The Bootlegger

31

Palm trees rustled, the sea was green, and the sky a fine blue. Iced daiquiris frosted their glasses, the finishing touch, like painter’s varnish, on a portrait of a dreamy afternoon in tropical Nassau.

Out of nowhere, the dream melted into a detective’s nightmare.

Pauline Grandzau had seen to every detail to disguise herself as a plucky businesswoman subtly battling the “no skirts” prejudice of the men in the liquor trade: She was awaiting a consignment of rye from the Glasgow company she represented; the market for Scotch was glutted, and Americans loved their rye; she had to make a deal with a buyer.

“Meantime, I’m talking up a storm to convince the buyers it’s coming soon and it will be the real McCoy, so they’ll bid up the price.”

“Are the buyers the rumrunners?”

“Exactly! They sail it up to the Row.”

Fern Hawley, seated across their little round cocktail table, seemed to swallow her story hook, line, and sinker. The Van Dorn detective, who was pretending to be a liquor agent, and Marat Zolner’s girlfriend, who was pretending to be a carefree American tourist, were going to be, in Fern’s own words, “great pals.”

They had climbed the lookout tower on the hotel’s roof, where liquor agents were watching the deep-blue sea for their ships, and admired Fern’s steam yacht, the biggest anchored in the turquoise harbor. Now on the patio under the royal palms, sharpers and hucksters, bankers and gangsters were bustling about overtime, and the daiquiris were flowing.

But, all of a sudden, just as Pauline eased Fern into a discussion of the liquor traffic — legal in the British colony, legal on the high seas, legal on Rum Row, illegal on the wrong side of the U.S. border — who should wander into the all-day, all-night party that Prohibition had made of the Lucerne Hotel than the only human being in all the British Bahamas who knew that she was a Van Dorn detective.

Joseph Van Dorn’s oldest friend, whom Isaac Bell had introduced her to at Bellevue Hospital, spotted her instantly and waved.

“Captain Novicki,” she blurted, jumping to her feet and trying to send signals with her eyes.

Dave Novicki churned toward their table, robust as a barrel of beer and guileless as a manatee.

She greeted him in a rush of words, hoping to contain him. “I’m so surprised to see you here, I thought you set sail already, may I introduce my new friend, Miss Fern Hawley of New York? She just landed in her yacht, you must have seen it in the harbor from your ship.” She took a breath and turned to Fern. “Captain Novicki commands a schooner that brings my import-export firm’s rum from, uhhm, Hispaniola, is it, Captain? Or will it be Jamaica next shipment?”

Novicki looked puzzled and about to speak, which could not possibly help.

Pauline stuck out her hand. Novicki took it, and she squeezed his horny paw as hard as she could, saying with a laugh she could only hope did not sound hysterical, “Or will you sail all the way to England to bring me some gin?”

Novicki looked down at her hand. Then he looked into her eyes.

Sea captains must be alert, she thought. And unusually observant. Surely—

He spoke at last.

“I’m not certain the old girl could sail as far as England, but I would risk it for you, my dear, if you’re hard-up for gin. In fact,” he added, warming to the fiction, “I would gladly sail her around the Horn to fetch you the wines of Chile or cross the Pacific for Japanese sake.”

With that, Novicki gave her hand a little squeeze, let go of it, and seized Fern’s. His sharp eyes roamed her beautiful face appreciatively, and when a surprised intake of breath from her revealed that he had her attention, he said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Hawley. What yacht did you arrive in?”

“Maya.”

“Yes, I saw her come in. Handsome steamer. Beats the newfangled diesels hands down. But may I caution you, if you’re discussing business deals with this young lady”—he clapped Pauline on the back—“hold tight to your fillings and count the spoons!”

“We’re only drinking daiquiris,” said Pauline. “This isn’t business. We just ran into each other down at the harbor.”

“I’m only a tourist,” said Fern. “Would you join us?”

Novicki looked like a man who very much wanted to while away the afternoon drinking daiquiris with two beautiful woman. Pauline shot him an eyeful of No, no, absolutely not!

“Thank you, Miss Hawley… Pauline. Nothing would delight me more. But I don’t like the look of that sky. I want deep water under my bottom, the sooner the better.”

He made his good-byes, choosing an instant when Fern turned to signal the waiter for refills to give Pauline a solemn grin.

Fern watched him churn away. “Did you notice what was going on with him?”

“What do you mean?”

“He was flirting with me.”

“Do you want me to call him back?”

Fern burst out laughing. “No! He’s way too old.”

“Are you sure?”

“O.K., I wouldn’t kick him out of bed. But, no, too late. He’s gone to his ship.”

Pauline shrugged. “All I know is, he’s the nicest rumrunner I’ve ever met. Most of them are pretty rough.” She took a sip from her glass.

Fern looked up through the palm fronds. “I don’t see what’s wrong with the sky, do you?”

“It looks wonderful,” said Pauline, “though it could be the daiquiris. Oh, mine’s getting empty again.”

“I already called the waiter. Here they come… What shall we drink to? New friends? I can’t believe how we just bumped into each other and, all of a sudden, we’re telling each other things like we’ve been friends forever.”

“To new friends and old friends,” said Pauline, clinking her glass against Fern’s. “And nice rumrunners.”

“I’ll leave the rumrunners to you. Bootleggers are more my style.”

“They’re rough, too, aren’t they?”

“Sometimes… Sometimes they’re real louses. Sometimes they’re the cat’s whiskers.”

“How do you tell them apart?”

Fern put down her drink and looked up at the sky. “You don’t. Until it’s too late.”

32

Isaac Bell inhaled the intoxicating mix of fresh paint, clean oil, and gasoline of a just launched, brand-new express cruiser. New she was, and beautiful, a sleek, ghostly gray that seemed to hover more than float on Biscayne Bay. He nudged her throttles and she got lively. He engaged the mufflers and she was suddenly silent.

A fast Prohibition Bureau boat pulled alongside and signaled him to stop. Bell waved good-bye. He cut out the mufflers and hit the throttles and left the revenuers bouncing on his thunderous wake.

He tore around Biscayne Bay, twirling her spoked wheel to cut figure eights past the hydroplane landings, the towering McAllister Hotel, draped in striped awnings, the Boat Club, and the Biscayne Boulevard finger piers, where the fleets of lumber schooners that supplied the building boom were unloading cypress and yellow pine. In the middle of the bay, off the Miami River, floated the pylons that marked the Motor Boat Race Course. Isaac Bell set an unofficial record around the three-mile circuit at sixty miles an hour.

Lynch & Harding had done themselves proud. She handled like a dream.

He circled a long passenger freighter from Baltimore that was transferring people to a harbor launch. A flying boat approached from the east. Bell raced alongside it as it landed. Then he opened her up and headed for the ocean, tearing under the causeway that linked downtown Miami to Miami Beach and pointing her razor-sharp bow at Government Cut at the south end of the bay. He blasted through the shipping channel at top speed and roared down the Atlantic Coast.

In the ocean swells, she felt big and fast and sturdy. Beyond the settlements, along shores thick with jungle broken repeatedly by the raw scars of clearance and construction, a dark boat shot from a mangrove swamp and chased after him. Bell slowed down and let the boat pull alongside. Three men wearing revolvers on their hips looked him over. Any doubts they were hijackers vanished when they reached for their weapons.

Bell tugged a lever conveniently located in the cockpit. A hatch popped open on the foredeck, and a Lewis gun swiveled up within easy reach. The hijackers raced back to their swamp.

Bell turned around and sped back past Government Cut and along the white sand of Miami Beach. He cut figure eights for the swimmers. Then he thundered back into Biscayne Bay and, having drawn the attention of half of Florida to Marion, he raced back to the dock.

A crowd of boatmen, tourists, and hotel guests had gathered. Bell landed in an explosive flurry of reversed engines, propeller wash, and flaming straight pipes.

“Wonder what you all are going to use that boat for?” drawled an onlooker with a snicker that everyone knew meant rum.

Isaac Bell said, “I’m going to get rich winning boat races.”

“That’s a good story for the Dries.”

“Want to bet? I’m calling out candidates.”

“Heck, who’d race you? That’s more airplane than boat.”

Bell said, “I heard about a big black boat whose owner thinks he’s hotter than jazz. We’ll see if he’s got the nerve to put his money where his mouth is.”

“Where is he?”

“Lying low,” Bell grinned, “since he heard I’m here. Fact is, I’ll pay a thousand dollars to anybody who tells me where to find him.”

“A thousand dollars?”

“Call it a finder’s fee. Call it a reward. I intend to call him out.”

“Show us the money.”

Isaac Bell pulled a roll from the pocket of his white duck trousers and flashed a thousand-dollar bill, common currency among top-notch Florida bootleggers. “Tell your friends,” he said. “Share the wealth.”

He tipped his visored skipper’s cap to the ladies and sauntered up the boardwalk to make a public show of lunch on the veranda while the word got around about the thousand. Before he got ten feet, he was waylaid by a beautiful blonde who was wearing a big hat and dark glasses and a white linen sheath dress that the sea breeze shaped to her trim figure.

Marat Zolner focused binoculars on the McAllister Hotel quay.

A long gray rum boat was tied alongside, sleek and muscular as a captured shark. Ten stories above Biscayne Bay, in a top-floor suite, he had watched her slice through Government Cut at sixty miles per hour, streak across the bay, and land just below. He had not been surprised to see Van Dorn Chief Investigator Isaac Bell vault out of her cockpit.

From razor bow to sturdy transom, the gray boat’s powerful lines were first cousin to Black Bird’s, realized by the same Lynch & Harding who had built his boat. And by now he knew that Isaac Bell was relentless.

The Comintern agent had no time for regrets. But for a moment he indulged in speculating what would have happened if he hadn’t shot Joseph Van Dorn. If not for that chance event — a twist of fate that the machine gunner he had shot on the Coast Guard cutter had not been an ordinary sailor — no one could have discovered his Comintern scheme until it was too late to stop him. Thanks to that twist of fate, Isaac Bell had thrown hurdles in his path, repeatedly, and showed no signs of going away.

The tall detective tipped the boat boys who tied his lines — lavishly, Zolner guessed by their bows and scrapes — then engaged the people hanging around the dock in banter. Suddenly, a girl took his arm. She was slim and blond but not his wife.

Zolner recalled that Marion Morgan Bell was taller. This girl was petite. He could not see much of her face under her hat and behind sunglasses, but she carried herself like a woman accustomed to being admired.

“What has caught your attention?” asked the woman who had summoned Zolner to the suite.

She was a Comintern courier, a forthright Italian Bolshevik who was sleeping with a man in Lenin’s inner circle and so trusted by Moscow that she could indulge in expensive hotels and speak her mind freely.

“Only a pretty girl.”

“I doubt that,” said the courier. “There is fury in your face. You look angry enough to kill.”

It seemed to Zolner that Bell and the girl were acquainted. Colleagues, he guessed by the familiar manner in which they faced each other. Maybe lovers, although he thought not. She was a colleague. Another Van Dorn detective.

“You misread my expression,” he told the courier. “I am happy enough to kill.”

“First things first, comrade. Your report.”

Couriers did not demand reports. Moscow had moved more quickly to replace Yuri Antipov than Zolner had predicted. The Italian woman with long black maiden’s hair and executioner’s eyes was his new overseer.

“One moment,” he said, snatching up her telephone without her permission. He gave the hotel operator the number of a speakeasy in a hotel on East Flagler and issued cryptic orders to the gangster who answered. Then he put down the telephone and asked Moscow’s woman, “Are you ready for my report?”

Isaac Bell was very surprised to see Pauline in Miami. She must have landed in the flying boat he had run beside.

“You made quite a spectacle of yourself,” she greeted him.

He said, “I don’t expect Marat Zolner to accept a challenge to race Black Bird. But a thousand-dollar finder’s fee ought to turn up someone who’s seen where he keeps her.”

“I hope you’ll take me for a ride.”

“We should not be seen together, Pauline. Zolner’s comrades could be watching.”

“I’m sorry. I should have cabled my report. It was foolish of me…” Her almost negligible German accent was suddenly evident. “But I just vanted to come. Last minute. An impulse…”

Bell had never seen her flustered before, even as a young girl. Nor had he ever seen her so beautiful. He realized, belatedly, that she had dressed with unusual care, even for her, applying lipstick with an artist’s hand. And she had changed her hair from the boyish bob he’d seen in New York to stylish marcel waves.

“How’d you make out with Fern?”

“Fern Hawley is deeply unhappy,” said Pauline. “It seems that Zolner has somehow disappointed her.”

“That’s what Marion said. A man had disappointed her.”

“Well, good for Marion.”

“Any clue as to how?”

“No. Whenever I approach that question, she closes the iron door.”

“What are our chances of turning her against him?”

“Mine are nil. You would have a better chance.”

“How do you reckon that?”

“She likes men. She likes good-looking men. And she likes men who stand out from the crowd. In fact, she thinks such men are her due.”

“I gather you don’t like her.”

Pauline recovered her smooth demeanor. “I didn’t say that. And I don’t mean to give that impression. She is a woman who has never had to do anything in her life. If circumstances ever forced her to, she might shine. She certainly wants to.”

“Go back to Nassau,” said Bell. “I’ll get out there as soon as I can.”

“She’s on her yacht. She could leave any minute.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Having wrecked, or at least slowed, Zolner’s Detroit operation, Isaac Bell knew that the clock was running. It was vital not to give the Comintern agent time to set up in Florida as he had in New York.

“All right,” Pauline said, briskly. “I’m off.”

“How are things working out with young Somers?”

“He’s a bright boy. I was comfortable leaving him in charge of the office.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Bell. “I thought you’d like him.”

Marat Zolner knew that Moscow would never accept the death of their new overseer so soon after Yuri’s. He could not kill her yet. He had no choice but to pretend to accept her authority. He said, “I can report that things are going swimmingly. Matters are in hand.”

“It does not look that way, to my eye. Nor to Moscow’s.”

“I will tell you what I told Yuri Antipov before he died. My scheme is the best strategy — the only strategy — to infiltrate the United States and subvert the government.”

“Moscow has come to understand that. Moscow agrees that America is a unique situation that requires a unique strategy.”

“Do they?” Zolner was amazed. “It sounds to me that certain comrades have been replaced.”

“That is not important. What is important is your failure to execute your strategy in Detroit.”

“A minor setback.”

“Minor? The loss of a liquor stockpile worth millions of dollars?”

His Canadian comrades had betrayed him.

“A regrettable loss,” Zolner admitted, “but replaceable.”

“And the drowning of your staunchest ally?”

There were no secrets.

He said, “There are plenty more where Weintraub came from. Detroit has no shortage of ambitious gangsters. He, too, is replaceable.”

Her next question came like a silken thrust of Yuri’s dagger. “And will you replace your stockbroker in New York?”

Zolner concealed his shock. He had underestimated the Comintern’s reach. It appeared that while he and Yuri had bombed Wall Street, some obscure branch of the Comintern had managed to infiltrate the stock exchange. Through an underpaid, envious clerk, was his first thought. But it could be higher up, inside a bank or brokerage house, through some privileged romantic “serving the cause” like Fern Hawley. Not Newtown Storms; there was not a romantic bone in the broker’s body. But someone with access to inside knowledge, in the finest Wall Street tradition.

He pretended he was bewildered.

“What are you talking about?”

“You have incurred enormous losses in the American stock market.”

“I salute you, comrade. I have no idea how you discovered it but your information is golden, if not a little out-of-date. The situation is temporary. Gains follow losses in the market. It is the nature of capitalism to—”

She cut him off.

“The loss of millions in liquor. The death of your staunchest ally in Detroit. Your stock market holdings all but wiped out. Please, comrade. Do you take us for fools? Nothing you’ve attempted has worked. How long before you’re beating on our door, begging for funding?”

Now it was relief, deep relief, that Zolner concealed. They did not know the truth behind the stock market losses. He said, “I don’t need a kopeck. I won’t ask for a kopeck.”

“I find that hard to believe. How will you save this situation?”

“Clear the decks and start over.”

“‘Decks’? What are these ‘decks’?”

“It’s an expression, comrade. It means that I will continue building our network as soon as I have cleared an obstacle out of my way.”

“Euphemisms are wasted on me, comrade. Who are you going to kill?”

“The one man making the obstacles.”

“Isaac Bell?”

Zolner laid on fulsome praise. “Your intelligence is golden, comrade.”

She was an idiot. Who else but Isaac Bell?

She said, “You have twenty-four hours.”

Zolner shook his head. “Absolutely not. I will not risk our mission by accepting an artificial deadline.”

“It’s not your deadline, comrade. It is the deadline Moscow has imposed on me.”

“For what?”

“To escort you home.”

“Home?”

“You’ve been recalled.”

33

When Marat Zolner drew himself up to his full height, the Italian courier thought to herself that the rumors about the ballet must be true. It was evident in the elegance of his stature that when he was a child somewhere in some benighted province of czarist Russia, Marat Zolner had indeed trained to be a dancer. Haughty as the aristocrats they both disdained and despised, he looked down his handsome nose at her and said, “Comrade, I know that the Comintern demands obedience.”

“It is well you remember.”

“Absolute and instant obedience makes us strong. Whether we obey out of faith in the revolution or out of loyalty to Russia — knowing that when we carry the fight abroad we keep the international bourgeoisie from invading while the Soviet is still recovering from the civil war — or out of fear.”

She said, “You may keep your motives to yourself.”

His shoulders sagged very slightly, and she fancied that she saw the spirit drain out of him. He turned to the window and stared out at the bay and the blue ocean beyond. He opened the window, lifting the sash with the grace that ornamented his every move, and she had the strangest feeling that he would rather step into the sky and fall ten stories to the beach than return to Moscow.

She said, “Surely you are not considering suicide.”

Marat Zolner turned back to her, thinking, Suicide? Why would I commit suicide? I have wealth, I have power, and I have enormous plans. These setbacks are temporary. The future is mine.

He said, “I am not coming with you.”

She raised her voice: “Gregor!”

A heavyset Russian almost as tall as Zolner pushed through the door from the adjoining suite. He held a Nagant revolver as if he knew how to use it. He pointed at Zolner’s shoulder and said in Russian, “Put your gun on the table, comrade.”

Zolner slowly opened his coat, pulled his automatic out of its holster by the butt, and laid it on the table. He feigned dismay, but surrendering the gun did not trouble him. He carried it mostly for show, preferring to fight in close.

The courier said, “He carries his blackjack in his left-hand hip pocket.”

“Put it on the table.”

He had no choice but to produce his blackjack and lay it beside the gun.

“Come closer,” said Gregor.

Marat Zolner knew the drill. He had cowed many a prisoner. Gregor would grab his arm in a powerful grip and smash his nose with the Nagant’s barrel. He stepped slowly closer, staring at the pistol as if mesmerized, right foot forward, left foot forward. Gregor drew the Nagant back slightly, winding up to strike. Right foot forward, left foot kicking toward the ceiling — a symphony of weight, momentum, balance — kicking higher, smashing Gregor’s jaw.

He caught the gun as it dropped, pressed it to the staggered man’s chest, and jerked the stiff trigger. The Nagant’s sealed cylinder made it much quieter than an ordinary revolver, and Gregor’s bulk further muffled the report.

The courier was as fearless as he. “Now what are you going to do?” she asked contemptuously.

“If I return home,” he answered, “I will return a hero.”

“Hero? You’ll spend the rest of your short life running from us and the American police.”

“They will blame his murder on you.”

“Who will believe that?”

“You shot your secret lover and committed suicide,” he said.

She tried to run.

Zolner bounded after her and caught her easily and threw her out the window he had opened.

Isaac Bell heard a woman shriek.

She was in the crowd on the dock gawking at his boat, and she was pointing a rigid arm up at the hotel. Bell saw a figure in the air beside the building, a woman streaming long black hair as she plummeted past the windows. Others were screaming before she landed on a third-floor balcony with a thud Bell could hear at the end of the dock. She bounced off a railing onto the veranda roof, tumbled the final two floors in a flurry of arms and legs, and flopped on the sand.

The wooden dock shook as thirty people ran to see the body.

Bell watched from the boat. A top-floor window was open, ten stories off the ground, seven above the balcony where the body first struck. No human being could have survived that fall.

“She came out backwards,” said a male voice from the water.

Bell looked down at a skiff with a big motor that had just tied up behind his transom. A middle-aged Floridian, browned and puckered by the powerful sun, was squinting up at him.

“You saw?”

“Yup. I just happened to be looking up at that moment and out she came. Backwards.”

“You should tell the police,” said Bell.

“Well, the police and I are not on speaking terms.”

“If you have evidence of foul play, you should report it.”

“There’s no law against falling backwards. Anyway, I don’t have time to talk to the cops. It’s you I come talking to.”

“About what?”

“My thousand dollars that I hear you’re paying to find that big black boat.”

34

Three days in Florida had convinced Isaac Bell that Miami was a boomtown of braggarts, boosters, and liars.

At least the fellow holding his hand up for the reward money was not among the majority of citizens who were new arrivals selling tales about imaginary pasts. His weathered face, canvas hat, ragged shirt, and his over-powered little skiff signified a lifelong fisherman and crabber who had a new career running Bimini whisky up the Florida rivers and bayous that he knew as well as the Darbees and Tobins knew New York Harbor.

“Did you see it?” asked Bell.

“Yup.”

“What does it look like?”

“It’s black.”

“What else?”

“It’s big.”

“So far, you haven’t said a thing I didn’t tell that crowd of folks on the dock.”

“It’s faster than greased lightning.”

“That’s a safe guess, since I told everyone I want to race it in this one.”

“It’s got a big old searchlight on front. Almost as big as yours.”

“Searchlights tend to go on this kind of boat. Does it have another one in back like mine?”

“Nope,” he said, and Bell got interested.

“What else?”

“Got a lot of motors.”

“How many?”

“Couldn’t quite tell. I knew it was three, but there could be another one. Like a spare, maybe. There’s something back there that could be a motor.”

“What’s your name?” asked Bell.

“Why you want to know?”

“I like to know the name of a fellow I hand a thousand dollars to. If it comes to that.”

“What’s my name?” He cast a wary eye at the hotel, where cops were shoving through the crowd around the fallen body. “You can call me Captain.”

“Tell me more, Captain.”

“At night, she shoots fire in the sky.”

“So does this one. Straight-piped Libertys. Where did you see it?”

“I answered a lot of questions, mister. But I don’t see no money.”

Bell leaned over the transom and stared him in the face. “You’ll see the money when I see the boat.”

Captain said, “He came by last night, and the night before that. You want to see him tonight?”

Three nights, Black Bird had set out for Bimini to buy a load of rye; three nights, she had captured other rumrunners instead before she was halfway there. Tonight she wouldn’t even leave the bay. Tonight she was going to war.

With Zolner at her helm and her engines muffled, she backed out of her hiding place between two of the dozens of five-masted lumber schooners that thrust their bowsprits over Biscayne Boulevard. The Comintern had purchased the ships, which were identical to the dozens that moored there, to use as floating liquor warehouses.

Paralleling the beach along the boulevard, slicing a quiet two miles through the dark, Black Bird motored south. She passed the McAllister Hotel, marked by a lighted sign on its roof, and turned into the narrow mouth of the Miami River.

Isaac Bell was thinking that “Captain” had sent him on a wild-goose chase.

He and Dashwood and Tobin had been waiting for hours in a hot, muggy, mosquito-infested freight-yard slip a quarter mile from the mouth of the river. Captain had led them here in his boat. After Bell had backed Marion into the slip, he had sent the rumrunner to the safety of the hotel dock — clutching a fifty-dollar down payment on his finder’s fee — in the likely event of gunplay.

There was occasional traffic on the river, even this late, an intermittent parade of fishing boats, small freighters, and cabin cruisers with singing drunks. Some of the freight boats were steamers, others were sailing schooners propelled in the narrow channel by auxiliary motors. The auxiliaries kept playing tricks on ears cocked for the muted rumble of Black Bird’s engines.

Then, all of a sudden, Bell heard her coming. No auxiliary motor could make such a noise. It was neither loud nor sharp but, like a threat of barely contained violence, the sound of suppressed strength that could be loosed any second.

“That’s her,” whispered Tobin. He was a few feet ahead of him on the foredeck, manning one of the Lewis guns. Dashwood was on the stern, fifty feet behind him, manning the other. Bell was in the cockpit, his boots resting lightly on the electric starters, one hand on the searchlight switches, the other on the horizontal bar that bridged all four throttles.

“Tell me when you see her,” Bell told Tobin, who had a better view down the river from his perch on the foredeck. Happily, the boat traffic had stopped for the moment.

She was moving very slowly.

Captain had claimed that he had seen her pass this slip. He had speculated she would hide in a boathouse on the new Seybold Canal, which served a development of homes where the owners moored steam yachts. He had not claimed to have seen her turn off the river into the canal, and, in fact, she could be heading for one of the factories or freight depots or warehouses that shared the banks of the little river with residences, hotels, boatyards, and houseboats.

Until Bell heard her muffled Libertys, he had not fully believed Captain for the simple reason that a river only four miles long that ended in a swamp was a risky place to hide. Once in, there was no getting out, other than by railcar, and loading a boat onto a railcar was far too slow a process to escape a chase.

“Here he is,” whispered Tobin.

A long shadow glided by, fifty feet from their boat’s bow, faintly silhouetted by factory lights across the river. Bell waited until it had cleared the freight slip and moved a hundred yards farther upstream. It wasn’t likely it could outrun the Van Dorn boat, and, even if it could, it couldn’t go far.

Bell stepped on his starters. He had warmed the Libertys every thirty minutes. All four fired up at once. He shoved all props forward and the boat shot from the slip. He turned his wheel hard over, swinging her upriver, and switched on the forward searchlight.

If Isaac Bell had any doubts that Marat Zolner was Prince André, they vanished when he saw Black Bird’s helmsman look over his shoulder into the glare. Bell recognized the lean, handsome face, the elegant stance he remembered gliding over the Club Deluxe dance floor, and the reptilian grace of movement he had first seen on the roof of Roosevelt Hospital the night that Marat Zolner shot Johann Kozlov.

Bell’s boat covered the yards between them in a flash.

He was pulling alongside before Black Bird unmuffled her engines. Suddenly, the black boat was thundering, leaping ahead on a boiling wake.

Ed Tobin shouted over the roar of their own engines, “I can’t shoot!”

Bell saw why. Ahead, on both sides of the narrow river, were the red and green and white lights of small boats. Fishermen were standing in them, dragging nets. Behind them on one shore was a white-shingled hotel, and lining the opposite shore was a row of houseboats. The powerful Lewis gun would chew them to pieces and kill anyone with the bad luck to meet a stray bullet.

“Hold your fire.”

The black boat was pulling ahead.

Bell poured on the gas.

The black boat left the fishing boats in its wake.

The channel ahead was clear.

“Fire!”

Ed Tobin triggered a burst of shells. He stopped firing almost instantly.

“Look out, Isaac!”

Bell was already jerking his throttles back.

“Hold on, Dash!” he shouted over his shoulder. “It’s a trap!”

35

The fishing boats were racing to shore, hauling lines out of the water, dragging something across the channel.

Marion struck before Isaac Bell could disengage his propellers.

Bell braced for a timber-jarring crash and hoped the reinforced bow would take it. Surprisingly, the express cruiser slowed without collision and seemed to hang mid-channel. Instead of a crash in the bow, he heard several loud bangs deep within the boat. His engines screamed, revving wildly, and he realized that Zolner’s men had strung a heavy cargo net across the channel. Its thick strands had fouled his churning propellers. Blades sheared and driveshafts snapped.

The Van Dorn boat was trapped in the middle of the river.

“Thompsons!” Dashwood called coolly. “Get down!”

The night exploded with red jets of fire and flying lead.

Their searchlight went black in a burst of hot glass.

Thank the Lord for armor plate, thought Isaac Bell. And bless Lynch & Harding. She carried two thousand gallons of explosively flammable gasoline, but the speedboat builders had snugged her fuel tanks under the sole, out of the range of bullets storming past.

Their Lewis guns were still useless. Behind the Thompson submachine guns strafing them from both sides of the river were homes with thin wooden walls. Bell yanked from its sheath a .30–06 bolt-action Springfield rifle he had stowed for such a contingency.

Tobin had one in his machine-gun nest.

Dashwood had one in his.

The Thompsons’ muzzle fire made excellent targets, particularly as the two-handled submachine guns were designed to be clutched snug to the torso. Bell fired. A gunman tumbled into the river.

Tobin fired and missed.

Dashwood made up for it, firing twice and dropping two.

The three Van Dorns whirled in unison to shoot the submachine gunners on the opposite bank. Before they could trigger their weapons, the shooting stopped.

Isaac Bell saw why in an instant.

The black boat was coming back.

It stormed downriver, Lewis gun pumping bullets with a continuous rumble. The rapid fire starred Bell’s windshield and clanged off the armor. By now, he knew what to expect of Marat Zolner. He stood up and aimed his rifle. A man on the bow of the speeding boat was about to throw a grenade. James Dashwood shot it out of his hand and it exploded behind the boat.

A second grenade sailed through the air. Isaac Bell and Ed Tobin fired together, and the grenade dropped into the river. Black Bird raced past the Van Dorn boat at fifty knots, thundering toward Biscayne Bay.

“Close,” said Tobin.

“Not close enough,” said Bell, watching the red glare of her exhaust disappear behind a bend in the river. He called to a fisherman, venturing out in his rowboat. “Shooting’s over, friend. Would fifty bucks get us a lift ashore?”

“A hundred.”

“It’s yours.”

On shore, Tobin went looking for a tugboat to tow them to a boatyard for repairs. Bell and Dashwood scoured the riverbank. The ambushers had taken their wounded with them. Bell retrieved a Thompson submachine gun they had dropped. Dashwood found a full box of German stick grenades.

“I don’t suppose our ‘Captain’ friend is waiting at the dock for the rest of his reward.”

Bell said, “Zolner is counterpunching. Question is, where’s he going to hit us next?”

Asa Somers had been in love many times. He had fallen head over heels for Mae Marsh in Intolerance and returned to the movie house again and again. Mary Pickford was next, in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and then Mabel Normand. And of course he fell in love regularly with girls he saw on streetcars until they jumped off at their stops. But never until now with a real live girl.

And Fräulein Grandzau was a real live girl. She was beautiful beyond description, wore wonderful-smelling perfume, and had a way of looking him right in the face when she talked to him. Her eyes were blue, a slatey shade, like the ocean on a sunny afternoon. And she was very kind. She showed him how to use a knife and fork in the European style, and she would touch her beautiful lips just lightly with her finger to remind him to close his mouth when he chewed so he would look the part of an important man in the liquor traffic. She even took him shopping — Mr. Van Dorn was paying — because even an apprentice detective masquerading as a clerk had to look as if he belonged in Nassau in a panama hat and a white suit almost like Isaac Bell’s.

They ate in wonderful hotels because that’s where the bootleggers ate.

Liquor dealers had to be where they could run into people who might buy their consignments like detectives had to be where they were likeliest to hear the latest about a big tanker full of grain alcohol that for some reason hadn’t shown up yet. And detectives investigating a Comintern agent’s girlfriend had to dress like people she would talk to.

Earlier that evening, they had eaten dinner on Miss Fern Hawley’s yacht, which was bigger than the old CG-9, with much better food. There was plenty of laughing and kidding around with Miss Hawley, who was really a looker, too.

Somers listened carefully to how Fräulein Grandzau used small talk like a wedge.

“When I was in New York, Fern, I kept hearing an expression. Why is the ladies’ lavatory called the powder room?”

Fern laughed. “Girls didn’t go to saloons before Prohibition. Now we go to speakeasies, so they had to add places for ladies to go and they called them powder rooms. To powder their noses? Speaking of which, excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

Fern was gone a long while and when she returned she ended the party all of a sudden, apologizing she had a headache. The yacht’s tender dropped them at the dock. But instead of calling it a night, Fräulein Grandzau had decided they would stop for a drink in a rough bar on Bay Street where she said she hoped to meet a buyer.

So far, no buyer had appeared. Somers didn’t mind. He could sit at a table across from her for the rest of his life and not mind. She drank — drinking a lot less than she pretended to, he noticed — and put him to the test to guess, in a low voice, what was the business of the other patrons. What did this one do? What did that one do? What about the guy passed out in the corner? Not that one. The guy with two guns, a revolver peeking out of his waistband and some other weapon bulging under his coat.

“Bodyguard?”

“Who is he guarding?”

“Maybe it’s his night off,” ventured Somers.

“Maybe.”

“He’s fast asleep.”

“Are you sure?”

“He hasn’t moved since we came in. And the bottle on his table is almost empty.”

“I agree,” she said. “He’s sleeping. What do you suppose he carries in his shoulder holster? Automatic or revolver?”

Somers eyed the bulge. “Revolver.”

“Automatic,” she said. She looked around for another test.

Two big guys came in, bought a bottle at the bar, and sat down at a table facing theirs. Fräulein Grandzau’s German accent, which ordinarily Somers could barely detect, got a little stronger. He heard a v in the word “want.”

“Asa,” she said very quietly. “I vant you to do exactly what I tell you. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you see where I am looking at the floor?”

“Yes, ma’am. Right next to your chair.”

“I want you to stand up on that spot and lean over, close to me, as if you mean to kiss me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now!”

He stood up and leaned close. Her perfume was intoxicating. She reached a hand behind the back of his head, curled her fingers into his hair, and pulled him almost to her lips. “Asa?” she whispered.

“Yes, ma’am?” His mouth was dry, his heart hammering his ribs.

“Did the Coast Guard teach you how to cock an automatic pistol?”

36

Dazed by Pauline Grandzau’s perfume and dumbfounded by her question, Asa Somers asked, “Why, ma’am?”

“Do you know how to cock that gun?” A whisper. Fierce.

“Yes.”

“I want you to go to the drunk. Take the automatic from his shoulder holster and cock it and bring it to me.”

“Wh—?”

“My hand is not strong enough to pull the slide, and my own gun is not heavy enough to stop those two… Don’t look at them!”

Somers glanced at the sleeping drunk. “When?”

“When the shooting starts.”

“Wh—?”

“Now!” She tipped the table on its side so the thick wooden top was facing the two big men like a shield. She kicked her leg high. Her dress flew open. As Somers dived toward the drunk, he glimpsed her snow-white thigh encircled in black lace. He saw a tiny pistol in a half holster, which she drew and cocked in a blur of motion. The shooting started before he reached the drunk, two quick shots like snapped sticks and a sullen Boom! back from a heavier gun.

The gunshots sent everyone in the place diving for the floor and woke up the drunk, who slapped groggily at Somers’s hand. She was right about it being a big automatic — a Colt Navy M1911. Somers jerked the slide, chambering a round. Then he grabbed the revolver before the drunk could and leaped back to Fräulein Grandzau, who by then had fired two more shots. One of the men was down on the floor with a pistol half fallen from his fingers. The other was charging them with a gun in one hand, a knife in the other, blood on his shirt, and murder in his eyes.

Fräulein Grandzau took the automatic in both her tiny hands. She fired once.

The .45 slug knocked the man’s legs out from under him and he went down with a crash.

She turned to Asa, her eyes oddly detached, as if she had left the room earlier.

“Good job, Asa. Now ve auf Wiedersehen before the police.”

Everyone else in the bar had scattered or was still hugging the floor. She led him onto a veranda and down rickety stairs into an alley, back onto Bay Street, past the liquor row of shacks and stables converted to warehouses that were receiving crates and barrels even at night, and onto Frederick Street.

“Who were they?” asked Asa.

“Two Russians who wanted to kill us.”

“How did you know they were Russians?”

“I know Russians.”

Ahead, at last, was their Lucerne Hotel.

“Is it O.K. if I hang on to this?” Somers asked. He opened his coat where he had slipped the drunk’s revolver into his waistband.

“Yes,” she said. “You earned it. Go get some sleep. I have to cable Isaac.”

“No you don’t.”

Asa Somers pointed toward the patio. Isaac Bell was standing in the door, a grim-faced specter in white. Detective Dashwood was across the lobby, one hand inside his coat, and Detective Ed Tobin, the tough Gang Squad guy with the lopsided face, was on the landing up the stairs with a hand inside his coat.

Fräulein Grandzau said, “Go to sleep, Asa. We’ll see you in the morning.”

“We chartered a flying boat,” said Isaac Bell, “thinking Zolner might attack here.”

“They just tried.”

Bell looked at her sharply. “Are you O.K.?”

Pauline shrugged. “Alive. Thanks to young Asa.”

Bell asked what had happened. Pauline told him. When she was done, she was shaking and blinking back tears. Bell slung an arm around her shoulders and walked her into the bar.

“Let me buy you a legal drink.”

The sky over Nassau that a lifetime at sea had told Captain Novicki could be trouble had not lied, although the blow it had forecast had taken longer to shape up than he expected. He had sailed his wooden schooner through the Windward Passage and into the Caribbean without a change in the weather. Then, quite suddenly — due east of Port-au-Prince, west of Guantánamo Bay — the glass started dropping faster than a man overboard. Silky cirrus clouds thickened. He had to decide whether to change course for Cuba and run for shelter in Guantánamo Bay or chance continuing to Jamaica.

The wind rose.

He ordered his topsails in, and reefs in his foresail and mainsail, and soon reefed again. A few hours later, he had her running under bare poles, fore and main furled, with only a storm jib and a rag of staysail for steerage. Whatever was brewing was going to barrel straight through the Windward Passage. So much for Guantánamo. It was Kingston or bust.

The falling barometer, the rising wind veering north, and the steepening seas warned that South Florida and The Bahamas were in for a drubbing. But an aching pain in an old break in his left foot, courtesy of a sawbones who’d swigged Bushmills Irish Whiskey while he set it, threatened a more ominous possibility.

“If this doesn’t grow into a hurricane,” he told his mate, “my name’s not Novicki.”

The mate, a grizzled Jamaican even older than he was, thought it would veer northwest along the Cuban coast and into the Gulf of Mexico.

“She could,” said Novicki. “But if she re-curves northeast, look out New York, Long Island, and Rum Row.”

Isaac bell swam across Nassau Harbour. Employing an Australian crawl, he lifted his face from the warm water periodically to navigate by the cream-colored funnel that jutted above the mahogany wheelhouse of the steam yacht Maya. Alongside the enormous white hull, he hauled himself onto a tender and climbed the gangway rigged to the side. He stopped at the teak rail on the main deck and called out, “Permission to come aboard?”

Stewards swarmed.

Fern Hawley herself appeared.

She gave his swim trunks a piercing look and his broad shoulders a warm smile.

“Mr. Bell. You have more scars than most men I meet.”

“I tend to bump into doors and slip in the bath. May I come aboard?”

She snapped her fingers. A steward handed her a thick Turkish towel. She tossed it to Bell and led him to a suite of canvas chairs under a gaily striped awning. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? Or were you just swimming by and stopped to catch your breath?”

Bell got right to it. “I’m curious about your friend Prince André.”

“As a detective?” she asked. “Or a banker?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I looked into your background. You’re of the Boston Bells. Louisburg Square. American States Bank.”

“My father is a banker. I am a detective. Have you seen Prince André recently?”

“Not since New York. I believe it was the night we met at Club Deluxe.”

He decided to throw the dice on Pauline’s and Marion’s belief that Fern Hawley was disappointed in Zolner. If they were wrong, he would find himself back in the water.

“I could swear I saw you with him in Detroit.”

She hesitated. Then her smirk faded and a faint smile softened her face. “I hope,” she said, softly, “that I won’t have to call my lawyers.”

Bell couched his answer very carefully.

“I mispoke slightly. I did not mean with him, I meant near him.”

He was bending the truth only slightly. For while he was reasonably sure he had seen her in the Pierce-Arrow limousine at Sam Rosenthal’s send-off, he had not seen her in it when it sped away, firing at the police. Nor had he seen Zolner’s gunmen get into it. But by mentioning lawyers, she had all but admitted she had been there.

Fern acknowledged as much, saying, “Now you’re the one taking a chance.”

“How so?”

“Shielding a criminal.”

“I did not see you commit the crime. Before the crime, I saw a young woman whose sense of adventure may have caused her to fall in with the wrong crowd…”

“You’re very generous, Mr. Bell. I am not that young.”

“You met ‘Prince André’ in Paris?”

“At a victory parade,” Fern said. “A Lancashire Regiment marching up the Champs-Élysées. I couldn’t believe my eyes. They were midgets. None taller than five feet. Prince André told me why. They were poorly paid coal miners. They belonged to a race of men who hadn’t had a decent meal in a hundred years. I realized — for the first time — the difference between rich and poor. Between capitalists and proletariat. Between owners and workers.” She touched Bell’s arm confidingly. “I’d never even called them workers before. I called them workmen. Or, as my father referred to them, ‘hands.’ Never people.”

“Prince André sounds unusually broad-minded for a Russian aristocrat. If there were more like him, they wouldn’t have had a revolution.”

“He can be sensitive.”

“Do you know what he’s up to now?”

“Business interests, I gather.”

“Did he ever ask you to invest in his interests?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“It’s a cliché of our times. The impoverished European aristocrat courts the wealthy American heiress.”

“Not this heiress. All he asked was to take him to Storms.”

“Storms?”

“Storms & Storms. One of my father’s brokers.” She laughed. “It was so funny. Stormy old Storms was quaking, terrified that André wanted to borrow money. He knew the cliché. When it was just the opposite.”

“What was opposite?”

“André gave him oodles to invest.”

Bell looked up at the sky. A scrim of cloud was spreading from the south. It had reddened the horizon at dawn. Now it seemed thicker… Cloud the issue, Joe Van Dorn taught apprentices. Throw them off with two more questions after you hit pay dirt.

“Would you have lunch with me at my hotel?”

“Let’s stay on the boat,” said Fern. “The chef has lobsters. Not our proper New England lobsters — they have no claws — but if we share a third, we won’t miss claws.”

“I wish we could,” said Bell, “but I have to send a cable.”

“About Prince André?”

“No. But there was something else I wanted to ask about him. I was wondering how a refugee survives suddenly losing… all this… comfort, I guess, that privileged people like you and I take for granted.” He gestured at her yacht, the gleaming brightwork, the polished brass, the attentive stewards. “That Prince André took for granted. What do you suppose is his greatest strength?”

“He’s an optimist.”

Three Van Dorn detectives — Adler, Kliegman, and Marcum, dressed like auditors in vested suits, bowler hats, and wire-rimmed glasses, and carrying green eyeshades in their bulging briefcases — paused before entering the Wall Street brokerage house of Storms & Storms to observe the Morgan Building, where the cops had found Detective Warren’s gold badge. Other than some shrapnel gouges in the marble wall, there was no sign of the unsolved bombing.

They addressed their old friend as if he were alive. “Hang on a moment longer, Harry, we’re going to get some back.”

The blue-uniformed guard at the front door ushered them in with a respectful bow.

Senior partner Newtown Storms’s secretary was less easily impressed.

“Whom do you gentlemen represent?”

“Adler, Kliegman & Marcum,” said Adler.

“I’m not familiar with your firm.”

“We are auditors. Our clients include the Enforcement Division of the Internal Revenue Service.”

“What business do you have with Mr. Storms?”

“Income tax evasion.”

“Mr. Storms has paid his taxes.”

“A client of his has not.”

That got them into Storms’s office. The patrician stockbroker kept them standing in front of his rosewood desk while he fingered their business cards, which were so freshly printed, Adler could smell the ink.

“Let me set you straight, gentlemen. I am not a government official. It is not my job to collect income taxes.”

Adler asked, “Is it your job to help your clients evade taxes?”

“Of course not. It is my job to help my clients minimize their taxes.”

Kliegman spoke up. “Minimizing. A slippery slope to the depths of evasion.”

“Particularly,” Adler said, “when enormous transactions are made with cash.”

“Cash is honest,” Storms shot back. “Cash deters excessive spending. People think twice when they have to count it out on the barrel-head instead of blithely scribbling a check in the hopes their banker covers their overdraft. Cash backed by gold. That’s my motto.”

The three detectives stood silent as bronze statues.

Storms asked, “Are you inquiring about a particular client of mine? Or are you just fishing?”

“Prince André.”

That got them invitations to sit down. Storms looked considerably less sure of himself. When his voice tube whistled, he jerked off the cap and growled, “Do not disturb me.”

“How rich is he?” Adler asked bluntly.

“Prince André is a wealthy man. He was wealthy before the market took off like a Roman candle, and he is wealthier now. And I assure you that, come next April 15, he will pay his fair taxes on his earnings in the market.”

“We have no doubt,” said Adler.

“Then why are you here?”

“Cash, Mr. Storms. Our old reliable friend cash. Backed by gold.”

The mild-mannered Adler suddenly had a steel gleam in his eye, and steel in his voice. “Cash can come from untaxed gains. Even illegal gains. Does he have private accounts or does he represent a corporation?”

Storms looked a little surprised by the question, and Adler feared he had misstepped. It turned out he hadn’t. Storms said, “Both actually. He has some corporate entities that maintain some accounts. And he also trusts us with the privilege of managing his personal holdings.”

“Numerous accounts of cash?”

Storms sprang to his feet. “I have spoken far too freely about private matters, don’t you think?”

“We think that a government prosecutor might wonder whether that cash was invested with you to hide all trace of ill-gotten gains.”

“I don’t like your implication, sir.”

Adler quoted from his dictionary: “Concealing the origins of money obtained illegally by passing it through a complex sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions is a crime.”

Kliegman quoted from his: “To transfer funds of dubious or illegal origin to a foreign country, and then later recover them from what seem to be clean sources, is a crime.”

Adler added, “To help a criminal hide cash is to become an accomplice in the crime of tax evasion.”

Detective Marcum had yet to speak. He had a deep voice that rumbled like a chain-drive “Bull Dog” truck. “To gain by not paying taxes is tax evasion, whether the original gain is legal or illegal.”

“No one has ever been prosecuted for that,” Storms protested.

“Yet,” said Marcum.

“Would you like to be the first?”

Newtown Storms said, staunchly, “An American citizen would be violating his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination if he admitted to illegal gains on his tax return.”

“Would you like to spend years in appeal, waiting for the Supreme Court to eventually rule on that dubious interpretation of our constitution?”

“Mr. Storms, we’re not asking for your money. We are asking you to betray a crook.”

“‘Crook’ is not a word that applies to the gentlemen classes my firm serves.”

“What if we told you he was a Bolshevik?”

Storms laughed. “Next, you’ll tell me President Harding wants America to join the League of Nations. And Marcus Garvey is signing on with the Ku Klux Klan.”

“What if it were true that Prince André is a Bolshevik?”

“How can he be a Bolshevik? The revolutionaries kicked him out of his country and seized his estates.”

“What if Prince André is a Bolshevik?”

“If it were true, Prince André would be a traitor to his class, and I would tell you everything you want to know.”

The wind was rising in Nassau, shivering flags and slapping halyards, when Isaac Bell returned to the steam yacht Maya. Fern Hawley received him in the main salon, which had been designed in the old Art Nouveau mode by the Tiffany Company. It was a breathtaking sight, thought Bell, that would force anyone questioning the pleasures of wealth to change his tune.

“Why, Mr. Bell, where are your swim trunks?”

“I hired a launch. There’s a mean chop on the harbor. Besides, it’s getting dark and I’m told sharks dine at night.”

“I’d have sent you a tender,” said Fern. “Would you like a drink?”

Bell said that he thought a drink would be a wonderful idea.

“Daiquiris or Scotch?”

“Scotch.”

“We’re in luck. I have the real McCoy. Haig & Haig.”

They touched glasses. She said, “I’m glad to see you again. Lunch was over too soon.”

“I have not been one hundred percent honest with you,” Bell replied.

Fern gave him a big smile. “Is it too much to hope that you lied when you told me you were always faithful to your wife?”

“I lied when I said I was not sending a cable about Prince André.”

“That much I figured out on my own. What’s up, Mr. Bell… I should call you Isaac, for gosh sake. I am going to call you Isaac. What’s up, Isaac?”

“Prince André is a traitor.”

Fern Hawley looked mystified. “A traitor to what? Russia? Russia is no more. Not his Russia.”

“He is a traitor to your cause.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Fern, let’s stop kidding each other. Prince André’s name is Marat Zolner.”

“I know him as Prince André.”

“Marat Zolner is a bootlegger.”

“So are half the enterprising businessmen in America.”

“Bootlegging is a masquerade. Marat Zolner is a Comintern agent conspiring against America.”

“He can’t be a traitor to America. He’s not American — or are you suggesting that I am the traitor? Traitoress?”

Isaac Bell did not smile back at her.

“Did Marat Zolner set the Wall Street bomb?”

“No.”

“So you do know Prince André as Marat Zolner.”

Fern answered tartly. “Spare me the battle of wits, Isaac. It’s obvious you know a lot.”

Bell’s reply was a cold, “How do you know he didn’t set that bomb?”

“Because Yuri did.”

“Who is Yuri?”

“Yuri Antipov. A Comintern agent sent by Moscow to ride herd on Marat. Marat did not want to bomb Wall Street. So Yuri did it.”

“Did you know he was going to explode a bomb on a crowded street?”

“No! They didn’t tell me such things. I only learned afterward.”

“Where is Yuri?”

“He died in the explosion.”

“Along with forty innocents.”

She hung her head. “They don’t think the way we do. They’ve experienced terrible things we haven’t.”

“Those forty have.”

“Moscow made Yuri a ‘hero of the revolution.’ Not Marat. He didn’t do it.”

“Why do you say Zolner didn’t do it? Just because he wasn’t killed in the blast?”

“Marat would never make such a mistake. He’s too meticulous. Yuri was impetuous. He would blunder ahead. He couldn’t help himself.”

Bell looked at her and she looked away. He said, “Could Zolner have made a ‘mistake,’ deliberately?”

“Why?”

“To get rid of his watchdog.”

“No.” She shook her head. “No. Absolutely not.”

“You say no, but you’re thinking that it is possible that he killed Yuri, aren’t you?”

She was silent a long moment, then said in a bleak and empty voice. “Yuri was my friend.”

“He was a murderer,” said Isaac Bell. “Forty times over.”

“I didn’t know he was going to do it.”

Bell made no effort to hide his disgust. “Whether you are a traitor, or a foolish young woman who — as I said generously, earlier — fell in with the ‘wrong crowd,’ will depend on your next move.”

“Betray him?”

“I will make it easy for you.”

“How?”

“I just told you. He’s already betrayed you. And your workers’ cause.”

“How?”

“You introduced him to Newtown Storms. Storms invests the enormous sums of cash that Marat Zolner earns bootlegging. Do you deny that he uses the money Storms makes in the stock market to finance his Comintern attack on our country?”

Fern Hawley returned Bell’s wintery gaze in silence.

“I am asking you privately,” said Bell. He had thought on this all afternoon. He had much bigger fish to fry than one confused spoiled brat. “Confidentially, Fern. Between you and me. All alone on your yacht in the middle of a harbor of a remote British colony.”

“Why are you protecting me?” she asked in a small voice.

“Two reasons. One, I truly do believe that you fell in with the wrong crowd.”

“What makes you believe that? You don’t know me.”

“A character reference from a colleague whose judgment I trust.”

“Who?”

“Pauline.”

“She’s yours?”

“She’s Van Dorn’s.”

Fern covered her face. “Oh, do I feel like a fool.”

“You aren’t the first. Pauline is the sharpest detective you will ever meet. She sees a possibility of something worthwhile in you, and what Pauline sees is good enough for me.”

“What is the second reason?”

“The second reason is far more important. You can give me Marat Zolner. Which is why I ask you about the Stormses’ investments financing the Comintern attack.”

Fern smirked the smirk that said she knew more than Bell did. “Actually, most of it comes straight from the bootlegging. Storms hasn’t made him as much as he hoped.”

“Oh yes he has,” said Bell. “Storms is good at what he does, and the market has been kind.”

“That’s not what Marat said.”

“That’s because Marat siphons off most of his stock earnings. He has secret, personal accounts with Storms & Storms. He stashed money in London and Paris and Berlin and Switzerland. He has made himself a very wealthy Bolshevik.”

Fern Hawley flushed. She took a deep breath. “Do you remember I told you he’s an optimist? That’s the least of it. He is a brilliant, natural-born liar. That dirty son of a—”

“I was hoping you would say that,” said Isaac Bell.

37

With his muted engines turning just enough revolutions to make headway through the deepening chop, Marat Zolner kept Maya between him and the town as he eased Black Bird alongside the big yacht in the dead of the night. He tossed a canvas-wrapped grappling hook over the teak rail, pulled himself up, and went to Fern’s cabin.

She was rubbing her beautiful face with a night cream and saw him in the mirror.

“Look what the cat dragged in.”

“Sadly, the cat has only a moment. What did you tell Isaac Bell?”

“No more than I had to to make him go away.”

“What did he ask?”

“He asked about the tanker. He knew the Comintern bought it. I confirmed that to keep him from asking more questions.”

“Did you tell him where it is?”

“No. That was the point of answering his previous question.”

“You’re good at this.”

“I was taught by a master… What are you doing here, Marat?”

Zolner gave her a strange smile. For as long as she had known him, she could rarely tell what he was really thinking. He looked sad, but she couldn’t swear to it, even when he asked, “Is the bank open tonight?”

Fern Hawley hoped that she was not a fool to wish that somehow what Isaac Bell had told her was not true. She opened her arms, saying, “All night.”

It turned out to be a short night, and, afterward, he looked even sadder, she thought.

“What is it?”

“Isaac Bell has beaten me.”

“How?”

“Detroit’s exploded. They’re killing each other like rats in a sewer. And I can’t control New York without being on top of it. And now, thanks to Isaac Bell, I can’t get money from Storms. But I will tell you this: Isaac Bell will wish he had died when I go home a hero.”

“Russia?”

“You will come with me.”

“Do you really want me, Marat?”

“Of course I want you. Now I need your help. Bell has put out a general alarm for my arrest.”

“How can he do that?”

“The Van Dorns have the ear of the Department of Justice and every police chief on the East Coast. I can’t take a train. I can’t land in a flying boat. I can’t board a liner.”

“What will you do?”

“I’m going to New York.”

“You just said there’s nothing for you in New York.”

“Comrades will hide me on a ship.”

“How will you get there?”

“Black Bird.”

“It’s over a thousand miles.”

“Twelve hundred.”

“But you could find a ship in Havana. Or San Juan. Or Port-au-Prince.”

“I have business to finish in New York.”

“What business?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“Marat, how can I trust you if you won’t trust me?”

“It’s something Yuri and I were doing.”

“Shall I meet you there?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It is something you would not understand. Meet me in Rotterdam. We’ll go home heroes.”

38

At breakfast in the Hotel Lucerne, nervous guests were discussing the storm. Gale warnings were flying from the stone fort that overlooked the harbor, and the morning newspaper quoted radio transmissions from Havana: Hurricane winds were sweeping Cuba, fashionable resorts were flooded.

“Brace yourself, Isaac,” Pauline whispered. “She’s back.”

Fern Hawley rushed in, wild-eyed and windblown. She looked like she had not slept.

A brisk nod from Bell caused Ed Tobin and Asa Somers to excuse themselves from the table. Fern sat across from him and Pauline. “Marat came to me last night.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s on his way to Russia. He wants me to come with him.”

“Where is he now?”

“He left in the night. For New York. To meet a ship that will smuggle him back to Europe.”

“He’ll never make it. I’ve got trains and ports covered.”

“He’s going on Black Bird.”

“By motorboat? It’s twelve hundred miles.”

“That’s what I said. It doesn’t make sense. He could escape faster and more easily by running to Havana, or Port-au-Prince, or San Juan. Even Bermuda’s closer than New York. But he told me he’s finishing something he started with Yuri. But I think it’s something else. He could have a lot of cash hidden.”

“Then to Russia?” asked Pauline.

“That’s what he said. Through Rotterdam. He said that you’d be sorry, Isaac, when he went home a hero.”

“A hero of the revolution?” said Bell.

“He said you’ll wish you were dead.”

Pauline asked, “Why are you telling us this now?”

“Because I think he’s up to something terrible.”

Bell said, “You told me earlier that you didn’t know where the alcohol tanker is. Do you?”

“Yes. It’s anchored off Eleuthera. We stopped there on the way down. My captain will have the exact position in his log.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I gave you everything, Isaac. I wanted to keep something for myself.”

Before Bell could answer, he felt Pauline’s knee firmly against his, warning Don’t speak, let Fern do it. And, indeed, Fern did speak. “I thought he kept the tanker at Eleuthera to do a stretching operation. But he could stretch in Nassau. Or up on Rum Row. So I wondered, was he hiding it for some reason?” She shrugged. “Maybe he was waiting for the price to rise.”

Bell exchanged glances with Pauline. Why sail a shipload of pure alcohol all the way from Bremerhaven, then abandon it on a remote island? Pauline ventured, “Marat could sail it home to Russia. Or trade the cargo for another ship.”

“He kept saying he’s got business in New York.”

“Or perhaps sail it to Rum Row and ‘taxi’ himself to the ship he’s leaving on.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Fern. “Except he kept saying he has business in New York.”

James Dashwood walked in. He was pale and his hands were shaking. Bell had heard him coughing all night.

“Dash,” said Bell. “Find a sawbones and hunker down here.”

“Where are you going?”

“That tanker makes me nervous. Pauline, you and I and Ed and Asa are going to Eleuthera.” He waved for Tobin to come back. “How are we on gas, Ed?”

“Full tanks.”

“Can we handle this weather?”

“Seventy feet long, four props, and eighteen hundred horsepower? I should think so.”

“Better rig the cockpit tarpaulin and the motor shrouds.”

“Already done.”

“We’ll need food and water in case we have to hole up for a few days.”

Fern said, “There’s a run on the shops. Come out to my yacht. I’ll give you food and water.”

“Women,” Ed Tobin growled, helping Pauline with a heavy canvas bag. “Why can’t they travel light?”

“Because we pack things men forget.”

“Hope you don’t get seasick. It’s going to be a mess out there.”

“I’ve never been seasick on the Aquitania.”

They headed across the windswept harbor on one engine.

Fern’s captain had steam up. Maya’s decks were cleared, the awnings stowed. Stewards and deckhands formed a human chain to pass food and water out their pilot door, across their tender, and into the Van Dorn cruiser rafted alongside.

Bell went up to the mahogany wheelhouse while Tobin and Asa lashed canvas over two of the idle engines to keep spray out of the straight pipes. Fern’s captain was an affable Connecticut Yankee. He showed Bell on his chart where he had seen the Sandra T. Congdon four days ago. Tiny Harbour Island was on the windward side of Eleuthera, the big island along the east side of Grand Bahama Bank.

“The tanker’s heavily laden, drawing too much to enter the lagoon. She anchored on the windward side, inside the Harbour Island reef.”

“Will she move for the storm?”

“She’ll put to sea if it swings east.” The captain glanced up at Fort Fincastle, where triangular red pennants flew. “But still only a gale warning. I just heard from a captain on the radiotelegraph that the storm is veering west across Cuba, while you’ll be heading east.” He nodded approvingly at Marion’s long, sleek hull. “It’ll be rough, but it’s only sixty miles, and your boat’s got a seakindly bow and plenty of power. If the storm changes course, you’ll have to hole up in Dunmore Town or Governor’s Harbour. Of course, the truly prudent thing would be to ride it out right here in Nassau.”

“Where are you going, Captain?”

“Bermuda.”

Fern intercepted Bell as he was about to go down the gangway.

“Can I come with you?”

“Sorry. Van Dorn policy: We don’t bring friends to gunfights.”

Fern smiled. “Does that mean I’m a friend?”

“Only as long as you behave yourself.”

“Isaac, what am I going to do? You’ve destroyed everything I believed in. Not you. He. I suspected, but you gave me proof, and it is terrible.”

Bell was anxious to clear the harbor. With any luck, he would trap Zolner on his tanker in two or three hours. “If you want to believe in something, try this: Prohibition is killing the country. Why don’t you join up with the society women trying to repeal it? Joe Van Dorn’s wife is leading them.”

“I have an aunt who’s formed a committee. But I’m not ready to hang out with a bunch of frumpy old ladies.”

Tobin started another engine. Bell raised his voice to be heard.

“If you were to ‘hang out’ with Dorothy Van Dorn, you would have to get used to men looking over your shoulder to catch a glimpse of her. She’s only a few years older than you are, stylish as Paris, and a dazzling beauty.”

“Sounds like you’ve fallen for her, Isaac.”

“Dorothy could make a good friend. I’ll introduce you.”

“I’ll give you a piece of information in return.” She stepped close to whisper in his ear. “Your ‘colleague’ is in love with you. Pauline never mentioned your name when we talked, of course, but now it’s clear.”

“I’m working on that,” said Bell.

“Ready, Mr. Bell?” called Tobin.

“One second… Fern, you told me that Zolner did not want to bomb Wall Street. But you also told me that you didn’t know about the plan in time to stop it.”

“I didn’t. Marat told me afterward, after Yuri died.”

“Why didn’t he want to bomb Wall Street?”

“He had bigger plans. Bombs would distract from the bootlegging plan.”

“Good luck, Fern. Safe passage to Bermuda.” Bell shook her hand, dodged her kiss, and ran down the gangway.

“Cast off.”

The Van Dorn express cruiser Marion was ten miles up the Northeast Providence Channel, with Nassau and New Providence Island twenty minutes in her wake, when James Dashwood saw the gale-warning flag lowered from Fort Fincastle. A red flag with a black square in its center took its place.

Dashwood hurried to the cable office to warn Isaac Bell that a hurricane was approaching The Bahamas. But, as he had feared, remote Harbour Island had neither cable nor radiotelegraph. His friends might as well have been on the far side of the moon.

39

“Boss man, he go to rum row.”

The Harbour Islanders who had been rolling gasoline barrels off a sailboat onto the Dunmore Town dock had stopped work to catch Marion’s mooring lines when the big cruiser rumbled into the harbor.

The tiny town occupied a low, narrow spit of land between the lagoon and ocean. Offshore, Atlantic combers pounded the fringing reef. But the sheltered waters inside the reef, where Bell had hoped to see the tanker looming above the shingled cottages, held not a single ship.

Marat Zolner had chosen well. The tiny shipbuilding harbor was both remote and cut off from the world. A four-masted schooner was under construction on shipyard ways, and the British Union Jack flew above a modest wood-frame government building, next to which ground had been broken to build another. But there was no radio tower, which made Dunmore Town not only remote but as cut off from the world as it had been in pirate times.

The Sandra T. Congdon had weighed anchor two days earlier, the islanders said.

Bell looked at Tobin and shook his head. “Making twelve knots, he’s halfway to New York.”

The sky was heavily clouded. They’d left the rain behind, and the forecast of the hurricane moving west over Cuba seemed to hold. But, Ed Tobin grumbled, wind gusts were swinging south of east, and the Dunmore Town residents had pulled small boats out of the water.

“Did you see a big black speedboat about the size of this one?”

“No, mon.”

“The tanker could have hoisted it on deck,” said Tobin.

“No, he’d have to catch up at sea,” said Bell, “if the tanker left two days ago.”

“Black boat last week,” an islander ventured.

Made sense, thought Bell. Even in wind and roiled seas, Marion had covered the sixty miles from Nassau in less than three hours. Zolner would have found this an ideal place to hide Black Bird, too. He could have zipped in and out with the boat.

He shook his head again. “Last time we almost caught the black boat, Zolner blew up his boathouse.”

“Maybe we’re lucky he moved the ship. If he left it, he would blow it up like his boathouse.”

“Going home a hero of the revolution,” said Pauline.

“But first finish Yuri’s job? What job?”

Bell smelled tobacco burning. The dockworkers had hunkered down behind the gasoline barrels to share a smoke.

“Douse that cigarette! You’ll blow my boat to kingdom come!”

The smoker took a last drag, passed it to his friend, who inhaled another. A third man grabbed a quick puff and flicked the butt in the water.

The man Bell was talking to chuckled. “Just like de boss man. Every day he always say, ‘No smoke by ship. Big explosion.’”

Isaac Bell plunged his hand in his pocket and pulled out his bankroll. Twelve tons of pure alcohol would make a very big explosion. “I want that gasoline.”

Tobin said, “We’ve got plenty in the tanks, Mr. Bell. It’ll only weigh us down.”

“We’ll burn it soon enough. It’s twelve hundred miles to New York.”

They had stowed the last barrel they could fit, and Bell had tipped the dockworkers lavishly, when a church bell began to toll. The islanders’ smiles faded at the urgent clamor. Their eyes shot to the government building. The Union Jack was descending the flagpole. A red flag with yellow stripes jumped up in its place.

“What’s that?” asked Bell.

“Red flag with black square say hurricane.”

“I know that. What do those yellow stripes mean?”

“Hurricane come straight here.”

Marion thundered through South Bar Passage. The tide was strong, the ocean swell steep and destructive in the narrow cut and breaking on the sandbar. Bell aimed at what looked deepest and drove her through in a welter of foam and headed for the open sea.

Beyond the reef, the seas were big but orderly. He set a course north and was glad to see that Marion could maintain forty knots without straining. His crew, he could see, were apprehensive, and he tried to raise their spirits.

“Between a cashiered Coastie, a Staten Island pirate, and a yachtsman, we ought to be able to find Cape Hatteras Light. From there, it’ll be an easy run up the coast.”

“How far is Cape Hatteras?” asked Pauline.

Bell shrugged. “Less than eight hundred miles.” He showed her the chart. “We’ll steer a course just west of north.”

Pauline’s brow furrowed as she studied the chart in the murky light that penetrated the windshield and the isinglass side curtains. “It appears we have to get around Abaco, first.”

“We should see Hope Town Light in a couple of hours,” said Bell.

“If we can make forty knots in these seas, we’ll take a full day and night to Cape Hatteras.”

“We’re burning a lot of gas at forty,” said Tobin.

“There’s a hurricane chasing behind,” said Bell. “I want room between it and us.”

Spray drummed on the cockpit tarp. The seas continued to mount and the wind rose. Every few minutes, the boat plowed into a wave markedly bigger than the rest and slowed dramatically.

Bell ordered a watch schedule in which each would steer for two hours, the limit before they lost focus and concentration. Asa brewed coffee in the galley tucked under the foredeck, then helped Pauline steer when it was her turn. Tobin passed around sandwiches of foie gras that Fern’s chef had contributed. In the dark, the compass cast a red glow on faces growing weary of the constant motion and the ceaseless thunder of the Libertys.

Bell caught catnaps, sitting near the helm, but only when Tobin was steering.

He awakened with cold water dripping on his face. The tarpaulin was soaked and it was beginning to leak. He rescued the chart, which was getting wet. The boat was laboring. Reluctantly, Bell cut their speed to thirty-five knots — still a phenomenal pace for any vessel in any seas — and reduced it again in a few hours to thirty knots as the waves grew taller and chaotic.

He decided that, at that rate, they could stop the forward Liberty to conserve it. Asa wrestled on canvas as soon as the pipes cooled. Soon after, they stopped the sternmost motor, as the boat would make her speed on two having burned off the weight of the extra gasoline.

The wind, which had blown from the south and then gradually east, backed suddenly north. Bell pictured the storm whirling, its counterclockwise winds moving sharply to the east as if it had crossed their wake and was heading toward Bermuda.

This was good news if it was traveling away from them rather than overtaking them but bad news if the powerful north wind set up counter- and crosscurrents. Worse, it suggested a storm that was growing in diameter, flinging ever-more-powerful winds hundreds of miles from its eye.

“Getting bad,” Tobin said quietly when they exchanged tricks at the wheel.

“She’s a big boat,” said Bell.

Ed’s lopsided, scarred face formed a tired grin. “I never met a captain who didn’t love his vessel.”

They were twenty-three hours beyond The Bahamas when the western horizon, which looked darker than a coal mine, began to cast an intermittent glow. Bell steered toward it and in a few miles it appeared to be the pulsing beam of a distant lighthouse.

“Cape Hatteras?”

Pauline pored over the chart, careful not to tear the wet paper.

“How is it blinking?” she asked.

Bell timed the flashes. “Fifteen seconds.”

“Cape Hatteras flashes every seven and a half seconds.”

“What flashes fifteen?”

“Cape May, New Jersey?”

“We could not have gotten that far north already.”

“To the south of Hatteras is Cape Lookout. Fifteen seconds.”

“Ed, check the sailing directions. How bright is that light?”

“In these clouds? Less than twelve.”

“Too close.”

Bell powered away from the coast and steered east of north. Three hours later, they spotted the seven-and-a-half-second flash of Cape Hatteras.

“I read that Hatteras is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic,” said Asa Somers. “Ships run aground by the thousands.”

Pauline said, “Thank you for that information.”

One of the Liberty motors coughed and quit.

Moments later, the second fell silent.

40

The boat lost way in an instant and turned her flank to the seas, which rolled her mercilessly.

Tobin and Somers ripped the shrouds off the reserve motors, and Isaac Bell pulled his chokes and hit the starters. One ground with the anemic wheeze of a weak battery. The other churned its motor over and over, but it wouldn’t fire.

The stern drifted around into the wind. A gust filled the cockpit tarp, lifted it like a kite, and blew it off. Rain and spray drenched the cockpit. Bell tried the starter again, hoping there was enough juice left in the battery. The motor fired, coughed, died, and caught again, cylinder by cylinder, until it was hitting on all twelve. As the propeller dug in and the cruiser got under way again, he steered back on their northerly course. Pauline and Somers dragged the tarp back over the cockpit and tied it down. Tobin jumped electricity to the dead battery with Mueller clips. Bell coaxed a second engine to life.

He was concerned that the heavy spray would drown them, so he engaged the mufflers, shunting the exhaust into underwater ports and effectively sealing the manifolds from the vertical pipes. But protection was bought at the cost of power, and their speed dropped. With the engines muted, they could hear the full roar of wind and tumbling seas, which grew louder as the day wore on.

Pauline took the helm, with Asa watching over her. Bell and Tobin went to work on the engines that had quit. Water in the gas seemed to be the cause. Spray could have entered as they pumped from the barrels purchased at Harbour Island. Or one of the barrels could have been contaminated. They jettisoned the contents of the day tank that fed those engines and pumped in fresh gas from their main tanks.

Both engines started. They shut them down again and shrouded their pipes to keep them in reserve. Bell feared they’d be needed soon enough. The two engines currently pushing the boat were exhausting blue smoke, and their valves were clattering like a bowling alley. They clattered through the night, and when one of the engines began to sound as if it were approaching the end, Bell switched them both off after starting the reserves.

Bell was on watch hours past dawn the next morning, driving through heavy squalls, with Pauline huddled against him fast asleep and Tobin and Asa sleeping under the foredeck, when he heard a rumble like thunder. A flash to his left could be the lightning that caused it. Fifteen seconds later, it flashed again, and then again in another fifteen, and he saw a white flashing pinprick of light.

Cape May Light could be seen up to twenty-four nautical miles. But not in these conditions. To see the light from the low boat through the wind-whipped rain, they had to be almost on top of it. What he had thought was thunder might be surf pounding land. Then he saw enormous waves breaking on a sandbar. He could feel them gathering behind him, lifting the boat to drive them onto the beach. He swung the wheel, hit his throttles, and fled the shore.

Fighting to maintain twenty knots, he ran east for an hour, then swung north again. Two hours passed. Tobin was at the helm. Bell saw a steady white light that did not blink.

“Absecon Light,” Pauline read.

“Atlantic City,” said Tobin. “Getting close, Mr. Bell. Barnegat next.”

Asa Somers spotted the red-and-white painted Barnegat Lighthouse itself, and again the cruiser peeled away from the shore. Two hours later, limping on one engine, holding the other that was still running in reserve, they saw the squalls race away and suddenly found themselves in sunlight on a patch of riled blue sea completely surrounded by heavy banks of cloud.

“What is going on?” asked Tobin, turning on his heel. “It’s like a miniature eye of a miniature hurricane.”

“Any idea where we are?” asked Bell.

“None.”

Pauline dragged her heavy canvas bag out of the foredeck cubby and handed it to Tobin.

“What’s this?”

“What you forgot to pack. A sextant and a Nautical Almanac. It’s noon. I recall Isaac knows how to use it. He can shoot the sun and tell us where we are.”

Bell said, “You drive, Ed. Keep her as steady as you can. On the jump. This won’t last.”

Indeed, the cloud banks were closing quickly around the strange clear patch. Bell swung the sextant to the sky and lowered the mirrored image of the sun to the horizon. From the scale, he called the angle to Pauline. She noted the time and ran her finger down the columns pertaining to the Greenwich mean angle. Asa held the chart.

“Approximately twenty miles from New York,” said Pauline. “Steer three hundred ten degrees to Ambrose Light.”

“Who taught you how to do that?” Tobin asked her.

“The captain of the Aquitania.”

Clouds and mist closed in abruptly. The visibility dropped to a quarter mile, then increased, then dropped again as squalls blew through fitfully. With twelve miles to go, they spotted a dismasted schooner. The storm-battered ship was tossing at anchor while its crew cut away ruined rigging. A bedsheet flapped from its bowsprit. An advertisement was painted on it in red:

“Rum Row,” said Isaac Bell.

They sped past island schooners and rusty steamers battened down for the storm.

“Look at that,” said Asa. “There’s some lunatic driving a taxi.”

“The price of booze goes up in bad weather,” Tobin explained. “They’ll get rich if they don’t drown.”

A fresh squall hit, riding a cold wind, and they were suddenly alone again on a seemingly empty sea. The squalls passed, and they could see for two or three miles that they were still alone except for a single big ship on a course similar to theirs, angling toward New York. They overtook it quickly.

“That’s her,” said Pauline.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I saw her in Bremerhaven.”

41

The tanker Sandra T. Congdon had a tall funnel in back, a sturdy white wheelhouse forward of center, and a straight bow.

“What’s that on the bow?”

“A three-inch gun,” said Pauline. “Left over from the war.”

Bell studied it in the binoculars. “Not that left over. They’ve got a heap of ammunition all ready to shoot. Pity the Harbor Squad that runs into them. Ed, keep us behind their house.”

Tobin altered course, as they caught up with the tanker, so that its wheelhouse blocked the deck gun’s line of fire.

“What are those guys on top doing?” asked Asa.

Bell focused his glasses on a wood-and-canvas flying bridge constructed on top of the wheelhouse.

“Unlimbering a Lewis gun,” he said. “Get your heads down.”

Machine-gun bullets screeched overhead and frothed the water. Tobin cut in the reserve engine and hit his throttles. A minute later, they were a half mile behind the tanker, beyond effective range of its machine gun.

Isaac Bell broke into an icy smile.

“Look who’s here… I’ll take the helm, Ed.”

Black Bird slid out from behind the tanker and sped at them, hurling spray.

Bell fired orders. “Pauline, down! Asa, foredeck gun! Tobin, stern!”

The two boats raced at each other at a combined velocity of one hundred miles an hour. Ed Tobin fired a long burst from the forward Lewis gun. Black Bird shot back. But a black boat proved a much better target than one painted as gray as rain.

Geysers of bullet-pocked water splashed around Marion.

Lead banged into Black Bird’s armor and crazed her windshield. Her gunner was blown from his weapon and pinwheeled backwards into the sea.

Another leaped to his place.

Less than fifty yards separated the speeding boats, and the new gunner could not have missed even if the Van Dorn boat had been invisible. Bell felt the slugs rattling off the armor plate. The man fired again. Bullets cut the air inches above his head. The boats hurtled past each other, missing by inches.

Asa Somers triggered the stern Lewis, raking Black Bird’s cockpit. All three men in it fell to the sole. Only one regained his feet: Marat Zolner.

Bell saw him twirl his helm and ram his throttles in a single swift motion. But nothing happened. The black boat did not answer her helm. Nor did she speed away, but fell back in the seas, barely drifting ahead.

“Good shooting, Asa!”

The young apprentice had blasted Zolner’s controls to pieces.

Zolner jumped from the cockpit to the Lewis gun, ripped off the ammunition drum, and banged a full one into place. He tracked the Van Dorn boat, which was circling for the kill, and fired a burst.

Isaac Bell saw what appeared to be tracer bullets, trailing blue smoke. But when Zolner got the range, which he did on his third burst, raking Marion just ahead of the engines, smoke curled from the bullet holes. Marat Zolner was firing World War balloon-busting incendiary ammunition. Each phosphorus bullet laced the Van Dorn hull with flame, and the boat was suddenly on fire.

Pauline Grandzau dived for the nearest extinguisher, ripped it from its clamp, pumped up pressure, and sprayed pyrene on the flames. She sprayed until the brass container was empty and scrambled across the deck for another.

“Help her, Asa!” Bell shouted. “Ed, put out the fire! I’ll get Zolner.”

Bell stood up so he could see over the bullet-scarred windshield.

He steered into a tight turn that careened the boat half on her side. When he was facing Black Bird, he shoved his throttles wide open. Blue smoke streaked. Zolner had reloaded with incendiaries.

Bell zigzagged, rapid turns hard left, hard right. He cut the distance from two hundred yards to one hundred, to fifty. Marat Zolner stopped firing, his face a startled mask of disbelief at the sight of the burning cruiser flying at him.

“Ramming!” Bell warned his people. “Hold tight!”

Bell aimed for the softest target just ahead of the engines. The Van Dorn boat struck Black Bird dead center and cut the Comintern boat in half. Bell saw Zolner thrown from the Lewis gun into the water. Then he was past, drawing back his throttles.

He saw Marat Zolner swimming hard toward the tanker.

“Ed! Asa! Pick him up, right side.”

Marion swooped alongside Zolner.

Tobin leaned over to grab him.

“Look out, Ed!”

Bell saw Zolner turn over onto his back to deliver a vicious thrust with a short dagger. The blade plunged into Tobin’s forearm. Blood fountained. The detective swung his fist and pitched forward and started to slide over the gunnel. Asa Somers grabbed him, hauled him back into the boat, and wrapped his belt around Tobin’s arm.

A Lewis gun opened up with a rapid Boom! Boom! Boom! Ricochets shrieked, splinters flew. The Sandra T. Congdon was raking them with machine-gun fire from the flying bridge.

Bell poured on the gas and peeled away. Zolner kept swimming toward the tanker. Bell ventured closer, but the gunner laid down deadly fire from the vantage of his high mount. Another rain squall tore between them. Bell drove into it, using it as cover to get closer. But when the rain lifted, the machine gun started churning bullets, even as a lifeboat approached Zolner. Any hope Bell had that the man was injured was dashed when the Comintern agent scrambled aboard like a monkey.

The rain fell hard. The tanker disappeared. Thick mist gathered.

“We’ll never him see in this,” gasped Tobin as Somers fought to stop the bleeding. “Where’s he going?”

“Where he’s been going all along,” said Isaac Bell. “Wall Street.”

Yuri Antipov had bombed a symbol of capitalism. Marat Zolner would burn its heart out with an alcohol-fueled fireball. And the Comintern would welcome the hero who incinerated New York’s Financial District the length of Wall Street from the East River to Trinity Church.

Bell stepped on the starter. The third engine fired back to life.

The battered Marion roared for New York Harbor at fifty knots.

She carried them between the arms of Sandy Hook and Rockaway Beach and up the Lower Bay in ten minutes, through the Narrows and across the Upper Bay in another seven. The third motor died at the Battery. The second in the East River under the Brooklyn Bridge.

Peering through a scrim of sheet rain, Bell spotted the tall hangars of the Loening factory and, just past it, the 31st Street Air Service Terminal. His last engine coughed, running out of gas. Fifty yards from the dock, it died. In the sudden silence, Bell disengaged the propeller to reduce drag, and she drifted close enough for Asa to loop a line around a bollard.

Bell pulled the Thompson submachine gun from a locker. “Pauline, get Ed to Bellevue. Asa, grab that box.”

“Where’d you get hand grenades?”

“Miami River. Come on!”

They ran to the Loening factory on the river’s edge. The mechanics had floated the Flying Yachts into the hangars, out of the wind. Bell climbed onto his and threw off the lines. “On the jump, boys. Open those doors and start my engine.”

“You can’t take off in this weather!” the foreman shouted.

“My mother died when I was a boy. I’ve gotten by without one since. Start my engine!”

42

Bell battled high waves taking off from the East River and ferocious gusts in the air as his flying boat climbed toward the Williamsburg Bridge. He steered between its towers, whose tops were lost in cloud, and aimed for the lowest dip in its suspension cables. He cleared them by inches. The horizon vanished in the rain.

He kept track of the horizon with a new Sperry instrument that combined a turn indicator and an inclinometer. But it was no help avoiding the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, much less the skyscrapers of Wall Street, and he flew blind, relying on his compass, Tank watch, and memory.

Asa Somers couldn’t stop grinning. He had never been in an airplane before.

When the Flying Yacht finally broke from the murk that enshrouded the port, Bell saw that he had already flown past the Narrows. The Lower Bay spread below him, dotted with ships. He ignored the vessels he saw at anchor. They were riding out the storm, huddled along the Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Jersey shores. Marat Zolner’s tanker would be moving, steaming up the Ambrose Channel on a relentless course toward Manhattan Island.

Bell flew the length of the channel. It was empty of ships. Had he guessed wrong? Had Zolner simply turned around and fled to Europe? When he saw Ambrose Lightship tossed violently on the storm-churned ocean, he circled back. But in the entire outer harbor he saw only one moving vessel braving the storm. Nearing the Narrows, it was, incredibly, a little rumrunner stacked with crates of whisky and sheeted in spray as it pitched and rolled.

Asa tapped Bell’s arm. He was scanning the water ahead through the binoculars. Above the Narrows, already into the Upper Bay, less than six miles from the Battery at the tip of Manhattan, a tanker was plowing toward the city. The Flying Yacht raced after it, and Bell soon recognized the Sandra T. Congdon by the tall funnel soaring from the back of her hull, her sturdy wheelhouse forward of center, her straight bow, and her graceful fantail stern. The cannon on her foredeck cinched it. Closer, he saw her crew frantically rowing away in the lifeboat. She was, indeed, a floating firebomb.

“Asa. Lash those grenades together in bundles of four.”

“Are we going to bomb him?”

“You are going to bomb those cannon shells on the foredeck. I’m going to fly the plane. See that knob on the end of the stick? That’s the detonator. Pull that knob when I tell you and drop it over the side fast as you can.”

He banked into a tight circle, straightened up behind the ship, and descended. The flying boat caught up quickly. Asa stood up in the cockpit so he could reach over the side windows. Bell soared fifty feet above the stack and over the wheelhouse, his Blériot wheel in constant motion as he tried to counteract the buffeting wind.

“Now!”

Thirty feet over the foredeck, they couldn’t miss. The bundled stick grenades landed on the cannon. They bounced onto the stacked cannon shells. But before they detonated, they skittered away and exploded with a harmless flash on the steel deck.

Bell circled for another try.

Zolner was ready with his Lewis gun. As Bell caught up with the tanker again, he flew into streaks of blue smoke. Incendiary bullets tore through his wing. Each left a trail of fire. Flames wrapped the wing.

“Seat belt, Asa, we have to land.”

“How can we stop him if we land?”

“Watch me.”

The wind, Bell thought, was blowing behind the ship, in line with her course up the channel, which would not make a dicey maneuver any easier. But slowing the plane by landing into the wind was not an option. Fanned by the slipstream, the fire enveloped the entire wing and tumbled into the passenger cabin directly behind the cockpit. He had no choice but to come down fast and hard.

Old Donald Darbee stopped his oyster boat in the middle of his hurricane whisky run to see what happened next. He and little Robin had noticed the tanker proceeding up the channel when no one in his right mind but a rumrunner was out. Then the tanker’s crew lowered a boat and rowed away. But the ship kept going. Then Isaac Bell’s airplane, which he recognized because it was identical to the Newport Flying Service planes but didn’t have that name written on it, swooped out of the storm and dropped a bomb on the tanker.

That didn’t do a thing to it. Then the tanker shot blue tracer bullets at Bell. And now Bell’s plane was falling out of the sky with its wings on fire.

“When he hits the water,” he told Robin, “we’ll pick up the pieces.”

“He won’t hit the water,” said the little girl. “He’ll hit the ship.”

Sharp-eyed Robin was right. Bell’s plane was flying behind the ship, catching up at forty knots to the tanker’s twelve. At the last second, it dodged the funnel and smacked down on the middle of the ship, slid along the flat deck between the funnel and the house in a shower of sparks, and banged to a stop against a ventilator.

“That can’t have done Mr. Bell any good,” Darbee said to Robin. “Might as well head home.”

“Let’s wait,” said Robin.

“What for?”

“It isn’t over.”

“Out!”

Bell grabbed the Thompson .45 in one hand and Asa with the other. He half helped, half threw the boy over the side, hooked a bundle of stick grenades on his belt, and jumped down beside him. “Run before it blows.”

“It will blow up the ship.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

They ran toward the house and took cover around the front of it.

Bell’s flying boat exploded. Wings, tail, floats, most of the passenger cabin, and the burning fuel tank flew into the wind and fell in the harbor. The few parts still smoldering on the steel deck were drenched by the rain. The ship, which was pounding ahead at twelve knots, and its flammable cargo, seemed immune. Bell had one hope left.

He drew his Browning pistol and shoved it into Asa’s hand. “Stay here. Take this. Shoot anybody who tries to follow me.”

Detonating the three-inch shells stacked around the cannon would blow the bow off the ship and stop her dead. He had failed to do it from the safety of the air. Here on the ship, the trick would be to do it without blowing himself up, too. Bell ran toward the cannon on the foredeck. Could he throw a grenade accurately enough to detonate the shells yet from far enough to escape with his life? He was reaching for one on his belt when he heard a shot behind him.

Bell whirled around. Asa had fallen to the deck.

A shadow swooped out of the rain like a giant bird. In the corner of his vision Bell saw a wet rope glistening. He saw Marat Zolner’s face — lips drawn with effort, eyes eerily calm. He saw a rubber-soled boot. The boot was flying at his face. Bell slewed aside. It slammed into his chest, knocked the Thompson out of his hands, and threw him halfway across the ship.

Bell tucked his shoulder, rolled, and sprang to his feet in a fighting crouch.

He was amazed to see the tall, lithe Russian so near, he could almost touch him.

Zolner was holding the rope. It was tied to the front rail on top of the wheelhouse, and Bell saw that he had jumped from the back to swing three stories to the deck.

“Simple physics, Bell. What are you doing on my ship?”

“Arresting a hero.”

“You’ve spoken with Fern.” Zolner let go of the rope.

Isaac Bell attacked, throwing lightning jabs and a hard left hook. He landed all three punches. Zolner shrugged them off. Bell threw two more with the same lack of effect. The man was so fast, it was like punching quicksilver.

Bell had twenty pounds on him, a huge advantage. He used it, wading in, punching hard. Ducking and weaving with incredible speed, Zolner pulled a long-handled blackjack from a back pocket and swung it. The blow was remarkable for its power and its accuracy, and Isaac Bell realized, as pain blazed through his elbow, that Zolner had hit him exactly where he intended to. His arm hung limply, coursing like fire, useless.

Zolner smiled. “That should even things up.” He shifted the blackjack from one hand to the other, left to right, right to left, fast as a juggler. The weapon was a blur and suddenly, in a burst of synchronized movement, it jumped at Bell’s face.

43

The blackjack whistled through the air. It came from Bell’s left and Bell could not lift his left arm high enough to block the bone-crushing blow. He struggled to raise it anyway. Otherwise, he hardly moved.

The blackjack grazed his nose.

Bell had moved just enough to let the blackjack pass and draw Zolner’s arm across his torso. He concentrated one hundred seventy-five pounds of bone and muscle to crash a low right cross straight into Zolner’s rib cage. His reward was a soft crack of bone and a gasp.

The Comintern agent staggered.

Bell moved to finish him off.

Zolner was too fast and too strong. The body blow should have doubled him up. But before Bell could retract his right fist and cock it for another blow, Zolner charged with sudden fury, kicking, punching, swinging his blackjack. Another strike against Bell’s elbow took his breath away. They grappled. Zolner broke loose.

Bell swiped blood out of his eyes, vaguely aware that the blackjack had torn his brow. He felt as if the tanker’s deck was shaking under his feet.

Zolner circled. Hunched, favoring his side, he said, “None of this would have happened if your precious boss hadn’t blundered into a bullet.”

“Three bullets.” Bell went straight at him.

Zolner sidestepped and jerked his thumb in the direction where Asa had fallen on the deck. “Is your vengeance worth it? The boy is dead. Your boss is crippled. And I’ll go home a hero.”

Bell stopped in his tracks.

He’s outfoxed me at nearly every turn, he thought. He’s outfoxing me now, but I don’t know how. Bell knew he was not thinking clearly. He was exhausted after two days in the storm. His arm was on fire. Something was going on that he didn’t understand.

Suddenly, it struck Bell why the deck was shaking.

The tall detective smiled. “The tanker is moving. You’ve got a man in the engine room and a helmsman steering. And I’m along for the ride because you told Fern you’ll make me sorry.”

“The boy is dead,” Zolner repeated.

Bell looked toward Asa, sprawled where he had left him at the back of the wheelhouse. He glanced over his shoulder at the deck cannon. Then he swept the foredeck with probing eyes.

“You’re a brilliant liar. But I heard only one shot from my gun. Asa shot at you and missed you. You slugged him as you swung past. And now you are stalling me while your fireship steams on.”

Bell turned as if to run to Asa. Zolner whirled to intercept him.

Bell spun the other way, darted across the ship, and scooped up the Thompson that Zolner had kicked out of his hands. By force of will, he closed his left hand around the forward grip, braced it against his body, and pulled the trigger. The recoil whipped it out of his weakened hand. All but the first bullet sprayed into the sky. The first struck its target.

Bell dived for cover.

A three-inch cannon shell exploded like thunder. A second detonated, and they all went off with a force that bucked the ship from end to end and lifted him five feet off the deck and dropped him like a sack of coal. He scrambled to his feet and ran for Asa. Zolner got there ahead of him. Bell pegged a wild shot that passed close to Zolner’s head. Zolner ducked. Bell slammed him out of his way, heaved Asa Somers over his right shoulder, ran to the side of the ship, and jumped.

He seemed to fall forever before they splashed into the water.

It closed over his head. He kicked as hard as he could to push the boy to the surface. Asa struggled. The cold water had revived him.

“Swim!” Bell roared at him. “Swim!” And the apprentice obeyed.

The hull was rushing past. Explosion after explosion shook the ship.

Jagged chunks of wood, steel rails, and burning canvas rained into the water around them. Ash fell like snow, oil splashed. Bell kicked his feet and paddled with his one good arm. The ship was past them now, drawing away, still hurtling toward the city. It disappeared into the murk of rain and fog. Bell thought all was lost. But just when it seemed that nothing could stop the fireship from steaming to Wall Street, a column of fire evaporated the rain and fog. Roaring from the ruptured hold, pluming into the sky, the fiercely burning alcohol blazed stark light on the Comintern’s tanker. It was sinking alone in the middle of the bay.

Isaac Bell saw Marat Zolner climbing a ladder up the back of the wheelhouse, racing the fires. He reached the flying bridge and stood for a long moment, a graceful shadow against the flames.

The wind bent the pillar of fire. An explosion blew the ship’s bow apart. Water rushed in and she settled rapidly to the bottom of the channel, disappearing except for the top of her tall funnel and a cloud of steam.

“Wow!” said Asa. He had a huge bruise over his eye.

“Think you can swim to shore?”

Brooklyn seemed closest. Bell tried an abbreviated backstroke with one arm. Before they got a hundred yards, a little boat with a big engine pulled alongside, and Isaac Bell looked up into the wrinkled face of Ed Tobin’s uncle Donny Darbee.

“I was coming by with a load of oysters,” he said. “Thought you could use a lift.”

“In return for which,” said Bell, “you want me to talk your so-called oysters past the cops.”

“That was Robin’s idea. She thinks we’ll get top dollar in Manhattan.”

A taxi pulled up to the St. Regis Hotel.

Isaac Bell stepped out, soaking wet, his mustache singed, his face and hair glazed with ash and salt and grease and blood. Asa Somers staggered after him in dripping rags.

The doorman waved them away. Burly house detectives blocked the steps.

“Buzz my wife,” said Bell. “Tell her I’m coming up.”

“Wife? Who’s your wife?”

“Mrs. Isaac Bell.”

“It’s Himself!”

The house detectives escorted them solicitously to the elevator. Bell stopped dead when he saw a newspaper.

Bad luck? Or divine retribution? It seemed, Bell thought, harsh punishment for falling in with the wrong crowd.

“Poor Fern,” said Asa. “She was so nice.”

“I’m not sure Fern would like to be remembered as ‘nice.’”

“Fräulein Grandzau liked her.”

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

Bell led Asa down the carpeted hall to Marion’s door.

He was suddenly aware that every bone and muscle ached. His left arm throbbed like a burning stick. He could feel the sea pounding, as if he had never left the boat, and could hear the Libertys roaring in his ears.

“Almost home, Asa.”

He squared his shoulders and knocked.

A peephole opened. A beautiful sea-coral-green eye peered through it and grew wide.

Bell grinned. “Joe sent me.”

Marion flung open the door. “You’re all right!”

“Tip-top.”

She threw her arms around him.

“Look out, you’ll get dirty.”

“I don’t care… Who’s this?… Oh, you must be the brave Asa who saved Joe. Come in. Come in, both of you.”

Pauline was behind her, bright and perfumed in a thick terry robe.

“Asa, are you all right?”

Asa swayed and caught himself on the doorknob. “Yes, ma’am. Tip-top.”

“Go take a bath.” She pointed down the hall. “There’s a robe on the hook.”

Joseph Van Dorn was waiting in a wicker wheelchair. Dorothy stood beside him, her eyes at peace.

“You look like hell,” he greeted Bell in a strong voice.

“You look better,” said Bell. “Much improved.”

“Hospital sprung me. That’s something.” Van Dorn hauled himself to his feet, steadied himself on the arm of the wheelchair, and reached for Bell’s hand. “Well done, Isaac. Well done. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Wait until you get the bill for my airplane.”

“Airplane?”

“And you’ll want a new bow and motors for the agency express cruiser. Don’t worry, you can afford it. Texas Walt is raking it in hand over fist out in Detroit.”

“He’s still in business?”

“At least until we get the Coast Guard contract back.”

Bell turned to Pauline. “Is Ed O.K.?”

“Ed’s fine. They stitched him up. It was a vein, not an artery… Isaac, I must speak with you.”

“What’s up?”

“Marion has given me a wonderful idea.”

Bell glanced at Marion. “She’s good at them.”

“I want to take young Asa for my apprentice.”

“To Germany?”

“With his parents’ permission, of course.”

“I believe he’s an orphan.”

“All the better. So am I. Isaac, make it so.”

The chief investigator of the Van Dorn Detective Agency turned to its founder.

Van Dorn said, “Your call.”

Bell locked eyes with Pauline and shared a private smile. “Based on how your apprentice handled a machine gun this afternoon, you might consider allowing him to carry a small pistol.”

“All in good time,” said Pauline. “Thank you, Isaac. And thank you, Marion.”

Van Dorn eased himself back down into his wheelchair and rolled toward the door. “We’re shoving off. Dorothy wants me home in bed.”

They agreed to talk in the morning. “Afternoon,” Marion corrected them. “Late afternoon.”

A freshly scrubbed Asa Somers appeared in a bathrobe with Band-Aids plastered on his brow. Pauline spoke quietly to him and they headed out the door.

“Alone at last,” said Marion. “Is your arm all right? You’re favoring it.”

“Just a little sore. Where are they going in bathrobes?”

“I got them a room upstairs.”

“One room?”

“The hotel’s packed because of the storm. It has twin beds, I think,” she added briskly. “They’ll work it out.”

“Good idea.”

“Now, what about you?” Marion asked. “What would you like?”

“I could use a drink.”

Marion said, “I’ll join you.”

“And a hot bath.”

“I’ll join you.”