“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.
When they got down to the canal-level doorway, now a parallelogram very ugly to see, they emerged onto the stoopdock to find that the canal outside was filled with brick and concrete rubble, wood beams, broken glass, crushed furniture, whatever. Apparently one of the twenty-story towers on the next block had collapsed, and the shock wave of air, or the wave of canal water, or the direct impact of building parts, or some combination of all these, had knocked over a lot of smaller buildings. Up and down the canal, buildings were tilted or tumbled. People were still emerging from them, gathering dazedly on stoops or piles of rubble. Some pulled at these piles; most just stood there looking around, stunned and blinking. The turbid canal water bubbled, and was disturbed by any number of small wakes: rats were swimming away. Mr. Hexter adjusted his glasses when he saw this, and said, “Fuck if it isn’t rats leaving a sinking ship! I never thought I’d see that.”
“Really?” Roberto said. “We see it all the time.”
Stefan rolled his eyes and suggested they get going somewhere.
Then Hexter’s own building groaned immensely behind them, and Stefan and Roberto picked up the old man by the elbows and moved him as fast as they could over the wreckage in the canal. They lifted him over impediments, huffing at his unexpected weight, and helped him through the watery sections, sometimes going thigh deep but always finding a way. Behind them the building was shrieking and groaning, and that gave them strength. When they got to the canal’s intersection with Eighth and looked back, they saw that Mr. Hexter’s building was still standing, if that was the word for it; it was tilted more heavily than when they had escaped from it, and had stopped tilting only because it was propped by the building next to it, crushing the neighbor but not completely collapsing it.
Hexter stood staring at it for a while. “Now it’s like I’m looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said. “Never expected to do that either.”
The boys stood holding the old man by the arms.
“You okay?” Stefan asked him again.
“I suppose getting wet like this can’t be good for us.”
“We got a bottle of bleach in our boat, we’ll spray you down. Let’s catch the vapo down to Twenty-third. We gotta get out of here.”
Stefan said to Roberto, “We’re taking him to the Met?”
“What else can we do?”
They explained the plan to Mr. Hexter. He looked confused and unhappy.
“Come on,” Roberto said, “we’ll be fine.”
“My maps!” Hexter cried. “Did you get my maps?”
“No,” Roberto said. “But we have that GPS position in our pad.”
“But my maps!”