Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  “Well, sometimes I call you and you’re not home,” Chris snapped. “What if I need to reach you? I don’t always know where you are, either.”

  “You’re smoking again,” Liz said, without turning around.

  “That’s right,” Chris said. “I’m smoking again.”

  Liz turned off the water, dried her hands and walked out of the room.

  Chris put down his fork. He wasn’t hungry anymore, either. The happy evening he’d planned, a kind of reunion, was a disaster.

  Liz had been delighted to find him home when she got in from the city, where she’d had a tryout for an industrial show. “I think I got it!” she said, hugging him. “I’m almost sure I got it! Oh, it’s good to have you home. I’ll take a quick shower and we’ll go out to dinner.”

  Chris hugged her, then stepped back. He should have said, “Hey, it’s so good to be home, and I’m so tired, let’s stay home together.” Instead, he told the exact truth. “I can’t go out, and please don’t ask me why. I just can’t go out.”

  Liz’s smile faded as he continued quickly. “But I picked up some steaks, and stuff for a salad, and a good burgundy. You go relax—I’m the cook here.”

  It hadn’t worked. Now, Chris put away the food and roamed restlessly around the apartment. He heard Liz running a bath. He felt edgy and trapped. He wondered whether he might take a chance, patch things up with her, take her someplace to hear some jazz. If anybody saw them, Chris could introduce her as his girlfriend.

  Of course he couldn’t. He’d have to set her up with a story beforehand, without being able to explain why. That would make things worse. Better to stay home and try to coax her back into a good mood.

  He poured two glasses of wine. When she came into the living room, he drew her down beside him on the sofa, and handed her a glass. “Let’s not fight,” he said. “Let’s just enjoy being together, okay?” Liz didn’t answer, but she took the glass and settled down next to him. “Let’s go in the bedroom and watch a movie on TV,” Chris said. “Stretch out and relax.” Then he leaned closer. “I’ve got a better idea. Let’s just go in the bedroom.”

  “I’ve missed you,” Liz murmured, as they lay nestled together. “I’ve missed you too,” Chris said.

  “Are you coming at Christmas?” Liz asked softly.

  “Hey, that’s a long way off,” Chris said. “Sure I’m coming at Christmas. I wouldn’t miss Christmas.”

  Liz sighed contentedly. “Let’s sleep late,” she murmured. “I want you in the morning.”

  “Sounds good,” Chris said. Then his eyes flew open. “Dammit, I can’t. I have to leave early.” He pulled himself out of bed and found the alarm clock. When he’d told Harry about the meeting coming up at the Kew, Harry had said to meet him at seven, at a post office in Manhattan, to talk about it.

  He set the alarm for five-thirty, got back into bed and reached for Liz again. But she had turned her back to him. She seemed to be asleep, though Chris was sure she wasn’t.

  They should have gotten a bachelor for this job, he thought unhappily. A guy with no ties. He’d give her Harry’s phone numbers in case she needed to reach him.

  He should have thought of that before. He should have thought of a lot of things before. He should have remembered that in the real world, he was a married man. Liz must have noticed he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring.

  4

  If anyone had ever told Chris that a time would come when he would appreciate Lieutenant Blanchard, he would have been speechless with disbelief.

  Chris had hated only two people in his life. There were people he didn’t like much, for one reason or another, and some he tried to avoid, but he’d actually hated, with a deep bitterness, only twice. As a child, he’d hated the woman who was godmother to one of his sisters. She was mean to him. She would hit him, for no reason that he could tell, whenever she had the chance. Chris’s father had never hit him; his mother had given him a smack on the rear end, once in a while, if she felt he needed it. But this old woman had once slapped him across the face so hard, when his mother wasn’t in the room, that his head spun to the side. He didn’t cry; he just stared at her, hating her, thinking, you have no right to hit me, you old bitch. Even when he was grown, he would ask his mother to let him know when that woman was coming to visit, so he wouldn’t be in the house.

  Lieutenant Blanchard was his tactical officer in the army. When Chris enlisted, he was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for his basic training. He found he liked the order and routine of military life. It seemed a rational, respectable way to live, and he decided to make the army his career. Since he didn’t have a college degree, he had to take a test for Officers Candidate School. The test was hard, and Chris was pessimistic. The sergeant skimmed over the test papers as Chris stood by his desk, nervously.

  The sergeant looked at him. “How much do you want to be an officer?” he asked.

  “I just really do,” Chris said. “All I want now is to be an officer in the United States Army.”

  The sergeant looked at the test papers, then back at Chris. He shoved the papers in a desk drawer. “There’s a class starting in two weeks,” he said gruffly. “You’re in it, son. Good luck to you.”

  On the very first day at Fort Benning, Georgia, Lieutenant Blanchard singled Chris out, asking him to step forward from the rank.

  “Candidate Anastos! You’re from New York, isn’t that right?” Lieutenant Blanchard asked.

  “Sir! Candidate Anastos, sir!” Chris said, in the formal style required in addressing an officer. “Yes sir, that’s right, I am from New York, sir.”

  The lieutenant smiled. “Well, I am a southerner, and I do not like New Yorkers,” he said. “Are you carrying a knife, boy?”

  “Sir! Candidate Anastos, sir! No sir, I am not carrying a knife,” Chris replied.

  “Now, I know you have got a knife on you, boy,” Blanchard persisted. “I want you to hand over that knife to me right now.” When Chris again denied it, the officer sneered. “I hate New Yorkers,” he said. “And I am going to break you, boy! You are not leadership material. Now give me fifty pushups.”

  From that day on, Blanchard was on him constantly. Constantly! In the mess hall, where the men ate in total silence, staring straight ahead, without moving their heads, Chris would be eating, looking directly across the table, when Blanchard would loom over him. “Candidate Anastos! You’re eyeballing again!” Whereupon Blanchard would pick up Chris’s food tray and hurl it across the room. Chris would have to clean up the mess, then go outside and do pushups while the rest of the guys finished eating.

  Once or twice a week, Blanchard would burst into Chris’s room at two or three o’clock in the morning, turn on the light and bark, “Candidate Anastos! You’re in the wrong room! You are being transferred to another room NOW!” Chris would lurch out of bed, gather all his bedding and gear, and move to another room on another floor, where he would make up the bed, hang up his clothing in the precise fashion, with uniform sleeves all pointing in the same direction in the closet, arrange underwear and socks folded in a certain way in the drawer, lay out his shaving gear just so. By the time he finished, it was time to get up. Once, Blanchard did that every night for five consecutive nights. Then he didn’t come for a week. But by then, Chris was so edgy and tense, lying in bed awake, expecting him to come bursting into the room any minute, that he might as well have come.

  Chris knew that some of the grueling routine was necessary and well-intended: the five-mile run before breakfast with full pack and rifle above the head, the chinning bar in the mess hall doorway—if you couldn’t pull ten chins, you couldn’t eat. “The word ‘can’t’ is not in your vocabulary,” Blanchard told the men. Chris understood that; an officer in the United States Army should be expected to do what ordinary men could not. He knew the purpose of keeping a guy mentally and physically off-balance was to keep him always at his peak, so when the time came to perform, he could handle it. When he was directing maybe forty or
fifty men on a mission, the tac officer would scream in his ear, “What is your decision NOW?” He didn’t have time to think about what he should do, or could or couldn’t do; he just did it.

  But Blanchard was going out of his way to harass him. Chris was not a star in the classroom, but his grades were passing. He tried to observe rules to the letter, mostly, though he did sneak cans of Sterno into his tent, on bivouac, because it was so damned cold. If it were set up properly, the heat would stay in the tent for about an hour and a half. His classmates elected him Code of Conduct officer. He took Blanchard’s constant punishments: “You got a hair sticking out of your nose, boy! Give me one hundred pushups! How many pushups do you owe me now, boy?” “Sir! Candidate Anastos, sir! Four hundred and seventy-five, sir!” During the day, Blanchard would come into his room, scuff up the floor, smile and walk out, so that Chris would have to spit-shine the floor all over again.

  The more Blanchard picked on him, the more Chris was determined to survive, and become an officer in the United States Army. He thought he was indeed leadership material. He mastered “Escape and Evasion,” when the men were dropped into an unfamiliar zone at night, equipped only with a poncho and a compass, and instructed to get back to the compound before sunup. Even with trained army dogs loose in the area, and with officers acting as the enemy, Chris always made it back without being captured.

  Near the end of his six months’ training, he thought he’d made it. The candidates were already being addressed as “Lieutenant” when Chris met Blanchard in the hall outside a classroom one day.

  “You think you’re going to make it, don’t you, boy?” Blanchard said, sticking his face right up under Chris’s nose. “Well, I don’t think you are going to make it, and I am not through with you yet.” The man was breathing so heavily on him that Chris reached out and pushed him away. It was a very slight push, only one hand lightly on the lieutenant’s shoulder, a please-move-back-a-little kind of push, but it was enough. Blanchard stepped back, stared for a moment, then grinned. “I broke you! I broke you, boy!” he said gleefully.

  Two days later, Chris was paneled: brought before a military board. Blanchard appeared to testify against him. Just before they went in, the officer reached out and brushed a piece of lint from Chris’s shoulder.

  The hearing was short. The room was ice-cold, with the air conditioning turned too high. The verdict of the board was that Chris not be commissioned at that time; he was told to reapply for OCS and go through the training again. Chris said the heck with it and returned to his infantry unit for the rest of his military service, still owing Blanchard several hundred pushups.

  Now, a decade later, Chris had to admit that all that training was coming in handy. He knew how to live with tension, constantly alert, making instant decisions, keeping people off-balance so they wouldn’t have time to stop and wonder, who the hell is this guy?

  He could scan a room or a restaurant and within thirty seconds know who was there and whether he should stay or not, by doing a map coordinate search: sectioning off small squares of the room and searching with his eyes in a grid pattern. One night when he stopped at Riccardo’s, a restaurant and catering hall in Queens, he saw a DA sitting at a table with a major OC figure. They were drinking and talking; at one point, the mobster put his arm around the DA. “Don’t give those guys any cases,” Chris told Harry. “Stick all your cases in Manhattan.” Harry turned it over to the feds, so Chris didn’t have to deal with it, but the incident made him worry: Who’s got a pipeline into the NYPD?

  He lived with insecurity, on the edge. Every day he asked himself, “Am I going to make a mistake today? Did somebody see me? Did somebody find out something about me since yesterday?” He found himself analyzing every comment that was made to him, every glance. If someone looked at him in what seemed to be even a minutely different way, Chris would immediately become suspicious. The psychological fear was worse than the physical fear, though they usually went hand-in-hand, Chris discovered, when he and Gene drove out to the Lakeville Manor, a Long Island place, to make a drop.

  Inside the front door, Chris made his grid search, but he hesitated a moment too long before turning back toward the door. “Hey, Chrissie, how are ya, how ya doing?” Dino called.

  Dino was standing at the bar with Les and Arnie and a couple of others. That old gang of mine, Chris thought grimly as he walked over to them. To make it worse—a lot worse—they were drinking with Dominic, Gene’s friend from Astoria, whom Chris had met at Jimmy’s. Dominic knew Chris through Gene; Dino and those guys knew Chris from way back. They knew he was going to become a cop.

  “Hey, Chrissie, long time no see,” Dino said, studying Chris. Arnie was frowning at him. Chris wondered if they could tell he was hyperventilating, oozing sweat. Maybe they don’t remember I went into the NYPD, he thought, knowing it was a futile thought.

  Still, nobody said anything, as they all had a drink and talked about the C&G Club. Gene handed out cards. As soon as he felt he reasonably could, Chris nodded to Gene. “Let’s go,” he said. “We got more stops to make.”

  As Chris and Gene were walking away, Chris saw Arnie lean close to Dominic, saying something. Then they both turned and looked at Chris. From the way they looked, Chris just knew what Arnie had told Dom. Let me just get out of here, Chris thought. Just a few more steps and I am out this door.

  “Hey Gene,” Dom called. “Come back here a minute, will ya? I wanna talk to you.”

  Gene went back to talk to Dom. Chris went to the bathroom. He was in absolute panic. He had his automatic in his boot, and he even wondered for a crazy moment whether he ought to come out shooting.

  Gene was waiting for him at the door, looking impassive. When they were back in the car and Gene still wasn’t talking, Chris couldn’t stand it. “What was that all about?” he asked. “What did Dom want?”

  Gene didn’t turn his head. He kept his eyes on the road. His hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. “Dom said that Arnie said, ‘What’s your friend doing with a fucking cop?’”

  Chris felt a tight band across his chest. He took a deep breath, to loosen it and get some air.

  “Arnie told Dom, ‘I know that guy, and he’s a cop, be careful,’” Gene continued.

  Chris took another breath, then forced himself to laugh. “So, what’s the big deal?” he said harshly. “Yeah, I was a cop, and I got fired. I got thrown off the job. So what?”

  Gene turned and looked at Chris. “That’s what I told him,” Gene said in a level tone. “I said, ‘Sure, I know that Curley used to be a cop. I thought everybody knew that.’” Gene turned his head and looked straight ahead at the road again. “I told him I’ve known you for twenty years, and you’re doin’ things with me now, and you’re a good guy and I trust you.”

  Chris didn’t know what to say. “Well, hey, thanks pal,” he muttered. He felt limp with relief. Why had Gene bailed him out? Had Gene checked him out downtown and been told the bad-cop story? Or had Gene done it, regardless, because they were partners, because he had pulled his gun on the shylock who was hounding Gene? It was another question he’d have to think about, without being able to ask.

  They checked in at their place, then ended up at Jimmy’s. Dominic was at the bar, fresh from his conversation at the Lakeville Manor, talking to Jimmy. From the way they looked at him, Chris knew that Dominic was passing on what he’d been told. Neither of them said anything to him about it, and Gene’s vouching for him had settled the matter, at least temporarily. But Chris felt that Dominic never trusted him after that. As for Jimmy, the question became academic.

  One night Chris and Gene left Jimmy’s place shortly after midnight, leaving Dom behind. Chris was behind the bar in the club when Dom came in, white as a ghost. “Gimme a drink,” he muttered. He sat at the bar, his hands trembling as he clenched the glass. “They just whacked Jimmy,” he said hoarsely. Jimmy had been gunned down in the Astoria municipal parking lot.

  Chris realized sharply then what he
’d always known: He was in more danger from those who thought he was a hood than from those who thought he was a cop. Guilt by association. Assassination by association. He felt reasonably safe in his own place, but outside, you never knew what was going to happen. You never knew what somebody you were with had going with somebody else. He left the Grotto one night about a half hour before Kostos. When Kostos got outside, a car pulled alongside the curb and a man with a gun leaned out and fired. Fortunately for Kostos, just as the car pulled up, he turned back toward the building and lowered his head slightly, as he unzipped his trousers to take a leak.

  Still, he was in the hospital a while, where he told the questioning police that he didn’t have any idea who had shot him—probably some black guys who’d intended to rob him. Chris never found out who had tried to whack him out, but it somehow got ironed out. Chris was glad, because he’d become rather fond of the old Greek. They sometimes sang Greek folk songs together, and listened to rebetiko music. “I like you,” Kostos told Chris one night, clasping his shoulders, “but I don’t do business with you unless I know you twenty years.”

  Chris wasn’t terribly disappointed. He’d met Solly.

  When Chris and Gene drove out to the Kew, they sat at the bar in the cocktail lounge until Solly motioned them to his corner table. They told him about the two men in overcoats who’d come to their club. “Did you give them money?” Solly asked. They said they hadn’t. “Good,” Solly said. “Once you give them money, you’re committed to them.” It was an insight for Chris into the curious code of honor among these thieves, a sense of obligation and commitment that existed along with a sense of fierce and sometimes deadly competition. “They won’t come back,” Solly told them. “You’re with me now. I’ll talk to Kostos tomorrow.”

  “Is that all there is to it?” Chris asked Gene, as they drove back to Astoria. “That’s all there is to it,” Gene said, laughing. “Those bums won’t come back.” And they did not. Once Solly talked to Kostos and gave the boys his blessing, the matter was closed. The two men respected one another and would do one another a favor whenever they could. It was Solly’s pleasure to help out the young fellows who were friends of his friend’s nephew. It was Kostos’s pleasure not only to let them alone, once they had Solly’s blessing; he would now patronize their place and send other customers around.