“You were obstructing boats taking a right from Madison onto Twenty-sixth,” I said. “I know because I almost nailed you. And you were back under that so-called diving bell, which is going to kill you if you don’t get rid of it. And who knew you were down there? And there is nothing left of Herman Melville’s house, I can tell you that for sure. That was three centuries ago and it’s a high-rise district now, so no way there’s anything left of the 1840s or whatever.”
“1863 to 1891,” Stefan said. “And we were going for the foundations. We were going to cut through the street just off the curb, and angle down to where the house was. The radar shows all kinds of house beams right under the street.”
“House beams?”
The boys put on their mulish look.
“Schliemann at Troy,” Charlotte suggested. “What’s-his-name at Knossos.”
“Archaeology?” I exclaimed. “Nostalgia?”
“Why not?” Roberto said.
“There was a lost manuscript,” Stefan added. “Isle of the Cross. A lost Melville novel.”
“Under the street?”
“They found Billy Budd in a shoe box. You never know.”
“Sometimes you know. There is not a lost Melville novel under the Twenty-sixth Street canal!”
Sullen silence in Vlade’s office. Vlade continued to work on his accounts. Feral madness fumed off Roberto like a whiff of skunk.
Charlotte heaved a big sigh.
“You guys are going to get killed,” I insisted. Then, to Charlotte and Vlade: “What the fuck, are these guys wards of the building or not?”
They both shook their heads.
“Wards of the city?”
At this Charlotte pursed her lips. “They don’t appear to have ever been processed by the city.”
“Meaning what?”
“There’s no record for them. They have no papers.”
“We are free citizens of the intertidal,” Stefan asserted.
“Where are your parents again?”
“Orphans,” Stefan explained.
“Where are your guardians?”
“No guardians.”
“What about foster parents?”
“No.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“I grew up with my parents in Russia,” Stefan said. “They died after we moved here, of the cholera. After that I moved out. The people I was with didn’t care.”
“What about you?” I said to Roberto.
He glared at Vlade’s screens.
Stefan said, “Roberto never had any parents or guardians. He brought himself up.”
“What do you mean? How does that work?”
Roberto stood up from his chair and said, “I take care of myself.”
“You mean you don’t remember your parents?”
“No, I mean I never had any. I can remember back to before I could walk. I always took care of myself. At first I crawled around. I guess I was around nine months old by then. I lived under the aquaculture dock at the Skyline Marina, and ate what fell through the dock to the underdock, where the clammers keep their stuff. There were old nets and stuff I could sleep in down there. Then after I learned to walk, I took stuff off the dock at night. People leave things there all the time.”
“Is that possible?” I said.
He shrugged. “Here I am.”
We all stared at him.
I looked over at Charlotte. She shrugged with her eyebrows. “We need to get you guys papers,” she said.
“Can you adopt them?” I asked her, but also including Vlade.
She gave me a look as if I were suggesting she tame water moccasins.
“For why?” Vlade said.
“To get some kind of leverage over them!”
Snorts from all four of them.
“All right,” I said. “Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when Roberto here goes out there and drowns. In your last moment I want you thinking, Damn, I should have listened to that Franklin guy.”
“Not gonna happen,” Roberto affirmed.
“What will you be thinking?” Stefan asked.
“Not gonna happen,” Roberto grimly insisted.
“Lose the so-called diving bell,” I suggested, giving up on them. I went to the door. “Find a new hobby.”
“In lower Manhattan?” Roberto said. “What would that be exactly?”
“Build drones. Sail. Grow oysters. Climb skyscrapers. Look for marine mammals in the harbor, I just saw some beavers today. Whatever! Anything that keeps you on the surface. And we should probably lock some home detention ankle bracelets on you guys so we can tell where you’ve gone. Or find your bodies.”
“No way,” the boys said in chorus.
“Way,” Charlotte said, transfixing them with her look. It was like sticking pins in butterflies. Even Roberto quailed. “You live here now,” Charlotte reminded them. “In residence begins responsibilities.”
“We can still go out and do stuff,” Stefan explained to Roberto. “We’ll still have our boat.”
Roberto looked at the floor. “Yes to losing the diving bell,” he said. “No to no fucking ankle bracelets. I’ll light out for the territory if you try that shit.”
“Deal,” Charlotte said.
“Let’s go get that bell,” Vlade suggested heavily to the boys. “I don’t like you fooling with that thing. I had colleagues drown at work, and they were good at diving. And you’re not good at it. And—I knew people like you who drowned too. It’s bad when it happens, for the people left behind.”
Something in his voice caught the boys’ attention. Charlotte reached out and put a hand to his arm. He shook his head, a black expression taking him far away. After a while the boys followed Vlade out into the boathouse looking chastened, maybe even thoughtful.
I went upstairs with Charlotte. She looked tired and walked with a slight limp. On the common floor she glanced at me. “Dinner?”
“I already bought a sandwich,” I said, “but I’ll eat it with you.”
“That’s fine. Tell me how things are going.”
She filled a plate in the dining room line, and we sat down in the din and the crowds jamming the long parallel tables filling the room. Hundreds of voices, hundreds of lives; it was exactly like being alone together, but louder. While we ate I told her about the view from the top of the Cloister cluster, and how Hector Ramirez had agreed to join the funding for my plan for redeveloping part of the intertidal. Then I described the plan in brief.
“Very nice,” she said. “You’ll need city approvals, but given the state of those neighborhoods, you should be able to get them.”
“Maybe you can help us figure out who to talk to.”
“Sure. I can put you in touch with some old friends.”
“They work in your building?”
“Yes, either there or at the mayor’s office.”
“You worked at the mayor’s office?”
“Once upon a time.”
I must have been giving her a look, because suddenly she waved a hand. “Yes, I began in Tammany Hall.”
“I heard you interned for Machiavelli,” I said.
She laughed. She did have some white hairs salting the black. “That’s what you’ll need now. Do you think these raft apartments could be put in one at a time, as infill, rather than knocking down a whole neighborhood?”
“Yeah sure. They’re modular. It would be more expensive.”
“Even so. Ever since Robert Moses, knocking down whole neighborhoods has been frowned upon.”
“This could be piecemeal. But everything scales in this kind of project. Maybe we could tell them about Peter Cooper Village.”
“Good idea. Or Roosevelt Island.”
“Whatever seems nicest.”
“Of course. But precedents. That this kind of thing has been done before.” She poked around in the remains of her salad. “So how does this match up with what we were talking about before, of popping the intertidal housing bubble?”