Dummerer

A beggar who pretends to be deaf and dumb.

“Uhl was a dummerer who had lost his store. Five years before, he had been sitting on the world. Any day on which his sad face, his package of pins, and his I am deaf and dumb sign didn’t take twenty dollars out of the office buildings along his route was a rotten day. His big card was his ability to play the statue when skeptical people yelled or made sudden noises behind him. When the Dummy was right, a gun going off beside his ear wouldn’t make him twitch an eyelid. But too much heroin broke his nerves until a whisper was enough to make him jump. He put away his pins and his sign—another man whose social life had ruined him.”

Dashiell Hammett, Dead Yellow Women (1924).