The Bootlegger

a stop to that.
•   •   •
ONE BIG HAND firm on the throttle of his S-1 Flying Yacht, the other on the wheel, Isaac Bell began racing down the East River for take-off speed. He dodged a railcar float and steered into a rapidly narrowing slot between a tugboat pushing a fleet of coal barges and another towing a bright red barge of dynamite. Joseph Van Dorn, the burly, scarlet-whiskered founder of the detective agency, sat beside him in the open cockpit, lost in thought.
The Greenpoint ferry surged out of the 23rd Street Terminal straight in their path. The sight of the slab-sided vessel, suddenly enormous in their windshield, made Joseph Van Dorn sit up straight. A brave and cool-headed man, he asked, “Do we have time to stop?”
Bell shoved his throttle wide open.
The Liberty engine mounted behind them on the wing thundered.
He hauled hard on the wheel.
The Loening S-1 held speed and altitude records but was notoriously slow to respond to the controls. Bell had replaced its stick and pedals with a combined steering and elevating Blériot wheel, in hopes of making it nimbler.
Passengers on the Greenpoint ferry backed from the rail.
Bell gave the wheel one last firm tug.
The Flying Yacht lunged off the water and cleared the ferry with a foot to spare.
“There ought to be a law against flying like you,” said Van Dorn.
Bell flew under the Williamsburg Bridge and between the spotting masts of a battleship docked at the Navy Yard. “Sorry to distract you from your dire thoughts.”
“You’ll distract us both to kingdom come.”
Bell headed across leaf-green Brooklyn at one hundred twenty miles an hour.
Van Dorn resumed pondering how to deal with misfortune.
The World War had upended his agency. Some of his best detectives had been killed fighting in the trenches. Others died shockingly young in the influenza epidemic. A post-war recession in the business world was bankrupting clients. And only yesterday, Isaac Bell had discovered that bootleggers, who were getting rich quick off Prohibition by bribing cops and politicians, had corrupted two of his best house detectives at the Hotel Gotham.
Bell climbed to three thousand feet before they reached the Rockaways. Where the white sand beach slid into the ocean like a flaying knife, he turned and headed east above the string of barrier islands that sheltered Long Island from the raw fury of the Atlantic. A booze smugglers’ paradise of hidden bays and marshes, inlets, creeks and canals stretched in the lee of those islands as far as he could see.
Thirty miles from New York, he banked the plane out over the steel-blue ocean and began to descend.
•   •   •
“CAN I COME IN THE LAUNCH, CHIEF?”
Seaman Third Class Asa Somers, the youngest sailor on the Coast Guard cutter CG-9, was beside himself. He had finally made it to sea, patrolling the Fire Island coast for rumrunners on a ship with a cannon and machine guns. Now the fastest flying boat in the world—a high-wing pusher monoplane—was looping down from the sky. And if the roar of its four-hundred-horsepower Liberty motor wasn’t thrilling enough, it was bringing a famous crime fighter he’d read about in Boys’ Life and the Police Gazette—Mr. Joseph Van Dorn, whose army of private detectives vowed: “We never give up! Never!”
“What’s got you all stirred up?” growled the white-haired chief petty officer.
“I want to meet Mr. Van Dorn when he lands.”
“He ain’t gonna land.”
“Why not?”
“Open your eyes, boy. See that swell? Four-foot seas’ll kick that flying boat ass over teakettle.”
“Maybe he’ll give it a whirl,” Somers said, with little hope. Flight Magazine praised the S-1’s speed a lot more than its handling.
“If he does,” said the chief, “you can come in the launch to pick up the bodies.”
Up on the flying bridge, CG-9’s skipper expressed the same opinion.
“Stand by with grappling hooks.”
The flying boat circled lower. When it whipped past, skimming wave tops, Somers recognized Van Dorn, who was seated beside the pilot in the glass-surrounded, open-roofed cockpit, by his red whiskers bristling in the slipstream.
The roar of the big twelve-cylinder engine faded to a whisper.
“Lunatic,” growled the chief.
But young Somers watched the Air Yacht’s ailerons. The wing flaps fluttered up and down almost faster than the eye could see as the pilot fought to keep her on an even keel. Back in her tail unit, the horizontal stabilizer bit the air, and down she came, steady as a locomotive on rails. Her long V-shaped hull touched the water, flaring a vapor-thin wake. Her wing floats skimmed the swell, and she settled lightly.
“Somers! Man the bow line.”
The boy leaped into the launch and they motored across the hundred yards that separated the cutter and the flying boat. The huge four-bladed propeller behind the wing stopped spinning, and the pilot, who had made an almost impossible landing look easy, climbed down from the cockpit onto the running board that extended around the front of the rocking hull. He was a tall, lean, fair-haired man with a no-nonsense expression on his handsome face. His golden hair and thick mustache were impeccably groomed. His tailored suit and the broad-brimmed hat pulled tight on his head were both white.
Somers dropped the bow line.
“What in blazes are you doing?” bellowed the chief.
“I bet that’s Isaac Bell!”
“I don’t care if it’s Mary Pickford! Don’t foul that line!”
The boy re-coiled the line, his gaze locked on the pilot. It had to be him. Bell’s picture was never in a magazine. But reports on Van Dorn always mentioned his chief investigator’s white suit and it suddenly struck Somers that the camera-shy detective could go incognito in a flash simply by changing his clothes.
“Heave a line, son!” he called. “Come on, you can do it—on the jump!”
Somers remembered to let the coil reel out of his palm as the chief had taught him. To his eternal gratitude the rope fell into Bell’s big hand.
“Good shot.” He pulled the plane and the boat together.
Somers asked, “Are you Isaac Bell, sir?”
“I’m his butler. Mum’s the word—Bell is still passed out in a speakeasy. Now, let’s get