Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  Even when he was with Liz, now, he felt almost as lonely as when they were not together. The warm sharing of their first two years of marriage was dissolving, replaced by silence. Not hostility, just silence.

  Chris still didn’t want to drop the project, though. He liked living on the edge. He was getting by, living by his wits. He liked knowing that he could step right up to the edge and stay there, keeping himself balanced. But the more time he spent on the edge, the more he needed, sometimes, to step back to firmer ground.

  His time with Marty had become that safer ground. In the six months he’d known her, he’d begun to think less about her father than about how good it was to be with her. And, as to her father, Chris was beginning to think Marty probably didn’t know all that much, or if she did, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to try to get it out of her. Maybe that would put her in a precarious position. So he put that on the back burner, in a way, and just relaxed with her. She had become the only person whom he saw regularly with whom he could talk. From enjoying her company, he came to need it.

  He’d lost track of both the clock and the calendar. On a day-to-day basis, the time of day or night meant nothing. Sometimes he grabbed a couple hours sleep on the sofa at the Astoria club before going to meet Harry, or going somewhere with Frankie, or down to Prince Street, or out to the Kew, or over to The Daily Planet to spend the day, or part of it; and so on, into another night.

  Seasons blended into one another; mostly he knew only whether it was hot or cold outside. It was always snowing when he went to the country at Christmas with Liz, and it was snowing on the night he and Marty went to the opera, then to the Oak Bar. When they left, some horse-drawn carriages were still lined up, as late as it was, at the edge of Central Park. “Let’s take a ride,” Chris said.

  The driver tucked the thick robe over their laps and smiled at them. The tiny lights twinkling in the trees along the road in the park, with the thick snow drifting past the lights, turned the scene into a blurry wonderland. Chris reached for Marty, to kiss her, just as the carriage door on his side flew open. He reached for it with one hand and held the door shut all the rest of the way, while trying to keep his other arm around her, trying to hold her and kiss her at the same time. They couldn’t stop laughing. When Chris took her hand to help her down, they couldn’t let go.

  At Waterside, he unlocked the door and headed quickly for the table lamp, bypassing the wall switch. Marty looked around. “Oh, this is nice,” she said. She walked to the window and looked at the snow falling on the dark water. “What a beautiful view,” she said.

  “It’s a nice place,” Chris agreed. He took her coat and opened the closet door. “It’s my niece’s place,” he said hurriedly, in case she’d glimpsed the woman’s clothing there. “I usually stay at my aunt’s, but my niece is in Paris—no, London—studying art. So I’m using her place. She left a lot of her stuff here.”

  Marty sat on the sofa while Chris opened a new bottle of brandy. “I see your niece likes Hopper, too,” Marty said. “I guess so,” Chris said. They talked a little about painting, as they sipped brandy, but it wasn’t long before they kissed. They kissed again.

  In the bedroom, Chris wished he hadn’t gotten those damned satin sheets.

  7

  Chris went for a walk. As much as he detested the cold, he had to get out of the apartment, beyond the reach of Harry and the telephone. He had a lot of thinking to do.

  He thought he shouldn’t see Marty again. Look at what you’ve done! He berated himself. You are a married man, and a cop doing a job, and you have broken the rules. You made a dumb mistake, and you better just drop it, now.

  He thought that Marty would be hurt and bewildered if he didn’t see her again. She’d think she was a one-night stand, and he couldn’t bear for her to think that. He’d never wanted any woman to think that. In all his years of bouncing around, he’d had a one-night stand only once, possibly twice. He remembered drinking at a bar one night with one of the go-go girls, both of them smashed; he remembered going home with her, though he didn’t remember her name. But he’d never been out for easy conquests, and he’d taken a lot of kidding about that when he was in the army, when guys seemed to consider women as notches in their belts, the more the manlier. Sometimes, when he’d gone out with a girl and they hadn’t ended up in bed, she was annoyed. “What’s the matter, are you a fag or something?” one girl had snapped. He’d always felt that a woman made more of an emotional commitment when she slept with a man than the man did, so he should feel some sense of obligation to her. When he had begun staying over with Liz at her apartment on the upper east side, he had felt a commitment that had led him to the altar.

  He thought he had made a major mistake in getting to know Marty so well. How could he not have seen this coming? How could he have imagined that he could become her close friend without sex coming into it, not as a hasty, meaningless tumble but as a natural development in a friendship between two healthy, passionate people? He thought they’d had a fantastic time in bed.

  He thought about the worst-case scenario. If it ever came to court, he thought it wouldn’t be a tremendous problem. He could simply say that he’d done it because his life was threatened. “My life was in danger. I had to make the decision, and I didn’t have time to confer with anybody.” That was the catch-all, saving phrase in undercover work: My life was in danger.

  He thought it wouldn’t come to that, though. He thought that if it came to that, Harry would save him, somehow. He thought he couldn’t possibly tell Harry about this.

  He thought he had a solid reason to be with Marty. It wasn’t as though he were having a love affair sponsored by the city of New York. He had a job to do.

  He had trudged several blocks up First Avenue in the thick snow, then down again. His feet were stiff with cold, so he ducked into a coffee shop on 23rd Street. Sitting at the counter with a mug of coffee, he thought it out rationally.

  He thought it made perfect sense. He was two different men. Chris the cop had a wife and in-laws, nieces and nephews, bills to pay, an apartment in Forest Hills. Chrissie lived at Waterside, a life that was totally, completely, entirely, separate from the other life. And no bills to pay, either.

  He thought that because he was two different men, living in two different worlds, he could love two different women in different ways for different reasons.

  He thought it was as simple as that.

  Liz was pleased about her New Year’s Eve booking at a club in Westchester. The place was small, she said, but it had a good reputation among agents and show-business people, a kind of insider’s place. For her combined Christmas-and-birthday present, Chris gave her an amplifier she wanted, a big, boxy thing with plug-in mike for projecting voice tones and nuance. He’d bought it in Manhattan, wrapped it himself in shiny red paper, and wedged it in the back seat of the car for the trip to the country. In a way, it seemed pointless to take it all the way to Massachusetts and bring it back again the next day, but he wanted her to open it on Christmas day, in the country, the way they always did. They always had several presents for one another—some small things, such as a scarf, gloves, a book, and one major gift. Chris liked directing the action: “Open this one first, now that one, now the flat box,” leading up to the main event. Liz loved the amplifier and got it working right away. That evening, after Christmas dinner, she sang for Chris and her parents and a couple of neighbors who’d dropped in. When she sang “Ave Maria,” you could have heard a pin drop. As soon as they got back home, she started practicing for New Year’s Eve.

  “I’ll be there,” Chris promised.

  He’d always enjoyed the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when people were in unusually good moods. Even at the 4-oh, cops had seemed less grumpy and cynical then. Marty was working, but she said there was a holiday mood around her office, and one afternoon she took a three-hour lunch. They walked around Rockefeller Center, watching the skaters against the glittering backdrop of the Christmas
tree. Ordinarily Chris wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing that, just standing around, but with the holiday crowds so thick, elbow-to-elbow, he felt reasonably secure. As they stood at the edge of the upper promenade, leaning over to look down at the bright figures flashing by, Marty asked him to come to a New Year’s party at a club on Long Island. “Well, there’s something else,” Chris began. But Marty looked so disappointed that he relented.

  “I’ll be there,” he promised.

  By New Year’s Eve, though, he didn’t want to go anyplace. He was wiped out from an especially busy week, from all the bouncing around. How many bars can you visit, how many nights can you stay up all night, fall asleep at dawn, then start all over again at noon, he wondered, without it catching up with you? Solly had asked him to keep a sharp eye on Zero’s during the holidays, when extra money flowed in and people had to be watched extra closely, so Chris had had to run out there every night.

  He’d been to Zero’s years earlier, when the place was called The Golden Slipper, serving up rock music and Chinese food. It was a big, noisy place, popular with young people then. One New Year’s Eve, before he became a cop, he’d gone there with his date and two other couples. The place was jammed, with tables squeezed in so tightly people could hardly move. The food was cold and greasy when it finally came late, and everybody got irritable. One of the girls in a group at the next table made a snide remark to Dottie, a girl in Chris’s party.

  “What did you say?” Dottie demanded.

  The other girl laughed in a sneering way. “You heard me,” she said.

  Dottie’s boyfriend Richie got up and pushed his way through the chairs, around to the other girl’s boyfriend. “You better watch your girlfriend,” Richie warned. “Tell her to watch her mouth.” That young man jumped up. “And just who the hell are you?” he hollered.

  In reply, Richie swung at the guy. Blood gushed from the guy’s nose; a friend of his jumped up and within seconds, it was a free-for-all. Chairs were being overturned, glasses thrown, people were yelling and punching. Chris couldn’t believe it. The music kept blaring. Next thing he knew, a couple of state troopers strode in. When one of them spoke to Richie at the direction of the guy with the nosebleed—“He started it! He started it!” the guy was yelling—Richie reached down to the table, picked up somebody’s plate of chow mein and pushed it right into the trooper’s face. Chris watched in horrified fascination as the trooper stood there, frozen, looking at the orange-y and brown chow mein sliding down the front of his uniform. Miraculously, Chris and the others talked the trooper out of locking Richie up. They all got out as quickly as they could. The Golden Slipper closed down for a long while, then. Chris hadn’t gone back, and he’d lost all taste for Chinese food.

  In its reincarnation as Zero’s, the place was jumping. It wasn’t just a mob spot; as he looked around, Chris saw that it was obviously still considered the place to go by young couples. Two bands played, alternating, so there was never a time out. There was valet parking, good food, non-Chinese—steaks, shrimp, chicken—and an air of flash that Chris enjoyed. As an emissary of Solly’s, who owned a piece of the place, Chris got the red-carpet treatment, being admitted by bouncers and escorted to a ringside table ahead of all the people standing in line shivering.

  On New Year’s Eve, he dressed slowly in a dark suit—he’d never worn a tuxedo—while looking longingly at the sofa. He just wanted to flop down, stretch out, and watch the new year come in on television, from Times Square. Around 10 o’clock he drove to Westchester.

  Liz looked absolutely terrific in a long dress with a black skirt and a silvery top. She wore a big black bow in her blond hair. Chris thought she looked like a young Patti Page. She sounded great too, he thought, feeling pleased about the amplifier. He looked around the room and saw a table to one side of the small stage, where he recognized two of her friends and their husbands. He joined them, and when Liz glanced over and saw him, she smiled, without dropping a note.

  At midnight, everybody counted down, ten to one. “Happy New Year!” people cried, as the band played “Auld Lang Syne.” Liz stepped down and came over to him.

  “Happy New Year,” she said.

  “Hey, Happy New Year,” Chris said, and kissed her.

  She sat at the table and they had a glass of champagne. “I hope it will be a happy year,” Liz said.

  “Me too,” Chris said. “I want this to be a very good year.” He finished his champagne and stood up. “I have to go now,” he said. “I gotta run.”

  Liz looked wistful. “Do you really have to?”

  “Yeah, I really have to, something came up,” Chris said. He leaned down and kissed her again.

  “You look fantastic,” he said. As he got to the door, he heard her singing again. He turned for one more look, then left quickly.

  What a time for a guy to walk out on his wife, he thought uneasily, as he pulled out of the parking lot. He told himself that he’d been with her at the most important moment, the stroke of midnight. But he didn’t feel good about it, and for a minute, as he waited at a red light, he thought of turning back.

  Marty’s face lighted up when she saw him. “Oh, I was afraid you weren’t coming,” she said. “I’ve been watching the door.”

  “I said I’d come,” he reminded her. “I had a long drive, but I’m here. Happy New Year.”

  She led him to her table and introduced him to her friends. It was a private party, no wiseguys, and after a couple of drinks, Chris relaxed. But he wouldn’t dance, no matter how much she pleaded.

  “Musicians don’t know how to dance,” he explained. “I’d step all over your feet. You wouldn’t have any toes left.” He smiled. “You look beautiful,” he said, “but I still won’t dance.”

  She was wearing a bright-yellow dress, high in the front but with no back to it; her hair was piled on top of her head, fastened with a gold clip. She was wearing the Florentine cross.

  “Are you sure you won’t dance?” she asked again.

  “I’m sure,” Chris said. “But I’m fine, you go dance with somebody else.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to dance with somebody else,” she said. “I want to be with you.” She reached out and laid her hand over his on the table.

  With his wavy white hair and chubby face, Aniello Dellacroce looked kindly, even benevolent; some of his soldiers called him “Uncle.” He was sometimes called George Rizzo and Timothy O’Neil, among other aliases. A United States Senate Committee had called him “the most powerful boss in New York.” In fact, Dellacroce was not the boss but the underboss, second in command of the Gambino crime family. At Intel, where they had the advantage of closer perspective than the people in Washington, he was called, with terse simplicity, “an extremely powerful individual” in the Gambino group.

  Chris called him Neil. He’d been a gunman for Albert Anastasia, in the wild days of “Murder Incorporated.” When Anastasia died—in such dramatic gangland fashion that it qualified as a rub-out—Carlo Gambino took over as boss, for nearly twenty years. When Gambino died in the fall of 1976, Dellacroce was considered the likely successor, until a conference in a Brooklyn kitchen anointed Paul Castellano, Gambino’s brother-in-law. But if Dellacroce was always the underboss, he was never underestimated. His name meant “Little Lamb of the Cross.”

  Chris was a teenager, hanging around the tranquil streets of Queens, when Anastasia was slaughtered in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel. Now Chris was hanging around clubs and restaurants with Dellacroce and his crew, drinking with them, singing Italian songs. Although Dellacroce seemed to like Chris, the old man was traditionally closemouthed. In the early seventies, he’d been jailed for contempt, when he refused to answer a grand jury’s questions about organized crime, even when offered immunity. He’d served time for tax evasion—specifically, for evading taxes on a six-figure stock payment he’d received for arranging labor peace for a Long Island manufacturer. But those were relatively minor convictions, considering.<
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  Not all Dellacroce’s crew members were as discreet. One chunky guy with a cigar liked to drink, and the more he drank, the more he talked. One night at a club he draped his arm around Chris and explained the heroin routes from Palermo to Milan to New York. He stopped talking when Dellacroce arrived, but Chris had heard a lot by then.

  “What does he look like?” Harry asked Chris, as they set about backgrounding the guy.

  “He reminds me of a penguin with a cigar,” Chris said.

  Chris turned up at several places the Penguin frequented after that, including a rendezvous with some Colombians in Jackson Heights, but the Penguin was drinking, so he didn’t seem suspicious at the sight of Chris, just pleased.

  Dellacroce and the Penguin worked out of the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street, between Prince and Spring, where Chris was taken by Solly. The Ravenite was Gambino land, and Solly was Luchese, but Chris found that family lines blurred when there was work to be done, deals to be made. Some endeavors were so lucrative that there was no need for anybody to get possessive or grabby; both families were conspicuous in the garment center. Chris sometimes couldn’t tell family members apart, because in fact they were often not apart. If one family tried to move in on another’s territory, without negotiating a split, of course there would be trouble, and often there had been. A Luchese couldn’t just waltz into Gambino territory and open an after-hours place, but he could get the okay, then give the Gambinos a cut.

  In general, it didn’t seem to matter so much what family a man belonged to, or was connected with, as what he could accomplish. It was earning power that mattered: manpower. Intel filed Solly’s brother as Luchese, yet he’d been given the contract to kill Joe Valachi by Vito Genovese. But it was not just individual crimes that mattered, under the RICO law; it was the activity of a “criminal enterprise,” a group that engaged in racketeering. And so it was the interaction and the associations that mattered. RICO was a kind of web; Chris was a spider. He didn’t know who might be caught in the web; he might never know. His job was to keep spinning.