The Bootlegger

“No,” said Bell. “I see no truck to take it in. And they shot up the Dodge. They didn’t hijack the booze. If they hijacked anything, they hijacked O’Neal.”

Bell turned his attention back to the gangster. “Where did they take him?”

“Nowhere.”

An electric police siren howled nearby. Bell’s hand flickered toward his boot. He held his throwing knife in front of the gangster’s face, then threw a headlock around his neck and slipped the knifepoint inside his ear. “I asked, where did they take him?”

“You’re not a cop?”

“We already established that. Which way?”

The gangster wet his lips. “Listen, this is between Trucks and them.”

“You know who grabbed him, don’t you?”

“Yeah, and I ain’t telling you because whatever you do to me they’ll do worse.”

“You want to bet?” asked Bell.

The gangster twisted his head to look imploringly at Ed Tobin. “Listen, buddy. You know who I’m talking about? The guys taking over the docks. Pushing out Lonergan and the rest.”

“Black Hand,” said Tobin.

“The Black Hand set Trucks up. They was waiting for him.”

Isaac Bell and Ed Tobin exchanged a glance. That the Italians, who were shoving the Irish out of the lucrative control of longshore labor, were gu

Or was it unco

“Where did the Black Hand take Trucks?” Bell asked.

Tobin leaned closer to whisper. “You better tell us. I have no control over what this guy does to you.”

Bell emphasized Tobin’s warning by sliding his blade deeper into the gangster’s ear. The point grazed his eardrum. Qui

“I don’t know for sure. They usually take guys to Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn’s a big place.”

“Fulton Street.”

“Fulton Street’s a big street.”

“Come on, mister, you’re going to get me in all kinds of trouble.”

“You’re in all kinds of trouble.”

Ed Tobin interceded again, in a ma

“Down by the ferry. Under the bridge.”

It was less than a mile across Lower Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge, even skirting the barricades in the Wall Street area where the police were still investigating the explosion. On the bridge, with the sky turning pink and the wind whistling through the bullet holes in the butcher van’s windshield, Ed Tobin asked, “Comintern and Black Hand? Fu

“Five’ll get you ten the Black Hand doesn’t know that Zolner is Comintern. Just a top-notch bootlegger smart enough to make friends. We can ask Trucks, but you have to step on the gas before they kill him. Go! On the jump!”

They careened through the snakes’ nest of exit ramps on squealing tires and down, down, down to the derelict ferry-landing neighborhood where Fulton Street petered out under the bridge in a slum of flophouses, blind pigs, and greasy spoons. Vagrants slept in doorways. Bell saw no cops anywhere.

The sun had yet to light the Gothic towers of the bridge, but it was reddening the top girders of the skyscrapers under construction across the river on Wall Street. The ferry to Manhattan, which few rode since the bridge had effectively put it out of business long ago, no longer ran at night. Along the waterfront, the shacks and docks and piers appeared abandoned, with peeling paint and splintery decks.

“There’s their Locomobile.”

They pulled up behind the auto they had seen race from the warehouse on Murray Street. It was parked beside a truck in the shadows at the foot of a pier under a broken streetlamp.

“Out on the pier,” said Bell, breaking into a run.

Far away, at the end of the long wooden structure that thrust into the river, a gang of six or seven surrounded a man they were half carrying, half dragging toward the water. Bell pulled his gun, stopped ru

Isaac Bell ran full tilt. The gangsters peeled away and scattered, ru

Bell tore off his coat, kicked out of his boots, and dived after him.

Piercing the center of the dimple that marked O’Neal’s entry, he drove straight down, stroking and kicking and reaching into the dark. Descending fifteen or twenty feet, he hit bottom, felt mud, banged into something hard — the foot of a piling. He felt around frantically and something soft closed around his outstretched hand and held on tight.

Bell could hardly believe it. It was a near miracle. But in diving straight down, he landed on the bottom next to O’Neal, who was clinging to his hand with all his might. Bell planted his feet in the mud and kicked off to pull him to the surface.

Bell could not lift him.

He tugged harder on the man’s hand as if to shout Push off! Help me lift you! Where was his natural buoyancy? Even a man who couldn’t swim would float partway to the surface, but Bell could not budge him from the mud.

He was ru

He pulled himself down by the gangster’s hand, braced again in the soft mud, and tried to push off. But again he could not lift the man. Now he was out of air. He could hear his heart pounding. There was a roaring in his head. He had no choice but to swim to the surface, fill his lungs, and dive down to help him again. O’Neal’s hand tightened around his with the superhuman strength of desperation.

Isaac Bell pried his fingers loose, one by one.

He heard a sudden hollow rush. Bubbles of air rubbed past his face. O’Neal was drowning. His grip slackened. Bell yanked free and kicked with his last strength toward the light overhead. He held his breath until he could wait no longer and when he opened his mouth and inhaled, he was amazed to discover he had made it to the air.

“Get a rope!” he yelled. “Ed get a rope!”

The resourceful Tobin was already sprinting back from the ferry landing. He threw a long rope. Bell filled his lungs and dragged it under. Unhindered by the slack water, he dived directly to the drowning gangster, looped the rope under his arms and tied it around his chest and shot to the surface.

“Pull!”

Twelve feet above him on the pier, Tobin had been joined by a couple of vagrants, who shouted for others to help, and they heaved on the rope like men who worked on boats and slowly lifted Trucks O’Neal out of the water. His head broke surface. He was, Bell feared, dead, but he shouted for them to hoist him up to the pier. They did, then dropped the rope for Bell. He climbed out and discovered that the gangsters who had thrown Trucks in the river had tied concrete cinder blocks to his ankles.

Ed was laboring over Trucks’s prone body, pressing on his back and raising his arms, attempting artificial respiration, expelling water and making his lungs draw fresh air. But it was hopeless. O’Neal was dead.

Cops arrived.

“Well, that’s a new one. Cement overshoes.”

“Who was he?”

“He was,” said Isaac Bell, “the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s best lead.”