“He got deported early, before Palmer’s fellow cabinet members accused the attorney general of seeing a Red behind every bush. Palmer was scheming to deport tens of thousands. But pretty soon the Red Scare was leaking steam.”
Bell shook his head in puzzlement. How did any of this get him closer to the rum gang that shot Joe Van Dorn?
Grady gathered his notes. “How’s the Boss doing?”
Bell brightened. “Better. Much better. The infection did not take hold. Dorothy just telephoned that he wants to see me. The docs said they’ll let me in tomorrow if he keeps improving.”
“Thank God. Give him my best. By the way, Isaac, this Genickschuss neck shot you told me about? We looked into it. Pauline was right. The Cheka perfected the technique.”
“I haven’t seen her wrong yet,” said Bell, and, with that in mind, sent another Marconigram to the Nieuw Amsterdam.
JOHNNY IS JOHANN KOZLOV.
RED SCARE DEPORTED TO GERMANY.
KOZLOV ASSOCIATES?
HOW DID KOZLOV RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES?
In the event she had landed already, he sent copies of it by transatlantic cable care of the Holland America Line to their Rotterdam pier and to the Van Dorn field office in Berlin.
• • •
“I’VE DISCOVERED ONE MAN who actually knew Johann Kozlov,” Isaac Bell told Marion over a midnight supper of Welsh rarebit and a bottle of Mumm champagne from the cellar Archie Abbott had installed in his East Side town house when the Volstead Act was passed. They were in their suite at the St. Regis, Bell sprawled in a comfortable armchair, Marion lounging on the couch. Happily home from a long day of chasing vaudevillians around Fort Lee, she had dressed for supper in a green silk peignoir that matched her eyes.
“Unfortunately, he’s somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a tramp steamer that doesn’t have a radio.”
Bell often talked over his cases with his wife, whose judgment he respected mightily. Marion had a law degree from Stanford University, a razor-sharp mind, and a knack for approaching clues from an unexpected angle. She was unusually observant. She was also an optimist.
“At least you have a name. And Grady’s Research boys say Kozlov joined the Communist Party. And you’re pretty sure he was a Wobbly.”
“But I can’t reckon how an anti-capitalist who wants to abolish the wage system becomes a rumrunner.”
“Maybe he was not that dedicated an anti-capitalist.”
“Dedicated enough to get deported,” said Bell.
“The Palmer Raids were an abomination,” said Marion, who had many foreign-born friends in the moving picture business.
Bell said, “The vast majority were turned loose.”
“I had one friend, a French actor, who was released within a week. Another, a brilliant Russian camera operator, spent three months in a filthy jail.”
“At least Mr. Palmer got his comeuppance when his party decided he was not their ideal candidate for president.”
“Funny, isn’t it?”
“What’s funny?”
“Your Herr Kozlov had the last laugh when he made his way back to New York to radicalize the sailors’ union.”
“Until he became a rumrunner.”
“Which,” said Marion, “you still find to be an unusual change of career.”
She paused for his answer, but he did not speak.
Bell was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on the case. Marion’s peignoir clung intriguingly, and she had loosened her hair, which she usually wore up to keep it out of the camera eyepiece. It framed her beautiful face like gold leaf.