Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem Page 12

  “That’s right.” Henson and the mechanic stared challengingly at one another.

  “Come on, then,” said the other man.

  Reluctantly he broke eye contact and walked out with the one he presumed was Culver. He took him over to an Indian Scout with saddlebags.

  “You do know how to handle one of these babies, don’t you? That there has 750 ccs.” He glanced from the bike to Henson. “Miss Lacy said give you the best.”

  “I haven’t spent all my time on dogsleds,” Henson answered. He took a leather helmet with goggles off a shelf, and after mounting the motorcycle, got it running. “Much obliged,” he said and rode out of the messenger service. Sure enough, using the map that Tesla had drawn, he got to the airfield in the wetlands.

  Roaring up, he saw the experimental airplane outside a hanger. Three people were standing near it and turned toward him as they heard the motorcycle approach. Then there was the report of a shot, and a head exploded in red mist.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Henson purposely slid the motorcycle out from under him as the next shot punctured his front tire. He rolled on the ground like someone afire and smothering the flames. Quickly, he was up in a crouch and running to where the other two had scrambled behind the plane.

  “Run, Matt,” Bessie Coleman yelled.

  “Who you tellin’?” he shouted back.

  Another shot from the rifle sunk into the asphalt just behind where he was running full bore. He dove, and crawled to make it to the side of the plane to join Coleman and the mechanic Shorty Duggan.

  “Any idea on who the hell’s shooting?” Henson said.

  “Damned if we know,” the older man said.

  “And that poor bird?” Henson said, pointing at the dead man.

  “That’s the fella Hugo sent over to see about our security,” Coleman said.

  “Shit,” Henson said.

  “Yeah,” she agreed.

  Two more shots rang out, puncturing the aircraft.

  “Bastard,” Duggan swore. “He’s gonna tear apart our beauty, then us.”

  Henson looked over at the fresh corpse, then looked into the hanger. “Got an idea.”

  “You tend to have dangerous ideas,” Coleman said with a tight smile.

  Henson went past the two, heading toward the tail end of the craft. From there, it was a open space to the hangar. Too bad he didn’t have one of his smoke bombs with him. He turned back to Coleman.

  “Can you make this contraption smoke?”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” she said.

  “You’ll burn out the wiring,” Duggan cautioned.

  “You like being a sitting duck?” Henson retorted.

  Duggan groaned, but said no more.

  Fortunately for them, the door to the plane was on their side and they hoisted Coleman inside, not bothering to lower the step ladder. She cranked the engines as a gunshot shattered part of the windshield.

  “Bessie,” both men cried out.

  “I’m fine. Get to it,” she called.

  She started the engines, careful not to flood them with too much fuel least they stall out. Like with a car and the mixture being too rich to burn off completely, she caused black smoke to eddy from the engine ports. As the cloud billowed, the dead man was obscured. Henson dashed to his body, having seen the man had a gun in a shoulder holster. He liberated the weapon. The smokescreen drifted in such a way that it provided cover for a running Henson. Though rifle shots punctured the shifting pall, he reached the hangar intact.

  Henson grabbed a gas can, swishing it to make sure there was fuel inside. With that and an oily rag, he paused, waiting for the drifting black-grey smoke to snake back toward the plane. He then hopped on the wing strut opposite Coleman’s pilot seat.

  “You ready?” he said.

  “No choice, in another minute or so, the engines will be fried.” She released the brakes and began taxiing the plane, the smoke from the over-burdened engines blowing across the windshield. The shooter tried, but couldn’t get a bead on the engine—at least not yet. They knew where the shots were originating, the sun was glinting off the long gun’s barrel at the edge of the airfield among a copse of white pines.

  The Skathi’s frame shuddered and one of the engines threaten to seize as a bullet punched into its metal shell. Still, the craft rolled forward even though one of the tires had been shot and was losing air fast.

  “Now or never, Matt,” Coleman yelled. “She’s about to shut down.”

  “I hear you.” Henson had climbed atop the wing. At first, the smoke hid him, but now as the plane heaved to a stop, the propellers stalled, and his cover was beginning to dissipate. He felt his pockets, swore, and on his stomach, bent down to the cockpit.

  “You got any matches?” he asked Coleman.

  “Flare gun,” she said, reaching for it where it was clamped inside the pilot’s side door. The smokescreen was almost all gone, drifting upward into the clear skies. She handed it to Henson.

  On a knee, Henson threw the can of gas as the sharpshooter continued blasting rounds into the wing and body of the plane., flung himself prone on the wing again, and shot the flare at the soaring can of gas and the rag. Grey at his temples, his aim was still true, and the can ignited with a whoosh.

  The resulting ball of fire fell, the patch of woods began burning, and the shooting stopped. Henson jumped to the ground and ran, firing his handgun through the smoke in that direction.

  “Have you lost your cotton pickin’ mind?” Coleman yelled from the plane. “Get back here.”

  “He’s making a break for it,” he called back over his shoulder. He leaped among the burning trees and shrubs where the shooter had been, the wood crackling and popping as fire consumed it from within. The woods were damp from recent rain but unattended the fire would surely spread.

  Ahead of him, Henson heard the shooter panting. It was harder to shoot back with a rifle given you had to stop and aim. In the chase, his handgun was an advantage. Farther along to his right, he saw a form hurrying through the growth. He shot at it, but didn’t stop him. Henson crashed through into a clearing in time to see the rifleman behind the wheel of a two-tone Buick coupe. Henson shot out the back window, but missed the tire as the car sped away. The vehicle’s bumper clipped a downed log as it went. Henson made a note of the license plate. He thought the car might have been the one his lawyer had noted a few days ago. He also noticed there were drops of blood on the ground. When he returned to the airstrip, the volunteer fire department had a horse-drawn steam-powered pumper putting out the fire. Additionally, there were several men with brass fire extinguishers on their backs also attending to the fire. He ditched the gun and came out of the forest.

  “How the hell did this start?” the captain of the crew yelled at Shorty Duggan and Bessie Coleman, square head swiveling on his bull neck from them to the smoldering aircraft and back.

  “Mr. Renwick will answer all your questions, sir,” Coleman said.

  “Yeah? And who’s that, missy?”

  “Hugo Renwick is your department’s biggest donor. Or will be,” Duggan said.

  There was more back and forth between this man and Duggan. Coleman started to walk off.

  “Just where the hell do you think you’re going, gal?” the captain called.

  “Make a call on the short wave,” she answered.

  “Hey now,” he started but Henson got in his way.

  “Let her make the call, cap’n.” He said it gently, but his eyes were agates.

  Had his men not been busy with the fire, the captain would have challenged back. As it was, he merely glared sourly at this uppity colored.

  The blaze was soon extinguished. but the firemen remained, discussing holding the three until they could fetch the police. A black Ford with red trim drove onto the airstrip and a man got out from behind the wheel. He wore owlish glasses and walked with a slight limp. The man talked at length with the
captain who, at one point, took off his hat, rubbing his hand over his crew cut hair. The man in the glasses then stood silently by as the captain addressed his crew.

  “Alright, we’re out of here.”

  “But captain—”

  “No buts,” he said, jerking a thumb at the trio. “Looks like they got them a muckety-muck to vouch for them.” He turned and pointed at them. “But you can bet dollars to donuts I’m going to keep a watch on what’s going on around here. Bunch’a coons and a brokedown mick up to who knows what. Sheet.”

  He clambered back on the wagon, the other firemen back into a battered GMC truck, and off they went.

  Standing side by side watching them go, their clothes seeped in the smell of charred embers, Henson turned to Coleman. “You got another plane you can use?’

  She shook her head, sighing. Duggan belly-laughed.

  By the time a new plane was secured, it was getting on to dark and Henson knew his scouting mission had to be performed in daylight. The tire of the Indian Scout had been repaired and, though the front fender was in bad shape, the rest of the bike was okay. Henson and Coleman set a time for their excursion, and he started back to the city. The man who’d been slain was an ex state trooper, so they, too, had an interest in finding his killer. Henson told Coleman and Duggan the license plate number of the shooter, and they in turn provided it to the authorities. The flyer would also have one of Renwick’s people track down the plate’s owner.

  Tired and hungry by the time he got back to Harlem, Henson stopped at a grocery store and bought some food. He rode home and parked the motorcycle on the street in front of his apartment. Given the bike was a v-twin, he removed the main spark plug wire leading one from one side of the engine to the other so the machine couldn’t be started and stolen. Gathering his purchases in his arms, he heard the approach of footfalls. He straightened to see two white men standing behind him. One was tall and wearing a fedora, the other short and compact with a snap-brim hat. He recognized fedora as the one who’d tailed he and Kunsler previously. The other had been in the sedan. Henson was also certain the taller agent had been the one pretending to be asleep that night in the tan Chrysler outside the RCA building.

  “Are you Matthew Henson?” asked the tall one.

  “I am.”

  “We’d like a word with you. Won’t take a minute.”

  “Make it tomorrow, would you? I’m just about to fix some dinner and hit the sack.”

  “You love your country, don’t you, Henson?” the bulldog in the snap brim said. “Or maybe you and that red mouthpiece of yours are two peas in a pod hugging Karl Marx’s underwear?”

  “You gents with the Justice Department? The Bureau? That Hoover fella send you to talk with lil’ ol’ me?”

  “You ought to be on Amos n’ Andy you’re so damn funny,” the bulldog said.

  “How do you know I’m not?”

  “Look you smart mouth shine, I—” began bulldog.

  The tall one in the fedora slapped the back of his hand against the other’s chest. “Go on and get your chow, Mr. Henson. We’ll take this up at another time.”

  “Good to know.”

  The tall one lit a cigarette, staring at Henson though the curtain of smoke. He turned and walked away. Bulldog lingered a moment, but then followed his compatriot. Henson went on up. He wasn’t sure what to make of this development. The government men were now coming at him directly. They were probably wise he knew about their tails and figured why not, put the squeeze on him directly. For sure those two must have something to do with Henrik Ellsmere’s disappearance. But if he’d told them about the Daughter, why the kid gloves? Why not just bop him over the head and work him over? Not that he knew where it was, but only he knew that pertinent fact. Maybe they hoped to spook him and have him lead them to it.

  Well, Henson concluded, yawning while he fried a pork chop and beans in a skillet, he’d go at this again tomorrow when he was refreshed. He ate at the table in his living room near a window open to the night. A full moon hung in the sky and Henson wondered what his son Anaukaq was up to in his days and nights in his family’s village. Chewing absently, he understood he wasn’t a boy any longer, Ackie would be eighteen or nineteen now—a man by many measures. Older now than when Henson left home at twelve to strike out on his own and find the sea welcoming. He finished his meal and dug out his bottle of bathtub hooch from a cabinet. Never a big drinker, he poured himself a draught from the half-full bottle and it away again. He sat back down at the table and drank, staring out past the moon and stars and imagining. As if the time difference didn’t exist, that his son was staring up at the same night sky.

  In the brownstone on Striver’s Row, two others were also looking up at the moon. Daddy Paradise and Miriam McNair had spent the day visiting potential donors to his foundation—for tax purposes, the Universal Prosperity and Inclusion Association—working on his upcoming presentation at Liberty Hall, and making love. Now they were both clothed in colorful silk robes, sitting side-by-side in the converted sun room on the top floor of McNair’s home. The room was her meditation chamber, and contained all manner of artifacts from voodoo gris-gris to Catholic statuettes she’d obtained on a trip to Mexico. Overhead was a skylight through which the moonlight shined.

  “If the meteorite exists, this could be a momentous time in our sojourn in this land. We were bound in chains and brought to these shores three hundred years and so ago,” Toliver said, gazing upward.

  “Oh, Charles, it seems so fanciful about this stone from space and what these white men seem to think it can do. It’s almost beyond belief.”

  “Yet here we sit in comfort in a structure where invisible current provides us light and music from boxes of wood and metal. Things that in the lifetime of our predecessors would seem like the conjurings of a wizard or blamed on the Devil.”

  She nodded in assent. “But an unheard of source of energy? And for all you know this… meteorite or whatever it is that crashed on Earth centuries ago, well, surely it can be depleted, used up like coal burning in a furnace, can’t it?”

  Gently, he took his hand away from the woman and tented his ringed fingers over a belly that had been spreading due to too many fine meals. “That may be, Miriam. But I have read arcane texts indicating there are hidden chambers in the pyramids of Egypt and of the Aztecs in Mexico through which the enlightened could receive cosmic rays from space. Granting them who knows what sort of power, for lack of a better word.”

  Her eyes got wide.

  “It may also be that whoever takes possession of this so-called Daughter can set their own price. From what I’ve been told, a piece no bigger than your hand once unleashed a tremendous lightning bolt that shattered large formations.”

  “More powerful than dynamite,” McNair observed.

  “But an energy it’s rumored that can’t be exhausted.” He spread his hands as if to encompass the enormity of his statement. “Now, this was not a direct eyewitness to this event,” he added, “but a second-hand account from someone who was with Mahri-Pahluk at the time.” He smiled at the Inuit nickname for the explorer.

  “How fortuitous then that you’ve been able to draw Mr. Henson into your orbit.”

  He looked at her unblinkingly. “Do you not see that as providence?”

  “Or doom,” she said, stiffening in her seat. “It’s from that inhabitable land of ice and snow. What if that blue whiteness is not what you and the others think it is. What if it signals the end of us, a new ice age?”

  “Then the first temple of ice will be here in Harlem.” A misty glare took ahold of him. “Think of it more in the sense of how so much of an iceberg is below the surface. Much like how the whites see us, dear Miriam. We know there is so much more to us as a people.” He waved a hand. “Our renaissance is a prime indicator.”

  “Yet I fear a backlash. Just look at what happened to those prosperous blacks in Tulsa not too long ago.”

  He tu
rned toward her, his hand on her knee. “Don’t you see, my sweet? All the more reason this object from the heavens, sent to us by the god force you and I know oversees our lives, is meant to be the way in which we might well make millions…monies we can well use for any number of enterprises for the advancement of the negro people.”

  His hand moved upward, massaging her inner thigh.

  She moaned slightly but caught herself from being carried away by desire. “Then it might be harnessed for destructive purposes.”

  “Only if it falls into the wrong hands. Between us and Queenie, we won’t let that happen. Yes, she is about fattening her pockets, but she is sincere about our improvement. Both can be accomplished.”

  “This is so damn dangerous.”

  He smiled, his hand moving further up without interference. “And exciting.”

  McNair sat back, Toliver’s hand now between her legs. “Yes,” she murmured.

  The moon continued to beam down on them.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bessie Coleman brought the bi-plane in low over the parkland in Poughkeepsie. The morning sun ascended in the horizon. “We might be waking up some of the swells,” she said to Henson, who sat in the seat behind her. “They don’t have to roll out of the sack to make it to the assembly line like us proletarians you know.”

  “Yeah, well, too much sleep is bad for you,” he cracked.

  “How about I swing over those big houses over there?” she said above the roar of the propeller and engine. The plane was a WWI-era British made Bristol and had seen better days. It had been borrowed from a friend of hers, a one-legged air jockey named Bull Hogan. Patches and sewn up sections predominated its canvas skin. But Coleman’s confidence in the machine remaining aloft had buoyed Henson, and off they’d gone from an airfield about 100 miles away.

  They had been reconnoitering the area for nearly half an hour. Henson had seen one house with stained-glass windows, but knew from Ellsmere the house was three stories and this one was only two.