“Don’t be a damned fool,” Spade said patiently. “You know what it is. I know where it is. That’s why we’re here.”
“Well, sir, where is it?”
Spade ignored the question.
The fat man bunched his lips, raised his eyebrows, and cocked his head a little to the left. “You see,” he said blandly, “I must tell you what I know, but you will not tell me what you know. That is hardly equitable, sir. No, no, I do not think we can do business along those lines.”
Spade’s face became pale and hard. He spoke rapidly in a low furious voice: “Think again and think fast. I told that punk of yours that you’d have to talk to me before you got through. I’ll tell you now that you’ll do your talking today or you are through. What are you wasting my time for? You and your lousy secret! Christ! I know exactly what that stuff is that they keep in the subtreasury vaults, but what good does that do me? I can get along without you. God damn you! Maybe you could have got along without me if you’d kept clear of me. You can’t now. Not in San Francisco. You’ll come in or you’ll get out—and you’ll do it today.”
He turned and with angry heedlessness tossed his glass at the table. The glass struck the wood, burst apart, and splashed its contents and glittering fragments over table and floor. Spade, deaf and blind to the crash, wheeled to confront the fat man again.
The fat man paid no more attention to the glass’s fate than Spade did: lips pursed, eyebrows raised, head cocked a little to the left, he had maintained his pink-faced blandness throughout Spade’s angry speech, and he maintained it now.
Spade, still furious, said: “And another thing, I don’t want—”
The door to Spade’s left opened. The boy who had admitted Spade came in. He shut the door, stood in front of it with his hands flat against his