Anna tugged at the laces of Dexter’s dress until he crouched. He rested his helmet against hers. “What the hell is that?”
“Phosphorescence. Live things in the water.” She had learned about it in diving class.
He began digging, too. The phosphorescence glowed around them in a cloud, dimly illuminating Dexter Styles in the water beside her. Warmth radiated from under her fingers, under the sand. She located a small round object stuck fast inside a buried link of chain and began working at it with her crude gloves, trying to dislodge it without snapping the tiny chain that held it fast. At last she freed the disk and turned it over in her hands. More metal; she was disappointed. There was a nub or a bolt along one rounded edge. Then, with an icy shock, the object became legible: a pocket watch. Anna cried out, the sound boxing her ears inside the helmet. She lifted the watch to her faceplate. Dexter Styles was still digging, and in that incandescence she barely made out the familiar engraving of a stranger’s initials.
Her father’s watch.
She began to cry. Even through her gloves, she felt the faint indentations of the engravings. JDV: Jakob De Veer, the man who had helped her father when he was a boy. Clutching the watch, she sobbed until the humidity inside her helmet began to daze her. She turned up her air and opened her spitcock to flush out helmet and dress. Still weeping, she pressed her helmet to Dexter’s, knowing that he would hear only the mechanical echo of her words, nothing else.
“I found him,” she said. “He’s here.”
*
By the time they began looking again for the cord they’d slid down, Dexter had long felt the need of more air. Crawling was harder than walking, had left him light-headed and rubber-legged. Holding the rope taut between them, they walked slowly in the direction where Anna believed the vertical line would be. Mercifully, they hit it.
Dexter waited at the bottom while she ascended. With his hand on the line, he felt her pause partway up to decompress a few minutes; then a jerk as she passed from line to ladder. Then nothing. The line went still in his hand, and Dexter felt only the currents muscling him. Carefully, he turned the air knob on his helmet clockwise just slightly, as the Negro had instructed. He took voluptuous breaths, the pleasure of gorging himself on that hissing air like guzzling cold water in a towering thirst. His light-headedness passed, leaving his senses sharp. He was alone at the bottom of the sea. The extremity of his position mesmerized Dexter. He’d always liked the dark, but night was the only version of it he’d known until now. This was the primeval dark of nightmares. It covered secrets too atrocious to be exposed: drowned children, sunken ships. He let go the line and took a few steps away, imagining himself cut off and alone in this forsaken place. Something long and smooth slid along the envelope of his diving suit—an eel? A fish? He felt the possibility of panic.
But what visited Dexter instead, as he stood alone in the throttling dark, was his first clear memory in years of Ed Kerrigan. An ironic asymmetrical smile from under the brim of his hat. Always a good hat, an excellent feather. The man knew how to dress. Holding down his hat in the wind as they’d walked along Manhattan Beach. How Dexter had liked him! Kerrigan’s accommodating manner; his quick, unshowy way of getting things done without letting on what it cost. A mick. There had been an understanding between them, Dexter had felt that instinctively. Later he’d wondered: understanding of what?
Kerrigan’s cipherlike nature had been essential to the job. He could go anywhere, find out anything. Through him, Dexter had tasted freedom from the constraints of time and space. He could appear where he was not supposed to be, listen to what he was not permitted to know. Proximity—that was what Kerrigan had granted him. Omniscience. Invisibility. And Dexter had grown accustomed to it—dependent upon it. He’d been far too comfortable, too greedy for the flow of facts, to consider that access, like all things, had its price.
In Dexter’s line of work, men who broke the rules egregiously were taken for a ride, as the parlance went. Everyone knew what had happened, and they were rarely mentioned again. Certainly Kerrigan had understood this.
Then why? Here was the question that had dogged Dexter in the years since his erstwhile employee had sung and paid the price: Why had he done it? Money? Dexter had paid him well—would have paid more, had Kerrigan asked.
Now, having seen the man’s lowly home, his crippled daughter, Dexter understood the reason even less. Why risk getting snuffed when his family needed him so badly? Why take the chance that someone—the healthy daughter, perhaps—might investigate?
There were no answers. Just the man, smiling his uneven smile as he looked out at the sea. “Not a ship in sight,” he’d said once, his reticence giving so little away that Dexter couldn’t tell if the news was good or bad. He’d looked out, and it was true: there was not a single ship.
Dexter seized the cord he’d come down on, looped his right arm and leg around it as the Negro had advised, and opened the air valve to inflate the diving suit. Sure enough, he began to rise as if by magic. For a euphoric moment Dexter felt godlike; he was flying, floating, breathing underwater—all things a human could not do. A sense of blinding comprehension assailed him. Yes, he thought, and then cried it aloud: “Yes!” An essential thing was clear to him at last, one that underlay everything else. He was gaining velocity, the diving suit ballooning uncontrollably as he flew up the rope, forcing his arms rigid so he couldn’t touch the dials on his helmet or even hold the rope any longer. He hardly cared; he was too enthralled. Of course, he thought, distracted from the rocketing speed of his ascent by the need to seal in his mind the crucial thing he’d finally understood.
His blown-up form shot to the surface fifty feet from the lighter. Marle bellowed at the goons, two of whom ran to the gunwale and began yanking at his lifeline. Bascombe kept his eyes on the compressor gauges, cursing fantastically. A mood of panicked concentration imposed harmony upon their motley ranks, all of them moving as one. Anna descended the ladder, bootless in her dress, and waited as the goons yanked Dexter Styles toward her, facedown and spread-eagled. He looked dead. When he was beside her, she tried to flip him over, intending to open his faceplate, but Marle bellowed for her to leave him.
“We need to get him on deck,” he said. “If he loses pressure, he’ll sink.”
It was true—in her fright, she hadn’t been thinking. She helped as best she could to shove his bloated form over the gunwale onto the deck, where two goons caught him under the armpits and two more backed them up. Anna leaped over the ladder and crouched beside him as the men turned him over. Water poured from his diving dress around her feet. She opened his faceplate with shaking hands. His eyes were glassy, wide-open.
“Can you hear me?” she said.