“Smoke?” Snap-brim offered, shaking a cigarette free from a pack.
“Sure,” he said, taking it and putting it in his mouth. The other one struck a match and lit it for him. He blew a stream toward the foot of his bed. “What can I do you fellas for?”
“Who paid you to put the grab on the professor?” Fedora asked.
“I’d like to help you, even if I knew what you were talking about, but I ain’t squawking, get me?”
The two men exchanged a look. Fedora talked as snap-brim lit a cigarette. “We’re going to find out sooner or later and you might as well do yourself some good, here. Or maybe you like the idea of wearing stripes in Sing Sing for the next thirty years.”
The cigarette paused on its way to the hood’s mouth. “Hey, I don’t know what you two are trying to pull, but you got it all wrong. When my lawyer gets here, he’ll straighten it out.”
“Your lawyer?” Fedora said. “What makes you think you got an ambulance chaser coming?”
Snap-brim stood near the door, his back to the bed. Rivets were driven into the door holding a metal plate in place. He looked out the rectangle of glass set in it. Then back at the man in the bed.
“I just know, okay?” The thug insisted.
“Yeah, he just knows, you know?’ Snap-brim had walked back to the foot of the bed, cigarette bobbing between his thin lips.
“Like a soothsayer?” Fedora shot back.
“Right,” his companion, said, “like he can see the future.”
“He see this coming?” Fedora slapped a hand over the hood’s mouth. Snap-brim grabbed one of the man’s ankles and pressed the tip of his lit cigarette against the sole of his bare foot. The trapped man’s eyes got wide and he squirmed and thrashed as the cigarette was pulled back then stabbed onto another part of his foot, sizzling his flesh.
“Now give us the fuckin’ name, punk,” Fedora seethed. With his other hand he’d jerked the prisoner’s free hand and wrist through the bars of the bed, wrenching on them as the calm snap-brim burned the hoodlum’s feet.
On the subway heading to the rent party, Henson told Stevenson more about his friend the professor.
“Destiny, words can’t accurately describe what it’s like out there in the never-night, no landmarks in front of you or over your head like with the stars. Maybe a gale wailing about you, rattling your bones in a cold that seeps into your brain. And after what we’d been through, well, Henrik sort of broke down on the trip home.”
“He was put away?”
“For a while. He got out though, went back to Europe as I understand it. But eventually found his way to the States.” He paused. “Now and then I’d hear from him, but we lost touch.”
“He was with you when you brought back a meteorite? A rock from space.”
“A several ton hunk of iron ore, baby.”
“Aren’t you just the he-man This place was non-descript, some of its brick exposed behind missing plaster. They could hear music coming from upstairs as they entered the vestibule door, which was ajar. Up they went to the third-floor, where the hallway crowded with revelers, the smell of collard greens and a trumpet trilled from one of the open doorways.
“Two bits apiece, please,” said a woman in a feathered turban and sequined dress.
Henson let a dollar bill drop into her proffered top hat. “Here you go, ma’am.”
“I think you good sir and good madam. Enjoy.”
She went through a nearby open doorway and as the two-stepped past, they saw people in a wide range of attire—even a tall woman in a beaded Mardi Gras mask.
“Matthew my man,” a deep voice called out.
“OD, three times in one week,” he responded.
“Must be fate,” the big man chuckled. Oscar Dulane was wearing his bowler but missing his cigar. He was in rolled-up shirtsleeves and holding a small plate with food on it, forking it down in a steady rhythm. “I’m getting a good crew together.”
“I knew you would.”
Dulane nodded and turned back to continue his conversation with two other men.
“Come on, I want to introduce you to Sissy.” Stevenson took Henson’s hand and led him further along the hallway. They entered another apartment where a poet was standing in the center of the room in the middle of a recitation.
“Lo the journey is long, we are bred for the hardship,” he was saying. The poet was stout with a nub of a head and long arms out of proportion to his short torso. “But the balance of justice tips in our favor,” he added.
“This is Matt Henson,” Stevenson said to a woman in knee-length plaid golf knickers. Her top was some sort of clingy material, and she wore a linen bolo jacket over that. Stevenson’s friend looked Henson up and down.
“From the way people talk about you in these parts,” she began, a feint Georgia accent coloring her words, “I figured you’d be seven feet tall with a blue ox.”
“I shrunk some,” Henson said.
She clapped him on the shoulder. There was a glass of bootleg whiskey in her other hand. “Yeah, well, any friend of my gal is a friend of mine, Mister Polar Bear. Y’all get some eats and hooch, okay? Everybody’s chipped in to make this a humdinger.”
She winked at Stevenson and wandered off.
“Where do you know here from?” Henson asked. “Don’t tell me she was the choir leader in your daddy’s church.”
“You’re not the only one with friends in high and low places.”
In the kitchen they helped themselves to fried chicken, greens and potato salad. The food along with
