The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

The boathouse mechanic switched off his electric grinder. For a long moment the only sound Marat Zolner heard was the lap of water echoing in the slips.

The Communist International—the “Comintern”—was Soviet Russia’s worldwide espionage network. The Russian Communist Party had launched it as its foreign arm when it seized control of the revolution that brought down Czar Nicholas II. The Comintern’s mission was to repeat that victory everywhere in the world and overthrow the governments of the international bourgeoisie by all available means—spying, sabotage, and armed force.

Marat Zolner was a battle-hardened soldier of the revolution. During the war he had provoked entire regiments to shoot their officers. He led the Soviet unit that captured the czar’s train, fought with the Bolsheviks to subvert the democratic provisional government, and shone in cavalry battles with White Loyalists in the Russian Civil War. Beyond the Russian border, he proved versatile, rallying Berlin street fighters to the barricades. Antipov had fought at his side.

“Go get something to eat!” he called to the valve grinder, a Russian, too. When they were alone, he said to Antipov, “Come here!”

He strode to the wall of spare motors. Sitting on one of the crates was a steel strongbox.

“Open that!”

Antipov flung back the lid. The box was crammed with cash, banded stacks of bills in denominations of one hundred and one thousand dollars.

“Where did you get this?”

“Profits,” said Zolner.

“Profits?”

“Money earned smuggling alcohol from Rum Row to Long Island roadhouses and New York speakeasies.”

“I ask of the revolution and you answer like a banker. Profits?”

“What I am doing costs money.”

“And what precisely are you doing?”

Marat Zolner said, “Masking our Comintern network of assassins and saboteurs as a liquor-bootlegging crime syndicate.”

“You wear your mask too well. You boast of pride and joy. You boast of gangsters, smugglers. Bootleggers. Where are the comrades?”

“Black Bird’s sailors are comrades—loyal Russian Bolshevik comrades of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Fleet. Johann was a comrade. You are a comrade.”

“And you?”

“My smugglers and gangsters obey me. I am their bootlegger boss. They don’t know I’m Comintern. They won’t know why I expand to Detroit and Miami—nor why our empire spreads to the South, the Midwest, the Pacific Coast.”

“Are you a comrade?”

“Have you not heard a word I said? Of course I am a comrade.”

Antipov shook his head.

“What is wrong, Yuri?”

“The Comintern sent you to New York to provoke revolution.”

“Precisely what my empire will achieve.”

“What part did you take in the strikes of Seattle shipyards? How did you aid the Boston police strike? What was your role in the coalfield strikes? Who did you co-opt in the nationwide steel strike? What of the May first seamens’ strike? Are you co-opting the IWW Wobblies? Have you seized control of the American Communist Party?”

Zolner laughed.

“I do not see the joke,” Antipov said heavily.

“The Wobblies and the American Communist Party and the labor unions are all in decline. The Congress, the newspapers, and the American Legion sow panic about ‘Reds.’ But the fact is, as you saw at the roadhouses tonight, Americans of every class are having too much fun defying Prohibition to care about politics, much less class struggle. Gangsters are their heroes. This is why my American Comintern unit fights under the guise of bootlegging.”

“Perhaps you will invest your profits on Wall Street,” Antipov said sarcastically.