Love or Honor

by Barthel, Joan;

  Inside the big manila envelope was a smaller envelope stuffed with cash: two thousand dollars in tens and twenties, mostly, with some fifties and a couple of hundred-dollar bills. Harry insisted that Chris count it and give him a receipt, which Chris did, feeling a bit ridiculous. There was a car registration in a corporate name, so that if anyone took down the plate number, it would either come up as a “no-hit”—too new to be filed—or, if someone really persisted, it would lead to some business in Brooklyn. And there were the car keys.

  “I already have a car,” Chris pointed out. “Why don’t we just change the plates on my vehicle? I don’t need another car.”

  Harry laughed. “You need this car,” he said. “C’mon.”

  He led Chris out of the room, down the stairs and out of the building, around the corner and down to a parking garage near the Hudson River. Harry spoke to a man at the garage and handed him the keys. A few minutes later, that man drove up the ramp in a gleaming new Buick, dark brown with a light-tan roof.

  Harry shook Chris’s hand. “Good luck, Jason,” he said. “Keep in touch.”

  As he drove east across Manhattan, Chris couldn’t help grinning. The flashy car smelled new and leathery and expensive. He had two grand in his pocket. He felt excited and sort of thrilled, very much as he’d felt when he was driving the red convertible across Manhattan, heading into Queens. And just as George hadn’t lectured him that day, as he drove across the Queensboro Bridge, neither was there anyone now to warn him, to say “Be careful.”

  More Greeks live in the Astoria section of Queens than anywhere else in the world, outside Athens. Only a twenty-minute subway ride from Bloomingdale’s, in mid-Manhattan, it’s also so far, in a sense, that someone who isn’t Greek can never complete the distance.

  Chris stopped at the newsstand, in the shadow of the elevated train, with racks of both Greek and English newspapers and magazines—Ethnikos Kirix, Proïni, The Greek National Herald. He bought a racing form; knowing that Greeks liked to gamble, it seemed a likely approach. He’d never been to the track, though, and as he settled at a table in a coffeehouse, struggling to decipher the language of the racing sheet, the wry catch-phrase came to him: It’s all Greek to me.

  He hadn’t spent time at the kafeneia—the coffeehouses—when he lived in Queens; as a teenager then, he’d had other things to do. His father had never had time to spend in coffeehouses; the only time George went to a bar was when he closed on a restaurant. Once he had taken Chris with him, set him on a stool near a dish of hardboiled eggs, and let Chris take a sip of his beer. Katrina had come to the commercial center of Astoria occasionally to buy groceries; Chris remembered the butcher shop with a full-size goat hanging head down in the window, and a hand-lettered sign: ALL YEAR ROUND, BABY LAMB PIG GOAT. Katrina had sent Chris a few times to the grocery store with gleaming green-and-gold cans of olive oil stacked in pyramids in the window, pungent with spices, dried apricots, and figs. Chris had dropped in at the Steinway branch of the public library a couple of times, but he never could remember when the books were due; he’d get a postcard from the library saying he owed them money, so finally he’d said the heck with it, and just stopped going.

  He’d gone to movies in the neighborhood as often as he could. Chris had always loved movies. When they still lived in Manhattan, when he was too young to go by himself, he used to go with his uncle Byron, who invariably fell asleep within the first twenty minutes. Chris would stand on the seat and watch the movie a couple of times over, or as long as Uncle Byron slept. When he was in the fifth or sixth grade, his teacher, Mr. Zuckerman, had worked as weekend cashier at a theater on upper Broadway, and let kids who behaved themselves in school all week get in free. Sometimes his mother even went to the movies with him. Katrina didn’t understand much English, but she loved westerns, and was especially fond of Gene Autry, who had such a lovely singing voice.

  Chris liked gangster movies and detective movies, though he suspected, even then, that they didn’t really go around snarling things like “You dirty rat!” Two detectives had come to the house once, at George’s request, to observe a man in the apartment across the street. The man had a habit of coming to the window, taking off his trousers and just standing there. Katrina and the girls were banished from the front room, but Chris was allowed to stay. He was very impressed by the detectives in their dark suits and soft hats, who talked in deep, smooth voices.

  With its tidy rows of tidy houses on clean streets, Astoria was a family community, not a high-crime precinct; the 114th was known as a “good house” to work in. During the day, its streets were filled with old women picking out fruit, piece by piece, at the produce stands, young women with toddlers in tow. At night the climate changed, but even in the daytime, Chris knew he had to stay alert, on the lookout for someone he knew. His mother lived just ten blocks away. He and Liz had been married at the Byzantine church, St. Demetrios, within walking distance of the coffeehouses where he was now hanging out.

  Liz wasn’t Greek—her ancestors were mostly German—but Chris knew his mother would be deeply distressed if they didn’t have a church wedding, and Liz had said it didn’t make any difference to her, Greek was fine. Katrina had seemed pleased that her thirty-two-year-old son was finally settling down, though Chris suspected she was less than thrilled with his choice of a bride. She never said so; she was so accustomed to the old-world tradition of not questioning the men of the family that she never discussed such things with him, and Chris was so used to not having to explain his feelings or his actions that he’d never brought it up with her.

  He didn’t think Katrina minded so much that he wasn’t marrying a Greek girl. Any bias she may have felt was more likely based on Liz’s career. Even Chris’s sisters had had their marriages arranged for them, in the old-world way. Katrina’s two-family house had been converted to three-family to accommodate his sisters, who lived the sort of traditional, housewifely lives that Liz clearly would not.

  In any case, it had been a festive wedding, an elaborate Greek service with a lot of music and chanting. The priest had spoken in English as well as in Greek, probably out of consideration for Liz and her relatives, who had come down from Massachusetts in such droves that they’d chartered a bus, making it unnecessary for anyone to drive back after a long day of partying. Chris’s cousin was his best man, because Phil was in St. Louis.

  Heads turned when Chris came into the coffeehouse, a stranger among the regulars. Late in the morning on a weekday, the place was filled with customers, mostly male, from young men in their twenties on up to elders in their sixties and seventies. Some of them sat at tables for two, others were grouped at tables seating four, with sometimes a fifth chair drawn up behind one of the chairs, in the consulting position.

  For the first few days, Chris didn’t stay long—an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Sometimes he came back in midafternoon, and sometimes he didn’t reappear until the next day. He didn’t want to appear to be in a hurry; he wanted to arouse interest, not suspicion. When he ordered coffee, or a rectangle of silky baklava, he always spoke in Greek. Since Greek men smoked a lot, he bought cigarettes, and soon was back to a pack a day. He wore dark glasses, a crisp sports jacket and slacks, no tie, a few gold chains around his neck, but no diamond ring on his little finger. He wanted to look flashy but in a restrained way. He didn’t wave money around flamboyantly, but he paid for a magazine at the newsstand with a twenty, a coffeehouse check for nine dollars with a fifty, and when he ate lunch at Stani Sistaria, the neighborhood restaurant with plaintive Greek music in the background and sentimental oil paintings of Mediterranean scenes on the stucco walls, he gave the cashier a hundred-dollar bill.

  Then he stayed away for three consecutive days, hoping that his reappearance would spark something. Sure enough: When he turned up at the place, a man speaking with a thick accent approached and sat down at his table. His name was Bennie—no last names exchanged. They talked about the day’s races, but as Bennie asked a few pointe
d questions, with men at other tables listening, Chris realized that Bennie was a scout, sent to find out whether Chris was an agent from Immigration.

  Chris laughed. “I’m just looking to make some money,” he said casually. He talked about being a jazz drummer, just back from a long gig in Vegas, then steered the conversation back to the horses. After another coffee, he left, not wishing to press the new relationship too eagerly. With nothing else to do, and with the marked-up racing form sticking out of his jacket pocket, he went to the track. Acting on advice from Bennie, plus his new understanding of the art, he lost two hundred dollars.

  The next day, Bennie greeted him warmly, and within half an hour, they had a deal. “You want to make some money?” Chris asked rhetorically. “I can get you all the cigarettes you want. You sell them for three dollars a carton, give me two.” Chris called Harry, who drove out early the next morning, to a side street near Chris’s apartment in a van filled with several hundred cartons of cigarettes that had been confiscated and were being stored with the property clerk at the NYPD. “Just be careful, they’re untaxed,” Chris warned Bennie. “No problem,” Bennie said. Chris and Harry set up a regular tobacco transfer then. Sometimes the cigarettes were so stale, from their long shelf life with the property clerk, that the tobacco slid right out of the paper. But nobody seemed to mind, because everybody was making money, including the card shop owners and delicatessen owners who bought the cartons from Bennie at discount and sold them for full price.

  When Bennie introduced Chris to his pal Gene, who wanted to make a few bucks, too, Chris added selected pieces of jewelry to his line, from the property clerk’s inventory. He was authorized to sell anything except drugs and guns; he was authorized to buy anything, including drugs and guns, and as time went on, he did. Sometimes when he made such a buy, Harry would turn the information over to the feds, making sure to keep Chris out of the picture completely. Sometimes the information went round-robin, with so many in-betweens involved that the federal people didn’t even know the information came from the NYPD. More often, Harry filed the intelligence for future use; their immediate goal went beyond drug busts.

  As the eyes and ears of the department, Chris felt compelled to report everything he saw and heard. Everything seemed crucial. If he saw someone stick an envelope in his pocket, he would note the guy’s name, the date, the exact time and location, without knowing whether the envelope contained payoff money or an electric bill. When he spotted Kostos’s Cadillac, he made a note. “I got his plate number,” he told Harry proudly. Harry sighed. “We already know his plate number,” he said.

  At the end of each day, which sometimes meant near dawn of the following day, as Chris began hanging around bars and clubs at night, he would write up pages of reports in longhand. “Type it up,” Harry pleaded. “I can’t read your writing.” So Chris got a typewriter and set it up in the second bedroom at home, which he appropriated as a den. But he was a two-finger typist, and that method was so slow that he turned to a tape recorder. He filled cassettes with his reports, which he either delivered to Harry at one of their prearranged meeting places, or sent to him by registered mail, leaving it to Harry to do his own typing.

  Liz came in as Chris was carrying the television set out of the room.

  “What’s happening?” she asked mildly. “Are we moving?”

  Chris set the TV on the floor in the bedroom and came into the living room, a little out of breath.

  “Hi, babe,” he said, kissing her. “No, not moving, just reorganizing. I have to use that room for an office for a while, okay?”

  “Okay,” Liz said.

  She changed into jeans and a T-shirt while Chris maneuvered the TV set onto an end table and got it working. He turned on the evening news, but when Liz went out to the kitchen, he followed her.

  “The thing is, I’ll be doing some work in there,” he told her, feeling awkward about trying to explain what he couldn’t explain.

  “For your new job?” Liz asked.

  “Right,” Chris said. “But remember, I said I couldn’t talk about it.”

  “I remember,” Liz said. She reached into the cupboard and brought down some cans and a bag of noodles. “I’ll make a casserole,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

  “Starving,” Chris said. He wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of another tuna casserole, but he wasn’t going to object. He knew he wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with, under any circumstances; especially now, he wasn’t going to argue about a casserole. He thought that if he suggested going out to dinner, she’d agree. She let him have his own way, most of the time—they’d gone to the Caribbean on their honeymoon because Chris loved the beach. Liz didn’t, and she’d spent the entire week under an umbrella, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat.

  Liz poured the mixture into a dish and put it in the oven. “About half an hour,” she said.

  Chris got a beer and they went back into the living room. He sat on the sofa and opened the newspaper while Liz went to the piano. She didn’t play well, just enough to pick out the notes in a piece she was learning, but Chris liked the way she looked, sitting there. They’d had a good time shopping for the piano as soon as they got back from their honeymoon. Usually Liz didn’t want him to go shopping with her—she always knew what she was looking for, and didn’t need him.

  “Did you have a good day?” he asked.

  “So-so,” she said, not looking up. “It could have been better.”

  “Well, hey, you’re good, you’re really good,” Chris said. “So you’ll have a better day tomorrow.”

  “I hope so,” Liz said. She looked over at him. “How was your day?”

  “Busy,” Chris said. He paused. “Ah—one more thing, about my work. I’ll be getting a new phone in the—in my office. If it rings when I’m not here, don’t answer it. Just let it ring. Don’t ever answer that phone.”

  “Will it interfere with our phone?” Liz asked. “I get business calls here, too.”

  “No, it won’t interfere with our phone,” Chris said.

  “Are you sure?” Liz continued. “Is our phone going to be monitored?”

  “No, no,” Chris said impatiently. “It has absolutely nothing to do with our regular phone. It’s on another wave length or something.”

  Liz didn’t say anything more. She kept working on the piece, picking out the notes with two fingers. Chris hoped she was satisfied about the phone, and he assumed she was, but it wasn’t always easy to tell what Liz was feeling. She wasn’t a demonstrative person, probably because of her German background, he thought. It was hard to tell when she was angry. He thought she probably had never been really angry at him, just as he had never been really angry at her. They’d never had a serious argument. They got along fine.

  The phone itself looked perfectly ordinary, a plain black telephone that he put on a small table next to an easy chair. But the workings of the phone were so complicated that Chris never knew how it worked, just that it was all electronic. It took the man from the phone company a whole day to install the equipment in a big box in the den closet. Harry came out that day and stayed to supervise the installation. All Chris knew for sure was that the phone was hooked up in such a devious way that if someone tried to trace the number—even someone from the phone company—they’d end up in Brooklyn. So Chris felt safe in giving the number to guys he was beginning to know, though he never told anyone where he lived. Most of the guys he met spent most of their lives in bars and clubs and restaurants, so the question had come up only casually, once or twice. He’d shrugged it off by mumbling that he lived in Valley Stream with his aunt, who was very sick and needed rest and quiet.

  Gene seemed to like Chris, whom he called “Curley,” and Chris liked Gene. He was a bad apple, no doubt about it. He’d spent time in the can, though he didn’t say for what. But he seemed to Chris to be a good family man, too, at least in context. He was separated from his wife—only temporary, he said—and was living in an apartmen
t in Astoria. He talked of his children with wistful pride, and showed Chris a wallet stuffed with their pictures.

  Gene was low-level, too, but he was a step above Bennie. And Chris felt that the way to get to the higher-ups was through the lower guys, who always owed them money. Gene owed a lot of money to the shylocks, he told Chris. He needed to make a lot of money to pay them off, and to give to his wife, for the kids. Gene intended to solve his financial problems by winning big at the Greek dice game, barbouti, and when he invited Chris to come with him to The Grotto, a cocktail lounge in Astoria, where a high-stakes barbouti game ran, Chris was delighted to go.

  The Grotto was Kostos’s place. Chris wasn’t introduced to him that first night, but he recognized him at once. Kostos wasn’t very tall, about five ten, but he was very stronglooking, powerfully built, and muscular. He had a friendly yet commanding way about him. He looked very Greek, yet he looked what Chris called “Americanized” too. He acted the way Chris thought any capo in the Italian crime community would act, with the Cadillac, the pinky ring, the gambling, the women, the whole ball of wax.

  Gene had told Chris something about Kostos, not realizing that Chris could have told him a lot more. Chris had heard at his Intel briefing that Kostos was thought to have had a role in the ten-million-dollar jewel robbery at the Pierre Hotel a few years earlier. Kostos’s friend Sammy Nalo—“Sammy the Arab,” who spoke Greek—had been convicted for that massive job and was doing time at Attica, where Kostos visited him. Kostos was suspected of having gotten a piece of that action; a lot of the loot was still missing. Nothing had been proven, though Chris had heard that when the police called on Kostos at that time, Kostos had greeted them at his front door wearing a bulletproof vest, carrying an automatic weapon.

  Kostos was known as a kind of Robin Hood in Astoria. If a woman with, say, three children and no husband was about to have her rent raised, and word got to Kostos that she couldn’t make it, Kostos was likely to arrange that her rent would stay the same or perhaps even be lowered. He gave generously to charities from one of his profitable businesses, which included a gas-skimming operation. Altogether, Kostos was most interesting, and as Chris became a regular at the Grotto, his life became more interesting, too. He met Kostos’s brother Pete, whose violent tendencies seemed to border on the psychotic. One night Chris was sitting at the bar when Pete and Kostos got into a loud argument. Before anyone could stop him, Pete pulled a gun and shot the barmaid—Kostos’s girlfriend—in the arm. Chris was stunned. He was dismayed that he couldn’t react as a cop, even though he was carrying a gun. He wasn’t carrying his service revolver, which he liked—that .38-caliber weapon was too big, too recognizable as the “detective special.” He had a little .25 Titan automatic, which he could slip into his jacket pocket as easily as though it were a hard pack of cigarettes. He didn’t have a bullet in the chamber because automatics were notoriously unreliable, likely to go off at any time, so if he’d had to use it, he’d have had to take time to load the chamber. Still, it was better than nothing. After so many years as a cop, carrying his weapon everywhere he went, he felt insecure without it, as most cops did. When his partner Phil got married, after only a year and a half on the force, he’d worn his gun under his tuxedo.