“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
