Solomon Gursky Was Here

One

1973. September. Pulling out of Wardour Street, gearing down with a gratifying roar, Terry tucked his battered MG into the carpark. Then he walked swiftly back to the Duke of Wellington, mindful of the plump grey skies for he was wearing his new suit, jacket nipped in just so at the waist, patch pockets, trousers slightly flared. They were all at the bar, waiting. Des, Nick, Bobby.

“Hello, hello, hello.”

“Saucy.”

“Ta-ra, ta-ra!”

A grinning Terry, dimples displayed to advantage, lifted the corners of his jacket and twirled about.

“Oh, my dear,” Bobby exclaimed, quaking with pleasure, “the wonders wrought by Cecil Gee.”

“Not bloody likely. Three hundred nicker it was. From Doug Hayward,” Terry announced, “tailor to the stars.”

Des reached over to stroke the fabric; then, abruptly, his hand dropped to Terry’s groin, fat fingers fondling. “And what have we here?”

“Forbidden fruit,” Terry said, slapping Des’s hand away as he leaped free.

“Bespoke, you mean.”

“Piss off, son.”

Nick, anticipating trouble, slid between them.

“Anybody seen Mother Foley?” Terry asked.

“Not to worry, Terry. Foley will be here. Got time for a nosh?”

“Not tonight, dear, I’ve got a headache.” Cunningly lifting a jacket sleeve, Terry revealed his magnificent bulky black wristwatch. The face showing absolutely nothing until he flicked a tiny knob and 7:31 lit up in computer-type numerals. “Ta-ra, ta-ra!”

“Where’d you nick it?”

“It’s not even on sale here yet. Lucy got it for me in New York.”

Suddenly Foley loomed over them. Grey curls leaking out from under a broad-brimmed safari hat, wine turtleneck sweater, tie-dyed jeans. Terry slipped into the Gents’ after him.

“You bring the bread, mon?”

“Mañana. No fear.”

Foley rubbed his purple jaw pensively.

“Oh, come off it, luv. When have I ever let you down?”

Foley handed it over. Terry, blowing him a kiss, danced back into the bar. “I’ve got time for one more.”

“And where are you off to tonight?” Des asked. “Pray tell.”

“Oh, maybe Annabel’s for a bit of the old filet mignon and some Dom P. Or possibly Les A. for a spot of chemmy.” Actually she had yet to take him anywhere that she might be recognized. Infuriating, that.

“Shame on you, Terry, selling your body beautiful for such ephemeral trifles.”

He reclaimed his MG, shooting into Hyde Park, emerging at the top of Sloane Street and cutting into Belgravia. He knew, without looking, that she would be waiting by the window of her mews flat, chain-smoking. So he took his own sweet time getting out of the car.

Wearing a black silk shift, the sleeves necessarily long, Lucy opened the door before he could ring the bell. The thumb on her right hand was wrinkled as a walnut, all the moisture sucked out of it. She had tried bandaging it at night, but it didn’t work. She tore the bandage off in her sleep.

Lucy’s large black eyes flickered with distress. Not quite forty-one, she looked older, possibly because she was so scrawny now. “The money’s on the hall table,” she said. Like he was the delivery boy from John Baily’s.

“You haven’t said a word about my suit.”

“Don’t tease me, Terry. Hand it over.”

“Do you think the trousers are too snug?”

“They advertise. Shall we leave it at that?” And she disappeared into the kitchen, slamming the door.

Terry drifted into the bedroom, idly opening drawers. In the topmost drawer of her bedside table, a priceless antique no doubt, the surface pocked with cigarette burns, he found a half-finished Toblerone bar. More chocolates, these from Bendicks, were in the next drawer, as well as used tissues everywhere, rings he could risk saying the char had nicked. The next drawer yielded a bottle of Quaaludes. Other bottles. Uppers, downers. And a book, many pages dog-eared, passages underlined here and there. The Collected Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book was inscribed in a tiny scrawl. “July 12,1956: To my darling Lucy, love, Moses.” Terry’s first impulse was to rip out the inscription and tear it into little pieces, but his instinct for self-preservation saved him. There were limits.

“You’ve got it,” Lucy said, emerging from the kitchen, “haven’t you, and you’re teasing me?”

“Sorry, luv.”

“Get me a drink.”

“Please.”

“I wouldn’t go too far if I were you.”

So he fetched her a Scotch. “Drink up. There’s a good girl. Now let’s go out and eat.”

“I can’t go out like this. I need something right now.”

“Ta-ra,” he sang out, leaping back as he flashed his envelope at her. “Ta-ra, ta-ra!”

“Terry, please.”

“I want to go to Les A.” Fending her off, he held tenaciously to the envelope. “Will you take me to Les A. for dinner?”

“Yes. Why not?” she said, startling him.

“Promise?”

“Yes yes yes.”

“All rightee, then.” Pulling her bodice away from her with a hooked finger, he rammed the envelope between her breasts. Then he stepped back, smirking, but smelling of fear. Lucy, beads of sweat sliding down her forehead, retreated to the bathroom. She trapped the little vein in her neck, pinching it between two fingers—it was either that or her tongue, the other veins had collapsed—and then she reached for the needle. When she came out again her manner was imperious. “Sit down, Terry.”

He sat.

“You were never the only hunk of meat dangling on the rack, my dear. If I shop around I daresay I can find a less expensive, more obliging cut.”

Cunt. But he didn’t say it. He knew from experience that it would soon wear off, she would need more, and then she was the one who would be obliging. So he grinned, making an offering of his dimples. “Can’t you take a joke any more?”

“A joke, yes. You, no.”

“Aren’t we going to Les A. together? Like you promised.”

“We’re not going anywhere together any more.” Relenting a little, she added, “Come on, Terry. Surely you knew it had to end sometime.”

“All rightee, then. Okay, ducks.”

Two

Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried. The family requested, unavailingly as it turned out, that instead of flowers donations should be sent to the Cancer Society. The flowers, some in the form of wreaths from sympathizers unfamiliar with Jewish ritual, were meticulously screened for compromising cards by a dutiful Harvey Schwartz. Most of them, Harvey was gratified to discover, came from celebrated people, achievers, names recognized beyond Montreal, around the world in fact, and this information he imparted to attendant newspapermen with his customary zeal.

Happily, there were no embarrassments. Lucky Luciano was dead. So were Al Capone, Waxey Gordon, “Little Farfel” Kavolick, Longy Zwillman and Gurrah Shapiro. Other cronies from the halcyon days did not send flowers or, with the exception of Meyer Lansky, were sufficiently tactful not to comment in the press. Lansky, unforgiving, told the reporter who surprised him in Miami with the news of Mr. Bernard’s death, “Without Solomon that bastard would have ended his days like he started them. Sweeping up in a whorehouse.” But, pressed by the news agencies, Lansky refused to elaborate. He insisted that he had been misquoted.

Fat Charley Lin rode to the funeral in a rented Rolls-Royce, passing out scented cards for his trendy Toronto restaurant, the House of Lin, to all comers. Stu MacIntyre, the former minister of justice, was also there, amused to see the son of the late Judge Gaston Leclerc in attendance. André Leclerc, who was in charge of public relations for McTavish in Europe, was rooted in Paris, but also, appropriately enough, maintained a château on the Loire. And just as Callaghan had anticipated, Bert Smith showed up to see Mr. Bernard buried.

“Mr. Smith?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Tim Callaghan. Remember me?”

“I remember you.”

“Yes. I thought you would. Well, he’s dead. It’s over now.”

“Over? It’s not over. It’s just begun. Now he will have to face a Judge that he can’t subvert.”

“Well, yes, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”

“It’s the only way of looking at it.”

“I would like to talk to you, Bert.”

“Call my secretary for an appointment.”

“We’re old men now, Bert, both of us. I would be grateful if we could go somewhere and talk.”

“About the good old days?”

“I know how you feel, Bert.”

“Do you now?”

“Let’s talk.”

The newspapers noted that Mr. Bernard, who began his life with nothing, was born in a sod hut on the prairie. The son of a peddler, Aaron Gursky, he owned his first hotel at the age of twenty-one and lived to preside over a distillery with estimated annual sales of more than a billion in fifteen different countries. Reporters observed that some two thousand mourners filed past Mr. Bernard’s coffin. Among them were federal and provincial cabinet ministers, American senators, the Israeli ambassador, and numerous business leaders. The rabbi, in his eulogy, ventured “that Mr. Bernard Gursky’s deeds would survive him locally, nationally and internationally at home and abroad. He was as good at giving away money as he was at making it. Though he supped with kings and presidents, he could also walk humbly with ordinary people, regardless of race, colour or creed. His sense of compassion was personal. We have lost a legend in our time, a man of world renown.”

Obituaries the world over emphasized Mr. Bernard’s generosity, his legitimate claim to being a latter-day philanthropist. They made no mention of his brother Solomon, the notorious Solomon, and mercifully downplayed the Prohibition years.

Harvey, his mood expansive, his shoes new, handled his own interviews with surprising élan. He was grateful that no embittered employee—say old Tim Callaghan—surfaced with the most compromising story of his long tenure with Mr. Bernard. The day the merchant bankers of London were flown in for lunch in the Gursky boardroom to celebrate their underwriting of a five-hundred-million-dollar line of credit that would enable Mr. Bernard to acquire the McEwen Bros. & Ross Distillery in the Scottish highlands. The day that lived in infamy in Harvey’s head, still polluting his dreams.

Mr. Bernard, intimidated for once, was determined that those establishment bankers, including one lord and two knights, would not wink at each other behind his back, putting him down for a reformed ghetto thug. He had gone over the menu endlessly and put on and discarded three suits before he settled on the charcoal grey, with the surprising help of a charming, disconcertingly pretty new receptionist. The young lady actually whistled as he passed, obliging a startled Mr. Bernard to stop and stare.

“It makes you look very distingué,” she said. “Like you were on your way to Windsor Castle.”

“What’s your name, young lady?”

“Why it’s Kathleen O’Brien, Mr. B.”

Nobody called him that. He enjoyed the mischief in it. He chuckled. “Can you type?” he asked.

“Like the wind,” she said. “I can also take shorthand, speak French fluently, and shoot a mean game of snooker.”

“But do you know enough not to repeat what you hear?”

“Try me, Mr. B.”

Transferred to his office for a trial run a week before the bankers’ lunch she teased him into exchanging his diamond-studded, initialled cuff-links for something more subdued, and even managed to talk him out of his black silk socks. “Only for Hungarians of questionable origin,” she said.

Rehearsing him for lunch, Miss O’Brien slapped his hand when he picked up a fork in his accustomed manner. “No, no, Mr. B. Like this.”

“But you’d have to be a real horse’s ass to hold your fork upside down.”

“Ours is not to reason why, Mr. B. It’s comme il faut.”

With the bankers’ lunch only two days away, Mr. Bernard began to pace his office frantically, his sinuses blocked, his stomach knotted, wishing that he had just a fraction of Solomon’s style, Solomon’s wit. The day of the luncheon he hollered at his underlings all morning, throwing ashtrays, kicking wastepaper baskets, chasing secretaries down the hall, lashing them with obscenities. Morrie, a born nosepicker, was banned from the building. In fact with the exception of Mr. Bernard’s own sons and Harvey, whom he needed, only the gentile executives of McTavish were invited to meet the bankers. Even at that Mr. Bernard agonized over the invitation list into the early hours of the morning, crossing out a name, reinstating it, crossing it out again.

To begin with, everything had gone amazingly well, the bankers drawn to the compelling drawing of a radiant Ephraim Gursky that hung in a gold frame over the fireplace. “Of course you know,” Mr. Bernard said, “we are hardly newcomers to this great land of opportunity. My grandfather first set foot in Canada in 1846. That’s the young fellow you’re looking at. Ephraim Gursky at age twenty-nine. He came over looking for the Northwest Passage. Shall we dine now, gentlemen.”

Only a grieving Harvey Schwartz could tell that Mr. Bernard—his speech numbingly formal, Emily Post perfect—was under a terrible strain; and he knew from experience what kind of eruption that could lead to. Then, just as the bankers were sitting down to the table, Harvey pulling out Mr. Bernard’s chair for him, Mr. Bernard relaxed prematurely. He let out a fart. A thundering fart. In the ensuing silence which seemed to last a decade for Harvey, but was actually a matter of seconds, Mr. Bernard, his eyes bulging, glared at Harvey.

“I’m—I’m—so sorry,” an ashen-faced Harvey stammered. “Been up all night—upset stomach—something I ate—sorry sorry—excuse me, gentlemen.” And he rushed off to his own toilet, where he slid to the floor, blinded by tears, quaking and raging and banging his head against the wall, trying to assuage his humiliation by quickly calculating the street value of his shares in Acorn and his McTavish stock options.

Harvey had not returned to the boardroom, but had fled the Gursky Tower, retreating to his bed for three days, pleading a migraine.

Now there was trouble of another kind. Only a day after Mr. Bernard was buried in the Temple Mount Sinai cemetery, his grave was desecrated. Fortunately, it was not the immediate family but Harvey who was contacted at once and hastened to the cemetery, uncomprehending but charged with concern by what he found there. A raven skewered and harpooned to the grave.

Harvey, his stomach churning, pressed a hundred-dollar bill into the cemetery custodian’s hand. He swore the old man to secrecy, established an immediate twenty-four-hour vigil at the graveside, and took his discovery to Walter Osgood, the former museum curator who ran the Gursky Art Foundation.

Osgood, a portly Englishman, troubled by dandruff and halitosis, sported a bushy moustache; he had mocking blue eyes and a manner that Harvey found decidedly condescending for—as he put it—somebody who would never be anything more than a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year prick. Aside from guiding the Gurskys in the acquisition of masters traditional and modern on the world market, Osgood also pronounced on literary matters in the Saturday edition of the Montreal Star. His widely read column, “The Bookworm’s Turn,” was larded with Latin quotations as were his frequent lectures to the St. James’s Literary Society and the Pen Club, some of which were delivered in his apartment or atelier as he preferred, which was on the second floor of a converted warehouse in Old Montreal. He shared his atelier with a lady whom he was fond of introducing as his inamorata. “Seulement,” he once confided to Becky, “pour épater les bourgeois.”

“Good for you,” she had replied, squeezing his hand.

Osgood, bulging out of his safari suit, suppressed amazement when Harvey burst into his office and slammed his burden down on his desk. The raven, Osgood said unequivocally, was rara avis indeed in Montreal, its natural habitat being the north. It was, of course, the royal bird. A raven croaked the warning of a royal death in Macbeth. The raven, he added, was consecrated to the Danish war god. Then, scrutinizing the harpoon, the shaft fashioned of caribou antler, the head made entirely of bear bone, the thong of bearded sealskin, he declared it to be clearly an Eskimo artifact, probably Netsilik in origin, but of a type that hadn’t been in use for a good many years. “Bloody valuable I should think. Where did you get it, old boy?”

“That’s of no importance,” Harvey replied brusquely, “but you see this here,” he said, indicating a symbol carved into the shank of the weapon, “that’s a ‘gimel’.”

Osgood, his slack facial skin splotchy at the best of times, reddened perceptibly. “I do beg your pardon,” he said, rising slowly, “but I must micturate.”

“What?”

“Pee pee.”

Osgood rested briefly on the toilet seat, his head bobbing between his knees. Then he splashed his face with cold water and reached into the medicine cabinet for the little packet and his tiny silver spoon, snorting deeply before he confronted Harvey again. “You were saying …”

“This is a ‘gimel’. A Hebrew letter, Walt,” Harvey added, as he knew Osgood found the diminutive offensive.

“Yes, yes, the third letter of the Hebraic alphabet. But that’s impossible, old boy. It’s simply not on. It may appear to be a ‘gimel’ to the uninformed eye, but it’s the maker’s sign, actually. And the maker, beyond a doubt, was an Eskimo or, more properly, an Inuit. Eskimo, don’t you know, is an Indian word that means ‘eater of raw meat’. It’s pejorative.” Osgood grinned. “Like kike, to take a random example,” he said, reaching for the harpoon.

Harvey snatched it back from him. “I think I’ll hold on to this, if you don’t mind?”

“Oh, Harvey, just a minute. I’ve had my amanuensis transcribe my notes for the up-and-coming souk in London. The Sotheby auction. Would you care for a copy?”

“Yes. You do that.”

“Harvey, um, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but you’ve changed. You seem taller now that—”

“Don’t get smart with me, Walt.”

Once back on the forty-first floor of the Bernard Gursky Tower, Harvey, all things considered, was not surprised to find Miss O’Brien lying in wait for him in Mr. Bernard’s office. Into the Scotch again, the bottle open on the desk. Loch Edmond’s Mist, Gursky’s twelve-year-old malt. The best. She was drinking it neat.

“Will you join me in a farewell salute, Mr. Schwartz?”

Years ago he had asked her to please call him Harvey, but she had turned him down. “I prefer to call you Mr. Schwartz.” Years ago she had only to sail down the hall on those long slender legs, auburn hair flowing, a crucifix nestled maddeningly between her breasts, for every man’s head to turn. Just about everybody in the office, but certainly not Harvey, had tried it on with her at least once, learning no more than that she was an expensive tease. She would drink with them at The Lantern, her manner silky, and sometimes even agree to an intimate dinner at the Café Martin, but nobody ever got into her apartment on Mountain Street.

Miss O’Brien, Harvey had to allow, had certainly kept her figure, but she no longer turned any heads. Look at her neck. Her hands. “Why ‘farewell’?” he asked, relieved.

“Isn’t it?”

“You’re family, Miss O’Brien.”

“Neither of us is family. I never made that mistake, Mr. Schwartz. Don’t you.”

Bristling because she had the effrontery, that whore, to suggest that they had ever been in the same boat, he smiled tightly and said, “I’d expect you to take a computer course. We all have to keep up with the times. But you’re always welcome here. A lady with your proven talents.”

“He used to say I’ll bet Harvey is peeking through the keyhole. Did you, Mr. Schwartz?”

“Meanwhile I have some good news for you. You were remembered in Mr. Bernard’s will. A bequest. Twenty thousand dollars.”

“Let’s not drag this out unnecessarily, Mr. Schwartz. I’ve come for the envelope he left in the safe.”

Harvey opened Mr. Bernard’s top desk drawer, plucked a file from it, and thrust it at her. “Here, if you are interested, is a list of the complete contents of his safe, properly notarized.”

“And were you there when the safe was opened, Mr. Schwartz?”

“There was no envelope addressed to you.”

“Mr. Bernard wouldn’t lie to me about a thing like that. I’m fifty-three years old now, Mr. Schwartz.”

“Time flies.”

“Mr. Bernard was right about you. You are a little runt. Goodbye for now.”

For now. After she had gone, Harvey brooded over the implied threat, weighing the possible consequences, when he was startled by the ghostly clack of snooker balls. The door to the billiards room was open. Harvey approached it cautiously, but smiled broadly when it turned out that it was only the pathetic Morrie in there. Mr. Morrie in a mood to reminisce.

“Did you know, Harvey, that I was shot at twice? I’m talking about the old days when hijacking was our biggest headache. The second time I was shot I soiled my pants. Bernie used to tease me about it something awful until Solomon found out. He grabbed Bernie and shoved him into the cab of the first truck in the next convoy out and that, boychick, was when ‘Nigger Joe’ Lebovitz and Hymie Paul, the Little Navy guys, were really catching it from the Purple Gang. Bernie was shaking like a leaf. A truck backfired and he hit the floor. So he never mentioned my embarrassment to me again.” Mr. Morrie paused to chalk his cue and then lined up a tricky shot. He failed to make it. “Hey, you know what I wanted when I was a young fella? To own a bar. Morrie’s. A nice, classy joint in a refined neighbourhood. Panelled walls. Old wood. Local artists could hang their pictures I wouldn’t charge a cent commission. I wouldn’t put pretzels or dried-out peanuts on the bar, but at six o’clock, bowls of freshly chopped liver. Devilled eggs. Spicy little sausages. I would cash personal cheques. You had a problem I’d be a good listener. That Morrie, they’d say, he’s some sweet guy. He pours you a drink it’s a drink.”

“Of course you realize,” Harvey said, trying not to show his distress, “that you couldn’t do that now.”

“It wouldn’t be dignified.”

“No.”

“I’m Bernard Gursky’s sole surviving brother.”

“So, boychick, how do you think you will rate with the new generation? The homogenized Gurskys. My brother’s children.”

So that was it. Morrie must have heard that he was to be dismissed from the board, the first decision of the new CEO at McTavish. “Lionel and I couldn’t be closer if we were brothers. Ask anybody.”

“You know what my poor brother really wanted he never got. What he wanted was to be accepted, really really accepted by them. Maybe to be appointed an ambassador. Like Joe Kennedy. Come to think of it, we didn’t do any worse. How do you figure it, Harvey?”

“By any standard you can think of Mr. Bernard was a great human being. A giant.”

“You’re such a smart fella, Harvey. Really you are. I’ve always admired you for that.”

“I sincerely appreciate the compliment.”

“But what did you do with the envelope?”

“There was no envelope. I can bring witnesses to support that statement.”

“Bernie assured me that he was making provision for Miss O.”

“I swear there was no envelope. Either he forgot or he was lying to her. With all due respect, he could be hard, you know. Look how he was to you for so many years.”

“You think he didn’t talk to me for all that time? Oy Harvey, when we were alone you know what? Some afternoons those last weeks he was still coming into the office he would lock the door to this room, raid the fridge for Popsicles, take out the cards, and we would get down on our hands and knees, playing nearest-to-the-wall, just like when we were kids. Tears came easily to him, you must know that, but in the last months there was no turning off the tap. Solomon, forgive me, Solomon. The truth is only Bernie could have made us so incredibly rich. I was obviously too dumb and Solomon would have destroyed McTavish just like he destroyed everything and everybody he touched. Lansky shouldn’t have said what he did. Solomon was a bandit. Guns. Whores. Runs across the river. Prohibition was made for him. Only Bernie could have built what we are sitting on now. But, you know, toward the end it was the early days that obsessed him. He told Miss O. plenty.”

“Who would listen to such an embittered old maid?”

Mr. Morrie chalked up his cue again and sank a red ball in a side pocket. “Moses Berger, maybe.”

Harvey began to pace. Should he ask Morrie about the harpoon, the raven? Naw, Morrie was teetering on the cliff edge of senility. Popsicles. Nearest-to-the-wall. Imagine. “There was no envelope.” Harvey’s eyes filled with tears. “But maybe I should find an envelope and fill it with plenty.”

“You’re such a clever fellow, Harvey. You think of everything.”

The next morning Harvey asked his secretary to find out where that flunk Moses Berger was hiding out these days. There was no answer in his cabin in the Townships. Harvey supplied his secretary with a list of bars.

“But it’s not even noon yet,” she protested.

“Late in the day for that one.”

Next Harvey told his secretary to try a salmon-fishing camp on the Restigouche.

“They’re expecting him on Tuesday.”

There were no further incidents at the graveside, but a week after Mr. Bernard died Harvey was called upon to deal with yet another conundrum. The Monday following Mr. Bernard’s death, his children had studied the newsweeklies for comment on their father’s passing and then conferred together, uniformly outraged. Lionel phoned Harvey from his perch high in the Gursky building on Fifth Avenue. “I need you here,” he said.

Harvey hastened to the airport and boarded one of the Gursky jets, a Lear. His lunch, ordered in advance and consumed at 28,000 feet, consisted of cottage cheese salad, a bowl of bran, and a sherbet of stewed prunes washed down with a bottle of Vichy water. Even as he flossed his teeth, Harvey pondered financial reports, but his mind was elsewhere. He knew that Lionel was giving a dinner party for Jackie Onassis that night. Harvey had packed his magenta velvet dinner jacket just in case. He no sooner landed at LaGuardia than a helicopter settled alongside, swallowing him, ascending again, and easing him on to the pad on the roof of the Gursky building, Harvey hurrying to Lionel’s office. Lionel thrust a copy of a newsweekly at him, open at the offending page. “Do you have a ball-park figure for our annual ad budget with Time and Newsweek?”

Reconciled, Harvey placed a call to the publisher while Lionel listened on the extension on his side of the desk.

“Mr. Bernard died last Monday after a long illness.”

“Yes. We know that. Please convey our condolences to Lionel.”

“He was a great human being. I say that not because of my continuing unique relationship to the family, but from the heart.”

“Nobody doubts that.”

“During his lifetime, you know, I had many offers to go elsewhere for more money. But as he was loyal to me, I was loyal to him. His children appreciate that.”

The publisher didn’t know what to say.

“From nothing he built one of the world’s largest liquor businesses. Wasn’t that truly remarkable?”

“Certainly it was.”

“Then why does his unfortunate passing rate no more than five lines in ‘Milestones’?”

As the publisher explained to Harvey that there had been a big break in the continuing Watergate story during the week and, consequently, the back of the magazine had been contracted to accommodate it, Lionel flipped the magazine open to another page, scribbled a note, and passed both to Harvey. The note read: “Ask him about the nigger.”

“Oh, I can understand that,” Harvey said to the publisher. “Only how come an Afro-American dies and he gets a full page?”

“Louis Armstrong was famous,” the publisher said.

Lapsing into pleasantries, Harvey continued to chat as Lionel hastily scribbled another note. Taking it, Harvey swallowed hard and interrupted the publisher. “But thinking aloud, if I may, why don’t you make up for overlooking Mr. Bernard’s death by doing a story on Lionel taking over, which is absolutely wonderful. I love him. I love him like a brother. I’m not ashamed to say that. But I think a lot of people are eager to know more about him, like what makes him tick and what are his future plans for McTavish.”

The deal made, or so he hoped, Harvey hung up; and then he raised his enormous expressionless brown eyes to Lionel, searching.

Lionel, his grin boyish, responded with a clap on the back. Harvey had seen him do that to manicurists and parking-lot attendants, just before fishing into his pocket for a tip.

“Join me in a drink?” Lionel asked.

“You go ahead. I’ll have a Vichy, please.”

Harvey subsided into a leather chair, spent, as an ebullient Lionel took to the telephone, calling one friend after another, letting it drop that over his objections the newsweekly was doing an in-depth story on him. “They’ll be calling all my friends, you know how they operate. Hey, you won’t tell them about Rumania, right?”

Rumania, Harvey remembered, sighing.

A year earlier Lionel had been included in a chartered jet laden with fifty corporate leaders who were flown to eastern Europe by the newsweekly to meet with Communist leaders. Afloat on champagne and caviar, Lionel and a couple of the other middle-aged magnates had started in goosing the stewardesses as soon as the seat-belt-sign blinked off. If some of the girls had been compliant, the long-legged straw-haired one Lionel fancied had clearly taken umbrage. She spurned his red roses and champagne in Warsaw. She slapped his face in the lobby of the Hotel Metropole in Moscow. And come Bucharest there was an embarrassing incident. A drunken Lionel, the stewardess claimed, had forced his way into her room, attempting indecent assault. Not so, Lionel protested, he had been invited. Once back in New York, however, the girl had consulted a lawyer, Harvey had been sent for, and the out-of-court settlement had not come cheap, all things considered.

Girls recalcitrant or unresponsive, but consumed by avarice, had been Lionel’s problem even at McGill. A terrified Harvey had unfortunately been present the first time a financial settlement had been demanded and Mr. Bernard had flown into one of his legendary rages, spewing obscenities.

Mr. Bernard, in his forties then, rocking on his tiny heels before the towering marble fireplace, seething. Young Lionel seated on the sofa, unperturbed, riding it out with a supercilious smile. When without warning an exasperated Mr. Bernard strode toward him, unzipped his fly, yanked out his penis, and shook it in his son’s face. “I want you to know, you whore-master, that in all my years this has only been into your mother, God bless her,” and, zipping up again, tearful, adding “and to this day she has the only cunt still good enough for Bernard Gursky. Respect. Dignity. That you still have to learn. Animal.”

Coming off another telephone call, Lionel looked up, surprised, “I didn’t realize that you were still here, Harvey.”

“Yeah, well, I was wondering if you needed me for anything else.”

“Nope.”

“Hey,” Harvey said, brightening, “would you like to join me for dinner tonight?”

“Sorry. I can’t.”

“Busy busy?”

“Bushed. I thought tonight I’d turn in early for once. Harvey, you look different. What is it?”

“I do not look different.”

“Harvey, I loved my father. But he was also something of a tyrant, wasn’t he?”

“We’ve got a problem, Lionel.” Miss O’Brien’s unfulfilled expectations. The envelope.

“Good for you, Harvey. How much was in it?”

“You were there when we opened the safe. There was no envelope.”

“Was the old goat screwing her for all those years?”

“No, but there were intimacies of a kind.”

“Hell, if that’s what he wanted, we could have afforded much better.”

“He also appears to have told her a good deal about the old days. It might be prudent to discover an envelope with, say, a couple of hundred thousand dollars in it.”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

“That’s exactly what I said to Morrie.”

“What in the hell has that idiot got to do with it?”

“It was his idea. I told him it was ill-advised. Once you start on a thing like that, you could be paying out for years.”

“I didn’t say there should be an envelope or that there shouldn’t be an envelope. All I said is I want nothing to do with it. You do what you think best, Harvey. I’d like to be able to count on you.”

A copy of the drawing of a radiant Ephraim Gursky that hung over the fireplace in the boardroom of the Bernard Gursky Tower in Montreal hung in a gold frame in Lionel’s office. Harvey was so familiar with it that he hadn’t looked at it for years, but he did now. Ephraim, no taller than Mr. Bernard, was, unlike him, all coiled muscle, obviously ready to spring out of the frame and wrestle both Lionel and Harvey to the ground. Ephraim was drawn alongside a blow-hole, with both feet planted in the pack ice, his expression defiant, his head hooded, his body covered with layers of sealskin, not so much to keep out the cold, it seemed, as to lock in the animal heat lest it melt the surrounding ice. He held a harpoon in his fist, the shaft made of caribou antler. There was a seal lying at his feet, the three masts of the doomed Erebus and jagged icebergs rising in the background, the black Arctic sky lit by paraselenae, the mock-moons of the north. Harvey, unaccountably distressed, looked away from the drawing and indicated the whalebone sculpture resting on a pedestal in the corner. “That’s Eskimo, isn’t it?”

“You want it, it’s yours.”

“No. But where did you get it?”

“I can’t remember how it got here, but I think it belonged to my Uncle Solomon once. Why?”

“Nothing. Just asking,” Harvey said, lifting the piece off the pedestal to examine its underside, where he espied what, to his uninformed eye, appeared to be a ‘gimel’.

Three

Each time he reached that point on the 132 where it overtook the St. Lawrence River and hung in there, twisting with the shore, hugging it—past Trois Pistoles, winding beyond Rimouski—Moses’s spirits soared. In his mind’s eye, he would obliterate the straining Winnebagos and swarms of black-leather motorcyclists and roadside signs: TARZAN CAMPING ICI … BAR BQ CHICKEN CHEZ OCTAVE … 10 DANSEUSES NUES 10. He would shut out the slapdash little riverside towns with their souvenir shops mounted on cinderblocks, windows choked with machine-tooled carvings of cute spade-bearded habitants. He would ignore the houses framed by multi-coloured lights, the owner’s initials woven into the aluminum storm door. Plastic reindeer staked in mid-prance on lawns already adorned with geranium beds set in worn whitewashed tires, the Quebecker’s coronet.

Blinding himself to what we had made of our provenance, he would try to see the countryside as it must have looked to Cartier and his crew of sea-weary fishermen out of St. Malo in 1534. The year that they first ventured beyond the gulf, sailing into the estuary and up the fjord, anchoring at Ile Verte to scamper after hares for the pot, putting in at Ile aux Coudres to shake wild hazelnuts free of the trees. Sailing into the Kingdom of the Saguenay and beyond, drifting past beluga whales and walrus and unbelievably thick schools of salar the leaper, as the king of freshwater fish was first known. Though the river would fail to lead them to La Chine—a disappointment to François I no doubt—how the poor and pinched men of Brittany must have marvelled at the cornucopia on either shore. The abundance of virgin dark green forest and the river-enriched black soil. The moose and deer and beaver and geese and ducks. The cod. The salmon, the salmon. The silvery, sea-bright salmon rolling in the ripples and leaping free.

At Mont-Joli, grateful to be exactly where he was for once, even without her, Moses dropped sharply right into the Gaspé on the winding 132. Rising and dipping he spun into the valley of the Matepédia, riverbanks soaring like canyon walls, the spruce and cedar and birch not so much rooted there as scaling the cliffs on which they held no more than a tenuous toe-hold. Then he crossed into New Brunswick at Pointe-à-la-Croix, taking the bridge into Campbellton and then making straight for the camp of the Restigouche. Vince’s Gulch was made up of a dining lodge and a sleeping lodge and a spread of outbuildings, including an ice-house.

Bouncing into the parking space in his Toyota shortly after five P.M. Moses noted two cars, with North Carolina licence plates, already in place in the shade, a Cadillac and a Mercedes 450 SEL with a Playboy bunny mounted on the rear bumper. Big chunky Jim Boyd, the head guide, walked slowly toward Moses, his catcher’s hand extended but his eyes troubled. “They got here about an hour ago,” he said. “Barney Gursky and his girlfriend Darlene Walton and Larry and Mary Lou Logan. The Logans have a teenage boy with them. Rob. A real doozer. He didn’t know there wasn’t going to be any TV and he suffers from allergies.” Jim allowed that to sink in before he added, “They never fished for salmon before. They’re in furniture, very big, looking to set up a factory, maybe two hundred jobs, either here or in Ontario. They’re guests of that horse’s ass who passes for our minister of trade and he wants them to have one hell of a good time. So we don’t want any trouble, Moses. Where’s Beatrice?”

“We’re not together any more.”

“You’re no damn good, Moses, and you’re going to die all alone like me in a tarpaper shack somewheres.”

Moses handed over his traditional gifts, a pound of Twinings Ceylon Breakfast Tea and a bottle of Macallan Single Highland Malt.

“You’ve already had two phone calls,” Jim said. “One of them was from England.”

“I’m not even here.”

Moses unpacked his things and then stepped out on the lodge porch to look at the water. The screen door to the adjoining bedroom whacked open and out sailed a real life Barbie doll, thirty maybe, blonde, drenched in perfume, her blue eyes not so much made up as underlined and set in italics; everything glowing, twinkly, her confident manner redeemed somewhat by badly chewed fingernails. She was wearing a corn-coloured raw silk top, a necklace ending in a pentangle in the cleft between her high perky breasts, and skintight designer jeans. She was barefoot, her toenails painted black. “Blessed be,” she sang out in a drinker’s husky voice, “I’m Darlene Walton. And what, may I inquire, is your rising house?”

“Why, I do believe I have a stationary Mercury rising in Pisces,” Moses said. Then he tried to take her arm to help her down from the porch, but she withdrew abruptly from his touch. “There’s a step missing,” he pointed out, irritated.

She shrugged fetchingly, crinkling her sweet little nose and rolling her eyes, her alarm signals overlarge, like that of a silent movie actress, all to warn him against the man watching from the porch of the dining lodge.

Barney Gursky might have been forty or sixty. If you didn’t know, it would be difficult to tell, for he was the manner of man who after forty didn’t age but settled into himself. His black hair hadn’t been cut but sculpted. He was bronzed and tall, not a hint of flab on him, with hard blue eyes and a sullen calculating mouth. Had Moses not known him he would have taken Barney for a golf pro who had failed to qualify for the tour, or a local TV morning host still waiting for that network offer. Darlene hastily introduced Moses, explaining, “I opened the screen door and there he was.”

Either Barney didn’t remember Moses, or he wasn’t allowing that he did. “Do they call you Moe for short?”

“No. They don’t.”

“Well, glad to meet you anyway, buddy boy.”

Barney was the Gursky cockatrice. A week after Anita’s first wedding, he had acquired a Lamborghini, shifted into overdrive, and lit out for California and then Florida, rumoured to have invested in turn in a roller-derby team, film production, oil exploration, the international arms market, a wet T-shirt girls’ basketball league in which he held the rights to the Miami Jigglers, et cetera.

Wanted, at one time or another, on various charges including fraud and alimony payment arrears, by the authorities in Florida, California, New York, and British Columbia, he hadn’t even attended his sister’s funeral in 1963. Charna had been discovered drowned in a swimming hole at the Friends of the Earth commune in northeastern Vermont four o’clock one morning, wearing nothing but a pair of snakeskin boots.

The Logans were waiting in the living room which, to Moses’s astonishment, was festooned with red roses and actually had a bartender in attendance, something he had never seen before. The middle-aged Logans seemed an ill-matched pair. Mary Lou looked happily plump, wearing harlequin glasses with the sort of lenses that both magnified and blurred her eyes. But Larry was a scrawny bird, his bald head shiny, his dentures gleaming. Had he been a customs inspector he would have searched the bags of anybody that he considered saucy or younger or more privileged than he was. Their enormous son, who wore a Rolling Stones T-shirt over an immense belly and outsize faded jeans, sat apart. His button-nose cherry red, Rob held a box of Kleenex and two large Lowney’s Nut Milk chocolate bars on his lap. The Logans were casually dressed, but Barney Gursky was even more fashionably turned out than his dishy girlfriend—Ralph Lauren polo shirt and dungarees and Tony Lama boots. Summoning the bartender with a flick of his manicured fingers, he asked Moses, “What can I offer you to drink?”

“A soda water, please.”

“Shucks, I think we got us a teetotaller, Larry. Bring this admirable fella a soda and the former Miss Sunset Beach here,” Barney said, indicating Darlene, “will have a vodka on the rocks, but just one before dinner. She’s watching her calorie intake.” The Logans were from Chapel Hill, Barney said, furniture manufacturers, very big, and Barney’s investment group was backing them in a venture that was willing to bet some twenty million plus on a Canadian plant. “And, hey, the fishing’s going to be just great, because Jimbo here won’t be holding us to the legal limit of two measly salmon a day, will you, boy?”

“We can’t do anything illegal, sir.”

“Now isn’t that nice,” Mary Lou said, “really nice. Jim here must have been told that we’re very important VIPs, but he won’t bend the law none for us. I respect that. Where do you hail from, Moe?”

“He doesn’t like being called Moe for short,” Darlene said, wandering in narrowing circles, closer and closer to the bar.

“Forget it, baby.”

“Holy Toledo, I was just going to put my glass down.”

“Montreal.”

“We stayed at the Le Château Champlain there,” Mary Lou said.

No sooner did Moses begin to unwrap a Monte Cristo than Rob leaped up and pointed a fat trembling finger at him.

“If you intend lighting that thing,” Mary Lou said, “you’ll have to step outside pronto.”

Jim Boyd, tying a fly at the corner table, pricked his finger on a hook.

“And what,” Barney asked, “would be your chosen field of endeavour, Moe?”

“He likes to be called Moses. He must think we’re simply dreadful.”

“These days you could say I don’t do much of anything.”

“Well, something tells me the former runner-up to Miss Flowering Dogwood has taken a shine to you, Berger.”

“Oh boy,” Darlene said, “here we go round the blueberry bush again.”

“Mulberry.”

Dinner at Vince’s Gulch was usually something to be endured. Steak fried grey to the core served with potatoes boiled past the crumbling point, followed by “homemade” apple pie from Delaney’s General Store, usually still frozen solid in the middle. But tonight a chef had been brought in from the Tudor Room of the Queen Victoria Hotel in Chatham. There was sweet corn and boiled lobster. Barney reached over to relieve Darlene of her corn—“More cellulite would be a real turn-off, baby”—and then called for another Scotch. Larry leaned forward so that Mary Lou could knot the napkin behind his neck. “Mercy bowcoop, Mummy.” And Rob lunged for the bread basket, stacking four hunks at his place, then swooping on the butter dish, appropriating it. He gathered his plate in, leaving his plump arm curled on the table, sheltering what was his by right. Lowering his head as if to charge, he decimated his first corn cob and started in to strip the next one.

Jim explained that at Vince’s Gulch the guides went out in the morning and again in the evening. There was no fishing in the afternoon. Everybody, he said, gets one turn at all the different pools during their three-day stay. He threw little twisted pieces of paper with the guides’ names on them into a hat and asked everybody to draw one. Barney, who went first, drew young Armand. Larry got Len, or Motor-Mouth, as he was known on the river, and Rob drew Gilles.

“Well then,” Jim said, “I guess that leaves me and Mr. Berger.”

“He’ll have the edge going out with the head guide, won’t he, boy?”

“We don’t call Jim or anybody else around here ‘boy’. Furthermore, it is not a competition.”

Barney accepted a large cognac and swished it around in his snifter. “I know you don’t drink, Berger, but are you a gambling man?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“You, me, and Larry here each write out a cheque for a thou and tack it to the bar. Come Thursday top rod takes the pot.”

“I’m an old hand, Barney. It’s more difficult than you think.”

“He’s been fly-fishing for years,” Darlene said.

“Okay. We’ve got a bet.”

Thick unyielding clouds lay overhead as the Logans waddled down the dirt track to the river laden with bug sprays and cameras and expensive-looking movie equipment. Rob lugged a portable radio and his Kleenex and a big bag of candy. Barney carried a bottle of cognac. As Darlene raised a long slender leg to sidestep off the little floating dock into their long canoe—Armand reaching out to help, his eyes on her panting bosom—Barney immediately knocked her off balance with a proprietorial whack on her bottom. “Oh, man, do I ever go for those buns!”

Allowing everybody else a head start, Moses lighted a Monte Cristo and settled into his canoe with Jim.

“What can I say, Moses?”

“Don’t come this week is what you could have said.”

Over the hum of the outboards, The Rolling Stones began to ricochet off the river walls, scattering the crows. Fortunately Rob was heading a good mile downriver to the Bar Pool.

Once Jim had anchored at their first drop, out of sight of the others, Moses started out with a Silver Doctor, went to a Green Highlander and then a Muddler without getting anything to rise. Things were no better on the second drop. On the third drop they saw a big salmon roll and another leap, maybe thirty feet out. Moses laid every fly he could think of over their heads, but they weren’t taking. Then there came a hollering and a squealing from the Fence Pool. “It’s probably only a grilse they got,” Jim said.

A half hour passed and then the deer flies came out and it began to drizzle. Covering the far fast water, stripping his line quickly, Moses got his strike. A big fish, maybe thirty pounds, taking so hard Moses didn’t even have to set the hook, his rod already bent double. Immediately the line screeched and the fish shot downriver, taking most of Moses’s backing before it paused and he started to reel in the slack. Jim lifted anchor and began to paddle gently toward shore, his net within reach. The fish came close enough to look at the canoe and raced downriver again, breaking water about fifty feet out. Flipping in the air. Dancing on its tail.

“Hey there, Moses. Hey there.”

The fish struck for the bottom and Moses imagined it down there, outraged, rubbing its throbbing jaw against the gravel, trying to dislodge the hook. It couldn’t, obviously, so it gave in to bad temper, flying out of the boiling water once more, shaking its angry head, diving, then resting deep, maybe pondering tactics. After Moses had played the fish for another twenty minutes, he heard and then saw the others in their canoes returning from their pools. Approaching Vince’s Hole, Gilles and Len both cut their outboards back sharply, as courtesy required, but not Armand, whom Barney had instructed to actually accelerate into the opposite bank before killing his engine. Frank Zappa bounced over the water at God knows how many decibels. Cursing, Moses reeled the fish in close. It was lying on its side on the surface now, panting desperately, but good for one more run. Moses vacillated only briefly before leading the exhausted fish toward the net. And that’s when Mary Lou stood up to take pictures, her flash attachment exploding again and again. Distracted, Moses didn’t notice his line tangling round the butt of his rod. The fish bolted, running his line taut and jerking free of the hook. Moses’s rod sprung upright, his line going slack.

“Well now,” Barney said, “like the old hands say: it’s more difficult than you think.”

Back in camp, Moses was told soon enough that Barney had killed two salmon, a total of twenty-four pounds, Larry had landed a five pound grilse, and Rob had lost a fish.

As the bartender had gone home it was an exuberant Barney who served the drinks, allowing Darlene another vodka and asking Moses whether he would like his soda straight up or on the rocks. Har, har, har. Moses, pleading fatigue, allowed that he would have just one and then retire to his room to read in bed.

“Didn’t I tell ya, Mary Lou? Moses is a real highbrow.”

“Well, I’ve read a whole stack of novels myself this year, both fiction and non-fiction. I never bother with TV.”

“In my humble opinion,” Darlene said, “TV is just one big waste of time. I only watch PBS.”

“Yeah,” Barney said. “‘Sesame Street.’”

Rob shook with laughter, retrieving a trail of snot from his upper lip with a lizard-like dart of his tongue.

“I’m going to turn in now,” a tearful Darlene said. “Will you be long, Barney?”

“I won’t be long here, but I sure will when I get there. So there’ll be no call for you to unpack your vibrator tonight, baby.”

The telephone rang, Barney scooping it up before Jim could reach it. “It’s for you, Moe.”

Jim rubbed his hands against his trousers. “You can take it in the kitchen,” he said.

It was London on the line.

“Lucy, is that you?”

“Yes,” a thick voice came crackling back.

It was, Moses reckoned, three o’clock in the morning in London. “What’s all that racket in the background?”

“I’m moving.”

“At this hour?”

“You’re such a nag, Moses.”

“Why are you slurring your words?”

“It’s my jaw. It’s still swollen. The dentist yesterday. Oh, you and Henry are both going to be sent some photographs. I don’t want either of you to open the envelopes. You are to put them right in the fire. Do you understand?”

“Are you in trouble again, Lucy?”

“Will you please do as I ask for once and not bother me with any stupid questions.”

“I will throw the envelope in the fire without opening it. Have you spoken to Henry yet?”

“Obviously you are more worried about him than you are about me.”

“There’s a delicate sensibility at play there.”

“But not here?”

“No.”

“You think I’m disgusting?”

“Yes,” Moses said, hanging up. Then he dug a couple of pills out of his pocket and swallowed them without water.

Approaching the bedroom lodge some fifteen minutes later, Moses saw moths dancing in the cone of light coming from Darlene’s bedroom. Darlene was waiting on her side of the screen door, wearing a Four Seasons Hotel towel robe belted loosely over a wispy black negligee with a red lace trim. “You’re not a teetotaller,” she said. “You had to give it up, but you continue to nurse some secret sorrow. My daddy was a boozer too.”

Moses laughed, delighted with her. Darlene was sucking on a joint. Opening the screen door, she handed it to him. Moses inhaled deeply before passing it back, not letting go of her hand, but drawing her close and whispering a suggestion to her.

“Why, Moses Berger, you are a simply dreadful man,” she said, all twinkly. “But if he sees your car gone as well he’ll figure it out and go absolutely apeshit.”

The banging screen door of the dining-room lodge warned them of Barney’s unsteady approach. Darlene thrust the joint at Moses, hastily adjusting her towel robe, and then began to spray her bedroom with deodorant. Retreating to his own room, Moses collapsed on his bed, gratified that he was still capable of mindless lust. Then the bickering flared in the next room, Darlene declaring with some vehemence, “I’m not getting up to brush my teeth and rinse out again. If that’s what you want go find yourself a whore.”

Moses quit his room and headed for the dirt road to walk off his rage. He made it as far as the turnoff for Kedgewick before he started back. Once in camp again, he didn’t return directly to his room. Instead he slipped into the dining room and dialled Clarkson’s number in Montreal. Clarkson, he knew, was in Toronto. Beatrice answered on the seventh ring.

“I’m at Vince’s Gulch.”

“Moses, it’s one A.M.” She sighed. “Did Jim ask after me?”

“Possibly he hasn’t inquired because he has yet to catch me alone.”

“You mean to say you’re with somebody up there? It was our place.”

“Get into your cat and drive straight out here. You should make it by morning.”

“Don’t humiliate yourself, Moses.”

Stung, he didn’t speak again until he could trust his voice. Then he said, “What in God’s name can you see in him?”

“Solomon Gursky isn’t his obsession. I am. Oh, and this will amuse you. He thinks I’m intelligent.”

“Beatrice, he’s going to bore you.”

“I’ve had quite enough of not being bored. What you call boring would be refreshing. At least if he goes out to fetch a pack of cigarettes at ten P.M., I can count on his not being gone for a week or ten days without a word, me going out of my mind, and then you phoning to say I’m in Paris or back in the clinic again. Is it somebody I know?”

“What are you talking about?”

“With you there.”

“Yes. It’s somebody you know. Why not somebody you know?” he asked, slamming down the receiver.

Barney was waiting in the bar, a glass half-filled with cognac to hand, his eyes shiny and unfocused. “Pussy trouble?” he asked.

“Good-night, Barney.”

“A word of advice, buddy boy. You never should have let your hair go grey like that. Have it dyed. We’ve been together two years and she still doesn’t know my real age. I keep my passport hidden.”

“Did you see your father when you were in Montreal?”

“Take my advice and have it dyed. Pump iron. Look at you. Shit.”

EVERYBODY WAS AT BREAKFAST by the time Moses got there.

“Well,” a red-eyed Barney said, mopping up the eggs on his plate and shoving back his chair, “I’m for an early start, baby.”

“I’m not going out with you this morning. It’s going to be buggy as hell out there and I don’t want to pick any more hooks out of my sweater.”

“You worry too much about your tits springing a leak.”

“Maybe there are some folks who don’t know yet. Why don’t you put an ad in the newspapers or on TV?”

Mary Lou flung her napkin down on the table. “Come with me, Rob.”

“My eggs weren’t turned over easy like I asked,” Rob said. “I’m bitten everywhere.” He banged his radio down on the table. “And something’s wrong with my Sony. I told you we shoulda bought a Sanyo.”

“There are fresh batteries in the car,” Larry said.

“It’s not the batteries. It doesn’t work. It’s fucken broke. Shit. My asthma. I shouldn’t get excited.”

“There’s a Radio Shack in Campbellton that would probably fix it,” Moses said. “It’s not such a long drive.”

Rob lost another fish in the rain that morning. Larry didn’t bring back anything and Barney, who had to settle for what looked like a nine-pound fish but weighed in at eleven, waited impatiently at the dock to see how Moses had made out. But when Jim motored into camp he was alone in his canoe. Moses, he explained, had been invited to lunch with an old chum, Dan Gainey, at the Cedar Lodge; and then he held up a twenty-six-pound salmon for Barney to admire. Which was when Darlene came skittering down the hill to join them. “I need the car keys,” she said.

Barney grabbed her by the buttocks, driving her against him. “I know what you need, but I could do with something to eat first.”

“While you’re having your nap I’m going to drive into Campbellton and get Rob’s radio fixed.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, tossing her the keys, which were weighed down by a heavy brass disc bearing the initials B.G.

WHEN HE UNDRESSED HER Moses had no doubt that he would find a little cord with a catch on the end dangling from her back. He would yank it and she would blink her eyelashes and chirp, “What’s up, doc?” Meanwhile he settled in to wait for her in the dark of the Marie Antoinette Room of the Auberge des Voyageurs in Campbellton. Three sodden Micmacs, seated at the bar, were watching a wrestling match on TV. An hour passed. Moses was about to give up when Darlene flew into the room, arms fluttering, eyes signalling fire and flood and emergency exits, her full petulant mouth forming a huge startled O. “Surprise, surprise,” she shrieked. “You’ll never guess who’s here, MARY LOU!!”

Mary Lou, stumbling in the unaccustomed dark, couldn’t even find Darlene at first. Squinting, she finally got her bearings. “Why if it isn’t the highbrow,” she said.

“What a COINCIDENCE!” Darlene pleaded, eyes darting from one to another, settling on Moses. “She needs the powder room right now.”

Moses indicated the door marked COURTESANS and Mary Lou toddled off obediently. Darlene’s explanation came in a rush. “He took the car keys with him this morning I could have died. When he got back, it seemed like CENTURIES. I said I would drive here to get Rob’s radio fixed and she insisted on coming along. But she won’t tattle on us. Mary Lou and I belong to the same coven. In a previous incarnation she was my son and in ancient times, when I was king of Egypt she was my queen.”

“Obviously you’ve been through a lot together.”

“I’ll say. But what are we going to do now?”

“There’s a bottle of vodka sitting in an ice bucket in the room I rented for the afternoon here.”

“Oh, you are such a dreadful man!” She offered him a quick hug. “But I couldn’t go that far now. I’m too scared. Mary Lou is very sensitive ever since her first husband, blessed be, was lost in the mail.”

Moses doubted that he had heard right.

“It was a very severe blow at that point in time. She should have sued the post office for plenty is what I told her. Some Christmas. All the family was gathered together but it just wasn’t the same opening the presents without Lyndon there.”

“How was he lost in the mail?”

“Cheezit,” she hissed, bashing his ankle under the table hard enough to make him wince.

Mary Lou settled into her chair, shed her glasses, and stared at Moses with big blue eyes as blank as Orphan Annie’s. “I can tell that you are a very well educated man just by looking into your third eye. If you ask me,” she said, her mouth puckered with suspicion, “your wife is a very lucky lady.”

“Actually, I’m not married.”

Making his excuses, Moses directed them to the Radio Shack. He retrieved Gainey’s Ford pickup and returned to the cabin on the river where Gainey kept watch over the Shaunnessy pools. Then he canoed back to Vince’s Gulch. Jim, standing on the shore, greeted him with a perfunctory nod. “What in the hell can you see in her, Moses?”

“She makes me laugh. Never underestimate that.”

Entering the dining lodge in search of a coffee, Moses found that Barney and Larry were being entertained by a deputy of New Brunswick’s minister of trade, an obsequious young man wearing a tartan jacket and canary yellow Bermuda shorts. The deputy had come equipped with information on local land and labour costs. Larry, taking notes on a legal pad, needed to know what kind of sweetener they could expect investment- and tax-wise from the provincial government. The deputy assured them they could expect New Brunswick to be generous, but he was not authorized to talk numbers. Barney didn’t like that. “The trouble with you Canadians,” he said, “is that you’re always sitting on the fence. Look at it this way, buddy boy, you can’t catch a dose pulling your meat, but it sure as hell ain’t as much fun as pussy.”

“I will certainly advise the minister of your feelings,” the deputy said, and then he reminded them that a lot of important people were waiting to meet them at the country club, but if they didn’t leave soon they wouldn’t be back in time to fish.

Barney called for another Scotch. “We’re waiting for the future Mrs. Middle-Aged Spread to get here.”

But when Mary Lou led Darlene into the dining lodge she was obviously in no condition to go anywhere. “I think I’d better lie down,” she said.

“Shit.”

“Shall we be off, then?” the deputy asked.

Barney looked hard at Moses sipping coffee in a far corner of the room.

“I promise to get you back by six, sir.”

Moses retreated to his room, aching for a nap, but no sooner did the cars pull out than he was startled by a rhythmic tapping on his wall. “Boo,” Darlene said.

She was waiting on the porch when he got there. All twinkly again, she drove him back into his room, thrusting against him. A perplexed Moses was weighing the two hundred jobs at possible risk against his so-far frustrated lust when the screen door banged open behind them. Rob, munching on a Lowney’s Nut Milk, asked, “Were you at least able to get it fixed?”

“The man said you must have banged it real hard against something because the innards are all fucked up, pardon my French, and he couldn’t do anything with it.”

“Uncle Barney said that you were feeling poorly and that I should stay with you in your room until he got back, in case you had to vomit or something.”

After they had gone, Moses opted for the public school boy’s remedy, a cold shower, and then he decided not to join the others for dinner. Instead he ate a cold roast beef sandwich in the kitchen with the grizzly Motor-Mouth. Motor-Mouth’s wife ran a florist’s shop that they both owned in Campbellton. “Having a good summer?” Moses asked.

“Terrific. We’re averaging three funerals a week.”

Short-tempered, his casting jerky, Moses lost a big fish in the Bar Pool and never got another strike. Barney came back with a fish that looked to be no more than ten pounds, but—according to young Armand—it had weighed in at twelve.

Moses retired early, but he was too restless to sleep. So he slipped into his clothes, went down to look at the water, and then climbed to the dining lodge to see if there was a Perrier in the refrigerator. Barney was standing at the bar. Drunk again.

“I’m developing a property for Warners. Dustin’s crazy for it, but I’m thinking Redford and Fonda. It’s a baseball story, the greatest ever told. I’ve got to keep it under wraps, but let me describe the big scene to you. Redford’s a pitcher, see, the greatest southpaw since Koufax. Only he can no longer throw red hot. He’s got arm trouble. Each time he’s gone to the mound this season the other teams have shelled him. So the manager, played by Walter Matthau, has benched him. Now we are into the deciding game of the World Series and the team’s young hotshot, Al Pacino, has been throwing and he is suddenly in trouble. His team is leading 7–4, but it’s the bottom of the ninth, the bad guys have the bases loaded, and up to the plate steps this big buck, a Reggie Jackson type, who can murder southpaws even when they’re at their best. What does Matthau do? He takes the ball away from Pacino and turns to the bullpen indicating his left arm. The crowd begins to murmur. No, no. Is he crazy? He’s bringing in Redford. Redford takes his warm-up pitches and then Reggie steps into the box. Tension? You can cut it with a knife. Reggie spits and Redford just grins at him. He rears back and pitches. Ball one. Reggie steps out of the box, looks at the third-base coach and steps in again. The catcher gives Redford a signal and he shakes it off. He throws. Ball two. The crowd is roaring. They are cursing Matthau. The windup. The pitch. Holy shit, it’s ball three! The fans are going bananas because they know Redford just has to throw a strike now. He’s won maybe two hundred games for them over the years and now some of those bastards are booing him. Cut to the stands, where Jane Fonda is weeping. She’s eight months pregnant, but the kid isn’t even his. It’s Reggie’s, which will be very controversial as well as give the picture a redeeming social value. Cut to Reggie at the plate. Imitating Babe Ruth, that cocky jigaboo points at the flagpole out there. He’s going to hit a dinger. Cut to Redford’s baby-blues and they say you fucked my wife. Now it comes. This is it. The catcher trots out to the plate and hands Redford another glove and Redford puts it on his left hand. The fucker has been practising a secret pitch for just such a spot as this. HE’S AMBIDEXTROUS! A SWITCH-PITCHER! THE FIRST IN THE HISTORY OF OUR NATIONAL PASTIME SINCE ABNER DOUBLEDAY INVENTED IT! But can he deliver? Sixty thousand fans in the stadium and you can hear a pin drop. Redford rears back. He throws. STEE-RIKE! Reggie calls time out and asks for another bat. A lot of good it will do him. STEE-RIKERINOO NUMBAH TWO! Reggie asks to see the ball. Catcalls. Boos. Laughter. He steps back into the box and this time he’s swinging for downtown you bet, but he’s out of there. STEE-RIKE-OLA NUMBAH THREE! Game over.” Barney, who had been acting out all the parts, slumped exhausted at the bar and poured himself another drink. “I’m going to call it The Big Switcheroo.”

“How old were you when Solomon’s plane went down?”

“Old enough to know that it was mighty convenient for somebody.” Barney stretched. He yawned.

“You know, Berger, I’ve got you figured out. Lionel sent you down here after he found out I was coming. You’re a paid snoop.”

“Good-night, Barney.”

But Barney followed him out on to the porch. “Hold on a minute. It’s copyrighted.”

“What?”

“The Big Switcheroo. And remember what I said. Have it dyed.”

Moses took his pill and slipped into bed. He didn’t hear Barney come in. Neither did he appreciate how deeply he must have slept until a subdued Darlene turned up for breakfast. The last to appear, her eyes were puffy and her lower lip swollen.

“See you later,” Barney said, “I’ve got to go and catch me a big fish.”

Outside Moses ran into Jim. “A Mr. Harvey Schwartz has called three times from Montreal. He knows that you’re here and he says that it’s urgent.”

There was not a cloud in the sky and the sun had already burnt the mist off the winding river when Jim anchored at their first drop on the Cross Point Pool.

Moses took a grilse and a big fish before noon. While Jim went to weigh them, he slipped away to have a few words with Darlene.

At lunch Jim reported that Moses had taken a five-pound grilse and a twenty-four-pound salmon. Barney had only managed to kill a small fish that weighed in at nine pounds. Rob took his first fish and Larry never got a strike. So Moses was now top rod, if only just. “Yeah,” Barney said, “but he’s shot his legal wad for today and I intend to take a whopper tonight.”

Moses didn’t turn up for dinner.

“Where’s the old hand?” Barney asked.

“Like you said, he’s not allowed to fish any more. I lent him my canoe so he could visit with Gainey downriver.”

“Well, let’s hope his cheque is good.”

Moses waited on the road, exactly where he had promised, and as soon as Darlene spotted him she slowed down, pulling up and letting him take the driver’s seat.

“How was he lost in the mail?” he asked, immediately.

“Oh, him. Holy Toledo!” Lyndon had been killed in a hunting accident in Vermont and Mary Lou arranged to have him cremated, the skull left intact so that it could sit on the mantelpiece each holiday season. “If only for little Rob’s sake,” she said. “But he was lost in the mail. The undertaker man swore up and down that he had sent him off in a box they had made especially because of how the bones stuck out of regulation size. Some of them didn’t crumble in the fire. He was a Baptist, you know.” A tear slid down her cheek. “Mary Lou wrote to the postmaster-general in Washington and phoned our congressman I don’t know how many times, but to this point in time nobody could ever find him. So poor old Lyndon is lying in some damp ratty post office basement somewhere, unclaimed after all these years because of insufficient postage or some shit like that.”

Moses turned the Mercedes on to a narrow bumpy track and eased it down a steep incline, tucking it among the trees where it could not be seen from either the road or the river. Then he led Darlene to where he had laid out the quilted blanket.

“Oh, you’re such a dreadful man,” she squealed, setting down her camera.

Moses lifted the vodka bottle out of the ice bucket, dipped in for some ice cubes, and poured her a long one. He sat down and watched enviously, his heart aching, as she gulped it. Then she contrived to tumble into his lap, the glass rolling away, her drink spilling on the blanket. He was still mourning the lost liquor as she squirmed out of her jeans and he slid her jersey over her head. He began to fondle and kiss her breasts.

“Oh boy, do I ever go for that,” she said, swaying from side to side, her pentangle clipping him in the nose as she jiggled her breasts and cooed, “You never guessed, didja?”

“How Lyndon was lost in the mail?”

“Nooo! How I had them made as a fortieth-birthday surprise for Barney.”

“Your breasts?”

“They’re implants, you silly.”

A troubled Moses retreated from her, unwrapped a Monte Cristo and lighted it with a shaky hand. “Did he pick the size?”

“He didn’t exactly, but hint hint, he did show me pictures from magazines of the kind of tits that turned him on. I’m such an airhead. Nothing could happen. I knew that, the doctor assured me, but for the first few months I wouldn’t let anybody squeeze too hard and I didn’t dare sit close to the fireplace at the ski lodge, because I was scared they might—Well, you know. The heat.”

Moses inhaled deeply, wishing that he were somewhere else, somewhere alone. Sensing that he had begun to drift, a pouting Darlene got him out of his shirt and began to probe between his legs, fishing for him. “There isn’t a manual I haven’t read,” she said. “Talk as dirty as you want. Order me to do things.”

She bit his ear. Moses yelped and bit right back.

“Hey, there! Hold your horses. Woa!” she said, thrusting him from her with surprising strength.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s my fault. I shoulda told you right off that there’s to be no scratching or biting or even hard pinching, honey, because he checks me out for bruises every night.” She had him out of his trousers now, but stopped abruptly short of descending on him, her face clouding. “How many times can you come at your age, honey? I should know that before I risk spoiling any multiples for me.”

Possibly, he thought, back in Chapel Hill, where they were very big in furniture, she did door-to-door surveys.

“Are you still there?” Reaching down to root out his testicles, she discovered, to her consternation, that he only had one. “Holy Toledo,” she said, a shopper short-changed.

“What did you expect? A cluster?”

“FAR OUT!” she exclaimed, running her tongue from his groin to his throat like he was an envelope to be sealed.

But now her camera had become painfully lodged in his back. Moses pried it free. “What did you bring this for?” he asked, holding it up.

“Silly. I brought it along because I thought you’d surely want to take some pussy pictures for a souvenir to remember me by. Look!”

Leaping up, she turned her back to him and bent over to clasp her knees, ass riding high, and then she hooked one finger through her black bikini panties, tugging at them. Shifting to an upright position, her back still turned to him, she shot him an over-the-shoulder naughty wink, licked her lips and then popped her thumb into her mouth, fellating it. He was reminded of the Goldberg Brothers Auto Parts calendar stapled to the wall in the Texaco station on Laurier Street. Unable to help himself, Moses shook with appreciative laughter. “Oh, Darlene, you are perfection. Honestly.”

“Then why aren’t you snapping any pictures?” She struck another Playmate pose, this one obliging her to at least partially dress. “Go ahead and shoot the whole roll, but please remember to take it with you.”

Only then did she notice that he was also dressed.

For her, he hoped, it would not be passion frustrated or, God help us, unrequited love so much as gym class cancelled for today.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” she said, “our being, well you know, platonic friends … but I did think we had come here to fuck our brains out and I never did it with a real highbrow before.”

“Maybe we should start thinking about getting back.”

“Not yet. Jim Boyd says you can make a salmon dance on its tail. Show me,” she said, her eyes taunting. “Show me.”

“Okay, but it will be strictly catch-and-release.”

“Like me,” she said, startling him.

He led her down the steep embankment to where he had beached Gainey’s canoe on the edge of one of the Shaunnessy pools.

“If Barney comes by now and sees us together,” she said, “he’ll beat the shit out of both of us.”

“He’s on the other side of the camp way upriver.”

“Lucky for you.”

Lifting Gainey’s rod out of the canoe, he took his anger out on his casting, whipping the line harder than was necessary, straining for the far shore before he even covered the near water. Within minutes he had hooked a big one, but it didn’t bolt downriver or break water. Instead it made for the bottom and sat there. Moses tightened his line, jiggling his rod, sweeping it to the right and then to the left.

“Can’t you finish anything you begin?”

“It’s a sulker. Hand me your car keys.”

“What are you going to do?”

He fed the key ring with the heavy brass disc on to his line. “Bop him over the head.”

“But what about THE KEYS?” she asked, wide-eyed, as they shot down the line.

“There’s nothing to worry about.” He would retrieve them as he released the fish in shallow water near the shore. “Hey, there he goes.”

His line screeched. About sixty feet out the silvery, sea-bright salmon came thrashing out of the water, sailing high. Twisting, flapping. It snapped the leader. The keys, flying free, caught a glint of the failing sun before they plopped into deep water and disappeared. “I’m afraid we’ve got something of a problem now,” Moses said, reeling in.

“A problem? Holy Toledo! Ass-hole! I don’t believe it. This isn’t happening to me. It’s a dream. You know what Barney’s going to do? He’s going to kill me and then he’s going to cancel all my credit cards again.”

“But not necessarily in that order.”

“If I were you right now I wouldn’t be coming on smart-ass. I’d be hoping I was covered by Blue Cross. And how!”

“Right now I’m not worried about me. It’s Jim I’m worried about.” He would never forgive him. “The two hundred jobs. The furniture factory.”

“You’re not only crazy but for a highbrow you sure take the airhead prize.” She explained. “How about that, Moe?”

Moses didn’t answer immediately. Instead he slowly unwrapped a Monte Cristo, bit off the tip, and smiled at her. “I’m going to tell you exactly what to do.”

BARNEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN JUBILANT. He was top rod. The salmon he had caught, while it was certainly not a whopper, had been sufficient to allow him to tip the scales five pounds better than Moses. But only the Logans and the guides were there to witness Barney’s triumph at the weigh-in outside the ice-house, and Jim seemed somewhat troubled by it. Barney was not surprised that Moses, obviously a sore loser, had yet to return from wherever he was visiting, but he was beginning to worry about his car. He had forgotten that Miss Calculation still had the keys. She never should have driven off without his permission.

“Maybe somebody ought to go out and look for her,” Mary Lou said.

Rob cleared his nose of snot with one wipe of his sleeve. “Daddy’s smoking,” he said.

Larry ground his cigarette into the gravel with his heel. “Where would we look?” he asked.

“The nearest pit stop is where,” Barney said. “She drives back here drunk she could slam into a tree. You know what that car cost me?”

Larry passed Barney his flask. His eyes burned bright. “I think she’s with Berger somewhere.”

“You’re crazy, Larry.”

“That’s exactly what you said the last time.”

“Okay, okay, let’s go. We’ll take your car.”

JIM WAS WAITING on the shore when Moses came in to beach the canoe. “How could you do this to me, Moses?”

“Hasn’t she come back yet?”

“You better believe it. With some cock-and-bull story too.”

“What did she say?”

“She went out for a drive and parked on the Kedgewick road, leaving the keys in the ignition, and walked down to the river to snap some pictures of the sunset. When she got back some no-good Micmacs had made off with her ear. Goddamn it, Moses, I hope you enjoyed yourself, because this could cost me my job and maybe two hundred other jobs for the people around here.”

“There weren’t going to be any jobs. They had no intention of building a factory here or in Ontario, but it got them a free fishing trip with all the trimmings. Last year they pulled off the same scam in Mexico and went bone fishing for a week without it costing them a dime. Where are they now?”

“Fat boy and his mommy are in the lodge and the men are out looking for the car. Darlene’s with them.”

“They’ll run into Gainey on the road and he’ll show them where it was abandoned by those no-good Micmacs who took it for a joyride. However, there is a problem. No keys. Barney will have to jump the wires.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you. He’s top rod. The son of a bitch weighed in some five pounds better than you did.”

“Shall we check it out?”

“Damn right.”

So they slipped into the ice-house where Barney’s catch lay in a row on last winter’s shrinking snows, and Jim knelt to probe their bellies one by one. “I’m going to have to fire Armand,” he said.

Then the cars rolled back into camp, the Cadillac followed by the Mercedes. Darlene jumped out, not looking right or left, but running to her bedroom, pursued by Barney.

“Is he going to beat up on her?” Jim asked.

“Just check her out for bruises.”

Mary Lou had poured herself a beer in the dining lodge. “They didn’t steal anything or do any damage. Even Barney’s camera was still on the front seat. Isn’t that nice?”

Moses was drawn to the radio. The late news. Watergate again. The tape that had been mysteriously erased. General Haig, speaking at a press conference, suggested that there was a sinister influence at work in the White House. Moses was still pondering that, dismissing his initial gut reaction as crazy—well, at best unlikely—when Barney came striding into the lodge. “The best man won,” he said, “or haven’t you heard?”

“Congratulations.”

“Fuck you too,” Barney said, and when the telephone rang he lunged for it. “Yeah, right. Sure he’s here. He’s been here for days. It’s for you, Moe. Your boss wants you to file a report on me. Boy, did I ever have you figured.”

Moses took the call in the kitchen.

“Moses, this is Harvey Schwartz. Mr. Bernard has died. No matter what you think, he was a great human being. I say that not because of my unique relationship with the family but from the heart.” Harvey told him what had happened. The raven, the harpoon. “In your opinion could this have been Henry’s doing?”

“Henry wouldn’t besmirch himself doing such a thing.”

“If it wasn’t Henry, who was it, then?”

“Henry would quote Ben Sira to you. ‘Seek not things that are too hard for thee, and search not things that are hidden from thee.’ Was there a ‘gimel’ carved into the harpoon?”

“Yes. Now tell me why anybody would commit such an obscene act?”

“You wouldn’t understand, Harvey,” he said, hanging up. Then, his heart thudding, Moses went to pack. The ravens gathering. A sinister influence at work in the White House. A “gimel”. I’m crazy, Moses thought. But he had already decided to fly to Washington. What else could he do?

The next morning Jim and Moses stood by the dining-lodge window, sipping coffee, as they watched Barney pose for picture after picture with his catch.

“He belongs to some kind of sportsman’s club back in Chapel Hill,” Jim said, “they meet once a month, and when he gets back he shows them his slides. This time he’s going to boast about how he came out here, fishing salmon for the first time, and came out top rod. The least you could do is cancel your cheque.”

Moses left Vince’s Gulch after breakfast, stopping at the post office in Campbellton to mail a small box to Chapel Hill.

“You’ll have to fill out a customs declaration,” the clerk said, taking the box. “Hey, this is awful heavy.”

“It should weigh exactly five pounds.”

“What’s in it?”

“Pebbles.”

“Pebbles?”

“Pebbles.”

Four

Harvey, an insomniac, could sleep comfortably these days, knowing it was not a total waste of time. Even while he drifted off, ostensibly an idling engine, his stocks were working in overdrive for him. His burgeoning shares in Acorn and Jewel. His fattening private portfolio.

Harvey’s day started out like a bell-ringer. Becky didn’t make one rude remark to him at breakfast. Picking up the front section of the Gazette at the table, he saw that it was Watergate, Watergate, Watergate everywhere. Harvey, as usual, waited until he got to the office to read the sports section. Bad omen. Turning to the box scores, he was brought up short by an item on the opposite page:

Miss Ingersoll buzzed to say Lionel Gursky was on the line from New York.

“My father’s only been in his grave for a week,” Lionel said, “and it’s started again.”

“Not necessarily.”

“I’m talking millions of dollars in shares, all of which were acquired in Montreal this time, through Clarkson, Frost & McKay. Isn’t Tom Clarkson a neighbour of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’d just better find out who his client is and what he’s after and call me back.”

Harvey had now been rooted in his house high in Westmount long enough for him to have grown familiar with his street. Its rhythms, its moods. Eight o’clock every morning, rain or snow, as his chauffeur backed his Mercedes out of his garage, the Jamaican Clean-Up Brigade, eyes swollen with sleep, began to lumber resentfully up the hill. One sullen, parcel-laden cleaning lady following another. And if Harvey was early starting out for the office he was bound to run into the Italian gardeners, a ferocious swarm, blasting compulsively on the horns of their pickup trucks as they swooped from house to house, ploughing the driveways clear of snow in winter and laying in beds of impatiens and petunias in summer, bellowing each to each, no matter what the hour, over the roar of their power mowers or snowblowers.

Further down the street was that most esteemed of Belvedere residents, Tom Clarkson, with his second wife, his surprising bride of a month, a girl called Beatrice. Tom was tall and thin, almost delicate, with sandy hair and piercing blue eyes. He had about him the manner of a man who would have been disappointed rather than angry with a maître d’ who didn’t show him to the best table. He served on symphony and museum boards because it was clearly his duty. He was also a collector: jade, nineteenth-century porcelain.

Tonight Tom Clarkson had a problem. Over the past three days Tom hadn’t returned four phone calls from Lionel Gursky’s office and now Harvey, the family’s pet cobra, was coming to the house, having been impulsively invited to the party by Beatrice. Mind you, she hadn’t had much choice in the matter. On Monday she ran into him at Dionne’s, Harvey introducing himself, explaining they were neighbours now. “I’ll bet you’re an Expo fan. Any time you want to use my box, just let me know.”

Tuesday she met Honor Parkman for drinks at the Ritz and when she called for the bill she found that it had already been paid, which baffled her until Harvey leaped up from another table and waved frantically.

Out to walk the corgi on Wednesday, Beatrice found Harvey lying in wait. “You’re going to have to cope with a lot of cars on Friday night. I know. We entertain a lot too. In fact, as soon as you’re settled in you and Tom simply must come to dinner.”

“Thank you.”

“Anyway I just wanted you to know you can direct as many cars as you like into our driveway. We won’t be going out Friday night, so it doesn’t matter if they block the garage entry.”

Beatrice, of whom Tom’s old friends knew distressingly little, was considerably younger than he was. One night when the Clarksons’ Volvo had broken down on Champlain Bridge, she astonished everybody by leaping out in spite of Tom’s protests, diving under the hood, calling for a rag and a wrench and setting things right. Laura Whitson had once seen her striding down Sherbrooke Street biting into an apple. Betty Kerr, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, felt that she was somehow too experienced for her age. There was something about her, a suggestion that she hadn’t been bred but had scratched to reach her present position, that made the other wives uneasy if not yet censorious. It didn’t help that they were unable to place her, not having been to school with her. Or that their husbands, once having been introduced, gratuitously protested that they found her a tich vulgar, but couldn’t they have her to dinner next week, if only for good old Tom’s sake.

Her freshly styled bouffant hairdo towering over her like a lacquered black helmet, her fingers swollen with rings heavy as knuckle-dusters, Becky wiggled into a shimmering silvery sheath especially acquired for the party.

The Clarkson living room was filled with chattering strangers, the sort on whom it only rained capital gains. The men, float of stomach, exuding confidence, their wives languorous, fetching, understated in clothes and manner, easy with each other, but quick to sniff out an intruding outsider. Tom greeted Harvey with a forced smile. “I think it’s awfully good of both of you to come on such short notice.”

“We’ll talk later,” Harvey said, moving on.

Tom turned to Beatrice. “I thought he was bringing his wife, not a hostess from Ruby Foo’s.”

“Now now now. That’s a Saint Laurent she’s wearing.”

Trailing a morose photographer, the ubiquitous Lucinda, of the Star’s Lifestyle section, thrust past Harvey, obviously seeking better bets. Pert, bright-eyed, she flitted from group to group, notebook poised. Finally she settled on Nathan Gursky, who immediately froze, like a squirrel caught by headlights as it attempted to cross the highway. “I’m turning tomorrow’s column into the most delicious game, Mr. Gursky.”

“Oh.”

“If Hollywood were to film your life story, who would you want to play Nathan Gursky?”

“Er.”

Nathan confronted Harvey with his problem.

“Tell her George Segal,” Harvey said.

“What about, um, Dustin Hoffman?”

“I’m picking him.”

Tom Clarkson had only tolerated Nathan Gursky and the Star’s Lucinda in his home because the party, being held just before a federal election, was actually a fund-raiser for Westmount’s cabinet minister. A most discreet fund-raiser, nobody mentioning the size of the cheque they had brought and the cabinet minister never acknowledging an envelope. He was a lean hound of a man. His wife was a MacGregor. Tom’s Uncle Jack owned a property next to his in Bermuda. Leaning against the mantelpiece, the cabinet minister neatly parried questions about the desirability of a price and wages freeze. Then Becky thrust herself forward, leading with the elbows, as if she were seventeen again and jumping a queue for a table at Miss Montreal. “My name’s Rebecca Schwartz. I’m a published writer. My husband is making a personal donation of ten thousand dollars to your campaign tonight. Now can you tell me if the government favours further wheat deals with Russia while so many Jews, falsely accused, languish in prison there?”

Holy shit. Before the cabinet minister could answer, Harvey retreated into another room, grabbing Moffat and telling him what he needed to know.

“Damn it, Harvey, he’s the soul of discretion. How in the hell am I supposed to find that out?”

Then Harvey, recognizing Jim Benson (CEO, Manucorp), broke into his circle. Since he had last seen him, Benson must have lost thirty pounds. Rubbing his own modest paunch, Harvey winked and said, “Boy, could I ever use a copy of your diet. How did you manage it, Jimmy?”

An appalled silence settled on the circle as it broke up, leaving Harvey stranded. And all at once Becky was there. “McClure is here,” she said. “He said I looked very soignée.” Becky beamed, pancake cracking. “Oh, something else I picked up. Jim Benson’s on chemotherapy now. They say he’s got six months. Maybe.”

McClure smiled at Beatrice over the rim of his bifocals. “I must say Tom has done splendidly for himself, but I do hope the children won’t become a problem, devoted as they are to poor Charlotte. Charlotte’s a Selby. Her great-uncle Herbert was my godfather. Her father and I served in the Black Watch together. Are you a Montrealer yourself?”

“No.”

“I thought not. Would you be from Toronto then?”

“Wrong again.”

“But even a creature as enchanting as you must be from somewhere, my dear.”

“Yellowknife. I was brought up a Raven kid.”

“I don’t understand.”

“In those days, in Old Town, you belonged to one mine or another. Raven or Giant. That’s how the kids were known in Yellowknife.”

“And is that where you met Moses Berger?”

“Oh my, you are inquisitive, aren’t you?”

“I only ask because my wife left him a letter and a cherry wood table in her will. I suppose you would no longer know where Mr. Berger can be reached?”

“Try The Caboose.”

“What’s that?”

“His club,” she said, sliding away from him.

Portly Neil Moffat finally caught Betty Kerr alone. “What about Wednesday?” he asked.

“I told you not to talk to me here.”

“It would look a lot more suspicious if I didn’t.”

Becky was here, there, and everywhere. Busily picking up table lamps to peer at the imprimatur on the underside. Flicking her nails at china pieces. Running the palm of her hand over side-table surfaces. Easing the corners of paintings free from the walls, making a note of the dealer’s name.

Joan St. Clair kissed Beatrice on both cheeks. “I haven’t seen Tom look so young and fit in years. You’re the best thing that ever happened to him. I understand you’re an Ottawa girl?”

“No.”

“But you met there?”

“Yes.”

“How nice for you.”

“Don’t you mean for both of us?”

Becky sailed into a group that included the Star’s Lucinda.

“Hello. I’m Becky Schwartz and, talking one writer to another, I think your stuff is wonderfully wicked. If Hollywood were to make my life story, I’d want to be played by Candice Bergen.”

Quack quack quack. Harvey, who had been stalking Tom Clarkson all evening, finally saw him alone and closed in quickly.

“Oh,” Tom said, “excuse me, there’s Beatrice.”

Approaching her from behind, Tom slid his arms around Beatrice’s waist. He kissed her neck. “You’re not being very nice to my friends.”

“If you mean McClure, he’s insufferable.”

“He’s so lonely now, darling. His wife was a Morgan. My Aunt Hattie’s cousin.”

Harvey found the toilet door unlocked, but Moffat was on the seat, his head held back, a bloody handkerchief clamped to his nose. Betty Kerr stood over him. “Get out, you little snoop,” she hissed at Harvey.

Joan St. Clair retreated to a corner of the hall with Laura Whitson. “She may be God’s gift between the sheets, but the child can only talk in monosyllables and there’s no family there.”

And Harvey finally cornered Tom in the kitchen. “Your firm put in a huge order for McTavish shares on Monday.”

“I don’t get to see all the slips.”

“I’m talking millions and millions of dollars. I want to know who you’re acting for.”

“That would be privileged information, Harvey.”

It was three A.M. before a portly Neil Moffat, the sole surviving guest at the Clarkson party turned it into a dirge, lamenting the future of the city, their patrimony.

“The party’s over, Thomas m’boy. Montreal Piss Quick is not where it happens any more. It’s all Toronto now, perfectly awful Turrono. Outright separatism doesn’t matter. What we’re going to get is de facto separatism. We’re going to be Boston in the new order of things. Or maybe even Milwaukee.”

Then, overwhelmed by nostalgia, Moffat recalled the good old days, the days when the civil service was still theirs. Not mismanaged by French-Canadians washed and hung out to dry by L.S.E. or the Harvard Business School. Or pushy jewboys out of Winnipeg’s North End. Look at McGill now. Old McGill. Or the Mount Royal Club. In my father’s day they turned down the importuning Mr. Bernard three times. Now Nathan, the old bootlegger’s simpering son, is actually a member. Last Christmas that timorous little twit sent the doorman a case of Crofter’s Best. Compliments of the season. Nobody knew what to say. Where to look.

Moffat began to tick off possible departures from Montreal on plump pink fingers. All the head offices with contingency plans, prepared to sneak out of town tippytoe if the Parti Québecois ever rides into office. “The Gurskys, I hear, are already abandoning the sinking ship, shifting key personnel into Hogtown. And they know those boys, those clever Semitic mice, they can feel balance sheets in the seat of their pants. It agitates the Jew’s sphincter. Like sex for us, eh, Thomas?”

Tom yawned. Beatrice began to empty ashtrays.

“Mind you,” Moffat said, “now that the old bastard’s dead, McTavish is vulnerable. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a takeover bid.”

Tom glanced pointedly at his wristwatch.

“Even before the old man died,” Moffat said, “once it was clear he had begun to slip, maybe six seven years ago, our office had a huge buying order.”

“Oh, that’s interesting. Do you remember who from?”

“A Brit. A Sir Hyman Kaplansky. Is that your client?”

“Mine’s one of those off-shore funds based in Geneva. Corvus Investment Trust.”

“Preparing to mount a raid, no doubt.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Neil. It would take billions to dislodge the family.”

“Providing they hang together.”

Moffat, his nose throbbing, his bladder fit to burst, finally consented to being led to the door, showering benedictions on Tom and his ravishing bride. “You old tomcat, you.”

Tom found Beatrice in the solarium. Self-absorbed, bending to water the plants, her breasts full. He hurried away to get his camera and began to snap pictures of her, just as he had taken pictures of her reading, combing her hair, descending the stairs in an evening gown.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said.

He salvaged a chilled bottle of Montrachet, floating in ice and corks and cigarette butts, and brought her a glass. “I’m told Moses Berger can now usually be found in a bar called The Caboose.”

“We’re going to be fine, Tom. Honestly we are. I have no interest in seeing Moses again.”

When Harvey got home, he was told that Mr. Gursky had phoned twice in his absence. Glaring at him, Becky peeled off a glittering silver slipper and threw it against the wall. “Shmuck. Why didn’t you tell me they’d all be so underdressed?”

Then the phone rang again.

“That must be the massuh,” she said. “Take it, Rastus.”

But it was Moffat.

“That doesn’t tell me anything,” Harvey said. “You’ve got to find out more.”

Harvey retreated to his study, sat down at his desk, and fished a file out of a bottom drawer. There was a killer shark out there somewhere who went into a feeding frenzy, say once every six seven years and then, unaccountably, swam away. A predator of infinite guile and patience who was bound to make a lethal move, sooner or later sinking his teeth into Lionel’s jugular. Well, Harvey reflected, considering his own stake in McTavish, possibly he could be a big gainer in the heat of any takeover bid.

Harvey waited until ten o’clock in the morning before he phoned Lionel. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said.

Then Harvey phoned his banker in Geneva. “I want to know who’s behind something called Corvus Investment Trust.”

“You aren’t the only one,” the banker said.

Five

“Here, if you are interested,” he had said, “is a list of the complete contents of the safe, properly notarized.”

“And were you there when the safe was opened, Mr. Schwartz?”

“There was no envelope addressed to you.”

So Kathleen O’Brien, who had been in charge of transcribing the tapes Mr. Bernard had made with Harvey, slipped the lot into her tote bag when she left the Bernard Gursky Tower on Dorchester Boulevard for the last time.

Tim Callaghan took her to the Café Martin for lunch and listened to her story with interest.

“But what was supposed to be in the envelope?” he asked.

“A certified cheque. Shares. I don’t know how many. All those years of my life. God in heaven.” She lit one cigarette off another. “You don’t understand, Tim. It isn’t the money.”

“I never thought that.”

“I adored the old bastard. Go ahead. Laugh.”

“You’ve hardly eaten a thing and you’re drinking far too much.”

“We held hands in the movies. Once every summer we sneaked off to Belmont Park together. The Hall of Mirrors. Dodge ’em cars. The House of Horrors …”

Her voice broke. Callaghan waited.

“There was a side of him the rest of you didn’t know.”

“Only you.”

“Yes. Only me. Christ.”

“Easy now.”

“He wouldn’t lie to me. Somebody stole the envelope. The little runt, probably. He didn’t like you.”

“Schwartz, for God’s sake.”

“Mr. B. Because you were Solomon’s man, he said. His brother’s death haunted him.”

“I wonder why.”

“I want to know what Moses Berger is up to out there in the woods.”

“Wrestling with his Gursky demons. Hoping to justify man’s ways to God.”

“He’s been here, there, and everywhere, digging up dirt on the family.”

“He’d like to talk to you.”

“No way.”

Kathleen phoned Mr. Morrie. He invited her over to his house and sat with her in the garden, where he knew that Libby could see him from her bedroom window.

“I want to know if you were there when the safe was opened, Mr. Morrie.”

“It pains me right here to tell you this,” Mr. Morrie said, hand on his heart, “but there was no envelope.”

“Couldn’t Harvey have pinched it earlier?”

“He didn’t have the combination to the safe.”

“Maybe Mr. B. just never got the time to put the envelope in the safe and it’s still among his papers in the house.”

“Didn’t I look?”

“Libby could have it.”

“Kathleen,” Mr. Morrie said, tears welling in his eyes, “forgive me, but I can’t stand to see you suffering like this. I have to tell you something hurtful. He also promised an envelope to a young lady in the New York office.”

“The hell he did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Christ.”

“I’m so ashamed.”

“Who?”

“I can’t say. I gave my word.”

She began to sob. Mr. Morrie took her in his arms. “Bernie, may he rest in peace, was a complicated man.”

“Was it Nora Weaver?”

“Why torture yourself?”

“Shit.”

“You know what? I’m going to go through his papers in the house again tomorrow. From top to bottom. And I bet you I find the envelope, just like he promised.”

“Did Lionel have the combination to the safe?”

“I’m such a fool. Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll phone him.”

“Forget it.”

“Let me give it a try.”

“There never was an envelope, and even if there was, I don’t want it any more.”

“I appreciate your feelings in this matter,” Mr. Morrie said, freshening her drink.

“I’m fifty-three years old now.”

“You don’t look a day over forty.”

Kathleen burst out laughing. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. “And what will you do now that Lionel has cut you out?”

“Say, why don’t we open a bar together downtown? Right on Crescent Street. Kate’s and Morrie’s.”

“Seriously.”

“Can I let you in on a secret?”

“Please.”

“After all these years my Barney came to see me on his way to the Maritimes. He was going salmon fishing. A guest of the minister of trade. Isn’t that something?”

“I hope he didn’t come to borrow money.”

“Barney is an outstanding person. Let me tell you that boy has more ideas …”

“So I’ve heard.”

“He’s in the furniture business in North Carolina. Very big. But, now that the ice has been broken, I’m hoping that he’ll come in with me in oil and other investments I can’t speak about yet. You come to work for us you name the salary.”

“Thank you,” Kathleen said, kissing him on the cheek, “but I think not.”

“Hector will drive you back to your place. But you know what? This is your second home. You’re feeling blue you hop into a taxi and come to dinner.”

Five minutes later the phone rang in Mr. Morrie’s study. “What did she want?” Libby demanded.

“I was hoping to get rid of her before you saw her here.”

“Money?”

“A letter of reference.”

“You give her a letter of reference it should be to the madam of a whorehouse.”

“You think I don’t appreciate your sentiments in this matter?”

“I don’t want to see her on the property again.”

“Whatever you say. Now would you like to come over tonight and watch ‘Dragnet’ with us?”

“It would hardly be the same,” she said, hanging up.

Mr. Morrie unlocked the top desk drawer and took out his private address book. He reached Moses at The Caboose. “Poor Kathleen O’Brien is very depressed,” he said. “I think it would be nice if you took her to lunch.”

Six

Moses knew that he could stay with Sam and Molly Birenbaum in Georgetown, but he opted for privacy, checking into the Madison instead. An hour later he took a taxi to Georgetown.

Sam, his caramel eyes shiny, hugged Moses. He held him tight. “Moishe. Moishe Berger. Shall I offer you a drink?”

“I’m on Antabuse.”

“Glad to hear it. Tea, then?”

“Please.”

Looking to warm the coals, Sam reminisced about the table with the crocheted tablecloth in the cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance Street. Then he got into London, their halcyon days, starting into a story about Lucy Gursky. Remembering, he stopped short.

“Sam, relax. It’s okay to talk about Lucy. Now tell me about Philip and the others too of course.”

There were three children. Marty, Ruth and Philip. Ruth was putting in a year at the Sorbonne. Neither of the boys, knock wood, were in Vietnam. Marty was at MIT and Philip, having dropped out for a couple of years, working as a bartender in San Francisco, was at Harvard. “He’s visiting us now.”

“Terrific. Where is he?”

“Out.”

“Oh.”

“He’s gay,” Sam said, slapping down the gauntlet and waiting for Moses’s reaction, pleading with his eyes.

“Well, he isn’t the only one.”

“I could be appropriately liberal about it if it were another man’s son, but it’s an abomination in one of my own.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s not that I’m prejudiced against faggots, it’s just that I don’t like them.” Sam poured himself a Scotch. A large one. “He wouldn’t come home for the weekend unless he could bring his Adams House sweetie-poo with him. What could I say? We hadn’t seen him in months. I was determined to behave myself. I wasn’t going to make a crack about his boyfriend’s earring or his black silk shirt open to his pupik at breakfast. We had words this morning. I don’t think it necessary for them to skinnydip in the pool. Molly looks out of the window it breaks her heart.”

“There’s a pool?”

“Hold tight. There’s a pool and the black maid you’ve already seen and a cook and stock options and a condo in Vail and a tax-shelter scam I don’t understand, but I’m sure will land me in the slammer one day. That’s the way it is, Moishe.”

Suddenly Molly was there. “Moses, it’s unfair how you never answer a letter but drop in and out of our lives once in five years.”

They ate at Sans Souci, senators and congressmen and others in search of prime-time exposure on the network stopping at their table to pay obeisance, whispering in Sam’s ear, delivering the latest Watergate scuttlebutt. He’s going to be impeached. No, he’s resigning. He’s no longer playing with all the dots on his dice. Henry told me. Len says. Kay assured me. Sam, Molly sensed, was not so much pleased as apprehensive at such a tangible display of his importance. He was waiting for Moses to pronounce. The less he said the more Sam drank. Liquor, as had always been the case, rendered him foolish. Three publishers, Sam let out, were pursuing him to do a Watergate book. Moses nodded. “So,” Sam said, deflated, “I didn’t become the Tolstoy of my generation.…”

“Did you, Moses?”

Moses shook his head, no.

“Do you still write short stories?” she asked.

“Canada has no need of another second-rate artist.”

“Gerald Murphy,” Molly said, pouncing.

“Clever Molly.”

“Hey, we’ve been through the fire together,” Sam pleaded. “We’re all friends here. What brings you to Washington? You still haven’t told us.”

Moses explained that he wanted to see raw tapes, everything available at the network, shot at the Watergate hearings or during Nixon’s press conferences. He wasn’t interested in the footage that had actually been shown, but the out-takes, especially panning shots of onlookers. “I’m looking for somebody who might have been there.”

“Who?”

“You wouldn’t know even if I told you.”

Sam asked Moses to return to the house with him as they had hardly begun to talk. He would play his Yiddish music hall records for him: Molly Picon, Aaron Lebedeff, Menasha Skulnik, Mickey Katz. But Moses, complaining of fatigue, asked to be dropped off at his hotel.

Once back at his place, Sam poured himself a Remy Martin.

“God knows you’re not a braggart,” Molly said, “but there was no stopping you tonight. Why do you feel you have to justify yourself to him?”

“You know when Moses was only twenty-one, he found an error in the OED. A first usage. We wrote them and they sent back a letter thanking him and promising to correct it in the next edition.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“I have, only you don’t know it. Okay, okay. The emes. I envy him.”

“You envy him? He’s an alcoholic, poor man, and who knows how many tranquilizers he takes he slurs his words now. Let’s face it, Sam, he didn’t amount to much.”

“And me? Hoo haw. Sam Burns né Birenbaum can call Cosell Howard to his face. Mike Wallace sees me he waves.”

“The truth is he’s a failure.”

“Oh, yeah, a failure absolutely. But he’s an enormous failure, a tragic waste, and I’m a little trendy horseshit TV mavin, the trustworthy face that comes between the Preparation-H and Light Days commercials.”

Sam wandered into the bathroom, knocking into things, opening the medicine cabinet, pulling out her jar of Vaseline and holding it up to the light, squinting.

“What are you doing?”

“I marked the level it was at with a pencil before we went to dinner.”

“Sam, you’re disgusting.”

“I’m disgusting? When they leave burn the sheets.” He shook his fist at the ceiling. “It’s an averah what they’re doing up there. Makkes they should have! A choleria on them! Faygelehs! Mamzarim!”

“Please Sam. Philip is not responsible for tonight. Lower your voice.”

“He plucks his eyebrows. I caught him at it. Maybe you should never have taken baths with him.”

“He was three years old at the time.”

“Okay, okay.”

“What did you and Moses talk about when I went to the ladies’?”

“This and that.”

“He’s your oldest friend. You’ve known each other since you were nine years old. What in the hell did you talk about?”

“The Mets. Moses thinks they can take Cincinnati in the playoffs. Pete Rose. Johnny Bench. Tony Perez. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“Raw tapes. What’s he after?”

“All I know is that he has that crazy look and I’ve seen it before.” And then Sam, breaking an old vow, told her the story, making her swear never to say anything to Moses. “In the spring of ’62 I think it was, I was drinking in the Algonquin with Mike, shortly after he started with The New Yorker, and we were soon joined by a couple of other editors.

They were sharing a private joke about something they called the Berger Syndrome. What’s that, I asked? Well, it seems that in the early fifties some kid called Berger, a Canadian, sent them a short story that everybody liked and wanted to publish. They wrote him, asking for a few minor revisions, and he wrote back a nutty letter saying The New Yorker regularly prints crap, so long as it is written by their friends, they couldn’t tell Pushkin from Ogden Nash, and he was withdrawing his story. When I met Moses the next afternoon for drinks at Costello’s, I got up sufficient nerve to ask him about it and he said, no, it was certainly not him. But he was lying. I could tell just looking at him. I thought he was going to pass out on the spot.”

“Why would Moses do such a thing?”

“Because he’s crazy.” Settling on the edge of the bed, depleted, Sam asked, “Was I really bragging tonight?”

“A little,” she said, bending to help him out of his trousers.

The bodice of her dress came away from her. Sam peeked. It was still nice, very nice. “Was Moses ever your lover?” he demanded, jerking upright.

“Philip’s his son. Now you know. The cat’s out of the bag.”

Sam forlorn, his eyes wet, said, “I want the truth.”

“Remember when you were working for the Gazette and there wasn’t enough money and I said I could give French lessons?”

“Yes.”

“Some French lessons. Moses and I were making pornographic movies together. Now can we get some sleep?”

But he couldn’t sleep. He was thirsty. He was dizzy. His heart was hammering. His stomach was rumbling. “They can take everything. The works. I would have settled for writing ‘The Dead’. Never mind War and Peace or Karamazov. Am I greedy? Certainly not. Just ‘The Dead’ by Samuel Burns né Birenbaum.”

“‘The best of a bad job is all any of us can make of it,’” she recited, hoping she had got the lines right. “‘Except of course, the saints …’”

“I wasn’t kidding about the sheets, you know. I want them burnt. I want the room fumigated.”

“Sam, he’s our son. We’ve got to play with the cards that we were dealt.”

“Molly, Molly,” he asked, lying on her breasts, weeping, “where has all the fun gone?”

Uninvited, her manner truculent, Molly turned up early at the Madison. She steered Moses into the dining room, slamming her PBS tote bag on the table. “Ever since he got your call saying you were coming he’s been on a high. Boy, were the two of you ever going to light up the town. He went through all of our books to make sure there were no compromising best-sellers on the shelves. The signed pictures of him with Kennedy were hidden in a drawer. His framed honorary degrees went into a cupboard. He must have made up and crossed out eight dinner-party lists, saying no, Moses wouldn’t approve of them. He laid in a case of Macallan. Our fridge is stocked with smoked salmon. Then you show up and stick him with the fact that he has a swimming pool. Count on Moses. You don’t tell him once—it would really cost you—how damn good and honest he is on TV. Or that he should write that Watergate book, he’s dying to, but it scares the bejesus out of him. Philip with that boy in his room is breaking his heart. I find him sobbing in the toilet, but you have nothing reassuring to say to him. I could wring your miserable bloody neck, you self-centred son of a bitch. Then last night he gets drunk, also to please Moses, and he actually asks me if we ever had an affair. He’s so pure of heart he doesn’t even know that he’s a much better man than you are. What are those cuts in the palms of your hands?”

“Some people grind their teeth in their sleep. I clench my fists. It’s a bad habit.”

“Read your paper and don’t look at me. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

Moses ordered more coffee for both of them, stirring five spoonfuls of sugar into his own cup.

“What are you doing to yourself?”

“I crave sweets now. I can never get enough. Please don’t start crying.”

“I won’t. I won’t.”

“The last time I was in the clinic there was a beautiful girl there I still can’t get out of my mind. I mean genuinely beautiful. A fawn. Maybe only nineteen years old. She would drift into my room, shrug out of that awful starchy gown, and do an arabesque, a pirouette, a tour en l’air. She never leaped, she soared. Then she would smile like a naughty girl, squat, and shit on my floor. It’s all right, I’d say. I don’t mind. She danced and shat on my floor every day for a week and then she was gone. We weren’t allowed cutlery, but somehow or other she got her hands on a fork and it was enough to do the job. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. If I had a reason I forgot.”

“Have you tried A.A.?”

“Yes.”

“Antabuse won’t do it. Can’t you cut it out whenever you feel like it?”

“Clever Molly.”

“When Marty’s in town he brings his friends around, really bright kids, and Sam adores drinking beer and horsing around with them. But they don’t know who Henry Wallace was or Jack Benny or Hank Greenberg. Sam’s Yiddish music hall records don’t do a thing for them. It drives him crazy. He’s going to be fifty soon. He’s jowly. He overeats. It’s the tension, you know, all that travelling. His new producer, he’s only thirty-two—he discos—he’s on coke half the time—he wants Sam to get a facelift. He’s done viewer surveys, demographic studies, may he rot in hell. Sam told him when I was with the Times I was nominated for a Pulitzer for my Korean stuff Kiss my ass, sonny. But there are rumours that they are testing younger faces and I don’t think they’ll renew his contract.”

“He ought to do the Watergate book.”

“Sam still collects 78s. You wouldn’t believe what he came home with the other night.” She sang, “‘Chickery Chick cha-la-cha-la, Check-a-la romey in a bananika.’”

“Molly, he’s a lucky man. You’re a good woman.”

“Good bad. I love him.”

“So do I.”

“Hey,” she said, brightening, her old jauntiness and loopy logic shining through, “in that case maybe we should have an affair.”

“Let’s save it for our dotage.”

“Come to dinner,” she said, fleeing, because she knew that she was going to cry again.

SAM, HURRYING HOME early from the office, changed quickly and made a dash for the pool. He found Philip and his boyfriend sunbathing on the back-yard terrace, sipping champagne. His champagne. “Celebrating something, boys?”

“You really are quelque chose, Dad,” Philip said, producing a glass for him.

Immediately regretting it, but unable to help himself, Sam said, “Gay was a perfectly good word until it was appropriated by your kind. Our hearts were young and gay. The gay hussar. Et cetera. Gay means cheerful, merry, sparkling. According to my thesaurus its opposite is joyless, glum, dreary. Whoever gave you the right to pass such a judgement on heterosexual love? Real chutzpah, that’s what I call it.”

“Oh, Dad, about those hussars. When the Austro-Hungarian empire was still intact no officer below the rank of colonel was legally allowed to wear makeup.”

“How does your family handle it, Steve?”

“They don’t.”

FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS Moses sat in a small stuffy screening room looking at footage of the Watergate hearings, circling sections on certain frames and having the lab blow them up, unavailingly. Then on Moses’s fifth day in the screening room there he was, seated immediately behind Maureen Dean, smiling that smile of his, a gold-tipped malacca cane clasped between his knees. Moses fled to the washroom and splashed cold water on his face. He went for a walk. He stopped for a hamburger somewhere. Then he returned to the screening room and sat staring at the frame, sliding in sweat, for the better part of an hour.

Back in his hotel room, Moses pulled the blinds and collapsed on his bed, chain-smoking through the rest of the afternoon. Once by air, he recalled, and once by water. He washed the blood off the palms of his hands and had already begun to pack when the phone rang. It was the front desk.

“Will you be checking out today, Mr. Berger?”

“Yes.”

The assistant manager had a letter for him.

“It was left here by a most distinguished-looking gentleman who said you would be turning up eventually.”

“Why didn’t you give this to me before?”

“His instructions were most explicit. We were not to let you have it until you were checking out.”

Moses opened the letter in the bar.

When the waiter approached his table, Moses ordered a Macallan. A double. Neat.

Seven

The next morning Sam sought out the editor who had worked with Moses. “I understand that you were a great help to my friend. Now show me what he wanted.”

So Barry screened the pertinent out-take for him, a panning shot of observers at the Watergate hearings, including many familiar faces, among them Maureen Dean and, immediately behind her, an old man with a gold-tipped malacca cane clasped between his knees. “It was either Mo Dean or the old guy seated right behind her who turned him on,” Barry said. “He shot right out of his seat to have a closer look, and then he lit out of here like he had been badly burnt.”

“Blow up the old guy for me. Big and bigger.”

Sam ate lunch at his desk, pondering the photographs Barry had brought him. I know that face, he thought. But where and how eluded him.

Later Sam took the photographs home with him and retreated to the library, but once more how and where he knew that face remained tantalizingly out of reach. So he began to pull down scrapbooks that Molly had put together in spite of his objections, poring over old newspaper stories that he had churned out on four continents, hoping something would evoke that face for him. It didn’t work. In fact all his efforts only muddled him, rendering the face even more elusive, and he went to bed wondering if he was mistaken after all.

Unable to sleep, he tried to play a game that had worked for him before. Think of something else, anything else, and the right brain circuits would connect without effort, putting a name to the face. He replayed Ralph Branca’s home-run pitch to Bobby Thomson, striking him out in his mind’s eye. Once again he savoured Ron Swoboda’s ninth-inning catch in the fourth game of the ’69 Series. Then, sinking into sleep, other images drifted into his mind. Moses saying, “Oh come on. Let’s take a peek.”

“I don’t think we ought to.”

“It’s probably the new Bonnard he bought.”

Lifting a cloth revealing what, at first glance, appears to be the most conventional of portraits, the sort that would be welcomed by the Royal Academy. A lovely young bourgeois lady seated in a wicker chair. Long blonde tresses, flushed cheeks. She wears a broad-brimmed straw hat with a pink bow, a multi-layered chiffon dress, also with a pink bow, and holds a bouquet of sweet williams in her hands. But there is something quirky about the portrait. The young lady’s eyes are of a different colour. One eye brown, one eye blue.

Eight

North, Moses knew, is where he would find him.

Where north?

Far.

On his return from Washington, Moses picked up his Toyota at Dorval, and set out for his cabin in the Townships to pack his northern gear. Then he collected his mail at The Caboose, drank for a couple of hours with Strawberry, and drove back to Montreal, where he had recently rented a pied-à-terre on Jeanne Mance Street. Every bottle in his flat was empty. So Moses took a taxi to Winnie’s, and carried on from there to Big Syl’s and when all the bars shut down for the night, he moved on to the Montreal Press Club, floating between tables to a dim corner and falling asleep almost immediately.

“Moses?”

Drifting awake, he was claimed by a fuzzy raven-haired figure, sweetly perfumed, throbbing in and out of focus. Her smile, tainted with benevolence, irritated him.

“Beatrice?”

“Yes. Are you pleased?”

The raven-haired figure, possibly Beatrice, subsided softly into a chair, silk rustling.

“Don’t let me fall asleep again.”

“I won’t.”

“Say your name.”

“Beatrice.”

“Imagine. Beatrice.”

He squinted, concentrating, grudgingly reducing the multiple breasts, each one exquisite, to two; the comically trebled mouth to a more satisfying sensual one.

Unable to cope with his idiotic gaze, she asked, “How do I look?”

“Harder.”

“Count on Moses.”

“You asked.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I can make it back to the bar again,” he said, pointing at his empty glass with a certain cunning. “You go, please.”

Enabling him to watch Beatrice, his heart’s desire, stride to the bar, obviously nourished by the stir her presence was creating among the men in shiny suits gathered there. She took too long. Head slumping, he drifted off to sleep again.

“Moses.”

“Go away.” Then he recognized Beatrice, the proffered drink, and he smiled again. “I want to ask you a question of the most intimate nature.”

“Please don’t start on me, Moses.”

“Do you wear pantyhose now?”

She shook her head, no, flushed but amused.

“Garters still. I knew it. Ah, Beatrice.” Satiated, he slid into sleep again, his smile serene.

“Moses?”

“What?”

“You said you didn’t want to snooze.”

Slowly, deliberately, he relit his dead cigar, enormously pleased with his accomplishment.

“Strawberry says you’re heading North of Sixty.”

“Tomorrow afternoon. Could I see a garter?”

“Oh, Moses, please.”

“Just one little peekee.”

“Where are you staying in town?”

“Why, Mrs. Clarkson, whatever are you thinking?”

“Stop playing the fool.”

“I rent an apartment here now.”

“I’ll drive you there and we can talk. It’s too depressing here.”

“It’s my club.”

“You belonged to better clubs once.”

“And a better woman.”

“Let’s go.”

“Only if I can have a peekee first.”

“Not here. There. Let’s go.”

He gave her his address before staggering out with her, toppling into her Porsche, and falling asleep again. But they had only gone a few blocks when he started to tremble. “Stop the car!”

Alarmed, she braked. Moses, fumbling with the door handle, tumbled out, lurching blindly into the middle of Sherbrooke Street.

“Moses!”

Circling, he scrambled to the curb, sinking to his knees beside a fire hydrant, his stomach heaving. Beatrice pulled up alongside and waited in the car for him to finish. She was wearing a new dress. A Givenchy. “Do you feel better now?”

“Worser.”

While Moses showered, she made coffee and then wandered restlessly about the apartment. Bay windows. Old-fashioned bulky radiators. The Persian carpet, worn threadbare in the middle, reminded her so vividly of home that she found herself searching for the walnut RCA radio cabinet and the sticky Peer’s Cream Soda bottle supporting the window with the broken sash. Then, clearing the dining-room table of old newspapers, she caught her first glimpse of the crocheted tablecloth. She slipped on her horn-rimmed glasses to have a better look just as Moses emerged from the bathroom in a towel dressing gown.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, stroking the tablecloth.

“My mother made it years ago.”

“How come you never brought it out when we were together?”

“I was saving it for your vintage years,” he said, accepting a black coffee and adding a couple of fingers of cognac to it. Then he bit off the tip of a Monte Cristo and lit it. “To think that I had once been so foolish to believe that you would be the one, as the old human question mark put it, who could ‘help me through this long disease, my life.’”

It was, she knew, his way of putting her down. She was supposed to recognize the quote. “You think I’m stupid,” she said.

“Of course you’re stupid, but it hardly matters in the circles you frequent now that you are so insufferably rich.”

“I didn’t marry him only for that.”

“I want my peekee now.”

“Go to hell.”

“Just the quickest of peeks, a mere flash, what would it cost you?”

“Why are you determined to make me feel cheap?”

“Aren’t you?”

“I loved you, Moses, but I couldn’t stand it any more. You have no idea of how insufferable you are when you’re drunk. I want my peekee. Just one little peekee. Fuck you.”

“At least I haven’t changed.”

“I’ll give you that much.”

“Actually, I would have left me a lot earlier than you did. I am impossible.”

“Are you going north to visit Henry?”

“I have a hunch the ravens are gathering. Damn it, Beatrice, why did you flush me out? What do you want with me now?”

“I needed somebody to talk to. Somebody I could trust.”

“Well that somebody isn’t me. Not any more.”

“Tom goes both ways. He has a boy. I’m not supposed to know but they’re in Antibes together now.”

“Then you’ll get an even richer divorce settlement than you were counting on when you decide it’s time to trade up again.”

“Take me north with you.

“Certainly not.”

“Can I stay the night?”

“Yes. No. Let me think.”

“Bastard.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because fool that I am,” he said, sinking into an armchair, “I sometimes rush to the door of my cabin, thinking I’ve heard a car and that it will be you.” He knocked over his coffee cup, half full of cognac. “Get out, Beatrice. Leave me alone,” he pleaded, before his head slumped forward and he began to snore.

Beatrice went into the kitchen and washed the dishes and then it came to her. She dug a pen and paper out of her purse and wrote, “The human question mark was Alexander Pope. You are as smug and pompous and hateful as ever.” She left the note on the dining-room table. Then she stood before him, hiked her dress, revealing her garters, and fled the apartment, weeping. Outside, she stopped, cursed, and retraced her steps, determined to retrieve the note. But his apartment door was locked.

Nine

Isaac, who had once tagged everywhere after his father, clutching the hem of his parka, now avoided him. Shirking his Talmud studies, pleading a headache. Declining to join him in saying grace after meals. Giving up on his Hebrew lessons. “Who speaks it here? Only you.”

Nialie anticipated that he could hurt Henry badly, but Henry claimed not to be distressed. “It’s a stage they all go through,” he said. “You are not to worry.”

Only twelve years old, Isaac’s face was already encrusted with angry red pimples. He bit his nails. His voice was cracking. Once inseparable from his schoolmates, always up to mischief, he now eschewed their company as well.

“What happened to all your friends?” Nialie asked him.

A shrug.

“I asked you a question.”

“So?”

“Answer me.”

“They’re always asking me for money.”

“Why?”

“That’s what you’ve got, they say, isn’t it?”

Cleaning his room, Nialie didn’t quite know what to make of the changes. The pinups of hockey players pasted to the wall (Guy Lafleur, Yvan Cournoyer, Ken Dryden) had been displaced by a row of McTavish labels peeled carefully off bottles that had been soaked in the sink, and a photograph of the McTavish building on Fifth Avenue, scissored out of the last quarterly report.

“What does an ‘adjusted dividend’ mean?” he asked at the sabbath table.

“Search me,” Henry replied.

“‘Amortization of goodwill and other intangible assets’?”

“I’m afraid your father is a prize klotz in these matters.”

“‘A covenant’?”

“Ah. Now we’re talking turkey. We are Am Berit, ‘The People of the Covenant.’ A covenant is what Riboyne Shel O’lem made with us at Mount Sinai, choosing Jews over all the other peoples in the world, liberating us from slavery in Egypt. Now how would you say Egypt in Hebrew?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Come on.”

“Eretz Mitzraim.”

“Yes. Excellent. Now in every generation, each person should feel as though he himself had gone forth from Eretz Mitzraim, as it is written: ‘And you shall explain to your child on that day, it is because of what the Lord did for me when I, myself, went forth from Egypt.’”

Hypocrite, Isaac thought, his only response a smirk. Hypocrite, hypocrite.

“Don’t make such a face to your father.”

“I can’t help how I look.”

“Leave the table.”

Henry waited an hour, tugging absently at his sidecurls, before he went to Isaac’s room. “Is there anything wrong, yingele?”

“No.”

“If there’s a problem, I’m here to help.”

“There’s nothing wrong, I said.”

But when Henry leaned over to kiss him good-night, Isaac slid away from him.

“Do you think I should buy us a TV set?” Henry asked.

“Only if we can afford it.”

Nialie found Henry in the living room. She brought him a cup of lemon tea. “Was he bad to you again?”

“No.”

“You look terrible.”

“I’m fine. H-h-h-honestly.”

A few days later Nialie startled Isaac going through the papers on Henry’s rolltop desk. “What are you looking for?” she demanded.

“A pencil,” he replied, leaping back.

“There’s plenty in your room.”

“Do you know how much he gives to the yeshivas in Jerusalem, never mind the Rebbe?”

“It’s his money.”

“Millions and millions.”

“Shame on you.”

“Yeah, sure. Go to your room. Don’t worry. I’m going.”

Then, his ear to the door, Isaac heard her say, “You ought to lock your desk every night.”

“What have I got to hide?” he asked.

Plenty, Isaac thought. If only she knew. But he wouldn’t tell her. He didn’t dare. Henry, whom everybody took for a holy man, a saint even, hid filthy photographs in his desk. Photographs more revealing than anything Isaac had ever seen in Playboy. They had come in a plain brown envelope from somebody in England and showed a naked woman, a really skinny one, doing amazing things with one man and sometimes two of them.

Nialie confronted Isaac at breakfast the next morning. “How can you be so rude to your father?” she asked.

Because he’s a hypocrite, he thought. But he didn’t say it. Instead he glared at her.

Ten

Condemned to a night in Edmonton before he could catch his morning flight to Yellowknife, Moses checked into the Westin, and then settled into a stool at the bar. Sean Riley was on TV. He was in Vancouver, peddling Bush Pilot, the book about his thrilling adventures in the Land of the Midnight Sun. The pleasantries didn’t last long and then the interviewer, a former Miss B.C. Lion, took a deep breath, swelling her bosom, and asked about Riley’s celebrated crash in the winter of ’64. His passenger, a mining engineer, had died on impact. A month later Riley, who had been given up for dead, limped out of the barrens right into the Mackenzie Lounge in Inuvik.

“As you know, it was rumoured in Yellowknife at the time that you survived your terrible ordeal by resorting to, um, cannibalism. If that’s the case,” the interviewer suggested, flushing, “and, darn it, who’s to say any one of us would have done different—if that’s the case—I’m looking at a guy who has had a very unusual experience, eh?” Then, glancing hastily at one of her index cards, she added. “Now what grabs me is how such an unusual experience has affected you personally and psychologically?”

“Say, I don’t get to appear on TV that often. Do you mind if I say hello to Molly Squeeze Play in Yellowknife?”

“What?”

“Hiya there, Molly. See you in The Gold Range tomorrow. Meanwhile keep your legs crossed, ha ha ha.”

“Does it haunt your dreams?” Shirley Anne asked.

“Molly?”

“Cannibalism.”

“Well, I’ll tell ya, it kind of puts you off your prime rib. Like, you know, it’s so good and sweet. Hardly any gristle.”

The bar was rocking with chattering men and women wearing name tags, educators gathered from all ends of the continent to ponder WHITHER THE GLOBAL VILLAGE? But, as Moses started into his fourth double Scotch, most of them had dispersed, only a handful of dedicated drinkers surviving. Then a lady came flying into the room, out of breath, obviously too late for the party. She snuggled into the stool immediately beside Moses and ordered a vodka on the rocks. “Prosit,” she said.

MY NAME IS CINDY DUTKOWSKI wore a snug woollen dress and carried an enormous shoulder bag. Fierce she was, black hair unruly, petite, forty maybe. She taught Communications 101 at Maryland U. “Say, do my eyes deceive me, or didn’t I see you in Washington last week, rapping with Sam Burns at the Sans Souci?”

“You’re mistaken.”

“I’ll bet you’re also a media personality and I should know your name.”

“Sorry about that.”

“If you tell me your name, I won’t bite.”

“Moses Berger,” he said, signing his bar bill and starting to slide off his stool. She shoved him back.

“Hey, you’re really shy. It’s a form of arrogance, you know. It also protects you against rejections in highly charged social encounters. I was a psych major.” Hers, she said, was an open marriage, which allowed both partners a life-style enabling them to explore their full sexual potential.

“That must be awfully convenient for you.”

“Oh come on. Do I have to spell it out? I’m interested if you are.”

MY NAME IS CINDY DUTKOWSKI scooped up her enormous shoulder bag and they went up to his room, not hers, because she was sharing with a real square, she said, a lady from Montana who undressed in the bathroom. “I’m willing to act out your favourite fantasy, so long as it isn’t too kinky.”

“The usual,” an intimidated Moses said, “will suit me fine.”

In that case, she had a menu of her own. “I’m going to be your laid-back, but secretly horny high-school teacher and you are the nerdy little teenager. I’ve asked you to report to my office after classes, pretending that we have to go over your latest assignment, but actually because I caught you peeking up my skirt when I sat on your desk this morning and it really turned me on. Now you go wait out in the hall and don’t knock on my office door until I call out ‘ready’. You dig?”

“I’m not sure exactly how you want me to behave.”

“Well, you know. You don’t know from nothing. Like Canadian will do.”

“Gotcha,” he said, slipping out of the room, tiptoeing over to the elevator bank, and then grabbing a taxi at the front door of the hotel. “Take me to a bar where they don’t play loud music.”

Seated on yet another bar stool, Moses pondered Beatrice’s baffling note again. It was three A.M. in Montreal now, but he, phoned her all the same. “What did you mean,” he asked, “that the human question mark was Alexander Pope?”

“Are you telling me,” she replied, her voice hard, “that you don’t remember?”

He began to sweat.

“You mean I’ve been sitting here, unable to sleep, crying because the note I left must have hurt you, and you don’t even remember last night?”

Moses hung up, mortified, and when he got back to the hotel he was confronted by another problem. His open suitcase on the floor was half empty. As it turned out, however, she hadn’t stolen anything. He found his shirts, socks, and underwear in the bathroom, floating in a tub full of water.

Once out at the Industrial Airport the next morning, Moses knew, without asking, which was the right gate for the PWA flight to Yellowknife. The familiar northern flotsam was already gathered there. A knot of chunky young Eskimos with their hair slicked back, wearing heavily studded black leather jackets, stovepipe jeans, and vinyl cowboy boots. Ladies in beehive hairdos and fat coats, lugging plastic bags filled with goods from Woodward’s. There was also a group of northern workers obviously returning from leave, heading back to the oil rigs or DEW line stations, their stakes blown on whores, satisfied that women were shit, life was shit, everything was shit. Bruised and fleshy they were, one of them with his eye badly blackened.

On arrival in Yellowknife, Moses took a taxi directly to The Gold Range, where he knew he would find Sean Riley. Sean ordered two and a juice, but Moses settled for a black coffee.

“It’s like that, is it?” Riley asked.

“Yes. How’s your book doing?”

“When I was a kid, my old man caught me in a lie, it was a visit to the woodshed. Now I get paid for it.”

Moses placed a photograph on the table. “I’d like to know if you saw this old man around here last week, possibly shopping around for a charter.”

“The naturalist from California. Mr. Corbeau?”

“That’s right.”

“Cooney flew him out to King William Island last Wednesday, I think. He figured the old coot was crazy, wanting to camp out there, but there was something about him. Anyway, according to Cooney, he built himself a snow house in a jiffy. Had plenty of supplies.”

“Could you fly me out there?”

“I could find him if I had to.”

“Tomorrow morning?”

“I charge ten dollars a mile for the Otter, six for the Cessna, if you agree to help with the pedalling.”

“We’ll take the Otter and we’ll put in overnight at Tulugaqtitut to look in on Henry.”

Henry and Nialie, given only short notice that they would be blessed with guests at their Shabbat table, enabling them to celebrate the mitzvah of hospitality, Hachnasat Orechim, happily stayed up most of the night preparing delicacies. Challah. Gefilte fish. Roast chicken. Tsimmes. Lokshen pudding with raisins. Honey cake. The very best linen was set out on the table and, as a concession to Moses, a prized bottle of fifty-year-old cognac on a side table. Isaac was ordered to bathe and put on a white shirt and tie and smartly pressed trousers before he went out with his father to meet the incoming Otter, Henry’s sidecurls dancing in the breeze.

“Sholem aleichem,” Henry sang out, embracing Moses.

“Aleichem sholem.”

Riley, not wishing to impose on two old friends who seldom got together any more, agreed to drinks at Henry’s house, but would not stay to dinner. “Could be I’m running a fever,” he said. “I think I’ll look in on Agnes McPhee.”

“Abei gezunt,” Nialie said.

After she had blessed the candles, they sat down at the table and Henry pronounced the traditional blessing over his son. “Yesimecha Elohim keEfrayim vechiMenasheh.” May God inspire you to live in the tradition of Ephraim and Menasheh, who carried forward the life of our people.

Henry waited, expectant, but a sulking Isaac didn’t respond until prodded by Nialie.

“Harachaman hu yevarech et avi mori baal habayit hazeh veet imi morati baalat habayit hazeh.” Merciful God, bless my beloved father and mother who guide our home and family.

Isaac, just short of hostile at the table to begin with, soon found himself giggling in response to Moses’s teasing of Henry, amazed that anyone could get away with cracking irreverent jokes about the Rebbe, astonished to see his father drinking more than one cognac. To Henry’s delight, he even joined in when the two men began to sing Shabbat songs, slapping the table with their hands to keep time.

“You know,” Moses said, “the first time I met your father he was just about your age, and we sat on his bedroom floor and refought the Battle of Waterloo with toy soldiers.”

Then, forgetting himself, Moses lit a Monte Cristo. Nialie was about to protest this desecration of the sabbath when Henry silenced her with a wave of his hand. It was, however, too much for Isaac. “How come,” he demanded, “Uncle Moses is allowed to smoke on Shabbat here and I’m not allowed to play hockey with the guys or even watch TV without being scolded for being such a bad Jew.”

“Moishe is not so much a bad Jew,” Henry said, “as a delinquent one.”

“I’ll put it out,” Moses said.

“No,” Henry said, and turning back to Isaac, he added, “And, furthermore, he is not my son. Remember, it is a mitzvah to teach one’s child Talmud Torah, as it is written: ‘Set these words, which I command you this day, upon your heart. Teach them faithfully to your children; speak of them in your home and on your way …’”

“Everything is written,” Isaac said, fighting tears, “even that I’m supposed to have a lousy time, because if it isn’t Shabbes it’s Tishah Be-Av or Shavuot or the Fast of Gedaliah or the Seventeenth of Tamuz or some other shit out of the stone ages. I know. Leave the table. I’m going. Good-night everybody.”

“Oy vey,” Henry said, dismissing Isaac’s outburst with a nervous giggle. “What a difficult age for a boy. Forgive him, Moishe, he didn’t mean to be rude. Excuse me for just a minute.”

Nialie waited until Henry had gone to Isaac’s bedroom, shutting the door behind him, before she spoke up. “He steals,” she said.

“Does Henry know?”

“You mustn’t say a word to him.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t.”

And then Henry was back, laden with weather charts, other documents, and a recently published book, many passages underlined. “According to Dr. Morton Feinberg, a really outstanding climatologist, we are in for it. The new ice age, which is almost upon us, will bring an end to civilization in the northern hemisphere as we know it.”

“Thank God for that,” Moses said, reaching for the cognac bottle.

“Fifty years from now, maybe less, the equatorial countries will dominate the planet.”

“Henry,” Moses said, irritated, “as there was once a School of Hillel and a School of Shamai, so there are now other experts who believe we are in for a different kind of judgement day. They say all the evidence points to the earth’s gradually warming because of the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which tends to trap a good deal of the earth’s heat. But the hell with all of them. Maybe you should worry less about the world coming to an end and more about Isaac.”

“I want you to look at these ch-ch-charts,” Henry said.

“There are better places to bring up a boy who will soon be an adolescent.”

Henry waited until Nialie had retreated to the kitchen. “I hope that he will attend the yeshiva in Crown Heights.”

“And what if he isn’t cut out to be a yeshiva bucher?”

“Look at these charts, please,” a tearful Henry pleaded, “and then tell me the earth is warming.”

Before flying out with Riley in the morning, Moses took Isaac to the Sir Igloo Inn Café for breakfast.

“Can I have bacon with my eggs?” Isaac asked.

“Don’t be a pain in the ass, please.”

“You mean it’s okay for you, but not for me.”

And then Riley was there, his eyes bloodshot. “If we don’t take off within ten minutes we could be weathered in here for days.”

“Isaac, why don’t we write to each other? Maybe you might even come to visit me during your summer holiday,” Moses said, immediately regretting the invitation, and then, turning to Riley, he added, “I’m coming, but I’ve got to say goodbye to Henry and Nialie first.”

Isaac went to join a group of boys at another table. They immediately closed ranks, making no room for him.

“See that old fart who just left here?” Isaac asked.

“So what?”

“He got my father pissed last night.”

“Like shit he did.”

The boys began to get up one by one.

“He used to fuck my aunt in London,” Isaac said.

“Big deal.”

Blocking their exit, Isaac flashed a hundred-dollar bill. “And he gave me this,” he said.

“Bullshit. You swiped it.”

“He gave it to me,” Isaac said, flushing.

“Then we’ll meet you here after school and everything’s on you.”

“I was just going to say that.”

FINDING MR. CORBEAU’S CAMP on King William Island did not turn out to be difficult. A runway of sorts had been cleared at Victory Point, some sixty-five miles from where the Erebus had last been seen. As the Otter lowered into it, Moses made out a snow house hard by the shore. No sooner did Riley slide to a stop than Moses flung open the cabin door, jumped on to the ice, and ran to the snow house. Dropping to his knees to crawl through the entry tunnel he got one of his feet tangled in a trip wire, flipping on a cassette.

There came a clap of thunder. The sound of a crackling fire and another thunder clap. Then a baritone voice, oozing self-importance:

“Moses, Moses, draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

Bastard. Son of a bitch.

“But here I am not any more.”

Moses, who had made out the tracks of four dogsleds leading away from the snow house, should have known as much. However, he couldn’t have been that late. The snow house, heated by a Coleman camp stove, was still reasonably warm. A caribou skin was laid like a carpet on the floor and on it rested a bottle of Dom Perignon, a tin of beluga caviar, a loaf of black bread, two volumes of Solomon’s journals, and a note: “If not me, who? If not now, when?”