The Bootlegger by Clive Cussler (novels in english TXT) 📗

Police took him to the hospital. He knew too much.”

“Pity,” said Antipov.

“Needless to say, Fern believes he was shot by a detective.”

“Of course. Who are those men following us?”

At no point had either Russian appeared to look back.

“Neighborhood thugs,” answered Zolner. “They rob immigrants who sneak off the ships.”

Antipov stopped where the shadows were thickest. “Do you have a cigarette?”

“Of course.” Zolner shook a Lucky Strike out of the pack. Antipov struck a match, let the wind blow it out, and struck another and lit the cigarette, shielding the flame this time expertly. The charade gave the thugs time to catch up. Three Irish, Zolner noted, two of them half drunk, but not enough to slow them down. The third floated with a boxer’s smooth gait. They attacked without a word.

Zolner retreated to his right, Antipov to his left. To the thugs, they looked like frightened men stumbling into each other, but their paths crossed as smoothly as parts of a machine, and when they finished exchanging places in a dance as precise as it was confusing, the thug charging Zolner was suddenly facing Antipov, and the thug lunging at Antipov was facing Zolner. Zolner dropped his man with a blackjack. Antipov stabbed his with a long, thin dagger.

The boxer scrambled backwards. Zolner and Antipov blocked any hope of running back to West Street or ahead to Tenth Avenue. He opened his hands in the air to show he was not armed.

Antipov spoke as if he were not standing five feet away. “Would it not be ironic to fall at the hands of common criminals?”

“Not likely,” said Zolner.

The boxer, seeing that flight was hopeless, closed his big hands into ham-size fists and went up on the balls of his feet.

“He is brave,” said Antipov.

“And handles himself well,” said Zolner. “What is your name?”

“What’s it to you?”

“We are deciding whether to kill you. Or pay you.”

“Pay me? Pay me for what?”

“Whatever we require. Tell me where you hang out and I will pay you when there’s a job to be done. Easy money.”

“Are you nuts?”

“We are bootleggers. We pay easy money for muscle. What is your name?”

“Ricky Newdell.”

“What do your pals call you?”

“They call me Hooks. ’Counta my left hook.”

Marat Zolner stared at him.

“My best punch,” Ricky Newdell explained.

“Where do you hang out?”

“Lunchroom at 18th and Tenth.”

“O.K., Hooks. You’ll hear from us. I’m Matt. He’s Jake. Turn around and walk back to West Street.”

“What about these guys?” The man Zolner had blackjacked was out cold. The man Antipov stabbed had not moved since he fell.

Zolner and Antipov wiped the blood off their weapons on the men’s coats.

Ricky Newdell said, “These guys are Gophers.”

Antipov looked at Zolner. “Goofer?” he asked, pronouncing the gang name as Hooks had. “What is Goofer?”

“Neighborhood gangsters. Used to rule the Hell’s Kitchen slum. Leaders dead and in prison.”

Antipov shrugged. “What do we care?”

“The Gophers ain’t gonna take this lying down,” warned Newdell.

“Hooks,” said Zolner. “This is your last chance. If you want easy money, turn around and walk away.”

Hooks Newdell turned around and walked toward West Street. Behind him he heard laughter, and the knife guy with the thick accent saying, “‘Goofers’? Like ‘goofy’?” Hooks did not look back. Something told him with these guys moving into the neighborhood, the Gophers’ days were numbered.

8

MARAT ZOLNER steered Yuri Antipov toward Tenth Avenue.

“Where are we going?”

“I have an auto.”

Antipov’s mouth tightened at the sight of the Packard Twin Six, as Zolner had expected it would. Wait until he saw the place Fern had rented for a hideout.

Zolner drove across the Brooklyn Bridge and east for two hours, over the Brooklyn line into Nassau County, and across Nassau on the Merrick Road to Suffolk and through a dozen villages on the Montauk Highway. The towns were dark, their people sleeping. The farms and forest between the towns were darker, except where roadhouses lit the night, like liners at sea, with colored lights, electric signs, and the headlights of expensive motorcars in parking lots.

Music spilled from the blazing windows.

“A cabaret!” said Antipov, breaking the silence that lay heavily between them.

“They’re called roadhouses in the country, cabarets in the city.”

“In the middle of nowhere.”

“Their patrons own automobiles.”

“And drink alcohol so openly.”

“Americans are avid lawbreakers.”

Zolner turned off the highway onto a narrow, dark, empty road. He drove for a mile until it ended at a substantial stone building with a tall, wide, iron-studded door in the middle. A warm, wet wind reeked of marsh and salt water. Overhead, through breaks in the trees, stars shone softly in a hazy sky.

“You have a big house,” said Antipov.

“This is the gatehouse.”

Zolner turned the lights on in the car and blew the horn. They waited.

“Aren’t you expected?”

“They have orders to make sure that we are not hijackers or Prohibition officers.”

At last, a big man in a leather cap stepped from the shadows with one hand in his pocket. “All clear, boss.”

Zolner said, “This is Yuri. He has the run of the property. Yuri, this is Trucks O’Neal. You can count on him.”

Trucks O’Neal took a close look and said, “I’ll remember you, Yuri.”

The iron-studded door swung open, and Zolner drove the Packard through it.

“Why did you tell him I was ‘Yuri’ instead of ‘Jake’?”

“Trucks is an American Army veteran and war profiteer turned bootlegger. He is loyal.”

“How can you be sure? He’s not a comrade.”

“I saved his skin in Germany, and I am making him wealthy and powerful here. In return, Trucks O’Neal is loyal. Better yet, he’s intelligent enough to stay loyal.”

He steered onto a curving bluestone driveway. The headlights swept hedgerows and gardens, tennis courts and greenhouses.

“Czar Nicholas would enjoy this,” Antipov remarked disapprovingly.

“Czar Nicholas is out of business,” Zolner shot back. He turned off the main drive, which went to the estate house whose roof could be seen darkly against the dim stars, and the tires rumbled over railroad tracks. “This is a private siding that connects to the main line to New York.”

“Is that a