The Bootlegger

by Clive Cussler

  “Does it belong to Fern?”

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

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

  “What is out there? I see no lights.”

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

  “What is around us on the land?”

  “Other estates of similar size. All private.”

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

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

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

  “But you concentrate it here.”

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

  “How do you get it here?”

  “The boats.”

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

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

  “You have made a success of bootlegging.”

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

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

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

  “Your pride?”

  Zolner ignored the mocking note in Antipov’s voice.

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

  “Why have they disassembled her motors?”

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

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

  “Intake or exhaust?” asked Antipov.

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

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

  “I would believe almost anything at this point.”

  Antipov spoke softly, but he was seething with anger.

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

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

  “What of the revolution?”

  “What of the revolution?”

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

  9

  “WHAT PRECISELY have you done to spearhead the Bolshevik takeover of America?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Open that!”

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

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Profits,” said Zolner.

  “Profits?”

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

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

  “What I am doing costs money.”

  “And what precisely are you doing?”

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

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

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

  “And you?”

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

  “Are you a comrade?”

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

  Antipov shook his head.

  “What is wrong, Yuri?”

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

  “Precisely what my empire will achieve.”

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

  Zolner laughed.

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

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

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


  “I already have.”

  “What?”

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

  “A broker?”

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

  “Your scheme is tangential and slow.”

  “I will not be rushed.”

  “Worse, you veer from the revolution.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Joining them?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I am not a counter-revolutionary.”

  “The effect of failure is counter-revolutionary.”

  “I will not fail.”

  “Moscow decides what is failure.”

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

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

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

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

  They laughed again.

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

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

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

  Antipov brightened. “She’s here?”

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

  • • •

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

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

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

  “Never.”

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

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

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

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

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

  But Yuri Antipov gave her a look of withering disdain.

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

  “Don’t you know why they are small?”

  “No. What do you mean?”

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

  “Yuri, what are you talking about?”

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

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

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

  “Have you eaten?” she asked.

  She pulled a bell cord. A butler appeared.

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

  “Bread and sausage.”

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yuri Antipov is no one’s friend.”

  “He’s your friend.”

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

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

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

  “So are you Comintern.”

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

  “Would Yuri throw you in that fire?”

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

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

  “Why are you grateful to him?”

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

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

  “I will fight at your side.”

  10

  THE FIRST MAIL DELIVERY of the morning brought a letter from the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office to the Van Dorn field office.