by Bera, Ilia
I asked the bartender for the time and learned that my client was running late—probably not showing up at all. The festering paranoia in my gut slowed the ticking of the clock. After what felt like another hour, I asked the bartender the same question.
“Ten minutes since you asked me last,” was his snarky response. His patience with me had grown thin throughout the night. Since sitting down at the bar, I’d ordered nothing but water and the time.
I did a lap around the joint, hoping to find a new client—maybe a prostitute or some gangster’s date. But the bar was void of women that night, crowded instead with rowdy men, all excited for fight night. No one stood without a beer in hand. And with every beer that passed through those hands, the volume grew louder and louder. I worked the crowds, trying to convince men how much happier their wives would if they returned home with a pair of Louboutin shoes.
One man offered me fifty bucks, and in my desperation I accepted. Those shoes were worth fifteen hundred. When I looked back at the man, him and his buddies were drinking from heeled shoes, like German sailors at Oktoberfest.
When I returned to the bar, a man in a thick winter coat was in my seat. I took the only other open seat, right next to him. As I sat, the coat-clad man was mid-conversation with the bartender. I would later discover that the man in my seat was Freddie.
“It’s cold in ‘ere. Can ya turn up the heat?” Freddie asked. He had his arms wrapped around his body.
“Sorry—I can’t control that. Besides, I think it’s pretty warm in here,” the bartender replied.
“Really? Damn, I must be catchin’ a cold or somethin’.”
“How’s about a vodka? Russian soldiers used to drink vodka to warm themselves up. They say that’s how they beat the Nazis.”
“I can’t drink vodka—makes my joints sore. How’s about a coffee?” Everything about Freddie was pathetic. He moaned in response to everything, and a whininess in his voice made me, and everyone else around him, roll their eyes.
“You want a coffee?” the bartender asked with a sigh. The bar was busy, and everyone knows how big a pain it is to make a pot coffee.
Freddie smiled and rubbed his hands together to keep warm.
The bartender sighed again as he turned to make the coffee, a clumsy process that took far too long for its worth. By the time he'd finished, the bar had become overcrowded with thirty-plus customers. When I asked for the time again, I didn’t receive an answer.
My client wasn’t showing up. I still had a pair of shoes and a couple of dresses I needed to move. My prayers were answered when I noticed the stockier, rugged-looking man with a wispy white beard sitting on the other side of Freddie. In another life, the man could have been a pirate. In this life, he was a businessman of some sort, trading in his hook hand for a gold watch. When the bartender took his order, he pointed to a top-shelf scotch, revealing the gold wedding band around his finger.
He opened his wallet to pay for the drink, revealing a series of hundreds. He could afford a five hundred dollar pair of Gucci heels.
I hardly had to lie to the man before he bought me clean—fifteen hundred for two dresses and the Gucci heels. He didn’t even bother to check the shoe-size. Not bad for three minutes of work—and not a moment too soon, either. As I stuffed the cash into my purse, the bartender handed Freddie his coffee.
“Ouch!” Freddie pulled back his hand, dropping the coffee on the Chanel dresses and Gucci heels.
“Good Lord!” my buyer cried, jumping back from the bar to dodge the hot coffee. The clothes soaked with coffee and so was his lap. Steam rose up from his midsection; to my surprise, none rose up from his ears.
“It was so hot!” Freddie grabbed his burnt fingers with his hand.
I could see a vein throbbing in the man’s forehead. “This is ruined,” he said, holding up a brown dress, which was a white dress only seconds before.
My lips parted but no words came out. He was right—it was all ruined. My heart told me to give the man his money back, but my gut told me otherwise. I needed the money—even if it meant reducing myself to a scumbag.
“Geez, I’m sorry,” Freddie said, giving his burnt fingers all his attention. Even with the dim lights in the underground bar, you could see that his fingers were fine. “Hey, bartender. Could I get another one? And not so hot, this time.” He used a bar napkin to wipe the few drops of coffee from his hand.
“Excuse me, buddy. You owe me fifteen-hundred bucks.” My angered client was still wiping coffee from his lap.
“What? No. It’s not my fault the coffee was scalding. Take it up with the bartender. Besides, you shouldn’t leave fifteen-hundred bucks worth of shit on the counter.” It’s not shit. At least, it wasn’t shit, until he stained it brown and scented it with stale coffee.
My new client grabbed Freddie by the collar of his coat, pulling him up to his feet. Freddie winced his face away. “Don’t hit me! Please!” Freddie cried. The old guy was surprisingly strong for his age.
“You’re lucky I don’t smash your teeth in.” His grip tightened around Freddie’s collar.
“Ouch!” Freddie yelled.
Nearby heads turned towards the action. Their fight-hungry faces lit up at the possibility of an early brawl. My face was among them, excited to witness vengeance on behalf of the spoiled Chanel.
“I want my fifteen hundred bucks,” my client said through his teeth.
Freddie winced away, using his hands to protect his face from his new enemy. “I—I don’t have fifteen hundred. I have three hundred. It’s all I have.” His eyes shut tight and his teeth clenched together as he awaited a solid knock to the face at any moment.
“Give it to me.”
“Okay—here—take it,” Freddie whined, reaching for his wallet. “It’s all I have. Don’t hurt me. Please.”
The white-bearded man snatched the money from his frightened victim. “You’d better bring me the rest the second you have it.” With a loud grunt, he let go and Freddie scurried away.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault the man’s a pathetic oaf,” the man said, taking his seat again.
Looking back on the incident, I have to give Freddie credit. He stayed in character and he went big. It was a convincing performance. He even had me convinced.
Minutes later, the bar erupted with cheering and hollering. Fight night was beginning.
CHAPTER NINE
FIGHTING FREDDIE
I had to stand up on my tiptoes to see over the crowd that had quickly formed around the cage. An older balding man stood near the cage door with a microphone in his hand. He waited a moment for the crowd to gather before beginning his bit.
“How’s everyone doing tonight?” he asked, receiving a roar from the criminal crowd. “Who came to see a fight?” Another, louder roar could be felt through the floor. “The fight you all came to see has been postponed—”
Before the announcer could finish his sentence, a thunderous booing drowned him out.
“Hold on—hold on. The fight has just been postponed to later tonight. Because tonight, we have not one, but two fights for you.” The booing quickly turned back into an eruption of excitement. “We’ve got a guy from out of town who thinks he’s pretty tough—tough enough to take on one of our regulars fighters—someone you all know and love.”
A bald-headed man, as thick as he was tall, stepped out from the back room, eliciting a booming applause from the crowd. Hannibal Hugo.
Hugo was a regular at the bar, though he hadn’t been a regular fighter for months—not since he bit another man’s nose off in the cage. I’ll never forget how much blood came out of the poor guy’s face. They looked, but they never found the tip of that poor guy’s nose. Rumour has it Hugo swallowed it.
Since then, the Hugo hadn’t been in a fight. No one was stupid enough to fight him. Instead, he sat alone in the corner, drinking cheap rum by the gallon, staring blatantly at the chest of every woman who came through, grunting a
nd growling like a horny hog.
I couldn’t wait to see who was dumb enough take Hugo on—who was dumb enough to think they were tougher than the man who earned the nickname, Hannibal Hugo.
It was Freddie, or as I knew him at the time, the pathetic coffee spiller.
Freddie’s entrance was not met with the same enthusiasm as Hugo’s—though the response was just as loud—a combination of heckling, booing, taunting, and laughing. Before stepping into the cage, Freddie removed his coat and his white wife beater, revealing his gym-toned body and many tattoos.
There’s a big difference between real muscles and gym muscles. The physique of a man who builds his muscles using his body is entirely different than the physique of a man who builds his muscles using weights and machines. A real man’s body is generally an unattractive thing—dense muscles with little or no definition, usually appearing chubby and sometimes flabby. You can’t see a real man’s abs or his pecs, because over his muscles is an insulating layer of fat—a layer of armour created by his working body. He eats meat and he works with his hands. Hell, even his hands are ugly, powerful things.
A body like Freddie’s, while it may be nice to look at, is an impractical thing. Using gym equipment, he’s specifically targeted the muscles that make panties wet. He’s careful with his routine to strike the perfect balance of mass and tone. He knows that women don’t like mass, women like definition. A truly powerful chest looks like a set of saggy tits. Women don’t want men with saggy tits. Freddie doesn’t want saggy tits. Freddie is not a man, but a life-sized Ken doll, trying to look like a man. And, in an attempt to look tough, he picked a bunch of tattoos out of a magazine. Some teenaged girls have the same little wolf-paw tattoo that he has on his bicep.
The face of the white-bearded man lit up. The glimmer in his eye suggested the desire to switch places with Hannibal Hugo. Had he known the fight was rigged, he just may have marched into that cage. Instead, he waved down one of the bookies.
Olivia’s Survival Guide, tip #498: Every fight is fixed. No exceptions. This is a new addition to Olivia’s Survival Guide—added five minutes after Freddie stepped into the cage.
Had I known the fight was rigged, I wouldn’t have bet every dollar I had in my purse—every dollar I had to my name, all on Hannibal Hugo. I knew fixed fights were a common occurrence underneath the Holiday Inn, but Hugo didn’t strike me as the type to throw a fight. I was about to be corrected.
Everyone crowded the cage. My only vantage point was far away from the action, on the raised lip beneath the bar. Even with the added height, I had to stand on the balls of my feet.
For the first time, Freddie revealed his trademark shit-eating grin. While Hugo stretched out his tree trunk arms, Freddie adjusted his bleached hair.
He threw a few punches into the air, imitating a warm-up up ritual he’d probably seen in a Rocky movie. I bit my lip to contain my excitement, which vanished a moment before the bell rang.
Nearby, far from the crowd, the bookie took one final bet—a big bet—to the tune of ten thousand dollars. It was the biggest bet of the night, and it was all on Freddie. My heart dropped into my stomach when the sleeve of the mystery bettor’s t-shirt rose to reveal a small wolf’s paw tattoo, just like Freddie’s.
Ding! The ringing of the bell reverberated in my gut.
No. This can’t be happening. If Freddie wins, I’ll have nothing. I needed to get my money back. Maybe it wasn’t too late. “Excuse me,” I said to the bookie.
“Yeah?”
I spoke quickly. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to bet.”
“Sorry lady—fight’s started.”
Panic set in. My head started spinning. “It just started—please.”
“No can do.”
“I’m begging you.”
“You’re going to miss the fight,” the bookie said, turning away from me.
He was right—I almost did. The fight didn’t take long.
Freddie hopped around, doing his best impression of Muhammad Ali, narrowly dodging the odd punch. The crowd sang their first and last cheer as Hannibal Hugo landed one of his throws—right to the side of Freddie’s face. After that, the room became loud with booing, hissing, and taunting.
Freddie continued prancing around the ring, basking in the crowd’s growing irritation. “Do something already!” someone shouted.
Hugo threw punch after punch, connecting with nothing but the damp basement air. The volume of the frustrated crowd only fuelled the grin on Freddie’s face. Already aware of my fate, all I could do was wait and hope that the matching paw-tattoos were nothing but coincidence. That hope was in vain.
A single blow to the face sent Hugo to the bloodstained cement slab below. Freddie dropped to his knees and began pummelling Hannibal Hugo’s face like a piece of Kobe beef. Left hooks, right hooks, all directly to the face. I lost count after fifteen blows. Silence fell over the room.
I was broke—not a penny to my name, and nothing to sell. All I had left was my minimum wage job as the night auditor at the Ilium Inn.
Before raising his arms in victory, Freddie checked the little wound on his forehead. Before reality stung the crowd—the reality that they’d all been conned—Freddie’s friend had cashed out and skirted towards the exit.
I followed.
CHAPTER TEN
THE ART OF SEDUCTION
Freddie’s partner-in-crime waited in the parking lot of Crazy Dave’s Used Car Emporium, unaware that I was watching from the guise of a dumpster in the alleyway behind the Holiday Inn. His hands were buried in his pockets as he casually paced the shadows between Crazy Dave’s security floodlights.
Occasionally, he slipped out of sight behind one of the taller vehicles on the lot, but I never lost sight of him thanks to high tall stature and the plume of cigarette smoke that followed him everywhere he went. With his frizzy red hair, he looked like a giant, lit matchstick.
It wasn’t until the masses of angry bar-goers had siphoned out of the Holiday Inn, and the Ilium streets became silent, that Freddie, seemingly out of nowhere, finally appeared to meet his friend.
The two men confirmed that the fight was fixed by sharing a high-five. Next to his friend, Freddie appeared short—surprisingly, as he looked so tall next to Hannibal Hugo.
Their secret meeting was short: the high-five, the passing of the leather messenger bag, and the parting. The red-haired friend was left with nothing but a dumb grin. I followed Freddie, at first from a distance. Once we were a few blocks from the criminal hangout, I caught up.
“Excuse me,” I said, approaching from behind.
Freddie didn’t stop. Instead, he glanced at me from over his shoulder. He made sure to scan my whole body, particularly my tits, before scoffing and looking back ahead. “I ain’t interested, toots.” Ain’t interested? The creep thought I was a prostitute.
I brushed the insult off. “What?”
“I’m not lookin’ for any company, love. Thanks, though.”
“I’m not selling any… company,” I said, clenching my fist as I squeezed my invisible stress ball.
“Right—Whatever you call it.” Freddie stopped as a car zipped past, then jogged across the street. He kept one of his hands firmly on his leather messenger bag.
“I’m not a hooker,” I said. I tried to keep my tone casual, but it came out blunt.
“Then what do you want?”
“I saw your fight, down in the club.” I jog to keep up.
He shrugs, keeps his face forward. “Okay.” There’s no emotion behind his voice.
“I wanted to say congratulations. It was a good fight.”
“Thanks,” he said, still not bothering to look over at me.
“You looked really good in that cage.”
“Okay,” he said again, without a spec of emotion in his voice, as if he wasn’t even listening.
“Really good.”
“Is that all you followed me to say?” He still refused to look over at me.
> “I didn’t follow you.”
“Then how’d you find me?”
“I was just walking home and I recognized you.” I bit my tongue and held my eye-contact, despite the absence of his.
“Yeahuh,” he said, dismissing my lie. “Well, if that’s it, why don’t ya run along? Get lost.” Freddie jogged across the street, beating an oncoming car.
My fist clenched my imaginary stress ball again. Before jogging across myself, I adjusted my top, exposing my cleavage to the cool Ilium rain. Freddie’s hand was still firmly clutching the messenger bag. If I’d had a gun, I would just have mugged the bastard.