Page 110 of If Looks Could Kill
“Neither am I.”
Little Giovanni(Monday, December 3, 1888)
Johnny Leone, proprietor of the Lion’s Den, had begun his day with a headache, a bartender not showing up for work, a carpenter’s bill for repairs to a pair of tables and a few chairs that had gotten smashed in a recent brawl—far from the usual tone for the Lion’s Den—and then the news that his upstairs tenant was vacating the property, leaving bullet holes in the plaster.
And now this pert little blond Salvation Army miss thought she could put some kind of moral guilt-trip hex on him with her pretty blue eyes. He’d indulged her because… because why not; she was easy to look at. The naïve little thing, full of religious zeal, was all the more amusing for having so much spirit. Pointlessly spent, but entertaining to watch. Bless her deluded little heart. She was a feisty kitten attacking a ball of yarn, imagining she was a lion.
He was the lion here, and he could watch her assault upon him with bored interest.
“I wouldn’t rent the space to someone keeping all Christian girls up there,” he told her now. “But what Jews do to their own kind is scarcely my affair.”
He was doing the kid a favor. The sooner she learned how the worldworked, the sooner she’d stop wasting her energy and his time.
Her cheeks flushed pink, and her long lashes gleamed with the beginnings of tears. God, she was gorgeous. Youth. End of the day, youth every time. Just look at her. She stirred something in him. All that farm-girl purity and innocence. He pictured her, not in this prudish Salvation Army getup, but in a low-cut evening gown. Blue silk. Long black gloves. An ostrich feather in those golden curls. On his arm of an evening, and afterward.
Why not on his arm?
The poor thing needed help. She’d gotten herself in too deep. He could keep her somewhere safe. Protect her from Rosie. Rosie wouldn’t tangle with him over just one girl.
He had plenty of time for this Pearl. A perfect Pearl. Time now to work his charm.
“So you see,” he told her, “things are rarely as simple as they seem at first glance.” He wagged his eyebrows playfully. “Not even me.”
And it worked—how it worked! She half rose from her seat and leaned her face toward him till he could almost taste her parted lips.
But it was her eyes that teased him now. His pulse quickened. Maybe Little Miss was more worldly-wise than he’d thought, and the idea sent a thrill through him. Blue pools, her eyes were, like the blue of the Adriatic. He sank into their warm waters.
“Neither am I,” she said.
Neither was she what?
His skin began to prickle. A cold sweat broke out under his collar. Still the girl gazed languidly at him, but now her hair explored her face like a lover’s caress. Sumptuous curls, fat and abundant, moved about her face. Her skin took on a sickly hue, an unearthly glare.
She reached inside him—he didn’t know how, but he was as caught as a fish on a line—and found something. Inside the body of the man, she found the child, playing with seashells on the white sands of the AdriaticSea. Squinting at the sunlight on the water. A snake undulated its way across the sand beside him and hissed. He whimpered in fright.
“Oh, little Giovanni,” came a familiar, reproachful voice. “What have you done?”
“Nothing, Mama!” he cried.
He jumped up to see his mother standing over him, shading her eyes to study a flat rock protruding from the sand. There sat a row of girls, sunning themselves in beach chairs. He recognized them all. Girls who’d come through the Lion’s Den, or Mother Rosie’s crib, upstairs. They tried to rise from their seats, but the chairs had shackled them with fierce tentacles. A snakelike creature rose from the depths of the sea, arching its long neck over the sand. Its catfish-whiskered maw distended open to devour each of them whole—girl, bathing dress, chair, and all. They screamed. They crunched. They disappeared.
“Little Giovanni,” his mother moaned once more. “Didn’t I raise you to be a good boy?”
“I didn’t do it, Mama,” he sobbed. “I wouldn’t.”
His mother had died more than a decade ago. Yet here she was. It made him ache, both with longing and with shame. That she should see what he’d become…
“No son of mine,” she declared, “would do such wickedness.”
“Never, Mama,” he wailed. God, what a pathetic little brat he was.
A shadow fell across him on the sand. He looked up and saw the whiskered face of the sea snake peering down at him with the boiling eyes of his disappointed mama.
The serpent spoke.Neither am I as simple as I seem.It yawned its mouth open wide.
He slumped down onto the wooden seat of his booth and hit the back of his skull.
“How does it feel,” said his mother’s voice—or perhaps not hers—close to his ear, “when our deeds come back to find us in the end?”
