“The Comintern are cold, ruthless, and eminently practical. They despise anarchists as hopelessly impractical.”
“Do you have any evidence the Comintern conspires with the IWW?”
Again Grady shook his head. “The Wobblies may be radicals, but they are essentially romantics. The Comintern has even less time for romantics than anarchists. Don’t forget, they invented Genickschuss to execute impractical radicals and romantics.”
Bell said, “You are telling me that the Comintern will attack America on its own—independent of our homegrown conspirators.”
“The cold, ruthless, practical ones might,” Grady amended cautiously.
“Aren’t they already attacking?”
Grady smiled. “Isaac, I am paid to keep heads level in the Research Department. Somehow, you have maneuvered me into speculating that the coldly efficient bootleggers who shot up a Coast Guard cutter, nearly killed Mr. Van Dorn, executed their wounded, and are currently wreaking havoc on street gangs and hijacking rumrunners and whisky haulers are actually attacking the United States of America.”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
“But bootlegging profits,” Grady Forrer cautioned, “are incalculably immense. Getting rich quick is as powerful a motivator as ideology.”
Chief Investigator Isaac Bell had heard enough.
He raised his voice so every detective in the bull pen could hear.
“Pauline Grandzau linked the bootleggers who shot Mr. Van Dorn to the Russian Bolshevik Comintern. As of this minute, the Van Dorn Agency will presume that these particular bootleggers—led by one Marat Zolner, alias Dmitri Smirnoff, alias Dima Smirnov—have more on their minds than getting rich quick.”
18
BILL LYNCH, a portly young boatbuilder already famous for the fastest speedboats on Great South Bay, and Harold Harding, his grizzled, cigar-chomping partner, watched with interest as a midnight blue eighty-horsepower Stutz Bearcat careened into Lynch & Harding Marine’s oyster-shell driveway.
A fair-haired man in a pinch-waist pin-striped suit jumped out of the roadster. He drew his Borsalino fedora low over his eyes and looked around with a no-nonsense expression at the orderly sprawl of docks and sheds that lined a bulkheaded Long Island creek.
Lynch sized him up through thick spectacles. Well over six feet tall and lean as cable, he had golden hair and a thick mustache that were barbered to a fare-thee-well. There was a bulge under his coat where either a fat wallet or a shoulder holster resided.
Lynch bet Harding a quarter that the bulge was artillery.
“No bet,” growled Harold. “But I’ll bet you that bookkeeper nosing around here yesterday works for him.”
“No bet. Looking for something, mister?”
“I’m looking for a boat.”
Bill Lynch said, “Something tells me you want a speedy one.”
“Let’s see what you’ve got.”
In the shed, mechanics were wrestling a heavy chain hoist to lower an eight-cylinder, liquid-cooled Curtiss OX-5 into a fishing boat hull that already contained two of them. The driver of the Stutz did not ask why a fisherman needed three aircraft motors. But he did ask how fast the Curtisses would make the boat.
Lynch, happily convinced that their visitor was a bootlegger, speculated within the realm of the believable that she would hit forty knots.
“Ever built a seventy-footer with three Libertys?”
Lynch and Harding exchanged a look.
“Yup.”
“Where is she?”
“Put her on a railcar.”
“Railcar?” The bootlegger glanced at the weed-choked siding that curved into the yard and connected to the Long Island Railroad tracks half a mile inland. “I’d have thought your customers sail them away.”