“South Bronx just east of the bridges.”
“What the fuck?”
“They didn’t say. Thanks for this, I’ve got my stuff right here.”
“What are you going to do?” Garr asked as they got in his speedster.
“I’ll dive to their diving bell and tie their rope back onto it.”
“A diving bell? Really?”
“That’s what Stefan said. It’s stupid.”
“Crazy stupid.”
“Well, that’s them. But we can’t let them drown.” As he said this his throat clenched so hard he had to look away.
“I guess,” Garr said, and got them going east on Twenty-sixth. The canal was crowded this time of day, but he was good at dodging through the crowd, and for once he had an excuse to do it, so he shot the boat over wakes and through gaps between barges and kayaks and vapos and rowboats and gondolas, gaps smaller than Vlade would have dared to attempt. The work of an obvious scofflaw, a Brooklyn dodger, but today usefully so.
Out in the East River he shoved his throttle forward and the little hydrofoil did its thing and rose up onto its foils and flew. Wind ripped past them over the clear bubble at the front of the cockpit. Vlade marveled at the speed with which the UN building shot past on their left. Then they were past Roosevelt Island’s drowned brick piles on their right, into the broad confluence that was Hell Gate, whooshing over it as if in a low-flying plane. They were going about sixty or seventy miles an hour, great news given the need. Despite himself Vlade was impressed, and almost feeling a tiny glow of relief through the knot in his stomach. Although he was also rediscovering what someone had once explained to him, that part of being post-traumatic was an inability to clear your head once you were triggered. You simply flashed back to the trauma and it was all just like then, all over again.
Onshore, in the broken rusty reef that was the submerged part of the south Bronx, a little gray zodiac was floating. The boys’ boat for sure, with one of them standing in it, desperately waving his arms overhead.
“Looks like our guys,” Garr remarked, and slowed enough for the boat to drop back into the water with a swan-chested splash. Even then it was a quick ride through the shallows, white wings to each side and Garr standing tall, looking forward to see if he was headed at anything dangerous. Ordinarily Vlade would have thought it much too fast, but given the circumstances he was happy the man was reckless. As long as he didn’t run aground on something. Vlade held his breath as they crossed over some dark spots in the blue, but they passed safely. He didn’t know if the foils on this craft slid up or not. Some did, some didn’t. Something to ask about later. He still wasn’t sure what to make of this young finance guy, a very dismissive and self-regarding fellow, or so it seemed. But good at piloting his little speedboat.
They pulled up next to Stefan, still standing in the zodiac, looking relieved. He balanced against their wake’s rocking and pointed down.
“He’s there!”
“How far down?” Vlade asked.
“On the bottom.”
“How far is that?”
“At high tide it’s twenty-eight feet.”
Vlade sighed. They were just past high tide. He had already struggled into his wetsuit, and now he shrugged on his smallest tank and vest and got the hose and mask and regulator and computer all arranged right, then lastly placed the mask carefully onto the suit’s hood. Gloves on, rope in hand.
“Okay, going down,” he told them, to keep to protocol. “Keep the tether on me loose. I’ll want to be able to move around.”
He slipped off the boat and felt the chill of the water at one remove. As always, at first it was a relief from his own heat, trapped by the wetsuit. He had been about to break into a sweat. Now it was cool, and soon it would be cold, but not right against his skin, more a hard coolness sucking at him from outside.
The river was dark even a foot deep, as usual in the drowned shallows of the boroughs. His headlamp illuminated nothing but estuarine particulates of various kinds—seaweed, dirt, little creatures, detritus. Top of the tide. Down below he saw the gleam of something.
He had the rope from the boys’ zodiac in hand, and with it he swam down to the top of the gleam. Eyebolt at the top of what appeared to be a clear plastic bell, the bell dense and thick enough that it reflected his light, making it hard to see what was inside it. Presumably Roberto, so he knocked three times on the side of it, then tied the rope on, three loops, after which he tugged hard. Then back to the surface, where he trod water and pulled his mask up.
“Did you see him?” Stefan asked anxiously. “Did you tie off?”
“Rope’s tied to the bell! Pull it up a bit and I’ll get him out from under it.”
Stefan and Garr hauled up on the rope. At first it obviously resisted them, so much that Vlade was amazed the boys had been able to pull each other up alone. There was a hand reel screwed onto the thwart, but it was little and it would take an effort to crank it. Then the two in the boat got it going, and Vlade put his face mask back in position and dove again, to help Roberto out from under the bell’s edge and into the boat. A good idea, as when he poked his head under the side of the bell and looked up into the pocket of captured air, the boy seemed stunned and only semiconscious. He was hanging on to a strap Velcroed to the inside of the bell, and his eyes were bugging out of his face, and his mouth was pursed into a tight little knot. He was ready to hold his breath and was not going to breathe until well into the open air, good man. He was still that conscious. Vlade nodded at him, pointed up, and hauled him down into the water, under the bell’s edge, and up to the surface. Then he shoved him up from below while the other two dragged him over the side and into the zodiac, which had a smaller cockpit than Garr’s speedster but was lower in the water.
Vlade crawled up over the side of the zodiac, never an easy move, but soon enough he flopped over the fat rubber tube into the cockpit. Roberto lay next to him on the bottom, wet, muddy, his face a brown tinged with blue. Shivering. Lips and nose whitish with cold or anoxia, or both. Vlade pulled off his own face mask and unclipped from his tank and got out of his gear. Then he sat beside Roberto and held his blue little hand. Very cold.
“Have you got any hot water in your boat?” he asked Garr.
“I have a flash heater,” Garr said.
“Jump up and draw us a bowl of the hottest water you have,” Vlade said. “We need to warm this kid up.” He put his face down to Roberto’s and said, “Roberto, what the hell? You could have died down there!” And suddenly his throat closed up again and he couldn’t say more. He looked away hot-eyed, tried to pull himself together. He hadn’t had the old feeling stab him as hard as this for many a year. It was just like his nightmares, even just like the original event itself. But now, here and now, if he could get this boy warmed up…
Roberto was shivering too hard to answer, but he nodded. He was shivering so hard his skinny body bounced off the bottom of the boat.
“Have you got a towel?” Vlade asked Stefan.
Stefan nodded and got it from a locker under the thwart. Vlade took it from him and began to dry Roberto’s head off, at the same time roughing him up a little to get his circulation going faster. “Let’s get this wetsuit off him.” Although maybe it would help heat him, maybe it would be warmer with it on than off. Vlade tried to clear his mind enough to recall standard practice in the city. They couldn’t warm his extremities too fast, he knew that, that was very dangerous, as it might drive cold blood to his heart and cause it to fail. In general they had to go slowly, but one way or another it was certainly necessary to warm him.