Hand over hand, with shuddering arms, he began to pull her lifeline toward himself by agonizing degrees, pivoting Anna’s rigid 320-pound bulk toward a vertical position. His face was scored with sweat, his eyes locked to Anna’s, as if the effort were happening there. She concentrated on not bending, an imperative that caused a conflagration of pain in her back. She was afraid of vomiting into the helmet. She longed to close her eyes, but it felt essential to maintain eye contact with Katz. Slowly, gravity began to pour the weight of her dress back toward her shoes. At last she bent her knees and rocked forward, nearly collapsing facedown on the stage. Katz caught her and pulled her upright, then guided her carefully onto the pier.
Savino and Grollier led her to the diving bench and unscrewed her helmet. Anna sat leaning over her knees, still thinking she might be sick. A hush encompassed all of them. Had she fallen into the freezing bay with her faceplate open, Anna could have drowned by the time they’d managed to haul her back up. She looked at the wet gray clouds that had covered up the sky while she was below. In one way, it felt like nothing: she was here, everything was fine. But it seemed possible that she still might fall.
Katz stood apart. He ran his hands through his hair and shook his head, then walked to the gangway to speak with the sailor on watch. Grollier and Savino removed Anna’s belt and breastplate and shoes. Anna clutched at familiar sounds of the Yard—motors, machinery, shouts—as if they could stop her fall.
Eventually, Katz returned, and they began loading equipment onto the truck. Anna was breaking down the flywheels on the air compressor when three naval officers approached from the ship’s gangway in double-breasted blue overcoats with gilt buttons and gold epaulettes.
The senior officer was tall and trim; even his salt-and-pepper hair looked rigorous under the crisp blue hat with its gold braid. “I want to thank you, gentlemen—ma’am—personally,” he said, shaking each of their hands and betraying no surprise at the sight of Anna. “Fine work, Mr. Katz. Fine, efficient work.”
Katz received this praise flinchingly, as if the words were goring him. Wet snow had begun to fall, but Anna hardly noticed it in the presence of these officers. They had come from the skyscraper ship; they would sail it into battle. In touching its hull, Anna had touched the war directly for the first time—felt the vehemence of its pulse.
When the officers had gone, the gray day closed back around them. Anna felt calm, but Katz was grave and distracted. His eyes wandered to hers, and without intending to, she smiled at him. Katz smiled tentatively back. They each took half the compressor and loaded it onto the truck.
*
Anna was crossing Navy Street, arm in arm with Ruby, when she recognized Dexter Styles’s Cadillac idling outside Richard’s Bar and Grill. She had looked for it every night.
“Excuse me,” she told her friends. She didn’t want them to meet, or even see, Dexter Styles. “I need to speak with someone.”
She crossed Sands Street, trailed by their curiosity. Dexter Styles stepped from his automobile and opened the passenger door. The familiar leather smell surrounded her.
She felt a change in him as soon as he sat beside her, an uncharacteristic quiet. The shadow of his beard was gray against his skin. He pulled away from the curb and nosed the car alongside a throng of Yard workers and sailors. Anna watched them longingly through her window. A minute ago she’d been among them, laughing with her friends. She felt as if she’d fallen down a well to someplace cavernous and bleak.
“He’s dead,” she said when they’d driven a block in silence. “Isn’t he.”
“Yes.”
She swallowed. “Where?”
“I can find out.”
She stared at the windshield wipers, their back-and-forth gumming the traffic lights into viscous colored syrup. The hunger for Dexter Styles was still alive in her, a field of feverish energy with no affinity for the man beside her. He was a different man, cool and withdrawn. But it was Anna who had changed. Returned. That was how it felt: as if a long, disjointed detour had delivered her at last to a familiar landscape. “Well, then do it!” she said, her voice rising. “Find out! What are you waiting for?”
He pulled up along an empty curb on Navy Street. The brick wall of the Yard was directly outside Anna’s window. Glancing at her, he said, “You’ll need your diving suit.”
“I’ll— What?” He was talking nonsense. When the words forced their meaning upon Anna, she lunged at his face.
Dexter Styles seized her hands with the artful speed of one practiced at disarming others. “Knock it off,” he breathed. “Or I won’t lift a finger.”
She’d forced him back against his window. Blood oozed from a scratch she’d made on his temple. Anna breathed his familiar breath, and the appetite rose in her. She felt his heart stamping through his overcoat. Their faces were nearly touching; he was about to kiss her. She was dying for him to. But she knew that she would bite him—kick and scratch and scream her head off.
He must have known, too, because he pushed her away from him slowly, keeping her hands immobilized. “Yes or no,” he said.
She took a ragged breath. “It isn’t that simple,” she muttered finally. “You need a boatload of equipment to dive.”
He tipped his head toward the wall, still holding her hands. “How much can you get out of there?”
“I don’t know. Some.”
“Whatever you can’t bring, I will.”
His confidence affronted her. “Really. A boat. An air compressor. Hoses. A diving ladder.”
“The boat is easy. I’ve people who can get the rest.”
“You’ve people who can do just about anything, haven’t you?”
“Just about.”
“We’ll need a second diver,” Anna said. “Normally, there would be two, but we could get away with just one.”
With a warning look, he let go her hands. “You’ve someone in mind?”
She tried to imagine Bascombe’s reaction to such a proposal. “He doesn’t like trouble.”
“No one does.”
Their eyes met pragmatically. They were working together, after all.
“How dangerous is it? Diving in an unfamiliar place?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t care.” She remembered being suspended under the veering sky, believing she would plunge to the bottom of the bay. It seemed to her now that she had fallen and survived.
“I care,” said Dexter Styles.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
* * *
Captain Kittredge brought the Elizabeth Seaman into Cape Town on February 25, eight days ahead of schedule, having made good on his boast by maintaining an average speed of twelve knots. He looked so picturesque, commanding the bridge with his fair hair and fine patrician hands, that Eddie sometimes imagined the Elizabeth Seaman as a yacht like the ones he’d watched, gathering into regattas at the foot of Long Island Sound, from the Bronx piers where he and the other protectory boys went swimming in summer. Kittredge was like a grown-up version of the youths he’d seen skylarking from Central Park with their tennis racquets and riding crops. The captain had so much luck, he’d luck to spare, Eddie told himself—enough for fifty-six men, he hoped.