“I can understand your being afraid of Cairo,” Spade said. “He’s out of your reach.”
“And you aren’t?”
“Not that way,” he said and grinned.
She blushed. She picked up a slice of bread encrusted with grey liverwurst. She put it down on her plate. She wrinkled her white forehead and she said: “It’s a black figure, as you know, smooth and shiny, of a bird, a hawk or falcon, about that high.” She held her hands a foot apart.
“What makes it important?”
She sipped coffee and brandy before she shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “They’d never tell me. They promised me five hundred pounds if I helped them get it. Then Floyd said afterward, after we’d left Joe, that he’d give me seven hundred and fifty.”
“So it must be worth more than seventy-five hundred dollars?”
“Oh, much more than that,” she said. “They didn’t pretend that they were sharing equally with me. They were simply hiring me to help them.”
“To help them how?”
She lifted her cup to her lips again. Spade, not moving the domineering stare of his yellow-grey eyes from her face, began to make a cigarette. Behind them the percolator bubbled on the stove.
“To help them get it from the man who had it,” she said slowly when she had lowered her cup, “a Russian named Kemidov.”
“How?”