Love or Honor (4 page)

George was born in Cyprus, though he didn't know the exact date, and he had several brothers, though he didn't know exactly how many. Their mother died when George was young, and his stepmother whipped him. He never went to school. He spent his days tending sheep, until he ran away when he was about fourteen, working as a deckhand on a freighter that just happened to be going to Argentina. He spent about ten years there before coming to America. Chris was always impressed that his father spoke Spanish so fluently.

At home, everyone spoke Greek, although as Chris and his two sisters got older, they spoke English to one another. When Chris went to kindergarten, he didn't know a word of English. When his teacher said something to him, and he didn't respond, she gave him a little push, and he began to cry. His mother just stood there, looking frightened. The teacher pointed Katrina toward the door, indicating that she should leave. When Katrina didn't move, the teacher gave her a little push, too. By then, Chris was crying hysterically.

He settled down when Mrs. Fletcher handed him a box of crayons and a sheet of drawing paper. Crayons and paper were the only art supplies available in public school kindergartens in the forties, but that was all Chris needed. He had a natural ability in art: When the other children were drawing stick figures, Chris was drawing faces, with eyes and ears, noses and mouths and hair, everything in proportion. When the class picture was taken at the end of the school year, Chris was standing right next to Mrs. Fletcher, who had her arm around him.

Chris's liking for school continued through the early years, thanks to his talent for drawing and music. By third grade, he was designing the sets for class plays. The teacher would lay out large pieces of posterboard and tell Chris what to draw—for a Western setting, some trees, mountains, a campfire—then the other children would color in the drawings. In fifth grade, he joined the drum-and-bugle corps. He'd had a set of drumsticks since he was three years old—no drums, just the sticks—and he'd gone around the house banging enthusiastically on pots and pans, tables, chests of drawers, any available surface. His first public performance with the drum was disastrous: At a school parade, he banged his drum so fiercely that he put a hole in it, and marched with his arms at his side, crying. It didn't occur to him until it was too late that he could have turned the drum around, as it hung around his neck, and beat it on the other side.

Except for music and art, he was uninterested in school, restless and fidgety. He was always embarrassed, at the beginning of each school year, when the teacher would ask each child, “And what does your father do?” As it got close to his turn, Chris would begin to squirm. George was cook and counterman and part-owner of three coffee shops, and Chris would mumble, “My father works in a restaurant.” He thought that sounded dumb, and he envied a kid who could say, proudly, “My father drives a truck!” Chris knew that his father spoke several languages—Turkish and Armenian, as well as Greek and Spanish—but he also knew that his father didn't understand how baseball was played. One Sunday, though, when his father walked over to Central Park with him, they ran a race, and George won. Chris was so delighted to see how fast his father could run that he didn't even mind losing. He talked about it so much at school that the other kids finally told him to shut up about it, they were tired of hearing him say that his father was the fastest runner in the whole world.

Katrina never learned English, but she spoke Italian as fluently as Greek. When she was orphaned in Greece, as a young child, she'd gone to live with relatives in Italy, before coming to this country. She lived with her Uncle Gus, who had a barbershop at 106th Street and Broadway. In tribute to the family roots, the shop was named The Riviera. George was living in a rooming house on the Upper West Side, getting haircuts at The Riviera. Katrina was earning money as a seamstress. Their marriage was arranged when she was eighteen and George was thirty-two.

As the only son, Chris felt a special responsibility to succeed, and he hated the feeling. His carefree, happy-go-lucky personality contrasted sharply with his father's sense of duty and discipline. Chris loved his father, and he didn't doubt that George loved him, but it was a remote, silent love. His mother told Chris that when he was an infant, George would pick him up from the cradle and hold him close. But the only time Chris remembered being in his father's arms was one Sunday morning when he was nine or ten. He had a terrible stomachache when he woke up. Katrina thought he was just trying to get out of going to church, so she told him to get up and get dressed, the pain would go away.

When Chris tried to get out of bed, his legs felt numb, and he vomited. His father picked him up and carried him down the stairs to the street, where he got a taxicab to take them to St. Luke's. Chris was operated on that afternoon for appendicitis. Except for that one time, Chris could not remember ever being physically close to his father. He could not remember hugging his father, or embracing him as men in the family embraced one another in greeting. Chris and George never seemed to be able to exchange any comfort with one another. They had never kissed.

When Chris was fourteen, George paid sixteen thousand dollars cash for a house in Queens. After that, Chris saw his father even less. George worked mostly at the coffee shop on West 45th Street in Manhattan, that he'd bought in partnership with Katrina's sister's husband. Chris barely tolerated junior high school, living for his music. He took drum lessons at a music studio in Astoria, and practiced for hours at home on a rubber pad glued to a piece of wood set at a slight angle, to strengthen his wrists and fingers and to perfect his timing. By sixteen he'd outgrown the Astoria teacher and was seeking out Gene Krupa clinics all over the city. He had acquired his first set of good drums—the bass, the snare, the floor tom, another pair of tom-toms, and the high-hats.

He passed the test for The High School of Music and Art, but a couple of his friends were going to Stuyvesant, where Chris had been accepted, too. So he went to Stuyvesant, and flunked out at the end of his first year because he didn't bother to keep up with the work. He went to a technical high school for a year, and found it tedious; since he didn't intend to be a greasemonkey all his life, he said, he transferred again, to William Cullen Bryant, where he graduated with a 2.8 average of a possible 4.0. He felt that was okay; George felt it could have been better. Chris didn't care, because his ambition was to play drums in a big band.

Two months before graduation, when he turned eighteen, Chris got a call from his father, telling him to come into the city. Chris tried to get out of it, but George insisted, so Chris took the subway in from Astoria and met George at his coffee shop near the Times Square stop. George was watching for him, and when Chris arrived, George told one of his helpers that he was going to take the rest of the day off. Chris was astonished, and a little aggravated; whatever George had called him in for was going to take the rest of the day. “What's going on, Pop?” he asked grumpily. “Why did you make me come in?” George said nothing, but led him outside, over to Broadway, then up Broadway to the Don Allen Chevrolet showroom at 58th Street. “Pick out a car,” George said.

Chris was stunned. He knew his father was serious, because his father was always serious. Still, he felt dazed as he looked around the showroom. He couldn't keep his eyes off the red convertible, and he was just wondering if he dared mention it when his father, who had been watching him, spoke quietly. “You know something?” George said. “I like that red car, don't you?”

Chris watched his father pay cash for the car, $3100. George sat in the front seat as Chris drove home. They didn't talk much; Chris was only thinking of showing off his car to all the girls. His father didn't lecture him about his driving; even going over the Queensboro Bridge, George didn't say, “Be careful.”

With not the slightest desire to go to college, Chris floundered around. Using a forged cabaret license, he played drums at a strip joint on West 52nd Street, earning five dollars a night, telling his father he was playing at school dances. At home he practiced till his hands blistered and bled; he taped them and kept practicing. He had his union card—Local 802—but work as a freelance musician was so sporadic that when somebody suggested, “Why don't you get a hack license?” Chris thought, why not?

He drove a cab from three o'clock in the afternoon until three o'clock the next morning. He hated the way passengers treated him as a subordinate, the way they ordered him around. “Don't drive so fast! Don't drive so slow! Make a right! Make a left! Hey, what are you
doing?
” Sometimes people would peer at him and say, “You don't look like a cab driver.” Usually he didn't respond, though he wanted to yell, “You're right, I'm not really a cab driver, I'm a musician!” He didn't, because he thought it was none of their business. If somebody pressed, he said he was married, with a wife and five kids, and was working to put himself through law school. He enjoyed making up bizarre stories, but he hated the job so much that at the end of two weeks he turned in his hack license.

When George put him to work in one of his restaurants, it was a disaster. As a cashier, Chris couldn't keep the tapes straight. As a waiter, he was so careless that customers complained. As a potato peeler, he was so bored that he paid some bums on the street a few dollars to come around to the back entrance and peel the potatoes for him.

When a guy he knew said he needed a drummer for a jazz combo, Chris thought it was the start of a solid musical career. They were booked at the Copa Lounge two nights a week—only big names played on weekends—and Chris loved it, though he didn't think much of Julie Podell, the owner. Podell wore a big ruby ring that he would bang down hard on the table when he wanted service. Chris thought Podell was a mean SOB, so he made it a point never to have a drink at the Copa. Instead, he'd go down the block to Chez Joey to have a drink and listen to the waiters sing opera. But the Copa was an interesting, lively place. Lots of off-duty cops came around, and so did flashy guys who wore diamond pinky rings and spent money so lavishly that Chris couldn't help but be impressed.

But that job ended, and he couldn't get another date. Jazz drummers, in those days of Elvis Presley and early rock, were not in demand. He enrolled in a course on how to sell life insurance and learned a remarkable pitch in which he never uttered the word “death.” At the point in the pitch where the subject inevitably came up, he was to say, “And then, if anything should happen, God forbid …” He watched sales films and listened to a lecture by a super-salesman who flew in from California to display his style. Among other tactics, Chris learned always to have a crisp new ten-dollar bill sticking out of his jacket pocket, and when the potential customer mentioned it, Chris was to whip it out and declare, “Yes! and this money can be
yours
!” When he went out to sell, he liked the freedom of motion in the job, which gave him time for practicing drums and hanging out at the beach. “You have a marvelous tan,” the office manager said to him suspiciously. “Well, I have a convertible, and I drive with the top down,” Chris said. But he knew his days were numbered. He knew his father felt he was going nowhere; though they rarely saw one another, Chris could feel the weight of George's disappointment all around him, like a sad, heavy presence in the house. When he ran out of friends to sell insurance to, he joined the army.

When he came home on furlough, he spent his days playing drums, his nights drinking and hanging around clubs, sleeping late. He was sound asleep one morning when George came into his room and shook him awake. “Get up,” George said brusquely. Chris followed him out to the kitchen, where George poured coffee for him, cooked eggs and made him eat, then showed him the notice in the morning paper about a walk-in test for the New York Police Department being given that day. “I want you to go down and take this test,” George said.

Chris didn't care, one way or the other, and he was in no condition to argue. It was easier just to go down and take the test. He didn't take it seriously. He had no intention of becoming a cop. He'd never understood his father's fondness for cops, anyway.

Two mounted policemen had just tethered their horses on West 45th Street when a man in a stocking mask, with his gun still in his hand, ran out of the coffee shop. When he fired at them, they shot him down on the sidewalk. Inside, the masked man had fired just one shot from his .22-caliber Beretta, hitting George in the chest.

Chris immersed himself in police work with the fervor of a man who wanted no context for remorse, no time to ponder ironies.

2

When he daydreamed of becoming a gold-shield detective, Chris always saw it very clearly. He was wearing a trenchcoat. He was knocking firmly on a door. When the door opened, he was saying, also firmly, “Good morning. I'm Detective Anastos. I'm here to solve the homicide for you.”

That spiffy image didn't survive the grittiness of the 4-oh, where he went from uniform into torn blue jeans and none-too-clean T-shirts, the better to make drug buys. So Chris always enjoyed going down to one of the police buildings in lower Manhattan, where the air of crisp efficiency and polish revived that old image. When he was recovering from hepatitis, he'd spent a few weeks on desk duty at headquarters, and although he hated the tedium of paperwork, he'd liked the feeling of the drafty old place. One day he'd ran into a chief he'd known uptown, who was then a deputy to the police commissioner. They talked, then Chief Devine said, “Come with me.” He led Chris through an outer office, past a couple of secretaries, into a huge room that reminded Chris of a magazine picture he'd seen of the Oval Office in the White House.

“See that desk?” Chief Devine said. “Know whose that is?”