The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

“Don’t you?”

“What?”

“Don’t you find it an unusual change of career?”

“Why don’t we sleep on it?” he asked.

She eyed him over the rim of her champagne flute. “Yes. We both have busy mornings.”

“Then we would be doubly wise,” said Isaac Bell, “to go to bed.”

“Wise,” Marion agreed. She put down her glass and headed into the bedroom.

Bell followed close behind.

“But!” said Marion, her eyes suddenly flashing.

“But what?”

“Johann Kozlov risked arrest, imprisonment, even his life, sneaking back into the country. Then he risked exposure by organizing the sailors’ strike. Labor organizers are arrested routinely. He was willing to risk getting caught. Wouldn’t you call that dedicated?”

Bell said, “But that does not change the fact that less than two months later, Johann Kozlov was wounded running rum.”

“But does that mean that he changed his career?”

“That,” said Bell, “is a very interesting question. You’re asking, was he running rum for some other reason than getting rich quick?”

Marion climbed under the sheets. “Are you ever coming to bed?”

13

PAULINE GRANDZAU trotted briskly down the Nieuw Amsterdam’s gangway, carrying her bag in one hand and Isaac’s Marconigram in the other. She deciphered the Van Dorn code in her head.

Isaac’s last query was the easiest.

HOW DID KOZLOV RETURN TO THE UNITED STATES?

Steamer ticket and false passport, if he had the means. Or try to snag a berth as a sailor and desert when the ship landed, which was difficult with tens of thousands of merchant seamen on the beach waiting for shipping to recover from the end of the war. Or, if Herr Kozlov was especially valuable to the Communist Party, then passage would be arranged by the Comintern Maritime Section, which not only organized seamen’s mutinies but used their network to move Communist agents around the world disguised as ships’ officers and seamen. Kozlov’s execution by Genickschuss suggested that he could have been that valuable, an operative who knew too much to be allowed to talk.

“Red Scare deported to Germany” and “Kozlov associates?” were matters that she had to address, gingerly and face-to-face, with her contacts in the police and the Foreign Service. A copy of the Marconigram was waiting with her steamer trunk, courtesy of the Holland America Line’s chief purser, which showed her exactly how important Isaac thought this Kozlov was. She would find a third copy at the office.

She took the train to Amsterdam, and on to Berlin, and arrived in Germany’s capital as night fell. Outside the railroad station, she found the streets of the government districts in Tiergarten and Mitte blocked by thousands of boys singing the “Internationale” and chanting, “Up and do battle! Up and do battle!”

Tense security police were guarding banks, newspaper offices, and public buildings.

Searchlights played across the façades. Armed bicyclists patrolled the streets in the uniform of the anti-Communist Freikorps. Headlines on news kiosks shrilled the battle cries, and fears, of the political factions vying for power in post-war Germany:

COMMUNISTS TO DYNAMITE MONUMENTS

ULTRA-REACTIONARY ARMY OFFICERS TO LAUNCH COUP

BOLSHEVIKS BURN BOURGEOISIE NEWSPAPERS

FREIKORPS COMMANDEER POLICE

REDS HIDE RIFLES IN MINE SHAFTS

Provocateurs abounded. There was unrest in Saxony, open rebellion in the city of Halle, and in Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, rumor that the Communists would hoist the red flag over the shipyards.