Twenty feet from the red boathouse dock, Tobin engaged his propellers in reverse, spun his helm, and raced his engines. The Gar Wood stopped abruptly, pivoted ninety degrees, and thundered backwards toward the dock pilings.
Isaac Bell jumped up on the stern and braced a boot on the dynamite. Ed switched his propellers forward again and rammed his throttles. The boat stopped six inches from a piling. Bell looped the rope around it and knotted the fastest bowline he had ever tied.
“Go!”
Ed Tobin eased forward, slowly paying out the rope. Bell let it slide loosely through his hands and watched for the bitter end. He heard men on the docks shouting for lights.
“Stop!” he called to Tobin.
They were precisely one hundred feet from the dock, over the joint between the two tunnels. Suddenly, searchlights glared down from boathouse roofs. Isaac Bell cut the ropes holding the dynamite. They started shooting.
Bell flicked a flame from an Austrian cigarette lighter made of a rifle cartridge that Pauline Grandzau had given him. Thompson submachine guns sprayed their once seen, never forgotten red flashes. Bullets whipped past, fanning his face and splintering the wooden crates. A bullet blew out the flame.
Bell heard the guard boat’s engines and the measured crack of a rifle as Dashwood coolly returned the submachine-gun fire. Bell flicked the lighter again and again, got it going, and touched the blue apex of the flame to the waterproof fuse. The fuse caught with a dazzling burst of sparks. He planted both feet and heaved his shoulder against the crates.
One hundred sixty pounds of dynamite slid off the back of the boat and sank like a stone.
“Go!” he shouted to Ed Tobin.
Ed Tobin rammed his throttles full ahead. The Gar Wood leaped forward. It had traveled barely fifty feet when the dynamite exploded with a muffled, violent thud. A geyser of water shot in the air beside the boat. A shock wave blasted after it, a tremendous eruption that splintered the hull and hurled the Van Dorn detectives into the river.
Inside the tunnel, a half-mile rail line had been converted to an immensely long warehouse. Two endless rows of twelve-bottle crates of whisky were stacked from the rails to the curving crown of the tunnel’s ceiling. Between the stacks, which stretched from Fighting Island almost to Ecorse, was a narrow corridor. It was twenty feet high but only three feet wide, barely wide enough for one man at time.
River water rammed into this corridor like a rectangular piston. The water filled the space between the crates on either side, the ceiling above, and the wooden railroad ties below. Marat Zolner and Abe Weintraub ran for their lives.
Weintraub was in the lead.
Zolner was catching up fast, his long legs propelling him twice the length of the shorter man’s steps. The lights — bare bulbs hanging overhead and powered by the dynamo on Fighting Island — flickered, and the animal fear that made him flee exploded into human terror. As horrific as the fate thundering after him was, it would be a million times worse in the dark.
A noise louder than the water chased them, the high-pitched clangor of breaking glass. The river was splintering crates and smashing bottles by the tens of thousands. The water stank of whisky.
Ahead, high in the flickering lights, Zolner saw the walls of crates begin to move. The river had overtaken and flanked them. Squeezed between the tunnel walls and the stacks, the water toppled the highest crates. They fell from both sides into the narrow corridor, strewn like boulders by a mountain landslide, and blocked the corridor. Weintraub scampered up the shifting pile of wood and glass like an ape, racing desperately for the top of the heap, where a sliver of light shone in the last three-foot-wide, two-foot-high opening.
Zolner scrambled after him. The river caught up. Water slammed into his back and hurled him toward the ceiling. Weintraub reached the opening and started to squirm through. Zolner was suddenly in water up to his neck. Weintraub’s thick torso was blocking the space. Zolner grabbed his foot. He braced his own feet on the tumbled stack, pulled with all his might, yanked the gangster out of the opening, and dived through it himself.
Weintraub tried to follow. He got stuck and let out a terrified roar: “Help me!”
He was stopping the water like a cork in a bottle, and if Zolner managed to pull him out, they would both drown. He ran to the shaft ladder, which was fixed to the cast-iron wall at the end of the tunnel. Mounting the iron rungs, he looked back.
The river smashed through the barrier. Abe Weintraub flew to the end of the tunnel, hurled on a crest of water and broken crates that dashed him against the cast-iron wall. The water rose to Zolner’s chest. He kicked loose from it and climbed up the shaft into the night. Across the river, he saw a motorboat’s searchlight probing the dark like a desperate finger.
“Isaac!”
“Mr. Bell!”
“Ed! Ed Tobin. Where are you?”
In the searchlight glare, the Van Dorns on the guard boat saw the shattered speedboat half sunk on its side. It was turning, slowly spinning, picking up speed, spinning faster and faster, as it was sucked into a huge whirlpool. A crater was spinning in the river, a gigantic hole left by a million tons of water plunging into the tunnel.
“Isaac!”
“Here!” Bell shouted. “Behind you!” The river current had helped him and Tobin swim away from the wreckage. Now the vortex was drawing them back.
The guard boat roared alongside them. Strong arms hauled them out of the water, drenched but unhurt, just as the last of the speedboat was sucked under.
Isaac Bell was grinning ear to ear.
“They’ll never invite me back to that yacht club.”
BOOK FOUR
HURRICANE
31
Palm trees rustled, the sea was green, and the sky a fine blue. Iced daiquiris frosted their glasses, the finishing touch, like painter’s varnish, on a portrait of a dreamy afternoon in tropical Nassau.
Out of nowhere, the dream melted into a detective’s nightmare.
Pauline Grandzau had seen to every detail to disguise herself as a plucky businesswoman subtly battling the “no skirts” prejudice of the men in the liquor trade: She was awaiting a consignment of rye from the Glasgow company she represented; the market for Scotch was glutted, and Americans loved their rye; she had to make a deal with a buyer.
“Meantime, I’m talking up a storm to convince the buyers it’s coming soon and it will be the real McCoy, so they’ll bid up the price.”
“Are the buyers the rumrunners?”
“Exactly! They sail it up to the Row.”
Fern Hawley, seated across their little round cocktail table, seemed to swallow her story hook, line, and sinker. The Van Dorn detective, who was pretending to be a liquor agent, and Marat Zolner’s girlfriend, who was pretending to be a carefree American tourist, were going to be, in Fern’s own words, “great pals.”
They had climbed the lookout tower on the hotel’s roof, where liquor agents were watching the deep-blue sea for their ships, and admired Fern’s steam yacht, the biggest anchored in the turquoise harbor. Now on the patio under the royal palms, sharpers and hucksters, bankers and gangsters were bustling about overtime, and the daiquiris were flowing.
But, all of a sudden, just as Pauline eased Fern into a discussion of the liquor traffic — legal in the British colony, legal on the high seas, legal on Rum Row, illegal on the wrong side of the U.S. border — who should wander into the all-day, all-night party that Prohibition had made of the Lucerne Hotel than the only human being in all the British Bahamas who knew that she was a Van Dorn detective.