Beyond the Narrows, the lighter turned east, and soon the Parachute Drop’s faint silhouette materialized to the left, along with skeletal shapes of the Wonder Wheel and the Cyclone. Then it turned south, then west; then Anna lost track. She thought they might be heading out of New York Harbor into the Atlantic. How deep would she have to go down?
Dexter Styles stood at the back of the boat, a hand on his fedora, his grim mien heightening Anna’s dread. They’d exchanged hardly a word on the drive to Red Hook, and she’d stuck close to Marle and Bascombe ever since. Their merriment kept her foreboding at bay. She had approached them squeamishly about the project, afraid they would laugh in her face or telephone the police, but it seemed that diving for a body at the bottom of New York Harbor—they never asked whose—was exactly the sort of crackpot adventure that had been missing from both their lives. Anna had felt compelled to remind them of the possible risks and pitfalls, but none of it registered in their dancing eyes—or perhaps the risks and pitfalls were the point.
When at last the lighter began to slow, Anna removed her coat and shoes and pulled a set of woolens over her jumpsuit and a warm night-watch cap onto her head. She wriggled inside the canvas dress without assistance while Bascombe and Marle tested the helmets and air hose couplings. The moon laid a faint feathery path toward them across the water. The helmsman undertook a series of adjustments and corrections until at last the skipper emitted a howl that made Anna’s scalp prickle, and the engine was silenced. The lighter’s two sailors, dungarees black from the coal they’d been heaping into a furnace belowdecks, began to lower the first of two double anchors, one at each end of the lighter, that would hold it stationary.
“Have you any idea where we are?” Anna asked her friends.
“Search me,” Bascombe said.
“Staten Island,” Marle said. “Southwest shore.”
“I knew that,” Bascombe said. “I was testing you.”
Their laughter had a defiant edge, as if sustaining their exuberance had become a strain. They dressed Anna: first the shoes, laced and buckled; then the helmet cushion. These steps were so deeply ingrained by now that performing them made their alien surroundings seem recognizable. Breastplate; bib; studs; collar; washers. When everything was on except the hat, Marle summoned the goons to the compressor’s flywheels. They began turning them zealously, elbowing each other aside in a show of indefatigability. Dexter Styles watched all of it from a distance, his face a mirror of Anna’s anxiety. She avoided looking at him.
When both anchors were taut and the boat stationary, Marle took a sounding. The rope’s wet knots indicated a depth of thirty-nine feet, a soft bottom of sand and mud. Then Bascombe and Marle heaved the descending line, with its hundred-pound weight, over the starboard side of the boat, close to the diving ladder. Anna and Marle helped Bascombe into the second dress—just the canvas, without the weighted parts. Her friends’ ebullience had flattened, and they proceeded now in workmanlike fashion. Anna sat on the diving stool wearing everything but her helmet. “I must speak with Mr. Styles,” she said.
He was beside her a moment later, kneeling to meet her eyes. His own looked cavernous.
“What am I looking for?” she said.
“You know what.”
“I mean what else.”
It took a moment. “Ropes, I’d imagine. A weight of some kind. Possibly a chain.”
Raising her voice to Marle and Bascombe, she said, “I’m ready.”
She rose from the stool and stumped to the ladder. They screwed on her helmet and attached the air hose and lifelines to its goosenecks, testing her air. Marle pulled the lifeline under her right arm and the air hose under her left, and secured them to the metal eyelets on the front of her breastplate. As she was about to mount the ladder, Bascombe peered at her through her open faceplate, his narrow eyes engaging hers with unusual directness. “I don’t like it,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
He snorted. “Hell, I’m not the one going down.”
“What could go wrong?” she said, which got a laugh.
He sealed her faceplate, and a cool chemical hiss of air filled Anna’s mouth and nostrils. She descended the ladder backward, then held the descending line and let the harbor swallow her. The current was tremendous, a pull with the force of the ocean behind it. Recalling Lieutenant Axel’s lesson on currents, she positioned herself so the water pushed at her back, pressing her against the descending line rather than separating her from it. Down, down she slid. She’d assumed that diving at night would be no different from diving in Wallabout Bay, with its poor visibility. But it turned out that the bay’s muddy opacity was something she’d seen. Here, there was no difference between opening her eyes and closing them. This made for an eerie dislocation, as if she were sliding toward nothing or floating in a void. When at last she reached the bottom, she clutched the line and blinked into the dark, wondering if she’d come down too quickly. A pull on her lifeline steadied her, and she pulled back. The current was milder at the bottom. Anna shut her eyes and immediately felt calmer. Here was a blindness she could tolerate.
She took a sixty-foot circling line from her tool bag and bent it to the descending line, just above the weight. Then, recalling a trick Lieutenant Axel had taught them (strange how well she’d listened, even with Bascombe muttering in her ear), she wedged her gloved fingers under the edge of the weight and flipped it over, so now her searching line was pinned underneath the weight and would slide more closely over the harbor floor. She looped the other end around her right wrist and walked away from the weight until the line pulled taut. Then she set down her tool bag to mark the beginning of her circle, lowered herself onto all fours, and began to crawl over the harbor floor in a clockwise direction, dragging the radius of circling line from her wrist. Immediately, the rope met with swells in the harbor bottom. At first Anna felt compelled to investigate each interference, but gradually, she was able to distinguish objects from topography. She kept her eyes closed and tried to forget the immensity around her, her own tiny solitude within it. Divers who’d worked on the freshwater pipeline from Staten Island spoke of wrecked ships on the harbor floor, hundred-year-old oyster beds choked with monstrous shells, eels fifty feet long. These apparitions seemed to flicker just beyond the reach of Anna’s fingers. She calmed herself with the thought of Marle holding her lifeline and air hose, gathering them in and letting them out as she moved. They could haul her up at any time. Four sharp pulls were all it would take.