She had a fractured intimation of the ugliness that would have preceded Dexter Styles’s replacement of Bascombe in the diving dress. Her mind swerved away; she needed to stay calm. “Can the compressor make enough air for both of us?”
“Are you breathing all right?” he asked.
She took a long inhale, which steadied her. She’d heard that the navy sometimes put men directly into the water in diving dress as the first step in their weeding-out process. The air coming into the hat was cool and dry, and her head felt clear. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve enough air. And you?”
“Never better.”
There was truth in this. Once he’d adjusted his air valve as the Negro had instructed, lifting the harness from his shoulders, Dexter had felt an unaccountable exhilaration while being pulled by the heavy shoes through the mighty, pressing dark. It was as if some mammoth effort he’d not been fully aware of having made was about to pay off at last. He could breathe. He could breathe and walk on the bottom of the sea.
“I’m afraid we won’t find anything,” he heard her say. “How do we know this is the right place?”
Her voice was faint, like a long-distance telephone connection. The result was that singular mix of intimacy and distance that Dexter often felt over the telephone, when a person far away seemed to whisper directly into his thoughts. “We’ll find him,” he said, his own voice booming by comparison. “The skipper knows. He’s here.”
This utterance confused Anna; the skipper was here? The voice that arrived through the helmets was leeched not just of volume but of any trace of feeling. It sounded the way a machine would sound if one could speak. Yet the words lingered. He’s here. A clear image of her father came to her suddenly: rising from the water at Coney Island after one of his morning swims, his body dripping, shining. A wink and a wave to the startled lifeguards who’d come on duty after he’d gone out, a rub with the Turkish towel he’d left beside Anna on the sand with his clothing and billfold. The radiant bliss that rose from him after those swims, as if he’d shaken off a sorrow that was with him always.
“I’m here,” she said softly. “I’m here, too.”
Dexter Styles pressed his helmet to hers. “If you’ve another rope, we can hold it between us and cover more ground,” came the mechanical rendering of his voice.
“I have.”
Taking his gloved hand, she led him back to her starting point of a few minutes before, where she’d left the tool bag. Inside was a thirty-foot rope with a lanyard at each end. She slipped one over her free wrist, the left, and the other onto his right wrist, below the wristband. Pressing her helmet to his, she said, “Walk away from me until the rope is taut, then crawl in the direction you feel me crawling. Your helmet should always be higher than your body; don’t let it drop.”
“All right.”
He did as instructed, getting awkwardly onto his knees when the rope tensed. He felt the soft harbor floor through the rubberized fabric of the diving suit. He lowered his gloves to the earth, taking care to keep his head up—though he’d forgotten to ask what would happen if he did not. Crawling felt grotesquely unnatural—when had he last crawled, for Christ’s sake? But the rope tugged at his wrist, and crawl he did, tentatively at first, afraid of dropping his head. Each slight resistance of the rope made him believe they’d found something, but he came to recognize these as bumps and tufts of plants on the harbor bottom. Gradually, the primal nature of the motion emptied his mind. He was crawling in the dark. Crawling in the dark. He was crawling. Crawling. After a while, he could not remember why.
*
The obstruction, when it came, lay along the outer rope conjoining Anna to Dexter Styles. She unhooked the inner circling line—the one holding her to the weight—in order to crawl toward him. Only then did she recognize the flaw in her plan: the rope she was letting go was their only link to the boat. She remembered her first dive—the confusion of wandering, disoriented, underwater. Even in the comparatively luminous and shallow Wallabout Bay, a three-inch manila rope had been impossible to find. In the worst case, Marle and Bascombe could haul her up by her lifeline. But could they haul up Dexter Styles?
Finding no alternative, she let go the inner line from her wrist and crawled along the outer rope to the obstacle: a heavy chain attached to a block of concrete. She felt Dexter Styles crawling from the other direction and then in the water beside her. She turned on her flashlight, its sallow glow awakening perhaps two feet of murky bay. The chain’s three-inch links were slippery with plant life, as if they hadn’t moved in a long time. Anna doused the light, frightened of what else she would see. She touched her hat to Dexter Styles’s and said, “What do you think?”
“That looks right,” came the faint reply.
The foreboding she’d felt all night moved very close. “I’m frightened,” she said, adopting the same monotone that his voice acquired in its passage through the two hats. This flat delivery had the odd effect of checking whatever emotions she might have felt. Only the words were left.
“Why did they kill him?” she asked.
“It’s what they do when they’re crossed.”
“Was he a criminal?”
“No.”
“Why did he cross them?”
“Only he knows that.”
“I’m going to search without the light.”
She felt him rise to his feet, perhaps to give her privacy, or from a disinclination to know what she found. The chain was coiled and doubled back to such an extent that it had assumed a solid mass. Tentatively, Anna began to loosen the folds of chain and probe among them. An enormous padlock affixed several links together and attached them by a padeye to the block of concrete. Anna wedged her fingers among the links, searching for something organic: fabric, leather, bone. She hadn’t any memory of what her father had worn the day he didn’t come back, but surely there had been a suit, a necktie, a hat. Shoes. She felt a pressure at her breastbone like a dark egg, its contents horror and revulsion. Anna dreaded these sensations, yet she craved a discovery that would unleash them: some proof that he hadn’t gone away. Had never left her. Anna’s need for this certainty drove her gloved fingers through mud and sand and slippery links of chain. But she found no shoes, no fabric, no bones. Could all of that have been carried away?
Flagging, she reminded herself how close she’d already come. Her presence here was miraculous; her only chance. This recognition catalyzed a frenzy of new digging. She swore under her breath the way men swore at the Yard: Damn it! Fuck it! She dug until she was distracted by the glow swarming behind her eyelids. She tried opening her eyes to dispel it, then realized that her eyes were already open. The glow was coming from outside—from the water itself. It intensified as she dug: metallic orange, purple, green, colors that weren’t exactly colors, like the hues of a photographic negative she’d once seen. They rose from the newly exposed earth and shimmered in the water around her.