“I want to go with you.”
“Children aren’t allowed, toots.”
“I used to go.”
“These are different places.”
“I used to go lately.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did I change?”
“Well, you’re bigger.”
“Did I get bigger suddenly?”
“Growing isn’t like that. It’s gradual.”
“Did you suddenly notice I was bigger?”
“I may have.”
“What did you notice?”
“Please, Anna.”
“When did you notice?”
“Please.”
After a long pause, she said, in a harder voice, “I’ll punish you back.”
“I don’t recommend that.”
“I’ll be idle.”
“That’s punishing yourself.”
“I’ll eat too many sweets.”
“You’ll end up like Mrs. Adair, without teeth.”
“I’ll dirty my clothes.”
“That’s punishing Mama.”
“I’ll be a floozy.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’ll be a floozy. Like Aunt Brianne.”
Eddie slapped her face. “Don’t you ever. Say that again.”
Anna held her cheek, dry-eyed. “Then let me come with you.”
* * *
After seven days, the convoy emerged from the Mozambique Channel without having lost a ship. Waves of vessels began peeling away—some west, to Mombasa, others east to Ceylon and Indonesia. The Elizabeth Seaman remained in a smaller convoy of eighteen ships and four escort vessels. There was still the drag of the Panamanian coal burner, now stationed directly in front of them. Several times each day, when the burner cleared her pipes, fine grains of soot settled over every inch of the Elizabeth Seaman. Captain Kittredge flicked them from his sleeves and fulminated over their glacial progress. As they plowed the calm, intensely blue waters of the Indian Ocean, Eddie observed the master’s mounting impatience with equally mounting curiosity. Kittredge was unpracticed at being denied the things he wanted. How would he stomach weeks behind the coal burner?
Eddie never found out. Before they reached the Seychelles, a flag signal indicated that the convoy was to scatter. Ships began moving away from one another in a slow, dreamlike version of birds startling. So languorous was their progress that at first it seemed they would never fully leave one another’s sight. Yet within the span of three hours, even the coal burner had faded away.
* * *
As Dexter Styles’s new ombudsman, Eddie visited roadhouses, casinos, restaurants, poker games. He assumed the guise of a visiting out-of-towner with money in his pocket; in early 1935, nobody turned that man away. If he chanced to meet someone he knew, Eddie greeted him warmly, bought him a drink, and left soon after. He went back the next day. He needed more than one visit to see beyond the surface of a place, and Styles gave him plenty of cash for expenses. These were the only bags Eddie still carried.
At first he met Styles every couple of weeks at a boathouse on Manhattan Beach to detail his findings. Crooked games were his bread and butter, but he observed other things he correctly guessed would interest Styles: a chef pimping out cigarette girls, dope-addicted card dealers tipping games for a fee, fairies he suspected of being blackmailed.
“You’re reaching, Mr. Kerrigan.”
“Isn’t that the job?”
“Don’t invent stories to divert me.”
“I wouldn’t know how.”
At the end of each visit, Styles gave him another two or three addresses. “Shouldn’t you write these down?”
“No need.”
“You’re that smart, eh?”
“I’m not a Harvard man, if that’s what you mean.”
Styles laughed. “If you were, I’d chuck you out.”
“You know the expression,” Eddie said. “ ‘Don’t write if you can talk, and don’t talk if you can nod.’ ”
Styles was delighted. “A mick said that.”
Eddie winked.
He told Dunellen he’d found work at a theater, as he had before the Depression—a world too distant from Dunellen’s own for him to realize how far-fetched this story was. He seemed relieved to have Eddie off his payroll, their tangled history stymieing the full expression of Dunellen’s ruthlessness. He bequeathed Eddie’s bagman duties upon the next desperate man, O’Bannon, then bewailed the hash he made of the job.
“He doesn’t have your touch, Ed,” he whined at Sonny’s, where Eddie still made a point of appearing with some regularity. “Banny walks in a room, all eyes are on him. He dropped an envelope at Dinty Moore’s, you fucking believe that? Greenbacks spilling out . . . you’d have thought that dough had leprosy, how fast everyone backed away, so they tell me. The waiters got rich. I told him, ‘Banny, one more like that, I’ll toss you off the pier myself. You can tell it to the fishes.’ ” Dunellen roused the slag heap of his corpus into a long-suffering shrug. “But his wife is going blind, and they’ve five little ones . . . I can’t leave him high and dry.” He swung his hard little eyes heavenward, then checked his loogans stationed at the door.
“You’re too good, Dunny,” Eddie said, all but laughing. “Too, too good. But mind yourself, friend: the world will try to take advantage of that soft heart of yours.”
“Speaking of, Ed.” Dunellen lowered his voice. “I took your advice about the wop.”
Eddie wasn’t sure which wop he meant, so many having offended Dunellen. “And . . . ?”
“I made a deal. With Tancredo.”
Eddie remembered now: Dunny’s middle lightweights. Tancredo had been putting the screws on him in order for them to fight.
“Humbled myself to that wop on bended knee. Let him trample my face right in the fucking mud.”
Eddie listened with concern. Dunellen prostrate was a vision he could see ending only in violence. Then a soft smile played at Dunellen’s lips. “Best advice I ever got.”
“No kidding,” Eddie said, exhaling.
“My boys are winning, Ed,” Dunellen said with the blushing air of a man imparting secrets. “They’re bursting with life. All they needed was a chance, a fair shake.”
“Glad to hear it, Dunny.”
“We’ll do anything for our kids, ain’t that right, Ed? Get walked on, spit on, shit on, pounded into a pulp. It’s all worthwhile if it makes them happy.”
Masochism didn’t suit Dunellen; Eddie wanted it to stop. “Sure, Dunny,” he said. “But don’t let it go too far. Look for your opening and get the hell out.”
Dunellen nodded, watching Eddie gravely. They were back inside the deeper story that was always between them like buried treasure: riptide, panic, rescue. Swimming parallel to shore, looking for a way back. At the same time, Eddie was explaining why he’d thrown Dunellen off—fucked him, Dunny would surely say if he’d a whiff of whom Eddie was working for now. The precise alignment of these several spheres made Eddie feel as though he could see in every direction at once.
“Tancredo doesn’t have to know,” Eddie cautioned. “Should never know. Look to yourself.”
Dunellen nodded, listening.
* * *
Eddie borrowed the Duesenberg and drove his family to a medical supply store in Paramus, New Jersey, where Lydia was fitted for her chair. The effect was transformative: at nine, she joined the vertical world for the first time. She sat at the table for meals. Agnes took her on walks. Anna leaned beside her at the window, watching sparrows peck at bread crumbs she’d placed on the sill. From behind, Eddie saw no obvious difference between them.
Once, when Agnes was changing Lydia’s diaper, the iceman drove away without waiting. Eddie bought his wife an electric icebox outright, not on layaway—he’d done with the lie of possessing things you didn’t own. For days, neighbors traipsed through the kitchen to admire this luxury, Lydia grinning at them from her new chair.
The icebox emitted a
sullen drone that kept Eddie awake. When at last he fell asleep, he dreamed of unplugging it.
“You must thank Mr. Dunellen for me,” Agnes said.
And: “What would we do without the union?”
And: “My, but we’re lucky, Ed. Look at everyone else.”
She said such things often, and Eddie smiled and murmured assent. But he detected a false bottom in his wife’s effusions, a hidden chamber containing all she was leaving unsaid. Agnes knew her way around. She couldn’t have failed to notice his longer hours, the fact that he rarely borrowed the Duesenberg, never took Anna with him. Yet apart from anodyne exclamations at their good fortune, she acknowledged none of this. Eddie took a morbid pleasure in observing his wife’s disingenuousness. But at night, when he held her in his arms and searched her careworn face, he could find no treachery in it.
* * *
Styles sent him to Albany, Saratoga, Atlantic City. He liked to know every particular of an operation, as though Eddie were a moving-picture camera. They never used names; it was Eddie’s job to fix on the key detail of a man that made him recognizable. Scars were easy. But there was always something: over-brilliantined hair; a particular ring; trousers puddling at the ankles; a bearlike walk. Girls were harder. “Blond,” “brunette,” and “pretty” were about the best he could do. What mattered were the men they came with.
Eddie marveled at how accurately Styles had diagnosed his deep indifference. “You’re my eyes and ears,” he often said, and Eddie liked the description. He was a channel for facts, nothing more. He relayed whole conversations without knowing who’d had them. And even when he came to know, inevitably, in the course of two years, he hadn’t any point of view. It’s nothing to do with me, he would tell himself. It happens the same, whether I’m there or not. Consequences were not his business.
“You’re a machine, Kerrigan. A human machine,” Styles marveled. It was a compliment. With Eddie as his eyes and ears, Styles could be anywhere, everywhere. He’d only to be curious.
Gradually, Styles’s curiosity reached beyond the businesses he controlled to rivals within the Syndicate, even associates. In January 1937, Eddie brought his cardboard please-don’t-rain suitcase to an Eastern Airlines ticket office on Vanderbilt Avenue. There he boarded a limousine with several other men to Newark Airfield. He was going to Miami to watch a man Styles wanted to know about. It was his first airplane ride.
At the airfield, Eddie removed his hat and ducked through the hatch of a silver airplane, his heart flailing. When everyone was aboard, the propellers swarmed outside the windows, and the plane staggered down a runway between snowy fields, accelerating into a breath-catching instant when its wheels parted from land and it hurtled aloft like ash in an updraft. Through a porthole, Eddie gaped at a toy replica of New York City: tiny cars on tiny streets; houses and trees and ball fields inlaid with snow; and then the sea, a sheet of beaten pewter—still infinite, even from this height. The engine buzzed in his ears. A woman wept beside him, hands clasped in prayer. Looking down at the heedless expanse of the earth, Eddie felt on the verge of a great discovery.
The airplane made stops in Washington, D.C., Raleigh, Charleston, Jacksonville, Palm Beach, and at last Miami, where an eye-level moon dropped silver onto a velvet black sea. The air smelled like honey. Even at the airport, Palm Beach style was on vivid display: white dinner jackets, pale silk shirts. By nine o’clock Eddie had Styles’s man in his sights: he sat at the rear of a casino, ashen-faced, heavy-lidded, looking more like an accountant than a fight promoter. Eddie tried to break even at a roulette wheel while memorizing the sequence of visitors to the man’s table. Thus engaged, he took a while to register that the girl leaning against him at the roulette wheel wasn’t doing that by mistake. He added her drinks to his tab with an idea of repaying the effort she’d already made. Or so he told himself. By the time his mark left the casino, Eddie’s decision to bring the girl to his hotel room seemed already to have been made.
He woke at sunrise to an unfamiliar perfume on his sheets. Disgust and desolation closed around him. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. Men do it all the time. No one will ever know. But these bromides made him feel as though he were being soothed by a idiot. He left the hotel and paced the cement-colored sand, flicking cigarette butts into the surf. His only relief came from telling himself that it wasn’t really him with the prostitute. He was Dexter Styles’s eyes and ears, no more. “I’m not here now,” Eddie said out loud more than once, the phrase providing, each time, a burst of analgesia.
That night, at a poker table that afforded a different slant on his mark, Eddie found his attention riveted by a familiar gait: the walk of a woman with corns carrying too many groceries. John Dunellen. He shambled through the casino with a limp Eddie hadn’t seen before—but he hardly saw Dunellen nowadays. His presence here so astounded Eddie that he forgot to turn away for several moments. For Dunellen in his element, that would have been too long, but he was far from his element now. He hobbled to the table Eddie had been watching—Tancredo’s, he realized, perhaps had already known—collapsed onto a chair, and bowed his great head in a masque of abjectness that Eddie could hardly bear to witness, even covertly. How had his old friend been brought so low? The meeting was insultingly short; Tancredo dismissed Dunellen with a curt nod whose disregard made Eddie flinch. Dunellen tottered to his feet and staggered away, lurching among gaming tables with such wobbling instability that Eddie thought he might crash down on top of one, scattering chips and chairs. Eddie dreaded this, knowing he would have to sit by and do nothing.
As Dunellen approached the distant exit, his limp softened, and Eddie caught a gleam of pleasure in his face. In that instant Eddie realized, with a spreading, dizzy delight, that he’d overlooked the mockery in his friend’s performance. The limp was phony. The suppliance was phony. Dunellen was laying it on thick, almost too thick—but then Eddie had been fooled. Dunny hadn’t rolled over for the wops, bless his mean, flinty heart. It was all a ruse, playacting as a means to some other end. He’d taken Eddie’s advice and found his opening. And more surprising than the spectacle of Dunellen’s charade was the joy Eddie took in seeing him pull it off. How he loved Dunny—wanted him to win! He wished he could run to his old friend and kiss his pendulous cheeks.
In his report to Styles, Eddie made no mention of Dunellen.
* * *
Eddie confessed at a church where he’d never been so the priest wouldn’t know him, and was given a rosary’s penance. Too easy. Despair wrapped him in its black cloak, and the trolley wheel rolled again through his thoughts. What was the point of anything he’d done, or was doing now, if it led to cavorting with prostitutes? It had all been a means to an end—but what end?
Instinctively, habitually, he turned to Anna. “Toots, I’ve a taste for a charlotte russe,” he said on a Saturday when Agnes was out with Lydia. “How about you?”
“I don’t care for them, Papa.”
“What? You used to love them.”
“Too sweet.”
Taken aback, he scrutinized Anna, seated at the kitchen table surrounded by her schoolbooks, with a sense of not having looked at her carefully in some time. She was fourteen, tall and lovely, but less specific than she’d once been. More like the women he struggled to describe to Dexter Styles.
“Come with me anyway,” he said. “Order something else.”
Anna rose and put on her coat. As they descended the stairs, Eddie detected an air of sufferance about her, as if there was something else she preferred to do. He was mystified. Anna always wanted to come with him! She’d fought so hard when he’d stopped including her in his work. That had been a while ago, of course—going on two years, he realized with a shock, counting up the months since he’d begun working for Styles. Eddie had presumed all along that he and Anna could revert to their old arrangement whenever he chose. Now, for the first time, he doubted this.
They sat at the counter at White’s. Anna ordered a chocolate soda; Eddie stu
ck piously to charlotte russe, which Mr. White brought him from the window case. While they waited, he lit a cigarette and handed her the coupon from inside his packet. She looked at it oddly, then said with a disbelieving laugh, “Papa, I don’t collect these anymore.”
“No? What about all the ones you saved?”
“There were never enough for the things I wanted.”
“There might have been by now.”
She looked at him curiously. “Why do you care?”
He didn’t care. He wanted her to care. “It seems a waste.”
“You would have smoked anyway,” she said. “Or did you smoke extra for me?” She smiled at him fondly, indulgently: a woman’s smile.
Eddie felt a deep stirring of unease. “When did you stop collecting them?”
She shrugged, a gesture he disliked.
“Recently?” he asked sharply.
Her face shuttered. “No. A long time ago.”
An elfin ghost appeared suddenly at Eddie’s side: his lively little Anna. Where was that garrulous sprite inside this languorous, indifferent girl seated beside him, disciplining herself not to look out the window? It was Eddie’s job to perceive such things. Whom did she want to look for?
Mr. White slid her chocolate soda across the counter, and they ate in silence. Eddie could think of nothing to say. His mind would only go back—to the snowball, the secret kiss. He wanted to ask Anna if she remembered those times, but was afraid she would not—worse, that they meant nothing to her.
And what about all the other days? The hundreds of other days they had spent together; why could he not remember those?
“You were right about the charlotte russe,” he said at last. “It’s too sweet.”
Afterward, they stood outside the drugstore. Anna said she was going to Stella’s, but Eddie sensed an untruth and began to sweat, despite the cold. Something had changed about Anna, permanently, fundamentally—he was certain of it. He’d looked away from his daughter—looked where Styles paid him to look—and she’d gone astray.
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