The Bootlegger

1

Two men in expensive clothes, a bootlegger and his bodyguard, dangled a bellboy upside down from the Hotel Gotham’s parapet.

The bodyguard held him by his ankles, nineteen stories above 55th Street. It was night. No one saw, and the boy’s screams were drowned out by the Fifth Avenue buses, the El thundering up Sixth, and trolley bells clanging on Madison.

The bootlegger shouted down at him, “Every bellhop in the hotel sells my booze! Whatsamatter with you?”

Church spires and mansion turrets reached for him like teeth.

“Last chance, sonny.”

A tall man in a summer suit glided silently across the roof. He drew a Browning automatic from his coat and a throwing knife from his boot. He mounted the parapet and pressed the pistol to the bodyguard’s temple.

“Hold tight.”

The bodyguard froze. The bootlegger shrank from the blade pricking his throat.

“Who the—”

“Isaac Bell. Van Dorn Agency. Sling him in on the count of two.”

“If you shoot, we drop him.”

“You’ll have holes in your heads before he passes the eighteenth floor… On my count: One! Pull him up. Two! Swing him over the edge… Lay him on the roof— Are you O.K., son?”

The bellboy had tears in his eyes. He nodded, head bobbing like a puppet.

“Go downstairs,” Isaac Bell told him, sliding his knife back in his boot and shifting the automatic to his left hand. “Tell your boss Chief Investigator Bell said to give you the week off and a fifty-dollar bonus for standing up to bootleggers.”

The bodyguard chose his moment well. When the tall detective reached down to help the boy stand, he swung a heavy, ring-studded fist. Skillfully thrown with the full power of a big man’s muscle behind it, it was blocked before it traveled four inches.

A bone-cracking counterpunch staggered him. His knees buckled and he collapsed on the tar. The bootlegger shot empty hands into the sky. “O.K., O.K.”

The Van Dorn detective agency — an operation with field offices in every city in the country and many abroad — maintained warm relations with the police. But Isaac Bell spotted trouble when he walked into the 54th Street precinct house.

The desk sergeant couldn’t meet his eye.

Bell reached across the high desk to shake his hand anyway. This particular sergeant’s father, retired roundsman Paddy O’Riordan, augmented his pension as a part-time night watchman for Van Dorn Protective Services.

“How’s your dad?”

Paddy was doing fine.

“Any chance of interviewing the bootlegger we caught at the Gotham?”

“The big guy’s at the hospital getting his jaw wired.”

“I want the little one, the boss.”

“Surety company paid his bond.”

Bell was incensed. “Bail? For attempted murder?”

“They expect the protection they pay for,” said Sergeant O’Riordan, poker-faced. “What I would do next time, Mr. Bell, instead of calling us, throw them in the river.”

Bell watched for the cop’s reaction when he replied, “I reckoned Coasties would fish them out.”

O’Riordan agreed with a world-weary “Yeah,” confirming the rumors that even some officers of the United States Coast Guard — the arm of the Treasury Department charged with enforcing Prohibition at sea — were in the bootleggers’ pockets.

Starting this afternoon, thought Bell, the Van Dorns would put a stop to that.

One big hand firm on the throttle of his S-1 Flying Yacht, the other on the wheel, Isaac Bell began racing down the East River for take-off speed. He dodged a railcar float and steered into a rapidly narrowing slot between a tugboat pushing a fleet of coal barges and another towing a bright red barge of dynamite. Joseph Van Dorn, the burly, scarlet-whiskered founder of the detective agency, sat beside him in the open cockpit, lost in thought.

The Greenpoint ferry surged out of the 23rd Street Terminal straight in their path. The sight of the slab-sided vessel, suddenly enormous in their windshield, made Joseph Van Dorn sit up straight. A brave and cool-headed man, he asked, “Do we have time to stop?”

Bell shoved his throttle wide open.

The Liberty engine mounted behind them on the wing thundered.

He hauled hard on the wheel.

The Loening S-1 held speed and altitude records but was notoriously slow to respond to the controls. Bell had replaced its stick and pedals with a combined steering and elevating Blériot wheel, in hopes of making it nimbler.

Passengers on the Greenpoint ferry backed from the rail.

Bell gave the wheel one last firm tug.

The Flying Yacht lunged off the water and cleared the ferry with a foot to spare.

“There ought to be a law against flying like you,” said Van Dorn.

Bell flew under the Williamsburg Bridge and between the spotting masts of a battleship docked at the Navy Yard. “Sorry to distract you from your dire thoughts.”

“You’ll distract us both to kingdom come.”

Bell headed across leaf-green Brooklyn at one hundred twenty miles an hour.

Van Dorn resumed pondering how to deal with misfortune.

The World War had upended his agency. Some of his best detectives had been killed fighting in the trenches. Others died shockingly young in the influenza epidemic. A post-war recession in the business world was bankrupting clients. And only yesterday, Isaac Bell had discovered that bootleggers, who were getting rich quick off Prohibition by bribing cops and politicians, had corrupted two of his best house detectives at the Hotel Gotham.

Bell climbed to three thousand feet before they reached the Rockaways. Where the white sand beach slid into the ocean like a flaying knife, he turned and headed east above the string of barrier islands that sheltered Long Island from the raw fury of the Atlantic. A booze smugglers’ paradise of hidden bays and marshes, inlets, creeks and canals stretched in the lee of those islands as far as he could see.

Thirty miles from New York, he banked the plane out over the steel-blue ocean and began to descend.

“Can I come in the launch, Chief?”

Seaman Third Class Asa Somers, the youngest sailor on the Coast Guard cutter CG-9, was beside himself. He had finally made it to sea, patrolling the Fire Island coast for rumrunners on a ship with a cannon and machine guns. Now the fastest flying boat in the world — a high-wing pusher monoplane — was looping down from the sky. And if the roar of its four-hundred-horsepower Liberty motor wasn’t thrilling enough, it was bringing a famous crime fighter he’d read about in Boys’ Life and the Police Gazette—Mr. Joseph Van Dorn, whose army of private detectives vowed: “We never give up! Never!”

“What’s got you all stirred up?” growled the white-haired chief petty officer.

“I want to meet Mr. Van Dorn when he lands.”

“He ain’t gonna land.”

“Why not?”

“Open your eyes, boy. See that swell? Four-foot seas’ll kick that flying boat ass over teakettle.”

“Maybe he’ll give it a whirl,” Somers said, with little hope. Flight Magazine praised the S-1’s speed a lot more than its handling.

“If he does,” said the chief, “you can come in the launch to pick up the bodies.”

Up on the flying bridge, CG-9’s skipper expressed the same opinion.

“Stand by with grappling hooks.”

The flying boat circled lower. When it whipped past, skimming wave tops, Somers recognized Van Dorn, who was seated beside the pilot in the glass-surrounded, open-roofed cockpit, by his red whiskers bristling in the slipstream.

The roar of the big twelve-cylinder engine faded to a whisper.

“Lunatic,” growled the chief.

But young Somers watched the Air Yacht’s ailerons. The wing flaps fluttered up and down almost faster than the eye could see as the pilot fought to keep her on an even keel. Back in her tail unit, the horizontal stabilizer bit the air, and down she came, steady as a locomotive on rails. Her long V-shaped hull touched the water, flaring a vapor-thin wake. Her wing floats skimmed the swell, and she settled lightly.

“Somers! Man the bow line.”

The boy leaped into the launch and they motored across the hundred yards that separated the cutter and the flying boat. The huge four-bladed propeller behind the wing stopped spinning, and the pilot, who had made an almost impossible landing look easy, climbed down from the cockpit onto the running board that extended around the front of the rocking hull. He was a tall, lean, fair-haired man with a no-nonsense expression on his handsome face. His golden hair and thick mustache were impeccably groomed. His tailored suit and the broad-brimmed hat pulled tight on his head were both white.

Somers dropped the bow line.

“What in blazes are you doing?” bellowed the chief.

“I bet that’s Isaac Bell!”

“I don’t care if it’s Mary Pickford! Don’t foul that line!”

The boy re-coiled the line, his gaze locked on the pilot. It had to be him. Bell’s picture was never in a magazine. But reports on Van Dorn always mentioned his chief investigator’s white suit and it suddenly struck Somers that the camera-shy detective could go incognito in a flash simply by changing his clothes.

“Heave a line, son!” he called. “Come on, you can do it — on the jump!”

Somers remembered to let the coil reel out of his palm as the chief had taught him. To his eternal gratitude the rope fell into Bell’s big hand.

“Good shot.” He pulled the plane and the boat together.

Somers asked, “Are you Isaac Bell, sir?”

“I’m his butler. Mum’s the word — Bell is still passed out in a speakeasy. Now, let’s get Mr. Van Dorn into your boat without dropping him in the drink. Ready?”

Bell reached to help Van Dorn, a heavily built man in his fifties with a prominent roman nose and hooded eyes. Van Dorn ignored Bell’s hand. Bell seized his elbow and guided him toward Somers with a conspiratorial grin.

“Hang on tight, son, he’s not as spry as he looks.”

Behind his grin, Bell’s blue eyes were cool and alert. He watched carefully as the older man stepped between the bouncing craft, and he relaxed only after Somers had him safely aboard.

“What’s your name, sailor?” asked Van Dorn in a voice that had the faintest lilt of an Irish accent.

“Seaman Third Class Asa Somers, sir.”

“Lied about your age?”

“How did you know?” Somers whispered.

“I worked that dodge to join the Marines.” He shot a thumbs-up toward the stern. “All aboard, Chief. Back to the ship.”

“Aye, sir.”

The boat wheeled away from the seaplane.

Van Dorn called to Bell, “Watch yourself at the Gotham. Don’t forget, those shameless SOBs have fifty pounds on you.”

If a mountain lion could smile, thought Asa Somers, it would smile like Isaac Bell when he answered, “Forget? Never.”

Joseph Van Dorn cast a skeptical eye on CG-9, a surplus submarine chaser the U.S. Navy had palmed off on the Coast Guard for Prohibition patrol. With a crow’s nest above a flying bridge, six-cylinder gasoline engines driving triple screws, and a three-inch Poole gun mounted on the foredeck, she had been built to spot, chase, and sink slow-moving German U-boats — not fast rumrunners.

She’d been worked hard in the war and scantly maintained since. The drone of pumps told him that her wooden hull had worked open many a leak. Her motor valves were chattering, even at half speed. She would still pack a punch with the Poole gun and a brace of .30–06 Lewis machine guns on the bridge wings. But even if she somehow managed to get in range of a rumrunner, who was trained to fire them?

Her middle-aged skipper was pouch-eyed and red-nosed. Her aged chief petty officer looked like a Spanish-American War vet. And the crew — with the exception of young Somers, who had scrambled eagerly up the mast to the lookout perch in the crow’s nest as soon as they shipped the launch — were pretty much the quality Van Dorn expected of recruits paid twenty-one dollars a month.

The skipper greeted him warily.

Van Dorn disarmed him with the amiable smile that had sent many a criminal to the penitentiary wondering why he had allowed this jovial gent close enough to clamp a steely hand on the scruff of his neck. A twinkle in the eye and a warm chortle in the voice fostered the notion of an easygoing fellow.

“I suppose your commandant told you the Treasury Department hired my detective agency to recommend how better to combat the illegal liquor traffic. But I bet scuttlebutt says we’re investigating who’s in cahoots with the bootleggers — pocketing bribes to look the other way.”

“They don’t have to bribe us. They outrun us, and they outnumber us. Or someone — I’m not saying who ’cause I don’t know who — tips them where we’re patrolling. Or they radio false distress calls; we’re supposed to save lives, so we steam to the rescue, leaving our station wide open. If we happen to catch ’em, the courts turn ’em loose and they buy their speedboats back at government auction.”

Van Dorn took a fresh look at the skipper. Maybe his nose was red from a head cold. Drinking man or not, he sounded genuinely indignant and fed up. Who could blame him?

In the year since Prohibition — the banning of the sale of alcohol by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and the Volstead Act — it seemed half the country had agreed to break the law. Millions of people would pay handsomely for a drink. Short of striking oil or gold in your backyard, there was no way to get rich quicker than to sell hooch. All you needed was a boat you could run a few miles offshore to a rum fleet of foreign-registered freighters and schooners anchored beyond the law in international waters. The newspapers had made a hero of Bill McCoy, captain of a schooner registered in the British Bahama Islands. He had come up with the scheme for circumventing the law, which made enforcing Prohibition a mug’s game.

“Like the song says”—Van Dorn recited a lyric from Irving Berlin’s latest hit—“‘You cannot make your shimmy shake on tea.’ How fast are the taxis?”

While fishermen and yacht owners sailed out to the rum fleet to buy a few bottles, big business was conducted by “taxis” or “contact boats”—high-powered, shallow-draft vessels in which professional rumrunners smuggled hundreds of cases ashore to bootleggers who paid top dollar.

“They build ’em faster every day.”

Van Dorn shook his head, feigning dismay. Isaac Bell had already convinced him to recommend flying-boat patrols, though God knows who would pay for them. Congress banned booze but failed to cough up money for enforcement.

“Taxi!”

All eyes shot to the crow’s nest.

Joseph Van Dorn whipped a pair of binoculars from his voluminous overcoat and focused in the direction Asa Somers was pointing his telescope. Low in the water and painted as gray as the sea and the sky, the rum boat was barely visible at a thousand yards.

“Full speed!” ordered the skipper, and bounded up the ladder to the flying bridge atop the wheelhouse. Van Dorn climbed heavily after him.

The engines ground harder. Valves stormed louder. The subchaser dug her stern in and boiled a white wake. “Fifteen knots,” said the skipper.

Subchasers had been built to do eighteen, but the oily blue smoke spewing from her exhaust ports told Van Dorn her worn engines were pushing their limits. Their quarry was overloaded, with its gunnels almost submerged, but it was churning along at seventeen or eighteen knots and growing fainter in the distance.

“Gunner! Put a shot across his bow.”

The Poole gun barked, shaking the deck. It was not apparent through Van Dorn’s powerful glasses where the cannon shell landed, but it was nowhere near the rum boat’s bow. The gunners landed their second shot closer. He saw it splash, but the boat continued to pull ahead.

Suddenly, just as it seemed the rummy would disappear in the failing light of evening, they got a break. The taxi slowed. She had hit something in the water, the skipper speculated, or thrown a prop, or blown a cylinder. Whatever had gone wrong on the heavily laden boat, the subchaser caught up slowly.

“They’ll dump the booze and run for it,” said the skipper.

Van Dorn adjusted his binoculars. But he saw no frantic figures throwing contraband overboard. The boat just kept running for the night.

“Gunner! Another across his bow.”

The Poole gun shook the deck again, and a shell splashed in front of the rumrunner. “They’ll pull up now.”

The warning shot had no effect and the rumrunner kept going.

Van Dorn made a quick count of the cases of whisky he saw heaped on deck, estimated the amount she could hold belowdecks, and calculated a minimum cargo of five hundred cases. If the bottles contained the “real McCoy”—authentic Scotch that had not been stretched or doctored with cheap grain alcohol — the boatload was worth thirty thousand dollars. To the crew of a rum boat, who before Prohibition had barely eked out a living catching fish, it was a fortune that might make them more brave than sensible. For thirty thousand dollars, six bootleggers could buy a Cadillac or a Rolls-Royce, a Marmon or a Minerva. For the fishermen’s families it meant snug cottages and steady food on the table.

The skipper switched on an electric siren. CG-9 screamed like a banshee. Still, the rum boat ran. “They’re crazy. Fire again!” the skipper shouted down to the gun crew. “Get ’em wet!”

The shell hit the water close enough to spray the crew. The rum boat stopped abruptly and turned one hundred eighty degrees to face the subchaser that was bearing down on them in a cloud of blue smoke.

“Stand by, Lewis guns!”

Grinning Coasties hunched over the drum-fed machine guns mounted on pedestals each side of the wheelhouse. Van Dorn reckoned that good sense would prevail at last. The Lewis was a wonderful weapon — fast-firing, rarely jamming, and highly accurate. Rumrunners could be expected to throw their hands in the air before the range got any shorter and let their lawyers spring them. Instead, when the cutter closed to a hundred yards, they started shooting.

Shouts of surprise rang out on the Coast Guard boat.

A rifle slug crackled past the mast, a foot from Van Dorn’s head. Another clanged off a ventilator cowling and ricocheted against the cannon on the foredeck, scattering the gun crew, who dived for cover. Van Dorn whipped his Colt .45 automatic from his coat, rammed his shoulder against the mast to counter the cutter’s roll, and took careful aim for a very long pistol shot. Just as he found the distant rifleman in his sights, a third rifle slug struck the Coastie manning the starboard Lewis gun and tumbled him off the back of the wing to the main deck.

The big detective climbed down the ladder as fast as he could and squeezed into the wing. He jerked back the machine gun’s slide with his left hand and triggered a three-shot burst with his right. Wood flew from the taxi’s cabin, inches from the rifleman. Three more and the rifle flew from his hands.

“Another taxi!” came Asa Somers’s high-pitched yell from the crow’s nest. “Another taxi, astern.”

Van Dorn concentrated on clearing the rumrunner’s cockpit. He directed a stream of .30–06 slugs that made a believer of the helmsman, who let go the wheel and flung himself flat.

Somers yelled again, “Taxi coming up behind us!”

Fear in the boy’s voice made Van Dorn look back.

A long, low black boat was closing fast. Van Dorn had never seen a boat so fast. Forty knots at least. Fifty miles per hour. Thunder chorused from multiple exhaust manifolds. Three dozen straight pipes lanced orange flame into the sky. Triple Liberty motors, massed in a row, each one as powerful as the turbo-supercharged L-12 on Isaac’s flying boat, spewed the fiery blast.

The gun crew on the foredeck couldn’t see it.

Charging from behind, slicing the seas like a knife, the black boat turned as the subchaser turned, holding the angle that screened it from the cannon. The port machine gunner couldn’t see it either, blocked by the wheelhouse. But Joseph Van Dorn could. He pivoted the Lewis gun and opened fire.

The vessel began weaving, jinking sharply left and right, agile as a dragonfly.

A cold smile darkened Van Dorn’s face.

“O.K., boys. That’s how you want it?” He pointed the Lewis gun straight down the middle of the weaving path and fired in bursts, peppering the black boat with a hundred rounds in ten seconds. Nearly half his shots hit. But to Van Dorn’s amazement, they bounced off, and he realized, too late, that she was armored with steel sheathing.

He raked the glass windshield behind which the helmsman crouched. The glass starred but did not shatter. Bulletproof. These boys had come prepared. Then the black boat fired back.

It, too, had a Lewis gun. Hidden below the deck, it pivoted up on a hinged mount, and Van Dorn saw in an instant that the fellow firing it knew his business. Scores of bullets drilled through the subchaser’s wooden hull right under where he manned his gun and riddled the chest-high canvas that protected the bridge wing from wind and spray. Van Dorn fired long bursts back. A cool, detached side of his mind marveled that he had not been hit by the withering fire.

Something smacked his chest hard as a thrown cobblestone.

Suddenly, he was falling over the rim of the bridge wing and plummeting toward the deck. The analytical side of his brain noted that the taxi they were chasing was speeding away, covered by machine-gun fire from the black boat, and that, as he fell, the Coast Guard cutter was wheeling to bring the Poole gun to bear. In turning her flank to the seas, she took a wave broadside and heeled steeply to starboard, so that when he finally landed it was not on the narrow deck but on the safety railing that surrounded it. The taut wire cable broke his fall and bounced him overboard into bitter cold water. The last thing he heard was Asa Somers’s shrill, “Mr. Van Dorn!”

2

“Powwow in the alley. Hancock, you cover.”

Isaac Bell appeared to wander casually through the Hotel Gotham’s sumptuous lobby. Four well-dressed house detectives drifted quietly after him, a smooth exodus unnoticed by the paying guests. When all four had assembled in the dark and narrow kitchen alley out back, Bell addressed two by name.

“Clayton. Ellis.”

Tom Clayton and Ed Ellis were typical Van Dorn Protective Services house dicks — tall, broad-shouldered heavyweights, not as sharp as full-fledged detectives but handsome as the Arrow Collar Man. Tricked out in a decent suit, clean white shirt, polished shoes, and four-in-hand necktie, neither of the former Southern Pacific Railroad detectives appeared out of place in an expensive hotel. But pickpockets, sneak thieves, and confidence men recognized bruisers to steer clear of.

“What’s up, Mr. Bell?”

“You’re fired.”

“What for?” Clayton demanded.

“You sullied the name of the Van Dorn Agency.”

“‘Sullied’?” Clayton smirked at his sidekick. “‘Sullied’?”

Ellis said, “I’m with you, pal. ‘Sullied’?”

Bell stifled his impulse to floor them both. The others in their squad had resisted taking bribes. For the good of the agency, he seized the opportunity to remind the honest ones what was at stake and to give them courage to resist temptation. So he answered the mocking question, calmly.

“Mr. Van Dorn built a top-notch outfit that spans the continent. We have offices in every city linked by private telegraph and long-distance telephone. We have hundreds of crack detectives — valuable men who know their business — and thousands of Protective Services boys guarding banks and jewelry shops, escorting bullion shipments, and standing watch in the finest hotels. But the outfit isn’t worth a plugged nickel if clients can’t trust our good name. Van Dorns do not accept graft. You did. You sullied our good name. That is what ‘sullied’ means, and that is why you are fired.”

“Listen here, Mr. Bell, it’s human nature to share the wealth. The bootleggers are hauling it in.”

Ellis chimed in. “The bellhops get their cut delivering bottles to the guests and it’s only fair we get our cut for allowing the booze in the door.”

“Not every bellhop.”

Clayton and Ellis traded a cagy glance. They knew what had happened.

“The bootlegger you took bribes from tried to throw a boy off the roof last night. That boy’s employer, Hotel Gotham, pays us to protect their property, their guests, and their workers. You two let that boy down. Don’t let me see you near this hotel ever again.”

“Are you threatening us?”

“Spot on, mister. Get lost.”

Clayton and Ellis stepped closer, light on their feet for big men. The honest house dicks exchanged looks, wondering if they should come to the chief investigator’s defense. Bell stayed them with a quick gesture. A barely perceptible hunch of his shoulder telegraphed a roundhouse right to end the scrap before it started.

Clayton saw it coming. He stepped lithely to his right. The by-the-book evasive move had the unexpected effect of driving his chin straight into Bell’s left, which rose from his knee like a wrecking ball and tossed the house dick backwards.

Ellis was already piling on, swinging a quicksilver left too powerful to block. Bell slipped it over his shoulder and returned a right cross to the side of Ellis’s head, which slammed him across the alley into Clayton, who was clinging to the wall.

Containing his anger, Isaac Bell said, “If I ever see you on the streets of New York, I’ll throw you in the Hudson River.”

“Mr. Bell! Mr. Bell!”

A Van Dorn apprentice — a fresh-faced kid of eighteen — burst from the kitchen door. “Mr. Bell. Mr. Van Dorn was shot!”

“What?”

Isaac Bell turned in horror toward the piping voice, so stricken that he failed to register the boy’s eyes tracking sudden motion.

Ellis had launched a powerful right hook. Bell succeeded in rolling with part of it, but enough glancing drive landed to knock him off his feet. He sprawled on the greasy concrete. Clayton bounded at him like a placekicker, reared back for maximum power, and launched a boot at his head. Bell tried to block it with his hand, but the boot brushed it aside and came straight at his face. Bell caught Clayton’s ankle in his other hand, held tight with all his strength, and surged to his feet in a double explosion of fury and despair.

He hoisted Clayton’s leg high above his shoulder, dumped him backwards to the concrete, and whirled to meet Ellis’s next punch, a pile-driver left aimed straight at his jaw. Bell ducked under it. Ellis’s balled knuckles burned across his scalp. He ducked lower, seized Ellis, and used the heavier man’s momentum to drive him at Clayton, who was rising to his feet. The house dicks’ faces met nose to nose, mashing cartilage and cracking bone. Bell dropped Ellis in a moaning heap and gripped the apprentice’s shoulder with an iron hand.

“Where is he?”

“Bellevue.”

Bell took a deep breath and braced himself. “Hospital? Or morgue?”

“Hospital.”

“Let’s go! The rest of you, back to work. Tell Hancock he’s in charge.”

The boy had the wit to have a cab waiting.

Bell questioned him closely as it raced across Midtown. But all anyone knew so far was that sometime after Isaac Bell put Joseph Van Dorn aboard the Coast Guard cutter, the Boss had been wounded in a gun battle with rumrunners. Bell thought, fleetingly, that he was probably tying up his Loening at the 31st Street Air Service Terminal when it happened.

“How did they get him ashore so quickly?”

What Joe would call the luck of the Irish had come to his rescue. An alert shore operator had relayed the Coast Guard radio report to the New York Police Department, and the Harbor Squad had dispatched a fast launch, which was already patrolling for rummies off Sandy Hook. It rendezvoused with the much slower cutter and raced Van Dorn up the East River to Bellevue Hospital. Bell would have preferred a hospital with more renowned surgeons than practiced at the overworked, understaffed municipal hospital, but the cops had chosen the one closest to the river.

“Soon as you drop me, take the cab straight back to the office. Tell Detective McKinney that I said that all hands are to hunt the criminals who attacked Mr. Van Dorn.” Darren McKinney was a young firecracker Van Dorn had brought up from Washington to run the New York field office.

“Tell him I said to call in markers from every bootlegger in the city; one of them will hear who did it. Tell him to look for a shot-up rum boat. And tell him to look for wounded in the hospitals.”

The cab screeched to a stop on smoking tires.

“Off you go! On the jump!”

Bell stormed into the hospital lobby.

At the desk, they told him that Joseph Van Dorn was in the operating room.

“How bad is he?”

“Three of our top surgeons are attending him.”

Bell steadied himself on the desk. Three? What grievous wounds would require three? “Has anyone called his wife?”

“Mrs. Van Dorn is in a waiting room. Would you like to see her?”

“Of course.”

A grim-faced receptionist led Bell to a private waiting room.

Dorothy Van Dorn fell into his arms. “Oh, Isaac. It can’t be.”

She was considerably younger than Joe, a brilliantly educated raven-haired beauty, the daughter of the Washington Navy Yard’s legendary dreadnaught gun builder Arthur Langner, the widow of naval architect Farley Kent. Dorothy had been at Smith College with Joe’s first wife, who died of pneumonia. Bell had watched with joy when what had seemed a commonsensical coupling of widowed parents with young children blossomed into a marriage that brought unexpected passion to the prim Van Dorn and a longed-for steadiness to the tempestuous Dorothy.

“Isaac, what was a man his age doing in a gunfight?”

There were several answers, none of which would help. There was no point in assuring his terrified wife that Joe Van Dorn was the steadiest of men in a gunfight, ever cool, alert, and deadly. Nor did Bell see any purpose in relating that his only fear when he put him aboard a United States Coast Guard cutter armed with two machine guns and a cannon was an accidental dunking. Now, of course, he wished he had insisted that Joe take a man with him. There was plenty of room in the Loening’s four-passenger cabin. He could have assigned a couple of men to look out for him.

“I don’t know yet what happened.”

“Who shot him?”

“We’re already investigating. I’ll know soon.”

He hugged her close, then let go to shake hands with Joe’s oldest friend who had accompanied Dorothy to the hospital. Captain Dave Novicki, broad and sturdy as a mooring bollard, was a retired ocean mariner. He had taken Joe under his wing years ago when he was a junior officer on the immigrant boat that brought the teenage Van Dorn to America. Bell had met Novicki often at Thanksgiving dinners in the Van Dorns’ Murray Hill town house. Joe credited the crusty old sailor’s steady influence for much of his success, just as Bell credited Van Dorn’s guidance for much of his.

“Thanks for coming,” he said to Bell.

Bell motioned Novicki aside to ask in a low voice, “How bad is he?”

“Touch and go. The chief doc promised a progress report in an hour. Two hours ago.”

A terrible hour passed. All looked up when a nurse came in. She whispered to Isaac Bell that there was a telephone call for him in the lobby. They handed him a phone at the reception desk. “McKinney?”

“Right here, Mr. Bell.”

“What do we have?”

“Ed Tobin found the boat the Coasties were chasing. Half-sunk near the Chelsea Piers. Not the boat that shot him. The taxi they were chasing.”

Tobin was a veteran of the New York field office’s Gang Squad and a blood relative of Staten Island families of watermen and coal pirates. As such, Ed Tobin knew the harbor better than the Harbor Squad.

“Booze mostly gone. Looks like they off-loaded into smaller boats. Ed says the cops claim they caught one in the East River.”

“Anyone show up shot in any hospitals?”

“We’re checking every hospital from Bay Shore, Long Island, to Brooklyn, to Staten Island, to Manhattan. Nothing yet.”

“No gunshot wounds in any?”

“None that don’t have a good story attached.”

“Tell me the stories.”

“Two guys who plugged each other disputing the right to sell beer to Bensonhurst speakeasies. Guy in a Herald Square hooch hole shot by his girlfriend for two-timing her. Guy in Roosevelt Hospital shot on the El. That’s it so far, but the night is young.”

“Who shot the guy on the El?”

“Got away. Cops found him alone.”

“Which El? Ninth Avenue?”

“Right. Cops took him to the closest hospital.”

“Cops? Why not ambulance?”

“He was walking under his own steam. Cops found him stumbling down from the Church stop at Saint Paul’s. You know, at 59th?”

“I know where it is.”

The Ninth Avenue Elevated Line, which ran right beside Roosevelt Hospital, started all the way downtown at South Ferry at the edge of the harbor and passed through Chelsea on the way up. A wounded rumrunner could just possibly have come ashore at either of those points and made it to the train.

McKinney said, “I’ll send the boys back to Roosevelt.”

“No. I’ll do it.” It was a very slim chance. But it beat hanging around helpless to do anything for Joe Van Dorn.

“How’s the Boss?” McKinney asked.

“I don’t know yet. They’re operating.”

“Of all the crazy things…”

“What do you mean?”

“That Mr. Van Dorn happened to be there, on that cutter, of all patrols. How many bootleggers go to the trouble of shooting at the Coast Guard? Anyone with half a brain knows it’s safer to surrender and let your lawyers bust you loose.”

“Good question,” said Bell. He hurried back to the waiting room, thinking that Joe had indeed run into an unlikely piece of bad luck. As McKinney said, most rumrunners knew it was not worth risking their lives in a shoot-out with the Coast Guard.

Still no word from the surgeons. Bell asked Dorothy, “Are you all right here? There’s something I have to look into.” She was deathly pale, and he could see she was nearing the end of her rope.

Captain Novicki flung a brawny arm around her shoulders and boomed, “You get the louses who shot him, Isaac. I’ll look after Dorothy and Joe like a mother bear.”

Isaac Bell flagged a cab and raced across town through light late-night traffic. It was less than fifteen minutes from Bellevue to Roosevelt Hospital, a giant three-hundred-fifty-bed red brick building. The hospital and the fortresslike Roman Catholic church of St. Paul the Apostle stood between the Irish and Negro slums of Hell’s Kitchen to the south and San Juan Hill to the north. “Blind pigs,” windowless illegal drinking parlors, darkened the ground floors of tenements. A train rattled overhead as he ran under the El and into the hospital. He gave the front-desk receptionist a look at his gold Van Dorn chief investigator badge, slipped him five dollars, and asked to speak with the patient admitted earlier with a gunshot wound.

“Top floor,” the receptionist told him. “Last room at the end of the hall. Private room, with a police guard.”

“How badly is he wounded?”

“He made it under his own steam.”

In the elevator, Bell folded a sawbuck for the cop.

The elevator opened on the soapy odor of a freshly mopped floor. The hall was empty, the tiles glistening.

Bell hurried down the long corridor. The elevator scissored shut behind him.

Ahead, he heard the sharp bang of a small-caliber pistol.

He ran toward the sound, pulling his Browning from his shoulder holster, and rounded the corner. He saw a stairwell door to his left. The door to the room to his right was half open. He heard a loud groan and saw on the floor blue-uniformed trouser legs and scuffed black brogans. Cop shoes. He pushed inside. A New York Police Department officer lay on his back, holding his head, eyes squeezed shut. He groaned again, “It hoits awful.”

On the bed, a blond-haired man in hospital garb lay on his side, curled like a fetus, his chin tucked tightly to his chest. The gunshot Bell had heard had been fired point-blank. A tiny red hole half the diameter of a dime pierced the back of his neck, with a ring of blood seared around the rim.

3

The window was open.

Bell thrust his head out. The square top of St. Paul’s south tower stood at eye level across the street. Beneath the window, the hospital’s sheer façade dropped twelve stories to the pavement.

He ran to the stairwell, opened the fire door, and listened for footsteps. Silence. Had the killer stopped some floors down? He couldn’t have reached the ground floor yet. Had he bolted out of the stairwell into a lower corridor? Had he climbed the stairs to the roof?

Pistol in hand, Bell raced up the flight, pushed through a door onto the tar-surfaced roof. A smoky sky reflected the dim lights of the neighborhood. Elevator-machine penthouses, stairwell penthouses, and chimneys loomed in the dark. Skylights cast up electric light from the rooms under them. He listened. Far below, another El rattled past. A shadow flickered behind the glow of a skylight, and Bell sprang after it.

He ran in silence, footfalls light on the soft tar, saw the shadow pass another skylight, and put on a burst of speed. He was twenty feet behind when the figure ahead stopped abruptly and whirled around.

Bell dived through the air, tucked his shoulder, clasped his gun to his torso, and rolled as he hit the tar. Two shots cracked in rapid succession, and lead flew through the space he had occupied an instant before.

The killer ducked behind an elevator house.

Bell ran around the other side. He saw a flash of light. A stairwell door opened just wide enough for a man. Bell pegged a shot at the strong, supple, reptilian silhouette, but it slipped away with fluid grace.

He ran to the door, ducked low, and yanked it open. He heard the running man’s boots pounding the stairs and plunged after him down two switchback flights. A foot-long brass nozzle flew at his head, swung from a canvas fire hose. Bell ducked under it. It clanged on the steel banister and bounced back at his face. He twisted aside, but in avoiding the heavy nozzle, he lost his footing and fell to one knee. Disoriented for a second, he sensed the man brush him. Two shots exploded loudly in the confined space, echoed to the roof and down to the cellar. Two slugs buried themselves in plaster beside his head.

Bell jumped to his feet and tore after the killer.

Suddenly, he had a clear shot. For a precious instant he was looking straight down at the crown of the man’s flat cap. He aimed his Browning, the modified No. 2 that he had carried for years. At this range he could not miss. He turned smoothly to keep the running killer in his line of sight. Gently, he started to squeeze the trigger. As he did, still moving to line up the shot, something bright as snow intruded on his field of fire.

It was a tall white cap of folded linen, the woman wearing it a nurse in a spotless white dress and pinafore apron. He jerked the gun aside and let go the trigger, a hairsbreath between the life and death of an innocent. Two innocents, he realized as he thundered down the stairs: the nurse, and the doctor who had been embracing her in the privacy of the stairwell and now was shielding her with his body.

“It’s not what you think,” cried the doctor.

Bell heard glass shatter below and pounded past them.

Three flights down, the stairs were dark. His boots crunched on broken glass. The killer had smashed the lights. Bell charged down the stairs into the dark. He stumbled, tripped up by a fire hose draped shin-high between the banisters. He snagged a banister with one hand, righted himself, and kept going.

Forced to go slowly in the dark, he heard a door slam. He climbed down two more flights. There was light again, marking where the killer had stopped breaking bulbs and exited the stairwell. He pushed through a door and found himself abruptly outside, bursting into an alley between the hospital and a stable — one of the many on Manhattan Island’s West Side that had not yet been converted to an auto garage. There was a tang of manure in the air and a sweet smell of straw.

The alley led to 58th Street, a long block of tenements. The sidewalks were deserted at this hour, the buildings’ windows mostly dark. The killer could have run into any of a score of doorways or ducked into a blind pig on Ninth Avenue to the east or Tenth Avenue to the west. The stable door was wide open. He ran inside. A night watchman and a groom were seated on beer kegs, playing checkers on a whisky barrel. The killer would have had to run past them to hide in the stable.

Bell wasted no time in plunking down the folded sawbuck meant for the cop. “You boys see a man with a gun run by?”

“Nope,” said the groom.

“Didn’t even see a man without a gun,” said the watchman. He looked pointedly at Bell’s pistol and asked, “Friend of yours?”

“Get out of his way and give a shout if you see him coming.”

Over on Ninth Avenue, another El screeched into the Church station. If the killer was already vaulting up the steps to take the train, Bell knew he could never catch up before it left the station. He backed onto the side way, stymied, and looked around. Fifty feet down the block he saw an incongruous sight, a Packard Twin Six town car. The chauffeur was just closing the front hood. He stepped back into the car and started the motor.

Bell holstered his weapon and hurried toward the car, straightening his coat.

As he approached, a side window in the passenger cabin lowered.

Expecting at this hour and in this neighborhood a wealthy old man calling on his mistress or visiting a brothel, Bell was surprised to see a beautiful young woman in a sleeveless sheath dress. She had strings of Baltic amber beads around her neck, a long cigarette holder perched in her fingers, and a cloche hat on her bobbed chestnut hair.

He reached automatically to sweep his hat off his head. He had lost it in the chase.

She had almond eyes, a mischievous smile, and a lovely contralto voice. The gin on her breath was the good stuff, not bathtub. “You look like a gentleman who can’t find a taxi.”

“Did you see a man run past moments ago?”

“No.”

“No one? Either side of the street?”

“Let me ask my driver. He was fiddling with the motor.” She swiveled a voice tube to her Cupid’s bow lips. “Did you see a man run past moments ago?”

She held the tube to her ear, then she turned back to Bell. “I’m sorry. He didn’t either. I wish I could help you. Although…” Another smile. “The car’s running again. If you truly need a taxi, I can offer you a ride.”

Bell looked up and down the street. He hadn’t a hope of finding him. His best bet was to go back to the hospital on the chance the cop had caught a close look at who banged him on his head.

“If I see him, should I—”

“Don’t go near him.”

“I won’t,” she promised. “I meant, if I should see him, I can report him to you. You should give me your card.”

Bell gave her his Van Dorn Detective Agency business card and introduced himself. “Isaac Bell.”

“A detective? I suppose that makes him a criminal.”

“He just shot a man.”

“You don’t say!” She fished her own card from a tiny clutch and extended her hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Bell. I’m Fern Hawley.”

Bell knew her name from the society columns, and her family’s name as well, having attended college in the city of New Haven. She was the sole heir of a Connecticut hardware-and-firearms magnate. And he was familiar with her sort, having been in France in the latter days of the war when independent, adventurous American heiresses indulged by their fathers — or left their own fortunes by their mothers and were therefore under the thumb of no man — flocked to Paris. Many came to do good, nursing the wounded or feeding starving refugees. Many had come to have a good time, run around with European aristocrats, and pay the rent for bohemian painters and writers.

He wondered why she had been on this slum street when her limousine broke down, but the fact was, New York’s wealthy young went where they pleased. Possibly headed to West 54th, where Park Avenue society “rubbernecked” at the drunks and brawlers marched through Men’s Night Court. Or exiting a side door from a private visit with a hospital patient.

“Are you sure I can’t offer you a ride, Mr. Bell?”

“Thank you, Miss Hawley, but not tonight.” He glanced up and down the street again. Back to the hospital to interview the cop before his sergeant arrived.

“Good night.” Fern Hawley tapped the chauffeur’s partition with her cigarette holder. The Packard Twin Six glided from the curb and turned uptown on Tenth Avenue.

Fern Hawley opened the chauffeur’s partition and said, “I tried. The man just would not get in the car.”

“Have you lost your touch?”

“Don’t make me laugh… Is Johann all right?”

“Dead.”

“Dead? How can Johann be dead? He walked into the hospital on his own two legs.”

Marat Zolner pulled off his visored chauffeur hat and dropped it beside his pistol. His hair was soaked with perspiration and he was breathing hard from running.

“The detective shot him,” he told her.

4

The cop guarding the murdered rumrunner had not seen the man who knocked him for a loop. That was all that Bell could learn from the angry police detectives swarming the hospital. A uniformed officer gave him his hat, which he had found in the stairwell. His derringer was still in it. Bell thanked him with a double sawbuck and raced back to Bellevue Hospital.

Joe Van Dorn was finally out of surgery.

The exhausted surgeons made no promises. “If he makes it through the next hour, he’ll have a chance in the hour after that. At least he’s strong. I can’t recall a man his age so fit.”

“Heart like a cathedral bell!” boomed Captain Novicki with a reassuring glance at Dorothy Van Dorn.

Dorothy asked, “How many bullets?”

“Madam,” said the surgeon. “This is hardly the time nor place, nor a topic to discuss with a woman.”

“My father was a scientist and an engineer. We discussed his work daily. I am asking you how many bullets struck my husband, where the bullets hit, and their effect on his condition.”

The chief surgeon looked at Isaac Bell.

Bell said, “Answer her.”

“All right. He was struck three times. One creased his skull and almost certainly produced a concussion. Two more passed through him. One pierced his upper arm, fortunately missed the bone, but severed the artery. The other punctured his chest. They were small bore rounds with a hard covering to take the grooves in the rifled barrel, which increased their penetrating power, so neither lodged in his body… Shall I go on?”

“How did he survive a severed artery?”

“The petty officer on the Coast Guard cutter arrested the hemorrhage by tourniquet.”

“And the bullet through his chest?”

The surgeon shook his head. “We did what we could. To some extent, the bullet pushed blood vessels, tendons, and ligaments aside. Immersion in salt water reduces the probability of septic infection. And the petty officer poured iodine over and around the wounds. We are of the impression that the cold seawater had the effect of slowing his heartbeat and lowering his blood pressure at that critical moment, which might possibly explain the miracle that he is alive.”

“Thank you, Doctor. May I see him now?”

“You may sit with him. I doubt he’ll speak yet. If he does, don’t tax him.”

Dorothy went into the room. A disapproving nurse moved from the chair beside the bed to a chair in the corner.

Bell and Novicki waited outside.

“Doctor?” Bell called as the surgeon was leaving. “You mentioned he was in the water. Any idea how he got out?”

“They said a Coast Guardsman dived in after him.”

Captain Novicki watched the surgeon shamble away. “There’s a man who needs a stiff drink and a good night’s sleep. Did you have any luck?”

“Caught up with one of the crew from the rum boat they were chasing. He died.”

“Good.”

Not at all good, thought Bell. The dead man could shed no light on his gang. He said, “We found the boat shot up. That’s about it. I’ll try to interview the Coast Guard people in the morning.”

“Get some sleep, Isaac. I’ll stay here.”

“In a while.”

“Isaac! He’s awake. He’s asking for you.”

Bell stepped silently into the room. Van Dorn lay flat on his back, his eyes closed, his cheeks oddly slack, and it took Bell a moment to realize they had shaved his beard and whiskers. His head was bandaged from crown to eyebrows. The biceps of his left arm wore another bandage, as did the crook of his right elbow where the tubing for blood transfusions had been inserted into his vein. Just visible below the hospital bedsheet was the top of an enormous dressing that encircled his chest. His eyes were closed. His lips were moving.

“Put your ear to him,” Dorothy whispered. “He’s trying to speak to you.”

Bell leaned close to do as she asked.

“Isaac.”

“I’m here, sir.”

“Listen.”

“Right here.”

“You must…”

Bell looked at Dorothy. “We shouldn’t tax him. He should rest.”

“Listen!” she shot back. “He won’t rest until he talks to you.”

Isaac Bell spoke in normal tones. “I’m here, Joe. What do you want me to do?”

“Protect the outfit,” Van Dorn whispered.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s in worse shape than I am.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“Stop lying. I’m touch and go. So’s the outfit… I lost Justice.”

Bell knew he meant his longtime contract to help the Department of Justice pursue bank robbers, motorcar thieves, and white slavers across state lines. He was not surprised. The Bureau of Investigation had greatly increased its force of special agents during the war and consequently was no longer willing to pay for nationwide investigations by a transcontinental detective agency.

Bell said, “We knew that was coming.”

Van Dorn whispered, “Treasury threw me a bone.”

He meant, of course, the Coast Guard contract that had gotten him shot. A favor from one of Joe’s many Washington friends, it would be canceled tomorrow morning when officials demanded to know why a civilian detective was in a gunfight on a Coast Guard vessel. No matter that investigating who in the Guard took bribes from bootleggers was for the good of the Service, the contract was lost.

But that was the least of the agency’s troubles.

Bell leaned closer.

“How’d you make out with Ellis and Clayton?”

“They’re leaving town.”

“Iceberg,” Van Dorn whispered.

The nurse jumped up. “That’s enough. He’s hallucinating.”

“No he’s not,” said Bell. He nodded sharply at Novicki to get the nurse out of his way. Van Dorn was saying that his life’s work was threatened by the corrupting effect of Prohibition. Two house dicks taking bribes were only the tip of the iceberg. The new men replacing detectives lost to the war and the flu pandemic were susceptible to corruption. And when the word about him firing Ellis and Clayton got around, how many Protective Services boys would quit to sign on with less scrupulous agencies with lower standards?

“Isaac.”

“Right here.”

“I’m counting on you… Protect the agency.”

“Rest easy,” said Bell. But he had his work cut out for him. It was less a matter of protecting the agency than saving it.

5

Haig & Haig Scotch whisky, twenty thousand cases in a freighter from Glasgow, landed in British colonial territory at the Bahaman port of Nassau. Import duty was paid and the whisky was locked in bonded warehouses. Six thousand of the cases were sold to the captain of the Bahamas-registered staysail schooner Ling Ling. He paid the export duty and cast off immediately for Long Island’s Rum Row.

During the warm and pleasant Gulf Stream sail north, Ling Ling’s crew worked on deck. The contents of twelve thousand bottles were stretched — doubled to twenty-four thousand — by mixing the authentic Haig & Haig with grain alcohol and distilled water and adding tea for color. They pasted counterfeit labels that guaranteed the contents on the extra bottles and sealed them with corks boiled in tea to make them look old. Then they repackaged the bottles in ham-shaped burlap bags holding six each, padded with straw, for ease of handling.

Ling Ling arrived off Fire Island on a dark night when the Coast Guard cutter CG-9 was picketing the schooner Aresthusa, steaming circles around it to keep taxis from picking up booze. A few miles away, flat-bottom boats slipped alongside Ling Ling. They loaded a thousand “hams” and sped to Fire Island, keeping a sharp eye peeled for “Prohibition Navy” patrols and for hijackers. Approaching the beach, they waited for the lights of a foot patrol to pass by. Then they landed in the surf, several miles east of the Blue Point Coast Guard Station.

The hams of Haig & Haig were loaded into carts that men trundled across the narrow island on a boardwalk laid in the soft sand. Fishing boats with oversize engines raced them five miles across Great South Bay and up an unlit channel and into a narrow creek. Cars and trucks were waiting at a dock just beyond the bright lights of a rambling wood-frame hotel. Music and laughter drifted across the marsh from which the creek had been dredged.

The Haig & Haig was quickly moved off the boats into the cars and trucks. The hotel’s handyman and dishwasher helped with the loading and were rewarded with a bottle each. Farm trucks, laundry trucks, and milk and grocery vans hurried off in various directions. Some small cars followed, Fords and Chevrolets with hidden compartments for their owners to smuggle a dozen bottles.

Last to leave were the big cars driven by professional bootleggers. Buicks, Packards, and Cadillacs — with seats removed to make more room for the Haig & Haig and with heavy-duty springs added to carry and conceal the extra weight — formed a convoy on the Montauk Highway and headed west toward New York City, seventy miles away.

The two-lane, all-weather road was dark. The towns it passed through were small, consisting of little more than a white church and a shuttered general store or filling station. They drove fast with their lights off, trusting to a starry sky and a sliver-thin moon.

A town constable and two Prohibition officers spotted the convoy and gave chase in a Ford. The bootleggers in the Buick that was protecting the rear of the convoy saw their headlights.

“Cops?”

“Hijackers?”

Either way, they weren’t stopping.

The Prohibition officers started shooting their revolvers.

“Hijackers!” shouted the bootleggers.

“Hold on!” The driver stomped hard on the Buick’s four-wheel brakes. The car stopped abruptly. The Ford, equipped only with two-wheel brakes, skidded past, the officers shooting. The Buick’s occupants, convinced that the cops were hijackers, opened fire with automatic pistols, wounding the constable.

Ahead lay Patchogue, a fair-size town, with a lace mill, streetlamps, and a business district along the highway, which was renamed Main Street as it passed through. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union had called an emergency meeting to denounce the Suffolk County sheriff for failing to arrest the bootleggers who were racing across Long Island nightly. The meeting was running late. The guest speaker — a wealthy duck farmer and a leading light in the Ku Klux Klan, which had declared war on rumrunners and bootleggers — was likening the sheriff to “an un-American Bolshevik,” when he was interrupted by a telephone report that an auto chase had resulted in the murder of a constable.

“Men!” bellowed the duck farmer. “If the sheriff won’t stop ’em, we will!”

He led a citizens’ posse into the street to ambush the bootleggers’ autos. The volunteer fire department stretched their hook and ladder across the highway.

The bootleggers, fearing more trouble in a larger, better-lit town, and still fifty long miles from the city, pulled their cars to the side of the road and sent a scout ahead. He reported that the fire department had blocked the highway and citizens were arming themselves with squirrel guns. The drivers turned to the boss — a former stickup man from Brooklyn who had put up the cash on behalf of associates there to buy the Haig & Haig from the fishermen — and hoped he had a plan.

His name was Steven Smith. But his men and the New York police called him Professor Smith, because he was always thinking and could usually be counted upon to come up with some way out of a fix like this one.

“Does the town have a church?” the Professor asked.

“A whole bunch,” said the scout.

Professor Smith chose one a distance from Main Street and sent two of his cousins to splash gasoline on the front steps and set it afire. Flames leaped to the steeple. When the fire department ran to put it out, and the citizens followed to watch, three Buicks, a Cadillac, and a Packard raced on toward New York with their Haig & Haig.

Hours later, the Brooklyn bootleggers finally felt close enough to New York to sigh in relief. Almost home. Less than a mile to the garage that the Professor had rented under the Fulton Street Elevated.

Marat Zolner had a five-ton Army truck that had been modified with a bigger motor and pneumatic tires. When fully loaded, it still wouldn’t top thirty-five miles an hour, but whoever chased it would have to contend with five armed men wearing blue uniforms in the Oldsmobile behind it.

“What’s taking them so long?” asked Zolner’s driver, a member of a once powerful, now rapidly fading West Side gang called the Gophers. The driver knew the tall, lean Marat Zolner only as Matt, who hired him often for high-paying jobs.

They had parked under the El and had been sitting there for hours. The driver was jumpy. Marat Zolner was patient, an icy presence in the shadows, unmoving, yet taut as a steel spring.

“They might have broken down. They might have run into cops. They might have run into someone who wanted to take it away from them.”

“Like us,” the driver snickered.

“Here they come.”

Five big town cars weighted down with heavy loads were pulling up, drivers blinking headlights for their garage to open its door, unaware that the man inside was tied up with a gag in his mouth. Zolner waved to his men in the Oldsmobile and they piled out with guns drawn.

The driver of the Cadillac stopped short. “This don’t look good.”

“Relax,” said Professor Smith. “It’s only cops.”

“I thought you paid them off.”

Suddenly, Smith didn’t like the look of this either. He said, “I did.”

“Looks like they want a raise.”

“I don’t think they’re cops,” he said too late. The sight of the uniforms had discouraged the bootleggers from pulling their guns. Now guns were pointed in their faces and pressed to their temples. Smith saw no way out. At best, even if they managed to win a gun battle in the street, the noise would attract the real cops. Even though they had already pocketed his payoff money, they would have no choice but to confiscate his Haig & Haig when a shoot-out woke up the neighborhood.

Smith raised his hands, signaling the others to give up. They were ordered out of the cars and frisked. Their guns were taken away. One of the bogus cops pointed at a five-ton truck parked across the street. “Load the truck.”

Again, Smith saw no way out of the fix. The booze was lost. But the hothead in the last Buick, the one who had shot at the Long Island constable’s Ford, grabbed for the nearest gun. He was a big man, and fast. He clamped a powerful hand around the phony cop’s wrist and squeezed so hard that the man cried out and dropped the gun into the Buick driver’s other hand. A hijacker stepped behind him, jammed a pistol against his spine, and pulled the trigger. The driver’s body muffled the shot, but it was still loud.

“Load the truck!”

Smith’s men rushed to obey before anyone else got shot or the cops came. In less than ten minutes all the cars had been emptied and the five-ton truck was rumbling away on groaning springs, trailed by an Oldsmobile full of exultant gunmen.

Marat Zolner and his driver took the truck across the Brooklyn Bridge, ditched three of the least reliable gunmen, and worked their way uptown, stopping twice to sell Haig & Haig to a speakeasy in the old Tenderloin and a chophouse whose owner was desperately trying to lure back the patrons he had lost to joints serving illegal liquor. The majority of Zolner’s haul was destined for popular speakeasies on 52nd and 53rd streets whose customers the newspapers had dubbed “the rich and fast.”

The sky was getting bright. It was nearly seven in the morning and people on the sidewalks were heading to work. A cop was waiting outside Tony’s.

Marat Zolner said, for the benefit of passersby, “Officer, we have a delivery for this establishment. Could you possibly direct traffic around the truck so we don’t jam up the street?”

He slipped the cop a fifty-dollar bill and the cop muttered, “Where you guys been? My shift’s almost over.”

With the cop overseeing the operation, Marat Zolner’s men passed ham after ham of Haig & Haig across the sidewalk and down to the speakeasy’s cellar entrance. Zolner carried a leather satchel with gold buckles to the heavy front door and knocked. A peephole opened.

“Joe sent me.”

The door swung open. “Hey, pal, how’s it going?”

“Long night. How about you?” He handed the bouncer ten dollars.

“We had one for the books. Park Avenue dame lost her pearls on the dance floor. Searched napkins, tablecloths, and floor sweepings. No dice.” He lowered his voice. “There’s a guy with the boss. I’d look out if I was you.”

Zolner pulled a bottle of Haig & Haig from his bag to thank the bouncer for the warning. Then he walked through the empty joint where a sleepy waiter was upending chairs onto tables and knocked on the owner’s office door. Tony himself opened it. He looked worried. “Come in,” he said. “Come in. How’d you make out?”

“Am I interrupting you?”

“No. No. Just talking to a fellow here who wants to meet you.”

Zolner said softly so only Tony could hear, “I know it’s not your fault.”

“Big of you,” Tony muttered back.

“Do me a favor. Count what I brought and hold my money out front.” He stepped aside to let Tony pass, then entered the office and shut the door. The office was a small, dingy inside room but furnished comfortably, with a carpet and a leather couch in addition to Tony’s desk. A heavyset thug in a good suit rose from the couch. He was wearing his hat.

“How’s it going?”

“Long night,” said Zolner as he placed the satchel on the desk.

“I’ll let you go in a minute.”

“How much?” asked Zolner.

“Half.”

“Half? That would make you the richest Dry agent in the country.”

“I’m not a Prohibition agent. I’m a businessman and you’re doing business on my block. It costs half to do business on my block.”

“You’re not a government agent?” asked Zolner.

“I just told you.”

“I had to be sure,” said Zolner. “Half, you say?” He dropped one hand into the satchel and the other into his pocket.

“Half— Hey!”

Zolner had crossed the space between them in a single swift step. He smashed the thug’s teeth with a blackjack in his right hand and swung a twelve-inch length of lead pipe against his temple. “Businessman?”

The thug swayed, eyes popped wide, feet frozen to the floor, blood pouring from his mouth. Zolner dropped him to the carpet with a second bone-smashing blow of the lead pipe.

At the front door of the speakeasy he counted the money Tony had waiting, piled it into his satchel, and returned fifty dollars.

“What’s this for?”

“You need a new carpet.”

Before crossing Central Park to Fern’s town house, Zolner made one more stop on the Upper West Side to buy a Prohibition agent breakfast at the Bretton Hall Hotel. For five hundred dollars, the federal officer told him about a government raid planned against a leading whisky runner’s downtown warehouse.

“Where will they take the booze?”

“Customs. The Appraisers’ Stores, down in the Village.”

Zolner passed the agent a bottle wrapped in burlap.

“What’s this?”

“The real McCoy. Haig & Haig.”

6

“Everyone down here is praying for Mr. Van Dorn… Well, not everyone, but you know what I mean.”

Dr. Shepherd Nuland, the New York County Medical Examiner, indicated a crowd of unclaimed corpses hanging upright in a refrigerated vault and then shook Isaac Bell’s hand warmly. It was an elevator ride and a short walk from Joe Van Dorn’s hospital room to Bellevue’s morgue.

“How’s he doing?”

“The docs aren’t making any promises,” said Bell.

“And how are you doing, Isaac?”

“I’ll feel better after I’ve seen the rumrunner who got shot at Roosevelt Hospital.”

“Figured you might. I’ll do him myself. You take notes.”

He gave Bell a white apron and a gauze face mask scented with oil of cloves and led him to a postmortem table where the body of the murdered rumrunner waited under a sheet. A stenographer was standing by. Nuland told him to go to lunch, and tugged off the sheet.

The Medical Examiner’s blithe disregard for official procedure was a wrenching reminder of Joe Van Dorn’s great gift for friendship. Rich, powerful, and accomplished men across the continent would jump to lend him a hand. Gather debts but never flaunt them, he had taught Bell from the first day of his apprenticeship. Forgive small sins. Offer help. Give favors, they’ll be returned.

Isaac Bell opened his notebook to take Nuland’s dictation.

“Caucasian male. Twenty-five to thirty years old. Sturdy. Muscular.”

Bell saw a large bandage around the man’s left thigh that the bedclothes had hidden last night. The Medical Examiner cut it off with scissors and whistled in amazement. “One tough hombre to walk on that.”

Two bullets had perforated the flesh. The examiner measured them as an inch and a half apart. He glanced at Bell. “Tight pattern.”

“Lewis gun.”

Bell wrote rapidly in a clear hand as Nuland went on to describe numerous healed bullet and knife wounds that scarred limbs and trunk, a broken nose, and missing teeth. The examiner noted that some of the scars were quite old, acquired in childhood.

“Your classic street-gang kid… All right, let’s see what finally caught up with him.”

Nuland noted the absence of an exit wound in the throat, mouth, and face, then wrestled the body onto its belly. There were more healed scars on the back of the torso and a single large hole in the posterior thigh where the Lewis gun slugs had exited jointly. Finally, he addressed the tiny, half-a-dime-size wound that Bell had seen just under the hairline in the nape of the neck.

“Point-blank range, small bore… Twenty-five caliber, probably… Powder tattooing around the flame zone… Powder grains embedded in the corneum… Powder grains in the mucosum…”

He scraped the grains from the skin’s outer and inner layers onto glass slides.

“Denser pattern of powder tattooing below the wound…” He looked up at Bell. “This Frenchman during the war worked out a system to gauge whether a bullet wound was courtesy of the Germans or self-inflicted… The Army wanted proof to prosecute malingerers who tried to get out of the trenches by shooting themselves in the leg. If we can believe Monsieur Chavigny, the heavier concentration under this wound indicates the bullet entered on an upward slant. Hand me that saw — let’s go find it… How you holding up, Isaac, need a bucket?”

“Getting hungry… Shall I run and get us sandwiches?”

“Corned beef… But let’s find the bullet first.”

Bell handed him a hammer and a chisel.

“Thanks… Where…? Oh, thanks.” He took the forceps from Bell. “Aha! That’s why it didn’t come out his mouth. It’s in his brain!… Here we are. A little .25, just like I told you.”

Isaac Bell stared at the mangled remains of the man who had either been the thug who machine-gunned Joe Van Dorn or an accomplice.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why what?” said Nuland, holding the slug to the light.

“Why didn’t it exit from his mouth?”

“Good question… Looks to me like the guy’s head was bent forward — sharply — chin to chest.” Nuland demonstrated by tucking his own chin to his chest. “Bullet angles into the nape, under or through the occipital bone — through, in this instance — and up into the skull. Easy on the victim. Dead in a flash, no pain.”

“Easy on the killer, too,” said Isaac Bell.

“How do you mean?”

“No death struggle, no blood.”

“Do you have time to see me off, Isaac?” asked Pauline Grandzau.

The doctors allowed no one but Dorothy, Captain Novicki, and Isaac Bell in Joseph Van Dorn’s room, which didn’t stop detectives from rushing to Bellevue to offer condolences to his wife and wish the Boss well and donate blood in the event of additional operations. The most striking visitor, by far, was Fräulein Privatdetektive Pauline Grandzau, chief of the Berlin field office.

The beautiful young German had won her detective spurs before the war when she was a teenage library student who helped Isaac Bell solve the Thief case.

“Are you going back already?” Bell asked. He was rushing off to the police laboratory, where, he had just learned, they were examining a pistol shell found in the murdered rumrunner’s hospital room. “Seems like you just got here.”

“I’m afraid so. Nieuw Amsterdam sails this afternoon.”

He reached automatically for his pocket watch, then shot his cuff instead to check the time. Strapped to his wrist was the perfect substitute for a man who had his hands on the controls of an airplane, racing boat, or motorcar — a Cartier “Tank,” which Marion, his wife, had given him for their anniversary.

“I’ll do my best to get to the boat,” he promised. Pauline, after all, had risked her life to help him behind German lines.

Holland America liners sailed from a Hoboken pier.

Bell made it with only minutes to spare, and when he boarded the Rotterdam-bound Nieuw Amsterdam, an aging seventeen-thousand-tonner, he found two Van Dorn detectives already crowded into Pauline’s little cabin. Research Department chief Grady Forrer — a scholarly giant of bull-like proportions — and young, pale-skinned, bantamweight James Dashwood — the finest pistol shot in the agency — who had brought her flowers. The giant and the rail-thin youth gripped their bouquets like clubs.

Pauline appeared oblivious to her dazzling effect on either of them.

“Isaac! I’m so glad you could make it.” She turned to Dashwood and Forrer. “Boys, thank you so much for coming. And thank you for the beautiful roses, Grady, and the lovely peonies, James. I’ll see you when I’m back in the autumn. Good-bye. Thank you. Good-bye.”

Grady and Dashwood shuffled out, reluctantly, and Bell had to hide a smile. The skinny little German student with yellow braids, freckles, bright blue eyes, and the moxie of a Berlin street fighter had grown up. A stylish bob replaced her braids. Her enormous eyes were deep as oceans. God alone knew where the freckles had gone. But the moxie was still there, hidden like a sleeve gun, ready when needed.

For a long moment, they stood looking at each other.

Bell broke the silence, speaking German — partly because people were shuffling by in the corridor and partly for old times’ sake — the college German she had helped him hone to stay alive.

“I attended the rumrunner’s autopsy.”

“What did you learn?”

“There was something a little odd about the way the killer shot him. He was shot point-blank. Not between the eyes or in the temple, where you’d expect, but in the back of his neck.”

Pauline’s eyes settled on him curiously. “Where in the back of his neck?”

“Just at the hairline.”

“The nape?”

“Exactly.”

“Next, you will tell me that the bullet did not exit.”

“How did you know?”

“It didn’t?”

“No. Straight up in his brain.”

“Was he American?”

“I assume so. He told the doctors his name was Johnny. Why?”

“Could he have come from abroad?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You just described a Genickschuss.”

“Genickschuss? What is that? Neck shot?”

“A bullet in the nape of the neck.”

“There’s a German word for everything,” Bell marveled.

“Actually, it’s Russian. The word is German, but the Russians coined it for the favored method of execution of the Russian Communist Cheka.”

“Soviet secret police?” asked Bell, equal parts intrigued and surprised. Cheka was short for the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

“A long and fancy name for the engineers of the Red Terror,” said Pauline. “Genickschuss is how they kill. Quickly, cleanly, efficiently.”

“The coroner thought it was efficient,” said Bell. “How did a Russian method of killing get a German name?”

Pauline reminded him that millions of Germans lived in Russia before the war. “There was plenty of mixing. And many a German worked for the Russian Revolution. Starting, if you will, with Karl Marx.”

“Funny way for a rumrunner to get shot… What would the Cheka be doing in New York?”

“Strictly speaking, they would not be Cheka but Comintern, the Russian Communists’ foreign attack force. The Comintern would be in New York for the same reason they’re in Germany. To lead revolution.”

Bell shook his head. “They call it revolution, but what they really want is to replace the old empires the war destroyed with new ones.”

“What gun did the killer use?” Pauline asked.

Bell looked at her curiously. “The boys at the police laboratory are pretty sure it was a Mann pocket pistol.”

“German. Why do they think it’s a Mann?”

“The cops found a shell that had expansion marks from the chamber groove.”

“That could only come from the new model. The 1920. Or the ’21.”

“That’s what the cops said. Apparently the 1920 model has a circular groove to permit an ultralight slide. I’ve not seen one yet.”

“You will love it,” said Pauline.

She reached under her skirt. Bell caught a flicker of a shapely white thigh encircled by black lace. She pressed a tiny semiautomatic pistol into his hand. It was smaller than a deck of cards, finely machined, and amazingly thin — less than three-quarters of an inch. It was too little for his hand, perfect for hers.

“Five shots,” she said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

The aluminum grips were warm from her skin, and Bell wondered, not for the first time, why such a beautiful girl had neither married nor kept a steady boyfriend.

“She is secretly in love with you,” Marion had told him.

“She knows my heart is spoken for,” had been Bell’s reply. He admired Pauline’s courage and her razor-sharp mind, and there was no denying she was wonderful to look at. But he, as he told Marion, was already in love.

“Is it accurate?”

“I trust it to twenty feet.”

Bell handed it back.

Pauline slipped it in its holster. She looked up with a smile. “Doesn’t it seem that our murdered rumrunner has experienced a more complicated death than an ordinary Prohibition gangster?”

“It might,” said Bell. “Except Prohibition’s get-rich-quick promises tempt all sorts.”

The liner’s whistle thundered overhead.

Pauline walked him to the gangway, where officers were urging visitors to disembark. “Auf Wiedersehen, Isaac. It was lovely to see you. Thanks for coming.”

“Glad I did. Your Genickschuss was worth the ride to Hoboken. Not to mention meeting your little Mann.”

She stood on tiptoe, kissed his cheek, and switched to English. “Please, give my warm regards to your wife.”

“I will as soon as I see her. She’s making a picture in Los Angeles.”

Deep in thought, Bell stood out on deck as the Hoboken Ferry steamed across the Hudson River. He looked back when it landed at 23rd Street. The tugs were turning Nieuw Amsterdam into the stream. For an instant, his keen eyes picked out Pauline among the passengers lining the rails, her hair a fleck of shining gold.

If Marion was right, he’d have to find a way to change Pauline’s mind.

He hurried into the terminal, searching for a coin telephone.

“Mortuary.”

“Dr. Nuland, please… Shep, I saw you retrieve powder samples.”

“Smokeless powder doesn’t leave a lot.”

“Enough to ascertain origin?”

“Possibly.”

“Would you ask your lab boys to trace where it came from?”

The formulas for smokeless powder were constantly refined. The latest included Ballistite, Cordite, Rifleite, French Poudre. Based on his conversation with Pauline, he wondered would the powder recovered in the postmortem be German military powder or Russian powder.

7

Newtown Storms, senior partner of Storms & Storms, a Wall Street brokerage founded by his great-grandfather to sell stock in the Erie Canal and expanded by succeeding generations to fund railroads and telegraph lines, welcomed Fern Hawley to his office effusively. She was a handful, with a perpetual smirk that implied she was privy to secrets unknown by ordinary mortals. But she was beautiful, she was very rich, and her father had allowed Storms & Storms to manage a full third of the Hawley fortune. With her was a tall, lithe Russian in a fine blue suit, whom Miss Hawley introduced as “My friend Prince André. We met years ago in Paris.”

Prince André—“late of Saint Petersburg,” as the Russian put it — was carrying an expensive leather satchel with gold buckles. When he put it down to shake hands, Storms saw that his cuff links were set with large diamonds. But he did not let down his guard. He had seen enough Russian refugees sniffing around Wall Street since their revolution to know that despite appearances, they were usually hard up. So, after sufficient small talk to demonstrate to Miss Hawley that he had not forgotten that she was a valued customer, Storms asked, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

“Prince André is unable to return to his estates in Russia… at this time,” said Miss Hawley.

Storms looked sympathetic, while congratulating himself on getting the Russian’s number. Dollars to donuts, Miss Hawley had paid for those cuff links. And his suit, too. He made a mental note to have private detectives look, discreetly, into how much the prince was trying to take her for. Why otherwise intelligent, hardworking fathers allowed these foolish women unfettered access to their money was a mystery raised regularly over cocktails at his club.

Storms said, “I understand. If a loan is required, there are people with whom I can arrange introductions.”

Prince André turned to Fern Hawley and laid on the Russian accent with a trowel. “Loan? Vat is ‘loan’?”

Fern laughed. “Mr. Storms. I’m afraid you’re confused. Prince André is looking to invest. Not borrow.”

“Invest?” Storms placed both hands on his desk and sat up in his chair.

“Unable to gain access to his estates,” said Miss Hawley, “Prince André has been forced to sell other assets. Jewels, mostly, and some French properties. Some of them, at least, in hopes of starting a new life in New York. Show him, André.”

Zolner unbuckled the satchel and threw it open.

“Oh?” Storms peered inside at tightly packed banded banknotes. “Oh. How much were you considering?”

“Prince André thought he would open an account with ten thousand dollars to see how you make use of it.”

“I think we could handle that very nicely.”

Then suddenly Prince André was speaking for himself, his accent all but unnoticeable, and his gaze alert, even challenging. “Miss Hawley thinks buying stocks is a good idea. But do not stock prices continue down?”

“The stock market should turn around any day now,” said Miss Hawley.

“But they have been going down for a year and a half,” said the Russian. “Since before Christmas in 1919?”

Newtown Storms hastened to take her side of the argument. “Miss Hawley, who has considerable experience in the market, is correct. They must go up.”

“Why?”

“Abnormally rapid speculative enhancement of prices for existing stocks caused them to go down. Which, frankly, many experts blame on a reckless class of people new to the discipline of investment. Fortunately, President Harding and Treasury Secretary Mellon are purging the rottenness out of the system by cutting taxes and making the government more efficient.”

“Unemployment remains high,” said Prince André. “People wander the streets in rags.”

“Because the extravagant cost of government saps industry with a withering hand. Don’t forget that labor is quiet, and will stay quiet. The steel strike fixed their wagon, as did the sailors’ strike in the spring. I can safely predict that wages will stay down where they should and lower the high cost of living. People will work harder and live a more moral life. Enterprising people will pick up the slack from less competent sorts. Uncertainty is bound to end, and business is about to boom. It will roar, Prince André. Now’s your chance to get in on the ground floor.”

Marat Zolner kept a straight face even though Fern was teasing him with an arched eyebrow. He said to the stockbroker, “You pose a most convincing-sounding argument.”

“And keep in mind, Your Highness, once you’ve opened an account, you can borrow against it in the event you ever need funds.”

“Why would I need funds when the market roars?”

Storms greeted such naïveté with a kindly chuckle. “I meant, to borrow against your account to buy more stocks to put into it.”

“I am convinced,” said Marat Zolner. He cast Fern Hawley a princely smile and shoved the satchel across Storms’s desk.

“You can take my word for it,” said the broker. “This is the beginning and you’re getting in on it. So if you decide to sell any more jewels, you know where to come.”

“Let us see, first, how you make out with this.”

“Never fear,” said Newtown Storms, who fully expected that President Harding and Secretary Mellon would set a great bull market in full swing before most of Wall Street realized it. “You will get rich quickly.”

“In that case,” said the prince, extending a surprisingly powerful hand. “We will see you again, quickly.”

As Storms rose to usher them out, Fern Hawley said with her knowing smirk, “Next time we stop by your office, you can offer us a drink,” and handed him from Marat Zolner’s satchel a bottle of Haig & Haig.

Isaac Bell paced the Van Dorn bull pen like a caged lion, flowing across the room in long strides, turning abruptly, flowing smoothly back, wheeling again. His gaze was active, and every detective in the room felt the chief investigator’s hard eyes aimed at him.

“It’s four days since Mr. Van Dorn was shot. Who did it?”

The squad of picked men Bell had drafted to track down the rumrunners who shot Van Dorn had nicknamed themselves the “Boss Boys.” They ran the gamut of Van Dorn operator types from deadly knife fighters who looked like accountants, to cerebral investigators who looked like dock wallopers, to every size and shape in between. Few appeared to have slept recently. There was a collective wince around the room when Isaac Bell repeated, “Four days. This is your city, gents. What is going on?”

The wince dissolved into shamefaced shrugs and sidelong glances in search of someone with something useful to say. Finally, the bravest of the Boss Boys, grizzled Harry Warren, who had headed the New York Gang Squad since the heyday of the Gophers, ventured into the lion’s den.

“Sorry, Isaac. West Side, East Side, Brooklyn, none of the gangs know who these guys are. I spoke with Peg Leg Lonergan and even he doesn’t know.”

Detectives stared at Harry in amazement and admiration, wondering how he had wangled a conversation with the closemouthed Lonergan and managed to return from Brooklyn alive.

Harry acknowledged their esteem with a modest nod. “If the leader of the White Hands doesn’t know about these guys, none of the Irish know these guys.”

“What about the Italians?” asked Bell.

Harry, who had changed his name, was known and respected in Little Italy. “Same thing with the Black Handers. Masseria, Cirillo, Yale, Altieri — none of them know.”

“What about Fats Vetere?”

“Him neither.”

“What makes you think they’re telling you the truth?”

“The bootlegging business is heating up. Gangsters and criminals are pushing out the amateurs. There’s so much money to be made. So if the White Hand or the Black Hand knew about these guys, they’d be wanting to get in touch either to buy from them or hijack them. But when I fished, they never fished back. The fact they didn’t try to pump me says the guys who shot the Boss are strangers to the gangs.”

Bell kept pacing. “What about the bootleggers?”

Several men cleared their throats and answered, briefly, one after another.

“The bootleggers I know don’t know, Isaac.”

“I went around the warehouses. They swear they don’t know.”

“Same thing on the piers, Isaac.”

“And the speakeasies. They’ve got no reason to lie to us, Isaac. It’s not like we’re arresting them.”

“It’s not like anyone’s arresting them.”

Bell paced harder, boot heels ringing. “What about the black boat?”

“Yeah, well, the Coasties say they saw this black boat. No one else did.”

“Except maybe Mr. Van Dorn. Is he talking yet, Isaac?”

“Not as much as the first day,” Bell answered, adding, quietly, “In fact, not at all, for the moment.” His surgeons feared an infection had settled into his chest. Dorothy was beside herself, and even Captain Novicki was losing faith.

“Watermen,” said Bell. He turned to the barrel-chested, broad-bellied Ed Tobin. A brutal beating by the Gopher gang when Tobin was a Van Dorn apprentice had maimed his face with a crushed cheekbone and a drooping eyelid. “Ed, have none of the watermen seen it?”

“None that will talk to me.”

“Have you asked Uncle Darbee?” Donald Darbee, Tobin’s great-uncle, was a Staten Island coal pirate with sidelines in salvaging cargo that fell off the docks and ferrying fugitives from New York to New Jersey.

“I asked him first off. Uncle Donny’s never seen the black boat, never heard of it. Though he did like the idea, and he asked me could I find out whether it’s got Liberty motors and, if so, how many, and are they installed in-line or side by side.”

Knowing laughter rumbled about the bull pen, and when even Bell cracked a faint smile, Tobin said, “Can I ask you, Mr. Bell, how are you making out with the Coast Guard?”

Bell’s smile vanished like a shuttered signal lamp. “I will continue trying to interview the cutter crew.” He had had no luck so far. The Coast Guard was keeping CG-9 at sea. When Bell offered to fly out in his plane to interview the crew, his offer was refused.

“McKinney!” Bell turned to the new chief of the New York field office. Darren McKinney was built short, wiry, and supple as chain mail. “You reported that the cops caught a lighter in the East River that had off-loaded the sinking rummy. What sort of booze were they carrying?”

“Dewar’s blended Scotch whisky. The real McCoy.”

“From Arethusa?” Arethusa was the famous McCoy’s schooner that cruised international waters off the coast of Fire Island.

“McCoy just sailed up a shipload from Nassau. But the guys the cops arrested in the East River swear that they got the stuff from somewhere other than the shot-up rummy — understandable, considering the circumstances.”

“Did they or didn’t they?” Bell demanded.

“Harbor Squad claims they followed them from the sinking rummy. These guys saying otherwise are understandably reluctant to be linked to a shooting that might have ki—”

A flicker of violence in Isaac Bell’s eyes silenced the detective mid-word.

“—That is to say, led to the wounding of the proprietor of the Van Dorn Detective Agency.”

Bell said, “I want that reluctance felt by every bootlegger in this city. Find out if they knew the guys on the shot-up rummy.”

“The rummy guys are in jail.”

“No they’re not,” said a gang unit detective hurrying into the bull pen. “Someone bailed ’em out.”

“Now’s our chance to find out. Run them down.”

“Sorry, Isaac, that won’t be possible.”

“Why not?”

“They just got fished out of the river… That’s why I’m late.”

The Van Dorns met the news of slaughtered witnesses with stunned silence. Criminals fearing the electric chair killed accomplices, not ordinary rumrunners and bootleggers.

Bell turned to Detective Tobin. “Ed, get on a boat. Go out to Arethusa and ask McCoy who he sold to that day. If he didn’t sell it, he might have some idea who did.”

“I’m not so sure he’s interested in helping, Mr. Bell.”

Bell said, “If he insists on protecting the buyer, tell him we’ll buy him a Lewis machine gun — he’ll need one for protection, the way things are going. Tell him what Harry Warren just said, criminals are moving in on bootlegging. If that doesn’t change his mind, make it damned clear to him that I will make his life on Rum Row immensely unpleasant by persuading the Coast Guard to assign a cutter to circle his schooner day and night for a month.”

Tobin started for the door.

“Wait,” said Bell. “Take two boys and plenty of firepower. And warn McCoy if he did do business with this roughneck element, he’s in danger. Whoever we’re looking for has a strong aversion to witnesses.”

Tobin turned to Harry Warren. The head of the Gang Squad assigned two of his hardest cases with a brisk nod, and Tobin led them to the weapons vault.

“We’ll take a new tack,” Bell told the rest. “The rumrunner who got shot at Roosevelt Hospital told the docs that his name was Johnny. Johnny was about twenty-five years old, medium height, strong build, blond hair cut short, bunch of scars. It’s possible he’s not American. He didn’t do much talking at the hospital with a couple of holes in his leg, so no one heard whether he had an accent. Get out there and find his friends.”

The detectives trooped out quickly and in seconds Bell was alone, racking his brain for what else he could do. The front-desk man telephoned.

“Lady to see you, Mr. Bell.”

“What’s her name?”

“Won’t say,” the desk detective whispered. A steady fellow normally, with a pistol under his coat and a sawed-off shotgun clamped beside his knee, he sounded almost giddy. “She’s a knockout.”

Bell went to the reception room.

The most beautiful woman he had ever seen was smiling, facing the door, in a tailored traveling suit with an open jacket and a skirt that hung straight to the middle of exquisite calves. She had straw-blond hair, sea-coral-green eyes, and a musical voice.

“I’m no lady. I’m your wife.”

“Marion!”

Bell swept her into his arms. “I’m so happy to see you.” He held her so close, he could feel her heart racing. “What are you doing here? Of course, you came to see Dorothy. She’s at the hospital.”

“I’ll see Dorothy later. How are you?”

“Working an angle on the gang that shot Joe. Hard to tell how he’s doing, but he’s hanging in there.”

“I meant, how are you getting on?”

“Plugging away,” he answered quickly, uncharacteristically repeating himself. “Staying on top of it. The boys are terrific. Everyone’s pitching in, working at it overtime.”

Marion Morgan Bell had traveled three thousand miles to examine her husband with a clear, cool gaze. She saw a shadow of apprehension in his eyes for the friend who was his mentor. She saw cold resolve to pursue Joe’s attackers. And she sensed that the man she loved with all her heart had somehow managed to brace every muscle in his body with hope.

“Good,” she said, greatly relieved. “I’ll go see Dorothy now.”

She held Bell’s hand as he walked her downstairs to put her in a taxi.

“I didn’t tell you I was coming because I didn’t know for sure when I’d arrive and I knew you’d have your hands full.”

“How did you get here so fast?”

“I caught a lift to Chicago on Preston and Josephine’s special.” Preston Whiteway owned a chain of newspapers. His wife, Josephine, was a famous aviatrix. Their private train, absurdly overpowered by a 4-8-2 ALCO locomotive, had set the latest speed record for Los Angeles to Chicago. “I just missed the Twentieth Century Limited, so I got Josephine to sneak me onto her pilot friend’s mail plane. The new De Havilland? You would have loved it. We averaged one hundred nine miles an hour.”

“I wasn’t aware that airmail planes had room for a passenger.”

“It was a tight squeeze. I was practically in the pilot’s lap, but he was so sweet about it.”

“I’ll bet.”

“We beat the Twentieth Century by four hours!”

“How long can you stay in New York?” Bell asked.

“The Four Marx Brothers asked me to direct a comedy in Fort Lee.”

“Aren’t they a vaudeville act?”

“They’re hoping a two-reeler will get them to Broadway.”

The St. Regis doorman hailed a cab. Bell helped Marion into it. He leaned in and kissed her. She whispered, “I booked a suite upstairs,” and began to kiss him back.

The cabbie cleared his throat, loudly. “Say, mister, why don’t you just ride along with us?”

“Pipe down,” said the doorman. “You got something against love?”

Below the ferry terminal at West 23rd Street, Marat Zolner lost sight of the Hudson River behind an unbroken wall of warehouses, bulkhead structures, and dock buildings. On the other side of that wall was a Dutch freighter in from Rotterdam. One of her crew was about to jump ship.

Zolner stopped in one of the cheap lunchrooms scattered along West Street that catered to seamen. It was across from a door in the wall beside a guard shack. Every seaman who stepped out had to show his papers to prove he had a job on a ship. Zolner ordered a cup of coffee and watched.

Antipov stepped through the door with three others. He was dressed like they were in a tight peacoat and flat cap, but his wire-thin silhouette and steel-frame eyeglasses were unmistakable. They showed their papers and crossed West Street. The three entered a blind pig. Antipov waited outside. He removed his glasses, polished them with a bandanna he pulled from his peacoat, then tied the bandanna around his neck.

Zolner joined him and they walked inland on a side street past unlit garages and shuttered warehouses.

Antipov spoke English with a heavy accent. “Where is Johann?”

“Dead. I’m glad you’ve come. I counted on him.”

“How did he die?”

“He was wounded by the Coast Guard. Police took him to the hospital. He knew too much.”

“Pity,” said Antipov.

“Needless to say, Fern believes he was shot by a detective.”

“Of course. Who are those men following us?”

At no point had either Russian appeared to look back.

“Neighborhood thugs,” answered Zolner. “They rob immigrants who sneak off the ships.”

Antipov stopped where the shadows were thickest. “Do you have a cigarette?”

“Of course.” Zolner shook a Lucky Strike out of the pack. Antipov struck a match, let the wind blow it out, and struck another and lit the cigarette, shielding the flame this time expertly. The charade gave the thugs time to catch up. Three Irish, Zolner noted, two of them half drunk, but not enough to slow them down. The third floated with a boxer’s smooth gait. They attacked without a word.

Zolner retreated to his right, Antipov to his left. To the thugs, they looked like frightened men stumbling into each other, but their paths crossed as smoothly as parts of a machine, and when they finished exchanging places in a dance as precise as it was confusing, the thug charging Zolner was suddenly facing Antipov, and the thug lunging at Antipov was facing Zolner. Zolner dropped his man with a blackjack. Antipov stabbed his with a long, thin dagger.

The boxer scrambled backwards. Zolner and Antipov blocked any hope of running back to West Street or ahead to Tenth Avenue. He opened his hands in the air to show he was not armed.

Antipov spoke as if he were not standing five feet away. “Would it not be ironic to fall at the hands of common criminals?”

“Not likely,” said Zolner.

The boxer, seeing that flight was hopeless, closed his big hands into ham-size fists and went up on the balls of his feet.

“He is brave,” said Antipov.

“And handles himself well,” said Zolner. “What is your name?”

“What’s it to you?”

“We are deciding whether to kill you. Or pay you.”

“Pay me? Pay me for what?”

“Whatever we require. Tell me where you hang out and I will pay you when there’s a job to be done. Easy money.”

“Are you nuts?”

“We are bootleggers. We pay easy money for muscle. What is your name?”

“Ricky Newdell.”

“What do your pals call you?”

“They call me Hooks. ’Counta my left hook.”

Marat Zolner stared at him.

“My best punch,” Ricky Newdell explained.

“Where do you hang out?”

“Lunchroom at 18th and Tenth.”

“O.K., Hooks. You’ll hear from us. I’m Matt. He’s Jake. Turn around and walk back to West Street.”

“What about these guys?” The man Zolner had blackjacked was out cold. The man Antipov stabbed had not moved since he fell.

Zolner and Antipov wiped the blood off their weapons on the men’s coats.

Ricky Newdell said, “These guys are Gophers.”

Antipov looked at Zolner. “Goofer?” he asked, pronouncing the gang name as Hooks had. “What is Goofer?”

“Neighborhood gangsters. Used to rule the Hell’s Kitchen slum. Leaders dead and in prison.”

Antipov shrugged. “What do we care?”

“The Gophers ain’t gonna take this lying down,” warned Newdell.

“Hooks,” said Zolner. “This is your last chance. If you want easy money, turn around and walk away.”

Hooks Newdell turned around and walked toward West Street. Behind him he heard laughter, and the knife guy with the thick accent saying, “‘Goofers’? Like ‘goofy’?” Hooks did not look back. Something told him with these guys moving into the neighborhood, the Gophers’ days were numbered.

8

Marat Zolner steered Yuri Antipov toward Tenth Avenue.

“Where are we going?”

“I have an auto.”

Antipov’s mouth tightened at the sight of the Packard Twin Six, as Zolner had expected it would. Wait until he saw the place Fern had rented for a hideout.

Zolner drove across the Brooklyn Bridge and east for two hours, over the Brooklyn line into Nassau County, and across Nassau on the Merrick Road to Suffolk and through a dozen villages on the Montauk Highway. The towns were dark, their people sleeping. The farms and forest between the towns were darker, except where roadhouses lit the night, like liners at sea, with colored lights, electric signs, and the headlights of expensive motorcars in parking lots.

Music spilled from the blazing windows.

“A cabaret!” said Antipov, breaking the silence that lay heavily between them.

“They’re called roadhouses in the country, cabarets in the city.”

“In the middle of nowhere.”

“Their patrons own automobiles.”

“And drink alcohol so openly.”

“Americans are avid lawbreakers.”

Zolner turned off the highway onto a narrow, dark, empty road. He drove for a mile until it ended at a substantial stone building with a tall, wide, iron-studded door in the middle. A warm, wet wind reeked of marsh and salt water. Overhead, through breaks in the trees, stars shone softly in a hazy sky.

“You have a big house,” said Antipov.

“This is the gatehouse.”

Zolner turned the lights on in the car and blew the horn. They waited.

“Aren’t you expected?”

“They have orders to make sure that we are not hijackers or Prohibition officers.”

At last, a big man in a leather cap stepped from the shadows with one hand in his pocket. “All clear, boss.”

Zolner said, “This is Yuri. He has the run of the property. Yuri, this is Trucks O’Neal. You can count on him.”

Trucks O’Neal took a close look and said, “I’ll remember you, Yuri.”

The iron-studded door swung open, and Zolner drove the Packard through it.

“Why did you tell him I was ‘Yuri’ instead of ‘Jake’?”

“Trucks is an American Army veteran and war profiteer turned bootlegger. He is loyal.”

“How can you be sure? He’s not a comrade.”

“I saved his skin in Germany, and I am making him wealthy and powerful here. In return, Trucks O’Neal is loyal. Better yet, he’s intelligent enough to stay loyal.”

He steered onto a curving bluestone driveway. The headlights swept hedgerows and gardens, tennis courts and greenhouses.

“Czar Nicholas would enjoy this,” Antipov remarked disapprovingly.

“Czar Nicholas is out of business,” Zolner shot back. He turned off the main drive, which went to the estate house whose roof could be seen darkly against the dim stars, and the tires rumbled over railroad tracks. “This is a private siding that connects to the main line to New York.”

“Is that a railcar?” The starlight reflected on cut-glass windows.

“A private car.”

“Does it belong to Fern?”

“Of course not. We would not risk any connection to Fern. Everything’s rented in cash by agents. In case we have to break camp quickly, none of this can be traced to her.” He stopped the Packard, climbed out, and stretched the kinks from the long ride. Antipov stood beside him. “What is that?” he asked, pointing at the silhouette of a tall spire.

“The hothouse chimney,” said Zolner. “It conceals a radio antenna. The signal guides our boats ashore.”

“What is out there? I see no lights.”

“Great South Bay. Forty miles long, five miles wide. Across it is Fire Island Inlet, and, through the inlet, the Atlantic Ocean.”

“What is around us on the land?”

“Other estates of similar size. All private.”

He walked Antipov to a large garage, led him in a side door, and turned on the lights to reveal a canvas-topped stake truck and six Packard and Pierce-Arrow automobiles. “The autos have strengthened suspensions so they don’t sag when loaded.”

“Why don’t you deliver it by rail? From your siding?”

“Have you forgotten trains are trapped on tracks? Rails are easily choked. The Prohibition agents would love nothing more than the opportunity to seize a railcar full of booze. We scatter it on the highways. If they’re lucky, they catch one auto in ten.”

“But you concentrate it here.”

“Many miles from the market in a dark and lonely place.”

“How do you get it here?”

“The boats.”

He turned out the garage lights and walked a gravel path to another large building on the bank of a still creek. The boathouse had no windows, so only when Zolner opened the door did Antipov see that it was brightly lit inside. Two large boats were tied in separate bulkheaded slips. One was broad beamed, a forty-foot freight boat with two huge motors.

“She carries a thousand cases at twenty-five knots,” said Zolner. “The price fluctuates according to demand, but in general her cargo will earn us fifty thousand dollars. A lot of money for a night’s work.”

“You have made a success of bootlegging.”

“The boats are the rum-running side of the business. Distributing and selling it is the actual bootlegging. I’ve made a success of that, too.”

“What is that other boat?” It was much longer than the freight boat and much narrower.

“My pride and joy,” said Zolner. “She, too, will carry a thousand cases, but at fifty miles an hour. And if anyone gets in her way, look out. She’ll gun them down. Her name is Black Bird.”

“Your pride?”

Zolner ignored the mocking note in Antipov’s voice.

“Her sailors are Russian — the best seamen in the world.”

“Why have they disassembled her motors?”

The heads were off all three Liberty engines. Carborundum growled against steel, cascading white sparks as a mechanic ground valves.

“The price of speed,” shrugged Zolner. “These motors burn up their valves on a regular basis.”

“Intake or exhaust?” asked Antipov.

“I forgot, you apprenticed as a mechanic. Exhaust, of course. It’s the heat that builds up. No one’s come up with a good way to cool them, though not for lack of trying every trick in the book, including hollow valves filled with mercury or sodium. Fortunately, the United States built seventeen thousand Liberty engines, most of which were never used in the war. We buy them for pennies on the dollar.”

He gestured at wooden crates stacked against the rear wall. “Believe it or not, it is often more efficient to replace the entire motor than waste time on the valves.”

“I would believe almost anything at this point.”

Antipov spoke softly, but he was seething with anger.

Now was the time, Zolner decided, to get this out in the open.

“What is it?” he asked. “What is troubling you, Yuri?”

“What of the revolution?”

“What of the revolution?”

“You are a Comintern agent, Comrade Zolner. You were sent here to spearhead the Bolshevik takeover of America.”

9

“What precisely have you done to spearhead the Bolshevik takeover of America?”

The boathouse mechanic switched off his electric grinder. For a long moment the only sound Marat Zolner heard was the lap of water echoing in the slips.

The Communist International — the “Comintern”—was Soviet Russia’s worldwide espionage network. The Russian Communist Party had launched it as its foreign arm when it seized control of the revolution that brought down Czar Nicholas II. The Comintern’s mission was to repeat that victory everywhere in the world and overthrow the governments of the international bourgeoisie by all available means — spying, sabotage, and armed force.

Marat Zolner was a battle-hardened soldier of the revolution. During the war he had provoked entire regiments to shoot their officers. He led the Soviet unit that captured the czar’s train, fought with the Bolsheviks to subvert the democratic provisional government, and shone in cavalry battles with White Loyalists in the Russian Civil War. Beyond the Russian border, he proved versatile, rallying Berlin street fighters to the barricades. Antipov had fought at his side.

“Go get something to eat!” he called to the valve grinder, a Russian, too. When they were alone, he said to Antipov, “Come here!”

He strode to the wall of spare motors. Sitting on one of the crates was a steel strongbox.

“Open that!”

Antipov flung back the lid. The box was crammed with cash, banded stacks of bills in denominations of one hundred and one thousand dollars.

“Where did you get this?”

“Profits,” said Zolner.

“Profits?”

“Money earned smuggling alcohol from Rum Row to Long Island roadhouses and New York speakeasies.”

“I ask of the revolution and you answer like a banker. Profits?”

“What I am doing costs money.”

“And what precisely are you doing?”

Marat Zolner said, “Masking our Comintern network of assassins and saboteurs as a liquor-bootlegging crime syndicate.”

“You wear your mask too well. You boast of pride and joy. You boast of gangsters, smugglers. Bootleggers. Where are the comrades?”

“Black Bird’s sailors are comrades — loyal Russian Bolshevik comrades of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet. Johann was a comrade. You are a comrade.”

“And you?”

“My smugglers and gangsters obey me. I am their bootlegger boss. They don’t know I’m Comintern. They won’t know why I expand to Detroit and Miami — nor why our empire spreads to the South, the Midwest, the Pacific Coast.”

“Are you a comrade?”

“Have you not heard a word I said? Of course I am a comrade.”

Antipov shook his head.

“What is wrong, Yuri?”

“The Comintern sent you to New York to provoke revolution.”

“Precisely what my empire will achieve.”

“What part did you take in the strikes of Seattle shipyards? How did you aid the Boston police strike? What was your role in the coalfield strikes? Who did you co-opt in the nationwide steel strike? What of the May first seamens’ strike? Are you co-opting the IWW Wobblies? Have you seized control of the American Communist Party?”

Zolner laughed.

“I do not see the joke,” Antipov said heavily.

“The Wobblies and the American Communist Party and the labor unions are all in decline. The Congress, the newspapers, and the American Legion sow panic about ‘Reds.’ But the fact is, as you saw at the roadhouses tonight, Americans of every class are having too much fun defying Prohibition to care about politics, much less class struggle. Gangsters are their heroes. This is why my American Comintern unit fights under the guise of bootlegging.”

“Perhaps you will invest your profits on Wall Street,” Antipov said sarcastically.

“I already have.”

“What?”

“Why shouldn’t I build an empire of activities on Wall Street? It will finance operations. Guns aren’t cheap. Neither are trucks, cars, boats. Not to mention bribes. Money is influence. Money is access to powerful allies. I have a broker steering excellent investments our way.”

“A broker?”

“To buy stocks. To raise money for the scheme.”

“Your scheme is tangential and slow.”

“I will not be rushed.”

“Worse, you veer from the revolution.”

Marat Zolner stared down at Antipov. “Listen to me very carefully, Yuri. I am established here. You just arrived. I will explain to you what is going on here. The United States of America emerged from the World War as the new leader of international capitalism, did it not?”

Antipov conceded that the old German and British empires were laid waste by war.

“Toppling capitalism’s most powerful industrial empire is too important to rush to defeat.”

“You’re not toppling capitalism. You’re joining it.”

“You forget our defeats. We rushed into battle against the international bourgeoisie in Hungary, and lost. We rushed again into the streets of Germany. And lost. Again. Of all the fights I’d fought, I had never seen anything as hopeless as our insurrection in retreat.”

“After we win the war, who cares if we lost a battle?”

“We had no fortress to run to, nowhere to rest, no hospital to doctor wounds, no armory to reload our empty guns. I stopped to help a poor girl whose jaw was shot away. Freikorps thugs came along, shooting the wounded. I played dead. She moaned. They heard. They killed her. I cowered under her body to save my own skin, and I swore that I would find a better way to fight the international bourgeoisie.”

“Joining them?”

“Beating them at their own game,” Zolner retorted.

“You were sent to make war on the state!” Antipov shouted. “Not play games!”

“Prohibition is America’s Achilles’ heel,” Zolner answered quietly and firmly. “Prohibition — this absurd law that people hate — will rot the state and make bootleggers rich.”

He smiled down at Antipov, far too confident in his scheme to raise his voice.

“I have learned to fight in wars that I’ve lost and in wars that I’ve won. There isn’t a bootlegger in America who can stand up to me. I will be the richest. My ‘profits’ that you disdain will finance the Comintern’s attack on the U.S. government. My profits will subvert officials, corrupt police, and destroy the state.”

Yuri shifted tactics. His voice grew soft. “Comrade Zolner — Marat — you know why Moscow sent me. Do I have to remind you, my friend, of the Red Terror? Do I have to remind you that the Cheka annihilates counter-revolutionaries?”

“I am not a counter-revolutionary.”

“The effect of failure is counter-revolutionary.”

“I will not fail.”

“Moscow decides what is failure.”

“Let Moscow tend to Russia. Let me tend to the United States. I will give America to the Comintern on a silver platter.”

“They would be just as happy to have it on base metal.”

Staring hard at each other, suddenly both men laughed, acknowledging their surprise that Antipov had made a joke.

“And happy to forgive me, too?” Zolner asked.

They laughed again.

But it was the laughter of deception. Both men knew the truth: The Comintern never forgave freethinking.

Zolner suspected another even grimmer truth: His once bold comrade, his blood brother of the street battles, had grown weary. Yuri Antipov had slipped into the role of functionary, an apparatchik obsessed with meaningless details instead of grand schemes. How many like Yuri would seize control of the revolution before they killed the revolution?

“Fern is waiting to see you,” he said.

Antipov brightened. “She’s here?”

“In the house.” He picked up a telephone. “I’ll call her. I’ll tell her you’re here.”

The estate house was a limestone mansion built by a railroad magnate thirty years ago in the Gilded Age. Zolner led Antipov through the sculpted entry into a great hall with painted ceilings depicting a history of land transportation that linked Egyptian chariots to crack express trains thundering across the Rocky Mountains. Antipov stared up at the mural. His jaw set like steel.

But when Fern Hawley swept down the vast curving staircase, Antipov melted as he always did in her presence. A big grin lit his stern face, and he extended both hands and shouted, “Midgets!”

Fern took his hands and laughed. “You will never let me forget that, will you?”

“Never.”

To greet her with “Midgets!” was to remind her of her conversion on a beautiful summer day in Paris. Victorious Allied regiments were marching down the Champs-Élysées. Bands were playing, crowds cheered, and the sun shone bright. Suddenly, she had cried out in astonishment, “Midgets!”

“What do you mean?” asked Zolner, who was holding her hand.

An English regiment was marching in strict order — rifles aligned perfectly on their shoulders, uniforms immaculate — but the soldiers were tiny miniature men, not one taller than five feet.

“They’re so little,” she said. “Little tiny midgets.”

“So they are,” said Zolner. “Still, they beat the Germans.”

But Yuri Antipov gave her a look of withering disdain.

“What is it?” she asked. “What did I say?”

“Don’t you know why they are small?”

“No. What do you mean?”

“It’s a Lancashire Regiment. From the English coalfields.”

“Yuri, what are you talking about?”

“They have mined coal for four generations. They are paid a pittance. Neither they nor their fathers nor their grandfathers nor their great-grandfathers have ever eaten enough food to grow tall.”

Even tonight, separated from that moment by three years and three thousand miles, Fern Hawley winced at the memory of such ignorance and such callousness. “They’re hungry,” she had whispered, and Antipov had reached around Zolner to grip her arm and say, “They will stay hungry until the revolution.”

Thanks to Antipov, she believed with all her heart that the international revolution of the proletariat should abolish government. Thanks to Antipov, she passionately supported the Russian proletariat’s struggling new state — the Socialist Republic of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers.

“Have you eaten?” she asked.

She pulled a bell cord. A butler appeared.

“What would you like, Yuri? Champagne? A cold bird?”

“Bread and sausage.”

Later, upstairs, alone in their palatial bedroom, she asked Zolner, “Why didn’t you tell me Yuri was coming?”

Marat Zolner had seen Fern Hawley in action and he admired her bravery and her coolness under fire. She did not panic when police charged with pistols and rubber truncheons. When they bombed the barricades with mine throwers, she could retreat without losing purpose, a rare gift. The revolution needed her sort to fight battles. But she was a naïve romantic. If the Comintern ran to pattern, when the war was finally won brave naïve romantics would be shot in the interest of stability. For romantics would be seen as dangerous as freethinkers.

Until then, he saw great advantage to teaming up with her.

She already helped him escape execution in Europe, staring down cops as she had the private detective at Roosevelt Hospital. In America she had shown him the ropes and provided extraordinary cover. Together, they had worked up disguises that allowed him to move freely. He had learned to ape the pretensions of the elegant White Russian émigrés fleeing to New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Or, wearing laborer’s duds, he could pass as just another of the faceless foreigners who toiled in the docks, mines, and mills. And to mingle with their bosses, he had only to stroll into the opera or a high-class speakeasy with Fern Hawley on his arm.

“I didn’t tell you that Yuri was coming because information that you do not need to know endangers both you and our mission. What if you were forced to reveal what you knew?”

“What are you talking about? This isn’t Russia or Germany. We’re in the United States.”

“You think there is no torture in the United States?”

Fern Hawley laughed. “They’d know what torture was when my lawyers got through with them.”

Marat Zolner said, “I’m sorry. Old habits die hard.”

“I am only asking you to trust me. You should have told me. Yuri is my friend.”

“Yuri Antipov is no one’s friend.”

“He’s your friend.”

“We fought together. We are brothers in blood. But he is not my friend. He is Comintern from the soles of his feet to the hair on his skull.”

“I know that. That’s why he likes me. He knows that I’m as devoted as he is to the proletariat.”

“He is Comintern,” Zolner repeated. “If Moscow ordered him to throw you in a fire, he would without a second thought.”

“So are you Comintern.”

“I use my brain to think. They hate thinking that they can’t control.”

“Would Yuri throw you in that fire?”

Zolner gave her a thin smile and turned out the light. “Only if they told him to.”

“Marat,” she whispered in the dark. “I am grateful to Yuri Antipov and I admire Yuri Antipov. But I could never love him the way I love you.”

“Why are you grateful to him?”

She sat up in the canopied bed and hugged her arms around her knees. The sky had cleared, and through the French windows she saw a sliver of moon hanging over the bay. “Yuri helps me understand a world I never knew until I met you two. He’s like a wise uncle. But you are my muse. Yuri was my guide. But you are my comrade-in-arms.”

“Wait until they force you to chose,” Zolner said bleakly.

“I will fight at your side.”

10

The first mail delivery of the morning brought a letter from the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office to the Van Dorn field office.

Bell was familiar with the powder plant, a sprawling factory he had often seen from the Broadway Limited on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line between Altoona and Harrisburg.

“Dear Shep,” he wrote back,

Isaac Bell hurried from the Sayville train station to a one-story white clapboard building that had Ionic columns supporting a wide triangular pediment in the Greek Revival style. Lettering carved in relief and painted black read:

Under his arm were several recent editions of the Long Island weekly he had ordered up from Van Dorn Research. He went inside and spotted his quarry, a retired private detective named Scudder Smith. Smith was wearing shirtsleeves, banded at the elbow, and a red bow tie. He was behind his desk, reading a long yellow galley that reeked of wet ink.

Bell said, “The Research boys found me your stories about rumrunners. Spellbinding.”

Smith looked up, dropped the galley, and jumped to his feet. “Isaac! How in the heck are you?”

“Scudder.” Bell shook his hand. “It’s been too long.”

The two men cast keen eyes on each others’ faces.

Bell, Smith thought, looked as youthful and robust as ever despite the years and the war that had marked so many. Smith, Bell thought, looked like he hadn’t had a drink in years and consequently was much less gnarly than when last he had seen him.

“What are you doing out here?” Scudder asked. “On a job?… Wait a second. How did you know I was here? Newsies don’t hawk the Suffolk County News on the sidewalks of New York.”

“Mr. Van Dorn’s wife showed me the note you sent to the hospital.”

“How is he doing?”

“He’s hanging on. Left me in charge, and I’ve got my hands full trying to keep the agency afloat. But I do know that he hopes there are no hard feelings.”

“Hell no. Getting fired for over-imbibing was the best thing that ever happened to me. Sobered up. Married the girl of my dreams. Helen promptly inherited the paper. So I’m back in my original business, writing news. Beats mixing it up with thugs half my age. And I don’t have to hang out, drinking burnt coffee, in the criminal court pressroom. I walk home for lunch with my beautiful wife, write what I please. I’m even a pillar of the community. You’ll love this, Isaac. They made me an Odd Fellow, a Moose, and a Mason, and the fellows starting a Lions Club asked me to join them, too.”

“Doesn’t it get a little quiet?” Bell asked. As a reporter turned detective, Scudder Smith had been famous at the Van Dorn Agency for knowing every street in the city, every saloon, and every brothel. And there was no better guide to a Chinatown opium den.

Scudder said, “Quiet? Not since Prohibition.”

Bell nodded. “I got the impression sniffing the air it’s been greeted with open arms. I smelled more booze on the sea breeze than salt.”

“Half the town has fired-up home stills. The only ones who don’t smell booze cooking are the cops.” He picked up the galley. “This is my editorial about cops seen treating chorus girls to supper in expensive roadhouses. I don’t know who’ll read it. The entire South Shore is having a ball.”

“Does your wife work on the paper?”

“She can. Practically ran it for her dad for years.”

“So I heard.”

“You heard? What do you mean?”

“Could she take over for a while?”

“Why?”

“So you could come back to New York and lend a hand ’til I get things straightened out.”

“Isaac, old son,” drawled Texas Walt Hatfield. “Shore Ah’d love to help you out, but Hollywood’s got me tangled tighter than a roped calf.”

Texas Walt Hatfield, another former Van Dorn detective, had become a matinee idol who starred in scores of western movies. His drawl had grown thicker and his choice of words more cowboy-ish, but he was still as lean and lethal-looking as a Comanche scalping knife. Bell had run him down in the Plaza Hotel’s Palm Court. Patrons at other tables were gaping, and several people had stopped by to ask for Walt’s autograph, which he supplied with a powerful handshake for the men and an I’ll-meet-you-later smile for the ladies.

“Ah mean, if Ah could get out of my contract, Ah’d be with you lickety-split.”

“Are you sure about that?” asked Bell.

“Heck yes. Ah hanker to get in a gunfight with real bullets.”

Bell nodded discreetly to the maître d’ who was awaiting his signal.

Walt changed the subject. “Ah’m mighty relieved the Boss is hanging on. How you doing running down the varmints who shot him?”

“The Coast Guard’s stonewalling, won’t let me near the crew, so I haven’t had a word from the witnesses, and the cops are stonewalling, being embarrassed they let a killer in the hospital room with a witness they were guarding. But the fellow’s postmortem examination was interesting…” He filled Walt in on the Genickschuss.

“You wouldn’t want to try that with a .45,” drawled Hatfield. “You’d have to rustle up the swampers to mop the walls… And how’s the fair Marion? Forgive my not asking sooner.”

“She’s shooting a comedy over in Fort Lee.”

“So you got your gal with you! That’s plumb perfect.”

The maître d’ reappeared leading a waiter, who was carrying a stick phone with an immensely long cord.

“Excuse me, gentlemen. There is a long-distance telephone call from Los Angeles, California, for Mr. Texas Walt Hatfield.”

“Excuse me a sec, Isaac. Like Ah say, they’re jest all over me like paint.”

He took the phone, held it to his mouth and ear. “Yup. This is Texas Walt. Who’s there?”

He sat up straight, covered the mouthpiece, and muttered to Bell, “It’s Mr. Andrew Rubenoff. He owns the moving picture studio — Yes, suh, Mr. Rubenoff. Yes, suh. Yes, suh… You don’t say… Ah see. O.K. Thank you… What’s that? Hang on, he’s right here.”

Texas Walt passed the telephone to Isaac Bell. “Damnedest thing. Just let me out of my contract temporarily. Now he wants to talk to you. His name’s Rubenoff. Andrew Rubenoff.”

Bell took the telephone, said, “Thank you, Uncle Andy,” and hung up.

Texas Walt stared. A slow grin creased his craggy face. “Isaac. You son of a gun.”

“I thought you were itching to get in a real gunfight.”

“Is he really your uncle?”

“I just call him that to razz him. He’s an old banking friend of my father’s.”

“Well, you got me. What are you going to do with me?”

“Put you to work.”

They were interrupted again, by ladies wanting Walt’s autograph. He signed their books and dazzled them with a smile. When they had gone, he said to Bell, “Ah hope you aren’t fixing to have me do any masquerading. This old face has gotten too famous to operate incognito.”

“I’m going to hide you in plain sight.”

“How?”

“Ever been to Detroit?”

“Detroit? What the deuce is in Detroit, except a bunch of automobiles?”

“Bootleggers,” said Bell. “The place is crawling with them.”

“Shore. Because it’s one mile from Canada. What’s that got to do with me?”

Bell looked Hatfield in the eye and said, “Walt, I just got word they’ve corrupted our Detroit field office from top to bottom. Our boys are taking payoffs to ride shotgun on liquor runs and shaking down the bellhops.”

“Our boys?” the Texan asked with a wintery scowl. “Are you sure, Isaac?”

“I don’t know who’s still on the square. I want you to pay them a visit.”

Walt strode directly to the hatcheck, threw down a quarter, and clapped his J. B. Stetson on his head. Bell intercepted him at the front door.

“Here’s your train ticket. I booked a stateroom on the Detroiter.”

“Ah can afford my own stateroom ticket.”

“Not on a detective’s salary, you can’t. Wire me tomorrow.”

A cable was waiting for Isaac Bell in the New York field office, which was three blocks down Fifth Avenue from the Plaza, on the second floor of the St. Regis Hotel.

Bell crumpled it in his fist. He had been counting on his best friend, Archibald Angell Abbott IV, to come back from Europe, where Van Dorn had sent him to reinvigorate the Paris, Rome, and London offices. This meant he had to find another right-hand man to help him straighten out the agency. McKinney was busy ramrodding the New York office. Harry Warren was busy with the Gang Squad, and, even if he weren’t, a detective who knew every gangster in New York hadn’t the national knowledge Bell needed. Nor did Scudder Smith. Tim Holian, out in Los Angeles, and Horace Bronson, back from Paris to his old post in San Francisco, were needed there to hold down the western states.

“Where’s Dashwood?”

“He’s at the rifle range, Mr. Bell.”

Bell walked quickly up Park Avenue to the Seventh Regiment Armory and down into the basement. The sharpshooters and marksmen of the regiment’s crack shooting team were practicing for a match in the double-decked rifle range. He waited behind the firing line, breathing in the lively scent of smokeless powder, until the clatter of .22s ceased. Targets were snaked in. The riflemen inspected them, then passed them to the range captain.

The range captain compared them for the tightest patterns around the bull’s-eyes and held up the winner’s target. In the center of the black eye was a hole so clean it might have been cut by folding the paper in two and cutting a tiny half-moon with scissors. “Number 14? Number 14? Where are you, sir?”

Detective James Dashwood descended from the upper deck. He looked paler than ever, Bell thought. His skin was dead white, and he was thin to the point of gaunt. His suit hung loosely on his frame.

“Of course,” said the range captain. “I should have guessed. Gentlemen, meet former lieutenant James Dashwood.”

The name drew respectful murmurs from the marksmen and sharpshooters. His service as an American Expeditionary Forces sniper in the trenches was legend.

“James,” the captain asked with a knowing smile. “Would you please show them your ‘rifle.’”

Dashwood gave a diffident shrug. He had a boyish voice. “That’s O.K., Captain.”

“Please, James. Your ‘rifle.’”

Dashwood looked around, clearly unhappy to be the center of attention. He saw Bell watching from the back. A pleased grin lit his face. Bell gave his former apprentice a proud thumbs-up.

Dashwood drew a pistol from his coat, held it up for all to see, and ducked his head shyly at the cheers.

When they were alone, walking down Park Avenue, Bell asked, “How are you feeling?”

“I’m O.K.”

“I asked for a reason,” said Bell. “How is your health?” Dashwood had been caught in a German gas attack and the chlorine had played havoc with his lungs.

“I have good days and bad. At the moment I’m doing O.K.”

“When’s the last time the coughing laid you low?”

“Last month. I got over it. What’s up, Mr. Bell?”

“I think you should start calling me Isaac.”

“O.K., Isaac,” Dashwood answered slowly, working his way around the unaccustomed way of conversing with the boss who had been his teacher, sage, and adviser all in one. “Why do you ask about my condition?”

“I promised Mr. Van Dorn to look after the agency until he recovers. I need a right hand. And a troubleshooter I can send around the continent.”

“Why not Archie Abbott?”

“Archie’s stuck in France.”

“Isn’t there anyone else?”

“None I’d prefer.” Bell stopped walking, looked Dashwood in the eye, and thrust out his hand. “Can we shake on it?”

“Telephone, Mr. Bell. Dr. Nuland at the morgue.”

“Hello, Shep. Thanks again for reporting on that powder.”

“Would you happen to be looking for a Russian?”

Bell felt a surge of excitement. “It’s likely that neck shot was by a Russian. Why?”

“I looked a little deeper when I got your note. About your hunch? Turns out in 1914, 1915, and 1916 the Aetna Explosives Company filled huge contracts to supply the Russian government with smokeless powder.”

After Bell put down the phone, he called someone he knew in the New York Police Department laboratory. He was a bullet expert who was paid well and regularly to do private work for the Van Dorn Detective Agency. “I’m calling about that shell casing they found at Roosevelt where a shooting victim was murdered. The one with the expansion ring from a Mann pistol. Any idea where it was manufactured?… What’s that?”

It sounded to Bell as if the expert was whispering into a mouthpiece muffled by his hand.

“Like I already told you, Mr. Bell, they got egg on their face, and it’ll cost me my job to speak a word. I’m really sorry, Mr. Bell. But they’ll sack me if I get caught.”

“No hard feelings,” said Bell and hung up. He was not surprised, but it had been worth a try. He had run into similar resistance with the Coast Guard. Every time he tried to interview the crew of CG-9, he was told she was out of reach, far at sea, or her radio was broken. The truth was, the Coast Guard brass were just as embarrassed about Van Dorn’s shooting as the cop brass were about the bungled police protection at the hospital.

He had managed to wrangle a glimpse of the report on the slug that Shepherd Nuland fished out of Johnny’s skull. But it had offered no clue to its source of manufacture. Which made the possible Russian source of the smokeless powder the only information as close to a fact that he could get his hands on.

He composed a Marconigram in Van Dorn cipher. The Radio Corporation of America would transmit it from the former Marconi Wireless Station in New Jersey to the liner Nieuw Amsterdam:

It wasn’t much to go on. But it would give Pauline Grandzau something to think about on the boat. And when Pauline put her mind to something, something interesting often came of it.

11

Hooks Newdell’s new bosses, Matt and Jake, thought big, bigger than anyone Hooks had ever met up with — bigger than the Gophers, bigger than the White Hand Gang, even bigger than the Italians who were taking over the docks. Just looking at the huge government building they were going to break into made him nervous.

Matt and Jake were in the backseat of a Marmon parked on Greenwich Street under the Ninth Avenue El in Greenwich Village two blocks from the piers. Hooks was in front at the wheel. High above the El loomed the government building, a stone-and-brick monster rising ten stories in the night and filling the entire block bordered by Christopher, Greenwich, Barrow, and Washington streets. Hooks had always called it the Customs Building, but it was also known as the Appraisers’ Stores and the Samples Office, a huge storehouse where U.S. Customs took samples of imported goods to appraise how much they could tax the foreign shipments. Built like a fortress, it was also where the government stashed confiscated liquor and smuggled jewels and antiques and anything else valuable they got their paws on, like last week when customs agents intercepted a bunch of submachine guns being shipped to Ireland for the Sinn Féin. It was the kind of place that guys dreamed about busting into.

Matt and Jake were actually going to do it. A liquor deal to end all liquor deals.

Matt had bribed a Prohibition agent. The agent had told him when a big booze raid was planned and where the goods that the Dry agents seized would be stored — ground floor, right inside the Christopher Street entrance. This made things easy, Matt had explained. The building had acres of storerooms. There were ten elevators and three miles of hallways. Seven hundred clerks worked in it during the day. Near the front door made it easy, quick and easy in and out. Late at night even better. So Matt said.

But it made Hooks nervous and he couldn’t stop talking. As they waited for the signal from Matt’s man inside, he tried again to break the silence that they wrapped around themselves like armor.

“The guys in the car were saying that you mighta shot a detective, Matt.”

Matt did not answer.

“Did ya?”

Marat Zolner was assessing whether Hooks Newdell had potential. He needed an American to represent him when he didn’t want his face or accent noticed. But he was beginning to doubt that Hooks was the man. “Did ya what?”

“What the guys say. That you shot a private dick.”

“Hooks, did it ever occur to you that whoever said that stands a good chance of getting shot himself?”

Hooks Newdell backpedaled madly. “They didn’t mean nothin’. They was just guessing. It’s just that we—they—were wondering, are you the guys who shot Joseph Van Dorn?”

Zolner remained silent, and the nervous Hooks sealed his doom. The fool simply did not know when to shut his mouth.

“Did you guys go bonkers?” he blurted. “You shot Joe Van Dorn? Do you know who that is?”

“Only a detective.”

“It’s bad enough shooting any Van Dorn. Even a house dick. But you guys shot their boss.”

“It’s not like a cop.”

“The Van Dorns got a saying: ‘We never give up! Never!’”

“Words.”

“Except you never hear word of ’em giving up… So you did shoot him?”

Yuri moved like lightning, and the tip of his dagger was suddenly pressing up against the soft flesh under Ricky Newdell’s chin. “Stop talking!”

“O.K.! O.K.!”

“Shut! Up!”

Hooks Newdell pressed his lips together and sat motionless.

Antipov glanced at Zolner. Zolner shook his head. Hooks would be useful alive for a couple of more hours. Antipov sheathed his dagger.

Zolner tugged a Waltham railroad watch from his pocket and angled it to the light of a streetlamp. “Start the motor.”

A minute later, a man dressed like a clerk, in a suit, necktie, and a bowler hat, walked up Greenwich Street from the direction of Barrow. He shot an anxious glance at the Marmon, ducked his head, and hurried on.

“Slowly,” said Marat Zolner. “Keep him in sight.”

The man turned left on Christopher.

“Pull over. Come with us.”

Yuri was out of the car before it stopped rolling. Zolner was right behind him, signaling for Hooks to stick close. They rounded the corner. The clerk was knocking at the front door, head down, afraid to look in their direction. Light spilled onto the sidewalk as the door was unlocked and swung inward. The clerk said, “Thank you. I’m working late tonight in the Verifier’s office.”

The guard he spoke to answered, “Yes, sir, Mr. Knowles— Hey!”

Antipov shoved Knowles into the guard. Marat Zolner struck Knowles to the floor, clearing the way for Hooks Newdell to punch the guard to his knees before he could draw his revolver and knock him unconscious with a fist to his jaw.

Zolner closed the door, leaving it open a crack. His five-ton truck careened around the corner of Washington Street, screeched to a stop, and roared backwards across the sidewalk and up to the front door. Dock wallopers leaped out from under the tarpaulin that covered the cargo bed and made a beeline for the room where the confiscated booze was stored. Within sixty seconds they were lugging cases of Canadian rye into the truck.

“Hooks! Come with me and Jake.”

Zolner headed for the central elevator bank at a dead run. All but one of the cars were dark at this late hour, and the operator slouched in it was yawning. It took the man a moment to realize something was wrong. It was too late. At Zolner’s signal, Hooks blackjacked him. They piled in, and Zolner ran the car down a level to the subbasement, where Knowles had reported the telephone switchboard was located. Hooks pummeled the night operator unconscious. Zolner and Antipov switched off the trunk lines. Then they ran back to the elevator. Zolner leaned hard on the control wheel and the car shot up.

“Hey, where you going?” asked Hooks when they passed the first floor.

“Shut up,” said Yuri.

Zolner ran the elevator to the tenth floor, the top. He and Yuri stepped out, guns drawn. Hooks followed with his bloody blackjack. The hall, empty and unguarded, was lined with blank steel doors. Zolner counted four from the elevator bank.

“Hope you have a key,” said Hooks, lumbering close behind.

Antipov shoved him aside and pulled from his pocket a quarter stick of dynamite. He secured it to the doorknob with electrician’s insulating tape and lit a short fuse with a match. Hooks ran down the hall. Antipov and Zolner hurried after him. The charge exploded with the sharp report of a very large firecracker and blew the door into a vault room that was heaped with four-foot-long canvas bags.

Antipov slashed one open with his dagger. He pulled out a weapon that looked like a short rifle or shotgun with two handgrips and a stick magazine, pointing straight down, and no butt stock.

“What’s that?” asked Hooks Newdell.

“An Annihilator,” said Zolner, tucking it tightly against his hip and pointing it straight ahead. He quickly gathered bags of the weapons and bags of extra magazines.

“What’s an Annihilator?”

“A submachine gun.”

“A machine gun you can carry around?” Hooks was amazed. Guys back from the war talked about Lewis machine guns. But Lewis guns were heavy — thirty pounds — and four or five feet long, and you had to mount them on something solid. This thing you could tuck under your coat.

“Fires .45 pistol ammunition. Twenty shots in a stick, reloads in a second.”

“I never seen one before.”

“Neither has anyone else in New York. Pick that up and let’s go.”

“Say, wait a minute. These are the Thompson guns the customs agents found on the ship. These are Sinn Féin’s guns.”

“No,” said Yuri Antipov. “They are ours.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Hooks, what is that you dropped?”

Hooks bent his head and looked down at his feet. “What?”

Yuri Antipov pressed his revolver to the nape of the boxer’s neck and pulled the trigger. Hooks collapsed in a heap.

Zolner asked, “What did you do that for?”

“You were going to kill him, were you not?”

“You should have waited. He could have helped us carry the guns.”

12

“I blame the Irish.”

“For which, the guns or the booze?”

“Both. The booze was a Sinn Féin smoke screen to get their submachine guns back.”

“Some smoke screen. Seventy-five thousand bucks of twenty-year-old Canadian Club. Sinn Féin oughta stop the civil war and open a speakeasy.”

So went the conversation among detectives hurrying in and out of the Van Dorn bull pen while Isaac Bell, who had set up a desk prominently in the middle of the room to keep everyone on his toes, combed through empty report after empty report on the Van Dorn shooting.

It was the morning after a daring and brilliantly executed late-night raid on the Appraisers’ Stores. The newspapers, which had printed less than half the story the private detectives had pieced together, were having a ball castigating Prohibition, Prohibition officials, Dry agents, U.S. Customs, the Treasury Department, and the New York City police.

“Just wait,” said Darren McKinney, “until they find out about the submachine guns. Heads will roll.” The New York cops and U.S. Customs had kept the gun theft out of the papers, but the story had to come out eventually.

Harry Warren burst in at a dead run. “Isaac! Wait ’til you hear the latest. I was just talking to a customs agent, and he—”

“If it doesn’t have to do with Joe Van Dorn, I don’t want to hear it—” But even as he spoke, Bell thought better of it and changed his mind. Any clues to the raid that were snagged in the Van Dorn net could stand them in good stead with the federal government. “Hold on, I take that back. What’s up?”

Harry leaned in close and spoke in a low voice. “Something’s fishy. They found a dead guy in the machine-gun room. A kid named Newdell. Ricky ‘Hooks’ Newdell. Small-potatoes thug dreaming of prizefights.”

“What’s fishy?”

“He hung out in a lunchroom on 18th. Customs guy didn’t know it, but that’s a Gopher joint. Hooks was a Gopher.”

“You’re kidding. What was a Gopher doing in that operation?”

“My question, too. The Gophers have been washed-up since before the war. The bunch that moved to Chelsea couldn’t pour water out of a hat with directions stamped on the crown.”

“Could they have been hired by Sinn Féin?” Bell asked dubiously.

“Sinn Féin aren’t stupid, and they’ve got plenty of gunmen without tapping Gophers.”

“How did he die?”

“Shot.”

“First I’ve heard there was gunplay.”

“No, no, no, not by customs agents. No, it sounds like one of his pals nailed him.”

Isaac Bell said, “That makes no sense. By all accounts we’ve heard, it was a smooth operation. Guys on that smooth an operation don’t usually kill each other on the job.”

“I agree, but a Gopher where a Gopher shouldn’t be is dead. Something’s up.”

Bell and Harry Warren were interrupted by Ed Tobin. The head of the Boss Boys squad looked like he’d slept under a pier. His suit was rumpled, his hat battered, his complexion sallow. But his eyes glowed with triumph.

“Found a friend of your Johnny,” he said. “I’m pretty sure.”

Isaac Bell surged to his feet. “Where?”

“Oysterman I was buying drinks for — Staten Island fellow named Tom Kemp — said a bootlegger he knew disappeared just when he was hoping the guy was going to hire his boat to taxi booze. The bootlegger looked like your description of Johnny, and he had a German accent.”

“Was his name Johnny?”

“We didn’t get that far. Kemp’s pal came into the blind pig and recognized my mug. Soon as he spilled I was a detective, Kemp clammed up.”

“I’ll get it out of him,” said Bell.

“He won’t talk to a detective. He thinks we’re the same as cops. Can’t blame him, if he’s hoping to make a living running booze— Hey, where’re you going, Isaac?”

“Tell the garage to send over a Stutz Bearcat.”

The tall detective strode to the costume room, stripped off his clothes, and put on a one-hundred-thirty-dollar pin-striped navy suit that he had waiting in a closet. Its coat had a pinched waist and was cut to accentuate his broad shoulders. He knotted a silk necktie, folded a matching handkerchief and inserted it in the breast pocket, and transferred the contents of his pockets. From a rack of hats, he chose one carefully, a dark Borsalino, then studied his reflection in a full-length mirror. He laced spats over his boots and looked again.

Something else was missing.

He unbuttoned his coat and rearranged his belongings. He closed it, pulled the Borsalino low over his eyes, and returned to the bull pen. “Let’s go.”

Tobin said, “That’s why you want a Stutz. It’ll make you look like a high-class bootlegger.”

“That, and the fact that it has a three-hundred-sixty-cubic-inch engine that puts out eighty horsepower,” said Bell. “The image ought to convince your man I intend to hire his boat.”

“I like the gun bulge.”

“Don’t tell my tailor.”

Bell opened his coat to show Tobin the notebook he had shoved behind his shoulder holster, deliberately puckering the cloth that his tailor had so skillfully crafted to conceal the Browning.

They drove the Stutz to the Battery and took it across to Staten Island on the ferry. From the St. George landing, they drove past the mansions and resort hotels of Richmond Terrace and along the Kill Van Kull, a narrow, winding strait of water that separated Staten Island from New Jersey and led to New York Harbor in either direction. Tobin got out of the car at Bridge Creek and pointed Bell in the direction of Tom Kemp’s oyster boat.

Bell drove within sight of the boat and parked the car on the side of the road where Kemp would see it when he looked up from the motor he was working on. Then he swaggered down the gangway onto a rickety floating dock. Kemp’s vessel was typical of the workboats that New York oystermen had been converting from sail to motor power since long before the war. It was broad and flat and thirty feet long. The motor sat in a hole in the deck, and Bell saw immediately that it was anything but typical. He recognized an eight-hundred-twenty-five-cubic-inch, six-cylinder Pierce-Arrow that Tom must have pulled out of a wrecked touring car. A maze of tubing indicated that he had added on an oversize oil pump to keep it lubricated when the boat angled its bow up at speed.

“How fast does this thing go?” he asked the figure crouched over it with tools scattered beside him.

“Who wants to know?” Kemp said without bothering to look up.

Bell stepped onto the boat without being invited — a sin, Ed Tobin had told him, that a waterman would equate with burning an American flag or insulting his mother. Kemp jumped to his feet. He was a big man with arms and shoulders that bulged from lifting oyster tongs since boyhood. Bell moved closer, two feet from the man, close enough for him to smell his cologne and have to crane his neck to meet his cold gaze.

“I want to know. How fast does your boat go?”

Tom Kemp took note of Bell’s expression. His eyes fixed on the bulge under his coat. “Thirty knots.”

“What’s that in miles per hour?”

“Jeez, mister, I don’t know. Thirty-five?”

“How fast when it’s loaded?”

“Depends with what.”

“Booze.”

“Mister, booze is—”

“Profitable,” said Bell, and before Tom could say anything else, “I hear two different stories about you, Mr. Kemp. One says you’re available to run rum. The other says you’ve already been hired. Which is it? Are you available or not?”

“I’m available.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah… You don’t believe me?”

“What happened to the German guy?” Bell shot back. Now he had to wait. Would Kemp answer, What German guy? Would he say, The German guy disappeared?

“How do you know about the German?” Kemp demanded.

Bell repeated, coldly, “What happened to the German guy?”

“I don’t know. He was hanging out, looking for a boat. I thought we had a deal. But he never showed.”

“When was this?”

“What do you care?”

Bell said, “When I learn a lot about a fellow who I’m going to trust with ten thousand bucks of my booze, I also learn what questions to ask to see if he lies to me. When did the German say he would show?”

“Sunday.”

Bell nodded. Johnny had died Saturday. He could have been intending to make another run Sunday.

“When did he tell you Sunday?”

“Last week.”

“O.K. You’re doing pretty good so far. Next question: What’s his name?”

“He called himself Johnny.”

“I know he called himself Johnny. What’s his real name?”

“What do you mean? It’s Johnny.”

“Germans don’t call themselves Johnny.”

“Oh yeah. Well, Johann. Something like that. Johann.”

“You’re doing O.K., Tom. Tell me his last name and we’re in business.”

Tom Kemp wet his lips. Bell suspected that the oysterman knew Johann’s last name but didn’t want to tell. He wondered why it mattered to him.

“Tom, I thought we’re on the square.”

“Kozlov. Johann Kozlov.”

“Good,” said Bell. “Very good.” Finally, a breakthrough, but he still wondered why Tom hesitated to reveal Kozlov’s name. He pulled a large roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off a hundred-dollar bill.

“Down payment,” he said. As Tom Kemp reached eagerly for the money, Bell asked, “Did you know him long?”

“Nope.”

“Then how’d you meet him?”

Tom wet his lips again.

Bell held tightly to the bill. “How did Johann know where to find you?”

“I don’t know. He just found me.”

“Why would he trust you?”

“I got an uncle works on the ships. Stoker. He hooked up with Johann Kozlov when the Wobblies were trying to put some backbone in the seamen’s union.”

“Johann Kozlov was a Wobbly?” Bell could not conceal his surprise. The Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, were passionately dedicated to the dream of labor taking control of production. They strived to make the established conservative craft unions demand more and fight harder, usually without success.

“The strike in the spring?” asked Bell. The International Seamen’s Union had struck every port in the nation on May 1 and lost so badly they had to accept a quarter cut in pay.

“The union kept the Wobblies out, and with no Wobblies to give ’em guts, the owners broke the strike.”

Broken so badly, Bell wondered, that a dedicated labor organizer threw up his hands and became a rumrunner? The Wobblies had been accused of many failings, but never greed.

“Where is your uncle?”

“Bound for Singapore, last I heard.”

“What line?”

Kemp got truculent again. “What the hell does a bootlegger care what line my uncle’s stoking for?”

The tall detective shifted smoothly back to his bootlegger act. “I don’t pay a man until I know whose side he’s on,” he said coldly, and started to stuff his roll back into his pocket. “What line owns the ship your uncle is working on?”

“No line will hire him since the strike. He shipped out on a tramp.”

“Johann Kozlov’s name,” said Grady Forrer, chief of Van Dorn Research, reporting next morning to Isaac Bell, “suggests both German and Russian heritage. He was, in fact, a German-born alien radical.”

“Was he a Wobbly?”

“We’ve found no evidence of an IWW connection yet. But he did join the Communist Party, which had some Wobblies in it. In fact, Kozlov joined both wings of it simultaneously, which is odd because the Communist Labor Party and the Communist Party of America couldn’t stand each other. Moscow ordered them to merge, but even that didn’t take until this spring when they finally formed the so-called United Communist Party. You can imagine the shoutfests at their meetings.”

“Could Moscow have sent Kozlov to America to deliver the order from Moscow to merge?”

“Interesting thought,” Grady mused, “if not likely.” He made a note. “I’ll look into it.”

“But you found no evidence of a direct link to the IWW? Remember, I was told he was organizing for the Wobblies in the sailors’ strike.”

Grady shrugged. “We found no evidence of involvement in the sailors’ strike. And no record of his joining the IWW. Which is not surprising, considering that he was deported.”

“Deported? When?”

“Kozlov was arrested in the Red Scare roundups — the Palmer Raids — in the first wave, at the end of 1919. The Justice Department deported him back to his native Germany.”

The government raids on alien radicals’ homes, schools, and businesses had been launched in late 1919 by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer after an Italian anarchist bombed Palmer’s Washington home. Bell said, “I’m not sure what to make of that. It’s a heck of a background for a rumrunner.”

Bell pondered the curiosity. How big a leap was it from radical to criminal? He had encountered labor radicals and he thought it a big leap indeed for those dedicated to a cause. On the other hand, how many in the bootlegging line even considered themselves criminals? They told themselves they were providing a service. Or, as Scudder Smith had put it, “having fun.” At least until the real criminals started beating them up to steal the profits.

“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.

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.

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:

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.

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.”

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.”