“No one knows. It was made by Greek artisans as a gift for Bergina, the sister of Alexander the Great.” She said almost defensively, “Everyone thought the sacking of Troy by the Greeks was just a legend until Heinrich Schliemann excavated the ruins. I have a letter from my father.”
She delved into a black French-tailored calfskin handbag, removed a letter that was written in Greek.
“It is dated 1920, but a man came to my mother’s house and gave it to her only a month ago.”
“This man with the letter was a Turk?”
“A Greek. He told my mother that he was a brigand in my father’s band of andartes and was with him at the end. He said he didn’t know what was in the letter, but it had been steamed open and clumsily glued shut again. He said he needed money.”
“Your mother give him any?”
“A little. She didn’t believe his story, but the letter is in my father’s handwriting. She gave me the letter on Saturday. On Monday the man started following me.” She opened the letter. “My father writes that he is in a little nameless town in the Balkans somewhere north of Greece. He says he knows where the chest of Bergina is hidden and that no one else does. He says it is his legacy to my mother and me.” She looked up. “If it’s real, wouldn’t the chest have immense monetary and historic value?”
“Maybe, but it doesn’t explain why a Turk would be tailing you around San Francisco five years later.”
“He writes that he is enclosing detailed directions to its hiding place. But there is nothing else, no directions, just the letter. But if the man following me thinks there were and finds out where I live, mightn’t he...” Her hands crumpled the letter. “I need to know I’m safe.”
Spade stood. “Where are you working?”
“I’m a secretary for Hartford and Cole. They’re in—”
“The Russ Building. Stocks and bonds. Go back to work, Miss Chiotras, leave at the usual time, go someplace you might go after work. You won’t see me, but I’ll be there.”
“I sometimes eat at the Gypsy Tea Shop in Grant Avenue.”
“Good. Afterward, walk up to Sutter. Window-shop. Go along Powell, walk through Union Square to Stockton. Take at least a half hour, then go to a movie at the Cameo, on Market between Fifth and Sixth. Then go home. If anyone’s following you he’ll have to show himself during that time.”
Spade frankly appraised her, her face, her body. A possessive gleam came into his eyes.
“But I’ll have to know where you live.”
“No!” She cried. She looked very young, very vulnerable.
“You have to promise that you won’t try to follow me home.” Spade shrugged, said blandly, “OK. No reason to do so.”
“I–I trust you, but if he should follow you and...” Spade tossed his pencil into the air, let it fall on the desk.
“Nobody can follow me without me seeing him. Come to the office tomorrow morning on your way to work. I’ll know more then.”
20
Shadow Man
The Gypsy Tea Shop in Grant, half a block above O’Farrell, was tricked out to look like a fortune-teller’s duikerrin room, where palms are read and psychic readings given. The crystal shades of the hanging lamps tinkled whenever the door was opened. On the side walls were framed Greek icons of the Virgin Mary, Saint Nicholas, and Saint Constantine. Pinned to the back wall was a diaphanous red, yellow, and purple skirt spread wide to add color to the room. On a corner table was a crystal ball made pastel by the votive candles glowing behind it.
Penny Chiotras sat at a window table alone. In profile her face looked tranquil, untroubled, but the tendons of the hand raising her teacup were taut with tension. She left money on the table, issued into busy Grant Avenue. Without looking around, she walked up toward Sutter two blocks above, following instructions.
“Good girl,” muttered Sam Spade approvingly.
He waited until she was lost from view in the evening press of strollers, then left his recessed entryway across from the tearoom. For the next thirty minutes she followed instructions, but then instead of going down toward Market and the Cameo Theater, she went into the front entrance of the St. Mark Hotel across Powell from Union Square.
“Not so good,” Spade muttered.
He got into the front cab in the taxi line, reached over the back of the seat to give the goateed driver a silver dollar.
“Go around the block, cap, and pull up just beyond Mason.”
The driver checked his rearview, grinned as he drifted his cab away from the curb.
“I don’t suppose you remember me, Mr. Spade, but I drove you all over hell and gone last year behind a Flip doorman who was shakin’ down guests stayin’ at the Baltimore Hotel with ladies not their wives.”
“Sure. Erle, isn’t it? I recognize the goatee.”
As they rounded the corner into Post, Penny Chiotras issued from the side entrance of the St. Mark. She checked the street, then walked to Powell and caught a down cable car to Market. But not to the Cameo Theater. Instead, she went down a block to Mission, boarded a number 11 streetcar, rode it all the way to the end of the line at Twenty-fourth and Hoffman in the Outer Mission, nestled below Diamond Heights in usually fog-free Noe Valley.
She waited outside the car until it started its return trip, jumped aboard when it was already moving, got off at Dolores and Twenty-third. Spade told the cabbie to wait, then followed her.
Penny ducked into Severn, one of three narrow halfblock alleys that run off Twenty-third between Dolores and Church. By the dim streetlight he watched her go up the stairs of a narrow wooden row house of uncertain color. He waited until a roller shade was pulled down in the third-floor front window on the left. Pale light went on behind it. When the light went out Spade returned to his waiting cab, went home and to bed and to sleep.
At 8 a.m. he was explaining to Effie Perine, “I told her I would tail her last night, see if anyone was behind her. I waited outside the Russ Building, where she says she’s a stockbroker’s secretary, picked her up, shadowed her. No one. Nothing.” Spade spread his hands wide to show how devoid of shadowers the back trail had been. “She ditched me at the St. Mark instead of going to the Cameo Theater. And what she told me doesn’t hold up. No sinister men ducking around corners.” His smile was without humor. “Except me.”
“Ditched you?” asked Effie Perine in an unbelieving voice.
She handed him the cigarette she had rolled for him; he lit it with a match from the desktop dispenser. She was frowning.
“So you don’t believe her,” she said.
“That she’s scared, yeah. That a Turk is shadowing her, no — at least not last night. She told me a wild tale about a gold-bound chest that’s supposed to be from the time of Alexander the Great, but—”
“The chest of Bergina!” exclaimed Effie Perine.
“Not you too,” Spade growled in mock disgust.
“It’s true Greek legend. Alexander was one of the greatest Greeks, a real hero to our people. Bergina was his sister. But how does that tie in with Penny’s father?”
“She showed me a letter written in Greek, said it was her father’s handwriting, said it was dated nineteen twenty. She said it was delivered to her mother last month by a man who said he had been a brigand in her father’s revolutionary band. Said he got some money from her ma and disappeared.”
Effie Perine’s mouth drew up almost primly. “Delivered? By hand? Five years late?”
“You don’t like it either, huh? The letter supposedly says her father found the chest and that it would be his legacy to his family. All I know, darling, is that her story about the Turk is hooey. I think the chest is hooey. She made me promise I wouldn’t follow her home because he only knows where she works. That’s hooey too. If he can pick her up at the one place he can follow her to the other.” An unholy glow came into his eyes. “I’d better follow her home tonight after all, see what’s so—”