“I like the way the water has waves in it,” Stefan said.
“Me too,” said the old man. “And look, it shows where the shore was when the Hussar sank. It was different then. These islands north of Hell Gate were infilled to make Ward Island, and now it’s entirely underwater. But back then there was a Little Hell Gate, and a Bronks Creek. And this little island, called Sunken Meadow, was a tidal island. They marked all the marshes really well on this map, I think because they couldn’t build on them or even fill them in, not easily anyway. So, look. The Hussar hits Pot Rock, over here on the Brooklyn side, and the captain tries to get to Stony Point, near the south end of the Bronx, where there was a pier. But all the contemporary accounts say the ship didn’t make it, and sank with its masts still sticking up out of the water. Some accounts have people even wading to shore. That wouldn’t be true right off Stony Point, because the tides run hard between there and the Brothers Islands, and the channel is deep. Also, there just wasn’t time to get that far. The accounts have it going down in less than an hour. The flood tide current runs at about seven miles an hour here, so even if it was the fastest tide possible, they couldn’t have gotten as far as North Brothers Island, which is where Simon Lake was diving back in the 1930s. So I think the ship sank between these little rocks here, between Sunken Meadow island and Stony Point, where it was all landfilled later. So the whole time since it sank, people have been looking in the wrong place, except right at the start, when the ship’s masts were sticking out of the water. The Brits got cables under it in the 1820s, which is why everyone is pretty sure the gold was on board, or else they wouldn’t have bothered with it. The fact that they were allowed to dive the site so soon after the War of 1812 boggles my mind. But anyway, I found their account of the attempt in London’s naval archives, back when I was young, and they confirmed what I was thinking from the timing calculations. It sank right here.”
And he put his forefinger on the 1821 map, on an X he had penciled there.
“So how come the Brits didn’t recover the gold?” Vlade asked.
“The ship broke apart as they were pulling it up, and then they didn’t have the diving skills to get something as small as two wooden chests. That river is dark, and the currents are fast.”
Vlade nodded. “I spent ten years in it,” he said. He waggled his eyebrows at the boys, who were looking at him amazed. “Ten years as a city diver, boys,” he said. “That’s why I knew what you were up to.” He looked at Hexter: “So you told the boys about this.”
“I did, but I didn’t think they should do the diving! In fact I told them not to!”
The boys were suddenly very interested in the 1821 map.
“Boys?” Vlade said.
“Well,” Roberto said, “it was just a case of one thing leading to another, really. We had this great metal detector from a guy who died. So we thought we’d just go up there and look around with that, you know.”
Stefan said, “We took it to the bottom where Mr. Hexter had said the Hussar was, and got a ping.”
“It was great!” Roberto said.
“Where’d you get the diving bell?” Vlade asked.
“We made it,” Roberto said.
“It’s the top of a barge’s grain hopper,” Stefan explained. “We looked at the diving bells at the dive shop at the Skyline Marina, and they looked just like the plastic tops of the grain hoppers. We glued some barrel hoops around the bottom edge of it to weight it down more, although it was already heavy, and glued an eye to the top, and there it was.”
Vlade and Hexter gave each other a look. “You got to watch out for these guys,” Vlade said.
“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.”