“Anna.”
These syllables, which Eddie hadn’t uttered aloud in years, seemed to crash together like a pair of cymbals, leaving behind a ringing echo. Abashed, he looked away. But as the seconds passed without reaction from Wyckoff, Eddie realized how unremarkable his disclosure was. Nowadays, most men on ships had left other lives behind. The war had made him ordinary.
“How old is she?” Wyckoff asked. “Your Anna.”
Eddie took a moment to calculate. “Twenty,” he said with surprise. “She’ll have been twenty just last week.”
“Grown-up!”
“I suppose twenty is grown-up.”
“I’m twenty-one,” Wyckoff said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
* * *
There were nights in the Mozambique Channel when the escort vessels dropped depth charges, filling the air with a tingling crackle. The general quarters bell rang and rang, bringing all hands on deck, and the convoy zigzagged for long stretches. Eddie stood on the flying bridge, raw-eyed, trying to maintain the Elizabeth Seaman’s station among the rows and columns of turning blacked-out ships. When he collapsed into his sack, he slept fitfully, Anna prowling his thoughts like a restless spirit.
“I want to go with you.”
“Children aren’t allowed, toots.”
“I used to go.”
“These are different places.”
“I used to go lately.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did I change?”
“Well, you’re bigger.”
“Did I get bigger suddenly?”
“Growing isn’t like that. It’s gradual.”
“Did you suddenly notice I was bigger?”
“I may have.”
“What did you notice?”
“Please, Anna.”
“When did you notice?”
“Please.”
After a long pause, she said, in a harder voice, “I’ll punish you back.”
“I don’t recommend that.”
“I’ll be idle.”
“That’s punishing yourself.”
“I’ll eat too many sweets.”
“You’ll end up like Mrs. Adair, without teeth.”
“I’ll dirty my clothes.”
“That’s punishing Mama.”
“I’ll be a floozy.”
“Pardon me?”
“I’ll be a floozy. Like Aunt Brianne.”
Eddie slapped her face. “Don’t you ever. Say that again.”
Anna held her cheek, dry-eyed. “Then let me come with you.”
*
After seven days, the convoy emerged from the Mozambique Channel without having lost a ship. Waves of vessels began peeling away—some west, to Mombasa, others east to Ceylon and Indonesia. The Elizabeth Seaman remained in a smaller convoy of eighteen ships and four escort vessels. There was still the drag of the Panamanian coal burner, now stationed directly in front of them. Several times each day, when the burner cleared her pipes, fine grains of soot settled over every inch of the Elizabeth Seaman. Captain Kittredge flicked them from his sleeves and fulminated over their glacial progress. As they plowed the calm, intensely blue waters of the Indian Ocean, Eddie observed the master’s mounting impatience with equally mounting curiosity. Kittredge was unpracticed at being denied the things he wanted. How would he stomach weeks behind the coal burner?
Eddie never found out. Before they reached the Seychelles, a flag signal indicated that the convoy was to scatter. Ships began moving away from one another in a slow, dreamlike version of birds startling. So languorous was their progress that at first it seemed they would never fully leave one another’s sight. Yet within the span of three hours, even the coal burner had faded away.
*
As Dexter Styles’s new ombudsman, Eddie visited roadhouses, casinos, restaurants, poker games. He assumed the guise of a visiting out-of-towner with money in his pocket; in early 1935, nobody turned that man away. If he chanced to meet someone he knew, Eddie greeted him warmly, bought him a drink, and left soon after. He went back the next day. He needed more than one visit to see beyond the surface of a place, and Styles gave him plenty of cash for expenses. These were the only bags Eddie still carried.
At first he met Styles every couple of weeks at a boathouse on Manhattan Beach to detail his findings. Crooked games were his bread and butter, but he observed other things he correctly guessed would interest Styles: a chef pimping out cigarette girls, dope-addicted card dealers tipping games for a fee, fairies he suspected of being blackmailed.
“You’re reaching, Mr. Kerrigan.”
“Isn’t that the job?”
“Don’t invent stories to divert me.”
“I wouldn’t know how.”
At the end of each visit, Styles gave him another two or three addresses. “Shouldn’t you write these down?”
“No need.”
“You’re that smart, eh?”
“I’m not a Harvard man, if that’s what you mean.”
Styles laughed. “If you were, I’d chuck you out.”
“You know the expression,” Eddie said. “?‘Don’t write if you can talk, and don’t talk if you can nod.’?”
Styles was delighted. “A mick said that.”
Eddie winked.
He told Dunellen he’d found work at a theater, as he had before the Depression—a world too distant from Dunellen’s own for him to realize how far-fetched this story was. He seemed relieved to have Eddie off his payroll, their tangled history stymieing the full expression of Dunellen’s ruthlessness. He bequeathed Eddie’s bagman duties upon the next desperate man, O’Bannon, then bewailed the hash he made of the job.
“He doesn’t have your touch, Ed,” he whined at Sonny’s, where Eddie still made a point of appearing with some regularity. “Banny walks in a room, all eyes are on him. He dropped an envelope at Dinty Moore’s, you fucking believe that? Greenbacks spilling out . . . you’d have thought that dough had leprosy, how fast everyone backed away, so they tell me. The waiters got rich. I told him, ‘Banny, one more like that, I’ll toss you off the pier myself. You can tell it to the fishes.’?” Dunellen roused the slag heap of his corpus into a long-suffering shrug. “But his wife is going blind, and they’ve five little ones . . . I can’t leave him high and dry.” He swung his hard little eyes heavenward, then checked his loogans stationed at the door.
“You’re too good, Dunny,” Eddie said, all but laughing. “Too, too good. But mind yourself, friend: the world will try to take advantage of that soft heart of yours.”
“Speaking of, Ed.” Dunellen lowered his voice. “I took your advice about the wop.”
Eddie wasn’t sure which wop he meant, so many having offended Dunellen. “And . . . ?”
“I made a deal. With Tancredo.”
Eddie remembered now: Dunny’s middle lightweights. Tancredo had been putting the screws on him in order for them to fight.
“Humbled myself to that wop on bended knee. Let him trample my face right in the fucking mud.”
Eddie listened with concern. Dunellen prostrate was a vision he could see ending only in violence. Then a soft smile played at Dunellen’s lips. “Best advice I ever got.”
“No kidding,” Eddie said, exhaling.
“My boys are winning, Ed,” Dunellen said with the blushing air of a man imparting secrets. “They’re bursting with life. All they needed was a chance, a fair shake.”