“I know that mug. That’s Two Laces.”
“Yeah, Dutch Schultz sent him to kill you,” Henson confirmed.
“Damn. Why me?”
The note had warned Henson. The message had been left by the man calling himself Vin O’Hara, and he’d stated that he was an infiltrator. The explorer had believed the message to be authentic. “Daddy Paradise’s big speech. Get you out of the way just in case. You being a black cop on the Harlem beat and all. Even though your bosses already said you can’t guard the event.”
Rodgers said, “I intended to be there anyway.”
Henson smiled at him.
“Say, what happened to your face?” Rodgers asked.
Henson chuckled dryly. “Long story. But right now, we have to save a whole bunch of people from getting slaughtered like Thanksgiving turkeys.”
When Henson had learned about Davis’ copying Tesla’s machine, he’d confronted him.
“Yes,” the aging inventor admitted heavily. “I’ve got it on good authority that after several years of failures, Davis was close to making a prototype of his own based on my idea. That’s why I’d renewed efforts to perfect my Electro-Pulsar.”
“How’d you find out what he was up to?” Henson had asked.
Tesla smiled lopsidedly. “Too many times over the years, Matt, I’ve made bad business decisions that have cost me financially and scientifically. Once it became clear that Davis was using me, I was determined to…reverse course, shall we say.”
“In what way?” Henson said.
As Tesla began to answer, one of his assistants had rushed out of his rooftop lab and whispered in his ear. When he was done, Tesla had invited Henson to follow. In the lab was a wireless of an advanced design unlike anything Henson had seen before. Freja Petersen’s voice came over the wavelength after Tesla spoke into his microphone. What she reported caused both men to gape.
Later, after his meeting with Tesla, Henson made a stop at the U.S. Customs House on the southern tip of the island. The building near Battery Park and the water’s edge was considered a fine example of the Beaux Arts style. Henson was disguised as a delivery man, wearing a light jacket with the words “B. Jonas Freight” stenciled on the back. He also carted a wooden box on a dolly. Once inside, he wheeled his supposed delivery to a metal door and knocked. A face appeared in the shatterproof window on the other side of the door. The woman unlocked it.
“Thanks, Edna.”
“Off course, Matt,” his across the hall neighbor said, wearing her blue clerk’s uniform. “You know how to let yourself out, yeah?”
“Absolutely.”
Mullins nodded, and they began walking along a long windowless hallway, Hanson trailing with the dolly. They got to a juncture and they separated, giving her a half wave as he did. He passed another clerk carrying a clipboard going in the opposite direction, and nodded curtly at him. He got to a door and entered. There was yet another clerk there, sitting on a stool behind a counter. He was a beer-bellied middle-aged white man with the stare of years of earned boredom.
“Yeah?” he said, as if forming that one word was effort.
Henson took a folded piece of paper out of the breast pocket of his shirt. “Delivery,” he said.
The other man didn’t bother to extend his hand for the paper. It seemed after years on the job, he’d perfected to the atom the amount of energy he needed to expend to complete any particular function. He did look at the sheet as it lay on the counter before him. He then made a heavy sound in his chest like a bear rousing from hibernation. He pulled over a clipboard and made a notation on the top sheet.
“Take it on back,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
Henson opened the low gate separating the well from the gallery in a courtroom. He wheeled in his box, and the bored man had to get off his stool to unlock another metal door, this one windowless. He was let into a two-story cavernous storage area of rows upon rows of metal shelves filled with wooden and cardboard boxes and other types of containers. Like in a library, at the end of each row there were numerical designations corresponding with a master list the clerk kept up front. The lazy clerk was supposed to personally take the deliveries in here. But Henson knew from Edna, he didn’t follow the protocol. The disguised explorer wheeled the dolly in a ways, and then deposited it between two rows. Inside the box was a cheap reproduction of a Ming dynasty vase. At some point, a clerk would come upon this and simply figure it had been removed from a shelf and not restocked.
Henson walked deeper into the rows until he came to row 51 X-9. He went down this aisle, the light gloomy and the air stuffy. A little past midway he stopped, having counted his steps like a kid in search of buried pirate’s treasure. There, on the third shelf up from the bottom, he removed a small wooden crate. There was no identifying sticker on it, and a person had to look close to note one of its nail heads had been dotted with red paint. He used a screwdriver he had on him to pry the lid off.
He inhaled sharply, staring at the triangular piece of the Daughter he’d broken off and taken back with him to America. He slipped the fragment into his jacket pocket. He then tamped the lid back on using the handle of the screwdriver. He tried not to look excited when he stepped back out and passed the clerk. He needn’t have bothered. The civil servant was
