When the car was stopped at a light, Anna seized his head between her star-shaped hands and kissed the side of his face with utmost tenderness. Eddie felt a sting in his eyes.
“That kiss,” Anna said. “That one is for Lydia.”
At home, she watched him deliver it. Eddie did so tenderly, exactly as she had instructed. He was a bagman, after all.
*
Eddie knew he was sluicing the corruption by delivering the boodling payoffs that sustained it—to aldermen, state senators, police superintendents, rival pier bosses, and back again, at different times. Yet he maintained an observational stance—he wasn’t really doing what he was doing; he was watching it. This distinction was essential to assuage his sense of failure and despair—the stubborn, beckoning vision of an oncoming trolley wheel. Gradually, his routes began to ramify beyond Dunellen’s piers to gaming halls where Dunny had an interest but not control. There was cheating here, too, but never when a higher-up was present. That meant the cheating wasn’t sanctioned from above, but a sub-racket of the dealers and game runners to increase their take without risking a suicidal move like robbing the house. It might therefore be stopped, if Eddie knew what higher-up to tell.
When Dunellen hadn’t any work for him, Eddie sometimes posed as a regular player to study the crookedness, and the crookedness inside that. He imagined he was a detective—real police, not the corrupt pawns who were the only bulls he knew. He wrote nothing down. The cheating was all in his head: who; when; how; how much. Meanwhile, a larger structure disclosed itself gradually—to know who paid whom was, in some sense, to know everything. It turned out that a single man controlled much of the gaming in New York City in late 1934. The path of profits to this personage contained switchbacks and hairpin turns that only a person making and receiving deliveries could begin to track. There was always a man behind the man, and another man behind that one—all the way up to God, Eddie supposed.
Two days after Christmas, Eddie polished his shoes, brushed his hat, and trimmed it with an iridescent green feather Agnes had saved from her piecework. He paid this almighty stranger a call at Nightlight, a former speaky in the West Forties that ambushed Eddie with nostalgia when he walked inside. He must have been here with Agnes and Brianne and the other dancers, back in the time he’d come to think of as Before.
According to the front-of-house man, the boss was not present. Eddie said he’d wait, ordered a rye and soda, and opened his silver pocket watch on the bar. He’d been a sucker in his nostalgia, he saw; the joint played on that, its seediness manufactured, or at least aware. He sensed that gaming was taking place, watched until he found the door, and guessed at the stakes by the men and women passing through it in paste pearls and last year’s hats. Nightlight’s racket wasn’t gambling, that was clear. It was something else—a way of making money that involved losing money on the surface.
Twenty-four minutes later, another man came along and asked whether Eddie would like to see the boss. Eddie followed him to a back room, where a gee with a Dick Tracy jaw was surrounded by wop goons. Eddie was shocked. Outside the purview of his piers, Dunellen was doing business with the Syndicate. That could only mean he hadn’t any choice.
Styles sent his lackeys packing. When Eddie had taken a seat across his desk, he said, “Are you police?”
Eddie shook his head. “A concerned citizen.”
Styles laughed. “What can I do for you, Mr. Kerrigan?”
Eddie laid out his discoveries game by game: location, means of cheating, approximate take. Styles listened in silence. Once or twice he interjected, “That’s none of ours,” but mostly, he listened. When Eddie had finished, he asked, “Why tell me this?”
“I’d want to know, if I were you.”
“Of course I want to know. What do you want?”
Eddie hadn’t expected to reach this point so quickly. He found himself uncertain what to say—what he wanted from Styles, exactly.
“I can give you something right now,” Styles said. “Just about anything, in fact.”
He eyed Kerrigan, searching for the weakness. Money wasn’t his object, or he’d have demanded it before singing. What, then? In a mick it was usually booze, but Kerrigan hadn’t the look of a lush. Nor was there much propensity for violence in those scrappy limbs, though he’d likely fight hard in self-defense. Women? Micks were famously prudish, faithful to their blowsy wives—perhaps recalling the bonny colleens they’d been before the assembly line of children, or from fear of their drunken, bellicose priests.
“Girls?” He was watching Kerrigan’s face, awaiting that trigger flinch that would let him know he’d found it. “We’ve girls galore around here.”
“I’ve a beautiful wife, Mr. Styles.”
“So have I,” Dexter said. “We’re lucky.”
Money, then. He was disappointed in Kerrigan; it would be less than he’d have gotten by demanding it first. “What do you call a fair price for the information you’ve given me?”
Eddie collected his thoughts, unsatisfied. “As I see it,” he began, “you could run your business better and at the same time make it cleaner—more fair, I mean—to the men who try their luck.” This sounded disingenuous, even silly. He sensed Styles’s bafflement—but sensed, too, that Styles enjoyed being baffled.
“Is it your impression, Mr. Kerrigan, that I run a charitable organization?” he asked.
Eddie couldn’t help but smile.
“You think like a police,” Styles said. “Why not join?”
“I’d still be working for you.”
Only then did Eddie understand what his object had been, coming here. He wanted a job.
“Some men find it a bitter pill to swallow, working for me,” Styles said. “They don’t like the change in times.”
Eddie took this to mean he wasn’t the first waterfront mick to come calling out of sheer desperation. “I guess that depends,” he said, “who they were working for before.”
Styles leaned back, sizing him up. Eddie did the same of the younger man across the desk: the phony name with a wop name crumpled just behind it, a restless dissatisfaction that registered as curiosity, energy. And underneath that, a sadness deep enough to bear its weight. Eddie saw a man he recognized and liked. He felt an affinity for Dexter Styles, whose very power derived from the fact that it was outside his scrum—in defiance of it. An allegiance purely of choice.
“It happens you’re right,” Styles said. “I’d like to clean up those games you mention. And I’d like to know what other leaks I’ve got. They’ve a tendency to vanish when my boys show up.”
“You need an ombudsman,” Eddie said. It was a word he’d discovered years ago, in a newspaper. He’d been waiting ever since for a chance to use it.
Styles smiled, bemused. “All right, then: an ombudsman. But we can’t meet here. Or be seen together.”
“Naturally.”
“Bring your family to my home and we’ll talk some more. You’ve children?”
“Two daughters.”