The Bootlegger (Isaac Bell 7)

Isaac Bell extended his hand. “Welcome back, boys. You’re reinstated. On probation, providing you keep your noses clean.”

“Oh, we will, Mr. Bell.”

“Thanks, Mr. Bell.”

“Should we quit our government jobs?”

“Stay at them. I’d like nothing better than a couple of good men inside the Prohibition Bureau.”

• • •

NEITHER ABE WEINTRAUB, who was only five and a half feet tall, nor Marat Zolner could stand erect in the Ecorse end of the Comintern’s tunnel under the Detroit River. The short, newly dug connecting section was wet, dimly lit, and had a very low ceiling. Water seeped through cracks in the bricks and sandbags and accumulated in a trench between the rails on which rolled eight-foot flatcars stacked with whisky cases.

Pumps on Fighting Island, two thousand feet away, emptied the trench when it filled. The pumps, a dynamo for the lights, and the flatcars were housed in a ferry terminal under construction on the island. There was no ferry, no plans for one, but there were various city of La Salle building permits for the terminal, and the fiction provided a ruse for the machinery.

The main tunnel, discovered by Polish gangsters who then dug the Ecorse connector, was a partially built railroad bore. It was much bigger, better lit, and comparatively dry, a high-crowned cast-iron tube that had been sealed shut and abandoned decades ago when Ecorse was a tiny village and Fighting Island, then as now, consisted of fifteen hundred acres of deserted swampy lowland. The curving ceiling was so high that it felt more like a room than a passage.

Zolner had feared, at first, that the low, cramped, hundred-foot connector between the abandoned tunnel and the Ecorse boathouse shaft would be a choke point. But then he had seen an unusual opportunity offered by the big railroad section—a secret, secure under-river warehouse where he could stash cases by the carload. It already contained a huge stockpile of liquor worth millions, and they were packing in more every day. The amount that he chose to funnel through the choke point would control the American liquor market, raising and lowering the price by adjusting supply.

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Only yesterday, when he caught wind that the River Gang had successfully landed ten thousand cases of a whisky labeled “Canadian Club” in Detroit, Zolner had immediately released ten thousand cases from the tunnel. Before the River Gang could sell theirs, Abe Weintraub’s distributors hit the streets with the same whisky at half the price. Bankruptcy would loom over a legitimate business. In the hooch trade it meant gunplay. The Purples won the shoot-outs with a Thomas .45 loaned by the Comintern.

Next week, carefully planned hijackings—scheduled to coincide with Volstead raids conducted by bribed agents—would squeeze supply. Zolner would sell more whisky from the tunnel at double the price. Pure capitalism, he joked to Weintraub. Worse than Karl Marx had ever dreamed.

He allowed no one but his own trusted agents near the Detroit side of the tunnel now that it was finished and the last workers executed. The sole exception to the ban was Admiral Abe. Not even Weintraub’s bodyguards were allowed near. By now, of course, Weintraub trusted him, even loved him, for the belief had sunk into his savage, one-track brain that Marat Zolner was not only making him rich and powerful but needed him to fend off the other gangs and protect the tunnel.

• • •

“EXCELLENT TOWN to hide a hooch tunnel.”

Ecorse also looked to Isaac Bell like a fine place to lam it from the cops.

He was piloting his long green Phaeton through the clogged streets of the cabaret section known as the Half Mile of Hell. No one would notice strangers and newcomers, not with thousands flooding in nightly to drink and careen about. Thousands from Detroit and the suburbs got drunk in the ramshackle cabarets, played roulette, blackjack, and craps in gambling parlors, and celebrated in the dance halls and brothels that had sprung to life with Prohibition.

Booze was plentiful and cheap. Steel mills and chemical plants had grown to supply the booming motor factories, and the customers had money to burn. Those who arrived sober quickly remedied their condition and thronged the streets all night. It was a good town to be a gangster and not a bad town for private detectives searching for a tunnel.

If the fancy Cadillac, the pistol bulge in his suit coat, and the Borsalino dragged over his eyes left any doubt Isaac Bell was a bootlegger, the sight of his bodyguards erased it. Scar-faced Ed Tobin rode shotgun, broken-nosed Clayton and Ellis glowered in the backseat. In the unlikely event they were recognized as Prohibition agents, they would not be the first bureau officials to accept freelance employment from a bootlegger who needed protection while prospecting for new opportunities or stalking rivals.

Bell turned onto a street that paralleled the river. The air reeked of mud, beer, and whisky. To his right, every building had a bar on the ground floor. The bars to his left occupied the backs of boathouses that extended from the Ecorse riverbank out over deep water. The tall detective and his men stalked into several. Each had a bar selling every known brand of whisky and gin, each had a free lunch like the old pre-Prohibition saloons, and each had plenty of scantily dressed women livening the atmosphere.

Bell spotted a bar on the waterside that was a bit darker than the others. Drawing closer, he noticed that the people lurching about the sidewalk were giving it a wide berth to avoid the broad-shouldered doormen who were blocking the entrance.

Bell said, “Let’s see what makes them unfriendly,” and led the way.

The doormen appraised the four men coming at them and reached inside their coats. Bell and Tobin seized their arms before they could pull guns and passed them back to Clayton and Ellis, who subdued them quickly. Bell pushed through the doors.

It was quiet inside, the bar empty. The bartender reached under it, then raised his hands over his head and gaped down the barrel of the Browning that materialized in Bell’s hand. The man looked both frightened and resigned, as if he expected something like this would be happening soon.

“What do you want?”

“Show us your cellar,” said Bell.

“Cellar? What cellar? It’s a boathouse.”

“We’d like to see it anyway.”

“Buddy, I’m telling you the truth.”