New York is the planned destination for the sale of the falcon in Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s account, and a city bound up with her attempt to recover her younger sister. Across the competing stories told to Sam Spade, it is both a practical waypoint and a place where the falcon’s trail and the characters’ claims to it converge.

The Sister Brigid Seeks

Brigid says her younger sister is in New York, though she does not know where in the city the girl met the man connected to her disappearance. Five years younger and only seventeen, the sister has not shared Brigid’s circle of friends; Brigid admits that they have never been as close as sisters should be. Their parents are in Europe, and Brigid says she must get the girl back before they return at the beginning of the month. The account makes New York not simply a destination but the setting of an urgent family responsibility, described by Brigid as something her parents could not bear to learn about.

A Destination in the Falcon’s Journey

Brigid says she met Floyd Thursby in the Orient and came with him from Hong Kong to San Francisco the week before recounting the story. According to her, Thursby had promised to help her, then used her dependence on him to betray her. She explains that Thursby proposed going to New York, selling the falcon there, and giving her a share. By the time they reached San Francisco, she had concluded he was not telling the truth and would not pay the seven hundred and fifty pounds he had promised.

The Deal and Its Breakdown

Brigid traces the falcon’s earlier passage through a chain of alliances and reversals. She says that she agreed to help for five hundred pounds in order to get the object from a Russian named Kemidov. In Marmara, she says, she and her associates discovered that Joel Cairo meant to leave with the falcon and give them nothing; they acted against him first. That turn did not secure Brigid’s position: Thursby still intended to take the object toward New York, where he could sell it while withholding her share. Brigid says she therefore came to Spade for help locating the falcon, hoping that possession would put her in a position to negotiate terms with Thursby.

New York in the Rival Accounts

Casper Gutman’s account gives the planned journey a different context. He says he and his associates knew Brigid well enough not to believe that Thursby knew where the falcon was, although they did not then know that she had entrusted it to Captain Jacobi in Hong Kong to bring to San Francisco aboard the La Paloma while she and the others took a faster boat. Gutman says that his group wanted to remove Thursby, whom he describes as Brigid’s ally and a notorious killer, both to weaken her protection and to make her reconsider her dispute with them. He also says that Wilmer followed Thursby after attempts to track his meetings with Brigid failed, and that Gutman’s effort to negotiate with Thursby came to nothing before Wilmer killed him. New York thus belongs to the route Brigid says Thursby proposed, but Gutman’s account places the decisive contest over the falcon elsewhere: in what each faction knew, concealed, and could prove.

Narrative Significance

The city’s importance is presented through plans and testimony rather than through a narrated visit. It gives Brigid’s explanation a destination and a promised financial outcome, while her sister’s presence there supplies a separate, personal urgency. Yet the falcon never reaches the sale Brigid describes: mistrust over Thursby’s promise sends her to Spade to find it, and Gutman’s retrospective account reveals that the object had been sent by another route. New York therefore marks the gap between the characters’ stated plans and the hidden movements that drive the investigation.