Solomon Gursky Was Here

One

Inevitably, Gitel Kugelmass’s daughter and her husband, the dentist, joined the exodus of English-speaking people from Montreal, fleeing down the 401 to Toronto. The Nathansons did not take Gitel with them. Instead they secured a place for her in the Mount Sinai, an apartment-hotel in Côte St. Luc with everything for Jewish seniors. A kosher dining room, a shul, arts and crafts classes, a health-atorium where a nice young girl led them in aerobics, a convenience store, twenty-four-hour security, and a room set aside for lectures, pinochle, funeral services, and dances on Saturday nights. Die Roite Gitel, tricked out in a big floppy hat and a flowing black cape, was anathema to those wives still lucky enough to have husbands in this world. A coquette. A menace on the dance floor. She was also known to invite men up to her apartment who were not yet incontinent or confined to walkers, serving them peach brandy. According to rumour, that choleria received the men in her black negligee trimmed with lace, slipping a Mick Jagger disc on the record player, that shaygetz howling, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”.

Gitel’s only other visitors were bouncy cemetery salesmen armed with lyrical graveyard photographs and casket price lists, urging her not to end up a burden to her family. Or round-shouldered rebbes in smelly caftans who guaranteed to light a memorial candle on each anniversary of her death for a mere twenty-five dollars. So once a week Moses drove into town to take Gitel to lunch. What began as a happy excursion, the two of them gabbing away in Yiddish, evolved into a melancholy duty. Following her second minor stroke, die Roite Gitel, who had once led the workers out against Fancy Finery, lost her compass. The first inkling Moses had that she was now somewhat addled came when she insisted he drive into Montreal a day early. “I’m calling from a pay phone,” she said. “My own line isn’t secure any more.”

Once seated with him at a table in Chez La Mère Michel, she showed him the letter. It was from her daughter in Toronto, inviting Gitel out for the High Holidays, and enclosing photographs of the grandchildren, Cynthia and Hilary.

“Well, that’s all very nice,” Moses said.

“Can’t you see this letter is an almost perfect imitation of Pearl’s handwriting?”

“Are you telling me she didn’t write it?”

“Pearl would die before inviting me to their house for Rosh Hashana. Either the CIA or the KGB is behind this letter.”

“Gitel, please, you don’t really think that.”

“I don’t think it. I know it.”

“Tell me why.”

“If it’s the CIA it’s because they know I was a Party member the same time as the Rosenbergs and if it’s the KGB it’s because they know I left.”

Moses ordered another Scotch. A double.

“Were you followed to my place?” she asked.

“I took precautions.”

“My apartment’s bugged.”

On occasion, however, Gitel was her adorable self at lunch. “Moishe,” she said, “I only want one thing more, to live long enough to see you publish your biography of Solomon Gursky.”

Then one night she wakened him with a phone call at two A.M. “I found it.”

‘‘What?’’

“The bug.”

Feeling foolish, but concerned for her sake, Moses drove to Montreal immediately after breakfast. Gitel, who had been pacing up and down, waiting, rolled back her living-room carpet. Protruding from the centre of the floor was an ominous copper cap. Gitel handed him a screwdriver and he got down on his hands and knees and unfastened it. Fortunately the Farbers, who lived in the apartment below, were in the kitchen when their living-room chandelier fell to the floor. Even so, it took a good deal of explaining.

Quitting the autoroute at exit 106 late the same afternoon, Moses pulled in for a drink at The Caboose. Gord Crawley’s second wife, the former widow Hawkins, was drunk again. When Gord edged past her, lugging a trayful of beer, she called out in a booming voice, “First marriage I never had time to take off my stockings, now I could knit a pair easy.”

Moses retreated to his cabin. He no longer kept regular hours. Instead he might work around the clock, or even longer, and then pass out, drunk, on his bed and sleep for twelve hours. And now, overcome by ill-temper and impatience, he lit a Monte Cristo, poured himself a Macallan, and sat down at his desk. Sorting, sifting, he came across a file card with a passing reference to Mr. Bernard, discovered in a biography of Sir Desmond McEwen, the Scots liquor baron. “Bernard Gursky struck me as just what one would expect a person of his birth and antecedents to be, intelligent, but without any personal charm that I could discover, in fact the reverse.” The lost file card had been serving as a bookmark in Trebitsch Lincoln’s scurrilous Revelations of an International Spy, which Moses had read hoping against hope that the notorious conman, a.k.a. Chao Kung, né Ignacz Trebitsch, had run into Solomon in China, but seemingly they had never met. Too bad.

Moses got up to stretch. He rubbed his eyes. Then he opened Solomon’s journal to the pages that dealt with the trial, Bert Smith, the shooting of McGraw, and Charley Lin.

Fat Charley.

Once proprietor of Wang’s Hand Laundry and two bedbug-ridden rooming houses, a survivor of the big autumn poker game of 1916, Charley received Moses at his own table in the House of Lin on a wintry night in 1972. The restaurant on Hazelton Avenue adjoined Mr. Giorgio’s showroom on one side and Morton’s Men’s Boutique on the other. An elongated, twisting papier-mâché dragon, breathing fire and smoke, was suspended from the silken ceiling from which there also hung a tracery of teardrop purple lights and bambooframed pink lanterns.

The House of Lin was favoured by Toronto’s film crowd. Slender, scented Chinese girls, wearing brocaded silk sheaths slit to the thigh, led the short rolypoly producers and their willowy young ladies to The Great Wall of China bar, where gathered around the rickshaw, its centrepiece, they sipped kirs or champagne as they studied their menus. Eventually the producers and their girls were escorted to tables according to rank. On each table there stood an enormous snifter in which rose petals floated in perfumed water.

The House of Lin’s menu, ostensibly mandarin, was shrewdly tilted to accommodate the palate of its clientele. The won ton soup, for instance, was reminiscent of mama’s chicken soup with lokshen. The steamed dumplings were indistinguishable from kreplach, except that they were filled with pork. The General Kang minced beef on a steamed cabbage leaf could pass for an unwrapped chaleshke.

Lin, possibly ninety years old now, Moses reckoned, was plump and bright-eyed and reeked of cologne. “It was Solomon’s doing, of course. I’m not saying he actually pulled the trigger on McGraw. He was far too, ah, you know …”

“Fastidious?”

“Far too what you said. But he brought in the killers from Detroit.”

“There are people who say it was Solomon they had come to shoot. He was the one who was supposed to go down to the railway station, wasn’t he?”

“But he sent McGraw in his place.”

“McGraw was his friend.”

“Until he discovered that he had been swindled at the poker table by a boy who had stolen his stake from his family in the first place.”

“And who told you that?”

Lin smiled his irritating wisdom-of-the-East smile.

“Was it Mr. Bernard?”

“Mr. Bernard is a great human being. King of the Jews. If not for him the family would be nowhere today.”

“Ah, so Harvey Schwartz eats here, does he?”

“When he is in town with his enchanting wife I’m pleased to say, but never Mr. Bernard, though I have extended him the offer of my hospitality more than once.”

“However, he did invest,” Moses said, taking a stab at it.

“I am sole proprietor of The House of Lin.”

“How did Solomon cheat?”

“Let me show you something,” Lin said, dealing cards from a deck he had prepared. “Kozochar had folded and so had Ingram and Kouri. I went out even though I was sitting on nines back to back. It was the only thing to do. McGraw was showing two ladies and a bullet and had been betting those ladies from the start like he had another one in the hole, and let me tell you he wasn’t one to bluff, McGraw. Solomon was sitting there with only sevens and a ten showing. He was not only seeing McGraw, he was raising him, shoving thousands into the pot. Then Ingram dealt McGraw another bullet, giving him a full house for sure, and Solomon a deuce, good for nothing. McGraw tossed the deed to the hotel into the pot and Solomon put up the Gursky store, the blacksmith’s shop, and the two rooming houses I had lost. And when they turned over the cards McGraw was sitting on only two bullets over ladies, that’s all, but that little son of a bitch was holding three sevens.”

“It happens.”

“If you had been sitting on back to back sevens to begin with would you have raised into two and then what looked like three ladies for sure? No, sir. Not unless you knew that all McGraw had in the hole was a lousy eight.”

“And how in the hell would Solomon have known that?”

“Now let me show you something else,” Lin said, motioning to a waiter who promptly brought him two more decks of cards lying on a painted enamel tray. Lin set the decks down on the table immediately before Moses. “Tell me on which one the cellophane and stamp have been steamed off and then resealed.”

“But you weren’t playing with Solomon’s cards.”

“No. Ingram’s.”

“Well, then.”

“But where did Ingram buy them, Mr. Berger?”

“From A. Gursky & Sons, General Merchants.”

“You’re not as stupid as I thought.”

“That still doesn’t prove anything, least of all that it was Solomon who ordered McGraw shot.”

“Then tell me why Solomon jumped bail, flying off to his death in that Gypsy Moth?”

“Because he knew that you had been paid to lie on the witness stand and, besides, he had other plans.”

“Not long term, I trust.”

“Tiu na xinq.”

Two

As defined by the Electoral Franchise Act of July 20, 1885, “Person” meant a male, including an Indian, but excluding anyone of the Chinese race, among them Charley’s father Wang Lin, who was one of Andrew Onderdonk’s lambs. More than ten thousand strong they were, these coolies plucked out of Kwangtung province to cut a swathe through the Rocky Mountains for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Suspended over cliff faces in swaying baskets, they fed sticks of dynamite into crevices and blasted twenty-seven tunnels through Fraser Canyon. Then, their work done, their presence no longer required, many of them drifted into the settlement that was incorporated as Vancouver in April 1886. The same month white navvies employed at Hastings sawmill struck for higher wages. The mill manager responded by hiring more Chinese, rounding up coolies willing to put in ten hours a day for $1.25. This enraged a local drunk named Locksley Lucas. So one night he organized a bunch outside the Sunnyside Hotel and they marched on the tents of Chinatown, bent on breaking heads. Some of the Chinese were tied together by their pigtails and flung over a cliff into the sea, encouraged to swim the rest of the way back to the Middle Kingdom.

Wang Lin, a survivor, fled into the interior of B.C., then over the Shining Mountains into the western heartland, finally settling in the small town where the best bargains were to be had at A. Gursky & Sons, General Merchants.

Wang’s son Charley prospered. Then, in the big autumn poker game of 1916, Charlie, as well as Kozochar, Ingram, Kouri, and McGraw were humiliated by Solomon, who rose from the card table the new owner of the Queen Victoria Hotel.

Before Solomon went off to the wars he installed McGraw as bartender, which some said was good of him. But it was hard on McGraw. He took to the bottle. He began to brood. Seated in the five-and-ten with Kouri, Kozochar, and Lin, he complained bitterly about Bernard, who made a point of checking out the cash register every night. He watched, amazed, as that strutting little bastard parlayed Solomon’s winnings into a bunch of hotels-cum-bordellos and a couple of mail-order houses that shifted booze from one province to another. Gathered around the hot stove with his cronies, McGraw allowed he never could have done it himself, he lacked the audacity. Yes, Lin countered, but neither could Bernard have managed it without the Queen Victoria as collateral. “And what if Solomon didn’t beat you fair and square,” Lin asked, “but he was cheating?”

Then Solomon sailed home and, without consulting Bernard, appointed McGraw manager of the Duke of York Hotel in North Portal, Saskatchewan, only a few feet from the border and immediately across the road from the railroad station for the Soo Line, which connected with Chicago.

Bernard was outraged when he discovered that McGraw had been promised twenty percent of the hotel’s take. “In the future,” he told Solomon, “such decisions are to be made by me, you, and Morrie together.”

No answer.

“I am considering offering my hand in marriage to Miss Libby Mintzberg of Winnipeg.”

Solomon whistled.

“Her father is president of the B’nai Brith synagogue. He’s a shoimer shabbos.”

“In that case, we must introduce him to Levine.”

Sammy “Red” Levine, out of Toledo, was strictly orthodox: he was never without a yarmulke and didn’t murder on the sabbath.

“Miss Mintzberg and I plan to have a family and then my needs will be greater than yours or Morrie’s.”

“Piss off, Bernie.”

During the Prohibition years Solomon was out of Saskatchewan more often than not, looking in on Tim Callaghan who was competing with Harry Low, Cecil Smith and Vital Benoit on the Windsor-Detroit Funnel, running into disputes with the Little Jewish Navy or the Purple Gang that only Solomon could settle by calling for a meeting in the Abars Island View or inviting everybody to dinner at Bertha Thomas’s Edgewater Thomas Inn.

Bertha Thomas died in 1955 and her roadhouse burnt down in 1970, but when Moses finally got to Windsor he managed to track down Al Hickley, who had once been her bouncer. In his seventies now, Al was rheumy-eyed, his speech thickened by a stroke, reduced to drinking what he called Ontario horsepiss, nesting in a rotting rooming house on Pitt Street. Al, who had been a rum-runner himself once he had quit the roadhouse, led Moses to a bar near the corner of Mercer Street that still reeked of last night’s vomit. “Hey, when I worked the Reaume Dock at Brighton Beach we not only ran booze across the river, but Chinks too. We loaded the Chinks in big bags, see, weighted, so’s a patrol boat got too close we had to throw ’em overboard with the booze. Shit, Moe, I think of all the booze lying at the bottom of the river it breaks my heart.”

“Did you ever meet Solomon Gursky in the old days?”

“I shook hands with Jack Dempsey himself once and I still got Babe Ruth’s autograph somewheres. The Yankees they was at Brigg’s to play the Tigers used to drink at Bertha’s. I talked to Al Capone a couple of times you never met a nicer guy. He could handle a thousand cases a day.”

“Gursky.”

“Used a cane and read books?”

“That’s the one.”

“Solly you mean. Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Hell’s bells, he was one of Bertha’s favourites. You know, we had a system at the Edgewater. The spotter buzzes us the cops are coming, Bertha lays a trail of ten-dollar bills from the front entrance to the back and those lardasses they’re bent over double going scoop scoop scoop. Pigs in a trough. Other times there’s a raid the shelves of booze behind the bar slides down a chute and waiters and members of the band are emptying customers’ glasses like crazy on to the thick thick carpet. But one time the fat little piano player he was, you know, a drug fiend, I’m dead against that, he misses naturally and there’s booze all over the dance floor. The cops they mop it up and they’re going to bring charges against Bertha, but Solly it was he saves her sweet ass. Why, Bertha, he says, I could have sworn you varnished the dance floor last night and didn’t that stuff contain alcohol? The judge, a good customer himself, laughs the cops out of court. Didn’t Solly die in an airplane crash?”

“Yes.”

“But his brothers are rich rich rich now?”

“Right.”

OR SOLOMON WAS IN CHICAGO, consulting with Al Capone’s financial adviser, Jacob “Greasy Thumb” Guzik. Or he was bound for Kansas City to cut a deal with Solly “Cutcher-Head-Off” Weissman. In Philadelphia, he handled the needs of Boo Boo Hoff and Nig Rosen and in Cleveland he supplied Moe Dalitz. Then he would meet with Bernard in Winnipeg or North Portal or the Plainsman Hotel, in Bienfait, and they would quarrel, Bernard spitting and cursing, and Solomon would take off again. He would check into the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for a couple of weeks, partying with Dutch Schultz and Abbadabba Berman at the Embassy or Hotsy-Totsy Club. Then he would drive to Saratoga to join Arnold Rothstein at the races, once wiring Bernard for fifty thousand dollars and another time for a hundred, sending Bernard into a rage.

The summer following the Chicago Black Sox scandal, Solomon joined with Lee Dillage, a North Dakota liquor dealer, in bankrolling an outlaw baseball team. The team that toured the border towns of Saskatchewan numbered among its players Swede Risberg and Happy Felsch, both former members of the notorious Black Sox. The games were a welcome distraction to the locals as well as the bootleggers, mostly out of North Dakota, who had to hang around one-horse towns like Oxbow and Estevan until after dark, before loading up their stripped-down Studebakers and Hudson Super-Sixes at the Gursky boozatoriums. Heading for the border without lights, their only problem the potholes prairie yokels had deliberately dug into tricky curves, hoping to shake loose a case of Bonnie Brew or Vat Inverness.

Meanwhile, a frustrated Bernard was on the boil, convinced that his courtship of Libby Mintzberg was foundering. Libby’s father, Heinrich Benjamin Mintzberg, BA, principal of the Winnipeg Hebrew Academy, president of the B’nai Jacob synagogue, treasurer of the Mount Sinai Beneficial Loan Society, invited Bernard into his study. A pouting Mrs. Mintzberg served tea with sponge cake and sat down to join them.

“When you first solicited my beloved daughter’s hand in matrimony,” Mr. Mintzberg began, “a matter of some consequence to my spouse and I—”

“If there’s a bigger catch in respectable Winnipeg society I’d like to know about it,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.

“—it grieved me, a professional man, that a potential future son-in-law of the Mintzbergs hadn’t even graduated high school.”

“And our precious one with her head always buried in a book,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.

“But then you assured me that you were the owner of The Royal Pure Drug Company, an impressive achievement considering your father’s origins in the shtetl—”

“And your own lack of a formal education.”

“—but now I hear that it’s really Solomon who is the boss.”

Putz. Mamzer. Yekke.

“Even though you’re the eldest,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.

Yachne. Choleria. “Well you heard wrong. I’m the real boss, but we’ve always had a partnership that also includes my brother Morrie.”

“So the materialistic proceeds of your various endeavours are shared in three equal parts?”

“Something like that.”

“Correct me if I err because I’m not well-versed in commercial arrangements, but I always surmised that the boss was somebody who owns more than fifty percent of the shares, the company properly registered.”

“Which will certainly be the case, sir, once the legal partnership papers are drawn up.”

“And when can we anticipate that auspicious day?”

“As soon as Solomon returns from Detroit, where I sent him to iron out certain bottlenecks in distribution.”

“Then I suggest we resume our deliberations once this matter has been resolved with your siblings. Meanwhile, Libby will continue to see you.”

“But no more than once a week.”

“And not exclusive of other beaux of good family.”

“Listen here, for shit’s sake, I earn more in a week than that fucken Saltzman does in a good year. Excuse me. I’m sorry.”

“Dr. Saltzman’s dental practice will undoubtedly grow.”

“And don’t take this personal, but he’s not shorter than Libby on the dance floor.”

“Neither am I if she isn’t wearing those goddamn high heels.”

“You see, Bernard, I’m taking the long view. I am thinking of the Mintzberg grandchildren.”

“God bless them,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.

“In a partnership shared equally among three brothers who are merely mortal the progeny are bound to squabble over their inheritance unless the line of succession is as clear as it is in the House of Windsor.”

MORRIE WAS no problem.

“Bernie, if you say I’m entitled to no more than twenty percent it’s hunky-dory with me, honest to God.”

“I love you, Morrie, and I’ll always take good care of you and yours.”

Bernard waited until Solomon had been back from Detroit for a couple of days before he went to see him in his suite in The Victory Hotel. Noon, and he was still lying in bed that one, reading newspapers. “Marcel Proust died yesterday. He was only fifty-one. What do you think of that?”

Empty champagne bottles drifted upside down in a silver bucket and there came a splashing from the bathroom, a girl in the tub, singing “April Showers”.

“We’ve got to talk.”

“No, we don’t. Shut the door after you and have them send up scrambled eggs for two and another bottle of Pol Roger.”

“Put down that newspaper and listen to me for a change. I pay all your gambling debts.”

“Do you think Boston did the right thing, trading Muddy Ruel like that?”

“You trust me. I trust you. Everybody trusts Morrie. But if any one of us was knocked down by a car, God forbid, nothing is clear, we have no legal partnership papers.”

“So you’ve got some right there in your briefcase,” Solomon said, reaching for it.

Even as Solomon scanned the documents, Bernard reminded him once more of how he had parlayed one hotel into nine, working eighteen hours a day while Solomon was gallivanting around Europe in an officer’s uniform. Furthermore, he pointed out, he was the eldest son with certain traditional rights going back to biblical times.

“Fifty-one percent for you, thirty for me, and nineteen for Morrie.”

“I could get him to settle for fifteen and I’d be satisfied with fifty point five-o, which would boost you to thirty-four and a half points.”

Solomon began to laugh.

“You whoremaster, you gambler, what if I lost my Libby because of you?”

“Then you’d have something else to thank me for.”

“I hate you,” Bernard hollered, scooping up an ashtray and throwing it at him, kicking open the bathroom door, “Give him the syph, he deserves it,” and taking a peek at the alarmed girl in the tub, slapping his cheek, amazed. “Oh, my God,” he said, fleeing the room.

Clara Teitelbaum snatched at the robe that hung from a hook on the door and spun out of the bathroom, wailing. “My father will throw me out in the street now and I don’t blame him one bit I’m dying of shame.”

“Don’t worry,” Solomon said, his mind elsewhere.

“I’m a respectable girl. I never even let another boy kiss me, but you, you animal, even a nun wouldn’t be safe with you.”

“I promise you Bernie won’t say a word to anybody.”

“And didn’t you promise me if I came here you’d know when to stop this time, you think I don’t know what they say about you?”

Solomon waited until her tears had subsided. “You’re not only ravishing, Clara, but you are so bright. Now tell me why I’m always so nasty to my brother.”

“He’ll blab to Libby and she’ll get on the phone to Faigy Rubin and my father, oh my God, you might as well hire me for the bar that’s all I’m good for now,” she said, thrusting her head deep into the pillows and beginning to quake with sobs again.

“Clara, please, you’re beginning to get on my nerves.”

“At least if I could say, Paw, I know I shouldn’t have let him, but we’re engaged.”

“If you don’t hurry, Clara, you’ll be late for your skating lessons. I’ll pick you up at eight and we’ll go to see Dream Street at the Regal.”

“I saw it,” she said, sniffling.

“The new Fairbanks then.”

“Better seven-thirty. But I’ll meet you there, I’ll say I’m going with a girlfriend, my father could be waiting at the door with a horsewhip. I wish I’d never met you and that’s the truth.”

Four o’clock in the afternoon Solomon was wakened by a soft scratching on the door. “Come on in, Morrie, the door’s unlocked.”

Morrie was followed by a waiter wheeling a table heaped with bagels and lox and cream cheese and a jug of coffee.

“Morrie, would you do me a favour?”

“Name it.”

“Would you marry the beautiful, but unbelievably dense Clara Teitelbaum for me?”

“Hey, what are you talking? She’s some number, Clara, very hoidytoidy too. Have you ever caught a look at her on the rink doing those figure-eights in that little skirt?”

“Unfortunately yes.”

“Her father leans against the fence, making sure nobody even talks to her.”

“What if I could fix you up with Clara tonight?”

“I’m glad to see you’re in such a good mood.”

“Oh yeah. Why?”

“Bernie’s really, really in love with Libby, but the Mintzbergs are giving him a hard time.”

“If you so much as mention those ridiculous contracts he’s drawn up I’ll throw you out of here.”

“Hold on. Don’t give me that look. But supposing that in order to win Libby’s hand he has to show those contracts to Mintzberg, but he also gave you a covering letter, nullifying the contracts, which would be torn up right after the marriage.”

“How could I be a party to deceiving the delightful daughter of such a worthy family of German Jews?”

So Morrie trudged back to the warehouse office and reported to Bernard that Solomon wouldn’t budge.

“I should have known better than to trust you with such an important thing, you little putz,” Bernard said, punching him in the stomach. Then grabbing his homburg and beaver coat, Bernard went flying out of the office.

Head lowered into the wind, Bernard went striding down Portage Street, cursing at anybody he banged into. Once more, in his mind’s eye, he saw Solomon, Ephraim’s anointed one, jump down from the fence into the flow of wild nervy horses in the corral. “Follow me, Bernie, and I’ll buy you a beer.” Turning a corner, tears freezing on his cheeks, he was confronted again by Lena Green Stockings. “It’s the boy with the two belly buttons.” Minnie Pryzack, seeing him reach for the towel, smiled at him, a tubby little man with wet fishy eyes who would have to scratch and bite to get what he wanted out of life, but never cheat, he thought, like Solomon certainly did in that card game, and yet to this day McGraw looks at me like I’m dog shit but would eat out of Solomon’s hand.

Bernard sat down in a booth in The Gold Nugget and ordered coffee and blueberry pie with a double helping of vanilla ice cream.

My God Lanksy phones and asks for Mr. Gursky.

Speaking, Bernard says.

I meant Solomon.

Well last time I looked I was Mr. Gursky too I’ll have you know.

Tell Solomon I called.

Click.

Hardly anybody in town could even qualify for a date with the unattainable Clara Teitelbaum, but Solomon was screwing her black and blue in the hotel. Yeah, sure. While he could win the Irish Sweepstakes easier than collecting a little good-night kiss from Libby.

“We all have to learn to control our desires,” she said.

“Yeah, well maybe not all. I could tell you something about your friend Clara Teitelbaum guaranteed to turn your hair white.”

“Like what?”

“Somebody is doing it to her.”

“Shame on you for making up such a thing. She isn’t even allowed out at night there isn’t a chaperone with.”

“So what about before lunch she’s supposed to be shopping?”

“You’re crazy.”

“About you, yes.”

“Then stop futzing around and get my father’s approval for the match.”

“There are problems.”

“Listen, Bernie, I’d marry you if you didn’t have even a dime to your name, but I can’t go against my father’s wishes. So get a move on, please, and you’ll see how warmly I can respond to your caresses,” she said, shutting the front door on him.

Goddamn it to hell. Working eighteen hours a day, Morrie more hindrance than help. Keeping the books. Sorting out cashier’s cheques drawn on banks in New York and Detroit and Chicago, everybody scared to carry too much cash now because of the hijackers. Checking out the boozatoriums and watching the tills in the hotels, every manager born to steal. Keeping the drivers from Minnesota happy, they got nothing to do all day but wait for dark, so suddenly they’ve started to rob the small-town banks and the yokels blame the liquor trade in general and the Gurskys in particular for welcoming such lowlifes into town. And meanwhile if Solomon isn’t shtupping Clara (her father finds out he’ll kill him for sure) or putting together a poker game, he’s in New York at Texas Guinan’s or better yet Mr. La De Da Himself is stuffing his kishkas at the Jockey Club with Arnold Rothstein and then wiring me for a hundred thousand here, fifty there, to settle his losses. He’s a menace. A makke. If I let him he’ll destroy everything I worked so hard to build and there will be nothing for my wife and children yet to come.

The following Tuesday night Bernard, wearing his homburg, grey serge suit, spats, and new wingtip shoes with elevator heels, called for Libby, as arranged, to take her to see The Kid at the Regal. A grim Mr. Mintzberg greeted him at the front door. “I’m afraid Miss Mintzberg can’t go out with you tonight.”

“She isn’t well?”

“God forbid,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.

“So what’s the problem?”

“Shame on you,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.

And then Libby appeared behind her parents in the foyer, a wraith, her eyes red, twisting a damp handkerchief in her hands. “Gossips are saying your brother has dishonoured Clara Teitelbaum. I don’t believe a word of it.”

“I’m not like him, Mr. Mintzberg.”

“Didn’t I tell them you’re always the gentleman,” Libby said.

“You give the word, Mr. Mintzberg, I marry Libby tomorrow.”

“Not under the present circumstances,” Mr. Mintzberg said, whacking the front door shut, a tearful Libby calling out, “Do something, sweetheart.”

“I have a hunch,” Bernard said to Solomon a couple of days later, “that you wouldn’t mind getting out of town for a while.”

“I appreciate your concern.”

“There are three carloads of whisky arriving at the CPR station at North Portal tomorrow night. Can you handle it?”

“Certainly.”

“Don’t accept cashier’s cheques from the Nebraska boys, only cash, those crooks they use pads of blank cheques that were stolen from banks here. Can I count on you?”

“You’re beginning to irritate me.”

“You have to be at the station by midnight without fail because the drivers start arriving about that time. And you are not to blow the receipts in a card game, if you don’t mind.”

On arrival in North Portal the next afternoon, Solomon made directly for the hotel and started to drink with McGraw and the rum-runners. A bunch of them, including Solomon and McGraw, moved on to The Imperial Pool Hall to shoot snooker at a thousand dollars a game. Solomon, who was ahead twelve thousand dollars at a quarter to twelve, didn’t feel it would be proper for him to lay down his cue and retreat to the railroad station, so he sent McGraw in his place.

Solomon was lining up a sharp-angled shot on the pink ball into the side pocket when the game was disrupted by two shotgun blasts that came from the direction of the railroad station. Everybody piled into the darkened street, reaching the station just in time to see a lone figure, shotgun in hand, dashing across the platform and taking off into the night in a Hudson Super-Six. Solomon bent over McGraw, dead on the station floor, shot from the window, once in the head, once through the chest. As the others gathered around, Solomon slipped away, retiring to his suite in the hotel. It was three A.M., and he had consumed half a bottle of cognac to no avail before he phoned Bernard. “McGraw went to the station in my place at midnight and somebody shot him.”

“Oh, no. How is he?”

“Dead is how he is the last time I looked.”

“Did they catch the killers?”

“No.”

Bernard began to curse.

“I didn’t want you to worry. I wanted you to know I was safe.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Something else while I’m at it,” Solomon said, remembering to coat the blade with honey. “Mintzberg has been buying the wrong stocks on margin from Duncan, Shire & Hamilton. Considering he has to be managing it on a parochial school principal’s salary, I’d say he’s heavily over-committed.”

“With God’s help he’ll lose his shirt, that fucken yekke.”

“Possibly he’d be grateful for a loan from an understanding son-in-law.”

Afraid he might doze off in spite of himself, Solomon shoved his bureau against the door to his room and laid his gun on the bedside table, alongside his bottle of cognac and gold pocket watch that was inscribed:

The murderer of Willy McGraw was never caught, but, so far as the RCMP was concerned, the motive was obvious. McGraw had been stripped of his diamond ring and, Solomon estimated, some nine thousand dollars in cash. However, within weeks, more than one cockeyed story about the murder was being floated in speakeasies as far away as Kansas City. McGraw, one theory had it, had been killed by hijackers in reprisal for his informing on a couple of them to the RCMP. Another theory ran that McGraw had been shot by mistake, the intended victim Solomon for having seduced the wife of a politician in Detroit. In support of that farrago there were witnesses who swore that the getaway car had a Michigan licence plate. Still others whispered that it was Solomon himself who had ordered the killing because McGraw had something dirty on him that went back years. Lending credence to that theory was the undeniable fact that it was Solomon who had sent McGraw to the railway station. Finally, some said that the killer had indeed been after Solomon, hired by the father of a girl he had ruined in Winnipeg.

In any event, Solomon was not seen on the prairie for months, and when he came back it was, to everybody’s surprise, to marry a girl in Winnipeg. She was six months’ pregnant at the time, living in seclusion in The Victory Hotel, her parents having disowned her. Solomon, they said, married her merely to give the child a name. An unnecessary gesture, as it turned out, because the baby girl was stillborn. Libby Gursky pronounced that a blessing in disguise, because otherwise the poor child would have been bound to live out her life under a cloud of shame.

Three

Moses Berger never visited a city without seeking out its second-hand bookshops, not satisfied with scanning the shelves but also rummaging through unsorted cartons in the basement. One of his most cherished discoveries was a memoir of R.B. Bennett, the New Brunswick-born prairie lawyer who led the Tories into office in Ottawa in 1930, ending a nine-year reign by Mackenzie King. The memoir, written by the prime minister’s secretary, Andrew D. MacLean, began:

The Right Honourable Richard Bedford Bennett, P.C., LL.D., D.C.L., K.C., M.P., Prime Minister of Canada, foremost statesman in an Empire of over four hundred million people, rises at seven-thirty, enjoys an ample breakfast, and is at his office, every morning, a few minutes before nine.

R.B. Bennett, descendant of United Empire Loyalists, a Methodist millionaire, a bachelor and former Sunday School teacher, was pledged to bring to justice the bootleggers who had been coddled by the Liberals for so long, but he didn’t get round to it until 1934. By that time the Gurskys, directors of the thriving James McTavish & Sons, were happily ensconced on the Montreal mountainside. Mr. Bernard’s mansion was dug into the highest ground, enabling him to look down on the adjoining homes of Solomon and Morrie as, one spring morning, he sat down to breakfast with Libby, three months’ pregnant. The maid announced that there were two men at the door who wished to see him. “They’re from the RCMP, sir, and wish to speak with you at once.”

They had warrants for the arrest of Bernard, Solomon, and Morrie, who were taken to RCMP headquarters to be fingerprinted and photographed and then escorted to the Montreal Court of the King’s Bench Chambers, where they were released on bail of $150,000 each. The Gursky boys, as the newspapers called them, were charged with the evasion of $7 million in customs duties and a further $15 million in excise taxes. Mr. Bernard was also charged with attempting to bribe Bert Smith, a customs officer.

It was the murder of Willy McGraw that ignited the prairie fire, politicians in faraway Ottawa sniffing the smoke that eventually led to the Gursky boys being scorched by a humiliating arrest. Following a plague of bank robberies instigated by bored American rum-runners, the murder of McGraw infuriated the law-abiding citizens of three prairie provinces, vociferous members of the Loyal Orange Lodge in particular. Prime Minister Mackenzie King heard the cry of his western children, consulted his crystal ball and the hands of his wall clock, and decreed an end to the export liquor trade in Saskatchewan, giving the Gurskys a month to shut down their operations there. However, King was too late to save the provincial Liberals from electoral defeat. A Tory candidate, taking to the stump, declared, “The Liberals have been in cahoots with the booze peddlers from the very beginning. Take Bernard Gursky, for instance, a millionaire many times over. He is alleged to have offered Inspector Smith a bribe of fifteen thousand dollars. Then how much do you think he and his brothers paid into Liberal coffers for immunity from prosecution all these years?” Next the Bishop of Saskatchewan, Cedric Brown, a former chaplain to the intrepid settlers of Gloriana, took to the pulpit. “Of the forty-six liquor export houses in Saskatchewan,” the bishop proclaimed, “sixteen are run by people of the Hebrew persuasion. When the Jews form one half of one percent of the population, and own sixteen of the forty-six export houses, it is time they were given to understand that since they have been received in this country, and have been given rights enjoyed by other white men, they must not defile the country by engaging in disreputable pursuits.” Then he quoted from a dockside sermon by the legendary Reverend Horn, who had led a company of God-fearing Britons westward ho to Gloriana. We are bound, the reverend had said, for the land of milk and honey. Not, the bishop added, for the fleshpots of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The bishop’s condemnation of the Jew bootleggers swiftly turned into a chorus, joined by the United Grain Growers, the Loyal Orange Lodge, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Ku Klux Klan and the Tories. The Tories sailed into office in the provincial election, promising to bring the Gurskys to the bar of justice.

That had been tried before, of course, by Bert Smith, who claimed that, as a consequence, Mr. Bernard had attempted to bribe him. The charge would be vehemently denied by Mr. Bernard before the Royal Commission on Customs and Excise, but the commission ruled that in their view a prima facie case had been made sufficient to warrant prosecution being entered against Bernard Gursky. Unfortunately, such was the press of other business, the commission neglected to set a date for the trial.

The Royal Commission, as a matter of fact, did not convene until several years after the alleged bribe attempt, but only a week following Smith’s confrontation with the Gurskys in the warehouse, he was, to his astonishment, reprimanded by his superiors and transferred to Winnipeg. He had only been in Winnipeg for a month when he discomfited the Gurskys again, this time impounding another bootlegger’s car on a back road, the culprit fleeing into the bush. When Mr. Bernard heard the news, taking the call in Morrie’s office, he ripped the telephone off the desk, flinging it out of the window. “I’m stuck with a little goyishe splinter under my fingernail.”

“Aw, he’s just a kid doing his job. One car. Big deal. You make a fuss and you’ll draw even more attention to us from the newspapers.”

“And I don’t make a fuss the word will get out that a fucken Boy Scout can make trouble for Bernard Gursky and get away with it.”

So Mr. Bernard went to Ottawa to meet the plump, rosy-cheeked Jules Omer Bouchard, chief preventive officer for the Department of Customs. Though Bouchard earned only four thousand dollars a year, he managed to maintain a mansion across the river in Hull, looked after by a niece; a retreat in Florida; and a riverside cottage in the Gaspé, a cabin cruiser tied up at the dock, the estate cared for by yet another of his nieces. He would end his days as a prison librarian, driven out of office by Tory scourges who pronounced him “a debauched public official, rolling in opulence like a hippo in the mud.” Actually, he was a most affable fellow, prescient as well. Once having adjudged the liquor laws unenforceable, a Presbyterian perversion, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t benefit from them. He was not avaricious, but savoured the good life, lavishing expensive gifts on his nieces and impecunious painters and writers whose work gave him pleasure.

A discerning art collector, Bouchard was an early patron of the work of Jean-Jacques Martineau, possibly the most prodigiously talented painter ever to emerge from French Canada. Alas, Martineau was unrecognized until years after the debt-ridden artist committed suicide in Granby in 1948. An event that led in 1970 to a seminal essay by a Parti Québecois metaphysician, “Qui a tué Martineau?”, in which it was charged that the painter had been murdered by anglophone indifference, which would be the lot of all Québecois artists, the white niggers of North America, until they were free to paint in their own language.

Bouchard paid Martineau four hundred dollars a month, and never descended to his cabin on the Baie de Chaleur without bringing a crate of Beaujolais, a quarter of venison or a freshly caught salmon, as well as a couple of his nieces. In exchange, he was allowed his choice of five canvases a year, one of which always hung behind his desk.

“Hey,” Mr. Bernard said, after describing his troubles with Smith, “that’s a wonderful painting you’ve got hanging there!” Pea-soup cod fishermen bringing in their catch. What a life, he thought. “You know, I’d give ten thousand dollars to own a picture like that.”

“You must be joking.”

“Fifteen. Cash,” Mr. Bernard shot back grumpily, indignant because he had seen better on the cover of many a jigsaw puzzle box which would have set him back only twenty-five cents.

A week later the bootlegger’s car that Smith had seized in Winnipeg was released by the Department of Customs and Excise and Smith was rebuked for having been seen driving the car for his personal use, a stain on the department’s honour. A fulminating Smith wrote back to Ottawa to protest that he had been seen driving the car to the garage and that there had already been an attempt to bribe him by the Gurskys. Furthermore, his apartment had been burgled, documents stolen. Everything possible, he wrote, was being done to hinder his investigation of the Gurskys and their ilk.

Without waiting for a reply to his letter, an aroused Smith took it upon himself one evening to raid the United Empire Wholesalers, the Gursky warehouse in Winnipeg. He stumbled on Morrie, seated on a stool, straining a drum of alcohol through a loaf of rye bread.

“What are you doing?” Smith asked, coming up behind him.

“I have to. The stuff’s rusty. Oh my God, it’s you.”

Smith found illegal compounding equipment on the premises, as well as a cardboard carton filled with counterfeit U.S. revenue stamps and a tea chest laden with forged labels for famous brands of American whiskies. He packed the evidence in a box, secured it with an official seal, and drove it down to the CPR express office to be shipped to Ottawa.

“What have you got there?” the clerk asked.

“Enough evidence to put the Gurskys in prison where they belong.”

“Then I’d better keep a sharp eye on it and get it on the first train out.”

Unfortunately by the time the box reached Ottawa much of the evidence was missing. Bouchard wired Smith to take no further action but to report directly to him in Ottawa at once. However, when Smith got to Bouchard’s outer office he was told to wait. Mr. Bernard was already seated with the chief preventive officer.

“Holy cow,” Mr. Bernard said, leaping out of his chair for a closer look, “where in the hell did you get another Martineau, my Libby is crazy for his stuff.”

“Oh, I couldn’t part with this one,” Bouchard said. “It’s a favourite of mine. His masterpiece.”

A sugaring-off party in the woods, fat women lugging pails, men boiling the maple syrup, kids cooling the stuff off in a snowbank and eating it, an old fart playing the fiddle, everybody freezing their balls no doubt but for them a whoopee time. Some bunch.

“I’m talking fifteen thousand dollars,” Mr. Bernard said, clicking open his attaché case.

“You’ve got to be joking. This one is a lot bigger than the first one you talked me out of.”

Fucking frog chiseller. “How much bigger would you say, my good friend?”

“Twice.”

“I’d say only as much again. Shake on it, Jules.”

Mr. Bernard and Bouchard retired to a restaurant in Hull for lunch and then a dozy Bouchard stumbled back to his office, aching for his sofa, but reconciled to dealing with Smith first. “The fact is,” he told Smith, “your action against the United Empire Wholesalers, while not constituting illegal entry, has shown a failure of judgement that reflects badly on this office and, therefore, I must tell you that you are temporarily suspended from further duty in excise work. Until we rule otherwise you are confined to customs work at the Port of Winnipeg and you are not authorized to undertake any outside investigations unless ordered by me.”

On his return to Winnipeg, Smith composed a long letter to the minister of justice asking why, after a Royal Commission had established that there was a prima facie case against Bernard Gursky for attempting to bribe him, no trial date had yet been set. The minister wrote back to say, unfortunately many of the Crown witnesses were ill and in any event the matter was really the concern of Saskatchewan’s attorney-general. So Smith wrote to the attorney-general who replied that in his humble opinion the problem was one of federal jurisdiction. Smith also wrote to his MP. He wrote to the prime minister. Several weeks later Smith received a letter discharging him from the Customs and Excise service. A cheque for three months’ salary was enclosed.

Smith moved into a rented room, setting his photograph of his parents standing before their sod hut in Gloriana on his bedside table, his Bible alongside, and began pecking away with two fingers at his second-hand Underwood, writing letters to cabinet ministers in Ottawa, proffering evidence of Gursky transgressions and querying the integrity of Jules Omer Bouchard. He had proof, he said, that the Gurskys had acquired a farm straddling the border in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, where one Albert Crawley had been wounded in a gun fight. He speculated about the Gurskys’ activities on the Detroit River and observed that they owned a shipping company in Newfoundland, with as many as thirty schooners on charter, each one bound for St. Pierre and Miquelon.

Smith’s letters went unacknowledged. Then, just as he despaired of ever seeing justice done, R.B. Bennett was thrust into office and soon had to contend with tin and tarpaper shacks springing up everywhere and with farmers who called their necessarily horse-drawn Model-Ts “Bennett buggies”. When thousands of the unemployed marched on Ottawa, Bennett was convinced that the country was teetering on the edge of a revolution. Unable to supply bread, he provided a circus. The Gurskys were arrested in Montreal, charged with the evasion of customs duty and excise tax. Prominent photographs of their mountainside mansions began to appear in newspapers. Reporters revived interest in the unsolved murder of Willy McGraw.

The government put together an intimidating flotilla of lawyers to prosecute the case, the captain on the bridge Stuart MacIntyre of Morgan, MacIntyre and Maclean. Bert Smith proceeded to MacIntyre’s office directly after his train from the west arrived at Windsor Station. MacIntyre heard him out and then met with his colleagues, his disappointment self-evident. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the guy’s not physically blessed, but an obvious nonentity who practically foams at the mouth at the mention of Bernard Gursky and is also out to get Bouchard, a member in good standing of both the St. Denis Club and the St. Jean Baptiste Society. Putting him on the stand is going to be risky.”

The Gurskys also assembled a formidable legal team, shrewdly comprised of one lawyer, Bernard Langlois, who was a French-Canadian, and another, Arthur Benchley, with impeccable Westmount connections, their tactics orchestrated by Moti Singerman, who would never question a witness himself.

The trial, presided over by Judge Gaston Leclerc, the former chief bagman for the Quebec Liberal Party, got off to a promising start, so far as the Gurskys were concerned. MacIntyre, opening for the Crown, charged that the Gurskys had conspired to violate the statutes of a friendly country, smuggling liquor over the longest undefended border in the world. Langlois countered that it would be incredible for the courts of the province of Quebec to administer the laws of the United States. “If the prosecution wishes to charge the Gursky brothers with smuggling, let them prove it.”

But in order for the Crown to make their case it was essential for them to have bank documentation proving that millions of dollars had passed between Ajax Shipping, the Gursky-owned company in Newfoundland, and Gibraltar, a Gursky family trust. However, the RCMP raid on McTavish headquarters had been too late, the account books having been lost in a fire the day before.

Things took a turn for the worse once Solomon moved into the witness stand. Pressed about his activities as an alleged bootlegger, he asked MacIntyre, “When you invited people to dinner at your seaside cottage on the Cape, during Prohibition, did you usually serve your guests carrot juice or cocktails?”

“What possible concern is that of yours?”

“I’d like to know what I missed—if anything.”

Had Solomon ever met with Al Capone? Yes. Longy Zwillman? Yes. Moe Dalitz? Yes again. “But,” Solomon said, “I have also met with Joan Miró and George Bernard Shaw, but I am neither a painter nor a writer. I have talked with your brother in Ottawa more than once and I am not a bigot.”

Judge Leclerc cautioned Solomon, not for the first time. MacIntyre, sorting through papers, feigning confusion, asked, “Can you tell me if the name Willy McGraw means anything to you?”

Before Arthur Benchley could protest that the question was irrelevant, Solomon replied, “He was a friend of mine.”

That night a distraught Mr. Bernard, dismissing his chauffeur, took to the wheel of his Cadillac and drove out to Ste.-Adèle. Judge Leclerc was waiting for him there, having reluctantly agreed to open his country place, Pickwick Corner, the grounds landscaped and the interior decorated to honour his somewhat skewed notion of a country squire’s cottage in the Cotswolds. True, the walled rose garden had been a failure, the rhododendrons had also yielded to frost, but there was a wishing well. Each spring, a host of golden daffodils. And the beautifully sculpted yews bordering his croquet lawn clearly showed the hand, according to one visitor, of a master choreographer.

Mr. Bernard joined Judge Leclerc in the living room, the fireplace wall adorned with paintings of the fox hunt, another wall lined with a grouping of backlit pewter plates and jugs. Both men sat in leather armchairs, Judge Leclerc filling his pipe with a fragrant mixture of tobacco imported from Fribourg and Treyer, in the Haymarket, his briar acquired from Inderwick’s. “Bernard,” Judge Leclerc said, smoothing his hairbrush moustache, tugging at his ascot, “we’ve jolly well got to give them something.”

“How come Jules Omer Bouchard, making maybe five grand a year, owns a big house in Hull and another in Florida and an estate in the Gaspé, eighteen-year-old nieces coming out of the woodwork everywhere, if he isn’t accepting bribes?”

“Jules is for it, anyway, the poor bloke, but that won’t be nearly enough.”

Mr. Bernard unlocked his attaché case.

“And that won’t do it, either.”

“Look here, you little prick, I go to jail, so do you.”

“By Jove, are you threatening me?”

“Sure I am.”

“Stu MacIntyre’s keen for blood. If he wins this case he can choose between being the next minister of justice or a seat on the Supreme Court.”

“What could he have against me?”

“Not you. Solomon. He tried to pick up Diana Morgan in that hotel he bought down here and he’s been after her ever since, his intent undoubtedly priapic.”

“I don’t know about that, but he’s got nooky on the brain that one. I’ll tell him to stop. Consider it done.”

“That young lady is a thoroughbred. She’s a granddaughter of Sir Russell Morgan and a niece of Stu MacIntyre’s. I hope to succeed MacIntyre as Master of the Ste.-Adèle Hunt Club. I would be the first French-Canadian to be so honoured. Fancy that.” Judge Leclerc brought out a decanter of port and two large snifters. “Did Solomon order McGraw killed?”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“My own brother.”

“We’ve bloody well got to feed them something.”

“Callaghan?”

“Not enough.”

“My own flesh and blood.”

“I understand.”

“What could I get? Worst case.”

“A heavy fine.”

“I can handle that.”

“And possibly ten years in prison.”

The next morning Bert Smith was called to the witness stand, realizing a dream that had sustained him night after night for years, gnashing his teeth in bed, raging, waking in a sweaty tangle of sheets. In his mind’s eye, given his day in court, Smith smote the Gurskys as David had Goliath, not with five smooth stones but with the truth. Then, the governor-general intervened on his behalf, reinstating him in customs and excise, the new chief investigating officer, seated in Bouchard’s chair. But now, stepping up to be sworn in at last, dizzy, his throat dry, he was mortified to hear the squeak of the new shoes he had purchased for the occasion. His shirt collar choked, but he didn’t dare loosen his tie. Although he had been to the toilet twice already his bladder was fit to burst. His stomach rumbled and he feared he might soil himself right there. Desperately trying to summon up MacIntyre’s detailed instructions, instead he could only recall their lunch together at Delmo’s, Smith, terrified of being caught out in a gaffe, waiting for the distinguished lawyer to order, mumbling, ”I’ll have the same, thank you, sir,” to the waiter. Then disgracing himself, realizing too late that he was buttering his bread with the fish knife, his embarrassment compounded when MacIntyre magnanimously followed suit.

Responding to the simplest question, determined to please MacIntyre, such a fine gentleman, Smith instinctively raised a hand to his mouth to hide his snaggle-teeth, then, asked to speak up more clearly this time, he lowered his hand abruptly, blushing and flustered. Sliding in sweat, stumbling, all the speeches he had rehearsed again and again were lost to him. He heard himself talking, those were his lips moving, but he had no idea what he was saying. In fact, bleeding vitriol and incoherence in equal parts, painfully aware of MacIntyre’s impatience and the grinning simians on the press bench, he did manage to blurt out that the accused, in the presence of his brothers and Tim Callaghan, had offered him a bribe of fifteen thousand dollars to let three American bootleggers go free. Then, even as he warmed to his tale, he grasped that MacIntyre, obviously annoyed, was distancing himself from him. “Thank you very much, Mr. Smith.”

“But—”

“I have no more questions.”

Later MacIntyre, pontificating in his boardroom before the firm’s most recent law graduates, would explain: “I knew I never should have allowed that malignant little man to testify. No sooner did he take the oath than I felt the ill-wind on the back of my neck. You see, boys, it was no use. There wasn’t anybody in that courtroom who hadn’t once been stopped and had his baggage searched by just such a punctilious little turd.”

MacIntyre’s questioning of him done, Smith was suddenly aware of somebody else swimming into focus, the portly Langlois, raising titters as he established that Smith was a Boy Scout leader who didn’t drink or smoke. And probably, Langlois ventured, didn’t have a sense of humour either or he would have realized when he was being teased by Mr. Bernard, a well-known practical joker.

“No bribe was offered,” Mr. Bernard testified, “but Smith came to the warehouse office when we happened to be checking out the contents of our safe, our monthly receipts out on the desk, maybe fifteen thousand dollars, and winking at my brothers, nudging Callaghan, I happened to say, hey, kid, how would you like some of this money? You could get those teeth fixed. Buy a pair of shoes that didn’t squeak …”

Laughter rose from the reporters.

“… treat your Boy Scout troop to ice-cream sodas. Maybe take out a girl for once. Wowee!”

Morrie said, “I can’t help but feel sorry for Mr. Smith, really such a nice, polite boy, but it was all a misunderstanding.”

Callaghan swore that no bribe had been offered in his presence.

And then Solomon took to the stand, aware of Smith sitting there, rocking in place, a hand held to his mouth, his eyes empty.

“Am I correct in saying,” MacIntyre said, “that you asked to speak to Mr. Smith alone?”

“Yes, but he wanted a witness.”

MacIntyre chuckled.

“So Callaghan stayed behind,” Solomon said.

“And was present when you warned Mr. Smith not to testify against you?”

“I did not warn him. I advised him not to testify.”

“But to take the money that was still on the table?”

“To take it or leave it, as he saw fit.”

“And then,” MacIntyre said, smiling at the witness over his reading glasses, “possibly you even said unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”

Judge Leclerc looked up, amazed. Before Langlois could intervene, MacIntyre continued, “If you recognize the quote …”

“The New Testament?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know about you, Mr. MacIntyre, but I’ve always found sequels something of a disappointment, especially Matthew.”

“Just who do you think you are to say a thing like that?”

“I am that I am, if you recognize the quote.”

Judge Leclerc hastily adjourned the court, announcing that it would reconvene at the usual hour the following morning.

And that night a troubled Mr. Bernard drove out to Ste.-Adèle again, where the judge was waiting.

“Guilty or not,” Mr. Bernard said, “it goes against my nature to turn in my own brother. I’d rather take my medicine like a man.”

“More’s the pity.”

“But if MacIntyre really, really wants to get at the truth I suggest that he get in touch with this man,” he said, passing him a slip of paper. “He will be arriving at the Windsor Hotel tomorrow afternoon.”

A couple of days later, Stu MacIntyre, questioning Solomon again, seemed to wander without point, defence lawyers leaping up to protest the irrelevance of his queries, Judge Leclerc overruling them, displaying uncharacteristic patience and good humour.

“I take it,” MacIntyre said, “that you are something of a gambling man?”

“Yes.”

“Horses?”

“Yes.”

“Snooker?”

“On occasion.”

“Like the night you sent Willy McGraw down to the railroad station, where he was killed by unknown gunmen?”

Arthur Benchley shot out of his seat, infuriated. Judge Leclerc, taking his point, reprimanded MacIntyre. MacIntyre apologized and was then allowed to proceed.

“Poker?”

“Yes.”

“As a matter of interest, for high stakes?”

“I’ve got a feeling we’re going to see a surprise witness here.”

“You haven’t answered the question, Mr. Gursky.”

“Just because you indicate a garden path, sir, doesn’t mean I have to follow it only to be confronted by a liar.”

Following a caution to the witness from Judge Leclerc, MacIntyre put the question to Solomon again.

“For high stakes. Yes.”

“Didn’t you once wager your father’s general store, as well as a good deal of cash against—”

“You’re forgetting the blacksmith’s shop and Charley Lin’s two rooming houses.”

“That as well then, against the deed to the Queen Victoria Hotel, then the property of the late Willy McGraw?”

“Yes.”

“Did you win?”

“Fortunately.”

“My own card-playing is limited to the occasional rubber of bridge, so please correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Gursky, but I would imagine in games played for such stakes it is crucial that the players trust each other to both honour their debts and play strictly according to the rules.”

“What you lack in subtlety, sir, you do make up for in prescience.”

“Would you please—”

“Answer the question?”

“Yes.”

“You are correct.”

“Am I also correct in assuming that if a player were suspected of cheating he would no longer be welcome at the tables?”

“If you are looking for a game, sir, I could arrange it. Outside the confines of this courtroom, I’m sure you wouldn’t dare play with a stacked deck.”

“Would you please answer the questions as they are put to you, Mr. Gursky.”

“Yes, an unscrupulous player would soon be discovered and find himself persona non grata at the tables, to say the least.”

“So had somebody threatened to compromise your no doubt enviable reputation as an honourable player it would have been a serious matter?”

“A very serious matter.”

“That’s all for the moment, Mr. Gursky, and I do thank you for the patience and of course the unfailing courtesy of your replies.” But as Solomon got up, MacIntyre motioned for him to sit down again. “Sorry. Just one more thing. Going back to that game in which you were lucky enough to win the Queen Victoria Hotel—”

“From the late Willy McGraw?”

“Yes. From the late Mr. McGraw. Can you tell me did you use new playing cards?”

“Yes.”

“And where were they purchased?”

“Why, from A. Gursky and Sons, General Merchants.”

Charley Lin wasn’t summoned to the stand until late in the afternoon. He averted his eyes as he waddled past Solomon, who smiled and whispered something that made Charley stumble and then turn to the judge to protest that he had had a long journey and did not feel well.

Judge Leclerc, noting the late hour, adjourned the court, asking Mr. Lin to resume the stand at ten the next morning.

But the next morning Solomon Gursky did not turn up in court at the appointed hour and was not to be found at home, either. He had met with Mr. Bernard the previous evening, according to Clara Gursky, the brothers quarrelling bitterly, and then he had gone out for a stroll at six in the morning and hadn’t been seen since.

“Did he take a suitcase with him, Mrs. Gursky?”

“No.”

It was late in the afternoon before the RCMP established that Solomon had taken a taxi to Cartierville airport and flown off in his Gypsy Moth with the raven painted on the fuselage.

Bound for where?

North was all Mr. Gursky said.

Where north, for Christ’s sake?

Far, he said.

Refuelling in Labrador, it was later discovered, heading still farther out in appalling weather conditions, a whiteout predicted.

The next day’s newspapers featured page one photographs of the late Willy McGraw, lying in a puddle of blood on the railway station floor. There were interviews with Charley Lin. Photographs of Solomon seen seated with “Legs” Diamond in the Hotsy-Totsy Club; Solomon standing on a corner of Third Avenue, kibitzing with Izzy and Moe, the fabled Prohibition agents; and, finally, a photograph of Solomon in his flier’s uniform, standing before his Sopwith Camel, on an airfield “somewhere in France.”

Reporters speculated that McGraw had discovered Solomon was playing with marked cards acquired from his father’s general store. Fearful of exposure, or possibly responding to blackmail, Solomon appointed McGraw manager of the Duke of York Hotel in North Portal and then had him murdered, his own alibi foolproof.

RCAF search planes hunted for Solomon’s Gypsy Moth, which seemed to have disappeared after refuelling in Labrador, where the mechanic who had serviced the plane was sharply questioned.

“Didn’t he tell you where he was heading?”

“North.”

“We know that, damn it, but where?”

“Far, he said.”

A bush pilot, consulted by the RCMP, said that the day Solomon had taken off nothing else was moving, because it was as good as flying through a bottle of milk. In a whiteout, he explained, there is absolutely no horizon, and even the most experienced pilot, riding it out, wheeling and turning, his sense of gravity gone, is inclined to fly upside down into the ground. And that, he felt, is what happened to Gursky somewhere in the barrens, where only an Eskimo had a chance to survive.

Shuffling into court three days after Solomon’s disappearance, Mr. Bernard apologized to Judge Leclerc for being unshaven and for wearing a suit jacket with a torn collar and slippers. It was not, he assured him, out of disrespect for the court, but in deference to the tradition of his people when mourning the death of an immediate family member, in this case a cherished brother, no matter what his sins.

Five days later, the Gypsy Moth still missing, Judge Gaston Leclerc delivered his verdict to an attentive court:

“The Crown claims that the accused maintained agencies in Newfoundland and St. Pierre et Miquelon for the purpose of smuggling and that the sales made there were proof of an illegal conspiracy. However, the accused were jolly well within their rights. They were legally entitled to maintain such agencies in such places, and it is no secret that at the time many Canadian distilleries sold as many of their products as they could outside of Canada. These acts, I’m bound to point out, were legal and the vendors were not obliged to verify the destination of the goods they sold, nor was there any obligation upon them to inquire of the buyers what they intended to do with the goods.” The judge concluded, “There is no evidence that the accused committed a criminal act. I am of the opinion that there is not, prima facie, proof of a conspiracy as alleged, and the accused are herewith discharged.” However, he did add that if Solomon Gursky were to be found alive there would be other charges that he would have to answer to in court.

The next morning an RCMP inspector subpoenaed Judge Leclerc’s bank records and raided his safety-deposit box. No incriminating evidence was found. In any event, Judge Leclerc retired the following year, stopping in Zurich before proceeding to the Cotswolds, where the estate he acquired had a walled rose garden, masses of rhododendrons, a labyrinth and apple and pear trees.

The long-awaited verdict on the Gurskys didn’t even make page one, because the same day charred pieces of a disintegrated Gypsy Moth were found strewn over a three-mile area in the barrens. Many of the airplane parts were brought in by a wandering band of Eskimos, all of them wearing sealskin parkas with fringes hanging from the corners, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands. One of the Eskimos had found an attaché case embossed with the initials S.G. It contained Solomon’s passport and close on two hundred thousand dollars in American banknotes. Solomon’s body was never found. It was assumed to have been blown apart when the Gypsy Moth exploded, the pieces dragged off and consumed by the white wolves of the barrens.

The next morning Mr. Bernard summoned Morrie to his house. “Before Solomon ran away,” he said, “he was good enough to sign these new partnership papers.”

Fifty-five percent of McTavish for Mr. Bernard, thirty percent for Solomon and his descendants, and fifteen percent for Morrie.

“I thought my share was going to be nineteen percent.”

“I fought for you like a tiger, but he wouldn’t budge.”

Mr. Morrie signed.

“There’s only the two of us left now,” Mr. Bernard said.

“Yes.”

“But you mustn’t worry about me. I’ve decided to start having regular check-ups.”

“Should I do the same you think?”

“Aw. Why go to the expense? You look terrific.”

Four

Becky Schwartz’s name was now a fixture in E.J. Gordon’s Social Notes in the Gazette, most recently in a column celebrating an anniversary of the Beaver Club; Harvey, like the other achievers who had been invited, bedecked in a beaver hat and a tailcoat and sporting a goatee for one of the grandest nights an the city’s high society calendar.

“Boy, do you ever look like a shmuck,” Becky had said before they started out.

“I’m not going.”

“We’re going. But would you please line the inside of that hat with paper or something. It looks like you have no forehead.”

The Beaver Club was founded in 1959 to recreate the riotous dinners held two centuries earlier by Montreal’s fur traders. “Welcoming the guests,” E.J. Gordon wrote, “were Caughnawaga Indians, clad in doeskins, the men wearing feathered headdresses, standing beside their tepee in an encampment in the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.” Seated cross-legged immediately before the tepee, beating the drums, was a fetching young girl, actually a great-great-granddaughter of Ephraim Gursky and Lena Green Stockings, who would later enchant the guests with her rendition of “Hava-negilla”.

Becky studied E.J. Gordon’s column in her four-poster bed the next morning, reclining against satin pillows, picking at a bran muffin. She was in a sour mood. Problems with the children. Bernard, into coke and God knows what else, was falling behind with his studies at Harvard. Libby, at Bennington, wouldn’t come home until Harvey divested his shares in any company with holdings in South Africa. And Becky, her outsize donations to the art museum and symphony orchestra notwithstanding, had still failed to crack the right dinner-party lists. She insisted that Harvey take her to dinner at the Ritz.

“The Moffats are watching our table. Order caviar.”

“But I don’t like it.”

“And don’t you dare mash chopped onions into it.” Then she told him what she had decided. “We’re going to redecorate the house and then hold a masked ball and invite le tout Montreal.”

Becky went after the best that money could buy, the much soughtafter Giorgio Embroli of Toronto and Milan. Giorgio, a master of rectilinear circuitry, did not undertake commissions just like that. He had first to explore the physic boundaries of the three-dimensional space involved and to test the stream of kinetic energy bound to flow between him and his clients. Harvey flew him into town in a Gursky Challenger jet. He and Becky welcomed him to their house by cracking open a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé that came out of a Napa Valley vineyard only recently acquired by McTavish. Giorgio raised his glass to the light, took a sip, swished it around in his mouth and grimaced. “Sadly,” he said, “most Californian wines are completely incapable of producing a sensory shock. They never surprise you. They tell you how they were made, but not how they came into existence.” Then, patting his ruby lips with a handkerchief, he said, “Show me, please, where I can rinse out the palate.”

Harvey didn’t blink at Giorgio’s fees. He stood by as the interior decorator floated out of the house, pausing at the front door, offering a pale scented cheek to Becky to be kissed. But once he was gone, Harvey threw out the Baccarat wine glass that had touched his lips and the Pratesi towel that he had used in the hall toilet. “I know they say that you can only get it from an exchange of bodily fluids,” he said, “but until they know for sure we’re not taking any chances.”

Giorgio’s live-in companion, Dov HaGibor, was a talented painter out of Ramat Aviv. He had started out as an abstract impressionist, determined to create work that celebrated a collision of ur-references as well as trapping infinity and assigning a linguistic function to colour. Recently, however, HaGibor had confounded his admirers by converting to high-voltage realism, his pictures interpreting fractured rather than unified space. He found his subjects by seeking out junk shops wherever he travelled, never knowing what he was looking for but recognizing it immediately he found it. An old photograph, discovered in a Salvation Army sale in Montreal, was the causa causans, as Walter Osgood, curator of the Gursky Art Foundation put it in his essay in Canadian Art, of the famous 14 × 8-foot canvas that was to dominate the redecorated Schwartz living room, its value escalating once HaGibor had died of AIDS.

There had been a barely legible inscription on the back of the original photograph that HaGibor had burnt once his painting was done: “Gloriana, October 10, 1903”. And “Gloriana” is what HaGibor called what came to be recognized as his masterpiece, the title an enigma, a matter of contention. Some critics argued that it made the artist’s satirical intent clear, but others insisted just as forcibly that HaGibor had meant his work to stand as a complaint against la condition humaine, as witness the Hebrew words flying off to the right. The words, translated, read: My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope.

In any event, the undeniably striking canvas showed a bewildered couple, the husband dour, the wife looking stricken, standing before a sod hut, the landscape bleak as it was bare. Though the couple in the original photograph had hardly ever seen each other nude in thirty-two years of marriage, they were naked to the world in the painting, the woman’s breasts desiccated and her genitals bald; the man pigeon-chested with a penis like a withered worm.

Harvey was determined to dump the canvas as soon as that hysterical Italian faggot was out of their house for good, but he relented once Walter Osgood came to inspect “Gloriana” and clearly coveted it. Then “Gloriana” was photographed for the cover of Canadian Art. Westmount matrons who had cut Becky at the annual museum ball now vied for invitations to view HaGibor’s last statement. The curator of the National Gallery in Ottawa requested permission to exhibit the painting, assuring Becky that a notice mounted alongside would read, “From the private collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Schwartz.” Dealers began to make unsolicited offers that would have enabled Harvey to quadruple his original investment, but he was not prepared to sell. Instead he increased the insurance on “Gloriana” five-fold. A risky move, as far as he was concerned, because if the picture were stolen anti-Semites would whisper that he had arranged it to collect the money. Harvey Schwartz would be blamed. Count on it.