“Trust? How much?”
“More than the rest. But don’t tell them where we’re going.”
• • •
OUTSIDE THE ST. REGIS HOTEL, grim-visaged detectives piled clanking golf bags from the Van Dorn weapons vault into town cars. The lead motor was an elegant Pierce-Arrow packed with folding ladders and grappling hooks to scale walls and axes and sledgehammers to breach them.
Bell gave the order to move out. Then he took Ed Tobin, Uncle Donny, and two detectives who were strong swimmers to the 31st Street Air Service Terminal. The mechanics at the Loening factory next door had his flying boat warmed up and ready to take off. Coiled in the passenger cabin were several hundred yards of light manila line and wire rope.
22
GREAT RIVER opened into the bay between a golf course under construction on one side and marshland on the other. The channel moved inland on a northerly route through flat shores that were speckled intermittently by the lights of mansions. A mile or so in, the river narrowed to a width of five hundred feet. Tall trees grew close to the shore. A small tributary entered from the west. Its dredged channel led from the main river to an enormous boathouse that showed no lights when night fell.
Isaac Bell had seen this water route from the air in the last of the daylight. After Uncle Donny pinpointed the boathouse, he got a good look at a huge mansion behind it, the road in, which was blocked by a substantial gatehouse, and a spur that connected a mile inland to the Long Island Railroad.
As soon as it was dark, he set detectives to work in strict silence. The swimmers crossed the tributary with a manila rope. Climbing out on the other side, they used it as a messenger line to pull the heavier wire rope after them and clamped the wire around thick trees. In the event the black boat had been repaired already and tried to make a run for it, the channel was blocked.
Bell ordered a pair of the heaviest town cars to be parked nose to nose across the road a short distance from the gatehouse. He had invited Prohibition officers on the raid—partly to process arrests, mostly to stay on friendly terms with government agencies that might contract with Van Dorn. They stayed in the blockade cars under James Dashwood’s watchful eye. The Dry agents were impatient, fiddling with their guns and whispering bad jokes. Bell had not told them yet who they were raiding, nor would he until he had every bootlegger on the property in handcuffs.
“Ready when you are, Mr. Bell,” said Ed Tobin.
“Now,” said Bell. Before a night owl neighbor telephoned the police about the roadblock.
The stone gatehouse was dark, with no sign of sentries. But nothing short of dynamite would budge its massive iron-studded door, so they left the battering ram in the Pierce-Arrow and scaled the walls with knotted line and grappling hooks. The first men up—Bell in the lead, followed by Tobin—carried folds of heavy canvas slung over their shoulders. The wall was topped with strands of barbed wire, reminding veterans of the trenches, minus artillery and machine guns. The masonry under the wire was impregnated with broken glass. They clipped the wire, covered the glass with the canvas, and left the ropes and canvas in place for the next men.
Eight detectives cleared the wall. Bell sent two to open the gatehouse door from inside for Dashwood and the Dry agents. The rest followed him to the boathouse on a route he had sketched from the air. They skirted the tennis courts and removed a stone pillar from under a birdbath in the formal gardens. Stumbling in the dark on the railroad siding, they followed the rails to the boathouse.
Bell signaled with whispers and shoulder taps to hold up at the door, which he could see dimly by the thin light of the stars. There were a few lit windows in the mansion, which loomed in the distance, but no lights shone in the boathouse. It seemed a miracle, but, so far, no one had heard them.
That was about to change.
“Break it down.”
The birdbath pillar made an excellent battering ram, and the door flew inward with the third thunderous blow. They spilled through, Bell in the lead. It was darker inside than out and eerily quiet, but for the lapping of water.
“Where is everybody?”
“Find the lights.”
Flashlight beams poked the dark until they found a big electrical box. They threw its knife switches and lights shone down from the rafters on two slips. One held a fair-size booze taxi with twin engines. The other was empty.
The black boat had vanished.
“Go get Uncle Donny.”
The detectives whom Bell had sent to the gatehouse had opened it, and the town cars streamed through and up the driveway, playing headlights on the mansion and the empty railroad siding. The Prohibition agents swaggered into the boathouse and looked around, big-eyed.
“Some operation.”
“Look at all that giggle water.”
“One hundred percent.”
Barrels of two-hundred-proof pure grain alcohol were stacked against the inland wall, sharing the space with some crated Liberty airplane motors and a strongbox with its lid propped open.
“Mr. Bell,” a detective called. “There’s no one in the house.”
“Gatehouse is empty,” said another.
“There you are, Uncle Donny.” Bell took him aside. “No black boat.”
“Damn.”
“Are you sure you saw him come in here?”
“Sure as I know my name.”
“In this boathouse?”
“I saw him from a distance. So did little Robin. You don’t believe me, ask her.”
“I believe you, sir.”
“Don’t start calling me sir.”
“Could this have been the boat you saw come after you?”
The old man gestured disdainfully. “There’s only two motors on that boat. And it ain’t black. The boat that chased me was black, longer, and had three motors.”
“You heard all three?”
“Heard ’em bust two props. Followed them home on their third.”
“But it’s not here.
