He woke at sunrise to an unfamiliar perfume on his sheets. Disgust and desolation closed around him. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. Men do it all the time. No one will ever know. But these bromides made him feel as though he were being soothed by a idiot. He left the hotel and paced the cement-colored sand, flicking cigarette butts into the surf. His only relief came from telling himself that it wasn’t really him with the prostitute. He was Dexter Styles’s eyes and ears, no more. “I’m not here now,” Eddie said out loud more than once, the phrase providing, each time, a burst of analgesia.
That night, at a poker table that afforded a different slant on his mark, Eddie found his attention riveted by a familiar gait: the walk of a woman with corns carrying too many groceries. John Dunellen. He shambled through the casino with a limp Eddie hadn’t seen before—but he hardly saw Dunellen nowadays. His presence here so astounded Eddie that he forgot to turn away for several moments. For Dunellen in his element, that would have been too long, but he was far from his element now. He hobbled to the table Eddie had been watching—Tancredo’s, he realized, perhaps had already known—collapsed onto a chair, and bowed his great head in a masque of abjectness that Eddie could hardly bear to witness, even covertly. How had his old friend been brought so low? The meeting was insultingly short; Tancredo dismissed Dunellen with a curt nod whose disregard made Eddie flinch. Dunellen tottered to his feet and staggered away, lurching among gaming tables with such wobbling instability that Eddie thought he might crash down on top of one, scattering chips and chairs. Eddie dreaded this, knowing he would have to sit by and do nothing.
As Dunellen approached the distant exit, his limp softened, and Eddie caught a gleam of pleasure in his face. In that instant Eddie realized, with a spreading, dizzy delight, that he’d overlooked the mockery in his friend’s performance. The limp was phony. The suppliance was phony. Dunellen was laying it on thick, almost too thick—but then Eddie had been fooled. Dunny hadn’t rolled over for the wops, bless his mean, flinty heart. It was all a ruse, playacting as a means to some other end. He’d taken Eddie’s advice and found his opening. And more surprising than the spectacle of Dunellen’s charade was the joy Eddie took in seeing him pull it off. How he loved Dunny—wanted him to win! He wished he could run to his old friend and kiss his pendulous cheeks.
In his report to Styles, Eddie made no mention of Dunellen.
*
Eddie confessed at a church where he’d never been so the priest wouldn’t know him, and was given a rosary’s penance. Too easy. Despair wrapped him in its black cloak, and the trolley wheel rolled again through his thoughts. What was the point of anything he’d done, or was doing now, if it led to cavorting with prostitutes? It had all been a means to an end—but what end?
Instinctively, habitually, he turned to Anna. “Toots, I’ve a taste for a charlotte russe,” he said on a Saturday when Agnes was out with Lydia. “How about you?”
“I don’t care for them, Papa.”
“What? You used to love them.”
“Too sweet.”
Taken aback, he scrutinized Anna, seated at the kitchen table surrounded by her schoolbooks, with a sense of not having looked at her carefully in some time. She was fourteen, tall and lovely, but less specific than she’d once been. More like the women he struggled to describe to Dexter Styles.
“Come with me anyway,” he said. “Order something else.”
Anna rose and put on her coat. As they descended the stairs, Eddie detected an air of sufferance about her, as if there was something else she preferred to do. He was mystified. Anna always wanted to come with him! She’d fought so hard when he’d stopped including her in his work. That had been a while ago, of course—going on two years, he realized with a shock, counting up the months since he’d begun working for Styles. Eddie had presumed all along that he and Anna could revert to their old arrangement whenever he chose. Now, for the first time, he doubted this.
They sat at the counter at White’s. Anna ordered a chocolate soda; Eddie stuck piously to charlotte russe, which Mr. White brought him from the window case. While they waited, he lit a cigarette and handed her the coupon from inside his packet. She looked at it oddly, then said with a disbelieving laugh, “Papa, I don’t collect these anymore.”
“No? What about all the ones you saved?”
“There were never enough for the things I wanted.”
“There might have been by now.”
She looked at him curiously. “Why do you care?”
He didn’t care. He wanted her to care. “It seems a waste.”
“You would have smoked anyway,” she said. “Or did you smoke extra for me?” She smiled at him fondly, indulgently: a woman’s smile.
Eddie felt a deep stirring of unease. “When did you stop collecting them?”
She shrugged, a gesture he disliked.
“Recently?” he asked sharply.
Her face shuttered. “No. A long time ago.”
An elfin ghost appeared suddenly at Eddie’s side: his lively little Anna. Where was that garrulous sprite inside this languorous, indifferent girl seated beside him, disciplining herself not to look out the window? It was Eddie’s job to perceive such things. Whom did she want to look for?
Mr. White slid her chocolate soda across the counter, and they ate in silence. Eddie could think of nothing to say. His mind would only go back—to the snowball, the secret kiss. He wanted to ask Anna if she remembered those times, but was afraid she would not—worse, that they meant nothing to her.
And what about all the other days? The hundreds of other days they had spent together; why could he not remember those?
“You were right about the charlotte russe,” he said at last. “It’s too sweet.”
Afterward, they stood outside the drugstore. Anna said she was going to Stella’s, but Eddie sensed an untruth and began to sweat, despite the cold. Something had changed about Anna, permanently, fundamentally—he was certain of it. He’d looked away from his daughter—looked where Styles paid him to look—and she’d gone astray.
The ghost sprite leaped and jumped and swung Eddie’s hand. She turned her face up at him, chattering: hours of meandering talk, thoughtless as a dog’s wagging tail, back and forth, back and forth.
Eddie gazed into Anna’s large dark eyes under their heavy lashes, trying to find that little sprite. But he’d looked away for too long, and the sprite had vanished. In her place stood a girl who hardly remembered him, wanted only to get away.
*
Dunellen was shot fifteen times from a moving automobile outside Sonny’s shortly after midnight. April 1937, three months after Eddie had seen him in Miami. Naturally, there were witnesses—Dunellen didn’t so much as take a leak by himself—but none would say a word. He’d had enemies galore, rivalries over hiring and pier control, but those feuds had simmered for years without serious issue. It was a wop-style execution.