Bell turned onto a street that paralleled the river. The air reeked of mud, beer, and whisky. To his right, every building had a bar on the ground floor. The bars to his left occupied the backs of boathouses that extended from the Ecorse riverbank out over deep water. The tall detective and his men stalked into several. Each had a bar selling every known brand of whisky and gin, each had a free lunch like the old pre-Prohibition saloons, and each had plenty of scantily dressed women livening the atmosphere.
Bell spotted a bar on the waterside that was a bit darker than the others. Drawing closer, he noticed that the people lurching about the sidewalk were giving it a wide berth to avoid the broad-shouldered doormen who were blocking the entrance.
Bell said, “Let’s see what makes them unfriendly,” and led the way.
The doormen appraised the four men coming at them and reached inside their coats. Bell and Tobin seized their arms before they could pull guns and passed them back to Clayton and Ellis, who subdued them quickly. Bell pushed through the doors.
It was quiet inside, the bar empty. The bartender reached under it, then raised his hands over his head and gaped down the barrel of the Browning that materialized in Bell’s hand. The man looked both frightened and resigned, as if he expected something like this would be happening soon.
“What do you want?”
“Show us your cellar,” said Bell.
“Cellar? What cellar? It’s a boathouse.”
“We’d like to see it anyway.”
“Buddy, I’m telling you the truth.”
“I want to see why this is the only bar on the street that has no customers. Open that trapdoor.”
The bartender pulled open the trapdoor. There was no cellar, only a short ladder that descended to the mud, and no shaft to a tunnel.
They walked through the barroom toward the river and stepped out on a landing. Hidden in the shadows, Bell saw similar landings to the left and right. Suddenly, a man stepped to the end of the dock next door and swung a lantern like a brakeman signaling a locomotive engineer. Then a lightbulb flashed on and off in the second-floor windows. They were signaling the coast was clear of cops and Prohibition officers, Bell realized, as a motorboat towed a barge in from the dark river and tied up at the dock. Two boatmen unloaded quickly. Two came out from their boathouse and ran the cases inside, and the boat towed the empty barge away. A bigger operation commenced on the other side, where a door opened in a boathouse, a deep-laden speedboat slipped in, and the door shut.
Tobin muttered to Bell, “Legitimate whisky haulers, no tunnel.”
Bell went in and took the bartender aside. “Take it easy. We have no more business here.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Bell reached into his pocket and pulled out a fat roll of hundred-dollar bills. “But I have a question. I’m curious about something. If you could help me out, I would greatly appreciate it.”
“Maybe I can help,” the bartender said cautiously. “Depends. What do you want to know?”
“Business is booming up and down the street. Why does this one joint have those hard-boiled boys keeping out the customers?”
“The boss got shot. We don’t know what’s going on.”
“Shot over what?”
“Purple Gang cut the price of Canadian Club in half. Knocked my boss right out of the market. He and his boys caught up with them on Michigan Grand. Before you know it, there’s gunplay. You ever hear of a submachine gun?”
“It rings a bell.”
“The Purples had one.”
29
THE VAN DORNS piled back in the Phaeton and kept hunting. They burst into two more unusually quiet bars. One was deserted. The other had a woman waiting anxiously for a husband who had yet to return from a whisky run. In neither did they find a shaft to a tunnel.
The first red streaks of dawn gleamed across the river. Bell called it a night.
“Beginning to think it isn’t here,” said Tobin.
Clayton and Ellis looked crestfallen. “Hope we didn’t give you a bum steer, Mr. Bell.”
“Grab some sleep, boys. We’ll try again tomorrow night.”
Clayton and Ellis went back to their hotel.
Bell and Tobin returned to Fort Van Dorn. Tobin climbed the stairs to the dormitory where Bell had ordered his detectives to sleep so he didn’t have to worry about them being ambushed in hotels. Bell checked the teleprinter. He found a wire from Grady Forrer.
POKING AROUND.
TELEPHONE SOONEST.
Bell boiled water and ground coffee beans while the operators put through the long-distance line. Submachine guns most likely meant Comintern. But why would the Comintern cut the price of booze?
The operator called back. “Ringing, sir.”
Grady answered with a wide-awake, “Isaac, you will love this.”
“What’s up?”
“But first, some background to put it in perspective. Before I walk you through ancient railroad history.”
Isaac Bell stifled a yawn and a groan. The night owl Grady was in one of his talkative moods. But the Van Dorn Research Department was arguably the detective agency’s greatest asset.
“Go right ahead. Take your time.”
“Thirty years ago, American railroads had pretty much overcome the insurmountable engineering challenges that used to impede construction. Advances in grading, bridge building, tunneling, and locomotive design meant they could build almost anywhere they pleased. The main obstacle to building new railroads was other railroads competing for the same markets. Do you understand?”
“No crystal was ever clearer, Grady.”
“You remember your old friend Osgood Hennessy?”
“Railroad tycoon,” said Bell, “who happens to be our mutual friend Archie Abbott’s father-in-law. Go on, please.”
“Thirty years ago, way back in 1891, Osgood Hennessy tried to organize another transcontinental railroad by connecting lines he owned east of Chicago to his Great Northern Railway west of Minneapolis. But rival railroads, which had corrupted even more Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota legislators, governors, and judges than Hennessy had, blocked him. He could neither lay new track between Chicago and Minneapolis nor gain a controlling interest of an existing line. But Old Man Hennessy, you may recall, was unstoppable.”
“Like a combination Brahma bull and Consolidated locomotive.”
“So Hennessy devised a scheme to connect Chicago to Minneapolis by a new route via Detroit.”
“Last time I looked at a map,” said Bell, “Detroit was east of Chicago.”
“Bear with me, Isaac. Stranger railroads were built in the ’90s; all sorts of monkey tricks to sell stock. But this was a real one, if roundabout. Hennessy surveyed a line from Minneapolis to Duluth, then up the shore of Lake Superior to Port Arthur and onto the Canadian Pacific Railroad at Port Arthur and around the top of Superior and Lake Huron and down through Ontario to Windsor, where it would connect with the New York Central.”
“What would the New York Central get out of that arrangement? The Vanderbilts hated Hennessy.”
“They would get access to the tunnel to Detroit.”
“What tunnel?”
“The tunnel Hennessy was excavating under the Detroit River.”
“There’s only one rail tunnel under the Detroit River and it wasn’t built until 1910.”
“Hennessy started his twenty years earlier.”
“He did?”
“He laid a two-thousand-foot cast-iron tube, using the same Beach shield compressed-air method as they did for the Saint Clair Tunnel.”
“First? Ahead of the rest of the line?”
“First off, he commissioned a geological survey for the tunnel. Then he went straight to work on it. Probably wanted to be sure that he could build the hardest part of the line before he committed to the rest.”
Bell said, “I remember when he built the Cascades Cutoff. He bridged Cascade Canyon first, way ahead of the line. ‘Speed,’ he used
to say. ‘It’s all about speed.’ Why doesn’t anybody know about this tunnel?”
“Hennessy had to keep it secret from his enemies or they’d have blocked him in the Michigan State House. He tunneled clandestinely—under the table, so to speak. Which was why he dug from the Canadian side . . . on Fighting Island.”
“Fighting Island?” Bell put down his coffee.
“The Canadians were glad to keep mum. The scheme would boost their railroads. Plus Hennessy bought the shield and all of his machinery and cast iron from the same Canadian factories that supplied the Saint Clair job.”
“Fighting Island to where?”
“Ecorse.”
“Grady, are you sure?”
“All the main lines pass close to Ecorse. Ecorse was the ideal place to connect.”
“So where is it?”
“Abandoned. The scheme collapsed and Hennessy cut his losses—stopped work just short of Ecorse.”
“Is it still there?”
“It must be. He’d have sealed it up, having paid for it, hoping to finish it sometime in the future. But it strikes me that if some smart bootlegger found out, he might have finished the last hundred feet or so and had himself a hooch tunnel from Fighting Island to Detroit.”
“So this would be a much bigger tunnel than something hacked out with shovel and pick.”
“Bigger? I’ll say. Hennessy’s section has room for a locomotive, tender, caboose, and twenty-five railcars.”
“Grady, you are a genius.”
Bell heard a sharp clang on the telephone line. Grady said, “I am raising a glass to that thought. Hope it helps.”
“Wait! Find me a map. Somewhere must be engineers’ plans and surveys.”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you? I put it on the night train. You’ll have it this morning.”
• • •
BELL HIRED A SURVEYOR. The surveyor confirmed with his transit what already looked likely to the naked eye. The jumping-off point indicated on Osgood Hennessy’s original tunnel drawings was beneath a large wooden building under construction on Fighting Island directly across from Ecorse. Inquiries in Canada revealed it was to be a ferry terminal, which seemed odd for an island peopled by a handful of recluses. The mystery was cleared up when the Van Dorns discovered that the company building the terminal had also applied for building permits to erect a Ferris wheel and dance pavilion for a mid-river summer resort.
“Maybe,” said Bell.
Plotting where the tunnel would emerge in Ecorse would have been a simple matter of perching the surveyor on the half-built terminal and pointing his transit across the water at the compass angle projected on Hennessy’s map. But binoculars showed the building site was fenced off. Riflemen were guarding the high wooden wall, confirmation that the tunnel started under the terminal.
• • •
BELL PRESENTED his New York Yacht Club credentials to gain admission to the Detroit Yacht Club. He bought a river chart and rented two Gar Wood speedboats. He made one a guard boat, manned by Tobin, Clayton, and Ellis, heavily armed, and took the surveyor with him downstream in the other.
“You’ll have to be quick,” he told the surveyor. “We don’t want to be noticed by customs or hijackers.”
• • •
NEARING ECORSE, Bell throttled back and disengaged the propellers to let the boat drift on the current while the surveyor sighted the terminal. He was quick.
“X marks the spot, Mr. Bell. The original tunnel is directly under us now.”
Bell engaged the engines in reverse to hold the boat against the current. The surveyor whipped his transit one hundred eighty degrees to pinpoint where on the Ecorse waterfront the tunnel would emerge, provided the last section continued in a straight line.
“That red boathouse, Mr. Bell, if the extension is in-line with the original.”
Bell noted that the chart showed a water depth of thirty feet. He wondered how deeply the crown of the tunnel was buried under the river bottom. A way to attack Marat Zolner was taking shape in his mind. It was instigated by the bartender’s tale of his boss getting shot. Submachine guns almost certainly indicated the Comintern had a hand in it. And if they did, he was beginning to realize why they would cut the price of booze in half.
Bell headed downriver, waited for dusk, and went back to the spot between the ferry terminal and the red boathouse. Idling the engines to keep the boat in place, he checked their position relative to the two structures. Then he took compass bearings on a light atop the red boathouse and bearings on prominent lights up and down the river. Returning to this precise spot tomorrow night would be a simple matter of lining up the lights.
30
JAMES DASHWOOD returned to Detroit with more bad news. He had come within sixty seconds of catching up with Fern Hawley—one minute too late to stop her chartered flying boat from taking off from Miami.
“Florida is a good place to hide if you’re as rich as she is. She could be in Palm Beach or the Florida Keys, or Havana, Cuba, or Bimini or Nassau or any other islands of The Bahamas. Or she could have rendezvoused with a yacht at sea. I put the word out to our various people and decided I’d be more useful back in Detroit.”
Bell said, “Maybe Nassau—where the booze tanker is headed. In which case, Pauline will deal with her.”
“Maybe I should go down and look out for Pauline?”
“Pauline looks out for herself. Do you remember the spy who was sabotaging the Navy’s battleships?”
Dashwood grinned. “I remember trying to convince his enormous bodyguard that I was an itinerant temperance orator, not a detective.”
Bell said, “Admiral Falconer showed me experiments in a test caisson where armor experts simulated torpedo attacks to measure the impact of explosions underwater. Torpedoes were coming into their own just as the science boys began to understand what made them so deadly.”
Blast energy from mines and torpedoes was terrifically amplified and concentrated underwater. By the middle of the war, depth charges were sinking submarines, which gave Bell an idea how to deal with the tunnel and everything in it.
“Round up four cases of dynamite.”
Bell wired Grady Forrer for more information from the geological survey that Osgood Hennessy had commissioned for his tunnel.
HOW DEEP TUNNEL?
WHAT IS BOTTOM MATERIAL?
Bell had decreed that gangland Detroit was too dangerous for even a fortified Van Dorn field office to employ apprentices, so he was forced to press tough Protective Services operatives into apprentice tasks. “Run to the library. Look in the 1891 issues of Harper’s Weekly for an article about the Saint Clair River Tunnel.”
“Library?”
“You can count on Harper’s for a rundown on the big engineering feats. 1891. The librarian will help you find it.”
“When?”
“Now! On the jump!”
The broad-shouldered house dick lumbered off, scratching his head.
Grady wired back:
BOTTOM CONSISTS OF SAND, CLAY, BOULDERS, AND ROCK.
TUNNEL CROWN THREE FEET UNDER BOTTOM.
“Good!”
But when the Protective Services op returned with the Harper’s article about the St. Clair Tunnel, Bell ran into a snag he hadn’t considered. The cast-iron walls of the St. Clair Tunnel were two inches thick, which would make it immensely strong. Hennessy’s abandoned tunnel had been built of similar cast-iron segments.
Stymied, and hoping to see the problem from another, more productive angle, Bell put it to Dashwood in the starkest terms. “We can’t count on explosives breaching the main tunnel. They will easily destroy the connector. But if the connector collapses too far from the main tunnel, the debris will seal it before the water reaches the main tunnel. To guarantee breaching the main tunnel and destroying the Comintern’s stockpile, we have to explode the dynamite very near the joint where the tunnels connect.”
Dashwood asked, “Why don’t we just raid the tunnel? That will shut it.
”
“It won’t stay shut long,” said Bell. “The cops and courts are for sale on both sides of the river. They’ll put pictures in the papers of a prosecutor swinging an ax at a case of whisky. But hush money will keep that booze safe where it is. Zolner and his partners will lay low ’til the politicians are done demanding another ‘drive’ against liquor, then back to business—unless we flood the tunnel and destroy the Comintern’s stockpile. I told Mr. Van Dorn, and I’ll tell you: I will not settle for bloodying his nose this time. I’m going to drive Marat Zolner out of Detroit.”
“Where do you think he’ll go?”
Bell answered, “Where do I think? Listen.”
He sat at the private-wire Morse key and tapped out a message to New York.
FORWARD FINAL PAYMENT LYNCH & HARDING MARINE.
DELIVER MARION EXPRESS CRUISER MIAMI.
“We have to stop him from setting up business the way he’s doing here in Detroit and back in New York.”
“What if he goes to The Bahamas?” Dashwood asked.
“He won’t. He has no reason to go to Nassau. Nassau is like Canada, a relatively safe base for legal liquor. Florida is lawless, an import-and-distribution center like Detroit and New York where he can fight to expand and take over.”
Bell gave Dashwood a cold smile and added, “If for some reason he does go to Nassau, Nassau is three hours from Miami by fast boat. And Marion is going to be one fast boat.”
• • •
HE WIRED GRADY AGAIN.
HOW FAR FROM SHORE DID HENNESSY TUNNEL STOP?
Grady telephoned long-distance.
“Too complicated for the wire. I found handwritten engineers’ notes on the survey that suggest they stopped excavating just where the bank began to slope upward.”
Bell spread open his Detroit River chart. “There’s a deep channel down the middle, nearer to Fighting Island, and then a narrower one, the Wyandotte Channel, that hugs the Ecorse shore.”
The Bootlegger Page 24