“Of course, sir.”
The change in her relations with Lieutenant Axel had happened perhaps three weeks before. From one day to the next, he seemed to grow accustomed to Anna, as if the attrition of habit had caused the scaffolding of his prejudice to crumble spontaneously. It was a stunning, almost magical reversal, and although it had begun before Anna found the pocket watch, she felt as if the watch had catalyzed the transformation. Now she found herself cast in the unlikely role of favorite—pet—as if the animus between herself and Lieutenant Axel had been converted into intimacy. He spoke to her in shorthand, and she understood it. His disparaging remarks about girls were compliments to Anna, for she was not like other girls. “Do me a favor, Kerrigan,” he’d told her the week before. “Cover up your hair on the barge, or we’ll have every birdbrained secretary on the goddamn Yard pounding on our door.”
“They might not want to dive, sir.”
“Probably true. There aren’t many as crazy as you. But I’m warning you, if they start turning up in droves, it’ll be your job to send them packing.”
“Unless they’re any good,” she’d said. But the lieutenant merely snorted, as she’d known he would—wanted him to, it seemed to Anna later, when her disingenuousness shamed her.
“Get a feel for the new men,” he told her now. “Tell me if any stands out. And Kerrigan.” He lowered his voice, glancing at the door. “Rattle them a little. You know what I mean. Separate the men from the boys.”
She left his office feeling buoyed by the flattery and guilty for enjoying it. She put on her work clothes and went outside to the pier. Sunlight poured through the building ways, and she closed her eyes, letting it warm her face. The pressure of her problem began to ease, like a fresh blow that had finally ceased to ache. The solution was obvious: diving would put an end to it. Trouble like hers was incompatible with this work; her monthly would come. That afternoon she had cramps while inspecting the hull of a torpedoed destroyer, five trainees observing her from the barge. She worried that the diving dress would be soiled—luxurious fretting that made her smile in the privacy of her helmet. When at last she asked Greer to stand guard at the restroom, she was incredulous to find she’d been wrong.
Each morning she awoke convinced that her trouble would end that day. By evening she was too exhausted to dwell on the fact that it hadn’t. The weather warmed enough that she and Rose began walking home along Clinton Avenue from Flushing rather than take a second trolley. On Friday, which was Sabbath for the Jews, Rose and her family lit two candles after supper and gathered around the table with a loaf of bread. While they added extra blessings for Sig and Caleb, in the army, Anna issued her own fervid prayer: Please let my trouble end. Unless her trouble ended, all of this would shortly disappear: the candles, the bread. Rose and her family. There were other kinds of homes where girls in trouble went to live.
In a separate chamber of Anna’s mind, a clock had been set in motion. If the diving failed to work, there was another way, but you couldn’t wait too long. Two weeks after her faint, Anna opened her eyes one morning and thought, I have to do something. She’d no idea how to begin, but the answer came as if she’d been planning it all along: She would find Nell. Nell would know what to do. Nell had done it herself.
After work, she took the subway to Union Square. Old men who’d fought in the Great War were playing chess in their heavy coats, pins and medals affixed to their hats. “I’ve Heard That Song Before” played on a portable phonograph, and teenagers were holding each other in their coats, dancing to the music. Watching them, Anna was stricken with longing. She had danced that way with boys at Brooklyn College, but she’d never felt as innocent as these teenagers looked. She had always been hiding something. She was hiding something now.
Twenty-one Gramercy Park South. It was uncanny how Nell had made her repeat it.
At the mention of Nell’s first name—still the only name Anna had—a doorman in a gray military-looking uniform went to a wall switchboard and plugged in a cable. Anna touched the pocket watch. She’d hoped that Nell would be at home preparing for the evening, and it seemed she was right. An elevator man ferried her to the eighth floor and released her into an alcove containing two paneled doors facing each other across a gush of red roses whose breadth was amplified by a mirror hanging just behind them. Anna’s wan reflection startled her. She was pinching color into her cheeks when Nell emerged from the left door wearing a satin peignoir whose lapels effervesced with tiny white feathers, like soapsuds. She seemed to take a moment to recall who Anna was; then she threw her arms around her, holding her cigarette away so as not to burn her. “How are you, darling?” she cried. “I haven’t seen you in ages, you naughty thing. Where have you been hiding?” Anna made a neutral murmur to each shrill utterance, and in the course of this back-and-forth, something settled in Nell. She drew away, narrowing her eyes at Anna. “Come in and tell me what’s wrong,” she said.
*
Anna returned to Gramercy Park early Sunday morning. She and Nell walked to Park Avenue, Nell’s sharp heels striking the pavement like nails being hammered. Her peroxided hair appeared blanched in the morning sun, and there were blue shadows under her eyes. She’d become a person who looked best in artificial light.
When they were seated in a taxi, Anna returned to the topic of price softly, so the cabbie wouldn’t hear. She’d no notion what the procedure would cost and was hoping she could pay over time.
“Hammond is paying,” Nell whispered back. “I told him it was for me.”
“Suppose he finds out?”
“Believe me,” Nell said, “he owes me.”
“Thank you,” Anna breathed, but the phrase seemed hardly sufficient. “And for coming with me. I never expected it.”
Nell shrugged. There was something curiously impersonal about her ministrations; Anna was fairly certain she would have done the same for any girl who came to her in trouble.
“You heard about Dexter Styles,” Nell said.
Anna fixed her gaze on the blur of tall gray buildings outside the window. “I saw it in the paper,” she said. “Horrible.”
“No one talks of anything else.”
“Do they know who did it? Or why?”
“There are a thousand rumors. Some people say it was the Chicago Syndicate. They’re more ruthless than the New York one, supposedly.”
“Why would they kill him?” Anna asked.
“There’s an investigation, but no one will talk. Unless they want the same treatment.”
“Maybe Dexter Styles talked.”
Nell considered this. “But why?” she said. “People say he was three quarters legitimate. Seven eighths! Why risk all that?”