The Bootlegger

“Wrapping themselves in the flag won’t pay bills. The company is nothing but paper. Mark my word, the Shipping Board will foreclose on the boat, and where will I be?”

Isaac Bell took out his wallet and laid a hundred-dollar bill on the purser’s desk. “Maybe this could tide you over. There’s something I have to know.”

“What?” asked the purser, eyeing hopefully the better part of two weeks’ salary.

“Early last spring in Bremerhaven, a Russian named Dmitri Smirnoff booked passage to New York on your ship. What do you recall of him?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Bell’s hand strayed over the bill, covering it. “He might have called himself Dima Smirnov, spelled with a v.”

“Smirnoff never came on board. He switched places last minute with another passenger.”

“Is that allowed?”

“It’s allowed if the chief purser says it’s allowed. The new passenger made it worth my while. It didn’t matter. Nobody got cheated. The company got their money. I just changed the manifest.”

“Who was the new passenger?”

“A New York hard case. Charlie O’Neal.”

“What do you mean by a ‘hard case’? A gangster?”

“Something like that. He had a nickname. He called himself Trucks. Gangsters tend to do that, don’t they? Trucks O’Neal. Sounds like a gangster.”

“Could you describe Trucks?”

“Beefy bruiser, like the moniker implies. Quick-moving. Black hair, high widow’s peak. His nose had been mashed a couple of times.”

“How tall?”

“Six foot.”

“Eyes?”

“Tiny little eyes. Like a pig.”

“What color?”

“Pig color.”

“Pigs have pink eyes,” said Bell.

“No, I meant kind of brown, like the rest of the pig.” The purser ruminated a moment and added, “By the way, I don’t mean to speak against him. Trucks didn’t cause any trouble or anything. He just wanted to get home.”

Bell removed his hand from the hundred and took another from his wallet. “Do you recall where ‘home’ was?”

“I think I have it somewhere in my files.” He opened a drawer and thumbed over folders. “Reason I remember is there was some problem with customs. By the time they worked it out, O’Neal had gone on ahead. So we delivered his trunk. Here! Four-sixteen West 20th Street, across the river in New York.”

“Chelsea,” said Bell, rising quickly. “Good luck with the Shipping Board.”

“I’ll need it,” said the purser. But by then the tall detective was striding as fast as his legs would thrust him across the embarkation lobby and down the gangplank.

West 20th Street was a once elegant block of town houses that overlooked the gardens of an Episcopal seminary. Many of the homes had been subdivided into rooming houses for the longshoremen who worked on the Chelsea piers. Number 416 was one of these, a slapped-together warren of sagging stairs and tiny rooms that smelled of tobacco and sweat. Bell found the elfin, white-haired superintendent drinking bathtub gin in a back apartment carved out of the original house’s kitchen. A cat had passed out on his lap.

“Trucks?” the super echoed.

“Charlie ‘Trucks’ O’Neal. What floor does he live on?”

“He left in May.”

“Did he leave a forwarding address?”

The super took a long slug from his jelly jar of cloudy gin and looked up quizzically. “I wouldn’t know how Park Avenue swells do it, mister, but down here on the docks men who adopt nicknames like Trucks do not leave forwarding addresses.”

“Trucks O’Neal,” said Harry Warren of the Gang Squad and proceeded to demonstrate why the Van Dorn Research boys swore, enviously, that surgeons had exchanged Harry’s brain for a Dewey decimal system gangster catalogue.

“Heavyweight, six-two, busted nose, black hair. Enlisted in ’17, one step ahead of the cops. Army kicked him out with a dishonorable discharge after the war for some sort of profiteering shenanigans. Came home and took up with his old crowd.”

Isaac Bell asked, “Is he a Gopher?”

“No,” said Harry. “He hates the Gophers and they hate him. That’s how he got his nose broken. You know, I haven’t heard much of him lately. Any of you guys?”

One of Harry’s younger men said, “I saw him on Broadway couple of months ago. Chorus girl on his arm, looking prosperous. I figured he was bootlegging.”

Another Gang Squad man said, “I don’t know how prosperous. I’m pretty sure I saw him driving a truck down on Warren Street. Scooted into a stable before I could get a good look.”

“A truck full of hooch,” said Harry Warren, “would make him prosperous.”

“Find him,” said Bell. “Pull out all stops.”

“This is a wonderful business,” said Marat Zolner. He strutted restlessly about his improvised bottling plant on Lower Manhattan’s Murray Street. Trucks O’Neal was snoring softly on a cot in the back. A covered alley co

“Smell!” He thrust an open bottle of single-malt whisky under Yuri’s nose.

Antipov recoiled. “It stinks like a peasant hut in winter.”

“That’s peat smoke, craved by co

“I smell nothing.”

“Two-hundred-proof industrial grain alcohol from a government-licensed distillery in Pe

“And this.”

He held another bottle over the flame. Antipov stepped back.

Zolner poured its contents on the fire, dousing it. “Water.”

“Listen to me, Marat. I am through waiting.”

But Zolner’s exuberance was not to be derailed.

“So! One part malt whisky, which cost us nothing but Black Bird’s gasoline. Ten parts pure two-hundred-proof grain alcohol, which cost bribes of fifty pe

He held up a bottle with a yellow label. “‘Glen Urquhart Genuine Single Malt Whisky’ counterfeit labels, indistinguishable from the original, a pe

“Voila! One hundred hijacked cases become two thousand cases. Gangsters who have no idea they work for us peddle it to speakeasies and roadhouses for a small cut of seventy-five dollars a case. Rendering pure profit of one hundred twenty thousand dollars for the exclusive use of the Comintern.”

“It is time to take direct action against the capitalists,” said Antipov. “Are you with me or against me?”

“With you, of course.”

He signaled silence with a finger to his lips and led Antipov quietly past the sleeping O’Neal and through the covered alley that co

The strong horse that had pulled Yuri Antipov’s wagonload of dynamite from New Jersey had grown restless cooped up in the stall. It snorted eagerly as Zolner and Antipov heaped hundreds of three-inch cast-iron window sash slugs around the explosives and concealed them under shovelfuls of coal. But it grew impatient when Zolner crawled under the wagon to co

The horse began kicking its stall.

“Easy,” Zolner called soothingly. “We’re almost ready.”

The animal calmed down immediately.

“How do you do that?” marveled Antipov, who had never fought on horseback.

“He knows I like him,” said Zolner. “He would never believe what we have pla