Forced Entry (2 page)

“Bring the bottle in the car,” Martin Blanks replied shortly. “I’m runnin’ close tonight. I gotta be in the city by eleven the latest. Time’s money, right?”

Still grinning, Marek Najowski passed the bottle of Paul Remy over to Martin Blanks, who wasted no time in sampling the contents while Marek slid into a wool jacket, an Ungaro houndstooth check which made no more impression on Martin Blanks than the cognac or the fire.

Ten minutes later, as they drove up Montague Street in Marek’s white Jaguar sedan, Marek turned to Marty Blanks and began his pitch, playing the part of the engaging rogue with complete confidence.

“Tell me somethin’, Marty,” he said. “When is money not money?”

“Don’t call me ‘Marty,’ ” Martin Blanks responded shortly.

“Am I offending you?” The Jaguar accelerated effortlessly. Without a sound. “Because you’re the last guy I want to offend. Hey, I’m the same as you. I grew up in Flatbush. I went to school with the nuns. I made my First Communion at St. Bernadette’s, for Christ’s sake.”

Marek began to weave the Jaguar in and out of the trucks and cars, pushing it just a little faster than the traffic allowed, talking quietly. “So what should I call you?”

“Martin,” Martin Blanks replied evenly.

“Is that what your friends call you?” Marek asked innocently. He was looking for the answer he got. Expecting it.

“No.”

Marek laughed, shaking his head ruefully. “Whatever you want, Martin. Ya gotta go with the flow. Am I right, or what? You could call me Marek. I used to go by my mother’s nickname for me—she was Irish, by the way—Mikey. I even had my name changed legally when I was about twenty-five. Changed it to Michael Najowski. Then, last year, I changed it back to Marek. You can’t run away from what you really are. In more ways than one.” He paused to thump on the leather armrest between Blanks and himself.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Blanks answered, his eyes straight ahead as the Jaguar slowed down to creep past a stalled Buick.

Marek Najowski didn’t reply for a moment, concentrating on the traffic as he maneuvered the Jaguar up the Tillary Street ramp and onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. “Tell me something,” he finally said. “Were you in Hell’s Kitchen before the Puerto Ricans took it over?” He knew, of course, that Martin Blanks had been taken from his family (and his neighborhood) before he was old enough to go out on the street, but the question was purely rhetorical. “Me, I grew up in Flatbush. On East 28th Street off Clarendon Road. Up until I was ten, it was all white. Italians, Irish, Poles, Germans. I’m talkin’ about working people, Martin. Cops, firemen, plumbers. Come Sunday morning, St. Bernadette’s ran six masses and every one of them was packed. All the kids I knew went to Catholic school. Maybe it wasn’t paradise, but it worked. People took care of each other. They took care of the apartments where they lived. They took care of the
neighborhood
. Am I right, or what?”

Despite his original intentions, Marek Najowski was unable to keep the anger out of his voice. But he’d caught Martin Blanks’ attention. The Irishman was looking at him with curiosity, waiting for the end of the story.

“Then the scum started moving in,” Najowski resumed.

“This I already figured.” Martin Blanks grinned for the first time.

“They came down from Atlantic Avenue. First to Eastern Parkway, then Empire Boulevard, then Linden Boulevard. Only a few, in the beginning. I remember the nuns telling us to get along. ‘They’re your brothers and sisters in God.’ And the politicians coming across with the same bullshit.

“Well, the nuns stayed locked up in the convent and the politicians didn’t live anywheres near Flatbush. They didn’t come home to find them pissing in the hallways. They didn’t see the scum throw bags of garbage out the window ’cause they were too lazy to carry their crap down the stairs. My father came to America after the war. He was raised up tough and he tried to get my mother to move out. Meanwhile, she’s tellin’ him to show ‘Christian charity.’ Well, here’s what Christian charity means to the scum. One day, my mom was coming home from shopping. Three o’clock in the afternoon. As she’s walking up the steps to our apartment—to her
home
—two of them come up to her. One grabs her pocket-book. No trouble, right. She gives it up, but the other one still gotta hit her. Gotta punch her in the mouth so she falls backward down the stairs. Know what, Martin? My mom’s still alive. She don’t know me, of course. She don’t know nothin’, but tubes and diapers.”

“And, nat’rally, you blame it on the blacks.”

Najowski shook his head. “You don’t understand. No matter what society you pick—I don’t care if it’s all white or all black or what it is—there’s a heap at the bottom. It’s boiling. Literally boiling. Like bees crawling over each other in the nest. You could go to Sweden where they’re whiter than white or Uganda where they’re so black, they’re invisible. Everybody wants to get out of the heap. It’s just natural to want to rise up. But how many do it? How many rise up and how many stay on the bottom? My mother struggled all her life, only to get destroyed by an insect from the very bottom of the heap. That’s not gonna be my fate, Marty. I already came too far for that.”

They drove in silence while Marek Najowski allowed his heart to slow down. Allowed the red curtain in front of his eyes slowly to peel away. Finally, when he was ready to resume the persona he’d set for himself earlier in the evening, he spoke again.

“So tell me,” he said, “when is money not money?”

“I give up.” Even Martin Blanks, who’d seen violence in all its forms, from gang rape to cold-blooded murder, didn’t have the heart to stop Najowski.

“When it’s in a suitcase under a bed. Then it’s a pile of shit. Am I right, or what?”

“I don’t get the point,” Blanks replied. Suddenly, he didn’t like where the conversation was going.

“You could make millions in the drug business and what does it get you? I mean how long before you get busted? Or until some rival burns you for your connections? A year? Two years? Five years? Next time you go upstate, you won’t come back until you’re an old man. Not only that, but they’ll take all your money. These days, when you get busted, they seize every dime and when you come out of jail, you’re just another asshole on welfare. See, Martin Blanks, right now all you have is a penniless future in an upstate jail.” Najowski flashed Blanks his most winning smile. “Am I right, or what?”

The reality was undeniable. A week before, Ali “Supreme Boy” Reynolds, one of South Jamaica’s legendary crack lords, had had all his properties seized while awaiting trial in a Rikers Island dormitory. Everything the feds could lay their hands on, including two apartment buildings in Miami, a 7-Eleven in Tennessee, a yacht anchored in the Flushing Bay Marina, and a stretch Mercedes. Since the racketeering laws, state and federal, had taken effect two years before, major drug dealers stood to lose their assets before the trial even took place. Theoretically, if they were found innocent and could prove they’d acquired their property through honest toil, they could recover. It’s the second part, of course, that provided the problems. A sharp lawyer might find a way to get a dealer off the hook, but even a genius can’t find a technicality that accounts for an unemployed man’s possession of hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of dollars in assets.

“Ya know somethin’, Najowski? You got a big fuckin’ mouth,” Blanks said finally. His short, square body was rock-hard, a hundred and ninety pounds glued to a five-foot-six-inch frame; his head was broad and the heavy bones over his small, blue, Irish eyes made him seem dull and stupid. He was neither, though he sometimes played the fool.

“Yeah,” Najowski replied, “but am I right, or what?” He nudged the Jaguar into the right lane and they exited the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at Roosevelt Avenue and turned east, crisscrossing the streets between Roosevelt Avenue and 37th Avenue, the main commercial blocks in the neighborhood known as Jackson Heights. Dozens of small shops declared the prosperity, the middle-class character of the area: food, clothing, hardware, pharmacies, stationery. The neighborhood might have been set in any large city, except that half the signs were written in two languages and there were as many Orientals on the streets as whites.

“Pakistanis and Koreans,” Najowski said, anticipating Blanks’ question. “With a few Indians and Hong Kong Chinese. The neighborhood used to be Jewish, Italian, and Irish. This is where they came when they got enough money to leave the slums and it held up until the late 60s. Then the spics—Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, Mexicans, Cubans—started to arrive and a lot of the whites got out. The Koreans came around 1980 with the wogs right behind. Now you find young professionals trying to beat Manhattan rents.”

“Why’d they run?” Blanks asked. “This neighborhood is clean. There’s nothin’ happenin’ on the streets. I don’t see no sign of drugs. They look like they come outta church.”

“It gets worse further east and along Roosevelt Avenue. There’s drugs in the bars. There’s even a dirty movie and a topless bar a couple of blocks from here. Hookers work the bar and sometimes the streets. That’s gonna be a big thing for us. That movie and that bar.”

Najowski pulled the car to the curb in front of 337-11 37th Avenue, an eighty-unit building with the name Jackson Arms carved over the entryway. Leaning back in the bucket seat, he watched his guest survey the neighborhood. Najowski had asked his connections to tell Blanks that Najowski wanted to propose a real estate deal. Nothing else. Now Blanks was looking over the property, impressed with the obvious quality of the housing, as Marek had hoped.

“Still looks like a good neighborhood,” Blanks observed neutrally. “These people take care of their shit. Not like in Flatbush, where you used to live.” He turned to his host and grinned innocently.

Najowski, ignoring the cut, changed the subject. “The way I figure, the mob is your best bet. They can take your money, for a percentage, and make it legitimate. But you’d have to trust them. You’d have to make them partners and, most likely, wops being wops, they’d have no reason to give an Irishman a piece of the action. Not once they got up a relationship with your suppliers and your customers. After that, they’d probably drop you in a field with a little hole behind one ear. Am I right, or what?”

“And you got a better way. Nat’rally. You want me to become a landlord. Well, I went to a lawyer, an old friend of mine, and he told me I can’t make no money buyin’ buildings more than fifteen years old. All them old buildings are rent-controlled. He says I’d be better off puttin’ the money in the bank. I’d get more return. Plus, the landlords are in a computer now. Up in Albany. All that’s gotta happen is one of the big pigs types ya name into that computer and you don’t have no more property.”

Najowski turned away from Blanks, staring out the side window long enough to make both of them uncomfortable. When he finally turned back, he was visibly upset. “You think I don’t know this? I’m a landlord, for Christ’s sake.”

“You know about rent control, all right,” Blanks said evenly. “But maybe you think that
I
don’t know about it. Maybe you think I’m another Irishman with potatoes and whiskey, instead of brains, between his ears.”

“What would you do if I ripped you off, Martin?”

“I’d kill ya. I wouldn’t have no choice.”

Najowski grinned enthusiastically; it was going exactly as planned. Let the asshole have his macho victories. It was the last card that mattered. He leaned in close to Blanks as he prepared to flash the bait. “Now listen carefully, Martin. This is where it gets good. Two years ago, Morris Katz, the Jew who owns this building and the two buildings running down 74th and 75th streets, sent his tenants notice that he wanted to convert his real estate from rental to co-op. Without gettin’ into it too deep, you should know the laws about conversion are written in such a way that the
owner
of the property has to beg the
tenants
to buy or move on. You can’t throw anybody out. Not even if their leases have expired. So long as they pay the rent, tenants have the right to renew their leases until they’re carried out in a box. That’s why Morris offered to sell the occupying tenants their apartments at a price thirty percent below the market price. That’s called the ‘insider’ price and it means the tenants could buy a hundred-thousand-dollar unit for seventy thousand. That’s a thirty-thousand-dollar profit. You’d think nobody in their right mind could refuse thirty thousand dollars. Am I right, or what?”

Najowski held up three fingers for Blanks’ inspection. “Three people took it, Martin. Three.” He paused to let the information sink in. “There’s two hundred forty units in these buildings and I can get them for just over fifteen million dollars. Two million up front and the rest in a ten-percent mortgage which Morris will hold. I can swing the two million. Two million ain’t a problem for me. Morris Katz is the problem. He bought the buildings in 1960 for two and a half million and the profit is gonna be taxed like ordinary income. Morris wants something under the table by way of compensation. Also, Morris don’t trust banks. Or anything else run by Christians. He wants a million dollars in gold coins—one-ounce Mexican pesos—at the exchange rate on the day before the closing.

“I don’t have cash, Martin. Or any way to get cash without attracting a lot of attention, but I know Morris Katz could get eighteen million if he wasn’t in such a hurry to get out.”

“What the fuck is an eighty-three-year-old man gonna do with a million dollars in gold?” Blanks interrupted, frowning. The whole deal had something wrong with it.

“Check this out, Martin. The Jew wants to sail his yacht to Jamaica, where he’ll pass out the coins to any little native gal who can get him off. He lost his wife and kids in the concentration camps in World War Two and he spent all his efforts makin’ money after the war. Didn’t have time to start another family and now he’s gotta have compensations.”

“I still don’t see what it’s got to do with me,” Blanks insisted. “What do I want with a rent-controlled building that even a Jew couldn’t make no money on?”