Love or Honor (9 page)

When Chris arrived for his last day of briefing, Harry had no new material for him to sift through. Instead, he locked the door from the inside and sat down at the table, across from Chris. From his briefcase, Harry brought out a large manila envelope and spread its contents on the table.

There was a new social security card and a checkbook in his new name for an account at a bank where Chris's paychecks would be deposited for him. Those paychecks would not come through the city comptroller's office, but from some corporation Chris had never heard of; his salary would be laundered, in classic style. There was not just one fake ID, but a handful, with various addresses. One address was a safe house outside New York, but the address in Valley Stream was an abandoned warehouse.

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 pointed 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.