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

it, then raised his hands over his head and gaped down the barrel of the Browning that materialized in Bell’s hand. The man looked both frightened and resigned, as if he expected something like this would be happening soon.

“What do you want?”

“Show us your cellar,” said Bell.

“Cellar? What cellar? It’s a boathouse.”

“We’d like to see it anyway.”

“Buddy, I’m telling you the truth.”

“I want to see why this is the only bar on the street that has no customers. Open that trapdoor.”

The bartender pulled open the trapdoor. There was no cellar, only a short ladder that descended to the mud, and no shaft to a tunnel.

They walked through the barroom toward the river and stepped out on a landing. Hidden in the shadows, Bell saw similar landings to the left and right. Suddenly, a man stepped to the end of the dock next door and swung a lantern like a brakeman signaling a locomotive engineer. Then a lightbulb flashed on and off in the second-floor windows. They were signaling the coast was clear of cops and Prohibition officers, Bell realized, as a motorboat towed a barge in from the dark river and tied up at the dock. Two boatmen unloaded quickly. Two came out from their boathouse and ran the cases inside, and the boat towed the empty barge away. A bigger operation commenced on the other side, where a door opened in a boathouse, a deep-laden speedboat slipped in, and the door shut.

Tobin muttered to Bell, “Legitimate whisky haulers, no tunnel.”

Bell went in and took the bartender aside. “Take it easy. We have no more business here.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Bell reached into his pocket and pulled out a fat roll of hundred-dollar bills. “But I have a question. I’m curious about something. If you could help me out, I would greatly appreciate it.”

“Maybe I can help,” the bartender said cautiously. “Depends. What do you want to know?”

“Business is booming up and down the street. Why does this one joint have those hard-boiled boys keeping out the customers?”

“The boss got shot. We don’t know what’s going on.”

“Shot over what?”

“Purple Gang cut the price of Canadian Club in half. Knocked my boss right out of the market. He and his boys caught up with them on Michigan Grand. Before you know it, there’s gunplay. You ever hear of a submachine gun?”

“It rings a bell.”

“The Purples had one.”

29

THE VAN DORNS piled back in the Phaeton and kept hunting. They burst into two more unusually quiet bars. One was deserted. The other had a woman waiting anxiously for a husband who had yet to return from a whisky run. In neither did they find a shaft to a tunnel.

The first red streaks of dawn gleamed across the river. Bell called it a night.

“Beginning to think it isn’t here,” said Tobin.

Clayton and Ellis looked crestfallen. “Hope we didn’t give you a bum steer, Mr. Bell.”

“Grab some sleep, boys. We’ll try again tomorrow night.”

Clayton and Ellis went back to their hotel.

Bell and Tobin returned to Fort Van Dorn. Tobin climbed the stairs to the dormitory where Bell had ordered his detectives to sleep so he didn’t have to worry about them being ambushed in hotels. Bell checked the teleprinter. He found a wire from Grady Forrer.

POKING AROUND.

TELEPHONE SOONEST.

Bell boiled water and ground coffee beans while the operators put through the long-distance line. Submachine guns most likely meant Comintern. But why would the Comintern cut the price of booze?

The operator called back. “Ringing, sir.”

Grady answered with a wide-awake, “Isaac, you will love this.”

“What’s up?”

“But first, some background to put it in perspective. Before I walk you through ancient railroad history.”

Isaac Bell stifled a yawn and a groan. The night owl Grady was in one of his talkative moods. But the Van Dorn Research Department was arguably the detective agency’s greatest asset.

“Go right ahead. Take your time.”

“Thirty years ago, American railroads had pretty much overcome the insurmountable engineering challenges that used to impede construction. Advances in grading, bridge building, tunneling, and locomotive design meant they could build almost anywhere they pleased. The main obstacle to building new railroads was other railroads competing for the same markets. Do you understand?”

“No crystal was ever clearer, Grady.”

“You remember your old friend Osgood Hennessy?”

“Railroad tycoon,” said Bell, “who happens to be our mutual friend Archie Abbott’s father-in-law. Go on, please.”

“Thirty years ago, way back in 1891, Osgood Hennessy tried to organize another transcontinental railroad by connecting lines he owned east of Chicago to his Great Northern Railway west of Minneapolis. But rival railroads, which had corrupted even more Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota legislators, governors, and judges than Hennessy had, blocked him. He could neither lay new track between Chicago and Minneapolis nor gain a controlling interest of an existing line. But Old Man Hennessy, you may recall, was unstoppable.”

“Like a combination Brahma bull and Consolidated locomotive.”

“So Hennessy devised a scheme to connect Chicago to Minneapolis by a new route via Detroit.”

“Last time I looked at a map,” said Bell, “Detroit was east of Chicago.”

“Bear with me, Isaac. Stranger railroads were built in the ’90s; all sorts of monkey tricks to sell stock. But this was a real one, if roundabout. Hennessy surveyed a line from Minneapolis to Duluth, then up the shore of Lake Superior to Port Arthur and onto the Canadian Pacific Railroad at Port Arthur and around the top of Superior and Lake Huron and down through Ontario to Windsor, where it would connect with the New York Central.”

“What would the New York Central get out of that arrangement? The Vanderbilts hated Hennessy.”

“They would get access to the tunnel to Detroit.”

“What tunnel?”

“The tunnel Hennessy was excavating under the Detroit River.”

“There’s only one rail tunnel under the Detroit River and it wasn’t built until 1910.”

“Hennessy started his twenty years earlier.”

“He did?”

“He laid a two-thousand-foot cast-iron tube, using the same Beach shield compressed-air method as they did for the Saint Clair Tunnel.”

“First? Ahead of the rest of the line?”

“First off, he commissioned a geological