“Just do as you’re told.”
A stage—a platform lowered by ropes—had been prepared for her descent. As the water closed around her, she rediscovered the sensation of being weightless. She felt the pull of the East River’s infamous currents even on the ship’s lee side. Down she went through soft fronds of daylight alongside the stupendous hull. Its sheer scale suggested violence. Anna wanted to touch it. Holding a rope of the stage, she swung her body toward the ship’s hull and let her gloved hand slide over its outer shell while the stage pulled her down. Her skin prickled into gooseflesh. The ship felt alert, alive. It exuded a hum that traveled through her fingers up her arm: the vibration of thousands of souls teeming within. Like a skyscraper turned on its side.
At last she made out the whorls of the after starboard screw and signaled to Katz that she’d reached it. Descending lines had been hung to help her maneuver, and she used these to float herself toward the screw. It was fifteen feet high, its five blades curved like the inside of a seashell. Anna moved among them, running her gloves along the edges of each blade to the center ring where they met. Nothing fouled them. Taking care not to foul her own lines, she climbed around the screw to the shaft connecting it to the engine. She followed this to the forward starboard screw, which had four blades rather than five. It, too, was clear. Now she gripped the forward edge of the ship’s rudder—like the steel door to a bank vault—and used it to pivot around to the port side of the hull, which faced the river. Currents buffeted her, swells of passing boats. On the forward port screw, she found the problem: a rope the width of her arm had snared among the blades. It was being held tight by one of the infamous railroad ties, which dangled several feet below.
A pull from Katz. Anna pulled back. Now she was supposed to return topside so that Grollier could cut through the obstructing rope with his oxy-hydrogen torch. But why should she go back up? Why not saw through the rope by hand, using the hacksaw in her tool bag? Anna made this choice in perfect knowledge that it was the wrong one. Following rules had got her nowhere. Passing tests had got her nowhere. In the course of getting nowhere, she had given up on some larger vision in which being good and trying to please made any sense. Why not take what she could while she had the chance?
She moved around the fouled screw blades, tugging at lengths of rope. The tightest segment was near the center, a figure eight caught between the two most vertical blades. Anna removed her hacksaw on its manila cord and began to saw at this portion of rope. It was slow work. Katz signaled again, then again. Each time she gave one pull in return—I’m all right—and continued with her work.
Katz signaled that he was sending down a slate. Anna repeated the signal but did not go starboard to write on it. As soon as they read her findings, she would be ordered topside, already in trouble. Why not stay down and finish what she’d begun? Like a thief trying to crack a safe before an alarm rang, Anna sawed in the half-dark, possessed by a feral determination she knew was pure selfishness, bound to hurt her in the end. She didn’t care. The rope began to strain where she sawed; she felt its tension pass into the dwindling number of intact strands until they quivered like fiddle strings. Then the rope snapped with a twang she could hear over the hiss of her air. Its two ends hung in the murk, hemp threads oscillating like tentacles. Anna climbed over the screw, tugging at other segments of rope, trying to redistribute their slack. The effort made her light-headed. All at once the ropes began to slip, the stanchion’s deadweight lulling them gently away from the screw blades. Then all of it fell away, rope frills waving as they fluttered into the dark.
Back on the rising stage, Anna experienced a first pinch of regret. Her modest achievement, easily replicable by Grollier with his torch, shrank beside the enormity of her offense. Even before the stage had reached the pier, she saw the scar burning scarlet on Katz’s upper lip. “It’s done,” she said quickly when he opened her faceplate. “The screw is clear.”
“How dare you ignore my orders?” he roared before she could step off the stage.
“It’s done,” she said, swallowing. “The job is done.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are? I sent down a slate and you ignored the slate.”
An animal smell, like ammonia, rose from inside Anna’s dress. She was afraid. “Let me off,” she said.
But Katz seemed out of his right mind. “Wait until I tell the lieutenant, you lousy cunt,” he bawled, jabbing his head at her so she saw gold fillings in his mouth and smelled baloney on his breath. “He’ll give you the bum’s rush so fast you’ll see stars.”
He was going to kill her; she could feel that he wanted to. She leaned backward, clutching the ropes of the stage.
“She’s falling,” someone screamed. “Grab her, grab her!”
The weight of the destabilized dress was too great to arrest; Anna’s left glove lost its grip on the rope, and she toppled like a tree, aware that gravity was pulling her away from her feet but unable to stop her fall. She saw veering sky and must have screamed. Or maybe the screaming was Katz.
Then she hung suspended. Katz had seized her lifeline and stopped her plunge at the last possible instant, before the heels of her boots left the stage. Anna held her body rigid, trying to anchor them in place. If her shoes slid off the edge, the weight of the dress would hurtle her straight to the bottom of the bay—along with Katz, if he didn’t let go. The lifeline was fastened to goosenecks at the back of her helmet and threaded through eyelets at the front of her breastplate. Gingerly, terrified of flipping over, Anna reached up a gloved hand and tried to close her faceplate.
“No. No,” Katz rasped from above her. “Don’t move.”