Manhattan Nocturne

by Colin Harrison

  The contraption hung by a stick off the headboard of the hospital bed: a vertical sequence of six little Frosted Flakes boxes held together by string. Hanging beneath them was another box, heavily altered, scissored such that the box had an arched roof.

  “Now watch. No! Would you like to do it, Mr. Crowley?”

  He said “Oooh,” and we wheeled him over to the bed. He extended his spidery old fingers and delicately pinched one of the various strings. His eyes were now bright with determination; in the ashes of his mind a coal still burned. His fingers pulled downward on the string and the small, arched box at the bottom slowly rose upward, inside of the boxes. He stopped the arched box as it went inside the top cereal box.

  “See?” James said, leaning forward. “It has little doors!” And, indeed, he pressed his fingers through a Lillipudan set of doors that swung on tape hinges. Opened, the door revealed another door in the interior box, one that corresponded perfectly, and which also opened.

  “Isn’t that the most spectacular thing you ever saw?” James said. He glanced at his watch. “Ah! I’m due in Mrs. Chu’s room. Appointments, appointments. Goodbye, sweetie!” He patted Mr. Crowley’s hand, and then disappeared.

  We were left in the room with the contraption hanging in front of us.

  “Mr. Crowley?” I asked. “Do you know that your son, Simon, is dead?”

  He contemplated me in the way a horse contemplates a man who knows nothing about horses, then closed his eyes. For a moment I feared that he might collapse in his chair, but he opened his eyes again, looking sideways, and a sound escaped his chest, an exhalation that may have carried an involuntary whimper of grief. We sat there. I moved closer to the toy elevator and inspected it. Mr. Crowley had attempted to make various markings on the inside and outside of each box, such as might correspond to buttons, panels, windows, and whatever other details of elevators I didn’t understand. There was a certain obsessiveness to it. When I looked up, Mr. Crowley was asleep, his head slumped back in the wheelchair and his mouth agape. I watched. His throat rattled as he breathed. After a minute his eyes opened just a little, and I could not tell if he saw me or was gone. I leaned forward and lifted my palm to the old man’s brow, silently urging him, as I have urged my children, to close his eyes and release his fears. The comfort of another’s warm hand. Mr. Crowley eased into the chair then, and his breathing deepened. After a few minutes I stood quietly and left.

  The next stop would be Mrs. Norma Segal’s residence, which was only about ten blocks away. The fact that Mrs. Segal was Mr. Crowley’s caretaker and also, with her husband, the former owner of the building in which Simon’s body had been found meant something, if only that the universe still coughed up coincidences now and then. I was eager to speak with her, and thus I do not know why I again checked Mr. Crowley’s visitor log on my way out, except that it had been a strangely compelling record when I’d looked at it on the way in, and now, having met Mr. Crowley, I viewed it as a document of great poignance. A man is born and grows up, learns to field a grounder, brushes his hair in the mirror, is married, has a son, works and eats and buys a bicycle for his son and screws his wife and goes to Yankee games and fixes his car and votes for Nixon and picks up a loaf of bread at the corner grocery and writes out his bills each month and brushes his teeth carefully, and then bang he is living in a nursing home and there is a three-ringed binder that proves that except for the bill collectors and a Mrs. Norma Segal, he is alone. The world has forgotten that he is alive. Even the well-meant affections of James the barber were generic. It also fascinated me, as I flipped the pages backward in time, and saw only Mrs. Segal’s signature, that Caroline had not visited Mr. Crowley after Simon’s death. Assuming that she loved Simon, her inability to visit his father even once seemed an act of remarkable callousness. She knew that he was here; she knew that the old should not be left to rot in warehouses. I kept flipping pages, and then I was back more than a year and a half, to the time before Simon died. Mrs. Segal had visited then, too. Her signature was occasionally interrupted by Simon’s, his being more of a dashing scrawl, as if he was hurried or irritated by formality. It appeared more frequently as time went backward, and I could see that his visits occurred in clusters, three visits in five days, or two in six, and then a long run in between. Mrs. Segal’s signature continued twice a week. As I went back further, Simon’s signature appeared every other day, and I assumed that this frequency had only been possible before his career accelerated. Back a few months further, and the visits were daily. Simon had been an extraordinarily devoted son. I flipped forward in the book and found his last visit and, surprisingly, this, too: a small parenthetical remark next to Simon’s name, in his own hand—(and Billy). The date was August 6, seventeen months prior. This, I remembered, was the last time Caroline had seen Simon alive. Billy Munson had been with Simon on that day. Who would have known?

  The voice was feminine, professional, efficient, and in no way interested in my problem. So was the next one. And the next. Billy Munson had left three banks in two years, and then the business altogether. Finally I located him in a small but potent venture capital firm, and his secretary allowed as to how he might be available that evening after a 5:30 P.M. business meeting at the Harvard Club. I needed to talk with both Munson and Mrs. Segal, but Mrs. Segal was an old woman with an old husband, hardly a moving target, and what sense I had told me that Munson was the more dynamic figure of the two. If he was around, I wanted to see him as soon as possible.

  Inside the club, I nodded at the desk man gravely. “Mr. Munson’s group?” I asked.

  “Third floor, sir.”

  I was greeted by a woman who looked like one of the second-string models in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. “How nice to see you,” she said, holding the smile too long—to show she didn’t mean it. “You can hang up your coat over there.” I followed a paneled hallway into a small room. A little man came forward as if propelled on wheels and grasped my hand. Golf clubs floated across his necktie. “We’re glad you could make it!” he said, conspiratorially. “With the weather like this tonight—” He shook his head as if contemplating a great sorrow, and then indicated that I should step forward to the bar. I waited for a gin and tonic. The bar adjoined a conference room; drink in hand, I wandered in. The women were all about fifty and wanted it extremely clear that they spent a lot of time in the gym. Their makeup and hair appeared to be variations on the themes of waxed fruit and injection-molded plastic. One of them looked about six months pregnant, and as I drifted past her, I heard her describing her Svengali, the fertility specialist. The men were older and moved about with a certain goatish pleasure; that they were here, in this room, for whatever purpose, seemed a matter of private congratulation. I looked about for Billy Munson. He would be easy enough to recognize, I figured, from the Simon Crowley videos: flamboyant, heavy brushlike hair.

  A large, tanned man came up to me. “Jim Krudop,” he announced. “Glad you could make it.” He had a grip like a plumber’s, and unlike the other men, he unapologetically sported a pillowed gut that pushed at the buttons of his shirt. I was about to ease out of the door when everyone began to sit down, with an air of expectation, children at the circus. The short man who had greeted me by the elevator sailed into the room. “We’re going to try and keep this brisk,” he announced. “All of you know me, so I’ll just introduce Bill Munson, who’s working out the legal aspects of the partnership and is overseeing the financing and budgeting. Bill has worked with Jim Krudop for quite some time and feels—can I put words in your mouth, Bill?” The little man smiled as if being electrocuted. “Bill feels great confidence about this project. He’ll introduce Jim, and then we’ll hand it over to Jim and his slide show.”

  Another man stood—in his late thirties, slender, going reassuringly gray, his face solid and deliberate, his hairline looking wiser as it disappeared. This was Billy Munson, soldier of capital. “I’ll just say a few words,” he began. “As you know, we’re trying to ra
ise ten million. Each investment unit is set at one hundred thousand. That is to say, the minimum investment is one hundred thousand. We’ve raised four million so far. We’ll be in Hong Kong tomorrow, then Tokyo, then Rio after that, and I expect by this time two weeks from today we’ll be oversubscribed. I’m trying to keep the costs down by having the legal work done in exchange for several units of partnership—Beppy Martin’s husband’s firm will be handling this, as a matter of fact.” He waved at the pregnant fifty-year-old. “Hi, Beppy, glad to see you here. The corporation will be either Swiss or Bermudan, for tax purposes. Now then, the ten million being raised will constitute seventy percent of the company, which monies will be returned, before the other thirty percent ownership receives anything, with interest at a reasonable percent, which would be accrued. The balance of the ownership includes Jim’s share, which is thirteen percent, and he would quickly tell you that out of that share he has to pay his divers and technicians, as well as certain government officials in the Azores. Ten percent is a good-faith payment to Bluegreen Exploration Limited, Jim’s previous limited partnership, which funded a great deal of his exploration of the Azores over the years as well as the recent technical survey of Graciosa Island, where the wrecks that Jim is interested in are located. Four percent of the ten million goes to the people who develop the financing, and the remaining three percent goes to Gripp Investments, for administrative support, ongoing assistance, supervision, and so on. The ten-million budget covers activity forward for four years. Some of that outlay Jim will describe further, but I can tell you that it includes a Phantom ROV with sonar, video, and still cameras for objects up to two thousand feet deep. There’s also a side-scan sonar unit, a magnetometer, a recompression chamber, four Zodiac boats, things like that—money well spent, I assure you. We also are paying an annual licensing fee to the Portuguese government of one hundred and fifty-five thousand for the six-month working period, as well as about one hundred and fifty thousand a year to GeoSub, the deep-water search group we’ll be subcontracting. I could go on with the financing, but I’ll let Jim tell the fun part.”

  Munson sat down in front; I couldn’t reach him. I’d have to wait.

  Krudop stood up. “Thanks to everyone who came here this evening,” he said. “As most of you know, I’ve been diving for wrecks for almost my whole life, ever since I got out of the marines. Now, I’ll just—can you get the lights?—thank you. I got interested in the Azores a long time ago, but the Portuguese government has had the place locked up for thirty years. There … ha-ha, I was a lot skinnier in this photo; that’s me working my first wreck, 1957. Now, the Azores were an important way station in transatlantic shipping from the late fifteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century. That’s a typical galleon, one hundred feet long. They would stop on their way back from the New World, going back to Spain, or from Brazil to Portugal. Also, the Portuguese East Indian ships coming around the Cape would land there. That’s the map of Graciosa Island. They dropped into the harbor for water, supplies, food. Often they picked up an armada escort if they were bearing gold or silver, as a lot of them were. That’s a shot of some gold ingots we found off Florida in 1962, just the kind that many of these ships had. Without the smelter’s marks, they’re worthless, and sell at the market’s spot price of gold. With the marks, and you can see that this one has several, and the date is 1547, they sell at about forty times spot. Not bad. The big silver ones like these, which we found in 1977 off St. Croix, we call doorstops. From 1500 to about 1825, the nine islands of the Azores were visited by maybe six hundred, eight hundred ships a year. We know that from the records in South America, in Lisbon, all the places where the governments have the old documents. This is one. I’ve spent thirty years learning to read these—usually they’re a mix of Portuguese, Castilian Spanish, Latin, sometimes even Dutch. They have the manifests of the ships. This one is for a Dutch trader, around 1550. It lists about thirty-six thousand gold coins. It was a deep-water wreck, and we found those gold coins inside a forty-square-meter area in 1969. Unfortunately, most of them were confiscated by the Panamanian government. Each of those would be worth about twenty-five thousand now. Anyway, in the Azores, you had all these ships going through. There are thousands of wrecks in the broader vicinity. That sounds like a lot, I know. But, for instance, in 1591, one hundred and twenty Spanish ships returning from South America were hit by a hurricane. Eighty-eight of them sunk. Here’s a cannon. We get a lot of these long-barreled ones in terrific condition, if they were cast in bronze. The fishermen sometimes bring them up. They’re about twenty thousand apiece these—”

  Sunken treasure. I sat in a room full of very rich people who wanted to find sunken treasure. I was looking for a videotape of a fat man, they were seeking sunken cannons. Everybody wants something. I glanced at Billy Munson, wondering how I could get him to talk to me.

  But now the show was getting good, better than anything on the shopping channels. “—in anaerobic zones,” Krudop was saying, “which means they are oxygen free, and that prevents the worms from chewing up the wood, which is good because the wood holds the treasure together better. The stuff is—that’s one of our divers operating the old sand vacuum we used to use. It would take three days to dig out the sand, say, in a room this size, but now we have this—it’s just like a big elbow, and we place it over the ship’s propeller and we blow the sand away. We can blow away the sand filling this room in maybe ten seconds and get down to what we call hardbase, where the ship will actually be. That’s a shot of some of the pearls we pulled up in Jamaica. We got seventeen thousand of them; four boats went down. Now, a lot of these boats were from the Far East, carrying porcelain. There, that’s Ming Dynasty porcelain we brought up in 1983. Every piece was broken. Every single piece. We brought up over two million shards, not one saucer. It was a shallow-water wreck; the stuff got knocked around, smashed up. Often the wrecks on reefs are not worth the effort, the stuff is too spread out. There, that’s a gold chain; we get a lot of those. The ship’s manifest always lists the contents, but often the ships have much more than that in contraband. The legality was that a sailor was not taxed on anything he had on his body if he was carried off a boat by two slaves. Very tricky wording. So the sailors would have gold chains made up that they wrapped their body in. Very fine links. Longest one we found was one hundred and twenty feet. Here’s a Portuguese astrolabe. We’ve found seventeen of the known sixty-nine ancient astrolabes in the world. Sotheby’s sold the last one for eight hundred and eighty-two thousand. Very rare. But we expect to find several. We’re estimating that if we make some hits we could average fifty million a boat. Of course, it takes years to get the money out, I want to stress that. This one shows a silver coin before cleaning, almost black, and after, with all the markings showing. We pulled up about eight thousand of those in Florida in 1969. There, that’s an entire rickshaw carriage made of jade that we brought up in 1978. It took a curator five years to—”

  I stopped listening and watched the flickering succession of doubloons, pieces of eight, pearls, ingots, ivory, bottles, vases, knife handles, bronze gun handles, snuff-boxes, cannon, gold spice chests, porcelain shaving bowls, silver horse stirrups, chests, silver combs, gems, crucifixes, and so on, a fabulous enumeration of ancient wealth. A woman came by with a platter every few minutes, and soon I had eaten about a hundred dollars’ worth of caviar. Eventually the lights came back on and Billy Munson took some questions. A wizened man who looked about eighty asked some sharp ones. He, of course, needed his investment back sooner rather than later. Then the gathering started breaking up. Munson didn’t look like he scared very easily. I eased over to him and, when I had the chance, whispered, “I was wondering if we might have a moment to have a slightly more private conversation.”

  Munson flicked his gaze past me to the little smiling man, who flashed yes with his eyebrows.

  “We’ll step into another room.”

  There I identified myself and explained that I had some
unsubstantiated rumors about his activities with Simon. I did not believe them, I said, because they were too outlandish, but I was wondering if we could discuss this shortly.

  Munson’s voice was calm: “What part of your story is full of shit?”

  “The part about not believing the rumors.”

  He had to get on a plane to Hong Kong, he said, but I was welcome to ride with him to JFK. “Hey, I knew Simon better than anybody. We spent a lot of time together. Lots of time.”

  “Must’ve been bad when he died.”

  “Bad. Very bad.”

  We walked outside and caught a cab. Munson rolled down his window, took out a joint, and began to smoke it. He relaxed visibly, which was good because I was about to attack.

  “Caroline says you two were close.”

  “We did some stuff.”

  “I heard something about you guys making some tapes together.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, the word got around about that.”

  “Wild times and so on.”

  “Pretty wild.”

  “You ever show them to people?”