IV

She looked pleadingly at him. His yellow-grey eyes were hard and implacable. Slowly she put her hand inside the neck of her dress, brought out a slender roll of bills, and put them in his waiting hand.

He smoothed the bills out and counted them⁠—four twenties, four tens, and a five. He returned two of the tens and the five to her. The others he put in his pocket. Then he stood up and said: “I’m going out and see what I can do for you. I’ll be back as soon as I can with the best news I can manage. I’ll ring four times⁠—long, short, long, short⁠—so you’ll know it’s me. You needn’t go to the door with me. I can let myself out.”

He left her standing in the center of the floor looking after him with dazed blue eyes.

Spade went into a reception-room whose door bore the legend Wise, Merican & Wise . The red-haired girl at the switchboard said: “Oh, hello, Mr. Spade.”

“Hello, darling,” he replied. “Is Sid in?”

He stood beside her with a hand on her plump shoulder while she manipulated a plug and spoke into the mouthpiece: “ Mr. Spade to see you, Mr. Wise.” She looked up at Spade. “Go right in.”

He squeezed her shoulder by way of acknowledgment, crossed the reception-room to a dully lighted inner corridor, and passed down the corridor to a frosted glass door at its far end. He opened the frosted glass door and went into an office where a small olive-skinned man with a tired oval face under thin dark hair dotted with dandruff sat behind an immense desk on which bales of paper were heaped.

The small man flourished a cold cigar-stub at Spade and said: “Pull a chair around. So Miles got the big one last night?” Neither his tired face nor his rather shrill voice held any emotion.