Bell let sailors pull him up onto the cutter’s stern deck. The petty officer hurried down to confront him, stopped cold, and said, “I know you from somewhere.”
Bell looked him in the eye. “I believe you’re the man who saved Joseph Van Dorn’s life with a tourniquet. If you are, I’m in your debt.”
“That’s who you are.”
“I wonder if you would do me another favor and tell your skipper I have to talk to him.” Just then the boarding party called out that there was no booze on the oyster boat.
The weary-looking skipper, who had been observing from the flying bridge, came down to the stern deck. “What’s the big idea with the smoke screen? There’s no liquor on your boat.”
“We knew you lamebrains would never find us if we didn’t help!” Darbee yelled.
The captain ignored him, saying to Bell, “You lured me off station to help your pals’ taxis get by. It’s a crime to impede a patrol.”
Isaac Bell extended his hand. “Captain, I am Van Dorn Chief Investigator Isaac Bell. I’m sure you don’t begrudge me investigating who shot my boss while he was on your ship. Do you?”
“Of course not. But—”
“You can get back to your patrol as soon as you tell me exactly what happened when Mr. Van Dorn was shot on your ship.”
“Why the charade?” The captain jerked a thumb at Darbee and his boat.
“The Coast Guard is dodging me. Your superiors won’t let me interview you or your crew.”
“I wondered about that,” the captain nodded. “That’s why they’ve kept us out here. Cook’s down to baked beans and water, and we’re running low on fuel.”
“As soon as you answer my questions,” said Bell, “I’ll stop bothering them and they’ll let you return to harbor.”
“I have nothing to hide.”
“What struck you most about the black boat?”
“Speed. I’ve never seen such a fast boat.”
Exactly what Joseph Van Dorn had told him. “What next?”
“Tactics,” said the captain. “They used their speed to great effect. They took advantage of my vessel’s shortcomings, maneuvering behind us so we couldn’t bring the Poole gun to bear.”
Bell said, “Mr. Van Dorn told me he thought he was back in Panama with the Marines.”
“I thought I was back in the war,” said the captain.
“Lead flying will do it,” said the petty officer.
“That, too, but what I’m saying is they conducted their attack like a naval engagement. Isn’t that so, Chief?”
“Aye, sir. The rumrunners handled themselves like vets.”
“They weren’t common criminals.”
Again, thought Bell, precisely what Van Dorn had said.
At that moment, with the cutter’s deck rolling under his feet, Isaac Bell voiced in his mind what he had been mulling ever since he chased the killer who murdered Johann Kozlov: If they weren’t common criminals, if they weren’t run-of-the-mill whisky haulers, what were they doing bootlegging?
“That’s all I know,” said the captain. “Chief, put him back on his boat.”
“One more thing,” said Bell. “Who pulled Mr. Van Dorn out of the water?”
The captain and the petty officer exchanged uncomfortable glances.
The captain spoke. “Seaman Third Class Asa Somers.”
“I’d like to shake his hand.”
The chief looked out at the water. The captain said, “Somers was discharged.”
“What for? He’s a hero.”
“His discharge order came straight from headquarters. Someone complained about the wild-goose chases we got sent on—said someone was tipping them off. The brass decided the complainer, or the tipster, was Somers. He was the last to join the ship. They took him off on a launch.”
“Was he the complainer?”
“I don’t know, but he’s a decent kid.”
“Smart as a whip,” said the chief.
“Where can I find him?”
• • •
“LONG LIVE SOVIET GERMANY!”
The Communist battle cry was uttered in hoarse whispers by the Hundertschaften company as they sneaked into Hamburg in the dead of night. Valtin ordered his men to break into shops to steal jars of kerosene. The Central Committee had promised stick grenades. Until they arrived, the Red shock troops would set fires with lamp oil. Which left Pauline with little hope that the Central Committee would dispatch Zolner as promised. But she was in the thick of it now, an unwilling participant in what was beginning to look to her like a doomed attack by a thousand men against a city of a million.
But as they advanced deeper into the city, they were joined by other Hundertschaften companies and ordinary citizens streaming down from the tenements. Their numbers began to swell. The first police station they attacked fell quickly. They marched bewildered policemen out in their own handcuffs—hostages, if needed—and looted the station house arsenals of rifles and pistols, ammunition, and a water-cooled MG 08/15 Maschinengewehr mounted on a tripod. Valtin assigned four war veterans to lug the machine gun to a tenement roof that commanded the street.
They continued toward the shipyards, the night dark, the streets deserted. Surprise seemed total. There was no sign of riot brigades, no mobs of Bürgerwehr auxiliaries, no columns of Freikorps. They were advancing stealthily on another police station when its lights went out.
“Attack!” Valtin bellowed, and they charged the building.
The cops opened fire with rifles and pistols. Flashes of red and yellow pierced the dark. Men fell in the street.
Valtin hurled a stick grenade. It smashed the glass of a small window and lodged against wire mesh. But the grenade was a dud and did not explode. The Hundertschaften resumed firing their pistols. The police answered with a machine gun. The roar was deafening, the muzzle flashes blinding. Anny pinwheeled into Pauline. Pauline tried to keep her from falling. She caught her in her arms. The girl was deadweight.
Pauline forced herself to look at her face. To her horror, she saw a dark hole between her eyes. Anny had been killed instantly. We were inches apart, Pauline thought, still holding her.
Three teenage boys, brave beyond reasoning, ran at the building, throwing jars of kerosene. Braver than they would be, Pauline thought, if they had been standing with Anny. Bullets cut them down. Glass shattered, kerosene splashed. A fourth boy ran to it with a burning rag. A bullet hurled him back and he fell on the burning rag. An old man who had joined them moments before the attack stepped forward. Bullets stormed past him. Pauline waited for him to die. He flicked a cigarette. It sailed through the dark like a shooting star. The front of the police station caught fire, and flames tumbled in the windows.
The door opened and policemen ran out, beating at their burning tunics with bare hands and rolling on the cobblestones to put out the flames. Pauline thought in the confusion that the Reds were helping the police put out the flames. But her eyes told the terrible truth. They were leaping over the bodies of the fallen boys to knock down the cops and kick them to death.
Pauline knew in that moment that her hopes for Germany had been hijacked exactly as ex-Kommandeur Fritz Richter had predicted they would be: no gracious winners, no shining knights.
She eased Anny’s body to the cobblestones with an awful feeling that the worst would thrive and the dreamers would die. Valtin’s Red Hundreds left the burning police station and raced toward the shipyard. Afraid to be left behind, Pauline ran after them.
Government posters at street corners proclaimed the death penalty for possessing weapons. The fighters tore them down. They crossed a broad thoroughfare, which Pauline recognized as one that led to the central railroad station where she could telephone long-distance to Richter in Berlin. She had seen no sign of the mysterious Zolner, and, in all the fighting, he might well be dead. She slowed and let the stragglers overtake her. As she began to turn away, she handed her first-aid rucksack to the last man in line.
He stare
d over her shoulder, his eyes suddenly widening with terror.
A column of squat gray armored cars was roaring up the thoroughfare.
“Run!”
The survivors of the Red Hundreds sprinted for the neighborhood of narrow, winding streets that housed the shipyard workers. The workers, who had been striking for days, had blocked the streets with massive, well-constructed barricades of overturned wagons, trucks, and furniture. They were reinforced with cobblestones and protected from above by snipers on the roofs.
The armored cars attacked, spitting machine-gun fire from narrow slits in their steel fronts. As Pauline had seen in Berlin, they were painted with skulls and crossbones. Stick grenades plummeted down from the rooftops. The powerful explosives blasted sheet armor loose from the attacking cars, exposing their drivers and machine gunners to rifle fire from above. Several cars stopped, immobilized. One caught fire. Another exploded. And the rest retreated.
Workers and Red Hundreds cheered and embraced.
Moments later, there was a huge explosion in the middle of the main barricade, tearing it apart and hurtling men and debris in the air.
“Minenwerfer!” Bomb throwers.
Another ten-pound mortar shell screamed down from the sky. And another.
“To the shipyard!”
Fleeing the ruined barricade, the survivors stampeded toward the shipyard.
The strikers opened the gates to let them in. Pauline emerged from the narrow streets, her ears ringing from the mortar explosions. She saw the ribs of a steamer under construction reaching for the open sky. A searchlight leaped along sheds and tall gantries and swept across the frame of the half-built ship and locked suddenly, brilliantly, on a huge red flag billowing in the wind.
The workers’ cheers were drowned out by gunfire from the river.
Hamburg police in armed motorboats raced toward the builders’ ways, firing rifles and mounted machine guns. Strikers and Hundertschaften dived for cover. The cops stormed ashore. Pauline saw the red flag illuminated by the searchlight descend swiftly down the mast and out of sight. Moments later, the police ran it up again, soaked in gasoline and burning fiercely.
17
THE RETREAT WAS CHAOS, every man for himself. The Reds threw away incriminating weapons and ran for the oldest slums of crooked alleys where they might hide, protected by the criminals who lived there. Pauline walked in the shadows of the buildings, head down, empty hands visible, eyes alert, watching for the police. A man still holding a gun raced by. In the wake of the insurrection the cops had retaken the rooftops, and a sniper cut him down.
She saw Valtin in a doorway. He had been shot. His peacoat was soaked with blood. It took him a confused moment to recognize her.
“Where is Anny?” he asked.
“Anny is dead. Put your arm over my shoulder. I’ll help you to a hospital.”
“Are you crazy? Wounds will tell them who we are.”
“Where is Zolner?”
Valtin was struggling to breathe. “If the Central Committee sent him, I didn’t see him.”
“What’s his first name?”
“Why do you keep . . . Oh yes, your poor betrayed brother.”
“What’s his first name?”
“Marat. Marat Zolner.”
“Marat Zolner.”
“It’s only his nom de guerre.”
“What’s his real name?”
Valtin closed his eyes. “Sometimes he is Dima Smirnov, spelled with a v. Sometimes Dmitri Smirnoff spelled with fs. Sometimes . . . Who knows? Who cares?” He sagged against the door. His chin slumped to his chest. His feet skidded out from under him. Pauline knelt beside him. When he opened his eyes, what she saw there told her that nothing would save him. He whispered something she couldn’t hear. A bubble of blood swelled on his lips. She leaned closer.
“What?”
The bubble made a wet Pop! against her ear. “Run!”
His hat had fallen beside him. Pauline laid it over his face and hurried away.
Looters were battering open shops and running from them with bread and milk and beer and coats and hats. Now it was the police who were erecting barricades, stringing barbed wire across the larger streets. She pressed into a doorway to wait for an armored car to creep past on an intersecting street. The men inside flung open their hatches and stood in the open, no longer afraid. It passed from her view.
An empty bottle smashed at her feet. Two looters lurched toward her. Before she could move, they had cornered her in the doorway. They were drunk, reeking of schnapps.
One grabbed her from behind, the other reached for her legs. She kicked out, knowing her only chance was to get to her gun before they found it. He caught her ankles. The man behind squeezed tighter. She went limp.
“Right,” he laughed. “Might as well enjoy it.”
He let go of her arms to turn her toward him and as he bent and pressed his reeking mouth to hers, she reached under her skirt with both hands, pulled her Mann, and cocked the slide. She shot the one who was holding her ankles first. He fell backwards with an expression of surprise. The other, oblivious because of gunfire ringing in the streets, kept trying to kiss her. She twisted the gun between them and pulled the trigger and he dropped to the cobbles, wounded, though not mortally, by the small-caliber gun.
Before Pauline could move ten feet, steel-helmeted cops stopped her and saw the gun she was trying to hide in her skirt. They shouted that she was under arrest.
“They tried to rape me,” she protested. “I had to protect myself.”
“Death is the penalty for weapons.”
“I have a license.” She showed them her genuine Ausweiskarte and a Van Dorn business card. She took the time they read her papers to calm herself.
“What in the name of God are you doing in Hamburg in the middle of a riot, Fräulein Privatdetektive?”
Pauline affected the confident manner of a Prussian aristocrat. “The Van Dorn Detective Agency intends to establish a field office in Germany’s second-largest city.”
“Take my advice. Wait until we’ve exterminated the rabble.”
She aimed a curt nod in the direction of the looters she had shot. “I would appreciate it if you accept these two as my contribution to the effort and escort me to Central Station.”
Startled by her audacity, the police officer looked down at the woman. She was small and slight and uncommonly pretty. But she had a field marshal’s icy eyes. He returned her pistol, offered his arm, and walked her to the station.
The telephones were working. She reached Richter by long distance. Germany had the most highly developed telephone system in Europe and the connection was so clear he could have been across the table in the Prater Garten.
“Hamburg? Are you all right? We have reports of heavy fighting.”
“It’s over,” she said.
“How bad was it?”
“Worse than even you could imagine. How is it in Berlin?”
“Quiet as a tomb. The Comintern got their signals crossed. They called off the Berlin and Bremen attacks. The fools in Hamburg were left in the lurch.”
“Who is Marat Zolner?”
She listened to the lines. They made the faintest hissing sound of falling water. Finally, Richter asked, “How did you find out about Zolner?”
“Johann Kozlov was his right-hand man.”
“I did not know that.”
“Didn’t I tell you I would bring you information?”
“Very good information,” Richter admitted.
“Now it’s your turn. Where is Marat Zolner?”
• • •
“FELLOW HERE to see you, Mr. Van Dorn,” said Isaac Bell.
Van Dorn’s haggard face lit with a weak smile. The boy was standing in the doorway in civilian clothes, fidgeting with his hat. “Seaman Somers! Come on in, son. Don’t let that nurse dragon scare you. Come by the bed where I can see you. Dorothy! This boy saved my life.”
“Are you getting better, sir?”
/> “Tip-top,” Van Dorn lied. “Have they made you captain yet?”
Somers hung his head. “They discharged me.”
“What?” The outraged eruption set him coughing, and the rib-racking cough turned him pale with pain. When he finally caught his breath, he waved the nurse aside and demanded of Bell, “Isaac? What’s going on?”
Bell explained how Somers had run afoul of the Coast Guard brass.
“That’s outrageous. They should have struck a medal . . . So you need a job?”
“Yes, sir, I do. But who would hire me being discharged?”
“Who will hire you? I’ll hire you. Starting here and now you’re a Van Dorn Apprentice Detective. Isaac, make it so!”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Van Dorn,” said Bell, not at all surprised by the turn of events, having engineered it. He didn’t doubt that young Somers had the requisite courage, daring, and enterprise to become a Van Dorn.
As for the Boss, he suddenly sounded invigorated.
“Welcome aboard, Somers. Of course we’ll have to clear it with your parents.”
“I’m an orphan, sir. I never knew my father. My mother died of tubercular trouble, working in the mill.”
“Kiss of death?” asked Van Dorn.
“Yes, sir.” To save money, mill owners held on to the old shuttles that required threading the eye with a suction of breath.
“Who will you start him under, Isaac?”
“Grady Forrer.”
“Research?”
“It’s clear talking to him that Asa’s read every magazine printed. He’ll get a good start with Grady, and we’ll move him around from there.”
Bell turned to a noise at the door. A Van Dorn messenger was knocking softly. “Mr. Bell? Cable from Germany.”
KOZLOV COMMUNIST FIGHTER BERLIN UPRISING.
RIGHT HAND TO COMINTERN AGENT MARAT ZOLNER,
ALIAS DMITRI SMIRNOFF,
ALIAS DIMA SMIRNOV.
ZOLNER ESCAPED GOVERNMENT DEATH SENTENCE.
SINCE KOZLOV IS DEAD I AM TRACING MARAT ZOLNER.
A name at last.
• • •
ISAAC BELL raced back to the St. Regis and burst into the Van Dorn offices, calling out for Grady Forrer. The Research man lumbered up to Bell’s desk in the middle of the bull pen. Under one massive arm was a cardboard file folder, bulging to capacity.
The Bootlegger Page 13