Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem

by Gary Phillips

  “Come to Papa,” the shooter said, scooping up money that was thrown onto the table.

  “While you’re in a good mood, Oscar…” Henson interrupted.

  “Well, well, look who’s slumming,” Oscar Dulane otherwise known as OD cracked, handing the dice off to the man next to him. The two walked over to a quiet corner.

  “Got a paying prospect for you,” Henson told Dulane. In addition to his being a bouncer, he also did work as—what was euphemistically termed—a “home defense officer”, rugged types employed by the ones who put on rent parties where back rooms were available for husbands tipping out on the missus. This often meant gambling was part of the attraction, and his job was to keep the peace if a tipsy patron acted out.

  Henson explained he needed some men to do guard duty at Daddy Paradise’s upcoming talk at Liberty Hall.

  OD said, “I can get some boys for the job. But it’d be good to go over the place, right?”

  “For sure. I’ll make the arrangements. Figure three days out.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  They discussed the job some more then Henson left. Back on the avenues, the newsie, Henry, told him Officer Rodgers was looking for him.

  Ellsmere was on his second cup of coffee when Henson arrived. Several of the diner’s patrons said hello to him as he stepped inside. The professor brightened at seeing him. “There he is, he who looked the Grim Destroyer in the face and didn’t blink.”

  Henson smiled sheepishly. “Good to see you too, Prof. It’s been awhile.”

  He rose from his stool, each had their hands on the other’s shoulders. “My Lord, Matthew, seems you haven’t aged a day.”

  “I wish that was true.”

  “We have a matter of much import to discuss, my lad. Where might we have such a discussion?”

  “There’s a booth in the back.” Henson took notice of the folded-over notes Ellsmere had with him.

  Ellsmere followed his gaze. “I suppose that will have to do.”

  Once they were seated, a waitress came over, refilling Ellsmere’s cup. She sat an empty cup down for Henson and filled that, too, from her tin pot. “Hi, Matt, breakfast or lunch usual?”

  “Guess I’ll have myself a late breakfast, Florence,” he said. “What about you, Prof?”

  “What’s your usual, Matthew?”

  “Eggs over easy, grits, bacon, coffee and sourdough toast,” Florence Brown said. “He’s got to keep his strength up,” she deadpanned.

  “Heh, well that’s more than I can handle,” Ellsmere said, patting his stomach. “But I could go for some eggs and bacon.”

  “Got it,” she said and walked away.

  Henson sampled his coffee. “So, what’s on your mind, Henrik?”

  He looked over his shoulder conspiratorially, then leaned forward. “The Daughter.”

  For a second Henson wondered how Ellsmere had heard about Destiny Stevenson. But then he got his bearings. “What about it?”

  “They’re looking for it.”

  Like when he was sledding and would halt the dogs to determine if a stretch of ice might be thinner than it looked, a familiar ball of wariness formed in his stomach. “Who is ‘they’, professor?”

  He plopped his sheets of calculations onto the tabletop. “As you may know, I’ve experienced something of a vagabond life since, well, since my troubles.”

  Henson had been the one to deliver Ellsmere to the sanitarium after the return to New York on the whale ship the Hope, bearing the largest of the Cape York meteorites, the thirty-four ton Tent, Saviksoah. The “Great Iron” as the Eskimos had nicknamed it. Eleven feet long and seven feet high. It took many hours, several hydraulic jacks and other engineering adaptations to load it onto the ship Previously, two other ancient meteorites had been brought back from the north shore of Melville Bay, the Mother, Ahnahnna, and the Dog, Kim-milk, both of which were much smaller than the Tent.

  Henson lowered his voice. “You didn’t tell anyone anything, did you?”

  “Of course not. All this time, even at my most…” he gestured, “untethered, I have not given that confidence away. But I must admit, through all my travails, unlocking the secrets of the Daughter has been the one beacon focusing my mind. Helping to keep me on task, I suppose one might say.”

  Henson nodded, staring into the depths of his coffee.

  Their food came, and both remained silent until the waitress departed again. Ellsmere spoke, “In my wanderings after my incident, in my travels, I might take a research job or lab work, what with teaching posts not available to me given, well you know…”

  Henson started in on his breakfast. “No rush, prof, but about the Daughter…”

  “Yes,” Ellsmere said over a mouthful of food. He swallowed, looking down at his meal, grinning. “I see why you frequent this place.”

  Henson smiled, “Beats roasted seal, don’t it?”

  “Oh, we got used to a lot of things out there, didn’t we? Anyway, as I was saying, I’ve been living in an itinerant manner. Even went out to Los Angeles for a time, a place called Pasadena actually. The one time I almost got a post again.” He forked in more of his breakfast, looking off, then refocused. “Anyway, making my way east again, I was approached by an interesting woman, herself part Inuit I’m pretty certain, with an interesting proposition. This was oh, four or so months ago.”

  “And what was the job?”

  “That’s just it, her finding me was a dream. I was paid handsomely, provided rooms and pertinent books, and all I had to do was further pursue avenues previously abandoned. Every two weeks or so she’d drop by and ask about my progress.”

  Henson took a few steps onto that ice. “But she was a ringer?”

  “As the colloquialism goes,” Ellsmere said in German, knowing that Henson would understand. He switched back to English. “About three weeks ago she asked me pointedly about my time at Princeton.”

  “Why did that raise your hackles?”

  “The light bulb finally went off in my head, Mathew. So hungry was I for being appreciated. But I suddenly understood, given her follow-up attempts at deflection, that the previous scientific inquiry for the sake of inquiry was just to butter me up you see. To draw me in and have me lower my guard. Her real interests, and that of her backers, I surmised, was what we are calling quantum physics that Dr. Einstein has gotten so much attention advancing.”

  Henson detected the envy in his voice. “What does that mean, quantum physics?

  “In 1919, astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble advanced the theory that our universe is constantly expanding, my friend. That it is not fixed, since the science of astronomy was established. This changed everything.”

  Henson chewed and recalled that more than once he’d been in an Arctic storm at night and the only way to find his way back was sighting specific star formations. Still, he didn’t have a PhD, let alone two of them. “How does that relate to what happened to you?”

  “I could go into what all that means via Hubble’s and Bohr’s theories. But to be succinct, it’s about the energy that is all around us, my rugged fellow. Untapped and unseen. But there nonetheless. It’s about unlocking the potential of the atom.”

  Now the ice began to crack beneath his feet. “Or objects from space.”

  Ellsmere stopped eating and sipped his coffee, eyeing his companion over the rim of the cup.

  “Did she mention the Daughter?”

  Ellsmere was chewing again. He paused and put his fork down. “Not directly, but I sensed that’s where she was going. As I said, she soon took the conversation elsewhere, but two days later, wound back around to my thoughts on this branch of physics.”

  “I don’t know, that seems natural as it relates to you. There’s a lot you have your finger in.”

  “Believe me, Matthew, I am not imagining this. I’m not hearing voices or seeing little green men. I didn’t even during my breakdown. My memory has always been quite intact. Wh
ich reminds me, when was the last time you’ve seen your son?”

  “Longer than it should be,” he admitted.

  Ellsmere started at him. “Take it from a man with no family, Matthew. Don’t let it go too much longer.”

  “You’re right.”

  Ellsmere held a piece of bacon near his mouth. “To continue, my rooms, if you will, were part of a larger mansion in Poughkeepsie. Mind you, I had relatively free run of the place until that evening when she broached that particular subject matter.”

  “You know where this mansion is?”

  “Not exactly. It was near a park though, and not far from the main highway. Along a kind of second floor landing was a row of stained glass windows, religious scenes.”

  “You were locked in that night?”

  “Yes, but overcoming a mortise lock was not hard,” he said proudly. “Prowling around, alert after those remarks about my atomic work, I overheard my beautiful captor talking to someone on the phone. I did not gather all of it, but I distinctly heard her mention the Daughter. Also, I understood they would be resorting to more… direct methods to get me to cooperate.”

  “You figured to lam it out?”

  Ellsmere frowned.

  “Escape?”

  “Here I am.”

  “But if the Daughter’s been found, I’m sure I would have gotten word,” Henson said, tamping down any urgency in his voice. No one knew he possessed the Daughter, a dangerous piece of space rock that scared him.

  “Unless the resourceful Ootah is dead. For this is something those of that ilk would kill for to possess.”

  “You think she worked for some oil or coal outfit? This part-Inuit woman?”

  “That is a possibility. At any rate, I’ve been hiding out near the Bowery. Frankly, and I suppose the psychiatrists at Dunwich would say this was a diversionary tactic on my part, I allowed myself to become immersed in what would it take to tap the Daughter’s potential.”

  “That ciphering of yours?” Henson said.

  “Yes.”

  The lunch crowd began entering, a mix of working men and women and others in snappier clothes. Henson keenly aware of the presence of more eyes and ears. “Let me settle up and we’ll go back to my place.”

  “Very good.” Stepping to the counter to pay, a portly man in glasses and a striped shirt looked over at him from his stool there. He took hold of his copy of The New York Amsterdam News he’d been reading with his meal.

  “Would you mind autographing this, Mr. Henson?” the man said.

  Henson smiled at the coffee-stained newspaper which was folded to a print ad. The ad depicted a drawing of a smiling Henson’s face, a fur hood over his head. In big letters the wording read: “There’s only one discovery for me, Clicquot Club Pale Dry Ginger Ale.” Smaller type went on attest that the product was made from the purest spring water, fresh juices of lemons and limes, pure cane sugar, and only the best in Jamaican ginger.

  “Here you go, glamor boy.” Mayfield handed Henson a pencil from behind her ear and he signed the advertisement. Handing the newspaper back, he noted on the flip side was a brief article about Daddy Paradise’s upcoming talk at Liberty Hall.

  Henson paid, and the two men stepped out onto the thoroughfare. As he’d told Destiny Stevenson, there hadn’t been anything in print or radio about the escapade from the other night. At a corner newsstand, a man with several days’ growth of whiskers and a balding head stood behind the array of newspapers, slicks and pulps such as Argosy and Weird Tales prominent. Despite the warmth of the day, he wore a threadbare sweater buttoned to his breastbone. He nodded at Henson, who nodded back.

  “Mr. Greene, how goes it?”

  “Same old sixes and sevens.”

  “I hear you.”

  A car with a canvas top screeched into view, nearly running down a woman crossing the street who made her objections known.

  “Get down,” Henson yelled, the glint of sunlight on the end of a Thompson gun’s barrel filling his vision. The gun rattled rounds at them, the spray of high-pitched bullets sending up a blizzard of newsprint and lurid color covers. Henson grabbed Ellsmere and they plunged behind a parked car. People screamed and ran and dived for cover all around him. A man, praying loudly, dove with his arms in front of his face through a plate glass window of a bakery.

  “Are you hit?” Henson asked.

  “I believe I’m whole, for now,” Ellsmere replied.

  The machine gunner was not the one called Eddie Henson had encountered the other night. These Chicago Typewriters were too damn plentiful. And that didn’t mean these men didn’t work for the Dutchman, too. Though could be they were working for whoever put the snatch on the professor, as he didn’t figure that to be Schultz.

  The canvas-topped car drove past, then, tires smoking, made a U-turn to roar back toward the two.

  “Stay put,” he told the scientist, getting into a crouch.

  “Just what is it you intend to do, Matthew?”

  “See if I can get us out of this.” Normally he didn’t go around armed, but since taking the job to protect Daddy Paradise’s daughter, he’d been keeping a couple of his throwing stars on him. He’d have to get close enough to use them—and stay alive in the process.

  On the passenger side of the car, a man rode the running board, pistol in his hand. He was in a suit and hat, a lion’s mask like something for a Halloween party covering his face. The car slowed, and he leapt off. On the other side, the one with the machine gun also got out of the car. He was dressed similarly, a rhino mask covering his face. The driver, in a cheetah mask, remained behind the wheel, engine idling. The lion with the handgun grabbed a small man who’d ducked behind his pushcart. The handgun’s muzzle was put against this man’s head.

  “Okay, Henson, give us the bookworm and I’ll let this poor bastard keep breathing. If you don’t, he’s the first one I kill—but not the last.”

  Hands up, Henson took several steps toward the two. “Maybe we can talk this over.” The machine gunner in his rhino mask was flanking him to the left. Even if he could plant a star in the head of the lion, the other one would cut him down in a blink.

  “You’re in no position to dicker,” the lion said.

  Henson chanced more steps. “Maybe I got money to make a counter-offer.”

  Lion snickered. “Where’d you get money?”

  “What do you think we bought back from the North Pole? Gold.” He calculated he might be able to throw both stars at once, strike his twin targets.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Yeah?” He stopped, stiffening. He knew he was going to be too slow in trying to fling one of his flying stars. Rhino Mask had sensed something was up and was leveling his weapon on Henson, about to riddle him with bullets.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Drop it,” a voice growled.

  Rhino Man turned around, but before he could trigger the machine gun, a shot lanced from Patrolman Cole Rodger’s revolver. Rhino Man’s eyes widened behind the slits of his mask.

  Henson didn’t hesitate; his arm snaking out like a fakir hypnotizing a cobra, he flung one of his throwing stars. But Lion Man had pushed his hostage down, jumping out of the way of the five-pointed ninja weapon. It nicked his coat arm but whisked past. He shot at Henson who was already in motion, not exactly going for cover but up and over the pushcart, which got knocked on end. A bullet pinged off the corner of the metal cart as Henson landed in a crouch. Henson threw a steak knife he’d plucked from the cart, and it sank into the middle of the Lion Man’s chest, pinning his tie to him.

  The car sped away, Officer Rodgers didn’t want to risk shooting at it lest he miss and hit an innocent. He put handcuffs on the wounded Rhino Man, whose machine gun lay nearby.

  “Get these off me, nigger,” the wounded man demanded.

  “Shut the hell up.” Rodgers tore off his mask, and then that of the dead man. He took out his notebook and called over several passerby who
’d ran for cover, getting names of potential witnesses.

  Henson, several feet away from the busy cop, got closer to Ellsmere who’d remained hunkered down behind the parked car. “Give me your papers,” he said quietly.

  The older man did. Henson went to shot-up newsstand. The proprietor had been grazed in the arm, but was otherwise unhurt. Henson folded up the notes and stuck them below the newsstand’s counter. He then winked at Mr. Greene, who dipped his head.

  A police car roared up, followed by another, each sporting the new colors recently adopted by the police department—green bodies, white roofs, and black bumpers. The second one was a late Ford Model A, and one of the cops rode the running board, cranking the siren as they approached. White officers spilled out onto the street, guns and nightsticks out. Henson stood next to Rodgers, making sure they could see his outstretched hands. That this colored policeman seemed to have matters in hand sent a ripple of restraint through the policemen. One of them came forward, a dead stump of a cigar in the corner of his mouth. He was a sergeant.

  “What the hell’s going on here, Patrolman?”

  “These here jungle mask fellas tried to kill Mister Matthew Henson. I have a description of the car they came in and a license plate number.”

  The sergeant rolled the cigar around on his thin lips, eyeballing the explorer and the knife sticking out of one of the hoodlums. “Henson…the butler for that bird who discovered the North Pole?”

  “Hardly,” Ellsmere said, having gotten up.

  “Who are you?”

  Henson answered, “He’s a colleague of mine.”

  “Colleague is it?” The cop looked from one to the other. “Okay, we’ll straighten this out at the precinct.” To Henson, “Gimme your hands.”

  “That’s not necessary, Sarge,” Rodgers said.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” he said, clinking the cuffs on.

  They took Henson in one patrol car, and an uncuffed Ellsmere in the other. An ambulance came, collecting the wounded man and the dead one. Rodgers made sure to ride in the vehicle with Henson so he’d arrive at the precinct unharmed—or arrive at all.