Idelba said, “Gentlemen, the dredge is gonna start sucking up whatever’s down there. I’m aiming it at the metal you discovered, which shows on my metal detectors too, so good work there. It’ll get real noisy when I turn the vacuum on, and what comes up at this end we’ll run through sieves. We won’t be able to hear each other, so if you see anything come out on the deck, wave so I can see you.”
By now she was shouting, because the whine of some motor or engine far louder than the previous motor was now screaming from the deckhouse under the bridge. It was so loud that it seemed possible that the entire tug was filled with whatever machine was running there below the deck. The vacuum cleaner from hell! Now they all had to shout right in each other’s ears if they were going to hear each other, but as most of them had their hands over their ears, this wasn’t going to work either. Thabo dug in a locker and brought out big plastic earmuffs for them all to put on, and after that things were much quieter, but they could only wave at each other.
The boys stood with Vlade and Mr. Hexter at the upper end of the dredge tube, and when it began to spew mud and gunk into a big box on the deck, they leaned over the box and inspected the brown-and-black flow. The familiar stink of anoxia filled the air, one of the smells of the city, here at its nastiest. They all wrinkled their noses and continued looking. Mud flowed down and out of a big meshed hole in the box, into a channel in the deck where hoses added water to the mix, and everything ran down the channel toward the stern and out a meshed gap back into the river. Vlade put on rubber gloves that went up to his elbow, then a dust mask over his nose, and began to finger through the mud in the box. It was obvious he had done this before.
A black plume of mud blossomed off the end of the tug as the vacuuming proceeded. The anoxic stench was pervasive and ugly. After about ten minutes of this, Idelba flipped a lever and the noise ground to a halt. Thabo and Vlade uncoupled the last section of tubing and began rooting around in the last tube. They dug out chunks of God knew what, put it under the hoses running into the channel on the deck, checked out whatever was revealed when the coating of mud was washed off, and then casually tossed what they had in hand overboard. Usually it was lumps of concrete or asphalt, sometimes soggy wood, which they inspected more closely; other times broken stones, or chunks of what looked like ceramic. A goat’s horn, a complete furry body of a raccoon or skunk maybe, giant clamshells, a big square bottle not broken, a fishing gaff, a drowned doll, many broken stones.
When the tube was cleared they began vacuuming again. Idelba guided the nozzle at the bottom, the old man looking over her shoulder intently. It was hard to believe he could interpret the blobs on the screens, but he seemed as interested as someone who knew what he was looking at. The noise was again incredible. The mud flowing through the box had nothing in it of any interest.
Again the tube clogged, again they cleared it by hand. Most of what they washed off now consisted of rounded stones, often broken, frequently shaped like giant eggs. When the vacuum was off Mr. Hexter said to them, “That’s glacial till! Most of Long Island is made of this stuff. It was left here at the end of the Ice Age. Means we’ve reached the old river bottom, maybe.”
Idelba nodded as she poked through the muck. “Unless you hit bedrock, you’re always dealing with till. Nothing else around this whole bay, except a little scrooch of soil on the land and mud under the water. Or landfill of various kinds. But mostly it’s till.”
After another clog was cleared they went back to it, but before the vacuum began its whining and screeching and roaring, Mr. Hexter said to Idelba, “So will you be able to tell when you’re as deep as that metal you detected?”
She nodded, and they were back to it.
Two clogs later they suddenly found themselves sorting through old fragments of wood, squared off and lathed to something like spars or thwarts. Everyone looked at each other wordlessly, eyebrows raised, eyes round. Pieces of an old ship—yes, these seemed to be pieces of an old ship. Back to another round of vacuuming with renewed interest, no doubt about it. The boys were hopping around looking at every lump in the channel on the deck, mostly stone after stone, pebble after pebble.
Then in the middle of the glaucous cronking of the upsuck, and the huge whine of the vacuum pump, a big clunk stopped everything. Something had hit the last tube filter hard. Idelba turned off the vacuum pump. They all took off their earmuffs. Thabo and Vlade delinked the tube from the box, and they began to dig in the muck caught on the tube’s filter.
Against the big mesh they found a wooden chest with a curved top, about two feet on a side, bound by strips of crumbly black that had colored the wood adjacent to them. Vlade tried to lift it out by himself and couldn’t. Thabo joined him, then Idelba, and they hefted it onto the deck, dropped it with a thump. Stefan and Roberto danced around the adults, crawled between them, sniffed the dead stench of the wet muddy wood. It was the smell of treasure.
Thabo picked up a short flat crowbar and looked at Idelba. Idelba looked at Mr. Hexter. Hexter nodded, grinning widely. “Be gentle,” he said. “It should be easy.”
It was. Thabo tapped the shorter end of the L into the seam between the box’s top and its side, next to a black metal plate that must once have included the box’s handle and lock; now it was just a knobbly mass. A few wiggles, a gentle lift, a scrape. Thabo twisted the crowbar and levered it up again. The top of the box came up with a liquid scrunch. And there in the box was a mass of coins. Slightly black, slightly green, but mainly gold. Gold coins.
They all cheered. They danced around howling deafly at the sky. It was great to see that the adults were just like Stefan and Roberto in this, that they still had that capacity in them even though grown up.
“There should be two boxes,” Mr. Hexter said loudly in response to a look from Idelba. “That’s what the manifest listed.”
“Okay,” Idelba said. “Let’s dig around a little, then. They were probably near each other to begin with.”
“Yes.”
So even though the boys were hopping around slapping hands and hugging, the adults turned on the vacuum again, and they all had to get their earmuffs back on and go through it all again. It was crazy. Stefan and Roberto stared at each other with their Can you believe this? looks. But crazy or not, after a couple more vacuuming sessions there was another big clunk, now characteristic and obvious, and they stopped the vacuum, unhooked the tube from the capture box, and lo and behold, another wooden chest.
After that Idelba still continued to dig around for a while, amazing the boys further, and even Mr. Hexter. Vlade just smiled at them, shaking his head. Idelba was nothing if not thorough, his look conveyed. In one break to clear the filter again, he said to them, “She’s going to suck up the whole south Bronx, I’m telling you. Just in case whatever. We may be here all night.”
Then they heard some slighter clunks coming from the deck, and they began to find black cup shapes, rusted knives, and a couple more pieces of ceramic, all rolling around in the muck at the bottom of the box, or sliding down the channel in the deck. The smell was sickening but none of them minded. Everyone had their rubber gloves in the mud and water, washing stuff off under the hoses like prospectors.
After about an hour of that they stopped finding anything that seemed like it was part of a ship. It was back to stones and pebbles and sand—that same glacial till, the primordial stuff of the harbor’s shores.
Finally Idelba turned off the vacuum yet again and looked at the old man. “What do you think?” she shouted. They were mostly deaf at this point.
“I think we’ve gotten what’s there to get!” Hexter exclaimed.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
On the way back down to the Twenty-sixth dock, they all stood around in the wheelhouse talking excitedly about the discovery. Mr. Hexter inspected some of the coins and declared them the right kind for the Hussar to be carrying, as only made sense. They were usually half coated with a greenish-black crud, but where they had bee
n touching they were a dull gold color, and Hexter brushed a few clean with a wire brush and declared they were mostly guineas, with a few examples of other kinds of coins. They gleamed in the bridge’s light like something intruding from another universe, one where the gravity was heavier. When they held a coin in their fingers and rubbed it, it felt like something twice as big at least, more like four times as big; the heaviness was very palpable.
“So whose are they?” Roberto asked, looking at Vlade.
Vlade saw the nature of his look and laughed. “They’re Mr. Hexter’s, right?”
“I guess so.” Roberto did not have a poker face, and his crestfallen expression made the others laugh.
“It’s right,” Stefan pointed out. “He’s the one who figured out where it was.”
“But you’re the ones who found it,” the old man said quickly. “And these fine people here dug it up. I think that makes us a consortium.”
“There’s a legal routine for this kind of thing,” Idelba said, frowning. “We use it sometimes down at the beach. We have to report certain kinds of finds to keep our permits good.”
None of the others looked happy about this, not that Idelba did either. Stefan and Roberto were appalled. “They’ll just take it away from us!” Roberto objected.
The adults considered this. It was obviously not unlikely.
“I could ask Charlotte,” Vlade said. “I would trust her to be on our side.”
The boys and Hexter nodded at this thought. As they slowed down to approach the dock, they were all frowning thoughtfully.
Before they reached Twenty-sixth, Thabo said something to Idelba, who called Vlade over to the scanning screens.
“Look, Thabo saw this while we were digging.” She tapped around and pulled up the screen shot she wanted. “This is our infrared, on one of the cables that we sent down with the dredger tube, so it’s seeing hot spots on the bottom. And look here—on our way back from where we were digging, there was a rectangular hot spot on the bottom.”
“Subway entry?” Vlade asked. “Those are still hot.”
“Yeah, it could be Cypress Avenue, right? That’s where it maps. But it’s hotter than most subway holes, and rectangular. It’s about the size and shape of a container from the old container ships. And see, the radar shows there’s a whole parking lot full of those containers a few blocks away, behind the old loading docks. It just makes me wonder if this is one of those. But down in the subway hole? And hot as it is?”
“Radioactive contents, maybe?”
“Christ, I hope not.”
“You don’t have a radiation detector on board?”
“Shit no.”
“You should. There’s a lot of crazy stuff in this harbor, you know that.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I should.”
“It’s not a case of what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
“I know that. Although I was kind of hoping it was.”
“Not. But yeah, this is weird. I’ll have my friends in city water take a look.”
“Good. You’re still in touch with those guys?”
“Oh yeah. We have poker night once a month, I usually make that.”
“Good. I’ll be interested to hear what they find out.”
“Me too.”
Roberto was still focused on the gold, so now he interrupted them. “What are we going to do with the treasure right now?”
Idelba and Vlade regarded each other.
“Let’s get it into the Met,” Vlade suggested. “Let me off at Twenty-sixth and I’ll sky over and get my boat, and we’ll take this stuff with us into the building and I’ll put it in the big safe. Then it’ll be safe while we figure out what to do with it. That could be tricky, now you mention it.”
“It was tricky before he mentioned it,” Idelba said. She looked at Thabo, who nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I know you’ll take care of us.”
Vlade nodded. “Of course.”
“We’re a consortium,” the old man said. “The Hussar Six.”
They agreed to that with handshakes all around, and Thabo turned the tug up into the flow of the East River and brought them up to the Twenty-sixth dock. The river and the city looked like something out of a dream.
Man sits on a bench in Central Park, middle of a hot summer night, 1947. Another man sits down on another bench across the path. Hey, how are ya. Good, how about you. Hot night eh? Too hot. My apartment’s an oven. Mine too. So what do you do? I’m a painter. Oh yeah? Me too. What’s your name? Willem de Kooning. What’s yours? Mark Rothko. Hey I’ve heard of you. I’ve heard of you too.
Start of a long friendship.
b) Vlade
The next day Vlade paid a visit to his friend Rosario O’Hara, one of the old veterans of the city’s subway squad. In the years when Vlade had worked for her they had done all the usual subway work, which in those years included extending their operational reach into the drowned parts of the subway, slow work that mostly consisted of using the train tubes as giant water-filled utilidors, and laying within them things like conduit pipe for power lines, sewage pipes, tracks for robotic supply submersible capsules, comm cables, and so on, all the while keeping passage in them clear for maintenance access by city divers. The old Metropolitan Transit Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had long ago split up the old jurisdictions and responsibilities, but not in any sane way, and one thing happening in the sixty percent of the subway system that was underwater was an ongoing power struggle between the successors to the two agencies, which also created zones of dispute and uncertainty in which more informal alliances between working teams could be created. Thus Vlade had spent ten years of his youth working for the LMMTA, and had strung a million miles of submersible line during that time, among other more interesting chores. All that work had been done in teams, and there was enough danger involved to make the teams like family for the time they were working together; and that feeling persisted long after the work was done.
So he felt safe in calling on Rosario and asking her to meet on a taqueria raft outside the Port Authority’s building on the Hudson, where they could talk as they ate, sitting at the edge of the raft.
“Have you heard of the Cypress station being put to use lately? Anyone blowing it out and squatting down there?”
“Not that I’ve heard. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I was up there with some friends the other day, and their infrared caught a hot spot on the bottom, and it seemed to be coming from out of the Cypress hole, and I thought it might be heat coming up from that stairwell.”
It was a common signal; most of the drowned subway stations lofted plumes of heat up from the underworld. Submarine New York was a busy place. “I don’t think there’s anything going on there,” Rosario said. “It was industrial around there, as I recall. Parking lots for cars, containers, buses, pallets. Also that row of oil tanks on the old shore.”
“That’s what I thought. But this was a hot spot. I’ve got a feeling that something might be going on down there.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. There’s some people from my building missing, and some sabotage of the building too, and it’s made me spooky. Anyway I’d like to take a look. And I think it’s tricky enough I need to buddy-dive it.”
Rosario nodded. “Okay. Trina Dobson and Jim Fritsche okay with you?”
“Of course. Just who I was hoping for.”
“I’ll see when they’re available. How about you?”
“I can get free when they can.”
The group convened later that week at Eighty-sixth, a station on the number 6 line up to Pelham. Vlade had been worried about surveillance of the site, and Rosario had suggested they come at it from the side, as they might have done if it were one of their old work projects in the tunnels. Vlade liked that, and Trina and Jim did too; clearly they were all happy to have an excuse to do the stupid thing again. No one dove the tunnels for fun, but it was fun.
E
ighty-sixth was one of the few stations on the 6 line to remain aboveground, and it gave them a place to gear up and check each other’s suits. Vlade and Jim had worked together in the old days, and Vlade knew Jim was a great diver; it was good to see him again. Trina was Rosario’s old partner. When they were ready, they clomped down the stairs and dove down to tube level, then got themselves arranged on the sides of a rail sled and sent it humming north.
Rail sleds moved through the black water of the tunnels much more slowly than the subway trains used to, but they were still much faster than people could have swum. Rosario had all the codes and the right to log on and take a ride. They had to make sure their time at this depth was short, in order to avoid having to decompress when they came up. So being able to catch a ride like this was good.
It was an eerie journey, a kind of submarine dream of an old subway ride, with all of them hanging on to the sled and exposed to the hard push of black water. They looked around in different directions and their headlamp beams fenced as they struck the tiled walls of the stations they passed through, making the walls gleam. The water in the tubes was clearer than in the rivers, and their lights hit the walls between stations and clarified the cylinder shape they were moving through. A weird sight, no matter how many times you saw it.
In half an hour the sled pulled them under the Harlem River and the Bronx Kill. Rosario stopped it in the Cypress Avenue station, and cautiously they swam up the black depths of the stairwell, the water getting murkier as they ascended.
There in the big room just under the old street level, they saw it: a shipping container, dark with crud, scarred by the lighter marks of ropes and hoist belts recently applied to its sides. It had been dropped down one of the holes that led up to the street level of old.
Vlade swam toward the container and scoped it with an infrared scope they had brought along for this purpose. Yes, it was hot. When he got close he stopped kicking and used his hands to wave himself to a stop. At one end of the container was an assemblage they all recognized, an inflatable airlock and tube staircase, covering the end of the container and standing out in the mucky surroundings because it was clean. These assemblages consisted of tubes attached to an adhesive airlock door. When the tube’s walls and its interior stairs were inflated, it would rise to the surface at about a forty-five-degree angle, where it could be opened at the top and any water inside pumped out, thus providing a dry descent to the airlock door, which could be glued to any kind of opening. A boat or dock on the surface could then grab the free end of the tube stairs and haul it up, and by using the stairs inside the tube, make a dry entry to whatever the bottom end of the tube was glued to. A standard piece of equipment all over the harbor, very familiar to them.