The Bootlegger

“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 rumru

“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 co

“Usually.”

“Where’d she go?”

“Haven’t seen her since.”

The bootlegger asked, “Could you build a faster one?”

Lynch said, “I drew up plans for a seventy-foot express cruiser with four Libertys turning quadruple screws. She’s waiting for a customer.”

“Could I have her in a month?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Harding bit clean through his stogie. “We can’t do it that fast.”

“Yes we can,” said Lynch. “I’ll have her in the water in thirty days.”

The tall customer with a gun in his coat asked, “Would you have any objection to me paying cash?”

“None I can think of,” said Lynch, and Harding lit a fresh cigar.

Lynch unrolled his plans. The customer pored over them knowledgeably. He ordered additional hatches fore and aft — Lewis gun emplacements, Lynch assumed, since he wanted reinforced scantlings under them — and electric mountings for Sperry high-intensity searchlights.

“And double the armor in the bow.”

“Pla

“I’d like to know I can.”

They settled on a price and a schedule of payouts keyed to hull completion, motor installation, and sea trials.

The customer started counting a down payment, stacking crisp hundred-dollar bills on a workbench. Midway, he paused. “The seventy-footer you built? The one with three motors. Was it for a regular customer?”

“Nope.”

“Someone you knew?”

“Nope.”

“What was his name?”

“Fu

Harold said, “You want to hear something really fu

“Black Bird?”

“’Counta the boat was black. I asked him should we paint Black Bird on the transom. He said no, he’d remember it.”

“What will you name yours?” asked Lynch.

“Marion.”

“Should we paint Marion on the transom?”

“In gold.”

He still hadn’t resumed counting money. “What did the fellow look like?”

“Tall man, even thi

“Did he speak with a foreign accent?”

“A bit,” said Lynch.

“City fellow,” said Harding. “They all got fu

“Russian, by any chance?”

“They all sound the same,” said Harding.

Lynch said, “We hear Swedes around here, and Dutchmen. Real ones from Holland. I doubt I ever heard a Russian.”

“We got less Russians than Chinamen,” said Harding.

“So for all you know,” said the bootlegger, “he could have been French?”

“No,” said Lynch, “I met plenty of Frenchies in the war.”

“And French ladies,” Harold leered. “You know, Billy won a medal.”

“By the way,” said Lynch, gazing intently at the half-counted stack of money, “we include compass and charts free of charge.”

“And fire extinguishers,” said Harding.

“What color do you want your boat?” asked Lynch.

The tall bootlegger pointed down the creek where it opened into the bay. The sky was overcast and it was impossible to distinguish where gray water ended and leaden cloud began. “That color.”

Isaac Bell found a new cable from Pauline when he got back from the boatyard. She had sent it from the North Sea German port of Bremerhaven.

POLICE LOST MARAT ZOLNER BREMERHAVEN.

ALIAS SMIRNOFF SAILED NEW YORK,

NORTH GERMAN LLOYD RHEIN,

RENAMED SUSQUEHANNA.

Bell checked “Incoming Steamships” in the Times’s “Shipping & Mails” pages. He found no listing for the Susqueha

Regardless of who owned them, North German Lloyd ships sailed from Hoboken as they did before the war. Bell hurried there on the ferry, went aboard and straight to the chief purser’s office.

The purser was American, a disgruntled employee of the U.S. Mail Shipping Company that had leased a fleet of North German Lloyd liners seized in the war. Bell listened sympathetically to an earful of complaints about the new “fly-by-night” owners who hadn’t paid the Shipping Board “a dime of rent they owe — not to mention my back salary.”

“Yes,” said Bell. “I’ve followed the story in the newspaper. Your company claims there’s a plot by foreign lines to sabotage American shipping?”