He would confess to Marty when they were at the beach. He always felt better when he was near the water. Marty asked for a week’s vacation, and they headed south.
They stopped at Colonial Williamsburg, and at Gettysburg, but Chris couldn’t enjoy it. As much as he loved history, he wanted to get on down to Virginia Beach. He didn’t even want to stop at Monticello, which surprised Marty, because he’d always said he wanted to see Monticello. He’d talked about Thomas Jefferson on one of their very first dates, she reminded him. Chris said he’d make it to Monticello another time. Anyway, he knew exactly what Monticello looked like, from pictures. There were columns in front of the house, and seven steps leading up to the front door. Seven steps didn’t sound like many, but these were long, stretching almost the width of the house, so that you knew, as you walked up the steps, that you were about to enter someplace special.
At Virginia Beach, they checked into a place right on the ocean. There was a little balcony with two chairs facing the ocean, but Chris didn’t want to talk there; there was another little balcony right next to theirs. All the rooms had these little balconies facing the ocean. A beehive, Chris thought. It looks like a damned beehive!
“What’s the matter, Christy?” Marty asked. He’d said nothing, but he was frowning.
He looked at her. “Nothing. I’m just tired from all the driving.”
“Why don’t you take a nap?” Marty suggested. “I’ll go down to the gift shop, get some postcards and walk around.”
Chris took a shower and stretched out on the bed. He couldn’t sleep, but it felt good to lie there, sorting out his thoughts, planning on how he would tell her. But it wasn’t easy to sort out his thoughts, as the sudden recollection struck him—a Gambino soldier was known to be operating a chain of pizza shops around Virginia Beach. That man’s father had been pinpointed by Intel as an international heroin trafficker who was wanted in Italy for the murder of seven police officers. A cop-killer, seven times over. And his son was running around Virginia Beach! Would he recognize Chris? Would Chris recognize him? Could Chris chance eating in a restaurant tonight? Was he being paranoid? Would somebody be lying in wait for him in the parking lot? At least then he wouldn’t have to tell Marty.
He had to tell her. He couldn’t go on without telling her. And she would understand. She had to understand. She lived in two worlds, too. At home she was a dutiful daughter who knew her place. A Mafia daughter. Away from home, she was her own person, freer. She would understand because she loved him.
But which Chris did she love? Would she still love him when he told her? “Guess what I do for a living. I’m a cop! Isn’t that great?” Maybe she would hate him. Maybe she would tell her father. Maybe she would throw her arms around him and say it was all right. Maybe she would tell her mother. When he thought of Anna, he felt so bad that he rolled over in the bed and just stuck his face in the pillow.
When Marty returned, she showered and dressed and they went to dinner at a steakhouse next door to the hotel. Chris had three bourbons and most of a bottle of wine. He thought drinking would make it easier to talk, because drinking and talking went hand in hand, as he knew from spending time with the Penguin.
They took towels from the room and walked out onto the beach. They spread the towels on the fine, white sand and sat in the moonlight. It wasn’t a full moon, but very bright, about three-quarters. If he was ever going to tell her, there would never be a better time, never a better place than tonight, on this beach in the moonlight.
And he was going to tell her. But he had to work up to it, first.
“I always did like going to the beach,” he said. “When we started going down to Sandy Hook, I remember I had raspberry ice cream for the first time. I never even knew there was such a thing as raspberry ice cream. I tried to find it in New York, but I never could.
“We had a bungalow at Sandy Hook. It was just a rented place, but we went there for a month every summer. Not when I was real little, but later on, when my pop had more money. He didn’t get down much, though. He used to come on Saturday night and go back to the city on Sunday night. Sometimes he worked on Sundays and sometimes he didn’t.
“I really liked going down, because I always did like the beach. I loved to smell the water. The only reason I didn’t like it at Sandy Hook was because my sister’s godmother had a bungalow down there, too. She never liked me at all. In fact, I think she hated me. One day, I remember, I wanted to get back at her for hitting me, so I set fire to her clothesline. She had a clothesline in the yard and I put a match to it, and when it started to burn, I ran back in my house and hid under the bed. I think I really wanted to burn her house down, and maybe her, too. The thing about it was …”
He stopped talking suddenly. This was ridiculous. He was going nowhere. Marty was just sitting, listening. She must think he was crazy, rambling on like this. Better to just blurt it out.
“There’s something you have to know,” he said.
Marty waited. Chris said nothing.
“What is it, Christy?” she asked. She sounded concerned. “What is it I have to know?”
He couldn’t answer. The words stuck in his throat.
“Christy, what’s the matter?” Marty asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just thinking.”
“Oh, Christy, what do you think about so much?” Marty said wistfully. “You’re always thinking. I thought that when you got out of New York, you would be the way you were in Boston. You were wonderful in Boston. You seemed so happy and relaxed, and now you’re all tense again.”
Chris stared at the waves breaking on the beach. The crash of the waves seemed to get louder and louder, echoing in his brain so that he couldn’t think. He couldn’t get it straight in his head.
“You just have to know that people are complicated,” he said wearily. “People are not always what they seem.”
Back in New York, it was worse than ever. Except for running to Our Lady of Pompeii, he could find no refuge. Once, being with Marty had been an escape. Now it seemed like escaping into a trap. Marty talked of marriage almost every time they were together. Every time he saw her, he knew that, sooner or later, the subject would come up, and he would be taut with anticipation. What will I say this time?
She didn’t nag him or pressure him. It was a sense of her expectations, her quiet question: “Have you thought any more about when we can get engaged, Christy?”
“No, I haven’t had a chance to think about it yet,” he would say. “Soon, though. If not at Christmas, then maybe Valentine’s Day, or Easter.”
She didn’t pursue it when he said that, but she looked so disappointed that he actually thought of becoming engaged. After all, engagements could be broken. He wasn’t really leading her on, he told himself. She was the one who’d brought it up in the first place.
Thinking about becoming engaged to this girl was so unreal that it was easy to think about. Everything seemed unreal, now. The fact that he was married and had a wife somewhere seemed unreal. The only thing that seemed real was a given moment, a certain situation. So he just got through the moment, or the situation, as best he could, in any way he could. It was a way of buying time. If he could buy some time, maybe whatever the problem was would go away. Or if it didn’t go away, if it came back, by then he would surely have figured out how to handle it. In the meantime, he would just say whatever had to be said to anybody to satisfy them, for the time being. That seemed the only way to handle it. Anyway, he didn’t think he had much longer.
When Marty reminded him of the wedding of her school friend, he had to go. He’d promised he would. He’d forgotten about it; she’d asked him so long ago that he must have thought then that the day would never come. But it came, and Marty was a bridesmaid.
He told her he wouldn’t go with her to the church. “You’ll have a partner there,” he told her. “Somebody will escort you down the aisle, and I’d just be in the way.” He joined her at the reception, at Leonard’s of G
reat Neck. She was stunningly beautiful in a pale-blue dress—more beautiful than the bride, he thought, though that girl was very pretty, too. And Chris was right: Marty did have a partner, a tall, good-looking guy who seemed to think that being in the wedding party gave him some kind of claim on her. The guy kept asking her to dance, and Marty kept saying yes. She explained to Chris that the guy was the bride’s cousin, from Chicago, so of course she had to be nice to him. It seemed to Chris that she was being nicer than she really had to be, though. As he sat at the table, drinking bourbon, watching her dancing with the guy, looking at him and laughing happily, Chris realized he was jealous.
When Marty came back to the table, there was another guy right behind her. Marty sat down quickly beside Chris and leaned against him, cocking her head. “Smile,” she told him. “Say cheese.” The wedding photographer snapped the picture so quickly that Chris didn’t have time to duck his head or turn away. He just sat there and had his picture taken.
He wanted to do the laundry. When he was first married, he’d found, to his surprise, that he enjoyed domestic chores. Doing the laundry, folding heaps of clean towels, was a satisfying thing to do, for some reason. So he went to Forest Hills, late one afternoon. Liz wasn’t home, but there was plenty of laundry around. Some of her things were hanging on the backs of chairs; there were towels all over the floor.
He straightened up the place, stuffed the laundry into big plastic bags, and went down to the basement. He did four loads, but he didn’t fold the things downstairs. He brought the bags up and spilled everything out onto the bed. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, folding towels, when Liz came home.
“A friend of mine said he saw you in a nightclub with a woman,” Liz said. Her voice wasn’t accusing, just conversational.
Chris tried to keep his voice level, too.
“It’s possible,” he said. “It’s very possible. Because of the work I’m doing. Somebody could see me with a woman, or two women, or half a dozen women.” He paused. “Who told you?”
“I can’t tell you,” Liz said.
“When did your friend see me?” Chris asked. “Was it last night?”
“Yes, last night,” Liz said.
Chris felt worse, in a way, than if someone had actually seen him with Marty. He hadn’t been at a nightclub the night before. Why was Liz lying? Was she trying to trap him into some sort of confession? Did she suspect something? Of course she must suspect something. It wasn’t bad enough that he was such a liar and deceiver. Now he’d turned his wife into a liar, too.
“Where did he see me?” Chris demanded. “I go to thousands of places. Where was this place?”
“He didn’t tell me that,” Liz said.
Chris knew he should drop it, let it go. But he couldn’t.
“Well, why is it his business to tell you what I’m doing?” he said angrily. “And why is it your business to tell him all about me?”
Liz just looked at him. “I didn’t tell him all about you,” she said quietly. “I’ve known him for a long time, and he says he knows you, and he knows you’re a policeman.”
“Well, who is this guy, anyway?” Chris demanded.
Liz laughed. “Why is that any of your business?” she asked.
She walked out of the room. Chris finished folding the towels and put them in the hall closet. Then he went into the den and closed the door. There was no point in trying to talk to Liz now. He thought she probably hadn’t wanted him to be a policeman, anyway.
Sundays at Marty’s house were becoming unbearable. Anna had always seemed fond of him, but now she smiled at him in a special way. “When you have a place of your own, I hope it will be near us,” she said, one day. “I’d like to watch my grandchildren growing up.”
Chris kept thinking of the Sunday afternoons when he was a kid, when people came to ask George for favors, paying their respects, asking George to vouch for a family member who wished to come to America. Chris remembered how, on their careful budget, his parents had served good wine in Katrina’s precious cordial glasses. When he thought of his father’s life of thrift and hard work, with no time to enjoy himself, then looked at John at his abundant table, he saw John as sleek and greedy and evil, and he longed to “get him good.” Then he looked to the other end of the table, and he saw Anna. He saw Marty. Then he saw John as Anna’s husband, Marty’s father. The thought crossed his mind that maybe John knew he was a cop, and was accepting it, because he knew his daughter loved him.
He sometimes wondered whether maybe it would work out. He would explain everything to everybody, and everybody would understand, and he and Marty would ride off into the sunset, just like in a movie. But the movies never showed what happened, after they rode off into the sunset. Of course it would never work. He would have to resign from the department. Even if he resigned, how could he explain that he was going to marry a mob guy’s daughter, after working undercover for almost five years? He would be charged with breaching confidentiality; he would almost surely be prosecuted.
Apart from all that, how could he expect Marty’s parents to believe him? “I’m a cop, and I’ve been spying on you, but I’ve changed my mind.” Even if he didn’t explain anything to anybody, and just ran away with Marty—assuming that she’d be willing to run—where would they go? There was no place in the world that would be far enough.
Of course it wouldn’t work out. He knew that, and because he knew that, he didn’t want to end it. He wanted to prolong it as long as he possibly could.
He had a few more things to do, anyway. He got some more pieces of jewelry for Solly’s son-in-law, who had the antiques shop on Third Avenue. He even did some mediating, having been around so long, and being so well-respected.
A guy named Irving, who had a tennis club in Howard Beach, had complained that a wiseguy had come into the tennis club and demanded money. When Irving refused, the hood had begun throwing things around, making a mess of the place. Chris could understand Irving’s problem; nobody liked to see fights going on, on the sidelines, when they were trying to play tennis.
When Irving went to Frankie for help, Frankie brought Chris into it. Frankie and Chris met the wiseguy at a booth at the Lindenwood Diner. Chris knew the guy was a bad, bad apple; he’d heard that he’d killed some women. His M.O. was to shoot them, then put them in a car, drive it someplace and burn it. Chris thought the fellow a psycho. Chris had met him at J.J.’s, a joint in Queens, and he wasn’t thrilled to be sitting with the guy in a close situation, in a booth at the diner. The wiseguy was quick with a gun; he had a special gun, Irving told them, with a red barrel.
So Chris let Frankie do most of the talking. He just listened as the hood told them he’d loaned money to Irv, to open the tennis club, so Irv owed him, now. Frankie told the guy that he and Chris would talk to Irving to get his side of the story. Irving told them that he had never borrowed that money, though Irv admitted he’d been involved in an airport job with the guy, taking down an armored car. He said the other guy had used the gun with the red barrel.
Chris called the Penguin.
“You wanna buy some TV sets?” Chris asked. “I got some nice new ones.”
The Penguin was ready to deal. Chris loaded a van with thirty thirteen-inch RCA color sets and drove down to Mulberry Street. The Penguin told Chris to take them to another club nearby, not the Ravenite. Chris was pleased, because he hadn’t even known about the other place. In a back room, one of the Penguin’s crew had the money ready, wrapped in brown butcher paper.
Chris didn’t hang around then. One quick drink; he was edgy, being wired. The merchandise didn’t have to be actually stolen, under the law. As long as the customers thought they were buying swag, it showed probable cause. The TV sets weren’t even confiscated. When the property clerk couldn’t come up with thirty new TV sets, Chris had bought them at Alexander’s. He paid a discount price, but then he lowballed them for the Penguin, to make the offer too good to refuse, so in the short run, the NYPD lost money on the d
eal.
For the last few months of his assignment, Chris just drifted through the days and weeks, thinking, floundering, hurting. The lump in his groin was growing; Marty had noticed it, when they were in bed.
“It’s nothing,” Chris assured her. “Just an old hernia.”
He was so entangled in his own problems that he scarcely noticed what was going on in the world, though he couldn’t help hearing. When Carmine Galante was assassinated, he heard about it from both sides. Nobody seemed surprised at the disrespectful way the guy had been hit—eating lunch at a Brooklyn restaurant—and Chris wasn’t surprised, either, considering how Galante had been booted out of the restaurant in Queens. From his side of the law, Chris heard that when detectives reached the scene, one of them stuck a cigar in Galante’s mouth. “He looks better that way,” the detective said. The photos of the dead man showed him lying on his back, in his short-sleeved shirt and summer slacks, his head tilted to one side and a cigar in his mouth.
Chris heard the Pope was coming to town.
“Is there any way I can meet the Pope, Harry?” Chris asked. Intel handled diplomatic escorts, visiting dignitaries, that kind of thing. “Not to be part of it, but just to meet the man, you know?”
“Are you crazy?” Harry said. “There’ll be pictures, cameras, TV, the works. Of course you can’t meet the Pope!”
“Think about it, Harry,” Chris persisted. “I just want to get his blessing. I’ll make it quick: in and out. I could wear a disguise.”
Harry grumbled and said he’d think about it. Chris was fairly optimistic. Maybe Harry could arrange it. They both knew this assignment was winding down. And after the night at the Kew, Harry owed him one.
Harry called back to say it wouldn’t work. “I ran it by the inspector and he said he didn’t see how we could do it. He said if there was a way to do it, okay, but he had his doubts.”
“Keep trying,” Chris urged. “It would be a real honor, Harry. I wouldn’t make a big deal about it, I promise. In and out. Pull some strings, Harry.”
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