“Beautiful,” Vlade commented. It had been much folded, but it did capture something of the gnarly density, the complexity, the sense of human depth crusting the bay. The man-hours that had gone into building it.
“Then here’s the Bollmann map, isn’t this a beauty? All the buildings!”
“Wow,” Vlade said. It was a bird’s-eye view of midtown, with each building drawn individually. “Oh no, he cuts it off right at Madison Square! See, there’s the edge of the Flatiron, but our building is cut off.”
“Not the very top of it, see? Right next to the letter G in the index grid, I think that’s the top of it. You can see the shape.”
Vlade laughed. “The map didn’t go any farther?”
“I guess it was just a midtown map, anyway this is all I’ve got.”
“What’s this colored one?”
“Colored indeed. It’s the Lusk Committee map, the so-called Red Scare map. Ethnic groups, see? Where they lived. Which was where all the horrible revolutionaries were supposed to come from.”
“What year was this?”
“1919.”
Vlade looked for their neighborhood. “I see we had, what is this color—Syrians, Turks, Armenians, and Greeks. I didn’t know that.”
“Some neighborhoods are still the same, but most have changed.”
“That’s for sure. I wonder if you could do anything like this now.”
“I guess you could, using the census maybe. But I think it would mostly be a hodgepodge.”
“I’m not sure,” Vlade said. “I’d like to see. Meanwhile, these are great.”
“Thanks. I’m so happy to have them back.”
Vlade nodded. “Good. So look, that brings me to the little incident with the boys up in the Bronx. Why don’t you tell me about that too. Do you have a map that shows where the HMS Hussar went down?”
Hexter glanced quickly at the boys.
“We had to tell him,” Roberto said. “He pulled me out.”
The old man sighed. “There’s not one map,” he told Vlade. “There are maps of the time that helped me. The British Headquarters map is an incredible thing. The British held Manhattan through the Revolutionary War, and their ordnance people were the best cartographers on Earth at that time. They made the map for military purposes, but also just to pass the time, it looks like. It goes right down to individual boulders. The original is in London, but I copied it from a photo when I was a kid.”
“Show him that one, Mr. H!”
“Okay, let’s.”
The boys got out a large folder, like an artist’s folder, and pulled out a big square mass of paper, treating it like nitroglycerin. On the floor they unfolded two sheets of paper that together were about ten feet by five. And there was Manhattan Island, in some prelapsarian state of undress: a little crosshatching of village at the Battery, the rest of it a wilderness of hills and meadows, forests and swamps and creek beds, all drawn as if seen from above.
“Holy God,” Vlade said. He sat down beside it and traced it with a finger. The area Madison Square now occupied was marked as a swamp with a creek running east from it, debouching into an inlet on the East River. “It’s so beautiful.”
“It is,” Hexter said, smiling a little. “I made this copy when I was twelve.”
“I want to make a map like this for what’s here now,” Roberto declared.
“A big task,” Hexter noted. “But a good idea.”
“Okay,” Vlade said. “I love this thing. But back to the Hussar, please.”
Hexter nodded. “So, this map was finished the very year the Hussar went down. It doesn’t include the Bronx, but it does have part of Hell Gate. And luckily there’s another great map that has the whole harbor, the Final Commissioners’ Plan of 1821. I’ve got a reproduction of it too, see, look at this.” He unfolded yet another map. “Beautiful, eh?”
“Very nice,” Vlade said. “Not quite the Headquarters map, but excellent detail.”
“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.