Forced Entry (31 page)

“Actually,” Mike Powell said, “this is pretty small-time with us. We supply some kids in the projects, but Marty wants to dump the crack business. He thinks we should stick to powder. Wholesale it and let someone else deal with the bullshit.” He indicated the stoves and the workers who moved around them, checking the paste. “Marty says it takes up too much room and there’s too many people involved.”

“Take my word for it,” Marek replied, “it’s not a problem that interests me. Why don’t we find Blanks and get this game over with?” He was furious, so furious he was having trouble controlling it. For Blanks to bring him here, to the site of an enormous potential bust, could only be understood as contempt or madness. Somehow, he didn’t think he’d be able to play the jolly ethnic tonight.

“Whatever you say.” Powell turned on his heel and walked, Najowski following behind, to the far wall of an adjoining bedroom. He pulled back a dirty gray blanket to reveal a hole cut through the wall into the adjoining building, then waited for Marek to go through, before dropping the blanket to cover the hole and walking back into the kitchen.

The first thing Marek Najowski saw as he entered Marty Blanks’ office was money. Stacks of it piled on a table in the center of the room. Though Marek was used to dealing in large sums, he’d never seen this much cash except on television. He was beginning to feel like he was in the middle of a movie; everything was slightly off-center, slightly out of control.

“There’s about five hundred large there,” Blanks announced. “Too many small bills, though. That’s how come it seems like so much more.”

Najowski looked at Blanks for the first time. He was sitting at a desk in a corner, smiling broadly. A tall black man sat next to him on the edge of the desk. He was smiling, too.

“Ain’t this place a bitch, Marek?” Blanks said. “The way you came in is the
only
way in. Every other entrance is bricked up by the city. But there’s three ways out. Three tunnels. The pigs’d have to send a fucking army to get up them stairs. By the time they got here, I’d be long gone.” He stopped for a moment, still smiling. Waiting for a reply, but not surprised when Marek remained silent. “By the way, I want you to meet my partner, Muhammad Latif. He’s a black Moslem, but not a Black Muslim, if you take my meaning. We met up in Attica. Watched each others backs for a couple of years, then decided to pool our connections. You know how it is, right? I mean after ya go through somethin’ like that, ya just make natural partners.” Blanks’ grin broadened. “Am I right, or what?”

“How’s it movin’?” Latif asked by way of a greeting.

“Fine,” Najowski replied. The single word hung painfully in the air. Marek, who could think of nothing except the insult being paid to him, noted Blanks’ continued smile. He tried to smile himself, struggling with it at first, but eventually grinning his broadest grin. No sense in showing his anger here. Much better to let the asshole have his triumph. Let the asshole think he was on top of it.

“Give us some privacy, Muhammad,” Blanks said. “Me and Marek are gonna talk business.”

“No problem, bro. I’ll see you tomorrow. So long, Marek. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

Marek said nothing, waiting patiently for the black man to leave the apartment. “You shouldn’t have brought me here,” he said as soon as they were alone.

“It was an emergency,” Blanks explained. “We got a runaway posse in the North Harlem Houses. Think they’re too tough to pay for their crack. If they get by with that bullshit, we gotta fight a war with every fuckin’ crew in Harlem. What we’re tryin’ to decide is if we wanna dump the crack business altogether. Just walk away and forget about it. Most of our business is in Hell’s Kitchen, anyway. Maybe we oughta chill a few of the kids who fucked us and get out.” He stopped suddenly, breaking into laughter. “It seems like now that I’m a man of property, I don’t have the heart for a battle no more.”

“Well, before you retire,” Najowski said, “you better take another look at your property. We got a lot of problems. The cops are making noises about HPD taking the building away from us. And there’s a councilman named Connely sniffing around for potential publicity. The fire hurt us bad. It was supposed to be a warning, but it made the old Jew into a martyr. I thought only Christians were martyrs, but now we got the first Jew martyr. The first
two
Jew martyrs. The old man is a martyr, too.”

“I don’t see what’s the big deal,” Blanks replied calmly. “The pigs can’t move against the building until they make some arrests and, so far, they ain’t busted nobody. Besides which, all the dealers are squatters. We didn’t actually rent them any apartments, so I don’t see how we can be held responsible.”

“You don’t understand New York real estate any more than I understand the economics of cocaine. If Councilman Connely gets HPD to attempt a seizure, we’ll be tied up for years. Between the three properties, we’ve already got fifty units empty. That’s a potential five million dollars, even if we never sold another apartment. We’d have our money back and we’d still own the rest of the apartments, a situation which I define as a sure winner. I don’t see any reason to risk everything. All we gotta do is cooperate for a month or so. Maybe do some repairs. Try to force the squatters out, but fail, because of the Legal Aid bitch. The trick is to make it look good. To make us appear to be innocent until the papers and the cameras forget all about us. Until we’re yesterday’s news.”

“Ya know somethin’, Marek, I think ya lost ya nerve. The way I see it, we only got one
real
problem and that problem’s got a name: Stanley Moodrow. That’s the ex-cop who’s runnin’ around with the Legal Aid lawyer. He used to be a detective on the Lower East Side, which is the only reason I didn’t set up there. I know this pig real good, Marek. He’s fuckin’ crazy. He never gives up. Never. I guarantee right this fuckin’ minute he’s lookin’ for the one who made that fire. If we don’t do somethin’ about him, he’s gonna come knockin’ on
my
door.”

“How can he find you?” Marek asked incredulously. He was afraid of real things, of city agencies and courtrooms. Not a retired flatfoot.

“He’s gonna take some of the assholes we got livin’ in them apartments and smack their heads until they say who put them in there. Then he’s gonna go to the people they name and do the same thing until he finally gets to me.” Blanks shook his head decisively. “I’m not gonna wait around until he blows me away, man. I’m gonna have his ass by the end of the week. Once he goes, the whole Jackson Heights deal is gonna fall into our laps.”

Marek walked over to the pile of money and began to heft the stacks of bills. He felt perfectly calm now. A thought floating just beyond his consciousness suddenly crystallized: he had the buildings and the tenants were on the run. What did he need Blanks for? “Let me see if I have this right, Martin,” he said finally. “You have a million dollars invested in real estate. In the long run, you stand to make ten million. You could, without doing anything else, make two or three million right now. But you’re willing to risk that in order to eliminate a retired cop from the Lower East Side because he might come looking for you ten years from now. You want to murder a retired cop.”

Blanks shrugged. “You wanna make it sound crazy, go ahead. But you don’t know shit about cops, Marek. In your life, cops are people to ask directions from. I’m tellin’ ya there’s pigs who take their shit personally. I met guys in the joint who got busted two years after they fucked up because some pig wouldn’t quit.”

“And if I vote against it, partner?” Marek was surprised to find his voice so calm.

“He’s goin’, Marek.” Blanks didn’t even bother to look up. “See, there’s somethin’ else you didn’t tell me about. You didn’t tell me about the empty apartments. You didn’t say that we can’t have more than ten percent vacancies if we wanna sell the apartments. Sometimes I don’t think you wanna tell me what the fuck is goin’ on.”

“That’s nothing,” Marek fumed. “Those apartments have to be empty for a year before they count as being warehoused. Plus I know a dozen brokers who specialize in putting buyers into empty apartments. Plus if we do major renovations, we can get a waiver.” He stopped to draw a deep breath. “Try to hear what I’m saying, Marty. If we don’t ease up for a month or so, this whole deal’s gonna blow wide open. We’ll have the cops all over us. I can almost always deal with HPD bureaucrats. I give them money and they look the other way. But not if I’m a celebrity. Then everybody wants to get a piece of your ass. Every judge, every cop, every inspector, every reporter. You want to see a headline:
Who Is Bolt Realty?
”

Blanks finally raised his eyes to meet his partner’s gaze. He looked surprised, perhaps annoyed. “Forget about it, Marek. Two…three days the most. Moodrow’s gone. And it’s all because you were right. When you told me this was my big chance and I should take it? You were a hundred percent right, Marek. Maybe you think I don’t know what happens the next time I take a fall, but I do. This is my
only
chance, mother-fucker, and I ain’t gonna play it like a pussy.”

A
CARESSINGLY WARM FRIDAY
morning, the kind of a spring day that destroys the will to work. A morning when the bright yellow forsythia growing freely along the Grand Central Parkway beckons to the commuters crawling past LaGuardia Airport, reminding them of other times. Reminding them of young love and long-forgotten resolutions to find a different way. Of dreamers crushed by the relentless grind of the city as surely as Sylvia Kaufman was crushed by the greedy dreams of Marek Najowski and Martin Blanks.

Betty Haluka, driving out to the 115th Precinct with Stanley Moodrow, thought of her aunt even while she noted the annual miracle. The yellow flowers grew so thickly it seemed as if an artist, in a sardonic moment, had decided to paste a swatch of bright yellow over a field of soot and litter. The forsythia, she knew, grew completely wild, like the laurel thickets in southern mountains, though on a much smaller scale. Of course, one expected beauty in the wild mountains of West Virginia. The sudden, brief appearance of the forsythia (to be completely forgotten with the onset of the broiling summer) always came as a surprise, even to veteran New Yorkers who’d been plying the same commuter routes for decades. A surprise, an intrusion, a silent, uneasy memory.

“What are they called again?” Betty asked. “The yellow flowers? All I can remember is that it’s a word that begins with ‘f’ and I could never pronounce it.”

Moodrow stirred alongside her. “I been thinking the same thing. Funny, I never saw this before. Whatever it is, there’s an awful lot of it. You think someone planted it?”

“I don’t know.” She paused as a giant Pan Am jet crossed the parkway a hundred feet above them. So loud it seemed to shake the world. “Forthithitha,” she said after the plane had safely dropped onto the La Guardia runway a quarter mile to the east. “Damn! I can’t say it. I could never say that word. Fasythitha.”

Rabbit Cohan didn’t want to get up when the alarm rang. He didn’t want to get into the shower or get dressed, either. In fact, he hadn’t been awake at eight o’clock in the morning since he’d come out of the service in ’86, not since he’d been initiated into the economic mysteries of cocaine by his twin older brothers, Ben and Mick.

But it was their own progress into those economics that had him out of bed after three hours’ sleep. The Cohan brothers were about to move up (assuming the job went off all right) and moving up was what it was all about—moving up to Jaguars and Porsches and North Shore mansions on Long Island Sound.

The best part was that he’d never done cocaine. Never done it and never been tempted. His relationship to the white lady was that of protector. He and his brothers protected shipments and money exchanges for bigger, stronger people who would, sooner or later, realize the value of the brothers Cohan. Who would properly evaluate their industrious sobriety and give them a piece of the mother-fucking action. In the meantime, they lived from contract to contract, augmenting their incomes with the odd hijacking.

“Big day comin’, boyo,” Mick Cohan said as Rabbit went by. “You ready to work?”

“Fuck you, too,” Rabbit answered smartly. Mick had a thick scar under his right eye. Without it, Rabbit could only tell the twins apart by their behavior. Mick was the aggressive one. He gave orders and the brothers obeyed. Ben was quiet, almost sullen. For some reason, Pop had liked his little Mickey. He’d never, so far as anyone could tell, liked anything except Budweiser before Mickey’d come along and he clearly disliked Ben, beating the boy as often and as casually as he beat his wife.

Still, the old man hadn’t been able to come between the twins, who stood by each other (and by their mother and, later, their little brother, Rabbit) despite their father’s tyranny. Predictably, Pop had died in his early fifties when his heart had followed his liver into the alcoholic toilet, and “making it up to Ma” became the second most important goal in the brothers’ lives.

“Whatsa matta with ya filthy sinners? Can’t yer stop that mastrubatin’ long enough to have a breakfast before ya go off ta work?”

“We’ll be there in a minute, Ma,” Rabbit called. He threw himself out of bed, pulling a Kelly green T-shirt over his head. Green was the family trademark and the brothers never left the house without proudly displaying a bit of the Irish. This despite the fact that only Rabbit had ever seen the “old sod” and he’d done it via a four-day pass while stationed in Paris.

As usual, breakfast was a massive affair—eggs, pancakes, ham, bacon, toast, fruit, coffee, juice. Lunch, if Ma got to serve it, would be just as heavy, and dinner was a challenge the boys loved to accept. Rabbit sat before his plate and reached mischievously for his coffee.

“Say yer grace,” Ma warned, swiping at his hand with the flat of a knife.

“Blessusohlordandthesethygifts…”

“Not like that, ya heathen bastard.” Her voice rose into a familiar screech. “Y’ll say yer prayers like a proper Catholic or ya won’t eat in this house.”

She raised her knife again, but Rabbit hastily apologized, running through the prayer calmly and clearly.