Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  The ghost sprite leaped and jumped and swung Eddie’s hand. She turned her face up at him, chattering: hours of meandering talk, thoughtless as a dog’s wagging tail, back and forth, back and forth.

  Eddie gazed into Anna’s large dark eyes under their heavy lashes, trying to find that little sprite. But he’d looked away for too long, and the sprite had vanished. In her place stood a girl who hardly remembered him, wanted only to get away.

  * * *

  Dunellen was shot fifteen times from a moving automobile outside Sonny’s shortly after midnight. April 1937, three months after Eddie had seen him in Miami. Naturally, there were witnesses—Dunellen didn’t so much as take a leak by himself—but none would say a word. He’d had enemies galore, rivalries over hiring and pier control, but those feuds had simmered for years without serious issue. It was a wop-style execution.

  He hung on for three days in the intensive care ward at Saint Vincent’s. Bulls came and went, but they never expected to get a word out of Dunny, even if he’d somehow managed to snap out of his coma and speak around the tube bisecting his throat.

  The protectory scrum gathered by twos and threes in the hospital lobby, all forty or thereabouts, with thinning hair and missing teeth. Eddie sobbed in their arms. “You knew him best,” they affirmed. “You were his favorite. No wonder; you saved his life. A man doesn’t forget.” Eddie craved these testimonials, but they provided only fleeting solace. He felt as if he’d shot Dunny himself.

  He recognized Bart Sheehan instantly, although he hadn’t seen his old friend in twenty years. Sheehan still had his hair, half-gray and in need of cutting. He looked like a man who lived in shirtsleeves. “You saved us once, Ed,” he wept, his black-Irish face riven by grief. “Pulled us out of the waves. I wouldn’t be here today, God is my witness.”

  Being dead did not hinder Dunellen from presiding over his own two-day wake, his silhouette like a pile of ore commanding the room from an oversize coffin. Under powder and pancake makeup, bullet holes were visible in his temple and forehead and neck. His wife, Maggie, howled inconsolably but garnered little sympathy. Her voluble grief—like her habit of yanking her husband out of bars prematurely—was widely construed as unwillingness to “let Dunny have a bit of fun.”

  Eddie was able to talk more calmly with Sheehan at the wake. His old friend was a widower, three kids, still living in the Bronx with his unmarried sister.

  “You’re a lawyer, so I hear,” Eddie said.

  “State attorney’s office. You, Ed?”

  “Oh, this and that.”

  “Tough times,” Bart said, mistaking Eddie’s vagueness for unemployment. “I’m lucky I work for the state.”

  “Is it like being a copper, what you do?”

  “Cleaner,” Bart said, and they laughed.

  A tidal wave of mourners surged into Guardian Angel Church on Sunday morning for Dunellen’s funeral—many still drunk, the rest hungover. Eddie heard whispers down the block: Joe Ryan is in the church. What better testament to Dunny’s power than having the most corrupt kingpin of them all, president of the International Longshoremen’s Union, present at his funeral?

  Agnes clutched Eddie’s arm. A bagpiper played on the church steps, and he felt tears come again. “What will this mean for us, love?” she asked with such an anxious look that Eddie realized she must have understood less than he’d thought. Perhaps nothing at all.

  “We’ll be all right,” he mumbled.

  Sheehan found his way to Eddie’s other side, and they walked arm in arm up the church steps. Inside the door, Eddie leaned close to his old friend’s ear. “The kite had it, a while back, you were looking into the Syndicate,” he whispered.

  He felt Sheehan’s recoil of surprise. Guardedly, he whispered back, “There’s truth in that.”

  “I might be able to . . . contribute.”

  Bart turned a skeptical eye upon Eddie. “What do you know about it?”

  “I know everything,” Eddie said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  * * *

  Twenty minutes south of the Red Hook boatyard where they’d met, the ancient man everyone referred to as “the skipper” began making noises that seemed to approximate speech. Leaning against the outside wall of a tiny wheelhouse, his ravaged face aimed skyward as if someone were jerking him backward by the hair, he moaned and keened at the spattered stars—more stars than Anna had ever seen, even from the dimmed-out shore.

  “Earile . . . smolf . . . skynech . . .”

  She turned to the skipper in alarm at each anguished utterance. No one else seemed to take any notice, with the exception of the helmsman: a tall blank-faced individual who ticked a wheel infinitesimally in response to each ejaculation. But he seemed less a human being than a lever the skipper was turning with his mind.

  It was eleven o’clock. The night was clear, the temperature forty-five degrees—warm for early March—the moon pronged and low. Searchlight beams prodded the night sky for aircraft. The harbor was crowded with invisible boats. Occasionally a towering shape bore down upon the lighter, and the skipper yowled at the helmsman, who steered them out of harm’s way nimbly as a butterfly, to be jostled by a violent wake. The Statue of Liberty was a dark silhouette, a single faint light at her flame.

  Even the skipper fell silent as they approached the Narrows, the entrance to the Lower Bay, patrolled by Fort Hamilton to the east and Fort Wadsworth to the west, on Staten Island. Dexter Styles said he’d “had a word” with someone at the Coast Guard who would make things right should the lighter be stopped, but no one wanted that. For perhaps ten minutes, the only sound on the lighter was the churn of its engine. Anna wondered if the draft would be shallow enough to pass over the submarine nets, then realized that the gate must be open. They had followed other ships—a convoy perhaps—into the Lower Bay. Horns and sirens grew fainter, and she felt rising wind and chop. Dexter Styles’s five “goons” (Bascombe’s word) leaned over the gunwales, holding their hats. They’d been brought along to turn the flywheels of the air compressor, but their presence on the lighter had an ominous effect.

  Only Marle and Bascombe continued to work, inspecting and preparing the air compressor Dexter Styles had arranged to have on board. It was a Morse Air Pump No. 1, identical to the compressors at the Naval Yard. They had anchored it to the bow, and now they cleaned its air reservoirs, oiled the piston rods, and lubricated the pump shaft handles with a mixture of oil and graphite. They’d had surprisingly little trouble removing a pair of diving crates from the Naval Yard—each containing a two-hundred-pound dress—along with six fifty-foot lengths of air hose, a loaded tool bag, two diving knives, and a spare-parts tin. It was almost too easy, they’d crowed when Anna had met them outside the Red Hook boatyard. So many divers had been commuting to the freshwater pipeline that the marine guards barely took note when they hauled the equipment through the Marshall Street gate onto a small flatbed truck Marle had borrowed from his uncle.

  Beyond the Narrows, the lighter turned east, and soon the Parachute Drop’s faint silhouette materialized to the left, along with skeletal shapes of the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone. Then it turned south, then west; then Anna lost track. She thought they might be heading out of New York Harbor into the Atlantic. How deep would she have to go down?

  Dexter Styles stood at the back of the boat, a hand on his fedora, his grim mien heightening Anna’s dread. They’d exchanged hardly a word on the drive to Red Hook, and she’d stuck close to Marle and Bascombe ever since. Their merriment kept her foreboding at bay. She had approached them squeamishly about the project, afraid they would laugh in her face or telephone the police, but it seemed that diving for a body at the bottom of New York Harbor—they never asked whose—was exactly the sort of crackpot adventure that had been missing from both their lives. Anna had felt compelled to remind them of the possible risks and pitfalls, but none of it registered in their dancing eyes—or perhaps the risks and pitfalls were the point.

  When at last th
e lighter began to slow, Anna removed her coat and shoes and pulled a set of woolens over her jumpsuit and a warm night-watch cap onto her head. She wriggled inside the canvas dress without assistance while Bascombe and Marle tested the helmets and air hose couplings. The moon laid a faint feathery path toward them across the water. The helmsman undertook a series of adjustments and corrections until at last the skipper emitted a howl that made Anna’s scalp prickle, and the engine was silenced. The lighter’s two sailors, dungarees black from the coal they’d been heaping into a furnace belowdecks, began to lower the first of two double anchors, one at each end of the lighter, that would hold it stationary.

  “Have you any idea where we are?” Anna asked her friends.

  “Search me,” Bascombe said.

  “Staten Island,” Marle said. “Southwest shore.”

  “I knew that,” Bascombe said. “I was testing you.”

  Their laughter had a defiant edge, as if sustaining their exuberance had become a strain. They dressed Anna: first the shoes, laced and buckled; then the helmet cushion. These steps were so deeply ingrained by now that performing them made their alien surroundings seem recognizable. Breastplate; bib; studs; collar; washers. When everything was on except the hat, Marle summoned the goons to the compressor’s flywheels. They began turning them zealously, elbowing each other aside in a show of indefatigability. Dexter Styles watched all of it from a distance, his face a mirror of Anna’s anxiety. She avoided looking at him.

  When both anchors were taut and the boat stationary, Marle took a sounding. The rope’s wet knots indicated a depth of thirty-nine feet, a soft bottom of sand and mud. Then Bascombe and Marle heaved the descending line, with its hundred-pound weight, over the starboard side of the boat, close to the diving ladder. Anna and Marle helped Bascombe into the second dress—just the canvas, without the weighted parts. Her friends’ ebullience had flattened, and they proceeded now in workmanlike fashion. Anna sat on the diving stool wearing everything but her helmet. “I must speak with Mr. Styles,” she said.

  He was beside her a moment later, kneeling to meet her eyes. His own looked cavernous.

  “What am I looking for?” she said.

  “You know what.”

  “I mean what else.”

  It took a moment. “Ropes, I’d imagine. A weight of some kind. Possibly a chain.”

  Raising her voice to Marle and Bascombe, she said, “I’m ready.”

  She rose from the stool and stumped to the ladder. They screwed on her helmet and attached the air hose and lifelines to its goosenecks, testing her air. Marle pulled the lifeline under her right arm and the air hose under her left, and secured them to the metal eyelets on the front of her breastplate. As she was about to mount the ladder, Bascombe peered at her through her open faceplate, his narrow eyes engaging hers with unusual directness. “I don’t like it,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He snorted. “Hell, I’m not the one going down.”

  “What could go wrong?” she said, which got a laugh.

  He sealed her faceplate, and a cool chemical hiss of air filled Anna’s mouth and nostrils. She descended the ladder backward, then held the descending line and let the harbor swallow her. The current was tremendous, a pull with the force of the ocean behind it. Recalling Lieutenant Axel’s lesson on currents, she positioned herself so the water pushed at her back, pressing her against the descending line rather than separating her from it. Down, down she slid. She’d assumed that diving at night would be no different from diving in Wallabout Bay, with its poor visibility. But it turned out that the bay’s muddy opacity was something she’d seen. Here, there was no difference between opening her eyes and closing them. This made for an eerie dislocation, as if she were sliding toward nothing or floating in a void. When at last she reached the bottom, she clutched the line and blinked into the dark, wondering if she’d come down too quickly. A pull on her lifeline steadied her, and she pulled back. The current was milder at the bottom. Anna shut her eyes and immediately felt calmer. Here was a blindness she could tolerate.

  She took a sixty-foot circling line from her tool bag and bent it to the descending line, just above the weight. Then, recalling a trick Lieutenant Axel had taught them (strange how well she’d listened, even with Bascombe muttering in her ear), she wedged her gloved fingers under the edge of the weight and flipped it over, so now her searching line was pinned underneath the weight and would slide more closely over the harbor floor. She looped the other end around her right wrist and walked away from the weight until the line pulled taut. Then she set down her tool bag to mark the beginning of her circle, lowered herself onto all fours, and began to crawl over the harbor floor in a clockwise direction, dragging the radius of circling line from her wrist. Immediately, the rope met with swells in the harbor bottom. At first Anna felt compelled to investigate each interference, but gradually, she was able to distinguish objects from topography. She kept her eyes closed and tried to forget the immensity around her, her own tiny solitude within it. Divers who’d worked on the freshwater pipeline from Staten Island spoke of wrecked ships on the harbor floor, hundred-year-old oyster beds choked with monstrous shells, eels fifty feet long. These apparitions seemed to flicker just beyond the reach of Anna’s fingers. She calmed herself with the thought of Marle holding her lifeline and air hose, gathering them in and letting them out as she moved. They could haul her up at any time. Four sharp pulls were all it would take.

  * * *

  Dexter watched his boys powering the air machine like figures on a clock. He was struggling, as he had from the start of this ride, to do the single thing he was worst at: nothing. His idleness made everything around him register on a scale from irksome to intolerable: Anna’s cohorts holding her ankles to guide her feet into the massive diving shoes; the Negro’s hand under her chin while they attached the harness, or whatever the hell it was. Their insularity made him envious—not just of the men but all three of them. They were working together, two men and a girl, with evident ease. Even after the diving suit was on and she no longer looked like a girl, he was resentful of their shared knowledge, their nomenclature and expertise. As they helped her backward into the harbor, Dexter took his first cigarette in five years and placed it between his lips. Enzo darted from the shadows in the nick of time to light it.

  Smoking woozily after his long abstinence, Dexter pulled a chair alongside the skipper’s and tipped back his head in solidarity with the ancient’s palsied neck. A stroke. Even in the cold, a sheen of sweat coated the skipper’s face. Dexter was near enough to smell the tomato juice he drank more or less constantly (slopping it liberally onto his clothes)—for ulcers, he said, though it seemed to Dexter that so much tomato juice might well be the ulcers’ cause. There it was, in a tin pail at his side. A riot of stars flashed overhead.

  “Who could’ve guessed, Skipper,” Dexter said. “That we had all these stars right over New York City.”

  The skipper gave a cough, unimpressed. He was a New York skipper, accustomed to navigating by landmarks and shore lights. The stars had confounded him. But when it came to the harbor, its winds and currents and tricky passes, he knew every bump and hole, the whereabouts of eddies neglected by the currents—places where objects would sink and not wash ashore. And he knew how to find those places again, or so he claimed.

  “Come now, Skipper. You’ll get used to the stars.”

  A bark of contradiction, which Dexter understood to mean that the war would end, the lights would go back on, and the New York sky would resume looking as it had.

  “You’re right, of course,” Dexter said. Then, very softly, “Say, you’re certain this is the place?”

  The skipper barked his umbrage at the very question.

  “How can you know, when everything looks so different in this dark?”

  The mariner tapped his temple below the white cap he always wore aboard, its starched cleanliness a bizarre contrast to his tomato-streaked squalor. “Nothing moves,
” he said, startling Dexter with the abrupt clarity of his speech. “In here.”

  “I see.”

  Soon restlessness overtook Dexter again. He considered trying to speak with Nestor, the helmsman, but that was hopeless. Once garrulous, Nestor had clammed up some years back after receiving a fright. Instead, Dexter approached the front of the boat, where his boys were sweating at the air machine. One of the Naval Yard men was there, a sour-faced towhead whose disapproval was thick enough to butter bread. His eyes were fixed on two gauges at the front of the air machine.

  “They turning those wheels fast enough?” Dexter asked him.

  “So far.”

  “Oh, they won’t let up.”

  “They’d best not.”

  A provocation. Its touch was like an electric current, so bracing and welcome that Dexter refrained from pointing out to the mug right then and there who was boss. He went instead to the other Naval Yard man, the Negro, who stood at the opposite end of the boat near the diving ladder. The lines attached to Anna ran through his hands into coils at his feet. His eyes were fixed on the water.

  “What are you watching, exactly?” Dexter asked.

  “Her bubbles,” the Negro said, not moving his eyes. “See them breaking? The current carries them; she isn’t necessarily right in that place.” He seemed friendly, neutral, difficult to read the way Negroes often were—except to other Negroes, he supposed.

  “How do you know where she is?”

  The Negro held up the cords in his hand. “I let these in and out as she moves, so there’s never too much slack. That way I can feel her signal pulls.”

  “Is it dangerous? What she’s doing?”

  “Not if we all do our jobs right.”

  They watched the bubbles, a pale boil on the harbor’s inky surface. “Your partner,” Dexter said. “Why has he a diving suit on?”