Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  From then on, he carried the scrap of paper with the rights written out everywhere he went. When a lawyer asked, “How did you advise my client of his rights?” Chris would say, “I read them from this piece of paper,” and he would whip out the scrap. If a lawyer then tried to trip him up by sneering, “You mean you don’t even know the rights without reading them?” Chris would smile and say, “Yes, I know them, but I wanted your client to have the best possible presentation.”

  Chris had absolutely no use for lawyers. “Even Shakespeare said, ‘Get rid of all the lawyers and we’ll have a better society,’ or something like that,” Chris pointed out. “I think maybe Christ said something like that, too.” He felt cops were often trapped in a tough, even an impossible situation. “Legislatures take months to put something into law, then they expect a cop to make a split-second decision, with no time for a committee meeting or a conference or any kind of huddle, and then enforce the law instantaneously and exactly right. And they say to a cop, ‘If you make a mistake, we’ll prosecute you.’” One way or another, Chris felt, a suspect was likely to slip through—by copping a plea, or claiming mitigating circumstances, or by having some sharp Legal Aid guy confuse the issue enough so that the case got thrown out. And Chris had learned not to take it personally.

  Except in the case of “The Bronx Bull Rapist.” Chris remembered how terrified the fifteen-year-old girl had been, how she’d backed away from him, whimpering, her face quivering, when he tried to talk to her. “Once a woman is raped, she’s never the same again,” Chris said moodily. “A part of her is stolen and she will never get it back.” He’d handled a rape case in which the woman had just sat there as he tried to get her to speak, with her jaw so tightly locked, the doctor found, that she physically couldn’t open her mouth to get the words out.

  Chris was determined that the Bronx Bull not get away. He called up some women he didn’t know but knew something about, whose bylines he’d seen, including “the one with the glasses,” Gloria Steinem. “I think the judge is coddling this guy,” Chris told them. “I think he’s completely insensitive to the women who were raped, and I’m afraid he’s going to sabotage this case and let the guy go.” On the next trial day, Chris’s team was lined up in the front rows. Each woman had a notebook and pen in hand, and kept her eyes riveted on the judge. Chris watched happily as the judge’s attitude changed, “from night to day. He got sixty-five years, baby!” Chris told Liz.

  Liz had been singing at a nightclub in Manhattan, when Chris dropped in one night to hear the flute player in the combo. He’d always liked the flute. The owner of the place knew Chris and, between sets, brought Liz over to say hello.

  “I hear you’re a policeman,” Liz said lightly.

  “Well, yeah, I am,” Chris mumbled awkwardly.

  “Well, I feel real safe now,” Liz said, and everybody laughed. Chris stayed until she was finished, then drove her home to her apartment on the upper east side. When he dropped her off, he didn’t ask for her phone number.

  When he went back to the club a few nights later, she asked why not. Chris mumbled something vague, because he didn’t have an answer. Liz was lovely, with blond hair in a classic pageboy cut, wide blue eyes and, in her black dress with a ruffled skirt and a string of pearls, she was sexy in a cool, sophisticated way.

  “Well, here it is,” she said, handing him a slip of paper. “Call me up sometime.” So he called, and they went to dinner. When she got a part in an off-Broadway revue, he went to see it twice. When the show closed, she invited him to Massachusetts for the weekend, to the small town where she’d grown up and where her parents still lived. Chris enjoyed the trip and he liked her parents, who seemed to like him, too, even though Liz’s dad was an avid golfer and Chris had always hated golf, along with most sports. As a kid, he’d always been the last to be picked for a team, any team, in any game. When he was the only kid left, just standing there, one team captain or the other would shrug and say, okay Chris, you’re with us. On Saturdays and Sundays, when other kids were playing ball, Chris was at home, practicing drums.

  Chris had never said “I love you” to anyone. Even when he felt that he loved someone, he didn’t say it in those words, not even within the family. He’d never told his mother he loved her, and certainly he’d never told his father. In a romantic relationship, he just couldn’t seem to get the words out. He hated the way people said “I love you,” so loosely, sometimes so falsely: At the station he heard guys on the phone, talking to their wives, saying they were working late, don’t wait supper, just go on to bed, see you tomorrow, I love you, then hanging up and heading out to meet their girlfriends.

  So Chris went to the other extreme and never said it. He assumed that people who knew him would know how he felt and, if he loved them, they would know it without him saying so. When Liz asked him, “Do you love me?” he was embarrassed and mumbled, “Well, yeah.” He knew certainly that he’d never met anyone so talented and glamorous, while still being so nice and so easy to talk to. He’d never known anyone like her. “Why are you interested in me?” he asked her. “I’m just a cop.” While the question was a trifle disingenuous—by now he was no longer oblivious to his masculine charm—he really did want to know. “I don’t meet many straight, normal people in my line of work,” Liz told him. So maybe she hadn’t known anyone like him, either.

  Chris liked being married. He no longer needed to spend so much time after hours at McSherry’s, now that he had a wife to come home to, share his day with. Shortly before he met Liz, he’d had the bout of hepatitis that the doctor blamed on alcohol. Getting married and settling down was a good way to straighten out, Chris thought. And as long as he’d stopped drinking, he thought he might as well go one step further, and he’d stopped smoking.

  Liz seemed content, too. She’d had a couple of roommates, each of whom had married and moved away. With the instability built into her profession, she welcomed some emotional and social security, too. She was understanding of Chris’s irregular schedule, because hers was. When she got a part in the road company of a Broadway musical, Chris flew out to Cleveland to see her.

  At home in Forest Hills, Chris discovered a domestic streak in himself that surprised him. When he was living with his mother, he’d been accustomed to not lifting a finger. Now, when he had a day off, he enjoyed doing the laundry. Liz liked to sleep late; he liked to bring her breakfast in bed. He could whip up a fine Greek salad. He especially enjoyed their trips to Massachusetts. Every year since they’d met, they’d gone there at Christmastime. Chris would spend Christmas Eve with his mother, then, very early on Christmas morning, he and Liz would pile into his car, loaded with gifts, and set off for the country, lighthearted as children, singing. Chris couldn’t match his wife’s trained voice, but he managed to hold his own. He thought that the more he sang, the better he sounded.

  There was always snow in the country. Liz’s parents didn’t have a farm, but they had a lot of ground, with birch woods stretching behind the house. Sometimes Chris got up very early, the morning after Christmas, and walked in the woods alone. He never chopped wood—as a city kid, he was sure he’d cut off a foot had he tried to wield an ax—but he learned to make a good long-lasting fire, poking and stoking it late into the night. The rambling old Victorian house smelled gloriously of pine, of roasting turkey, and pies in the oven. He liked to lie on the floor in front of the fire, listening to the murmur of voices all around him, sometimes dozing, sometimes just dreaming. He liked the way he and Liz seemed to laugh a lot, in the country. At home, in the city, there didn’t seem to be as much time to laugh. They had busy schedules. Sometimes they met in the city for dinner, then went to a club to hear jazz. Chris could never persuade Liz to go to the opera, though. As much as she loved music, Liz didn’t like opera, so he went only once in a while, while she was out of town, and he played his opera records at home only when he was there alone.

  The Maria Callas was so loud that he almost didn’t hear the shrill r
ing of the phone.

  “Chris, don’t be stupid,” the man on the phone said bluntly. “Do you realize what you’re doing, if you turn this down?”

  It was Captain Selzer, whom Chris had known in the Bronx, who now worked downtown. He hadn’t been at the morning meeting, but obviously knew all about it.

  “Hey, Cap,” Chris said. “I’ve already turned it down. I just don’t want it, you know? I’m really happy where I am.”

  “Chris, listen to me,” Selzer said. “Just listen to me for a minute. I’m telling you, don’t say no to this. You know Intel is the elite unit. I don’t have to tell you that, and if you do a good job, Chris, you can make the gold.”

  “And what if I don’t?” Chris countered. “What if I screw up? Would I get busted back to the bag?”

  “No, no you wouldn’t,” Selzer said. “I give you my word, you wouldn’t go back into uniform. You could just go back to what you’re doing now.”

  “Hey boss, you know I want the gold,” Chris said. “But I think I can get it anyway, with what I’m doing, sooner or later. And I really don’t want this job.”

  “I’m telling you again,” Selzer persisted, “don’t turn this down. You’d be making a big mistake.”

  “Hey, I don’t even know what they want me to do, exactly,” Chris said. “Gather intelligence, they said. But that sounds real vague, and I don’t really know what they want me to do. I’m not sure they know what they want me to do.”

  “Here’s what I want you to do, Chris,” the captain said. “Take the job for a little while. Ninety days. How does ninety days sound? Then, if you want to drop it, you drop it, no questions asked.”

  “I still don’t think …” Chris began, when the captain cut in. “Think about it some more,” he said briskly. “The inspector wants you to think about it some more. He thinks you haven’t thought about this sufficiently, Chris, and he wants you to take the weekend to think about it. So you do that.” He hung up before Chris could say anything more.

  Chris turned the record over and walked out to the kitchen. He got another cup of coffee, took a sip, then poured it down the sink and opened a diet cola. He went back into the living room and sat at the end of the sofa.

  He’d started out as a mediocre cop, then he became a good cop. Not a superstar, just a very good cop. He was satisfied with what he was doing at the 4-oh. After coming close to messing up his life, all the drinking and the drifting, he was straightened out. As a good cop, he was making something of himself. Redeeming himself.

  Early in his career, he’d been lazy. Once, Chief Bouza in the Bronx had called him up to his office. Bouza was an impressive-looking guy, very tall and lanky, six five, with a wonderful way of speaking. Some people thought he was arrogant, but Chris liked him a lot. The chief had a fabulous vocabulary; talking with him, Chris thought, was like talking to a professor.

  The chief pointed a finger at him. “What are you doing in terms of education?” he demanded.

  “Well, I take some classes at John Jay,” Chris began. Then he stopped. He didn’t want to bullshit the chief. It was true that he’d signed up for classes given at the precinct through the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But it was also true that he didn’t pay attention, didn’t do the assigned reading, and often dozed in class. “Well, nothing,” Chris admitted.

  “You know, Chris,” the chief said, “I’m a dropout from Manual Trades High School. And now I have my Ph.D. in Police Management.” Chris was wondering how to respond—should he congratulate the boss?—when Bouza pointed dramatically to the bookshelf behind his desk. “See those books? Those are my books, Chris. I wrote them! And yet I was a dropout from Manual Trades!”

  Chris could see what the chief was driving at, men, and for a while he tried to pay more attention to the classes. But his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t need a college degree to get the gold shield of a detective. For that he needed a hook or a “rabbi”—either a high-ranking cop who could give him a strong reference and hook Chris up the ladder with him, or someone who would press his cause, perhaps using political connections. Chris had neither, so he needed lots of arrests, lots of medals. He was working on it.

  He went back into the kitchen for the rest of the soda. He stood again at the kitchen window, looking down at the courtyard. The overhead lights had just gone on; in the early dusk, a man was walking along the path, swinging a briefcase, probably on his way home from work. Heading home to his wife and children.

  Chris and Liz had talked about having children, then had put it on the back burner. For one thing, Liz had worked hard to get where she was in her profession; she’d taken lessons for years—dancing, singing, acting; she’d gone to auditions constantly, answered “cattle calls,” and she seemed to be just on the verge of getting some big breaks. She had time—she’d be just twenty-eight on her next birthday, around Christmastime. Chris was a great believer in letting people do what they had to do, so that years later, one of them couldn’t say to the other, “If it hadn’t been for you …” If Liz didn’t want to interrupt her career now by having babies, it would have been selfish and wrong of him to hassle her about it.

  He thought of calling his mother. Katrina still lived in the house in Queens, where Chris had lived until he was married. He’d never thought it strange that a bachelor over thirty still lived at home; his father had always stressed that family was the most important thing in life. When George became a successful businessman, people had come to see him, to ask him to sponsor a family member in the old country who wished to come to America. Because George had an established business, his vouching that the immigrants would work in one of his restaurants, or in some other job that he would arrange for them, and not have to go on relief, was often their key to entry.

  George never refused such a request, even though so many people came to see him, some Sunday afternoons, that they had to form a line. Sometimes people were so grateful that they would kiss George’s hand, which Chris thought was weird. Chris had never taken part in those Sunday rituals, but he remembered the people coming, paying their respects to George, asking a favor. He remembered Katrina bringing out the homemade cookies, with small servings of wine in her precious cordial glasses, dark red with silver rims.

  Sunday was always family day. When it got to the point where George didn’t work on Sundays most of the time, they all went to church for the long Greek liturgy, then came home for dinner. Katrina always cooked lamb. Often, relatives came by for a visit. George had brought Katrina’s brother Michael and her sister Rosa to this country; Rosa had married a friend of George’s, from his old rooming house on upper Broadway, near the Riviera barbershop, so there was a collection of aunts and uncles and cousins. Those Sundays were the only days Chris remembered seeing much of his father, those Sunday dinners the only meals he remembered sharing with him. During the week, Chris and his sisters would have eaten and were usually in bed by the time George got home. Katrina always had George’s meal ready, no matter what the hour, and after he’d eaten, George would go straight to bed. He never went to a restaurant except his own, except to work.

  Chris still visited his mother almost every Sunday. Even when Liz was home and wanted Chris to do something else on Sunday, Chris tried never to let his mother down. Katrina never would have complained if he hadn’t come, which is why he tried hard to make it.

  Katrina was only fifty-one when George died, but she’d worn black from that day on, and would wear it, Chris knew, to her grave. Chris had spent the three days of his father’s wake at a bar down the block from the funeral home. He’d walked up to the open casket, one time, to look at his father, and that was it. He knew his sisters were taking care of Katrina, and he knew somebody was making the arrangements—probably Uncle Mike—so Chris had just kind of drifted through those three days. He could remember people seeking him out at the bar, from time to time, coming up to him, putting a hand on his shoulder and saying, “How are you doing?”

  On the day of the funera
l, Chris stood on one side of his mother, Uncle Mike on the other side, as the pallbearers carried the coffin out of church. Chris didn’t know those men; he guessed they were from the funeral home. Suddenly Uncle Mike stepped over to one of them, tapped him on the shoulder, and took his place. Chris wished he had done that, too. Nobody had asked him, but then, nobody had asked Uncle Mike, either.

  At the time, Chris hadn’t thought much about it, but later it bothered him. He thought George would have been pleased if Chris had done that, as a sign of respect.

  George would have been pleased, too, that Chris was respected as a very good cop, that he was redeeming himself. And if he knew that Chris had been singled out, asked to join Intelligence, where they took only the best men, he could even have been proud.

  3

  His code name was Jason.

  Only one man at the Intelligence Division would know him. “This is Jason,” Chris would say when he telephoned Harry, his control officer, his only link with the department. The inspector and a few other men would know about the assignment, of course, but only Harry would know on a regular basis where Jason was and what he was doing. Chris would send his reports to Harry, signed only with the code name. In his new life as a jazz drummer, just back from Vegas, looking for some action, he would keep his first name, so he would respond naturally, but he had a new last name. In his real life at home with Liz, with his mother and his sisters and friends, who knew nothing about the other names, he would still be Chris Anastos.

  Already he was three different people, and he hadn’t even started the job.

  Before going under, he spent one more week at the 4-oh, to make his leaving there seem reasonably normal, not particularly irregular or dramatic. It was a strange week. He didn’t want to make arrests, which would have tied him up in court, but it was difficult for him to walk around the neighborhood without sniffing trouble. Were those guys huddled around a table in the pizza parlor planning something more complex than whether to get mushroom or pepperoni? One of them had a long record of stickups. Maybe that young woman pushing a baby carriage very slowly, up and down the block, not seeming to be going anywhere, was pushing something else, something slipped into the pillowcase, or inside the baby’s bonnet. It had happened.