Love or Honor (29 page)

9

“Who's that loudmouth at the bar?” Lou asked. “Anybody know that jerk?”

He gestured toward a man at the bar who was drinking too fast, talking too loud, laughing, making himself conspicuous. Chris was sitting at the Kew's corner table, with Lou and Nick and Solly. He turned to take a look.

It was Harry.

Harry swiveled around on the bar stool. He looked toward their table and grinned. When he saw Chris staring at him, he lifted his glass in their direction. “Give those people over there a drink! Give everybody in the place a drink!”

“Aw, who cares?” Chris mumbled. “Some stupid out-of-towner. Who the hell cares?”

His mind was a jumble. This was Harry. This was worse than the night at the Lakeville Manor. The idea of Harry turning up at the Kew was so improbable, so totally unbelievable that Chris even wondered for a moment whether it was just a guy who looked exactly like Harry. It
couldn't
be Harry.

Harry had a woman with him whom Chris recognized as a policewoman from Intel. From time to time, Harry leaned toward her, said something, then turned to look at the corner table.

Chris was trying to think of an excuse to leave when Harry stood up, dropped a handful of bills on the bar, and walked out. On his way out, he looked once again at the corner table, with a wide grin. The policewoman went with him.

“Let's go,” Nick said to Lou. They got up swiftly and went out. Chris sat there for a few minutes, dazed. Then he finished his drink, said goodnight to Solly, and left.

He drove to Astoria. He was anticipating what he would say when he talked to Harry the next day. He was going to yell at him so loud he'd pierce Harry's eardrum over the phone. It would serve him right. What in God's name was he doing at the Kew? Chris was so unnerved that he just wanted to get back to his own place, relax, have some drinks.

He parked across the street and walked into the downstairs bar. He hadn't had anything to eat, at the Kew; maybe a sandwich would help the sinking feeling in his stomach. The place downstairs didn't serve real food, no dinners, but behind the bar there was a small grill for heating sandwiches wrapped in foil.

He opened the door and stepped in. Loud music from the jukebox hit him in the face. He walked along the edge of the tiny dance floor, just a circle in the middle of the room, heading for the end of the bar. As he walked along, he glanced around.

Harry was dancing. Dancing! Harry was having a marvelous time, jumping around in the middle of the floor, waving his arms, snapping his fingers, as he danced with the policewoman.

Chris turned away quickly, but not quickly enough. Harry reached over and grabbed him by the arm.

“Hey, buddy, what are you doing?” Chris said angrily. Harry grinned at him and winked. Just then, at that precise moment, from the corner of his eye, Chris saw Nick and Lou. Maybe he didn't actually see them; maybe he just sensed their presence. But he knew they were there. They couldn't hear what Chris was saying, but they could see Harry holding him by the arm, smiling and winking.

Chris shook loose. He just wanted out of the place. But as he got near the door, Lou called to him. “Hey Chrissie, c'mon over, we wanna talk to you.”

This is trouble, Chris thought dully. This is major trouble.

“Here's a question for you,” Lou said, in a quiet voice. “How did that guy get from the Kew to your place?”

Chris shrugged. “How the hell do I know?”

Nick was frowning. “Who told him about this place?” Nick demanded. “How did he get from there to here?”

“Hey, Nicky, how do I know?” Chris said. “Look, I gave the girl at the Kew a lot of my cards—fifty, maybe a hundred—maybe she gave him one.”

“Yeah, maybe that's it,” Nick said slowly. “Maybe you're right. Maybe that's what happened.” He frowned again. “When did you give her the cards?”

“Hey, what are you questioning me for?” Chris said angrily. “What's the matter with you, anyway?”

Nick laid a hand on Chris's arm. “C'mon, let's go outside,” he said.

Chris followed him out onto the sidewalk, then across the street, where Nick stopped behind a parked car.

“We'll wait for him here,” Nick said. “Lemme tell you, if this guy's somebody, I'm gonna get him.”

He reached into his pocket. Chris heard a snap. He saw the flash of Nick's knife with the eight-inch blade.

“Are you nuts?” Chris yelled. “What's the matter with you, anyway? The guy's a fucking harmless out-of-towner.”

Nick pushed him slightly. “You calling me nuts?” he demanded. “Nobody calls me nuts!” He flexed his hand, turning the knife from side to side.

“Hey, Nicky, take it easy,” Chris said. “I'm just saying, why bother with this guy? Some dumb tourist—why get so upset about him?”

“He's not harmless,” Nick insisted. “Why did he go from there to here?”

Chris was suddenly very, very tired. All the energy seemed to drain right out of him, through his body and down his legs, out his feet. He thought he was going to collapse. All the trust he had built up with these guys, all the work he'd done, down the tubes. Part of his mind didn't believe this was happening. Part of his mind knew it was happening, and knew he couldn't deal with it.

“I don't know,” Chris said. “I don't know why he went from there to here, Nicky.”

“Well, we're gonna find out,” Nick said. He laughed shortly. “Lou's watching him in there. When he comes out, we're gonna tail him. And if he's somebody, we're gonna get him.”

Chris had to sit down or he would fall down. “I gotta go now,” he told Nick. “Do what you have to do. I don't give a shit.”

He went up to his club, using the street entrance. He couldn't stand to see Harry again. He sat down on a barstool and just stayed there, without seeing or hearing anything. He felt as though he were in a trance. This is it. This is how it ends. Right here in Astoria, where it started.

He had no idea how long he'd been sitting there when Lou and Nick burst in. Chris just looked at them.

“The guy's a cop!” Lou told him. “He's a fucking cop! We followed him, and he went over to the precinct and got gas for his car.”

Nick put his hand on Chris's shoulder. “Yeah, a fucking cop,” Nick repeated. “So why did he come here, Chrissie?”

“Maybe he's talking to the weasel downstairs,” Chris said. “I heard the weasel was talking. Or maybe”—he looked Nick straight in the eye—“maybe he just wanted to see what I was doing.”

“I just wanted to see what you were doing,” Harry said, when Chris called him from Waterside. He yawned into the phone. “Hey, it's four o'clock in the morning. You woke me up.”

“I
know
I woke you up!” Chris yelled. “Man, are you
crazy
? You gotta be crazy, Harry! You put me in the jackpot! You were followed!” Chris was sputtering with fury; he could hardly talk.

“Naw, I wasn't followed,” Harry said sleepily.

“I am telling you, man, you were followed!” Chris shouted. “You are an idiot, Harry! You almost got whacked out, and me with you.”

“Naw, I wasn't followed,” Harry repeated. “Calm down. Get some sleep. Talk to you tomorrow.” Harry hung up the phone.

Chris poured some bourbon over ice and sat in the dark living room.

He was overwhelmed with shame.

Of course Harry had to check on him. His reports had gotten so thin that the people at Intel who saw them must have questioned Harry. Maybe they thought Chris had crossed the line, gone over to the other side, a double agent. As stupidly as Harry had acted—he shouldn't have had so much to drink—Chris knew that Harry was just trying to protect him. He must have tried to mollify the brass: “Jason's okay. I'll just run out, take a look, see what he's doing.”

Chris had been able to string everybody along, including himself, until the dinner with Angelo. Once he'd sabotaged that conversation, it was out of control. He'd reported simply that Angelo had been there, and that nothing important had been said. His report said, basically, that there was nothing to report. It occurred to him that Angelo's report probably said the same thing.

What a joke! What a terrible black joke! He felt so good, so right with Marty and her parents that the real Chris—the Code of Conduct officer, the boy whose father had taught him never to lie or cheat or steal—was coming through.

But was that the real Chris? He'd been successful in this job because he was so believable. He had immersed himself so deeply in his character that he had become that person.

Had he
always been
that person? It was a terrifying thought. But look at the evidence. Look at how he'd slipped into his wiseguy role as though it were a second skin. Look at the way he'd always liked to live—drinking, spending money. His father's money. He used to take guys to his father's restaurant late at night and sign the check. George never forbade that, but said to him once, “I don't mind if you bring your friends. Just be sure these people
are
your friends, because it takes me a long time to earn forty dollars.” His friends had always been half wiseguys, at least. True, he'd straightened out, when he was in the army, but that was only a temporary rehabilitation. He'd gone back to drifting and drinking and bouncing around, until he'd joined the NYPD as a way of redeeming himself.

Maybe, of all the illusions he'd been involved in, the expectation of redemption was the most deceptive of all.

“We're both doing God's work,” Father Conlin had said to him, years ago. And Chris had always thought so. But everybody knows that the devil doesn't look ugly or disgusting. The devil disguises himself in very attractive ways, and influences you in ways that make wrong things look right.

At the beginning of this job, Chris had thought he was doing the wrong things for the right reasons. He had manipulated people. Undercover work meant manipulating people; that's what it was all about. But he had gone beyond the point where manipulation was necessary. He was frightened when he realized that he'd passed that point easily, without even noticing.

He still wasn't exactly sure of that point. Of course it had been wrong to manipulate Liz, and Marty, and Anna, and Harry, beyond a certain point. But what about Solly? The old guy liked him. He'd looked out for him. “Go down and put it in the car,” Solly had told him, not wanting him to be nabbed for carrying a gun. Solly had kept him clean when Chris had tried to buy drugs. “You're not gonna do babania, Chris.” Chris even thought Solly hadn't had all that much to do with drugs. Or maybe he just wanted to think that. What about John? “No matter what you've heard about him, he's still my father,” Marty had said. If Chris himself had a daughter, he knew how he'd feel if somebody deceived her, and his wife, in such a way.

Had John become a father figure to him? Chris didn't want to think so, but he had to admit the possibility. He just didn't know. Certainly he felt that Anna could be his mother. Anna was a wonderful lady, devoted to her husband. She loved her husband very much. Katrina had loved George very much. He just didn't know.

He was totally confused. He wasn't crazy. He knew he wasn't losing his mind. But the thoughts tumbled through his head as he sat in the living room. This is not my home. I have a home. I have a wife. I have a job. What am I doing? How am I going to get out of this?

He didn't know where to turn. He knew the department said it would help a guy in trouble. But he felt that what the department said and what it did were two different things. He knew a guy who'd gone for help with a drinking problem—on his own, just turned himself in. They sent him for treatment, but then they sent him to some hellhole in Brooklyn where somebody told him, off the record, never to bother applying for a transfer, he was lucky that Brooklyn had agreed to take him on, and he was stuck there forever. As for the department's psychiatrist, cops joked you'd have to be crazy to go there. Sure, he'd talk to you, but they'd take your gun away, mark you “unstable” or worse, in your file, and God knows what they'd do with you then. Cops weren't supposed to need psychiatrists. Cops were invulnerable. Cops could handle anything. Which is why cops hit the bottle, or jumped off a bridge, or went home and belted the wife across the mouth. Anyway, what would Chris tell a shrink? “Well, doc, my problem is, I'm two different people …”

He'd stopped going to church. He'd always gone to church when he was a kid. He was an altar boy at St. Gerosimus, on 105th Street, every Sunday. One morning he'd sneaked a sip of the altar wine, and when the priest saw him, he'd grabbed Chris and twisted the boy's ear so hard that Chris thought it would tear off. His ear had stayed red and painful all day.

He prayed a lot, when he was a kid. He had a bad fall in the playground one day, and when he walked home, everything was blurry. He prayed hard, then—please God, please don't let me be blind. When Katrina took him to the doctor, the doctor pressed against Chris's head and asked, “Does it hurt back here?” When Chris said it didn't, the doctor said his eyes would be all right. Chris even remembered to pray then, to thank God that he wasn't blind. In fact, Chris had prayed so hard when he was a kid, that he thought probably nobody prayed as much as he did, not even the Dali Lama.

He was always careful how he prayed to God, though, because he was afraid of God. You had to be, because that's what kept you from doing wrong. If you weren't what they called a God-fearing person, you would run around doing all kinds of bad things. So Chris was afraid of God, but not Jesus. Every year at Eastertime, Katrina took Chris and the girls to see
King of Kings,
the silent movie, with H. B. Warner as Jesus. Whenever Chris was in church, and the priest said the name “Jesus,” Chris immediately saw the face of H. B. Warner, so he was never afraid of him. He thought Jesus was a nicer man than the priest at St. Gerosimus.