The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

Bell made it with only minutes to spare, and when he boarded the Rotterdam-bound Nieuw Amsterdam, an aging seventeen-thousand-tonner, he found two Van Dorn detectives already crowded into Pauline’s little cabin. Research Department chief Grady Forrer—a scholarly giant of bull-like proportions—and young, pale-skinned, bantamweight James Dashwood—the finest pistol shot in the agency—who had brought her flowers. The giant and the rail-thin youth gripped their bouquets like clubs.

Pauline appeared oblivious to her dazzling effect on either of them.

“Isaac! I’m so glad you could make it.” She turned to Dashwood and Forrer. “Boys, thank you so much for coming. And thank you for the beautiful roses, Grady, and the lovely peonies, James. I’ll see you when I’m back in the autumn. Good-bye. Thank you. Good-bye.”

Grady and Dashwood shuffled out, reluctantly, and Bell had to hide a smile. The skinny little German student with yellow braids, freckles, bright blue eyes, and the moxie of a Berlin street fighter had grown up. A stylish bob replaced her braids. Her enormous eyes were deep as oceans. God alone knew where the freckles had gone. But the moxie was still there, hidden like a sleeve gun, ready when needed.

For a long moment, they stood looking at each other.

Bell broke the silence, speaking German—partly because people were shuffling by in the corridor and partly for old times’ sake—the college German she had helped him hone to stay alive.

“I attended the rumrunner’s autopsy.”

“What did you learn?”

“There was something a little odd about the way the killer shot him. He was shot point-blank. Not between the eyes or in the temple, where you’d expect, but in the back of his neck.”

Pauline’s eyes settled on him curiously. “Where in the back of his neck?”

“Just at the hairline.”

“The nape?”

“Exactly.”

“Next, you will tell me that the bullet did not exit.”

“How did you know?”

“It didn’t?”

“No. Straight up in his brain.”

“Was he American?”

“I assume so. He told the doctors his name was Johnny. Why?”

“Could he have come from abroad?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You just described a Genickschuss.”

“Genickschuss? What is that? Neck shot?”

“A bullet in the nape of the neck.”

“There’s a German word for everything,” Bell marveled.

“Actually, it’s Russian. The word is German, but the Russians coined it for the favored method of execution of the Russian Communist Cheka.”

“Soviet secret police?” asked Bell, equal parts intrigued and surprised. Cheka was short for the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.

“A long and fancy name for the engineers of the Red Terror,” said Pauline. “Genickschuss is how they kill. Quickly, cleanly, efficiently.”

“The coroner thought it was efficient,” said Bell. “How did a Russian method of killing get a German name?”

Pauline reminded him that millions of Germans lived in Russia before the war. “There was plenty of mixing. And many a German worked for the Russian Revolution. Starting, if you will, with Karl Marx.”