“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?”
They nodded.
“You ever been out here before?”
They shook their heads.
“And I thought I was local,” Vlade said. “Well, good. Here, see that barge and tug, about halfway down Coney Island? That’s where we’re going. That’s my friend Idelba doing her job.”
“Is she about halfway done with it?” Roberto asked.
“Good question. You’ll have to ask her.”
Vlade approached the barge. It was tall and long, accompanied by a tug that looked small in comparison, though the tug dwarfed Vlade’s boat as they drew alongside. There was a dock tied to the barge that Vlade could draw up to, and a crew of dockmen to grab their painter and tie them fast to dock cleats.
Vlade had called ahead, feeling more nervous than he had felt for many years, and sure enough, there was Idelba now, standing at the back of the group. She was a tall dark woman, Moroccan by birth, still rangy, still beautiful in a harsh frightening way. Vlade’s ex-wife, and the one person from his past he still thought about, the only one still alive anyway. The wildest, the smartest—the one he had loved and lost. His partner in disaster and death, his comrade in a nightmare for two. Nostalgia, the pain of the lost home. And the pain of what had happened.