The Bootlegger

  “Go get Uncle Donny.”

  The detectives whom Bell had sent to the gatehouse had opened it, and the town cars streamed through and up the driveway, playing headlights on the mansion and the empty railroad siding. The Prohibition agents swaggered into the boathouse and looked around, big-eyed.

  “Some operation.”

  “Look at all that giggle water.”

  “One hundred percent.”

  Barrels of two-hundred-proof pure grain alcohol were stacked against the inland wall, sharing the space with some crated Liberty airplane motors and a strongbox with its lid propped open.

  “Mr. Bell,” a detective called. “There’s no one in the house.”

  “Gatehouse is empty,” said another.

  “There you are, Uncle Donny.” Bell took him aside. “No black boat.”

  “Damn.”

  “Are you sure you saw him come in here?”

  “Sure as I know my name.”

  “In this boathouse?”

  “I saw him from a distance. So did little Robin. You don’t believe me, ask her.”

  “I believe you, sir.”

  “Don’t start calling me sir.”

  “Could this have been the boat you saw come after you?”

  The old man gestured disdainfully. “There’s only two motors on that boat. And it ain’t black. The boat that chased me was black, longer, and had three motors.”

  “You heard all three?”

  “Heard ’em bust two props. Followed them home on their third.”

  “But it’s not here. Where did it go?”

  “Didn’t get past that wire.”

  Bell asked whether the black boat might have sunk in the channel before it reached the boathouse.

  Darbee shook his shaggy head. “First of all, the channel ain’t deep. If he sunk, we’d see him sticking up. Second, I saw him go in here. And I saw them close that door.”

  Bell beckoned Ed Tobin. “Bring your light.” Tobin and Darbee followed him outside. “Point it at the tracks.”

  Ed shone his light on the rail. They knelt down and inspected it closely. “Son of a gun,” said Tobin. “Almost no rust on top.”

  Bell ran his fingers along the side of the rail. The base and the web were heavily encrusted with iron oxide, but the running surface atop the head was almost smooth, the rust ground away recently by the wheels of a train.

  “The builders told me,” said Bell, “that whoever bought the boat took it away on a railcar. Looks like they did it again.”

  “Where?”

  “They’ve had the better part of a day to take it anywhere. There’s a telephone inside. Call the railroad and get started tracking a flatcar. Where’s Dashwood?”

  “Right here, Isaac. I was just checking the mansion.”

  “Let’s see what they left behind.”

  They stepped back into the lit boathouse.

  Bell saw the blood rush from Dashwood’s face. His skin went dead white, and he seemed to be holding his breath. “Are you all right, James?”

  Dashwood narrowed his eyes and appeared to be looking everywhere at once.

  “James.”

  “Sorry, Isaac.” His color returned as quickly as it had faded. But he still looked tense. “Threw me, for a second, back to the war. When we broke out of the trench and took a village, I’d climb the church belfry or the town hall cupola for a shooting position. When the Germans retreated, they’d booby-trap the place. My spotter stepped on the stairs and it blew him to kingdom come.”

  “What did you see here?” Bell asked sharply. “What set you off?”

  “It was the emptiness, I think. Deserted. Like we found in France.”

  Bell saw the Prohibition agents clustered around the open strongbox. “What have you got there, gents?”

  “That’s O.K., Mr. Bell. We’ll be confiscating this. It’s government property now.”

  “Is there something in that strongbox?”

  The agents moved closer, shielding it with their bodies.

  “What is in there?” demanded Bell.

  “Just a couple bucks. Looks like they took the money and ran and forgot a couple of bucks.”

  “Don’t touch that money.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll count it up and take proper care of it. You go about your business.”

  “Don’t touch it!” Bell roared. “It’s a booby trap.”

  The Dry agents ignored him and grabbed the cash.

  Isaac Bell caught one glimpse of what looked like thousands of dollars, not “a couple of bucks,” as he yanked Dashwood and Ed Tobin backwards through the door. With a flash of light and hollow Boom! an explosion erupted under the barrels of grain alcohol. Flaming liquid leaped to the rafters, and the whole place was afire in seconds.

  23

  MARAT ZOLNER drove Black Bird the length of Lake Erie in a single dark night.

  With new propellers and driveshafts, and her Libertys freshly tuned, she cruised the two-hundred-forty-mile voyage from Buffalo Main Light to the mouth of the Detroit River at an easy-on-the-valves, fuel-stretching thirty miles an hour. Zolner kept her so far offshore, straddling the invisible border between Canada and America, that all he could see of the lights of Erie and Cleveland were low halos to the south. She slowed only twice: for heavy seas, when a squall lashed the western flats with wind and rain; and, earlier, to sink with her Lewis gun a wooden customs boat, which could never catch her but had a radio to report her presence.

  Nearing the Detroit River, Zolner stopped off the Pelee Passage Light and flashed an Aldis signal lamp. A motorboat sped out from Point Pelee, driven by a Comintern Maritime Section agent with a smuggler’s knowledge of the long, narrow strait’s labyrinth of coves, islands, and inlets. He led the black boat up the Pelee Passage, past the Bar Point Shoal Lighthouse and into the Amherstburg Channel. Reserved for inbound shipping, the channel ran north between Bois Blanc Island and the Canadian mainland. They overtook monster shadows in the dark, six-hundred-foot iron ore carriers, riding high in ballast.

  “What a wonderful place,” said Marat Zolner.

  City lights and chimneys belching fire marked the office buildings, automobile plants, and foundries of Detroit on the American side of the river. On the Canadian side—ninety seconds at Black Bird’s top speed—were the “border cities” of Windsor, Riverside, Ford City, Walkerville, Sandwich, Ojibway, and La Salle. Their population was a mere tenth of Detroit’s, but they were as brightly lit, their waterfronts crammed with distilleries, breweries, and the government export docks where customs cleared alcohol for export. The cleared booze was absolutely legal until it crossed the international border in the middle of the river.

  The boat leading them veered toward Windsor and pointed the way to a hidden inlet that led to a brick boathouse that had been built before the war for an industrialist’s yacht.

  Black Bird rumbled into it. Men lowered the door, and she was safe.

  • • •

  ISAAC BELL ordered a dozen Van Dorn detectives to track the flatcar that had taken Black Bird from Marat Zolner’s Great River estate. He had no proof that Zolner had rented the estate; whoever had had paid cash through brokers who had disappeared. Vanished, too, were the agents who had arranged for the railroad to move the car. But if not Zolner, who else? Besides, Zolner or not, the black boat served the Comintern.

  The Van Dorns started at Zolner’s siding, the remnants of a passenger spur that had served the exclusive South Side Sportsmen’s Club. The spur connected to the Montauk Branch of the Long Island Railroad. Detectives went west toward New York City and east toward Montauk Point. In both directions were many towns with freight sidings near creeks, inlets, and harbors.

  Bell himself headed three station stops to the west to the railroad’s district freight yard at Babylon. On the chief dispatcher’s blackboard was a record of a “special,” an extra, unscheduled train, consisting of a locomotive, tender, caboose, and a flatcar, serial number 55461.

  He asked
to speak with the engineer, but the man was out on another train. The locomotive’s fireman was “around somewhere,” but neither in the freight house, where large items were stored, nor in the express house, which handled packages. “Try the engine house.” Skirting piles of sand and gravel and a clamshell bucket loading hopper cars, Bell found the fireman oiling a 4-6-0 and asked if he had a look at the boat.

  “What boat?”

  “On the flatcar.”

  “Is that what it was? It was wrapped under canvas. Sure, could have been a boat, I suppose.”

  “Didn’t you wonder?”

  “Weren’t about to ask. They were a tough bunch.”

  “How many men?”

  “Six or seven, I believe. They holed up in the caboose, made the brakeman ride up in the cab with me and the engineer.”

  “Where’d you take it?”

  “I rode as far as Jamaica.”

  From the Long Island Railroad’s central freight junction at Jamaica, in the New York City borough of Queens, car number 55461 had been sent to the East New York freight yard. From East New York, it was shunted to the waterfront Bay Ridge Terminal and rolled onto a car float. A Pennsylvania Railroad tugboat shepherded the car float across the Upper Bay to Jersey City’s Greenville Terminal, where 55461 disappeared.

  Bell made a contribution to the railroad police “benevolent fund” and blanketed the yard with his own detectives to search for it. But it was nowhere on the property. Nor did the Pennsylvania Railroad have any record of the flatcar heading south or west on “Pennsy” track.

  An angry Isaac Bell stormed that a flatcar carrying a seventy-foot speedboat, covered in canvas or not, could not simply vanish. A frightened dispatcher finally admitted that shortly after the car had arrived at Greenville, someone had lifted some papers from the chief dispatcher’s files. Bell recalled from Grady Forrer’s report that, when penetrating a foreign nation, the Comintern routinely infiltrated railroads and dockyards with low-level agents.

  “What would happen,” he asked the Greenville dispatcher, “if flatcar 55461 had continued down the line with no record of its existence?”

  “That would have caused great confusion and immediate consternation.”

  Bell sent his men on a search for what competing railroad line the flatcar might have been transferred to. They picked up the trail nearby in Jersey City at the Weehawken junction. Number 55461 had been coupled to a New York Central freight train. The New York Central freight had headed north on the Central’s West Shore Division, which meandered four hundred twenty-five miles from Weehawken, New Jersey, to Buffalo, New York.

  Isaac Bell sent detectives after the freight. But with a fair idea of Black Bird’s ultimate destination forming in his mind, Bell himself raced to the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western’s Hoboken Terminal. The Phoebe Snow, a high-speed passenger limited, whisked him straight to Buffalo.

  • • •

  THE BUFFALO YARDMASTER at the New York Central West Shore Division Terminal told Bell the freight train had already been broken up. Some of the cars had unloaded in Buffalo and some were dispersed to other railroads. “A boat, you say?”

  “Under canvas.”

  “Well, if it was a boat, go talk to the Buffalo Creek Railroad. They switch cars to the waterfront.”

  Bell hitched a ride on a Buffalo Creek switching engine, a little 0-6-0, that pushed a string of empty hopper cars back to the waterfront, where giant bulk carriers from the Midwest were moored to grain elevator docks. The engineer dropped the last empty, and the little engine huffed a few hundred yards to the end of the line. The rails stopped beside a crane on the edge of Lake Erie.

  “Dropped him right here.”

  The engineer lit a cigarette. Bell climbed down beside the murky water and stared west.

  “A boat,” said the engineer, “can go anywhere from here.”

  “Detroit.”

  “Anywhere. The Great Lakes are all connected. It could be Detroit. Could be Chicago, Milwaukee, even Duluth—though I don’t know who’d want to go to Duluth—Cleveland, Toledo, or even up Lake Ontario to Toronto.”

  “Detroit,” said Bell.

  The ingredients for three of every four drinks consumed in America were smuggled across the Detroit River. Where else could Marat Zolner and his Black Bird be but Detroit? Bell was sure it was Detroit. But he was less sure why.

  The Van Dorn Detective Agency had bloodied his nose in New York, taking his Long Island estate and his bottling plant in Lower Manhattan. Had Zolner fled to Detroit? Or did he already have New York in the bag, despite a bloody nose, and had gone to Detroit to expand his empire?

  • • •

  “GOOD LUCK,” a Canadian stevedore at the liquor export dock muttered as the long black whisky hauler rumbled into the dark. “You’ll need it when the Purple Gang hears you coming a mile away.”

  He and his mates were placing bets. The new boat, which had taken on a full thousand cases of Canadian Club, made a hell of a racket. Who would catch it first? Customs picketboats? Or the hijackers? The hijackers were the favorites. Side bets were placed on the notoriously vicious River Gang. The smart money inclined toward the rival Purple Gang, dubbed “monstrous” by a newspaperman whose head was found soon after floating in Lake Erie.

  Any whisky hauler with any brains at all used mufflers. And if the black boat’s noise didn’t cut its odds to near zero, it was nowhere as fast as it looked. The newcomers had overloaded it. Crossing a stretch of river where a whisky hauler’s only friends were speed and stealth, it rode low in the water, its engines laboring, at the pace of a steamer on a Sunday school outing.

  • • •

  THE RIVER GANG BOSS, “St. Louis Pete” Berelli, son of Sicilian immigrants, had grown up in a Jewish slum. Initiated as a boy into the neighborhood’s exceptionally violent street gang, Berelli had nothing against the Jews. Until he hauled whisky in Detroit and ran up against the Purple Gang. Their so-called Jewish Navy whisky hijackers made the gangsters back in St. Louis look like choirboys. There was absolutely no reason to club every man on his boat and throw their bodies into the river. And even less reason to tow him behind the boat by a rope tied around his ankles to drown him slowly.

  He was half dead when the rope slackened. The boat had stopped. Frantically flapping his arms to hold his head above water, he heard a loud motorboat passing in the dark. His blood ran colder than the water. A veteran of whisky crossings—and a savage hijacker himself—St. Louis Pete knew what the Purples would do next. In about two seconds, he would be drowning again, but not so slowly.

  • • •

  IN THE COCKPIT of the Purple Gang’s speedboat, the Jewish Navy’s “Admiral Abe” Weintraub had lost interest in St. Louis Pete Berelli.

  “Shut up . . . Listen!”

  Weintraub thought he heard what sounded like a very big boat on a night run to Detroit. There it roared again, motors straining to move a heavy load.

  “Get him!” he shouted at his driver, and they tore after it.

  His boat was a powerful Gar Wood with monster Allison supercharged motors and a semi-displacement hull. Towing the River Gang boat they had just hijacked, and the Sicilian behind it, diminished its speed by very little. But, oddly, while they caught up close enough to see the red glare of the nightrunner’s exhaust pipes, they couldn’t quite overtake it.

  “Faster!” Admiral Abe yelled.

  The driver, a loan shark enforcer by day, feared Admiral Abe as every sensible gangster did. He coaxed every bit he could out of his engines.

  Suddenly, the red glare they were following disappeared. The Gar Wood was enveloped in a dark cloud of thick, choking smoke. They were coughing on the smoke when the boat they were chasing fell silent.

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Stop!”

  The driver jerked back his throttles. The bow dropped into the water, and the Gar Wood slowed so quickly that the boat they were towing crashed into their stern with an impact that splintered mahogany
and knocked all but Admiral Abe off their feet.

  “Kill ’em!” he yelled, pulling a heavy Colt Navy automatic and shooting into the dark where he sensed a long black hull sliding alongside. A searchlight blazed, and in the half second before it blinded him, he saw a Lewis machine gun on a sturdy mount. It spat fire in short bursts that cut his men down even as they pulled pistols. The noise was deafening and then over.

  The black boat slammed alongside. Fighting men swarmed aboard, scooped the fallen gangsters off the decks, and threw them in the river. A rifle barrel knocked Weintraub’s gun out of his hand. Men grabbed him. He fought. They beat him to the deck and hog-tied him, with his wrists behind his back and tight to his ankles.

  “Who are you bastards?”

  A tall, lean figure with his face masked smashed a blackjack against Weintraub’s mouth.

  The searchlight went out.

  Abe Weintraub spat blood and teeth. “I said, who are you bastards?”

  “New partners.”

  Weintraub spat another tooth. “I don’t need a partner.”

  “Not your partner,” came the scornful reply, “your boss’s partner. Who is he?”

  “We’re the Purple Gang,” Weintraub shot back. “Leave the booze and run while you can.”

  They looped a line to the rope that tied his wrists to his ankles and threw him in the water. Weintraub held his breath, waiting for them to pull him out, waiting for the rope to jerk his wrists and drag him toward air. He waited until he could wait no more and had to breathe. He gulped for air but inhaled water.

  They jerked his head out of the water. He gasped, coughed, gagged, and threw up. They dropped him back in the water. The second time they pulled his head back to air, the guy who had knocked his teeth out leaned over the side of the boat and addressed him conversationally. “There’s a drowned guy hanging off the boat you were towing. Any idea who he was?”

  Weintraub answered—the wop didn’t matter, and it would buy time before they dunked him again. “St. Louis Pete.”

  “With what gang was Mr. Pete affiliated?”

  “What?”

  “Who’d he hang with?”

  “River Gang.”