The Bootlegger Read online

  “How many were arrested in the Palmer Raids?”

  “At least ten thousand,” Grady answered.

  “How many were deported?”

  “Eight hundred.”

  “One in twelve? That puts Herr Kozlov in select company.”

  “Or just unlucky.”

  “How so?”

  “He got deported early, before Palmer’s fellow cabinet members accused the attorney general of seeing a Red behind every bush. Palmer was scheming to deport tens of thousands. But pretty soon the Red Scare was leaking steam.”

  Bell shook his head in puzzlement. How did any of this get him closer to the rum gang that shot Joe Van Dorn?

  Grady gathered his notes. “How’s the Boss doing?”

  Bell brightened. “Better. Much better. The infection did not take hold. Dorothy just telephoned that he wants to see me. The docs said they’ll let me in tomorrow if he keeps improving.”

  “Thank God. Give him my best. By the way, Isaac, this Genickschuss neck shot you told me about? We looked into it. Pauline was right. The Cheka perfected the technique.”

  “I haven’t seen her wrong yet,” said Bell, and, with that in mind, sent another Marconigram to the Nieuw Amsterdam.

  JOHNNY IS JOHANN KOZLOV.

  RED SCARE DEPORTED TO GERMANY.

  KOZLOV ASSOCIATES?

  HOW DID KOZLOV RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES?

  In the event she had landed already, he sent copies of it by transatlantic cable care of the Holland America Line to their Rotterdam pier and to the Van Dorn field office in Berlin.

  • • •

  “I’VE DISCOVERED ONE MAN who actually knew Johann Kozlov,” Isaac Bell told Marion over a midnight supper of Welsh rarebit and a bottle of Mumm champagne from the cellar Archie Abbott had installed in his East Side town house when the Volstead Act was passed. They were in their suite at the St. Regis, Bell sprawled in a comfortable armchair, Marion lounging on the couch. Happily home from a long day of chasing vaudevillians around Fort Lee, she had dressed for supper in a green silk peignoir that matched her eyes.

  “Unfortunately, he’s somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a tramp steamer that doesn’t have a radio.”

  Bell often talked over his cases with his wife, whose judgment he respected mightily. Marion had a law degree from Stanford University, a razor-sharp mind, and a knack for approaching clues from an unexpected angle. She was unusually observant. She was also an optimist.

  “At least you have a name. And Grady’s Research boys say Kozlov joined the Communist Party. And you’re pretty sure he was a Wobbly.”

  “But I can’t reckon how an anti-capitalist who wants to abolish the wage system becomes a rumrunner.”

  “Maybe he was not that dedicated an anti-capitalist.”

  “Dedicated enough to get deported,” said Bell.

  “The Palmer Raids were an abomination,” said Marion, who had many foreign-born friends in the moving picture business.

  Bell said, “The vast majority were turned loose.”

  “I had one friend, a French actor, who was released within a week. Another, a brilliant Russian camera operator, spent three months in a filthy jail.”

  “At least Mr. Palmer got his comeuppance when his party decided he was not their ideal candidate for president.”

  “Funny, isn’t it?”

  “What’s funny?”

  “Your Herr Kozlov had the last laugh when he made his way back to New York to radicalize the sailors’ union.”

  “Until he became a rumrunner.”

  “Which,” said Marion, “you still find to be an unusual change of career.”

  She paused for his answer, but he did not speak.

  Bell was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the case. Marion’s peignoir clung intriguingly, and she had loosened her hair, which she usually wore up to keep it out of the camera eyepiece. It framed her beautiful face like gold leaf.

  “Don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you find it an unusual change of career?”

  “Why don’t we sleep on it?” he asked.

  She eyed him over the rim of her champagne flute. “Yes. We both have busy mornings.”

  “Then we would be doubly wise,” said Isaac Bell, “to go to bed.”

  “Wise,” Marion agreed. She put down her glass and headed into the bedroom.

  Bell followed close behind.

  “But!” said Marion, her eyes suddenly flashing.

  “But what?”

  “Johann Kozlov risked arrest, imprisonment, even his life, sneaking back into the country. Then he risked exposure by organizing the sailors’ strike. Labor organizers are arrested routinely. He was willing to risk getting caught. Wouldn’t you call that dedicated?”

  Bell said, “But that does not change the fact that less than two months later, Johann Kozlov was wounded running rum.”

  “But does that mean that he changed his career?”

  “That,” said Bell, “is a very interesting question. You’re asking, was he running rum for some other reason than getting rich quick?”

  Marion climbed under the sheets. “Are you ever coming to bed?”

  13

  PAULINE GRANDZAU trotted briskly down the Nieuw Amsterdam’s gangway, carrying her bag in one hand and Isaac’s Marconigram in the other. She deciphered the Van Dorn code in her head.

  Isaac’s last query was the easiest.

  HOW DID KOZLOV RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES?

  Steamer ticket and false passport, if he had the means. Or try to snag a berth as a sailor and desert when the ship landed, which was difficult with tens of thousands of merchant seamen on the beach waiting for shipping to recover from the end of the war. Or, if Herr Kozlov was especially valuable to the Communist Party, then passage would be arranged by the Comintern Maritime Section, which not only organized seamen’s mutinies but used their network to move Communist agents around the world disguised as ships’ officers and seamen. Kozlov’s execution by Genickschuss suggested that he could have been that valuable, an operative who knew too much to be allowed to talk.

  “Red Scare deported to Germany” and “Kozlov associates?” were matters that she had to address, gingerly and face-to-face, with her contacts in the police and the Foreign Service. A copy of the Marconigram was waiting with her steamer trunk, courtesy of the Holland America Line’s chief purser, which showed her exactly how important Isaac thought this Kozlov was. She would find a third copy at the office.

  She took the train to Amsterdam, and on to Berlin, and arrived in Germany’s capital as night fell. Outside the railroad station, she found the streets of the government districts in Tiergarten and Mitte blocked by thousands of boys singing the “Internationale” and chanting, “Up and do battle! Up and do battle!”

  Tense security police were guarding banks, newspaper offices, and public buildings.

  Searchlights played across the façades. Armed bicyclists patrolled the streets in the uniform of the anti-Communist Freikorps. Headlines on news kiosks shrilled the battle cries, and fears, of the political factions vying for power in post-war Germany:

  COMMUNISTS TO DYNAMITE MONUMENTS

  ULTRA-REACTIONARY ARMY OFFICERS TO LAUNCH COUP

  BOLSHEVIKS BURN BOURGEOISIE NEWSPAPERS

  FREIKORPS COMMANDEER POLICE

  REDS HIDE RIFLES IN MINE SHAFTS

  Provocateurs abounded. There was unrest in Saxony, open rebellion in the city of Halle, and in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, rumor that the Communists would hoist the red flag over the shipyards.

  Pauline gave up trying to get to her office and retreated to the train station to telephone central police headquarters. All lines were busy. Back outside, the streetcars and trams had stopped running. She refused to be stymied. Berlin was her city, and she was proud to know every neighborhood and nearly every street. She had had the briefest apprenticeship of any Van Dorn field chief, but she had observed her
mentor, Art Curtis, in action and had learned by his example to cultivate friends in places both high and low.

  She waded through the crowds, racking her brain for whom among her network of friends and informants in government, business, the military, police, and criminals could help her find at least the beginning of Kozlov’s trail.

  She cut down to the Unter den Linden and walked a mile on the boulevard through thickening crowds. The police headquarters at Alexanderplatz was surrounded by poor and chaotic neighborhoods fought over by Reds and anti-Communists. The building looked under siege behind a wall of Freikorps trucks and police armored cars parked around it end to end.

  She hurried back to the train station to send telegrams to her police contacts. Thankfully, the telegraph was working. But only one friend wired back.

  PRATER.

  She walked as fast as she could to the Prater Garten, a beer garden set under chestnut trees in Prenzlauer Berg. It was just far enough beyond Mitte to offer sanctuary from the tumult shaking the center of the city. Klaxons could be heard faintly, accompanied by a rumble of armored car engines, but at least the demonstrations and fights were too far off to be seen.

  She spied a cadaverous man at a table under the trees and took a chair across from him. He had been the powerful Kommandeur of Berlin’s center Polizeigruppen until he resisted Freikorps demands. Desperate to regain his power, he was hungry for information. Give, Isaac Bell had taught her, and you shall receive.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  He eyed her bleakly and puffed smoke from a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Finally, he muttered, “The worst part of being demoted into semi-retirement is that beautiful private detectives no longer call on me for favors.”

  “This must come as a great relief to your wife.”

  Fritz Richter laughed out loud. “Pauline, Pauline, you always did brighten the day.”

  Pauline answered him formally. “You will please remember, Herr Polizeikommandeur, that I asked for information—not favors—and I always give you information back.”

  “It’s been too long a time, Fräulein Privatdetektive.”

  “I’m home from the United States only this evening. You are the first old acquaintance I have called on.”

  “Go back, is my advice. Make a new life in a new country. Our Germany is exploding again.”

  “I don’t want a new country.”

  “There’s a new one coming whether you want it or not. Our warring Nationalists and Communists and Social Democrats and National Socialists and Freikorps and Red Hundreds—a plague on all their houses—are not fighting for their supposed ideals. They are fighting for the spoils of the World War.”

  “Our chief investigator told me that not ten days ago in New York.”

  “How unusual. I don’t think of Americans as taking the long view. Did he tell you, too, that the winner—the best organized and most ruthless—will dictate the future of ordinary people who are trying to avoid the fight?”

  “Semi-retirement has brought out the gloomy philosopher in you.”

  “There will be no gracious winners, no knights in shining armor.” He signaled the waiter. “May I buy you beer, young lady?”

  “No. Let Van Dorn pay.” She ordered beer and, suddenly realizing she was starving: “I haven’t eaten all day. Will you join me?”

  Richter nodded and lit a new cigarette from the ember of the old. He wouldn’t eat but she ordered anyway. “Weisswurst.”

  Richter raised his glass. “Prost!”

  “Cheers! I’m tracking a man named Johann Kozlov who was deported last year by the Americans. He made his way back to America, where he was shot in the Cheka way.”

  “Comintern. Yes?”

  “I would say, yes. Who can I talk to?”

  He eyed her appraisingly. “What is it worth to you?”

  She returned a look that put Fritz Richter in mind of an alpine blizzard. “If I would not sleep with an important police commander for information, why would I sleep with a demoted, semi-retired old lecher?”

  Before he could think of an answer, she broke into a smile that left him no choice but to smile back, duck his head, and murmur, “You can’t blame an old lecher for trying.”

  Which led to an introduction to someone she did not know at the Foreign Office.

  • • •

  AT BELLEVUE HOSPITAL, Isaac Bell found Joseph Van Dorn propped up on pillows and gazing expectantly at the door. He had a week’s growth of new beard on his cheeks, which made him look a little healthier. His eyes were clearer but hardly piercing, and Bell had to work hard to put a smile on his face. The founder of the Van Dorn Detective Agency looked old and very, very tired.

  “There you are,” Van Dorn whispered.

  “Came as soon as they let me. How are you?”

  Dorothy Van Dorn and David Novicki were hovering. Novicki said, “I was just entertaining our pal here with tales of my retirement, wasn’t I, Joe? ‘Barnacle Bill’ is home from the sea. Joe won’t believe that I was driving a trolley on Long Island.”

  Van Dorn whispered, “Passengers have no idea what a hand they have at the helm.”

  “Trolley went bust,” says Novicki. “I’m going to drive a taxi.”

  “Dorothy,” Van Dorn whispered. “Why don’t you and Dave grab yourself some lunch. I need to talk with Isaac.”

  “Not too much,” she said.

  “We’ll behave ourselves. Don’t you worry.”

  Dorothy kissed him on the forehead and leveled her silvery gray eyes on Bell. “Go easy. He’s not out of the woods yet. But he’s been clamoring to see you.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t tire him.”

  Van Dorn waited until his wife and friend were out the door. Then he asked Bell in a hoarse whisper, “How’s it going in Detroit?”

  “Worse than we thought.”

  Bell explained that the entire field office was being undermined by corruption, including the supposedly loyal detective Van Dorn had put in charge.

  “We have to clear ’em out and rebuild from scratch.”

  “Send Kansas City Eddie Edwards,” Van Dorn replied in a voice so low Bell could barely hear. “He’ll straighten them out.”

  “Eddie’s not getting any younger,” said Bell. “And Detroit’s getting tougher. I sent Texas Walt.”

  “Hatfield? Isn’t he out west, making moving pictures?”

  “Walt’s taking time off.”

  “I hope he hasn’t gone soft. All that Hollywood high living.”

  “If Walt’s gone soft, it doesn’t show.”

  Van Dorn closed his eyes. He lay silent, his chest barely moving with his breath. When he finally opened his eyes again, Bell said, “I do have better news about Protective Services.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Darnedest thing, but when the word got out that Clayton and Ellis were let go, our hotel dicks took notice all around the country.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I sent agents disguised as bootleggers to offer bribes.”

  “Good for you!”

  “The boys told them to get lost. Several were so emphatic, they threw punches.”

  “That is a great relief. How are we doing with the Coast Guard?”

  “I’m sorry, Joe. They canceled the contract.”

  “Damnation!” Van Dorn erupted, which set him to coughing. Bell held a handkerchief for him and then gave him water. Van Dorn caught his breath. “I was really hoping we could parley new government work out of that. I got shot and lost the client. No justice in the world.”

  Bell was relieved to see a wry smile on Van Dorn’s bristly cheeks. He said, “I’ll try and learn what our chances are when I finally get through to the Coast Guard chief of staff.”

  “O.K. . . . How are we doing with the gang who shot up the cutter?”

  “One of them showed up at Roosevelt Hospital, wounded. Before I could interview him, someone killed him.”

  Van Dorn whispered,
“What for?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they thought you were dead and they’d be facing murder charges if they didn’t kill the witness. At any rate, I almost caught the guy who shot him, but I lost him. I doubt I’d recognize him if he walked in the door. But we got the dead man’s name. Alien radical, deported to Germany, sneaked back in. I have Pauline working on who his friends were over there.”

  “That’s a good start.”

  “I am hoping you can help me, hoping you might remember a little more.”

  “Shoot,” Van Dorn said weakly.

  “The Coast Guard still won’t talk to me. So all I know about what happened out there is secondhand from the harbor cops. And the harbor’s boiling with rumors. What do you remember about a black boat?”

  “It was going like a bat out of hell. Fastest boat I ever saw, Isaac. Had to be doing fifty miles an hour. It had a Lewis gun and a fellow who knew how to use it. And it was armored.”

  “An armored speedboat?”

  “Bulletproof glass in the windshield, too. I thought for sure I’d nailed him. Bullets bounced off it like rain. The only men I hit were on the other boat. The taxi.”

  “Was the black boat guarding the taxi?”

  “That was certainly the effect. Here’s the thing, Isaac.” Van Dorn sat up taller, his eyes glowing.

  “Take it easy. Talk slowly. Don’t push yourself. O.K.?”

  “O.K.,” Van Dorn whispered. “Here’s the situation. My head’s clearing, and I’m remembering that was one heck of a gun battle.”

  “Machine guns and armor . . . I should say so.”

  Van Dorn waved for silence. “I’ve been in plenty scraps, but not like that one. I thought I was back in Panama. Do you know what I mean?”

  Bell nodded. Decades ago, as a young U.S. Marine, Joe Van Dorn had landed on the Isthmus in the middle of a revolution.

  “Those boys on the black boat knew their business. They used their speed to hold an angle of engagement the Coasties couldn’t cover with their cannon. They’d been to war before.”