Little Miss Mute
By David M. Bachman
Copyright 2012 David M. Bachman
****~~~~****
It was her eyes that should have told me everything about her, right from the very beginning. It felt like just random chance that our gaze met from across the bar at that one moment, but I should have known it was deliberate. Those eyes, like huge green emeralds that shone from behind round black-framed windows with heavy dark curtains, were her first line of offense. The dame had gorgeous eyes, and she knew it … and she was using them on me.
I waited for her to glance away. They always did, any time I caught a gal looking my direction. They stared at the freak show for as long as they dared, but looked away the very second their attention was too obvious. It wasn’t politeness or courtesy, but fear. I was a scary kind of guy, at least to anyone that didn’t know me. I was scary because they didn’t know how I’d come to look the way that I did, nor could they be sure what I was capable of doing. They couldn’t know whether I was a man of good intentions or ill repute, but a man with scars running across his face the way mine did could only be considered bad. That was most women for ya’, except for this one.
I waited. She didn’t look away. Bold, this dame. A woman that could hold a stranger’s gaze like that from across a room was one that wanted something. I wasn’t loaded, not in the money sense, and the way I was dressed should have made that fairly clear enough in a blink. Cheap hat and coat, worn and scuffed shoes, and my hands and shirt still slightly grease-stained from a bit of roadside mechanic work I’d had to do in the rain to even make it to the bar that night, I was no Dapper Dan in the least. So, unless she was looking for someone to cover her tab, I knew that it wasn’t money she was after. Common sense should have told me that she wasn’t looking to find her way into my bed, either, but that heavy-lidded gaze of hers was dripping with sex so raw that I could almost taste it over the Lucky Strike hanging from my lips.
I’m not sure how I hadn’t noticed her when she’d first walked into the place. She wasn’t making a scene, but she stuck out from the crowd of usual barflies like a polished black opal in a handful of diamonds. Girls these days were all about the bob haircuts, flapper hats, and Raggedy Anne makeup; this dame, on the other hand, was something straight out of the Victorian days of wrought iron, corsets, and cathedrals. And the way she held herself, almost posing for a snapshot of my mind’s camera, I knew she was no dame at all, but a lady. My slow stare took in her elbow-length velvet gloves, a formal dress, ballroom slipper-like shoes, a long-stemmed cigarette holder, and a veiled hat, all in black. I wondered whose funeral she’d just attended, and who the hell got buried this close to midnight on a rainy October weekday. Just the same, I wondered how the hell I’d never seen her before; getting into a speakeasy like this was a matter of knowing the right people, and I wondered just who the hell she’d known to get in here, herself.
So, I gave her a few seconds. I never look away first – I’ve never needed to, not for a long time – but after I felt my eyes going dry, I started to feel a little bit ridiculous and I finally glanced down into my tumbler of whiskey. I waited a few, took a drag from my cigarette and a sip of my whiskey, and pretended to accidentally look in her direction again. Those eyes, those emerald green eyes were still locked on me. She wasn’t ogling me with awe or horror, just giving me that same sultry bedroom stare that never blinked. If she had wanted me to know that she was interested, she had already made it pretty clear. Now, she was dancing on a thin edge between randy and rude.
I don’t approach women. I’m not shy, and I’m no fairy. Fact is I’m just not one of those guys. I see a fella’ sauntering up to a gal, I’m looking at a guy that’s full of himself, or trying really hard to impress a dame enough to overlook his shortcomings – a guy short on change, packing a derringer in his jock instead of a rifle, whatever. I always figured, if a gal’s hard up enough for company to settle with a guy with my looks, she’d come to me first. It’s bad enough that I can’t help scaring the daylights out of a gal with my ugly mug. The last thing I’m sure any of them would want is someone like me getting up close and personal with them, to boot; at that point, any woman that goes home with me is only doing so because she’s probably more afraid of what she thinks I might do to her, otherwise. But this one, she wasn’t coming to me. She was interested, damned interested, and she wasn’t going to be ignored. I wasn’t keen on being stared at, either – call it a bad case of self-awareness, I guess – and there was only one way I could think of resolving this matter, short of downing my drink and walking out.
Standing up in a place like that was a lot like sticking your head in a cloud. The ceiling was so low, the air in that place so still that the smoke hung in a thick fog so dense and separate from the rest of the atmosphere that you had to duck under the bottom line and suck a few breaths if you weren’t already used to it. A person standing under five-four probably wouldn’t have even caught a whiff of tobacco unless someone blew it right into their face. The way this underground speakeasy was laid out, this was the upper half that caught all of the exhaust from the lower half. Heat rises and shit floats, so this wasn’t the kind of room where your upper class Rockefellers spent their nights. It was something to make me wonder why she was here, as I walked through that dense man-made fog with my cigarette pinched between my fingers of the same hand that held my whiskey.
The barest hint of a smile curved her lips, which were painted a burgundy so dark it could have been arterial blood. Right away, I knew she was the type that was used to getting what she wanted, especially when it came to men. Well, she’d wanted me to heel, and there I was, standing next to her table like an obedient dog on two feet. Three empty chairs awaited my selection. I wasn’t comfy or brazen enough to go for the one right next to her.
“So, how was the eulogy?” I asked her as I sat down on the worn wooden stool farthest from the wall. For a moment or two, she just stared at me. “The sermon? Y’know, the preacher’s funeral speech?”
Those eyes were still on me, but they said nothing, or at least not in reply. I wasn’t sure if she couldn’t hear me over the mild din of chatter from the other patrons, or if the dame had been born deaf. The way she looked with those startlingly green eyes, pale alabaster skin, and straight, dark, almost-but-not-quite-black hair, I should have guessed her to be a foreigner. Gypsy woman, I guessed, something Slavic in her bloodline. Nobody in these parts had all three of those traits of skin tone, hair, and eye color, together. The Irish girls here had the green eyes, the dark-haired gals were Greek or Italian, and the pale women were German or Dutch, but there was always some other odd quirk in the mix to throw it all off. We had all types in the city, but not so much to the north end here, especially out past the Johnson County line, and never any Slavs. It was just my luck, meeting a lady of her caliber and not having anyone within a hundred miles that knew how to speak a lick of any Slavic language.
“Never mind. You’ve probably heard that one before,” I sighed. I took a sip of booze that went down less than smoothly. “By the way, I’m Paul.”
Yet again, she offered nothing in the way of words for a response, but she did smile a bit more and nod her head to me in acknowledgment. Either she was deaf, or her knowledge of English didn’t even include the basic howdy-there stuff; in either case, my chances for this going anywhere were already looking about as bright as the rainy rural drive home.
“Me, Paul … Paul Verconi. You…?” I attempted, going for the caveman approach as I gestured first to myself, then her. When in doubt, use your hands.
She understood that enough to shake her head in reply.
“You don’t have a name, or you just don’t wanna give it to me?”
Again, she shook her pre
tty head. She was still smiling, anyway. Okay, so she had her own way of playing the name game. Fair enough, seeing as I was feeding her a phony name to begin with – I wasn’t even Italian.
“Speak any English?”
She then offered what would be about the closest thing to a full sentence she would give me that night, without even parting her lips. She pointed to me, then made a quack-quack gesture with her free gloved hand; she then pointed to herself, and then to one of her delicate ears that peeked out from under her glossy black hair. You talk, I’ll listen, she was saying. I couldn’t read minds or lips, but I was a champ at charades.
“So, you understand English?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Pretty well?”
Another nod.
“Can you speak it at all?”
She shook her head lightly.
“Don’t know how, or you just don’t want to?”
She made a zipper gesture across those full, bloody-red lips of hers. Great, so she was a mute. I wasn’t sure whether I would have been better off if she’d only been a foreigner; at least, in that case, she could have learned to talk a bit in something other than gibberish later on. Then again, I wasn’t sure why it mattered, anyway. I wasn’t planning to marry this dame right off the bat, was I? Frankly, a gal would have to be either nuts, stupid, or one damned tough cookie to want to get hitched with a sap like me. I’m not such a bad guy, really, but the way my life works, she’d have to be bulletproof to make it last for more than a few months before something would happen to her. I don’t have enemies, but my friends do, and the friends of my friends’ enemies are their enemies, too … or something like that. I hadn’t exactly earned all of my scars from turning wrenches, if you know what I mean.
I took one last drag from my cigarette before I stubbed it out in a nearby ashtray, asking, “So, how does this work, exactly? I tell you my life’s story and you decide if I’m worth your time?”
She nodded to that, removing her spent cigarette from its holder and crushing it out beside mine in the ashtray. I didn’t recall having ever seen her take a drag from it in the first place. She turned to face me more directly and propped her delicate chin upon the back of her knuckles, resting her elbows on the surface of an old wooden table as worn and marked-up as my own face. I still hadn’t decided whether or not I liked the way she studied me with those damned enchanting gem-like green eyes of hers, looking at me like I was some kind of an ape behind an invisible set of iron bars. Either she saw me as some kind of fascinating freak show, or … something else that I couldn’t quite place. The more I thought about it, the less I liked it.
Just the same, I wasn’t going to turn away the only quality skirt whose attention had come my way in what felt like years. I didn’t have to understand it to appreciate it, did I? Besides, any man that thinks he understands dames is just about as crazy as they are.
“Probably goes without saying, you wanna know how I got this way, huh?” I proposed, rubbing my lumpy mug. “Not much to tell about it, really. Some guys didn’t like me because I was playing for the wrong team … y’know? So, I’ve had a few rough nights. Broken bottle here, a knife there, close call with a bullet on this part, and …y’know, things like that.”
She nodded like she understood me perfectly.
“People see me, and for a minute, they think I was in The War, or something. Then they see that I’m not in a uniform and I look like an overdressed bum, they start making their own assumptions,” I said. I gave a shrug. “Who am I to blame ‘em? I saw you, I thought you were a widow or something, all dressed in black like that. Easier to judge someone by their looks than it is to take the time to get to know them, isn’t it?”
Again, she nodded. I took another sip of my whiskey. It was getting low. I could make it last longer by sipping smaller, but I’d earned my drinks. Besides, I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be staying there for very much longer, anyhow. The look that Little Miss Mute was giving me wasn’t so much a studying one as it was something I could only call hungry. The way she leaned just a little more over the table, the way her eyes hooked onto mine with only a rare blink here or there for effect, she was making me feel mighty damned uncomfortable. I don’t know how, but I got the feeling that she wanted to just throw that table over, pounce on me, and plant me a wet one right on the lips. I could remember the last time I’d ever seen a woman look at me like that. Actually, that’s a lie. Yeah, I could remember a time like that … but I’d promised myself that I’d do my best to forget about it.
I knocked back the last of my drink and wiggled the empty glass at her. “You up for a round?”
She shook her head. She didn’t have a glass of anything in front of her. A teetotaler and a stranger in a speakeasy? If she weren’t a she, she would have had “cop” stamped on her forehead. Then again, there weren’t any laws that I knew of that barred a woman from being an informant, either. The way she was dressed and the way she acted, though, there wasn’t a chance in hell that she wouldn’t have attracted enough attention to herself to get her cover blown. In fact, nobody else in the place seemed to have the stones to do more than give her a curious look or two – pretty to look at, but not pretty enough to approach? Either I was several more drinks farther along than I knew, or everyone else was privy to something about her that I hadn’t yet figured out.
“Suit yourself,” I said with another shrug as I moved to get up, falsely meaning to order another for myself but really just wanting to get away from her.
Before I was even halfway out of my chair, I felt something soft but impossibly firm clamp down on my wrist in a blink, pinning it to the table. If I’d been holding the tumbler any more loosely, she would’ve knocked it right out of my mitt. That black velvet-gloved hand of hers had a grip like nothing I’d ever felt. She wasn’t trying to crush me, just holding her fingers around the meaty joint of my wrist, but the tension I felt in those slender digits of hers was something I can only compare to a pair of handcuffs. I was a pretty strong fella’, but I could feel enough power in that grip of hers that she’d only be giving my hand back to me when she wanted to.
I started to seriously question the quality of the whiskey I’d been drinking there. I knew the feds were making enough busts on liquor to put a hurt on the supply, and some guys were starting to water their booze down with formaldehyde and God-knew-what-else to make their stocks last. Either I was losing my stomach for hard liquor, or I was losing my marbles, because I could almost have sworn in that second that Little Miss Mute had enough muscle she could’ve snapped my bones like twigs with just a squeeze of her hand. Her smile had only faltered slightly as she shook her head at me.
“No? What, you wanna leave already?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.
She nodded, and her smile returned as she arose from her seat with a graceful, fluid motion, picking up her small black purse in the same movement. I stood with her, not having much choice in the matter as she kept hold of my wrist. She took the tumbler from my hand, set it down upon the table, and began to lead me away. She looked to the barkeep and gave him a wave. The way he returned a simple solemn nod to her and then a blank stare to me was somehow unsettling, especially since Frank and I had exchanged a lot of banter over that bar for the past couple of months. Something was up, and I was really starting to hate being the only one not in the know. I’m not that stupid, not normally, but I guess maybe all it takes to undo a tough guy is a spooky little skirt with a pretty pair of eyes.
The one smart thing I’d done that night was bring along Big Bertha. Tucked under my coat in a worn leather shoulder holster, that tough forty-five caliber M1911 had saved my ass enough times in the past that I knew better than to go out to a place like this without her. I don’t like to brag about it, but Big Bertha had seen more action in the States than her standard-issue sister ever had during her tour of duty in Europe in the war against my ancestors.
Feeling that miniature piece of artillery hanging heavy under my left arm
against my ribs, I was bothered by the fact that Little Miss Mute had control of my gun hand. I could probably crank my left around and get Bertha out if I needed to in a pinch, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as smooth and easy as I’d probably need it to happen. If things were going to get ugly for no good reason at that point, the last thing I wanted to do was get popped because I couldn’t fight off some eerie little dame’s death-grip on my wrist.
Maybe “little” wasn’t the word for her. She was little, as far as her figure went – I liked my women with a bit more substance to them than she had, but I wasn’t complaining – but by height, her and I were almost a dead match. Then again, I was just a stocky German, all shoulders and ape arms; she was all legs and eyes, but the only glimpses I could catch of those stems of hers were when she climbed the stairs ahead of me, leading me up and out of the joint. The musty, smoky dampness of the speakeasy was traded off in favor of the somewhat moldy, cool, clean dampness of the rain-drenched night as we exited the cellar-like entry door and then the foyer that sheltered it.
I said goodnight to Big Vin at the door; he half-smiled when he first saw me, but went flat-blank just like Frank had when he saw Little Miss Mute wave farewell to him. He knew her. He had to have known her, otherwise he would have never let her in. But something about her didn’t sit right with him. That unspoken reference said a lot about her and should have set off all kinds of warning bells in my head. It didn’t. Even if it had, at some point I had apparently sabotaged my own personal warnings. This dame was beyond dangerous.
I hesitated for a blink in the doorway, getting ready to shrug my trench coat and throw it over her shoulders, but she led me straight out into the downpour without a moment’s hesitation. Feeling my insides knot as I went on alert, I started trying to dig in my heels and pry her fingers off my wrist. I was being set up, I knew it, and this crazy dish would drag me to my grave if I
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