Love or Honor (16 page)

“That's kind of how it was with my family,” Chris said. “‘Get an education,' my Pop always said, ‘because that's the one thing nobody can ever take away from you.' It meant an awful lot to him, because he never went to school at all, not even one day.”

He paused, choosing his words carefully.

“He made money, though. He started with nothing. When he first came over, he said he worked seven days for seven dollars. But he worked hard and had a good business.” He paused. “I hear your father's in the trucking business.”

Marty said nothing.

“Has he been in that business long?” Chris asked.

“As long as I can remember,” Marty said.

“That's what I heard,” Chris said. “I've heard some things about your father.”

“So have a lot of people, Christy,” Marty said quietly. “But no matter what you've heard, he's still my father.”

Chris enjoyed the evening so much that he thought he wouldn't take Marty back to Tre Scalini or any other high-profile place. Let it happen slowly, he told himself. When she gets to trust you, she's more likely to volunteer things about her father. They began to meet once a week, always openly, never in a clandestine or sneaky way. Chris got opera tickets.
Rigoletto
had closed, so he had to sit through
Aida,
but he had a good time anyway, both at the opera and at the Plaza, where they stopped for a nightcap and spent a merry hour arguing about the effectiveness of certain high notes.

He didn't feel it was really necessary to use Marty for display purposes, anyway. He was becoming noticed on his own. One night he went alone to a restaurant in mid-Manhattan where Lou had taken him. It was a relief to go to dinner alone without having to wear the damned wire, without maneuvering a seat at the end of a table, where it wouldn't be so easy for a guy to bump up against him or throw an arm around him; those guys did a lot of hugging and grabbing and touching one another.

He was enjoying a good dinner when Artie, a regular there, approached him.

“I think you're a cop,” Artie said bluntly.

Chris didn't stop eating, and he didn't deny it, which he thought would have been suspicious.

“You're entitled to your opinion, Art,” he said casually.

Artie put his hand on Chris's shoulder. “I said, I think you're a cop,” he repeated darkly.

Chris put down his fork. He stood up. Maybe it's time for the best defense, he thought. He picked up the fork and pressed the tines against Artie's shirt lightly.

“Do me a favor,” Chris said harshly. “You think I'm a cop, Art? Okay, so you think I'm a cop. That's okay with me, pal. I don't give a shit what you think. But you keep it to yourself, okay? Because I'm doing good, I'm making money, and if you fuck things up for me with other people, you're going to get hurt, understand?”

He pressed the fork a little harder. “I don't care what you think,” he went on, talking gruffly. “It doesn't bother me at all what you think. But if you start badmouthing me to other people, you're in trouble, pal. Because you don't really know who I am or what I do, do you? DO YOU?”

Artie backed away. “Hey, okay,” he mumbled. “Hey, don't get so upset.”

“I spend my money here,” Chris went on fiercely, “and I'm telling you, just keep your fucking opinions to yourself, okay?”

“Okay, okay,” Artie muttered. “Hey, I'm sorry. Dinner's on me, okay?”

Chris put down the fork. “Okay, then, no problem.”

He went back to his dinner, feeling good about his act. But just as he was finishing, Artie returned. “I feel like moving around tonight,” he said. “Let's have a drink around the corner.”

Chris thought this was Artie's way of apologizing, admitting he'd been wrong. “Sure, why not?” he said.

The place around the corner had a reputation as a good place to fence merchandise. Chris had met a prosperous fence there. He knew that in the long run, fencing was important, because it eventually affected the general public: When goods are stolen from warehouses, trucks hijacked, everybody ends up paying for it down the road. But it wasn't a priority with him, so he didn't pay much attention to other conversations. He just sat at the bar with Artie.

They were on their second drink when Artie reached into his pocket and brought out a folded tinfoil packet. “This is a present,” he declared. “Even if you
are
a cop, I can give it to you. It isn't a crime unless I sell it to you.”

Wrong, pal, Chris thought. Giving it to me is a criminal act, too. But he was less concerned with the legal point than with the realization that Artie still wasn't satisfied. So he took the stuff and put it in his pocket. “I'll blow later,” he said. But Artie shook his head. “No,
now,”
he said. “Let's go in the bathroom.”

There, Artie was insistent. “C'mon, c'mon, let's blow.” Chris knew the guy wouldn't let up until he was convinced; he must be thinking a cop would never go that far.

Chris thought he could fake it. He'd done it before. At his club, when guys he was with had passed around a joint, he'd taken it; he'd learned that if he blew out instead of in, he got the same glow. If the other guys started laughing, then, Chris started laughing, too, and they wouldn't know the difference.

Even with heroin, it had worked once. He'd gone into an apartment building to make a buy. Four big guys, really huge, were in the apartment, and when he'd bought the stuff, they'd stopped him as he was about to leave. “We want you to get off here,” one guy said.

Chris had tried to talk his way out of it. “I'll do it later. I ain't got my toys with me.”

The biggest guy smiled tightly. “We got all that shit right here.”

Chris gave it one more shot. “Naw, I don't like using anybody else's shit.” But the guy just handed him the needle. When Chris looked around the room, he saw two guys blocking the door, another at the window.

He took the needle and went into a corner, near the bathroom door. With his head bowed and his back turned, he put the needle through the skin on his arm, and out the other side. He stayed in that position for a minute or two. What do I do now? he thought. It occurred to him that maybe they'd given him pure flour, and that this was a test.

“How do you feel, brother?” one guy said, peering at him. Chris straightened and shrugged, his heart pounding. “I've had better,” he said arrogantly. The guy smiled. “Okay man, you're cool,” he said, motioning to the others to let Chris out.

Now, in the bathroom, Chris hoped he could duplicate that scene.

He handed the packet from his pocket to Artie, who took a large dash between his fingers and put it up his nose, keeping his eyes on Chris. Chris took some, bent his head, smeared it on his upper lip, and made such a general fuss about it that Artie was apparently satisfied.

They went back to the bar, then Art wanted to blow again. They went through the same routine twice more, until most of the stuff was used. Chris kept the small residue in the packet with him.

“I'm going to call it a night now, Art,” he said. But Artie draped his arm around Chris's shoulder. “No, not yet,” he said. “Now we're going over to Spartacus and get laid. For a hundred, you get the works.”

He was watching Chris closely, for his immediate reaction. He wants to see me undress, Chris thought, to see if I'm wired or armed. Since he wasn't wired, thank God, he decided to string him along, maybe settle this once and for all.

Spartacus was called a health club, though Chris had never seen any exercise machines there, let alone aerobics classes. But it had showers and lockers and private rooms for its select clients; there was a fifty-dollar admission charge just to get in the front door. Chris gave it one more try. “Some other time, Art,” he said. “I don't feel like paying tonight.” Artie grinned. “Don't worry about it,” he said. “I'm paying the freight.”

At the bar at Spartacus, done up like a Roman fantasy, Artie beckoned to a girl to join them. She brought a friend with her. The men went up to the locker room, where Chris took off all his clothes, put them in a locker and put the key on the elastic band around his wrist. Just like the YMCA, he thought wryly. As screwed up as Artie was, with all the booze and the coke, he was watching intently as Chris came out of the shower. So Chris dropped the towel he'd wrapped around his waist and stood, facing Artie.

“Well, whaddaya think, Art?” he asked lightly. “Am I okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Artie muttered, blinking. He shook his head. “After this, we'll meet downstairs and then we'll go for a ride,” he said.

Chris didn't like the sound of that. A ride might mean going to a diner for scrambled eggs. Or it might mean a different kind of ride. He waited until Art had disappeared into a room with his girl, then Chris went into one of the rooms. It was small, plain, clean, like a serviceable but not luxurious hotel room.

“Hello, how are you tonight?” said the girl who followed him in.

“Not so good,” Chris told her. “Listen, honey, I'm a little too drunk right now, you know?” He knew from his occasional experience with these girls, back at the 4-oh, and more often at The Daily Planet, that they wanted nothing to do with drunks. A drunk would take all night, wear the girl out.

“I gotta go, sweetheart,” Chris told her. “Here, this is for your time.”

He handed her twenty-five dollars, dressed quickly and got out fast. He was so tense that when he got down to his Waterside place, which was so conveniently close, he couldn't fall asleep. He lay on the bed, his eyes wide open, thinking that this was one hell of a stressful way to make a living.

“Why the opera?” Harry wanted to know. “And why the best seats?” When Chris explained, Harry was not only satisfied, but pleased. “Don't let her get away,” he said. Chris said he didn't intend to.

But he continued to have arguments with Harry, who'd yelled at him for going to Vegas with Frankie. “It's too dangerous,” Harry told him. “I didn't know where you were going. What if you hadn't come back? I might never have known what happened to you.”

“Listen, I made a commitment,” Chris said. But Harry kept on. “Well, you should have asked me, or at least you should have told me, where you were going, before you made the commitment.”

“Look, Harry,” Chris said. “I have to make instant decisions here. I can't say to a guy, ‘Wait a minute, I don't know if I can go to Vegas with you, I have to ask my mother.'”

Harry sighed. “I'm getting old before my time with you,” he said. “I feel responsible for you.” Chris could see that Harry was under a strain. The guy smoked four packs a day, and sometimes, after their meetings, Harry would say he needed a drink. Chris usually could use a drink, too, because he knew Harry had a point. If he were taken for a ride, dumped somewhere, he might never be found. And even if he were found, he had false ID. How would my mother know, Chris wondered. How would my wife know?

If worse came to worst, if somebody put a gun to his head, he always intended to say, “I'm a cop. I'm a detective with the New York Police Department.” He had nothing on him to prove that—no shield, no “detective special”—but he would give them Harry's phone number and say, “Check it out, call this number.” If he could convince them that he was a cop, he felt it would be okay, at least with the older guys, who still respected cops and would feel that as a cop, he was just doing his job. Besides, hitting a cop would draw so much heat that they would feel it wasn't worth it.

He wasn't so sure about the younger guys, though. One of Carmine Persico's sons had breezed into an after-hours place on the upper east side of Manhattan one night, where Chris was making a drop. He'd looked Chris straight in the eye and said, “I've always wanted to kill a cop.” Even though Chris felt that the kid was just shooting off his mouth, he knew that the old rules of this game, such as they were, were less important to the generation coming up. He also knew that, in such a situation, there probably would not be time for discussion, giving out phone numbers; people who considered him an informer would be likely to shoot first and ask questions later. As an informer, Chris would meet an informer's fate; shot offguard, then dumped, and if the shooter felt melodramatic, with a canary stuffed in his mouth.

Yet Harry never suggested that he drop the project. He just renewed it automatically. Even if Harry had suggested that they curtail it, Chris would have objected. He didn't want to stop. He felt like an actor in a developing drama. And if you were reading a script, say, would you want to stop in the middle? Wouldn't you want to know how it all came out?

And the plot seemed to be thickening. The longer Chris stayed under, the more there was to do. It wasn't just one-way intelligence, from Chris to Harry to the vault or wherever. Sometimes Harry had questions for him, names to target, cases that Chris might be able to help with. When Homicide talked to Harry about a body that had been found floating in the East River, Harry passed it to Chris. It wasn't a body actually, just a torso; the head and legs were missing, along with most of the arms. But the arms had been cut off below the elbow, and one elbow had gotten stuck in a drainpipe, which is how the body came to be found. Slowly, painstakingly, the ID had been made, partly through spinal X rays, partly by checking back with a woman who'd reported her father missing, months earlier. The dead man turned out to be a shylock from Astoria. When his daughter turned over his papers to Homicide, the name of Kostos and his brother were found in his account book. Apparently Pete the Greek had still owed the dead guy seventy thousand dollars. “See what you can find out on this homicide,” Harry told Chris, who thought he had a good chance of picking up something, now that he was meeting so many people. He'd met lots of guys in Astoria, more at the Kew, a crew in Manhattan.