Love or Honor by Joan; Barthel

in Brooklyn. So Chris felt safe in giving the number to guys he was beginning to know, though he never told anyone where he lived. Most of the guys he met spent most of their lives in bars and clubs and restaurants, so the question had come up only casually, once or twice. He’d shrugged it off by mumbling that he lived in Valley Stream with his aunt, who was very sick and needed rest and quiet.
    Gene seemed to like Chris, whom he called “Curley,” and Chris liked Gene. He was a bad apple, no doubt about it. He’d spent time in the can, though he didn’t say for what. But he seemed to Chris to be a good family man, too, at least in context. He was separated from his wife—only temporary, he said—and was living in an apartment in Astoria. He talked of his children with wistful pride, and showed Chris a wallet stuffed with their pictures.
    Gene was low-level, too, but he was a step above Bennie. And Chris felt that the way to get to the higher-ups was through the lower guys, who always owed them money. Gene owed a lot of money to the shylocks, he told Chris. He needed to make a lot of money to pay them off, and to give to his wife, for the kids. Gene intended to solve his financial problems by winning big at the Greek dice game, barbouti, and when he invited Chris to come with him to The Grotto, a cocktail lounge in Astoria, where a high-stakes barbouti game ran, Chris was delighted to go.
    The Grotto was Kostos’s place. Chris wasn’t introduced to him that first night, but he recognized him at once. Kostos wasn’t very tall, about five ten, but he was very stronglooking, powerfully built, and muscular. He had a friendly yet commanding way about him. He looked very Greek, yet he looked what Chris called “Americanized” too. He acted the way Chris thought any capo in the Italian crime community would act, with the Cadillac, the pinky ring, the gambling, the women, the whole ball of wax.
    Gene had told Chris something about Kostos, not realizing that Chris could have told him a lot more. Chris had heard at his Intel briefing that Kostos was thought to have had a role in the ten-million-dollar jewel robbery at the Pierre Hotel a few years earlier. Kostos’s friend Sammy Nalo—“Sammy the Arab,” who spoke Greek—had been convicted for that massive job and was doing time at Attica, where Kostos visited him. Kostos was suspected of having gotten a piece of that action; a lot of the loot was still missing. Nothing had been proven, though Chris had heard that when the police called on Kostos at that time, Kostos had greeted them at his front door wearing a bulletproof vest, carrying an automatic weapon.
    Kostos was known as a kind of Robin Hood in Astoria. If a woman with, say, three children and no husband was about to have her rent raised, and word got to Kostos that she couldn’t make it, Kostos was likely to arrange that her rent would stay the same or perhaps even be lowered. He gave generously to charities from one of his profitable businesses, which included a gas-skimming operation. Altogether, Kostos was most interesting, and as Chris became a regular at the Grotto, his life became more interesting, too. He met Kostos’s brother Pete, whose violent tendencies seemed to border on the psychotic. One night Chris was sitting at the bar when Pete and Kostos got into a loud argument. Before anyone could stop him, Pete pulled a gun and shot the barmaid—Kostos’s girlfriend—in the arm. Chris was stunned. He was dismayed that he couldn’t react as a cop, even though he was carrying a gun. He wasn’t carrying his service revolver, which he liked—that .38-caliber weapon was too big, too recognizable as the “detective special.” He had a little .25 Titan automatic, which he could slip into his jacket pocket as easily as though it were a hard pack of cigarettes. He didn’t have a bullet in the chamber because automatics