside.
It opened into a sort of vestibule that was about as warm as a slow oven.
He came in after me, shut the outer door, opened an inner door and we went through that.
Then it was really hot.
The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom.
The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants.
The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank.
The plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.
They smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.
The butler did his best to get me through without being smacked in the face by the sodden leaves, and after a while we came to a clearing in the middle of the jungle, under the domed roof.
Here, in a space of hexagonal flags, an old red Turkish rug was laid down and on the rug was a wheel chair, and in the wheel chair an old and obviously dying man watched us come with black eyes from which all fire had died long ago, but which still had the coal-black directness of the eyes in the portrait that hung above the mantel in the hail.
The rest of his face was a leaden mask, with the bloodless lips and the sharp nose and the sunken temples and the outward-turning earlobes of approaching dissolution.
His long narrow body was wrapped — in that heat — in a traveling rug and a faded red bathrobe.
His thin clawlike hands were folded loosely on the rug, purple-nailed.
A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.
The butler stood in front of him and said:
"This is Mr. Marlowe, General."
The old man didn't move or speak, or even nod.
He just looked at me lifelessly.
The butler pushed a damp wicker chair against the backs of my legs and I sat down. He took my hat with a deft scoop.
Then the old man dragged his voice up from the bottom of a well and said: