Spade took off his hat and tossed it to the other end of the sofa.
He grinned at Gutman.
The looseness of his lower lip and the droop of his upper eyelids combined with the v's in his face to make his grin lewd as a satyr's.
"That daughter of yours has a nice belly," he said, "too nice to be scratched up with pins."
Gutman's smile was affable if a bit oily.
The boy in the doorway took a short step forward, raising his pistol as far as his hip.
Everybody in the room looked at him.
In the dissimilar eyes with which Brigid O'Shaughnessy and Joel Cairo looked at him there was, oddly, something identically reproving.
The boy blushed, drew back his advanced foot, straightened his legs, lowered the pistol and stood as he had stood before, looking under lashes that hid his eyes at Spade's chest. The blush was pale enough and lasted for only an instant, but it was startling on his face that habitually was so cold and composed.
Gutman turned his sleek-eyed fat smile on Spade again. His voice was a suave purring.
"Yes, sir, that was a shame, but you must admit that it served its purpose."
Spade's brows twitched together.
"Anything would've," he said.
"Naturally I wanted to see you as soon as I had the falcon.
Cash customers—why not?
I went to Burlingame expecting to run into this sort of a meeting.
I didn't know you were blundering around, half an hour late, trying to get me out of the way so you could find Jacobi again before he found me."
Gutman chuckled.
His chuckle seemed to hold nothing but satisfaction.
"Well, sir," he said, "in any case, here we are having our little meeting, if that's what you wanted."
"That's what I wanted.
How soon are you ready to make the first payment and take the falcon off my hands?"
Brigid O'Shaughnessy sat up straight and looked at Spade with surprised blue eyes.
He patted her shoulder inattentively.
His eyes were steady on Gutman's.
Gutman's twinkled merrily between sheltering fatpuffs.
He said: "Well, sir, as to that," and put a hand inside the breast of his coat.
Cairo, hands on thighs, leaned forward in his chair, breathing between parted soft lips. His dark eyes had the surface-shine of lacquer. They shifted their focus warily from Spade's face to Gutman's, from Gutman's to Spade's.
Gutman repeated,
"Well, sir, as to that," and took a white envelope from his pocket.
Ten eyes—the boy's now only half obscured by his lashes—looked at the envelope.
Turning the envelope over in his swollen hands, Gutman studied for a moment its blank white front and then its back, unsealed, with the flap tucked in.
He raised his head, smiled amiably, and scaled the envelope at Spade's lap.
The envelope, though not bulky, was heavy enough to fly true. It struck the lower part of Spade's chest and dropped down on his thighs.
He picked it up deliberately and opened it deliberately, using both hands, having taken his left arm from around the girl.
The contents of the envelope were thousand-dollar bills, smooth and stiff and new.
Spade took them out and counted them.
There were ten of them.
Spade looked up smiling. He said mildly:
"We were talking about more money ti-ian this."
"Yes, sir, we were," Gutman agreed, "but we were talking then.
This is actual n-ioney, 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 n-iore seriously, yet not altogether seriously: "There are more of us to be taken care of nosy."
He moved his twinkling eyes and his fat hiead to indicate Cairo.
"And—well, sir, in short—the situation has changed."
While Gutman talked Spade had tapped the edges of the ten bills into alignment and had returned then-i to their envelope, tucking the flap in over them.
Now-', with forearms on knees, he sat hunched forward, dangling the envelope from a corner held lightly by finger and thumb down between his legs.
His reply to the fat n-ian was careless: