The Tattooed Girl Read online

  Fortunately, the proprietor of The Café wasn’t on the premises.

  Fortunately, no one was waiting for a table. Most of the tables were vacated.

  Sharp-eyed Dmitri had noticed immediately that the girl was sitting not at one of the cleared tables but at a messy uncleared table. What would have repelled legitimate customers attracted her. Wineglasses with a little wine remaining, a single espresso cup, two plates containing crusts of sourdough bread and the remains of potato salad and dill pickles. Dmitri knew her strategy: like a feral cat that senses it must not arouse suspicion by betraying hunger and must make only slow, cautiously executed moves, she would sit casually for as long as she could bear it; she would glance neither to the left nor the right; she would appear to be watching, with a faint smile, mourning doves on the pavement near her feet waiting to be fed as they’d been fed sporadically through the afternoon by diners; at last, she would pick up a bread crust and break it into bits and toss them to the mourning doves even as, with a sleight of hand worthy of a magician, she would lift the other crust to her mouth and eat it. As the birds cooed and scolded and fluttered their wings to beat one another away from the meager bread-bits, the girl would scoop up the potato salad in her fingers and lick her fingers clean. Panting now, reckless, she would lift the wineglasses in rapid succession and drain them . . . Dmitri made it a point to turn away from the girl, hoisting a heavy tray to his shoulder. He wouldn’t watch. Let her do what she would. He pushed his way through swinging doors into The Café.

  Thinking, Poor cunt.

  WHEN HE RETURNED to the sidewalk a few minutes later, it was to discover that the girl with the blemished cheek and snarled straw-hair had moved to another uncleared table. But there were only emptied beer glasses and a crumpled bag of potato chips here. She seemed to have given up foraging for food and sat slumped forward amid the dirtied plates, her head on her arms. Dmitri stood over her and saw with interest that the girl’s forearms and the backs of her hands were finely marked as with calligraphy, or embroidery; where her hair parted to reveal a portion of the milky nape of her neck, there was a filigree of magenta and dull red. The marks on the girl’s hands, across her knuckles, looked like wispy remnants of lace gloves. If these were tattoos, they weren’t very vivid or emphatic; they looked more like a miniature language. The needle tracks of a junkie mainlining heroin, morphine, Demerol? Like a dog—yet an elegant breed, a borzoi—Dmitri stooped to sniff the girl’s odor: female, fleshy, underarm hairs, a dense bush of pubic hair, fattish voluptuous young-girl breasts with nipples like soft blind eyes, moist creases in belly, thighs, buttocks . . . A swoon of sexual need came over him, like a suddenly ringing phone.

  “Excuse me? Miss?”

  The girl lifted her head and stared at him. She had mineral eyes threaded with tiny broken capillaries. Junkie eyes, maybe. Or the eyes of one who is exhausted.

  On her right cheek, hovering beneath the eye, was a moth-figure, or a faint iridescent gray-magenta smudge in the shape of a moth, about the size of Dmitri’s big blunt thumbnail.

  “Is that a tattoo, or a birthmark?”

  It was Dmitri’s style to speak forcibly with females who didn’t reside in Carmel Heights. From experience he’d found it to be exactly the style such females responded to.

  Stricken with embarrassment the girl touched her cheek. As if she’d imagined it might be hidden, private. And this stranger had seen.

  She shook her head, mutely. She rose clumsily from the chair. She would shrink away like a kicked dog. She groped for her soiled denim backpack, her fake-leather bag that had overturned beneath the table. Dmitri glanced quickly about and saw that, except for two chess players deeply engrossed in their game, the outdoor café was empty. “Wait. I’m your friend.” He touched the girl’s shoulder, not lightly but firmly, reassuringly. He gathered in his hand a wad of her dried snarled hair as he would, later that night, grab a wad of her scratchy pubic hair. He saw with pitying tenderness that she was wearing a man’s shirt she’d been given, obviously it didn’t fit her, oversized at the shoulders and even at the breasts; and a pale-rose gauzy wraparound skirt that fell to her ankles, layers of fabric so diaphanous it seemed without texture or design. She was very attractive despite her slattern look. Perhaps because of her slattern look. The milky skin, the slack sensuous-red mouth, a soft baby’s face beneath the strained and frightened face of a woman closer to thirty than sixteen. Dmitri smiled. Gently he said, “Don’t know? If it’s a tattoo, or if you were born with it?”

  For he was one whose questions must be answered. You quickly learned: Dmitri’s questions must be answered promptly and honestly.

  Yet the girl mumbled inaudibly. She would have run from the café leaving behind some of her possessions if Dmitri hadn’t blocked her way. He took her hand and gripped it tight. “Hey. I told you, I’m your friend. You’re safe with me. I won’t call the cops.”

  He liked it that, at once, the girl believed him. The wish to believe him was so strong. Not a panicked feral creature, this sad-eyed girl, but a domestic creature who has been beaten and traumatized but can be reclaimed.

  ALMA, she was.

  No last name?

  Yes the mark on her cheek was a tattoo. Maybe it was meant to be a moth, how should she know.

  The other marks, yes they were tattoos. Sure.

  Crude tattoos, Dmitri observed. Wondering who’d done them.

  (Prison tattoos? That was a possibility.)

  He was feeding her now, watching her eat. Not leftovers from customers’ plates but decent leftovers from the kitchen he’d heated up himself. Sometimes watching females gorge themselves disgusted him but Alma was different. A beautiful soft fleshy goose you wanted to fatten. Stuff her milky white face and throat with the richest foods till her liver swelled, ripened, burst.

  It was Thursday, a chess night at The Café. He’d brought the girl inside and seated her at a booth near the kitchen door. Alma was more intelligent than he’d believed. Out on the street he’d thought she might be mentally retarded, schizzy, a junkie. Maybe she was a junkie, or a drinker, obviously there was something wrong with her but it might be, he was speculating, a wrongness that could be turned to advantage. “Poor girl. Poor beautiful girl. Eat all you want. Somebody has treated you very badly.”

  Tears of relief and gratitude glistened in her bloodshot eyes.

  Her mouth was full, she couldn’t yet thank him.

  He loved it that she ate so hungrily. She even lowered her head toward the plate, strands of brittle ashy hair fell into her food, and he lifted them out, amused as an indulgent father. His girl was so clumsy! So sensual. He was becoming sexually aroused watching her. Her rapidly chewing mouth, heavy-lidded eyes, glimpses of her slightly stained, imperfect teeth and her moist pink tongue he imagined would be scratchy as a cat’s tongue . . . Saliva glistened in the corners of her mouth, she wiped her mouth repeatedly on the back of her hand, scarcely pausing in her eating. Dmitri loomed over her, liking it that he was making her self-conscious: this meant she placed a value on his opinion of her. He had the power to make her uneasy, anxious. He would knead her soft white skin like bread dough. He would turn her inside out the way, tugging with a forefinger, you can gut a fish.

  “More? I’ll bring more.”

  Alma was embarrassed of eating so ravenously in his presence yet she ate ravenously for she needed to eat, and in that need she was unashamed. Dmitri saw in the girl a fleeting, socially-determined embarrassment masking a deeper absence of shame.

  Very good. If you are the Tattooed Girl, you must be without shame.

  He wanted to talk more about the tattoos. Who’d perpetrated them upon her?

  Alma seemed not to hear his question. Her eyes were moist and heavy-lidded as if she were in the throes of lovemaking. She ate, lowering her head. Dmitri closed his fingers in her hair and gave her a small jolt.

  She winced. She told him she didn’t know, didn’t know who had marked her up. She didn’t know their names.
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  Their names?

  Alma laughed. It was a hissing, explosive laugh. A laugh of no mirth. Her eyes squinted nearly shut, in this sudden convulsion of laughing. Unconsciously she was squeezing her upper arms against her rib cage. As if lifting her heavy breasts. She said she didn’t know, maybe there was one and maybe there was more than one, it had happened a long time ago, she never thought about it.

  Or maybe another woman marked you. In prison?

  Dmitri was one to fasten onto theories. Could be a strength, could be a weakness. Obviously, his sign was Capricorn. Brooding, egoistic, unforgiving, self-sufficient. Controlling.

  He wanted to know: where’d she come from?

  Her eyes blinked slowly. Just now? Or—then?

  Then.

  Her forehead crinkled. As if she was trying to remember. She said, almost inaudibly, what sounded like “Akron”—“Acheron”? Dmitri asked her to say it again and again she said what might have been “Akron”—“Acheron.” But this place wasn’t in New York State, it was in Pennsylvania. In the mountains.

  Where, Alma said giggling, there’s been fires since 1962.

  Dmitri doubted this. Fires since 1962?

  Sure.

  Dmitri squeezed Alma’s chin between his thumb and forefinger.

  Obviously, you’d be a fool to believe everything this female says.

  Alma caught that look. She wasn’t so sleepy-eyed as she appeared. She protested yes there were fires where she came from. Down in the mines. Started before she was born. A long time before.

  Yes? And when was she born?

  Alma’s expression turned crafty. She didn’t want to answer this question. Dmitri guessed she was trying to calculate his age. He was older than he looked.

  Dmitri glanced about The Café. No one was watching.

  He took Alma’s hands in his. They weren’t very attractive hands for a woman so feminine. The fingers were stubby, with broken and dirt-edged nails. And the crude tattoos like cobwebs sticking to her skin. Like graffiti, or drunken speech. Dmitri moistened his thumb and forefinger and rubbed at the tattoo on the back of Alma’s right hand, thinking it was nothing but filth and would come off.

  It didn’t. The tattoo was real enough, inked into Alma’s skin.

  Tiny grains of dirt did roll up beneath his fingertips, however.

  Dmitri laughed. What a dirty, coarse child Alma was. “Haven’t had a bath in a while, eh? I’ll give you one tonight.”

  “GOOD EVENING, Mr. Seigl.”

  “Good evening, Dmitri.”

  “Espresso, Mr. Seigl?”

  “Please.”

  Each exchange the waiter had with Joshua Seigl followed this pattern: Dmitri anticipated Seigl’s request which was predictable as clockwork, and was met with a look of startled gratitude, as if a genie had materialized beside the older man.

  Three nights a week after The Café closed as a bistro serving meals, chess players congregated at the rear of the restaurant in an area where tables were smaller, and inset with chessboards; floorboards were unfinished; there were no potted ferns, cloth napkins, romantic candlelight. In an earlier incarnation dating back to the somber years 1968–69, The Café had been a coffee shop and gathering place for anti–Vietnam War poems to be chanted and amateur musicians to perform; its walls were raw, roughened brick, and its ceiling hammered tin. For some reason germane to the mutinous energies of the era, several windows in this space had been painted in black panels, and these panels remained like blinkered eyes. Atmosphere meant little to the dozen or so hardcore chess players who were oblivious to all except the boards before them and their opponents’ poised hands.

  The youngest was seventeen, a high school boy with sand-colored hair and a perpetual squint; the oldest was a professor emeritus of medieval philosophy at the College of Mount Carmel, in his early nineties. There was a stocky, attractively buff-faced woman of about thirty-five with hair trimmed short as a man’s, a self-employed taxidermist from the small town of Niles, New York; there was A.G., a former Rochester elementary school principal of whom it was said he’d been urged into retirement for reasons never made public; there was a plumber-poet, or poet-plumber, a veteran of the 1960s who wore his straggly gray hair in a ponytail. There was a grimly convivial middle-aged man from St. Catherines, Ontario, who spoke of chess as his legalized habit. There was Fen, the player generally conceded to be the best of the lot, at least when he wasn’t in a nervously manic state and likely to sweep chess pieces off the board in mid-game; Fen too was middle-aged, with a goatee and shaking hands; rumored to have been a chess prodigy who’d had a nervous breakdown at a world chess tournament in Paris in the early 1970s on the eve of what should have been his great triumph. There was the younger, aggressive Hector Rodriguez, who took up more space than his small burly frame would seem to require. There was Joshua Seigl.

  “Is this table satisfactory, Mr. Seigl?”

  “Perfect.”

  Big bewhiskered absentminded Seigl sank heavily into his usual place at his usual table, where, this evening, he would play his usual brooding chess game with the palsied, near-blind but cunning Professor Emeritus, which game would stretch on to midnight when The Café closed.

  Seigl smiled, rubbing his hands together heartily. A shy man, yet determined to seem gregarious in such settings. He was much liked, perhaps even loved, among the chess addicts for his kindness, wit, and good humor even when he lost. “Chess,” Seigl said, sighing, “like humankind, a useless passion. But here we are.”

  In the chess culture there are crucial caste distinctions, but the great distinction is between the chess addict and the mere chess player. No chess genius is not a chess addict though a chess addict may not be a genius. Seigl wasn’t one of the addicted, and so not one of the best, though he took the game seriously, sighed and muttered to himself, struck his forehead with his fist, often stumbled away from the game board to pace outside The Café, waiting for his opponent’s dreaded move. Dmitri with his shrewd predator’s eye singled out Seigl among the motley chess players as the only individual of interest, or promise. It seemed to Dmitri (who occasionally played chess himself, but only with opponents he knew he could beat) that Seigl was different from the others: he freely chose to play chess five or six times a month at The Café as a respite from life, while the other players were driven to play of necessity: chess was their lives.

  “Your espresso, sir.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  Absorbed in the crucial opening moves of the game, Seigl glanced up blinking at the graceful-gliding waiter who’d materialized out of nowhere. Had he ordered espresso? Evidently.

  His elderly opponent, professor emeritus of medieval philosophy, drank only ice water. He supported one finely trembling big-veined hand with the other and leaned over the chess table like a vulture.

  “Will you have an espresso, too, John?”

  But John grunted no, irritated with so much talk.

  Dmitri backed off, but would keep an eye on Seigl through the evening. (As he was keeping an eye on the tattooed girl now nodding off in a corner booth.) When Seigl glanced up, unconsciously seeking him, Dmitri would glide forward anticipating his request: another espresso?

  Of habitual customers of The Café, Seigl, who sometimes dined in the bistro with friends, was known for his generous tips. Though he drank sparingly, he often left tips with a drunkard’s wayward largess. Amid the chess players, who had little money, and were by nature tightfisted, Seigl could be depended upon to leave behind not coins but bills, and not one-dollar bills, either. Dmitri sensed that Seigl was ashamed of having money, crumpling ten-dollar bills to push beneath plates for a waiter to discover only after Seigl had slipped away. (Sometimes, depending upon who Seigl’s chess opponent of the evening was, Dmitri had to salvage his tip, which could be as much as thirty dollars, before Seigl’s chess opponent finessed a bill or two into his own pocket. Fen, the ex-prodigy now eking out a living in Mount Carmel by tutoring students in math, was the most t
reacherous.) To be thanked by waiters was an embarrassment, too, to Seigl; of The Café’s staff, it was only Dmitri with whom Seigl felt comfortable, for only Dmitri knew how to express gratitude in just the right, understated tone. Thinking I know, sir! How clumsy it is for you, giving money to people like me whose rotten luck in life is that they must serve you, and not you them. And maybe one day our situations will be reversed, what then?

  It didn’t help that Joshua Seigl was a Jew. Or maybe it did help, Dmitri hated Jews.

  Seigl was glancing up from the chessboard, crinkling his forehead like an overgrown baby. That big-boned swarthy-Semitic face Dmitri supposed some women would think was handsome, even sexy. Distinctive as something hacked out of stone. Yes, Dmitri hated this man: hated serving him, accepting his lavish tips, having to be grateful and having to like him.

  Dmitri glided forward gravely smiling. “Cigarettes, sir?”

  “Why, yes . . .”

  “Your usual brand?”

  “Please.”

  Unfiltered Marlboros. Crude, virile, cowboy-American.

  And matches. Dmitri would bring a matchbook embossed with The Café. For Seigl never carried matches, as he never carried cigarettes.

  Dmitri liked it that Seigl, who came so often to The Café and left such generous tips for waiters, was a minor celebrity locally. Among the general population no one would have heard of Joshua Seigl, of course, yet, in the affluent suburb of Carmel Heights, everyone who mattered knew him by sight. Seigl had published a much-admired novel as a young man. He’d lived in the area most of his life. He was from a well-to-do local family. (Dmitri wasn’t one hundred percent bitter about rich Jews because there had to be a genuine money-making talent, possibly a gene, in the Jewish soul; their success couldn’t be purely cunning and conniving.) Dmitri had never seen Seigl’s house on the Hill but he supposed it must be one of those old stone mansions overlooking the Tuscarora River, protected from people like Dmitri Meatte by six-foot wrought iron fences, electronic burglar alarms, private security police cruising in unmarked cars.