The Bootlegger

  “What else happened?”

  “I saw the black boat everyone’s talking about.”

  Bell’s eyes lit up. “Describe it!”

  The old sea captain, not surprisingly, was an excellent witness. He had observed closely and recalled details. He estimated that the boat was sixty or seventy feet long. “Narrow beam. She rides very low in the water, but she’ll be seakindly with that flared bow. Three Libertys in the motor box. And there was room in the box for an extra standing by in case one stopped running. Forward cockpit, room for four or five men. She looks small because she’s built so fine, but she is one big boat. I’ll bet she’ll carry a thousand cases.”

  “Guns?”

  “Oh yes. Sounded like the Lewis the Navy had on the subchasers. And a mammoth searchlight. Big as a destroyer’s.”

  “Armor?”

  Novicki shrugged his brawny shoulders. “I don’t know, I wasn’t shooting back.”

  “How fast is she? Joe thought she turned fifty knots.”

  “Those Libertys roared like she could.”

  “It sounds very much like what Joe described. How’d you happen to survive?”

  “Took my chances in the drink.”

  “You swam ashore?” Bell asked, astonished. The seawater was cold and rough and Novicki had to be pushing seventy.

  “No. I clambered aboard my boat, stuffed canvas in the holes they chopped, and bailed like mad until we drifted onto the beach. The Inlet Coast Guard Station lent a hand. Lucky the thieves took every last bag of booze, so I wasn’t breaking any laws.”

  “Close call all around,” said Bell.

  The old man hung his head. “I feel like a damned fool. I was out of a job. Broke. Fellow offered me money to make the taxi run. Sounded like easy money.”

  “How many runs did you do?”

  “It was my first.”

  “Want some advice?”

  “Yeah, I know. Don’t do it again.”

  “Running rum will get you killed. The smuggling business is changing, fast—gangsters are taking over.”

  “Based on last night,” Novicki said wryly, “I can’t argue with that.”

  Bell said, “Maybe Barnacle Bill should go back to sea.”

  “Isaac, I’d love to. Damned few windjammers left since the war sunk so many. No one’s going to put a man my age in charge of a steamer.”

  “I’ll bet I can put you on a windjammer,” said Bell. “I talked to fellows in the Bahamas liquor business—I’m working every angle in this case—and they operate on the ‘lawful’ side, shipping Scotch and gin from Britain and rum from Hispaniola to Nassau. It’s a legal, aboveboard enterprise—at least until the rumrunners take it from Nassau. How would you feel if I could wrangle you a job sailing a rum schooner from the Caribbean up to The Bahamas?”

  “If they’d hire an old man.”

  “They’ll hire any qualified master who’s still breathing. Few young captains can be trusted with a sailing ship. And seafaring geezers are in short supply, what with so many captains taking up the booze business. What do you say?”

  “I’d be mighty grateful.”

  Isaac Bell thrust out his hand. “Put her there. We’ll shake on it. And don’t worry, Joe won’t hear about this from me.”

  “I’ll tell him myself as soon as he’s up to hearing it. I won’t lie to a friend. But, Isaac, there’s one more thing I should tell you.”

  Bell smiled. “I hope you haven’t rifled the poor box.”

  “Didn’t burn down any churches either,” Novicki smiled back. “I don’t know what it means. I thought I heard the hijackers shouting in Russian.”

  “Russian? Are you sure?”

  “The Lewis gun was going to beat the band, but I’ve sailed with Russians—right good seamen when sober—and I swear they could have been yelling Russian. Sure as heck weren’t English.”

  Isaac Bell dampened his excitement at this news. He did not want to encourage Novicki to embellish beyond what he believed. “There are many foreign sailors on Rum Row. Could they have been sailors up from the Caribbean?”

  “No, I’d recognize the Caribbean dialect.”

  “There’s a slew of Italian gangsters in the booze line. Maybe it was a ship from Italy?”

  “No, they weren’t Eye-talian. Coulda been German, but the more I think on it, I heard Russian. Or Polish, I suppose. Except Russian doesn’t make sense. I mean, I could imagine Russians anchoring on Rum Row to sell the stuff, I suppose, but not running it to the beach. That’s for local fellows who know the water.”

  “I’m glad you came to me, Dave.”

  “Might this help you nail the thugs who shot Joe?”

  “It could,” said Bell. Considering, he thought to himself, that a German-Russian rumrunner had been shot, in the grisly Cheka way, with a bullet that could have been propelled by Russian smokeless powder. “Go say good-bye to Joe and Dorothy and pack your sea chest.”

  “I hate leaving them.”

  “They’ll get by. I’m here, Dorothy’s strong, and, with any luck, Joe will continue improving.”

  “If he doesn’t get another infection.”

  “You being here can’t stop an infection,” Bell said firmly. He reached for his wallet. “Buy a train ticket to Miami. I’ll have a wire about the ship waiting for you at the station. Depending on where the ship is, you’ll have to take a steamer either to Nassau or down to Jamaica or Hispaniola.”

  “I can’t take your money.”

  Bell was not surprised by Novicki’s reluctance and had prepared for it. He extended a thick wad of bills. “It’s not my money, it’s Van Dorn money. And I’m hiring you to send me a report on the Nassau-to-Miami rum-running before you ship out for the Caribbean.”

  Novicki set a stubborn jaw.

  “It’s not charity,” Bell insisted firmly. “I’m convinced that the illegal booze business is about to become a national criminal enterprise. If I’m right, then the smuggling and bootlegging at entry points like Detroit and Florida are going to attract the same criminals who are getting rich in New York. I’ve already put a top man in Detroit. The fact that you are going to Miami means that you can help me out down there.”

  “I’ll get myself down there on my own.”

  Bell grabbed his hand and pressed the money into it. “I need you there right away. You’re alert and observant, Dave. I need all the help you can give me.”

  He walked Captain Novicki out the door and hurried back to the bull pen, where he leveled an imperious finger at three bespectacled detectives. Dressed in vests, bow ties, and banded shirtsleeves, they looked less like private investigators than hard-eyed, humorless bookkeepers.

  Adler, Kliegman, and Marcum gathered around his desk.

  “The high-powered armored rum boat that machine-gunned the Boss is prowling the coast again,” Bell said. “Grady Forrer will pinpoint the location of boatyards in Long Island, New York, and New Jersey that are capable of building such a vessel. You gents will canvas them to find out which one launched her. Pretend that your bootlegger boss is offering top dollar to buy one like it—only faster. Telephone me the instant you find one and I’ll be there with the money.”

  Something else that the cool-headed old geezer told him about the black boat had lodged in the back of Bell’s mind. Despite ducking bullets and swimming for his life, Dave Novicki had recalled in fine detail a long rank of three engines spitting fire from a motor box near the stern. He had speculated that the box had room for a fourth engine. That the fourth was not spitting fire indicated either that it had broken down or, as likely, was a replacement standing by in case one of the three regulars stopped running.

  No one knew better than an airplane pilot that Libertys broke down often. A big selling point when he bought his Loening Air Yacht had been the design that perched the motor high atop the wing, which provided for quick removal and replacement of the entire unit. He had not signed on the dotted line until Loening Aeronautical threw in a spare motor and a crat
e of valves.

  “McKinney!”

  “Right here, Mr. Bell.”

  “Do any of your Washington friends work for the War Department’s director of sales?”

  “They’ll know someone who does.”

  “Find a War Department man who can tell us who buys war surplus Liberty motors and spare parts.”

  “I don’t mean to outguess you, Mr. Bell, but at last count the government had thirteen thousand Liberty motors on hand.”

  “That’s why bootleggers buy them. They’re fast, cheap, and plentiful. Tell your man to concentrate on motor and spare parts purchases within a hundred miles of New York.”

  The detectives scattered.

  Bell sent a transatlantic cable to Pauline Grandzau.

  MORE RUSSIANS.

  WHAT OF KOZLOV?

  • • •

  PAULINE GRANDZAU SHOOK the Communist girl Anny awake when the Hamburg train slowed to stop at a small-town station ten miles before the northern port city. They got off the train and walked from the town into the forest where Anny’s friend, Valtin, was leading a Hundertschaften company of a hundred Communist fighters in maneuvers in preparation to lead an uprising in Hamburg.

  “Is Valtin your friend or boyfriend?” Pauline asked.

  “We don’t do it that way. If a girl likes a boy, she says, ‘Come with me.’ And if he wants to, he comes. But that doesn’t mean you have to be with him every day.”

  “What if you do want to be with him every day?”

  “You can. But if another girl says, ‘Come with me,’ you would be wrong to try to stop him. The revolution has no room for jealousy.”

  Pauline Grandzau found that utopian fantasy even harder to believe when Anny pointed out the tall, handsome, dark-haired Valtin. Even seen at a distance through the trees, he looked like a man who could provoke an array of jealousies with a smile.

  At the moment, he was concentrating mightily on drilling a hundred tough-looking merchant seamen armed with ancient czarist army rifles, a variety of pistols, including a handful of new Ortgies, some powerful World War stick grenades, and numerous old-fashioned Kugel grenades. Of the hundred, she noticed on closer inspection, at least twenty were younger men, carrying knives and clubs.

  They were rehearsing signals for assault and retreat as they advanced and fell back along forest paths that represented city streets and gathered around trees that stood for tenement buildings and factories. A huge heap of fallen trees and limbs became a street barricade.

  Valtin ordered a break. The men sprawled on the forest floor and shared cigarettes. Valtin sauntered over and kissed Anny on the mouth without taking his eyes off Pauline. “Who are you?”

  “This is Pauline,” said Anny. “She saved me from the Bürgerwehr.”

  “How?”

  Anny explained how she’d been trapped in the bomb factory. Pauline said, “All I did was find a way out.”

  “Why were you there?”

  “She is looking for someone named Kozlov.”

  “Johann Kozlov,” said Pauline. “I had hoped one of the bomb builders knew him, but the Bürgerwehr attacked before I could ask.”

  “Why do you ask about Kozlov?”

  Pauline had rehearsed her answer. “My brother is in prison in America. Kozlov tried to get out of being deported by testifying against Fritz. I want Kozlov to retract his false statements.”

  “Why would he?”

  “To free a wrongly accused honest man.”

  “Are you out of your mind? Kozlov is a revolutionary. He can’t operate by ‘honest man’ morals.”

  Valtin was not aware that Johann Kozlov had been killed in America. Pauline thought that odd if Kozlov had been his recruit. Of course, Valtin had been hiding and preparing for the assault on Hamburg and cut off from regular intelligence. But it struck her that Valtin hadn’t necessarily recruited Kozlov to the Comintern. What if Kozlov was already a Comintern agent and Valtin had been sent either to test his loyalty since his arrest in America or to give him instructions from Moscow?

  Valtin was eyeing her suspiciously. “Who are you? What do you do? How do you make your living?”

  “I am a librarian.”

  “Where?”

  “Berlin.” She gave him a card.

  “Prussian State Library,” he read aloud. “You have degrees. You are a specialist. Where did you grow up?”

  She told him her mother’s last address in Wedding. He raised his eyebrows. “You’ve come a long way.”

  “Education elevates.”

  “You do not speak with the accent of a Berlin street urchin.”

  Pauline said, “I was ambitious to leave all that behind.”

  “Not very far behind in a Wedding bomb factory. And now you’re standing in a Red encampment.”

  “I go where I must to help my brother. I ask you again, where should I look for Kozlov?”

  “Berlin. He was a street fighter in the uprising.”

  “Who were his comrades?”

  “He fought beside Zolner,” Valtin answered offhandedly as if Zolner was a name she should know. A hero and a famous leader. Ex-commander Richter would know the name. From Hamburg she could telephone Richter and ask what the police knew about Zolner.

  “Do you know where Zolner is now?”

  “I am hoping the Central Committee will dispatch Zolner to lead the fight in Hamburg. Why don’t you come with us?” He spoke offhandedly again, but it was clearly a challenge. Or a test.

  “What is Zolner’s first name?”

  “Why don’t you ask him in Hamburg?”

  It was dark when the Hundertschaften began marching along a railroad track toward Hamburg and she was alone with Anny. The women’s job was to carry first-aid kits at the back of the line.

  “What is Zolner’s first name?”

  “I don’t know,” Anny whispered back. “They say he once danced in the ballet.”

  16

  “OH, I’M SO SORRY, MR. BELL. It looks like CG-9 got new orders. They never came off patrol.”

  The Coast Guard lieutenant assigned to oversee Isaac Bell’s interview of the captain of cutter CG-9 did not look one bit sorry that the Staten Island slip where Bell had been told the cutter was docked was empty. “Too bad you had to come all the way out here.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Bell. “I have a friend in Staten Island. It’s a nice day. We’ll go for a boat ride.”

  Bell drove to the docks at Richmond Terrace and for two hundred dollars chartered a boat skippered by Detective Ed Tobin’s great-uncle Donald Darbee. It was a broad, low, flat-bottomed oyster scow, but unlike a vessel actually used to tong oysters, it had a gigantic four-barrel Peerless V-8 motor for outrunning the Harbor Squad. Since passage of the Volstead Act, the long-haired, grizzled Darbee had installed a modern radiotelegraph to keep track of the Prohibition patrols. The radio was operated by his pretty teenage granddaughter, Robin. Robin was cool as a cucumber and knew Morse code.

  Bell told the old man his plan and, together, they removed everything from the boat that could be construed as illegal, leaving on Darbee’s Kill Van Kull dock the leftovers of booze, opium, and ammunition that had fallen under the bilgeboards. “With no contraband on board,” Bell explained, “when the Coast Guard catches us, they can’t arrest us.”

  “Don’t like the idea of getting caught,” Darbee grumbled.

  “Grandpa,” said Robin, rolling her eyes. “Mr. Bell just told you why.”

  “I know why. I’m old, not stupid. He wants to get on that cutter. But I don’t like getting caught. It goes against my nature.”

  Bell piloted the oyster boat across the busy harbor, through the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and out the Lower Bay, past the Ambrose Lightship, and into the ocean. Darbee and little Robin crouched under the forward cubby, exchanging radio transmissions with Staten Island watermen who were already at sea, heading for Rum Row. Cousins and cronies helped Darbee pinpoint cutter CG-9’s position within a few miles.
>
  Bell opened up the throttle and steered east-northeast. An hour later, ten miles off Long Beach, he spotted the distinctive high-bow, swept-stern profile of the former submarine chaser. The Coast Guard vessel stayed to its course, its lookouts failing to spot the low gray oyster boat.

  “O.K., Mr. Darbee. Show ’em we’re here.”

  Darbee poured motor oil through a specially constructed funnel. The oil dripped into the hot exhaust manifold. His boat trailed a huge cloud of smoke.

  “First time I ever used my smoke screen for bait.”

  The cutter wheeled about and headed toward them, carving a bright bow wave. Bell throttled back until he had just enough way to keep the boat headed into the seas. The cutter drew near. Seen from the low oyster boat, it looked enormous, its deck gun formidable, its twin Lewis guns lethal.

  Isaac Bell and Uncle Donny and young Robin raised their hands in the air. The cutter swung alongside, banged hard against their hull, and sailors jumped aboard with drawn guns. They made lines fast and began searching the boat.

  Bell saw the cutter’s white-haired petty officer staring down at him. In a moment he would recognize him as the pilot who had delivered Joseph Van Dorn in a Flying Yacht. He had to get aboard the cutter before he did or the game would be up.

  “Uncle Donny,” he muttered. “Could you manage to do something to annoy them?”

  Donald Darbee, who despised authority in general and rated the Coast Guard even lower than the New York Police Department Harbor Squad, curled his lips to show yellow teeth in a mocking smile.

  The sailor guarding them shouted, “What are you grinning at?”

  “I haven’t had this much fun since a foggy night I ‘helped’ a police boat run into the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Shut up, old man. Watch your mouth.”

  Now Bell raised his voice in righteous indignation. “Watch your mouth, sailor! That’s no way to talk to a gentleman four times your age.”

  “Shut up or you’re under arrest.”

  Bell shouted, louder, “You can’t arrest me!”

  “Oh yeah? You’re under arrest. March!”

  Bell let sailors pull him up onto the cutter’s stern deck. The petty officer hurried down to confront him, stopped cold, and said, “I know you from somewhere.”