The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

• • •

AN ARMORED CAR painted with skulls and crossbones led a gang of anti-Communists into a Berlin alley. They were police-trained and armed with pistols and rubber truncheons. The men trapped inside the Communist bomb factory panicked. The Reds had one gun among them, a rusted revolver. The consignment of brand-new Ortgies 7.65 pistols that the Central Committee had promised had not materialized. Anny, the girl who cooked for them, turned in terror to Pauline Grandzau.

Pauline took her hand.

The bomb factory was hidden in a ground-floor tenement flat in the Wedding working-class district of narrow streets and crooked alleys. If anyone could help her find the truth about Johann Kozlov, it was this girl Pauline had followed here. Anny was a passionate believer in the workers’ cause and a reluctant convert to violent revolution, which she called a historic necessity.

Though highly intelligent, she seemed utterly unaware that the security police had been watching her. She would be locked in a cell if they hadn’t hoped she would lead them to the Comintern agent, Valtin, who had approached Johann Kozlov. At this crucial moment, Pauline surmised, they had lost track of her and had no idea that their unwitting Judas goat was moments from being badly injured or killed.

The door shook as the anti-Communists hammered on it with truncheons and gun butts. The bombmakers threw their shoulders against the door to hold it shut.

“Help me pull up the rug,” Pauline told Anny.

The bombmakers had apparently grown up in neighborhoods less poor than this one and none of them even suspected there was a trapdoor under the filthy carpet. It opened over a wet earthen cellar. The cellar had been dug decades ago by country peasants when they moved to the city in the forlorn hope of storing vegetables grown in tenement shadows.

“How did you know?” Anny whispered.

“When I w

as a girl, I lived in Wedding with my mother.”

If the root cellar was like others Pauline had seen, it would have another door that opened outside into what she hoped would be an interior yard with a fence they could squeeze through and run. It did. Holding Anny’s hand tightly, she emerged under a sliver of gray sky spitting rain.

Buildings walled them in on all four sides. Only one had a door.

“What of the others?” asked Anny.

“They’ll follow, if they have any sense,”

But before the bomb builders could escape through the cellar, an explosion shook the ground. A cloud of dust burst from the cellar door. Pauline felt the earth tremble under her feet as the entire front of the crumbling tenement collapsed. Brick and timber buried the anti-Communists and their armored car in the alley and the bomb-makers in their flat.

• • •

ISAAC BELL asked Captain Novicki, “What happened to your face, Dave?”

“Just some splinters.”

“Looks like a treeful.”

“Listen, Isaac. I have a confession to make.”

“What did you do?”

“I got caught running rum.”

Bell gave him a brisk once-over. His cheeks above his beard and his forehead were speckled with cuts, and he had one of those new Band-Aids stuck on his ear. He was lucky he hadn’t lost an eye. Otherwise, he looked his usual rugged self, a feisty old man who did not think he was old. “Caught running rum? Or hijacked?”

“Hijacked.”

“Where’d it happen?”

“They were waiting a half mile off Fire Island Inlet. Shot up my boat and stole the . . . cargo. Then chopped holes in the bottom to sink her.”

“Sounds like you’re lucky you’re alive.”

“Darned lucky. Thankfully, I don’t have to tell Joe right away. Bad enough admitting to you that I broke the law.”

“I’m not a cop,” said Bell. “And I’m not a priest.”