Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  “Can I speak to a detective?” the woman asked.

  “You can speak to me,” Chris said. “I’m in charge here. What’s the problem?”

  “Well, my son tells me,” she began, then she stopped. She looked closely into Chris’s face, apparently trying to decide whether she should tell him what her son had told her. Then she went on. “My name is Mrs. Lopez, and this here is my son Miguel. My son Miguel is telling me that there is a man in the projects who is doing bad things with my son. Not with my son Miguel, with my other son.”

  Chris looked at the boy. “What happened?”

  Miguel suddenly seemed anxious to talk. “Well, I play in the street with my brother, and this man comes down …” Miguel went on to tell about the man who came to the school playground, talked to them, then invited them up to his apartment. The man told the boys he had some new bicycles to show them, that they could use.

  “What happened when you got upstairs?” Chris asked.

  “Then the man, we went into the bedroom, and he stuck his dick in my brother’s ass,” Miguel said.

  Mrs. Lopez began to cry.

  “Did he do that to you, Miguel?” Chris asked gently.

  “No,” Miguel said. “Just to my brother.”

  “Where is your other son, Mrs. Lopez?” Chris asked.

  “I am sick at my heart,” she said. “He is at school.”

  Chris went to the school, spoke to the teacher and got the thirteen-year-old boy out of class. “Your brother is telling me things that have happened to you,” Chris said. “Are they true?”

  “No!” the boy said angrily. “No, they are not true!”

  “You can tell me the truth,” Chris said. “I’m your friend, and you don’t have to be ashamed to tell me.”

  “It’s not true!” the boy insisted. “Nothing happened.”

  Well, maybe the little guy is making it up, Chris thought. Maybe he’s trying to get attention or something, who knows? Still, he had to be sure. “Let’s just go get some ice cream then, as long as we’re out here,” Chris said. “I could use some ice cream.” They walked to a new place that had just opened, near the station, where the owner served homemade ice cream. Chris ordered a scoop of vanilla, and the boy got a banana split.

  “You know, if anything bad did happen, it’s not your fault,” Chris said. He paused, but the boy said nothing. He kept his eyes on the dish. “As painful as it seems now,” Chris said, “you’ll feel better if you tell me. I know that for sure. And if something happened and you don’t tell me about it, it’s going to bother you for the rest of your life.”

  The boy jabbed at his ice cream, and began to cry. Chris handed him a napkin. “Finish your ice cream,” he said. “Then you can tell me.”

  When the boy finished, he put his spoon in the dish and with his eyes down, staring at the spoon, he told Chris where they’d gone to see the bicycles, and what happened there. He looked up at Chris with such a bleak expression that Chris reached over and hugged him, almost knocking the dish off the table. “It’s okay,” Chris kept telling him. “It’s not your fault. It’s okay.”

  He took the boy to the station, to wait there with his mother, then went to the man’s apartment. He was sure he had the guy cold, but when the door opened, Chris just stared. The guy was in a wheelchair.

  “I’m investigating something,” Chris said. “Can I come in?”

  As he walked in, Chris could see kids’ drawings taped around the archway into the kitchen, and on the refrigerator door. He crossed to the window, which looked directly across the street into the schoolyard. Pictures of children were taped around the window frame. Through the open bedroom door, he saw two shiny blue bicycles. Still, the guy was in a wheelchair.

  “What am I being accused of?” the man asked in a calm voice.

  “We can discuss it at the precinct,” Chris told him. “I want you to come with me now.”

  The man smiled slightly. “Of course I’ll come with you.”

  Chris wheeled him downstairs, lifted him into the car, and folded the chair into the backseat. At the precinct, he put the man into a small room. “Wait here,” Chris said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Chris went down the hall to the room where Mrs. Lopez was sitting with her sons. “I want you to tell me again what happened,” he said to the older boy. “And you must be very, very sure.”

  The boy repeated the story in detail, with his younger brother chiming in. Mrs. Lopez twisted her hands in her lap, nervously. “It’ll be all right,” Chris told the family. “You did the right thing to come here.”

  Chris went back to the old man. “I’m placing you under arrest,” he told him. The old man stared at him. “What for?” he asked in a strained voice.

  “For child molesting and sodomy,” Chris said.

  The man clutched his chest and fell forward in his chair. “I’m getting a heart attack,” he gasped. Chris thought he was faking, but he wasn’t. Chris called the Emergency squad and rode in the ambulance with the old man to the hospital.

  By the time Chris got back to the station, about three hours later, a priest was talking to the captain. Chris wasn’t surprised that the priest knew about the case; in that neighborhood, everybody knew everything that was going on.

  “Chris, this is Father Conlin,” the captain said.

  “Hello, Father Conlin,” Chris said.

  “I want you to know that this man you are accusing is a pillar of society!” the priest declared. “He is a very religious man, and you are wrong to accuse him.”

  “Well,” Chris said, “I have two kids saying this is what he did.”

  “Kids make up stories,” the priest said.

  “I know kids make up stories,” Chris said. “But I believe these boys, and based on what we know, I had to arrest him.”

  When the priest had gone, the captain pointed his finger at Chris. “If you’re wrong about this, you’re going to be pounding a beat in the most Godforsaken part of the Bronx,” he warned.

  “I’m not wrong,” Chris insisted, thinking, please God, please don’t let me be wrong.

  Back at the hospital, he found the man’s condition had stabilized, so he took prints and sent them to Albany. At the bedside arraignment next day, Father Conlin had just arrived when the report came back. Chris showed him the yellow sheets, the guy’s previous record: twenty-one counts of lascivious conduct, going back to the 1940s, from different places: Boston, Washington, Chicago.

  “From now on,” Chris told the priest, “you stick to your work and I’ll stick to mine.”

  Father Conlin smiled sadly. “We’re both doing God’s work,” he said.

  One Saturday in September, when Chris drove Marty home from the beach, her mother came to greet him in the front hall. “We’d like you to come for dinner tomorrow,” she said, smiling at him. “Sunday is our macaroni day.”

  “Thank you very much, I’d like that,” Chris said. “Thank you.”

  Marty walked out to the car with him. “I forgot to ask what time,” Chris said. “What time should I come?”

  “Oh, you know what time families eat on Sundays, don’t you?” Marty said casually. “What time does your family eat?”

  Chris thought back quickly to Sunday dinners with his parents and his sisters. After the long Greek liturgy, they were home in early afternoon. Katrina and the girls immediately disappeared into the kitchen to work on the lamb dinner, the main event of the day, while George settled down with the Sunday newspaper, passing Chris the comic section. “About the middle of the afternoon,” Chris said. “Three o’clock, three-thirty.”

  “That’s right,” Marty said. “See you tomorrow.”

  A little after noon on Sunday, Chris drove down to Prince Street with a thick envelope for Solly, his share of the week’s take. On the way back to his car, he stopped at a fruit and vegetable stand and bought a big bunch of chrysanthemums, a mix of rust-colored and dazzling yellow. As he headed out to Long Island, he thought that Sunday dinne
r at his girl’s house sounded like an old-fashioned movie, with Van Johnson, maybe, and June Allyson. He was dressed in his Sunday best, too, a dark suit with a light-blue shirt and striped tie, although his mop of curls, and the dark glasses, always added a slightly raffish look, no matter what he wore.

  Traffic was light, and he reached the house early, before two o’clock. He was surprised to see a couple of cars already parked along the curving driveway. Almost as a reflex, he noted the plate numbers and repeated them in his head, over and over, as he walked to the door and rang the bell. He wasn’t wired, and he could hardly whip out a notebook and jot them down. He knew he’d remember them; the sharp memory that had gotten him through high school with hardly any studying came in handy in this job.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea,” he warned Marty, when she opened the door. “You don’t think these flowers are for you, do you?”

  Marty laughed. “Then you should give them to her yourself. She’s in the kitchen.” Chris followed her as far as the doorway into the dining room, then he stopped. John was sitting at the dining room table with three men. There was a platter of fruit and cheese on the table, and a jug of red wine.

  The men stopped talking when they saw Chris. John waved a hand toward him. “This is Chris,” he said. He did not give the names of the men, who nodded curtly, not smiling. They did not seem pleased to see him. Same here, guys, Chris thought; walking into a roomful of strangers isn’t my favorite thing. He hoped that from the way he looked—awkward and nervous, standing in the doorway clutching a bouquet of flowers—they would take him at face value. Anna came from the kitchen, and as she smiled, kissed him, and took the flowers, he heard John murmur, “My daughter’s boyfriend.”

  Chris had been interested that it was Anna who’d invited him for Sunday dinner, and now he understood. Marty may have wanted to ask him, and maybe she’d suggested it to her mother, but the invitation had to be cleared with a higher authority, because Sunday was more than macaroni day. John was holding court at his table; the men were not casual dinner guests. Anna must have asked permission from her husband, and gotten the nod to have Chris join them.

  John beckoned Chris to sit down and poured a glass of wine for him. Anna brought out the mums in a glass bowl. “I chopped the stems down so we could have them on the table,” she said. “They’re beautiful. They’re my favorite flower.” She placed her hand lightly on Chris’s shoulder for a moment. “Make yourself at home,” she said. “Have something to eat. Marty’s helping me in the kitchen.” She went back into the kitchen, closing the door tightly behind her.

  Chris drank his wine and cut a wedge of cheese. After a short silence, one of the men began talking again. But Chris was too edgy to pay close attention at first. He was, on pins and needles, expecting one of the men to turn to him and ask him a direct question. A half hour, Chris thought. If a half hour passes and nobody asks me anything, I’m okay. Whether that was an accurate barometer or not, it was the barometer he used. He didn’t want to keep looking at his watch, but he had a good sense of time, and as a half hour passed, he began to relax. He caught the names of only two of the three men: Angelo and Ed.

  The men didn’t always stay seated. One or two would get up and drift into the hallway or the den. John would talk with one of them in the alcove near the window, then another man would join them. There were all kinds of corners and spaces where people could mingle and talk, in a sort of open-house atmosphere. Chris got up from the table, too, taking a piece of cheese, and sat for a while in the wing chair in the front hall, where he could see into the dining room, the living room, and the den. The den looked impersonal and uninteresting, like a doctor’s waiting room. But the conversation he was hearing was not uninteresting. At least one of the men was from the garment center, looking for a loan from John. Somebody mentioned “a hundred large”—one hundred thousand dollars.

  Chris knew the garment industry was vulnerable. If a guy had a bad year and was in debt, no bank was just going to hand over a hundred thousand dollars for his fall line. Yet without the money there would be no fall line. He was a legitimate businessman, but if he couldn’t get the loan from a legitimate bank, he had to look somewhere else, quickly. And so, loansharks didn’t have to advertise; they didn’t go around drumming up business, grabbing somebody’s lapels and saying, “Hey, you gotta borrow money from me.” Somebody in the garment center would steer the client to John, and somebody would probably come along to vouch for him.

  Chris had done that, though with considerably smaller digits. He’d taken guys to the Elmhurst Diner, where Big Lou did business in the last booth. “Lou, this is Jake. He needs five large.”

  Lou would peer at Chris, not at Jake. “Are you vouching for him, Chrissie?”

  “Yeah, I’m vouching for him, he’s okay.” Chris became what the banks would call a cosigner, responsible not just for the guy’s debt but for the interest—the vigorish, the juice, the payment that had to be made regularly, usually weekly, without ever reducing the original amount. If a guy borrowed, say, a thousand dollars, the vig might be two hundred a week, every week, until the thousand could be repaid in a lump. The only way to beat the shy was to repay the debt quickly, but that rarely happened; a guy who needed a grand so desperately one week was unlikely to have it in hand the following week, unless he scored at the track, which was also unlikely. More often, the borrower couldn’t even come up with the vig, week after week. In the old days, such an unfortunate might have been hurled down a flight of stairs or dragged into an alley. Dead men never came up with the vig, though, while men who were threatened, possibly roughed up a bit, but left alive, could be bled forever. Thus, contemporary shylocking involved the art of negotiation. “Okay, we’ll bring the vig down from five hundred a week to two hundred, and here’s what you’re gonna do: You’re gonna get rid of the girlfriend, no more cards, no more new cars, and okay, no problem. But if we find out you’re bouncing around, you got a new Caddy, then it goes back to five and then you got a problem.” Thus things were worked out, most of the time: When one guy whom Chris vouched for didn’t cooperate, his laundromat burned down.

  From the transactions Chris had watched, or had been involved in at the Kew and the Elmhurst Diner and other spots, he knew the looks on the faces of all the players: the shy, the client, the voucher. He knew the language: “Hey Chrissie, I promise, next week, I promise, on my mother’s eyes!” John’s friends were not talking street slang; they were well-dressed, and John’s dining room was not the end booth at a diner. But the nods and gestures, the body language, were unmistakable. A shy was a shy was a shy, and thus did he prosper and worm his way into legitimate businesses. If the guy borrowing from John couldn’t pay on time, he wouldn’t be whacked out. He would just have a new partner.

  Precisely at three o’clock, the kitchen door opened, and Anna appeared with a platter of steaming pasta. Marty was behind her, with a tureen of red sauce. John sat at the head of the table, and Chris took his usual place in the middle of the table, next to Marty. Since that was the place he’d been given the first night he came to dinner, he always sat there afterward. Anna sat at the opposite end of the table from her husband, nearest the kitchen; the three men sat across from Marty and Chris.

  When talking stopped and serious eating began, Chris could immediately tell who was Italian and who wasn’t by their language. An Italian guy called pasta “macaroni,” no matter what kind it was, except for special dishes—ravioli, lasagna—while a guy who wasn’t Italian would say “Pass the linguine.” To an Italian, sauce wasn’t sauce: it was “Pass the gravy.” Table manners were a giveaway, too. Almost all the OC men Chris had met, including John, bent low over their plates and ate greedily, almost to the point of slurping their food. Chris thought this harked back to the days when they’d been poor and hungry, when food on the table was not necessarily a given. Or maybe they just had lousy manners. In any case, Chris kept his head up, his elbows off the table, as he’d been taught; it occurred to hi
m that even though eating properly—“Eat nice,” Katrina would say—came naturally to him, it was making a good impression on Anna, and he was pleased about that.

  Dinner was a lengthy affair, about three hours. Between courses, people got up and wandered around; one of the men left, after the pasta, and didn’t return. There was an enormous amount of food—the mums had to be removed from the table to make room for all the dishes. Bountiful meals had been the custom at Chris’s house, too, even after he was grown up. Whenever Phil came by the house, Katrina would greet him with affection and would immediately disappear into the kitchen. Phil would hear dishes rattling, the refrigerator door opening, pots and pans being brought out. “I’m just going to be here a minute, ma’am,” Phil would call out. “Thank you very much, but I really can’t eat anything.” Then Katrina would emerge with a tray laden with food. “I’ll just set it down here and you can just take what you want,” she would say.

  Of all the dishes on the table, John seemed fondest of the braciole, the pork cutlets. “Good, from Brooklyn,” he pointed out. Chris knew that OC people went out of their way—or, more precisely, sent someone else out of their way—to get what they considered the best available food in any category: pork cutlets from a shop in Brooklyn, fresh fish from Fulton Street, long loaves of bread from Zito’s, cannoli from Ferrara’s on Grand Street in Little Italy. Chris’s favorite was the chunky potato salad, and he remarked on it. Anna was pleased. “I knew you liked it the first time you came to us,” she said.

  Marty and Anna cleared the table, finally. John got a bottle of sambuca from the sideboard, while Anna brought coffee and the required dish of coffee beans. John and Angelo drank espresso, the others drank American coffee. Shortly after the men left, John got to his feet, stretched and yawned. “Good night,” he said. Then he looked pointedly at Chris. “Are you going out tonight?”