Forced Entry (7 page)

But Sylvia never found the jokes funny, though she kept her opinions to herself. Louis was very ill; he looked as thin and frail as Sylvia’s own husband toward the end of his illness. Of course, it was cancer that took Bennie Kaufman, and Pat’s lover probably had AIDS, but they looked almost the same. Pat Sheehan wasn’t really one of those close friends Sergeant Dunlap had told her to invite, but Pat was always friendly in the supermarket or the laundry room. Sylvia had asked him on impulse and been surprised when he accepted.

“This Rosenkrantz guy gonna come, Sylvia? Cause if he ain’t even gonna come…” Inez Almeyda folded her arms across her chest. Twenty-eight years old, she was inevitably angry about something. Sylvia had come upon Inez a few weeks after the Almeyda family moved into their fourth floor apartment and been assaulted with the inadequacies of the world surrounding them. All of it, except for her husband and whomever she happened to be talking to.

“In my country, we get rid of these women without signing no petitions,” Inez continued. That was her second theme.
In my country
. As if, Sylvia thought, Cuba was paradise. Inez’s husband, whenever
he
mentioned Cuba, made it sound like the bowels of hell.

Andre Almeyda interrupted his wife, asserting his authority along with his opinion. “We’re jus’ gonna wait,” he said firmly, shutting Inez down as no one else could. “No matter if this guy from the management come or no, we gotta do something. We cannot have our kids seein’ them
putas
in the hallway.” He made a motion, as if to spit on the rug and Sylvias eyes widened until she realized that the gesture was only a gesture. The Cuban Almeyda family were born-again Christians,
Evangelistas
, and attended prayer meetings twice a week. Their oldest, an eight year old, went to the church school instead of P.S. 78, right around the corner.

“Did anyone see what happened to the front door? Did anyone happen to notice the lock don’t work? The key don’t go in the door? The tong thing don’t snap back in the goddamn hole? We got no security whatsoever. Did anyone happen to notice?” Mike Birnbaum glared at them before answering his own question. “Hoodlums. Drug addicts. Whores. When Morris Katz owned these buildings, he ran them like palaces. Now we got new management we don’t even know who it is. How can a company be an owner? We should have bought our apartments when we had the chance. Then
we
decide who lives here.”

Mike Birnbaum, reversing form by outliving his wife, was eighty-one years old and even angrier than Inez Almeyda. Angrier than in his youth when he’d won prize after prize fighting Christians in YMCA boxing rings and liked to refer to himself as a “belligerent Jew.” Long retired, he subsisted on a pension from the Department of Health and was chronically broke.

The conversation, as the group gave up on the arrival of Al Rosenkrantz, Project Supervisor for Precision Management, began to pick up. Sylvia, who busied herself with coffee and wedges of spice cake (her best, with the lemon icing), noted that only one of her co-conspirators was minimizing the danger to their way of life. Predictably, it was Myron Gold. Like Mike, Annie, and herself, Myron was one of the old-timers.

“So what’s the big deal?” he asked, spreading his hands to show his amazement. He’d been raised in the building, then gotten married and divorced, before returning to 2B after his father’s death. His mother, Shirley Gold, recovering from surgery to remove a tumor from her jaw, only left the apartment for biweekly chemotherapy treatments at Physician’s Hospital, a few blocks away. “You remember two years ago we had those people in 3F?” Myron waited patiently for them to recall the unofficial chapter of the Iron Horsemen, a motorcycle gang dedicated to speed, alcohol, and heavy metal. They’d moved in, en masse, with a mousy blond secretary who’d lived in 3F for a year before developing a taste for group sex and Harley Hogs. “All right, so it took a little time. Who can expect speed when you’re dealing with city hall? But, can anyone deny the fact Morris got ’em out of there? These creatures in 1F may not be pleasant to look at, but they’re only a nuisance. Not a cause to make a whole association. I mean some of us are talking about lawyers and housing inspectors. Gimme a break, already.”

“Then what about the superintendent?” Mike Birnbaum stared at Myron Gold with barely disguised contempt. Myron was a “get-along” Jew, an assimilationist. The kind Mike and his old man had always hated. The kind that moved back in with mommy when things got tough. “No super anymore and last night I froze my ass off. Pardon my French.” He nodded to the women. “I’m eighty-one and I gotta carry down my own garbage. Since Morris left, the whole joint is a piece of…” Noting the look of dismay on Andre Almeyda’s face, he pulled himself up just in time.

“What of the other buildings?” Muhammad Assiz, a Pakistani and a Moslem, had only been a resident of the Jackson Arms for ten months. Sylvia didn’t know him very well and she hadn’t invited him. She did want some of the Asians to attend and she’d spoken to an older gentleman in front of the mailboxes. His name was Aftab and, while he couldn’t come himself, he wanted to send a younger man. “As an observer. So we can be seeing what it is before we are signing anything. The management is already after us. You see many empty apartments where formerly we were living and things are very dangerous for us right now. But we will send one young man to observe. Muhammad Assiz, who is very intelligent, a doctor in our country, a technician in yours.”

Sylvia, tuned to the immaculate politeness and the wide smile, didn’t register Aftab’s anger until later, but, angry or not, there were twelve Pakistani families in the Jackson Arms and she’d need all of them if things got worse.

“Why in the other buildings is there nothing happening like this?” Muhammad Assiz, a polite smile gracing his smooth, brown skin, allowed his musical voice to express the very essence of reason. “There are many Pakistanis living in these other buildings and there is no problem there.”

That was the big question, Sylvia thought. And nobody has an answer. Morris owned three buildings. Two of them were running along with no changes. With the same supers, the same tenants, the same basic services. As if Morris Katz was still in charge.

“Exactly right.” Myron Gold seized Muhammad’s idea without registering the suspicions troubling the Pakistani. “There’s no reason to believe that just because a drunken super gets tossed on his butt like he deserves, the Nazis have invaded Jackson Heights.” He let his voice rise on the final phrase, ending his statement with a question mark, then tossed Mike Birnbaum his most significant look. Myron Gold wasn’t about to be bullied by an eighty-one-year-old man.

“But you don’t
know
, right?” Mike Birnbaum couldn’t let Myron have the last word. They would carry him out in a sheet before he let a
putz
like Myron make him look bad. “Two days ago, I phone up these
gonifs
who call themselves Precision Management. I tell ’em, ‘Look, from you I don’t wanna hear word one. I want you should refer me to the landlord. I wanna talk to the landlord direct.’ You know what the
shiksa
done to me? She hung up. Don’t even tell me to mind my own business. Bang. She hangs up.”

“What’s the point?” Myron asked, looking at the others for support. “What
is
the damn point?” He hated coming down to the old man’s level, but the bastard was so infuriating, so blindly stubborn.

“The point,” Mike Birnbaum continued, a long bony finger cocked nearly in Myron’s face, “is it could be
Hitler
owning our homes and you don’t got no way to prove me wrong. Also tell me this—if the
gontser machers
ain’t up to no good, why they gotta hide?”

Mike’s question, like that of Muhammad Assiz, hung in the air, and Sylvia Kaufman, with no notion of how to run a meeting, how to keep the focus of conversation on a particular goal, was allowing the evening to degenerate into a personal debate that excluded the very people, the Almeydas, the Parks, the Assizes, who formed the majority of tenants. She had an instinctive understanding of where the evening was headed, but no idea how to bring it back to its original purpose.

What followed, unfortunately for the Jackson Arms Tenants’ Association, did provide a focus for the meeting, a vehicle which carried them off in an utterly wrong direction. Mike Birnbaum, energized by Myron’s failure to provide an answer to his question, was gearing up for another assault, when the outside bell rang. Sylvia jumped up to buzz her visitor in, then remembered that the outer lock was broken and there was no reason Mr. Rosenkrantz (if that’s who it was) couldn’t walk right up to her door. Nevertheless, she activated the buzzer designed to release the lock on the lobby door, then opened her own door to await their visitor.

“Al Rosenkrantz,” the fat man said, shaking Sylvia’s outstretched hand as he rushed past her. “Sorry to be late, folks.” He pulled off a tan London Fog trench coat and handed it to his hostess. “We had an emergency in the Bronx. Heatless building. I had to light a fire under the repair crew.” His small eyes, overshadowed by heavy brows and pinched by sallow, puffy cheeks, darted from person to person and he nodded whenever he made eye contact, absently running a finger along his thin, dark mustache.

“What about an emergency right here? I froze my butt off last night.” Mike Birnbaum was the first to find his voice.

“Please, call me Al,” Rosenkrantz began.

“I don’t call you nothin’ until I see results,” Birnbaum returned.

Sighing, Rosenkrantz positioned his fat body over a kitchen chair and sat heavily. “Please, everyone, call me Al,” he repeated, then spoke directly to Mike Birnbaum. “I don’t know who I’m speaking to…”

“A tenant,” Birnbaum answered, folding his arms tightly across his thin chest.

Rosenkrantz, looking sharply at the old man, couldn’t have asked for a better beginning. The senile bastard would make a perfect dupe. “Mrs. Kaufman,” he said, turning to Sylvia, “I agreed to come here tonight so that I could hear your complaints firsthand. As you know, Precision Management has been in charge of your building for less than three months. In that time, we’ve made some changes, but we feel that, in the long run, these changes will reflect the true needs of the owners
and
the tenants.”

“Is this why you are throwing us into the street?” Muhammad Assiz, his voice sweet as sherbert, interrupted Al Rosenkrantz’s set speech. “Since you have taken the buildings, only the Pakistani people have been evicted. Tell me why this is.”

Rosenkrantz smiled indulgently. “Please,” he said. “Your name. What should I call you.”

“Muhammad Assiz.”

“Muhammad, I’ve been in this business for fifteen years and I have never been involved in a deal this big where the new landlord didn’t check leases. The first thing any landlord wants to know is who is living in which unit and are they living there legally.”

“So he could get a rent increase,” Birnbaum snorted.

Al Rosenkrantz accepted a cup of coffee and sipped at it gently, before answering. “A lease,” he began in his most reverential tones, “is a profound legal document. A lease is a contract that defines the conditions of a binding, long-term relationship. The lease is so important to urban life, that New York City has created a special court, the Tenant-Landlord Court, to enforce the provisions of leases. I tell you a landlord has as much right to require that his tenants live within the lease, as the tenants have to demand the landlord honor the obligations specified in the lease.” He paused, deliberately seeking out Myron Gold who was staring at Mike Birnbaum as if at a cockroach on his kitchen table. When he got a nod from Gold, an acknowledgment of his irrefutable logic, he began again. “But these are all problems associated with a new relationship. Believe me, six months from now every one of the empty apartments will have been rerented. A new super—one who can stay sober long enough to fix those locks when the savages break them—will be in place. Everything will be returned to normal and you’ll be laughing at your suspicions. Look at the other buildings on the sidestreets. We’ve brought them through the transition without a hitch. Just give it a little time.”

Andre Almeyda, restraining his wife, spoke up first. “Mr. Rosenkrantz.”

“Please, call me Al.”

“No, Mr. Rosenkrantz. I am Cuban. Born in Cuba and I learn in Cuba that not everyone who shakes your hand is a friend. I want to know why you allow these whores to move into our building? I raise my little girls to believe in our Lord Jesus Christ and I don’t want them to see such things.”

“Good. I’m glad you brought that up.” Accepting a slice of cake from Sylvia Kaufman, he flashed her a quick smile. He could feel the sweat forming in the roots of his thick, black hair; it was the one thing he couldn’t control. He took a quick bite of the cake, savoring the tang of the lemon icing, before answering. “When I first heard of these alleged prostitutes, I went into the files and personally checked the lease on 1F. The unit is currently rented to a man named Sal Ragozzo. One of our field men paid a visit to 1F just last week and found Mr. Ragozzo in residence. According to the lease, we cannot evict just because the tenant has roommates. Now, if the police make an arrest and get a conviction, we can have them removed without a problem. That would be a clear violation of the morals clause in the lease. But without some proof, I believe we’d lose in Tenant-Landlord Court.” Quickly, with a little sigh of disgust, he wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief. “Still, as a demonstration of Precision Management’s good faith, if you can bring us a petition with…let’s say twenty names on it, we’ll serve Mr. Ragozzo with an eviction notice and see if he decides to fight. Meanwhile, I do feel that you should demand police help. Put some heat on these scum right away. One thing I personally guarantee, Precision Management will double-check the references of all new tenants. There will be no repeat of this unfortunate situation, which, I should add, was
inherited
by Precision Management. Apartment 1F was rented to Mr. Ragozzo by Morris Katz three weeks before the closing.”