Love or Honor (2 page)

In spite of such successes, and partly because of them, Chris was not the most popular cop at the 4-oh—although he was not deeply disliked, and he'd made some close friends, especially his first partner, Phil. But quite a few of the guys on the roster regarded him with puzzled skepticism as a loner, an oddball, hard to figure out. It didn't help that he was a Greek among Irish, he opposed capital punishment, he carried
Bulfinch's Mythology
in his car at all times, and his heroes were Thomas Jefferson and Alexander the Great.

Yet he wasn't a philosopher or a scholar; he'd scraped through high school—three schools in four years—mostly because of his splendid memory, paying attention only to the subjects that interested him: history, music, and art. He was sentimental—an operatic aria could bring tears to his eyes—and a romantic, though not in a conventional sense. When he got his first maternity call and had to deliver the baby, all went well—he wiped the baby when it emerged, hit it on the back until it began to cry, laid it on the mother's thigh until the ambulance arrived, and the mother vowed to name the baby after Chris—yet he never liked to talk about it. He'd felt dizzy and lightheaded, and he thought it had been an awful sight.

He had a reckless streak and, in the beginning, a capacity for serious drinking that enabled him to hold his own, and then some, with other cops at the end of a shift. He'd been a street kid in New York, and he was not naïve.

But the streets he'd grown up in, in the 1940s and 1950s, were not the streets he patrolled in the late sixties and now, in the seventies. Street life for Chris had meant stickball, stoopball, peashooters, and skelsey, a game like shuffle-board: You drew boxes with chalk on the pavement, filled bottlecaps with melted wax, then tried to knock other kids' bottlecaps out of the squares. He wasn't a sissy: He belonged to a tough-enough gang, the Dukes of Manhattan, for about a year, wearing a black-and-yellow sweater with his name stitched on the pocket. He'd pulled fire alarms and opened fire hydrants. He'd broken off car aerials to make weapons for use against a rival gang, The Sportsmen. On a dare, he'd sauntered into a Woolworth's, grabbed a red-and-yellow magnet from the toy counter and dashed out of the store. He hadn't been caught, but he hadn't ventured back into that Woolworth's for two months; he was sure the manager would recognize him from the guilty look on his face. One summer he and a pal, Carlos, had made regular trips to a leather factory, where they'd scaled the high fence, dropped down into the yard and snitched scraps of leather. But they'd used the scraps to make wallets and wristbands, cutting their own patterns and sewing them by hand, with a commitment that would have warmed the heart of a youth worker. He was an innocent in a thoroughly innocent time.

When he came to the 4-oh, a street kid was one who used dope or sold it or both; heroin was the choice, then. A street kid no longer stole dime store trinkets, but television sets, and the store manager had reason to be afraid of
him
. The carpet guns of Chris's boyhood, though not innocuous—a piece of wood whittled into a gun shape, and a heavy piece of linoleum latched into place with a rubber band—were no match for the pieces flaunted by teenagers in the South Bronx.

In the twenty years between Chris's boyhood and the time he was sworn in, the world had changed. He found it amazing that the change had come so swiftly—not gradually, so a person could see it coming and maybe have time to prepare, to come to terms with it, but drastically, overnight. Innocence was trampled on streets that had been playgrounds and were now battlegrounds, sometimes killing grounds. In one short period, four bombs were discovered, planted in police cars. So many police call boxes were booby-trapped that the order came down not to use them; patrolmen were to carry a dime pasted in their memo books at all times, so they could telephone the station. A New York City Councilman asked the Governor to send in the National Guard at least part-time to supplement the police who, just after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., were put on emergency schedule; twelve hours a day, six days a week.

Although it seemed to be the worst of times to be a cop—a season of pervasive despair—it was, in a way, the best of times for Chris. A season of possibilities. The need for law and structure was so visible that it gave him the sense of purpose he'd never known in his first assignment, the Rockaway Beach precinct, where his main job was chasing unlicensed vendors off the beach. He didn't care that the young hustlers were selling beer from coolers, but the merchants along the boardwalk complained so vigorously to the precinct boss that Chris had been given a quota: “If you don't give out ten summonses a day, I'll know you're taking a payoff,” the boss warned. So Chris had no choice but to stalk the guys on the beach, who would hastily close their coolers and sit on them, trying to act nonchalant, when they saw him coming. He hated seeing that guilty look on their faces. He hated the tediousness of writing out each two-dollar summons. He hated getting sand in his shoes.

Chris didn't feel like a cop, and he didn't even look like a cop, much of the time; with a shortage of lockers at the station, he had to carry his uniform back and forth from home. He was so aggravated at the whole setup that he didn't bother with a garment bag; he just folded the uniform and carried it in a brown paper grocery bag in the trunk of his car.

He got so fed up with answering endless questions—“Where's the Ferris wheel?” “Where's the subway?” “Where's the toilet, Officer?”—that he filled out a Form 57, Request for Transfer, specifically asking for assignment to either Harlem or the South Bronx. Hearing stories of the work other cops had done there, or the work that cops they knew had done, made him envious; by comparison, he felt he wasn't doing police work at all. “If I'd wanted to spend my days on the beach, I'd have gotten myself a wagon and sold ice cream,” he grumbled to guys at the precinct, who usually told him to shut up and count his blessings, usually in more colorful terms.

When summer ended and the beach emptied, it was even worse: the seemingly aimless patrolling, standing on deserted street corners. Until he finally got the long-awaited call from the guy who monitored the teletype—“Hey, Chrissie, you're going to the 4-oh in the Bronx!”—he had plenty of time and energy, after work, to play. He and a bachelor buddy dropped in one night at a lively place, a cocktail lounge with a bowling alley attached. They were in partial uniform—raincoats over uniform pants and shirts—and after they'd been drinking and laughing a while, they became friendly with a woman at the bar, Josie. She had a girlfriend with her.

Pretty soon, the women invited Chris and his buddy to come home with them, to Josie's friend's apartment. The women said they lived right next door to one another, on the same floor in the same nearby building. Josie seemed especially gleeful that Chris was a cop, and assured him that her husband would be out all night, playing cards. “Hey, I don't get involved with married women,” Chris protested. But by and by, after some more drinks and some more laughs, the four of them went over to the girlfriend's apartment. They were all drinking, laughing, fooling around, when Josie's husband began hammering at the door, cursing, yelling, looking for his wife. Chris and his friend made an immediate exit through the second-floor window. Chris felt daredevil and rakish, rather like Errol Flynn. He felt he hadn't been in any great danger—although he knew, even then, that the place was a mob hangout.

In his very first week at the 4-oh, he'd made an arrest. It wasn't a big arrest; in fact, it was a measly little arrest. But as his first arrest, it was the first proof that he was indeed a cop, protector of the right, avenger of the wrong. And, as measly little arrests go, it was rather colorful.

He was assigned to duty at an elementary school where there had been serious discipline problems. He was standing at the window of a classroom when he saw a man opening the hood of a car and removing the battery. Chris knew that the teachers parked their cars there, and he knew the guy wasn't a teacher.

He raced out to the street. The thief saw him, dropped the battery in the snow, slammed the hood of the car and took off. Chris caught up with him and tackled him from behind. They fell down together. Chris's hat fell off, and they both rolled over it. The hat was bent totally out of shape. Chris pulled out the handcuffs and put them on, just as he'd been taught, the lecture running through his head: When you put the handcuffs on, be careful, because that's their last moment of freedom. If they're going to try anything, they're going to try it then. Do it as quickly as possible. Try to get the cuffs on one hand, at least, very quickly. Always cuff them behind their back, which makes it much harder to run. Besides, if they're cuffed in front, they could raise their cuffed hands and swing at you, or smash you in the face with the hardware. Try to get them down on the floor, facedown, with your knee in their back.

Chris did all that. He was just pulling the guy back up to his feet when a man came running toward them. “That's my car, Officer, and he was stealing my battery!” the man cried. Whereupon he took a swing at the man in handcuffs. “Hey, hold it, hold it, take it easy!” Chris yelled. “But that's my car, and he was stealing my battery!” the man cried. He was trying to throw more punches, as the shriek of sirens pierced the street. Someone from inside the school had called the precinct, saying a policeman was in trouble. The call had gone out as a ten-thirteen—assist patrolman—which cops respond to without delay. And thus half a dozen radio cars, sirens screaming, lights flashing, were converging on the crime scene, bumping into one another, skidding in the snow, hurrying to help the cop in such danger from a guy trying to steal a car battery.

At the station, Chris stood with his prisoner at the big desk on the raised platform in the front hall. “What do you have there, son?” the lieutenant asked.

“I have an arrest for petty larceny,” Chris said proudly.

“Oh, so it's just a petty larceny you have there,” the boss repeated in his thick brogue. He sounded disappointed. “But did he try to assault you, Officer?”

Chris hesitated. “Well, I had to tackle him,” he said. The boss beamed. “Oh, so he assaulted you, isn't that correct?”

“Well, I guess so,” Chris said uncertainly. The boss stepped down from the platform and put his arm around him. “Nice work, son,” he said. At the end of the shift, a bunch of the guys took Chris across the street to McSherry's, the cops' 19th hole, where he was initiated as a member of the tribe.

He got his first medal when he was working temporarily in a car with another rookie, Andy Glover, one of the few black guys at the precinct then. They were the same age, with the same amount of experience: none. Andy had married young; he had a nine-year-old son and an infant daughter. Chris enjoyed working with Andy, who always seemed to see the bright side of life. Andy had an ear-to-ear grin, a sensational grin that split his face in half.

They were cruising down Willis Avenue one afternoon when they spotted a guy running out of a clothing store, a knife in his hand. Right behind him, a woman appeared in the doorway of the little shop, waving her hands wildly and screaming, “Holdup! He gimme holdup!”

Andy jumped out of the car and gave chase. Chris drove the car around the corner, up over the curb, and boxed them in. Andy tackled the guy and was trying to wrest away his knife when Chris rushed over and fell on both of them. Between the two of them, Chris and Andy disarmed the guy. Andy cuffed him while Chris dug into his pocket for a tattered scrap of paper and read him his rights.

Chris and Andy took their prisoner in, and that was about it. They hadn't been in grave danger; still, the guy was armed, so they wrote a suitably interesting account of the incident for the lieutenant, who okayed it, added his comments and sent it downtown. Months later, a set of orders came up from Headquarters:
GLOVER AND ANASTOS AWARDED EPD
. The EPD—the Excellent Police Duty medal—was the lowest a cop could get, and there was no ceremony involved; Chris just went down to the Equipment Bureau and filled out a form for the property clerk, who handed him a medal as though Chris had just requisitioned a box of paper clips. Still, a medal was a medal, the first for both Chris and Andy. It was a small bar, green and white, worn above the badge on the uniform jacket. As a cop gathered more medals, the number on the bar would change. Chris would eventually earn thirty-two medals of varying degrees, but that first medal, the EPD, was always special to him, and so was Andy Glover.

When Chris was assigned to regular car duty with Phil, others considered them an extremely odd couple. True, they were both Greek, but after that, whatever did they have in common? Chris was a playboy, a regular at McSherry's; Phil was so straight that Chris teased him he should have become a priest.

Phil had wanted to be a cop as long as he could remember, since he was a schoolboy passing the policeman who stood at the corner of 85th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. When Phil was ten, he'd gone with his mother to visit his godmother, who lived at 68th and Third. While the grownups were visiting, Phil walked around the corner to the 19th Precinct on 67th Street, where the sign on the door said
VISITORS WELCOME.
Phil went in. “I'm a visitor,” he told the man behind the desk. “Please take me on a tour of this police station.”

The cop stared at him. Looking back on it, Phil thought he must have looked like Opie from
The Andy Griffith Show.
“Well, sure,” the cop said. He showed Phil all around the first floor, including the holding pens in the back. “This is where we put the bad people,” he told the wide-eyed boy. At the door, they shook hands. “I'm glad you want to be a policeman when you grow up,” the cop told Phil. “Don't let anybody change your mind.”