The Bootlegger Read online

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cussler, Clive.

  The bootlegger : an Isaac Bell adventure / Clive Cussler and Justin Scott.

  p. cm.—(An Isaac Bell Adventure ; 7)

  ISBN 978-0-698-14073-8

  1. Bell, Isaac (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Fiction. 3. Prohibition—Fiction. I. Scott, Justin. II. Title.

  PS3553.U75B66 2014 2013044314

  813'.54—dc23

  Endpapers and interior illustrations by Roland Dahlquist

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Janet

  Contents

  Also by Clive Cussler

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Book Two

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Book Three

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Book Four

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  1

  TWO MEN IN EXPENSIVE CLOTHES, a bootlegger and his bodyguard, dangled a bellboy upside down from the Hotel Gotham’s parapet.

  The bodyguard held him by his ankles, nineteen stories above 55th Street. It was night. No one saw, and the boy’s screams were drowned out by the Fifth Avenue buses, the El thundering up Sixth, and trolley bells clanging on Madison.

  The bootlegger shouted down at him, “Every bellhop in the hotel sells my booze! Whatsamatter with you?”

  Church spires and mansion turrets reached for him like teeth.

  “Last chance, sonny.”

  A tall man in a summer suit glided silently across the roof. He drew a Browning automatic from his coat and a throwing knife from his boot. He mounted the parapet and pressed the pistol to the bodyguard’s temple.

  “Hold tight.”

  The bodyguard froze. The bootlegger shrank from the blade pricking his throat.

  “Who the—”

  “Isaac Bell. Van Dorn Agency. Sling him in on the count of two.”

  “If you shoot, we drop him.”

  “You’ll have holes in your heads before he passes the eighteenth floor . . . On my count: One! Pull him up. Two! Swing him over the edge . . . Lay him on the roof— Are you O.K., son?”

  The bellboy had tears in his eyes. He nodded, head bobbing like a puppet.

  “Go downstairs,” Isaac Bell told him, sliding his knife back in his boot and shifting the automatic to his left hand. “Tell your boss Chief Investigator Bell said to give you the week off and a fifty-dollar bonus for standing up to bootleggers.”

  The bodyguard chose his moment well. When the tall detective reached down to help the boy stand, he swung a heavy, ring-studded fist. Skillfully thrown with the full power of a big man’s muscle behind it, it was blocked before it traveled four inches.

  A bone-cracking counterpunch staggered him. His knees buckled and he collapsed on the tar. The bootlegger shot empty hands into the sky. “O.K., O.K.”

  • • •

  THE VAN DORN DETECTIVE
AGENCY—an operation with field offices in every city in the country and many abroad—maintained warm relations with the police. But Isaac Bell spotted trouble when he walked into the 54th Street precinct house.

  The desk sergeant couldn’t meet his eye.

  Bell reached across the high desk to shake his hand anyway. This particular sergeant’s father, retired roundsman Paddy O’Riordan, augmented his pension as a part-time night watchman for Van Dorn Protective Services.

  “How’s your dad?”

  Paddy was doing fine.

  “Any chance of interviewing the bootlegger we caught at the Gotham?”

  “The big guy’s at the hospital getting his jaw wired.”

  “I want the little one, the boss.”

  “Surety company paid his bond.”

  Bell was incensed. “Bail? For attempted murder?”

  “They expect the protection they pay for,” said Sergeant O’Riordan, poker-faced. “What I would do next time, Mr. Bell, instead of calling us, throw them in the river.”

  Bell watched for the cop’s reaction when he replied, “I reckoned Coasties would fish them out.”

  O’Riordan agreed with a world-weary “Yeah,” confirming the rumors that even some officers of the United States Coast Guard—the arm of the Treasury Department charged with enforcing Prohibition at sea—were in the bootleggers’ pockets.

  Starting this afternoon, thought Bell, the Van Dorns would put a stop to that.

  • • •

  ONE BIG HAND firm on the throttle of his S-1 Flying Yacht, the other on the wheel, Isaac Bell began racing down the East River for take-off speed. He dodged a railcar float and steered into a rapidly narrowing slot between a tugboat pushing a fleet of coal barges and another towing a bright red barge of dynamite. Joseph Van Dorn, the burly, scarlet-whiskered founder of the detective agency, sat beside him in the open cockpit, lost in thought.

  The Greenpoint ferry surged out of the 23rd Street Terminal straight in their path. The sight of the slab-sided vessel, suddenly enormous in their windshield, made Joseph Van Dorn sit up straight. A brave and cool-headed man, he asked, “Do we have time to stop?”

  Bell shoved his throttle wide open.

  The Liberty engine mounted behind them on the wing thundered.

  He hauled hard on the wheel.

  The Loening S-1 held speed and altitude records but was notoriously slow to respond to the controls. Bell had replaced its stick and pedals with a combined steering and elevating Blériot wheel, in hopes of making it nimbler.

  Passengers on the Greenpoint ferry backed from the rail.

  Bell gave the wheel one last firm tug.

  The Flying Yacht lunged off the water and cleared the ferry with a foot to spare.

  “There ought to be a law against flying like you,” said Van Dorn.

  Bell flew under the Williamsburg Bridge and between the spotting masts of a battleship docked at the Navy Yard. “Sorry to distract you from your dire thoughts.”

  “You’ll distract us both to kingdom come.”

  Bell headed across leaf-green Brooklyn at one hundred twenty miles an hour.

  Van Dorn resumed pondering how to deal with misfortune.

  The World War had upended his agency. Some of his best detectives had been killed fighting in the trenches. Others died shockingly young in the influenza epidemic. A post-war recession in the business world was bankrupting clients. And only yesterday, Isaac Bell had discovered that bootleggers, who were getting rich quick off Prohibition by bribing cops and politicians, had corrupted two of his best house detectives at the Hotel Gotham.

  Bell climbed to three thousand feet before they reached the Rockaways. Where the white sand beach slid into the ocean like a flaying knife, he turned and headed east above the string of barrier islands that sheltered Long Island from the raw fury of the Atlantic. A booze smugglers’ paradise of hidden bays and marshes, inlets, creeks and canals stretched in the lee of those islands as far as he could see.

  Thirty miles from New York, he banked the plane out over the steel-blue ocean and began to descend.

  • • •

  “CAN I COME IN THE LAUNCH, CHIEF?”

  Seaman Third Class Asa Somers, the youngest sailor on the Coast Guard cutter CG-9, was beside himself. He had finally made it to sea, patrolling the Fire Island coast for rumrunners on a ship with a cannon and machine guns. Now the fastest flying boat in the world—a high-wing pusher monoplane—was looping down from the sky. And if the roar of its four-hundred-horsepower Liberty motor wasn’t thrilling enough, it was bringing a famous crime fighter he’d read about in Boys’ Life and the Police Gazette—Mr. Joseph Van Dorn, whose army of private detectives vowed: “We never give up! Never!”

  “What’s got you all stirred up?” growled the white-haired chief petty officer.

  “I want to meet Mr. Van Dorn when he lands.”

  “He ain’t gonna land.”

  “Why not?”

  “Open your eyes, boy. See that swell? Four-foot seas’ll kick that flying boat ass over teakettle.”

  “Maybe he’ll give it a whirl,” Somers said, with little hope. Flight Magazine praised the S-1’s speed a lot more than its handling.

  “If he does,” said the chief, “you can come in the launch to pick up the bodies.”

  Up on the flying bridge, CG-9’s skipper expressed the same opinion.

  “Stand by with grappling hooks.”

  The flying boat circled lower. When it whipped past, skimming wave tops, Somers recognized Van Dorn, who was seated beside the pilot in the glass-surrounded, open-roofed cockpit, by his red whiskers bristling in the slipstream.

  The roar of the big twelve-cylinder engine faded to a whisper.

  “Lunatic,” growled the chief.

  But young Somers watched the Air Yacht’s ailerons. The wing flaps fluttered up and down almost faster than the eye could see as the pilot fought to keep her on an even keel. Back in her tail unit, the horizontal stabilizer bit the air, and down she came, steady as a locomotive on rails. Her long V-shaped hull touched the water, flaring a vapor-thin wake. Her wing floats skimmed the swell, and she settled lightly.

  “Somers! Man the bow line.”

  The boy leaped into the launch and they motored across the hundred yards that separated the cutter and the flying boat. The huge four-bladed propeller behind the wing stopped spinning, and the pilot, who had made an almost impossible landing look easy, climbed down from the cockpit onto the running board that extended around the front of the rocking hull. He was a tall, lean, fair-haired man with a no-nonsense expression on his handsome face. His golden hair and thick mustache were impeccably groomed. His tailored suit and the broad-brimmed hat pulled tight on his head were both white.

  Somers dropped the bow line.

  “What in blazes are you doing?” bellowed the chief.

  “I bet that’s Isaac Bell!”

  “I don’t care if it’s Mary Pickford! Don’t foul that line!”

  The boy re-coiled the line, his gaze locked on the pilot. It had to be him. Bell’s picture was never in a magazine. But reports on Van Dorn always mentioned his chief investigator’s white suit and it suddenly struck Somers that the camera-shy detective could go incognito in a flash simply by changing his clothes.

  “Heave a line, son!” he called. “Come on, you can do it—on the jump!”

  Somers remembered to let the coil reel out of his palm as the chief had taught him. To his eternal gratitude the rope fell into Bell’s big hand.

  “Good shot.” He pulled the plane and the boat together.

  Somers asked, “Are you Isaac Bell, sir?”

  “I’m his butler. Mum’s the word—Bell is still passed out in a speakeasy. Now, let’s get Mr. Van Dorn into your boat without dropping him in the drink. Ready?”

  Bell reached to help Van Dorn, a heavily built man in his fifties with a prominent roman nose and hooded eyes. Van Dorn ignored Bell’s hand. Bell seized his elbow and guided him toward So
mers with a conspiratorial grin.

  “Hang on tight, son, he’s not as spry as he looks.”

  Behind his grin, Bell’s blue eyes were cool and alert. He watched carefully as the older man stepped between the bouncing craft, and he relaxed only after Somers had him safely aboard.

  “What’s your name, sailor?” asked Van Dorn in a voice that had the faintest lilt of an Irish accent.

  “Seaman Third Class Asa Somers, sir.”

  “Lied about your age?”

  “How did you know?” Somers whispered.

  “I worked that dodge to join the Marines.” He shot a thumbs-up toward the stern. “All aboard, Chief. Back to the ship.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The boat wheeled away from the seaplane.

  Van Dorn called to Bell, “Watch yourself at the Gotham. Don’t forget, those shameless SOBs have fifty pounds on you.”

  If a mountain lion could smile, thought Asa Somers, it would smile like Isaac Bell when he answered, “Forget? Never.”

  • • •

  JOSEPH VAN DORN cast a skeptical eye on CG-9, a surplus submarine chaser the U.S. Navy had palmed off on the Coast Guard for Prohibition patrol. With a crow’s nest above a flying bridge, six-cylinder gasoline engines driving triple screws, and a three-inch Poole gun mounted on the foredeck, she had been built to spot, chase, and sink slow-moving German U-boats—not fast rumrunners.

  She’d been worked hard in the war and scantly maintained since. The drone of pumps told him that her wooden hull had worked open many a leak. Her motor valves were chattering, even at half speed. She would still pack a punch with the Poole gun and a brace of .30-06 Lewis machine guns on the bridge wings. But even if she somehow managed to get in range of a rumrunner, who was trained to fire them?

  Her middle-aged skipper was pouch-eyed and red-nosed. Her aged chief petty officer looked like a Spanish-American War vet. And the crew—with the exception of young Somers, who had scrambled eagerly up the mast to the lookout perch in the crow’s nest as soon as they shipped the launch—were pretty much the quality Van Dorn expected of recruits paid twenty-one dollars a month.

  The skipper greeted him warily.

  Van Dorn disarmed him with the amiable smile that had sent many a criminal to the penitentiary wondering why he had allowed this jovial gent close enough to clamp a steely hand on the scruff of his neck. A twinkle in the eye and a warm chortle in the voice fostered the notion of an easygoing fellow.