“Glad to hear it, Dunny.”
“We’ll do anything for our kids, ain’t that right, Ed? Get walked on, spit on, shit on, pounded into a pulp. It’s all worthwhile if it makes them happy.”
Masochism didn’t suit Dunellen; Eddie wanted it to stop. “Sure, Dunny,” he said. “But don’t let it go too far. Look for your opening and get the hell out.”
Dunellen nodded, watching Eddie gravely. They were back inside the deeper story that was always between them like buried treasure: riptide, panic, rescue. Swimming parallel to shore, looking for a way back. At the same time, Eddie was explaining why he’d thrown Dunellen off—fucked him, Dunny would surely say if he’d a whiff of whom Eddie was working for now. The precise alignment of these several spheres made Eddie feel as though he could see in every direction at once.
“Tancredo doesn’t have to know,” Eddie cautioned. “Should never know. Look to yourself.”
Dunellen nodded, listening.
*
Eddie borrowed the Duesenberg and drove his family to a medical supply store in Paramus, New Jersey, where Lydia was fitted for her chair. The effect was transformative: at nine, she joined the vertical world for the first time. She sat at the table for meals. Agnes took her on walks. Anna leaned beside her at the window, watching sparrows peck at bread crumbs she’d placed on the sill. From behind, Eddie saw no obvious difference between them.
Once, when Agnes was changing Lydia’s diaper, the iceman drove away without waiting. Eddie bought his wife an electric icebox outright, not on layaway—he’d done with the lie of possessing things you didn’t own. For days, neighbors traipsed through the kitchen to admire this luxury, Lydia grinning at them from her new chair.
The icebox emitted a sullen drone that kept Eddie awake. When at last he fell asleep, he dreamed of unplugging it.
“You must thank Mr. Dunellen for me,” Agnes said.
And: “What would we do without the union?”
And: “My, but we’re lucky, Ed. Look at everyone else.”
She said such things often, and Eddie smiled and murmured assent. But he detected a false bottom in his wife’s effusions, a hidden chamber containing all she was leaving unsaid. Agnes knew her way around. She couldn’t have failed to notice his longer hours, the fact that he rarely borrowed the Duesenberg, never took Anna with him. Yet apart from anodyne exclamations at their good fortune, she acknowledged none of this. Eddie took a morbid pleasure in observing his wife’s disingenuousness. But at night, when he held her in his arms and searched her careworn face, he could find no treachery in it.
*
Styles sent him to Albany, Saratoga, Atlantic City. He liked to know every particular of an operation, as though Eddie were a moving-picture camera. They never used names; it was Eddie’s job to fix on the key detail of a man that made him recognizable. Scars were easy. But there was always something: over-brilliantined hair; a particular ring; trousers puddling at the ankles; a bearlike walk. Girls were harder. “Blond,” “brunette,” and “pretty” were about the best he could do. What mattered were the men they came with.
Eddie marveled at how accurately Styles had diagnosed his deep indifference. “You’re my eyes and ears,” he often said, and Eddie liked the description. He was a channel for facts, nothing more. He relayed whole conversations without knowing who’d had them. And even when he came to know, inevitably, in the course of two years, he hadn’t any point of view. It’s nothing to do with me, he would tell himself. It happens the same, whether I’m there or not. Consequences were not his business.
“You’re a machine, Kerrigan. A human machine,” Styles marveled. It was a compliment. With Eddie as his eyes and ears, Styles could be anywhere, everywhere. He’d only to be curious.
Gradually, Styles’s curiosity reached beyond the businesses he controlled to rivals within the Syndicate, even associates. In January 1937, Eddie brought his cardboard please-don’t-rain suitcase to an Eastern Airlines ticket office on Vanderbilt Avenue. There he boarded a limousine with several other men to Newark Airfield. He was going to Miami to watch a man Styles wanted to know about. It was his first airplane ride.
At the airfield, Eddie removed his hat and ducked through the hatch of a silver airplane, his heart flailing. When everyone was aboard, the propellers swarmed outside the windows, and the plane staggered down a runway between snowy fields, accelerating into a breath-catching instant when its wheels parted from land and it hurtled aloft like ash in an updraft. Through a porthole, Eddie gaped at a toy replica of New York City: tiny cars on tiny streets; houses and trees and ball fields inlaid with snow; and then the sea, a sheet of beaten pewter—still infinite, even from this height. The engine buzzed in his ears. A woman wept beside him, hands clasped in prayer. Looking down at the heedless expanse of the earth, Eddie felt on the verge of a great discovery.
The airplane made stops in Washington, D.C., Raleigh, Charleston, Jacksonville, Palm Beach, and at last Miami, where an eye-level moon dropped silver onto a velvet black sea. The air smelled like honey. Even at the airport, Palm Beach style was on vivid display: white dinner jackets, pale silk shirts. By nine o’clock Eddie had Styles’s man in his sights: he sat at the rear of a casino, ashen-faced, heavy-lidded, looking more like an accountant than a fight promoter. Eddie tried to break even at a roulette wheel while memorizing the sequence of visitors to the man’s table. Thus engaged, he took a while to register that the girl leaning against him at the roulette wheel wasn’t doing that by mistake. He added her drinks to his tab with an idea of repaying the effort she’d already made. Or so he told himself. By the time his mark left the casino, Eddie’s decision to bring the girl to his hotel room seemed already to have been made.