Stefan couldn’t see much of Roberto, and even the bell was just a kind of glow in the dark water, lit by Roberto’s flashlight. But Roberto was now standing on an old asphalt surface of what once had been a parking lot, just behind the old riverfront in the south end of the Bronx. With the aid of his light he would be able to see quite well under the bell.
Stefan tugged once on the oxygen tube. All good?
A tug came back. All good.
Down there Roberto would be deploying their metal detector, after detaching it from the inner wall of the bell. This detector was a Golfier Maximus, liberated from the effects of another neighbor of Mr. Hexter’s, a canal diver who had recently died and appeared to have no family. Roberto would use this detector to scan the ancient submerged asphalt and see if it detected anything under Mr. Hexter’s spot.
And indeed, down under the diving bell, Roberto turned on the detector, set it for gold, and jumped when the detector immediately started beeping—his head clonked against the side of the diving bell, and he shouted uselessly up to Stefan. He picked up the end of the air hose and shrieked into it. “We found it! We found it! We found it!” His heart was pounding like crazy.
He moved the detector around the perimeter of the bell. The pinging was fastest near one edge, he thought it might be north. The beeping got faster rather than louder as the detector was moved closer to its target metal; it started loud in the first place. Roberto’s heart rate was accelerating in time with the beeps, and he began to hyperventilate a little, muttering, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” He detached a can of red spray paint they had Velcroed to the inside of the bell and sprayed the wet asphalt under his feet, watched the paint bubble and spread over the pebbly old asphalt. It might not stick very well, but it might. Some of it should stay there for later.
Time passed for Stefan up in the boat. In the slight breeze he was getting a little cold. One of the great things about this hunt was that the spot they were investigating had been a parking lot built on landfill, which meant that for centuries people would not have thought to look there for a sunken ship, nor, if it had occurred to them, would they have had an easy time looking. Not until the Second Pulse had returned this area to a state of nature, if that was the right way to say it, had it become possible again to hunt for a shipwreck here. Which if found could be dug up in secret, under water all the while and no one the wiser. Marine archaeology was cool that way. And so it was that one of the greatest sunken treasures of all time might possibly be located at last.
But for now it seemed to him that Roberto had been down there a long time. The little oxygen bottle’s gauge was showing that it was nearly empty. Stefan tugged on the oxygen tube three times.
Down below, Roberto saw this but ignored it. He put his cold foot on the tube so it wouldn’t pull out under the edge of the bell. Then he tugged once: all good.
Stefan tugged back three times, harder than before. Low battery power, low oxygen, and the tide was now ebbing, so that he had to begin running the boat against the slap of the flow, gauging the tension in the bell rope against that of the buoy line and the oxygen line. None of them could get too taut, especially not the oxygen line.
He tugged three times again, harder still. Roberto could be hard to convince even when you were talking to him.
“Damn it, I’m pulling you,” Stefan announced loudly down at the bell. Yelled it, really. They had a hand reel screwed to their plywood thwart, and now he looped the bell rope over the reel and began to turn hard on the crank, pulling the bell and therefore Roberto up from the bottom.
Down below Roberto hurried to tack the paint can and metal detector against the inside of the bell before it rose over him. Already the water had rushed under its edge and slapped him up to the knees. Time to take a deep breath and slip under the edge and swim up to the surface, but the tools had to be secured first.
Stefan kept on cranking, knowing this was the only way to get Roberto to give up and surface. When he hit the surface he would start cursing viciously as soon as he could catch his breath, although his voice was too high to make the curses very impressive. Pretty soon Stefan could see the top of the bell, and right after that Roberto burst onto the surface of the water, blowing out air, and then started in, not with curses but with triumphant whoops, “Yes! Yes!” followed by “I found it! We found it! The detector! It went off! We found it!” Then some violent hacking as he swallowed some river water.
“Oh my God!” Quickly Stefan helped him over the rounded side of the boat, then hauled up the bell while Roberto started pulling himself out of the wetsuit. “You really did? It went off for gold?”
“It definitely did. It went really fast, really fast. I shouted up the air hose to tell you, couldn’t you hear?”
“No. I don’t think air hoses transmit voices very far.”
Roberto laughed. “I was screaming atcha. It was great. I marked the spot with the spray can, I don’t know if that will work, but we’ve got the buoy there too, and the GPS. Mr. Hexter is going to freak.”
Freed of the wetsuit, standing in the wind in his wet shorts, he shut his eyes and Stefan sprayed him with a water bottle liberally dosed with bleach, and then Roberto toweled off his face. The harbor’s water was often nasty and could give you a rash, or worse. When Roberto was dried and dressed, he helped Stefan haul the diving bell onto the bow, and then they cast off from their underwater buoy and began to motor downstream, chattering all the while.
“We’re going to run out of battery,” Stefan said. Luckily the ebb tide would help them get downstream. “Hope we don’t float right out the Narrows.”
“Whatever,” Roberto said. Although floating out the Narrows would be bad. Their battery was a piece of crap, though better than the previous one. Roberto looked around the East River to check for traffic: crowded, as usual. If they were caught drifting in a traffic lane they could get arrested and their boat impounded. The water police and other people in authority would find out they had no adults responsible for them—no papers—nothing. The various people around Madison Square whom they associated with were not fully aware of their situation, at least not formally, and they might not appreciate being asked for help if Stefan and Roberto were to name them as responsible parties. No, they had to avoid getting stopped.
“If we can row over to the city we can find a plug-in and recharge.”
“Maybe.”
“And hey, we found it!”
Stefan nodded. He met Roberto’s eye and grinned. They hooted, slapped hands. They rowed to their first underwater buoy and tied the diving bell’s rope to it and let it down sideways, without any air trapped under it. It would wait down there for their next visit.
Then they drifted south to where Hell Gate became the East River. Stefan spotted a break in the river traffic, gunned their motor, and made as quick a crossing of the traffic lanes as he could, burning most of the rest of their battery’s juice. No police drones seemed to be hovering over them. The dragonback of superscrapers studding Washington Heights had a million windows facing them, but no one would be looking. Surveillance cameras of various kinds would have recorded their crossing, but they weren’t any different from any other craft on the water. No, the main problem now was simply getting home on a hard ebb tide.