The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

“Don’t touch that money.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll count it up and take proper care of it. You go about your business.”

“Don’t touch it!” Bell roared. “It’s a booby trap.”

The Dry agents ignored him and grabbed the cash.

Isaac Bell caught one glimpse of what looked like thousands of dollars, not “a couple of bucks,” as he yanked Dashwood and Ed Tobin backwards through the door. With a flash of light and hollow Boom! an explosion erupted under the barrels of grain alcohol. Flaming liquid leaped to the rafters, and the whole place was afire in seconds.

23

MARAT ZOLNER drove Black Bird the length of Lake Erie in a single dark night.

With new propellers and driveshafts, and her Libertys freshly tuned, she cruised the two-hundred-forty-mile voyage from Buffalo Main Light to the mouth of the Detroit River at an easy-on-the-valves, fuel-stretching thirty miles an hour. Zolner kept her so far offshore, straddling the invisible border between Canada and America, that all he could see of the lights of Erie and Cleveland were low halos to the south. She slowed only twice: for heavy seas, when a squall lashed the western flats with wind and rain; and, earlier, to sink with her Lewis gun a wooden customs boat, which could never catch her but had a radio to report her presence.

Nearing the Detroit River, Zolner stopped off the Pelee Passage Light and flashed an Aldis signal lamp. A motorboat sped out from Point Pelee, driven by a Comintern Maritime Section agent with a smuggler’s knowledge of the long, narrow strait’s labyrinth of coves, islands, and inlets. He led the black boat up the Pelee Passage, past the Bar Point Shoal Lighthouse and into the Amherstburg Channel. Reserved for inbound shipping, the channel ran north between Bois Blanc Island and the Canadian mainland. They overtook monster shadows in the dark, six-hundred-foot iron ore carriers, riding high in ballast.

“What a wonderful place,” said Marat Zolner.

City lights and chimneys belching fire marked the office buildings, automobile plants, and foundries of Detroit on the American side of the river. On the Canadian side—ninety seconds at Black Bird’s top speed—were the “border cities” of Windsor, Riverside, Ford City, Walkerville, Sandwich, Ojibway, and La Salle. Their population was a mere tenth of Detroit’s, but they were as brightly lit, their waterfronts crammed with distilleries, breweries, and the government export docks where customs cleared alcohol for export. The cleared booze was absolutely legal until it crossed the international border in the middle of the river.

The boat leading them veered toward Windsor and pointed the way to a hidden inlet that led to a brick boathouse that had been built before the war for an industrialist’s yacht.

Black Bird rumbled into it. Men lowered the door, and she was safe.

• • •

ISAAC BELL ordered a dozen Van Dorn detectives to track the flatcar that had taken Black Bird from Marat Zolner’s Great River estate. He had no proof that Zolner had rented the estate; whoever had had paid cash through brokers who had disappeared. Vanished, too, were the agents who had arranged for the railroad to move the car. But if not Zolner, who else? Besides, Zolner or not, the black boat served the Comintern.

The Van Dorns started at Zolner’s siding, the remnants of a passenger spur that had served the exclusive South Side Sportsmen’s Club. The spur connected to the Montauk Branch of the Long Island Railroad. Detectives went west toward New York City and east toward Montauk Point. In both directions were many towns with freight sidings near creeks, inlets, and harbors.

Bell himself headed three station stops to the west to the railroad’s district freight yard at Babylon. On the chief dispatcher’s blackboard was a record of a “special,” an extra, unscheduled train, consisting of a locomotive, tender, caboose, and a flatcar,

serial number 55461.

He asked to speak with the engineer, but the man was out on another train. The locomotive’s fireman was “around somewhere,” but neither in the freight house, where large items were stored, nor in the express house, which handled packages. “Try the engine house.” Skirting piles of sand and gravel and a clamshell bucket loading hopper cars, Bell found the fireman oiling a 4-6-0 and asked if he had a look at the boat.

“What boat?”

“On the flatcar.”

“Is that what it was? It was wrapped under canvas. Sure, could have been a boat, I suppose.”

“Didn’t you wonder?”

“Weren’t about to ask. They were a tough bunch.”

“How many men?”

“Six or seven, I believe. They holed up in the caboose, made the brakeman ride up in the cab with me and the engineer.”

“Where’d you take it?”

“I rode as far as Jamaica.”

From the Long Island Railroad’s central freight junction at Jamaica, in the New York City borough of Queens, car number 55461 had been sent to the East New York freight yard. From East New York, it was shunted to the waterfront Bay Ridge Terminal and rolled onto a car float. A Pennsylvania Railroad tugboat shepherded the car float across the Upper Bay to Jersey City’s Greenville Terminal, where 55461 disappeared.

Bell made a contribution to the railroad police “benevolent fund” and blanketed the yard with his own detectives to search for it. But it was nowhere on the property. Nor did the Pennsylvania Railroad have any record of the flatcar heading south or west on “Pennsy” track.