The Bootlegger Read online

  14

  AS NEWTOWN STORMS had predicted to Marat Zolner, the stock market began to move up.

  “I can’t promise every week will be as exciting as this one, Prince André,” Storms told him on the telephone. “We were especially fortunate with a New York Central offering. The firm had an inside track, shall we say. Your ten thousand dollars is now worth twenty.”

  “I need ten thousand of it immediately,” said Zolner.

  “May I strongly counsel, Your Highness, that you plow this windfall back into your account? I see new opportunities every day.”

  “I see one, too,” said Zolner. “Fern will pick up the money this afternoon.”

  That evening, Marat Zolner took the ten thousand to the Bronx and paid the owner of Morrison Motor Express for a controlling interest in a fleet of seven-and-a-half-ton Mack AC “Bulldog” trucks. He dispatched four of the sturdy, slope-nosed, long-haul vehicles three hundred fifty miles to Champlain, New York, on the Canadian border.

  Zolner gave command of the convoy to the powerfully built and aptly nicknamed Trucks O’Neal. Next to each driver rode a guard armed with cash for the booze, the names of the customs agents to pay off, and a Thompson submachine gun to either defend the convoy or, if they ran into a New York–bound shipment, cut short the two-day trip to Canada and hijack it.

  • • •

  DESPITE, or because of, an introduction by retired police commander Richter, the Foreign Service secretary did not invite Pauline Grandzau to his office. Pauline suggested they meet at the Kronprinzenpalais, where the National Gallery had created a wonderful new museum for modern art.

  “That would be splendid,” he said, his genuine enthusiasm reminding her that for anyone who loved painting and sculpture and film, it was a magnificent time to be alive in Germany. For artists, the past was over and the future gleamed.

  They made eye contact in the bustling front hall—he as handsome as Richter had promised her, she as striking as Richter had promised him—and he followed Pauline upstairs to the top floor, which housed a temporary collection. They wandered separately until, as if by chance, both were standing in front of an exciting Hannah Höch collage, a photo montage, with a title that made it hard to dismiss the violence in the streets.

  Pauline read the title aloud, couching it as a question: “‘Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany’?”

  “Tongue in cheek?” the Foreign Service man asked.

  “Let us hope.”

  Side by side, they continued in low tones.

  “We had Kozlov watched from the moment we stamped his passport.”

  “Is he Comintern?”

  The secretary answered that nothing in the Foreign Service files had indicated whether Kozlov served the Russian Comintern. But all in his department agreed that the newly returned emigrant would be a fount of up-to-date information about radicals in the United States and therefore a potential agent to be smuggled back in.

  “We asked who would approach him, this revolutionary who knew America. It did not take long. They met at the zoo. The agent’s name was Valtin.”

  “Is Valtin Comintern?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where did they go? What did they do?”

  The reply was neutral, his voice and expression bland. “The security police made a fateful decision to watch but not intervene. They were hoping, I suppose, to arrest not just two men but an entire network. Thus when they lost track of Kozlov, they lost Valtin, too.”

  • • •

  THE SWEEPERS WERE OUT IN FORCE, cleaning the streets of every sign of the demonstrations and marches around Alexanderplatz, when Pauline called on an old friend in the security police. They went out for coffee and pastry.

  “You know I can’t talk about this.”

  “Of course you can’t,” she said. “But, I must ask you”—the clatter of china and silver in the busy confectionary ensured that even the couple holding hands at the next table could not hear them, but she lowered her voice anyway for dramatic effect—“is it true that Valtin and Kozlov escaped surveillance and disappeared?”

  “Disappeared?” He sat up straight as a sword. “Is that what the Foreign Office told you? Pauline, how could you believe that for even a moment?”

  “I did not think it likely. I imagined you let that story out to get them off your back.”

  “You imagined correctly. We followed Kozlov’s and Valtin’s every move. We watched like hawks. We were keen-eyed and we were silent. They never saw us.”

  “Did Valtin put Kozlov on a boat to America?”

  He hesitated. “I am not privy to that detail.”

  That sounded to Pauline as if the Foreign Office secretary had it right. The security police had indeed lost sight of Kozlov and his Comintern contact. “Where is Valtin now?”

  “We are currently tracking him through a young woman who is either a Comintern courier or his lover, or both. We’re holding back to see with whom else she makes contact.”

  It was more likely, she thought, they hoped the girl would lead them back to the agent they had lost. “What is her name?”

  “Her name is Anny.”

  “Anny?” Pauline took a dainty bite of her Mohnkuchen. Her tongue crept across her lips to lick a poppy seed. She touched her mouth with her napkin and eyed him over the linen as if it were a veil.

  The Polizeioberstleutnant steadied his breathing.

  “What is Anny’s last name?” she asked.

  “You are a devil in devil’s clothing, Fräulein Privatdetektive Grandzau. I’ve spoken too freely already. You know I cannot tell you her last name.”

  “You can’t blame a devil for trying . . . If you can’t tell me her last name, you can surely tell me what is the color of her hair and eyes . . . or perhaps where she stays or works . . .”

  • • •

  WHEN MARAT ZOLNER returned to Manhattan from the Bronx, he found that Yuri Antipov had left an urgent message with Fern Hawley.

  “He wants you to meet him downtown. He said you’ll know where.”

  Zolner went to a blind pig on Vesey around the corner from the Washington Market. Antipov was taking a small sip of what passed for gin in the place.

  “How is your empire?” he asked.

  Zolner said, “You know, bootlegging wasn’t my idea originally. I got it in Finland. Do you recall the Comintern scheme to raise money for weapons by smuggling liquor past Finnish Customs? It was very innovative until the Comintern’s entire Finnish Section passed out drunk on the contraband.”

  Antipov did not laugh.

  “What do you want from me?” Zolner asked.

  “I want you to rent a stable in Lower Manhattan.”

  “What for?”

  “Come.” Antipov led him around the corner to Barclay Street, where he had parked an old-fashioned coal wagon identical to the thousands that cluttered the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan and drove the truck drivers crazy. A strong horse stood in the traces, nosing an empty feed bag.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I brought it over from New Jersey on the ferry. It is high time to do the job we were sent to do.”

  “What’s in the wagon?”

  “Dynamite.”

  Zolner stared at him while he thought how to deal with what was clearly an ultimatum. Antipov gazed back calmly, a man whose mind was made up, determined, utterly sure, and implacable.

  “Where did you get dynamite?”

  “I memorized Moscow’s list of quarries where comrades work,” Antipov answered. “If you will not help me, I’ll do it myself.”

  “I will help you, of course. There is no reason why we can’t build and attack at the same time.”

  “I need a safe stable for the wagon.”

  “You’ll be inside it in one hour.”

  Antipov looked at him curiously. “You surprise me, Marat. I would have thought you would tell me to go to hell.”

  “We
are Comintern, Yuri. Our goal is the same. Overthrow the international bourgeoisie by every means. Come. Let’s walk the horse while we talk.”

  “Where?”

  “I have a stable. Ten short blocks.”

  “It must be a safe place to prepare the attack.”

  “Trucks O’Neal will keep it safe.”

  “Excellent.” Antipov had come to see the value of the American, a hard-boiled, clearheaded gangster who could recruit similarly trustworthy men when they were needed.

  Zolner took the bridle and coaxed the animal to turn the wagon up Washington Street. “What is our target?”

  “Wall Street.”

  15

  A PATCHED SAIL of faded canvas looked common, thought Captain Novicki. Even innocent. And if you hoisted your sail on a slow-moving, old-fashioned, cat-rigged workboat and sat a white-whiskered Barnacle Bill smoking his pipe at the tiller, you’d be damned-near invisible. At least to anyone searching for the get-rich-quick boys.

  Or so Novicki hoped as he steered his catboat across Great South Bay. A stiff wind raised a fierce chop studded with whitecaps. The old mariner sailed blithely through it, out the narrow Fire Island Inlet and into the Atlantic Ocean.

  Eight miles out in international waters he found a row of wooden schooners and rusty tramp freighters anchored to the shallow bottom and pitching on the swells. Their hulls and rigging were hung with billboards advertising authentic Scotch whisky, English gin, and French champagne. Captain Novicki tied up at the schooner he had contracted to deliver for and handed over mail and gifts of fresh fruit and vegetables to the captain and his family and soda pop for the kids. The oldest child climbed the mast with binoculars to watch for the Coast Guard while the family helped load as many cases as Novicki’s boat would hold.

  He was not the only upright citizen taxiing booze to shore. It was evident from the private yachts and motorboats sailing up and down Rum Row, bargaining with the ships selling liquor. But neither they nor any rum-running taxi that night had a more valuable cargo—the finest single-malt Scotch whisky of such a dark color and pungent smoky aroma that it could be stretched five-to-one with grain alcohol and still sold as the real McCoy.

  The schooner captain and his wife appeared anxious. Novicki asked what was bothering them.

  “There was another hijacking last night. At least we think there was. The boat never came back, and he was in fine shape when he headed in. I’d keep a weather eye, if I were you.”

  “Nobody’ll bother a little old catboat.”

  “She ain’t that little, and she’s beamy as a barge,” said the schooner captain. “Any gangster who knows his business will see you squeezed in a hundred cases.”

  Novicki had timed it so he could run for the coast after dark. Eight miles off and ten miles upwind of Fire Island Inlet, he had an easy sail on following seas. He covered two miles in thirty minutes, ears cocked for the sound of engines. A couple of taxis roared past at five times his speed.

  Suddenly, he heard the distinctive rumble of tripled-up gasoline motors. He hurried to the mast and dropped the sail and got the canvas on deck seconds before a Coast Guard cutter swept the water with its searchlight. It moved on eventually. He raised his sail and kept listening.

  He was almost back to the inlet when he sensed as much as heard distant thunder.

  He gauged his position to be too far off to hear the surf on the beach. Nor was it a storm. The sky was clearing and stars were already burning through the haze. He reached over the side and dipped his pipe into the water, dousing the red glow.

  The thunder moved closer.

  Fire raced over the waves, a bank of dense flame that unveiled in its down glow the profile of a long black boat.

  • • •

  NOVICKI TIED HIS TILLER and hurried forward to drop the sail again. But this time he was too late. The black boat had a searchlight that was bigger than the Coast Guard’s. The white-hot beam swept the sea, skipping from wave top to wave top, and suddenly blazed on the sail like a hundred suns. Blinded and confused, the old man stumbled to his tiller as if he could somehow steer his way out of this mess.

  A machine gun roared. The barrel spit fire almost as bright as the black boat’s exhaust, and almost as loud. Bullets pierced Novicki’s decks and sent splinters into his face. The storm of lead blasting the wood, shredding the sail, and screaming past his ears was paralyzing. His hand locked on the tiller. The thundering engines quieted, throttled down, as the boat drew near. But the gun kept firing staccato bursts and the bullets kept flying. In between the bursts he heard men yelling. In all the noise and confusion it took him a moment to realize they weren’t Americans. They were speaking a foreign language. He couldn’t hear much over the gun, but it might be Russian, a language he had encountered occasionally at sea.

  The oddity had the wholly unexpected effect of clearing his head. He couldn’t understand their meaning, but whatever language they were shouting, it sure wouldn’t translate as “Cease fire!” Confident that the sea held no worse dangers, the old mariner filled his lungs and rolled over the side and into the water.

  It was startling cold, cold enough to almost stop the heart. He was dragged under by the weight of his coat, which he had buttoned against the chilly night air. He did not fight it but let it take him deep, away from the riot overhead. The water muffled the thunder of the black boat’s engines and the roar of the machine gun. But he heard the purposeful thrashing of many propellers.

  He was running out of air. He ripped at the buttons and got out of his coat and swam at an angle to the surface, trying to move as far as he could from the boats. He broke surface at last, gulped air, and looked around. The hijackers were thirty feet away, swarming over his boat, busy loading his booze into theirs. They had switched off the searchlight and were working by flashlight. He swam farther away so they wouldn’t see him and dog-paddled, teeth chattering, to stay afloat. As soon as they finished, they attacked the catboat’s bilges with axes, chopping holes in the bottom. She started to settle, pulled under by the weight of her centerboard.

  The black boat engaged its engines and thundered into the night.

  • • •

  AN ARMORED CAR painted with skulls and crossbones led a gang of anti-Communists into a Berlin alley. They were police-trained and armed with pistols and rubber truncheons. The men trapped inside the Communist bomb factory panicked. The Reds had one gun among them, a rusted revolver. The consignment of brand-new Ortgies 7.65 pistols that the Central Committee had promised had not materialized. Anny, the girl who cooked for them, turned in terror to Pauline Grandzau.

  Pauline took her hand.

  The bomb factory was hidden in a ground-floor tenement flat in the Wedding working-class district of narrow streets and crooked alleys. If anyone could help her find the truth about Johann Kozlov, it was this girl Pauline had followed here. Anny was a passionate believer in the workers’ cause and a reluctant convert to violent revolution, which she called a historic necessity.

  Though highly intelligent, she seemed utterly unaware that the security police had been watching her. She would be locked in a cell if they hadn’t hoped she would lead them to the Comintern agent, Valtin, who had approached Johann Kozlov. At this crucial moment, Pauline surmised, they had lost track of her and had no idea that their unwitting Judas goat was moments from being badly injured or killed.

  The door shook as the anti-Communists hammered on it with truncheons and gun butts. The bombmakers threw their shoulders against the door to hold it shut.

  “Help me pull up the rug,” Pauline told Anny.

  The bombmakers had apparently grown up in neighborhoods less poor than this one and none of them even suspected there was a trapdoor under the filthy carpet. It opened over a wet earthen cellar. The cellar had been dug decades ago by country peasants when they moved to the city in the forlorn hope of storing vegetables grown in tenement shadows.

  “How did you know?” Anny whispered.

  “When I w
as a girl, I lived in Wedding with my mother.”

  If the root cellar was like others Pauline had seen, it would have another door that opened outside into what she hoped would be an interior yard with a fence they could squeeze through and run. It did. Holding Anny’s hand tightly, she emerged under a sliver of gray sky spitting rain.

  Buildings walled them in on all four sides. Only one had a door.

  “What of the others?” asked Anny.

  “They’ll follow, if they have any sense,”

  But before the bomb builders could escape through the cellar, an explosion shook the ground. A cloud of dust burst from the cellar door. Pauline felt the earth tremble under her feet as the entire front of the crumbling tenement collapsed. Brick and timber buried the anti-Communists and their armored car in the alley and the bomb-makers in their flat.

  • • •

  ISAAC BELL asked Captain Novicki, “What happened to your face, Dave?”

  “Just some splinters.”

  “Looks like a treeful.”

  “Listen, Isaac. I have a confession to make.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got caught running rum.”

  Bell gave him a brisk once-over. His cheeks above his beard and his forehead were speckled with cuts, and he had one of those new Band-Aids stuck on his ear. He was lucky he hadn’t lost an eye. Otherwise, he looked his usual rugged self, a feisty old man who did not think he was old. “Caught running rum? Or hijacked?”

  “Hijacked.”

  “Where’d it happen?”

  “They were waiting a half mile off Fire Island Inlet. Shot up my boat and stole the . . . cargo. Then chopped holes in the bottom to sink her.”

  “Sounds like you’re lucky you’re alive.”

  “Darned lucky. Thankfully, I don’t have to tell Joe right away. Bad enough admitting to you that I broke the law.”

  “I’m not a cop,” said Bell. “And I’m not a priest.”

  “You’re a Van Dorn, that’s worse. Joe sets high standards. It would be easier telling a cop or a priest. This is just embarrassing as hell. But I’m telling you for a reason.”