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.
“Did the oxygen keep flowing to you the whole time?” Vlade asked Roberto.
Roberto shook his head, then with difficulty said, “The bell edge squished it. I lifted the bell. Tried to.”
“Good man. I think you’re going to be all right here.” No sense in bawling the kid out now; fear was probably chilling his extremities along with everything else. “Let’s get some of this hot water Mr. Garr has here onto your chest.”
Garr stepped over the gunwales into the zodiac’s cockpit with minimal spillage from the bowl in his hands, and Vlade took the bowl and scooped water out with his hand, scalding his fingers more with the contrast of temperatures than the water’s actual heat, and dripped some of it onto Roberto’s chest. Heat would diffuse through the wetsuit, a good thing. Vlade was past the moment of his flashback now, back in the present moment with this kid, who was going to be all right.
“Slowly,” Vlade said, and had Stefan continue to dry Roberto’s hair with the towel. Quickly the water cooled to a point where he could put the boy’s hands in the bowl. Roberto kept shivering, with occasional spasms of extra shuddering, but shivering was good; there was a point where you got too cold to shiver, very hard to come back from. But the kid wasn’t there; he was shivering like mad. Stefan finished drying his head off. They got him out of the wetsuit, then toweled down, then dressed: pants, shirt, and baggy coat on, and another dry towel wrapped around his head like a turban.
“Okay,” Vlade said after a while. To Garr he said, “How about you tow us back home.”
Franklin nodded once. “I can’t believe I’m towing you guys home again,” he said to Stefan and Roberto.
“Thanks,” the boys said weakly.
“What should we do with their diving bell?” Franklin asked Vlade.
“Cut it loose. We can get it later.”
As Garr was in his cockpit piloting them, Vlade sat back and got himself between Roberto and the wind.
“All right,” he said. “What the fuck was that about?”
Roberto gulped. “We were just out looking for some treasure.”
Vlade shook his head. “Come on. No bullshit.”
“It’s true!” both boys exclaimed.
They looked at each other for a second.
“It’s the Hussar,” Roberto said. “It’s the HMS Hussar.”
“Ah come on,” Vlade said. “That old chestnut?”
The boys were amazed. “You know about it?”
“Everyone knows about it. British treasure ship, hit a rock and went down in Hell Gate. Every water rat in the history of New York has gone diving for it. Now it’s you guys’s turn.”
“But we found it! We really did!”
“Right.”
Stefan said, “We did because Mr. Hexter knows. He studied the maps and the records.”
“I’m sure. And what did you boys find down there?”
“We borrowed a metal detector that can specify for gold thirty feet down, and we took it to where Mr. Hexter said the ship had to be, and we got a big signal.”
“A really big signal!”
“I’m sure. And then you started digging underwater?”
“That’s right.”
“Under your diving bell?”
“That’s right.”
“But how is that supposed to work? That’s landfill there, right? Part of the Bronx.”
“Yeah that’s right. That’s where it was.”
“So the Hussar sank in the river and then the south Bronx got extended over it, is that what you’re saying?”
“Exactly.”
“So how were you going to dig through that landfill under a tiny diving bell? Where were you going to put the dirt you dug up?”
“That’s what I said,” Stefan said after a silence.
“I had a plan,” Roberto muttered miserably.
“I’m sure,” Vlade said. He tousled Roberto’s turban. “Tell you what, I’ll keep this news to myself, and we’ll have a little conference with your old man of the maps when we get back and you get properly dried and warmed and fed. Sound good?”
“Thanks, Vlade.”
Private money and public (or state) money work together and to the same end. Their actions have been absolutely complementary during the crisis, aimed at safeguarding the markets for which they are ready to sacrifice society, social cohesion, and democracy.
claimed Maurizio Lazzarato
The author of this book is to be commended for her zeal in tracking down much behind-the-scenes material never before published … Not that the Pushcart War was a small war. However, it was confined to the streets of one city, and it lasted only four months. During those four months, of course, the fate of one of the great cities of the world hung in the balance.
Jean Merrill, The Pushcart War
Fungibility, n. The tendency of everything to be completely interchangeable with money. Health, for instance.
i) that citizen