“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.”
r /> “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.”