After that Idelba still continued to dig around for a while, amazing the boys further, and even Mr. Hexter. Vlade just smiled at them, shaking his head. Idelba was nothing if not thorough, his look conveyed. In one break to clear the filter again, he said to them, “She’s going to suck up the whole south Bronx, I’m telling you. Just in case whatever. We may be here all night.”
Then they heard some slighter clunks coming from the deck, and they began to find black cup shapes, rusted knives, and a couple more pieces of ceramic, all rolling around in the muck at the bottom of the box, or sliding down the channel in the deck. The smell was sickening but none of them minded. Everyone had their rubber gloves in the mud and water, washing stuff off under the hoses like prospectors.
After about an hour of that they stopped finding anything that seemed like it was part of a ship. It was back to stones and pebbles and sand—that same glacial till, the primordial stuff of the harbor’s shores.
Finally Idelba turned off the vacuum yet again and looked at the old man. “What do you think?” she shouted. They were mostly deaf at this point.
“I think we’ve gotten what’s there to get!” Hexter exclaimed.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
On the way back down to the Twenty-sixth dock, they all stood around in the wheelhouse talking excitedly about the discovery. Mr. Hexter inspected some of the coins and declared them the right kind for the Hussar to be carrying, as only made sense. They were usually half coated with a greenish-black crud, but where they had been touching they were a dull gold color, and Hexter brushed a few clean with a wire brush and declared they were mostly guineas, with a few examples of other kinds of coins. They gleamed in the bridge’s light like something intruding from another universe, one where the gravity was heavier. When they held a coin in their fingers and rubbed it, it felt like something twice as big at least, more like four times as big; the heaviness was very palpable.
“So whose are they?” Roberto asked, looking at Vlade.
Vlade saw the nature of his look and laughed. “They’re Mr. Hexter’s, right?”
“I guess so.” Roberto did not have a poker face, and his crestfallen expression made the others laugh.
“It’s right,” Stefan pointed out. “He’s the one who figured out where it was.”
“But you’re the ones who found it,” the old man said quickly. “And these fine people here dug it up. I think that makes us a consortium.”
“There’s a legal routine for this kind of thing,” Idelba said, frowning. “We use it sometimes down at the beach. We have to report certain kinds of finds to keep our permits good.”
None of the others looked happy about this, not that Idelba did either. Stefan and Roberto were appalled. “They’ll just take it away from us!” Roberto objected.
The adults considered this. It was obviously not unlikely.
“I could ask Charlotte,” Vlade said. “I would trust her to be on our side.”
The boys and Hexter nodded at this thought. As they slowed down to approach the dock, they were all frowning thoughtfully.
Before they reached Twenty-sixth, Thabo said something to Idelba, who called Vlade over to the scanning screens.
“Look, Thabo saw this while we were digging.” She tapped around and pulled up the screen shot she wanted. “This is our infrared, on one of the cables that we sent down with the dredger tube, so it’s seeing hot spots on the bottom. And look here—on our way back from where we were digging, there was a rectangular hot spot on the bottom.”
“Subway entry?” Vlade asked. “Those are still hot.”
“Yeah, it could be Cypress Avenue, right? That’s where it maps. But it’s hotter than most subway holes, and rectangular. It’s about the size and shape of a container from the old container ships. And see, the radar shows there’s a whole parking lot full of those containers a few blocks away, behind the old loading docks. It just makes me wonder if this is one of those. But down in the subway hole? And hot as it is?”
“Radioactive contents, maybe?”
“Christ, I hope not.”
“You don’t have a radiation detector on board?”
“Shit no.”
“You should. There’s a lot of crazy stuff in this harbor, you know that.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I should.”
“It’s not a case of what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
“I know that. Although I was kind of hoping it was.”
“Not. But yeah, this is weird. I’ll have my friends in city water take a look.”
“Good. You’re still in touch with those guys?”
“Oh yeah. We have poker night once a month, I usually make that.”
“Good. I’ll be interested to hear what they find out.”
“Me too.”
Roberto was still focused on the gold, so now he interrupted them. “What are we going to do with the treasure right now?”
Idelba and Vlade regarded each other.
“Let’s get it into the Met,” Vlade suggested. “Let me off at Twenty-sixth and I’ll sky over and get my boat, and we’ll take this stuff with us into the building and I’ll put it in the big safe. Then it’ll be safe while we figure out what to do with it. That could be tricky, now you mention it.”
“It was tricky before he mentioned it,” Idelba said. She looked at Thabo, who nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I know you’ll take care of us.”
Vlade nodded. “Of course.”
“We’re a consortium,” the old man said. “The Hussar Six.”
They agreed to that with handshakes all around, and Thabo turned the tug up into the flow of the East River and brought them up to the Twenty-sixth dock. The river and the city looked like something out of a dream.
Man sits on a bench in Central Park, middle of a hot summer night, 1947. Another man sits down on another bench across the path. Hey, how are ya. Good, how about you. Hot night eh? Too hot. My apartment’s an oven. Mine too. So what do you do? I’m a painter. Oh yeah? Me too. What’s your name? Willem de Kooning. What’s yours? Mark Rothko. Hey I’ve heard of you. I’ve heard of you too.
Start of a long friendship.
b) Vlade