“That’s what they like about it,” Charlotte supposed sourly. “It’s pure. And they’re pure. Purifying the world is their idea of what they’re doing.”
Amelia was scowling. “It’s true. But I hate them. Because it was a good idea to move those bears down there. And it could be temporary, you know? A few centuries. So I want to kill them, whoever they are. And I want the bears down there.”
“You could always move them in secret,” Charlotte suggested. “You don’t have to tell the whole world about it.”
“I didn’t!” Amelia protested. “We didn’t broadcast live.”
“But you would have later.”
“Sure, but not with the location. Besides, do you really think anything happens in secret anymore?” she asked, as if Charlotte were na?ve.
“Lots of things happen in secret,” Charlotte said. “Just ask Mutt and Jeff here.”
“We were held hostage in a secret location,” Mutt explained to the mystified Amelia. “Three months.”
“I almost died,” Jeff said.
“I’m sorry,” Amelia said. She drained her cup in a single swallow, like Roberto. “But now you’re back.”
“And so are you,” Vlade reminded her. “And the boys helped Mr. Hexter here out of his lodging when it was melting, over in Chelsea. So some assisted migrations have worked, you might say. And here we are. We’re all here.”
“Not my polar bears,” Amelia objected.
“Well, true. That was a disaster, for sure. A crime.”
“It was about five percent of all the polar bears left alive in the wild. And Antarctica is their big chance for survival.”
“Just do it again,” Charlotte suggested again. “Do it in secret.”
Protecting endangered species in secret was a paradigm buster that left Amelia obviously conflicted, or even confused. But at least she was no longer on the verge of weeping. In fact she was refilling her cup.
“It’s a good idea,” Vlade said in transition, “but for now, the boys and Mr. Hexter and I have some news too.”
Charlotte nodded, relieved at the change of subject. She knew Vlade was very fond of their resident cloud star, but to Charlotte she seemed just as spacey and superficial as she did on her program, not that Charlotte had ever watched more than ten minutes of it. Naked starlets wrestling wolf pups: no. “So what’s up?” she said. “We need something better to celebrate than kidnapping, murdered bears, and almost selling our home to some fucking gentrifiers.”
“Did that happen?” Amelia cried.
“It did,” Charlotte said grimly.
“But, on the other hand,” Vlade weighed in heavily, “we didn’t take the offer. And the boys here used Mr. Hexter’s awesome historical research to locate the wreck of the HMS Hussar.”
“Which means what?” Charlotte asked.
The boys were delighted at her ignorance and quickly told her the story. British treasure ship, sunk in Hell Gate, searched for ever since, but only Mr. Hexter had pinned the spot where it went down, under a drowned parking lot in the Bronx. And the boys had dived it using their own diving bell (“Wait, what?” Charlotte said), and there it was, right where predicted, but down under twenty feet of mud and landfill, an unwieldy goo, impossible for the boys to dig up on their own, so Vlade had enlisted the help of his friends Idelba and Thabo, who ran a huge, huge, gigantic sand dredge out at Coney Island, they were moving Coney Island’s beach up to the new shoreline twenty blocks north, and for them digging up the Hussar’s treasure chest (actual treasure chests, small but insanely heavy) was nothing, it was toothpick work, and now Idelba and Thabo were part of their consortium, joining the people right here around this table.
“Gold?” Charlotte and Amelia said together.
Mr. Hexter and the boys explained the story of the British army’s adherence to the gold standard, mark of an earlier age’s concept of money. Four million dollars in gold. In 1780 dollars. Meaning that now, using the median of about twenty inflation calculators Mr. Hexter had found, they were sitting on about four billion dollars.
“Aren’t there laws about salvaging sunken treasure?” Charlotte asked.
There were. But the flood had created so many legal snarls around the intertidal that the laws were no longer so clear as they had been.
“You ignored the laws,” Charlotte said.
“We didn’t tell anyone,” Vlade clarified. “So far. And Idelba has a salvage license. But that gold was lost. It was never going to be found. So, you know. If we melted the coins down, it would just be gold bars.”
“But wait. These gold coins, aren’t they more valuable historically than just plain gold would be? And the ship too. Aren’t they archaeological artifacts, part of the city’s history and all?”
“The ship was smooshed,” Roberto said. “It was all gooed up in the gunk, all rotted and everything.”
“But the chests, and the coins?”
“They found a cannon of the Hussar a long time ago,” Vlade said. “It was even still loaded, they had to cut the cannonball out of the rust and get the gunpowder out of it so it wouldn’t blow up. It’s somewhere in Central Park.”
“So since we’ve got that we don’t need the gold coins, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
Charlotte shook her head. “I can’t believe you guys.”
“Well,” Vlade said, “look at it this way. How much was that bid on the building here? Four billion, right? Four point one billion dollars, didn’t you say?”
“Hmm,” Charlotte said.
“We could outbid them.”
“But it’s already our building.”
“You know what I mean. We could afford to fend them off.”
“True.” Charlotte thought it over. “I don’t know. It still strikes me as a problem. I’d be very interested to hear what Inspector Gen would say about it. About what we should do with it to normalize it, so to speak. To monetize it.”
The others said nothing to this. Obviously consulting a police inspector about the matter did not appeal to them. On the other hand, Inspector Gen was a resident and a known presence. Solid; polite; reassuring; a straight shooter. A bit scary, in fact, and now in more ways than one.
“Come on,” Charlotte said. “She would keep it to herself.”
“Would she?” Vlade asked.
“I think so.”
Vlade shrugged, looked around at the others. The boys were round-eyed with consternation, Mr. Hexter cross-eyed, Mutt and Jeff not yet returned to this planet, Amelia busy leaving it by way of the wine. Charlotte pinged Gen, found she was down in her room. “Gen, could you come up to the farm and give us an opinion on a city issue?”
A few minutes later, Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir was standing there before them, tall and massive in the dark, hard to see well. They invited her to sit down, and then hesitantly, as if it were some kind of hypothetical case, Vlade and Mr. Hexter explained about the recovery of the Hussar’s gold. Gen watched them politely as they spoke.
“So,” Charlotte said at the end of their recitation, “what do you think we should do about it?”
Gen continued to look at them, blinking as she regarded them each in turn. “You’re asking me?”
“Yes. Obviously. As I just said.”