Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  Harry was ecstatic when he saw Chris’s report. “Holy shit!” Harry exclaimed. “We’ve never been able to get close to this bunch. Holy shit!”

  At a morning meeting at a hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Harry gave Chris a rundown.

  “They’re out on Long Island, some of them,” Harry said, “but they’re operating downtown, all over the place. Trucking, construction, just for openers. We think your new pal Solly might be the connection.”

  Chris looked dubious. “What am I supposed to do now, exactly?”

  “Exactly what you’re doing,” Harry said. “Keep your eyes and ears open. Only now you’re in a spot where you can see and hear more. A lot more.”

  “So what about the Greeks?” Chris asked.

  “Look, you’ve done nice work with the Greeks,” Harry assured him. “And you’ll still keep your hand in. What I’m telling you—and I’m not sure you’re listening—is that now you are dealing with some heavyweights.”

  “Hey, I’m listening,” Chris protested. “I’m just trying to get it straight. Who are these guys, anyway? You got pictures?”

  “We don’t have everybody on file,” Harry said patiently. “I told you that. Look, if we knew what everybody was doing with everybody else, we wouldn’t need you out there. You’ll just have to stay on the lookout. Get yourself noticed. Stay close to Solly, he’s got interesting associations.” Harry paused. “You want to review photos, no problem. I can call it up here in ten minutes.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Chris said, a little annoyed that Harry might be doubting his memory. “I remember that stuff.”

  “Okay then,” Harry said. He paused again. “You’re getting in deeper, kid. You want a backup?”

  “No way,” Chris said.

  Solly was a “made man”—initiated—in the Luchese crime family. He told Chris that his brother had had the contract to kill Joseph Valachi back in the early sixties, when both men were doing time in Atlanta. But Valachi, knowing he was marked, had not waited to be hit. Early one summer morning, in the prison yard, Valachi had taken a two-foot length of iron pipe and beat a prisoner to death. Only he’d killed the wrong man. Solly’s brother was alive and well and living in Little Italy, operating a social club on Prince Street. He was a Luchese capo, believed by Intel to control a network through which other traditional OC families acquired much of their narcotics.

  It was Joe Valachi who, after making that bloody error, had talked openly, at length, about the Mafia, giving law enforcement people and the general public a long look at the inner workings of “Cosa Nostra.” Even before that, Senator Estes Kefauver had broken investigatory ground with his year-long examination of crime in America, including the infiltration of legitimate businesses by “known hoodlums.” Kefauver had closed with a ringing statement: “I know it is hard to pin anything on the Costellos, Adonises, Anastasias, Zwillmans, Lanskys, and all the rest of that dirty crew [but] if it takes years or even decades, we should get them.”

  Chris was ten years old when the Kefauver hearings ended. Now, two and a half decades later, he was trying to pin something on them by becoming one of “that dirty crew.” Still, what did he know about the Mafia?

  He knew he’d liked The Godfather, especially the theme music, but he knew that much of the stuff written about the mob was romantic garbage. He knew they sometimes seemed like court jesters, with their nicknames and their slang, their pointy shoes, their black shirts with white ties, but from his perspective, it wasn’t so funny.

  He knew that his father had been right about their old neighborhood; Luchese, Frank Costello, and Joe Valachi had been among the regulars. Valachi had even owned the Aida restaurant, six blocks from Chris’s home, until 1945, when he sold it for reasons not unlike George’s: The neighborhood was going downhill.

  He knew that the silly name he’d heard as a kid, “Three-Finger Brown,” was Gaetaneo Luchese, a.k.a. Thomas Luchese and Tommy Brown. (He knew, but didn’t know why, Italian mobsters favored Irish aliases: Aniello Dellacroce was Timothy O’Neil; Thomas Eboli, who’d been whacked out not long before Chris went under, was Tommy Ryan.)

  And he knew that the term “wiseguy” was too intriguing and catchy to describe them. He preferred “asshole.”

  Solly chain-smoked Pall Malls. Chris never saw him—ever—without a cigarette. He was sixty-two years old, a little pudgy, short, with pouches under his eyes, a perpetually mournful expression and a mind, Chris found, like a calculator. Solly could calculate percentages in his head while Chris was still muddling through “times this” and “divide by this” on paper.

  Partly because Chris was a friend of Frankie, via Gene, partly because Chris on his own was so likable and respectful and smart, Solly took Chris under his wing. Chris made a quick cigarette deal with Solly, who passed the instructions along to his crew, and made twelve hundred dollars for himself without moving from his chair at the Kew. When Chris learned that Solly did some deals with antiques, working through his son-in-law, who had a shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan, Chris wangled a vase and a few other objects from the property clerk. Solly was not impressed. “This isn’t Ming dynasty,” he informed Chris, who yelled at Harry to tell the property clerk to henceforth give him only authentic merchandise, not fakes.

  Harry was hounding Chris to get inside Solly’s brother’s club on Prince Street. Chris explained to Harry what Harry already knew: You didn’t just run down to Prince Street, drop in and snoop around. You waited to be taken there, and you wouldn’t be taken there until you were trusted, until you’d proven yourself.

  Chris was careful to let Solly think he could be trusted. When Chris began driving out to the Kew, he would hang around the bar until Solly invited him over to his table. In the meantime, Chris found that the barmaid’s chatter could be very helpful. When other men arrived to talk business with Solly, Chris would get up and leave the table, so Solly would know he was a respectful guy. Chris knew that by winning Solly’s trust at the outset, he’d hear those things and more, another day.

  His technique worked so well that he seemed to gain not only Solly’s trust, but a measure of concern. Knowing that Solly’s family was heavily into heroin, he tried to make a deal with him. But Solly shook his head. “Keep out of that, Chrissie,” he said in his slow, mournful voice. “I don’t want you to do that. No babania. You’re gonna keep out of that stuff.” One night, at a gambling joint, Solly pointed his finger at Chris. “Are you carrying a piece?” Chris said yes. “Now you go right down and put it in your car,” Solly said, as though he were correcting a wayward lad who’d been caught with a forbidden Hershey bar. Chris realized that Solly was protecting him; in case of a raid, Solly didn’t want him to be collared for carrying a gun.

  Other people noticed Solly’s concern, especially one of his henchmen, a guy called Big Lou. “You know, Chrissie,” Lou said to him one day, with thoughtful menace, “you’re moving up awfully fast, and I keep wondering why. I spent two hours today thinking about you.”

  Chris grinned at him. Sometimes, he reflected ruefully, the style of the cop and the wiseguy were not so unlike: Each knew how to stay alert in a macho world, and had mastered the art of the snappy comeback. “That’s funny,” Chris shot back, “because I only spent ten minutes today thinking about you.”

  As a wisecrack, it was true enough. With managing the Astoria joint, and hanging out at the Kew, and dropping in occasionally at clubs in “Greek Town” along Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, Chris sometimes didn’t know if he was coming or going. Trying to maintain a marriage was something that had to be squeezed in, somehow, sometime; it didn’t help that even when he was at home, Chris felt he was at the mercy of the phone in the den.

  He no longer remembered when payday was; he knew his check, four hundred dollars and change, was being deposited for him every two weeks; he’d written out rent checks in advance, and that aspect of his life began to seem less and less real, part of another world. Sometimes he didn’t know what was going on i
n that world, and he didn’t particularly try to know. He picked up a newspaper most days, so he wouldn’t lose touch entirely, which is how he knew that two cops had been killed.

  Chris stood frozen, right there on the sidewalk by the newsstand as he read the story through. The cops had been gunned down in the street, where they’d stopped a car—a red convertible. The reason for the killing wasn’t yet known, but the cops had been on “routine patrol.” They lay dying in the street, one a fifty-year-old veteran, Sergeant Frederick Reddy, one a thirty-four-year-old, Police Officer Andrew Glover.

  Now, in the traffic noises all around him, all Chris could hear was the woman in the doorway of her shop screaming, “Holdup! He gimme holdup!” He remembered his partner tackling the guy, and Chris tumbling down on both of them. He remembered the medal—his first medal, and the first for Andy Glover, too. He remembered Andy’s grin, that sensational grin that split his face in half. Andy had always seen the bright side of life.

  When he went to the country with Liz that Christmas, he felt he needed the trip more than ever.

  They walked in the woods. They made a snowman. They roasted marshmallows in the fireplace. They lay on the floor together, near the Christmas tree, looking into the fire. Chris hadn’t realized, until he was out of New York, how tense he’d become. Now he could feel the tension drain away. For a day and a half, he had absolutely nothing to worry about. He didn’t have to be on edge, constantly on guard. Liz noticed the difference. “You’re a different person when you’re out of the city,” she said. “You’re not so tense. You’re more like yourself.”

  Yet he wasn’t sorry when it was time to return to his other life, which he had to admit he was enjoying. He didn’t think of it as lying. He was acting; playing a role. It never occurred to him to feel guilty or bad in any way about what he was doing. All the wrong things he was doing were being done for all the right reasons. How many people ever got the chance to do what he was doing and never have to pay the price?

  He liked the feeling of cash in his pocket. He liked being able to go to a restaurant with a group and pick up the check. He didn’t do that often, lest he be considered a lob, a popcorn—in laymen’s language, a pushover—but he did it often enough to please Solly and, he had to admit, to please himself. He liked tossing a ten-dollar bill to the kid who parked his car, leaving a twenty-dollar tip for the barmaid after a night at the Kew, or at the Grotto. He liked eating well, at places where OC guys ate. The restaurants were not always fancy, though some were, but the food was invariably first-rate. These customers demanded the whitest veal, the best imported pasta, the most carefully garlicked sauces, the freshest fish. Chris learned to be specific when he ordered: not just bourbon, but Jack Daniels. He learned to drink sambuca—not unlike the ouzo his father had sometimes brought out, on holidays at home—with three coffee beans in it. The waiter always brought the bottle to the table, along with a dish of coffee beans. You poured your own, and you had to take three beans—not four, not two, always three—for good luck.

  He liked being recognized and catered to. At Lucho’s, on Third Avenue in Manhattan, the chef would come out from the kitchen, when he heard that Chris had arrived, to take his order personally, to assure Chris that he’d make the sauce just the way he liked it, extra garlic. Chris liked summoning the chef, then, after the meal, to give compliments and a large greenback to go with it. He liked being able to peel off, say, six hundred dollars from his bankroll, when he was buying, leave a two-hundred-dollar cash tip, and he liked knowing that, after that, he’d never have to call for a reservation.

  He liked bouncing around. The restlessness that had led him, in earlier years, to pick up club dates here and there, never planning ahead, to live for the day, now had a justified outlet. When Frankie said, “Hey, Chrissie, let’s go to Vegas for the weekend,” he liked being able to say, “Why not?” and hop on the plane without a second thought. Gene went along. They had no business to conduct, though they ran into a bunch of people Gene and Frankie knew; they just went to eat and drink and have some laughs. Chris didn’t have to justify the trip on his expense account, because Frankie insisted it was his treat, thanks to one of the credit cards in various names he carried.

  Like most of his colleagues, Frankie considered spending his own money a mark of dishonor, though he had enough of his own from his no-show job in construction. Or almost no-show; for his thousand dollars a week, Frankie was supposed to show up at the building site and blow the whistle at starting time, and again at quitting time. As far as Chris could tell, Frankie never let that responsibility weigh too heavily. Chris liked going to the track with Frankie, especially as he was beginning to win more often than he lost. He liked buying a hot Brioni suit, a seven-hundred-dollar job, for a hundred-fifty. He liked being able to buy hot gifts; when the barmaid at the Kew said to him one night, admiringly, “Chris, you are class personified,” he reached in his pocket and handed her a gold chain. He liked the freedom of motion in this job—and he didn’t have to try to sell anybody insurance.

  And he liked the apartment Harry set up for him, in the Waterside complex, just off East 25th Street in Manhattan. In the dark-red high-rise, jutting out into the East River, he had an apartment above the twenty-fifth floor, with a glorious nighttime view of twinkling lights, sparkling dark water, jeweled bridges.

  Harry outfitted two apartments, one above the other, with an amazing array of monitoring devices. When Chris came into his apartment and turned on the wall switch at the door, all systems flicked ON; the recorder, the camera inserted behind a picture on the wall, facing the sofa. The phone was rigged, but simply, not in the sophisticated method they’d used in Forest Hills: There was a carbon mike in the mouthpiece, which meant that Chris could unscrew the mouthpiece and take out the mike, if he wanted to, and somebody who unscrewed the mouthpiece would see the mike, too. Since they didn’t know how long Chris would be needing the place, Harry said—probably not very long—they didn’t want to go through the complicated, expensive electronic business again. When Chris was alone, with no need for gadgets, he wouldn’t use the wall switch; he would turn on the table lamps in the living room and in the bedroom.

  The kitchen was small, not even a separate room, with only a divider between the kitchen space and the living room. Since Chris didn’t intend to do much kitchen duty, it didn’t matter. Once in a while he had a yen for Greek food, after years of thinking he’d had his fill. At school, when other kids had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or baloney sandwiches, in their lunchboxes, he’d find that Katrina had sent him off with eggplant parmigiana, olives, artichokes. When he had feta cheese in his lunch, other kids would hold their noses and say, “What the heck is that?” Chris would sometimes throw his lunch away, on the way to school, and either go without, or buy a handful of candy bars and call it lunch.

  The apartment was unfurnished. “Don’t get carried away,” Harry warned, when Chris set out to furnish the place. “You’re not supposed to be living like a sheik.” Chris said he wouldn’t. An hour later, Harry called back. “I’ve arranged a loan from the Salvation Army,” he told Chris. “I thought you might get carried away.”

  So Chris went to the Salvation Army where, somewhat to his surprise, it worked out fine. The Salvation Army people, having been told that two rooms of furniture were needed for an important NYPD project, had sorted out some very good pieces, including a sofa in a dark-green fabric and an upholstered chair, lightly used, just enough so the pieces didn’t look too new. The dining table and chairs were ordinary looking, but Chris knew that the guys who would be coming around to play cards would play on an overturned orange crate, if necessary. The queen-sized bed had a new mattress. Chris bought satin sheets, in a whimsical mood, to give the place some flash.

  At the Salvation Army, he bought a small suitcase full of women’s clothes, using a mental picture of Liz to guide him in choosing the clothes, which the clerk told him was size eight. He bought three pairs of high-heeled shoes and went to
a drugstore where he asked the salesgirl to pick out a collection of cosmetics for him to give to a young lady as a gift. All these things scattered around the apartment would give visitors the impression that Chris had a woman in his life. In fact, he had suggested to Harry that a policewoman be sent under, to be his occasional girlfriend. When Harry vetoed that idea, Chris had begun picking out girls from the flock at his place to take to dinner from time to time, or to a club. If he’d never been seen with a female, he thought he’d be looked at with suspicion. Although he thought there was a good deal of latent homosexuality among mob guys, they had women—lots of women—in their lives. In these circles, Friday night was “gummare” night—girlfriend night—at clubs and restaurants, Saturday night was wife night, usually at the same clubs and restaurants. Chris figured the wives must have thought, What the heck? The man’s a killer, a shylock, an extortionist—what difference does it make if he has a girlfriend?

  Chris had lived with his mother until he was married, so this was the first place of his own, all his own, that he didn’t have to share even with a wife. He put up a Rigoletto poster and shelved his opera records. He put up bookshelves and stacked some of his books, including Bulfinch’s Mythology. He hung a framed print of his favorite painting, Edward Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning.”

  Once, it was said, you proved yourself in the mob by making a hit: killing somebody. Harry had a plan, in case that ever came up—he’d have arranged to have the potential victim kidnapped by the law and held in faraway protective custody while Chris took all the credit. They didn’t expect it would come up, though, and it didn’t. In the modern mob, Chris found, you proved yourself by showing that you were an earner. Anybody could be connected, whether Greek, Jew, even black, if he could prove himself an earner. He wouldn’t be cut in on a flourishing enterprise, but he would be given a chance to prove he could turn around an operation that wasn’t doing well. Chris knew he was being tested when Solly commissioned him to take over the management of an OC spot on West 38th Street in Manhattan. “The guy who’s running it for me is slacking off,” Solly told Chris. “He’s out, I’m putting you in.”