The Bootlegger

by Clive Cussler

  “O.K.! O.K.!”

  “Shut! Up!”

  Hooks Newdell pressed his lips together and sat motionless.

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

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

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

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

  The man turned left on Christopher.

  “Pull over. Come with us.”

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

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

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

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

  “Hooks! Come with me and Jake.”

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

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

  “Shut up,” said Yuri.

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

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

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

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

  “What’s that?” asked Hooks Newdell.

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

  “What’s an Annihilator?”

  “A submachine gun.”

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

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

  “I never seen one before.”

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

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

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

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Hooks, what is that you dropped?”

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

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

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

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

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

  12

  “I BLAME THE IRISH.”

  “For which, the guns or the booze?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What’s fishy?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “How did he die?”

  “Shot.”

  “First I’ve heard there was gunplay.”

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

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

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

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

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

  Isaac Bell surged to his feet. “Where?”

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

  “Was his name Johnny?”

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

  “I’ll get it out of him,” said Bell.

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

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

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

  Something else was missing.

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

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

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

  “I like the gun bulge.”

  “Don’t tell my tailor.”

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

  • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What’s that in miles per hour?”

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

  “How fast when it’s loaded?”

  “Depends with what.”

  “Booze.”

  “Mister, booze is—”

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

  “I’m available.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah . . . You don’t believe me?”

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

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

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

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

  “When was this?”

  “What do you care?”

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

  “Sunday.”

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

  “When did he tell you Sunday?”

  “Last week.”

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

  “He called himself Johnny.”

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

  “What do you mean? It’s Johnny.”

  “Germans don’t call themselves Johnny.”

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

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

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

  “Tom, I thought we’re on the square.”

  “Kozlov. Johann Kozlov.”

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

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

  “Nope.”

  “Then how’d you meet him?”

  Tom wet his lips again.

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

  “I don’t know. He just found me.”

  “Why would he trust you?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where is your uncle?”

  “Bound for Singapore, last I heard.”

  “What line?”

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

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

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

  • • •

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

  “Was he a Wobbly?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Deported? When?”

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

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

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