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

Was it for a regular customer?”

“Nope.”

“Someone you knew?”

“Nope.”

“What was his name?”

“Funny thing you should ask. He paid cash like you. Hundred-dollar bills. After he brought the third payment, I said to Harold here, ‘You know, Harold, we don’t know that fellow’s name.’ And Harold said, ‘His name is Franklin. Ben Franklin.’ Harold meant because his face is on the hundred-dollar bill.”

Harold said, “You want to hear something really funny: The man with no name named the boat. He called it Black Bird.”

“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 thinner than you. Light on his feet, like he seemed to float. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Cheekbones like chisels.”

“Did he speak with a foreign accent?”

“A bit,” said Lynch.

“City fellow,” said Harding. “They all got funny accents.”

“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 Susquehanna. But under “Outgoing Steamships Carrying Mail” she was listed as sailing the next day to Bremerhaven with mail for Germany and Denmark. Which meant she was at her pier now.

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?”

“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.