Solomon Gursky Was Here

One

Shortly after his arrival in London, Ephraim was accosted on Regent Street by a girl with sable skin. She was young and saucy, wearing a pork-pie hat with a jaunty red plume and a brown mantle and a heavily flounced crinoline skirt. On any other afternoon Ephraim would readily have accompanied the girl to her lodging house, risking the bully bound to be hidden there, but on his first day in London the ferment of the streets was sufficient for him. The din, the din. Rattling omnibuses, broughams and chaises, hackneys and saddlehorses. He saw ragged boys turn cartwheels, sweeping pedestrian crossings free of dung for elegant ladies, all rustling satins and silks. Grim men in bobbing black top hats seemed to be everywhere. As one of them emerged from a pub, his face flushed, he was confronted by an emaciated old beggar offering boxes of lucifer matches and small sticks of sealing wax in trembling hands.

Ephraim sought out a remote corner of Hyde Park, and satisfied that he was concealed by shrubbery, dug a deep hole with his trowel and buried the leather purse with his gold watch, his prayer shawl and phylacteries, and all of his money, save ten shillings. But he kept his candlesticks secure under his shirt, intending to dispose of them at a pawnbroker’s in Whitechapel or Spitalfields.

Ephraim lost his way briefly in the maze that made up the rookery behind the Strand, emerging hard by St. Paul’s, an unfamiliar stench leading him to the street-level maw of an open underground abattoir, its thickly caked walls sweating fat and blood. As he stopped to gaze, he was thrust aside by workers who were hurling protesting sheep into the pit so that they would break their legs before being set upon with knives by the slaughterers below, already ankle deep in slippery entrails and excrement. Close by other men, heedless of buzzing flies and scuttling sewer rats, were busy boiling fat, rendering glue and scraping tripe.

Mindful of dippers and ganefs, moving on smartly whenever he saw a peeler, Ephraim finally reached Whitechapel. Two sodden sailors lay in a pool of their own piss outside a gin mill. One of them had a purply eye swollen shut, the other a broken bloodied nose. And suddenly there were stalls, stalls everywhere.

The stalls of Petticoat Lane offered apples and oysters, cheap jewellery, boots, toys, whelks, herring and cutlery and firewood. Ephraim pressed on as far as the Earl of Effingham Theatre, joining the rambunctious mob inside. Jenny O’Hara, wrapped in gauze twinkly with sequins, her enormous rouged bubbies all but plopping free of her corset, settled on a swing and sang:

Hopping off her swing, approaching the front of the stage with mincing little steps, Jenny continued:

The sum Ephraim was offered for his candlesticks in the first pawnbroker’s shop he entered did not tempt him; he also declined the pittance proffered in the second jerryshop he visited. Unfortunately, coming out of yet another shop, he was nabbed by a peeler.

Shedding hot tears, Ephraim fell to the gutter, kicking his legs, hoping to attract the sympathy of passersby. He protested that he was an orphan, driven by hunger to pawning his beloved granny’s candlesticks, but his story wouldn’t wash. Ephraim spent his first night in London incarcerated in the gassy bowels of a rotting hulk on the lower Thames and within a week he was sentenced to six months in the notorious “Steel” (so-called after the Bastille) in Coldbath Fields.

On arrival, the lags sized him up and assumed that once Sergeant Walsh had wearied of him, he would be sequestered in the harem until things sorted themselves out and he found a protector. But the obdurate Ephraim refused to lower his trousers for Sergeant Walsh. As a consequence, he was obliged to ride the cockchafer every morning, treading down a wheel of twenty-four steps that sank away from him at an infuriating fixed rate in stifling heat. When that failed to do the trick Sergeant Walsh sentenced him to a week of shot-drill on the square. For this exercise he joined other offenders in a row, the men posted three yards apart. On a shouted order from Sergeant Walsh each man picked up a twenty-four-pound cannon-ball, lugged it as far as his neighbour’s position and hurried back to his own place, where another cannon-ball left there by his other neighbour was waiting for him. The drill usually lasted an hour, sometimes longer, depending on how urgently Sergeant Walsh needed a beer. When Ephraim still resisted the sergeant’s advances, he earned himself some time on the crank. This required him to turn a sand-filled drum with a crank handle, the drum’s revolutions recorded by a clock mechanism. He was birched again and again. Then one morning Sergeant Walsh was found squatting in an outhouse, his throat slashed from ear to ear. Detectives descended on the Steel, questioning all the lags, putting everybody on short ration, flogging indiscriminately, but the culprit was never discovered. Ephraim, a prime suspect, was vouched for by Izzy Garber, who swore that the boy, troubled by a fever, had slept by his side all through the night.

The impudent, astonishingly resourceful Izzy Garber, a hirsute, barrel-chested master of magic, was a born scrounger for whom nothing was impossible, even within the bleak confines of the Steel. At the right moment Izzy’s loosely worn shirt would yield salamis, coils of stuffed derma, roasted chickens or rounds of cheese acquired who knows where, God knows how. He also never lacked for tobacco and gin and Indian hemp and soothing salves to heal the lacery of cuts burnt into Ephraim’s back. The other prisoners, even the turnkeys, treated Izzy with deference, calling upon him again and again to extract teeth, set broken bones, or stitch knife wounds, no questions asked. Izzy, never without his yarmulke, embossed with the inscription, “Honour the Sabbath, To keep it Holy,” was the most triumphantly Jewish man Ephraim had ever met. “Look at their God, or son of, as those sods would have it. Turn the other cheek. The meek shall inherit the earth. Codswallop. Nancyboy horseshit. But our God is truly vengeful,” Izzy once said, thrusting his siddur at Ephraim. “So say your evening prayers, because it doesn’t pay to mess with Jehovah, that old Jew tucker.”

Izzy aside, Ephraim’s sojourn in the Steel proved an invaluable learning experience. From coiners who normally operated in the Holy Land rookery of St. Giles he learned how to take a counterfeit with an unmilled edge and work it into acceptable coin. Practising with pickpockets of his own age he was soon adjudged sufficiently adroit to become a dipper, although he had no intention of putting himself in the hands of a kidsman when he got out.

“Nischt fur dich,” Izzy Garber said.

From a member of the swell mob out of Seven Dials Ephraim absorbed all he needed to know about garroting. But Izzy proved Ephraim’s most beneficial teacher. One night he told him how he had used to work village greens as a prater, or bogus preacher, raising funds for a mission to the savages of the Gold Coast. “‘Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.’” Another night Izzy recalled his days as a professional beggar. He told Ephraim how, posted outside a church, waiting for the Christians to emerge, he would promptly fall to the ground, simulating convulsions: foam, produced by soap shavings under his tongue, bubbling pathetically to his lips. Then, as soon as sympathetic members of the congregation had flocked around, he would whip out his letter.

Given his skill in penmanship and Latin, and the connections he had made in the Steel, Ephraim envisaged setting himself up as a screever once his sentence was done. Izzy was pleased with his protégé. “It wouldn’t be nice for a Yiddisher boy to be a footpad or a dragsman. Remember, tsatskeleh, we are the People of the Book.”

“How will I find you after I get out?”

“Don’t worry,” Izzy said. “I’ll find you.”

On his release, Ephraim dug his money out of its hiding place in Hyde Park, acquired the necessary quills and inks and parchments, and moved into a lodging house in Whitechapel. Within months he was prospering. After dark he drifted from gin-shop, through bordello to gaming-house, seeking Izzy Garber, unavailingly. But during the day he was hard at it. He wrote letters for ruined clergymen. “Milady—I held the rank of Captain in the Peninsular War. I have struggled exceedingly hard, after being discharged from the service on account of my crippling wounds, but unhappily.…” Keeping a sharp eye on the death notices in the Times, he would send an appropriately dressed dollymop, a pillow bound to her belly, to the fashionable home of the newly bereaved family of a gentleman. She would carry a letter saying that the bearer had been seduced by the deceased and was now with child but utterly without means, cast off by her own family, and though she did not wish to publicize the affair.…

His letters, the penmanship exquisite, were signed with the names of sea captains, rectors, major generals, and lords of the realm; and they were garnished with heart-rending appeals, nicely turned Latin phrases and suitable biblical quotations.

Such was the demand for Ephraim’s inventive pen that he soon acquired an opera hat, a white waistcoat, an elegant snuff box and a silk handkerchief. He was brought to the attention of a theatrical producer, who offered him a position in his combine of brothels. Ephraim declined, but he did accompany him to a boxing match and saw Ikey Pig, a Jew, badly mauled. However, one taste of the fancy was enough to make him a victim of boximania. He was with the producer again when an American Negro, an escaped slave, had the effrontery to challenge for the enviable title of Champion of England. As Pierce Egan wrote of this match, “that a FOREIGNER should have the temerity to put in a claim, even for the mere contention of tearing the CHAMPION’S CAP from the British brow, much more the honour of wearing it, or bearing it away from GREAT BRITAIN, such an idea however distant, never intruded itself into the breasts of an Englishman.”

Ephraim, despairing of ever finding Izzy, became a regular at Laurent’s Dancing Academy in Windmill Street, the Argyll Rooms, and of course Kate Hamilton’s night house, flourishing there as a favourite of Thelma Coyne, whom he considered establishing in a flat in Holborn as his very own poule-de-luxe.

Wandering through Piccadilly one night he was drawn into his first, admittedly spurious, acquaintance with Canada through a theatrical poster.

Thrilled by the events in Egyptian Hall, but naggingly suspicious of the chief, Ephraim slipped backstage after the performance. Voices were raised in the chief’s dressing room.

“Paskudnyak! Mamzer!”

“Hok mir nit kayn tchynik.”

“Ver derharget!”

His doubts happily confirmed, Ephraim kicked open the door. The hirsute, barrel-chested chief instantly dived behind a screen. His plump raging wife scooped up a hatchet.

“Izzy, come on out of there.”

“Ephraim!”

The two old lags embraced. “I told you I’d find you,” Izzy said, and then turning to his wife he added, “This lad here can set bones almost as well as I can. You can’t teach these things. You’ve got to have the touch.”

They repaired through greasy fog to a garlicky, smoke-filled basement kitchen in Soho that kept open late to cater to the troupe as well as other dubious night people. Buxom waitresses in stained lowcut blouses sailed through the jostling crowd, hoisting tankards of ale even as they slapped probing hands, their curses drowned in a cacophony of Yiddish, Greek, and Italian. In a gas-lit corner, an old jeweller, one eye sprouting a magnifying glass, bargained with a solemn moustachioed Sikh. At Izzy’s table, platters of chopped liver and shmaltz herring were followed by steaming trays of stuffed derma, boiled flanken, kasha drenched in chicken fat and potato kreplach. Shouting over the din, Ephraim congratulated Izzy on the full house at the Egyptian Hall and then asked why there would be no performances on the Wednesday and Thursday of the following week.

Affronted, Izzy replied, “I think it would be most inappropriate for us to perform the war dance on Yom Kippur.”

“Gottzedank,” Mrs. Garber said.

What finally brought Ephraim down, as it would many times in the future, was a dangerous admixture of vanity, lust, and recklessness. Many a night he entertained two particularly pert Irish girls, the Sullivan sisters, in his attic rooms. The obliging sisters, who lived in the same lodging house as he did, thrived as palmers by day, prostitutes by night. On occasion Ephraim, in a mood to go on the randy, would treat the two of them to an evening at the Eagle, splurging on a box. Not for the small profit involved, but because he enjoyed the sport of it, there were nights when Ephraim would go out bug-hunting with them. The sisters, posted under a gas lamp, would lure a likely, prosperous-looking drunk, preferably a country bumpkin, into buying them a tot in a gin-shop where Ephraim waited. Jammed tight against the crowded bar, Dotty would stroke him, lick his ear, and sing softly:

Meanwhile Kate would pick his pocket and usually that’s all there was to it. But if the victim caught on to what was happening, making a fuss, then Ephraim would be called upon to act as the sisters’ stickman. Simulating outrage, he would elbow through to the victim, vociferous in his defence, assuring him that he had seen everything. Then, as soon as Kate had slipped him the booty, he would rush off, ostensibly to fetch a peeler, but actually hurrying back to his lodging to await the girls, a bottle of claret uncorked on his bedside table. If necessary, back in the gin-shop the girls would submit to a useless search, protesting their innocence, bawling at their offended modesty, until the embarrassed victim would flee into the fog.

Bug-hunting became such a plague that questions were raised in parliament. Irate citizens wrote to the Times, inveighing against Scotland Yard’s ineptitude. And so, inevitably, one night the sisters’ victim turned out to be a police detective, working with an accomplice of his own. The accomplice, another detective, followed Ephraim out of the gin-shop, nabbing him as he was about to enter his lodging house. Even so, Ephraim might have got off with another six-month sentence, but the detective insisted on a visit to his rooms.

“You don’t understand, sir,” Ephraim said. “I don’t live here among the Ikey Pigs and I had no idea that those girls had slipped that gentleman’s purse into my pocket.”

“Why did you stop here, then?”

“You will think badly of me, sir, but I had come to await those wicked girls in their rooms. My father was taken from us at Trafalgar and now my poor widowed mother will be undone. I am a victim of my own lust.”

But a closer search of Ephraim’s waistcoat yielded one of the calling cards he had foolishly had printed and the address was the same. The detective and Ephraim proceeded to his attic rooms, where the work table was strewn with begging letters awaiting pick-up by clients. Burglar’s tools, actually not Ephraim’s but held by him for a ticket-of-leave man of his acquaintance, were discovered in the closet. A brace and bit fitted with a large, adjustable cutting head; a jemmy; a set of pick-locks and a peter-cutter. A desk drawer turned out to be filled with forged official seals. Another drawer contained a harvest of silk handkerchiefs, the property of the Sullivan sisters, but no matter. As the detective began to make notes, Ephraim lunged at him, knocking him off his feet, and flew down the stairs right into the waiting arms of the other detective, who had just entered the lodging house with the Sullivan sisters in tow.

“There he is,” Dotty squealed, “the fancyman who forced us into a life of sin.”

“He takes all our money,” Kate hollered.

Two

The fat pulpy man from the DEW line station offered him twenty dollars, but Isaac wouldn’t do it. Instead he continued as before. For five dollars he met the man once a week in the toilet of the Sir Igloo Inn Café and pumped his thing until it squirted. This time, however, the man gave him two hand-rolled cigarettes as well. “It’s a special kind of tobacco, kid. If you like it, and you want more, maybe we can talk again about the other deal.”

Isaac couldn’t spend his earnings going to a movie because they didn’t have one. They didn’t have anything in Tulugaqtitut. Bored, an irritated Isaac drifted through the settlement, cursing it. He paused at his customary vantage point, the one that offered him a view of Agnes McPhee’s bedroom. She seldom drew the curtains, and more than once he had seen Agnes going at it with one of the bush pilots, her quivering naked legs reaching for the ceiling. But today he couldn’t even catch her undressing. So Isaac wandered into the Hudson’s Bay trading post, Ian Campbell instantly alert, setting aside his ledgers to watch him. “Hey, Isaac,” Campbell called out, playing to the other customers, “has your father decided on which kind of boat yet?”

Everybody, but Nialie, knew Henry was crazy. “Mind your own business,” Isaac hollered.

“Just asking, kid, because it looks like rain.”

Each mail plane would bring Henry elegant packages from boatbuilders. C. vanLent & Zonen Kaag, Abeking & Rasmussen, S.E. Ward & Co., Hitachi Zosen. Each package came with encomiums from satisfied sheiks and international arms dealers and Hollywood moguls. There were colour photographs, elaborate deck plans, and, invariably, a personal letter from the designer.

None of them understood. Henry was not unreasonable. He didn’t expect a boat built of gopher-wood, or that the length would be three hundred cubits, the breadth fifty cubits, and the height thirty cubits. But he was not interested in Twin MTU main engines or U25 HP Caterpillar D-353s. When the time came he was not so foolish as to think his descendants would send forth a dove—or, more appropriate to the generations of Ephraim, a raven—but neither would a pad for a Bell Jet Ranger III helicopter be required. The likelihood was that there would be no fuel and they would be dependent on the wind in their sails for power. So Henry was thinking of a three-masted ship modelled on turn-of-the-century schooners or possibly a windjammer or the sort of square-rigger that had once been built in the Maritimes.

“Please don’t do it,” Isaac said.

“Why not, yingele?”

“Don’t do it!”

“Give me a reason.”

“Everybody is laughing at us already. Is that reason enough for you?”

“Are you ashamed of me?”

“Maybe for more reasons than one,” Isaac said, fleeing.

Seated at his rolltop desk with the two bullet holes in it, awash in estimates and brochures, Henry turned to his Pentateuch for solace, rocking over it, reading, “And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping things, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.”

Of course that could never happen again. God had established a covenant. He had set his bow in a cloud. But the conditions that prevailed today, the wickedness of man great in the earth, were as bad as those of Noah’s time. God’s punishment, Henry was convinced, would be another ice age. Then there would be floods and a properly equipped ship would be crucial to survival. Meanwhile, Henry continued to study the entrails.

A CIA report predicted catastrophic changes that would return the world climate to a condition similar to that of one hundred to four hundred years ago. The report, leaked to the Washington Post, anticipated famine in the near future.

The earth’s cooling will lead to increasingly desperate attempts on the part of the powerful, but hungry, nations to get grain any way they can. Massive migrations, sometimes backed by force, will be a live issue and political and economic instability will be widespread.

Henry’s file also included a recent item clipped from the Edmonton Journal.

Once his parents had gone to bed, Isaac lit his handrolled cigarette in his own little bedroom, switching on a tape.

A gale-force wind screamed across the Arctic. “Last week,” the narrator said, “we left Captain Allan Cohol lying in a fish net inches from death. Frightened by the golden-haired stranger’s escape from a coffin of ice after centuries of entombment, the men of the Eskimo village have overcome him and are preparing now to thrust a harpoon through the giant stranger’s heart.”

“No!” Kirnik cried. “We will take him by sled to Dr. Fantom. The doctor has things to cause sleep. When he sleeps we will send for the police.”

“So the men of Fish Fiord,” the narrator said, “manhandled the mighty man of muscle onto a dogsled, his fabulous frame still entangled in the coils of the net. Their destination was the sinister quarters of Dr. Fantom, renegade refugee from the world of medicine, practising his nefarious skills in the hiding of the high north. Fantom looked down at the giant in the net.”

“I am Captain Allan Cohol. Inter-galactic 80321. I demand my rights.”

Chuckling malevolently, Fantom said, “Come now, relax. My name is Frederick Fantom, MD. You may call me Fred. I will call you Al. Well, isn’t that amusing, gentlemen? Meet our new friend. Al Cohol. What a truly intoxicating pleasure to make your acquaintance. Now then, your arm, my friend. This won’t hurt a bit.”

“Don’t touch me with that needle, you foul physician. This is medical mayhem,” Captain Al Cohol protested, already in a daze.

“Let’s get some stimulant into you. Overproof rum. Just what the doctor ordered, Al. Now open your mouth like a good patient.”

Sounds of struggle. Gurglings, splutterings, liquid being swallowed.

“Look,” Kirnik cried, alarmed. “Look at his eyes. Look at the way his face is changing.”

Captain Al Cohol began to roar. “Kill! I’ll kill you all. A-a-rghh-h-h!”

There now came the terrifying sounds of tearing and rending. The Eskimos shout and scream as Captain Al Cohol hurls himself at them.

“What is this?” the narrator asked. “Captain Al Cohol, the hero of the inter-galactic fleet, driven into madness by a glass of rum?”

Then another voice proclaimed, “The ordeals of Captain Al Cohol is a radio adaptation by E.G. Perrault of a comic-book series written by Art Sorensen for the Alcohol Education Program of the Northwest Territories Government.”

His tape done, Isaac reached under his mattress to dig out his folder of New York photographs, cut from the pages of Time, Newsweek and People. Photographs of the world out there where the main event wasn’t the arrival of an Otter from Yellowknife and the sun didn’t sink below the horizon for month after chilling month. Photographs of film stars and tycoons and fashion models. He had written to his Uncle Lionel, reminding him of his visit and inviting him to come again, signing himself, “Your admirer, Isaac.” In response, he had been sent an electric train set with a card signed by Lionel’s private secretary.

The next evening a resolute Isaac delighted Henry at the dinner table, joining him in saying grace and asking if they might resume their Talmud studies. They had only been at it a week when Isaac burst into tears at the table.

“What is it, yingele?”

“Please don’t send me to school in Yellowknife. I want to attend the Rebbe’s yeshiva in Brooklyn.”

Henry, his eyes sparkling, danced his son around the room, singing, “Shteht oif shteht oif, l’avoidas haBoiray.” Wakeup, wake up, to do the work of the Creator.

Nialie watched without expression, frightened for both of them.

Three

September 1916. Solomon, seventeen years old now, short for his age, wiry, his skin burnt nut-brown by the prairie sun, was perched on the corral fence behind the Queen Victoria Hotel with Bernard and Morrie. Plump Bernard, who parted his hair in the middle and already owned a three-piece grey serge suit and a homburg and spats, sucked on a caramel. Morrie, whittling away on a chunk of wood as usual, was apprehensive as Solomon had joined them on the fence for once, familiar as he was with Solomon’s need to bring Bernard to the boil. Slapping at flies, squinting against the sun, the Gursky brothers were waiting for the sale to start. Aaron had bought a snorting, restive herd of wild mustangs from Hardy, overpaying again, and now hoped to sell to the farmers, most of whom were already in debt to him at the store. By this juncture the Gurskys had moved into town, living above

Cajoling, sweaty, Aaron bantered with the farmers at the corral, laughing too hard at their inane jokes. The farmers feigning indifference, most of them waiting for sundown when the jumpy Jew’s prices would drop.

No sooner did Aaron cut a deal on a horse, realizing a small profit, than he would invite the buyer into the hotel bar for a ceremonial drink. The farmer would not order a beer like Aaron, but would spit on the sawdust-covered floor, wink at the bartender, and demand a double shot of the hard stuff, saying, “Both of my boys have already enlisted, but I suppose yours will be staying put.”

Then a breathless Aaron would zip out to the corral again, counting the shiny rumps of the remaining horses, calculating likely losses in his head, mingling with the other farmers, thrusting gifts of coloured hair ribbons at their wives and children. Panicky at sundown, he would drop prices drastically.

Solomon prodded Bernard with his elbow. “Now that you’re such a man of affairs, a student of correspondence courses, what do you make of all this?”

“Whatever I make of it is strictly my own business.”

“Why can’t we be like the three musketeers,” Morrie asked, “all for one and one for all? The Gursky brothers.”

“Well,” Solomon said, “I’ll tell you what I think. The bar’s turning over a bigger profit than Paw is sucking up to that bunch of farmers. What Paw ought to do is buy the hotel and sell drinks and let somebody else worry about the horses.”

And then Solomon, terrifying Morrie, jumped down from the fence right into the flow of wild nervy horses in the corral. Solomon, Ephraim’s anointed one.

Bernard didn’t credit most of his brother’s tales about his trek to the Polar Sea with their grandfather. But whatever had really happened out there, Solomon had returned blessed with a certain grace, an inner stillness. And watching him now, at ease with the wild mustangs, Bernard grasped that had he been the one to jump into the corral, probably stumbling in the dust, they would have smelled his fear and reared up on their hind legs, snorting, looking to take a chomp out of him. Bernard understood for the first time that he was a coarse, tubby little man with wet fishy eyes, and that he would have to scratch and bite and cheat to get what he wanted out of life, which was plenty, but that Solomon would sit, expecting the world to come to him, and he would be served. He watched Solomon crossing that corral, he watched choking on envy and hatred, and yet, for all that, he yearned for Solomon’s approval. Then Solomon spoiled it by pausing to taunt him, calling back, “Follow me, Bernie, and I’ll buy you a beer.”

“Go straight to hell.”

“Aw, you two,” Morrie groaned. “Hey, you’re crying.”

“I am not. He’s going to shtupp Minnie Pryzack now.”

Minnie, comfortably ensconced in the Queen Victoria Hotel for years, was only seventeen when she first went west, working the first-class carriages on the train from Winnipeg to the coast and back again.

“He’s going to shtupp Minnie and then he’s going to join the poker game.”

“They’d never let him play in the big autumn game. Besides, he’s busted.”

“I wasn’t afraid of jumping into the corral, but then you would have had to come after and you could have been hurt. Is he really broke?”

“They cleaned him out last Thursday.”

Aaron, sprawled at the kitchen table, smelling of manure, his ears and nose clogged with dust, his back aching, counted out his money twice, calculating that he had turned a profit of fifty-five dollars, provided two of the farmers honoured their notes.

Morrie stooped to remove his father’s boots and then brought him a glass of lemon tea and a bowl of stewed prunes.

“Paw,” Bernard said, “if you ask me, you work too hard for too little.”

“You’re a good boy,” Aaron said. “Morrie too.”

RATHER THAN RISK throwing everything into the pot in the heat of the game, Solomon gave Minnie his valise, as well as his railroad ticket out and five ten-dollar bills, which would see him through, if things turned out badly. Then he drifted through the kitchen of the Queen Victoria Hotel, climbed the back stairs to the third floor, and rapped three long, two short, and one long on the attic door.

McGraw shot the bolts. “You can’t play. Not tonight.”

Solomon didn’t budge.

“It’s different rules tonight, kid. You know that.”

Not including Solomon, there were five of them gathered together for the big autumn game, the betting soaring so high it could only be risked once a year. McGraw, the owner of the hotel and the blacksmith’s shop, a recent acquisition; George Kouri, the Lebanese, who had owned the five-and-ten-cent store and a shop that sold buggies and wagons; Ingram, Sifton’s man, who dealt railroad land to the Slavs in their sheepskin coats; Charley Lin, who had owned the laundry and the butchershop, but since last autumn’s big game only a couple of bedbug-ridden rooming houses; and Kozochar, the barber and fire chief. A side table was stacked with cold cuts, potato salad, and bottles of whisky and vodka. There were two cots in an adjoining room, in case anybody needed to take a nap or wanted to send down for one of the girls, maybe changing his luck.

Last year’s big game had ended acrimoniously after forty-eight hours, one of Charley Lin’s rooming houses, the blacksmith’s shop, two cow pastures, six heifers, three Polish whores and one Indian one and $4,500 changing hands. The men involved in the big game enjoyed the status it conferred on them by dint of the enormity of their winnings or losses. The game, a curse on the wives, had once been broken up by three of them marching on the tables. Since then it convened at a different place every year. The basement of Kouri’s five-and-ten. The back room in the fire station. And this year the attic of the Queen Victoria Hotel. Weeks before the men sat down to the table, the game was the subject of speculation in town, and was denounced from the pulpit by the Reverend Ezekiel Shipley, who blamed it all on the harlots of the town.

McGraw was adamant. “It just wouldn’t be right to deal you in,” he said.

McGraw had been against allowing Solomon into the weekly game in the first place. He was hardly a man of substance, like the rest of them, but merely a snooty kid. Besides McGraw liked Aaron, a dummy maybe, but an honest and hardworking Jew. Kouri had been indifferent, but Ingram was also opposed and Kozochar dead against it. “It would be like taking candy from a baby.”

“His money’s as good as yours or mine,” Charley Lin said with appetite.

Ostensibly it was the need to teach Solomon a lesson that was his ticket of admission, because the men resented him without knowing exactly why. But there was another consideration. They wanted to impress him with their money and their moxie. That little son of a bitch.

His grandfather had been a squaw man, his father was a peddler, and, for all that, the boy, a mere seventeen-year-old, a squirt, a Jew, strode through the streets of town as if he were a prince-in-waiting, destined for great things. Unfailingly polite, considerate, it was difficult to fault him. If a fire broke out at four o’clock of a sub-zero morning, he was there at once to join the bucket brigade. When Miss Thomson was poorly, laid low with one of those feminine ailments, he took over the schoolhouse, enchanting the children. The Reverend Shipley, who could sniff evil in a year-old babe born to fornicate, sought out Solomon for discussions of the Holy Scripture. He was also more welcome on the reservation than any one of them, and could be gone with the Indians, God knows where, for ten days at a time. But there was something about him that riled the men and made them want to rub his nose in fresh dog shit.

Unlike pushy Bernard or Morrie (a really nice, polite kid), he didn’t deign to serve in his father’s store. But it was because he could be found there on occasion that the daughters were drawn to A. Gursky & Sons in swarms, blushing if he greeted them, the one he picked out for a buggy ride all but swooning on the spot. And, remarkably, the other young men in town, far from being jealous, vied for his favour, competing to recruit him as a hunting or drinking partner.

Once Solomon just happened to be passing in his buggy when McGraw’s wagon was stuck in the mud. Immediately he jumped down and offered help. “No, no,” McGraw protested, kneeling in the muck, his own shoulder to the wheel, “you’ll only get dirty.” Then McGraw turned pale, amazed at himself, because he would not have said such a thing to anybody else in town.

Solomon brought two hundred dollars to his first game, his pool-room earnings, and was promptly stripped of it. But he didn’t sulk. He didn’t complain. Instead he joked about it. “My initiation fee,” he said.

So when he turned up again he was made welcome, the men digging deep for old hunting stories and gilding tales of past sexual triumphs, determined to prove to him that far from being a bunch of big-bellied hicks they were, if the truth were known, a band of hellraisers.

Solomon did reasonably well in his second game until he foolishly tried to bluff Kouri, showing three ladies, with what turned out to be no better than eights over deuces. He lost a third time and a fourth and now he was back, demanding a seat at the autumn game. McGraw didn’t like it one bit. If they cleaned him out people would say they had taken advantage of a kid, but if he won it would be even more embarrassing.

“I must have dropped five hundred bucks at this table,” Solomon said. “You owe me a chair.”

“We don’t owe you shit,” Ingram said.

“No IOUs tonight. You want to sit down,” McGraw said, sure that would be the end of it, “you got to show us at least a thousand dollars.”

Solomon laid out his money on the table like bait immediately before Charley Lin.

“What can I get you to drink, kid?” Charley Lin asked.

BERNARD BROUGHT HIS FATHER a slice of honey cake. “Paw, I’ve got an idea.”

Aaron, dazed by fatigue, itchy everywhere from horsefly bites, only half-listened.

“We could bring in a fiddler on Friday nights. Salt the pretzels more. Start a darts league. I know where we can get mugs with bottoms an inch thicker for the draft beer. Morrie could handle the cash register.”

“And how would we raise the down payment?”

“McGraw buys his beer from Faulkner’s. If we switched to Langham, signing a contract with them, they’d lend us some money. So would the bank.”

“Sure. The bank.”

“This isn’t Russia, Paw.”

“Neither is it Gan Eden.”

Aaron, his money in hand, shuffled over to a corner of the kitchen, lifted a plank floorboard, dug out his strongbox, unlocked it, and howled and stumbled backward, a stricken man. Fanny, who had been tending to the pots simmering on the wood stove, was instantly by his side. “Aaron!”

His eyes had gone flat. All he could manage was a croak. “It’s gone. The money.”

“Some of that money’s mine,” Bernard yelled, seizing the box, turning it upside down and shaking it.

Out tumbled citizenship papers, a marriage licence, birth certificates, but no cash and no deed to the general store.

“Should I go to the police?” Aaron asked in a failing voice.

“Only if you want to put your son in prison,” Bernard said.

“How can you be sure it was him?” Morrie asked.

“I’ll kill him for this,” Bernard said. And he was off and running, pursued by Morrie. Bernard didn’t stop before he stood red and panting before Boyd, the porcine clerk in the Queen Victoria Hotel. “Where’s the fucken poker game?” he demanded.

Boyd, his smile bright with malevolence, pointed at the sign behind his desk: no cursing, no spitting, no games of chance allowed.

“Listen, you little shit, if you don’t tell me where I can find Solomon I’m going to try every room in the hotel.”

“You go right ahead, shorty, but there are some awful big guys in a number of them rooms, some of them entertaining company.”

A tearful Morrie stepped between them. “Please, Mr. Boyd, we have to find Solomon.”

“If I see him I’ll tell him you’re looking for him.”

The Gurskys sat up all through the night waiting for Solomon to come home. Fanny moaning and Aaron seated in a chair with his hands folded, his eyes turned inward. “I’m too old to start over again,” he said to nobody in particular.

It was dawn before Bernard slipped into the bedroom he shared with his two brothers and discovered that two of Solomon’s drawers were empty and his valise was gone. Win or lose, he wasn’t coming back.

“I’VE SEEN DEAD MEN look better than you do right now.”

“Unfavourable winds,” Solomon said to Minnie in the adjoining room. “How much did you bring?”

“Your fifty and the railway ticket and eight hundred of my own and my rings.”

“What happens if I lose that too?”

“Then you must promise to marry me.”

“Minnie,” he said, inclined to be generous, “you must be thirty years old.”

“Take it or leave it.”

“It’s blackmail,” he said, scooping up the money.

“Now that’s what I call a proposal.”

IT WAS TIME to open the store.

“What we should do,” Bernard said, “is hire wagons and move all our stock somewhere safe, because tonight this place may no longer belong to us.”

“He’s a minor,” Morrie said.

“Prick. If he signs over the deed and we don’t honour his gambling debt, we’re asking for a fire.”

Bernard figured he wouldn’t run away without saying goodbye to Lena Green Stockings, so he took the buggy and rode out to the reservation. Kids with scabs on their faces wrestling in the dirt, one of them with rickets. A drunk slumped against a tree trunk outside George Two Axe’s store, scrawny chickens pecking at his vomit. Flies everywhere. Crows fluttering over the entrails of a dead dog, flying off with the ropey bits.

Bernard entered the tarpaper shack and was enraged to find it stocked with goods that could only have been swiped from A. Gursky & Sons, General Merchants. Tea. Sugar. An open ten-pound bag of flour on a high shelf. He found her out in the back yard, seated on a wicker chair with a broken seat, dozing.

“Lena!”

No answer.

“Lena, Solomon left in such a hurry he forgot to give me his new address.”

When she finally raised her head, wizened as a walnut, he saw that she no longer had any teeth.

“It’s important that I have it,” Bernard said, pulling a bottle of rum out of his jacket pocket and waving it in front of her.

Lena smiled. “It’s the boy with the two belly buttons,” she said, remembering.

“Jesus Christ! Son of a bitch! Fuck! Everybody looks like that coming out of the swimming hole.”

Her head began to slump again.

“Your shack is full of stolen goods. I could tell on you and then they’ll come to lock you up.”

Lena swatted a fly.

“Where’s he going?”

“To see the world.”

Passing through her shack again, Bernard paused to leave evidence of his passage, and then he went to see Minnie, taking the bar entrance to the hotel to avoid another encounter with Boyd. “I want you to give Solomon a message. Lena Green Stockings told me where he’s planning to run to.”

“How did you get that flour all over your suit?”

“Maybe my father won’t go to the police, but I will. You tell him that.”

Solomon came home three o’clock the next morning and went right to the kitchen sink, stooping to pump cold water over his head. He turned around just in time to see Bernard making a run at him, his arms outstretched, his fingers curled, ready to scratch. Solomon slapped him away and then went to his father and dropped the deed to the general store and a bundle of money tied with an elastic band on to his lap.

“Some of that money you stole was mine,” Bernard said.

Emptying his pockets one by one, Solomon piled banknotes on the kitchen table, more money than the Gurskys had ever seen at one time.

“Big shot,” Bernard said, “it’s a good thing you were lucky for once.”

Morrie went to make coffee and Bernard sat down to count the money.

“We are the new owners of the Queen Victoria Hotel and the blacksmith’s shop on Prince Albert Street and a rooming house on Duke. The hotel comes with an eight-thousand-dollar mortgage, now our responsibility. Sell the rooming house. It’s a fire trap. The blacksmith’s shop is for André Clear Sky.”

“I don’t see any hotel deeds here,” Bernard said.

Solomon reached into his jacket pocket and tossed the deeds on the table.

“You’re a good boy,” Aaron said.

“Like hell he is. He was planning to run away. Me, I stopped him.”

Solomon waited until his mother had left the kitchen. “I want somebody to wake me up in time for the noon train. I’m going to Winnipeg. I’m joining the army. But please don’t any of you say anything to Maw. I’ll tell her myself.”

Bernard stood apart, fulminating, as everybody fussed over Solomon at the train station. Minnie and the other whores, Lena, some farm girls whose names he didn’t even know, a drunken McGraw, and Fanny Gursky awash in tears. Then Bernard ate lunch with his father. “I’m registering the hotel in my name, because I’m the eldest.”

Wearing his homburg, his three-piece suit and spats, Bernard went to see the notary and then had a word with Morrie. “You know Boyd, the fat clerk at the hotel?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Go tell him he’s fired. You’re taking his place.”

Next Bernard went to the hotel and arranged for a box of chocolates and a victrola to be sent to room twelve, and then he sailed into the bar and sat down at Minnie’s table.

“If I invited you to sit here,” she said, “remind me.”

“You better learn to talk nice if you want to continue here. I’m boss now.”

“It’s Solomon’s hotel.”

“My kid brother left me in charge. Go to room twelve at once and wait for me there.”

Minnie was waiting when Bernard entered the bedroom. “Help yourself to a chocolate,” he said. “It’s for you. The whole box. The largest on sale.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you read the funnies?”

“I look at the pictures,” she said, blushing.

“My favourite is Krazy Kat, but I also like Abie Kabibble. How’s the chocolate?”

“Very nice.”

“It breaks my heart, but the army turned me down. Flat feet. I don’t mind if you tell that to the other girls, but if you repeat anything else that happens here you will not be allowed into the bar again. Now tell me what you like better, waltz or ragtime?”

“Ragtime.”

Sweaty, his hand trembling, Bernard nevertheless managed to set the record on the victrola: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”.

“Are we going to dance first?” Minnie asked.

“Just you. Taking things off. But not your garter belt or stockings. And you mustn’t look at me, not even a little peek,” he said, reaching for a towel. But the record was finished before he was satisfied.

“What do I do now?” she asked.

He put on another record. “I Love My Wife, But, Oh, You Kid.”

“Now you can get dressed and don’t forget to take your chocolates.”

“Would you like to do it, honey?”

“Don’t honey me. I’m Mr. Gursky to you.”

“Mr. Gursky.”

“Do what?”

“Dress me.”

“Shit, I know you can’t read, but surely you know how to put your clothes on at your age.”

“Sorry.”

“Well, hold on a minute. If I could do the brassiere I wouldn’t say no.”

“Oh, Mr. Gursky, chocolate makes my skin break out, but do I ever love Frenchy perfumes and scented soaps and anything made of silk.”

Once she had gone, Bernard immediately washed his hands with soap and water, using a different towel. Then he curled up on the bed, hot with shame. Later he picked up the incriminating towel with two fingers and took it to room fourteen, which he knew was empty, and left it there. And he decided to punish himself for his indulgence. For the rest of the week, when he popped into Susy’s Lunch to meet Morrie at four o’clock, as was his habit, he took his blueberry pie without ice cream.

Four

While Solomon was overseas, during the First World War, Bernard acquired hotels in Regina, Saskatoon, Portage la Prairie, Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, and Winnipeg. Shrewdly, he followed wherever a railway extension was planned, buying hotels close to the yards. The hotels provided beer and breakfast at six, before the railroad men went to work, and solace more appropriate to bachelors when the men drifted back in the evening, their shifts done. The Gurskys’ burgeoning fortunes could be measured by the escalation of the down payments they made on hotels, conscientiously recorded by Morrie, which leapt from $10,000, through $35,000, to $150,000 paid to a certain Bruno Hauswasser for the New Berlin Hotel in Winnipeg, telephones in each of its one hundred rooms, an elevator to every floor, but unfortunately cursed with a restaurant that specialized in wiener schnitzel and sauerbraten, and a bar which had done little business since the Kaiser marched on Belgium. Bernard placed an ad in the Tribune announcing the hotel’s new name, The Victory, and that, as a patriotic gesture, the new Canadian ownership was offering one free beer an evening to nurses.

The family sold the general store and moved to Winnipeg. Manitoba had already been declared dry, except for Temperance Beer and alcohol “for use for medicinal, scientific, mechanical, industrial or sacramental purposes.” Fortunately, there was a convenient loophole in the law. As interprovincial trade in liquor was still allowed, Bernard acquired a mail-order house in a small town in Ontario, and Morrie became a distributor of something called Rock-a-Bye Cough Cure, which enjoyed an understandably huge sale.

The outraged drys began to apply more pressure on Ottawa. A Presbyterian minister, back from a visit to the Canadian troops in England, declared that innocent boys were being “debauched by British booze, and by the immoral filth of London.” The Reverend Sidney Lambert sniffed even more iniquity at home. “I would rather Germany wins this war,” he said, “than see these get-rich-quick liquor men rule and damn the young men of Canada.”

In 1917 the Gurskys were struck not one, but two blows. Ottawa introduced income tax, a nuisance that Bernard chose to ignore. Then, on Christmas eve, the importation of intoxicating liquors over two-and-a-half-percent proof was banned until after the war’s end by an Order-in-Council. Only three months later, in March 1918, another Order-in-Council abolished interprovincial trafficking in liquor.

Morrie’s memoir of the years that followed was uncommonly evasive, even for him, but, surprisingly, also a touch poetic. “This is no tale of woe,” he wrote, “but as we climbed out of the prairie of toils into the garden of plenty, enjoying our first tasty chunks out of the roast beef of life, Solomon and Bernard began to quarrel bitterly, and I had to intervene more than once. It was in that acid soil that seeds of my future nervous breakdown were planted.”

Solomon came home in the spring of 1918, wearing a flying-officer’s uniform, favouring his left leg, and sporting the first of his malacca canes. Bernard sat down with him and laid out all that he had accomplished during his absence. The family holdings, he said, now included nine hotels and two mail-order houses, one in a small town in Ontario and the other in Montreal, and then he looked up, hungering for praise, entitled to it, but gaining only an impatient nod. “Okay,” Bernard roared, “you want me to give it to you straight? In spite of my working sixteen hours a day, since the introduction of the new laws, the mail-order houses aren’t worth a dry fart. And you know what those fucken hotels are good for now? A fire. Insurance money.”

Solomon sent for copies of the Orders-in-Council, studied them in bed, and the next morning summoned Bernard and Morrie. “We’re going into the wholesale drug business,” he said.

Wearing his uniform, Solomon took the Manitoba Liberal party bagman to dinner at The Victory Hotel.

“How I envy you,” the bagman said. “I was desperate to join my regiment, but the prime minister insisted I could do more for the war effort in Ottawa.”

A girl was provided for the bagman, a considerable tribute was paid, and the necessary licence was forthcoming. An abandoned warehouse was acquired and The Royal Pure Drug Company of Canada was born. Within weeks it was producing Ginger Spit, Dandy Bracer, Dr. Isaac Grant’s Liver & Kidney Cure, Raven Cough Brew, and Tip-Top Fixer among other elixirs. The brew was blended by pouring sugar, molasses, tobacco juice, blue stone and raw alcohol into washtubs and letting it sit overnight. In the morning, once drowned rats had been scooped out with a fishing net, the solution was stirred with an oar, strained, tinted different colours, and bottled.

Then Solomon discovered another loophole in the law. Given a drug licence, a wholesaler could import real whisky from Scotland without limit, providing it was stored in a bonded warehouse, imported for re-export. Another girl was washed and scented for the bagman, more money was fed into the voracious maw of the Liberal party machine, and warehouses were promptly bought in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec. Railroad carloads of whisky were imported from Scotland.

And then Solomon had another idea. “Why are we selling other people’s booze when we could make our own?”

Morrie was sent out to buy mixing vats and bottling equipment, and Solomon set to designing labels and commissioning a printer to produce them. Highland Cream, Crofter’s Delight, Bonnie Brew, Pride of the Highlands, Balmoral Malt, Vat Inverness, Ivanhoe Special Brand. Bernard, armed with a book he had stolen from the library, insisted that he be put in charge of the blending that was to be done in one-thousand-gallon redwood vats and Solomon, amused, agreed to it. But the initial carload of 65 overproof ethyl alcohol shipped to the Winnipeg warehouse presented them with a conundrum, and it was only the first of many carloads expected. If the overproof were to be used in the making of beverage alcohol it would be subject to a tax of $2.40 a gallon, but if, on the other hand, it was to be used to make vinegar the excise tax would be only 27¢ a gallon. Lloyd Corbett, the obese, affable Winnipeg customs agent, explained the problem.

“What time is it, my good friend?” Bernard asked.

“Eleven twenty-three.”

“Come,” Bernard said, and taking him by the arm he led him to the window and pointed at the big, endlessly blue prairie sky. “I tell you what, I’m such a crazy fool, I’m willing to bet you a thousand dollars it rains before noon.”

Lloyd Corbett sat down again, sorting out his genitals, and then lit his pipe. “Jeez, Bernie, I’m crazier than you are. I’ll bet you two thousand dollars and give you until one o’clock before the first drop falls.”

While they waited, Bernard fished a bottle of Scotch out of his desk drawer and poured Corbett a large shot. Among them, it was never too early.

“I’m retiring next month. Going to settle in Victoria. Had enough of these damn winters.”

“Will Frobisher be taking your place?” Bernard asked, suddenly alert.

“Nope. He’s going to Ottawa. They’ve already sent in a new fella. Just a kid. His name’s Smith. Bertram Smith.”

“Well, let me have his address and I’ll send him a case of Johnny Walker Red to welcome him into town.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Bernie, if I was you.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“Smith’s a teetotaller.”

“Married?”

“Nope.”

“I bet I’ve got just the girl for him.”

“He’s a regular church-goer, Bernie. A troop leader with the Boy Scouts.”

Three weeks passed before Bert Smith made his first appearance at the warehouse. At first glance, Bernard took him for another unemployed farm boy looking for a day’s work, he walked so softly and seemed so unsure of himself. Smith was scrawny, dry brown hair parted in the middle, pale as a plucked chicken, grey eyes with pupils like nailheads, blade of a nose blackhead peppery, hardly any lips, just a line there clamped shut, and a receding chin. His suit, too large for him, was neatly pressed and his black leather shoes shone. Once he introduced himself, Bernard grasped why he kept his mouth shut so tight. His crowded teeth were not so much irregular as running off in every which direction, the puffy gums an angry red. And his breath came hot and smelly. “I’m the new customs agent,” Smith said.

“It’s very thoughtful of you to come by to say hello. What do you say we grab a coffee and a blueberry pie at The Regent?”

They sat together in a booth.

“Where are you from?”

“Saskatoon.”

“Isn’t that my favourite town?”

“I came to inquire about the four carloads of bonded whisky you’ve got lying on a railroad siding.”

“You got a hero, Bert? Jesus aside.”

“Jesus was not a hero, Mr. Gursky. He is our Saviour.”

“Goddamn right he is. I meant no disrespect.”

“Those who do not accept him can never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Or the Manitoba Club, you little rat, Bernard thought, but never mind. “Risky risky,” he said, “that’s life. And death too, if I take your point correctly.”

“Yes.”

“Me, my hero is Baden-Powell. You know, the best years of my life were in the Boy Scouts and it really pains me that the troops here haven’t got a proper meeting hall. We’d like to contribute to that, the Gurskys, and we’d be honoured if you served as treasurer, taking charge of the funds at the committee’s disposal.”

“I would like to know if your bonded whisky is really for re-export and, if so, I want to see evidence of its final destination.”

“Papers papers. When it comes to paperwork you’re looking at a guy who takes the booby-prize. Give me a couple of days and I’ll find the documents.”

“I’ll be back next Wednesday,” Smith said, and on his way out he paid for his own coffee and blueberry pie.

Bernard, sniffing trouble, was filled with unease. Then, returning to the office, sifting through the monthly bank statements, his unease flared into red-hot anger, and he hurried over to The Victory Hotel, pulling Solomon away from the poker table, and presenting him with the evidence. “I’ve found you out,” he hollered, waving cancelled cheques at him, cheques endorsed by Solomon. “Look at this. $3,000 to Billy Sunday. $3,500 to the Anti-Saloon League. And here’s another one. $2,500 to Alphonso Alva Hopkins. You invented that name. Admit it.”

“Why, Mr. Hopkins is a writer and editor of great distinction. In 1915 he campaigned to have the name of German measles changed to victory or liberty measles, and now he is even more adamantly opposed to the scum of besodden Europe—people like us, Bernie—corrupting the Christian youth of this once-pure continent with booze.”

“If you ask me none of these cheques are going where you say, but they are covering your poker losses right here in the hotel.”

“I’ll get back to my game now.”

“The hell you will. Tell me what the fuck is going on!”

“We’re investing in the future.”

Two days later Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition would be enforced a year later.

“Bernard, you driven, greedy bastard,” Solomon said, “Bernard, you’re going to be richer than you imagined in your wildest dreams.”

In his excitement, Bernard forgot to tell Solomon about Bertram Smith, and that he would be coming back the following week.

Five

The necessary customs documents for the bonded whisky were not produced, contrary to Bernard’s promise, so Smith had no choice but to report the infraction to the Regina office. He was rebuked for his zeal. Then, patrolling a border road one evening, Smith saw two “Whisky Six” Studebakers racing south, riding low on their springs under a full load of booze. The bootleggers promptly switched on their rear windshield searchlights, trying to blind their pursuer, but Smith pulled ahead and cut them off at the border. The bootleggers turned out to be three defiant, unemployed construction workers out of North Dakota. They giggled at the sight of their scrawny, snaggle-toothed captor. “Jeez, sonny, you ain’t gonna shoot us, are ya?”

Smith established that the three Americans had crossed the border illegally the night before and, consequently, had to be detained until they paid double duty on their cars, some $1,850, that would be reimbursed once they returned to the States.

“Hey, why don’t you just be a good boy and take us to town, where the Gurskys will straighten you out.”

Bernard arranged for Smith to meet with him, Solomon, and Morrie in the warehouse office, Tim Callaghan also in attendance.

“It was good of you to come here today, Mr. Smith,” Solomon said. “May I pour you a drink?”

“He doesn’t.”

“Such a nice boy,” Morrie said.

“A putz you mean,” Bernard said, “just like you.”

“Is there anything I can offer you?”

“No.”

“How about money. Plenty of it,” Bernard sang out, opening the safe and tossing bundles of banknotes on to the desk. “You could get your teeth fixed. Buy a suit that fits. A car. A house, even. The girls you could get. Wowee!”

“Precisely how much money is on the table?” Smith asked.

“Ten thousand dollars,” Bernard said, brightening. Smith took out his fountain pen and made a note on his pad.

“But maybe if I counted it again it could come to fifteen.”

“I intend to see you and your brothers in prison.”

“Would that give you pleasure?” Solomon asked.

“You and your sort will have to learn once and for all that not everybody has his price.”

“You know what you’re asking for, Mr. Fucken Boy Scout Troop Leader,” Bernard shouted, “Mr. Eighteen-Dollars-a-Week Pipsqueak, you’re asking for trouble, eh? Big big trouble.”

“I intend to report your threats verbatim,” Smith said, scribbling on his pad again.

“You heard that? Threats yet. Well fuck you, sonny, I don’t threaten cockroaches. I squash them,” Bernard said, rubbing his heel into the floor, “like this.”

“Mr. Callaghan, you are a witness to this attempted bribe and to the threats to my person. I expect you to testify accordingly in court.”

“I’m Tim’s boss, not you, cacker. Jeez, why didn’t you ever do anything about those teeth of yours? Look at him, guys,” Bernard said, heaving with laughter, “I’ll bet he hasn’t even busted his cherry yet.”

“You’re disgusting.”

Solomon said he wished to speak to Smith alone. Grudgingly, Bernard stepped outside, followed by Morrie, Callaghan starting after.

“I’m leaving too,” Smith said, “unless Mr. Callaghan stays.”

“You want a witness?” Solomon asked.

“Yes.”

So Callaghan remained behind.

“I want to assure you, in the presence of Mr. Callaghan, that even if you choose to testify against us nothing will happen to you.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“I admire you for it, honestly, but the deck is stacked against you. Your superiors, grossly underpaid, are not nearly so fastidious. Far from appreciating your ardour they will crush you for it. Don’t testify, Smith.”

“I was both threatened here and offered a bribe.”

“Yes, but circumstances will oblige me to deny it, and Callaghan will lie for my sake.”

“But he’ll be under oath.”

“Swearing on a Bible?”

“Yes, sir,” Smith said, infuriated with himself for the “sir,” but there was something in Solomon that compelled it.

“Oh Smith, Smith, if it’s justice you’re after, don’t bother looking for it in this world, wait for the next. I’ve got enough on my conscience without you. Take the money or leave it, as you see fit, but don’t stick your neck out.”

Once he had gone, Solomon poured himself a Scotch and then passed the bottle to Callaghan. “Did you know, Tim, that John Calvin attended the same school in Paris as Rabelais? Le Collège de Montaigu.”

“And what if I don’t care to swear on a Bible and then lie for your sake on a witness stand?”

“That would really make things interesting.”

Bernard was back, Morrie trailing after. “Softsoaping him got you nowhere, eh?”

“He’s a man of principle.”

“So you’re sending for somebody.”

“I promised that nothing would happen to him.”

“Hey, that was big of you, but I didn’t. Meyer would help. Little Farfel owes us. Phone him. Or maybe Longy better.”

‘‘Forget it.’’

“Good good. We’ll go to prison and learn how to sew mailbags or stamp licence plates. Why should other guys have all the fun? Say something, Morrie.”

“What should I say?”

“Say you don’t want to go to prison.”

“I don’t want to go to prison.”

“With him for a brother who needs a parrot? Come on, Solomon. Send for somebody.”

“What did you make of Smith, Tim?”

Callaghan shrugged. He looked troubled.

“What if that’s the size the saints are now? Bad teeth. Boils on their neck. Consumed with hatred.”

Morrie approached Solomon. “In your honest opinion,” he asked, “is he dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“Watch,” Bernard said, “he’s going to run to the toilet now.”

Morrie froze in the middle of the room.

“What are you going to do? Wet your pants just because I called the shot? Go, for Christ’s sake.” Then Bernard turned on Callaghan. “I’d like to have a word alone with my brothers, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” Callaghan said, leaving.

“Tim could testify against us to save his own neck.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“Speak to Meyer. Send for somebody.”

Solomon poured himself another drink.

“You think it doesn’t go against my nature?” Bernard asked.

Six

Among the dusty stacks of Gursky memorabilia that cluttered Moses’s cabin was a copy of The Cunarder for May 1933. Featured articles included “In Havana, Gay Capital of Cuba” and “Czechoslovakia’s Winter Jollity”. There was also a double-page spread of “Some Trans-Atlantic Personalities” posing on the decks of the Berengaria, Aquitania, Caronia and Mauretania. Among them were the Duchess of Marlborough, the former Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt; Madame Luisa Tetrazzini, a star of the New York Metropolitan Opera House; and Mrs. George F. Gould, “Filiae pulchrae, mater pulcherior might have been coined to describe Mrs. Gould.” The photograph next to that of Mrs. Gould was one of Solomon Gursky. “Nothing at the moment is more in the public eye than a possible end to the enforcement of Prohibition in the United States. Above is seen a prominent Canadian distiller intimately connected with the looming wet invasion of America. He is smiling against the deck plating of the Aquitania, where he allowed himself to be photographed on a recent trip to England.”

Moses had noted on a file card, attached to The Cunarder with a paper clip, that several months earlier—on February 27, 1933 to be precise—the American House of Representatives and the Senate had passed a resolution to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. The resolution called for ratification of Repeal by a majority vote of state conventions in thirty-six states. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an acknowledged wet, was sworn in as the thirty-second president of the United States on March 4 and early in April it became legal to sell 3.2 percent beer. H.L. Mencken sampled a glass of the new brew in the bar of the Rennert Hotel in Baltimore. “Not bad at all,” he said. “Fill it again.”

Solomon sailed for England in May, ostensibly bound for Edinburgh, where he was to seek a partnership in the American market with the powerful McCarthy Distillers Limited of Lochnagar, just above Balmoral. But over the next three months there was nothing but the occasional teasing postcard from Solomon. Postcards from Berlin and Munich and London and Cambridge and finally Moscow. Meanwhile a fulminating Mr. Bernard was not idle. He acquired a distillery in Ontario and another in Tennessee. Solomon returned to Montreal early in October.

“What happened in Scotland?” Mr. Bernard demanded, his eyes bulging.

“You know damn well I never got there. You go, Bernie.”

“I need your permission? Like hell I do.”

Mr. Bernard sailed late in October only to find that the Scots liquor barons considered him not quite the right sort to represent their interests in America now that Prohibition was about to end. In fact, they seemed amused by his presumption. A bristling Mr. Bernard was in London, staying at the Savoy, when Utah became the thirty-sixth Repeal State, making the news official. November 20 that was, and the headline in the Evening News read:

Solomon, to Mr. Bernard’s bewilderment, did not mock him for coming home empty-handed. Solomon had put a short-wave radio and a cot into his office. Unsavoury, shifty-eyed little strangers, wearing funny European-style suits, dribbling cigarette ash everywhere, met with him there and left with their pockets bulging with cash.

“What are we buying?” Mr. Bernard asked.

“Kikes.”

“You’ll make fun of me once too often.”

Solomon had already made the first of what would become many infuriating trips to Ottawa, this time to see Horace MacIntyre, the deputy minister of immigration. MacIntyre, a bachelor and church elder, was celebrated throughout the civil service for his rectitude. If he mailed a personal letter from his office he dropped two cents into a box for the postage.

MacIntyre listened to Solomon’s plea for the refugees with some impatience. “Let’s not hide behind euphemisms, Mr. Gursky. By refugees you mean Jews.”

“I had been told that you were a most perspicacious and forthright man.”

“Jews tend to be classified as ‘non-preferred immigrants’ not because of their race, which prejudice I would find repugnant, but because they consider work in agriculture or mining beneath their dignity.”

“My grandfather worked in the mines in England before he came here in 1846, and my father was a farmer on the prairies.”

“But I understand that you have since found more profitable employment.”

Solomon smiled his gleeful smile.

“It is because your people are such confirmed city-dwellers, and would usurp positions that could be filled by the native-born, or immigrants from the Mother Country, that we simply cannot open the flood-gates.”

“As the population of this country is presently constituted, the Jews make up no more than 1.5 percent,” Solomon said, and then he went on to describe some of the things he had seen in Germany.

“As it happens,” MacIntyre said, “I am an admirer of the writings of Mr. Walter Lippmann, a co-religionist of yours though somewhat demure about it. He is of the opinion that the persecution of the Jews serves a useful purpose by satisfying the German need to conquer somebody. In fact, it’s his considered opinion that it is a kind of lightning rod which protects Europe. Of course it’s a nuisance, Mr. Gursky, but there is no need to panic.”

Come summer Mr. Bernard was on the boil. It was rumoured that the prime minister intended to put the Gursky brothers in jail and throw away the key. The government case against them pending, the Gurskys bound to be charged with, among other things, avoiding customs duty on smuggled liquor, Mr. Bernard huddled with his lawyers every night, enraged with Solomon who sat silent throughout the sessions, seemingly indifferent to their fate. And now it was Mr. Bernard who flitted between Montreal and Ottawa once, sometimes twice, a week, lugging large sums of cash in his attaché case and returning with paintings by Jean-Jacques Martineau, which he threw into a cupboard. Such was the state of his nerves that a month passed before he noticed Morrie’s absence.

Charging into their original Montreal offices on Sherbrooke Street one morning, kicking open office doors, searching toilets, he demanded, “Where’s my brother?”

“Take it easy, Mr. Bernard,” Tim Callaghan said.

Irish drunk. Christ-lover. “Oh yeah. Why?”

“Because the way you’re carrying on these days, you’re asking for an ulcer.”

“I don’t get ulcers. I give them. Where in the fuck is Morrie?”

Solomon was sent for.

“Did you actually hit him with an ashtray?” Solomon asked.

“Only a fool wouldn’t have ducked.”

“Morrie’s had enough of you. He’s tired of bringing up his breakfast every morning. He’s retired to the country with Ida and the kids.”

Mr. Bernard descended on Morrie’s secretary. Terrified, she drew a map that would enable him to find Morrie’s place in the Laurentians. Threatened, she told him about Morrie’s workshop. Cursed, spat at, she snitched about the furniture-making. Mr. Bernard fired her. “Take your handbag and that nail file, the sound drives me crazy, and take your ten-cents-a-gallon perfume from Kresge’s and your Kotex box and get the hell out of here.” Then he called for his limousine and sped out to Ste.-Adèle.

Morrie, forewarned, waited in the living room, his head resting on Ida’s lap. Then he roused himself and stood by the window, cracking his knuckles. When Mr. Bernard finally pulled into the long driveway and pounced out of his limousine, he did not start immediately for the large renovated farmhouse on the hill overlooking the lake. Instead, a startled Morrie watched him make straight for the vegetable garden. Yanking out tomato plants. Trampling on lettuce beds. Kicking over cabbages. Jumping up and down on eggplants, popping them. Pulling a pitchfork free of a manure pile and swinging away at corn stalks. Then he rushed to the front door, pounding on it with his fists. “Look at my suit! Look at my shoes! I’m covered in farm shit.”

He squirted right into the dining room, pulling a linen cloth off the table, sending a vase of roses crashing to the pine floor, and wiping his hands and then his shoes clean of eggplant pulp.

“Tell him that you’re not going back!” Ida shrieked.

“What was your father? A little Jew in a grocery store with a scale that gave fourteen ounces to the pound, living in a shack that didn’t even have an inside toilet. You went into the outhouse for a crap, you had to guard your balls against bumblebees. Now you wear diamonds and mink I risked life and limb to pay for. Go to your room at once. I have to talk to my brother.”

Ida fled, pausing at the top of the stairs to shout “Hitler!” before slamming the bedroom door and locking it from the inside.

“If God forbid she was my wife I’d teach her some manners let me tell you. What did you pay for this dump?”

Morrie told him.

“How many acres?”

“Thirty.”

“Big deal. If I wanted a place in the country, I’d have a hundred acres at least and I’d be on the sunny side of the lake in a bigger house, where the floors didn’t creak.” He shook with laughter. “They must have seen you coming, you putz.”

“I suppose so.”

Mr. Bernard went to the window. “Is that,” he asked, pointing at an obviously new clapboard building, “the workshop where you make the furniture?”

“Yes.”

“I’m told that you accept orders for bookshelves and that you actually sell the stuff through a shop in Ste.-Adèle.” Mr. Bernard scooped up a delicate side table. “You made this itsy-bitsy fuckshit table?”

“Yes.”

“How much are you asking for it?”

“Ten dollars.”

“I’ll give you seven,” Mr. Bernard said, counting out the bills, “because if you sell direct to me, you don’t have to cut in the goy shopkeeper in Ste.-Adèle.” Then he kicked over the table and jumped up and down on it. “You are my brother, you cuntlapper, and if the rich anti-Semites in Ste.-Adèle are buying your shit, it’s only because they can say, hey, you know who made that crappy lopsided little table for me for ten dollars? Mr. Bernard’s brother. You can’t do this to me. I want you back in the office eight o’clock tomorrow morning, or I’ll take an axe to that woodshop.”

Morrie gathered together the remains of his table and set them down beside the fireplace.

Out of breath, Mr. Bernard subsided to the sofa. He wiped his face with a handkerchief. “What have you got for dinner?” he asked.

“Veal chops.”

“What with?”

“Roast potatoes.”

“I had that last night. Would she make me some kasha instead?”

“I could ask.”

“Better say it’s for you. Hey, remember Mama’s kishka? She always had the biggest piece for me. But I was her favourite, eh?”

“Yes.”

“What have you got for a starter?”

“There’s some borscht from last night.”

Mr. Bernard yawned. He stretched. He raised a buttock and farted. “Eddie Cantor’s on tonight. You got a radio here?”

“The reception is not very good in the mountains.”

“I suppose we could play some gin. Aw, forget it. I can eat better at my place. But a Popsicle would hit the spot. You wouldn’t have any in the ice-box, would you?”

“Didn’t I know you were coming?”

Morrie brought out a couple of Popsicles, crumpling the wrappers.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Mr. Bernard asked, retrieving the wrappers and flattening them out. “You fill out the coupon in back you can win a two-wheel bicycle. What time can I expect you back in the office tomorrow morning?”

Morrie began to crack his knuckles again.

“Morrie, be sensible for once. Without you, how am I going to settle my quarrels with Solomon? I need your vote so that I can beat him fair and square.”

“I’m tired of being pressed in a vice between the two of you.”

“Good. Tell him!” shrieked a voice from the top of the stairs.

An outraged Mr. Bernard shot out of the sofa, his arms extended, his fingers curled. Ready to scratch.

“If I ever made you kasha, you oysvorf, it would be sprinkled with arsenic,” Ida shouted, scooting back into her room and this time shoving her dresser against the door.

“You have no idea what Solomon’s like now,” Mr. Bernard said, sinking back into the sofa, “our crazy brother. We were better off when he was chasing nooky. Now he stays overnight in the office, sometimes with Callaghan, the two of them knocking back a quart each, and he listens to the shortwave radio, fiddling with the dial all night. Hitler makes a speech, he never misses it.”

“I’m not coming back to the office any more.”

“I’ll give you until Monday morning out here, but that’s it.”

Mr. Bernard got home after dark, but he knew better than to telephone Solomon at his place. There was no point. He was never there. And in the morning Mr. Bernard discovered that Solomon was in Ottawa again, stirring things up, at a time when the last thing the Gurskys needed was more enemies in high places.

Solomon told MacIntyre, “I have acquired two thousand acres of farmland in the Laurentians as well as—”

“Where in the Laurentians?” MacIntyre demanded.

“Not far from Ste.-Agathe. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, Ste.-Agathe,” MacIntyre said, relieved. “For years now I’ve taken my holidays winter and summer at Chalet Antoine in Ste.-Adèle. Do you know it?”

“No. I’ve acquired two thousand acres, as well as a large herd of beef and dairy cattle, and I have a list of people who promise to settle there.”

“Mr. Gursky, are you seriously asking me to consider placing more Jews in the province of Quebec?”

“And why not?”

MacIntyre sent for a file. “Look at this, will you?” It was an editorial page clipping from Le Devoir. “The Jewish shopkeeper on St. Lawrence Boulevard does nothing to increase our natural resources.” Then he passed him a copy of a petition that had been delivered to parliament by Wilfred Lacroix, a Liberal MP. The petition, signed by more than 120,000 members of the St. Jean Baptiste Society opposed “all immigration and especially Jewish immigration” to Quebec.

“If it would facilitate matters, I could buy land in Ontario or the Maritimes.”

“I am overwhelmed by the prodigality of your purse, Mr. Gursky, but there is a problem. Yours is a race apart with—how shall I put it?—an exasperating penchant for organizing their affairs better than other people. This endless agitation to flood this country with relatives and friends or so-called farmers must stop. My hands are tied. I’m sorry.”

When Solomon returned to the old McTavish building the next morning, he discovered Mr. Bernard lying in wait for him.

“How did you make out?” Solomon asked.

“Morrie wouldn’t listen to reason.”

“Let him be, Bernie.”

“Listen, there’s a trial coming up. Bert Smith is spilling the beans everywhere. I get on the witness stand, prejudiced people think I haven’t got an honest face. You get on the stand you will be so fucken arrogant the judge will hate you. Morrie’s a sweetheart. Everybody loves him. But he’s got to be coached. So pull yourself together and bring him back here.”

“I have business in Ste.-Adèle a week Wednesday. I’ll look in on Morrie, but I’m not making any promises.”

Solomon’s business was at the Chalet Antoine, the most elegant resort in Ste.-Adèle, rising from a hilltop thick with pine and cedar and silver birch, commanding a view of Lac Renault that the travel brochures described as ravishing. A notice posted on the gate read:

It was late on a fine summer’s afternoon when Solomon got there. He made right for the bar that was tastefully done in natural pine with a low beamed ceiling. There was a painting of Howie Morenz cutting in on the net. There were also photographs of Red Grange, Walter Hagen, and Bill Tilden. French doors opened on to a flagstone terrace bordered by beds of gladioli, overlooking the tennis courts and the lake. There were six guests in the bar. A stout middle-aged couple at one table, obviously just back from the golf course. She wore a tartan skirt and he was in knickerbockers. A man, alone, pondering the stock market pages in the Star. A man and woman at another table. He, staring stonily into the middle distance; she, intent on her copy of Anthony Adverse. And then a lovely young lady seated alone, sipping white wine, writing a letter on rice-paper stationery, the sort that could only be ordered from abroad. Honey-coloured hair caught in an ivory clasp. Red painted mouth full but severe. She wore a striped beach shirt, a pleated navy blue skirt and tennis shoes. Magazines littered her table top. Vanity Fair, Vogue. When Solomon sailed in, she looked up—squinting just a little, obviously near-sighted—and then returned to her letter. Interloper dismissed.

Solomon sat down, unfolded a Yiddish newspaper, and summoned the waiter. “Du whisky, s’il vous plaît. Glenlivet.”

The man who had been staring into the middle distance leaned over to say something to his wife. She set down her book and reached for her handbag, securing it on her lap. Distress darkened the golfers’ table like the wind before a violent rain. But the young lady who was seated alone continued to write her letter.

Paul, the burly, hirsute waiter, went to fetch the manager and led him to Solomon’s table. M. Raymond Morin. A capon with a handlebar moustache.

“Ah,” Solomon said, “le patron.” And he repeated his order.

“I must ask you to leave.”

“Oh, don’t be so fatuous, Raymond,” the young lady seated alone called out, “serve him his drink and be done with it.”

“There are other bars …”

“Dépêches-toi mon vieux,” Solomon said.

Then the man who had been pondering the Star’s stock market pages said, “I can appreciate your finding this hotel’s policy offensive, but I can’t grasp why anybody would want to drink where they are not welcome.”

“Your argument is not without merit,” Solomon said.

“Paul, call the police.”

“You needn’t bother, M. Morin. They’re on their way,” Solomon said, and then he repeated his order.

“It’s against our policy to serve your kind.”

“You tell him, Ray,” the golfer’s wife said.

“I bought this hotel yesterday afternoon.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

“And, as for these two,” Solomon said, indicating the golfer and his wife, “I want them out of here before dinner.”

“Cheek.”

The young lady seated alone put down her pen. “Ah well then, in that case the hotel’s policy hasn’t changed, only the nature of the clientele prohibited.” Then she gathered her things together and retreated to the terrace.

The reader of the stock market pages smiled.

“Are you a lawyer?” Solomon asked.

“I’m afraid I’m already committed to representing the other side, Mr. Gursky.”

“The law was an ass.”

“But it’s all we’ve got. And there’s still a body or two unaccounted for.”

“But not Bert Smith’s. Wasn’t that decent of me?”

“More likely foolish.”

“This country has no tap root. Instead there’s Smith. The very essence.”

Two provincial policemen arrived: Coté and Pinard. “What can we do to help, Mr. Gursky?”

“I am the manager here,” M. Morin protested.

“Don’t make a fool of yourself, Raymond,” the lawyer said. “If Mr. Gursky says he has really bought this white elephant, I expect it must be the case. Somebody has put one over on him.”

“Actually the hotel’s completely booked from Friday afternoon, but I do appreciate your concern.”

“Glad to be of help. Incidentally I’m Stuart MacIntyre. I believe you’re acquainted with my brother Horace.”

“Indeed I am!”

“He’s joining me here on Friday.”

Solomon slipped out to the terrace. She sat at the far table, the sun in her hair and on her bare arms. “Have you really bought the hotel?” she asked.

“Yes. May I sit down?”

“Are you sufficiently wealthy to buy all the restricted hotels in the Laurentians?”

“I ought to introduce myself.”

“I know who you are and what you are, Mr. Gursky. I’m Diana Morgan. And there’s no need to stare. You’re quite right. One eye is blue and the other is brown. Will they send you to prison?”

“I doubt it.”

“Don’t underestimate Stu MacIntyre.”

“You know him, of course.”

“His wife’s a Bailey. She’s my aunt. Stu and my father go duck hunting together.”

“How long will you be staying here?”

“I come here for tennis lessons. We have a cottage near by.”

“Have dinner with me.”

She shook her head, no. “Your brother is making a bookcase for me. He’s such a sweet man.”

Rising, Solomon said, “I apologize for what happened in there.”

“You were looking forward to a real donnybrook, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, surprised.

“You don’t understand. Those boring but nice people in there abhor a scene even more than they dislike Jews.”

“I don’t give a damn about the people in there.”

“What do you give a damn about?”

“I’m looking for the Kingdom of Prester John,” he said, retreating back into the hotel.

Prester John. She wanted to call him back. Stay, she thought, talk to me some more, Mr. Solomon Gursky. But bloody Stu was sitting in the bar. Even as things stood, he was bound to report to her father. Her luck. Oh well, she thought, if she hurried home there would still be time for a swim before dinner.

Solomon, standing by the window, watched her stride toward her car, a dark green Biddle and Smart sports phaeton. He lingered by the window until she drove off.

“Couldn’t get to first base with her, could you, Gursky?” And then Solomon turned back to the room and found himself face to face with the golfer, the latter’s eyes dancing with malice.

“Don’t you dare condescend to me,” Solomon said, lunging, grabbing the golfer by the throat and slamming him against the wall. More than a hundred years after Maimonides had written his Guide for the Perplexed, your ancestors, pledging each other’s health in cups of their own blood, were living in mean sod huts, sleeping on bare boards wrapped in their filthy plaids.

“Let go of him,” the golfer’s wife screamed.

Spinoza had already written his Ethics when your forebears still had their children wearing amulets to ward off the evil eye and carried fire in a circle around their cattle to keep them safe from injury.

“Please, Mr. Gursky. He’s choking.”

Solomon yanked the golfer forward, then shoved him back hard, bouncing his head against the wall. His wife screamed again. Then the two provincial police moved in, breaking Solomon’s grip on the golfer. “Hey, that’s enough,” Pinard said. “Enough.”

Seven

Plump, foolish Ida, her makeup too thick, greeted him at the door. Solomon had come bearing gifts. A flask of scent for her. An enormous teddy bear for Barney. Then he presented Morrie with a complete set of bench stones in an aromatic cedar box; a set of rasps and rifflers, imported from England; and a jack plane made of red beech.

“He’s not going back to the office,” Ida said.

Solomon rocked Ida in his arms, kissing her pulpy cheeks. “My God, Ida, you look ten years younger. If you weren’t married to my brother I’d be chasing you around the room right now.”

“We could always give him a quarter and send him to the movies, that one.”

“How long can you stay?” Morrie asked.

“A few days maybe.”

“Wonderful,” Morrie said, frightened.

Solomon brought them up to date on Montreal. How difficult it was to sleep, it had turned so hot. “Honestly,” he said, “you’re better off right here.”

“You should have brought Clara and the kids with you,” Ida said, fishing.

King Kong, with Fay Wray, was playing at the Palace, Solomon said, and there was a new Jean Harlow at the Loew’s. Everybody was singing the hit song from the new Moss Hart and Irving Berlin show. Solomon, who had brought the record with him, put it on the victrola.

Ida played the record again and shimmied along with it. “Isn’t anybody going to dance with me?” she asked.

“No,” Morrie said.

At dinner, Ida warned Solomon to not so much as dip his little toe into the lake. It hadn’t been quarantined like the North River in Prévost. It wasn’t nearly as bad as Montreal, where all the children’s day camps had been shut down. But there were already nine polio cases confirmed in Ste.-Agathe, six in Ste.-Adèle. “Don’t even brush your teeth with water from the tap. I’ll bring a jug of freshly boiled to your bedroom in the morning.”

“Solange can bring it to him.”

“Hey there, Barney McGoogle, ain’t he my brother-in-law?”

Solomon refilled Ida’s wine glass and then demanded a tour of the woodwork shop. Morrie vacillated.

“Well, I’m not afraid of what will happen to me in the dark. I’ll take him,” Ida said.

“You wait here.”

“Secrets,” Ida called after them. “Dirty jokes maybe. You think I couldn’t do with a laugh?”

The workshop was fired by a wood-fed boiler. The craftsman’s bench was built in the traditional European style, made of steamed beech with a rubbed-oil finish. There was a large front vice, bench dog holes in front and a recessed tool trough running along the back. Solomon wandered into the rear and passed his hands over the planks stacked neatly in steel trays. Pine, oak, cedar, butternut and cherry wood. He went on to admire all the tools mounted just so on pegged boards or resting on shelves. Mallets, moulding and scrub and block planes, skew and butt chisels, roughing gouges, special bow and fret saws, dowelling jigs and pins and a threading kit.

“I know I have to testify at the trial,” Morrie said. “Don’t worry. I’ll get everything right.”

“Did you make this yourself?”

A kitchen chair. Solomon sat on it.

“You’ve seen enough. Let’s go.”

“And this bookcase?” Solomon asked, passing his hand over the one slightly jagged edge.

“It was ordered by a customer. A lady. Let’s go now.”

Solomon sat down at the craftsman’s bench and toyed with the vice. “Will she pick it up or do you deliver?”

“She’s supposed to come for it a week from Friday with her caretaker. They have a small truck.”

“Invite her to tea.”

“I knew something was up. Listen here, Mr. Skirt-Chaser, she happens to be Sir Russell Morgan’s granddaughter. Please, Solomon.” He cracked his knuckles and sighed. “You only just get here practically and already my heart is hammering. Okay, okay, I’ll invite her to tea. But only if you swear you won’t try any monkey business.”

“Would you let me try my hand at making something in here?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. It takes training. A lot of my tools are very delicate.”

Ida hollered from the kitchen window. “Have I got B.O. and even my best friends won’t tell me?”

“I’ll be careful with your tools.”

Early the next morning Morrie drove Barney to Count Gzybrzki’s stables for a ride on a shetland pony. Ida, perfumed and powdered, hurried to Solomon’s bedroom. “Ready or not here I come with a jug of water,” she called out, all giggly. “But no funny stuff, eh?”

The bed was empty.

Ida was brooding over a third cup of coffee with toast and strawberry jam before Morrie got back.

“I thought he was with you,” Ida said.

“You’ll never believe this, but Solomon’s in the workshop trying to make something. Whatever it is, let’s tell him it’s wonderful.”

“I’ll take him lunch.”

“Neither of us is to even go near the shop until he’s finished in there. He took the keys. He says what he’s making has to be a surprise.”

“Oh, for me!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. He looks at me I can tell he’s undressing me with his eyes.”

Solomon had begun work at six-thirty, firing the boiler. Then he rooted about for some framing squares and sorted out mallets and chisels and other essential tools. He retrieved four drawer pulls mixed up with other fixtures from a large bucket. They were flush-fitting and made from cast brass. Exactly what he wanted. Sifting through the lumber that was stacked on the steel trays, he was tempted by the bird’s-eye maple, but finally settled on the wild cherry wood. Difficult to work with, but strong. It was light brown, but of an amber hue at the heart that would darken further with age, its pores following the outline of the growth ring boundary. He sorted out the planks, sniffing and stroking them, and then he studied them for checking and warping. There was more than sufficient lumber for his needs. A good thing, because Solomon anticipated a lot of wastage. Except for the drawer pulls, not one nail, not one screw, would compromise his work. All the joints would be tongue-and-groove or else mortise-and-tenon. The piece he had in mind for her was a dressing table. She would keep her diary, rich in girlish surmise, in one drawer, and the jewels he would astonish her with in another. There would, no doubt, be fragrant sachets in each drawer. On the surface, a silver candlestick, a crystal bowl filled with pot-pourri, her vanity set. On a hot summer’s evening, the window open to catch the breeze from the lake, she would sit there brushing her thick honey-coloured hair, counting the strokes.

Solomon was determined to finish the table by Friday noon, but the first day he was content to square his lumber, smoothing the edges with a joiner plane.

He had met her father once. A big man, barrel-chested. My name is Russell Morgan, Jr., K.C., look on my inheritance, ye mighty, and despair. He was active in the Empire League and a colonel in the Black Watch. He was the inept, hard-drinking senior partner in Morgan, MacIntyre and Maclean, whom the younger partners tolerated only because of his esteemed name and useful Square Mile connections. He was a notorious snob. But, to be fair, there was also something quixotic in his nature. Twice he had stood for parliament in Montreal as a Tory and twice he had gone down to inevitable defeat. Once, a Liberal heckler planted at one of his meetings put a question to him in French. Russell Morgan, Jr. tried to dismiss him with a wave of his hand, but the heckler persisted. “Is it possible,” he demanded, “that your family has been here all these years and you still do not speak French?”

“It is no more necessary for me to speak French, my good man, than it would be contingent upon me to understand Chinese if I lived in Hong Kong.”

Mr. Bernard, terrified by rumours that the brilliant Stuart MacIntyre might be representing the government in court, had foolishly approached the firm himself. Russell Morgan, Jr. had never heard of anything so outrageous. So Mr. Bernard, compounding his folly, tried to seduce him with numbers.

“Oh, isn’t that rich, boys?”

Finally Mr. Bernard played his ace in the hole. “I wonder if you are aware that your grandfather and mine were once involved in a business negotiation? The New Camelot Mining & Smelting Company.”

“Miss Higgins will show you to the door, Gursky, as surely as Stu MacIntyre will see you and your brothers behind bars where you belong. Good-day.”

THE LIGHT WAS FAILING when Solomon slipped into the kitchen to find a sour Ida waiting for him.

“Ida, you look adorable.”

Her shoulder-length permed hair had been gathered into a flat rolled chignon. She wore a black lace dress by Chanel, that threatened to split at the seams. “It’s nothing,” she said, sucking in a breath.

Barney had already eaten and been put to bed when Ida served dinner by candlelight. Morrie, bubbling with good humour, said, “Maybe I should take him on as an apprentice. What do you think, Ida?”

Solomon was out of the house at six-thirty every morning and didn’t return until nightfall. But he didn’t spend all of his time in the workshop. He also went for walks. Once he saw her from a distance. At ease in her rose garden, cutting blooms for the table. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat with a pink bow. She will keep the book she is reading on the surface of her table. It will be encased in a tooled leather slipcover with a red silk bookmark. Say, Sense and Sensibility or Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. He will read aloud to her at night. He would tell her about Ephraim in Van Diemen’s Land and on the Erebus and how her grandfather had held him prisoner in that hotel in Sherbrooke.

“Say,” Ida said, “could you use a sweeper-upper in there? I charge two bits an hour, but no pinching.”

“It’s a surprise,” Morrie said. “I told you. We’re not allowed in there.”

“Oh, did you remember, Morrie?” Solomon asked.

“Did he remember what?”

“Miss Diana Morgan is coming to tea,” Morrie said, averting his eyes.

“Hey, I live here too. Why wasn’t I told?”

“He’s telling you now.”

“If you think you’re going to screw her, mister, you’ve got a surprise coming.”

“Ida!” Morrie said.

“Ida! Pish pish. I’ll bet even a milk bottle isn’t safe alone in a room with Solomon. Poor Clara, that’s all I can say.” Ida shoved her chair back from the table and marched out of the dining room, pausing at the door. “She won’t come, Solomon. At the last minute she’ll have to shampoo her horsey-worsey or go to church for confession. Forgive me, Father, but on the hay ride last Saturday night Harry McClure kissed me on the lips and slipped his hand under my skirt. Describe it, my child.”

“She’s not a Catholic,” Morrie said.

“Big deal. Neither am I.”

“And who is Harry McClure?” Solomon asked.

“Just one of the many young men who are after her. I mean talk about naches. She’s by Sir Russell Morgan a granddaughter. I’d be practising my curtsies right now only I know those people and she ain’t coming to this house, her father sees me on the road you’d think he’d stepped in dogshit.”

The wild cherry wood table was finished by Friday noon. Solomon covered it with a blanket, locked up, and went into the house to bathe and change his clothes. Punctually, at 4:30, a Ford pickup twisted into the long winding driveway leading to the house. Emile Boisvert, the Morgans’ caretaker, had come to collect the bookcase. “Miss Morgan sends her apologies,” he said. “She is not feeling well.”

Solomon went directly to the workshop, picked up an axe and, at the last minute, drove it not into the table but the floor. Then he carried the table into the house, still covered with a blanket.

“My surprise,” Ida exclaimed, jumping up and down.

Solomon announced that he wouldn’t be able to stay for dinner, he had to get back to Montreal, and then he pulled the blanket free and revealed the table.

“Now that’s what I call a cabinet-maker,” Ida said.

Morrie ran a hand over the surface of the table. He stooped to stroke the legs. He opened and shut a drawer.

“Say something,” Ida said, nudging him.

“It’s beautiful.”

Early the next morning Morrie trudged out to his workshop, sat down at the craftsman’s bench and held his head in his hands and wept. He packed his tools away and covered both the bench and his foot-pedal lathe with a sheet and then padlocked the workshop from the outside, intending never to return again.

Ida had taken her bread and jam into the living room, where she could admire the table as she munched.

“We’re going back to Montreal,” Morrie said.

Ida wiped her sticky fingers with a napkin and put the record on the victrola again.

She shimmied. He watched.

Eight

By the time Moses got to the Chalet Antoine, early one spring afternoon in 1968, it had changed hands many times. In its most recent reincarnation the chalet was a nursing home, septuagenarians sucking up sun on the flagstone terrace where Solomon had once told Diana about the Kingdom of Prester John. Moses didn’t linger, but drove right on to the cottage on the lake that was still owned by Mr. Morrie. Happily, the French-Canadian caretaker, a convivial old man, was pleased to join Moses for a crêpe aux pommes and several beers in the village and then show him around the estate and the cottage.

“The family doesn’t stay here any more,” he said, “but Mr. Morrie keeps an eye on things. He may not come out for months at a time and then he’s here twice in the same week.”

The furniture was covered with sheets.

“What does he do when he visits?”

“Sometimes he can sit on that swing out there under the maple tree for hours, thinking about things.”

The wood-workshop was locked. “Have you got a key?” Moses asked.

“Sorry, Mr. Berger, but I’m the only one allowed in there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, to keep all the machinery oiled, you know, the wood fed and polished, and to make sure there are no uninvited guests. Squirrels. Field mice.”

“Does Mr. Morrie ever use it?”

“Funny you should ask. I caught him peering in that window once and I could swear he was crying. Hey, hold on a minute, Mr. Morrie, I’ll run and get the key. No, no, he said. Not yet. But one day.”

Then Moses continued on to what the locals still referred to with pride as the Sir Russell Morgan estate, where the elusive Diana had finally agreed to see him. Following a long meandering driveway, Moses drove slowly past a small apple orchard, a stand of sugar maple trees, stables, a barn, a tennis court, an immense greenhouse, a potting shed, an asparagus bed, a raspberry patch, and many more tilled beds, separated by brick walks, already planted with flowers and vegetables he imagined. There were clusters of daffodils here, there, and everywhere before the main house. White clapboard. Wraparound porch. Solid oak door with polished brass knocker. A maid led Moses into the solarium, where Diana McClure sat in a wingbacked wicker chair surrounded by greenery. One eye brown, one eye blue.

“It needn’t be tea, Mr. Berger. I can offer you something more invigorating.”

“Tea would be fine, thank you.”

“As you pulled up, I couldn’t help noticing that your front tires look distressingly soft. You must stop at M. Laurin’s garage on your way back and have him check the pressure. First left just before you reach the bottom of the hill. If he’s the least bit officious do tell him that I sent you.”

“I’ll do that,” Moses said, mumbling something flattering about her gardens.

“It’s a form of tyranny. Self-imposed, but tyranny all the same. I dare not leave here this time of year when everything will soon be coming up in such a frenzy.”

“Including the black flies.”

“Do you garden, then?”

“I’m new at it and not very good.”

“Take my advice, then, and don’t read too many books. They will only discourage and confuse you. Get yourself a copy of Vita Sackville-West’s A Joy of Gardening and follow her.”

“I’ll do that. Thank you.”

“Shouldn’t you write it down?”

“Yes,” he said, fumbling for his pen. “It is very kind of you to let me intrude like this, Mrs. McClure.”

“Not in the least, but I doubt that I can be of much help. May I ask you a direct question?”

“Certainly.”

“You wrote to say you were working on a biography of Solomon Gursky. I do admire your industry, Mr. Berger, but who would be interested after all these years?”

“I am.”

“The only valid reason for embarking on such a project. Now tell me why.”

“Oh my. That’s such a long and convoluted story.”

“I’m in no hurry, if you aren’t.”

An apprehensive Moses gathered that he was being weighed on the scales of her intuitions, its measures unknown to him, and, all at once, found himself gabbing away like a silly schoolboy. Telling her about L.B. Lionel’s birthday party. Ephraim Gursky. His involvement with Lucy. Henry in the Arctic. Then, suddenly, he stopped short, amazed at himself.

“Is the family co-operating?”

“No.”

“There was no love lost between Solomon and Bernard.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh come now, Mr. Berger. You’ll have to do better than that,” she said, laughing flirtatiously.

He blushed.

“If I may be so presumptuous, I think an excellent model for you might be The Quest for Corvo by A.J.A. Symons. Brilliant, I thought.”

“Yes.”

“Have you a publisher?”

“Um, no. I mean it’s premature.”

“I think McClelland & Stewart are the most adventurous of the lot here, though a touch vulgar in their promotions. However, the likelihood is that they would be more interested in a biography of poor Mr. Bernard.”

“Why ‘poor’ Mr. Bernard?” Moses asked, stiffening.

“I suspect,” she said, smiling, “that you think I am badly disposed to him because he is a Jew.”

“No,” Moses lied.

“Don’t you find it exhausting?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I would.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Being Jewish. For all its gratifications it coloured Solomon’s reactions to everything. Like you, he always had his hackles raised. I am not an anti-Semite, Mr. Berger, and neither did I consider the bootlegging such a disgrace. On the contrary. It was frightfully clever and quite the only interesting thing about Mr. Bernard. I said ‘poor’ Mr. Bernard, because all he ever wanted out of our pathetic, so-called establishment was a seat in the senate. A modest enough demand. I would have awarded him two, happily.”

“About Solomon.”

“And me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You have been told that we had an affair,” she said, surprising him.

“Yes. But I don’t mean to pry,” he protested, stumbling.

“Of course you do, young man, or why are you here?”

“Sorry. You are absolutely right.”

“This is hardly what I would describe as an age of discretion, Mr. Berger. I have seen the president of the United States pull out his shirt and lower his trousers on television to show us his abdominal scars. Public figures, if they be drunkards or womanizers or even swindlers, seem compelled to write steamy, self-pitying best-sellers about it, beating their breasts for profit. What I’m getting at,” she said, her voice softening, “is that I’m afraid, much as I’d like to be helpful, that I couldn’t tell you anything that might be hurtful to Mr. McClure or my son.”

“At the risk of being rude, why did you agree to see me?”

“A reasonable question. A most justifiable question. Let me think. Possibly because I’m a bored old lady and my curiosity got the better of me. Wait. There is something else. I have read your occasional book review in the Spectator or Encounter and I was not unimpressed by your intelligence. I took it that you were a young man of sensibility and I have not been disappointed.”

Moses, beaming, wondered if it would be pushy of him to slip in that he had once been a Rhodes scholar. He decided against it.

“I need time, Mr. Berger. I must think about this very carefully.”

Before he left, she had the gardener bring him a bundle of fresh asparagus. “Don’t throw out the water you cook them in—for no longer than twelve minutes, as I’m sure you know, the crowns kept out of the water—and you will have the beginnings of a nourishing broth. And please do remember to see about your tire pressure or I shall worry about you on the road.”

Driving back to Montreal, Moses was suffused with a feeling of well-being, unusual for him.

Well, not quite. But Diana McClure née Morgan did describe me as a young man of intelligence and sensibility. Not bad, he thought.

Nine

Instead of heading directly back to his cabin in the Townships, Moses drove in to Montreal, stopping at Callaghan’s apartment. Inevitably, they fell to talking about Solomon.

“Solomon’s jokes were always at somebody else’s expense,” Callaghan said, “but he was indifferent to the damage. Take that prank of buying the Chalet Antoine in Ste.-Adèle, for instance. Far from being overjoyed, the bunch from Fancy Finery were intimidated the minute they came spilling out of those chartered buses and saw what kind of hotel they were being put up at. Tennis courts. Lawn bowling. Croquet. Canoes. Instead of a bottle of seltzer at each table, a snobby waiter presenting them with a wine list and a menu they couldn’t understand. Pâté de fois gras. Ris de veau. Tournedos. A couple of the more enterprising husbands piled into a pickup truck, drove out to Prévost, and came back with a sack of kosher chickens and briskets, gallon jars of sour pickles, stacks of rye bread and so forth, and their wives took over the kitchen. But then there were those bastards who gathered in boats offshore, come to gawk at the fat ladies taking the sun in their bras and bloomers and the men playing pinochle in their underwear. So the beneficiaries of Solomon’s largesse, confined to the hotel for the most part, longed for nothing so much as the corner cigar & soda or the familiar front-door stoop. Moses, there are some eggs in the fridge if you’re hungry. Mrs. Hawkins marks the hardboiled ones with an X for me.”

Moses groaned.

“Okay, next time you flatter me with an unannounced visit I’ll see to it that the larder is properly stocked. Pass the bottle.”

“Here you go.”

“If I had to mark the map I’d say it wasn’t the trial, but Ste.-Adèle. Everything changed between the brothers after Ste.-Adèle. This is conjecture on my part but I think it was only then that Bernard grasped he would have to shaft Solomon if he was to survive himself. As for poor Morrie, castrating him would have been more merciful than humiliating him before his wife with that perfectly made cherry wood table. And Solomon, the insatiable Solomon, got his comeuppance at last. ‘I know who you are and what you are, Mr. Gursky.’”

“I was out to see her in Ste.-Adèle this afternoon.”

“Diana McClure?”

“And what did you find out?”

“That I’m in love.”

“Seriously.”

“It was incredible. She interviewed me, not me her. She was awfully polite, but she wouldn’t say anything. There was her son to consider. Her husband.”

“The son is worthless and Harry McClure’s a boor. He’s a regular at those appalling Beaver Club dinners. All got up in whiskers, goatee, frock coat and beaver hat. Excuse me,” Callaghan said, rising, “but my bladder isn’t what it used to be.”

When Callaghan returned, he settled into his chair, reached for the bottle, and said, “Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish the famine; and Jews the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from the Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are still huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared by the Americans on one side and the bush on the other. And now that we are here, prospering, we do our damn best to exclude more ill-bred newcomers, because they remind us of our own mean origins in the draper’s shop in Inverness or the shtetl or the bog. What was I talking about?”

“Solomon.”

“Okay. Solomon. There are some things even a man of genius can never overcome and that’s his origins. He was not her sort. Sure, her grandfather was a swindler, but he was knighted for his efforts. Like Sir Hugh Allan. Had the Jesuits or the rabbis got their hands on Diana she would have been the better for it, left with mysteries to conjure with, real baggage to check. But her school was Miss Edgar’s and Miss Cramp’s and what she learned there was never to cross her legs, and not to laugh out loud in the theatre or eat in public. She was brought up to believe that a lady only had her name in the newspaper three times: when she was born, when she married, and when she died. And hello, hello, along comes this notorious thundering Jew, who will not be denied, and she was both fascinated and terrified. She didn’t turn up at the trial and he never forgave her for that. And she’s just one chunk of the wreckage Solomon left in his wake. Damn him.”

“I thought he was your friend.”

“You don’t understand anything. I count myself blessed that I knew a man of such roaring. I loved him.”

Moses cooked the fresh asparagus for the two of them, supporting the crowns with crumpled foil to lift them out of the water, and then he asked Callaghan if he had an empty jar he could borrow.

“Whatever for?”

“The water will make a nourishing broth.”

Ten

Diana McClure’s second letter, the one delivered posthumously, began: