The Bootlegger

15

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nobody’ll bother a little old catboat.”

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

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

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

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

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

The thunder moved closer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pauline took her hand.

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

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

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

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

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

“How did you know?” Anny whispered.

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

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

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

“What of the others?” asked Anny.

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

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

Isaac Bell asked Captain Novicki, “What happened to your face, Dave?”

“Just some splinters.”

“Looks like a treeful.”

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

“What did you do?”

“I got caught running rum.”

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

“Hijacked.”

“Where’d it happen?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What else happened?”

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

Bell’s eyes lit up. “Describe it!”

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

“Guns?”

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

“Armor?”

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

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

“Those Libertys roared like she could.”

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

“Took my chances in the drink.”

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

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

“Close call all around,” said Bell.

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

“How many runs did you do?”

“It was my first.”

“Want some advice?”

“Yeah, I know. Don’t do it again.”

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

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

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

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

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

“If they’d hire an old man.”

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

“I’d be mighty grateful.”

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

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

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

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

“Russian? Are you sure?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m glad you came to me, Dave.”

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

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

“I hate leaving them.”

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

“If he doesn’t get another infection.”

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

“I can’t take your money.”

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

Novicki set a stubborn jaw.

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

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

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

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

Adler, Kliegman, and Marcum gathered around his desk.

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

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

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

“McKinney!”

“Right here, Mr. Bell.”

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

“They’ll know someone who does.”

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

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

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

The detectives scattered.

Bell sent a transatlantic cable to Pauline Grandzau.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How?”

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

“Why were you there?”

“She is looking for someone named Kozlov.”

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

“Why do you ask about Kozlov?”

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

“Why would he?”

“To free a wrongly accused honest man.”

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

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

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

“I am a librarian.”

“Where?”

“Berlin.” She gave him a card.

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

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

“Education elevates.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Who were his comrades?”

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

“Do you know where Zolner is now?”

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

“What is Zolner’s first name?”

“Why don’t you ask him in Hamburg?”

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

“What is Zolner’s first name?”

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

16

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Mr. Bell. It looks like CG-9 got new orders. They never came off patrol.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bell piloted the oyster boat across the busy harbor, through the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and out the Lower Bay, past the Ambrose Lightship, and into the ocean. Darbee and little Robin crouched under the forward cubby, exchanging radio transmissions with Staten Island watermen who were already at sea, heading for Rum Row. Cousins and cronies helped Darbee pinpoint cutter CG-9’s position within a few miles.

Bell opened up the throttle and steered east-northeast. An hour later, ten miles off Long Beach, he spotted the distinctive high-bow, swept-stern profile of the former submarine chaser. The Coast Guard vessel stayed to its course, its lookouts failing to spot the low gray oyster boat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shut up, old man. Watch your mouth.”

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

“Shut up or you’re under arrest.”

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

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

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

Bell looked him in the eye. “I believe you’re the man who saved Joseph Van Dorn’s life with a tourniquet. If you are, I’m in your debt.”

“That’s who you are.”

“I wonder if you would do me another favor and tell your skipper I have to talk to him.” Just then the boarding party called out that there was no booze on the oyster boat.

The weary-looking skipper, who had been observing from the flying bridge, came down to the stern deck. “What’s the big idea with the smoke screen? There’s no liquor on your boat.”

“We knew you lamebrains would never find us if we didn’t help!” Darbee yelled.

The captain ignored him, saying to Bell, “You lured me off station to help your pals’ taxis get by. It’s a crime to impede a patrol.”

Isaac Bell extended his hand. “Captain, I am Van Dorn Chief Investigator Isaac Bell. I’m sure you don’t begrudge me investigating who shot my boss while he was on your ship. Do you?”

“Of course not. But—”

“You can get back to your patrol as soon as you tell me exactly what happened when Mr. Van Dorn was shot on your ship.”

“Why the charade?” The captain jerked a thumb at Darbee and his boat.

“The Coast Guard is dodging me. Your superiors won’t let me interview you or your crew.”

“I wondered about that,” the captain nodded. “That’s why they’ve kept us out here. Cook’s down to baked beans and water, and we’re running low on fuel.”

“As soon as you answer my questions,” said Bell, “I’ll stop bothering them and they’ll let you return to harbor.”

“I have nothing to hide.”

“What struck you most about the black boat?”

“Speed. I’ve never seen such a fast boat.”

Exactly what Joseph Van Dorn had told him. “What next?”

“Tactics,” said the captain. “They used their speed to great effect. They took advantage of my vessel’s shortcomings, maneuvering behind us so we couldn’t bring the Poole gun to bear.”

Bell said, “Mr. Van Dorn told me he thought he was back in Panama with the Marines.”

“I thought I was back in the war,” said the captain.

“Lead flying will do it,” said the petty officer.

“That, too, but what I’m saying is they conducted their attack like a naval engagement. Isn’t that so, Chief?”

“Aye, sir. The rumrunners handled themselves like vets.”

“They weren’t common criminals.”

Again, thought Bell, precisely what Van Dorn had said.

At that moment, with the cutter’s deck rolling under his feet, Isaac Bell voiced in his mind what he had been mulling ever since he chased the killer who murdered Johann Kozlov: If they weren’t common criminals, if they weren’t run-of-the-mill whisky haulers, what were they doing bootlegging?

“That’s all I know,” said the captain. “Chief, put him back on his boat.”

“One more thing,” said Bell. “Who pulled Mr. Van Dorn out of the water?”

The captain and the petty officer exchanged uncomfortable glances.

The captain spoke. “Seaman Third Class Asa Somers.”

“I’d like to shake his hand.”

The chief looked out at the water. The captain said, “Somers was discharged.”

“What for? He’s a hero.”

“His discharge order came straight from headquarters. Someone complained about the wild-goose chases we got sent on — said someone was tipping them off. The brass decided the complainer, or the tipster, was Somers. He was the last to join the ship. They took him off on a launch.”

“Was he the complainer?”

“I don’t know, but he’s a decent kid.”

“Smart as a whip,” said the chief.

“Where can I find him?”

“Long live Soviet Germany!”

The Communist battle cry was uttered in hoarse whispers by the Hundertschaften company as they sneaked into Hamburg in the dead of night. Valtin ordered his men to break into shops to steal jars of kerosene. The Central Committee had promised stick grenades. Until they arrived, the Red shock troops would set fires with lamp oil. Which left Pauline with little hope that the Central Committee would dispatch Zolner as promised. But she was in the thick of it now, an unwilling participant in what was beginning to look to her like a doomed attack by a thousand men against a city of a million.

But as they advanced deeper into the city, they were joined by other Hundertschaften companies and ordinary citizens streaming down from the tenements. Their numbers began to swell. The first police station they attacked fell quickly. They marched bewildered policemen out in their own handcuffs — hostages, if needed — and looted the station house arsenals of rifles and pistols, ammunition, and a water-cooled MG 08/15 Maschinengewehr mounted on a tripod. Valtin assigned four war veterans to lug the machine gun to a tenement roof that commanded the street.

They continued toward the shipyards, the night dark, the streets deserted. Surprise seemed total. There was no sign of riot brigades, no mobs of Bürgerwehr auxiliaries, no columns of Freikorps. They were advancing stealthily on another police station when its lights went out.

“Attack!” Valtin bellowed, and they charged the building.

The cops opened fire with rifles and pistols. Flashes of red and yellow pierced the dark. Men fell in the street.

Valtin hurled a stick grenade. It smashed the glass of a small window and lodged against wire mesh. But the grenade was a dud and did not explode. The Hundertschaften resumed firing their pistols. The police answered with a machine gun. The roar was deafening, the muzzle flashes blinding. Anny pinwheeled into Pauline. Pauline tried to keep her from falling. She caught her in her arms. The girl was deadweight.

Pauline forced herself to look at her face. To her horror, she saw a dark hole between her eyes. Anny had been killed instantly. We were inches apart, Pauline thought, still holding her.

Three teenage boys, brave beyond reasoning, ran at the building, throwing jars of kerosene. Braver than they would be, Pauline thought, if they had been standing with Anny. Bullets cut them down. Glass shattered, kerosene splashed. A fourth boy ran to it with a burning rag. A bullet hurled him back and he fell on the burning rag. An old man who had joined them moments before the attack stepped forward. Bullets stormed past him. Pauline waited for him to die. He flicked a cigarette. It sailed through the dark like a shooting star. The front of the police station caught fire, and flames tumbled in the windows.

The door opened and policemen ran out, beating at their burning tunics with bare hands and rolling on the cobblestones to put out the flames. Pauline thought in the confusion that the Reds were helping the police put out the flames. But her eyes told the terrible truth. They were leaping over the bodies of the fallen boys to knock down the cops and kick them to death.

Pauline knew in that moment that her hopes for Germany had been hijacked exactly as ex-Kommandeur Fritz Richter had predicted they would be: no gracious winners, no shining knights.

She eased Anny’s body to the cobblestones with an awful feeling that the worst would thrive and the dreamers would die. Valtin’s Red Hundreds left the burning police station and raced toward the shipyard. Afraid to be left behind, Pauline ran after them.

Government posters at street corners proclaimed the death penalty for possessing weapons. The fighters tore them down. They crossed a broad thoroughfare, which Pauline recognized as one that led to the central railroad station where she could telephone long-distance to Richter in Berlin. She had seen no sign of the mysterious Zolner, and, in all the fighting, he might well be dead. She slowed and let the stragglers overtake her. As she began to turn away, she handed her first-aid rucksack to the last man in line.

He stared over her shoulder, his eyes suddenly widening with terror.

A column of squat gray armored cars was roaring up the thoroughfare.

“Run!”

The survivors of the Red Hundreds sprinted for the neighborhood of narrow, winding streets that housed the shipyard workers. The workers, who had been striking for days, had blocked the streets with massive, well-constructed barricades of overturned wagons, trucks, and furniture. They were reinforced with cobblestones and protected from above by snipers on the roofs.

The armored cars attacked, spitting machine-gun fire from narrow slits in their steel fronts. As Pauline had seen in Berlin, they were painted with skulls and crossbones. Stick grenades plummeted down from the rooftops. The powerful explosives blasted sheet armor loose from the attacking cars, exposing their drivers and machine gunners to rifle fire from above. Several cars stopped, immobilized. One caught fire. Another exploded. And the rest retreated.

Workers and Red Hundreds cheered and embraced.

Moments later, there was a huge explosion in the middle of the main barricade, tearing it apart and hurtling men and debris in the air.

“Minenwerfer!” Bomb throwers.

Another ten-pound mortar shell screamed down from the sky. And another.

“To the shipyard!”

Fleeing the ruined barricade, the survivors stampeded toward the shipyard.

The strikers opened the gates to let them in. Pauline emerged from the narrow streets, her ears ringing from the mortar explosions. She saw the ribs of a steamer under construction reaching for the open sky. A searchlight leaped along sheds and tall gantries and swept across the frame of the half-built ship and locked suddenly, brilliantly, on a huge red flag billowing in the wind.

The workers’ cheers were drowned out by gunfire from the river.

Hamburg police in armed motorboats raced toward the builders’ ways, firing rifles and mounted machine guns. Strikers and Hundertschaften dived for cover. The cops stormed ashore. Pauline saw the red flag illuminated by the searchlight descend swiftly down the mast and out of sight. Moments later, the police ran it up again, soaked in gasoline and burning fiercely.

17

The retreat was chaos, every man for himself. The Reds threw away incriminating weapons and ran for the oldest slums of crooked alleys where they might hide, protected by the criminals who lived there. Pauline walked in the shadows of the buildings, head down, empty hands visible, eyes alert, watching for the police. A man still holding a gun raced by. In the wake of the insurrection the cops had retaken the rooftops, and a sniper cut him down.

She saw Valtin in a doorway. He had been shot. His peacoat was soaked with blood. It took him a confused moment to recognize her.

“Where is Anny?” he asked.

“Anny is dead. Put your arm over my shoulder. I’ll help you to a hospital.”

“Are you crazy? Wounds will tell them who we are.”

“Where is Zolner?”

Valtin was struggling to breathe. “If the Central Committee sent him, I didn’t see him.”

“What’s his first name?”

“Why do you keep… Oh yes, your poor betrayed brother.”

“What’s his first name?”

“Marat. Marat Zolner.”

“Marat Zolner.”

“It’s only his nom de guerre.”

“What’s his real name?”

Valtin closed his eyes. “Sometimes he is Dima Smirnov, spelled with a v. Sometimes Dmitri Smirnoff spelled with fs. Sometimes… Who knows? Who cares?” He sagged against the door. His chin slumped to his chest. His feet skidded out from under him. Pauline knelt beside him. When he opened his eyes, what she saw there told her that nothing would save him. He whispered something she couldn’t hear. A bubble of blood swelled on his lips. She leaned closer.

“What?”

The bubble made a wet Pop! against her ear. “Run!”

His hat had fallen beside him. Pauline laid it over his face and hurried away.

Looters were battering open shops and running from them with bread and milk and beer and coats and hats. Now it was the police who were erecting barricades, stringing barbed wire across the larger streets. She pressed into a doorway to wait for an armored car to creep past on an intersecting street. The men inside flung open their hatches and stood in the open, no longer afraid. It passed from her view.

An empty bottle smashed at her feet. Two looters lurched toward her. Before she could move, they had cornered her in the doorway. They were drunk, reeking of schnapps.

One grabbed her from behind, the other reached for her legs. She kicked out, knowing her only chance was to get to her gun before they found it. He caught her ankles. The man behind squeezed tighter. She went limp.

“Right,” he laughed. “Might as well enjoy it.”

He let go of her arms to turn her toward him and as he bent and pressed his reeking mouth to hers, she reached under her skirt with both hands, pulled her Mann, and cocked the slide. She shot the one who was holding her ankles first. He fell backwards with an expression of surprise. The other, oblivious because of gunfire ringing in the streets, kept trying to kiss her. She twisted the gun between them and pulled the trigger and he dropped to the cobbles, wounded, though not mortally, by the small-caliber gun.

Before Pauline could move ten feet, steel-helmeted cops stopped her and saw the gun she was trying to hide in her skirt. They shouted that she was under arrest.

“They tried to rape me,” she protested. “I had to protect myself.”

“Death is the penalty for weapons.”

“I have a license.” She showed them her genuine Ausweiskarte and a Van Dorn business card. She took the time they read her papers to calm herself.

“What in the name of God are you doing in Hamburg in the middle of a riot, Fräulein Privatdetektive?”

Pauline affected the confident manner of a Prussian aristocrat. “The Van Dorn Detective Agency intends to establish a field office in Germany’s second-largest city.”

“Take my advice. Wait until we’ve exterminated the rabble.”

She aimed a curt nod in the direction of the looters she had shot. “I would appreciate it if you accept these two as my contribution to the effort and escort me to Central Station.”

Startled by her audacity, the police officer looked down at the woman. She was small and slight and uncommonly pretty. But she had a field marshal’s icy eyes. He returned her pistol, offered his arm, and walked her to the station.

The telephones were working. She reached Richter by long distance. Germany had the most highly developed telephone system in Europe and the connection was so clear he could have been across the table in the Prater Garten.

“Hamburg? Are you all right? We have reports of heavy fighting.”

“It’s over,” she said.

“How bad was it?”

“Worse than even you could imagine. How is it in Berlin?”

“Quiet as a tomb. The Comintern got their signals crossed. They called off the Berlin and Bremen attacks. The fools in Hamburg were left in the lurch.”

“Who is Marat Zolner?”

She listened to the lines. They made the faintest hissing sound of falling water. Finally, Richter asked, “How did you find out about Zolner?”

“Johann Kozlov was his right-hand man.”

“I did not know that.”

“Didn’t I tell you I would bring you information?”

“Very good information,” Richter admitted.

“Now it’s your turn. Where is Marat Zolner?”

“Fellow here to see you, Mr. Van Dorn,” said Isaac Bell.

Van Dorn’s haggard face lit with a weak smile. The boy was standing in the doorway in civilian clothes, fidgeting with his hat. “Seaman Somers! Come on in, son. Don’t let that nurse dragon scare you. Come by the bed where I can see you. Dorothy! This boy saved my life.”

“Are you getting better, sir?”

“Tip-top,” Van Dorn lied. “Have they made you captain yet?”

Somers hung his head. “They discharged me.”

“What?” The outraged eruption set him coughing, and the rib-racking cough turned him pale with pain. When he finally caught his breath, he waved the nurse aside and demanded of Bell, “Isaac? What’s going on?”

Bell explained how Somers had run afoul of the Coast Guard brass.

“That’s outrageous. They should have struck a medal… So you need a job?”

“Yes, sir, I do. But who would hire me being discharged?”

“Who will hire you? I’ll hire you. Starting here and now you’re a Van Dorn Apprentice Detective. Isaac, make it so!”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Van Dorn,” said Bell, not at all surprised by the turn of events, having engineered it. He didn’t doubt that young Somers had the requisite courage, daring, and enterprise to become a Van Dorn.

As for the Boss, he suddenly sounded invigorated.

“Welcome aboard, Somers. Of course we’ll have to clear it with your parents.”

“I’m an orphan, sir. I never knew my father. My mother died of tubercular trouble, working in the mill.”

“Kiss of death?” asked Van Dorn.

“Yes, sir.” To save money, mill owners held on to the old shuttles that required threading the eye with a suction of breath.

“Who will you start him under, Isaac?”

“Grady Forrer.”

“Research?”

“It’s clear talking to him that Asa’s read every magazine printed. He’ll get a good start with Grady, and we’ll move him around from there.”

Bell turned to a noise at the door. A Van Dorn messenger was knocking softly. “Mr. Bell? Cable from Germany.”

A name at last.

Isaac Bell raced back to the St. Regis and burst into the Van Dorn offices, calling out for Grady Forrer. The Research man lumbered up to Bell’s desk in the middle of the bull pen. Under one massive arm was a cardboard file folder, bulging to capacity.

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

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

“What’s this?”

“Your report on the Comintern.”

“What?”

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

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

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

“How are they doing?”

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

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

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

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

“What about the anarchists?”

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Aren’t they already attacking?”

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

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

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

Chief Investigator Isaac Bell had heard enough.

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

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

18

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

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

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

Lynch bet Harding a quarter that the bulge was artillery.

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

“No bet. Looking for something, mister?”

“I’m looking for a boat.”

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

“Let’s see what you’ve got.”

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

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

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

Lynch and Harding exchanged a look.

“Yup.”

“Where is she?”

“Put her on a railcar.”

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

“Usually.”

“Where’d she go?”

“Haven’t seen her since.”

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

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

“Could I have her in a month?”

“I don’t see why not.”

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

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

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

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

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

“And double the armor in the bow.”

“Planning on ramming the opposition?”

“I’d like to know I can.”

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

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

“Nope.”

“Someone you knew?”

“Nope.”

“What was his name?”

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

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

“Black Bird?”

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

“What will you name yours?” asked Lynch.

“Marion.”

“Should we paint Marion on the transom?”

“In gold.”

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

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

“Did he speak with a foreign accent?”

“A bit,” said Lynch.

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

“Russian, by any chance?”

“They all sound the same,” said Harding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And fire extinguishers,” said Harding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothing.”

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

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

“Is that allowed?”

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

“Who was the new passenger?”

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

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

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

“Could you describe Trucks?”

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

“How tall?”

“Six foot.”

“Eyes?”

“Tiny little eyes. Like a pig.”

“What color?”

“Pig color.”

“Pigs have pink eyes,” said Bell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Trucks?” the super echoed.

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

“He left in May.”

“Did he leave a forwarding address?”

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

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

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

Isaac Bell asked, “Is he a Gopher?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I smell nothing.”

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

“And this.”

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

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

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

But Zolner’s exuberance was not to be derailed.

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

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

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

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

“With you, of course.”

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

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

The horse began kicking its stall.

“Easy,” Zolner called soothingly. “We’re almost ready.”

The animal calmed down immediately.

“How do you do that?” marveled Antipov, who had never fought on horseback.

“He knows I like him,” said Zolner. “He would never believe what we have planned for him. Would you?” he asked, approaching the animal with an apple.

Yuri, the least sentimental of men, asked, “Couldn’t we unhitch him?”

“The Financial District is crawling with police. The streets and sidewalks are jam-packed at lunch hour. We’ll be lucky to get away on foot, much less leading a horse. All right, are you ready?”

“I’ve been ready for days!”

“I am talking to the horse.”

Zolner opened the stall, said, “Come along,” and hitched the animal to the wagon.

They dressed in workmen’s shirts, trousers, boots, and flat caps, all smudged with coal dust, and rubbed dust on their hands and faces. Zolner climbed up on the driver’s bench and took the reins. Antipov slid open the stable door.

A man who looked like a plainclothes police officer stepped in from the sidewalk. He looked around with quick, hard eyes, took in the horse, Zolner seated in the wagon, and Yuri Antipov frozen with surprise. He opened his coat, revealing a gleaming badge pinned inside the lapel, and a fleeting glimpse of a heavy automatic pistol.

“Have either of you gents seen Charlie ‘Trucks’ O’Neal?”

Zolner spoke first in Russian, saying to Yuri, “I will distract him for you,” and in heavily accented English, “Ve not know such person.”

“Big guy, six-two, broken nose, black hair.”

“Ve not know such person.”

“That’s funny. ’Cause I hear he rents this stable. And here are you guys with a horse and a wagon, which are staples of the stable business, if you know what I mean.”

“Are you policeman?”

The man stared a moment, appeared to make up his mind, and suddenly sounded more friendly. “Don’t worry, gents, I’m not a cop. Van Dorn private detective. Harry Warren’s my name. I don’t mean to keep you guys from going about your business. Though I’m not sure who’s going to buy your coal in the middle of the summer.”

He opened his coat again, took out a wallet, and flashed a ten-dollar bill. “Are you sure you haven’t seen him?”

Marat Zolner reached for the money and stuffed it in his pocket. “Man who rent stable… desk there.” He pointed at the office door.

“Thanks. You gents go on. I’ll wait for him in there.”

Harry Warren was halfway to the office door when Antipov started after him, dagger drawn.

“Was that Russian you were speaking?” asked the detective, turning suddenly and drawing his pistol with blinding speed. He fired once, into the stable floor, an inch from Antipov’s shoe. The Comintern officer skidded to a stop.

Harry Warren glanced at the distant door to the street. No one had been passing by, no one was peering in for the source of the gunshot, which was good. He needed time with these two without the cops.

He said to Zolner, “Translate to your pal to drop his knife before I shoot him. And you keep your hands where I can see them.”

Zolner spoke. Antipov let the dagger fall from his hand.

Warren did not know what he had stumbled into while looking for Trucks O’Neal, but it looked promising. Particularly with the Russian connections Isaac Bell kept turning up. He addressed Zolner in a deliberately conversational tone while watching closely for the man’s reaction. “The reason I ask about Russian is we keep running into a Russian connection to this case we’re trying to solve about who tried to kill our boss. Could be coincidence, though, if it is, your pal’s attempt to stick a knife in my back will require some explaining.”

Marat Zolner and Yuri Antipov stood still as bronze statues. Not even their eyes moved, not even to track the sudden motion of Trucks O’Neal entering silently from the covered alley and clutching a full bottle of counterfeit Glen Urquhart Genuine by the neck.

Harry Warren sensed the rush and whirled. The bottle aimed at the back of his head smashed against his temple, fracturing the thin bone and rupturing the artery under it.

Marat Zolner shut the stable door. Antipov and Trucks O’Neal slung the detective’s body into the wagon beside the dynamite and covered it with more coal.

“Why,” Zolner asked, “are the Van Dorns looking for you?”

“Me?”

“He asked if we had seen you. Why?”

“Say, wait a minute. I didn’t do nothin’ to bring ’em after me.”

“Don’t come back here. We’re done with the stable. We’re done bottling.”

“But there’s eighty thousand bucks of Scotch next door.”

“It’s more like one hundred fifty thousand,” Zolner said quietly.

“Are you blaming me?”

“I’m sending you to Detroit before they catch up with you.”

“I’m not starting over in Detroit.”

Zolner stepped very close and stared down into Trucks’s eyes. “Trucks, I’ve never questioned your loyalty. Remove anything of yours that is incriminating. I’ll have people meet your train. Go! Now!”

O’Neal backed away, spun on his heel, and hurried through the covered alley.

“Kill him,” said Antipov.

“Capitalists first. Open the door.”

Antipov opened the door again.

They sat side by side on the driver’s bench. The horse plodded slowly through the clogged streets of Lower Manhattan, down Broadway to Trinity Church, and turned onto Wall Street. Zolner reined in and set the brake outside No. 23 Wall on the corner of Broad. Left to his own devices, he would have parked the dynamite around the corner at the New York Stock Exchange, the nucleus of the Financial District. But Yuri had chosen the marble headquarters of J. P. Morgan.

He climbed down and adjusted the horse’s feed bag, then knelt by the wagon, pretending to adjust the swingletree while he connected the final detonation wire.

“Cops!”

Yuri Antipov had spotted a policeman coming their way. Marat Zolner climbed back up, sat beside him, and took the reins. The cop pushed closer through the crowd.

Antipov fingered the dagger under his shirt.

“That won’t help this time,” said Zolner. “Wait on the wagon until I’ve dealt with him. I’ll be right back.” He jumped down again.

Yuri Antipov watched Marat Zolner intercept the cop. Would he bribe him? Or blackjack him? Not in front of all these people who thronged the busy intersection. Suddenly, both the cop and Zolner hurried away and melted into the crowd. What had Marat said to him? Antipov was trying to figure out what was going on and what he should do when he heard an alarm clock ring.

19

Isaac Bell heard the explosion four miles away in the Van Dorns’ St. Regis office. Wildly divergent reports flooded in on the wires and telephones, blaming a dynamite accident on a Jersey City dock, a Lower Manhattan gas main, a subterranean New York Steam Company pipe, then a powder mishap at one of the many Financial District construction sites.

Bell received an urgent call from police headquarters.

“Inspector Condon would appreciate if you’d come down to No. 23 Wall Street.”

The fastest way downtown was on the subway. Bell got as close as he could and ran the rest of the distance from City Hall Station, where they had stopped the trains. He was blocks from Wall Street when he saw windows blown out of buildings. Nearer the explosion, the carnage was horrific. He estimated scores had been killed and hundreds injured. Trucks and taxis were turned upside down, scattered like toys. The dead were huddled on the sidewalk under coats. The street was deep in broken glass. From it, Bell gingerly extracted a cucumber-shaped piece of cast iron with a hole through its length.

He spotted Inspector Condon directing an army of plainclothes and uniforms from the front steps of the Morgan Building. Its windows were smashed from basement to attic, its marble walls pocked with shrapnel and blackened by coal dust. The mutilated carcass of a dray horse lay on the curb. Only the animal’s head was intact, blinders covering its eyes.

“Thanks for coming, Isaac,” Condon said gravely. He was a youthful-looking, fresh-faced son and grandson of cops and universally believed to be the department’s fastest-rising star. “I’m awful sorry, but I have to show you something.”

He handed Bell a battered piece of gold.

“Van Dorn shield.”

“I’m afraid so, my friend.”

Senior men carried gold. Bell held it to the light. He could just make out the engraved No. 17 and it shook him to the core.

“Harry Warren.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Condon inhaled sharply, blinked, and looked away. ”Always the wrong man… Any idea what Harry was doing down here?”

“Last he told me, he was nosing around Warren Street.”

“Of all the ways to go,” said the cop. “Harry busted into more gang dens than you and I could shake a stick at and here he ends up an innocent bystander.”

“Where’s his body?”

“I don’t know that we’ll ever find it. He must have been right next to the damned thing. His badge landed in the Morgan lobby.”

Bell put it in his pocket. “Does the Bomb Squad have any idea what caused it?”

“Not yet. They found a wagon shaft and this horse with its guts blown out. Could have been some damned fool transporting powder. Some people saw a wagon right there where you see all the burn marks. And there are three or four foundation excavations nearby where the contractors would store dynamite. Fire department has the Bureau of Combustibles checking permits. But considering J. P. Morgan was every Bolshevik’s Bogey Man, I will not be surprised to learn it was a bomb.”

“It was a bomb,” said Bell. “It wasn’t an accident.”

He handed Condon the chunk of iron he had picked up.

“Recognize this?”

“Sash cord slug,” said the inspector, naming the counterweight used to open windows. “Could have blown out of one of these buildings.”

“You don’t find sash slugs in modern skyscrapers. Besides, see how it’s burnt? It could have been in the explosion.”

Condon grew red in the face. “If that’s so, then some cold-blooded radical was deliberately trying to kill or maim as many people as possible.”

“If it was,” Bell spoke with cold fury, “then the Red Scare boys deported the wrong radicals.”

Tragically, the foreigners like Johann Kozlov — not to mention Marion’s movie-folk friends — rounded up and deported in the Red Scare were immensely less dangerous than whoever detonated the bomb.

“Innocents,” he told Inspector Condon, “paid the price.”

His angry gaze fixed on the dead horse.

“Dick? Do you mind if I take a shoe?”

Isaac Bell brought Harry Warren’s badge back to the office and dictated a directive: “The Van Dorn Agency will establish its own Bomb Investigations Department and contract to provide better information to the government than the Justice Department is getting from its Bureau of Investigation.”

He put Grady Forrer in charge of hiring the best specialists, made a note to ask Joe Van Dorn who his best contact was at Justice, and instructed Darren McKinney to find the sharpest Washington lobbyist that money could buy.

Next, he assembled the Gang Squad. Grieving detectives circled his desk.

“Does anyone know what Harry was doing on Wall Street?”

“He said he was going to Warren Street, Mr. Bell.”

“That’s what he told me.”

“How did he get down to Wall Street?”

They looked at Ed Tobin who had apprenticed under Harry. Ed said, “He could have spotted Trucks O’Neal on Warren Street and followed him down to Wall Street.”

“And then,” Bell asked, “he had the worst luck in the world walking past that wagon just when it went off?”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t like coincidences,” said Bell. “And I don’t believe there’s a detective in this room who likes them either.”

“No argument there, Mr. Bell.”

Bell said, “Here’s how we find whether Harry Warren followed Trucks O’Neal to Wall Street. Keep searching for Trucks O’Neal. Check morgues and hospitals. If O’Neal’s among the victims, that’ll settle it. But if we find him alive and unhurt, we’ll have proof Harry wasn’t near Trucks when the dynamite went off. Find Trucks O’Neal! Start on Warren Street. Find that stable Harry was looking for. There can’t be that many still in business down there.”

A detective said, “I just got back from there, Mr. Bell. The only stable I found was locked up.”

“Go back. Watch the place. Meanwhile, look at this.”

Bell laid the battered scrap of gold on his deck. “Harry’s badge. Number 17. Cops found it blown through the front door of the Morgan Building.”

Around it he placed a horseshoe with a jagged nail and a patch of rubber stuck to it.

“From the horse that pulled the wagon that blew up… Find the farrier who shoed the horse that pulled the wagon that transported the dynamite that killed Harry Warren. The farrier will tell us who owned the wagon.”

“Yuri died a hero of the revolution,” Marat Zolner told Fern Hawley.

She was red-eyed and crying inconsolably. “Don’t pretend that you’re not glad that you lost your overseer.”

“Only until Moscow sends the next.”

“They’ll never find another like him.”

That, thought Zolner, is certainly my hope.

And not an empty hope. Ironically, Yuri’s Wall Street bombing would buy him time. With nearly forty dead, four hundred wounded, and photographs of the wreckage in every newspaper in the world, the Comintern had plenty to celebrate. So he was a hero, too, and it would be a while before the apparatchiks got brave enough to challenge him again.

Trucks O’Neal posed an immediate threat. When the Van Dorns caught up with him, the gangster knew too much. There was no doubt they would. Trucks had refused to hide in Detroit, so the only question was how soon. Worse, by now Trucks had had time to realize that he was a threat, which meant he would not let Zolner near enough to kill him. But Trucks was greedy. And greedy men were predictable.

Grady Forrer pulled a recent issue of International Horseshoers’ Monthly Magazine from the Van Dorn Research Department’s library stacks and opened it on a desk in front of Apprentice Somers. Next to it he placed the horseshoe that Isaac Bell had brought back from the Wall Street bombing.

“What we have for our search for a particular farrier is a horseshoe and a nail and a scrap of rubber from what was likely a horseshoe pad. Now, this monthly is chockful of interesting articles about the goings-on in the International Union of Journeymen Horseshoers of the U.S. and Canada. But what we are interested in are these advertisements for horseshoes, horse nails, and horseshoe pads. Are you with me so far?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Forrer.”

“Why don’t we start with the horseshoe itself. Describe it to me.”

“It’s worn thin.”

“Do you see the manufacturer’s name or trademark stamped on it?”

Somers turned it over in his hands. “No, sir. No name. No stamp.”

“So how are we going to compare it to these ads? You think on that. I’ll be back.”

When Forrer returned, Somers pointed excitedly at the advertisement for Red Tip horseshoes made by the Neverslip Manufacturing Company of New Brunswick, New Jersey. “Look at this ad, Mr. Forrer. It tells you all about how to make a horseshoe. You could make one yourself after you read this ad.”

“Yes,” said Grady. “But when researching for information about something specific like where was this horseshoe made, you’ve got to be careful not to get sidetracked. You and I could read every word in every ad in the magazine. But should we? Because while we’re learning to make horseshoes, the criminals who shot Mr. Van Dorn are at target practice, improving their aim to shoot the next detective. Unless we stop them first. Now, why don’t you tackle this nail. I’ll be back.”

When Grady Forrer returned, young Somers had disappeared. An hour passed and he burst excitedly into the newspaper library where Forrer was assembling a report on Detroit’s gang wars.

“Apprentices go to lunch when they’re told to, Master Somers.”

“I didn’t go to lunch. The nail is worn down like the shoe, so there’s no special marks on it. But I noticed something on the shoe so I ran over to Third Avenue and showed it to a carter. See this little wedge? The carter told me the farrier brazes it onto the shoe to lift the back of the hoof if the horse is standing wrong on it.”

Grady turned the shoe over in his huge fingers. “Horse podiatry?”

“Now look at this mark.” Somers peeled the rubber off the wedge and touched a fingernail to a faint mark pressed into the metal.

Forrer snatched up a magnifying glass. “What is this?… ‘RDNJ’?”

“NJ could mean New Jersey. So RD might be the farrier’s initials.”

“Sounds like you ought to get over to New Jersey and find RD.”

“How?”

“Remember those advertisements in Horseshoers’ for shoes and nails and pads. Where did they tell the farrier to buy their products?”

“The jobber?”

“Work up a list of New Jersey jobbers for blacksmith supplies.”

The bleary-eyed Gang Squad detective, who hadn’t slept in the twenty-four hours after the bombing, made a believable-looking derelict as he pretended to snooze in a doorway across Warren Street from the stable he was watching.

“It took us a while to catch on,” he told Isaac Bell, who hadn’t slept either, when Bell crouched beside him, pretending to give him a cigarette. It was late at night and the streets were empty.

“This guy who looks exactly like Trucks — Ed Tobin swears it’s him — goes in the stable in this side, then he drives out on Murray Street. The backs of the buildings butt together in the middle of the block. He just went in again. Ed’s watching on Murray.”

“Stay here,” said Bell. “Nail him if he comes out. I’ll cover the other side.”

He ran full speed to the corner, down Greenwich, and turned onto Murray.

Ed Tobin was waiting inside a butcher’s van, eye to a peephole. Tired as he was, he flashed Bell a predatory grin. “I snuck close. He’s got one truck left. Loading booze now.”

“How many helpers?”

“None. He’s clearing the place out all alone.”

Bell said, “Looks like he knew Harry was close.”

“If Harry was getting close, what was he doing on Wall Street?”

“Maybe Harry got too close,” said Bell.

“And Trucks killed him? And put him in the wagon?”

“That’s a stable on Warren Street. Where would you put a wagon while you collected dynamite?”

“The same guys.”

The chief investigator and the Gang Squad chief’s onetime apprentice exchanged a grim look.

“I’ve been asking myself something similar,” said Tobin. “Harry shadowed suspects close as glue. Trucks doesn’t have a mark on him. So Harry couldn’t have been following close when he got blown up. But Harry had no reason to be in front of the Morgan Building. He was supposed to be eleven blocks uptown, here at the stable.”

“What you are speculating,” Bell said, “is that Harry was in the wagon.”

“I didn’t want to say it. It sounds too crazy.”

“It’s not crazy,” said Bell. “It is speculative. And it would be purely wild speculation if we were not tracking possible Comintern agents hell-bent on sowing terror.”

“So what if Harry, looking for Trucks, got the drop on them in the stable? What if they turned the tables and killed him?”

Isaac Bell nodded. “That could be why Trucks is running for it, if he knew that Harry was a Van Dorn. Van Dorns don’t come alone. He’s grabbing what he can of the booze before we catch up with him.”

“You want to bust in the door?”

“Very much so,” said Bell. “But I’d rather see where he goes. If anyone knows who Marat Zolner is, it’s the gangster who came back home on Zolner’s steamer ticket.”

“Door’s opening!”

“Can you trust this thing to keep up?”

“It’s running O.K.”

A heavyset man pulled the doors inward. The streetlight fell on his face. His skin gleamed with perspiration. He had removed his hat, revealing a distinct widow’s peak.

“That’s Trucks,” said Tobin. “No question. See what I said? Not a mark on him.”

Trucks O’Neal stepped back into the warehouse and a moment later drove out in a Dodge delivery van, riding low under the weight of a heavy load.

Bell said, “He didn’t close the door this time. He’s finished. He’s not coming back.”

Tobin jumped behind the steering wheel and stepped on the electric starter.

“Stick close,” said Bell. “I’d rather he spots us than we lose him.”

They followed the Dodge downtown for eight blocks, into the Syrian quarter, and across Rector Street to West Street and down a block. Trucks O’Neal rounded the corner, half a block ahead of Isaac Bell and Ed Tobin. They followed, turning into a dark street that was suddenly ablaze with muzzle flashes.

A staccato roar echoed off the buildings like a thunderstorm of chain lightning. A line of bullets stitched holes in a row of parked cars. Tobin slammed on the brakes.

Isaac Bell threw open the passenger door, collared Tobin with his free hand, and dragged him out with him. As they rolled across the cobbles the butcher van resonated like a tin drum, its sides and windshield punctured repeatedly.

“Thompson .45 submachine gun.” Bell rolled to a crouched position behind a bullet-riddled Model T and whipped his Browning from his coat.

“What are they shooting at us for?” Tobin shouted over the roar, which continued at the same deadly pitch.

“They’re not.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“They’re shooting at the guys shooting back.”

A scattering of pistol fire confirmed that the Van Dorns had driven into the middle of someone else’s gunfight. Tobin drew a short-barreled belly gun, which would be of even less use against the Thompson than Bell’s automatic.

Another storm of bullets raked the street. This time no one shot back. When it stopped, Bell raised his head to look for O’Neal. He saw the Dodge with its tires flattened and its driver’s door open, but no sign of the gangster. A Locomobile burst from a warehouse, careened past the Dodge, and raced around the corner on squealing tires.

And suddenly it was quiet.

Bell knew he had the briefest of moments to find whether Trucks O’Neal had survived before the cops came and took charge. Trailed closely by Tobin, who watched their backs, the tall detective approached the Dodge. It had been riddled, like the Van Dorn van and most of the vehicles in sight. It reeked of spilled alcohol from hundreds of broken bottles. There was no one inside.

Bell heard a groan. They followed the sound into the warehouse from where the automobile had just raced. Cases of whisky were stacked around the walls.

“Glen Urquhart Genuine,” said Tobin. “Same stuff Trucks had at Murray Street. Looks like he got hijacked.”

“But where is Trucks?”

Deeper into the warehouse they found a flashy-looking man in a gaudy suit who had been creased in the shoulder by a bullet. He was struggling to sit up and reach for a pistol that had fallen beside him.

Bell kicked the gun away and knelt by him.

“Who shot you?”

“Who shot me? What are you, a cop?”

“Van Dorn.”

“Same thing.”

“Who shot you?” Isaac Bell repeated coldly.

“No one.”

“What happened here?”

“Beats me.”

“Where’s Trucks O’Neal?”

The gangster surprised Bell. He laughed. “Trucks? Trucks went for a ride.”

“Where?”

“I don’t talk to cops.”

“You’ll wish we were cops,” Tobin growled over Bell’s shoulder. To Bell he said, “This guy I recognize is Johnny Quinn, who sells hooch for Lonergan. Isn’t that right, Johnny?”

Quinn nodded. “I need a doctor.”

“You’ll need an undertaker if you don’t give us O’Neal,” said Tobin, and then he spoke to Bell as if the gangster was not sprawled on concrete between them. “The way I read it, Trucks is selling the stuff to this guy. Hijacker with the Thompson tries to take the stuff. Mr. Quinn and his friends hold them off. Quinn’s shot, friends run for it. Hijackers get some but not all of O’Neal’s product.”

“No,” said Bell. “I see no truck to take it in. And they shot up the Dodge. They didn’t hijack the booze. If they hijacked anything, they hijacked O’Neal.”

Bell turned his attention back to the gangster. “Where did they take him?”

“Nowhere.”

An electric police siren howled nearby. Bell’s hand flickered toward his boot. He held his throwing knife in front of the gangster’s face, then threw a headlock around his neck and slipped the knifepoint inside his ear. “I asked, where did they take him?”

“You’re not a cop?”

“We already established that. Which way?”

The gangster wet his lips. “Listen, this is between Trucks and them.”

“You know who grabbed him, don’t you?”

“Yeah, and I ain’t telling you because whatever you do to me they’ll do worse.”

“You want to bet?” asked Bell.

The gangster twisted his head to look imploringly at Ed Tobin. “Listen, buddy. You know who I’m talking about? The guys taking over the docks. Pushing out Lonergan and the rest.”

“Black Hand,” said Tobin.

“The Black Hand set Trucks up. They was waiting for him.”

Isaac Bell and Ed Tobin exchanged a glance. That the Italians, who were shoving the Irish out of the lucrative control of longshore labor, were gunning for Trucks O’Neal was a wrinkle unconnected to the Comintern and Marat Zolner.

Or was it unconnected? Bell wondered. What if Zolner was teaming up with partners? What if he had teamed up New York’s new top dogs? If he had formed a working alliance, then it was very possible that those new partners were doing Zolner a service eliminating a witness who knew enough to threaten their joint schemes.

“Where did the Black Hand take Trucks?” Bell asked.

Tobin leaned closer to whisper. “You better tell us. I have no control over what this guy does to you.”

Bell emphasized Tobin’s warning by sliding his blade deeper into the gangster’s ear. The point grazed his eardrum. Quinn went limp. Bell said, “You already told us they took Trucks for a ‘ride.’ Where?”

“I don’t know for sure. They usually take guys to Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn’s a big place.”

“Fulton Street.”

“Fulton Street’s a big street.”

“Come on, mister, you’re going to get me in all kinds of trouble.”

“You’re in all kinds of trouble.”

Ed Tobin interceded again, in a manner now less kindly than fatalistic. “Think of this guy as your priest. God’s the only one he’ll tell your confession to and God probably doesn’t care. Where on Fulton?”

“Down by the ferry. Under the bridge.”

It was less than a mile across Lower Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge, even skirting the barricades in the Wall Street area where the police were still investigating the explosion. On the bridge, with the sky turning pink and the wind whistling through the bullet holes in the butcher van’s windshield, Ed Tobin asked, “Comintern and Black Hand? Funny combination.”

“Five’ll get you ten the Black Hand doesn’t know that Zolner is Comintern. Just a top-notch bootlegger smart enough to make friends. We can ask Trucks, but you have to step on the gas before they kill him. Go! On the jump!”

They careened through the snakes’ nest of exit ramps on squealing tires and down, down, down to the derelict ferry-landing neighborhood where Fulton Street petered out under the bridge in a slum of flophouses, blind pigs, and greasy spoons. Vagrants slept in doorways. Bell saw no cops anywhere.

The sun had yet to light the Gothic towers of the bridge, but it was reddening the top girders of the skyscrapers under construction across the river on Wall Street. The ferry to Manhattan, which few rode since the bridge had effectively put it out of business long ago, no longer ran at night. Along the waterfront, the shacks and docks and piers appeared abandoned, with peeling paint and splintery decks.

“There’s their Locomobile.”

They pulled up behind the auto they had seen race from the warehouse on Murray Street. It was parked beside a truck in the shadows at the foot of a pier under a broken streetlamp.

“Out on the pier,” said Bell, breaking into a run.

Far away, at the end of the long wooden structure that thrust into the river, a gang of six or seven surrounded a man they were half carrying, half dragging toward the water. Bell pulled his gun, stopped running, and took aim. Careful not to hit Trucks, he fired twice, close, over their heads. A hat flew. A gangster ducked and threw himself flat. The rest held tight, reached the end, and threw Trucks O’Neal into the river.

Isaac Bell ran full tilt. The gangsters peeled away and scattered, running back toward their auto, watching Bell carefully and making room for him to run past them. The river was at slack tide, the serene surface disturbed by a single round dimple. Trucks had plunged into the water like an anvil and sank straight to the bottom.

Bell tore off his coat, kicked out of his boots, and dived after him.

Piercing the center of the dimple that marked O’Neal’s entry, he drove straight down, stroking and kicking and reaching into the dark. Descending fifteen or twenty feet, he hit bottom, felt mud, banged into something hard — the foot of a piling. He felt around frantically and something soft closed around his outstretched hand and held on tight.

Bell could hardly believe it. It was a near miracle. But in diving straight down, he landed on the bottom next to O’Neal, who was clinging to his hand with all his might. Bell planted his feet in the mud and kicked off to pull him to the surface.

Bell could not lift him.

He tugged harder on the man’s hand as if to shout Push off! Help me lift you! Where was his natural buoyancy? Even a man who couldn’t swim would float partway to the surface, but Bell could not budge him from the mud.

He was running out of air.

He pulled himself down by the gangster’s hand, braced again in the soft mud, and tried to push off. But again he could not lift the man. Now he was out of air. He could hear his heart pounding. There was a roaring in his head. He had no choice but to swim to the surface, fill his lungs, and dive down to help him again. O’Neal’s hand tightened around his with the superhuman strength of desperation.

Isaac Bell pried his fingers loose, one by one.

He heard a sudden hollow rush. Bubbles of air rubbed past his face. O’Neal was drowning. His grip slackened. Bell yanked free and kicked with his last strength toward the light overhead. He held his breath until he could wait no longer and when he opened his mouth and inhaled, he was amazed to discover he had made it to the air.

“Get a rope!” he yelled. “Ed get a rope!”

The resourceful Tobin was already sprinting back from the ferry landing. He threw a long rope. Bell filled his lungs and dragged it under. Unhindered by the slack water, he dived directly to the drowning gangster, looped the rope under his arms and tied it around his chest and shot to the surface.

“Pull!”

Twelve feet above him on the pier, Tobin had been joined by a couple of vagrants, who shouted for others to help, and they heaved on the rope like men who worked on boats and slowly lifted Trucks O’Neal out of the water. His head broke surface. He was, Bell feared, dead, but he shouted for them to hoist him up to the pier. They did, then dropped the rope for Bell. He climbed out and discovered that the gangsters who had thrown Trucks in the river had tied concrete cinder blocks to his ankles.

Ed was laboring over Trucks’s prone body, pressing on his back and raising his arms, attempting artificial respiration, expelling water and making his lungs draw fresh air. But it was hopeless. O’Neal was dead.

Cops arrived.

“Well, that’s a new one. Cement overshoes.”

“Who was he?”

“He was,” said Isaac Bell, “the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s best lead.”

“Can I get a gun from the weapons’ vault, Mr. Forrer?”

“Apprentice Van Dorns don’t carry guns.”

“I learned how to shoot in the Coast Guard.”

“Nix. I am sending you to Newark to interview a jobber of farrier supplies. It is highly unlikely that a man who makes his living selling horse nails and anvils will engage you in a shoot-out.”

Somers looked so disappointed that Forrer elaborated.

“Mr. Van Dorn believes that a young man with a gun is less observant than he should be, imagining that he can shoot his way out of difficulty. But a young man dependent upon his wits to survive learns to be more observant… A necessary detective skill, wouldn’t you agree, young man?”

Somers took the train to Newark.

In the Ironbound District, near the freight station, he found the warehouse that belonged to the New Jersey horseshoe jobber that he and Mr. Forrer had settled on as the likely purveyor of the horseshoe Mr. Bell had retrieved on Wall Street.

The jobber told him that the rubber scrap stuck to the horseshoe could have been either a Revere Rubber Company Air Cushion Pad or a Dryden Hoof Pad.

“How about Neverslip Manufacturing from New Brunswick?” asked Somers.

“Coulda been.”

“Do you have any idea which farrier might have bought it from you?”

“No. It could have been anyone.”

“What if that same farrier also bought this Neverslip shoe?”

The jobber turned the worn shoe over in his hands. “Coulda.”

Somers showed him the mark stamped in the wedge. “How would this get marked like this?”

“The farrier has his initials on a punch. Smacks it with a hammer to make his mark. He signs it. Like a trademark.”

“Do you recognize the initials RD?”

“Sonny, why are you asking all these questions?”

Asa Somers straightened his skinny shoulders and stood tall. “I am an apprentice Van Dorn private detective. We are investigating the bombing on Wall Street.”

“I thought the government does that. And the cops.”

“Could he be one of your customers?”

“Could be.”

“Do you remember the farrier’s name?”

The jobber shrugged, as if deciding that Somers was an earnest lad who posed no threat to his customer. “His name is Ross. Ross Danis.”

“Where can I find him?”

“I don’t know where he sleeps these days. He used to be farrier and blacksmith on Mrs. Dodge’s estate ’til they let him go.”

“For what?” asked Somers, whose own firing by the Coast Guard still stung despite his wonderful new job with the Van Dorns.

“They say Mr. Dodge,” snickered the jobber, “was getting green-eyed, if you’re old enough to know what I mean.”

“Do you mean that Mr. Dodge was jealous of Mr. Danis’s attentions to Mrs. Dodge?”

“The lady was smiling like she hadn’t in years.”

“Where would I find Mr. Danis when he’s working?”

“Seeing as he just bought himself a spanking new Boss leather apron and a fresh set of Disston rasps, he’s probably shoeing horses at the Monmouth County Fair — unless Mr. Dodge is in attendance.”

“But what of the revolution?” asked Fern Hawley.

She was staring sullenly at an untouched glass of genuine champagne that had been poured for her by former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, the owner of Harlem’s Club Deluxe.

Marat Zolner had hoped a late-night outing would take her mind off Yuri.

“Bootlegging,” he reminded her again, “is our path to revolution.”

“Yuri didn’t think so.”

The famous black prizefighter’s Lenox Avenue speakeasy was Fern’s favorite cabaret. A hot jazz band drew the cream of the Park Avenue crowd. They came uptown in limousines and taxis, dressed to the nines, after private dinner parties, theater, and the opera. Zolner enjoyed it, too, especially while playing the part of an aristocratic Russian émigré out on the town with his American benefactress. It was great fun to be rich, fun to slum with movie stars and gangsters and young flappers in short hair and shorter skirts.

“Yuri did not understand,” he said gently. “But he was coming around to seeing America the way it is going.”

“But where are we going?” asked Fern. She had been impatient for results before Yuri was killed. Now she was obsessed.

“We are going to a city where a narrow river, which a speedboat can cross in minutes, is all that separates a legally wet nation from a legally dry nation.”

“Detroit,” said Fern, who had kept up to date on every aspect of Prohibition since Zolner first hatched his scheme.

“Detroit. Three of every four drinks poured in the United States come from Detroit. Detroit sells to Saint Louis, New Orleans, Kansas City, and Denver, the West, Midwest, and South.”

“But the Purple Gang and the River Gang are fighting to control it. They own the police. They own the politicians.”

Marat Zolner reached under the table and took her knee in a firm grip. “That is why we are going to Detroit.”

“But what of the revolution?” Fern repeated defiantly. She looked away, refusing to meet Zolner’s eye. Her own eyes fell on the smiling Jack Johnson, who was greeting a striking couple at the door.

“Look! There’s Isaac Bell.”

20

“Welcome back, Isaac. And Mrs. Bell, what a pleasure to see you again.”

Former heavyweight champion Jack Johnson — a remarkably fit-looking forty-three-year-old black man — cut a splendid figure in a dark suit with chalk-white stripes. He bowed low over Marion’s hand.

“Would it be too much to hope that you are making a new picture in New York?”

“From now on, I’m shooting all my movies in New York. Nothing in Hollywood can hold a candle to Club Deluxe.”

Johnson accepted the compliment with a hearty laugh.

“By the way, Isaac, thank you for the cigars.”

“You thanked me already, Jack. They were the least I could do.”

Johnson had served a stretch at Leavenworth — railroaded into the penitentiary on a false Mann Act charge — and Isaac Bell, like many of the great prizefighter’s admirers, had sent boxes of the finest La Aroma de Cubas to help him through the year. “I see you’re looking to fight Dempsey. Or is that just newspaper talk?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re a mighty fit forty-three and Jack Dempsey’s twenty-six.”

“I believe I could lick him. I’m feeling tip-top, in better condition than ever.”

“You look it,” said Bell.

“I don’t want to fight any second-raters and neither does Dempsey. It’ll be a heck of a battle. I’ll tell you this, though.” Jack Johnson lowered his voice. “I better win. The hoodlums are moving in on me here. I won’t own this joint much longer.”

“Who?” asked Bell.

“Some bootlegger gangster they’re about to set loose from Sing Sing. I’m told he’s planning to buy me out cheap and redecorate with ‘jungle’ stuff, palm trees and all that. I won’t have much say in it unless I want to go to war with guns and knives, and that I am too old for.”

“Which gangster?”

Jack Johnson looked out at his busy cabaret. He smiled at the sight of the packed tables, rushing waiters, and crowded dance floor. “Don’t know yet, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got some scouts in here watching me right now. Like I say, it’s time for me to go back in the ring.”

Marat Zolner recognized the man talking to Jack Johnson as the Van Dorn detective who pursued him the night he executed Johann Kozlov.

“Are you sure he never saw your face?” Fern asked.

“Absolutely.”

“But you were close enough to see him shoot Johann.”

“I said I heard the shot. I didn’t see it.”

“So it could have been someone else who killed Johann?”

“I saw no one but Bell.” And then, to steer Fern off the subject of the shooting, he asked, “Who’s the gorgeous creature on his arm?”

“His wife. Marion Morgan Bell. The movie director.”

“Director? Such a beauty should be the star.”

“Would you like me to ask Mr. Bell to introduce her to you?” Fern asked icily.

“I meant nothing to get sore about, only that at a distance, at least, she appears to be extraordinarily beautiful.”

“Such a handsome man,” Fern shot back, “deserves at least one beauty.”

She watched Isaac Bell rake the speakeasy with a probing gaze that missed nothing. His violet blue eyes settled on her and darkened in recognition even as he smiled hello.

Fern waved.

“What are you doing?” asked Zolner.

“Here’s your chance for a close-up.”

Bell and Marion made their way slowly across the crowded speakeasy, stopped repeatedly by fans jumping up to tell Marion how much they liked her moving pictures. Few directors would ever be recognized by the general public, but when Marion appeared in a movie magazine, her face was remembered.

“I’d like to stop at Fern Hawley’s table,” Bell told her.

“Who’s the man with her?”

“Let’s find out.”

The society woman’s companion rose politely when they stopped at the table. He stood with poise and grace, a trim and elegant man as tall as Bell and slightly thinner. He had an easy manner but a sharp gaze. Fern introduced him. “My old friend Prince André, late of Saint Petersburg.”

Bell and Prince André shook hands firmly. Bell introduced Marion. Pleasantries were exchanged. They agreed to sit for a moment.

Prince André engaged Marion in a technical conversation about film, drawing on the Russian model. Marion told him that she was shooting a comedy about a Russian ballet company stranded in New York.

“What will you title it?”

“Jump to New York.”

“What could be better? We should all ‘jump to New York,’ should we not, my dear?”

Fern Hawley said to Bell, “My friend is laying on the charm for your wife.”

“I’m used to it,” said Bell.

“How often does it end in fisticuffs?”

“No more than half the time.”

Fern’s grin made her eyes even more opaque. She pursed her Cupid’s bow lips to ask, “And the outcome when it does?”

“They don’t do it again. Is Prince André a recent arrival?”

“I knew him in Paris.”

“Was he a refugee then?”

“Far from it. His family had estates in France.”

“And also in America?”

“None I know of,” Fern said. “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” said Bell with a glance at Prince André and a private smile for Marion.

“A blunt question,” Fern said.

“Blunt away,” said Bell. “What’s on your mind?”

“When we met the first time, when you were chasing… whoever you were chasing?”

“Yes?”

“I had the impression that you could, under the right circumstances, like me very much.”

“I’ve always liked characters,” said Bell.

“Good characters or bad characters?”

“I mean, different types — nonconformists, bohemians.”

“I’m not sure I’ve been complimented.”

Bell grinned. “You’re positive you’re complimented. You love standing out.”

“So you could like me?” Fern smiled. Her almond eyes slid toward Marion. “Under the right circumstances.”

“They don’t exist,” said Bell. He turned to Prince André. “We’ve entertained you far too long, sir. Forgive the interruption.”

Marion slipped her hand into his arm and they continued across the speakeasy. “I’ve yet to meet a Russian refugee who wasn’t a prince or at least a count.”

“He’s a tough-looking prince,” said Bell.

“I thought so, too. Did you see his hands?”

“Powerful. His shake felt more American than European.”

“He told me he fought in the cavalry.”

“I hope Miss Hawley knows what she’s doing.”

Marion said, “Miss Hawley strikes me as a woman who has known what she was doing since the day she broke every heart in kindergarten. Do you find her attractive?”

“I certainly would,” said Bell, “if I weren’t with the loveliest woman in the world.”

“How would you feel if I bobbed my hair like hers?”

“I like your hair the way it is. But I’d take you bald, if it made you happy. Where do you suppose Fern Hawley found Prince André?”

“If broke aristocrats find rich American heiresses in New York the way they do in Hollywood, he would have wrangled introductions so he could show up in some place she was comfortable — a country club or an expensive restaurant.”

“She told me they met in Paris.”

“I’m sure Miss Hawley was comfortable in Paris.”

“May I have this fox-trot?”

They danced to a jazzed-up “Melancholy Baby,” Bell sweeping Marion around other couples in order to pass repeatedly close to Fern and Prince André’s table. The heiress and the Russian refugee were deep in conversation.

When Bell and Marion returned to their table, Marion said, “Despite her stick-it-in-your-eye smirk, Miss Hawley is not happy.”

“Why?”

“I think she’s disappointed.”

“Could the bloom be off the rose?”

“No, that rose is still blooming. It’s something else.”

Bell noticed a broad-shouldered man in evening clothes watching Fern’s table from the bar, his highball glass untouched. When Prince André looked toward him, he straightened up slightly, as an employee might, confirming Bell’s strong impression he was a bodyguard. The Russian’s active gaze wheeled his way. Before he could see Bell watching, Bell turned to Marion.

“Speaking of blooming roses, I forgot to tell you Pauline sends her warm regards.”

Across the room, Prince André rose to his feet and extended his hand to Fern Hawley. He guided her onto the dance floor and took her in his arms.

Marion said, “You see what I mean about the rose? These two enjoy each other. Isn’t he a wonderful dancer?”

Bell agreed. “He looks like he trained in the ballet.”

“He’s tall, for the ballet.”

“Maybe he was a short boy. At any rate, I’m shopping around for the right fellow for Pauline.”

“Who?”

“Dashwood is nuts for her.”

Marion looked skeptical. “I’ve always thought that Dashwood is uncommonly close to his mother.”

“She starred in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and taught Dashwood how to shoot.”

“Mr. Freud would have a ball with that one. On the other hand, if anyone could wean Dashwood, it would be Fräulein Grandzau.”

Bell glanced through the crowds again. “Do you suppose you could get Fern Hawley to open up to you?”

“I’ll try. How can we get the prince out of the way?”

“I’ll ask the waiter to tell him he’s wanted on the telephone.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know how Miss Hawley happened to be sitting in her limousine on a slum street outside the back door of Roosevelt Hospital the night the killer who shot Johann Kozlov got away from me. I wondered then, and I wonder more now. It had to be a coincidence. But…”

“But you hate coincidences. I’ll try and work my way around to it… Too late, there they go!”

Bell watched closely as Fern and Prince André left straight from the dance floor. A waiter ran after them with the feathered boa she had left on her chair.

“You’re right,” said Bell. “She is disappointed in him. There’s something in the angle she holds her head.”

“You should be a detective… Where are you going?”

Bell’s reply was a terse, “Don’t follow me.”

The man he had observed at the bar moved quickly to escort Fern and Prince André out of the speakeasy. Bell followed. A thug in a topcoat, who Bell had noticed lounging under the electric canopy earlier, blocked a newspaper photographer trying to snap a picture of Fern and the prince. Moving to stop Bell, he put a hand on his arm.

“Save yourself trouble, mister. Go back inside while you have teeth.”

The tall detective knocked him to the pavement.

But by then the bodyguard — Bell had no doubt anymore he was that — had shut Fern and the prince’s car door. The chauffeur stepped on the gas and sped into busy Lenox Avenue. The bodyguard faced Bell, took in his partner on the sidewalk with a swift glance, and opened his coat to show his pistol. “Want something, mister?”

Bell opened his own coat, closed a big hand around his Browning, and started toward him. But late-night revelers were swarming the sidewalk, and loaded taxis were hauling up to the curb.

The Packard carrying Fern Hawley and Prince André cut in front of a trolley and disappeared. The bodyguard helped his partner stand and they left in a taxi, leaving Isaac Bell to wonder whether they were guarding the wealthy young woman or her pampered gigolo who looked thoroughly capable of guarding himself.

In the limousine, Marat put his arm around Fern.

She turned her face away. “The bank’s closed.”

“Bank? What bank?”

“It’s an expression. It’s the way a girl says she’s not in the mood.”

“Since when?”

“Since… I have the heebie-jeebies about Yuri.”

“The bank did not appear to be closed to Isaac Bell.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Marat. He’s a detective. That’s all we need.”

“You were falling all over him.”

“He’s married.”

“Do you ask me to believe that would stop you?”

“It would stop him — don’t you know anything?”

They rode in silence until the car stopped in front of her town house. The driver jumped out. Marat Zolner signaled through the glass not to open the door.

“Now what?” said Fern.

“How long will this bank be closed?” he asked.

“Not forever. I just need a little time.” She patted his hand. “Don’t worry, it’ll be O.K.”

“We have much to do. You keep asking about the revolution. The revolution requires intense focus. Nothing should distract from it. Therefore, we will do the following: You will stay here while I’m away. Use the time to think. I’ll send for you once I’m established. If you want to come, you’ll come.”

“Where are you going?”

“I told you. I am expanding our operation. I am ready to take Detroit.”

“Who is ‘I’? Who do you mean? I the bootlegger? I the Comintern officer?”

“We are one,” said Marat Zolner. “I. The bootlegger. And the Comintern. This is the plan. This has always been the plan.”

“What of the revolution?”

“We are the revolution.”

“Yuri was the revolution. Johann was the revolution. Look what happened to them.”

“Yuri lost his way. He lost his focus. Dynamite does not forgive mistakes. Johann had the bad luck to run into the wrong detective.”

“You won’t escape the Van Dorns in Detroit.”

“What makes you think that?”

“They have field offices everywhere, including Detroit.”

Zolner reached out and squeezed her leg hard.

“Stop!”

Zolner squeezed harder and said, “The Van Dorn Detroit field office is going out of business.”

21

Thirty miles to the east, that same night, Uncle Donny Darbee was running an oyster boat full of Scotch from Rum Row toward Far Rockaway Inlet. Progress, he was thinking, was a wonderful thing. The modern world worked better than the one he had been born in. Fog lay thick on the water, but a radio signal kept him on course like magic. The big Peerless V-8 his nephews had lifted out of someone’s new automobile made his boat faster than an old-fashioned twenty-horsepower Ford and beat the pants off sails and steam engines. And Prohibition, God bless the politicians who passed it, made running rum far more bankable than pirating coal and easier on an old man’s back.

It looked like the fog had scared off the marine police and the Coast Guard.

Guided by the crash of breakers, he slipped in near silence through the stone breakwaters of the inlet. He continued with his heavily muffled engine throttled way back into Reynolds Channel, a sheltered strait that paralleled the ocean between Long Beach Island and Long Island. Listening for other boats, so as not to collide in the dark, and paying close attention to the changing currents, which indicated his position in the narrow channel, he headed on the course indicated by Robin’s radio. They had two more miles of waters he knew well to a boathouse owned by a Long Beach hotel that would buy his booze.

“Grandpa!”

“What?”

“The radio’s going haywire.”

The next moment, Darbee heard the thunder of ganged Libertys. He looked over his shoulder and saw the blood-red glare of their fiery exhaust. Too late, he realized, the radio signal was a trap and the black boat everyone was talking about was trying to hijack him. A big searchlight burned through the fog, passed over his low gray hull, and swooped back like a hungry sea hawk.

“Hunker down by the engine before they start shooting.”

Robin obeyed instantly. “What are you going to do, Grandpa?”

“I’m going to hope to heck he don’t spot us.”

He eased his throttle forward and picked up speed, reasoning that they wouldn’t hear him over the roar of their own engines. But suddenly their engines grew quiet. They had either slowed down to listen or shifted their engine exhausts through heavy mufflers, as he had shifted his when he entered the inlet.

The searchlight blazed back toward him. They were not making a secret of their presence, and Darbee suspected it wasn’t the fog that cleared out the cops but payoffs. Which meant he and the little girl were entirely on their own. He poured on as much speed as the Peerless would give while muffled. The searchlight swung close. He saw the glow touch Robin’s face. She looked frightened, but she was cool — one of the reasons he took her along on these jaunts.

Now they saw him.

He opened his cutouts for more speed. The Peerless roared.

Behind them the Libertys got very loud, and the big boat sprinted after him.

Robin asked again, “What are we going to do, Grandpa?”

“We’re going to run him onto Hog Island.”

“What’s Hog Island?”

“Summer resort. Dancing pavilion, restaurants, bathhouses, carnival on the boardwalk.”

She looked ahead into the empty dark, looked back at the Cyclops eye of the searchlight catching up, and looked worriedly at her grandfather. His long hair was streaming in the wind. He had one gnarly hand draped casually on the tiller. The expression on his face was weirdly serene, considering they were being chased by something scarier than cops, and she wondered, with a stab of heartbreak, Had the black boat frightened the old man out of his wits?

“I don’t see any island, Grandpa.”

“Neither does he.”

“But where is it?”

“Hurricane washed it away.”

“What hurricane, Grandpa?”

“I don’t remember — back thirty, forty years ago. Before your mother was born, if I recall.”

“Where is Hog Island now?”

“About three feet under us.”

“Oh!” she burst out in relief. He was O.K. “A sandbar! But, Grandpa, we draw almost three feet.”

“He draws five.”

At that moment, behind them, they heard the big engines stop.

“They found it!” said Darbee. He slowed down and engaged his mufflers. In the near silence, they listened to men shouting in fear and anger.

“What language is that, Grandpa?”

“Hell knows, but I can tell you what they’re yelling: We’re hard aground on a sandbar, the tide is going out, and if we don’t get off it right now we’ll be sitting ducks when the sun comes up.”

Darbee leaned on his tiller. They doubled back and listened from a distance. The black boat’s engines thundered and died, thundered and died, as they repeatedly risked their propellers trying to back her off. An engine suddenly revved so fast, it screamed.

“Busted a prop,” Darbee said cheerfully. “Or a shaft. Oops, there goes another one. He’s got one to go. Let’s hope he don’t bust that one, too.”

“Why? Let him bust all three and we’ll get out of here.”

A single engine churned cautiously, revved a little, and slowed.

“Hear that?” Darbee exulted. “He got off. Good.”

“Why good, Grandpa?”

“You just watch.”

The black boat limped east at ten knots.

Darbee followed. They passed Jones Inlet, but stayed in the inner passage, as he suspected they would. They did not dare go back out into the ocean with only one propeller, a propeller thumping from a bent shaft.

“Grandpa, what are we doing?”

“Gonna find out where he lives.”

“Why?”

“Why? What do you mean why? I want that boat.”

“How are we going to steal a boat from all those gangsters?”

“Haven’t figured that out yet.”

They followed for hours as it picked its way carefully through the twisty channel and finally out into South Oyster Bay and across it to Great South Bay. A dim gray dawn began to lighten the east. Soon the old man and his granddaughter could see the faintest hint of the black boat silhouetted against it.

“Where are we, Grandpa?” Robin whispered.

“Off Great River, I believe.”

“Have you figured out how we’re going to steal it?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe Mr. Bell could help us.”

“That goody two-shoes don’t steal boats.”

“But if we did him a favor…”

Out of the mouths of babes, old Darbee thought. What a smart little girl she was. A chip off the old block.

“… maybe Mr. Bell would do one back.”

“The metal is flying,” bellowed Ross Danis.

The big farrier had a handsome head of hair, an amiable grin, and bright eyes. Sweat glistened on his broad chest and streamed from his massive arms. Asa Somers found it hard to believe that a man could have so many muscles. He bulged like the Jack Dempsey advertisements for Nuxated Iron.

It was Babies Day at the Monmouth County Fair.

Following the baby show would be a horse show and then horse racing, which meant Danis was busy at his portable forge. Asa Somers offered to crank his bellows to keep his fire white-hot. This kept both hands free to go at it, in the farrier’s own words, “hammer and tongs,” fitting shoes, driving and clinching nails into hoofs, finishing with his rasp. It had the side advantage of keeping him talkative.

When Danis finally stopped for a swig of water, and a furtive slug from a flask, Somers showed him the worn Neverslip shoe. “Could you have put this shoe on a horse?”

“Hope not. Looks like the animal threw it, which would make me look bad.”

“He didn’t throw it.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Wall Street.”

“Never worked on Wall Street.”

“I didn’t mean you did it on Wall Street.”

“Not only did I never work on Wall Street, I find it hard to imagine a horse I shoed ever being on Wall Street. That’s across the river in New York City. Is it a swell’s carriage horse?”

“Is this your mark on this wedge?”

Danis leaned over it to look, dripping sweat on Somers’s arm. “I’ll be darned. Where’d you find this?”

“The horse was pulling a coal wagon.”

“Coal wagon? I don’t understand. No teamster’s going to drive his coal wagon all the way to New Jersey to shoe his horse.”

“What if the horse was sold to a New York coal wagon teamster after you shoed him?”

“Well, I’ll be,” said Danis, his red face lighting in recognition.

“What do you mean?”

“His name was Redman.”

“Who?”

“Big, strong quarry horse. Seventeen hands. Strong as a mule. Good-natured, too. Just the sweetest temper.”

“Who owns him?”

“Fellow came in all in a rush. He had just bought him, didn’t realize he had a loose shoe. Didn’t know a thing about horses. I wondered how he’d ever hitch up the wagon. I figured I’d lend a hand, but Redman was such a sweet-natured animal they worked it out.”

“Did you get his name?”

“Redman.”

“The man.”

“No. He was a foreigner. Had a real thick accent, and he was in a heck of a rush. Gave me two bucks and ran off.”

“Was that here?”

“No, no, no. Not at the fair. Up in Jersey City… Wall Street? Yeah, that makes sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“Last I saw, they were heading toward the ferry.”

Asa Somers reported to Grady Forrer and, a while later, he overheard Mr. Bell on the telephone. “We traced the horseshoe to a New Jersey farrier. I’m sorry, Dick, but it looks like a dead end.”

Isaac Bell said good-bye to Inspector Condon and hung up the telephone, wondering what next. He was painfully aware that he needed a lucky break or two. But, so far, they weren’t flocking his way.

He noticed Somers skulking about. “Why the long face, Asa?”

“The horseshoe didn’t help?”

“What? No, don’t worry about it. We have to try everything to find what works.”

“I wish mine had.”

“I could say the same about Trucks O’Neal and the Black Bird motors. It’s the nature of the game. You just keep plugging away.”

“Can I have a gun?”

“Not yet.”

“I heard a rumor from some of the boys that when you were an apprentice you bought your own derringer.”

“Like most rumors, that’s not entirely true.”

Somers looked at Bell inquiringly.

“Go on, son. If you’re going to be a detective, you have to ask questions. Ask.”

“What wasn’t true?”

“I didn’t buy my derringer. I took a derringer away from somebody. And kept it.”

Darren McKinney ran into the bull pen. “Mr. Bell!”

“McKinney.”

“My Washington fellow came through.”

Shipments to the New York region from the War Department director of sales included a dozen surplus Liberty engines, and crates of spare parts, to the Long Island Railroad freight depot in Bayport, sixty miles from the city. Isaac Bell drew a circle on the map, representing the likely distance a truck would drive from a railroad depot, and dispatched detectives to all the South Shore towns within it.

“Blue Point, Sayville, Patchogue, Great River, Bay Shore, Islip, West Islip.”

“Needle in a haystack,” said McKinney.

But Isaac Bell was optimistic. “We were looking in a hundred-mile haystack. Now we’re down to ten.”

The Van Dorn operator rang. “Long-distance telephone from Texas Walt Hatfield.”

“Detroit?”

“Yes, but not on the private line.”

It was a fairly decent connection. Bell could hear hints of Walt’s drawl. “Ah busted some heads, cleaning up the office. We’re down to two good men.”

“Are you sure about them?”

“Plumb sure. Exceptin’ we had a mite of trouble. They’re both in the hospital, owing to a bushwhacker lobbing a hand grenade into the premises.”

Bell asked how badly they were hurt.

“They’ll recover, but they’re not tip-top at the moment.”

“Who threw the grenade?”

“I’d say the Purple Gang.”

“The Purple Gang are street kids.”

“The little tykes are growing by leaps and bounds. Partly on account of their vicious habits. Partly due to the Eye-talians killing each other off leaving the Purples to play the big time. Most of the Detroit big boys are sleeping in the river. There’s been a complete change of gang bosses.”

“Close the office.”

“The hand grenade sort of did that already. I’ve got a real estate fellow looking for a new space.”

“Close it. Permanently.”

“Now, hold on, Isaac,” Texas Walt drawled. “These hydrophobic skunks will get the wrong idea if we slink out of town with our tails between our legs.”

“We’ll come back — undercover.”

“I already told you it won’t do having folks stopping me for my autograph while I’m masquerading as a criminal.”

Isaac Bell said, “And I told you I’m going to hide you in plain sight—”

Bell looked up at a sudden commotion. Ed Tobin burst into the office, grinning like a bulldog that had sunk its teeth into a steak.

“—Hold the wire, Walt.” Bell put down the phone. “What?”

“Uncle Donny found the black boat.”

“Where?”

“Great River.”

Bell stood up. “Great River?”

“It’s way out on Long Island.”

“I know where it is,” said Bell. “Eight miles from the Bayport freight house, where the War Department shipped a dozen surplus Libertys. Where are they keeping it?”

“Stashed it in a boathouse on a private estate.”

Bell grabbed the phone. “Walt, I’ll call you back when I can. Meantime, tell your real estate agent to rent a big place out of town for a roadhouse.”

“Roadhouse?”

“You heard me. Rent a roadhouse!”

Bell banged down the phone.

“How did he find it?”

“It tried to hijack him. Uncle Donny followed it, hoping to steal it.”

“What changed his mind?”

“Too many of them. And he had little Robin with him. So now he’s hoping when we catch it, we’ll give it to him.”

“Fair enough. But that’s a lot of boat for one old man. Aren’t his nephews in the jailhouse?”

“Jimmy and Marvyn got set loose for good behavior — actually, a paperwork error in their favor. Wes, and Charlie, and Dave and Eddie, and Blaze are up for parole, eventually.”

“Wait a minute. How did that oyster scow manage to keep up with a fifty-knot express cruiser?”

“She ran aground. Busted props and driveshafts.”

Isaac Bell headed for the door. “We’ll get there before they fix her. Where’s Dashwood? James, round up the boys! And get ahold of some Prohibition agents you can trust.”

“Trust? How much?”

“More than the rest. But don’t tell them where we’re going.”

Outside the St. Regis Hotel, grim-visaged detectives piled clanking golf bags from the Van Dorn weapons vault into town cars. The lead motor was an elegant Pierce-Arrow packed with folding ladders and grappling hooks to scale walls and axes and sledgehammers to breach them.

Bell gave the order to move out. Then he took Ed Tobin, Uncle Donny, and two detectives who were strong swimmers to the 31st Street Air Service Terminal. The mechanics at the Loening factory next door had his flying boat warmed up and ready to take off. Coiled in the passenger cabin were several hundred yards of light manila line and wire rope.

22

Great River opened into the bay between a golf course under construction on one side and marshland on the other. The channel moved inland on a northerly route through flat shores that were speckled intermittently by the lights of mansions. A mile or so in, the river narrowed to a width of five hundred feet. Tall trees grew close to the shore. A small tributary entered from the west. Its dredged channel led from the main river to an enormous boathouse that showed no lights when night fell.

Isaac Bell had seen this water route from the air in the last of the daylight. After Uncle Donny pinpointed the boathouse, he got a good look at a huge mansion behind it, the road in, which was blocked by a substantial gatehouse, and a spur that connected a mile inland to the Long Island Railroad.

As soon as it was dark, he set detectives to work in strict silence. The swimmers crossed the tributary with a manila rope. Climbing out on the other side, they used it as a messenger line to pull the heavier wire rope after them and clamped the wire around thick trees. In the event the black boat had been repaired already and tried to make a run for it, the channel was blocked.

Bell ordered a pair of the heaviest town cars to be parked nose to nose across the road a short distance from the gatehouse. He had invited Prohibition officers on the raid — partly to process arrests, mostly to stay on friendly terms with government agencies that might contract with Van Dorn. They stayed in the blockade cars under James Dashwood’s watchful eye. The Dry agents were impatient, fiddling with their guns and whispering bad jokes. Bell had not told them yet who they were raiding, nor would he until he had every bootlegger on the property in handcuffs.

“Ready when you are, Mr. Bell,” said Ed Tobin.

“Now,” said Bell. Before a night owl neighbor telephoned the police about the roadblock.

The stone gatehouse was dark, with no sign of sentries. But nothing short of dynamite would budge its massive iron-studded door, so they left the battering ram in the Pierce-Arrow and scaled the walls with knotted line and grappling hooks. The first men up — Bell in the lead, followed by Tobin — carried folds of heavy canvas slung over their shoulders. The wall was topped with strands of barbed wire, reminding veterans of the trenches, minus artillery and machine guns. The masonry under the wire was impregnated with broken glass. They clipped the wire, covered the glass with the canvas, and left the ropes and canvas in place for the next men.

Eight detectives cleared the wall. Bell sent two to open the gatehouse door from inside for Dashwood and the Dry agents. The rest followed him to the boathouse on a route he had sketched from the air. They skirted the tennis courts and removed a stone pillar from under a birdbath in the formal gardens. Stumbling in the dark on the railroad siding, they followed the rails to the boathouse.

Bell signaled with whispers and shoulder taps to hold up at the door, which he could see dimly by the thin light of the stars. There were a few lit windows in the mansion, which loomed in the distance, but no lights shone in the boathouse. It seemed a miracle, but, so far, no one had heard them.

That was about to change.

“Break it down.”

The birdbath pillar made an excellent battering ram, and the door flew inward with the third thunderous blow. They spilled through, Bell in the lead. It was darker inside than out and eerily quiet, but for the lapping of water.

“Where is everybody?”

“Find the lights.”

Flashlight beams poked the dark until they found a big electrical box. They threw its knife switches and lights shone down from the rafters on two slips. One held a fair-size booze taxi with twin engines. The other was empty.

The black boat had vanished.

“Go get Uncle Donny.”

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

“Some operation.”

“Look at all that giggle water.”

“One hundred percent.”

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

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

“Gatehouse is empty,” said another.

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

“Damn.”

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

“Sure as I know my name.”

“In this boathouse?”

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

“I believe you, sir.”

“Don’t start calling me sir.”

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

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

“You heard all three?”

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

“But it’s not here. Where did it go?”

“Didn’t get past that wire.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?”

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

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

“Let’s see what they left behind.”

They stepped back into the lit boathouse.

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

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

“James.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Is there something in that strongbox?”

The agents moved closer, shielding it with their bodies.

“What is in there?” demanded Bell.

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

“Don’t touch that money.”

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

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

The Dry agents ignored him and grabbed the cash.

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