The Thinker

Crime Fiction by John Haymaker

No sooner had the black stretch limo pulled up curbside in front of an abandoned tenement building in the Bronx, but the passenger side opened and a muscular young man, wearing a black sport jacket over a black turtleneck, jumped out and ran around to open the passenger door. Three bodyguards jumped out of a Mercedes tailing the limo and ran up to the tenement doorway. All postured and kept moving, pacing nervously, rolling their shoulders back, cocking their necks to look all around. Mazram, a gentleman of about fifty with neatly styled silvery hair, emerged from the limo putting a cream-colored, crushed patent leather Italian shoe on the curb. He scratched an ear, sniffled and stood up to survey the building as he held a cigar to his lips and lit it, sucking gently to get the tip burning. Giving his men the thumbs-up, Mazram strode across the sidewalk with a camel-hair trench coat draped over his shoulders as a cape.

Inside the foyer, another set of thugs blocked the entry. “Hey Boss,” a lisping voice boomed across the foyer. “Excapo arrived ‘bout ten minutes ago. Nobody was carrying. They’re upstairs. Fifth floor already.” With a self-satisfied smile, Mazram immediately held his arms out to the side, palms up. One of Excapo’s men moved forward to frisk him, reaching inside the coat to run his hands around Mazram’s waist and pat him down the legs. “Okay, he’s clean,” he announced. Mazram proceeded across the marble foyer, littered with scattered garbage, broken plaster chunks, a couple of yellowed newspapers, and colored circulars still held by rubber bands. A heavy carpet of dust and debris ground like sand under his shoes. After being frisked in turn, Mazram’s bodyguards followed. The once grand staircase they ascended was missing many of its spindles and a few floorboards, so they lumbered to step around the obstacles. At each step, Mazram’s tweed pants rose up, revealing his nylon socks in fallen, sloppy folds about his ankles.

As Mazram and his men walked down the top-floor hallway, each step echoed in short, sharp bursts that seemed to ricochet off the walls. Wooden lathe stripes showed in the wall where the old plaster had fallen off. All up and down the hallway, doors hung off their hinges and boards under the silver-painted radiators had bowed, heaving them awkwardly aside. At the far end of the hall, several associates of both Excapo and Mazram stood beneath a Men’s Room sign.

Mazram entered the fifth-floor tenement toilet, a hand already extended as he approached Excapo, a stocky man of about sixty with thick, yellowish-grey hair, an excess of nose hair and overgrown eyebrows that seemed to blink along with his eyelids. He wheezed as he sat at the far end of a makeshift table set up in front of a row of seven or eight urinals. The stall doors had been ripped off their hinges and were now being used as a makeshift table in the shower area, set up on three waist-high, dented-up garbage cans. Several wooden desk chairs and a couple of brown metal folding chairs had been placed around the table. Excapo stood as Mazram approached, staring Mazram straight in the eye as the two shook hands, firmly and overlong, like two politicians playing to photographers.

“Excapo, after so many years, it is indeed a pleasure to see you.”

“Likewise, I have often looked forwards to this moment. Perhaps our years of rivalry have toughened us enough that now we might humbly lead together.”

Excapo returned to his seat, and Mazram walked over to the porcelain urinals, grayed by a web of splintering hairline cracks, and faced the wall to piss, looking up at the ceiling. “You know, I can always do my best thinking in the toilet, like some guys get to singing in the shower,” Mazram said as he shook off. “I just hope the feds like the echo chamber effect, the assholes!” remarked Excapo, who leaned his head to one side and pursed his lips as if chewing on a toothpick. Mazram dropped his cigar butt into the yellow pool that collected in the basin, which sounded a ‘poof’ as the cigar instantly singed the urine, releasing a white puff of smoke and a pungent scent. Mazram turned around as he raised his zipper. “Pardon my modesty,” he said, and he handed off his coat to an associate, who held the coat collar by one finger out to the side of a shoulder.

Excapo gestured for Mazram to sit, and Mazram pulled a wooden chair out from the opposite end of the table and turned it around, straddling the seat while balancing the chair on two forward-leaning legs.

“Listen, my friend,” Excapo began. “The time for a truce has come. In exchange for your cooperation, I am prepared to back off the south wharf and hand over the fifth ward to Little Ezek. No more hits. No more turf wars.”

Mazram, who had sat with his hands folded and cupped, suddenly threw open his hands as if flicking something off the tips and widened his eyes with mock surprise. He then began nodding and clasped his hands back together.

“Then we are agreed. We have a new era of partnership and cooperation. Our two families can live as one.” Excapo’s lopsided grin grew from a terse slit in one corner of his mouth to a broad rounding of his lips by the time it reached the other side.

The lieutenants all around the table suddenly broke into smiles. The bosses smiled, they smiled. Then came genuine laughter. The bosses laughed, they laughed, revealing a roomful of yellowed teeth, some chipped and broken, some capped with gold and some studded with diamond garnets. After a time, Mazram raised both his hands out to the side of his head, patting the air repeatedly, motioning for all to quiet down, but all the lieutenants and associates broke into a chorus, “Speech! Speech! Speech!” Mazram reluctantly rose, made a humble bow, and as if raising a toast, began, “Excapo, we must do this more often.”

On cue, one of Mazram’s associates stood abruptly, grabbed his chair by the seat back and smashed it across the table, splintering the chair into pieces, sending the stall doors crashing to the floor and the garbage cans rattling. A rapid round of gun blasts echoed from downstairs and ceased. Excapo looked to the bathroom door, his mouth agape, then glared at Mazram, who stepped aside to the doorway. Mazram’s men were immediately wielding lethal makeshift weapons with horrible violence. A chair leg caught Excapo straight across his face, knocking him into a wall even as an associate swung a folded metal chair, a hand on each of the legs, and beat Excapo over the head repeatedly with the seat back. Excapo’s chief lieutenant lay back against the urinals with a chair spindle sticking out of his chest. The muscular young man in a black sports jacket and turtleneck kicked at the head of another of Excapo’s associates relentlessly until he spit up blood, which dribbled off his chin and seeped into his blue dress shirt.

The sudden fury of violence overwhelmed Excapo’s men, and in minutes it was over. Mazram’s men panted from exhaustion. A couple of them leaned against the walls and wiped blood splatters from their faces. Another pair hugged each other like boxers after a drawn-out match. Compared to this melee, St. Valentines Day had been merciful.

Mazram still stood in the doorway, where he had watched in safety. He congratulated his men now, making a motion of clapping his hands silently. He pivoted his coat off his chief lieutenant’s finger onto his own, swung it over his back and unfurled his cape once more to make his exit.

Descending the grand staircase, Mazram flicked dust from his shirtsleeves and then stooped over to wipe blood splatters off one of his shoes. “Hey Boss! It was beautiful!” boomed a lisping voice from the foyer. “At the first sign of trouble upstairs, all their heads looked up, right where you are now! We blasted ‘em good. They been laid out on the second floor, like you wanted.”

Mazram paused on the landing, nodded and kicked a loose floorboard, sending it skipping across the foyer, bouncing with the hollow ring of a dropped baseball bat.

Outside the building, a man in an orange jumpsuit and yellow hard hat stapled a notice on the entry door with several quick snaps of a staple gun.

“Coming down today, heh!” noted Mazram. “I got a crew inside getting out some fixtures. Give ‘em two minutes. We’ll get the cars out of here.”

“Not a problem,” the man in the orange jump suit responded as he turned to go, waving a hand as he walked away. A yellow caterpillar crane rolled into position. More workmen in orange jumpsuits got out of pickups. A couple of them climbed up on the crane and tested its levers, while another climbed part way up the crane arm to unhook the wrecking ball. The muscular young man in black crossed the street to speak with an engineer holding a clipboard. He put his arm around the engineer and passed him a thick padded envelope as the two walked down the street a ways.

Mazram’s men filtered out of the building jangling car keys and got in the Mercedes and Lincolns and double-parked limos and Cadillacs and pulled away, squealing tires as they drove off. Mazram’s limo drove away last, but then reappeared and parked one block down, the engine idling as it waited.

The muscular young man in black jogged down the street. He came up to the limo window, which rolled down as he approached. “You were right, Boss. They didn’t see nothing.”

“I’m always right. And who’s the genius that gave them the wrong address?”

“I don’t know nothing about that, Boss. There must’ve been an awful mix up at city hall yesterday,” he smirked.

“It doesn’t take much to get city hall mixed up,” Mazram laughed outright. “What the fuck? The city’ll be glad to get that blight out of there, anyway.”

The crane had already swung up flush against a neighboring tenement and slowly began picking up momentum. The black wrecking ball slammed forward, crashing into the building like cannon volley, sending a thick fog of brick dust into the air, coating everything. As the crane began maneuvering a second swing, Mazram said, “Come on, let’s get out of here. I gotta take another leak. Damned prostate.” The limo backed halfway down the block, made a wide U-turn and turned down a side street. The driver hesitated at a stop sign, turned left onto a thoroughfare and got lost in traffic. 

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Bio: John Haymaker is a LGBTQIA+ writer whose stories and nonfiction appear in various online journals, including Real Fiction Forum’s Accidental Correspondent, Quibble.Lit, Piker Press, The Bookends Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Cosmic Double and Across the Margin. His Chinese to English translations appear online at Bewildering Stories. Find John online at his website HERE.

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