"You couldn't do it, sir.
Nobody could do it that hadn't had a world of experience with things of that sort, and"—he paused impressively—"thcre aren't any other things of that sort."
His bulbs jostled one another as he laughed again.
He stopped laughing, abruptly.
His fleshy lips hung open as laughter had left them.
He stared at Spade with an intentness that suggested myopia.
He asked:
"You mean you don't know what it is?" Amazement took the throatiness out of his voice.
Spade made a careless gesture with his cigar.
"Oh, hell," he said lightly,
"I know what it's supposed to look like. I know the value in life you people put on it.
I don't know what it is."
"She didn't tell you?"
"Miss O'Shaughnessy?"
"Yes.
A lovely girl, sir."
"Uh-huh.
No."
The fat man's eyes were dark gleams in ambush behind pink puffs of flesh.
He said indistinctly,
"She must know," and then, "And Cairo didn't either?"
"Cairo is cagey.
He's willing to buy it, but he won't risk telling me anything I don't know already."
The fat man moistened his lips with his tongue.
"How much is he willing to buy it for?" he asked.
"Ten thousand dollars."
The fat man laughed scornfully.
"Ten thousand, and dollars, mind you, not even pounds.
That's the Greek for you.
Humph!
And what did you say to that?"
"I said if I turned it over to him I'd expect the ten thousand."
"Ah, yes, if!
Nicely put, sir."
The fat man's forehead squirmed in a flesh-blurred frown.
"They must know," he said only partly aloud, then:
"Do they?
Do they know what the bird is, sir?
What was your impression?"
"I can't help you there," Spade confessed. "There's not much to go by.
Cairo didn't say he did and he didn't say he didn't. She said she didn't, but I took it for granted that she was lying."
"That was not an in judicious thing to do," the fat man said, but his mind was obviously not on his words.
He scratched his head.
He frowned until his forehead was marked by raw red creases.
He fidgeted in his chair as much as his size and the size of the chair permitted fidgeting.
He shut his eyes, opened them suddenly—wide—and said to Spade:
"Maybe they don't."
His bulbous pink face slowly lost its worried frown and then, more quickly, took on an expression of ineffable happiness.
"If they don't," he cried, and again:
"If they don't I'm the only one in the whole wide sweet world who does!"