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

to Detroit and Miami—nor why our empire spreads to the South, the Midwest, the Pacific Coast.”

“Are you a comrade?”

“Have you not heard a word I said? Of course I am a comrade.”

Antipov shook his head.

“What is wrong, Yuri?”

“The Comintern sent you to New York to provoke revolution.”

“Precisely what my empire will achieve.”

“What part did you take in the strikes of Seattle shipyards? How did you aid the Boston police strike? What was your role in the coalfield strikes? Who did you co-opt in the nationwide steel strike? What of the May first seamens’ strike? Are you co-opting the IWW Wobblies? Have you seized control of the American Communist Party?”

Zolner laughed.

“I do not see the joke,” Antipov said heavily.

“The Wobblies and the American Communist Party and the labor unions are all in decline. The Congress, the newspapers, and the American Legion sow panic about ‘Reds.’ But the fact is, as you saw at the roadhouses tonight, Americans of every class are having too much fun defying Prohibition to care about politics, much less class struggle. Gangsters are their heroes. This is why my American Comintern unit fights under the guise of bootlegging.”

“Perhaps you will invest your profits on Wall Street,” Antipov said sarcastically.

“I already have.”

“What?”

“Why shouldn’t I build an empire of activities on Wall Street? It will finance operations. Guns aren’t cheap. Neither are trucks, cars, boats. Not to mention bribes. Money is influence. Money is access to powerful allies. I have a broker steering excellent investments our way.”

“A broker?”

“To buy stocks. To raise money for the scheme.”

“Your scheme is tangential and slow.”

“I will not be rushed.”

“Worse, you veer from the revolution.”

Marat Zolner stared down at Antipov. “Listen to me very carefully, Yuri. I am established here. You just arrived. I will explain to you what is going on here. The United States of America emerged from the World War as the new leader of international capitalism, did it not?”

Antipov conceded that the old German and British empires were laid waste by war.

“Toppling capitalism’s most powerful industrial empire is too important to rush to defeat.”

“You’re not toppling capitalism. You’re joining it.”

“You forget our defeats. We rushed into battle against the international bourgeoisie in Hungary, and lost. We rushed again into the streets of Germany. And lost. Again. Of all the fights I’d fought, I had never seen anything as hopeless as our insurrection in retreat.”

“After we win the war, who cares if we lost a battle?”

“We had no fortress to run to, nowhere to rest, no hospital to doctor wounds, no armory to reload our empty guns. I stopped to help a poor girl whose jaw was shot away. Freikorps thugs came along, shooting the wounded. I played dead. She moaned. They heard. They killed her. I cowered under her body to save my own skin, and I swore that I would find a better way to fight the international bourgeoisie.”

“Joining them?”

“Beating them at their own game,” Zolner retorted.

“You were sent to make war on the state!” Antipov shouted. “Not play games!”

“Prohibition is America’s Achilles’ heel,” Zolner answered quietly and firmly. “Prohibition—this absurd law that people hate—will rot the state and make bootleggers rich.”

He smiled down at Antipov, far too confident in his scheme to raise his voice.

“I have learned to fight in wars that I’ve lost and in wars that I’ve won. There isn’t a bootlegger in America who can stand up to me. I will be the richest. My ‘profits’ that you disdain will finance the Comintern’s attack on the U.S. government. My profits will subvert officials, corrupt police, and destroy the state.”

Yuri shifted tactics. His voice grew soft. “Comrade Zolner—Marat—you know why Moscow sent me. Do I have to remind you, my friend, of the Red Terror? Do I have to remind you that the Cheka annihilates counter-revolutionaries?”

“I am not a counter-revolutionary.”

“The effect of failure is counter-revolutionary.”

“I will not fail.”

“Moscow decides what is failure.”

“Let Moscow tend to Russia. Let me tend to the United States. I will give America to the Comintern on a silver platter.”

“They would be just as happy to have it on base metal.”

Staring hard at each other, suddenly both men laughed, acknowledging their surprise that Antipov had made a joke.

“And happy to forgive me, too?” Zolner asked.

They laughed again.

But it was the laughter of deception. Both men knew the truth: The Comintern never forgave freethinking.

Zolner suspected another even grimmer truth: His once bold comrade, his blood brother of the street battles, had grown weary. Yuri Antipov had slipped into the role of functionary, an apparatchik obsessed with meaningless details instead of grand schemes. How many like Yuri would seize control of the revolution before they killed the revolution?

“Fern is waiting to see you,” he said.

Antipov brightened. “She’s here?”

“In the house.” He picked up a telephone. “I’ll call her. I’ll tell her you’re here.”

•   •   •

THE ESTATE HOUSE was a limestone mansion built by a railroad magnate thirty years ago in the Gilded Age. Zolner led Antipov through the sculpted entry into a great hall with painted ceilings depicting a history of land transportation that linked Egyptian chariots to crack express trains thundering across the Rocky Mountains. Antipov stared up at the mural. His jaw set like steel.

But when Fern Hawley swept down the vast curving staircase, Antipov melted as he always did in her presence. A big grin lit his stern face, and he extended both hands and shouted, “Midgets!”

Fern took his hands and laughed. “You will never let me forget that, will you?”

“Never.”

To greet her with “Midgets!” was to remind her of her conversion on a beautiful summer day in Paris. Victorious Allied regiments were marching down the Champs-Élysées. Bands were playing, crowds cheered, and the sun shone bright. Suddenly, she had cried out in astonishment, “Midgets!”

“What do you mean?” asked Zolner, who was holding her hand.

An English regiment was marching in strict order—rifles aligned perfectly on their shoulders, uniforms immaculate—but the soldiers were tiny miniature men, not one taller than five feet.

“They’re so little,” she said. “Little tiny midgets.”

“So they are,” said Zolner. “Still,