“Or bust some heads. That one in the front, Dundy, busted mine during the strike in nineteen.”
They were standing near the foot of the gangplank when the policemen descended with four manacled seamen between them. Both men turned away to draw on their cigarettes as the officers and their prisoners passed. When Spade and Tingly turned back, the first officer, Rafferty, and Quartermaster Kest were at the head of the gangplank to watch the procession to the squad cars. Their voices carried.
“I bet those four let that passenger put all the stolen gold in his steamer trunks in the baggage room,” said Kest.
Rafferty shook his head almost belligerently.
“Don’t you believe it. They’re all good union men and they’ve been with us for six voyages now. They’ll be back. Then whatever s.o.b. pulled this job, he’d better haul ass. The cops will be out for blood for sure.”
“I s’pose you’re right.” Kest added casually, “Can you get Phillips to relieve me here while I get some chow?”
Rafferty went in search of Kest’s replacement. Spade said, “Let’s play some pool. Penny a ball?”
“Why the hell not?” said Tingly. “There sure ain’t gonna be no work today for the likes of us.”
As they strolled down the Embarcadero, Kest roared by them on a green motorcycle with a sidecar.
It was 11 p.m. The two seamen pulling graveyard watch, Hans Grost and Shelly Grafton, were on the boat deck checking the gas-vent pipes from the fuel tanks. Grost was thick and slow with pig eyes, Grafton lean and lithe, knife eyed. Their movements were surreptitious. They descended quickly and silently to the promenade deck, which had been roped off so it could be re-covered with gray rub berized paint before the vessel departed San Francisco. After quickly checking the bottoms of the scuppers — drainpipes — from the boat deck, they set off toward the smell of fresh coffee wafting from the galley.
Sam Spade, still in his longshoreman’s denim jacket and pants, a blue knit navy watch cap pulled down hard on his head, emerged from an alcove beside the doorway to the passengers’ cabins. He crossed quickly to the drainpipes. The bottoms of all of them were plugged pending the paint job. Spade lightly tapped each in turn with the rounded steel end of his Flylock pocketknife. The first three gave off a hollow metallic clang. The fourth emitted a dull thunk.
Spade followed that scupper up to the boat deck. Its top was blocked. The others were not. He stared thoughtfully at it for a full two minutes, then went around tapping the vent pipes from the fuel tanks that Grost and Grafton also had been checking. Again, one of them emitted a thunk instead of a clang.
After looking into the lifeboats hanging from their boat deck davits, Spade departed the vessel. It was just midnight.
Fog was drifting in through the Golden Gate and the horns were busy, as well as the bells and whistles of the ferries crossing to and from Oakland and Sausalito, up in Marin County.
Spade strolled from Pier 35 down toward the Ferry Building. As he passed the intersection where Front and Union touch the Embarcadero, three bulky shapes emerged from the shadows. Their features were obscured by the heavy hoods of their jackets. The man in front had a baseball bat, brass knuckles glinted on the second man’s fist, a knife gleamed in the hand of the third.
Spade backed up against the front of the Pier 19 warehouse. His body seemed to shrink, to draw in on itself as if to make him a smaller target. Terror was in his eyes, his head swiveled from side to side to keep all three men in view. His hands were out as if to ward off attack. The fear in his eyes was echoed in his voice; he seemed to have trouble getting words past a closed-down larynx.
“Chrissake, guys, don’t — don’t hurt me. I’ll give you everything I’ve got. You don’t have to hurt me.”
The lead man gave a heavy laugh of triumph.
“A snoop, and a yellow-livered snoop besides. You’ve been sticking your nose into the wrong guy’s business.”
He swung the baseball bat at the cringing figure’s head. But Spade had already charged inside the bat’s arc. His right elbow jammed up into the attacker’s exposed throat.
His charge was so sudden that the second man’s brass knucks only grazed the side of his face, dropping him to one knee. But even as Spade went down, he was driving forward off his other foot.
The top of Spade’s head crunched into Brass Knucks’s chin. The man went backward with blood spouting from his ruined mouth as the first attacker, gasping and choking, hit the pavement with the back of his head. He was motionless.
Grunting like a wild boar, Spade whirled to drive his cupped hands simultaneously against both of the knifeman’s ears. Howling with the pain of shattered eardrums, the man landed on his knees, tipped over sideways, and lay still, clutching both sides of his head, yowling.
Forty-five seconds had passed.
Spade looked quickly around, panting, holding his handkerchief to his scraped cheek. No pedestrians were in sight. No traffic passed on the Embarcadero. He bent over each man in turn, pulling back their hoods so he could see their faces. It was obvious from his expression that he didn’t know any of them. He checked their pockets. No money, no I.D. He walked away.
At the turnaround in front of the Ferry Building, Spade jumped aboard an almost-empty Market Street Owl just pulling away. He took a seat close to the back door and kept his head down and the handkerchief to his face to mask the bleeding.
He left the car at Ellis Street, walked the block and a half to his apartment at 120 Ellis. His hands were shaking. The blood on his cheek was clotting. He took off his heavy woolen cap. There was a bloody tooth embedded in the fabric. He threw the tooth into the gutter, let himself in, trudged up the stairs, let himself into his room.
Spade pulled the chain of the bare overhead sixty-watt bulb, tossed his cap and coat on the davenport bed, and went around a counter with a tall stool in front of it. In the tiny cubicle behind it were a sink and a table with an Energex single-burner hot plate on top, two plates, and cutlery on the shelf below.
He washed his hands and face, wincing when the hot water hit his lacerated cheek, dried gingerly using the towel that hung on a rack behind the counter. From a narrow cupboard above the sink, he took a Johnson & Johnson first aid medical kit and liberally applied iodine to his cheek, again wincing, added a gauze pad and sticking plaster.
From the shelf below the bedside stand he got a wine glass and a half-full bottle of rum, opened the window to let in the cold wet night air and the smells and incessant night sounds of Market Street. He sat down in the room’s only chair and drank rum and rolled and smoked cigarettes.
“The plot thickens,” he finally muttered aloud.
He washed and dried his glass, put it and the Bacardi back in the nightstand. He undressed and put on the green-and-white checked pajamas he took from under the pillow, pulled the chain on the overhead bulb, and got into bed.
He slept.
8
Take It to the Bank
“Sam, what happened to your face?”
Spade wore a white shirt with narrow green stripes; his suit coat was over the back of his swivel chair. He stubbed out his cigarette, said, “Three muggers. We’re making progress.”
“Getting beat up is making progress?”
“You oughtta see the other guys.”
“There was nothing in the papers—”
“I can’t figure if they were warning me off or trying to kill me.”
“Kill you?” Effie Perine’s face was suddenly pale.
“Brass knucks, a shiv, a baseball bat. Easy to go too far. Someone’s getting worried.” He leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “I was on the San Anselmo last night and watched two seamen on graveyard watch checking out the drainpipes.”