Read Online Forced Entry by Stephen Solomita - Free Book Online Page A

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