Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  Chris had always loved hot summer days as much as he hated winter. The only time he’d welcomed the cold was early in his career at the 4-oh when he was still in uniform. In the summertime, people swarmed through the streets all night, many of them drinking, then brawling or shooting. The neighborhood quieted down when the temperature dropped; cops always said the weather was the best policeman. Even in the bitterest cold, Chris had always done straight eights—working his full shift without hiding out in some warm space—except his first Christmas Eve. He’d been standing on Willis Avenue in what seemed like zero-degree weather, near an Irish tavern. A loudspeaker above the door was playing a record of a dog barking to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” People kept knocking on the window of the place, beckoning to him. Finally he gave in. He walked inside, said “Merry Christmas,” and when the bartender set a bottle of V.O. in front of him, Chris poured a long one. Everybody cheered.

  He felt better when he was at a beach, stretched out, thinking, reading, listening to his radio. He knew guys who said if they had money, they’d buy a yacht or a fancy foreign car. All Chris would buy if he had money, he always said, was a beach house. Nothing big or elaborate, just a cabin of some kind, a little place where he could hear and see and smell the ocean. Water had a calming effect on him, and he felt wonderfully calm and relaxed when he and Marty went to the beach. Because he’d spent so many days at the beach, both as a teenager and later, when he was supposed to be selling insurance, he didn’t take her to one of the busy, heavily populated Long Island beaches, where he might have been spotted, but to Gilgo, an inlet beach beyond Jones Beach.

  The first Saturday they went, he rented a speedboat and they went for a spin. Chris was hardly an expert at the wheel, but he did okay. He felt terrific, and Marty seemed to be having a good time, too. He thought she looked gorgeous, with the spray flinging up around her face, her long dark hair streaming in the wind. She looked happy and healthy, wholesome and sexy, all at once. “You look like a commercial for suntan lotion,” he said, but with the noises of the motor, she didn’t hear him.

  She’d brought a picnic supper: wedges of cheese, rounds of rye bread with prosciutto, grapes and nectarines and two slices of angelfood cake. Chris had brought a bottle of white wine that was warm by the time they opened it, but it tasted fine, anyway, as they spread a blanket on the sand, ate, and drank and talked.

  Chris found a lot to talk about, going back to his childhood. He recalled how his family had gone to Orchard Beach, on summer Sundays when he was little. The subway trip had seemed very long, but it was exciting, too, everybody laden with bags and towels. Once they got there, they stayed all day and evening, until almost dark. His father worked on Sundays, but a couple of uncles went; his uncle Mike had taught him to swim, at Orchard Beach, when Chris was five years old. “We were doing shishkebab at our picnics twenty years before the world discovered it,” Chris said.

  It occurred to Chris that one reason he could relax and talk and enjoy being with Marty so much was that he didn’t have to think about any sexual involvement. He could get to know her as a person, without clouding the issue with romance, which of course was out of the question. First of all, he was a married man, even though he rarely saw his wife. Second, he was getting to know Marty for purposes of the job, not for personal reasons. The department frowned, to put it mildly, on a cop getting romantically involved in a case. If the case ever came to trial, and a witness could testify that she’d been intimate with the investigating officer, it would probably be over, both for the case and for the cop.

  He didn’t want Marty to think he didn’t find her attractive, though. In fact, he was struck by how lovely she looked in her one-piece bathing suit, a black-and-white print, with a big white cotton shirt draped around her shoulders. She hadn’t made a fuss about combing her hair or putting on lipstick or anything, which he understood women did in order to look good. Liz always spent a long time on her makeup, it seemed to him, and was forever pulling out a mirror when they were out someplace, to check and see what she looked like.

  So he kissed Marty warmly but not lingeringly, and she kissed him back. He put his arm around her as they sat side by side, watching the sun begin to set. As good as it felt to have her close to him, he didn’t have to think ahead, as he might otherwise have thought, about sex entering the picture. He had the luxury of just getting to know her. He had the wonderful freedom to just become her friend.

  That summer, 1977, was Chris’s third summer undercover and in some ways the most interesting. He’d met Marty. And in mid-July, he was at Waterside when all the lights went out. He heard news of the city-wide blackout on his battery-powered radio, and heard that all off-duty policemen were to report to work immediately.

  Using his flashlight, he dialed Liz and got her answering machine. “It’s me,” he said. “I just called to make sure you’re all right.” He paused awkwardly. “Well, uh, since you’re not home, I guess you’re out with somebody, so that’s good.” He paused again, not knowing what to say on the tape. “Uh, I’m working now,” he said. “Bye now.”

  He called Marty. “How are you doing?”

  “We’re fine,” she said, laughing. “We must have about fifty candles, at least, all over the house. It’s like some enormous birthday party. I wish you could see this.”

  “Hey, I wish so too,” Chris said. “See you soon.”

  He turned the radio back on and heard again that off-duty officers were ordered back to work. He felt a slight pang that he was missing the action; the 4-oh would be a hot spot tonight. Of course he wasn’t off-duty; he was never off-duty. Still, he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t hear from Harry. Sometimes Harry hung around in the upstairs apartment; he just might pop down and suggest that Chris go out and make himself useful. Of course Harry wouldn’t, and even if Harry were just arriving at the building, say, he’d never make it up nearly thirty flights of stairs, not with his four-pack-a-day habit.

  He called his mother, who said she was fine, the girls were with her, and the children, everybody was fine. “I’m fine too,” Chris said. He groped in the refrigerator for a beer that was still nice and cold, sat down on the sofa and called Phil.

  Now that Phil and his family were back from St. Louis, transferred to New York, Chris called him often. It was against the rules, of course, to talk to anybody about the job, but Phil was such a straight arrow, and Chris’s closest friend. Chris trusted Phil beyond the point where he’d ever expected to be able to trust anyone. If Phil had ever said, “Hey Butch, I’m coming over to do a lobotomy on you,” Chris would have said, “Okay, what time are you coming?” He felt he could tell Phil anything. Yet he hadn’t told him everything he was doing, just that his undercover job involved organized crime, and he was bouncing around, making good progress.

  Now, sitting in the dark, with his beer, Chris told Phil how good he was feeling. He told him he’d met a girl who could be helpful in the work he was doing, and he was finding out that he actually liked her a lot, wasn’t that terrific?

  He was surprised that Phil didn’t seem to think it was so terrific. “Be careful,” Phil said. “Watch out that you don’t dig yourself a hole so deep that you won’t be able to climb out.”

  Chris was disappointed in Phil’s reaction, and a little annoyed. “Hey, don’t worry about it, Partner,” he said. “I’m doing fine.” Afterward he realized he’d used a phrase he hated, a phrase common in the mob. There were several phrases that bothered him, that they used all the time; “good people,” as in “He’s good people,” usually said in a muttered growl; it was meant to be a compliment, but to Chris it always sounded like a slangy curse. “Doin’ the right thing.” When somebody picked up a restaurant check quietly, without making a grandstand show, somebody would mutter approvingly, “He’s doin’ the right thing.” He especially hated it when they said, “Don’t worry about it,” because that meant there was something to worry about.

  6

  “Do we know a captain in the Bro
nx?” Solly asked Chris one night at the Kew.

  As Chris stared at him, Solly rephrased the question. “Do you know a captain in the Bronx?”

  “Hey, who …” Chris stammered. “Hey, no, I mean, why would I know a captain in the Bronx?” It wasn’t hard for him to sound astonished; the question had come out of the blue.

  “Hey, Solly, why do you think I’d know a captain in the Bronx?” Chris asked again. Solly just shrugged and said nothing more. He never brought it up again, and he continued to treat Chris as he always did, in his soft-spoken, amiable, even affectionate way.

  Chris worried endlessly about it. It was another example of a ball being tossed in the air, bouncing around, without knowing where or when or even if it would ever come down. Another reason to worry and wonder: What does he know? What has he found out about me since yesterday? He almost wished Solly had said something definite, accusing him of knowing a captain in the Bronx. At least that would have been something concrete to deal with, something he could pin down. Uncertainty was the worst. He was at the bar at the Kew when a woman who was sitting alone, drinking, smiled at him, then moved from her place to the barstool next to his. She was attractive—not a great beauty, but a nice-looking woman, in her late thirties. He thought she was just a lonely lady, looking for company—the Kew Motor Inn attracted an ordinary, middle-class clientele—until she spoke.

  “I need a gun,” she said quietly.

  “What do you need a gun for?” Chris asked, startled.

  “I just need a gun to take care of things,” she said.

  “Well, go on up to Harlem,” Chris advised. “You can buy a hundred guns.” She shook her head. “No, I can’t go up there.”

  She said her name was Darlene, and she kept pressuring. It was obvious that she had targeted him, picked him out of the crowd at the Kew. Then she got up abruptly, without finishing her drink. “I’ll call you later,” she said.

  Fifteen minutes later, the phone behind the bar rang. “It’s for you,” the barmaid said. She knew Chris well by now, and she gave him a sly wink as she handed him the phone.

  Darlene told him her room number and urged him to come up. “Bring a bottle with you,” she murmured. She kept talking vaguely about “taking care of things.” As curious as he was, Chris had no intention of going up to her room—God knows what he’d be walking into—so he said he’d call her later from another phone. When he called back, he taped the conversation, in which she said not only that she needed a gun, but she wanted to give him the contract to kill her husband. Chris stalled and said he’d be in touch. He passed the report to Harry, but as far as he knew, nobody ever solved the riddle of Darlene. He never heard from her again, and she never reappeared at the Kew. Maybe she was a mob woman, setting him up. Maybe she was legit, in the sense that she was an unhappy wife who really did want her husband removed. Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she was a federal agent, perhaps with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, looking for a weapons bust; he knew that at one point the Kew had been targeted by the feds.

  She might even have been another undercover cop. Between the feds and the NYPD, with its various task forces and branches and projects, sometimes the right hand didn’t know, couldn’t know, what the left hand was doing. Chris was with Solly and an associate of Solly’s, a guy named Slater—one of the few guys known only by his last name, instead of the reverse—when a fellow whom Slater knew walked in. “Hi, how are you doin’, come on over,” Slater called to the newcomer, who joined them at the table.

  Chris knew him too. He didn’t know the name, but he recognized the face. The guy was from Narcotics.

  Slater and the nark were talking when Solly interrupted “Where you from?” he asked.

  “Brooklyn,” the guy said.

  “From Brooklyn,” Solly repeated. “Then you know the Nineteenth Hole?”

  The guy shook his head.

  “You don’t know the Nineteenth Hole?” Solly repeated.

  “No,” the guy said. Solly didn’t say anything else. When the guy left, Slater went with him.

  Solly looked at Chris. “That guy’s a cop,” he said simply. “Every fucking wiseguy in Brooklyn knows the Nineteenth Hole.”

  As soon as Chris left, he called Harry. “Reach out, whoever this guy is, and pull him up,” Chris said. “He’s burned, and he’s going to get himself hurt.” Stupid! Chris fumed. Idiot! A guy who couldn’t deal with the unexpected shouldn’t be in the game.

  Not that you could always anticipate, Chris admitted. Things happened quickly. He was at the bar at Lucho’s one night, minding his own business, when a guy sitting next to him left to go to the toilet. While he was gone, the guy’s girlfriend said hello to Chris. Chris said hello, and they were chatting casually about nothing at all when the guy returned. He placed his hand heavily on Chris’s shoulder. “I’m telling you, you leave my girl alone,” he growled.

  Chris reached up and brushed the hand away. “You’ve got it all wrong, buddy,” he said in annoyance. He’d come to Lucho’s just to have a drink and a good meal from the chef who catered to his whims, for no other reason. This guy didn’t even look like OC; Lucho’s wasn’t a heavy place. Ordinary people from the neighborhood stopped in at the bar on their way home from work, and the mob guys who came were mostly low-level. The place had a gloomy feeling, though sometimes a woman played the piano that was squeezed at an angle in the narrow archway between the bar and the dining room. There was dark paneling along the walls, and plastic geraniums in hanging baskets.

  But the food was first-rate, and in this low-key neighborhood spot, Chris felt he could unwind a little. At most bars and clubs, he had to be constantly on guard, so he relished a chance to be by himself and have a good dinner. And now this bum was messing up his evening.

  As Chris stood up, ready to move into the dining room, the guy picked up the girl’s glass and hurled it at the wall. When the glass shattered, one tiny sliver flew into Chris’s eye. It hurt like hell. Muttering, holding his hand over his eye, he made his way out to Third Avenue and hailed a cab. “Take me to a hospital,” he said.

  “Which hospital, mister?” the cabbie said, turning in his seat to peer curiously at Chris.

  “Oh Jesus, Bellevue,” Chris said. “Hurry up.” But as the taxi headed down Second Avenue, Chris thought the Emergency Room at Bellevue—always a hotspot for accidents, stabbings, shootings—might be swarming with cops. “No, make it Beth Israel,” he said. That was the next place he could think of in the neighborhood close to Waterside.

  The young doctor on duty used a machine pressed right up against Chris’s forehead. “You’ve got a piece of glass in your eye,” the doctor said.

  “I know that, Doc,” Chris said peevishly. “So what can you do about it?”

  “So I can take it out,” the doctor snapped, putting Chris in his place. Chris kept quiet as the doctor worked, then. Fortunately, the cornea wasn’t damaged, though Chris had to wear a bandage for a few days. He lost all visual perspective, and found himself raising a foot to take a step when he was on level ground. Stepping off a curb seemed like stepping off a cliff. He stumbled a lot. He was thoroughly aggravated at the whole stupid incident, though he took a wry interest in the knowledge that the hospital bill would be sent to the address he’d given from one of his fake IDs. The Valley Stream address was an abandoned warehouse, so the bill from Emergency was destined to float around the city forever.

  So many guys were coming to his Friday night poker games that Chris recruited a man from Astoria to make drinks, and a couple of pretty girls to serve sandwiches. That wasn’t difficult, because the help, especially the girls, could easily pick up a couple hundred dollars a night in tips. Chris cut the games to pay his expenses, taking a percentage of the pot, usually 10 percent, and sometimes he even sat in. Guys who ran the games usually didn’t do that, but he got bored, just watching, and he thought sitting in would convince anybody who needed convincing that the games weren’t fixed. Experienced players didn’t need convincing; most
mob games weren’t crooked, just cut-throat.

  Often the games went on so long, with people coming and going all night, that Chris was surprised that his neighbors didn’t complain. The Waterside complex seemed so wholesome and middle-class. Healthy-looking people streamed in and out of the athletic club on the balcony level, with its exercise machines and heated pool. In the outdoor plaza, spacious and agreeably arranged for people-watching, like a European plaza, he saw people strolling, old people with their faces tilted to the sunshine, their eyes closed; young people with babies in carriages, teenagers on skateboards, and he wondered: How can you not know? He couldn’t figure out how he could get by with what he was doing, right under all these respectable noses.

  Not that his clients came noisily. They just slipped out of the elevator and tapped on his door, almost unheard. But there were so many coming! He began to run two games simultaneously, one game around the nondescript Salvation Army table, another half-on and half-off the sofa, partly on the end table, leaving a couple of people with no place to sit—they had to kneel. Sometimes Harry stood watch in the apartment above, but more often, it was left to Chris to report on who came. It got to the point where guys Chris knew were bringing so many players he didn’t know that when he met Harry, and Harry showed him pictures, Chris sometimes couldn’t match any of the new ones with the faces in Harry’s portfolio. Whenever he was able to identify a photo, without any doubt, he did, but when he wasn’t absolutely sure, he said so, even though Harry got frustrated. Chris was bending over backward not to make a false ID, because he’d never forgotten how terrible it was to be told he’d fingered the wrong person.

  He’d been sitting at the front desk at the 4-oh, because it was his turn to catch a case, when a woman came in, with a boy about eight or nine years old clutching her hand. The woman carried a black tote bag in her other hand; she wore a kerchief and a black coat. She was not so much leading the boy as dragging him, because he looked as though he just wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.