Big Tony Sana looked intrigued by the thought. He said, “Bosses come and go.”
“Let’s say one came.”
“Could be a bunch of guys.”
“Max Stern?”
Tony looked surprised. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Around. Could it be Max Stern?”
“Could be.”
“Where do I find him?”
“Who knows? I’m telling you, Max Stern ain’t my boss.”
• • •
“ADMIRAL ABE,” said Marat Zolner. “Aren’t you glad you saw reason?”
They were dining on sweetbreads, the most expensive item on the menu at Detroit’s classy new Hotel Wolverine and one that Weintraub could chew without many teeth.
Abe Weintraub shot a murderous glare across the table. He had a moon-shaped face with a small nose, ears, and mouth. He looked, Zolner thought, innocuous, even gentle, except for his dark dead eyes.
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I ain’t no pushover.”
“You made that clear,” said Zolner, who had seen enough Cheka torture chambers to admire a thug as determined as Abe Weintraub not to be broken. His conversion had taken so long that it was a miracle they hadn’t accidentally drowned him. But Weintraub had been worth the trouble. He commanded the Purple Gang’s Jewish Navy by dint of brains, unmatched brutality, and ruthless determination. He knew every Detroit criminal worth knowing, saw them with a clear eye, and knew their weaknesses and their strengths. He would make an aggressive captain of foot soldiers in any revolution.
“Now what?” asked Weintraub, mopping his plate clean with a slice of bread.
“Now you will tell me who to kill.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tell me which gangsters to get out of our way. Starting at the top.”
“Tell you? Or kill ’em for you?”
It was like discussing terms with a wolf or a shark. Or the hotel’s namesake wolverine. Weintraub understood destruction and only destruction, but he understood it very well. Zolner had set up a number of gangsters like him in New York—to control supply and demand—but none so ferocious.
He said, “You will help me locate them. We will ferret out the chinks in their armor. Then we will kill them.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I will allow you to pick up the pieces.”
Weintraub stared in disbelief. “I thought I heard it all. This takes the cake.”
“I am offering you the city of Detroit,” Marat Zolner said.
“When I’m done, it will be my city. I don’t need you.”
“Would you prefer to wait five years in hopes your enemies all kill each other off? Keeping in mind that the one who survives will emerge strong. Or do you want to get to it right now?”
“Now.”
“Starting at the top, Abe, who do we kill first?”
“Max Stern.”
“Is that a fact?” the Bolshevik asked coldly.
“Max Stern,” Weintraub repeated.
The agents whom Zolner had sent ahead to scout Detroit and Windsor had predicted that the top boss would be a Jew. The Italian gangs had decimated themselves in the murderous Giannola–Vitale mafia wars. A Purple Gang killer named Max Stern had been rated most likely to emerge top dog.
“I’ve heard that, too,” said Zolner.
“Now you hear it from me.”
“Except that I also hear that Stern has disappeared.” The gangster had vanished the very night Black Bird rumbled into her Windsor boathouse.
“Yeah, well, these boss guys lay low. For their health.”
Marat Zolner’s features hardened. “Max Stern was incinerated in a brewery furnace over in Windsor.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You have one more chance, you lying son of a bitch.”
Abe Weintraub did not protest the insult. “O.K. Just testing who you are. I don’t know how you know this stuff, but you’re the real thing.”
“Last chance, Abe: Who do we kill first?”
“Sam Rosenthal.”
Zolner settled back in his chair. At last. “I wondered if it was him.”
“Wonder ’til you’re blue in the face,” said Weintraub. “Rosenthal is bulletproof.”
“Isn’t Sam Rosenthal digging a tunnel under the river?”
Abe Weintraub ignored the question—a clue, Zolner knew by now, that the tight-lipped gangster knew the answer—and said, “Nobody gets close enough to shoot him. Nobody’s seen him outside in a year.”
Zolner had been hearing that more Canadian booze traveled under the river than on it. Some was smuggled in railroad freight cars. A Polish gang was said to pull submerged containers on the bottom of the river by a windlass cable, which sounded slow and cumbersome. But another story held great promise, a smuggling tunnel that would make the Comintern’s fortune. The tunnel would lock up Detroit and add the biggest transit point to the operations he set up in New York.
“Is Sam Rosenthal digging a tunnel under the river?”
“When’d you hear that?”
Zolner laid both big hands on the tablecloth and leaned forward. “Abe, it’s too late to turn off the phonograph.”
“Go to hell.”
“Do you really want to go back in the water?”
Weintraub half rose from the table.
“Abe, look around the lobby.”
Weintraub glared. “I’ve got torpedoes, too.”
“Look again, Abe. See the salesman with the big sample case? See the long-haired violin player? . . . Mine are tougher and smarter, and they’ve got your boys covered with Thompson .45s . . . Besides, do you really want a shoot-out? Or would you rather accept my offer of Detroit? Do you know where Rosenthal is digging?”
“No.”
“I hear he’s digging from one of the Canadian islands,” said Zolner. “That would make sense, tunnel only half a mile instead of a full mile all the way across, and start in friendlier territory.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Find out which.”
“Tell you this. When it’s dug, it will put your black boat out of business.”
Black Bird would soon “fly south for the winter” on a railcar to Miami, a fact that Zolner kept to himself. He said, “Rosenthal’s tunnel will put your entire Jewish Navy out of business.”
Weintraub fell silent.
He knows about the tunnel, thought Zolner. His agents were spot-on about the rumors. The tunnel was almost finished. But it was maddening that no one knew where it was.
“Surely you understand that the future of hauling Canadian booze is moving huge volumes of it through Rosenthal’s tunnel, not lugging it on boats and trucks on ice.”
“So the tunnel is why you want to kill Rosenthal?”
“And why I
