The Bootlegger

23

Marat Zolner drove Black Bird the length of Lake Erie in a single dark night.

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

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

“What a wonderful place,” said Marat Zolner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What boat?”

“On the flatcar.”

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

“Didn’t you wonder?”

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

“How many men?”

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

“Where’d you take it?”

“I rode as far as Jamaica.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Under canvas.”

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

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

“Dropped him right here.”

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

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

“Detroit.”

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

“Detroit,” said Bell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shut up… Listen!”

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

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

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

“Faster!” Admiral Abe yelled.

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

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

“Where’d he go?”

“Stop!”

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

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

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

“Who are you bastards?”

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

The searchlight went out.

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

“New partners.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“With what gang was Mr. Pete affiliated?”

“What?”

“Who’d he hang with?”

“River Gang.”

“Poor Mr. Pete. Horrible way to die. Put him back under!”

They brought him up sooner than before, but he was gagging out of control. It seemed to take forever to get actual air in his lungs. When he could speak, Abe Weintraub said, “We’re the Purple Gang. We own the river. We own the city. What do you think you’re doing?”

“Doing? I am terrorizing you. What do you think I’m doing?”

“Why?”

“To beat you into submission. Do you want to die slowly? Or would you prefer to be beaten into submission?”

“No one beats Abe Weintraub.”

“There’s a first time for everything, Mr. Weintraub. You’re looking at yours. You will turn on the phonograph and tell me who’s your boss.”

“What’s the difference? You’ll kill me either way.”

“There is a third way. Work for me. Trespasses are forgiven if you’re my man. Would you like that?”

“Go to hell.”

“Put him back under.”

24

An electric sign of multicolored bulbs as dazzling as any in Asbury Park glared atop a fresh-painted, veranda-draped hotel on an all-weather highway ten miles outside Detroit:

The parking lot was full of Pierce-Arrows, Packards, Cadillacs, Rolls-Royces, Marmons, and Minervas, and it looked like a safe bet there were movie stars inside. If they were, then a new kind of lighted sign imported from Paris — neon gas set aglow inside clear tubes shaped like a martini glass — left no doubt they were drinking cocktails. Music gushed from the open windows, a sweet tune from a Broadway hit. It was played by Detroit’s favorite twelve-piece society band, Leroy Smith’s, and the cream of the Motor City’s fast and rich spilled onto the verandas, dancing and singing along with “Kansas Nightingale” Amber Edwards:

A lime green V-8 Cadillac Sport Phaeton pulled up under the porte cochere.

Texas Walt Hatfield himself strode down the front steps to greet it. The tall western star was wearing his signature J. B. Stetson hat, a turquoise silk shirt, string tie, brocade vest, and ostrich-skin boots. Twin Colts were holstered low on his hips. Strapping doormen flanked him.

“Good job, Walt,” said Isaac Bell, stepping down from the Phaeton in his bootlegger outfit. “The joint is jumpin’.”

“Just like you ordered. Music, gambling, pretty gals, and the best booze south of Canada. Now, will you tell me why I’m operating an illegal alcohol establishment?”

“What do you mean illegal? The cops are directing traffic.”

“And the town council’s in the bar, toasting the mayor. Dammit to hell, Isaac, why is the Van Dorn Detective Agency running a roadhouse?”

“Information,” said Bell. “Moneymaking roadhouses attract gangsters offering ‘protection’ for a cut of the profits. We’ll put the question to every shakedown thug who tries to horn in on us.”

“What question?”

“The same question Marat Zolner is asking: Who is Detroit’s top dog? He’s looking for a bootleg partner, like the Black Hand in New York.”

“Detroit’s different. Top dogs get shot, dynamited, and throat-slit on a regular basis. Every time the cops reckon who’s running things, the sidewinder gets ambushed. It’s bootleg war.”

“I’m betting the Comintern has the muscle and the money to swing the war their way. The boss who Zolner backs will win the war. When we learn who Zolner chooses, we will do the ambushing.”

“Looking forward to that,” said Texas Walt. “Meantime, we’re making money hand over fist. More than enough to cover the bribes— Good evening, Mr. Mayor. Good evening, Judge,” he greeted two plump men in new suits. “Your fair ladies asked me to tell you they’re getting a head start in the bar.”

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” said Bell, “if the Comintern were up to the same scheme we were?”

“Ah’d put nothing past Bolsheviks,” said Walt. “But how do you mean?”

“Bootlegging to pay for the revolution.”

Walt Hatfield laughed. “Personally, Ah’d say the heck with the revolution, Ah’m getting rich off Prohibition.”

“Of course, you’re not a Bolshevik.”

“Not when last Ah looked. Hold on! There’s trouble. Be right back, Isaac, gotta bust a head.”

“Need help?”

“There’s only three of them.”

The tall Texan bounded up the steps and inside where a bootlegger in a flash suit was pummeling a waiter held by a pair of husky bodyguards. Walt’s anvil fists flew. Within moments Walt Hatfield was walking the bootlegger, who now had a bloody nose, and a limping bodyguard to the parking lot. Ed Tobin, dressed as a floor manager in a tuxedo, followed him with an unconscious thug over his shoulder.

Bell headed inside, asking himself how odd was the idea of bootlegging whisky to fund the revolution. Invading armies fed off the land, foraging as they marched. Grady Forrer had chronicled Communist holdup gangs robbing czarist banks: “Stick ’em up in the name of the revolution!” Sinn Féin had paid to smuggle Thompson .45 submachine guns by robbing banks. Bell’s own father, a Union intelligence officer in the Civil War, had hunted down Confederate raiders robbing express cars. Why wouldn’t a Russian Comintern espionage agent plotting to overthrow the United States mask his Bolshevik assassins and saboteurs as a bootlegging crime syndicate?

The bar was seventy feet long and lined three deep.

Bell ordered a napkin and a glass of ice.

Scudder Smith sidled up with a Brooklyn Eagle press card in his hatband and dark tea in a highball glass. Most in the bar were too drunk to notice they knew each other, but, just in case, it paid to keep things private and appear to have just met.

“Brooklyn Eagle?” asked Bell. “You’re out of your territory.”

“The paper sent me to write a feature story on Prohibition in Detroit.”

“Have you found any?”

“I haven’t seen evidence of Prohibition, but I’ve heard rumors about a hooch tunnel under the river. Have you heard about the tunnel?”

“This is the first I’ve heard.”

“Sounds loony, except they all say the Polish gang dug it, which makes sense. The Poles emigrated from Silesia, where they mine coal. So they’re good at digging.”

Bell lowered his voice. “Scudder, find me that black boat. Pretend you’re writing about speedboats. Detroit’s famous for hydroplanes. There’s a guy named Gar Wood who builds the fastest.”

Walt joined them. “Ain’t had so much fun since Ah rode with Pancho Villa. That’s the fourth ruckus tonight and it ain’t hardly dark. Same thing last night.”

The bartender passed him a dampened handkerchief to wipe the blood from his knuckles.

Scudder asked, “Since when did you ride with Pancho Villa?”

“Back when Isaac was in short pants at Yale. Where you going, Isaac?”

“Have a chat with your sparring partners.”

He found the three in the parking lot, slumped against a Marmon, under the watchful eye of a Van Dorn. The unconscious bodyguard was still out cold. Bell hauled the bootlegger to his feet, walked him out of earshot, and handed him the glass of ice and the napkin. The bootlegger wiped the blood off his face and pressed ice to his nose.

“Thanks, buddy.”

“Would you answer some questions for me?”

“Are you a cop?”

The TEXAS WALT’S sign lit the parking lot bright as day. Isaac Bell gestured at his expensive suit, his handmade boots, and his rabbit-felt Borsalino. Then he shot a cuff, revealing diamond links and his gold Tank watch.

“Do I look like a cop?”

“You buddies with that damned cowboy who punched my nose?”

“I just got into town. Trying to get the lay of the land. But I’m hearing strange rumors.”

“Like what?”

“Rumor has it,” said Isaac Bell, “there’s a casino out in the middle of Lake Erie on a big ship.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Ever hear that?”

The bootlegger shrugged. “I heard they got a speakeasy in a dirigible.”

“Like the Germans bombed London with?” asked Bell. He had heard it, too. It was one of the crazier Prohibition tales floating around the Motor City. No one was clear how the giant airship remained invisible in daylight or how the customers got from the ground to the hovering casino.

“How do they get up to it?”

“They must have figured out how to land an airplane on it.”

Bell said, “I think I’ll stick to roadhouses. What’s your name, by the way? I’m Joe.”

The bootlegger gave him a long look and decided to play it safe. “I’m Joe, too. Pleased to meet you, Joe.”

They shook hands. Bell said, “I also heard about hijackers with a black boat.”

“There’s a lot of black boats on the river.”

“This one’s got a Lewis gun.”

Joe nodded sagely. “You can’t go wrong with Lewis guns.”

“Ever hear about a tunnel under the river?”

“Sure. They got a train tunnel.”

“For hauling whisky?”

“Yeah, you grease a brakeman and slip some on a freight car.”

“But you never heard about a tunnel just for booze?”

Joe looked Isaac Bell in the eye. “A tunnel would be a surefire way to haul hooch. If I had heard it, it would be my tunnel and I sure as hell wouldn’t tell anybody about it.”

Isaac Bell went back to the bar. Another fight broke out. It looked to Bell to be a staged battle intended to intimidate the paying customers and impress upon the owners the wisdom of paying for protection.

“Tarnation!” said Texas Walt. “Here we go again.”

Hatfield waded in. Ed Tobin joined him, trading his silver cocktail tray for a blackjack, and laid two men on the floor. The thug directing the theatrics pulled a gun.

Bell and Scudder moved swiftly to help. They needn’t have bothered. Light glinted on Hatfield’s scalping knife, and the gun fell from a hand flayed to the bone. Van Dorn waiters wrapped it in napkins and marched the gunman through the kitchen door. A woman stepped up for Walt’s autograph and the movie star obliged.

“Pay dirt!” he grinned when he got back to the bar. “We have finally attracted a higher grade of extortionist. He threatened to sell me protection ‘insurance.’ A step up from plain old ‘protection.’”

Bell said, “I’ll see if you put him in a talking mood.”

He found the gunman propped up on a keg outside the kitchen door, clutching his hand and guarded by an enormous Protective Services man. The napkins reeked of whisky that the Van Dorns had doused it with to prevent infection. He was white-faced with shock. But he retained the in-charge demeanor of a racket boss used to running the show.

Bell drew up another keg. “Hurt much?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you pulled a gun on the wrong guy.”

“No kidding. Where’d a movie star learn to use a knife like that? I thought they was all mamma’s boys. I never seen it coming.”

“In Hollywood,” Bell said, maintaining a serious expression, “they teach the actors the fighting that goes with the kind of movies they’re in.”

He passed his flask. The gunman pulled hard on it.

“Who are you working for?”

“You a cop?”

Isaac Bell took back his flask. “Do I look like a cop?”

“Then who are you?”

“I’m Gus,” said Bell, using the other standard name for the speakeasy doorman. “What should I call you?”

“I’m Gus, too,” said the gangster. “But it happens to be my real name. Who are you really?”

“I’m a guy who won’t pay for a shakedown but will pay for information.”

“Where’d you come from?”

“Chicago,” said Bell, a city he knew intimately, having apprenticed there under Joseph Van Dorn.

“Where in Chicago?”

“Grew up on the West Side.”

“You know the Spillane brothers?”

“I put them out of business.”

This was true, although sending them to Joliet Penitentiary was not the way Gus interpreted it, judging by a look of respect and a knowing assessment of Bell’s high-priced duds.

“What are you doing in Detroit?”

Bell skipped his black boat rumors gambit and went straight to the heart of his scheme. “I’m looking for introductions.”

“To who?”

“Potential partners.”

The gangster perked up. “I thought Texas Walt owned the joint.”

“I have an interest in it. We’re looking for guys who know their business. So far, you are not a shining example of knowing your business, but maybe you’re just having a slow night.”

“Partners? That’s what I offered that son-of-a-bitch movie star.”

“You offered him protection insurance.”

“Any fool knows that means partners. You can’t run a business in Detroit without protection.”

“He doesn’t seem to need protection.”

“What kind of partners?”

“Supply partners. Partners we can count on for steady liquor. Do your bosses happen to be in the hauling business?”

“What makes you think I have a boss?”

“Bosses don’t barge into a joint waving a gun.”

“They do in Detroit.”

Bell regarded him thoughtfully. “Is that a fact?”

The gunman stood up. “Here’s another fact: You can go to hell.”

Isaac Bell drew his Browning and aimed it at the gangster’s as yet unwounded hand. “You want another crippled paw? Sit down!”

Flummoxed, the gangster gripped the blood-soaked napkins, sat back down on the keg, and cradled his hand in his lap. “What is going on?” he protested. “Where are all you guys coming from?”

“What do you mean, what’s going on? What guys?”

“Always in Detroit we fight each other. Now we got outsiders, torpedoes shoving into our operations. Hijackers.”

“What hijackers? Boats on the river?”

“You take your life in your hands on the river.”

“Have you run into a big black boat? Machine gun? Armor plate?”

“No.”

“Have you ever run up against the Jewish Navy?”

“Once.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing I’d want to happen again.”

Bell said, “It sounds like they put you out of business.”

“I’m waiting for winter. Drive across the ice.”

“It’s summer. How are you making a living in the meantime?”

“Snatch racket.”

“Who are you kidnapping?”

“Guys that can’t go to the cops.”

Isaac Bell indicated familiarity with the kidnapping business by raising a pertinent objection. “Guys who can’t go to the cops can be a handful.”

“Sure can. You gotta be careful who you snatch. You wouldn’t want to kidnap a Jewish Navy guy. You want guys with dough from bookmaking, whisky hauling, and girls; you want payroll bandits, loan sharks, auto thieves — except if they’re Purples. Purples would chase you all the way to Mexico.”

If Marat Zolner intended to make a criminal alliance in Detroit, as he had with the Black Hand in New York, the leader of the rising Purple Gang would be high on his list. The difficulty would be identifying him. As Walt had noted, Detroit bosses were killed right and left by the warring gangs, and even the cops were never sure who was on top.

“Who’s the Purple’s boss?”

“You have a lot of questions, mister.”

“I have a lot of curiosity,” said Bell. “What’s his name?”

“Forget it.”

“Would you like to go for a ride?”

“Where?”

Gus followed Bell’s gaze, past the kitchen and across the lot to a black Stutz sedan parked in the shadows, and his meaning sunk in. Leaning against it were Harry Warren’s toughest Gang Squad detectives. Grieving for the murdered Harry, they had no difficulty looking like gangsters who would kill without hesitation and enjoy it. Gus shook his head. “Look, mister…”

“What’s his name?”

“Saying it could get me killed.”

“Not saying it will get you killed. What’s his name?”

Gus looked around, ducked his head like a turtle, and whispered, “Stern.”

“First name?”

“Max.”

“Where do I find Max Stern?”

“I ain’t that high up, mister. You gotta believe me.”

“Where do you guess he hangs out?”

“The big guys don’t hang out. Too dangerous.”

Bell believed him. At least he had a name of the boss Zolner might go to. He switched tactics. “I keep hearing stories about that black boat.”

“Boats are old hat.”

“What do you mean?”

“Driving whisky sixes across the ice will be old hat, too.”

Bell said, “What are you talking about?”

“When they get the tunnel.”

“What tunnel?”

The gangster backpedaled. He was either reconsidering the truth of the rumor or the wisdom of talking about it. He said, “If you ask me, it’s talk. Like the dirigible. Like the floating casino.”

“What’s the talk?”

“They’re almost done digging it. Just talk.”

“Where?”

Gus repeated almost word for word what “Joe” had told Bell in the parking lot. “If I knew where, I’d own it, which I don’t. If I did, I wouldn’t need the money for shaking down your roadhouse. Or if I knew and I didn’t own it, I’d be dead.”

“Why dead?”

“You can’t move a tunnel. Only two ways to hide it: pay off or kill off everybody who knows about it.”

Bell said, “If that were true, wouldn’t you hear about workmen — masons, bricklayers, maybe even sandhogs — floating facedown in the river?”

“The river’s full of bodies. Everyone thinks they’re hijacked whisky haulers. Could be some other reason. Could be guys digging tunnels.” The gangster hunched over his wounded hand and fell silent.

Convinced that he had gotten as much as he could out of Gus, Bell walked up the paved path that led to the front of the roadhouse. He was feeling discouraged. This tunnel talk was interesting, but he did not feel one foot closer to Marat Zolner and the Comintern.

It was getting late. Cars were pulling away, and he saw a line of red taillights, driving home to Detroit. The cops directing traffic had called it a night. As he approached the front steps, he exchanged nods with Dashwood, who was keeping an eye on things from the far side of the veranda. Stragglers lingered, swells and flappers prolonging good-byes with hip flasks.

Suddenly, Bell saw headlights blazing up the road, racing against the Detroit-bound traffic. The auto, a seven-passenger Packard, passed the parking lot. But instead of turning under the porte cochere, it stopped out front on the road. A man leaped out, gripping a stick grenade by its long handle. He jerked the detonating cord and wound up like a fastball pitcher aiming to burn one over the inside corner.

Isaac Bell sprang into motion, running as fast as he could.

The grenade flew on a flat trajectory, under the high roof of the porte cochere, straight at the veranda where men and women were shaking hands and hugging good night. A tipsy flapper stumbled on the steps. James Dashwood glided to her rescue and she fell into his arms instead of down the stairs.

25

The girl laughed, her face bright in the glare of the TEXAS WALT’S sign. The shadow of the grenade swooped across it like a bat. Dashwood turned toward it, too late. Isaac Bell was drawing near, sprinting among the revelers, long arm reaching, hand outstretched. He was so close that he recognized the grenade as the German Army Stielhandgranate. If it was a newer Model 24, it was loaded with almost two pounds of TNT, enough high explosive to kill everyone within fifteen feet.

It smacked into his hand like a line drive.

The 24s had a five-second delay. Bell had two seconds left to throw it as far as he could. His finger caught in the carrying hook. He grabbed the wooden handle with his other hand, wrenched it off his finger, and hurled it with all his might.

The Packard raced away. The thug who had thrown the grenade gaped, mesmerized, as it sped back to him like a boomerang.

Bell and Dashwood opened their arms wide and dragged as many people as they could down on the steps and floor of the veranda. The grenade detonated. A flash of light threw shadows on the front wall. A shock wave slammed Bell and Dashwood into the people. The explosion was deafening and blew out the front windows and half the lightbulbs in the TEXAS WALT’S sign.

In the light that remained, a cloud of dust hung heavily on the road. There was nothing to be seen of the gangster who had thrown the stick grenade. Through the ringing in his ears, Isaac Bell heard screams of fear. The roar of a powerful motor cut through the screams.

The Packard had turned around. It was racing back, windows bristling with rifles and pistols. Dashwood and Bell stumbled to their feet and staggered to the road.

The driver of the Packard saw two men emerge from the dust cloud the grenade had kicked up. He floored his accelerator. Tony, the boss beside him in the front seat, and the boys in the back started shooting, jerking their triggers as fast as they could.

The two men stepped into the middle of the road, turned sideways, raised pistols, and started firing back. A bullet shattered the windshield and knocked the driver’s hat sideways. Another broke a headlight.

“Get the big one!” shouted Tony. They shifted fire, and a lucky shot from the swaying auto knocked the bigger man off the road. The smaller, a skinny scarecrow, stepped into the lights, gun raised like a target shooter.

“Run him down!”

Flame lanced from his pistol. A left front tire blew, and the wheel jerked in the driver’s hands. The scarecrow fired again. The right front tire blew, and the heavy auto skidded and screeched on smoking rims straight at him.

James Dashwood drifted aside like a matador. The Packard slid past. He fired a shot into each rear tire, and the car swerved into a tree with a loud bang. Three men were thrown to the pavement. The driver was impaled on the steering column. Van Dorns swarmed from the roadhouse and surrounded them. Dashwood ran to where Isaac Bell had fallen.

“Isaac!”

“I’m O.K.”

Dashwood mopped Bell’s brow with a handkerchief. “You don’t look O.K. You’re covered in blood.”

“Scalp, I think.”

“He’s fine,” said Walt Hatfield, who hurried up with a shotgun. “Just leaking a little.”

Hatfield handed Bell a bandanna. “You’re O.K., old son, aren’t you?”

The Texan’s anxious expression scared Dashwood more than the blood.

“Where are they?” asked Bell. His ears were ringing, his head spinning. He saw the wrecked Packard wrapped half around a tree. Bloodied gunmen sprawled beside it. “Anyone else hurt?”

“Folks on the porch are mostly shook-up.”

A siren howled in the distance.

Bell surged to his feet and stood, swaying. He gripped Dashwood’s skinny arm and pointed at the gunmen. “Give the cops all those louses except the boss. Bring him to the cellar. On the jump! They’ll be here any second.”

“Attempted murder,” said Isaac Bell. “Even in Detroit they’ll lock you up.”

“Not for long,” said the gangster manacled to a cellar post. He had a gash on his head that had splattered his clothes as bloodily as Bell’s. Bell hoped that the man had a headache worse than the one that was jackhammering his own skull. He had left the doctor Texas Walt called to stitch his scalp cooling his heels upstairs until he had wrung everything he could out of the gangster. The whisky he poured on it to stop the bleeding had hurt worse than the bullet that parted his hair, and he could not quite see straight. It took no acting talent to sound vengeful.

“Long,” he said. “Very long. I’ll hand you to the U.S. Marshal. He’ll get you on a federal offense.”

“This ain’t federal.”

“Ever heard of the Espionage Act? The Congress wrote it with your name on it. Radicals throw bombs. Aliens throw bombs. Communists. Bolsheviks. The United States Attorney will put you in the big house for life.”

“They can’t pin that on me.”

“Thirty witnesses saw your gang throw a grenade. Thirty witnesses saw you rake a crowd of people with rifle fire.”

“They don’t have the guts to testify. I’ll be out in a day.”

“I’ve got the guts to testify,” said Texas Walt.

“So do I,” said Ed Tobin.

“Me, too,” said Dashwood.

“Even I will muster the courage,” said Isaac Bell. “That’s four of us.”

“Mister,” said Texas Walt, leaning in to put his hawk face an inch from the gangster’s. “You’ve got one greasy foot in the federal penitentiary and another on thin ice. It is high time you start talking.”

The gangster pressed his free hand to his bloody head. “What do you want to know?”

Bell studied their prisoner carefully. The thug would expect Bell to ask who had ordered him to bomb the roadhouse. Fear and criminal pride would make him resist turning in someone he knew.

“Your name.”

“Tony.”

“Tony what?”

“Big Tony Sana.”

“Who gave you the grenade, Tony?”

“War surplus. They’re all over the place.”

“It was a German stick grenade. How did you happen to get your paws on a grenade from the Kaiser’s army?”

Bell reckoned that the Comintern was the likeliest source. Such a powerful grenade would also explain the phenomenal damage Bell had seen at the former Van Dorn offices. The Detroit mobs hadn’t yet figured that the Texas Walt roadhouse was a Van Dorn masquerade. But the Comintern might well have.

The gangster shrugged. “I don’t know. One of the guys got a box of ’em somewhere.”

Bell thought that Tony Sana looked genuinely puzzled that of all the questions the roadhouse torpedoes could ask, who cared where a hand grenade came from? Had Marat Zolner paid Tony’s gang to attack Texas Walt’s? Had he allied with them as he had with the Black Hand in New York? No. Tony was small-time. If anything, Zolner was playing Tony’s boys for suckers, as he had the Gophers.

“I want to know who gave you the grenade.”

“Maybe some doughboy brought souvenirs home from the war.”

“Which one of your guys did he give it to?”

“I think it was Little Angelo.”

“We’ll deal with Angelo later. Now, what’s this I heard about a hooch tunnel under the river?”

“I didn’t hear nothing about no tunnel.”

Bell said, “People tell me boats are old hat. And come winter, driving whisky sixes across the ice will be old hat, too.”

“Yeah, well, there oughta be plenty of business for everyone.”

“Who’s your boss?”

“I’m my boss.”

“What about the cable sub?”

Tony looked glad to discuss a topic outside his own business. “These dumb Polacks, they got a long rope and a crank. They sink the booze in the river in steel kegs. The rope drags it across the bottom.”

“From where?”

“Some island.”

“Where does it go?”

“Poletown.”

“Who runs it?”

“I told ya, Polacks from Poletown.”

“Poles from Poletown?”

“Yeah, except the Jaworski gang says it ain’t them. Lying bastards. They was speaking Polack.”

“Polish? Who was speaking Polish. The cable sub?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Speaking Polish? Or Russian?”

“Same thing, ain’t it?”

Bell exchanged glances with Dashwood and Tobin. Suddenly, there were two Dashwoods and two Tobins. It took a moment to realize that the shot that had creased his skull was giving him double vision. He blinked. There were still two of each detective. He turned to two Tonys.

“Tony, you say you don’t have a boss. If you did have a boss, who would he be?”

Big Tony Sana looked intrigued by the thought. He said, “Bosses come and go.”

“Let’s say one came.”

“Could be a bunch of guys.”

“Max Stern?”

Tony looked surprised. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Around. Could it be Max Stern?”

“Could be.”

“Where do I find him?”

“Who knows? I’m telling you, Max Stern ain’t my boss.”

“Admiral Abe,” said Marat Zolner. “Aren’t you glad you saw reason?”

They were dining on sweetbreads, the most expensive item on the menu at Detroit’s classy new Hotel Wolverine and one that Weintraub could chew without many teeth.

Abe Weintraub shot a murderous glare across the table. He had a moon-shaped face with a small nose, ears, and mouth. He looked, Zolner thought, innocuous, even gentle, except for his dark dead eyes.

“Don’t get the wrong idea. I ain’t no pushover.”

“You made that clear,” said Zolner, who had seen enough Cheka torture chambers to admire a thug as determined as Abe Weintraub not to be broken. His conversion had taken so long that it was a miracle they hadn’t accidentally drowned him. But Weintraub had been worth the trouble. He commanded the Purple Gang’s Jewish Navy by dint of brains, unmatched brutality, and ruthless determination. He knew every Detroit criminal worth knowing, saw them with a clear eye, and knew their weaknesses and their strengths. He would make an aggressive captain of foot soldiers in any revolution.

“Now what?” asked Weintraub, mopping his plate clean with a slice of bread.

“Now you will tell me who to kill.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tell me which gangsters to get out of our way. Starting at the top.”

“Tell you? Or kill ’em for you?”

It was like discussing terms with a wolf or a shark. Or the hotel’s namesake wolverine. Weintraub understood destruction and only destruction, but he understood it very well. Zolner had set up a number of gangsters like him in New York — to control supply and demand — but none so ferocious.

He said, “You will help me locate them. We will ferret out the chinks in their armor. Then we will kill them.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I will allow you to pick up the pieces.”

Weintraub stared in disbelief. “I thought I heard it all. This takes the cake.”

“I am offering you the city of Detroit,” Marat Zolner said.

“When I’m done, it will be my city. I don’t need you.”

“Would you prefer to wait five years in hopes your enemies all kill each other off? Keeping in mind that the one who survives will emerge strong. Or do you want to get to it right now?”

“Now.”

“Starting at the top, Abe, who do we kill first?”

“Max Stern.”

“Is that a fact?” the Bolshevik asked coldly.

“Max Stern,” Weintraub repeated.

The agents whom Zolner had sent ahead to scout Detroit and Windsor had predicted that the top boss would be a Jew. The Italian gangs had decimated themselves in the murderous Giannola — Vitale mafia wars. A Purple Gang killer named Max Stern had been rated most likely to emerge top dog.

“I’ve heard that, too,” said Zolner.

“Now you hear it from me.”

“Except that I also hear that Stern has disappeared.” The gangster had vanished the very night Black Bird rumbled into her Windsor boathouse.

“Yeah, well, these boss guys lay low. For their health.”

Marat Zolner’s features hardened. “Max Stern was incinerated in a brewery furnace over in Windsor.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You have one more chance, you lying son of a bitch.”

Abe Weintraub did not protest the insult. “O.K. Just testing who you are. I don’t know how you know this stuff, but you’re the real thing.”

“Last chance, Abe: Who do we kill first?”

“Sam Rosenthal.”

Zolner settled back in his chair. At last. “I wondered if it was him.”

“Wonder ’til you’re blue in the face,” said Weintraub. “Rosenthal is bulletproof.”

“Isn’t Sam Rosenthal digging a tunnel under the river?”

Abe Weintraub ignored the question — a clue, Zolner knew by now, that the tight-lipped gangster knew the answer — and said, “Nobody gets close enough to shoot him. Nobody’s seen him outside in a year.”

Zolner had been hearing that more Canadian booze traveled under the river than on it. Some was smuggled in railroad freight cars. A Polish gang was said to pull submerged containers on the bottom of the river by a windlass cable, which sounded slow and cumbersome. But another story held great promise, a smuggling tunnel that would make the Comintern’s fortune. The tunnel would lock up Detroit and add the biggest transit point to the operations he set up in New York.

“Is Sam Rosenthal digging a tunnel under the river?”

“When’d you hear that?”

Zolner laid both big hands on the tablecloth and leaned forward. “Abe, it’s too late to turn off the phonograph.”

“Go to hell.”

“Do you really want to go back in the water?”

Weintraub half rose from the table.

“Abe, look around the lobby.”

Weintraub glared. “I’ve got torpedoes, too.”

“Look again, Abe. See the salesman with the big sample case? See the long-haired violin player?… Mine are tougher and smarter, and they’ve got your boys covered with Thompson .45s… Besides, do you really want a shoot-out? Or would you rather accept my offer of Detroit? Do you know where Rosenthal is digging?”

“No.”

“I hear he’s digging from one of the Canadian islands,” said Zolner. “That would make sense, tunnel only half a mile instead of a full mile all the way across, and start in friendlier territory.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Find out which.”

“Tell you this. When it’s dug, it will put your black boat out of business.”

Black Bird would soon “fly south for the winter” on a railcar to Miami, a fact that Zolner kept to himself. He said, “Rosenthal’s tunnel will put your entire Jewish Navy out of business.”

Weintraub fell silent.

He knows about the tunnel, thought Zolner. His agents were spot-on about the rumors. The tunnel was almost finished. But it was maddening that no one knew where it was.

“Surely you understand that the future of hauling Canadian booze is moving huge volumes of it through Rosenthal’s tunnel, not lugging it on boats and trucks on ice.”

“So the tunnel is why you want to kill Rosenthal?”

“And why I want to give you Detroit — so you can help me hold on to the tunnel.”

“But Rosenthal could be good for business if he stops the wars. Divvy up territories. Lay down some rules.”

Marat Zolner asked, “Do you really believe that Rosenthal can stop the wars without sinking your Jewish Navy? Better we lay down the rules.”

For the first time since Marat Zolner hijacked Abe Weintraub’s boat, he saw the Jewish gangster smile.

26

“Why’s a Jew getting buried by the Catholics?” Scudder Smith asked the Detroit police captain whose blue-coated squads were struggling to keep ten thousand spectators on the sidewalks.

The Van Dorn detective had notebook and pencil in hand and his Brooklyn Eagle press card in his hat. It was a hot, sunny morning on Detroit’s west side. Across Dexter Avenue stood St. Gregory the Great, a sturdy red brick church with a limestone façade. The doors were open, and pallbearers were staggering down the front steps under the weight of a fifteen-thousand-dollar silver coffin.

“His mother was from Ireland,” said the cop. “She made him go to Saint Gregory’s school straight through fourth grade.”

Scores of polished autos were lined up to follow the hearse and flower cars to the cemetery. Bronze stars attached to bumpers identified autos that belonged to city department functionaries, and Scudder Smith said from the side of his mouth as Isaac Bell passed by, “Gives the official touch to the ceremonial procession. Look at all those five-thousand-dollar motors. You’d think they were burying the king of England.”

Bell moved restlessly among the crowd, disguised as a workman in plumber’s overalls and a flat cap that covered the bandage on his throbbing head. Fitful bouts of double vision flipped the sidewalk into a funhouse ride.

Tobin was here, too, as was Dashwood, trying to identify the hoodlums and beer runners and whisky haulers attending the lavish funeral. The newspapers were calling it the Purple Gang’s biggest-ever “send-off.”

The flower cars behind the hearse carried wreathes with the dead man’s name in gold letters.

Bell was deeply disappointed and thoroughly disgusted by this latest setback. Inside the coffin was a heap of bone and ash discovered by Windsor brewery workers while cleaning a firebox. The bones had been identified by their owner’s prized blackjack. The nickel-stainless grip engraved with his initials MS had survived the flames.

With the gangster Bell had hoped would lead him to Zolner now dead, Bell could do little but draw on his photographic memory to compare wanted posters and police mug shots to Max Stern’s gangster friends and family lining up their luxurious automobiles. In one of those splendid autos could be the new boss of Detroit’s Purple Gang — the gangster with whom Marat Zolner would join forces.

Cops on motorcycles and horseback cleared a lane in the middle of Dexter Avenue, and the biggest wreath by far came up the avenue towed on a trailer hung with black crepe. Thousands of red roses depicted a full-size replica of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. A golden banner ran its length.

“What’s the word on Sam?” Bell asked Scudder, who had been buying liquor lunches, dinners, and breakfasts for Detroit’s newspapermen to get the latest on the gangs.

“The boys in the pressroom were taking bets whether Sam Rosenthal would show his face, figuring he’s safe with Max dead.”

“The new boss?”

“They say he’s smarter than Einstein. And the other contender hasn’t been heard from lately.”

“Admiral Abe?”

“Abe Weintraub. With Abe out of the picture, Sam could be Marat’s new pal.”

Bell focused on a real Rolls-Royce behind the trailer, a slab-sided sky blue Silver Ghost town car agleam with glass and nickel. A window rolled down, and he saw a sun-starved, hatchet-faced figure observing the crowds with a cold smile. Rosenthal looked young, strong, and triumphant.

“Judging by Mr. Rosenthal’s floral contribution,” said Bell, “you might be right. You and Ed and Dash stay here. I’ll follow that Rolls.”

The funeral cortege began pulling slowly from the church. Bell followed on the sidewalk, battling through the crowd to pace Sam Rosenthal’s Rolls-Royce. Suddenly, his senses jumped to even higher alert.

A Pierce-Arrow Limousine Landau slipped out of a side street, and the police blocked the cars behind it so it could join the file three cars ahead of Rosenthal’s. What had drawn Bell’s eye was a glimpse of the passenger, a mourning woman in a black cloche hat with a veil. Max’s wife? No, a wife would not be alone in the car but surrounded by family. His mistress, was more likely. He could not quite see her face behind the veil, but something about the cock of her head was familiar.

Fern Hawley? But how could a rich society girl be riding in a gangster parade? Yet, he could swear it was her. He had observed the heiress closely when he and Marion had bumped into her and Prince André at Club Deluxe. If it was Fern, he saw no sign of Prince André. Unless he was driving. Not likely. Bell tried to see the driver behind the front window, but reflections in the glass revealed only the silhouette of a chauffeur’s cap.

He was struck by an even more peculiar thought. Prince André, as he remembered Fern’s friend, looked similar to speedboat builder Bill Lynch’s description of the man who bought Black Bird. As with most big ideas, as soon as it coursed through his mind he wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him earlier. The answer was context. It was probably nothing, but there was a simple way to find out. Bell made a mental note to have Research show Lynch a photograph of Prince André from the society pages. He returned his attention to pushing through the spectators packing the sidewalks to keep up with the Rolls-Royce.

He heard music — strings — piercing the blare of motorcycle and auto engines, and loud voices ohhhing and ahhhing over the limousines and flowers. On a street corner far ahead, he saw a band of violinists in black coats and slouch hats. They were serenading the cortege with a slow and halting arrangement of “O Sole Mio.”

A Neapolitan love song seemed an odd choice of music to bury an American gangster of Jewish and Irish heritage. Maybe, thought Bell, it was the only tune they knew. They sounded painfully shrill, even at a distance. Maybe it was his headache, but in fact two were wielding their bows like carpenter saws and had their eyes fixed desperately as drowning men on the tall, wraith-thin violinist in the middle, who seemed to be carrying the lead.

Bell felt his every sense drawn to him. The musician’s face was shrouded by the broad, low-swept brim of his hat, his instrument, and his bowing arm. But Bell had seen his silhouette before, the same supple reptilian grace he had seen on Roosevelt Hospital’s roof, and again — it hit him with electric force — on the dance floor of Club Deluxe.

The Pierce-Arrow wheeled out of the cortege as suddenly as it had slipped in and disappeared around the corner where the band was playing. No chance for another look at whether it was Fern Hawley in back. But at this moment, what Bell wanted much more was an up close look at the tall violinist.

He peered over a rippling sea of ladies’ cloches and men’s cloth caps and fedoras. There were hundreds of people between them. The crowd jammed the sidewalk, from the buildings to the police line at the curb, weirdly multiplied by a spasm of double vision. He squinted his eyes to clear the carnival.

The hearse and the limousines gathered speed.

Sam Rosenthal’s Silver Ghost passed Bell. It was almost a full block ahead when it reached the musicians. Rosenthal extended his pale white hand to toss them a tip. Gold coins flew through the air, glittering in the sun. The people murmured, acknowledging his gesture: The new king was generous. The music stopped abruptly.

Isaac Bell saw the musicians duck to the sidewalk to pick up the coins. They popped up in unison. All five were cradling Thompson .45 submachine guns, bracing them against their ribs by their double handgrips.

The tall, thin violinist triggered his first.

His henchmen followed his lead with an earsplitting roar.

Shards of glass flew as hundreds of slugs riddled Sam Rosenthal’s Rolls-Royce. The sight of flame-spitting guns stampeded the people nearest to the car. They turned and ran, the bigger trampling the smaller. Those farther off who heard the shattering blast of gunfire threw themselves to the sidewalk.

Isaac Bell leaped over prone forms and shoved past people too stunned to duck. He ran toward the gunmen, who continued to rake the Rolls-Royce even after the lifeless bodies of Sam Rosenthal and his bodyguards and driver had spilled onto the avenue. Before he could get halfway there, the car caught fire. The shooting stopped. The gunmen stuffed their Thompsons into instrument cases and ran down the side street.

Bell reached the pile of violins and violas in time to see the Pierce-Arrow limousine that he thought was Fern Hawley’s speed away from the carnage. A cop ran after it, waving his pistol. A burst of .45 slugs cut him down.

27

Cold-eyed men who traveled light arrived from Cleveland, Toledo, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh, and jumped to the Michigan Central platforms before their trains stopped rolling. They hurried on their way, across town to a former Wells Fargo Express office that Isaac Bell had rented on Woodbridge Street.

The building was in the freight district between the Michigan Central and New York Central depots, a block from the Detroit River. Thick walls, small windows, and steel doors made for a fortified headquarters. The out-of-town detectives — valuable men who knew their business whom Bell had summoned from the Midwest field offices — were greeted by the sobering sight of workmen wiring mesh over the barred glass to keep out hand grenades. What even the sharpest-eyed did not see were the snipers James Dashwood had installed atop a water tower that overlooked the approaches.

Having housed an express company, the new Detroit headquarters, which the detectives nicknamed Fort Van Dorn, was wired for a variety of telephone and telegraph lines. Within hours of taking possession, Bell had local and long-distance telephone connections, private telephone and telegraph lines to the rest of the field offices, a Morkrum telegraph printer, and an overseas cable link.

“I underestimated Marat Zolner,” he reported to Joseph Van Dorn at Bellevue Hospital by long distance. “And I overestimated the effect of what I thought was a body blow we gave them in New York. The Comintern did not flee from New York. Zolner expanded to Detroit.”

“Interesting hunch,” said Van Dorn.

“It’s more than a hunch.”

“But you could just as easily conclude that Zolner machine-gunned the boss of the Purple Gang out of desperation.” Van Dorn’s voice was stronger, and Dorothy told Bell when she answered the telephone that he was sitting up in a chair. “You drove him from New York and he’s desperate to start over in Detroit.”

“No,” said Bell. “Zolner is fighting from strength, not weakness. We bloodied his nose in New York, but we did not break up his alliances. The profits from his New York bootlegger partners are funding the expansion.”

“If bootlegging made him that rich, why didn’t he buy his way into Detroit? Why’d he pounce with all four feet?”

“No one can buy Detroit. It’s too volatile. He has to beat the gangs to control the bootlegging.”

“That has a greater ring of fact than your expanding from New York theory for which you have no evidence.”

Yes, thought Bell. The Boss is sounding a little more like himself. He was marshaling his arguments when the Morkrum printer clattered. James Dashwood ripped a message off the paper roll and handed him the curly sheet.

“Hold the wire, Joe.”

The New York office had forwarded a long overseas cable from Germany. Bell decoded the familiar Van Dorn cipher in his head.

Pauline Grandzau had discovered that Comintern agents had chartered the twelve-thousand-ton tanker Sandra T. Congdon and loaded it with two-hundred-proof pure grain alcohol. The tanker had sailed from Bremerhaven bound for Nassau, The Bahamas.

Bell whistled in amazement.

“What?” Van Dorn growled into his phone.

“Proof,” said Bell. “A shipload of two hundred proof.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Proof that Marat Zolner is not only still operating in New York but expanding. The Comintern is gearing up to supply Rum Row on a whole new scale.”

He read Pauline’s cable aloud to Van Dorn.

They discussed its ramifications. Possession of grain alcohol was a not to be missed opportunity to dilute genuine liquor. Such a big ship could carry well over a hundred thousand barrels — five hundred railroad tank cars — easily stretched to fifty million bottles.

“Enough liquor,” said Van Dorn, “to plaster the adult population of the East Coast through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.”

“And pour a hundred million dollars into the Comintern’s treasury.”

“That is fifty times the federal budget for enforcement of Prohibition,” said Van Dorn. “Good for Pauline. Will you send her to Nassau as she asked?”

“Absolutely.”

“Even long-distance, I can hear a gleam in your eye, Isaac. Just don’t forget that Zolner has proved himself a mastermind. And he’s got the entire Comintern on his side.”

“I’m not sure about that,” said Bell. “I have a hunch he’s a one-man show.”

“They’re making a great success of getting away with every crime in the book,” Van Dorn countered drily.

“But nothing that he’s built so far can last without him. When we stop Zolner, we stop the Comintern.”

“Nothing’s stopped him yet.”

“The way to stop him is to use against him the one thing I admire about him,” said Bell.

“Admire?” Van Dorn’s explosion of indignation spiraled into a coughing fit.

Bell listened to the wracking cough, praying for it to ease, but it knocked Joe breathless. Bell waited, gripping the phone. The doctors had warned there’d be setbacks, and he’d just set one off.

A woman spoke into the phone. “Mr. Van Dorn will telephone you back when he is able.”

“Marion?”

“Isaac!”

“Is he O.K.?”

“I don’t know. I just walked in. Here’s a nurse… And a doctor… They’ve got him…” She lowered her voice. “Oh, the poor man. It breaks your heart. He’s better one moment, then falls back. They’ve got him now, Isaac. Don’t worry. How are you?”

“Tip-top,” Bell lied, gingerly rubbing his itching stitches. He pictured her lighting up Joe’s room in a smart suit and hat. “And how are you?”

“They gave me another movie. I’m having fun filming all day and missing you at dinner.”

“How about after dinner?”

“Worse. The New York papers said there was a shooting in Detroit.”

“It’s the national pastime out here. Bigger than baseball.”

“This one sounded like a war.”

“I will tell you all about it when I see you.”

“Can’t wait. Here’s Joe… He claims he’s ‘tip-top.’ Where do you suppose he learned that expression? Good-bye, darling. So lovely to hear your voice.”

Van Dorn did not sound much recovered. He took a few shallow breaths and wheezed, “How could you possibly admire a murdering, thieving, treacherous, bomb-throwing, godless Bolshevik who slaughters innocents?”

“He leads from the front. In the thick of the fight. He is no coward.”

“Neither is Satan.”

“It’s his Achilles’ heel. I’ll find him where the lead is flying. And that’s where I’ll finish him.”

Van Dorn fell silent.

Had the long-distance connection broken? Or something worse? “Are you O.K., Joe?”

“I was just wondering if a villain weren’t a villain, would he be a hero’s best friend?”

Isaac Bell was in no mood for philosophy. “I would not be one bit surprised that Marat Zolner manned the Lewis gun that shot you. And I have absolutely no doubt he was there when Harry Warren was killed and personally loaded his body — dead or dying — into that wagon.”

“All right,” Van Dorn whispered. “I know what you’re saying. What’s your next move?”

“Drive Zolner out of Detroit.”

“How?”

“Find out who Zolner installed in place of Rosenthal. Question his girlfriend, Fern Hawley. Send Pauline to Nassau to throw a monkey wrench in whatever he’s up to with that tanker. And find that whisky tunnel, because if the Comintern doesn’t own it already, it will soon. When they do, they will be so rich it could be impossible to stop them.”

Pauline’s cable had ended:

During the war, Bell recalled, she had smuggled a downed Scottish flier out of Germany. The pilot’s grandfather had founded a distillery. Bell cabled back.

The reply he received was not from Germany but from France, where Archie Abbott remained in temporary command of the Van Dorn field office.

Isaac Bell laughed. So much for “request.”

“Fräulein Moxie” was off to the races — Cunard express liner Aquitania from Le Havre to New York; Havana Special, overnight train to Miami, Florida; and the new flying-boat service to Nassau. Pauline would be across the Atlantic and in The Bahamas in seven or eight days. While a war-weary, ten-knot tanker was still on the high seas, she would have time before it landed to establish a business front in Nassau with a Market Street import-export office under a shingle that read:

The Wolverine, the express train that connected with the 20th Century in Buffalo, brought photographs of Fern Hawley that Van Dorn Research had clipped from the New York society pages. That the one shot of the heiress gallivanting included Prince André doubled Bell’s suspicion that the Russian and Marat Zolner were the same man. His picture was out of focus, blurred by motion. It looked to Bell as if, caught by surprise climbing out of a limousine, he was trying to turn his face from the camera.

Bell wired Grady Forrer.

Bell armed his detectives with Fern’s photographs and sent them to query desk clerks and managers at Detroit’s top hotels. In none of the fancier places where he would expect her to stay was the Connecticut heiress recognized. Nor was Prince André. They polled second-rate hotels, and garages that rented limousines, with no results.

The society reporters wrote, repeatedly, that she had served as a volunteer war nurse in France. Bell cabled Archie Abbott to inquire about her and Prince André.

At Michigan Central Station, Bell’s detectives found no evidence of her arriving recently on any of the extra-fare limited trains like The Detroiter or The Wolverine that a wealthy woman would ride. On the other hand, thought Bell, she was uncommonly wealthy. He went personally to the private sidings. New York Central Railroad detectives, always eager to help a Van Dorn executive in hopes of future employment, had no memory of Fern Hawley arriving by private car from New York.

“What about New Haven?”

A rail dick recalled that a car from Connecticut had parked for several days on a private siding. “Left yesterday at noon.”

Only hours after the machine-gun attack on Rosenthal.

“Where did it go?”

They questioned dispatchers. The private car had been coupled to a New York Central passenger train bound for Cincinnati that connected with the Southern Railway’s “Royal Palm” to Jacksonville, Florida.

With an idea forming of where she was headed, Bell asked, “What line does the Southern connect to in Jacksonville?”

“Florida East Coast Railway.”

Isaac Bell slipped him a double sawbuck and his card. “If you need something from the Van Dorns, drop me a line.”

The tall detective returned to the main passenger terminal and found a coin telephone to call James Dashwood at Fort Van Dorn.

“She’s gone to Miami! I’m booking you a through ticket on the Royal Palm. Get down to Florida and find out what she’s up to.”

“Is Zolner with her?”

“He can’t leave Detroit until he’s installed his replacement for Rosenthal and they finish that tunnel.”

“Do you think Zolner sent her away to keep her out of danger?”

“Possibly. Or she could be fed up with him and gone south early for the winter. Except I’ve got a very strong feeling that Fern Hawley’s gone on ahead to lay the groundwork for his next move.”

Dashwood played the devil’s advocate as Bell had taught him to. “Based on what?”

“Based on Pauline’s report that the Comintern sent a shipload of grain alcohol to The Bahamas. Nassau is only a hundred eighty miles from Miami, Bimini’s even closer, and Florida is a booze funnel into the entire South. He’ll have New York in the East, Detroit in the Midwest, and Florida in the South.

“At that point, he can paste a new label on millions of bottles—‘Genuine Old Cominterm, America’s Favorite.’”

Isaac Bell paced impatiently.

“Whisky haulers have heard about a booze tunnel under the Detroit River. Strong-arm men have heard about this tunnel. The cops have heard about this tunnel. Crooks have heard about this tunnel. Gangsters have heard about this tunnel. Wouldn’t you think that Detroit newspapermen have not only heard about this tunnel but would also have some inkling of where it is?”

“It’s a big story,” Scudder Smith agreed. He was toying with his hat and looked like a man who was reconsidering not drinking.

“You’re picking up bar tabs for every reporter in town,” Bell reminded him. “One of them must be writing the big story.”

“No editor would run it. It would get the reporter shot — which wouldn’t trouble most editors excessively — but it could get the editor himself shot, too, and that possibility would trouble him.”

Isaac Bell did not smile.

“Funny enough,” said Scudder. “You know who’s really looking for the tunnel?”

“Volstead officers,” said Bell. “The payoffs would make them rich men.”

“Or dead.”

Bell said, “Go back to the pressrooms, go back to the blind pigs where newspapermen hang out. There must be some cub reporter out there scrambling for a scoop that would make his name.”

Scudder Smith came back much sooner than Bell had expected.

“Now what?”

Scudder grinned ear to ear. “I have redeemed myself.”

“Did you find a reporter who found the tunnel?”

“No. But I found several reporters who know who might have shot Sam Rosenthal.”

“Might have?”

“I don’t know who actually pulled the trigger, but I definitely know who replaced him. Abe Weintraub, like we guessed. Admiral Abe.”

“I thought he disappeared. I thought he was dead.”

“So did I. So did they. But then I caught a rumor that the admiral was seen gumming his supper at the Hotel Wolverine.”

“‘Gumming’?”

“Apparently someone — an amazingly formidable someone — knocked Abe’s teeth out. I checked. I found a Wolverine waiter who said he ate sweetbreads. Sweetbreads and champagne. Sweetbreads are expensive. A meal you eat when you’re celebrating. As if you became the new Purples’ boss.”

“And easy to chew,” said Bell. “Any idea who knocked his teeth out?”

“Everyone agrees that whoever did it must be dead by now.”

“Was he dining alone?”

“That’s the best part. I showed the waiter Prince André’s photograph. He thought Prince André might be the guy Abe was eating sweetbreads with.”

Bell thought that this was too much to hope for. The most that Bill Lynch and Harold Harding had conceded, when shown the out-of-focus photograph, was a dubious “maybe” that it was the bootlegger who had commissioned Black Bird.

He asked, “Why was the waiter so talkative?”

“He needed money to leave Detroit.”

“Why?”

“I persuaded him, after I suggested that Abe might be the new boss of the Purples, that any association with Admiral Abe could be dangerous for his health. Including — or especially — witnessing who he eats sweetbreads with. Rightly or wrongly, the waiter decided to start over a thousand miles away. I — or, strictly speaking, Mr. Van Dorn — provided the means.”

“But it’s not impossible that the waiter told you what he thought you wanted to hear,” said Bell.

“May I suggest,” said Scudder, “that we have a field office full of valuable men to follow up on this?”

James Dashwood telegraphed on the private wire that he had traced Fern Hawley’s railcar to a Palm Beach, Florida, siding that served an oceanfront estate seventy miles north of Miami. Neither the car nor the estate was owned by her.

There was nothing innately suspicious about renting cars and estates. She could, indeed, be setting up early for the winter in Florida, where more and more of the rich headed when the weather got cold. Typically, though, society people of Fern’s means were building elaborate homes in Palm Beach and Miami. She could be testing the waters. But for what? Winter holidays or Marat Zolner’s empire?

The answer came in a contrite wire from Dashwood.

“Couple of prohibition dicks asking to see you, Isaac,” said Texas Walt.

Bell looked up from the sandwiches he was sharing at the kitchen chopping block with Leon Randolph, the Texas Walt’s Roadhouse cook whom he knew from the days Leon had cooked on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe’s Overland Limited.

“How did they know to find me here?”

“I wondered, too. I persuaded them to leave their artillery with the hatcheck.”

The bar was empty at this hour but for a bartender who was polishing a sawed-off shotgun.

Bell’s stern features darkened with such anger when he recognized the Volstead agents that Texas Walt’s hands would have strayed toward his Colts if the bartender didn’t already have them covered.

“We got to talk, Mr. Bell.”

Tom Clayton and Ed Ellis, the former Protective Services house detectives Bell had fired from the Hotel Gotham, looked prosperous. Their cheeks were pink from the barbershop, their hair slick. They wore signet rings on their fingers and remained somewhat handsome, despite imperfectly healed broken noses.

“We’ve already bribed your superiors,” Bell answered coldly.

“We know,” Ed Ellis said. “Bureau chief told us Texas Walt’s is hands-off.”

“It should be for what it cost us. Did you inform your chief that we’re Van Dorns?”

“No!” cried Clayton.

“We wouldn’t squeal on you!” said Ellis.

“Why not?”

“We don’t want to gum up your case.”

“Mighty big of you,” Bell said, more than a little puzzled.

“Can we talk in private?” asked Clayton.

“How’d you happen to land in Detroit?”

Clayton ducked his head.

Ellis rubbed his nose. “We knew we weren’t welcome in New York anymore.”

Clayton immediately said, “Hey, no hard feelings, Mr. Bell. We got what we deserved.”

“We just thank God they didn’t kill that little kid.”

“Detroit,” said Bell. “I asked how did you two end up in Detroit?”

“We figured the Detroit Prohibition Bureau had to be a gold mine, with all the booze coming from Canada.”

“Came out to wangle jobs,” said Clayton, and Ellis explained matter-of-factly, “Government doesn’t pay much, but the salary’s only a start, if you know what we mean.”

“You mean graft,” said Bell. “Hush money, payoffs, protection.”

“We ain’t lying to you.”

But their story didn’t add up. Congress had organized the Prohibition Bureau to be exempt from Civil Service regulations. As a result, its system of hiring agents was completely corrupt, and the bureau was hobbled by cronyism, nepotism, and patronage.

“How did you manage Volstead jobs? Nobody gets in the bureau without some bigwig pulling wires.”

“We know a bigwig,” said Ellis.

Clayton explained. “A Michigan politician staying at the Gotham was getting in a jam with his missus over a manicure girl.”

“We fixed it for him — arranged for a onetime gift — and he was mighty grateful. ‘If you boys ever need anything in Detroit, look me up.’”

“We looked him up.”

“Presto!” said Ellis and patted his badge.

Isaac Bell turned to Walt Hatfield. “I can handle them.”

The bartender put away his shotgun.

Bell took Clayton and Ellis to the cellar where he had interrogated Tony. “It better be good, boys. I’m in no mood to play.” Which was putting it mildly. Harry Warren was dead, and Marat Zolner was getting stronger every day.

Clayton and Ellis exchanged significant looks. They nudged each other. Then they chorused, “We heard you’re looking for a tunnel.”

28

“We can help you.”

“Where did you hear we’re looking for it?” asked Bell.

“Everybody knows the Van Dorns have a new office down by the tracks,” said Clayton.

“Hoods and cops wonder what you’re up to,” said Ellis.

“They heard you’re asking about the tunnel.”

“It sort of happens,” said Ellis. “Word gets around.”

“Questions raise questions,” Bell snapped. “Go on!”

“Our bosses at the bureau caught wind of the tunnel, too. They’re hunting night and day. They reckon it’ll be worth a fortune in protection.”

“And they’re worried you’ll get there first,” said Ellis.

Clayton said, “Me and Ed knew they wouldn’t share it with us — they hog the big payoffs — so me and him did a little snooping on our own. Thinking maybe we’d get there first. We heard the tunnel guys drowned a bunch of Eye-talians working on it. They weren’t hoods, just some bricklayers and stonemasons.”

“Murdered ’em because they knew where it was,” said Ellis.

“It didn’t seem right.”

“Making us think that maybe getting rich off Prohibition isn’t completely right either,” said Ellis.

Bell stared hard at them, wanting to believe that they had stumbled onto valuable information but not clear about their motives. They gazed back, wide-eyed and guileless, and Bell recalled, with growing excitement, that a prison chaplain once told him that he was often surprised by the particular event that shunted a sinner to a righteous path.

“Do you know where the tunnel is?” he asked.

“Pretty fair idea,” said Clayton.

“Downriver,” said Ellis. “It starts on Fighting Island.”

“Comes up under a boathouse in Ecorse.”

This sounded pretty good, thought Bell. Fighting Island was logical — a large, empty mid-river island on the Canada side of the international boundary. Ecorse on the United States side was a lawless, wide-open town next door to Detroit with elected officials and cops in the bootleggers’ pockets.

“Do you know where the boathouse is?”

“Got some good hunches,” said Ellis.

Bell said, “There are two hundred boathouses on the Ecorse waterfront and dozens of slips.”

“Gotta be near the creek,” said Clayton, narrowing the location considerably.

“Where’d your hunches come from?”

“Heard our boss talking.”

“Any theories who dug it?”

“The boss thought Polacks started digging it. Polacks from Poletown. Started in Ecorse. Then Eye-talians pushed ’em out. Then there was talk of Russians.”

“Russians?” asked Bell, keeping his own information to himself. “Where did Russians come from?”

“Could be talk, but there’s thousands of foreigners in Detroit.”

“Where does your boss stand on this?”

Clayton’s answer suggested a second motive for their conversion: a healthy desire to seek shelter in Fort Van Dorn. “He died yesterday, killed crossing Michigan Avenue.”

“Hit-and-run. Could have been a Ford. Could have been a Dodge.”

Isaac Bell extended his hand. “Welcome back, boys. You’re reinstated. On probation, providing you keep your noses clean.”

“Oh, we will, Mr. Bell.”

“Thanks, Mr. Bell.”

“Should we quit our government jobs?”

“Stay at them. I’d like nothing better than a couple of good men inside the Prohibition Bureau.”

Neither Abe Weintraub, who was only five and a half feet tall, nor Marat Zolner could stand erect in the Ecorse end of the Comintern’s tunnel under the Detroit River. The short, newly dug connecting section was wet, dimly lit, and had a very low ceiling. Water seeped through cracks in the bricks and sandbags and accumulated in a trench between the rails on which rolled eight-foot flatcars stacked with whisky cases.

Pumps on Fighting Island, two thousand feet away, emptied the trench when it filled. The pumps, a dynamo for the lights, and the flatcars were housed in a ferry terminal under construction on the island. There was no ferry, no plans for one, but there were various city of La Salle building permits for the terminal, and the fiction provided a ruse for the machinery.

The main tunnel, discovered by Polish gangsters who then dug the Ecorse connector, was a partially built railroad bore. It was much bigger, better lit, and comparatively dry, a high-crowned cast-iron tube that had been sealed shut and abandoned decades ago when Ecorse was a tiny village and Fighting Island, then as now, consisted of fifteen hundred acres of deserted swampy lowland. The curving ceiling was so high that it felt more like a room than a passage.

Zolner had feared, at first, that the low, cramped, hundred-foot connector between the abandoned tunnel and the Ecorse boathouse shaft would be a choke point. But then he had seen an unusual opportunity offered by the big railroad section — a secret, secure under-river warehouse where he could stash cases by the carload. It already contained a huge stockpile of liquor worth millions, and they were packing in more every day. The amount that he chose to funnel through the choke point would control the American liquor market, raising and lowering the price by adjusting supply.

Only yesterday, when he caught wind that the River Gang had successfully landed ten thousand cases of a whisky labeled “Canadian Club” in Detroit, Zolner had immediately released ten thousand cases from the tunnel. Before the River Gang could sell theirs, Abe Weintraub’s distributors hit the streets with the same whisky at half the price. Bankruptcy would loom over a legitimate business. In the hooch trade it meant gunplay. The Purples won the shoot-outs with a Thomas .45 loaned by the Comintern.

Next week, carefully planned hijackings — scheduled to coincide with Volstead raids conducted by bribed agents — would squeeze supply. Zolner would sell more whisky from the tunnel at double the price. Pure capitalism, he joked to Weintraub. Worse than Karl Marx had ever dreamed.

He allowed no one but his own trusted agents near the Detroit side of the tunnel now that it was finished and the last workers executed. The sole exception to the ban was Admiral Abe. Not even Weintraub’s bodyguards were allowed near. By now, of course, Weintraub trusted him, even loved him, for the belief had sunk into his savage, one-track brain that Marat Zolner was not only making him rich and powerful but needed him to fend off the other gangs and protect the tunnel.

“Excellent town to hide a hooch tunnel.”

Ecorse also looked to Isaac Bell like a fine place to lam it from the cops.

He was piloting his long green Phaeton through the clogged streets of the cabaret section known as the Half Mile of Hell. No one would notice strangers and newcomers, not with thousands flooding in nightly to drink and careen about. Thousands from Detroit and the suburbs got drunk in the ramshackle cabarets, played roulette, blackjack, and craps in gambling parlors, and celebrated in the dance halls and brothels that had sprung to life with Prohibition.

Booze was plentiful and cheap. Steel mills and chemical plants had grown to supply the booming motor factories, and the customers had money to burn. Those who arrived sober quickly remedied their condition and thronged the streets all night. It was a good town to be a gangster and not a bad town for private detectives searching for a tunnel.

If the fancy Cadillac, the pistol bulge in his suit coat, and the Borsalino dragged over his eyes left any doubt Isaac Bell was a bootlegger, the sight of his bodyguards erased it. Scar-faced Ed Tobin rode shotgun, broken-nosed Clayton and Ellis glowered in the backseat. In the unlikely event they were recognized as Prohibition agents, they would not be the first bureau officials to accept freelance employment from a bootlegger who needed protection while prospecting for new opportunities or stalking rivals.

Bell turned onto a street that paralleled the river. The air reeked of mud, beer, and whisky. To his right, every building had a bar on the ground floor. The bars to his left occupied the backs of boathouses that extended from the Ecorse riverbank out over deep water. The tall detective and his men stalked into several. Each had a bar selling every known brand of whisky and gin, each had a free lunch like the old pre-Prohibition saloons, and each had plenty of scantily dressed women livening the atmosphere.

Bell spotted a bar on the waterside that was a bit darker than the others. Drawing closer, he noticed that the people lurching about the sidewalk were giving it a wide berth to avoid the broad-shouldered doormen who were blocking the entrance.

Bell said, “Let’s see what makes them unfriendly,” and led the way.

The doormen appraised the four men coming at them and reached inside their coats. Bell and Tobin seized their arms before they could pull guns and passed them back to Clayton and Ellis, who subdued them quickly. Bell pushed through the doors.

It was quiet inside, the bar empty. The bartender reached under it, then raised his hands over his head and gaped down the barrel of the Browning that materialized in Bell’s hand. The man looked both frightened and resigned, as if he expected something like this would be happening soon.

“What do you want?”

“Show us your cellar,” said Bell.

“Cellar? What cellar? It’s a boathouse.”

“We’d like to see it anyway.”

“Buddy, I’m telling you the truth.”

“I want to see why this is the only bar on the street that has no customers. Open that trapdoor.”

The bartender pulled open the trapdoor. There was no cellar, only a short ladder that descended to the mud, and no shaft to a tunnel.

They walked through the barroom toward the river and stepped out on a landing. Hidden in the shadows, Bell saw similar landings to the left and right. Suddenly, a man stepped to the end of the dock next door and swung a lantern like a brakeman signaling a locomotive engineer. Then a lightbulb flashed on and off in the second-floor windows. They were signaling the coast was clear of cops and Prohibition officers, Bell realized, as a motorboat towed a barge in from the dark river and tied up at the dock. Two boatmen unloaded quickly. Two came out from their boathouse and ran the cases inside, and the boat towed the empty barge away. A bigger operation commenced on the other side, where a door opened in a boathouse, a deep-laden speedboat slipped in, and the door shut.

Tobin muttered to Bell, “Legitimate whisky haulers, no tunnel.”

Bell went in and took the bartender aside. “Take it easy. We have no more business here.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Bell reached into his pocket and pulled out a fat roll of hundred-dollar bills. “But I have a question. I’m curious about something. If you could help me out, I would greatly appreciate it.”

“Maybe I can help,” the bartender said cautiously. “Depends. What do you want to know?”

“Business is booming up and down the street. Why does this one joint have those hard-boiled boys keeping out the customers?”

“The boss got shot. We don’t know what’s going on.”

“Shot over what?”

“Purple Gang cut the price of Canadian Club in half. Knocked my boss right out of the market. He and his boys caught up with them on Michigan Grand. Before you know it, there’s gunplay. You ever hear of a submachine gun?”

“It rings a bell.”

“The Purples had one.”

29

The Van Dorns piled back in the Phaeton and kept hunting. They burst into two more unusually quiet bars. One was deserted. The other had a woman waiting anxiously for a husband who had yet to return from a whisky run. In neither did they find a shaft to a tunnel.

The first red streaks of dawn gleamed across the river. Bell called it a night.

“Beginning to think it isn’t here,” said Tobin.

Clayton and Ellis looked crestfallen. “Hope we didn’t give you a bum steer, Mr. Bell.”

“Grab some sleep, boys. We’ll try again tomorrow night.”

Clayton and Ellis went back to their hotel.

Bell and Tobin returned to Fort Van Dorn. Tobin climbed the stairs to the dormitory where Bell had ordered his detectives to sleep so he didn’t have to worry about them being ambushed in hotels. Bell checked the teleprinter. He found a wire from Grady Forrer.

Bell boiled water and ground coffee beans while the operators put through the long-distance line. Submachine guns most likely meant Comintern. But why would the Comintern cut the price of booze?

The operator called back. “Ringing, sir.”

Grady answered with a wide-awake, “Isaac, you will love this.”

“What’s up?”

“But first, some background to put it in perspective. Before I walk you through ancient railroad history.”

Isaac Bell stifled a yawn and a groan. The night owl Grady was in one of his talkative moods. But the Van Dorn Research Department was arguably the detective agency’s greatest asset.

“Go right ahead. Take your time.”

“Thirty years ago, American railroads had pretty much overcome the insurmountable engineering challenges that used to impede construction. Advances in grading, bridge building, tunneling, and locomotive design meant they could build almost anywhere they pleased. The main obstacle to building new railroads was other railroads competing for the same markets. Do you understand?”

“No crystal was ever clearer, Grady.”

“You remember your old friend Osgood Hennessy?”

“Railroad tycoon,” said Bell, “who happens to be our mutual friend Archie Abbott’s father-in-law. Go on, please.”

“Thirty years ago, way back in 1891, Osgood Hennessy tried to organize another transcontinental railroad by connecting lines he owned east of Chicago to his Great Northern Railway west of Minneapolis. But rival railroads, which had corrupted even more Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota legislators, governors, and judges than Hennessy had, blocked him. He could neither lay new track between Chicago and Minneapolis nor gain a controlling interest of an existing line. But Old Man Hennessy, you may recall, was unstoppable.”

“Like a combination Brahma bull and Consolidated locomotive.”

“So Hennessy devised a scheme to connect Chicago to Minneapolis by a new route via Detroit.”

“Last time I looked at a map,” said Bell, “Detroit was east of Chicago.”

“Bear with me, Isaac. Stranger railroads were built in the ’90s; all sorts of monkey tricks to sell stock. But this was a real one, if roundabout. Hennessy surveyed a line from Minneapolis to Duluth, then up the shore of Lake Superior to Port Arthur and onto the Canadian Pacific Railroad at Port Arthur and around the top of Superior and Lake Huron and down through Ontario to Windsor, where it would connect with the New York Central.”

“What would the New York Central get out of that arrangement? The Vanderbilts hated Hennessy.”

“They would get access to the tunnel to Detroit.”

“What tunnel?”

“The tunnel Hennessy was excavating under the Detroit River.”

“There’s only one rail tunnel under the Detroit River and it wasn’t built until 1910.”

“Hennessy started his twenty years earlier.”

“He did?”

“He laid a two-thousand-foot cast-iron tube, using the same Beach shield compressed-air method as they did for the Saint Clair Tunnel.”

“First? Ahead of the rest of the line?”

“First off, he commissioned a geological survey for the tunnel. Then he went straight to work on it. Probably wanted to be sure that he could build the hardest part of the line before he committed to the rest.”

Bell said, “I remember when he built the Cascades Cutoff. He bridged Cascade Canyon first, way ahead of the line. ‘Speed,’ he used to say. ‘It’s all about speed.’ Why doesn’t anybody know about this tunnel?”

“Hennessy had to keep it secret from his enemies or they’d have blocked him in the Michigan State House. He tunneled clandestinely — under the table, so to speak. Which was why he dug from the Canadian side… on Fighting Island.”

“Fighting Island?” Bell put down his coffee.

“The Canadians were glad to keep mum. The scheme would boost their railroads. Plus Hennessy bought the shield and all of his machinery and cast iron from the same Canadian factories that supplied the Saint Clair job.”

“Fighting Island to where?”

“Ecorse.”

“Grady, are you sure?”

“All the main lines pass close to Ecorse. Ecorse was the ideal place to connect.”

“So where is it?”

“Abandoned. The scheme collapsed and Hennessy cut his losses — stopped work just short of Ecorse.”

“Is it still there?”

“It must be. He’d have sealed it up, having paid for it, hoping to finish it sometime in the future. But it strikes me that if some smart bootlegger found out, he might have finished the last hundred feet or so and had himself a hooch tunnel from Fighting Island to Detroit.”

“So this would be a much bigger tunnel than something hacked out with shovel and pick.”

“Bigger? I’ll say. Hennessy’s section has room for a locomotive, tender, caboose, and twenty-five railcars.”

“Grady, you are a genius.”

Bell heard a sharp clang on the telephone line. Grady said, “I am raising a glass to that thought. Hope it helps.”

“Wait! Find me a map. Somewhere must be engineers’ plans and surveys.”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? I put it on the night train. You’ll have it this morning.”

Bell hired a surveyor. The surveyor confirmed with his transit what already looked likely to the naked eye. The jumping-off point indicated on Osgood Hennessy’s original tunnel drawings was beneath a large wooden building under construction on Fighting Island directly across from Ecorse. Inquiries in Canada revealed it was to be a ferry terminal, which seemed odd for an island peopled by a handful of recluses. The mystery was cleared up when the Van Dorns discovered that the company building the terminal had also applied for building permits to erect a Ferris wheel and dance pavilion for a mid-river summer resort.

“Maybe,” said Bell.

Plotting where the tunnel would emerge in Ecorse would have been a simple matter of perching the surveyor on the half-built terminal and pointing his transit across the water at the compass angle projected on Hennessy’s map. But binoculars showed the building site was fenced off. Riflemen were guarding the high wooden wall, confirmation that the tunnel started under the terminal.

Bell presented his New York Yacht Club credentials to gain admission to the Detroit Yacht Club. He bought a river chart and rented two Gar Wood speedboats. He made one a guard boat, manned by Tobin, Clayton, and Ellis, heavily armed, and took the surveyor with him downstream in the other.

“You’ll have to be quick,” he told the surveyor. “We don’t want to be noticed by customs or hijackers.”

Nearing Ecorse, Bell throttled back and disengaged the propellers to let the boat drift on the current while the surveyor sighted the terminal. He was quick.

“X marks the spot, Mr. Bell. The original tunnel is directly under us now.”

Bell engaged the engines in reverse to hold the boat against the current. The surveyor whipped his transit one hundred eighty degrees to pinpoint where on the Ecorse waterfront the tunnel would emerge, provided the last section continued in a straight line.

“That red boathouse, Mr. Bell, if the extension is in-line with the original.”

Bell noted that the chart showed a water depth of thirty feet. He wondered how deeply the crown of the tunnel was buried under the river bottom. A way to attack Marat Zolner was taking shape in his mind. It was instigated by the bartender’s tale of his boss getting shot. Submachine guns almost certainly indicated the Comintern had a hand in it. And if they did, he was beginning to realize why they would cut the price of booze in half.

Bell headed downriver, waited for dusk, and went back to the spot between the ferry terminal and the red boathouse. Idling the engines to keep the boat in place, he checked their position relative to the two structures. Then he took compass bearings on a light atop the red boathouse and bearings on prominent lights up and down the river. Returning to this precise spot tomorrow night would be a simple matter of lining up the lights.

30

James Dashwood returned to Detroit with more bad news. He had come within sixty seconds of catching up with Fern Hawley — one minute too late to stop her chartered flying boat from taking off from Miami.

“Florida is a good place to hide if you’re as rich as she is. She could be in Palm Beach or the Florida Keys, or Havana, Cuba, or Bimini or Nassau or any other islands of The Bahamas. Or she could have rendezvoused with a yacht at sea. I put the word out to our various people and decided I’d be more useful back in Detroit.”

Bell said, “Maybe Nassau — where the booze tanker is headed. In which case, Pauline will deal with her.”

“Maybe I should go down and look out for Pauline?”

“Pauline looks out for herself. Do you remember the spy who was sabotaging the Navy’s battleships?”

Dashwood grinned. “I remember trying to convince his enormous bodyguard that I was an itinerant temperance orator, not a detective.”

Bell said, “Admiral Falconer showed me experiments in a test caisson where armor experts simulated torpedo attacks to measure the impact of explosions underwater. Torpedoes were coming into their own just as the science boys began to understand what made them so deadly.”

Blast energy from mines and torpedoes was terrifically amplified and concentrated underwater. By the middle of the war, depth charges were sinking submarines, which gave Bell an idea how to deal with the tunnel and everything in it.

“Round up four cases of dynamite.”

Bell wired Grady Forrer for more information from the geological survey that Osgood Hennessy had commissioned for his tunnel.

Bell had decreed that gangland Detroit was too dangerous for even a fortified Van Dorn field office to employ apprentices, so he was forced to press tough Protective Services operatives into apprentice tasks. “Run to the library. Look in the 1891 issues of Harper’s Weekly for an article about the Saint Clair River Tunnel.”

“Library?”

“You can count on Harper’s for a rundown on the big engineering feats. 1891. The librarian will help you find it.”

“When?”

“Now! On the jump!”

The broad-shouldered house dick lumbered off, scratching his head.

Grady wired back:

“Good!”

But when the Protective Services op returned with the Harper’s article about the St. Clair Tunnel, Bell ran into a snag he hadn’t considered. The cast-iron walls of the St. Clair Tunnel were two inches thick, which would make it immensely strong. Hennessy’s abandoned tunnel had been built of similar cast-iron segments.

Stymied, and hoping to see the problem from another, more productive angle, Bell put it to Dashwood in the starkest terms. “We can’t count on explosives breaching the main tunnel. They will easily destroy the connector. But if the connector collapses too far from the main tunnel, the debris will seal it before the water reaches the main tunnel. To guarantee breaching the main tunnel and destroying the Comintern’s stockpile, we have to explode the dynamite very near the joint where the tunnels connect.”

Dashwood asked, “Why don’t we just raid the tunnel? That will shut it.”

“It won’t stay shut long,” said Bell. “The cops and courts are for sale on both sides of the river. They’ll put pictures in the papers of a prosecutor swinging an ax at a case of whisky. But hush money will keep that booze safe where it is. Zolner and his partners will lay low ’til the politicians are done demanding another ‘drive’ against liquor, then back to business — unless we flood the tunnel and destroy the Comintern’s stockpile. I told Mr. Van Dorn, and I’ll tell you: I will not settle for bloodying his nose this time. I’m going to drive Marat Zolner out of Detroit.”

“Where do you think he’ll go?”

Bell answered, “Where do I think? Listen.”

He sat at the private-wire Morse key and tapped out a message to New York.

“We have to stop him from setting up business the way he’s doing here in Detroit and back in New York.”

“What if he goes to The Bahamas?” Dashwood asked.

“He won’t. He has no reason to go to Nassau. Nassau is like Canada, a relatively safe base for legal liquor. Florida is lawless, an import-and-distribution center like Detroit and New York where he can fight to expand and take over.”

Bell gave Dashwood a cold smile and added, “If for some reason he does go to Nassau, Nassau is three hours from Miami by fast boat. And Marion is going to be one fast boat.”

He wired Grady again.

Grady telephoned long-distance.

“Too complicated for the wire. I found handwritten engineers’ notes on the survey that suggest they stopped excavating just where the bank began to slope upward.”

Bell spread open his Detroit River chart. “There’s a deep channel down the middle, nearer to Fighting Island, and then a narrower one, the Wyandotte Channel, that hugs the Ecorse shore.”

“They must have dredged it deeper since the survey. There’s no channel mentioned.”

“It hugs the shore,” said Bell. “The dredge would have struck the crown of the tunnel probably, so just beyond the current Wyandotte Channel is where they must have stopped.”

He improvised calipers with two fingers and compared the distance to the chart’s scale.

Grady said, “The other reason I telephoned…”

“What?” Bell was distracted. It wasn’t so much the headache — they were tapering off, and the plague of double vision had pretty much ended. He was puzzling some way to drop his improvised depth charge exactly one hundred feet offshore. “What did you say, Grady?”

“The Research Department is assembling a complete Prohibition file — an up-to-date encyclopedia of bootleggers, gangsters, rumrunners, et cetera, with curriculum vitae, photographs, fingerprints.”

“Good job. That’ll show the Justice Department what we can do.”

“I thought I’d pop down to The Bahamas. Get the latest on the Nassau import-export racket. What do you think?”

“I think you’d get in Pauline’s way.”

“Oh, that’s right, she’s down there,” Grady said innocently. “Is she all right on her own?”

“Pauline is quite all right on her own… Actually, you raise a good point. She could use a trustworthy runner. Tell you what, send young Somers to Nassau. I’ll cable Pauline.”

Then Bell called for the Protective Services op, whom he had sent earlier to the library.

“Go buy a rope.”

“How long?”

“One hundred four feet.”

“One hundred four?”

“The four’s for a loop. Watch carefully how they measure.”

Jack Payne, a Van Dorn detective on loan from the Cleveland field office, had been a combat engineer in the trenches during the war. Working in an empty backwater slip Bell located near the Detroit Yacht Club, Payne rigged the dynamite with waterproof fuses and detonators and screwed twenty pounds of old horseshoes to each of the forty-pound cases so they would sink fast.

After dark, they tied the cases into one heavy packet perched on the stern of one of the Gar Wood speedboats.

“Just to review your scheme, Mr. Bell,” said Detective Payne, “keep in mind that that shock wave will go up as well as down. The moment you drop these crates, jam your throttles and get away from there as fast as you can.”

“The Bureau chief found the tunnel,” reported Ellis and Clayton, arriving winded at Fort Van Dorn.

“Sorry, Mr. Bell. They’re dickering the cost of protection right now.”

Isaac Bell’s response was a fathomless smile.

“Tell me all about it.”

“They somehow connected with the mayor of the city of La Salle and—”

Bell cut him off. “I don’t care how. What can you tell me about the tunnel that you didn’t know before?”

“It’s got more booze in it than we thought. A lot more.”

“Guards?”

“Armies. Tons of them at the ferry terminal, tons in Ecorse. Every building around that boathouse is theirs. Including the second one we raided.”

“How many guards are in the tunnel?”

“They don’t let anyone in the tunnel.”

Isaac Bell said, “Good. I was a little concerned about not-so-innocent innocent bystanders.” He raised his voice so the others could hear. “O.K., gents, we’re doing it now.”

Isaac Bell let Ed Tobin drive the dynamite boat. In the dark, a son of Staten Island coal pirates would make a shrewder helmsman than a scion of Boston bankers. The black water seemed to swallow distance. Channel lights, shore lights, and boat lights could be confusing. And gauging position required a smuggler’s eye. Bell stood by their improvised depth charge with the hundred-four-foot rope coiled in his hands.

Shadowed by the guard boat, they raced down the Detroit River. As Ecorse came into view, Tobin lined up the boathouse, shore, and ferry terminal lights. He cut his throttles abruptly and swerved toward the row of boathouses that thrust out from the bank. Guards heard them coming and hurried out on their docks.

Twenty feet from the red boathouse dock, Tobin engaged his propellers in reverse, spun his helm, and raced his engines. The Gar Wood stopped abruptly, pivoted ninety degrees, and thundered backwards toward the dock pilings.

Isaac Bell jumped up on the stern and braced a boot on the dynamite. Ed switched his propellers forward again and rammed his throttles. The boat stopped six inches from a piling. Bell looped the rope around it and knotted the fastest bowline he had ever tied.

“Go!”

Ed Tobin eased forward, slowly paying out the rope. Bell let it slide loosely through his hands and watched for the bitter end. He heard men on the docks shouting for lights.

“Stop!” he called to Tobin.

They were precisely one hundred feet from the dock, over the joint between the two tunnels. Suddenly, searchlights glared down from boathouse roofs. Isaac Bell cut the ropes holding the dynamite. They started shooting.

Bell flicked a flame from an Austrian cigarette lighter made of a rifle cartridge that Pauline Grandzau had given him. Thompson submachine guns sprayed their once seen, never forgotten red flashes. Bullets whipped past, fanning his face and splintering the wooden crates. A bullet blew out the flame.

Bell heard the guard boat’s engines and the measured crack of a rifle as Dashwood coolly returned the submachine-gun fire. Bell flicked the lighter again and again, got it going, and touched the blue apex of the flame to the waterproof fuse. The fuse caught with a dazzling burst of sparks. He planted both feet and heaved his shoulder against the crates.

One hundred sixty pounds of dynamite slid off the back of the boat and sank like a stone.

“Go!” he shouted to Ed Tobin.

Ed Tobin rammed his throttles full ahead. The Gar Wood leaped forward. It had traveled barely fifty feet when the dynamite exploded with a muffled, violent thud. A geyser of water shot in the air beside the boat. A shock wave blasted after it, a tremendous eruption that splintered the hull and hurled the Van Dorn detectives into the river.

Inside the tunnel, a half-mile rail line had been converted to an immensely long warehouse. Two endless rows of twelve-bottle crates of whisky were stacked from the rails to the curving crown of the tunnel’s ceiling. Between the stacks, which stretched from Fighting Island almost to Ecorse, was a narrow corridor. It was twenty feet high but only three feet wide, barely wide enough for one man at time.

River water rammed into this corridor like a rectangular piston. The water filled the space between the crates on either side, the ceiling above, and the wooden railroad ties below. Marat Zolner and Abe Weintraub ran for their lives.

Weintraub was in the lead.

Zolner was catching up fast, his long legs propelling him twice the length of the shorter man’s steps. The lights — bare bulbs hanging overhead and powered by the dynamo on Fighting Island — flickered, and the animal fear that made him flee exploded into human terror. As horrific as the fate thundering after him was, it would be a million times worse in the dark.

A noise louder than the water chased them, the high-pitched clangor of breaking glass. The river was splintering crates and smashing bottles by the tens of thousands. The water stank of whisky.

Ahead, high in the flickering lights, Zolner saw the walls of crates begin to move. The river had overtaken and flanked them. Squeezed between the tunnel walls and the stacks, the water toppled the highest crates. They fell from both sides into the narrow corridor, strewn like boulders by a mountain landslide, and blocked the corridor. Weintraub scampered up the shifting pile of wood and glass like an ape, racing desperately for the top of the heap, where a sliver of light shone in the last three-foot-wide, two-foot-high opening.

Zolner scrambled after him. The river caught up. Water slammed into his back and hurled him toward the ceiling. Weintraub reached the opening and started to squirm through. Zolner was suddenly in water up to his neck. Weintraub’s thick torso was blocking the space. Zolner grabbed his foot. He braced his own feet on the tumbled stack, pulled with all his might, yanked the gangster out of the opening, and dived through it himself.

Weintraub tried to follow. He got stuck and let out a terrified roar: “Help me!”

He was stopping the water like a cork in a bottle, and if Zolner managed to pull him out, they would both drown. He ran to the shaft ladder, which was fixed to the cast-iron wall at the end of the tunnel. Mounting the iron rungs, he looked back.

The river smashed through the barrier. Abe Weintraub flew to the end of the tunnel, hurled on a crest of water and broken crates that dashed him against the cast-iron wall. The water rose to Zolner’s chest. He kicked loose from it and climbed up the shaft into the night. Across the river, he saw a motorboat’s searchlight probing the dark like a desperate finger.

“Isaac!”

“Mr. Bell!”

“Ed! Ed Tobin. Where are you?”

In the searchlight glare, the Van Dorns on the guard boat saw the shattered speedboat half sunk on its side. It was turning, slowly spinning, picking up speed, spinning faster and faster, as it was sucked into a huge whirlpool. A crater was spinning in the river, a gigantic hole left by a million tons of water plunging into the tunnel.

“Isaac!”

“Here!” Bell shouted. “Behind you!” The river current had helped him and Tobin swim away from the wreckage. Now the vortex was drawing them back.

The guard boat roared alongside them. Strong arms hauled them out of the water, drenched but unhurt, just as the last of the speedboat was sucked under.

Isaac Bell was grinning ear to ear.

“They’ll never invite me back to that yacht club.”