"So you're saying that the federal government's program is so badly funded as to border on fraud," said the Swedish television announcer, her hair as cool yellow as pale wheat stalks, her skin the white smooth cream of the North people, her teeth even and unravaged by cavity or brace. A shimmering black silk pants suit highlighted full and ready breasts and driving derriere. Even while she stood still, the black silk moved up and down her leg. Her perfume enveloped Reverend Wadson.
"Dat exactly what I been sayin','' Wadson said.
"You have been so helpful, Reverend, to Swedish television," the blond said. "I wish we could have more of your time."
"Who say you can't?" asked the reverend. He was a big man, at least six-feet-four and he seemed to throw his whole body into her face.
"Don't you have a lecture tonight on the beauty of black women?" she asked. Reverend Wadson took twenty seconds to mouth the letters on the name tag pinned to the beautiful rising black silk covering what must be a mountain of white breast.
"Ingrid," he said, looking up to make sure by watching her face that he had said it correctly. "Ingrid, I think sisterhood powerful. Powerful. Powerful. I with you in sisterhood."
A black woman in stylish but hard-lined dashiki with elegant barren copper jewelry around her long ebony neck and with short hair in black rows, tugged at the sleeve of Reverend Wadson.
"Reverend, your lecture. Remember, you're a consultant to the city on race relations."
"I busy," said Wadson and smiled at the blond.
"But you are part of the program. You are a consultant to the city," said the black woman.
"Later," said Reverend Wadson.
"But your lecture is about the city's fight against racism,'' said the woman. She smiled politely but firmly at the Swedish television announcer.
"Later, I said. We workin' international now," said Reverend Wadson who placed a large hand on the silk-covered shoulder of Ingrid. Ingrid smiled. Reverend Wadson saw her breasts peak under the black silk. She wasn't wearing a bra.
"Reverend," said the black woman, her lips pursing. "There are many people who want to hear you talk on beauty and black being synonymous."
"Synonymous? Ah never calls it synonymous. Never. Black beauty your basic beauty. It ain' synonymous. Too long, oh Lawd, has our beautiful black beauties been called synonymous by white racists. Ingrid, we gots get outta here and talk about racism and beauty."
"Synonymous means 'the same as,"" said the black woman. "Black is the same as beauty, beauty is black. Black is beauty."
"Right on," said Reverend Wadson, turning his back on the woman and guiding Ingrid into his path.
"Reverend, New York City pays you forty-nine thousand dollars a year for your lectures," said the woman tugging the back of Wadson's dark ministerial coat.
"I busy, woman," said Reverend Wadson.
"Reverend, I'm not letting you go," said the woman.
"I be back, Ingrid. Doan you go nowhere, heah?"
"I will be here," said the Swedish beauty and gave Wadson a big wink. The reverend went into an administrative room of the hotel to talk to the black woman who was helping him in his lecture series to colleges in the city.
"This only take a minute," said Reverend Wadson who had played tight end for a black college in the south and was known to be able to unfoot someone with one swipe. He slammed the black woman's head against the wall. She dropped like a sack of soggy week-old collards.
Wadson returned to Ingrid. A group of young blacks had gathered around her. With bulk strength, Reverend Wadson cleared them away. And still chuckling, he brought Ingrid to a conference room where he finally got his hands on the black silk and undraped it away from the soft white body that he covered with his anxious tongue. And just before his triumph, she wriggled away and he lunged for her. But she was too fast. She claimed he really didn't want her.
Want her? Was that a droop of disinterest, Wadson wanted to know?
She consented but only after he promised his help.
"Sho. Anyfing," panted the Reverend Wadson. "First dis."
Ingrid smiled her perfect smooth-skinned smile. Reverend Wadson thought at that moment she needed no skin lighteners. Never a lotion on that face.
She asked to kiss him.
He allowed as that would be all right.
Down went the zipper of his trousers. Ingrid reached up and brought her long hair behind her head in two handfuls.
Reverend Wadson lunged forward, body and desire out of control.
Suddenly Ingrid pulled back.
"Drop your gun, Reverend," she said and gone was the lilt of Sweden from her voice.
"Hah?" Wadson said.
"Drop that gun you're carrying," she repeated. "A gorilla with a gun is dangerous."
"Bitch," said the reverend and was about to bang her yellow head into the furniture when he felt a tingle around a very delicate part of his body. It was as if she had slipped a ring on it.
"Oh, my Lawd," said the reverend, looking down in horror. For there was a ring down there, a white metal band, but surrounding the band was his own blood, a thin line. His desire disappeared like a yoyo coming back to the hand that launched it, but the white metal ring closed down to the size of his diminishing desire. And the blood was still there.
"Don't worry, Reverend, that's just a little blood. Do you want to see more?"
And then there was pain in that most delicate place. Reverend Wadson looked down in horror at the growing red drippings.
He grabbed the ring but could not tug it off without tearing his flesh.
"Ah kill you," bellowed the massive man.
"And you lose it, sweety," said Ingrid and she held up a little black box the size of a box of restaurant souvenir matches. It had a small red plastic toggle switch set in the center. She moved the switch forward and the pain in his groin eased. She moved it back and it felt as if someone were sticking pins in a circle around his organ.
"Close up your pants, Reverend. We're going out."
"S'right. Ah gots speech to make. Yessuh, black is beauty. De mos' beautiful. Got to get on wif it right now. Racism, it doan sleep. No suh. Black, it you basic beauty."
"Can the crap, Reverend. You're coming with me."
"Ah's bleeding," wailed Wadson.
"Don't worry. You'll live."
Wadson's big brown eyes looked at the blond woman with distrust.
"C'mon, I didn't go to this trouble to mug you, Reverend."
Reverend Wadson stuffed a used Kleenex around the metallic ring that bound him like a slave. He hoped that it might loosen and with a jerk he could get it off. But it did not loosen and he realized that the little box she held was stronger than a gun. There was some sort of radio wave the box operated on that made the ring smaller or larger. If he were to get a wall between him and that thing, why, the ring might slip off easily.
"If radio contact is broken," said the blond, "you lose everything. The ring closes for good and goodbye your preaching instrument."
Reverend Wadson smiled and handed over his pearl-handled revolver, handle first. He made sure he was always near her as they left the hotel. But not too close. Whenever his big brown hammy paws got near the instrument Ingrid carried, he felt a stinging pain in a most painful place.
They got into Ingrid's car. She drove and told him to get into the back seat where he sat with his hands hovering over his groin. It dawned on him that this was the first waking moment of his adult life that he was with a beautiful woman without organizing some program to get himself into her pants.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The building was only three blocks from Macy's in the center of Manhattan but when Macy's and Gimbel's rang their closing bells, the whole area cleared out as if it were a blackboard and God had wiped the wet eraser of night over it.
Reverend Wadson slumped deeper into the back seat of the car as it pulled to a stop in front of an old lime-stained brick building that looked like a hiring hall for rats. He looked cautiously out
his side window, then craned his neck to look behind the car.
"Ah doan laks dis place," he said. "This neighborhood not safe dis time of night."
"I'll protect you, Porkchop," Ingrid said.
"Ain' got my piece," said Wadson. "Ain' nobody got no right make somebody go into some place like dis without him got a piece to protects him."
"Like those old white people you turned loose in that jungle tonight? That got burned alive?"
"Weren't my fault," Reverend Wadson said. If he could just get her talking, maybe he could get his hands on that little black box she kept pressed between her legs as she drove. "Dey volunteers. Dey volunteer to make up fo' centuries of white oppression."
Ingrid carefully took off her driving gloves. She seemed in no hurry to leave the car, as if she were waiting for a signal. Wadson moved up slightly on the edge of the seat. One big hand around her neck and her own hands would probably fly up to her throat to save herself. Then he could pluck that little black box from between her legs. But carefully. Carefully.
"They were poor old people who didn't know any better," Ingrid said. "They believed all that bilge that they heard from fakers like you and others just like you. You should have protected them."
"Not my job to give dem protection. Gubbermint not give me 'nough money to give de protection. Gubbermint cheat de black man again and now try to blame dat accident on the black man. Oh, when will it end, dis oppression?" he moaned.
"The strong have an obligation to protect the weak," said Ingrid. "In the old colonies of the western world, that used to be called the white man's burden. Nowadays, in these jungles…" she paused and started to turn toward him "… it's the jungle bunny's burden."
Wadson had almost reached the edge of his seat when Ingrid turned and gave him a full bright smile of perfect pearlescent teeth. "You move another inch toward me, darkie, and you're going to be singing soprano for the rest of your life."
Reverend Wadson slumped back in the corner of the seat again.
"Ah still doan lak dis place," he said.
"If we're attacked by a marauding band, you can give them all your all-inen-are-brothers sermon. That should raise their consciousness. Assuming they have any."
She seemed satisfied that Wadson had given up any aggressive plans, so she turned back and continued looking out the front window. Just to remind him, she touched the red toggle switch atop the black box.
"All right, all right," Wadson said hurriedly then groaned in relief as the pressure was relieved slightly.
The pain was bearable but it was always there. Wadson didn't trust that Ingrid not to mess with that switch so he sat still. Very still. His day would come. One day, he'd get her and she wouldn't have that little black box and he would have his gun and he would do his number on her and then when he was all done, he would turn her over to the Saxon Lords for a toy and they would teach her not to mess with the black man, not to subjugate him and his nobility to her own…
Someone was coming down the street. Three men moved along toward them. Black men. Young black men with big floppy hats and platform shoes and skin-tight trousers. Was that who she was waiting for?
The three men stopped ten feet from the car, peering through the windshield. One bent closer for a better look, saw Ingrid's white blond hair, and pointed toward her. The other two bent over for a better look. They smiled, bright sunshine smiles in their midnight faces. Hitching up their trousers, they sauntered over to the car.
Go 'way, Reverend Wadson thought. Go 'way, we don' want no trouble wif you. But he said nothing.
The biggest of the three young men, who looked to be eighteen years old, tapped on the window near Ingrid's left ear.
She looked at him coolly, then rolled the window down two inches.
"Yes?"
"You lost, lady? We help you if you is lost,"
"I'm not lost, thank you."
"Then why you waiting here? Hah. Why you here?"
"I like it here."
"You waiting for a man, you doan have to waits no mo'. Now you gots three mens."
"Wonderful," Ingrid said. "Why don't we all make a date to meet sometime at the monkey house at the zoo?"
"Doan have to wait for no dates to meet wif us. We heah now and we ready for you." He turned to his two companions. "Ain' we ready for her?"
One nodded. The other said, "Oooooh, is we ever?"
"It's been nice talking to you boys. Good night," Ingrid said.
"Wait a minute. Ain' no boys you talking to. No boys. We's men. Where you getting that boys? You doan go doing no boying around heah. We's men. You want to see how big mens we is, we shows you."
He reached down to unzip his fly.
"Take it out and I'll take it off," Ingrid said.
"Take it out," said one of the other youths.
"Yeah. Take it out," said the other. "She 'fraid your black power. Show her your tower of power."
The first youth was confused now. He looked at Ingrid.
"Yo wanna see it?"
"No," she said. "I want your lips. I want your big beautiful lips to kiss."
The boy swelled up and smirked at his two friends. "Well, little foxy lady, ain' no trouble wiffen dat dere." He bent over and put his face toward the car. He puckered his lips in the two-inch opening at the top of the window.
Ingrid stuck Reverend Wadson's pearl-handled revolver into the big open mouth.
"Here, Sambo, suck on this for a while."
The young black man recoiled. "Sheeit," he said.
"Nice to meet you. My name's Ingrid."
"Dis bitch crazy," said the man, wiping the taste of the gun barrel from his mouth.
"This what?" Ingrid asked, pointing the barrel of the gun at the man's stomach.
"Ah sorry. Lady. Come on, boys, we go now. Yes'm, we go now."
"Have a nice day, nigger," Ingrid said.
She pointed the gun at him again as he moved back a step.
"Yes'm," he said. "Yes'm." He put an arm around the shoulder of one of his friends and moved quickly away from the car, careful to make sure that his friend was between him and the gun barrel.
Ingrid rolled up the window. Reverend Wadson breathed again. They had never seen him, hidden in the dark corner of the rear seat. Ingrid seemed content not to talk and Wadson decided not to try to get her to change her mind.
They waited in silence another ten minutes before Ingrid said, "All right. We can go up now." As Reverend Wadson got out of the car, she said, "Lock it up. Your friends may come back and eat the seats if you don't." She waited, then nodded to Wadson to lead the way down the street. She followed, her fingers on the red toggle switch of the little black box.
"Up here," she ordered as they passed in front of a three-story stone tenement. Wadson led the way up to the top floor. There was only one door on the floor and Ingrid pushed Wadson through it, into a large, spartan apartment where Tony Spesk, ne Colonel Speskaya, sat on a brown flowered sofa, reading Commentary Magazine with a thin smile on his pale face.
He nodded to Ingrid as she entered, and told Wadson to sit down in the chair facing the couch.
"You are here, Reverend Wadson, because we need your services."
"Who you?" Wadson asked.
Spesk grinned, a large wide smile. "We are the people who control your life. That's all you need to know."
With a sudden flash of inspiration, Wadson asked, "You communists?"
"You might say that," said Spesk.
"Ah communist too," said Wadson.
"Oh, really?"
"Yeah. Ah believes in share and share alike. Equality. Nobody being rich ober de bodies ob de poor. Ah believes in dat."
"How droll," said Spesk. He stood up from the couch, carefully placing the magazine on one of the arms. "And what is your viewpoint of the Hegelian dichotomy?"
"Hah?" said Reverend Wadson.
"What do you think of the revolt of the sailors at Kronstadt?" Spesk asked. "The Menshevik heresy?"
"Hah
?"
"Of course, you support the labor theory of value as modified by the research of Belchov?"
"Hah?"
"I hope, Reverend Wadson," Spesk said, "that you live to see the Communist victory. Because two days later, you'll be in a field picking cotton. Ingrid, call and make sure our other visitor is on his way."
Ingrid nodded and went from the large living room into a smaller room, closing the door behind her. Wadson noticed that she had placed the small black box on the arm of the couch near Spesk. His chance at last. An opening.
When the door had closed behind Ingrid, he smiled at Spesk.
"That one bad woman."
"Oh?" said Spesk.
"Yeah. She a racist. She hate black men. She committing a 'trocity on me."
"Too bad, Wadson. Next to me, she looks like Albert Schweitzer."
His eyes had a strange hard glint in them and while Reverend Wadson didn't know who Albert Schweitzer was, because he didn't pay too much attention to the comings and goings of Jews, he decided Spesk's comment pretty well sealed off the prospect of a counter-conspiracy against Ingrid. And the black box was still too far away.
"Listen, Mister…"
"Spesk. Tony Spesk."
"Well, listen Mr. Spesk, she got dis ring on me and it hurts. You fixing to let me loose?"
"A day or two if you behave yourself. Never, if you cause me any trouble."
"I causes you no trouble," Wadson said. "I be the least troubling man you ever likely to find."
"Good, because I need you for something. Sit on the floor and listen."
Wadson moved off the chair and lowered himself to the floor, carefully, as if he had raw eggs in his back pockets.
"There is a white man. He travels with an old Oriental. I want them."
"You gots dem. Where is they?"
"I don't know. I saw them down in your neighborhood. Near the house where that old woman, Mrs. Mueller, was killed."
Mrs. Mueller? Mrs. Mueller? That was the old woman the government was so interested in. They had been looking for something. And whatever it was Wadson had it. Her apartment had yielded only junk, but there was a strange-looking device that the Saxon Lords had brought Wadson to try to fence.
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