“Where are you going, Captain?”
“Bermuda.”
Fern intercepted Bell as he was about to go down the gangway.
“Can I come with you?”
“Sorry. Van Dorn policy: We don’t bring friends to gunfights.”
Fern smiled. “Does that mean I’m a friend?”
“Only as long as you behave yourself.”
“Isaac, what am I going to do? You’ve destroyed everything I believed in. Not you. He. I suspected, but you gave me proof, and it is terrible.”
Bell was anxious to clear the harbor. With any luck, he would trap Zolner on his tanker in two or three hours. “If you want to believe in something, try this: Prohibition is killing the country. Why don’t you join up with the society women trying to repeal it? Joe Van Dorn’s wife is leading them.”
“I have an aunt who’s formed a committee. But I’m not ready to hang out with a bunch of frumpy old ladies.”
Tobin started another engine. Bell raised his voice to be heard.
“If you were to ‘hang out’ with Dorothy Van Dorn, you would have to get used to men looking over your shoulder to catch a glimpse of her. She’s only a few years older than you are, stylish as Paris, and a dazzling beauty.”
“Sounds like you’ve fallen for her, Isaac.”
“Dorothy could make a good friend. I’ll introduce you.”
“I’ll give you a piece of information in return.” She stepped close to whisper in his ear. “Your ‘colleague’ is in love with you. Pauline never mentioned your name when we talked, of course, but now it’s clear.”
“I’m working on that,” said Bell.
“Ready, Mr. Bell?” called Tobin.
“One second… Fern, you told me that Zolner did not want to bomb Wall Street. But you also told me that you didn’t know about the plan in time to stop it.”
“I didn’t. Marat told me afterward, after Yuri died.”
“Why didn’t he want to bomb Wall Street?”
“He had bigger plans. Bombs would distract from the bootlegging plan.”
“Good luck, Fern. Safe passage to Bermuda.” Bell shook her hand, dodged her kiss, and ran down the gangway.
“Cast off.”
The Van Dorn express cruiser Marion was ten miles up the Northeast Providence Channel, with Nassau and New Providence Island twenty minutes in her wake, when James Dashwood saw the gale-warning flag lowered from Fort Fincastle. A red flag with a black square in its center took its place.
Dashwood hurried to the cable office to warn Isaac Bell that a hurricane was approaching The Bahamas. But, as he had feared, remote Harbour Island had neither cable nor radiotelegraph. His friends might as well have been on the far side of the moon.
39
“Boss man, he go to rum row.”
The Harbour Islanders who had been rolling gasoline barrels off a sailboat onto the Dunmore Town dock had stopped work to catch Marion’s mooring lines when the big cruiser rumbled into the harbor.
The tiny town occupied a low, narrow spit of land between the lagoon and ocean. Offshore, Atlantic combers pounded the fringing reef. But the sheltered waters inside the reef, where Bell had hoped to see the tanker looming above the shingled cottages, held not a single ship.
Marat Zolner had chosen well. The tiny shipbuilding harbor was both remote and cut off from the world. A four-masted schooner was under construction on shipyard ways, and the British Union Jack flew above a modest wood-frame government building, next to which ground had been broken to build another. But there was no radio tower, which made Dunmore Town not only remote but as cut off from the world as it had been in pirate times.
The Sandra T. Congdon had weighed anchor two days earlier, the islanders said.
Bell looked at Tobin and shook his head. “Making twelve knots, he’s halfway to New York.”
The sky was heavily clouded. They’d left the rain behind, and the forecast of the hurricane moving west over Cuba seemed to hold. But, Ed Tobin grumbled, wind gusts were swinging south of east, and the Dunmore Town residents had pulled small boats out of the water.
“Did you see a big black speedboat about the size of this one?”
“No, mon.”
“The tanker could have hoisted it on deck,” said Tobin.
“No, he’d have to catch up at sea,” said Bell, “if the tanker left two days ago.”
“Black boat last week,” an islander ventured.
Made sense, thought Bell. Even in wind and roiled seas, Marion had covered the sixty miles from Nassau in less than three hours. Zolner would have found this an ideal place to hide Black Bird, too. He could have zipped in and out with the boat.
He shook his head again. “Last time we almost caught the black boat, Zolner blew up his boathouse.”
“Maybe we’re lucky he moved the ship. If he left it, he would blow it up like his boathouse.”
“Going home a hero of the revolution,” said Pauline.
“But first finish Yuri’s job? What job?”
Bell smelled tobacco burning. The dockworkers had hunkered down behind the gasoline barrels to share a smoke.
“Douse that cigarette! You’ll blow my boat to kingdom come!”
The smoker took a last drag, passed it to his friend, who inhaled another. A third man grabbed a quick puff and flicked the butt in the water.
The man Bell was talking to chuckled. “Just like de boss man. Every day he always say, ‘No smoke by ship. Big explosion.’”
Isaac Bell plunged his hand in his pocket and pulled out his bankroll. Twelve tons of pure alcohol would make a very big explosion. “I want that gasoline.”
Tobin said, “We’ve got plenty in the tanks, Mr. Bell. It’ll only weigh us down.”
“We’ll burn it soon enough. It’s twelve hundred miles to New York.”
They had stowed the last barrel they could fit, and Bell had tipped the dockworkers lavishly, when a church bell began to toll. The islanders’ smiles faded at the urgent clamor. Their eyes shot to the government building. The Union Jack was descending the flagpole. A red flag with yellow stripes jumped up in its place.
“What’s that?” asked Bell.
“Red flag with black square say hurricane.”
“I know that. What do those yellow stripes mean?”
“Hurricane come straight here.”
Marion thundered through South Bar Passage. The tide was strong, the ocean swell steep and destructive in the narrow cut and breaking on the sandbar. Bell aimed at what looked deepest and drove her through in a welter of foam and headed for the open sea.
Beyond the reef, the seas were big but orderly. He set a course north and was glad to see that Marion could maintain forty knots without straining. His crew, he could see, were apprehensive, and he tried to raise their spirits.
“Between a cashiered Coastie, a Staten Island pirate, and a yachtsman, we ought to be able to find Cape Hatteras Light. From there, it’ll be an easy run up the coast.”
“How far is Cape Hatteras?” asked Pauline.
Bell shrugged. “Less than eight hundred miles.” He showed her the chart. “We’ll steer a course just west of north.”
Pauline’s brow furrowed as she studied the chart in the murky light that penetrated the windshield and the isinglass side curtains. “It appears we have to get around Abaco, first.”