“What’s your name?” asked Bell.
“Why you want to know?”
“I like to know the name of a fellow I hand a thousand dollars to. If it comes to that.”
“What’s my name?” He cast a wary eye at the hotel, where cops were shoving through the crowd around the fallen body. “You can call me Captain.”
“Tell me more, Captain.”
“At night, she shoots fire in the sky.”
“So does this one. Straight-piped Libertys. Where did you see it?”
“I answered a lot of questions, mister. But I don’t see no money.”
Bell leaned over the transom and stared him in the face. “You’ll see the money when I see the boat.”
Captain said, “He came by last night, and the night before that. You want to see him tonight?”
• • •
THREE NIGHTS, Black Bird had set out for Bimini to buy a load of rye; three nights, she had captured other rumrunners instead before she was halfway there. Tonight she wouldn’t even leave the bay. Tonight she was going to war.
With Zolner at her helm and her engines muffled, she backed out of her hiding place between two of the dozens of five-masted lumber schooners that thrust their bowsprits over Biscayne Boulevard. The Comintern had purchased the ships, which were identical to the dozens that moored there, to use as floating liquor warehouses.
Paralleling the beach along the boulevard, slicing a quiet two miles through the dark, Black Bird motored south. She passed the McAllister Hotel, marked by a lighted sign on its roof, and turned into the narrow mouth of the Miami River.
• • •
ISAAC BELL was thinking that “Captain” had sent him on a wild-goose chase.
He and Dashwood and Tobin had been waiting for hours in a hot, muggy, mosquito-infested freight-yard slip a quarter mile from the mouth of the river. Captain had led them here in his boat. After Bell had backed Marion into the slip, he had sent the rumrunner to the safety of the hotel dock—clutching a fifty-dollar down payment on his finder’s fee—in the likely event of gunplay.
There was occasional traffic on the river, even this late, an intermittent parade of fishing boats, small freighters, and cabin cruisers with singing drunks. Some of the freight boats were steamers, others were sailing schooners propelled in the narrow channel by auxiliary motors. The auxiliaries kept playing tricks on ears cocked for the muted rumble of Black Bird’s engines.
Then, all of a sudden, Bell heard her coming. No auxiliary motor could make such a noise. It was neither loud nor sharp but, like a threat of barely contained violence, the sound of suppressed strength that could be loosed any second.
“That’s her,” whispered Tobin. He was a few feet ahead of him on the foredeck, manning one of the Lewis guns. Dashwood was on the stern, fifty feet behind him, manning the other. Bell was in the cockpit, his boots resting lightly on the electric starters, one hand on the searchlight switches, the other on the horizontal bar that bridged all four throttles.
“Tell me when you see her,” Bell told Tobin, who had a better view down the river from his perch on the foredeck. Happily, the boat traffic had stopped for the moment.
She was moving very slowly.
Captain had claimed that he had seen her pass this slip. He had speculated she would hide in a boathouse on the new Seybold Canal, which served a development of homes where the owners moored steam yachts. He had not claimed to have seen her turn off the river into the canal, and, in fact, she could be heading for one of the factories or freight depots or warehouses that shared the banks of the little river with residences, hotels, boatyards, and houseboats.
Until Bell heard her muffled Libertys, he had not fully believed Captain for the simple reason that a river only four miles long that ended in a swamp was a risky place to hide. Once in, there was no getting out, other than by railcar, and loading a boat onto a railcar was far too slow a process to escape a chase.
“Here he is,” whispered Tobin.
A long shadow glided by, fifty feet from their boat’s bow, faintly silhouetted by factory lights across the river. Bell waited until it had cleared the freight slip and moved a hundred yards farther upstream. It wasn’t likely it could outrun the Van Dorn boat, and, even if it could, it couldn’t go far.
Bell stepped on his starters. He had warmed the Libertys every thirty minutes. All four fired up at once. He shoved all props forward and the boat shot from the slip. He turned his wheel hard over, swinging her upriver, and switched on the forward searchlight.
If Isaac Bell had any doubts that Marat Zolner was Prince André, they vanished when he saw Black Bird’s helmsman look over his shoulder into the glare. Bell recognized the lean, handsome face, the elegant stance he remembered gliding over the Club Deluxe dance floor, and the reptilian grace of movement he had first seen on the roof of Roosevelt Hospital the night that Marat Zolner shot Johann Kozlov.
Bell’s boat covered the yards between them in a flash.
He was pulling alongside before Black Bird unmuffled her engines. Suddenly, the black boat was thundering, leaping ahead on a boiling wake.
Ed Tobin shouted over the roar of their own engines, “I can’t shoot!”
Bell saw why. Ahead, on both sides of the narrow river, were the red and green and white lights of small boats. Fishermen were standing in them, dragging nets. Behind them on one shore was a white-shingled hotel, and lining the opposite shore was a row of houseboats. The powerful Lewis gun would chew them to pieces and kill anyone with the bad luck to meet a stray bullet.
“Hold your fire.”
The black boat was pulling ahead.
Bell poured on the gas.
The black boat left the fishing boats in its wake.
The channel ahead was clear.
“Fire!”
Ed Tobin triggered a burst of shells. He stopped firing almost instantly.
“Look out, Isaac!”
Bell was already jerking his throttles back.
“Hold on, Dash!” he shouted over his shoulder. “It’s a trap!”
35
THE FISHING BOATS were racing to shore, hauling lines out of the water, dragging something across the channel.
Marion struck before Isaac Bell could disengage his propellers.
Bell braced for a timber-jarring crash and hoped the reinforced bow would take it. Surprisingly, the express cruiser slowed without collision and seemed to hang mid-channel. Instead of a crash in the bow, he heard several loud bangs deep within the boat. His engines screamed, revving wildly, and he realized that Zolner’s men had strung a heavy cargo net across the channel. Its thick strands had fouled his churning propellers. Blades sheared and driveshafts snapped.
The Van Dorn boat was trapped in the middle of the river.
“Thompsons!” Dashwood called coolly. “Get down!”
The night exploded with red jets of fire and flying lead.
Their searchlight went black in a burst of hot glass.
Thank the Lord for armor plate, thought Isaac Bell. And bless Lynch & Harding. She carried two thousand gallons of explosively flammable gasoline, but the speedboat builders had snugged her fuel tanks under the sole, out of the range of bullets storming past.
Their Lewis guns were still useless. Behind the Thompson submachine guns strafing them from both sides of the river were homes with thin wooden walls. Bell yanked from its sheath a .30-06 bolt-action Springfield rifle he had stowed for such a contingency.
Tobin had one in his machine-gun nest.
Dashwood had one in his.
The Thompsons’ muzzle fire made excellent targets, particularly as the two-handled submachine guns were designed to be clutched snug to the torso. Bell fired. A gunman tumbled into the river.
Tobin fired and missed.
Dashwood made up for it, firing twice and dropping two.
The three Van Dorns whirled in unison to shoot the submachine gunners on the opposite bank. Before they could trigger their weapons, the shoot
ing stopped.
Isaac Bell saw why in an instant.
The black boat was coming back.
It stormed downriver, Lewis gun pumping bullets with a continuous rumble. The rapid fire starred Bell’s windshield and clanged off the armor. By now, he knew what to expect of Marat Zolner. He stood up and aimed his rifle. A man on the bow of the speeding boat was about to throw a grenade. James Dashwood shot it out of his hand and it exploded behind the boat.
A second grenade sailed through the air. Isaac Bell and Ed Tobin fired together, and the grenade dropped into the river. Black Bird raced past the Van Dorn boat at fifty knots, thundering toward Biscayne Bay.
“Close,” said Tobin.
“Not close enough,” said Bell, watching the red glare of her exhaust disappear behind a bend in the river. He called to a fisherman, venturing out in his rowboat. “Shooting’s over, friend. Would fifty bucks get us a lift ashore?”
“A hundred.”
“It’s yours.”
On shore, Tobin went looking for a tugboat to tow them to a boatyard for repairs. Bell and Dashwood scoured the riverbank. The ambushers had taken their wounded with them. Bell retrieved a Thompson submachine gun they had dropped. Dashwood found a full box of German stick grenades.
“I don’t suppose our ‘Captain’ friend is waiting at the dock for the rest of his reward.”
Bell said, “Zolner is counterpunching. Question is, where’s he going to hit us next?”
• • •
ASA SOMERS had been in love many times. He had fallen head over heels for Mae Marsh in Intolerance and returned to the movie house again and again. Mary Pickford was next, in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and then Mabel Normand. And of course he fell in love regularly with girls he saw on streetcars until they jumped off at their stops. But never until now with a real live girl.
And Fräulein Grandzau was a real live girl. She was beautiful beyond description, wore wonderful-smelling perfume, and had a way of looking him right in the face when she talked to him. Her eyes were blue, a slatey shade, like the ocean on a sunny afternoon. And she was very kind. She showed him how to use a knife and fork in the European style, and she would touch her beautiful lips just lightly with her finger to remind him to close his mouth when he chewed so he would look the part of an important man in the liquor traffic. She even took him shopping—Mr. Van Dorn was paying—because even an apprentice detective masquerading as a clerk had to look as if he belonged in Nassau in a panama hat and a white suit almost like Isaac Bell’s.
They ate in wonderful hotels because that’s where the bootleggers ate.
Liquor dealers had to be where they could run into people who might buy their consignments like detectives had to be where they were likeliest to hear the latest about a big tanker full of grain alcohol that for some reason hadn’t shown up yet. And detectives investigating a Comintern agent’s girlfriend had to dress like people she would talk to.
Earlier that evening, they had eaten dinner on Miss Fern Hawley’s yacht, which was bigger than the old CG-9, with much better food. There was plenty of laughing and kidding around with Miss Hawley, who was really a looker, too.
Somers listened carefully to how Fräulein Grandzau used small talk like a wedge.
“When I was in New York, Fern, I kept hearing an expression. Why is the ladies’ lavatory called the powder room?”
Fern laughed. “Girls didn’t go to saloons before Prohibition. Now we go to speakeasies, so they had to add places for ladies to go and they called them powder rooms. To powder their noses? Speaking of which, excuse me, I’ll be right back.”
Fern was gone a long while and when she returned she ended the party all of a sudden, apologizing she had a headache. The yacht’s tender dropped them at the dock. But instead of calling it a night, Fräulein Grandzau had decided they would stop for a drink in a rough bar on Bay Street where she said she hoped to meet a buyer.
So far, no buyer had appeared. Somers didn’t mind. He could sit at a table across from her for the rest of his life and not mind. She drank—drinking a lot less than she pretended to, he noticed—and put him to the test to guess, in a low voice, what was the business of the other patrons. What did this one do? What did that one do? What about the guy passed out in the corner? Not that one. The guy with two guns, a revolver peeking out of his waistband and some other weapon bulging under his coat.
“Bodyguard?”
“Who is he guarding?”
“Maybe it’s his night off,” ventured Somers.
“Maybe.”
“He’s fast asleep.”
“Are you sure?”
“He hasn’t moved since we came in. And the bottle on his table is almost empty.”
“I agree,” she said. “He’s sleeping. What do you suppose he carries in his shoulder holster? Automatic or revolver?”
Somers eyed the bulge. “Revolver.”
“Automatic,” she said. She looked around for another test.
Two big guys came in, bought a bottle at the bar, and sat down at a table facing theirs. Fräulein Grandzau’s German accent, which ordinarily Somers could barely detect, got a little stronger. He heard a v in the word “want.”
“Asa,” she said very quietly. “I vant you to do exactly what I tell you. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you see where I am looking at the floor?”
“Yes, ma’am. Right next to your chair.”
“I want you to stand up on that spot and lean over, close to me, as if you mean to kiss me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now!”
He stood up and leaned close. Her perfume was intoxicating. She reached a hand behind the back of his head, curled her fingers into his hair, and pulled him almost to her lips. “Asa?” she whispered.
“Yes, ma’am?” His mouth was dry, his heart hammering his ribs.
“Did the Coast Guard teach you how to cock an automatic pistol?”
36
DAZED BY PAULINE GRANDZAU’S perfume and dumbfounded by her question, Asa Somers asked, “Why, ma’am?”
“Do you know how to cock that gun?” A whisper. Fierce.
“Yes.”
“I want you to go to the drunk. Take the automatic from his shoulder holster and cock it and bring it to me.”
“Wh—?”
“My hand is not strong enough to pull the slide, and my own gun is not heavy enough to stop those two . . . Don’t look at them!”
Somers glanced at the sleeping drunk. “When?”
“When the shooting starts.”
“Wh—?”
“Now!” She tipped the table on its side so the thick wooden top was facing the two big men like a shield. She kicked her leg high. Her dress flew open. As Somers dived toward the drunk, he glimpsed her snow-white thigh encircled in black lace. He saw a tiny pistol in a half holster, which she drew and cocked in a blur of motion. The shooting started before he reached the drunk, two quick shots like snapped sticks and a sullen Boom! back from a heavier gun.
The gunshots sent everyone in the place diving for the floor and woke up the drunk, who slapped groggily at Somers’s hand. She was right about it being a big automatic—a Colt Navy M1911. Somers jerked the slide, chambering a round. Then he grabbed the revolver before the drunk could and leaped back to Fräulein Grandzau, who by then had fired two more shots. One of the men was down on the floor with a pistol half fallen from his fingers. The other was charging them with a gun in one hand, a knife in the other, blood on his shirt, and murder in his eyes.
Fräulein Grandzau took the automatic in both her tiny hands. She fired once.
The .45 slug knocked the man’s legs out from under him and he went down with a crash.
She turned to Asa, her eyes oddly detached, as if she had left the room earlier.
“Good job, Asa. Now ve auf Wiedersehen before the police.”
Everyone else in the bar had scattered or was still hugging the floor. She led hi
m onto a veranda and down rickety stairs into an alley, back onto Bay Street, past the liquor row of shacks and stables converted to warehouses that were receiving crates and barrels even at night, and onto Frederick Street.
“Who were they?” asked Asa.
“Two Russians who wanted to kill us.”
“How did you know they were Russians?”
“I know Russians.”
Ahead, at last, was their Lucerne Hotel.
“Is it O.K. if I hang on to this?” Somers asked. He opened his coat where he had slipped the drunk’s revolver into his waistband.
“Yes,” she said. “You earned it. Go get some sleep. I have to cable Isaac.”
“No you don’t.”
Asa Somers pointed toward the patio. Isaac Bell was standing in the door, a grim-faced specter in white. Detective Dashwood was across the lobby, one hand inside his coat, and Detective Ed Tobin, the tough Gang Squad guy with the lopsided face, was on the landing up the stairs with a hand inside his coat.
Fräulein Grandzau said, “Go to sleep, Asa. We’ll see you in the morning.”
• • •
“WE CHARTERED A FLYING BOAT,” said Isaac Bell, “thinking Zolner might attack here.”
“They just tried.”
Bell looked at her sharply. “Are you O.K.?”
Pauline shrugged. “Alive. Thanks to young Asa.”
Bell asked what had happened. Pauline told him. When she was done, she was shaking and blinking back tears. Bell slung an arm around her shoulders and walked her into the bar.
“Let me buy you a legal drink.”
• • •
THE SKY OVER NASSAU that a lifetime at sea had told Captain Novicki could be trouble had not lied, although the blow it had forecast had taken longer to shape up than he expected. He had sailed his wooden schooner through the Windward Passage and into the Caribbean without a change in the weather. Then, quite suddenly—due east of Port-au-Prince, west of Guantánamo Bay—the glass started dropping faster than a man overboard. Silky cirrus clouds thickened. He had to decide whether to change course for Cuba and run for shelter in Guantánamo Bay or chance continuing to Jamaica.
The Bootlegger Page 27