The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 20: The Maxwells

Fingers and I made sure not to be playing a board game when Angel returned home that night just in case she had finished her job early or hadn’t been able to hook up with Louie. And, luckily, we did because she had finished her job early and returned around half past ten. She was in a surprisingly good mood, which meant her mission had been an unqualified success.

“Louie’s hired 2 guys, maybe 3,” Angel got straight to business, “they’re named Maxwell.”

“All of them?”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Oh, fuck, what, oh fuck? You know them?” I asked Fingers

“Yes.”

“Is there a hitman newsletter or something?”

“Word gets around. They’re bad news.”

“How bad?”

“Real bad.”

“Like, on the scale of bad news where would they fall?”

“They’re English or something like that.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“Real fucked up pair. I can’t believe Louie hired out-of-towners. I was sure he was going to try to hire Matches or Freckles.”

“Does anybody have a normal name in your business?”

“Harry and Tommy Maxwell do, but they’re not normal.”

“Louie said Humphrey’s left town for the week,” Angel continued her report, “he’s gone to Europe to buy a country or something. He doesn’t want to be anywhere near here when everything goes down.”

“That sounds like Humphrey.” I stood up and went to the window and looked to the alley below. An overweight Orange Tabby was mating with a small Black Persian. Or maybe they were fighting. I’m not a cat person so I don’t know about these things, from my vantage point they were 2 blurry shapes gravitationally drawn to each other in a swell of emotion, probably not that different than how all the people on the street look to Humphrey from his 178^th floor window.

I could feel blue light on my face as the Tabby gained top position. This looking out the window stuff was actually working. My head cleared and a plan formed. I turned back to Fingers and Angel, pose over. “Well, you got Angel out of working for that jerk,” I said to Fingers, “and you got the info about who Louie hired next,” I said to Angel, “I guess that means it’s time I should get in touch with our new British friends.”

“They’re a couple of psychos. You won’t be able to talk to them,” Fingers warned.

“I can talk to anybody.”

“You won’t be able to talk to them.”

“I can talk to them.”

“They’ll shoot you before you can open your mouth. You won’t be able to talk to them.”

“Really? They wouldn’t let me say a word.”

“Not one word.”

“Not one?”

“As soon as they see your face there’s going to be a bullet in it.”

Fingers was certain. I was going to have to come up with a new plan. I walked back to the window and looked down again, the cats were gone but the blue light was still there.

So apparently Louie had accomplished his task of finding the 2 meanest, slimiest, rottenest, most lethal s.o.b.s on the planet. They were in Scotland. Specifically, Glasgow.

Harry and Tommy Maxwell were father and son. Tommy was certain Harry was his father but was never quite sure which one of Harry’s many girlfriends was his mother, and the girlfriends didn’t know either, it was a very confusing time when young Tommy was born.

Despite Tommy’s doubtful maternity, and opposed to his lack of relationship with his 5 other offspring, who he considered lazy and unambitious, most of them ending up in typical office jobs or working in software development in Aberdeen, Harry had taken quite a shine to the young Tommy from a very early age. In fact, he often said the day of Tommy’s birth was the second happiest day of his life, only after the 1980 Scottish Cup Final. And Harry trained Tommy in all of the dark arts of theft and intimidation and murder for hire from the youngest of ages (3, although to be fair to Harry he waited until Tommy was 8 before the murder for hire tutorials). They would take day trips to Edinburgh to make fun of the tourists from London and to torture the locals. Literally, to torture the locals. Harry felt it was good practice for Tommy. Tommy thought it was just plain fun.

Because Harry had taken over Tommy’s education at such a young age, Tommy, unlike the rest of his generation in Scotland who had seen their accents soften and slowly fade during the mass media and Internet eras from the outrageous stereotypes that are routinely depicted in film and television and novels, had a burr that was as pure as that which poured forth from the lips of Harry’s extraordinarily pious clergyman grandfather, Thomas, who during his brief time in the clergy in the Midlands of England (where he was sent as part of an exchange program that was briefly, and ill-fatedly, put into effect by a little known article in the Church of Scotland Act of 1921) routinely gave sermons his entire congregation thought were in Latin since no one could understand his accent. This made them think he was too much of a traditionalist, or even worse, a secret Catholic, and within 5 months Thomas’ career in the church was over and he was banished back north of the border to Scotland where he immediately met Harry’s grandmother and lived out the quiet peaceful life of a bookkeeper in a dry goods firm.

Unfortunately, this meant no one in modern day Britain could understand Tommy outside of a very specific 2 block radius in one of the roughest sections of Glasgow, which meant in turn that whenever his son wanted to communicate with anyone from the outside world, Harry would have to translate for him. This of course stunted Tommy’s development to no end, keeping him along the not very straight not very narrow sociopathic path his father had always wished for him.

However, in spite of his fairly extreme sadistic tendencies, from a distance, and even for the most part close-up, Tommy looked quite normal, in fact, he was a rather good-looking young man and was extraordinarily popular with the opposite sex (or ‘stoots’ as he called them in his overwhelmingly insular Scottish dialect that only a dozen other people in the world spoke regularly), even though for the most part (as in over 90% of conversation) he was unable to engage in any type of dialogue beyond the occasional understandable curse word or various repeated mentions of the name Ronnie O’Sullivan (who Tommy thought, not wrongly, is a modern day genius) and a very very few other proper nouns of names and places of the like that aren’t allowed in Scrabble. Most of the women that Tommy ‘dated’ didn’t seem to mind that he spoke a mysterious ancient language they couldn’t understand. Some of them even thought it was an improvement on their conversations with other (more appropriate but less ‘exciting’) suitors.

Harry and Tommy migrated south of Hadrian’s Wall not long after Tommy reached the age of maturity, but unlike Tommy’s namesake grandfather, they stayed in the land of the usurpers, mainly in the Isle of Dogs area of London, to ply their criminal trade, only returning to Scotland for brief vacations back home to Glasgow and also to continue their tradition of terrorizing the locals in Edinburgh.

To put it mildly, that this father and son combination was now tasked with my murder wasn’t particularly comforting. Fingers was right, I wasn’t going to be able to talk to them. (And not just because I couldn’t understand Tommy, who to be fair could perfectly understand normally accented English.) I contemplated several options as I looked down to the empty alley. Most of them centered around avoidance. But a man can’t avoid his pursuers for the rest of his life. Sometimes a man (or woman) needs to confront those pursuers. Or at least trick them into making a mistake. Now, how was I going to trick Harry and Tommy Maxwell?

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