Solomon Gursky Was Here

One

“According to the Haidas, of the unfortunately named Queen Charlotte Islands, more properly Haida Gwai, the Islands of the People,” Sir Hyman once said to Moses, “according to them, before there was anything, before the great flood had covered the earth and receded, before the animals walked the earth or the trees covered the land or the birds flew between the trees, there was the raven. Because the raven had always existed and always would. But he was dissatisfied as, at the time, the whole world was still dark. Inky black. The reason for this was an old man living in a house by the river. The old man had a box which contained a box which contained an infinite number of boxes, each nestled in a box slightly larger than itself until finally there was a box so small all it could contain was all the light in the universe. The raven was understandably resentful. Because of the darkness on the earth he kept bumping into things. He was slowed down in his pursuit of food and other fleshly pleasures and in his constant and notorious need to meddle and change things. And so, inevitably, he took it upon himself to steal the light of the universe from the old man.”

Moses and Sir Hyman were strolling through Regent’s Park, en route to Prunier’s.

“But I think I’ll save the rest of the story for lunch, dear boy. A pity Lucy couldn’t join us.”

“An audition.”

“In the end she will have to settle for being a producer, putting her inheritance and business acumen to some use. But don’t you dare repeat I suggested as much.”

From the time Moses first met Sir Hyman in Blackwell’s bookshop, through his turbulent affair with Lucy and after, he had listened to the old necromancer pronounce on many things, but mostly politics. Mind you, they first began to see a lot of each other in an especially febrile year. A watershed year. 1956. Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, hinting that Stalin had been responsible for the murder of Kirov, his licence for the show trials that led to the execution of two more rivals, Zinoviev and Kamenev. After Khrushchev snitched, Nasser grabbed the Suez Canal. Then, in the autumn, Russian tanks rolled into Budapest. The British and the French, in collusion with the Israelis, attacked Suez.

Moses and Sir Hyman talked at length about these matters, strolling through Regent’s Park or drinking late in Sir Hyman’s library, the old man sitting with a malacca cane clasped between his knees, his chin resting on the handle. Moses also became a fixture at Cumberland Terrace dinner parties, Sir Hyman seated at the head of a dining-room table with an Irish linen tablecloth, lecturing tycoons and cabinet ministers and actresses. Moses was enchanted. He was spellbound. But he also came to feel possessed. He discovered, to his consternation, that he had picked up some of Sir Hyman’s patterns of speech. Moses Berger, a Jeanne Mance boy born and bred, actually addressing people as “dear boy”. Even more chilling, leaning against the bar in The Bale of Hay, he once found himself passing off a witticism of Sir Hyman’s as his own. Another day he discovered himself drifting through the cane shop in New Oxford Street trying out various walking sticks for effect. He fled. He turned down the next invitation to dinner and the one after. Then, inevitably, he was drawn back to the flame.

Drinking together in the library one night, Moses and Sir Hyman discussed the Khrushchev speech, Moses inveighing against the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, recalling the sense of betrayal round the table with the crocheted cloth. Sir Hyman pounced, holding forth on the history behind that devil’s accord. If not for the Germans, he said, there might never have been a Bolshevik revolution in the first place. They were the ones who slipped the silver bullet on to the sealed train to the Finland Station, counting on Lenin to seize power and take Russia out of the war. Then, in 1922, when the revolution was still in quarantine, the German delegation to the Genoa Conference signed the Rapallo Treaty with the Soviets, effectively ending their isolation. “The consequences of that treaty,” Sir Hyman said, “are not without interest.”

It enabled the Germans to evade the arms clauses of the Versailles Treaty, sending air and tank officers to Russia for training. In return, the Germans built airfields for the Bolsheviks and tutored them in the military arts. “With hindsight,” Sir Hyman said, “we can say that the Wehrmacht that all but conquered Russia was trained there between 1922 and 1933, and instructed the army that destroyed them.”

Each time they met, Sir Hyman inquired about Moses’s progress with his study of the Beveridge Plan. Finally Moses confessed that he had put it aside. Instead he was thinking of writing something about Lucy’s father, Solomon Gursky.

“Ah.”

Sir Hyman, he allowed, had inadvertently led him to a great discovery. While cataloguing Sir Hyman’s Arctic library, he had accidently stumbled on an unmistakable reference to Solomon’s grandfather Ephraim Gursky, and now he suspected that Ephraim might have been a survivor of the Franklin expedition.

“But there were no survivors,” Sir Hyman said.

“Certainly that would appear to be the case,” Moses agreed, adding that he would soon be returning to Canada to pursue his researches.

“And will the Gursky family finance such mischief?”

Moses laughed.

“How will you manage, then?”

“I suppose I’ll have to teach.”

“I’ll put you on an allowance, my dear boy.”

“I couldn’t,” Moses blurted out.

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Coyness doesn’t become you, Moses. Neither are you a bore. Yes or no. I haven’t the patience to twist your arm before you condescend to accept a stipend from an indecently rich old man.”

“Let me think about it.”

Moses had only been back in Montreal for a month, filling in at McGill for a friend on a sabbatical, when he wrote to Sir Hyman, thanking him for his generosity, but turning down his offer of a stipend. Actually he was longing to take the money, but he suspected the offer was more in the nature of a test. If he accepted, he would be diminished in Sir Hyman’s estimation, and what he wanted, above all, was for the old man to love him. For the old man to look upon him as a son.

Moses’s letter went unanswered for months of anguish, convincing him that he had blundered yet again, offending Sir Hyman when his real intention, he acknowledged, had been to ingratiate himself. Then Sir Hyman was heard from at last. A letter from Budapest. Would Moses consider coming over for the summer to help with some unspecified chores, while Lady Olivia was cruising the Greek islands with some old friends? Moses leaped at the opportunity.

“And how is the work progressing?” Sir Hyman asked.

“By fits and starts.”

“I was hoping you had brought me some pages to read.”

Moses was put up in a spare bedroom in the flat on Cumberland Terrace, his initial chore to compile another catalogue, this time of Sir Hyman’s collection of Judaica. He was sent to antiquarian book dealers in Dublin and Inverness to inspect and acquire specific Arctic titles, the price of no consequence. He flew to Rome and Athens to deliver packets that could not be entrusted to the mail. Most weekends he joined Sir Hyman at his estate on the Sussex coast, accompanying him for a swim before breakfast, and encouraged to roam at will through the rambling house and grounds.

Moses did not get over the following summer, but, instead, flew out to the Northwest Territories, ostensibly to visit Henry and Nialie, but actually to seek out Eskimos named Gor-ski, Girskee, or Gur-ski. However, he did keep in touch with Sir Hyman. Moses’s letters, polished again and again before he dared send them off, instantly regretted as too familiar or not sufficiently entertaining, were acknowledged by the occasional postcard from Havana or Amman or Saigon. And Moses was back in the summer of 1959, met by a Bentley at Heathrow and driven directly to Sussex. Sir Hyman welcomed him with champagne. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “how much I’m looking forward to reading the pages you brought me.”

‘‘Not yet.’’

“But you are making progress?”

Moses told him that he had acquired transcripts of the trial. He had been out west twice. He had spoken with Mr. Morrie again. “According to Lucy, her father kept a journal.”

“And that would be a big help, would it?”

“If it still exists and I manage to get my hands on it, yes, certainly, an enormous help.”

“Well, if you really haven’t brought me any pages, I do hope you at least remembered to pack your dinner jacket.”

Sir Hyman and Lady Olivia were expecting something like sixty guests that evening, some arriving by car and others in a bus chartered for the party in honour of a visiting American senator. Sir Hyman, waving his hand, had assembled the usual suspects for the occasion. A lively but potentially vitriolic mix of politicians, film and theatre people, men “who were something in the city,” art dealers, journalists, and any American of consequence who happened to be in London. Included in the latter group, much to Moses’s delight, was Sam Burns, en route to Moscow to cover Vice-President Nixon’s visit for the network.

Moses, taking Sam by the arm, led him on a private tour of the gardens and then through a basement door, down a winding corridor, into a vast wine cellar. He sat Sam down at a table, fetched a couple of glasses, and cracked open a bottle of vintage champagne.

“Christ,” Sam said, “are you allowed to do that?”

“Hymie wouldn’t mind in the least.”

“You call him that?”

“Sure.”

Sam strolled down one of the wine cellar rows, scanning labels. “Not a bottle of Kik Cola anywhere. My luck.”

“Remember Gurd’s?”

“Orange Crush.”

“May Wests.”

“Cherry Blossoms.”

“Who centred the Punch Line?”

“Elmer fucking Lach.”

“The Razzle Dazzle Line?”

“Buddy O’Connor.”

“How come RAF night-fighters can see in the dark?”

“Because they eat their carrots. Now tell me where your benefactor, if that’s what he is, gets his millions?”

“This is nothing,” Moses said. “Come. I’ll show you some of the paintings he doesn’t even bother to display upstairs.”

Moses led him into another room, pressed one of the sequence of buttons under the wall thermostat, and out slid a long rack: a Francis Bacon, a Graham Sutherland, a Sidney Nolan.

“He’s going to think we’re snooping down here. Let’s go, Moses.”

A cloth covered a painting leaning against the wall. “Let’s take a peek,” Moses said.

“I don’t think we ought to.”

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

Moses lifted the cloth and revealed what appeared to be the most conventional of portraits. A lovely young bourgeois lady seated in a wicker chair. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat with a pink bow, a multi-layered chiffon dress, also with a pink bow, and held a bouquet of sweet williams in her hands. But there was something quirky about the portrait. The young lady’s eyes were of a different colour. One eye brown, one eye blue.

“Oh my God,” Moses howled. “Oh Christ!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Let’s go.”

“I haven’t finished my drink.”

“Let’s go, I said.”

Sir Hyman was chatting with a group in the living room.

“I’ve got to speak to you,” Moses said.

“Now?” Sir Hyman asked, eyebrows raised.

“Right now.”

“Oh. Well. Yes. Certainly. The library.”

Moses waited an exasperating five minutes before Sir Hyman joined him there.

“How come, Sir Hyman Kaplansky, how come, Sir Hyman,” Moses shouted, “that sitting on the floor downstairs there is a portrait of Diana McClure née Morgan?”

“Ah.”

“Have you brought me any pages, dear boy. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward—”

“I’d all but given up on you. I was beginning to think you’d never find it,” Sir Hyman said, deflating him with a stroke.

“Does Lucy know?”

“Nor Henry. And you are not to say anything to them, now or ever. I want your word on that.”

“Dear boy.”

“Yingele.”

“Bastard.”

Two couples, carrying champagne glasses, drifted into the library. “Oh dear, are we intruding, Hymie?”

“Most certainly not. I was just telling Moses about my latest acquisition,” he said, indicating the picture hanging over the fireplace. A raven perched on a half-open sea shell, human beings struggling to emerge from it.

“This is the raven that stole the light of the world from an old man and then scattered it throughout the skies. After the great flood had receded, he flew to a beach to gorge himself on the delicacies left behind by the water. However, he wasn’t hungry for once.” Looking directly at Moses, a stricken Moses, he went on to say, “But his other appetites—lust, curiosity, and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures—these remained unsatisfied. The raven, his wings crossed behind his back, strolled along the beach, his sharp eyes alert for any unusual sight or sound. Taking to the air, he called petulantly to the empty sky. To his delight, he heard an answering cry, a muffled squeak.

“Scanning the beach something caught his eye. A gigantic clamshell. He landed and found that the shell was fill of little creatures, cowering in the terror of his menacing shadow. So the raven leaned his great head close to the shell, and with his smooth trickster’s tongue that had got him in and out of so many misadventures during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled the little creatures to come out and play.”

Sir Hyman paused as a waiter brought everybody more champagne.

“As you well know, Moses, the raven speaks in two voices, one harsh and dissembling, and the other, which he used now, seductive. So it wasn’t long before one after another the little shell-dwellers timidly emerged. Bizarre they were. Two-legged like the raven, but without glossy feathers or thrusting beak or strong wings. They were the original humans.”

Sir Hyman paused again for a sip from his glass and the two couples, more than somewhat bored, took advantage of the break to retreat from the library.

“I have so many questions,” Moses said.

“And my house is full of guests. We’ll talk on Wednesday.”

“Why not tomorrow?”

“Because tomorrow noon you are flying to Paris. A package to deliver. You are booked into the Crillon for three nights. A certain M. Provost will join you for breakfast on Monday or the very latest Tuesday, and you will hand over the package with my compliments.”

Provost did not appear on Monday morning. Tuesday morning Moses sat down to breakfast, opened the Times, and read that Sir Hyman Kaplansky, the noted financier, had apparently drowned in stormy seas. Sir Hyman, as was his habit, had set out early Monday morning for his pre-breakfast swim in spite of gale warnings, and did not return. His beach robe, slippers, and the book he was reading, were found abandoned in the sand. Lady Olivia told reporters that Sir Hyman, who suffered from a weak heart, had been cautioned not to swim unaccompanied or in rough seas, but he was an obstinate man. Foul play was not suspected. Fishing trawlers in the area had been alerted and lifeboats were out searching in high seas.

They needn’t bother, Moses thought, bitterly amused. Obviously the raven with the unquenchable itch was at it again, playing tricks on the world and its creatures. Once by air, he thought, and now by water.

Provost failed to appear again. A frustrated Moses retired to his room, lit a cigar, and considered the package on his bed for a long time before he tore it open.

It contained three morocco-bound volumes of the journals of Solomon Gursky and a letter addressed to Moses Berger, Esq. The letter advised him that he was the recipient of an income of thirty thousand dollars a year to be paid quarterly by Corvus Trust, Zurich.

Moses lay down on the bed, picked up a volume of the journals, and opened it at random.

“Fort McEwen, Alberta. 1908. Late one winter afternoon I found my grandfather waiting for me on his sled outside the school house. Ephraim stank of rum. His cheek was bruised and his lower lip was swollen.…”

Two

A ceiling-to-floor bookcase in the living room of Moses’s cabin in the woods was crammed with books, newspaper and magazine clippings relating to the life of the elusive, obscenely rich Sir Hyman Kaplansky, as he then styled himself.

The index of the third volume of the celebrated diaries of a British MP with impeccable Bloomsbury bona fides revealed several entries for Sir Hyman Kaplansky.

An earlier entry was dated September 12, 1941.

The next entry for Sir Hyman dealt at length with that infamous dinner party in his Cumberland Terrace flat. A Passover seder, of all things, to which Sir Hyman—much to Lady Olivia’s horror—had invited the MP and other noted anti-Semites. Among them, a couple of survivors of the Cliveden set, an unabashed admirer of Sir Oswald Mosley, a famous novelist, a celebrated actress, a West End impresario, a Polish count and a rambunctious cabinet minister who was an adamant opponent of further Jewish settlement in troubled Palestine. Why did they come?

The novelist, arguably the most gifted of his time, wrote in his diary:

Another diary, this one kept by the actress, reminded her many admirers of exactly what she was wearing (an outfit especially created for her by Norman Hartnell) on the day the Bomb fell on Hiroshima. On another page she revealed for the first time that her only child lay dying in Charing Cross Hospital on the night theatrical tradition obliged her to open in Peonies for Penelope, a musical that ran for three years at the Haymarket in spite of the posh critics. An entry dated three days before Sir Hyman’s dinner party described a lunch at the Ivy with the West End impresario, a noted sybarite.

Other diaries, memoirs, letter collections and biographies of the period were rich in details of that disastrous night. There were contradictions, of course, each memoir writer laying claim to the evening’s most memorable bons mots. Other discrepancies related to Lady Olivia, who had been born and raised an Anglican. Some charged that she had treacherously been a party to the insult, but others were equally certain that she was its true victim. Both groups agreed that the Polish count was her lover, but they split again on whether Sir Hyman condoned the relationship, was ignorant of it, or—just possibly—had planned the scandal to avenge himself on both of them. Whatever the case, there was no disputing the main thrust of events, only their interpretation.

Including Sir Hyman and Lady Olivia, there were thirteen at the refectory table, which made for much light-hearted bantering, the mood darkening only when Sir Hyman—insensitive or vindictive, depending on the witness—pointed out that that had been the precise number gathered at the most famous of all Passover noshes.

Every diary and memoir writer mentioned the table setting, describing it either as opulent or all too typically reeking of Levantine ostentation. The wine goblets and decanters were made of late-Georgian flint glass, their hue Waterford blue. The seventeenth-century candelabra were of a French design, with classic heads and overlapping scales and foliated strapwork. The heavy, ornate silverware was of the same period. Other artifacts were of Jewish origin. There was, for instance, a silver Passover condiment set, its style German Baroque, stamped with fruit and foliage. The seder tray itself, the platter on which the offending matzohs would lie, was made of pewter. It was eighteenth-century Dutch in origin, unusually large, engraved with Haggadah liturgies, artfully combining the pictorial and calligraphic.

An ebullient Sir Hyman welcomed his guests to the table with a prepared little speech that some would later condemn as grovelling and others, given the shocking turn of events, as a damned impertinence. In the first place, he said, he wished to say how grateful he was that everyone had accepted his invitation, because he knew how prejudiced they were against some of his kind. He hardly blamed them. Some of his kind, especially those sprung from eastern Europe, were insufferably pushy and did in fact drive a hard bargain, and to prove his point he quoted some lines of T.S. Eliot:

Such people, Sir Hyman said, embarrassed him and other gentlemen of Hebraic origin even more than they were an affront to decent Christians. In a lighter vein, Sir Hyman went on to say that he hoped his guests would find the rituals essential to the Passover feast a welcome little frisson. Each of them would find a little book at their place. It was called a Haggadah and they should think of it as a libretto. We should tell—that is to say, “hagged”—of our exodus from Egypt, not the last time the Jews did a midnight flit. The Haggadah—like the libretto of any musical in trouble in Boston or Manchester—was being constantly revised to keep pace with the latest Jewish bad patch. He had seen one, for instance, that included a child’s drawing of the last seder held in Theresienstadt. The drawing, alas, was without any artistic merit, but—it could be argued—did have a certain maudlin charm. He had seen another one that made much of the fact that the Nazi all-out artillery attack on the grouchy Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had begun on the eve of Passover. A man who had survived that kerfuffle only to perish in a concentration camp later on had written, “We are faced with a Passover of hunger and poverty, without even ‘the bread of affliction’. For eating and drinking there is neither matzoh nor wine. For prayer there are no synagogues or houses of study. Their doors are closed and darkness reigns in the dwelling-places of Israel.” However, Sir Hyman hastily pointed out, we have come here not to mourn but to be jolly. He beamed at Lady Olivia, who responded by jiggling a little bell. Servants refilled the champagne glasses at once.

Seder, Sir Hyman informed his captive audience, seemingly indifferent to their growing restiveness, literally means programme, which applies to the prescribed ceremonies of the Passover ritual. Raising the pewter matzoh platter, he proclaimed first in Hebrew and then in English: “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat.”

“Hear, hear!”

“Goodo!”

It was now nine P.M., and though Sir Hyman’s guests had begun to arrive as early as six, there had—much to their chagrin—been no hors-d’oeuvres served. Not so much as a wizened olive or peanut or blade of celery. Stomachs were rumbling. Appetites were keen. Sensing his guests’ impatience, Sir Hyman hurried through the reading of the Haggadah that necessarily preceded the feast, skipping page after page. Even so, he had to be aware of the shifting of chairs, the fidgeting that verged on the hostile, the raising of eyebrows, the dark looks. It did not help matters that each time the kitchen doors swung open the dining room was filled with the most tantalizing aromas. Steaming chicken broth. Lamb on the sizzle. Finally, at ten P.M., Sir Hyman nodded at an increasingly distressed Lady Olivia, who promptly jiggled her little bell.

Ah.

There were gasps of pleasure as a huge, wobbly, gleaming mound of beluga caviar was set down on the table. Next came an enormous platter of pleasingly moist smoked salmon. The salmon was followed by a silver salver heavy with baked carp and a surround of golden jelly. Everybody was set to pounce, but Sir Hyman, his smile gleeful, raised a restraining hand. “Wait, please. There is one more protocol of Zion, as it were, to be observed. Before indulging ourselves we are obliged to eat the bread of affliction. The matzoh.”

“Let’s get on with it, then.”

“For God’s sake, Hymie, I’m hungry enough to eat a horse.”

“Hear, hear!”

Sir Hyman nodded and a servant removed the pewter matzoh platter, piled it high with the bread of affliction, and returned it to the table, covered with a magenta velvet cloth.

“What we have here,” Sir Hyman said, “are not the tasteless, massproduced matzohs you might expect to find on the tables of tradesmen in Swiss Cottage or Golders Green, their eyes on the main chance. These are the authentic matzohs of ancient and time-honoured tradition. They are called Matzoh Shemurah. Guarded matzoh. Baked behind locked doors, under conditions of the strictest security, according to a recipe first formulated in Babylon. Brought from there to Lyons in the year 1142, of the Christian era, and from there to York. These were made for me by a venerable Polish rabbi I know in Whitechapel.”

“Come on, Hymie!”

“Let’s get on with it.”

“I’m starved!”

Sir Hyman yanked the magenta cloth free, and revealed was a stack of the most unappetizing-looking biscuits. Coarse, unevenly baked, flecked with rust spots, their surfaces bumpy with big brown blisters.

“Everybody take one, please,” Sir Hyman said, “but, careful, they’re hot.”

Once everybody had a matzoh in hand, Sir Hyman stood up and offered a solemn benediction. “Blessed be God, who brings food out of the earth. Blessed be God, who made each mitzvah bring us holiness, and laid on us the eating of matzoh.” Then he indicated that they were free to dig in at last.

The West End impresario, his eyes on the caviar, was the first to take a bite. Starchy, he thought. Bland. But then he felt a blister in the matzoh burst like a pustule and the next thing he knew a warm fluid was dribbling down his chin. He was about to wipe it away with his napkin when the actress, seated opposite him, took one look and let out a terrifying scream. “Oh, my poor Hugh,” she cried. “Hugh, just look at you!”

But he was already sufficiently discomfited merely looking at her. A thick reddish substance was splattered over her panting ivory bosom.

“My God!” somebody wailed, dropping his leaky matzoh shemurah.

The fastidious Cynthia Cavendish cupped her hands to her mouth, desperate to spit out the warm red sticky stuff, then took a peek at it trickling between her fingers and subsided to the carpet in a dead faint.

Horace McEwen, smartly avoiding the sinking Cynthia, stared at his rust-smeared napkin, his lips trembling, and then stuck two fingers into his mouth, prying for loose teeth.

“It’s blood, don’t you know?”

“Bastard!”

“We’re all covered in ritual blood!”

The Rt. Hon. Richard Cholmondeley knocked back his chair and, convinced that he was dying, began to bring up bile and what he also took for blood. “Tell Constance,” he pleaded with nobody in particular, “that the photographs in the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk are not mine. Noddy gave them to me for safekeeping when he got back from Marrakech.”

The cabinet minister’s plump wife vomited all over his Moss Bros. dinner jacket before he could thrust her clear, sending her reeling backwards. “Now look what you’ve done,” he said. ‘‘Just look.’’

The sodden novelist slid to the floor. Unfortunately he was clutching the antique Irish lace tablecloth at the time and, consequently, brought down some priceless wine goblets as well as the platter of smoked salmon with him. The impresario, with characteristic presence of mind, grabbed the other end of the tablecloth just in time to secure the sliding tureen of caviar. Torn between anger and appetite, he snatched a soup spoon and lunged at the caviar once, twice, three times before demanding his coat and hat. The Polish count, his face ashen, leaped up and challenged Sir Hyman to a duel.

Sir Hyman startled him by responding softly in fluent Polish. “Your father was a swindler and your mother was a whore and you, dear boy, are a ponce. Name the time and place.”

Lady Olivia sat rocking her face in her hands, as her guests scattered, raging and cursing.

“You will pay dearly for this outrage, Hymie.”

“You haven’t heard the end of it!”

“Tell it not in Gath,” Sir Hyman said, “publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice.…”

The last departing guest claimed to have heard a stricken Lady Olivia ask, “How could you humiliate me like this, Hymie?”

He purportedly replied, “There will be no more assignations with that squalid little Polack. Now let’s eat the lamb before it’s hopelessly overdone.”

“I despise you,” Lady Olivia shrieked, stamping her foot and fleeing to her bedroom.

There was only one account, its accuracy dubious, of that infamous evening’s aftermath. It appeared in Through the Keyhole: A Butler Remembers, a truncated version of which was serialized in The News of the World, the full text available only from Olympia Press, Paris. In a steamy chapter about his employment by Sir Hyman, Albert Hotchkins—remembering that Passover seder—wrote:

“After the Top People had fled faster than an Italian from the battlefront, and a tearful Lady Olivia had retreated to her bedroom, the old cuckold sat alone at the table, happy as a Jew at a fire sale, having himself a proper fit of giggles. Then he summoned the non-U people, including this yobbo, out of the kitchen and insisted we join him in a nosh. We were in there faster than the proverbial fox into a chicken coop. Caviar, smoked salmon, roast lamb. Now I knew Sir Hyman enjoyed his libations, but this is the first time I saw him pickled as a dill in a barrel. He was a veritable one-man Goon Show! He entertained us with side-splitting imitations of every one of his guests. He also did Churchill for us and Gilbert Harding and Lady Docker. He sat down at the piano and sang us one of ye olde time music hall songs. (Pardon me, Queen Victoria, I know you’re not amused!!!)

“Then he sang us some Passover ditties in Hebrew or Yiddish or Rubbish, I’m not sure which, and something else in Chinese. Chinese? Yes. For that was the night Sir Hyman settled a mystery darker than a nigger’s arsehole for us. He wasn’t, as the Telegraph diarist had speculated, of Hungarian extraction. He had been born in Petrograd, as it then was, but had been raised in Shanghai, where his dad had fled to after the revolution had spread through old Mother Russia like wildfire.

“It was a night to remember! Eventually we rolled up the carpet and, to coin a phrase, danced in the dawn as if there was no tomorrow. If I hadn’t known better I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that that was the night the sly old nancyboy actually dipped his wick into Mary, the naughtiest lady’s maid ever to come out of County Clare, as keen for a taste of roger any time as a Chinaman is for chop suey. (See Chapter Seven: ‘Eat Your Heart Out, Fanny Hill!!’) Certainly we didn’t see hide nor hair of them for a couple of hours and when they rejoined us he was as quiet as a burglar and she looked as innocent as the cat who had just swallowed the canary, but it was his spunk more likely!”

It was generally assumed that Sir Hyman was a homosexual, but one of the most celebrated beauties of the era, Lady Margaret Thomas, didn’t agree. Her biographer reproduced the following diary entry in full.

Sir Hyman was mentioned again in the salacious diaries of Dorothy Ogilvie-Hunt, which were introduced as evidence in the notorious man-in-the-black-apron trial. It seems that the lovely but promiscuous Dorothy not only accommodated many lovers, but graded their performance from delta-minus to alpha-plus, the latter accolade seldom awarded. The events leading up to her initial tryst with Sir Hyman were described in some detail.

Mr. Justice Horner ruled the next four pages inadmissible evidence, but allowed that they concluded with the encomium ALPHA PLUS followed by four exclamation marks.

Many wartime diaries and journals, published thirty years later, were rich in references to Sir Hyman, a notable entry appearing in the diaries of the Duc de Baugé. The Duc, whose château was in Maine-et-Loire, had been a fixture at Hymie’s celebrated dinner parties in his own château, just outside of Angers, also on the banks of the Maine. Hymie’s château, surrounded by vineyards and parkland, had originally been built by a military family in 1502. Badly damaged during the revolution, left to crumble for more than a century, it had been lovingly restored by Hymie in the thirties. During the occupation it was the official residence of SS Obergruppenführer Klaus Gehrbrandt, something of a sybarite.

Cross-checking, Moses came upon an interesting gap. Sir Hyman, or plain Hymie as he then was, seemingly dropped out of sight in June 1944 and was not mentioned again, and then only in passing, until August of the same year. His name surfaced in the diaries of a Labour MP, a noted Fabian pamphleteer who had served as a junior minister in the coalition government but had been forced to resign his seat in disgrace in 1948. Apparently he had taken too keen an interest in discipline at a hospice for distressed young ladies that was the pride of his constituency; the so-called spanking soirées that The News of the World made so much of at the time, publishing a photograph of the MP in a gym slip.

Then, quite by chance, reading The Berlin Diaries of Baron Theodor von Lippe, Moses was startled to come across the following entry.

This, of course, was sufficient to propel Moses into a search of publishers’ catalogues, German as well as English, but he came up with only one more reference to Herr Dr. Otto Raven. He found it in the Wiener Library, in the unpublished journals of a Swedish princess who had passed the war years in Berlin, married to one of the Hohenzollerns.

When Hyman Kaplansky’s name appeared on the King’s New Year’s Honours List some six months later hardly anybody was surprised. He was not the first, nor the last, heavy contributor to the Conservative party chest to be rewarded with a title.

Three

One Saturday morning in 1974 a flock of the Faithful gathered at Henry’s house to celebrate the bar mitzvah of the great-great-grandson of Tulugaq. Nialie, who had learned to temper recipes plucked from her Jenny Grossinger cookbook with local produce, served chopped chicken liver moistened with seal shmaltz. Though most of the knishes were filled with mashed potatoes, there were others that were stuffed with minced caribou: In the absence of candy, a platter of succulent seals’ eyes was available for the children. Among Isaac’s gifts, there was a book from his father, a collection of sermons by the Rebbe who reigned over 770 Eastern Parkway, illuminating eternal mysteries, deciphering the code hidden within the holy texts:

“We can hasten the arrival of the Moshiach by intensifying our simcha or rejoicing. Simcha is obviously connected with the Moshiach or why do both words contain the Hebrew letters ‘shin,’ ‘mem,’ and ‘ches’? Similarly there is an inner link between Moses and Moshiach, as witness the verse, ‘And the sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come …,’ which is clearly a concealed reference to the Moshiach, as the words ‘yavo Shiloh’ and ‘Moshiach’ are numerically equal. Also equal are the words ‘Shiloh’ and ‘Moses’, proof positive that the coming of the Moshiach is related to Moses. Furthermore, ‘yavo’ is numerically equal to ‘echad’, which means one; therefore we can deduce that the Moshiach = Moses + One.”

When Isaac was to enroll in the yeshiva a month later, an elated Henry flew down to New York with him. Father and son made directly for Crown Heights. They stopped for a Lubavitch beef burger at Marmelstein’s, on Kingston Avenue, and then went out for a stroll.

“We’re being stared at,” Isaac said.

“It’s your imagination.”

They paused to look in Suri’s window, filled with glamorous wigs for the wives of the faithful who had shaven their heads to render themselves unattractive to men other than their husbands. Reflected in the glass, Isaac saw men across the street pointing him out, whispering together.

Sleek black hair. Brown skin. “They’re going to take me for some kind of freak of nature here,” Isaac said.

“Narishkeit. We’re among good people,” Henry said, taking him by the hand and leading him into the Tzivos Hashem store.

Garishly coloured portraits of the Rebbe, similar to the pictures of saints peddled at the kiosks outside provincial cathedrals in Europe, were on display everywhere, framed in plastic pressed and burnished to resemble pine. The Rebbe’s graven image was also available in postcard and wallet-window size or embossed on canvas tote bags. Isaac overheard a bearded man say, “Don’t look now, but it’s the rich meshuggena from the northland.”

“What can I buy for you?” Henry asked.

“Nothing,” Isaac said, glaring right back at a couple of pimply boys of his own age. “Let’s go.”

Next Henry took Isaac to the yeshiva to sit in on a study session with one of the Rebbe’s younger acolytes, swaying over his text:

“We look into the mirror,” he asked the men gathered at the long table, “and what do we see? The self, of course. You see yourself, I see myself, and so forth and so on. If we have a clean face, we see a clean face in the mirror. If we have a dirty face, that is what the mirror reflects back on us. So when we see bad in another person we know that we too have this bad.

“Now looking up into the mirror, we see the face, but looking down, what? The feet. You see your feet, I see my feet, and so forth and so on. The Rebbe has pointed out to us that on Simchas Torah one does not dance with his head—he dances with his feet. From this our beloved teacher has deduced that a person’s intellectual capacities make no difference on Simchas Torah and this is equally true for every Jew worldwide.

“Looking into the mirror you should also note that the higher is contained in the lower and the lower in the higher. But the reverse is also true. Chassidus teaches us that the lower is revealed in the higher and the higher in the lower.”

Isaac yawned. He yearned to see Broadway. The Felt Forum. A hockey game in Madison Square Garden. The offices where Screw was published. The McTavish building on Fifth Avenue.

“Are we going to visit Uncle Lionel?”

“I think not.”

But Henry, carrying charts, did take him to Columbia University. While Henry conferred with a climatologist, Isaac sat on a bench in the outer office. Bored, he dipped into the Mishneh Torah Henry had bought him at Merkaz Stam. The Messianic King, he read, will be a descendant of the House of David. “Anyone who does not believe in him or does not wait for his coming, denies not only the statements of the other prophets, but those of the Torah and Moses, our teacher. The Torah testified …”

Finally Henry emerged from the climatologist’s office, looking chastened. “Tell me, yingele, do you think your father is nuts?”

They made another stop, this time at an address on W. 47th Street, where Henry had to see somebody about a pair of diamond earrings, a gift for Nialie.

“How long will you be?” Isaac asked.

“A half-hour maybe.”

“I’ll wait outside.”

Bearded men in bobbing black hats seemed to be everywhere, flying past, briefcases chained to their wrists. Sirens wailed somewhere. The traffic stalled. Isaac, moving along, caught up with a bunch of people gathered in a semi-circle at the corner of Eighth Avenue. Thrusting through to the front, he came upon a ragged black boy turning cartwheels, two of his chums dancing on their heads. Then he was accosted by a girl wearing a see-through blouse and a silver miniskirt. Her hair was dyed orange and purple. Isaac, frightened, started back.

Crossing Seventh Avenue, he made out Henry in the distance, pacing up and down, searching, sidecurls bobbing. On impulse, Isaac retreated into a doorway. Look at him, he thought. With his millions, we could be living in a penthouse here. He wouldn’t have to keep dirty photographs of a skinny girl in his bottom desk drawer, he could afford the real thing, but, no, it had to be Tulugaqtitut. Shit. Fuck.

Henry, increasingly frantic, was stopping passers-by, obviously describing Isaac to them, asking if they had seen him. Five minutes passed before Isaac, taking pity on him, emerged from his hiding place. The instant Henry spotted him striding down the street he raced forward to embrace him. “Thank Hashem you’re safe,” he cried, even as Isaac wiggled free, embarrassed.

Two days later Henry returned to Tulugaqtitut, laden with books. Isaac didn’t see him again until he flew home, two weeks before Passover, and the two of them set out on the journey that led to Henry’s death only a hundred miles short of Tuktuyaktuk.

Four

The first thing Isaac noticed when he flew home for Passover was the new ship with three masts locked into the ice in the bay. Damn. Just what he needed, in case the gang in the Sir Igloo Inn Café didn’t already have enough to tease him about. The ship, which had been built in Holland, had its planking doubled, the bow and stern bolstered with steel plates. It was provisioned with sacks of grain and rice and dried vegetables, the immense freezer stocked by the Nôtre Dame de Grace Kosher Meat Mart. Crazy Henry’s Ark, they called it.

“You just got home,” Nialie said, “and already you are in a bad mood.”

“Forget it.”

Nialie soon had more to worry about. The night before Henry was to start on his journey a big menacing black raven pecked at their bedroom window, wakening Nialie with a start. She clung to Henry, pleading with him not to go, but he insisted. The trip was traditional. Every spring, two weeks before Passover, he and Pootoogook set out for a hunting camp of the Faithful, some 250 miles east along the Arctic shore. The Faithful counted on Henry to bring them boxes filled with the bread of affliction and wine appropriate to the feast days. Furthermore, Henry pointed out, this Passover’s journey would be a special pleasure for him. Pootoogook, troubled by arthritis, would not be coming. Instead Henry would be taking Pootoogook’s fifteen-year-old grandson Johnny and, for the first time ever, Isaac, whom he counted on to continue the tradition in later years.

A gleeful Henry roused Isaac out of bed early. “Wake up, wake up, to do the work of the Creator!”

To please Isaac, they were not taking the dogs with them this year. For a change, the sleds laden with supplies would be pulled by three red snowmobiles, the third snowmobile lugging a sled with sufficient fuel for the journey there and home again.

Given reasonable weather conditions, Henry was usually five days out, a day in camp, five days back. This enabled him to be home a couple of days before the first seder, in good time to search his pre-fab for any trace of Bedikat Chametz, leavened bread, and to observe the mitzvah of Tzedakah, distributing money among the poor. But this year, as Nialie watched Henry start out with Johnny and Isaac, she doubted that she would ever see her husband again in this world. So she was hardly surprised when Henry failed to turn up in time for the first seder and she did what he would have expected. She went through the house, covering all the mirrors with towels, and then took to a low stool, holding her head in her hands, rocking to and fro, keening.

Henry’s party was five days overdue when Moses, gone to collect his mail at The Caboose, read in the Gazette:

The story noted that Henry, a Hassidic Jew, the eccentric son of Solomon Gursky, had been rooted in the Arctic for years, married to a native woman. It was illustrated by a photograph of the ship with three masts locked in the ice. A vessel, the reporter wrote, that the locals called Crazy Henry’s Ark, its estimated cost three million dollars.

Moses threw things into a suitcase, drove to Dorval airport, the other side of Montreal, and caught the first flight to Edmonton. He had to wait three maddening hours before he could make a connection to Yellowknife, where he immediately set out for the Canadian Armed Forces search-and-rescue headquarters, volunteering to serve as a spotter. The search master, adding his name to the list, told him that two long-range Hercules transports had already been crisscrossing the area of the highest probability for three days, flying a mile apart at a height of 1,000 feet. The area of the highest probability was calculated to be 350 miles long and 250 miles wide. In the event of a siting, para-rescuers were standing by equipped with a long-range Labrador helicopter, prepared to take off immediately. The good news was that Henry’s party had certainly reached their destination, remained in camp for a day, and then started back with sufficient food and fuel to get them home. A land search was also underway, Eskimos fanning out over Henry’s most likely route home.

The next morning a whiteout grounded the search planes and Moses passed most of the day in The Trapline with Sean Riley.

“He should have taken his dogs,” Riley said, “not those goddamn snowmobiles. You can’t eat snowmobiles.”

“What are their chances, Sean?”

“They’re crossing some damn unforgiving country, but if Henry’s okay, they’re okay. If not, not. Henry knows the terrain, but Isaac’s no damn good and Johnny’s a druggie. If Henry’s out of it, those kids could head off any which way, providing the snowmobiles haven’t broken down.”

“All three of them?”

“Bloody unlikely I know, but there’s been an accident for sure. Somebody overturned or went over a cliff or into a crevice or how the hell do I know what, and maybe they’ve set up camp and they’re waiting to be rescued.”

“Didn’t they take flares with them?”

“If I had to guess I’d say they lost the sled with the flares and what we got to hope is that it wasn’t also the one with the food and the fuel. Look, Moses, they’re good for ten days out there, maybe two weeks, before we have to worry.”

Another two days passed before the search planes were able to take off again, this time flying at five hundred feet only a half-mile apart. Moses, like the rest of the volunteers, was only capable of logging ten minutes at a stretch as a spotter, harnessed into the open loading hatch at the rear of the Hercules, squinting at the ice and snow skidding past in temperatures that ran to forty below.

They flew out day after day, weather permitting. Then, on the twenty-third day, the camp was sited, a solitary figure scrambling out of a tent to wave frantically. The Hercules swooped low, dropping a survival pack, and the para-rescuers started out in their helicopter. Security was thick at Yellowknife airport, but Sean Riley managed to have a word with the helicopter pilot shortly after he landed, and then he hurried off to The Trapline to meet with Moses. “Henry’s dead. A broken neck. Johnny starved to death. They’ve brought in Isaac and they’ve got him in the hospital now. The RCMP are guarding his room.”

“Why?”

“They lost the sled with the food. Isaac survived by slicing chunks out of Henry’s thighs,” Riley said, ordering double Scotches for both of them.

“What about Johnny?”

“He refused to nosh on the great-grandson of Tulugaq, but what did he know? Little prick was just a savage. Are you going to be sick?”

“No.”

“Look here, Moses, Henry was already dead. You might have done the same. Certainly I would have.”

Moses ordered another round.

“Isaac swears he didn’t dig in until the tenth day out there,” Riley said, “but the helicopter crew told the RCMP they found little bags filled with cubes of meat hanging from his tent. If Isaac had waited ten days, like he said, Henry’s body would have been harder than a frozen log. Splinters is what he would have got, not boeuf bourgignon. Something else. Bizarre, if it’s true.”

‘‘Let’s have it.”

“Isaac says he was attacked by ravens one morning. Maybe he was delirious or he dreamt it.”

Rumours of cannibalism were all over town. Reporters, attracted by the Gursky name, flew in from Toronto, London, and New York. Convening in The Trapline, they concocted a verse to commemorate the event:

Moses decided not to stay on for THE CORONER’S COURT INQUIRY INTO THE MATTER TOUCHING UPON THE DEATHS OF:

HENRY GURSKY, and

JOHNNY POOTOOGOOK.

However, he was still in Yellowknife the morning they released Isaac from the hospital, flanked by lawyers. “My client,” one of them said, “is still suffering from bereavement overload and has nothing to say to the press at this point in time.”

Five

Considering the nature of Isaac’s sin, there were lengthy deliberations before the yeshiva agreed to take him back, and then only on sufferance.

“How could you do such a thing?” one rebbe asked.

Another rebbe said, “The other one maybe. But your own father, alav ha-sholem?”

“The other one was trayf,” Isaac responded, glaring at them.

He had come home only once since he had been acquitted by the coroner’s inquiry, grudgingly come to spend the Aseret Yemei Tushuvah, the ten days of repentance from Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur, with his mother, avoiding the Sir Igloo Inn Café and the Hudson’s Bay trading post, where the teasing was relentless.

“Have you come back to roast your mother for dinner?”

No answer.

“Nurse Agnes likes men to eat her. Try her.”

Friday evening, he stood defiantly at the door of his father’s house, waiting for the Faithful camped on the edge of the settlement to appear, beating on their skin drums, parading their traditional offerings before them, but nobody came.

“Any of them would have done exactly what I did,” he shouted at Nialie, slamming the door to his room, and collapsing on the bed that had the letters of the Hebrew alphabet painted on the head-board. A deadly “gimel” flying out of the raven’s beak. Nialie brought him a bowl of soup.

“And if one more person tells me what a saint he was,” Isaac hollered, “I’ll punch him out! There was another side to him! Only I know!”

“Know what?”

He pitied his mother too much to tell. “Never mind.”

Eventually the yeshiva principal found out about the marijuana and the Puerto Rican maid.

“It is written,” Isaac argued, quoting Melachim, “that a king may take wives and concubines up to the number eighteen, and I am descended from the House of David.”

Once Nialie discovered that her son had been expelled from the yeshiva, she stopped his allowance. An infuriated Isaac went to the McTavish building on Fifth Avenue.

“I want to see Lionel Gursky.”

“Have you an appointment?” the receptionist asked.

“I’m his cousin.”

A stocky teenager in a black leather motorcycle jacket, stovepipe jeans, and cowboy boots. Sleek black hair, hot slanty eyes, brown skin. “Sure,” she said, amused.

Even as a security guard approached, Isaac slapped his passport on the counter. The guard snorted, incredulous, but put in a call to Lionel’s office all the same. There was a pause, then he said, “Take the elevator to the fifty-second floor. Mr. Lionel’s secretary will meet you there, kid.”

Isaac trailed behind the young lady who led him to Lionel’s office, his eyes on her legs.

“Mr. Lionel is already late for a board meeting. He can give you ten minutes.”

She had to buzz him into Lionel’s outer office, monitored by a TV eye and attended by an armed guard. Behind the guard, rising over a Ming dynasty vase laden with gladioli, there loomed a portrait of Mr. Bernard.

Another set of doors, seemingly solid oak but actually lined with steel, slid open. Lionel’s corner office was the largest Isaac had ever seen. Antique desk. Leather sofas. Matching wastepaper baskets fashioned of elephant’s feet. Thick creamy carpet. Silken walls. A framed Forbes magazine cover of Lionel. A painting of cod fishermen in the Gaspé. Photographs of Lionel shaking hands with President Nixon, bussing Golda, embracing Frank Sinatra, dancing with Elizabeth Taylor, presenting a trophy to Jack Nicklaus.

“Your father was a saint and a role model for the rest of us poor sinners,” Lionel said. “Please accept my belated condolences.”

Isaac, his smile ambivalent, explained that he had left the yeshiva following a religious dispute, and now wished to enroll in a secular school, continuing his education in New York, but there were problems. When he was twenty-one he would inherit millions as well as a nice bundle of McTavish stock. Meanwhile, his mother controlled everything. She was determined that he return to the Arctic.

Lionel’s secretary intruded.

“Thank you, Miss Mosley. I’ll take that call in the library, but you stay here and keep my cousin company, will you?”

Isaac began to prowl about the office. He drifted behind the antique desk, sat down in Lionel’s chair, and spun around.

“I don’t think you should do that.”

“Now I have to piss,” he said, leaping up.

“There’s a men’s room down the hall,” Miss Mosley said, tugging at her skirt. “First right and second left. Security will give you a key.”

“Isn’t there a can right here?”

“It’s Mr. Lionel’s.”

“I promise to lift the seat.”

At first glance, the medicine cabinet yielded nothing of interest, but a tray on the glass table was filled with cuff-links: pearl, jade, gold. Isaac pocketed a pair and plucked the most promising bottle of pills out of the cabinet.

Lionel’s secretary had gone, displaced by the guard from the outer office.

“Hey, what happened to my baby-sitter, man?”

“You just sit there like a good lad and wait for Mr. Lionel.”

But Lionel didn’t return. Instead he sent a short man, plump and pink, with a full head of curly ginger hair. “Your father was a wonderful human being,” Harvey said. “I say that from the heart. Mr. Lionel sympathizes with your situation and admires your ambition. He has instructed me to put you on an allowance of two hundred dollars a week, which we will credit to your bank once you fill me in on the details. Later there will be some papers for you to sign.”

“When do I come back for them?”

“They will be mailed to you. Meanwhile, this envelope contains a thousand dollars in cash.”

“Where’s my fucken cousin?” Isaac asked, snatching the envelope.

“Mr. Lionel says you must come to see him again soon.”

Isaac rented a one-room apartment on W. 46th Street near the corner of Tenth Avenue, supplementing his meagre allowance by picking up jobs here and there that didn’t require a green card. Bussing tables at Joe Allen’s. Washing dishes at Roy Rogers on Broadway. Passing out cards on the street for DIAL 976-SEXY.

SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, fifteen years old now, he stared at his ceiling, unshaven, his back adhering to his futon. The summer heat of his one-room apartment a torment, he reached for his tiger-striped jockey shorts on the floor and wiped the sweat from his neck and face. Then he rolled a joint and groped blindly for a tape, slamming it into his Sony. No sooner did he hear the gale-force winds raging across the barrens than he giggled fondly. There was the distant howl of a wolf, electronic music, the sounds of human struggle, and then the narrator faded in:

“The Ravenmen, man-shaped creatures from the ancient spirit world are attacking the good people of Fish Fiord; their fingers bearing the talons of an owl; their noses formed like the beak of a hawk; their great arms feathered and winged. Many of the villagers run in fear, but others fight on against fearful odds. In the forefront is Captain Cohol, pitting his prowess against the pitiless pillagers, fighting like ten men in a gleaming circle of death …”

Posters and bumper stickers were plastered to the walls of Isaac’s apartment. Posters of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger. Sandwiched between Black Sabbath and Deep Purple was a garishly coloured picture of the Rebbe who reigned over 770 Eastern Parkway. A nude Marilyn Monroe, sprawling on a white rug, smiled at the Rebbe from the opposite wall. Glued to the poster was the crest Isaac used to wear on the breast pocket of his jacket, certifying that he was a foot soldier in the ARMY OF HASHEM. A car bumper sticker pasted on another wall read WE WANT THE MOSHIACH NOW.

Those days, Isaac thought, inhaling deeply. Yeshiva days. Waking in the wintry dark to say his Modeh Ani, the Prayer of Thanks Upon Rising:

Fuck the yeshiva. And flick the Gurskys too. Some family. Lionel, that scum-bag, had never agreed to see him again. Mind you, he was only a cousin. Lucy, his aunt, his only aunt, had treated him even worse. Not to begin with. No sir. To begin with she had thought he was the cutest thing since sliced bread. He had first gone to visit Lucy in her apartment in the Dakota while he was still studying at the yeshiva. He rang the bell clutching a beribboned box of Magen David Glatt Kosher chocolates, unaware that he was intruding on a cocktail party. A little Filipino in a white jacket answered the door and then an out-of-breath lady wearing a tent-like kaftan chugged down the hall to greet him. She was immense, bloated, heavily made-up, her glittering black eyes outlined with something silvery, her chins jiggly. Lucy grasped a retreating Isaac and held him at arm’s length, bracelets of hammered gold jangling. Isaac, who still wore sidecurls, a wispy moustache and just a hint of beard, black hat, long black jacket, thick white woollen socks. “Oh my shattered nerves,” she called out in a voice loud enough to command attention. “Look, everybody, it’s my nephew. Isn’t he super!”

Then, taking Isaac by the hand, she fed him to one guest after another, singing out again and again, “This is the son of my brother, the early warning system.” Earning chuckles and going on to explain that her saintly brother lived in the Arctic, married to an Eskimo, waiting for the world to end. “Out there, he’ll be the first to know, wouldn’t you say?”

Finally Lucy abandoned Isaac to a group that included a couple of agents, a set designer, and the star of a long-running Broadway play. Isaac had seen the actor on the “Johnny Carson Show”. Determined to make a good impression, he asked, “So, tell me, do you find it like a drag to have to repeat the same lines night after night?”

The actor rolled his eyes and handed Isaac his empty glass. “There you go,” he said.

Backing away, Isaac collided with a pretty young girl wearing a miniskirt and a T-shirt with LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR emblazoned on it. He could make out her nipples. “Sorry, sorry,” he said.

“Hey, you look really neat in that. Did you come straight from the location?”

“What?” he asked, beginning to perspire.

“Didn’t you have time to change for the party?”

“These are my clothes.”

“Come off it,” she said. “I just happen to know Mazursky was shooting in the Village today.”

He saw Lucy once more before Henry’s death, this time in a building on Broadway, the young man who was her personal assistant ushering him into her office. Lucy, her kaftan hiked up to her applepie knees, her fat legs propped up on a hassock, was shouting into the phone. “Tell that no-talent cunt that the time is long past when she could play an ingénue and a year from now when her tits are hanging round her ankles she’ll be grateful for any crumb, not that she will ever work for Lucy Gursky again.” Then she hung up and shoved the huge platter of brownies on her desk toward him. “Oh, shit. Hold it. They’re not kosher.”

Though she had failed to return any of his phone calls, she seemed so pleased to see him that she cancelled her reservation for lunch at the Russian Tea Room and had her chauffeur take them to a kosher deli on W. 47th Street. Ordering a second mound of latkes—“I shouldn’t but this is an occasion, isn’t it?”—she regaled him with loving stories about Henry.

“You know, your father suffered from a bad stammer until he picked up with your lot, so the Rebbe can’t be all bad.”

Isaac, seizing his opportunity, his words spilling out at such a pace that she had difficulty following him, told her that he had an idea for a movie. It was about the Messiah. Locked in the Arctic ice for centuries, he explodes out of a pingo, his mission to waken the Jewish dead and lead them to Eretz Yisroel. He has a weakness, however. If he is fed non-kosher food he loses his magical powers, he goes berserk.

“I love it,” Lucy said, and grasping what a hoot it would be to read aloud at her next party, she added, “You must send me an outline.”

When he next got in touch with her, after he had been expelled from the yeshiva, she shrieked at him over the phone, “I’m surprised you even have the nerve to call me, you disgusting little cannibal,” and she hung up on him.

One night only a month later Lucy dismissed her chauffeur, pretending that she was staying home, and then took a taxi to Sammy’s Roumanian Paradise, a restaurant she frequented on rare nights when she was alone and so depressed there was nothing else for it, gorging herself on platters of unhatched chicken eggs, kishka, and flank steak, and then sliding into a troubled sleep on the drive home. Back at the Dakota, even as her taxi driver lifted her out of the back seat, she saw Isaac emerging from the shadows. “Go away,” she said.

Gone were the sidecurls and black hat. He wore a filthy T-shirt, jeans torn at the knees, and sneakers.

“You can’t come up with me. Bugger off. Animal.”

“I haven’t had a thing to eat in forty-eight hours.”

She seemed to wobble in place.

“You’re supposed to be my aunt,” he said, beginning to sniffle.

Her breath coming short, sweat trickling down her forehead and upper lip, she sighed and said, “I’ll give you five minutes.’’

But once in her apartment, she retired to her bedroom and didn’t come out again until she had changed into a fresh kaftan, promptly sinking into the sofa and lifting her swollen legs on to a hassock.

“Are you willing to listen to my side of the story?” Isaac asked.

“No. I am not. But you’ll find my handbag on the dresser in the bedroom,” she said, unwilling to get up again. “I’ll give you something this once. Wait. I know exactly how much money is in there.”

It was a mistake. He was gone too long. So she hoisted herself upright and followed him into the bedroom.

Isaac was staring at the large photograph on the wall of a slender lady in a sexy black cocktail dress, her bra stuffed with Kleenex.

“Who’s that?” he demanded, smirking, for he recognized her, even with her clothes on, and was only looking for a confirmation.

“Why that,” she said, curtsying, “is a photograph of your Aunt Lucy in her prime, taken by a rather naughty boy in London in 1972, if memory serves. Or did you think I was born looking like a hippo?”

“No.”

She fished a hundred and seventy dollars out of her handbag and handed it to him. “But, remember, you are not to come here again.”

“Sure thing.”

TO BE SO RICH and yet so broke. Denied by his own family. Maddening. Isaac wanted to scream, he longed to break things, it was so unjust.

His apartment stank. He opened the window, but there was no breeze. Not even the cockroaches stirred. In search of solace, he slapped another Captain A. tape into his Sony.

“Wrestled into submission by the rapacious Ravenmen, Captain Cohol has broken loose from the terrible table of death only to be cruelly clouted to the ice once more.”

Toologaq, malevolent master of the Ravensmen, laughed fiendishly. “Brace yourself, space snoop, because this electric current will teach you watt’s watt.”

Shit shit shit. Isaac kicked his Sony across the floor. Only fifteen years old, he would have to endure another six years before the money and shares would be his. Groping for his can of spray paint, he treated the Rebbe to a squirt in the nose. Wobbly on his feet, he whirled around and took aim at Marilyn Monroe’s coozy.

Then the doorbell rang. Three strangers. A little old man; a taller one, middle-aged; and a bleached blonde, all twinkly, reeking of perfume. “I’m your Cousin Barney,” the middle-aged man said, “this is your great-uncle Morrie, and what we have here,” he added, grabbing the blonde by the buttocks to propel her forward, “is the former runner-up to Miss Conduct. You can look but you can’t touch.”

Mr. Morrie sighed and clacked his tongue. “To think that a grandson of Solomon’s would have to live like this.”

“The first thing we’re going to do,” Barney said, “is buy you some decent threads.”

“I’ll bet a motorcycle would be more his life-style.” Darlene crinkled her nose. “Mine too, honeychild. Vroom Vroom!”

“You ever eaten at the ‘21’?” Barney asked.

Their fingernails bearing the talons of an owl, Isaac remembered, staring at Darlene’s fingernails. “What do you want from me?” he asked, retreating.

Barney took the spray paint can out of his hands. He aimed it at the bumper sticker on the wall that read WE WANT THE MOSHIACH NOW and squirted a line through it, crossing it out, as it were. Then he found a blank space and wrote:

Mr. Morrie lingered in New York for a week, absolutely refusing to leave until he had established Isaac in a decent apartment, and had provided him with an allowance proper to his brother Solomon’s grandson. They ate lunch together every day. “You know,” Isaac said, “you are like the first relative ever to take an interest in me.”

“After what you’ve been through. What about your Aunt Lucy?”

“Don’t even mention that sex-crazed elephant’s name to me.”

“Lucy sex-crazed? You’ve got to be kidding.”

So Isaac showed him his file of photographs.

Tears welled in Mr. Morrie’s eyes. “To think that the poor child could have once been so unhappy,” he said, stuffing the photographs into his briefcase. “Now tell me, Isaac, what is it you want to do with your life?”

“I want to make movies.”

“You know what I say? I say why not, once things are settled.”

Six

One night that same summer, the summer of 1976, Sam and Molly Birenbaum went bumping across the Aberdare Salient in a Toyota Land Cruiser. Their guide, a former white hunter, was pursuing a loping, slope-shouldered hyena. Soon they were overlooking a pack of them, their pelts greasy and bellies bloated, hooting and cackling as they fed on a dead hippo lying on its side in a dry riverbed. The hippo hide impenetrable, the hyenas were eating into the animal through the softer anus, emerging from the cavity again and again with dripping chunks of pink meat or gut, thrusting the scavenging jackals aside.

“I’ve seen all I can bear,” Sam said. “I was raised on Rashi, not Denys Finch Hatton, so let us repair to our tent, tzatskeleh.”

Molly was delighted to see him in such high spirits. Only three months earlier, in Washington, he looked pasty and was growing increasingly sour. Obviously he had had his fill of hurrying to airports, flying hundreds of miles only to come back with another thirty-second sound bite from a politician or a film clip trivializing a disaster. “Judging by our commercials,” he told her one night, “outside the beltway, the only people who watch our newscasts suffer from loose dentures, insomnia, heartburn, flatulence and, put plainly, they don’t shit regular.”

So, on the night of his birthday, Molly took him to La Maison Blanche for dinner and told him, “Enough.” Lapsing into Yiddish because she knew it gave him pleasure, reminding him of Friday nights at L.B.’s, the men holding forth at the table with the crocheted cloth, he and Moses in the kitchen, overcome with awe as Shloime Bishinsky combed nickels out of their hair. She told him that when she had married him, a cub reporter on the Gazette, cultivating a moustache to make him look older, she had never dreamed that one day he would provide in such style for her and the children. But now the boys were grown, and Sam had more than enough money socked away, so the time had come for him to put in for early retirement. He could take a year off, maybe two, nobody was counting, and then he could decide whether to teach or write or join PBS or National Public Radio, both of which had made offers.

“Yeah, but what would I do for a year, never mind two?”

“We’re going away,” she said, presenting him with his birthday present, a safari for two in Kenya.

It worked wonderfully well for the first few days. Then, the morning after they had seen the hyenas feeding on the dead hippo, they stopped at the Aberdare Country Club for lunch, and Sam caught up with the news.

Air France Flight 139, originating in Tel Aviv on Sunday, June 27, bound from Athens to Paris, had been hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The airbus had refuelled in Libya and was now on the ground at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, where His Excellency al-Hajji Field Marshall Dr. Idi Amin Dada, holder of the British Victoria Cross, DSO, MC, appointed by God Almighty to be saviour of his people, announced that he would negotiate between the terrorists and the Israelis.

“They’ll fly out that no-nothing kid, Sanders, to cover for us.”

“It’s no longer any of your business, Sam.”

The next morning they crossed into the Rift Valley, hot and sticky, the dung-coloured hills yielding to soaring purplish walls on both sides. Then they took a motorboat across the crocodile-infested waters of Lake Baringo to Jonathan Leakey’s Island Camp. The camp overlooking the lake was hewn right out of the cliffside, embedded with cacti and desert roses and acacias. Sam made directly for the radio in the bar.

Wednesday, June 30. The hijackers demanded the release of fifty-three convicted terrorists, five held in Kenya, eight in Europe, and the remaining forty in Israel. If there was no Israeli response by three P.M., Thursday, they threatened to kill the hostages and blow up the airbus. Another report, this one out of Paris, revealed that forty-seven of the two hundred and fifty-six hostages and twelve crew members had been freed and flown to Charles de Gaulle airport. They said that the Jews had been separated from the others under guard in the old terminal building at Entebbe, this segregation imposed by the two young Germans who appeared to be in charge of the operation. Yet another report stated that Chaim Herzog, Israeli ambassador to the UN, had appealed for help from Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim.

Sam asked to use the office telephone. After endless delays, he finally got through to the network in New York, and then he stumbled out of the office ashen-faced, searching for Molly. He found her by the poolside. “Kornfeld, that coke-head, put me on hold. I hung up on him.”

The next day they continued on to Lake Begoria. Sam, to Molly’s chagrin, only feigning interest in the herds of antelope and gazelles and zebras they passed. Then, fortunately for Sam, there was to be a four-day break in Nairobi before they moved on to the Masai Mara. They no sooner checked into the Norfolk Hotel than Sam bought every newspaper available and drifted out to the terrace to join Molly for a drink. He was not altogether surprised to find that the terrace, usually thinly populated in the early afternoon, was now crowded with Israelis. A sudden infusion of tourists. Obviously military men and women in mufti. They talked in whispers, occasionally rising from their tables to chat with an old man who sat alone, a bottle of Loch Edmond’s Mist before him. He was a short man, wiry, his hands clasped together over the handle of a malacca cane, his chin resting on his hands.

“You’re staring,” Molly said.

Sam hurried to the front desk, described the old man, and was told his name was Cuervo. “Mr. Cuervo,” the clerk said, “is a dealer in Kikuyu and Masai antiquities. He has a gallery on the Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. The Africana.”

Sam returned to his table and told Molly to belt up.

“But we just got here.”

They took a taxi to Embakasi Airport, where Sam saw an El Al Boeing 707. Refuelling, he was told, before proceeding to Johannesburg as scheduled. There were also two unmarked airplanes on the far end of the tarmac, another Boeing 707 and a Hercules, both being guarded by Israeli tourists.

Instead of returning directly to the Norfolk, Sam and Molly stopped at the Thorn Tree Bar at the New Stanley Hotel. And there he was again, the old man, and at tables on either side of him there were Israelis laden with camera cases that obviously held weapons. Mr. Cuervo was chatting with two other men, whom Sam later discovered were Lionel Bryn Davies, chief of the Nairobi police, and Bruce Mackenzie, a former minister of agriculture who now served as a special adviser to Jomo Kenyatta. Once the two men left, Mr. Cuervo motioned for Sam and Molly to join him.

“I thought we’d met before,” Sam said.

“Oh, no. I’ve never had the pleasure. But of course I recognize you from television. What brings you to Nairobi?”

“We’re on safari.”

“Ah.”

“And you?”

“Tomorrow night you and Mrs. Burns must be my guests for dinner at Alan Bobbé’s Bistro, and then I will try to answer at least some of your questions. Shall we say drinks at seven?”

“Are you sure we haven’t met before?”

“I’m afraid not.”

That night, Saturday, July 3, following the ninety-minute raid on Entebbe, two El Al Boeing 707s, one of them a makeshift hospital, put in at Embakasi airport. They were joined in the early hours of Sunday morning by four Thunderbird Hercules. Waiting ambulances rushed ten of the more gravely wounded Israeli soldiers to Kenyatta State Hospital. Then the airplanes refuelled and were gone.

Sam read about it at breakfast in the Sunday Nation, which had to have had advance notice of the raid. The rest of the day passed slowly, Sam irritable, self-absorbed, but at last it was time to join Cuervo at Alan Bobbé’s Bistro. The maître d’, who had been expecting them, reached for the bottle of Dom Perignon that floated in a bucket of ice on their table.

“Please don’t open it yet,” Molly said. “We’ll wait for Mr. Cuervo.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Cuervo had to leave Nairobi unexpectedly. He sends his apologies and insists that you are to be his guests for dinner.”

Back in Washington, writing his piece about Cuervo for the New Republic, Sam checked things out in Los Angeles as a matter of form. As he suspected, there was no Africana Gallery on Rodeo Drive nor a Cuervo listed in the telephone book.

Seven

1983 it was. Autumn. The season of the sodden partridges, drunk from pecking at fallen, fermented crab apples. Leaves had to be raked. It was nippy out there. The air smelled of oncoming snow, but Moses had not yet taken down his screens and set his double windows in place. His winter wood, dumped in the driveway by Legion Hall, needed to be stacked. Avoiding these chores, Moses—choking on dust—surrounded by overturned cartons—contemplated the interior of his cabin. A sea of disorder. All because he was determined to find his missing Silver Doctor, as if his life depended on it. Exhausted, Moses went to pour himself a drink. Then the phone rang.

“Hi, there. It’s me.”

The overdressed, fulminating divorcée he had picked up in Montreal on Tuesday.

“I’ll be on the four o’clock bus to Magog. Is there anything I can bring?”

Oh, Christ, had he invited her out for the weekend? “Um, no.”

“You don’t sound pleased.”

“Why, I’m delighted. I’ll meet you at the bus station.”

As soon as she hung up, Moses dialled Grumpy’s and asked to speak to the bartender. “It’s Moses Berger. What’s the name of the lady I met at your place on Tuesday?”

“Not Mary?”

“Yes. That’s it. Thanks.”

He collected empty bottles and soiled dishes. He emptied ashtrays. Then he began to stuff papers back into cartons. Fool. Drunkard. Why didn’t you say you were in bed with a fever?

There had been a time when Moses had enjoyed the novelty of having a woman out to his cabin for the weekend, but now that he was fifty-two years old—grown increasingly cranky, according to Strawberry—given to rising and eating whenever it suited him, he found it an intolerable intrusion. The exception, for some years, had been Kathleen O’Brien, whom he adored. But eventually he came to dread her visits as well. Visits that unfailingly ended with the two of them stumbling about in a drunken stupor. Kathleen disposed to tears and self-pity and finally incoherence, lamenting the fate of what she called Les Misérables. The select club of Gursky casualties. She, a victim of Mr. B., and Moses undone by Solomon.

Each time she came out one or another of the tapes had to be played. Mr. Bernard, mouldering in his lead-lined coffin, coming back to haunt them: “Every family has a cross to bear, a skeleton in the closet, that’s life.…”

The rabbi who had spoken over Mr. Bernard’s casket had said, “Here was a man who was wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. He flew in his own jet. He sailed on his own yacht. He had been to Buckingham Palace as well as the White House. Mrs. Roosevelt and Ben-Gurion had both come to his house to eat Libby’s boiled beef and kasha. Prime ministers of this great country regularly sought his advice. The truth is Mr. Bernard, may he rest in peace, founded one of the greatest family fortunes in North America. But what did this paragon, this legend in his own time, plead for on his deathbed? I’m going to tell you because it’s such a beautiful lesson for all of us gathered here. Mr. Bernard asked for the one thing his millions couldn’t buy. God’s mercy. That was his last request. A plea for God’s mercy.…”

But Mr. Morrie, who had been there, told Moses what had actually happened at his brother’s deathbed.

Fading, his eyes filming over, Mr. Bernard had blinked awake to see Libby taking his bony waxy hand, holding it to her powdered cheek. She sang:

Mr. Bernard tried to scratch, intent on drawing blood, but he no longer had the strength. “No, no,” was all he could manage.

“Bernie, Bernie,” she sobbed, “do you believe in God?”

“How can you talk such crap at a time like this?”

“It’s not crap, sweetie-pie.”

“It’s not crap, she says. Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand anything? If God exists, I’m fucked.”

And then, Mr. Morrie said, he was gone.

KATHLEEN’S VISITS, often unannounced, became a torment. The once fastidious and acerbic Miss O., a lady of quality, spilling out of her Subaru with the dented hood, puffy, her step uncertain, wearing a food-stained old sweater and a skirt with a broken zipper, bearing liquor commission bags that rattled, and then talking into the dawn, repeating her stories again and again.

Contemplating her one night, passed out on the sofa, snoring, her mouth agape, Moses remembered her leading him out of the Ritz, at Anita Gursky’s first wedding, to spare him listening to the poem L.B. had written in honour of the bride and groom. He leaned over and wiped her chin, he kissed her on both cheeks, covered her with a blanket, and whispered, “I love you,” assuming that she couldn’t hear. But Kathleen stirred. “Me too you,” she said. “But what will become of us?”

The missing manilla envelope still inflamed her. “He didn’t lie. Not to me. The little runt took it or maybe Libby has it.”

Gitel Kugelmass, who lingered on at the Mount Sinai, never came out to his cabin, but phoned often. Most recently to report that Dr. Putterman was undoubtedly an RCMP undercover agent.

“Gitel,” Moses said, “I want you to come with me to see a doctor I know.”

“Maybe that Dr. Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial, where it was proven the CIA was paying them to experiment with mindbending drugs on old people who had no idea what was going on.”

Unfortunately he couldn’t deny that.

“Or you could put me on the next plane to Moscow, where I could join the other dissidents in the loonybin.”

The last time he had taken Gitel to lunch she had said, “Remember the letter L.B. sent me and Kronitz in Ste.-Agathe, pleading with us to think of the children? Not that my Errol Flynn of the north didn’t already have his chess set packed. Well that letter is to be included in that young professor’s book, you know the one I mean, he’s always gabbing away on TV, he’s against nuclear arms and wears Red Indian jewellery?”

“Zeigler?”

“That’s the one. Isn’t it ironic, Moishe? All those years hungering for fame and L.B. doesn’t live to see his biography published?”

Three letters from Professor Herman Zeigler lay unanswered in Moses’s cabin. The last one, a gem, had come with three enclosures.

1. A street map, detailing the exact route of L.B.’s afternoon strolls from the house with the garden and ornamental shrubs on a tree-lined street in Outremont, down to Park Avenue, past Curly’s newsstand, the Regent cinema, Moe’s barbershop, the YMHA and Fletcher’s Field, cutting left at Pine Avenue to Horn’s Cafeteria. He asked Moses to correct any errors or add variations to the route.

2. A photograph of “The Bard”, a sculpture of L.B.’s massive head by Marion Peterson, CM, OC, that now rested on a pedestal in the foyer of La Bibliothèque Juive de Montréal.

3. Thoughtfully included computer printouts that tabulated the frequency of rank-shifted clauses, tense auxiliaries, nouns with attributive adverbs, total noun phrase packers, et cetera in the poetry of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and L.B. Berger.

L.B., Moses was gratified to note, came first in the use of personal pronouns.

In the letter itself, Zeigler requested an interview with Moses in connection with a paper he was preparing for a conference in Banff on The Failure Syndrome of the Progeny of Great Canadian Artists. “Certainly,” he wrote, “your co-operation in this venture would be seminal.”

He had not seen Beatrice for years, but he continued to monitor her climb. An avid fan. She had already dispensed with the biodegradable Tom Clarkson, divorcing him for a pretty price. According to reports, she would soon be married to the man favoured to be the next Canadian high commissioner to the United Kingdom. From there it ought to be only a hop, skip, and a jump to another marriage and a coronet. Meanwhile, the urchin who had once been known as a Raven kid in Old Town would be working garden parties at Buckingham Palace. Moses, delighted for her, visualized Beatrice telling Mrs. Thatcher how to dress and quarter a caribou and reminding Prince Charles that they had met once before, in the Elks Hall in fabled Yellowknife.

Lucy sent him newspaper clippings and magazine articles about her that he might have missed. A photograph of her in People hugging Andy Warhol, inscribed, “Look at your little Lucy now!!” Reviews, largely favourable, of her productions on and off Broadway. A profile in New York portrayed her as foul-mouthed, notoriously bitchy about actresses who had worked for her, but a perfectionist, no expense spared when she mounted a production.

Lucy’s last phone call had come a long time ago, maybe a couple of years after Henry’s death.

“The cannibal was here to see me last night.”

“What?”

“Henry’s boy. Isaac.”

“How is he?”

“He gives me the creeps is how he is.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“You sound drunk.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“Come down to New York and I’ll pay your fare. You don’t have to stay with me if you don’t want to. I’ll put you up at the Carlyle.”

“Say, I can remember when you suggested to Henry that he could pay for my company.”

“We could have been married and had grown children by now.”

“No, it would have been irresponsible. I’m an unredeemed lush and you have yet to complete your childhood.”

“I weigh 280 pounds. I can’t stop. I’m a monster. I’m going to explode one day like a sausage in a frying pan,” she shrieked before hanging up.

Gitel, Beatrice, Lucy, Kathleen. For the rest, the kind of women Moses managed to attract to his cabin offered five minutes of release paid for with hours of irritation. There had been a lady of a certain age who couldn’t abide cigar smoke and another out for a weekend who read a Sidney Sheldon paperback in his bed. Wet towels on his bathroom floor. Hairs clogging his sink. His records put back in the wrong sleeves. Women who expected chitchat at breakfast. And now, not Mary, as Grumpy’s bartender had so aptly put it, out for the weekend. Fortunately, Mary insisted on leaving at once after he reprimanded her on Saturday morning.

“Not that I give a shit what you think,” she said, “but I wasn’t snooping. I have no interest whatsoever in your fucking papers. I was just foolish enough to believe you’d be pleasantly surprised if somebody tried to put this pig-sty in order.”

Moses drove her to the bus station in Magog.

“I’ll pay my own fare, if you don’t mind. And this is for you. I sat on it last night. Do me a favour. Shove it up your ass.”

His Silver Doctor.

Eight

Moses pulled in at The Caboose on his way home.

“Wait till you hear what happened,” Strawberry said. “It’s 10:30 A.M.—yesterday—bank’s been opened a good half-hour and Bunk ain’t cashed his welfare cheque yet so’s he can start on his monthly toot.”

Bunk and his woman were now rooted in a shack up there somewhere in the hills beyond Lake Nick.

“So Hi-Test’s worried and he loads a case of twenty-four into his four-wheeler and off he goes to check things out last night.”

Entering the cabin, Hi-Test immediately sniffed something bad. He brushed past Bunk, snoozing at the kitchen table, his head cradled in his arms behind a barricade of empty quart bottles of Labatt’s 50. He pursued the smell into the bedroom, bolted right out again, and shook Bunk awake. “Hey,” he said, “your woman’s lying dead in there.”

“Oh, so that’s it,” Bunk said, relieved, “and I thought it was she was angry with me. She’s sure been awful quiet since yesterday.”

The bar was crowded, most of the regulars celebrating the arrival of their welfare cheques, but Legion Hall and Sneaker were nowhere to be seen. “They’re hiding somewhere in the hills,” Strawberry said.

Only a week earlier Legion Hall and Sneaker had set up a stall on the 243 piled high with quart cans, ostensibly filled with maple syrup. A placard nailed to the stall read:

They moved two hundred cans and skedaddled before any of their customers could discover that the cans were actually filled with a mixture of used motor oil and water, and now the provincial police were out making inquiries.

Moses sat staring at the salmon fly he had set out on the table. His Silver Doctor. After all his years on the rivers it finally struck him that he wasn’t the angler but the salmon. A teasing, gleeful Solomon casting the flies over his head, getting him to roll, rise, and dance on his tail at will. Sea-bright Moses was when he first took the hook, but no more than a black salmon now, ice-bound in a dark river, the open sea closed to him.

Retrieving the fly, Moses returned to his cabin. Once dead by air, once by water, and now, Moses assumed, pacing, a shot of Macallan in hand, and now truly dead. If Solomon were still alive, he would be eighty-four years old, hardly impossible. But since he had last surfaced in Nairobi, Moses had heard from him only once. A telegram sent from Hanoi, in 1978, in response to a memoir Moses had published in Encounter about the group that had once gathered round the table with the crocheted tablecloth.

Solomon, Moses suspected, didn’t die of old age, but in the Gulag or a stadium in Latin America. Wherever, the ravens would have gathered.

Dead, Moses. Extinct. You knew that back in 1980, the first year masses of red roses did not bedeck the grave of Diana McClure on the anniversary of her death. So the black salmon is now obliged to sit down, sort things out, and write Solomon’s tale or what he knew of it. Or to risk the open sea, swimming out of his Gursky mausoleum never to return.

Problems.

“Hello there, Beatrice. Guess who? Yes. It’s your favourite barrel of fun, Moses Berger. If you’ll give up that oaf, I’ll swear off drinking for life and take you to London myself.”

Moses glanced at the portrait of L.B., contemplating the cosmos, enduring its weight, and turned away, surprised by tears. He freshened his drink. Then, badly in need of distraction, flicked on the TV, knowing it was time for Sam Burns to pronounce on PBS. Worrying about Lech Walesa. Disgusted by the massacre of the Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila. Instead there was an interview with the self-satisfied thug himself. Defence Minister Arik Sharon, and Moses switched off the TV impatiently.

Happily Henry hadn’t lived to learn of the raids on the refugee camps, winked at by the party in power in the country that was to be a beacon unto the nations. Neither did he live to see the end of the world or to discover that if God did intend to punish us for our transgressions, we would fry rather than freeze, victims of the greenhouse effect. Once more he resolved to visit Nialie in the spring, possibly for Passover, and pardoned himself for not contacting Isaac, an abomination to him.

Moses lit a Monte Cristo, broke open a fresh bottle of Macallan, thrust Solomon’s journals aside, and turned to his latest file of Gursky clippings. The family battle for control of Mr. Bernard’s little cabbage patch was heating up, growing increasingly acrimonious. Competing appeals to shareholders appeared in full page ads in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal among other places.

Savvy investment analysts had long predicted that McTavish, given its under-valued assets but uninspired management, its vulnerability through sometimes ill-conceived diversification, was ripe for a hostile takeover bid that would wrest control from the family. What they had not anticipated was that it would be the Gurskys themselves who would be locked in a quarrel over the spoils. A dispute that became public knowledge after Isaac Gursky reached the age of majority, acquiring the shares that had been left in trust for him by his father. While these shares of themselves were not of intimidating consequence, and Isaac was considered a mere scratch player in the unfolding struggle, he began to attract attention once it was discovered that he was a protégé of the shy, self-effacing man the press had dubbed the Gursky jackdaw. The surprising Mr. Morrie who had been surreptitiously accumulating McTavish shares for years, parking them as far away as Tokyo.

Mr. Morrie, ensconced in a suite in the Sherry-Netherlands, was quickly established as a sentimental favourite of the press. He was, after all, the last survivor of the founding brothers. An observant reporter from Money noted the moist eyes and trembling hands when Mr. Morrie, whom he described as the Gursky leprechaun, read a statement aloud:

“It pains me, in my old age, to see the children and grandchildren fighting tooth and nail over the business my genius of a brother Bernard built with a little help from me and Solomon who died so young. There is more than enough money for all concerned. Nothing would delight me more than to have everybody meet with me to settle this embarrassing family feud in private. After all, we are a family. All I am asking for is seats on the board for my son Barney and my nephew Isaac. Lionel, bless him, is welcome to stay on at McTavish, though not necessarily as CEO. It is my fondest hope that he will come to realize that blood is thicker than water.”

Lionel would have none of it. Heavily favoured in the betting if only because he was the CEO in place, he held the bulk of his late father’s shares and was supported by his brother, Nathan, his sister, Anita, and, he claimed, his cousin Lucy, the Broadway producer. Lucy, barricaded in her apartment in the Dakota, refused to talk to reporters, but, according to informed reports, she so detested her nephew Isaac that she was willing to overlook an old family feud and throw in her lot with Lionel. Her shares, it was rumoured, might be sufficient to tip the balance either way.

Then an imponderable factor came into play. The shadowy Corvus Trust of Zurich. A spokesman for Corvus, custodians of 4.2 percent of the McTavish shares, only aroused suspicions by declaring that they were “friendly buyers, potential white knights, not hostile bidders.”

Moses, following the struggle from his cabin, read of platoons of fabulously expensive lawyers, who were pelting the courts with charges and counter-charges; merchant bankers and brokerage houses at risk on both sides; and uncommitted raiders and greenmail enthusiasts circling the fray, ready to pounce.

Journalists rejoiced in what was undoubtedly the juiciest family feud in years, billions at stake.

Isaac babbled to one and all about his movie-making plans and Barney was turning up on talk-shows everywhere, gabbing about his future plans for McTavish, including a bid for a major league baseball franchise and a scheme to tow icebergs from the Arctic to the Middle East.

Responding to a tip, a New York Post reporter located a selfproclaimed former mistress of Barney’s, the now disconcertingly plump, even matronly Darlene. This led to titillating photographs and a full-blown interview in Penthouse. Darlene wore her ankh ring for the occasion. “It’s Egyptian,” she explained, “and symbolizes life. Most Wiccans wear it with the point facing out to protect themselves against negative forces, but I’ve got a strong psychic shield. I wear it with the point inward.” She said that she had been a witch since Camelot. “You know, King Arthur’s time. I’m reincarnated every seven generations. I’m part Jew, part Mohawk, and part Seventh Day Adventurer. And did I tell you that I was once a good Jewish mother, you know, when I saw the Crucifixion? It was very, very moving.”

The interviewer pointed out that Barney had denied that they had ever been lovers.

“Uh huh,” she said, unsnapping the locket lying against her throat, “then how come I still got this?”

Purportedly a lock of Barney’s pubic hair.

“In those bygone days he was very romantic and one night in the Ramada Inn we exchanged locks of pubic hair as a symbol of our enduring love ha, ha, ha. If you doubt my word I challenge you to have these hairs scientifically tested.”

The cover of New York showed Isaac flying through the air over the McTavish building on Fifth Avenue in a red and blue Captain Al Cohol uniform, a yarmulke fastened to his hair with a paperclip.

Predictably even the National Enquirer got into the act, stung with a $200-million libel suit as a consequence. The Enquirer featured a front-page photograph of Isaac emerging from the rescue helicopter at Yellowknife airport.

Other, more fastidious publications obviously decided to eschew the Gursky family feud. An indignant Lionel discovered that Art & Antiques had temporarily postponed a photo essay on his collection of early North American banknotes. His wife took to her bed, seething, when Town & Country cancelled its piece on “Those Glittering Gurskys”, which was to include a double-page Avedon photograph of Cheryl in her music room. “Dress: Arnold Scaasi. At Saks Fifth Avenue; Sara Fredericks, Palm Beach. Hosiery, Geoffrey Beene. Shoes, Stuart Weitzman. Makeup by Antonio Da Costa Rocha, New York. Asprey of London jewels.”

An ailing Libby summoned Lionel to the family mansion in Westmount.

“Your father once told me that on Solomon’s last night in Montreal, just before he flew off in that Gypsy Moth, he warned him that if anybody tried to diddle Henry or Lucy out of their shares he would come back from the grave if necessary and my Bernie was finished. A dead man.”

“Daddy died of cancer, remember?” Lionel asked, dismissing his mother’s foolish apprehensions.

“I remember it like yesterday. But who put that dead raven on his grave is what I’d like to know.”

Back in New York, Lionel sent for Harvey Schwartz.

“There’s a story I want to read in the columns, but it wouldn’t look good coming from me. I have it on the most reliable authority that Isaac suffers from delusions about being the Messiah. Moses plus one or some shit like that. Maybe the little prick was zonked out of his head, but that’s what he told a bunch he took to dinner at the Odeon last night. I want to scare all the little guys out there who are wondering what to do with their proxies. I want to read about this in Liz Smith tomorrow. Understand?”

“Lionel, this is difficult for me to say, but I have decided it doesn’t behoove me to take any further part in what is essentially a family quarrel.”

“How much did Morrie offer you for your piddly pile of shares, you little runt?”

“Mr. Morrie is a great human being. I say that not because he has been kind to me since I was a youngster, but from the heart. However, I will not take his side in this matter either.”

Then things began to crumble.

A spokesman for Corvus Trust declared that they had decided to cast their lot with a new management for McTavish, the next CEO, possibly an outsider, to be selected by a triad of three generations of Gurskys: Morrie, Barney, and Isaac.

Next Mr. Morrie went to the Dakota to talk to Lucy, who was irrevocably opposed to his takeover, according to most observers. That afternoon Lucy’s Broadway office released a surprising statement. Barney and Isaac Gursky would be joining her board. In the future, LG Productions, shortly to become a division of McTavish Industries, would be mounting film as well as stage productions. Lucy, who had taken to her bed, was unavailable to answer questions herself.

Mr. Bernard’s portrait was removed from the outer office of the McTavish building on Fifth Avenue and in its place went the drawing of Ephraim Gursky, all coiled muscle, obviously ready to spring out of the frame and wrestle anybody to the ground. Ephraim was drawn alongside a blow-hole, with both feet planted in the pack ice, his expression defiant, his head hooded, his body covered with layers of sealskin, not so much to keep out the cold, it seemed, as to lock in the animal heat lest it melt the surrounding ice. He held a harpoon in his fist, the shaft made of caribou antler. There was a seal lying at his feet, the three masts of the doomed Erebus and jagged icebergs rising in the background, the black Arctic sky lit by paraselanae, the mock-moons of the north.

An uncommonly serene Mr. Morrie announced his retirement from his estate in Ste.-Adèle.

“Barney and Isaac don’t need any old fogies in the office, but if they want some bad advice they always know where to find me, those two outstanding young men.”

Asking the reporters to wait, Mr. Morrie slipped into the house, opened his wall safe, and removed a set of keys that lay on a large brown envelope, addressed to MISS O., PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL. Then he invited the reporters into his wood workshop.

“This is my new office, ladies and gentlemen. Anybody needs a nicely made table, a bookcase maybe, I’m accepting orders starting right now. Free estimates on request.”

AUTUMN. The season of the sodden partridges, drunk from pecking at fallen, fermented crab apples. Moses, in need of fresh air, dropped his empty Macallan bottle into a wastepaper basket and drifted outside. Raking leaves, he wondered what Solomon would have made of all of it.

One of the journals Solomon had sent Moses some years back had come with a typically irritating note:

“I once told you that you were no more than a figment of my imagination. Therefore, if you continued to exist, so must I.”

But he’s dead, Moses thought, even as the sky above was filled with a sudden roaring, Moses ducking involuntarily, an airplane passing low enough overhead to clip the treetops. Straightening up, his balance uncertain, Moses couldn’t find the airplane anywhere. Then it was back. A black Gypsy Moth wagging its wings at him. It made another pass at the cabin, wagging its wings again. Then, as Moses watched, it began to climb. He knew where it was going.

North.

Where north?

Far.

Watching the Gypsy Moth climb, Moses believed that he saw it turn into a big menacing black bird, the likes of which hadn’t been seen over Lake Memphremagog since the record cold spell of 1851. A raven with flapping wings. A raven with an unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures. He watched the bird soar higher and higher, until he lost it in the sun.