Running From Legs and Other Stories
- Автор: Хантер Эван
- Год: 2000
- Язык: английский
- Год: Five Star
- ISBN: 978-0-7862-2671-9
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Running From Legs and Other Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
In the other room, the band was playing “Ja-Da,” a tune from the war years. We were all drinking from coffee cups. In the coffee cups was something very brown and very vile tasting, but it was not coffee.
Dominique was smiling.
It occurred to me that perhaps she was smiling at me.
Dominique was twenty-eight years old, a beautiful, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, tall and slender and utterly desirable. A native of France, she had come to America as a widow shortly after the war ended; her husband had been killed three days before the guns went silent. One day, alone with her in my grandmother’s shop — Dominique was folding silk panties, I was sitting on a stool in front of the counter, watching her — she told me she despaired of ever finding another man as wonderful as her husband had been. “I ‘ave been spoil’, n’est-ce pas?” she said. I adored her French accent. I told her that I, too, had suffered losses in my life. And so, like cautious strangers fearful of allowing even our glances to meet, we’d skirted the possibilities inherent in our chance proximity.
But now — her smile.
The Brothers Three was very crowded tonight. Lots of smoke and laughter and the sound of a four-piece band coming from the other room. Piano, drums, alto saxophone, and trumpet. There was a dance floor in the other room. I wondered if I should ask Dominique to dance. I had never danced with her. I tried to remember when last I’d danced with anyone.
I’d been limping, yes. And a French girl whispered in my ear — this was after I’d got out of the hospital, it was shortly after the armistice was signed — a French girl whispered to me in Paris that she found a man with a slight limp very sexy. “Je trouve très séduisante,” she said, “une claudication legère.” She had nice poitrines, but I’m not sure I believed her. I think she was just being kind to an American doughboy who’d got shot in the foot during the fighting around the Bois des Loges on a bad day in November. I found that somewhat humiliating, getting shot in the foot. It did not seem very heroic, getting shot in the foot. I no longer limped, but I still had the feeling that some people thought I’d shot myself in the goddamn foot. To get out of the 78th Division or something. As if such a thought had ever crossed my mind.
Dominique kept smiling at me.
Boozily.
I figured she’d had too much coffee.
She was wearing basic black tonight. A simple black satin, narrow in silhouette, bare of back, its neckline square and adorned with pearls, its waistline low, its hemline falling to mid-thigh where a three-inch expanse of white flesh separated the dress from the rolled tops of her blond silk stockings. She was smoking. As were Vinnie and my grandmother. Smoking had something to do with drinking. If you drank, you smoked. That seemed to be the way it worked.
Dominique kept drinking and smoking and smiling at me.
I smiled back.
My grandmother ordered another round.
She was drinking Manhattans. Dominique was drinking Martinis. Vinnie was drinking something called a Between the Sheets, which was one-third brandy, one-third Cointreau, one-third rum, and a dash of lemon juice. I was drinking a Bosom Caresser. These were all cocktails, an American word made popular when drinking became illegal. Cocktails.
In the other room, a double paradiddle and a solid bass drum shot ended the song. There was a pattering of applause, a slight expectant pause, and then the alto saxophone soared into the opening riff of a slow, sad, and bluesy rendition of “Who’s Sorry Now?”
“Richard?” Dominique said, and raised one eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to ask me to dance?”
She was easily the most beautiful woman in the room. Eyes lined with black mascara, lips and cheeks painted the color of all those poppies I’d seen growing in fields across the length and breadth of France. Her dark hair bobbed in a shingle cut, the scent of mimosa wafting across the table.
“Richard?”
Her voice a caress.
Alto saxophone calling mournfully from the next room.
Smoke swirling like fog coming in off the docks on the day we landed over there. We were back now because it was over over there. And I no longer limped. And Dominique was asking me to dance.
“Go dance with her,” my grandmother said.
“Yes, come,” Dominique said, and put out her cigarette. Rising, she moved out of the booth past my grandmother, who rescued her Manhattan by holding it close to her protective bosom, and then winked at me as if to say “These are new times, Richie, we have the vote now, we can drink and we can smoke, anything goes nowadays, Richie. Go dance with Dominique.”
Is what my grandmother’s wink seemed to say.
I took Dominique’s hand.
Together, hand in hand, we moved toward the other room.
“I love this song,” Dominique said, and squeezed my hand.
There were round tables with white tablecloths in the other room, embracing a half-moon-shaped, highly polished, parquet dance floor. The lights were dimmer in this part of the club, perhaps because the foxtrot was a new dance that encouraged cheeks against cheeks and hands upon asses. A party of three — a handsome man in a dinner jacket and two women in gowns — sat at one of the tables with Bruno Tataglia. Bruno was leaning over the table, in obviously obsequious conversation with the good-looking man whose eyes kept checking out women on the dance floor even though there was one beautiful woman sitting on his left and another on his right. Both women were wearing white satin gowns and they both had purple hair. I had heard of women wearing orange, or red, or green, or even purple wigs when they went out on the town, but this was the first time I’d ever actually seen one.
Two, in fact.
I wondered how Dominique would look in a purple wig.
“Dominique?”
Bruno’s voice.
He rose as we came abreast of the table, took her elbow, and said to the man in the dinner jacket, “Mr. Noland, I’d like you to meet the beauteous Dominique.”
“Pleasure,” Mr. Noland said.
Dominique nodded politely.
“And Richie here,” Bruno said as an afterthought.
“Nice to meet you,” I said.
Mr. Noland’s eyes were on Dominique.
“Won’t you join us?” he said.
“Thank you, but we’re about to dance,” Dominique said, and squeezed my hand again, and led me out onto the floor. I held her close. We began swaying in time to the music. The trumpet player was putting in a mute. The piano player eased him into his solo.
Liquid brass.
Dominique’s left hand moved up to the back of my neck.
“You dance well,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Does it ever ache you? Your foot?”
“When it rains,” I said.
“Was it terrible, the war?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
I did not much feel like talking about it. I gently steered her away from the ring of tables and back toward the bandstand, sweeping her gracefully past the table where Bruno was grinning oleaginously at Mr. Noland and his two blond bimbos.
Mr. Noland’s eyes met mine.
A shiver ran up my spine.
I had never seen eyes like that in my life.
Not even on the battlefield.
Not even on men eager to kill me.
Dominique and I glided over the parquet floor.