The Bootlegger
Page 21
Convinced that he had gotten as much as he could out of Gus, Bell walked up the paved path that led to the front of the roadhouse. He was feeling discouraged. This tunnel talk was interesting, but he did not feel one foot closer to Marat Zolner and the Comintern.
It was getting late. Cars were pulling away, and he saw a line of red taillights, driving home to Detroit. The cops directing traffic had called it a night. As he approached the front steps, he exchanged nods with Dashwood, who was keeping an eye on things from the far side of the veranda. Stragglers lingered, swells and flappers prolonging good-byes with hip flasks.
Suddenly, Bell saw headlights blazing up the road, racing against the Detroit-bound traffic. The auto, a seven-passenger Packard, passed the parking lot. But instead of turning under the porte cochere, it stopped out front on the road. A man leaped out, gripping a stick grenade by its long handle. He jerked the detonating cord and wound up like a fastball pitcher aiming to burn one over the inside corner.
Isaac Bell sprang into motion, running as fast as he could.
The grenade flew on a flat trajectory, under the high roof of the porte cochere, straight at the veranda where men and women were shaking hands and hugging good night. A tipsy flapper stumbled on the steps. James Dashwood glided to her rescue and she fell into his arms instead of down the stairs.
25
THE GIRL LAUGHED, her face bright in the glare of the TEXAS WALT’S sign. The shadow of the grenade swooped across it like a bat. Dashwood turned toward it, too late. Isaac Bell was drawing near, sprinting among the revelers, long arm reaching, hand outstretched. He was so close that he recognized the grenade as the German Army Stielhandgranate. If it was a newer Model 24, it was loaded with almost two pounds of TNT, enough high explosive to kill everyone within fifteen feet.
It smacked into his hand like a line drive.
The 24s had a five-second delay. Bell had two seconds left to throw it as far as he could. His finger caught in the carrying hook. He grabbed the wooden handle with his other hand, wrenched it off his finger, and hurled it with all his might.
The Packard raced away. The thug who had thrown the grenade gaped, mesmerized, as it sped back to him like a boomerang.
Bell and Dashwood opened their arms wide and dragged as many people as they could down on the steps and floor of the veranda. The grenade detonated. A flash of light threw shadows on the front wall. A shock wave slammed Bell and Dashwood into the people. The explosion was deafening and blew out the front windows and half the lightbulbs in the TEXAS WALT’S sign.
In the light that remained, a cloud of dust hung heavily on the road. There was nothing to be seen of the gangster who had thrown the stick grenade. Through the ringing in his ears, Isaac Bell heard screams of fear. The roar of a powerful motor cut through the screams.
The Packard had turned around. It was racing back, windows bristling with rifles and pistols. Dashwood and Bell stumbled to their feet and staggered to the road.
• • •
THE DRIVER OF THE PACKARD saw two men emerge from the dust cloud the grenade had kicked up. He floored his accelerator. Tony, the boss beside him in the front seat, and the boys in the back started shooting, jerking their triggers as fast as they could.
The two men stepped into the middle of the road, turned sideways, raised pistols, and started firing back. A bullet shattered the windshield and knocked the driver’s hat sideways. Another broke a headlight.
“Get the big one!” shouted Tony. They shifted fire, and a lucky shot from the swaying auto knocked the bigger man off the road. The smaller, a skinny scarecrow, stepped into the lights, gun raised like a target shooter.
“Run him down!”
Flame lanced from his pistol. A left front tire blew, and the wheel jerked in the driver’s hands. The scarecrow fired again. The right front tire blew, and the heavy auto skidded and screeched on smoking rims straight at him.
• • •
JAMES DASHWOOD drifted aside like a matador. The Packard slid past. He fired a shot into each rear tire, and the car swerved into a tree with a loud bang. Three men were thrown to the pavement. The driver was impaled on the steering column. Van Dorns swarmed from the roadhouse and surrounded them. Dashwood ran to where Isaac Bell had fallen.
“Isaac!”
“I’m O.K.”
Dashwood mopped Bell’s brow with a handkerchief. “You don’t look O.K. You’re covered in blood.”
“Scalp, I think.”
“He’s fine,” said Walt Hatfield, who hurried up with a shotgun. “Just leaking a little.”
Hatfield handed Bell a bandanna. “You’re O.K., old son, aren’t you?”
The Texan’s anxious expression scared Dashwood more than the blood.
“Where are they?” asked Bell. His ears were ringing, his head spinning. He saw the wrecked Packard wrapped half around a tree. Bloodied gunmen sprawled beside it. “Anyone else hurt?”
“Folks on the porch are mostly shook-up.”
A siren howled in the distance.
Bell surged to his feet and stood, swaying. He gripped Dashwood’s skinny arm and pointed at the gunmen. “Give the cops all those louses except the boss. Bring him to the cellar. On the jump! They’ll be here any second.”
• • •
“ATTEMPTED MURDER,” said Isaac Bell. “Even in Detroit they’ll lock you up.”
“Not for long,” said the gangster manacled to a cellar post. He had a gash on his head that had splattered his clothes as bloodily as Bell’s. Bell hoped that the man had a headache worse than the one that was jackhammering his own skull. He had left the doctor Texas Walt called to stitch his scalp cooling his heels upstairs until he had wrung everything he could out of the gangster. The whisky he poured on it to stop the bleeding had hurt worse than the bullet that parted his hair, and he could not quite see straight. It took no acting talent to sound vengeful.
“Long,” he said. “Very long. I’ll hand you to the U.S. Marshal. He’ll get you on a federal offense.”
“This ain’t federal.”
“Ever heard of the Espionage Act? The Congress wrote it with your name on it. Radicals throw bombs. Aliens throw bombs. Communists. Bolsheviks. The United States Attorney will put you in the big house for life.”
“They can’t pin that on me.”
“Thirty witnesses saw your gang throw a grenade. Thirty witnesses saw you rake a crowd of people with rifle fire.”
“They don’t have the guts to testify. I’ll be out in a day.”
“I’ve got the guts to testify,” said Texas Walt.
“So do I,” said Ed Tobin.
“Me, too,” said Dashwood.
“Even I will muster the courage,” said Isaac Bell. “That’s four of us.”
“Mister,” said Texas Walt, leaning in to put his hawk face an inch from the gangster’s. “You’ve got one greasy foot in the federal penitentiary and another on thin ice. It is high time you start talking.”
The gangster pressed his free hand to his bloody head. “What do you want to know?”
Bell studied their prisoner carefully. The thug would expect Bell to ask who had ordered him to bomb the roadhouse. Fear and criminal pride would make him resist turning in someone he knew.
“Your name.”
“Tony.”
“Tony what?”
“Big Tony Sana.”
“Who gave you the grenade, Tony?”
“War surplus. They’re all over the place.”
“It was a German stick grenade. How did you happen to get your paws on a grenade from the Kaiser’s army?”
Bell reckoned that the Comintern was the likeliest source. Such a powerful grenade would also explain the phenomenal damage Bell had seen at the former Van Dorn offices. The Detroit mobs hadn’t yet figured that the Texas Walt roadhouse was a Van Dorn masquerade. But the Comintern might well have.
The gangster shrugged. “I don’t know. One of the guys got a box of ’em somewhere.”
Be
ll thought that Tony Sana looked genuinely puzzled that of all the questions the roadhouse torpedoes could ask, who cared where a hand grenade came from? Had Marat Zolner paid Tony’s gang to attack Texas Walt’s? Had he allied with them as he had with the Black Hand in New York? No. Tony was small-time. If anything, Zolner was playing Tony’s boys for suckers, as he had the Gophers.
“I want to know who gave you the grenade.”
“Maybe some doughboy brought souvenirs home from the war.”
“Which one of your guys did he give it to?”
“I think it was Little Angelo.”
“We’ll deal with Angelo later. Now, what’s this I heard about a hooch tunnel under the river?”
“I didn’t hear nothing about no tunnel.”
Bell said, “People tell me boats are old hat. And come winter, driving whisky sixes across the ice will be old hat, too.”
“Yeah, well, there oughta be plenty of business for everyone.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“I’m my boss.”
“What about the cable sub?”
Tony looked glad to discuss a topic outside his own business. “These dumb Polacks, they got a long rope and a crank. They sink the booze in the river in steel kegs. The rope drags it across the bottom.”
“From where?”
“Some island.”
“Where does it go?”
“Poletown.”
“Who runs it?”
“I told ya, Polacks from Poletown.”
“Poles from Poletown?”
“Yeah, except the Jaworski gang says it ain’t them. Lying bastards. They was speaking Polack.”
“Polish? Who was speaking Polish. The cable sub?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“Speaking Polish? Or Russian?”
“Same thing, ain’t it?”
Bell exchanged glances with Dashwood and Tobin. Suddenly, there were two Dashwoods and two Tobins. It took a moment to realize that the shot that had creased his skull was giving him double vision. He blinked. There were still two of each detective. He turned to two Tonys.
“Tony, you say you don’t have a boss. If you did have a boss, who would he be?”
Big Tony Sana looked intrigued by the thought. He said, “Bosses come and go.”
“Let’s say one came.”
“Could be a bunch of guys.”
“Max Stern?”
Tony looked surprised. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Around. Could it be Max Stern?”
“Could be.”
“Where do I find him?”
“Who knows? I’m telling you, Max Stern ain’t my boss.”
• • •
“ADMIRAL ABE,” said Marat Zolner. “Aren’t you glad you saw reason?”
They were dining on sweetbreads, the most expensive item on the menu at Detroit’s classy new Hotel Wolverine and one that Weintraub could chew without many teeth.
Abe Weintraub shot a murderous glare across the table. He had a moon-shaped face with a small nose, ears, and mouth. He looked, Zolner thought, innocuous, even gentle, except for his dark dead eyes.
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I ain’t no pushover.”
“You made that clear,” said Zolner, who had seen enough Cheka torture chambers to admire a thug as determined as Abe Weintraub not to be broken. His conversion had taken so long that it was a miracle they hadn’t accidentally drowned him. But Weintraub had been worth the trouble. He commanded the Purple Gang’s Jewish Navy by dint of brains, unmatched brutality, and ruthless determination. He knew every Detroit criminal worth knowing, saw them with a clear eye, and knew their weaknesses and their strengths. He would make an aggressive captain of foot soldiers in any revolution.
“Now what?” asked Weintraub, mopping his plate clean with a slice of bread.
“Now you will tell me who to kill.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tell me which gangsters to get out of our way. Starting at the top.”
“Tell you? Or kill ’em for you?”
It was like discussing terms with a wolf or a shark. Or the hotel’s namesake wolverine. Weintraub understood destruction and only destruction, but he understood it very well. Zolner had set up a number of gangsters like him in New York—to control supply and demand—but none so ferocious.
He said, “You will help me locate them. We will ferret out the chinks in their armor. Then we will kill them.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I will allow you to pick up the pieces.”
Weintraub stared in disbelief. “I thought I heard it all. This takes the cake.”
“I am offering you the city of Detroit,” Marat Zolner said.
“When I’m done, it will be my city. I don’t need you.”
“Would you prefer to wait five years in hopes your enemies all kill each other off? Keeping in mind that the one who survives will emerge strong. Or do you want to get to it right now?”
“Now.”
“Starting at the top, Abe, who do we kill first?”
“Max Stern.”
“Is that a fact?” the Bolshevik asked coldly.
“Max Stern,” Weintraub repeated.
The agents whom Zolner had sent ahead to scout Detroit and Windsor had predicted that the top boss would be a Jew. The Italian gangs had decimated themselves in the murderous Giannola–Vitale mafia wars. A Purple Gang killer named Max Stern had been rated most likely to emerge top dog.
“I’ve heard that, too,” said Zolner.
“Now you hear it from me.”
“Except that I also hear that Stern has disappeared.” The gangster had vanished the very night Black Bird rumbled into her Windsor boathouse.
“Yeah, well, these boss guys lay low. For their health.”
Marat Zolner’s features hardened. “Max Stern was incinerated in a brewery furnace over in Windsor.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You have one more chance, you lying son of a bitch.”
Abe Weintraub did not protest the insult. “O.K. Just testing who you are. I don’t know how you know this stuff, but you’re the real thing.”
“Last chance, Abe: Who do we kill first?”
“Sam Rosenthal.”
Zolner settled back in his chair. At last. “I wondered if it was him.”
“Wonder ’til you’re blue in the face,” said Weintraub. “Rosenthal is bulletproof.”
“Isn’t Sam Rosenthal digging a tunnel under the river?”
Abe Weintraub ignored the question—a clue, Zolner knew by now, that the tight-lipped gangster knew the answer—and said, “Nobody gets close enough to shoot him. Nobody’s seen him outside in a year.”
Zolner had been hearing that more Canadian booze traveled under the river than on it. Some was smuggled in railroad freight cars. A Polish gang was said to pull submerged containers on the bottom of the river by a windlass cable, which sounded slow and cumbersome. But another story held great promise, a smuggling tunnel that would make the Comintern’s fortune. The tunnel would lock up Detroit and add the biggest transit point to the operations he set up in New York.
“Is Sam Rosenthal digging a tunnel under the river?”
“When’d you hear that?”
Zolner laid both big hands on the tablecloth and leaned forward. “Abe, it’s too late to turn off the phonograph.”
“Go to hell.”
“Do you really want to go back in the water?”
Weintraub half rose from the table.
“Abe, look around the lobby.”
Weintraub glared. “I’ve got torpedoes, too.”
“Look again, Abe. See the salesman with the big sample case? See the long-haired violin player? . . . Mine are tougher and smarter, and they’ve got your boys covered with Thompson .45s . . . Besides, do you really want a shoot-out? Or would you rather accept my offer of Detroit? Do you know where Rosenthal is digging?”
“No.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Find out which.”
“Tell you this. When it’s dug, it will put your black boat out of business.”
Black Bird would soon “fly south for the winter” on a railcar to Miami, a fact that Zolner kept to himself. He said, “Rosenthal’s tunnel will put your entire Jewish Navy out of business.”
Weintraub fell silent.
He knows about the tunnel, thought Zolner. His agents were spot-on about the rumors. The tunnel was almost finished. But it was maddening that no one knew where it was.
“Surely you understand that the future of hauling Canadian booze is moving huge volumes of it through Rosenthal’s tunnel, not lugging it on boats and trucks on ice.”
“So the tunnel is why you want to kill Rosenthal?”
“And why I want to give you Detroit—so you can help me hold on to the tunnel.”
“But Rosenthal could be good for business if he stops the wars. Divvy up territories. Lay down some rules.”
Marat Zolner asked, “Do you really believe that Rosenthal can stop the wars without sinking your Jewish Navy? Better we lay down the rules.”
For the first time since Marat Zolner hijacked Abe Weintraub’s boat, he saw the Jewish gangster smile.
26
“WHY’S A JEW getting buried by the Catholics?” Scudder Smith asked the Detroit police captain whose blue-coated squads were struggling to keep ten thousand spectators on the sidewalks.
The Van Dorn detective had notebook and pencil in hand and his Brooklyn Eagle press card in his hat. It was a hot, sunny morning on Detroit’s west side. Across Dexter Avenue stood St. Gregory the Great, a sturdy red brick church with a limestone façade. The doors were open, and pallbearers were staggering down the front steps under the weight of a fifteen-thousand-dollar silver coffin.
“His mother was from Ireland,” said the cop. “She made him go to Saint Gregory’s school straight through fourth grade.”