They sat on each side of him. The map was a USGS topographical map from before the floods, of Manhattan and some of the surrounding harbor area. It had both elevation contour intervals and streets and buildings—a very crowded map, on which the old man had also drawn the original shorelines of the bay in green, and the current shorelines in red. And there in the south Bronx, inland from the shore as drawn by the USGS mapmakers, but underwater when considering both the red and the green lines, was a black X. Hexter tapped it with his forefinger, as always; the middle of the X was even a little worn.
“So, you know how I told you before,” he said, his usual preface. “I told you before, the HMS Hussar takes off from down near Battery Park where the British have their dock. November 23, 1780. One hundred fourteen feet long, thirty-four feet wide, sixth-rate twenty-eight-gun frigate, crew of about a hundred men. Maybe also seventy American prisoners of war. Captain Maurice Pole wants to go through Hell Gate and into Long Island Sound, even though his local pilot, a black slave named Mr. Swan, advises against it as being dangerous. They get most of the way through Hell Gate but run into Pot Rock, which is a rock shelf sticking out from Astoria. Captain Pole goes down to inspect and sees a giant hole at the bow of the ship, he comes up saying they have to ground the ship and get everyone to shore. The current is carrying them north, so they aim for either Port Morris on the Bronx shore, or North Brother Island, called Montressor’s Island at the time, but glug. Down they go. It all happens too fast and down goes the Hussar, in such shallow water that the masts are still sticking out into the air when it hits bottom. Most of the sailors get to shore alive in boats, although there was a rumor for a while that the seventy American prisoners all drowned, still chained belowdecks.”
“So that’s good, right?” Roberto asks.
“What, that seventy Americans drowned?”
“No, that it was shallow where it went down.”
“I knew you meant that. Yes, it’s good. But very soon afterward, the British got chains under the ship’s hull and dragged it around, trying to pull it back up. But it came apart and they never got the gold. Four million dollars of gold coins to pay British soldiers, in two wooden chests bound with iron hoops. Four million in 1780 terms. The coins would have been guineas or the like, so I don’t know why they always give the value in dollars, but anyway.”
“Lots of gold.”
“Oh yeah. By now that amount of gold would be worth a gazillion.”
“How much really?”
“I don’t know. I think a couple billion.”
“And in shallow water.”
“Right. But it’s murky, and the river moves fast in both directions. It’s only calm there at ebb and full tide, about an hour each, as you boys know. And they broke the ship trying to haul it up, so the ship was distributed up and down the riverbed, probably. Almost certainly. The gold chests probably didn’t move very far. There they are, down there still. But the river keeps changing its banks, ripping them down and building them up. And in the 1910s they filled in the Bronx shore in that area, made some new docks and a loading area behind them. It took me years in the libraries to find the surveying maps that the city workers made before and after that infill. Plus I found a map from the 1820s that showed where the British went when they came here and tried to pull the ship up. They knew where it was, and twice they tried to salvage it. For sure they were going for the gold. So I was able to put all that together and mark it, and later I figured out the GPS coordinates for the spot. And that’s what you went to. And there it was.”
The boys nodded.
“But how deep?” Roberto prompted, after Hexter seemed to be taking a little nap.
Hexter started upright and looked at the boys. “The ship was built in 1763 and had twenty-eight cannons. One of which they pulled up and put in Central Park, and only found out later it had a cannonball and gunpowder rusted inside it. They had to defuse it with a bomb squad! So anyway, sixth-raters like that had a single deck, not that high off the water. About ten feet. And the masts were still sticking out of the water, so that means it sank in something between fifteen and say forty feet, but the river isn’t that deep so close to shore, so say twenty feet. Then they filled in that part of the river, but only a few feet higher than high tide, no more than eight feet. And now sea level is said to be about fifty feet higher than back then, so, what, you’re hitting bottom at forty feet down?”
“More like twenty,” Stefan said.
“Okay, well, maybe the shore there was more built up than I thought. Anyway, the implication is that the chests will be thirty or forty feet below the current bottom.”
“But the metal detector detected it,” Stefan pointed out.
“That’s right. So that suggests it’s around thirty feet down.”
“So we can do it,” Roberto declared.
Stefan wasn’t so sure. “I mean, we can, if we go back enough times, but I don’t know if there’s room for that much dirt under our diving bell. In fact I know there isn’t.”
“We’ll have to circle the hole, move the dirt off in different directions,” Roberto said. “Or put it in buckets.”
Stefan nodded uncertainly. “It would be better if we could get scuba gear and dive with that. Our diving bell is too small.”
The old man regarded them, nodding in thought. “I might be able to—”
The room lurched hard to the side, tumbling the stacks of books all around. The boys shrugged them off, but the old man was knocked to the ground by a stack of atlases. They threw these off him and helped him back to his feet, then went digging for his glasses, him moaning all the while.
“What happened, what happened?”
“Look at the walls!” Stefan said, shocked. The room itself now tilted like one of the remaining stacks of books, and through one bookshelf and its books they could see daylight, and the next building over.
“We gotta get out of here!” Roberto told Mr. Hexter, pulling him upright.
“I need my glasses,” the old man cried. “I can’t see without them.”
“Okay but let’s hurry!”
The two boys crouched and threw books around carefully but swiftly until Roberto came upon the glasses; they were still intact.
Hexter put them on and looked around. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s the building, isn’t it.”
“Yeah it is. Let’s hurry and get out of here. We’ll help you down.”
Buildings in the drink collapsed all the time, it was a regular thing. The boys had tended to scoff at the bad stories told about such collapses, but now they were remembering how Vlade always called the intertidal the death zone. Don’t spend too much time in the death zone, he would say, explaining that that was what climbers called mountains above twenty thousand feet. As the boys spent lots of time in the intertidal and were now diving the river too, they tended to just agree with him and let it be, maybe considering themselves to be like climbers at altitude. Tough guys. But now they were holding the old man by the elbows and hurrying him along the sideways-tilted hall as best they could, then down the stairs, one step at a time, had to make sure he didn’t fall or else it would take even more time, sometimes placing his feet by grabbing his ankles and placing them. The stairwell was all knocked around, railings down, open cracks in walls showing the building next door. Smell of seaweed and the anoxic stink of released mud, worse than any chamber pot. There was a booming from outside, and any number of shouts and bangs and other sounds. Shafts of light cut through the hazy air of the stairwell at odd and alarming angles, and quite a few of the stairs gave underfoot. Clearly this old building could fall over any moment. The oozy stench filled the air, like the building’s guts or something.