Love or Honor (14 page)

The kitchen was small, not even a separate room, with only a divider between the kitchen space and the living room. Since Chris didn't intend to do much kitchen duty, it didn't matter. Once in a while he had a yen for Greek food, after years of thinking he'd had his fill. At school, when other kids had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or baloney sandwiches, in their lunchboxes, he'd find that Katrina had sent him off with eggplant parmigiana, olives, artichokes. When he had feta cheese in his lunch, other kids would hold their noses and say, “What the heck is
that?”
Chris would sometimes throw his lunch away, on the way to school, and either go without, or buy a handful of candy bars and call it lunch.

The apartment was unfurnished. “Don't get carried away,” Harry warned, when Chris set out to furnish the place. “You're not supposed to be living like a sheik.” Chris said he wouldn't. An hour later, Harry called back. “I've arranged a loan from the Salvation Army,” he told Chris. “I thought you might get carried away.”

So Chris went to the Salvation Army where, somewhat to his surprise, it worked out fine. The Salvation Army people, having been told that two rooms of furniture were needed for an important NYPD project, had sorted out some very good pieces, including a sofa in a dark-green fabric and an upholstered chair, lightly used, just enough so the pieces didn't look too new. The dining table and chairs were ordinary looking, but Chris knew that the guys who would be coming around to play cards would play on an overturned orange crate, if necessary. The queen-sized bed had a new mattress. Chris bought satin sheets, in a whimsical mood, to give the place some flash.

At the Salvation Army, he bought a small suitcase full of women's clothes, using a mental picture of Liz to guide him in choosing the clothes, which the clerk told him was size eight. He bought three pairs of high-heeled shoes and went to a drugstore where he asked the salesgirl to pick out a collection of cosmetics for him to give to a young lady as a gift. All these things scattered around the apartment would give visitors the impression that Chris had a woman in his life. In fact, he had suggested to Harry that a policewoman be sent under, to be his occasional girlfriend. When Harry vetoed that idea, Chris had begun picking out girls from the flock at his place to take to dinner from time to time, or to a club. If he'd never been seen with a female, he thought he'd be looked at with suspicion. Although he thought there was a good deal of latent homosexuality among mob guys, they had women—lots of women—in their lives. In these circles, Friday night was
“gummare”
night—girlfriend night—at clubs and restaurants, Saturday night was wife night, usually at the same clubs and restaurants. Chris figured the wives must have thought, What the heck? The man's a killer, a shylock, an extortionist—what difference does it make if he has a girlfriend?

Chris had lived with his mother until he was married, so this was the first place of his own, all his own, that he didn't have to share even with a wife. He put up a
Rigoletto
poster and shelved his opera records. He put up bookshelves and stacked some of his books, including
Bulfinch's Mythology.
He hung a framed print of his favorite painting, Edward Hopper's “Early Sunday Morning.”

Once, it was said, you proved yourself in the mob by making a hit: killing somebody. Harry had a plan, in case that ever came up—he'd have arranged to have the potential victim kidnapped by the law and held in faraway protective custody while Chris took all the credit. They didn't expect it would come up, though, and it didn't. In the modern mob, Chris found, you proved yourself by showing that you were an earner. Anybody could be connected, whether Greek, Jew, even black, if he could prove himself an earner. He wouldn't be cut in on a flourishing enterprise, but he would be given a chance to prove he could turn around an operation that wasn't doing well. Chris knew he was being tested when Solly commissioned him to take over the management of an OC spot on West 38th Street in Manhattan. “The guy who's running it for me is slacking off,” Solly told Chris. “He's out, I'm putting you in.”

As much as he wanted to get next to Solly and his crew, Chris was dismayed at the prospect because, beside the gambling operation, there was a prostitute section. He took a chance, and told Solly of his qualms. “I don't want you to be a pimp,” Solly assured him. “I just want you to manage the place.”

Chris recruited a guy from Astoria to oversee the pross operation and, altogether, it wasn't so bad. The old loft building was clean and well-kept, with a directory in the small lobby that listed the place as The Daily Planet. The girls were mostly young and pretty, recruited from ads for “Hostess” in the
Village Voice;
many of them were college students. And the customers were mostly clean-cut, upright citizens; businessmen with briefcases, making a quick detour between their offices and the nearby Port Authority Bus Terminal, where they caught buses home to the suburbs. Still, Chris felt cheap as he worked on the bookkeeping: thirty-five dollars a pop, with twenty-five for the house, eight for the girl, two for towels.

By 8
P.M.
the pross business had died out, and Chris could concentrate on the gambling side, which he enjoyed. He decided to set up a barbouti game. He thought he could pick up the cups for rolling the dice at any store, maybe even Woolworth's. When he couldn't find them anywhere, he had to ask a guy at the Grotto. “You're still a Greek greenhorn,” the guy jeered. “There's only one place you can get them, and they have to be hand-stitched, with a special kind of leather.” When he wouldn't tell Chris where that one place was, Chris turned to Kostos, who sent him to a cobbler in Astoria. Chris had to pay two hundred fifty dollars for the pair of cups. Harry hit the ceiling when Chris showed him that item on his expenses, but he calmed down when Chris handed over a large bundle of bills. On a good night, The Daily Planet grossed eight to ten thousand dollars. Even on a slow night, two to four thousand. The place in Astoria wasn't doing so well—Chris suspected that Gene was skimming, to pay the shys—but it didn't seem to matter so much. Even after Chris turned over Solly's share—sometimes to Solly himself, sometimes to Big Lou—Chris had a lot of cash to turn over to Harry, while still keeping several thousand in his pocket for day-to-day expenses. He couldn't help thinking, hey, maybe crime
does
pay!

“See that guy?” a club owner said to Chris one night at the Skyway, a joint near LaGuardia. “He's one of the youngest captains in the police department. He pulls yellow sheets for me.”

Chris didn't know the guy, but he felt a little sick. He still felt bad when he learned that cops, even captains, had their price. As a child, he'd been walking with his mother along a street in East Harlem, when he'd caught a glimpse of a scene that, even now, all these years later, stood out in his mind in a dreadful freeze-frame.

They'd been passing a tenement building, Chris clinging to his mother's hand, when he'd turned his head slightly and had seen, in the doorway of a building, a man beating up a cop in uniform. The man was hitting the policeman hard, holding him up against the wall with one hand and punching him in the stomach with the other hand.

Katrina hadn't seen it, and in a moment they'd passed by. It had bothered Chris then, though he hadn't said anything about it; he wouldn't have known what to say. Later, he realized he'd seen a cop on the take being beaten up by a guy he'd doublecrossed, or hadn't paid off sufficiently, or whatever.

Even when he became a cop, Chris had had only one encounter that illustrated to him the relationship of some cops with some OC people. He and Phil had never worked with the public morals unit, whose job it was to keep tabs on after-hours places, the KG's—known gamblers—and the clubs in their South Bronx neighborhood. But one day, about eleven o'clock in the morning, they'd spotted a guy on a street corner who seemed to them to be making all the right wrong moves. When they parked their car around the corner and got out, intending to talk to him, the guy took off. They ran him down at Emilio's, where he was sitting at the bar with a drink in his hand.

“Why were you running away from us?” Phil demanded.

“Who, me?” the man mumbled. “I don't know what you're talking about.” While Phil was getting the guy to his feet, patting him down, Chris noticed a tiny slip of white sticking out from the thick vinyl padding along the bartop. When Chris pulled on it, other bits of paper came up, too.

“Digits,” Chris told Phil. “Numbers. The guy's a bookie.”

He jabbed a finger at him. “We're taking you in for gambling,” he said, as a voice called softly, from the semi-darkness at the end of the bar. “Officer, can I talk to you?”

Phil stayed with the numbers runner while Chris walked the length of the bar, to the man who'd spoken. He was older, with gray hair, well-dressed. “Can we work this out?” he asked Chris.

Chris stared at him.

“Let my guy go,” the man repeated, “and you and I can adjudicate this right here.”

Chris felt as though he had been smacked in the face. “If you are offering me a bribe,” he said loudly, “this is what I am going to do. First: I am going to kick you in the balls. Second: I am then going to lock you up also.”

The man just smiled and shrugged, a small, half-sad, half-sanguine smile that said, have it your way, but you're wrong.

Chris put the slips in his helmet bag—they always carried helmets in the car, for riot situations—and they drove with their prisoner back to the station. Chris was astonished to find that they were not congratulated on making the bookmaker collar; in fact, they got a lot of flak. They were criticized for having overstepped their role and some cops suggested they just drop it, even though it was felony weight. When they went ahead with the procedures, vouchered all the evidence, they were given the silent treatment, made to feel like outcasts. When the court date came, all the evidence—the betting slips—had mysteriously disappeared. Chris thought again of the man's quiet arrogance, the smug sense of power reflected in that look on his face.

Now he was seeing that same look on the faces around him. In their world of rules and power plays and respect, these men—at least the older men—spoke quietly. Solly had an especially slow, deliberate way of speaking, as though nothing in the world could upset him.

The deeper Chris got with the Italians, the more he felt that this route was more productive. He had pretty much concluded that there was no organized crime structure among the Greeks. Obviously they had connections, roots within the Italian families, but as far as the Greek crime community went, it was not organized. Only Kostos and a guy from Canada seemed to have real influence; below them, the mob was on the loose. The Greeks were so unstructured, in fact, that Gene suggested to Chris that they set up a crime family.

Chris knew that Gene and most of the others felt he was more intelligent than they. He didn't necessarily think so; he felt a novice in their world, while they knew all the angles. Still, they were coming to him for advice. Chris was fascinated by one guy who made about ten grand a month in fraudulent insurance claims, who came to Chris for advice in filling out the forms. Chris was fascinated by his MO: He would buy cars in various states, change the VIN—the Vehicle Identification Number—get a duplicate car, stage a wreck, and eventually collect. The operation was so complicated that it went over Chris's head, and he was impressed. The scheme was so profitable that the man moved from Astoria to a luxury building on the east side of Manhattan, where he organized a tenant's association. When he collected a five-hundred-dollar membership fee from most of the sixty tenants, he moved out.

“Why don't we start our own thing, and you be the top guy?” Gene asked Chris, who thought it was an excellent suggestion, as he explained to Harry. “I'll draw more attention, I'll get more information.”

Harry turned purple. “Are you
nuts
? Are you
bananas
? Have you gone totally
berserk
?” Harry yelled. “Do you have any idea what could happen to you? Forget it! I am telling you, forget it!” So Chris had to explain to Gene regretfully that it was too bad, he just didn't have time to be a godfather.

It was true that his time was limited in Queens, now that he was paying so much attention to Solly and the Italians. When Solly invited him to a christening party one Sunday in late spring, Chris was glad to go. He was always on the lookout for new names and faces.

The house was big and rambling—not a mansion, but a house that spoke of money and all the consolations money could buy. More than the house, it was the wide sweep of lawn that impressed Chris. He knew the price of acreage on Long Island. A circular driveway led to the main entrance, where Doric columns—a little too grand for the house—flanked the doorway.

Chris didn't go inside that day. The party was outdoors, on the expanse of freshly trimmed lawn, where a blue-and-yellow-striped tent had been set up. A long table was laden with food: watermelons scooped out holding melon balls, strawberries, gleaming black grapes. A chef in a tall white hat carved slices of baked ham; there were enormous bowls of pasta and seafood. White-jacketed waiters walked around, pouring what seemed to be oceans of champagne. An accordion player and a violinist strolled among the guests.

Chris waited until he was sure he was being observed before he approached the gift table. Some of the women had brought crib blankets and booties, but the gift of choice was cash. He took a new hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and dropped it into the crystal bowl in the center of the table, with bouquets of blue-tinged carnations on either side of the bowl.

He turned and almost bumped into her. She was slim and lovely, wearing a pretty summer dress, silky and kind of floating, with a beautiful Florentine cross, blue enamel overlaid with gold, around her neck. Chris's first thought was that she looked more Irish than Italian. She reminded him of the actress, Katharine Ross.