The upper halves of the superscrapers ringing the north end of the park caught the last of the day’s sunlight. Some windows facing southwest blinked gold, inlaid in immense glass curves of plum, cobalt, bronze, mallard green. The park’s advocates had had to fight ferociously to keep the park free of buildings; as dry land it was now ten times more valuable than it had been before. But it would take more than drowning lower Manhattan to make New Yorkers give up on Central Park. They had made one concession by filling in Onassis Pond, feeling that there was enough water in the city without it; but other than that, here it was, forested, autumnal, same as always, lying as if at the bottom of a steep-walled open-roofed rectangular room. It looked like they were ants.
Charlotte said something to this effect, and Larry shook his head and chuckled at her. “There you go again, always thinking we’re so small,” he said.
“I do not! I don’t know what you mean!”
“Ah well.” He waved it aside; it wasn’t worth trying to explain, the gesture said. Would only cause her to protest more, protest something obvious about herself. He didn’t want to get into it.
Annoyed, Charlotte said nothing. Suddenly the persistent sense of being ever so slightly condescended to coalesced in her. He was indulging her; he was a busy important man, making time for an old flame. A form of nostalgia for him: this was what lay there under the surface of his easy tolerance.
“We should do this more often,” Charlotte lied.
“For sure,” Larry lied back.
To some natures this stimulant of life in a great city becomes a thing as binding and necessary as opium is to one addicted to the habit. It becomes their breath of life; they cannot exist outside of it; rather than be deprived of it they are content to suffer hunger, want, pain, and misery; they wouldn’t exchange even a ragged and wretched condition among the great crowd for any degree of comfort away from it.
—Tom Johnson
Damon Runyon’s ashes were cast by Eddie Rickenbacker from a plane flying over Times Square.
c) Vlade
Vlade now made a kind of cop’s round of the building every evening after dinner, checking all the security systems and visiting all the rooms lower than the high tide line. Also the top floors under the blimp mast, and while he was at it, anywhere he thought taking a look would be a good idea. Yes, he was nervous, he had to admit it, to himself if no one else. Something was going on, and with that offer on the building looking like a hostile takeover, the attacks might be pressure to accept. It wouldn’t be the first time in New York real estate, nor the thousandth. So he was nervous, and made his rounds with a pistol in a shoulder holster under his jacket. That felt a little extreme, but he did it anyway.
A couple of nights after they had pulled Roberto out of the south Bronx, at the end of his tour of the building, Vlade got off the elevator at the farm and went out to the southeast corner to see how the old man was doing. No surprise to look in through the hotello’s flap door and find Stefan and Roberto there with him, seated on the floor around a pile of old maps.
“Come in,” Hexter said, and gestured to a chair.
Vlade sat. “Looks like the boys got some of your maps back.”
“Yes, all the important ones,” the old man said. “I’m so relieved. Look, here’s a Risse map, 1900. It won a prize at the World’s Fair in France. Risse was a French immigrant, and he took his map back to Paris and it was the sensation of the fair, people lined up to walk around it. It was ten feet on a side. The original was lost, but they made this smaller version to sell. It’s a kind of celebration of the five boroughs coming together. That happened in 1898, and then they commissioned Risse to do this. I love this map.”
“Beautiful,” Vlade commented. It had been much folded, but it did capture something of the gnarly density, the complexity, the sense of human depth crusting the bay. The man-hours that had gone into building it.
“Then here’s the Bollmann map, isn’t this a beauty? All the buildings!”
“Wow,” Vlade said. It was a bird’s-eye view of midtown, with each building drawn individually. “Oh no, he cuts it off right at Madison Square! See, there’s the edge of the Flatiron, but our building is cut off.”
“Not the very top of it, see? Right next to the letter G in the index grid, I think that’s the top of it. You can see the shape.”
Vlade laughed. “The map didn’t go any farther?”
“I guess it was just a midtown map, anyway this is all I’ve got.”
“What’s this colored one?”
“Colored indeed. It’s the Lusk Committee map, the so-called Red Scare map. Ethnic groups, see? Where they lived. Which was where all the horrible revolutionaries were supposed to come from.”
“What year was this?”
“1919.”
Vlade looked for their neighborhood. “I see we had, what is this color—Syrians, Turks, Armenians, and Greeks. I didn’t know that.”
“Some neighborhoods are still the same, but most have changed.”
“That’s for sure. I wonder if you could do anything like this now.”
“I guess you could, using the census maybe. But I think it would mostly be a hodgepodge.”
“I’m not sure,” Vlade said. “I’d like to see. Meanwhile, these are great.”
“Thanks. I’m so happy to have them back.”
Vlade nodded. “Good. So look, that brings me to the little incident with the boys up in the Bronx. Why don’t you tell me about that too. Do you have a map that shows where the HMS Hussar went down?”
Hexter glanced quickly at the boys.
“We had to tell him,” Roberto said. “He pulled me out.”
The old man sighed. “There’s not one map,” he told Vlade. “There are maps of the time that helped me. The British Headquarters map is an incredible thing. The British held Manhattan through the Revolutionary War, and their ordnance people were the best cartographers on Earth at that time. They made the map for military purposes, but also just to pass the time, it looks like. It goes right down to individual boulders. The original is in London, but I copied it from a photo when I was a kid.”
“Show him that one, Mr. H!”
“Okay, let’s.”
The boys got out a large folder, like an artist’s folder, and pulled out a big square mass of paper, treating it like nitroglycerin. On the floor they unfolded two sheets of paper that together were about ten feet by five. And there was Manhattan Island, in some prelapsarian state of undress: a little crosshatching of village at the Battery, the rest of it a wilderness of hills and meadows, forests and swamps and creek beds, all drawn as if seen from above.
“Holy God,” Vlade said. He sat down beside it and traced it with a finger. The area Madison Square now occupied was marked as a swamp with a creek running east from it, debouching into an inlet on the East River. “It’s so beautiful.”
“It is,” Hexter said, smiling a little. “I made this copy when I was twelve.”
“I want to make a map like this for what’s here now,” Roberto declared.
“A big task,” Hexter noted. “But a good idea.”
“Okay,” Vlade said. “I love this thing. But back to the Hussar, please.”
Hexter nodded. “So, this map was finished the very year the Hussar went down. It doesn’t include the Bronx, but it does have part of Hell Gate. And luckily there’s another great map that has the whole harbor, the Final Commissioners’ Plan of 1821. I’ve got a reproduction of it too, see, look at this.” He unfolded yet another map. “Beautiful, eh?”
“Very nice,” Vlade said. “Not quite the Headquarters map, but excellent detail.”
“I like the way the water has waves in it,” Stefan said.
“Me too,” said the old man. “And look, it shows where the shore was when the Hussar sank. It was different then. These islands north of Hell Gate were infilled to make Ward Island, and now it’s entirely underwater. But back then there was a Little Hell Gate, and a Bronks Creek. And
this little island, called Sunken Meadow, was a tidal island. They marked all the marshes really well on this map, I think because they couldn’t build on them or even fill them in, not easily anyway. So, look. The Hussar hits Pot Rock, over here on the Brooklyn side, and the captain tries to get to Stony Point, near the south end of the Bronx, where there was a pier. But all the contemporary accounts say the ship didn’t make it, and sank with its masts still sticking up out of the water. Some accounts have people even wading to shore. That wouldn’t be true right off Stony Point, because the tides run hard between there and the Brothers Islands, and the channel is deep. Also, there just wasn’t time to get that far. The accounts have it going down in less than an hour. The flood tide current runs at about seven miles an hour here, so even if it was the fastest tide possible, they couldn’t have gotten as far as North Brothers Island, which is where Simon Lake was diving back in the 1930s. So I think the ship sank between these little rocks here, between Sunken Meadow island and Stony Point, where it was all landfilled later. So the whole time since it sank, people have been looking in the wrong place, except right at the start, when the ship’s masts were sticking out of the water. The Brits got cables under it in the 1820s, which is why everyone is pretty sure the gold was on board, or else they wouldn’t have bothered with it. The fact that they were allowed to dive the site so soon after the War of 1812 boggles my mind. But anyway, I found their account of the attempt in London’s naval archives, back when I was young, and they confirmed what I was thinking from the timing calculations. It sank right here.”
And he put his forefinger on the 1821 map, on an X he had penciled there.
“So how come the Brits didn’t recover the gold?” Vlade asked.
“The ship broke apart as they were pulling it up, and then they didn’t have the diving skills to get something as small as two wooden chests. That river is dark, and the currents are fast.”
Vlade nodded. “I spent ten years in it,” he said. He waggled his eyebrows at the boys, who were looking at him amazed. “Ten years as a city diver, boys,” he said. “That’s why I knew what you were up to.” He looked at Hexter: “So you told the boys about this.”
“I did, but I didn’t think they should do the diving! In fact I told them not to!”
The boys were suddenly very interested in the 1821 map.
“Boys?” Vlade said.
“Well,” Roberto said, “it was just a case of one thing leading to another, really. We had this great metal detector from a guy who died. So we thought we’d just go up there and look around with that, you know.”
Stefan said, “We took it to the bottom where Mr. Hexter had said the Hussar was, and got a ping.”
“It was great!” Roberto said.
“Where’d you get the diving bell?” Vlade asked.
“We made it,” Roberto said.
“It’s the top of a barge’s grain hopper,” Stefan explained. “We looked at the diving bells at the dive shop at the Skyline Marina, and they looked just like the plastic tops of the grain hoppers. We glued some barrel hoops around the bottom edge of it to weight it down more, although it was already heavy, and glued an eye to the top, and there it was.”
Vlade and Hexter gave each other a look. “You got to watch out for these guys,” Vlade said.
“I know.”
“So the diving bell worked fine, and there we were, getting a big hit on the metal detector. And this metal detector can tell what kind of metal it is! So it isn’t just some boiler or something down there. It’s gold.”
“Or some other metal heavier than iron.”
“The metal detector said gold. And it was in the right spot.”
“So we thought we could make several dives, and dig through the asphalt there, it was really soft, and maybe we could get down to it. We were going to show Mr. Hexter what we had found, and we figured he would be happy, and we could go from there.”
This was beginning to sound a little altruistical to Vlade. He gave the two boys a stern look.
“It wasn’t going to work, boys. Just from what I’ve heard here, the ship was on the bottom of the river. So say it’s twenty feet down, which is what you’d need to get the ship itself underwater. Then they fill in that part of the river, covering the wreck. That shore was then about ten feet above high tide. So what you’ve got now is about thirty or forty feet of landfill over your ship. No way were you going to shovel your way down thirty feet under a diving bell.”
“That’s what I said,” Stefan said.
“I think we could have,” Roberto insisted. “It’s just a matter of spreading the digging out over lots of dives. The ground under the asphalt has to be soft! I was making huge progress!”
The others stared at him.
“Really?” Vlade asked.
“Really! I swear to God!”
Vlade looked at Hexter, who shrugged. “They showed me the metal detector reading,” Hexter said. “If it was accurate, it was a big signal, and set for gold. So I can see why they wanted to try.”
Vlade sat looking at the map from 1821. Bronx yellow, Queens blue, Manhattan red, Brooklyn a yellowy orange. In 1821 there was no Madison Square yet, but Broadway crossed Park Avenue there already, and the creek and swamp were drained and gone. Some kind of parade ground was marked at the intersection, and a fort. The Met was still ninety years in the future. The great city, morphing through time. Astounding, really, that they had drawn this vision of it in 1821, when the existing city was almost entirely below Wall Street. Visionary cartography. It was more a plan than a map. People saw what they wanted to see. As here with the boys.
“Tell you what,” he said. “If you agree, I could go talk to my old friend Idelba about this.” He paused for a second or two, frightened at what he was proposing. He hadn’t seen her in sixteen years. “She runs a dredging barge out at Coney Island. They’re sucking the old beach’s sand off the bottom and moving it inland. She’s got some wicked underwater power there. I might be able to talk her into helping us out. I think we’d have to tell her the story to get her to agree to it, but I would trust her to keep it to herself. We went through some stuff that makes me sure we can trust her.” That was one way of putting it. “Then we could see if you’ve got anything down there without you drowning yourselves. What do you say?”
The boys and the old man looked at each other for a while, and then Roberto said, “Okay, sure. Let’s try it.”
Vlade decided to take the boys out to Coney Island on his own boat, even though the building’s boat was a bit faster, because he didn’t want this trip on the books. His boat, an eighteen-foot aluminum-hulled runabout with an electric overboard, had become somewhat of an afterthought for him, because he was always either in the Met or out doing Met business in the Metboat, but it was still there tucked in the rafters of the boathouse, and once he got it down it was a pleasure to see it again, and feel it under the tiller as they hummed out Twenty-third to the East River and headed south across Upper New York Bay. Once they were clear of the traffic channels he opened it up full throttle. The two wings of spray the boat threw to the side were modest, but the frills topping them were sparked with rainbow dots, and the mild bounce over the harbor chop gave them an extra sense of speed. Speedboat on the water! It was a very particular feel, and judging by the looks on the boys’ faces, they hadn’t often felt it.
And as always, passing through the Narrows was a thrill. Even with sea level fifty feet higher, the Verrazano Bridge still crossed the air so far above them that it was like something left over from Atlantis. It couldn’t help but make you think about the rest of the world. Vlade knew that world was out there, but he never went inland; he had never been more than five miles from the ocean in his life. To him this bay was everything, and the giant vestiges of the antediluvian world seemed magical, as from an age of gold.
After that, out to sea. The blue Atlantic! Swells rocked the boat, and Vlade had to slow down as he turned left to hug the shore, now marked by a white
line of crashing breakers. For a half hour they ran southeast just offshore, until they passed Bath Beach, where Vlade headed the boat straight south to Sea Gate, the western end of Coney Island.
Then they were off Coney Island, really just a hammerhead peninsula at the south end of Brooklyn. A reef now, studded with ruins. They paralleled the old shore, humming east slowly, rocking on the incoming swells. Vlade wondered if the boys might be susceptible to seasickness, but they stood in the cockpit staring around, oblivious to the rocking, which Vlade himself found rather queasy-making.
Tide line ruins on Coney Island stuck out of the white jumble of broken waves, various stubs and blocks of wrecked buildings; they looked like gigantic pallets that had grounded here. One could watch a wave break against the first line of apartments and rooftops, then wash through them north into the scattered rooftops behind, breaking up and losing force, until some backwash slugged into the oncoming wave and turned it into a melee of loose white water a couple hundred yards broad, and extending for as far as they could see to the east. From here the coastline looked endless, though Vlade knew for a fact that Coney Island was only about four miles long. But far to the southeast one could see the whitewater at Breezy Point, marking the horizon and thus seeming many miles distant. It was an illusion but it still looked immense, as if it would take all day to motor to Breezy Point, as if they were coasting a vast land on a bigger planet. Ultimately, Vlade thought, you had to accept that the illusion was basically true: the world was huge. So maybe they were seeing it right after all.
The boys’ faces were round-eyed, awestruck. Vlade laughed to see them. “Great to be out here, right?”