Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  And it would happen again, Chris knew, when he spotted the man he’d nicknamed Pumpkin. He was wearing an orange jacket, a bright-green cap with a black visor, and a swaggering smile that said he owned the block—which, in a very practical sense, he did.

  Chris swore angrily. He’d caught up with Pumpkin, less than two months earlier, after stalking him for weeks, trying to figure out where the guy stashed his junk. He’d approached the pusher a few times, in various disguises—once, even sporting a chestnut-colored wig—but Pumpkin was tuned in to trouble and had never been willing to deal. Then Chris had put on a master act. Wearing a red bandanna tied around his head gypsy-style, a stained fatigue jacket, with a canvas pouch dangling from his shoulder, he’d stumbled down the block, appearing to be drunk, sick, stoned.

  Past the liquor store, where sales were made from behind a thick Plexiglas shield, past the vacant lot piled with rubbish, he had stopped in the middle of the block, where Pumpkin was leaning against the brick wall of an abandoned tenement.

  Chris lurched toward the curb, reaching out to grab on to a parking meter for support. When he seemed to regain his balance, he turned and shuffled across the sidewalk.

  “Hey man,” he mumbled, “you got something for me today?”

  Pumpkin said nothing. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored dark glasses.

  “I’m sick, brother,” Chris pleaded in a rasping voice. “I gotta get high.”

  “I don’t know you,” Pumpkin said shortly.

  “Hey, I just want to cop some junk, you know?” Chris moaned.

  “Who sent you down?”

  “Oh, some brother—hey man, what difference?” Chris turned, as though to move away. “Okay, okay, I don’t need to buy from you, man.”

  Pumpkin called him back. “How much you want?”

  “Gimme a dime bag.” Chris groped in his jeans pocket and brought out a folded ten-dollar bill.

  Pumpkin eased down the side of the building, very slowly, his long legs bending as gracefully as a dancer’s. Near the bottom of the wall he turned slightly, sliding his hand along the wall. He removed a loose brick, took a glassine envelope from the hole, and deftly pushed the brick back into place. In a swift handshake, the envelope and the money were exchanged. “Move,” Pumpkin hissed.

  Chris moved, bobbing his head as he turned away. At the curb, he stopped. He stood up straight. The handcuffs in his pouch made a satisfying clank as he walked briskly back to Pumpkin to deliver the curtain line. “I forgot to tell you: You’re under arrest.”

  It was a very good line, but clearly it had merely been the end of the first act, in what looked to be a long-running show. Here was Pumpkin, back on the street, having breezed through the judicial revolving door. Frustrated and depressed, Chris decided to stay off the streets until it was time to go downtown.

  Yet he didn’t like hanging around the precinct, either, in the midst of the everyday activity, the hustle and bustle that had nothing to do with him. It was disappointing to be leaving without a transfer party, the traditional sendoff that reminded cops of their indissoluble fellowship, that reinforced the feeling that even when they left, they belonged. When Chris left, he didn’t know where he would belong.

  It was tough not to talk about his assignment, not even about the meeting, among guys who talked incessantly about what they were doing, the collars they’d made, and the ones they intended to make. “What should I tell people?” Chris had asked Harry. “Tell them you can’t tell them,” Harry said shortly. When the message came over the 4-oh wire: P O ANASTOS TEMP REASSIGN—everybody knew the terseness meant they shouldn’t ask questions, but not everybody could resist. Chris had never been much of a liar, probably because his father had always made lying sound like the deadliest of all deadly sins. “If you do a wrong thing you must say so,” George had lectured his children. “No matter how bad, it is not so bad as a lie. My daughters do not lie. My son does not lie.” For all the faults and character flaws he’d accumulated over the years, Chris thought wryly, he found it hard to manage a straight-out lie, though surely it could be justified now. So he just evaded the questions with a shrug of the shoulders, a shake of the head. “Okay, then,” some of the guys said. “Good luck.” Only Mac pressed a little more. “Hey, what’s going on? Is the Mod Squad breaking up for good?”

  “They just want me to do some special job for a while,” Chris said. “I really don’t know much about it.”

  He really didn’t. “You’ll be our eyes and ears,” Harry told him, leading him into a small room at the Intelligence Division. The room had a rectangular table, with a chair on either side of it. Nothing else. There was no window. The door could be locked from both the inside and the outside.

  The inspector greeted him on the first day with a warm handshake. “Welcome aboard,” the inspector said. “If you have any problems, let me know.” Chris didn’t see him anymore after that, and didn’t talk to anyone but Harry.

  The hall was lined with rooms like the room Chris was using, some of them empty, with the door open, some with the doors closed. Other men, other jobs, probably. But that was only a guess, based on seeing guys either coming or going from a room, often wearing dark glasses. Undercover work had not even been mentioned at the Academy, let alone taught. Maybe it couldn’t be taught, as the Internal Revenue Service had learned, to its great embarrassment. In the early 1960s, when the IRS had tried to teach agents how to act like criminals in order to run down tax evaders in the world of organized crime, they’d ended up a laughingstock. They’d set up “stress seminars” at various motels around Washington, testing guys with liquor and women to see if they’d keep their mouths shut. The operation came to light when one totally drunk agent was picked up by the Maryland State Police on a highway near a motel. At first he was so drunk he couldn’t answer their questions. When he sobered up enough to speak, he still wouldn’t answer their questions because he thought it was part of the test.

  Obviously, undercover work was going to be OJT—on-the-job training. Chris hadn’t even taken the month-long Criminal Investigation Course that was routinely prescribed for cops who went into plainclothes. The CIC was designed for the morals squad, mostly; Chris’s plainclothes unit had not been an investigatory body. For the stuff he dealt with, categorized loosely as “violent street crimes,” he didn’t need a special course. He just needed to be in the right place at the right time.

  Harry brought in stacks of folders, so many he had to make more than one trip from wherever he got them, to Chris’s room. The folders bulged with reports, photographs, clippings—an array of information on men who came under the general heading OC: Organized Crime. Gathering information on their comings and goings wasn’t difficult, Harry said, especially since the Organized Crime Control Bureau had been set up by Commissioner Murphy in the reform, post-Knapp days. And Intelligence had its own squad, the Organized Crime Monitoring Unit. Some OCMU guys did nothing all day, every day, but keep a target in view. Where does he go? Who does he see? What are his habits? The feds did the same thing, but all this tailing and monitoring didn’t amount to much unless they had evidence. The guys in the folders knew that, just as they knew, more often than not, when they were being tailed. Sometimes they would taunt the guys tailing them, strolling over to the car, knocking on the window. “I’m going to be inside this place for a couple of hours, you can relax, go get yourself some coffee and a doughnut.”

  Five years earlier, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization act—RICO—had been adopted by Congress, and law enforcement people were just beginning to learn to use what they hoped would become an enormously important tool. RICO had created a crime category, “racketeering,” based on two or more crimes being committed within a ten-year period as part of a “criminal enterprise.” Lawmen and lawwomen were trying to gather evidence of these enterprises, trying to show that crimes were joined in by members of various crime families. Specifically, Harry said, the NYPD was looking for evidence that would justify a w
iretap, or the planting of a bug. For that they needed “probable cause,” and for that, they needed to wire Chris. He was outfitted with a Nagra, which he hated.

  He was given a small, flat box about four inches square and shown how to tape it to his body—under his arm, or in the small of his back. A thin wire about three feet long was laced over his shoulder. One end of the wire connected to the box, the other end to a tiny microphone that was no bigger than the eraser at the end of a pencil. The mike was taped to his chest, just above the muscle. The reels of recording tape ran for three hours; when Chris was alone, he could switch off the recorder with a remote control button in his pocket.

  Every week or so, he was to send the reels to Harry, who would vouch for them and put them in a vault at the NYPD, for future use, unless the information couldn’t wait. If a hijacking seemed imminent, or if guns were moving in preparation for an immediate job, perhaps even a killing, Chris was to get in touch with Harry at once. When it was necessary for them to meet, they’d pick the lobby of a bank, or a post office, sometimes a hotel room; the locations would change.

  Chris was to use his own judgment on when and where to be wired. When he wasn’t wired, he was to make notes in any way possible and send those to Harry, too. “You won’t make arrests,” Harry emphasized. “Your job is to gather intelligence and send it in. We’ll take it from there. Even if it doesn’t mean anything to you, send it in. It may mean something to us.”

  But Chris was not being sent in as a cleanup hitter against the Mafia, Harry stressed. His job was simply to infiltrate the Greek community and figure out the organization and structure of its criminal element. Harry said that arrests had been made among the Greeks in Queens, but they seemed disconnected. A cop at the 114th Precinct in Astoria had tried to do some digging, but his name was Sean, with a face to match, so he’d made no headway among the clannish Greeks. There was a man at the top, Harry told Chris, a kind of Greek godfather, Kostos. Harry called him “The Big G,” pronouncing it with a hard G, as in Greek. Chris was to get close to Kostos, find out whether he headed an organized crime family, and whether that family was linked with organized crime among the Italians.

  A handful of names and faces in the folders were familiar to Chris. When he’d worked as a musician, sometimes playing at a club, sometimes just bouncing around, he’d met people who were on the fringes of organized crime, sometimes well beyond the fringe, which is why his father had objected so strenuously to that career. Now, in a folder, Chris recognized Tony. When Tony had opened a bar in Queens, Chris had brought his combo to play on opening night, and he’d done that again at the christening party for Tony’s baby daughter, Amanda. When Chris wouldn’t accept any payment, Tony had given Chris an unusual gift, a huge soap sculpture in the shape of Buddha. Over the years the soap had fallen on the floor several times, with pieces chipping off, but Chris had always managed to glue the pieces back together, so that the Buddha shape was still clear. When Tony’s brother was gunned down, Chris had hurried over to Tony’s club. Tony was secluded inside, refusing to see anyone. But when he was told that Chris had come, he told the man at the door to let Chris in. Chris was the only person Tony wanted to talk to at that time.

  He knew Dino, Les, Arnie, and that crew. He’d played at Dino’s place, the Starglow Lounge, and had enjoyed it. Chris thought that Dino and his pals had been involved in the “French Connection” job—not the original operation, but afterward, when drugs that had been recovered and vouchered at the NYPD just disappeared.

  He knew Bing and his father, Sal. One night Chris and Bing were at a bar, drinking, when Sal came by. Sal was a tough old bird, in some kind of racket, though Chris wasn’t sure exactly what it was, then.

  “I hear you’re going into the police department,” Sal had said.

  “That’s right, I am,” Chris replied.

  “Good,” Sal said firmly. “You’ll either be a first-grade detective, or you’ll be thrown off the force. One or the other.” Bing laughed, but Chris could see that both father and son were pleased for him. “Good luck to you,” Sal said, gripping Chris’s hand. Chris never saw Sal, after that. The old guy died about a year later, and Chris hadn’t seen Bing since then, though he’d heard from him once. When Chris’s picture appeared in the paper, in the “Hero Cops” story, Bing had telephoned him. “Chris, babe, I’m so proud of you! My Pop would have been proud of you, too. That’s great! That’s just great!”

  When he became a cop, Chris had to cut off those old acquaintances. “Consorting with Known Criminals” could get a guy thrown off the job. So he didn’t know what had become of most of them. “What happens if I run into somebody?” he asked Harry. “Some of these guys might know me, and they’ll know I didn’t just come out of an Easter egg.”

  Harry explained that Chris’s file would be pulled, sealed, and locked in a safe at the DA’s office. A red flag would be posted on the police roster, the wheel. If someone called asking for Chris, or asking about him, the switchboard would note the warning and refer the caller to an extension, where the caller would be told that Officer Anastos had been terminated. Thrown off the force for extortion and bribery. A bad cop. Chris needed this protection, not only from the mob guys who might be checking him out—theirs was a world of paranoia and suspicion, not without reason—but from people who should have been trustworthy, throughout the NYPD, both cops and civilians. “We do have people who sell information,” Harry told Chris, simply.

  Most people in the department would have no reason to think that the story was fake. In fact, Chris reflected ruefully, some guys might find it very easy to accept. We could see it coming, some guys at the 4-oh might say. Anastos always seemed a little reckless, a little weird, something funny about the guy. Just as the brightest leaves on an autumn tree were the most rotten, guys like Anastos were the first to fall.

  Chris asked only that his mother not be told he’d been expelled from the force. Katrina was not an old woman, but she’d grown somber and frail since George’s death. Chris thought it might actually kill her if she thought he had dishonored himself and his family, and the memory of his father. He persuaded Harry to allow him to tell Katrina that he’d been transferred someplace where he could not be reached, that she was never to try to reach him, that he’d call her often and would see her as often as he could. Katrina would ask no questions, Chris assured Harry, and she would follow his instructions perfectly. A Greek-Italian woman took a man’s word without protest.

  Liz was a different woman. “I got a new assignment,” he told her simply. “It’s with the Intelligence Division, but I can’t tell you anything about it.” Liz was about to speak, so Chris continued quickly. “Intelligence is the elite unit in our department, and this will be very good for my career. But I can’t tell you where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing, so please, just don’t ask me any questions.” So Liz didn’t, though her expression reflected a clear question: Don’t you trust me?

  The harsh truth was that he didn’t. He couldn’t. Not even a wife was welcome in the secluded world of the undercover cop, in which even a casual comment, unexceptional in itself, could be literally a matter of life and death. If Liz knew anything at all about his work, she might know too much.

  Chris himself didn’t want to know too much. As he studied the material Harry gave him, he realized he might be learning something that nobody else knew. In a conversation, he might let something slip. Then the guy would wonder, how does he know that? Chris didn’t want anybody to wonder about him, at least not to the extent that questions would be asked to which there were only impossible answers.

  Near the end of his second week in the closed room at Intel, Chris and Harry agreed that he knew as much as he could, or should, know. In fact, Harry pointed out that some of the men the department most yearned to nail were hidden behind a curtain of legitimacy that seemed impassable. Their names might be known, their games suspected, but in police language, it had never been possible to “get them good.” They kept a low
profile. As high-level managers of their shadowy world—arranging things, settling problems—they were, in a way, more of a menace than the hoods on the street, because of the depth of their knowledge and experience, their executive expertise. Such a man, Harry said, would typically be in his late fifties, early sixties, probably having moved up from the violence of Prohibition days to a position of relative respectability. He likely would have moved from one of the city’s notorious neighborhoods to the suburbs, where he would be, not exactly a pillar of the community, not a polished Wall Street type, but not a crude, cigar-chomping figure, either. He was as desirable a target as he was difficult to describe. “You’ll know him when you see him,” Harry said.

  When Chris arrived for his last day of briefing, Harry had no new material for him to sift through. Instead, he locked the door from the inside and sat down at the table, across from Chris. From his briefcase, Harry brought out a large manila envelope and spread its contents on the table.

  There was a new social security card and a checkbook in his new name for an account at a bank where Chris’s paychecks would be deposited for him. Those paychecks would not come through the city comptroller’s office, but from some corporation Chris had never heard of; his salary would be laundered, in classic style. There was not just one fake ID, but a handful, with various addresses. One address was a safe house outside New York, but the address in Valley Stream was an abandoned warehouse.