He hung on for three days in the intensive care ward at Saint Vincent’s. Bulls came and went, but they never expected to get a word out of Dunny, even if he’d somehow managed to snap out of his coma and speak around the tube bisecting his throat.
The protectory scrum gathered by twos and threes in the hospital lobby, all forty or thereabouts, with thinning hair and missing teeth. Eddie sobbed in their arms. “You knew him best,” they affirmed. “You were his favorite. No wonder; you saved his life. A man doesn’t forget.” Eddie craved these testimonials, but they provided only fleeting solace. He felt as if he’d shot Dunny himself.
He recognized Bart Sheehan instantly, although he hadn’t seen his old friend in twenty years. Sheehan still had his hair, half-gray and in need of cutting. He looked like a man who lived in shirtsleeves. “You saved us once, Ed,” he wept, his black-Irish face riven by grief. “Pulled us out of the waves. I wouldn’t be here today, God is my witness.”
Being dead did not hinder Dunellen from presiding over his own two-day wake, his silhouette like a pile of ore commanding the room from an oversize coffin. Under powder and pancake makeup, bullet holes were visible in his temple and forehead and neck. His wife, Maggie, howled inconsolably but garnered little sympathy. Her voluble grief—like her habit of yanking her husband out of bars prematurely—was widely construed as unwillingness to “let Dunny have a bit of fun.”
Eddie was able to talk more calmly with Sheehan at the wake. His old friend was a widower, three kids, still living in the Bronx with his unmarried sister.
“You’re a lawyer, so I hear,” Eddie said.
“State attorney’s office. You, Ed?”
“Oh, this and that.”
“Tough times,” Bart said, mistaking Eddie’s vagueness for unemployment. “I’m lucky I work for the state.”
“Is it like being a copper, what you do?”
“Cleaner,” Bart said, and they laughed.
A tidal wave of mourners surged into Guardian Angel Church on Sunday morning for Dunellen’s funeral—many still drunk, the rest hungover. Eddie heard whispers down the block: Joe Ryan is in the church. What better testament to Dunny’s power than having the most corrupt kingpin of them all, president of the International Longshoremen’s Union, present at his funeral?
Agnes clutched Eddie’s arm. A bagpiper played on the church steps, and he felt tears come again. “What will this mean for us, love?” she asked with such an anxious look that Eddie realized she must have understood less than he’d thought. Perhaps nothing at all.
“We’ll be all right,” he mumbled.
Sheehan found his way to Eddie’s other side, and they walked arm in arm up the church steps. Inside the door, Eddie leaned close to his old friend’s ear. “The kite had it, a while back, you were looking into the Syndicate,” he whispered.
He felt Sheehan’s recoil of surprise. Guardedly, he whispered back, “There’s truth in that.”
“I might be able to . . . contribute.”
Bart turned a skeptical eye upon Eddie. “What do you know about it?”
“I know everything,” Eddie said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
* * *
Twenty minutes south of the Red Hook boatyard where they’d met, the ancient man everyone referred to as “the skipper” began making noises that seemed to approximate speech. Leaning against the outside wall of a tiny wheelhouse, his ravaged face aimed skyward as if someone were jerking him backward by the hair, he moaned and keened at the spattered stars—more stars than Anna had ever seen, even from the dimmed-out shore.
“Earile . . . smolf . . . skynech . . .”
She turned to the skipper in alarm at each anguished utterance. No one else seemed to take any notice, with the exception of the helmsman: a tall blank-faced individual who ticked a wheel infinitesimally in response to each ejaculation. But he seemed less a human being than a lever the skipper was turning with his mind.
It was eleven o’clock. The night was clear, the temperature forty-five degrees—warm for early March—the moon pronged and low. Searchlight beams prodded the night sky for aircraft. The harbor was crowded with invisible boats. Occasionally a towering shape bore down upon the lighter, and the skipper yowled at the helmsman, who steered them out of harm’s way nimbly as a butterfly, to be jostled by a violent wake. The Statue of Liberty was a dark silhouette, a single faint light at her flame.
Even the skipper fell silent as they approached the Narrows, the entrance to the Lower Bay, patrolled by Fort Hamilton to the east and Fort Wadsworth to the west, on Staten Island. Dexter Styles said he’d “had a word” with someone at the Coast Guard who would make things right should the lighter be stopped, but no one wanted that. For perhaps ten minutes, the only sound on the lighter was the churn of its engine. Anna wondered if the draft would be shallow enough to pass over the submarine nets, then realized that the gate must be open. They had followed other ships—a convoy perhaps—into the Lower Bay. Horns and sirens grew fainter, and she felt rising wind and chop. Dexter Styles’s five “goons” (Bascombe’s word) leaned over the gunwales, holding their hats. They’d been brought along to turn the flywheels of the air compressor, but their presence on the lighter had an ominous effect.
Only Marle and Bascombe continued to work, inspecting and preparing the air compressor Dexter Styles had arranged to have on board. It was a Morse Air Pump No. 1, identical to the compressors at the Naval Yard. They had anchored it to the bow, and now they cleaned its air reservoirs, oiled the piston rods, and lubricated the pump shaft handles with a mixture of oil and graphite. They’d had surprisingly little trouble removing a pair of diving crates from the Naval Yard—each containing a two-hundred-pound dress—along with six fifty-foot lengths of air hose, a loaded tool bag, two diving knives, and a spare-parts tin. It was almost too easy, they’d crowed when Anna had met them outside the Red Hook boatyard. So many divers had been commuting to the freshwater pipeline that the marine guards barely took note when they hauled the equipment through the Marshall Street gate onto a small flatbed truck Marle had borrowed from his uncle.