The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

“Who is ‘I’? Who do you mean? I the bootlegger? I the Comintern officer?”

“We are one,” said Marat Zolner. “I. The bootlegger. And the Comintern. This is the plan. This has always been the plan.”

“What of the revolution?”

“We are the revolution.”

“Yuri was the revolution. Johann was the revolution. Look what happened to them.”

“Yuri lost his way. He lost his focus. Dynamite does not forgive mistakes. Johann had the bad luck to run into the wrong detective.”

“You won’t escape the Van Dorns in Detroit.”

“What makes you think that?”

“They have field offices everywhere, including Detroit.”

Zolner reached out and squeezed her leg hard.

“Stop!”

Zolner squeezed harder and said, “The Van Dorn Detroit field office is going out of business.”

21

THIRTY MILES TO THE EAST, that same night, Uncle Donny Darbee was running an oyster boat full of Scotch from Rum Row toward Far Rockaway Inlet. Progress, he was thinking, was a wonderful thing. The modern world worked better than the one he had been born in. Fog lay thick on the water, but a radio signal kept him on course like magic. The big Peerless V-8 his nephews had lifted out of someone’s new automobile made his boat faster than an old-fashioned twenty-horsepower Ford and beat the pants off sails and steam engines. And Prohibition, God bless the politicians who passed it, made running rum far more bankable than pirating coal and easier on an old man’s back.

It looked like the fog had scared off the marine police and the Coast Guard.

Guided by the crash of breakers, he slipped in near silence through the stone breakwaters of the inlet. He continued with his heavily muffled engine throttled way back into Reynolds Channel, a sheltered strait that paralleled the ocean between Long Beach Island and Long Island. Listening for other boats, so as not to collide in the dark, and paying close attention to the changing currents, which indicated his position in the narrow channel, he headed on the course indicated by Robin’s radio. They had two more miles of waters he knew well to a boathouse owned by a Long Beach hotel that would buy his booze.

“Grandpa!”

“What?”

“The radio’s going haywire.”

The next moment, Darbee heard the thunder of ganged Libertys. He looked over his shoulder and saw the blood-red glare of their fiery exhaust. Too late, he realized, the radio signal was a trap and the black boat everyone was talking about was trying to hijack him. A big searchlight burned through the fog, passed over his low gray hull, and swooped back like a hungry sea hawk.

“Hunker down by the engine before they start shooting.”

Robin obeyed instantly. “What are you going to do, Grandpa?”

“I’m going to hope to heck he don’t spot us.”

He eased his throttle forward and picked up speed, reasoning that they wouldn’t hear him over the roar of their own engines. But suddenly their engines grew quiet. They had either slowed down to listen or shifted their engine exhausts through heavy mufflers, as he had shifted his when he entered the inlet.

The searchlight blazed back toward him. They were not making a secret of their presence, and Darbee suspected it wasn’t the fog that cleared out the cops but payoffs. Which meant he and the little girl were entirely on their own. He poured on as much speed as the Peerless would give while muffled. The searchlight swung close. He saw the glow touch Robin’s face. She looked frightened, but she was cool—one of the reasons he took her along on these jaunts.

Now they saw him.

He opened his cutouts for more speed. The Peerless roared.

Behind them the Libertys got very loud, and the big boat sprinted after him.

Robin asked again, “What are we going to do, Grandpa?”

“We’re going to run him onto Hog Island.”