Dexter Styles replaced his hat, checked his watch, cracked a shutter to look outside. “We need to get out of here,” he said.
They walked to the car a distance apart. The dawn was a cold, sparkling blue. He opened the passenger door, and Anna slipped inside the fragrant interior. He shut his own door, hard, and pulled away. After several minutes of silent driving, he said, “It puts me in an uncomfortable position. Learning this now.”
“Then you did know him,” Anna said. “He did work for you.” She realized that she had never fully believed this. The memory had too much the quality of a dream or a wish.
“I’d have told you any time you’d asked.”
“Do you remember when he brought me to your house?”
“No.”
“It was winter, like this. I took off my shoes.”
“You can be absolutely certain,” he said, “if I’d remembered any of that, we would not be sitting together in this car.”
“Do you know what happened to him?” she asked. “To Eddie Kerrigan?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.”
Anna watched him, waiting for him to look back at her, but he stared fixedly at the road. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
He braked so suddenly that the tires made a little shriek, pinching the curb of a quiet street lined with houses. He turned on her, white-faced. “You don’t believe me?”
“I’m sorry,” she stammered.
“You’re the one who’s been lying through your teeth. I’ve no idea who you are—what you are. Are you a hooker? Did someone pay you to fuck me and say these things?”
She belted him across the face, her mind a half second behind her hand, which left a red slash on his cheek. “I’ve told you who I am,” she said, her voice shaking. “I’m Anna Kerrigan, Eddie Kerrigan’s daughter. That’s who I’ve been all this time.”
She thought he might hit her back. The hands clutching the steering wheel were scarred, like a boxer’s. He took a long breath. At last he turned to her. “What is it that you want? Money?”
She nearly hit him again. But the rage flashed through her and left her calm, more lucid than she’d felt in weeks.
“I want to know where he went,” she said. “Or if he’s alive.”
“I can’t help with any of that.”
“Wouldn’t you want your daughter to look for you if you disappeared?” she asked. “Wouldn’t you expect it?”
“It’s the very last thing I would want.”
She was taken aback. “Why?”
“I’d want her to stay as far away as possible,” he said. “To keep her safe.”
He was looking straight ahead. Anna watched his pugilist’s hands on the steering wheel and felt his words move through her. She threw open the door and sprang from the car with no idea where she was. She began walking down the block ahead of the car, half expecting it to pull up alongside her, to hear his voice. But Dexter Styles drove past without turning his head.
?PART FIVE
The Voyage
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
* * *
Five weeks earlier
On New Year’s Day 1943, Eddie Kerrigan climbed Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower—or as close as the soldiers standing guard would let him go—to look down at the Embarcadero Piers. He made out three Liberty ships taking on cargo. They were identical, of course, but he knew that the middle one was the Elizabeth Seaman, where he was expected to report for duty in under an hour. Eddie dreaded this. In fact, he’d climbed Telegraph Hill in hopes that elevation, with its attendant perspective, would help to shrink his reluctance.
He’d taken the third mate’s examination the previous week, over five consecutive days, in San Francisco’s vast columned Custom House. Just walking up those steps—as if to a library or a city hall—had cowed him. He’d had so little schooling, read nothing but newspapers before going to sea. But everyone read aboard ships—there wasn’t much else to do if you didn’t play cards or cribbage. Tentatively, Eddie had begun to read, and found that it suited him. He still read slowly, but his mind proved to be like a dog waiting for someone to throw a stick so it could tumble and pant to retrieve it. He’d memorized whole portions of the Merchant Marine Officers’ Handbook and had a nearly perfect mark on his third mate’s exam.
He scrutinized the Elizabeth Seaman as best he could without binoculars. Booms were lowering large crates into the number two hold: aircraft, he guessed. As he watched, he was troubled by an unfamiliar vigilance—a readiness to be galled by missteps, as though he were already responsible for this ship he hadn’t set foot on, even at a half-mile’s distance. He chided himself: the merchant service wasn’t the navy, for Pete’s sake. Merchant officers hadn’t so much as set uniforms. Yet now that he’d become an officer, even in the abstract, Eddie sensed that the passive tranquility he’d cultivated during five and a half years at sea was in jeopardy.
Not that he hadn’t worked hard. He’d worked like a coolie—that had been an essential part of the peace. In his first jobs, on the engine room’s “black gang,” he’d shoveled coal, fed furnaces, and broken up fires; cleaned and lubricated the ship’s scalding, sweating innards at temperatures of 125 degrees while being bludgeoned by an engine roar that had left a permanent jingle in his ears. Exhaustion had emptied his soul. After eight months he’d crept from the engine room to join the deck crew, the garish sunshine hounding him mercilessly at first. When at last his eyes had adjusted, he’d looked out and noticed the sea as if it were entirely new: an infinite hypnotic expanse that could look like scales, wax, hammered silver, wrinkled flesh. It had structure and layers you couldn’t see from land. Fixing his eyes upon this unfamiliar sea, Eddie had learned to float in a semi-conscious state, alert but not fully awake. Blood broke in golden flashes inside his eyeballs. A humming emptiness filled his mind. Not to think, not to feel—simply to be, without pain. He remembered his old life, but those memories occupied just one room in his mind, and there were others—more than Eddie had realized. He learned to avoid that particular room. After a while, he forgot where it was.