The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott: Chapter 21 - The Apartment (Part Two)
Fingers pulled his gun from the holster that was hidden underneath his elbow-patched sport coat. He nodded at Angel and Angel nodded back at him. I was left out of the nodding and strategically placed myself on the floor behind the couch. I thought about trying to fit myself in Angel’s mini-fridge, maybe the Maxwells were on to something after all when they inspected every narrow crook and pint-sized cranny in my apartment.
We were all in position: Angel with one hand on the doorknob the other on the deadbolt latch; Fingers standing to the side of the door ready to be hidden by the opening door, gun out, silencer on; me, lying face down behind the couch watching the scene through wincing eyes.
Angel took a deep breath. Then a deeper one. She and Fingers exchanged a look, Angel leaned in to the door and eyes wide as tankers looked through the peephole. She took her eye away and shook her head to let Fingers know she couldn’t see anything, there was a hand over the peephole. If this was the movies Fingers would have cocked his gun in anticipation at this point but cocking a gun doesn’t enable it to fire any more quickly so instead he took careful aim at where he assumed one of the Maxwells’ heads would be when Angel opened the door. I grabbed a thickly bound book of Renaissance paintings (hobbies) that was resting on the floor against the wall and held it tightly in both of my hands ready to use it with no mercy on whoever was going to enter the apartment.
The doorknob was unlocked first. Angel messed up her hair, pretending to have just woken up, maybe there was a way to get out of this without bloodshed and she could convince them she was alone in the apartment.
Turn, click, sound of waterfall in reverse, the deadbolt was disengaged and the door flashed open. A short man presumptuously stepped inside surprising all of us.
“Hello sweetheart.”
Hey, this wasn’t a Maxwell. It was a Toledo and he was holding a gun in his right hand at hip level. Angel backed up. Fingers’ shoulders slumped in disbelief as the door closed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I could see Fingers mutter under his breath just before Toledo noticed the giant man standing behind him, and just before Toledo’s gun was efficiently removed from his hand, and just before Fingers was using the butt of Toledo’s own gun to smash Toledo’s bandaged nose, breaking it for the second time in a week. Toledo was on the ground after the first blow this time and a very pissed off Fingers was on his knees over him, raining blows down on the defenseless pimp.
“What did I tell you!” Fingers shouted over and over again as his fists pumped down like titanium hard pistons into the engine block that was Ronnie Toledo’s bone structure.
Angel and I exchanged a horrified look. If one of us didn’t do something, Fingers could kill him. She may have hated her former pimp, but she didn’t want him dead, and she definitely didn’t want to see him killed with Fingers’ bare hands on her apartment floor.
Angel got to Fingers first and tried pulling him off, but the big man was raging, he wasn’t going to go easily, I was there after another second, and together we pulled Fingers off Toledo and got him back to his feet.
“What did I tell you.” Fingers said one last time, now breathing heavily.
Until that point, I had seen nice Fingers, idiosyncratic Fingers and business-like hitman Fingers, but this was the first time I had seen an angry violent-tempered Fingers. It wasn’t something I ever wanted to see again. It showed me the anger that had probably led him into his profession initially, the anger that the decades had dulled but could resurface if the right triggers were set off in his brain, and apparently an abusive pimp who refused to listen to him was one of those triggers.
Toledo was on the ground making hairball noises again, “Ack, Ack.”
Fingers had composed himself. “Get up,” he said to the little man on the floor.
“Ack, Ack.”
“Get up!”
Toledo stood, bloody swollen face and all. “Ack,” he said to us.
Amazingly, he still had all of his teeth. Their artificial whiteness gleamed underneath the sticky reds and purplish blues that now covered his head. He refused to look at Angel. And he was too scared to look Fingers in the eye. So he looked at me. “Get out of here and don’t come back,” I said putting on the tough face Fingers had given a failing grade to the first time we had visited Toledo.
“Ack,” Toledo said back to me and started moving to the door.
“Wait.” Fingers stopped him. “Take off your pants.”
“What?”
“What?”
“What?”
Angel, Toledo and myself all responded.
Fingers’ demand had helped Toledo get rid of his hairball. Angel and I were just confused.
“Take off your pants.” Fingers told him a second time.
Angry Fingers was not a version of Fingers one would refuse, so Toledo began to comply, unbuckling his belt, sliding off his pants. He made a move towards his shorts. This was entering weird territory.
“Not the shorts. Just the pants,” Fingers clarified.
Toledo’s pants were now on the floor and he stood in front of us humiliated in white boxers with red hearts on them. Fingers kicked the pants away and then pointed his large right index finger straight at Toledo’s twice broken nose.
“If you ever come back here, or ever show your face to any of us again, I’m not going to kill you, no, I’m going to keep you alive so I can chain you up in some forgotten basement of some forgotten abandoned house, and then I’m going to dig up the bones of your favorite family dog, the one you loved and cherished as a child, the one you still have fond innocent memories of, and I’m going to show up at that basement and beat you with Fluffy’s femur bone every fucking night for the rest of your life. Do you understand me?”
“Ack.”
I think Toledo understood him.
That night, after the levity of the Toledo incident (and after Fingers literally kicked his boxered ass out of the apartment), gloom descended for a second time. The Maxwells’ stunning display of disregard for any non-Maxwell thing on the planet was apparent in the way they had treated my apartment. Fingers knew they were no Toledo. We all knew they were no Toledo. Ronnie Toledo could be intimidated and threatened and convincing threats, whether real or not, could get rid of him.
One of the Maxwells, either of the Maxwells, would not go away because of words or a few broken bones. Fingers would have to finish the job with them once it was started. They were vicious in the way of the truly amoral, in the way of the uncaring universe; my existence, Fingers’ existence, Angel’s existence, were inconsequential to them, they were getting money to kill me but it could just as easily be done for fun or by accident or to pass the time.
Fingers went back to rearranging his stack of teal & gold foil tile notecards, Angel found an old Burt Reynolds movie on tv, I sat staring out the window, watching and waiting for something, anything: the Maxwells’ return, Toledo’s return, cats mating or fighting or reenacting an episode of Tom and Jerry. The ferocity of the Maxwells’ performance had left such a chill in the air that Angel put on an extra layer of clothing when she finally went to bed even though it was a seasonably hot Los Angeles night.
When Angel gets worried, the lines at the edges of her eyes, the ones that other Angelenos would botox and erase like beautiful stanzas of poetry wiped away from a chalkboard forever lost to time, curled like a baby’s frown. And she was worried, the frown reaching baby in clinical depression levels. Fingers wasn’t worried, I don’t think Fingers gets worried, although the obsessively thumbed notecards would probably disagree; in his face I saw stone-cold disappointment. The same disappointment I saw in my father’s face when I told him I was going to go to graduate school to study post-existentialist philosophers instead of law school. My plans weren’t working. Fingers had put his faith in me and I was letting him down.
Films are generally made with 3 act structures. In fact, it’s become kind of a religion in Hollywood, and if the ending of a movie is going to end with a happy ending, the end of the second act needs to be sad, it needs to be the low point for the protagonist. That’s how the 3 act structure works; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy marries girl (and lives happily ever after). Well, I’m the protagonist and I won’t admit that this was my lowest point and I guess technically this isn’t a film, but for the first time in a long while my plan to take over the world was seriously in doubt.