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TWO MEN IN EXPENSIVE CLOTHES, a bootlegger and his bodyguard, dangled a bellboy upside down from the Hotel Gotham’s parapet.
The bodyguard held him by his ankles, nineteen stories above 55th Street. It was night. No one saw, and the boy’s screams were drowned out by the Fifth Avenue buses, the El thundering up Sixth, and trolley bells clanging on Madison.
The bootlegger shouted down at him, “Every bellhop in the hotel sells my booze! Whatsamatter with you?”
Church spires and mansion turrets reached for him like teeth.
“Last chance, sonny.”
A tall man in a summer suit glided silently across the roof. He drew a Browning automatic from his coat and a throwing knife from his boot. He mounted the parapet and pressed the pistol to the bodyguard’s temple.
“Hold tight.”
The bodyguard froze. The bootlegger shrank from the blade pricking his throat.
“Who the—”
“Isaac Bell. Van Dorn Agency. Sling him in on the count of two.”
“If you shoot, we drop him.”
“You’ll have holes in your heads before he passes the eighteenth floor . . . On my count: One! Pull him up. Two! Swing him over the edge . . . Lay him on the roof— Are you O.K., son?”
The bellboy had tears in his eyes. He nodded, head bobbing like a puppet.
“Go downstairs,” Isaac Bell told him, sliding his knife back in his boot and shifting the automatic to his left hand. “Tell your boss Chief Investigator Bell said to give you the week off and a fifty-dollar bonus for standing up to bootleggers.”
The bodyguard chose his moment well. When the tall detective reached down to help the boy stand, he swung a heavy, ring-studded fist. Skillfully thrown with the full power of a big man’s muscle behind it, it was blocked before it traveled four inches.
A bone-cracking counterpunch staggered him. His knees buckled and he collapsed on the tar. The bootlegger shot empty hands into the sky. “O.K., O.K.”
• • •
THE VAN DORN DETECTIVE
AGENCY—an operation with field offices in every city in the country and many abroad—maintained warm relations with the police. But Isaac Bell spotted trouble when he walked into the 54th Street precinct house.
The desk sergeant couldn’t meet his eye.
Bell reached across the high desk to shake his hand anyway. This particular sergeant’s father, retired roundsman Paddy O’Riordan, augmented his pension as a part-time night watchman for Van Dorn Protective Services.
“How’s your dad?”
Paddy was doing fine.
“Any chance of interviewing the bootlegger we caught at the Gotham?”
“The big guy’s at the hospital getting his jaw wired.”
“I want the little one, the boss.”
“Surety company paid his bond.”
Bell was incensed. “Bail? For attempted murder?”
“They expect the protection they pay for,” said Sergeant O’Riordan, poker-faced. “What I would do next time, Mr. Bell, instead of calling us, throw them in the river.”
Bell watched for the cop’s reaction when he replied, “I reckoned Coasties would fish them out.”
O’Riordan agreed with a world-weary “Yeah,” confirming the rumors that even some officers of the United States Coast Guard—the arm of the Treasury Department charged with enforcing Prohibition at sea—were in the bootleggers’ pockets.
Starting this afternoon, thought Bell, the Van Dorns would put 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.
