The Bootlegger Read online

  “Russia again,” said Bell. “Pauline found another Bolshevik connection. Find out everything you can about a Comintern agent named Marat Zolner. And I want a full report on the Comintern.”

  “The Comintern is the foreign espionage arm of the Russian Revolution,” said Grady Forrer. He heaved the file folder onto Bell’s desk, where it landed like a blacksmith’s anvil.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your report on the Comintern.”

  “What?”

  “I suspected you would want it after your interest in Cheka Genickschuss—neck shots.”

  A pleased smile warmed Isaac Bell’s face. It was right and fit that the crime-fighting operation Joseph Van Dorn had taken such pains to build had shifted smoothly into top gear to bring his attackers to justice.

  Grady patted the folder lovingly. “The gist is, the Comintern exports the Communist revolution around the world to, quote, ‘overthrow the governments of the international bourgeoisie by all available means—spying, sabotage, and armed force.’”

  “How are they doing?”

  “They fell on their face in Hungary and, so far at least, they’re falling on their face in Germany. I predict they will fare better in India and much, much better in China.”

  “What about here? How are they making out in America?”

  Grady adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. Bell was familiar with his deliberate expression. He had seen it often. Grady’s central belief—a tenet he drilled into his apprentices—was that generalizations murdered facts.

  “Interesting question, Isaac. And difficult to answer. America is different. We were not destroyed by the World War. Despite the current business recession, we are not starving. And I see no evidence that the Comintern has united the warring American Communist factions in any manner that made them stronger.”

  “What about the anarchists?”

  Grady Forrer shook his head. “The Bureau of Investigation would have us believe the Bolsheviks have teamed up with radicals and anarchists. That is simply not true.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Comintern are cold, ruthless, and eminently practical. They despise anarchists as hopelessly impractical.”

  “Do you have any evidence the Comintern conspires with the IWW?”

  Again Grady shook his head. “The Wobblies may be radicals, but they are essentially romantics. The Comintern has even less time for romantics than anarchists. Don’t forget, they invented Genickschuss to execute impractical radicals and romantics.”

  Bell said, “You are telling me that the Comintern will attack America on its own—independent of our homegrown conspirators.”

  “The cold, ruthless, practical ones might,” Grady amended cautiously.

  “Aren’t they already attacking?”

  Grady smiled. “Isaac, I am paid to keep heads level in the Research Department. Somehow, you have maneuvered me into speculating that the coldly efficient bootleggers who shot up a Coast Guard cutter, nearly killed Mr. Van Dorn, executed their wounded, and are currently wreaking havoc on street gangs and hijacking rumrunners and whisky haulers are actually attacking the United States of America.”

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  “But bootlegging profits,” Grady Forrer cautioned, “are incalculably immense. Getting rich quick is as powerful a motivator as ideology.”

  Chief Investigator Isaac Bell had heard enough.

  He raised his voice so every detective in the bull pen could hear.

  “Pauline Grandzau linked the bootleggers who shot Mr. Van Dorn to the Russian Bolshevik Comintern. As of this minute, the Van Dorn Agency will presume that these particular bootleggers—led by one Marat Zolner, alias Dmitri Smirnoff, alias Dima Smirnov—have more on their minds than getting rich quick.”

  18

  BILL LYNCH, a portly young boatbuilder already famous for the fastest speedboats on Great South Bay, and Harold Harding, his grizzled, cigar-chomping partner, watched with interest as a midnight blue eighty-horsepower Stutz Bearcat careened into Lynch & Harding Marine’s oyster-shell driveway.

  A fair-haired man in a pinch-waist pin-striped suit jumped out of the roadster. He drew his Borsalino fedora low over his eyes and looked around with a no-nonsense expression at the orderly sprawl of docks and sheds that lined a bulkheaded Long Island creek.

  Lynch sized him up through thick spectacles. Well over six feet tall and lean as cable, he had golden hair and a thick mustache that were barbered to a fare-thee-well. There was a bulge under his coat where either a fat wallet or a shoulder holster resided.

  Lynch bet Harding a quarter that the bulge was artillery.

  “No bet,” growled Harold. “But I’ll bet you that bookkeeper nosing around here yesterday works for him.”

  “No bet. Looking for something, mister?”

  “I’m looking for a boat.”

  Bill Lynch said, “Something tells me you want a speedy one.”

  “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  In the shed, mechanics were wrestling a heavy chain hoist to lower an eight-cylinder, liquid-cooled Curtiss OX-5 into a fishing boat hull that already contained two of them. The driver of the Stutz did not ask why a fisherman needed three aircraft motors. But he did ask how fast the Curtisses would make the boat.

  Lynch, happily convinced that their visitor was a bootlegger, speculated within the realm of the believable that she would hit forty knots.

  “Ever built a seventy-footer with three Libertys?”

  Lynch and Harding exchanged a look.

  “Yup.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Put her on a railcar.”

  “Railcar?” The bootlegger glanced at the weed-choked siding that curved into the yard and connected to the Long Island Railroad tracks half a mile inland. “I’d have thought your customers sail them away.”

  “Usually.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Haven’t seen her since.”

  The bootlegger asked, “Could you build a faster one?”

  Lynch said, “I drew up plans for a seventy-foot express cruiser with four Libertys turning quadruple screws. She’s waiting for a customer.”

  “Could I have her in a month?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Harding bit clean through his stogie. “We can’t do it that fast.”

  “Yes we can,” said Lynch. “I’ll have her in the water in thirty days.”

  The tall customer with a gun in his coat asked, “Would you have any objection to me paying cash?”

  “None I can think of,” said Lynch, and Harding lit a fresh cigar.

  Lynch unrolled his plans. The customer pored over them knowledgeably. He ordered additional hatches fore and aft—Lewis gun emplacements, Lynch assumed, since he wanted reinforced scantlings under them—and electric mountings for Sperry high-intensity searchlights.

  “And double the armor in the bow.”

  “Planning on ramming the opposition?”

  “I’d like to know I can.”

  They settled on a price and a schedule of payouts keyed to hull completion, motor installation, and sea trials.

  The customer started counting a down payment, stacking crisp hundred-dollar bills on a workbench. Midway, he paused. “The seventy-footer you built? The one with three motors. Was it for a regular customer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Someone you knew?”

  “Nope.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Funny thing you should ask. He paid cash like you. Hundred-dollar bills. After he brought the third payment, I said to Harold here, ‘You know, Harold, we don’t know that fellow’s name.’ And Harold said, ‘His name is Franklin. Ben Franklin.’ Harold meant because his face is on the hundred-dollar bill.”

  Harold said, “You want to hear something really funny: The man with no name named the boat. He called it Black Bird.”

  “Black Bird?”

  “’Counta the boat was
black. I asked him should we paint Black Bird on the transom. He said no, he’d remember it.”

  “What will you name yours?” asked Lynch.

  “Marion.”

  “Should we paint Marion on the transom?”

  “In gold.”

  He still hadn’t resumed counting money. “What did the fellow look like?”

  “Tall man, even thinner than you. Light on his feet, like he seemed to float. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Cheekbones like chisels.”

  “Did he speak with a foreign accent?”

  “A bit,” said Lynch.

  “City fellow,” said Harding. “They all got funny accents.”

  “Russian, by any chance?”

  “They all sound the same,” said Harding.

  Lynch said, “We hear Swedes around here, and Dutchmen. Real ones from Holland. I doubt I ever heard a Russian.”

  “We got less Russians than Chinamen,” said Harding.

  “So for all you know,” said the bootlegger, “he could have been French?”

  “No,” said Lynch, “I met plenty of Frenchies in the war.”

  “And French ladies,” Harold leered. “You know, Billy won a medal.”

  “By the way,” said Lynch, gazing intently at the half-counted stack of money, “we include compass and charts free of charge.”

  “And fire extinguishers,” said Harding.

  “What color do you want your boat?” asked Lynch.

  The tall bootlegger pointed down the creek where it opened into the bay. The sky was overcast and it was impossible to distinguish where gray water ended and leaden cloud began. “That color.”

  • • •

  ISAAC BELL found a new cable from Pauline when he got back from the boatyard. She had sent it from the North Sea German port of Bremerhaven.

  POLICE LOST MARAT ZOLNER BREMERHAVEN.

  ALIAS SMIRNOFF SAILED NEW YORK,

  NORTH GERMAN LLOYD RHEIN,

  RENAMED SUSQUEHANNA.

  Bell checked “Incoming Steamships” in the Times’s “Shipping & Mails” pages. He found no listing for the Susquehanna. But under “Outgoing Steamships Carrying Mail” she was listed as sailing the next day to Bremerhaven with mail for Germany and Denmark. Which meant she was at her pier now.

  Regardless of who owned them, North German Lloyd ships sailed from Hoboken as they did before the war. Bell hurried there on the ferry, went aboard and straight to the chief purser’s office.

  The purser was American, a disgruntled employee of the U.S. Mail Shipping Company that had leased a fleet of North German Lloyd liners seized in the war. Bell listened sympathetically to an earful of complaints about the new “fly-by-night” owners who hadn’t paid the Shipping Board “a dime of rent they owe—not to mention my back salary.”

  “Yes,” said Bell. “I’ve followed the story in the newspaper. Your company claims there’s a plot by foreign lines to sabotage American shipping?”

  “Wrapping themselves in the flag won’t pay bills. The company is nothing but paper. Mark my word, the Shipping Board will foreclose on the boat, and where will I be?”

  Isaac Bell took out his wallet and laid a hundred-dollar bill on the purser’s desk. “Maybe this could tide you over. There’s something I have to know.”

  “What?” asked the purser, eyeing hopefully the better part of two weeks’ salary.

  “Early last spring in Bremerhaven, a Russian named Dmitri Smirnoff booked passage to New York on your ship. What do you recall of him?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Bell’s hand strayed over the bill, covering it. “He might have called himself Dima Smirnov, spelled with a v.”

  “Smirnoff never came on board. He switched places last minute with another passenger.”

  “Is that allowed?”

  “It’s allowed if the chief purser says it’s allowed. The new passenger made it worth my while. It didn’t matter. Nobody got cheated. The company got their money. I just changed the manifest.”

  “Who was the new passenger?”

  “A New York hard case. Charlie O’Neal.”

  “What do you mean by a ‘hard case’? A gangster?”

  “Something like that. He had a nickname. He called himself Trucks. Gangsters tend to do that, don’t they? Trucks O’Neal. Sounds like a gangster.”

  “Could you describe Trucks?”

  “Beefy bruiser, like the moniker implies. Quick-moving. Black hair, high widow’s peak. His nose had been mashed a couple of times.”

  “How tall?”

  “Six foot.”

  “Eyes?”

  “Tiny little eyes. Like a pig.”

  “What color?”

  “Pig color.”

  “Pigs have pink eyes,” said Bell.

  “No, I meant kind of brown, like the rest of the pig.” The purser ruminated a moment and added, “By the way, I don’t mean to speak against him. Trucks didn’t cause any trouble or anything. He just wanted to get home.”

  Bell removed his hand from the hundred and took another from his wallet. “Do you recall where ‘home’ was?”

  “I think I have it somewhere in my files.” He opened a drawer and thumbed over folders. “Reason I remember is there was some problem with customs. By the time they worked it out, O’Neal had gone on ahead. So we delivered his trunk. Here! Four-sixteen West 20th Street, across the river in New York.”

  “Chelsea,” said Bell, rising quickly. “Good luck with the Shipping Board.”

  “I’ll need it,” said the purser. But by then the tall detective was striding as fast as his legs would thrust him across the embarkation lobby and down the gangplank.

  • • •

  WEST 20TH STREET was a once elegant block of town houses that overlooked the gardens of an Episcopal seminary. Many of the homes had been subdivided into rooming houses for the longshoremen who worked on the Chelsea piers. Number 416 was one of these, a slapped-together warren of sagging stairs and tiny rooms that smelled of tobacco and sweat. Bell found the elfin, white-haired superintendent drinking bathtub gin in a back apartment carved out of the original house’s kitchen. A cat had passed out on his lap.

  “Trucks?” the super echoed.

  “Charlie ‘Trucks’ O’Neal. What floor does he live on?”

  “He left in May.”

  “Did he leave a forwarding address?”

  The super took a long slug from his jelly jar of cloudy gin and looked up quizzically. “I wouldn’t know how Park Avenue swells do it, mister, but down here on the docks men who adopt nicknames like Trucks do not leave forwarding addresses.”

  • • •

  “TRUCKS O’NEAL,” said Harry Warren of the Gang Squad and proceeded to demonstrate why the Van Dorn Research boys swore, enviously, that surgeons had exchanged Harry’s brain for a Dewey decimal system gangster catalogue.

  “Heavyweight, six-two, busted nose, black hair. Enlisted in ’17, one step ahead of the cops. Army kicked him out with a dishonorable discharge after the war for some sort of profiteering shenanigans. Came home and took up with his old crowd.”

  Isaac Bell asked, “Is he a Gopher?”

  “No,” said Harry. “He hates the Gophers and they hate him. That’s how he got his nose broken. You know, I haven’t heard much of him lately. Any of you guys?”

  One of Harry’s younger men said, “I saw him on Broadway couple of months ago. Chorus girl on his arm, looking prosperous. I figured he was bootlegging.”

  Another Gang Squad man said, “I don’t know how prosperous. I’m pretty sure I saw him driving a truck down on Warren Street. Scooted into a stable before I could get a good look.”

  “A truck full of hooch,” said Harry Warren, “would make him prosperous.”

  “Find him,” said Bell. “Pull out all stops.”

  • • •

  “THIS IS A WONDERFUL BUSINESS,” said Marat Zolner. He strutted restlessly about his improvised bottling plant on Lower Manhattan’s Murray Street. Trucks O’Neal was
snoring softly on a cot in the back. A covered alley connected the former warehouse to the stable that Zolner had rented on Warren Street for Antipov’s horse and wagon.

  “Smell!” He thrust an open bottle of single-malt whisky under Yuri’s nose.

  Antipov recoiled. “It stinks like a peasant hut in winter.”

  “That’s peat smoke, craved by connoisseurs. Smell this.” He extended a bottle of clear fluid.

  “I smell nothing.”

  “Two-hundred-proof industrial grain alcohol from a government-licensed distillery in Pennsylvania. So pure, it’s flammable as gasoline.” He splashed it on the concrete floor, flicked Antipov’s cigarette from his lips, and tossed it. Blue flame jumped waist-high.

  “And this.”

  He held another bottle over the flame. Antipov stepped back.

  Zolner poured its contents on the fire, dousing it. “Water.”

  “Listen to me, Marat. I am through waiting.”

  But Zolner’s exuberance was not to be derailed.

  “So! One part malt whisky, which cost us nothing but Black Bird’s gasoline. Ten parts pure two-hundred-proof grain alcohol, which cost bribes of fifty pennies per bottle, plus ten pennies per bottle for Trucks O’Neal’s payments to thugs to guard the shipment from the distillery. Ten parts water, free from the tap.”

  He held up a bottle with a yellow label. “‘Glen Urquhart Genuine Single Malt Whisky’ counterfeit labels, indistinguishable from the original, a penny apiece. Empty bottle and cork, two pennies. Tea for color.

  “Voila! One hundred hijacked cases become two thousand cases. Gangsters who have no idea they work for us peddle it to speakeasies and roadhouses for a small cut of seventy-five dollars a case. Rendering pure profit of one hundred twenty thousand dollars for the exclusive use of the Comintern.”

  “It is time to take direct action against the capitalists,” said Antipov. “Are you with me or against me?”

  “With you, of course.”

  He signaled silence with a finger to his lips and led Antipov quietly past the sleeping O’Neal and through the covered alley that connected the back of the bottling plant to the back of the stable.

  • • •

  THE STRONG HORSE that had pulled Yuri Antipov’s wagonload of dynamite from New Jersey had grown restless cooped up in the stall. It snorted eagerly as Zolner and Antipov heaped hundreds of three-inch cast-iron window sash slugs around the explosives and concealed them under shovelfuls of coal. But it grew impatient when Zolner crawled under the wagon to connect the detonator to a battery-powered flashlight and a Waterbury alarm clock—leaving one wire loose, which he would connect only after the wagon stopped lurching and banging on the cobblestones.