“Oh, but that’s not important,” she objected, “and wouldn’t help you”—she smiled impudently—“and is certainly none of your business.”
“This was in Constantinople?”
She hesitated, nodded, and said: “Marmora.”
He waved his cigarette at her, saying: “Go ahead, what happened then?”
“But that’s all. I’ve told you. They promised me five hundred pounds to help them and I did and then we found that Joe Cairo meant to desert us, taking the falcon with him and leaving us nothing. So we did exactly that to him, first. But then I wasn’t any better off than I had been before, because Floyd hadn’t any intention at all of paying me the seven hundred and fifty pounds he had promised me. I had learned that by the time we got here. He said we would go to New York, where he would sell it and give me my share, but I could see he wasn’t telling me the truth.” Indignation had darkened her eyes to violet. “And that’s why I came to you to get you to help me learn where the falcon was.”
“And suppose you’d got it? What then?”
“Then I’d have been in a position to talk terms with Mr. Floyd Thursby.”
Spade squinted at her and suggested: “But you wouldn’t have known where to take it to get more money than he’d give you, the larger sum that you knew he expected to sell it for?”
“I did not know,” she said.
Spade scowled at the ashes he had dumped on his plate. “What makes it worth all that money?” he demanded. “You must have some idea, at least be able to guess.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”