The Bootlegger

by Clive Cussler

  The wind rose.

  He ordered his topsails in, and reefs in his foresail and mainsail, and soon reefed again. A few hours later, he had her running under bare poles, fore and main furled, with only a storm jib and a rag of staysail for steerage. Whatever was brewing was going to barrel straight through the Windward Passage. So much for Guantánamo. It was Kingston or bust.

  The falling barometer, the rising wind veering north, and the steepening seas warned that South Florida and The Bahamas were in for a drubbing. But an aching pain in an old break in his left foot, courtesy of a sawbones who’d swigged Bushmills Irish Whiskey while he set it, threatened a more ominous possibility.

  “If this doesn’t grow into a hurricane,” he told his mate, “my name’s not Novicki.”

  The mate, a grizzled Jamaican even older than he was, thought it would veer northwest along the Cuban coast and into the Gulf of Mexico.

  “She could,” said Novicki. “But if she re-curves northeast, look out New York, Long Island, and Rum Row.”

  • • •

  ISAAC BELL swam across Nassau Harbour. Employing an Australian crawl, he lifted his face from the warm water periodically to navigate by the cream-colored funnel that jutted above the mahogany wheelhouse of the steam yacht Maya. Alongside the enormous white hull, he hauled himself onto a tender and climbed the gangway rigged to the side. He stopped at the teak rail on the main deck and called out, “Permission to come aboard?”

  Stewards swarmed.

  Fern Hawley herself appeared.

  She gave his swim trunks a piercing look and his broad shoulders a warm smile.

  “Mr. Bell. You have more scars than most men I meet.”

  “I tend to bump into doors and slip in the bath. May I come aboard?”

  She snapped her fingers. A steward handed her a thick Turkish towel. She tossed it to Bell and led him to a suite of canvas chairs under a gaily striped awning. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? Or were you just swimming by and stopped to catch your breath?”

  Bell got right to it. “I’m curious about your friend Prince André.”

  “As a detective?” she asked. “Or a banker?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I looked into your background. You’re of the Boston Bells. Louisburg Square. American States Bank.”

  “My father is a banker. I am a detective. Have you seen Prince André recently?”

  “Not since New York. I believe it was the night we met at Club Deluxe.”

  He decided to throw the dice on Pauline’s and Marion’s belief that Fern Hawley was disappointed in Zolner. If they were wrong, he would find himself back in the water.

  “I could swear I saw you with him in Detroit.”

  She hesitated. Then her smirk faded and a faint smile softened her face. “I hope,” she said, softly, “that I won’t have to call my lawyers.”

  Bell couched his answer very carefully.

  “I mispoke slightly. I did not mean with him, I meant near him.”

  He was bending the truth only slightly. For while he was reasonably sure he had seen her in the Pierce-Arrow limousine at Sam Rosenthal’s send-off, he had not seen her in it when it sped away, firing at the police. Nor had he seen Zolner’s gunmen get into it. But by mentioning lawyers, she had all but admitted she had been there.

  Fern acknowledged as much, saying, “Now you’re the one taking a chance.”

  “How so?”

  “Shielding a criminal.”

  “I did not see you commit the crime. Before the crime, I saw a young woman whose sense of adventure may have caused her to fall in with the wrong crowd . . .”

  “You’re very generous, Mr. Bell. I am not that young.”

  “You met ‘Prince André’ in Paris?”

  “At a victory parade,” Fern said. “A Lancashire Regiment marching up the Champs-Élysées. I couldn’t believe my eyes. They were midgets. None taller than five feet. Prince André told me why. They were poorly paid coal miners. They belonged to a race of men who hadn’t had a decent meal in a hundred years. I realized—for the first time—the difference between rich and poor. Between capitalists and proletariat. Between owners and workers.” She touched Bell’s arm confidingly. “I’d never even called them workers before. I called them workmen. Or, as my father referred to them, ‘hands.’ Never people.”

  “Prince André sounds unusually broad-minded for a Russian aristocrat. If there were more like him, they wouldn’t have had a revolution.”

  “He can be sensitive.”

  “Do you know what he’s up to now?”

  “Business interests, I gather.”

  “Did he ever ask you to invest in his interests?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “It’s a cliché of our times. The impoverished European aristocrat courts the wealthy American heiress.”

  “Not this heiress. All he asked was to take him to Storms.”

  “Storms?”

  “Storms & Storms. One of my father’s brokers.” She laughed. “It was so funny. Stormy old Storms was quaking, terrified that André wanted to borrow money. He knew the cliché. When it was just the opposite.”

  “What was opposite?”

  “André gave him oodles to invest.”

  Bell looked up at the sky. A scrim of cloud was spreading from the south. It had reddened the horizon at dawn. Now it seemed thicker . . . Cloud the issue, Joe Van Dorn taught apprentices. Throw them off with two more questions after you hit pay dirt.

  “Would you have lunch with me at my hotel?”

  “Let’s stay on the boat,” said Fern. “The chef has lobsters. Not our proper New England lobsters—they have no claws—but if we share a third, we won’t miss claws.”

  “I wish we could,” said Bell, “but I have to send a cable.”

  “About Prince André?”

  “No. But there was something else I wanted to ask about him. I was wondering how a refugee survives suddenly losing . . . all this . . . comfort, I guess, that privileged people like you and I take for granted.” He gestured at her yacht, the gleaming brightwork, the polished brass, the attentive stewards. “That Prince André took for granted. What do you suppose is his greatest strength?”

  “He’s an optimist.”

  • • •

  THREE VAN DORN DETECTIVES—Adler, Kliegman, and Marcum, dressed like auditors in vested suits, bowler hats, and wire-rimmed glasses, and carrying green eyeshades in their bulging briefcases—paused before entering the Wall Street brokerage house of Storms & Storms to observe the Morgan Building, where the cops had found Detective Warren’s gold badge. Other than some shrapnel gouges in the marble wall, there was no sign of the unsolved bombing.

  They addressed their old friend as if he were alive. “Hang on a moment longer, Harry, we’re going to get some back.”

  • • •

  THE BLUE-UNIFORMED GUARD at the front door ushered them in with a respectful bow.

  Senior partner Newtown Storms’s secretary was less easily impressed.

  “Whom do you gentlemen represent?”

  “Adler, Kliegman & Marcum,” said Adler.

  “I’m not familiar with your firm.”

  “We are auditors. Our clients include the Enforcement Division of the Internal Revenue Service.”

  “What business do you have with Mr. Storms?”

  “Income tax evasion.”

  “Mr. Storms has paid his taxes.”

  “A client of his has not.”

  That got them into Storms’s office. The patrician stockbroker kept them standing in front of his rosewood desk while he fingered their business cards, which were so freshly printed, Adler could smell the ink.

  “Let me set you straight, gentlemen. I am not a government official. It is not my job to collect income taxes.”

  Adler asked, “Is it your job to help your clients evade taxes?”

  “Of course not. It is my job to help my clients minimize their taxes.”


  Kliegman spoke up. “Minimizing. A slippery slope to the depths of evasion.”

  “Particularly,” Adler said, “when enormous transactions are made with cash.”

  “Cash is honest,” Storms shot back. “Cash deters excessive spending. People think twice when they have to count it out on the barrel-head instead of blithely scribbling a check in the hopes their banker covers their overdraft. Cash backed by gold. That’s my motto.”

  The three detectives stood silent as bronze statues.

  Storms asked, “Are you inquiring about a particular client of mine? Or are you just fishing?”

  “Prince André.”

  That got them invitations to sit down. Storms looked considerably less sure of himself. When his voice tube whistled, he jerked off the cap and growled, “Do not disturb me.”

  “How rich is he?” Adler asked bluntly.

  “Prince André is a wealthy man. He was wealthy before the market took off like a Roman candle, and he is wealthier now. And I assure you that, come next April 15, he will pay his fair taxes on his earnings in the market.”

  “We have no doubt,” said Adler.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Cash, Mr. Storms. Our old reliable friend cash. Backed by gold.”

  The mild-mannered Adler suddenly had a steel gleam in his eye, and steel in his voice. “Cash can come from untaxed gains. Even illegal gains. Does he have private accounts or does he represent a corporation?”

  Storms looked a little surprised by the question, and Adler feared he had misstepped. It turned out he hadn’t. Storms said, “Both actually. He has some corporate entities that maintain some accounts. And he also trusts us with the privilege of managing his personal holdings.”

  “Numerous accounts of cash?”

  Storms sprang to his feet. “I have spoken far too freely about private matters, don’t you think?”

  “We think that a government prosecutor might wonder whether that cash was invested with you to hide all trace of ill-gotten gains.”

  “I don’t like your implication, sir.”

  Adler quoted from his dictionary: “Concealing the origins of money obtained illegally by passing it through a complex sequence of banking transfers or commercial transactions is a crime.”

  Kliegman quoted from his: “To transfer funds of dubious or illegal origin to a foreign country, and then later recover them from what seem to be clean sources, is a crime.”

  Adler added, “To help a criminal hide cash is to become an accomplice in the crime of tax evasion.”

  Detective Marcum had yet to speak. He had a deep voice that rumbled like a chain-drive “Bull Dog” truck. “To gain by not paying taxes is tax evasion, whether the original gain is legal or illegal.”

  “No one has ever been prosecuted for that,” Storms protested.

  “Yet,” said Marcum.

  “Would you like to be the first?”

  Newtown Storms said, staunchly, “An American citizen would be violating his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination if he admitted to illegal gains on his tax return.”

  “Would you like to spend years in appeal, waiting for the Supreme Court to eventually rule on that dubious interpretation of our constitution?”

  “Mr. Storms, we’re not asking for your money. We are asking you to betray a crook.”

  “‘Crook’ is not a word that applies to the gentlemen classes my firm serves.”

  “What if we told you he was a Bolshevik?”

  Storms laughed. “Next, you’ll tell me President Harding wants America to join the League of Nations. And Marcus Garvey is signing on with the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “What if it were true that Prince André is a Bolshevik?”

  “How can he be a Bolshevik? The revolutionaries kicked him out of his country and seized his estates.”

  “What if Prince André is a Bolshevik?”

  “If it were true, Prince André would be a traitor to his class, and I would tell you everything you want to know.”

  • • •

  THE WIND WAS RISING IN NASSAU, shivering flags and slapping halyards, when Isaac Bell returned to the steam yacht Maya. Fern Hawley received him in the main salon, which had been designed in the old Art Nouveau mode by the Tiffany Company. It was a breathtaking sight, thought Bell, that would force anyone questioning the pleasures of wealth to change his tune.

  “Why, Mr. Bell, where are your swim trunks?”

  “I hired a launch. There’s a mean chop on the harbor. Besides, it’s getting dark and I’m told sharks dine at night.”

  “I’d have sent you a tender,” said Fern. “Would you like a drink?”

  Bell said that he thought a drink would be a wonderful idea.

  “Daiquiris or Scotch?”

  “Scotch.”

  “We’re in luck. I have the real McCoy. Haig & Haig.”

  They touched glasses. She said, “I’m glad to see you again. Lunch was over too soon.”

  “I have not been one hundred percent honest with you,” Bell replied.

  Fern gave him a big smile. “Is it too much to hope that you lied when you told me you were always faithful to your wife?”

  “I lied when I said I was not sending a cable about Prince André.”

  “That much I figured out on my own. What’s up, Mr. Bell . . . I should call you Isaac, for gosh sake. I am going to call you Isaac. What’s up, Isaac?”

  “Prince André is a traitor.”

  Fern Hawley looked mystified. “A traitor to what? Russia? Russia is no more. Not his Russia.”

  “He is a traitor to your cause.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Fern, let’s stop kidding each other. Prince André’s name is Marat Zolner.”

  “I know him as Prince André.”

  “Marat Zolner is a bootlegger.”

  “So are half the enterprising businessmen in America.”

  “Bootlegging is a masquerade. Marat Zolner is a Comintern agent conspiring against America.”

  “He can’t be a traitor to America. He’s not American—or are you suggesting that I am the traitor? Traitoress?”

  Isaac Bell did not smile back at her.

  “Did Marat Zolner set the Wall Street bomb?”

  “No.”

  “So you do know Prince André as Marat Zolner.”

  Fern answered tartly. “Spare me the battle of wits, Isaac. It’s obvious you know a lot.”

  Bell’s reply was a cold, “How do you know he didn’t set that bomb?”

  “Because Yuri did.”

  “Who is Yuri?”

  “Yuri Antipov. A Comintern agent sent by Moscow to ride herd on Marat. Marat did not want to bomb Wall Street. So Yuri did it.”

  “Did you know he was going to explode a bomb on a crowded street?”

  “No! They didn’t tell me such things. I only learned afterward.”

  “Where is Yuri?”

  “He died in the explosion.”

  “Along with forty innocents.”

  She hung her head. “They don’t think the way we do. They’ve experienced terrible things we haven’t.”

  “Those forty have.”

  “Moscow made Yuri a ‘hero of the revolution.’ Not Marat. He didn’t do it.”

  “Why do you say Zolner didn’t do it? Just because he wasn’t killed in the blast?”

  “Marat would never make such a mistake. He’s too meticulous. Yuri was impetuous. He would blunder ahead. He couldn’t help himself.”

  Bell looked at her and she looked away. He said, “Could Zolner have made a ‘mistake,’ deliberately?”

  “Why?”

  “To get rid of his watchdog.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “No. Absolutely not.”

  “You say no, but you’re thinking that it is possible that he killed Yuri, aren’t you?”

  She was silent a long moment, then said in a bleak and empty voice. “Yuri was my friend.”

  “He was a
murderer,” said Isaac Bell. “Forty times over.”

  “I didn’t know he was going to do it.”

  Bell made no effort to hide his disgust. “Whether you are a traitor, or a foolish young woman who—as I said generously, earlier—fell in with the ‘wrong crowd,’ will depend on your next move.”

  “Betray him?”

  “I will make it easy for you.”

  “How?”

  “I just told you. He’s already betrayed you. And your workers’ cause.”

  “How?”

  “You introduced him to Newtown Storms. Storms invests the enormous sums of cash that Marat Zolner earns bootlegging. Do you deny that he uses the money Storms makes in the stock market to finance his Comintern attack on our country?”

  Fern Hawley returned Bell’s wintery gaze in silence.

  “I am asking you privately,” said Bell. He had thought on this all afternoon. He had much bigger fish to fry than one confused spoiled brat. “Confidentially, Fern. Between you and me. All alone on your yacht in the middle of a harbor of a remote British colony.”

  “Why are you protecting me?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Two reasons. One, I truly do believe that you fell in with the wrong crowd.”

  “What makes you believe that? You don’t know me.”

  “A character reference from a colleague whose judgment I trust.”

  “Who?”

  “Pauline.”

  “She’s yours?”

  “She’s Van Dorn’s.”

  Fern covered her face. “Oh, do I feel like a fool.”

  “You aren’t the first. Pauline is the sharpest detective you will ever meet. She sees a possibility of something worthwhile in you, and what Pauline sees is good enough for me.”

  “What is the second reason?”

  “The second reason is far more important. You can give me Marat Zolner. Which is why I ask you about the Stormses’ investments financing the Comintern attack.”

  Fern smirked the smirk that said she knew more than Bell did. “Actually, most of it comes straight from the bootlegging. Storms hasn’t made him as much as he hoped.”

  “Oh yes he has,” said Bell. “Storms is good at what he does, and the market has been kind.”

  “That’s not what Marat said.”

  “That’s because Marat siphons off most of his stock earnings. He has secret, personal accounts with Storms & Storms. He stashed money in London and Paris and Berlin and Switzerland. He has made himself a very wealthy Bolshevik.”