Love or Honor (7 page)

There was always snow in the country. Liz's parents didn't have a farm, but they had a lot of ground, with birch woods stretching behind the house. Sometimes Chris got up very early, the morning after Christmas, and walked in the woods alone. He never chopped wood—as a city kid, he was sure he'd cut off a foot had he tried to wield an ax—but he learned to make a good long-lasting fire, poking and stoking it late into the night. The rambling old Victorian house smelled gloriously of pine, of roasting turkey, and pies in the oven. He liked to lie on the floor in front of the fire, listening to the murmur of voices all around him, sometimes dozing, sometimes just dreaming. He liked the way he and Liz seemed to laugh a lot, in the country. At home, in the city, there didn't seem to be as much time to laugh. They had busy schedules. Sometimes they met in the city for dinner, then went to a club to hear jazz. Chris could never persuade Liz to go to the opera, though. As much as she loved music, Liz didn't like opera, so he went only once in a while, while she was out of town, and he played his opera records at home only when he was there alone.

The Maria Callas was so loud that he almost didn't hear the shrill ring of the phone.

“Chris, don't be stupid,” the man on the phone said bluntly. “Do you realize what you're doing, if you turn this down?”

It was Captain Selzer, whom Chris had known in the Bronx, who now worked downtown. He hadn't been at the morning meeting, but obviously knew all about it.

“Hey, Cap,” Chris said. “I've already turned it down. I just don't want it, you know? I'm really happy where I am.”

“Chris, listen to me,” Selzer said. “Just listen to me for a minute. I'm telling you, don't say no to this. You know Intel is the elite unit. I don't have to tell you that, and if you do a good job, Chris, you can make the gold.”

“And what if I don't?” Chris countered. “What if I screw up? Would I get busted back to the bag?”

“No, no you wouldn't,” Selzer said. “I give you my word, you wouldn't go back into uniform. You could just go back to what you're doing now.”

“Hey boss, you know I want the gold,” Chris said. “But I think I can get it anyway, with what I'm doing, sooner or later. And I really don't want this job.”

“I'm telling you again,” Selzer persisted, “don't turn this down. You'd be making a big mistake.”

“Hey, I don't even know what they want me to do, exactly,” Chris said. “Gather intelligence, they said. But that sounds real vague, and I don't really know what they want me to do. I'm not sure
they
know what they want me to do.”

“Here's what I want you to do, Chris,” the captain said. “Take the job for a little while. Ninety days. How does ninety days sound? Then, if you want to drop it, you drop it, no questions asked.”

“I still don't think …” Chris began, when the captain cut in. “Think about it some more,” he said briskly. “The inspector wants you to think about it some more. He thinks you haven't thought about this sufficiently, Chris, and he wants you to take the weekend to think about it. So you do that.” He hung up before Chris could say anything more.

Chris turned the record over and walked out to the kitchen. He got another cup of coffee, took a sip, then poured it down the sink and opened a diet cola. He went back into the living room and sat at the end of the sofa.

He'd started out as a mediocre cop, then he became a good cop. Not a superstar, just a very good cop. He was satisfied with what he was doing at the 4-oh. After coming close to messing up his life, all the drinking and the drifting, he was straightened out. As a good cop, he was making something of himself. Redeeming himself.

Early in his career, he'd been lazy. Once, Chief Bouza in the Bronx had called him up to his office. Bouza was an impressive-looking guy, very tall and lanky, six five, with a wonderful way of speaking. Some people thought he was arrogant, but Chris liked him a lot. The chief had a fabulous vocabulary; talking with him, Chris thought, was like talking to a professor.

The chief pointed a finger at him. “What are you doing in terms of education?” he demanded.

“Well, I take some classes at John Jay,” Chris began. Then he stopped. He didn't want to bullshit the chief. It was true that he'd signed up for classes given at the precinct through the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But it was also true that he didn't pay attention, didn't do the assigned reading, and often dozed in class. “Well, nothing,” Chris admitted.

“You know, Chris,” the chief said, “I'm a dropout from Manual Trades High School. And now I have my Ph.D. in Police Management.” Chris was wondering how to respond—should he congratulate the boss?—when Bouza pointed dramatically to the bookshelf behind his desk. “See those books? Those are
my
books, Chris. I wrote them! And yet I was a dropout from Manual Trades!”

Chris could see what the chief was driving at, men, and for a while he tried to pay more attention to the classes. But his heart wasn't in it. He didn't need a college degree to get the gold shield of a detective. For that he needed a hook or a “rabbi”—either a high-ranking cop who could give him a strong reference and hook Chris up the ladder with him, or someone who would press his cause, perhaps using political connections. Chris had neither, so he needed lots of arrests, lots of medals. He was working on it.

He went back into the kitchen for the rest of the soda. He stood again at the kitchen window, looking down at the courtyard. The overhead lights had just gone on; in the early dusk, a man was walking along the path, swinging a briefcase, probably on his way home from work. Heading home to his wife and children.

Chris and Liz had talked about having children, then had put it on the back burner. For one thing, Liz had worked hard to get where she was in her profession; she'd taken lessons for years—dancing, singing, acting; she'd gone to auditions constantly, answered “cattle calls,” and she seemed to be just on the verge of getting some big breaks. She had time—she'd be just twenty-eight on her next birthday, around Christmastime. Chris was a great believer in letting people do what they had to do, so that years later, one of them couldn't say to the other, “If it hadn't been for you …” If Liz didn't want to interrupt her career now by having babies, it would have been selfish and wrong of him to hassle her about it.

He thought of calling his mother. Katrina still lived in the house in Queens, where Chris had lived until he was married. He'd never thought it strange that a bachelor over thirty still lived at home; his father had always stressed that family was the most important thing in life. When George became a successful businessman, people had come to see him, to ask him to sponsor a family member in the old country who wished to come to America. Because George had an established business, his vouching that the immigrants would work in one of his restaurants, or in some other job that he would arrange for them, and not have to go on relief, was often their key to entry.

George never refused such a request, even though so many people came to see him, some Sunday afternoons, that they had to form a line. Sometimes people were so grateful that they would kiss George's hand, which Chris thought was weird. Chris had never taken part in those Sunday rituals, but he remembered the people coming, paying their respects to George, asking a favor. He remembered Katrina bringing out the homemade cookies, with small servings of wine in her precious cordial glasses, dark red with silver rims.

Sunday was always family day. When it got to the point where George didn't work on Sundays most of the time, they all went to church for the long Greek liturgy, then came home for dinner. Katrina always cooked lamb. Often, relatives came by for a visit. George had brought Katrina's brother Michael and her sister Rosa to this country; Rosa had married a friend of George's, from his old rooming house on upper Broadway, near the Riviera barbershop, so there was a collection of aunts and uncles and cousins. Those Sundays were the only days Chris remembered seeing much of his father, those Sunday dinners the only meals he remembered sharing with him. During the week, Chris and his sisters would have eaten and were usually in bed by the time George got home. Katrina always had George's meal ready, no matter what the hour, and after he'd eaten, George would go straight to bed. He never went to a restaurant except his own, except to work.

Chris still visited his mother almost every Sunday. Even when Liz was home and wanted Chris to do something else on Sunday, Chris tried never to let his mother down. Katrina never would have complained if he hadn't come, which is why he tried hard to make it.

Katrina was only fifty-one when George died, but she'd worn black from that day on, and would wear it, Chris knew, to her grave. Chris had spent the three days of his father's wake at a bar down the block from the funeral home. He'd walked up to the open casket, one time, to look at his father, and that was it. He knew his sisters were taking care of Katrina, and he knew somebody was making the arrangements—probably Uncle Mike—so Chris had just kind of drifted through those three days. He could remember people seeking him out at the bar, from time to time, coming up to him, putting a hand on his shoulder and saying, “How are you doing?”

On the day of the funeral, Chris stood on one side of his mother, Uncle Mike on the other side, as the pallbearers carried the coffin out of church. Chris didn't know those men; he guessed they were from the funeral home. Suddenly Uncle Mike stepped over to one of them, tapped him on the shoulder, and took his place. Chris wished he had done that, too. Nobody had asked him, but then, nobody had asked Uncle Mike, either.

At the time, Chris hadn't thought much about it, but later it bothered him. He thought George would have been pleased if Chris had done that, as a sign of respect.

George would have been pleased, too, that Chris was respected as a very good cop, that he was redeeming himself. And if he knew that Chris had been singled out, asked to join Intelligence, where they took only the best men, he could even have been proud.

3

His code name was Jason.

Only one man at the Intelligence Division would know him. “This is Jason,” Chris would say when he telephoned Harry, his control officer, his only link with the department. The inspector and a few other men would know about the assignment, of course, but only Harry would know on a regular basis where Jason was and what he was doing. Chris would send his reports to Harry, signed only with the code name. In his new life as a jazz drummer, just back from Vegas, looking for some action, he would keep his first name, so he would respond naturally, but he had a new last name. In his real life at home with Liz, with his mother and his sisters and friends, who knew nothing about the other names, he would still be Chris Anastos.

Already he was three different people, and he hadn't even started the job.

Before going under, he spent one more week at the 4-oh, to make his leaving there seem reasonably normal, not particularly irregular or dramatic. It was a strange week. He didn't want to make arrests, which would have tied him up in court, but it was difficult for him to walk around the neighborhood without sniffing trouble. Were those guys huddled around a table in the pizza parlor planning something more complex than whether to get mushroom or pepperoni? One of them had a long record of stickups. Maybe that young woman pushing a baby carriage very slowly, up and down the block, not seeming to be going anywhere, was pushing something else, something slipped into the pillowcase, or inside the baby's bonnet. It had happened.

And it would happen again, Chris knew, when he spotted the man he'd nicknamed Pumpkin. He was wearing an orange jacket, a bright-green cap with a black visor, and a swaggering smile that said he owned the block—which, in a very practical sense, he did.

Chris swore angrily. He'd caught up with Pumpkin, less than two months earlier, after stalking him for weeks, trying to figure out where the guy stashed his junk. He'd approached the pusher a few times, in various disguises—once, even sporting a chestnut-colored wig—but Pumpkin was tuned in to trouble and had never been willing to deal. Then Chris had put on a master act. Wearing a red bandanna tied around his head gypsy-style, a stained fatigue jacket, with a canvas pouch dangling from his shoulder, he'd stumbled down the block, appearing to be drunk, sick, stoned.

Past the liquor store, where sales were made from behind a thick Plexiglas shield, past the vacant lot piled with rubbish, he had stopped in the middle of the block, where Pumpkin was leaning against the brick wall of an abandoned tenement.

Chris lurched toward the curb, reaching out to grab on to a parking meter for support. When he seemed to regain his balance, he turned and shuffled across the sidewalk.

“Hey man,” he mumbled, “you got something for me today?”

Pumpkin said nothing. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored dark glasses.

“I'm sick, brother,” Chris pleaded in a rasping voice. “I gotta get high.”

“I don't know you,” Pumpkin said shortly.

“Hey, I just want to cop some junk, you know?” Chris moaned.

“Who sent you down?”

“Oh, some brother—hey man, what difference?” Chris turned, as though to move away. “Okay, okay, I don't need to buy from you, man.”

Pumpkin called him back. “How much you want?”

“Gimme a dime bag.” Chris groped in his jeans pocket and brought out a folded ten-dollar bill.

Pumpkin eased down the side of the building, very slowly, his long legs bending as gracefully as a dancer's. Near the bottom of the wall he turned slightly, sliding his hand along the wall. He removed a loose brick, took a glassine envelope from the hole, and deftly pushed the brick back into place. In a swift handshake, the envelope and the money were exchanged. “Move,” Pumpkin hissed.