Love or Honor (21 page)

He'd noticed the strain during the holiday period of the second year he was undercover, in 1976, even before he'd met Marty. He and Liz had spent Thanksgiving Day with friends in Forest Hills; he'd spent a lot of time playing with the friends' children, in order to avoid conversation about himself. At Christmas, the trip to the country seemed different, somehow. He'd felt lonely, even in the welcoming warmth of her parents' house. In a way he couldn't quite pinpoint, Liz seemed different. He knew he seemed different to her, too—uncommunicative, distant. He had a lot he wanted to tell her, but nothing he could say.

He couldn't even be sure she felt the same toward him. It crossed his mind that maybe she was making new friends, too—people she didn't want to talk about. “Are you seeing other men?” was a question he wanted to ask, more than once, to bring it out in the open. But since he couldn't bring his life into the open, he didn't ask. That unspoken agreement—don't ask me and I won't ask you—was keeping the balance. He had never expected his marriage to become a balancing act, but when he saw his wife, about once every three weeks, it seemed to him that that's what it had become.

Chris had enjoyed art since Mrs. Fletcher had given him his first colored pencils, in kindergarten, and art was Marty's talent. They'd already made a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, and had had a fine, satisfying argument. Chris had never liked Picasso. In fact, he hated Picasso. “He draws noses over here and eyes over there,” he complained to Marty. “If there's a message there, I don't get it.”

“Oh, you're just old-fashioned,” Marty teased.

At the Met, Chris argued, there were pictures worth spending time on, pictures by people like Caravaggio and Tintoretto. “But I'm not just old-fashioned,” he protested. “I like Edward Hopper, he's modern. And I don't care that much for Rembrandt, there's too much of a haze in his stuff.”

The day at the Met was so pleasant, with late brunch after, that when beach weather tapered off, Saturdays in the city became a habit. In the crisp autumn sunshine they walked down Fifth Avenue, window-shopping, talking. Marty liked going all the way down to Greenwich Village. On autumn Saturdays, it seemed as though everybody in New York headed down to the Village to stroll around, and shop, and then wander on a little farther, where the Village streets spilled over into Little Italy, with its many good restaurants. But Marty never wanted to go that far.

She seemed more relaxed with him now than she had been in the beginning. She'd seemed cautious about him at first, a little leery, which Chris could understand. But the more they were together, the freer she seemed. It occurred to Chris that they had something basic in common that they couldn't talk about: Each lived in two different worlds. Marty was an intelligent woman who had to know who her father was and what he did. Mafia children might be satisfied, when they were young, with some made-up story about their fathers—they were in Europe, or away on a long business trip, when they were in fact doing time. But when children grew up, they had to know. Even if a father had not done time, they had to know. What did Marty think her father was, a used-car salesman?

But then Marty had gone to college. She'd lived in Paris, and now she had a promising career as a graphics artist. When she was away from her house, from her father, she moved into that world. Chris met her there. He was no scholar, but he was interested in things that interested her: movies, art, history. Most wiseguys didn't know anything about these things, and didn't want to know. Chris felt that if you hung around wiseguys for any appreciable length of time, you could lower your IQ by fifty points, easily.

When Marty asked questions, he tried to stick as close to the truth as possible, to make it easier to remember what he'd said in case the subject came up again. So when she asked about brothers and sisters, he said he had two sisters. But he added that one lived in California, and the other was married to a man in the military, stationed in West Germany, so that Marty wouldn't ask to meet them. He couldn't bring himself to say his mother was dead, so he said his mother was a nut about travel, and was always going someplace; right now she was on a long cruise, all the way around the world. He was aware of the irony, as he said it; Katrina had been in only two states in her entire life, New York and New Jersey. She never wanted to go anywhere else, and when he and his sisters had urged her, after George's death, to get out more, take a trip, see something of the world, she had looked bewildered and had asked them why. Why would a person ever want to leave home?

Chris tried to divert questions back to Marty, or to ask them first. So she talked about her friends, some from college, a couple from her office, and one very close girlfriend who had just gotten engaged and had asked Marty to be in her wedding. That was a long way off, Marty said, but she invited Chris to come, and Chris said he would.

“Who are
your
friends?” Marty asked. “I'd like to meet some of them.”

Chris shrugged it off. “My friends are mostly alcoholic musicians,” he said. “My friends you wouldn't want to meet, believe me.”

The safest topic was his father. He could talk truthfully and at length about George, and he found himself telling Marty things about his father, and remembering things as he told her, that he'd almost forgotten. In grammar school, each child had had a bank account; once a week, the child would bring in money—twenty-five cents, fifty cents, possibly a dollar—and give it to the teacher, who would record it in the child's bankbook and deposit it at a branch of the Bowery Savings Bank on 86th Street. George had been so pleased at this method of teaching thrift to the children that he had given Chris five or ten dollars a week to deposit. A few times, Chris remembered, he had twenty dollars to hand the teacher. Chris recalled how the other kids stared when he brought in such amounts; even the teacher looked surprised. On Saturday afternoons, when Chris went to the movies, he usually had a couple of dollars in his pocket, but in order to be one of the gang, he did as the other kids did and bought just one thing—a “sugar daddy,” a box of Milk Duds—and made it last all afternoon.

“What did your father look like?” Marty asked.

“He was a good-looking man,” Chris said. He could see the wedding picture that his mother kept on the living-room table: Katrina in a long, straight-skirted dress that she'd made herself, with a high collar and puffy sleeves, George standing stiffly at her side, his hair slicked back, his dark eyes looking squarely into the camera. “My father looked something like a younger Clark Gable, only without the mustache,” Chris said. “But he had the same hairline, and the same eyes, kind of the same expression.”

“Do you look like him?” Marty asked.

“Maybe a little,” Chris said. “Only his hair was straight. Everybody in my family has straight hair but me. I think the reason I always hated having my picture taken was because I hated my curly hair when I was a kid.”

“I'd like to have a picture of you,” Marty said.

“Hey, why would you want a picture of me?” Chris asked. His voice was light, but the question made him edgy.

“People give each other pictures,” Marty said. “I could show it around the office and say, ‘This is the millionaire who sent me the roses.' Or maybe I could make it into a dartboard.” Chris laughed, but Marty kept on. “No, really, do you have a picture I could have?”

“No, actually, I don't,” Chris said. “I really always did try to get out of having my picture taken. I got a box camera for Christmas when I was eleven or twelve, and I took it apart to see how it worked, then I couldn't put the thing back together.” That was mostly all true. The only recent picture he had, besides his police ID, had been taken in the driveway of Phil's house in Rockland County. Chris had been visiting and he was in the driveway, about to get in his car, when Phil's wife came out with their little boy, Chris's namesake. “We want a picture of the two of you together,” Judy said. So Chris stood there, holding the child's hand, feeling foolish, not knowing whether he should look into the camera or down at the boy. He didn't know where the picture was, now; he supposed Phil and Judy had it.

“Well, we'll have to do something about that,” Marty said. “I really do want a picture.”

Chris started to say something snappy, but he stopped. He was uncomfortable now with smart-ass remarks when he was with Marty. In the beginning, he'd done that easily. One night, Marty had looked at him curiously. “I'm trying to figure you out,” she said. “You're different from the other men who know my father, and I can't put my finger on what it is.”

Chris had lifted his glass and winked.

“I'm one of a kind, baby,” he said.

Now he talked normally. He was aware that the more he talked with her in his usual way—not a wiseguy, not a philosopher, just in between, like a regular person—the more she would see he was different. And he was glad of that. He didn't want her to think of him as just another hood.

She didn't seem to think that. She seemed comfortable with him, too. Chris noticed that she laughed more when she was away from her house. She didn't seem intimidated by her father, but she was noticeably freer and more at ease when she was with Chris, more apt to express her own opinions, more her own person. Chris didn't spend a lot of time trying to analyze her relationship with her father; he told himself not to be a bargain-basement Freud. But he could see the difference in her, as she came to know Chris better.

She had the freedom to become his friend, too.

Harry ran the plates and told Chris that Angelo, one of the men at the Sunday dinner, was an informer. Angelo had known John for thirty years, and had just recently been flipped. He'd been nabbed for something and was facing heavy time. Angelo was about John's age, pushing sixty; he didn't have time to do heavy time.

Sometimes Chris suspected that guys he met were informers. He would call Harry and say, “Check this guy out,” and give the plate number. If word came back that the guy had been locked up, then suddenly was out on bail, Chris could put two and two together. This time the information was definite: Angelo was an informer.

Chris didn't like informers. He and Phil had used them, working street crimes. But when it came to major stuff, Chris felt they couldn't be trusted, that they would lie as readily to the NYPD or whoever they were working for as to the guys they were informing on. Informers were likely to tell you anything you wanted to hear. Harry had told Chris at the outset that somebody higher up had suggested that Chris use an informer on this job, the way the Bureau used informers with their undercover people. Harry passed on the idea a little reluctantly; the rivalry between the department and the FBI was no secret, even to the general public. But Harry had to point out that using an informer in the mob to vouch for Chris would make it easier. “This is my pal Chrissie from Vegas, he's good, he's okay.”

Chris had refused. He didn't want anybody out there to have any kind of control over him; you never knew what that guy might do, what kind of pressure he might be under, what he might end up saying about Chris.

Anyway, the fewer people who knew about him, the better. Too many people on a project meant too many possible leaks. There'd been an undercover project in the Bronx, during Chris's time at the 4-oh, though in another neighborhood, with an informer involved. Chris thought the project, a kind of sting operation, had gone sour because there were just too many guys in on it, both federal people and city detectives. Their plan was to buy a discotheque where OC guys hung out. An ex-con who was an informer for the Justice Department had teamed up with a city detective who spoke fluent Italian. The joint was interesting, patronized by Carlo Gambino, among other heavyweights, and the whole thing seemed carefully planned, with the informer paid five hundred dollars a week for his efforts. Yet within five months the plan had collapsed, partly because of ridiculous blundering—they'd nestled a camera in a tree directly in front of the joint, which a guy would have had to be blind not to notice—but also, Chris thought, because there were just too many players. It turned into an expensive fiasco. The patrons fingered the potential new owners as the law, and stopped coming. Once they stopped coming, there was no point in buying the place. “People ceased to appear,” one federal agent reported dryly. “We realized we could get stuck with, a white elephant.”

Harry brought up the idea once more, but Chris was adamant. “No way, Harry,” he declared. “I don't care what the Bureau does. I'm a street kid, and I'll do this on my own.”

Now, Harry agreed that Chris was doing very well on his own. He'd moved up, from hustling untaxed cigarettes, to the higher levels of organized crime, first with the Greeks, then with the Italians. He fit in perfectly. He wouldn't have fit in with other crime outfits. Everybody knew that organized crime was not limited to Italians. Chris heard conversations about deals going down with the Chinese, where Chinatown overlapped Little Italy. Russian mobsters had Brighton Beach, and there was a kind of Irish Mafia in the Hell's Kitchen area, on the west side of Manhattan. In fact, when Chris reported that one of Kostos's flunkies did a few things with the Westies, Harry was interested. He told Chris he'd heard that the Westies were doing hits for the Castellano people, and he suggested that Chris go over and look into it.

“You
go, Harry,” Chris said. “Forget it. The way I look and dress, they'd throw me out the window, if I was lucky.”

The Westies were violent and unpredictable, inclined to chop up a guy for no rhyme or reason. You couldn't play around with them.

With the Greeks and the Italians, Chris could play around. He was doing well with them because he was accepted. He was accepted because he was believable. And he was believable because he had become the person they thought he was. Beyond the dress and the mannerisms, the language and the gestures, the way of walking and talking and scheming, he felt like Chrissie the jazz drummer, the smart guy on his way up. That wasn't what he
did;
it was what he
was
. Undercover work was referred to, in the department, as being “out there,” but in truth, it was “in there.”