6 - Prudential counterforce

Summary

Spade flung his words out with a brutal sort of carelessness that gave them more weight than they could have got from dramatic emphasis or from loudness. “If you kill me, how are you going to get the bird? If I know you can't afford to kill me till you have it, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?”

Gutman cocked his head to the left and considered these questions. … “Well, sir, there are other means of persuasion besides killing and threatening to kill.”

“Sure,” Spade agreed, “but they're not much good unless the threat of death is behind them to hold the victim down. See what I mean? If you try something I don't like I won't stand for it. I'll make it a matter of your having to call it off or kill me, knowing you can't afford to kill me.”

“I see what you mean.” Gutman chuckled. “That is an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides, because, as you know, sir, men are likely to forget in the heat of action where their best interest lies and let their emotions carry them away.”

Spade too was all smiling blandness. “That's the trick, from my side,” he said, “to make my play strong enough that it ties you up, but yet not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgment.”

Gutman said fondly: “By Gad, sir, you are a character!”

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon