Solomon Gursky Was Here

One

1973 it was. Out there on the rim of the world, in Tulugaqtitut, hard by the shore of the Beaufort Sea, midnight had come and gone, the fierce summer sun still riding high in the sky. Henry Gursky set his book aside—Pirke Aboth, Sayings of the Fathers—to glance out of the window. Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.

Obviously the Otter was going to be late again, but it would turn up eventually, unless the pilot out of Yellowknife had been diverted by an emergency call. Or he’s drunk again, Henry thought. Tomorrow’s flight wouldn’t do, it would be too late. Henry sighed and reached out to stroke his son’s sleek black hair. “Aleph,” he said.

“Aleph.”

“Beth.”

“Not now,” Isaac pleaded, “it’s time.”

“Oh yes, sorry.” Remembering, Henry reached out to flick the dial of his radio. Isaac’s eyes shone with pleasure as the familiar sounds reverberated through the living room of the pre-fab.

A gale-force wind raging across the barrens. The distant howl of a wolf. Electronic music, something from another world. “Into every life some rain must fall,” the narrator began solemnly. “In Captain Al Cohol’s case, catastrophe cascades upon his great blond head in a steady downpour.”

Henry clacked his tongue; he slapped his cheek, simulating fear. Isaac, burrowing more deeply into the sofa, tugged absently at the ritual fringes of his undershirt. Four fringes there were, each fringe comprised of twelve silken strands.

“Once the good-hearted defender of the people of Fish Fiord against the monstrous Raven Men, Captain Al Cohol had descended into the gutter, deposited there by the poisonous effects of booze. First a beer parlour brawl, then a night in jail, and now an interview with the welfare people in Inuvik.”

Fading in, the welfare worker said, “Now then, let’s fill in the necessary forms, shall we? Your name is?”

“Captain Al Cohol, Intergalactic 80321.”

“Yes … and your last address?”

“737 Twelve Moon Avenue, province of Lutania, planet Barkelda.” Oy vey, Henry thought, giving his son a gleeful poke. Isaac responded with a giggle.

“Fine, just fine. Now then, your profession?”

“Intergalactic space commander, with degrees in antigravity science and ionic transmutation.”

“That’s a problem of course. We don’t have much call for that kind of thing around Inuvik. Unfortunately a person can be too highly qualified. What happened to your clothes? Were you forced to sell them?”

“Sir, these are my clothes. This is the fashion of the day on Barkelda.”

“Not all that practical in the north. You’ll never get a job anywhere around here wearing yellow, red, and blue underwear. We’ve got to get you into something decent and warm. And your hair! Shoulder-length hair just isn’t in in Inuvik.”

“I haven’t had a chance to cut it for centuries.”

“You can have it now. Captain Al Cohol, you have been highly recommended to us by the RCMP who state that Nurse Alley has given you the highest character references. Here is fifty dollars. Go and buy warm, decent clothing and a respectable haircut.”

“I can’t do this. I’ve never accepted charity in my life.”

“False pride. We’re here to help you, if you are prepared to help yourself. But stay away from alcohol, captain.”

“I promise you by all the galaxies! Thank you and goodbye.”

Henry, hearing an engine, leaned forward to peer out of the window, but it wasn’t the Otter. It was a charter, a DC-3. On the radio, a door opened and closed. Street noises were heard. The narrator faded in, saying, “Out in the cold, inclement streets of Inuvik, Captain Al Cohol’s heart was still laden over the loss of the lovely Lois. Somehow he must regain his pride and prove himself worthy of the brave little nurse of the north. But meanwhile he has the nagging need for nutriment and a place to sleep for the night. He finds a transient centre where he can bunk down with the other lost souls like himself.”

Henry glanced out of the window again, unavailingly, and the next thing he knew Captain Al Cohol had fallen in with the ruffians in the transient centre, joining them in a poker game.

“This is a friendly game, stranger, and to make it friendlier I got a treat for all of us, a jug of moose milk. You ever tasted moose milk?”

“Never, but it sounds nutritious. I haven’t eaten in some time.”

“Good. Let’s pour a round before we deal a game.”

Glug, glug, glug.

“Drink up, stranger.”

The narrator intervened, alarmed. “DON’T DO IT, CAPTAIN AL COHOL! YOU’LL BE RIGHT BACK WHERE YOU STARTED—IN THE GUTTER AGAIN!”

Glug, glug, glug.

“The valiant wanderer from outer space may have stepped out of the frying pan into the fire. Keep your fingers crossed and wait ’til the next episode in the ordeals of Captain Al Cohol, the hapless nomad of the high north.”

The episode was followed by the usual warning that alcohol can make you a different man, and that once hooked on liquor it was a hard habit to break. Like God, Henry thought, surprised by his own irreverence.

“So if you can’t help yourself, call on someone who can, Alcohol Education, Government of the Northwest Territories, NWT.”

Henry switched off the radio but continued to sit by the window, searching the heavens from time to time, a Bible open on his lap.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

It was past one A.M. when he saw a dot in the distance. Gradually it sprouted wings, it grew a tail, both with blinking red lights attached. Lowering, it bounced in the wind, the wings fluttering. The Otter finally circled the bay—swinging out—banking—seemingly consumed by the blazing sun before it was miraculously there again, sinking, settling into the freezing water, kicking up skirts of spray.

Henry Gursky slipped into his parka and mukluks and started for the dock, wheeling a porter’s cart before him. Henry, in his early forties, was a sinewy man with an inky black beard and long dancing sidecurls; he was knobby, with a gleeful face. Solomon’s face. A knitted yarmulke was fastened like a stopper to his thin black hair. He waved at the settlement children and the hunters who had already gathered in the bay, happy for a diversion. Two grey seals, freshly killed, lay gleaming on the rocks, their eyeballs torn out, the sockets bleeding, festooned with black flies already feasting there.

The pilot, new to North of Sixty, had heard enough gossip in The Gold Range Bar in Yellowknife to inquire after the settlement nurse. “Tell her I have a surprise for her,” he said.

Henry greeted the pilot with a smile. “Baroch ha’bo,” he called out.

Squinting, suspicious, the pilot demanded, “What’s that mean?”

“Translated loosely it means ‘blessed be the arrival.’”

“You must be Gursky.”

“Indeed I am. Did you bring it?”

“You bet.”

It was the familiar zinc half-trunk, battered, but the locks intact.

When the oil drillers of Inuvik, largely southern flotsam, had begun to move marijuana and even more lethal stuff through the territory, an alert RCMP corporal, unfamiliar with Henry, had asked him, his manner correct but firm, to unlock the half-trunk right there. Henry had obliged and the corporal, probing the contents, peering quizzically at the bill of lading, had shaken his head, incredulous.

“I never expected to find a Jew in such rough country,” the pilot said.

“We’re an astonishing people. Dandelions, my father used to say. Dig us out here and riding the wind and the rain we take root there. Any mail for me?”

There was a copy of Newsweek, a pensive John Dean filling the cover; two back issues of The Beaver; a quarterly report from James McTavish Distillers Ltd. and a cheque for $2,114,626.17; a gun catalogue from Abercrombie & Fitch; a copy of The Moshiach (or Messiah) Times for Isaac; a letter from the Rebbe at 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn; another letter from the Crédit-Suisse; a parcel of books from Hatchards, but not a word from his sister Lucy in London nor from Moses Berger.

The pilot watched Henry heave the half-trunk on to the cart and trundle off, past the Co-op, toward the settlement, oblivious of the swarming mosquitoes. The settlement was comprised of fifty pre-fab cubes, known as 512s because they each measured 512 square feet. The 512s were laid out in neat rows, huddling tight to a fire station, a meeting hall and school, a nursing station, the Co-op, and the Sir Igloo Inn Café, which was run by the local bootlegger. There was also a Hudson’s Bay trading post with living quarters for the factor, a taciturn young man called Ian Campbell. Campbell had been recruited to North of Sixty directly from Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis. A wool-dyer’s boy, he now found himself master of credit and provisions, a keeper of ledgers, with something like the powers of a thane over the hunters in the community. He avoided the school-teaching couple from Toronto, who pandered to the natives, and he was no more than polite to the sluttish nurse who swam through his dreams, making him thrash about in bed at night. On occasion loneliness drove him to playing chess with the unbelievably rich crazy Jew, but, for the most part, he favoured drinking with the grey pulpy denizens of the overheated DEW line station, some eight miles from the settlement.

In the winter you could distinguish Henry’s pre-fab from the rest, as it was the only one without quarters of frozen caribou or seal ribs stacked on the roof. It was also larger than the other pre-fabs, made up of three 512s joined together. Henry kept dogs. He could afford to feed them. Twice a week a wagon passed and filled everybody’s household tank with fresh drinking water that had been siphoned through a hole in the ice of a nearby lake. Once a day the honey wagon stopped at each pre-fab to pick up the Glad bags filled with human waste. These were dumped on the ice only three miles out to sea in spite of the hunters’ complaints. The problem was that following spring breakup the bags floated free and many a seal brought in was covered in excrement, an inconvenience.

During the long dark winter there was a ploughed airstrip illuminated by lighted oil drums, but in summer only float planes serviced the settlement.

A Greek immigrant, the pilot had been told in Yellowknife about Henry. He had thought, understandably, that they were pulling his leg. He had been seated in the sour-smelling Gold Range, knocking back two and a juice with some of the other bush pilots and miners when a Yugoslav foreman from the Great Con had said, “He’s been all the way to Boothia with a dog team and he knows King William like the palm of his hand.”

“What’s he looking for?” the Greek asked, soliciting laughter. “Oil?”

“Brethren of his who have strayed too far from the sun.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re not expected to.”

The nurse was there. Thinner than he liked, older than he had been told. “I brought you something,” he said.

“Yes,” Agnes said, “they usually do,” and she turned and walked away from him. If he followed, all right, if he didn’t, all right. It wasn’t in her hands.

Henry, approaching the Sir Igloo Inn Café, a corrugated hut, saw a tangle of kids cavorting in the dust. As he drew nearer one of the kids squirted free, black hair flying, and disappeared behind an aluminum shed. “Isaac!” Henry called after him, abandoning his cart to pursue his son. “Isaac!”

He found him hidden behind an oil drum, chewing greedily on a raw seal’s eye, sucking the goodness out of it. “You mustn’t,” Henry chided him, tenderly wiping the blood off his chin with a handkerchief. “It’s not kosher. It’s unclean, yingele. Trayf.”

Isaac, giggly, his coal-black eyes bright, accepted an orange instead. “Aleph,” Henry said.

“Aleph.”

“Beth.”

“Beth.”

“And next?” Henry asked, pausing to pull his ear.

“Gimel.”

“Bravo,” Henry exclaimed, pushing open the door to his pre-fab.

“Nialie,” he sang out, “it’s here.”

His wife, an uncommonly slender Netsilik out of Spence Bay, smiled broadly. “Kayn anyhoreh,” she said.

Together they lowered the zinc half-trunk to the floor, Henry unlocking it, taking only the bill of lading from the Nôtre Dame de Grace Kosher Meat Market, in Montreal, to the rolltop desk that had once belonged to his father. There were two bullet holes in it. “We’ve got a new pilot today. A Greek. Agnes came out to meet him.”

“Then he will find something wrong with his engine and he will stay the night.”

“That’s enough, Nialie.”

At three A.M. the lowering sun bobbed briefly on the world’s rim.

Henry, who had only ten minutes before it would start to climb again, stood and turned to the east wall, the one that faced Jerusalem, and began his evening prayers. Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.

Henry’s faith, conceived on the shores of another sea, nurtured in Babylon, burnished in Spain and the Pale of Settlement, seemingly provided for all contingencies save those of the Arctic adherent. So Henry, a resourceful man in some matters, usually improvised, his religious life governed not by the manic sun of the Beaufort Sea, but instead by a clock attuned to a saner schedule. A southern schedule.

Henry slept for six hours, waking the next morning, Friday, to find Nialie salting a brisket that had defrosted during the night. She allowed the blood to drain into the sink, even as her grandmother had learned to do it as a child during the season of Tulugaq who had come on the wooden ship with three masts. The sabbath chicken lay trussed in a pot, the braided bread was ready for the oven.

His morning prayers done, Henry shed his talith, folded it neatly, and removed his phylacteries. Immediately after breakfast he sat down at his desk to write a letter to Moses Berger.

The last time Henry had seen Moses was just after he had been fired by NYU. Henry, in New York to consult with the Rebbe at 770 Eastern Parkway, had gone to visit Moses in his apartment. A fetid basement hole on Ninth Avenue. Furniture you couldn’t unload on the Salvation Army. Empty Scotch bottles everywhere. On the bathroom sink a bar of soap resting in slime with indentations made by the teeth marks of mice.

Four o’clock in the afternoon it was and Moses was still lying in bed, his face puffy and bruised, a purple bloom on his forehead. “What’s today?” he asked.

“Wednesday.”

Henry rented a car and drove Moses to the clinic in New Hampshire.

“He looks like he ran into a wall,” the doctor said. “Who did he get into a fight with this time?”

“That’s unfair. He was mugged. Look here, Moses has never been violent.”

The doctor extracted a typed sheet from a file on his desk. “On a flight to New York a couple of years ago—unprovoked, according to eyewitnesses—he tried to punch out a couple of furriers and had to be forcibly restrained by crew members. Your friend is filled with bottled-up rage. Shake the bottle hard enough and the cork pops.”

Moses’s last letter to Henry had been bouncy, even joyous, which was worrying, because in the past that had always been an alarm signal. He and Beatrice were living together again, this time in Ottawa. Moses, who was lecturing at Carleton, didn’t dare disgrace himself again, but he seemed well aware of that.

Henry hesitated before sealing his letter. Should he add a postscript about his cousin Lionel’s perplexing visit? No, he wouldn’t, because he was ashamed and had already been rebuked by Nialie for his meek behaviour. Mr. Milquetoast, that’s me.

Lionel’s visit would have been a trial at the best of times, but as his cousin came during Aseret Yemai Tushuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance, it was a mitzvah to be reconciled with a family member who had wronged you, even as it was written: “A person should be pliant as a reed and not hard like a cedar in granting forgiveness.”

Lionel, his sister Anita, and his younger brother Nathan were the heirs apparent to McTavish Distillers Ltd., Jewel Investment Trust, Acorn Properties, Polar Energy, and the rest of the increasingly diversified Gursky empire. Lionel, Henry remembered, had been the boldest of the Gursky brood even as a child. Grabbing maids where he shouldn’t. Propelling his bicycle into whatever new boys had been screened to play with him, knowing that their palpitating mothers wouldn’t dare complain.

Henry hadn’t heard from Lionel, who presided over the New York office of McTavish Distillers, for a good ten years when the distressing phone call came. Henry grasped that so far as Lionel was concerned he was certifiable if push came to shove, and maybe he was right. Retrieving an old quarterly McTavish report from a bottom desk drawer, and skimming through it before being confronted by Lionel, was enough to confirm to Henry his own inadequacies. Oy, was he ever in for a drubbing! Lionel, unlike him, was bound to be in tune with the songs that money sang. Bank debentures, floating bond rates, amortization of deferred charges, et cetera. All Greek to Henry.

LIONEL, FLYING INTO YELLOWKNIFE on one of the Gursky jets, recalled his cousin Henry as a backward boy—no, just this side of retarded—whom he used to tease because he was such a bed-wetter. Henry had actually had to repeat the sixth grade. Then, if memory served, there had been no high school for the little prick, but instead an endless spill of grim deferential tutors and shrinks and maybe a private school or two for rich kids whose elevator didn’t go to the top floor. Somewhere along that troubled road Henry had found God and retreated into a Brooklyn yeshiva where he no longer dared to even change his toothpaste brand without the approval of his mighty Oz, the Rebbe who ruled the funny-farm at 770. And then—presto!—he had lit out for the Arctic, of all places, where he took a stone-age bride, an Eskimo. Wait, wait. There had been a newspaper story that had prompted Henry’s flight to the far north—something that Lionel’s parents had worried about in the kitchen, gabbing away in Yiddish. Lionel dimly remembered bits and pieces. A newspaper item recounting that, inexplicably, for the third time in a century, a remote band of Eskimos was starving. The authorities were baffled because at the time there was no shortage of blubber or whatever it was they ate. The nutty natives simply refused food. Even when government officials airlifted in all manner of supplies they still wouldn’t eat. Psychologists who were hurried out to the scene hinted at dark tribal rites, the curse of shamans, referring dumbfounded reporters to Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, The Golden Bough, Totem and Taboo. But all the natives would allow was that it was forbidden, it was the Day of the … what? The Owl? The Eagle? Some shit like that. Nobody could understand the problem, and then Henry flew out and somehow or other set things right. Some of the Eskimos had died, but many were saved.

Henry flew into Yellowknife on a Ptarmigan Air Otter, taking Isaac with him so that he could have a first look at Sir John Franklin High School, which he would most likely have to attend once he had graduated from primary school in the settlement. Nialie was not disposed to accept the alternative, the Rebbe’s yeshiva high school in Crown Heights. “The other boys wouldn’t accept him as such a shayner yid. He would be picked on just because he’s a different colour.”

The enterprising commissioner of the Northwest Territories, anticipating possible investments, had led the delegation greeting Lionel at the airport. Lionel, grown bald and portly, resplendent in a beaver coat, a Giorgio Armani suit and sheepskin-lined boots, his eyes hidden behind tinted aviator glasses. The commissioner had ordained that the penthouse apartment in the nine-storey building, known locally as The Highrise, should be made available to Lionel, the bar thoughtfully stocked only with bottles blessed with the Gursky brand names. The penthouse, lavishly appointed by North of Sixty standards, had been built to accommodate Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip on their visit to the Northwest Territories in 1970. “I hope you’ll be comfortable between the royal sheets,” the commissioner said, his eyes twinkling.

“I’ll require a board to go under my mattress. My back, you know.”

“Right, right. Now I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that there are old natives here who still tell tales about your great-grandfather, tales handed down from one generation to another. Would you care to meet any of them, Mr. Gursky?”

“Tight schedule. Can I get back to you after I’ve met with my cousin?”

Lionel was annoyed that when Henry, that God-crazed fool, finally did turn up, he had brought his little half-breed son with him. But the boy, obviously as dim-witted as his father, settled unobtrusively into a corner with a comic book and the latest issue of The Moshiach Times. Page one delivered a Tzivot Hashem Report from a girl named Gila, rooted in Ashkelon. She wrote, “Our madircha, our counsellor in Tzivot Hashem, tells us that there are children like ourselves all over the world, all trying to do the same thing, to carry out the commands of our Commander-In-Chief, Hashem.” The proper noun Hashem was followed by an asterisk that led to a footnote explaining, “Hashem: A name of G-d,” as if Isaac didn’t know as much.

Isaac seemed self-absorbed, indifferent, while the two men talked or, more accurately, Lionel pontificated and Henry listened.

“I think it’s time we put our fathers’ quarrels behind us, Henry, don’t you?”

Nialie had made Henry promise. Don’t fidget. Look him in the eye. Yes, he had assured her, but he had already lowered his eyes and begun to cross and uncross his legs.

“You’re a character, Henry. You’re really something else. Do you know you still haven’t cashed your last dividend cheque?”

“I’ll send it to the bank first thing tomorrow morning.”

“That cheque was for three million, eight hundred thousand and some odd dollars. Have you any idea what you’ve already lost in interest?”

Having managed to put him on the defensive, Lionel now did his shrewd best to evoke the old days, reminding him of the games they had played together behind those tall sheltering walls. Then, tired of dribbling, he went for the basket. Mr. Bernard, he said, was now seventy-four years old, he no longer dipped both oars in the water, so it was sad but inevitable that control of James McTavish Distillers Ltd. would soon fall into Lionel’s hands.

“What about Nathan?”

“Let’s be serious. It’s a humbling thought,” Lionel went on to say, “but also a challenge. Remember what John Kennedy (another bootlegger’s son, eh) said? The torch has been passed to another generation. I used to shmooze with Bobby. I know Teddy. Sinatra has been to our place in Southampton. You know who sang at my Lionel Jr.’s bar mitzvah? Diana Ross. Kissinger has to use the can there’s one of the girls from Rowan and Martin being shtupped by the schwartze. Not Sammy Davis Jr., but the other one. The funny one. Rocky was at the bar mitzvah. So were Elaine and Swifty and Arnie Palmer. We golf together. About the distillery. There will be changes. Long overdue. Control should pass into my hands, but there’s a kicker. What we have to remember is that this is a public company with an enviable cashflow and shares that are presently under-valued, so there are lots of vultures circling out there. The family, assuming all of us vote our shares as a block (after all, we’re mishpoche, no matter whose version of the old quarrel you accept) still only controls 21.7 percent of the company. According to the best advice available to me—and I’m talking Lehmann Brothers, I’m talking Goldman Sachs—we’re vulnerable. Maybe even a sitting duck. Now put plainly, Henry, you have no real interest in the company. Why, you’ve never so much as attended a board meeting. That’s not a reproach. We’re all so damned proud of you. You’re into things that really matter. God and eternity and shit like that. Henry, you’re a saint. A flicking saint. I look up to you. But somebody’s got to stay in New York and watch over the shop. It isn’t carved in stone anywhere that a Getty will always run Getty Oil or a Ford Ford. You’re lucky enough to have it you’ve got to watch over it day and night. Henry, in order to protect everybody’s interest, including yours and Lucy’s, I need the authority to vote both your shares. I brought along some proxy papers. You could have the Rebbe look them over. Or I tell you what. And I want you to know I didn’t come here intending to make this offer. I could regret it tomorrow. My lawyers will think I’m crazy. I am crazy! I’m willing to buy out all your shares at 25 percent above current market value. What do you think?”

“Does your father know about this?”

“Henry, this grieves me, but Mr. Bernard ain’t what he used to be.

He drools. He falls asleep at board meetings. Or he sits there, sucking on one of those damn Popsicles, farting away, while decisions involving millions are being made. You think the word isn’t out on the street? The word is out. He also gives in more frequently to that notorious temper of his. Important executives I took considerable pains to recruit are fired, lost to our competitors. Why? Because they’re too tall. Appointments with merchant bankers aren’t kept. It’s the old Henry Ford syndrome all over again. He’s stuck with his first hard-on. He’ll make you a Model-T in any colour you want so long as it’s black. Ms. Bernard won’t allow us to drop old dark heavy Scotches, no longer popular, because he once had a hand in the blending. He knocks down any new light blend if it comes from what he calls my marketing pricks. He could destroy the empire he built, and destroy me, just like the senile Ford all but destroyed his son and empire. No, Mr. Bernard doesn’t know I’m here. This is between you and me, Henry. Our secret. I have decided to trust you, that’s right, and I want you to trust me. Twenty-five percent above market value. What do you say, Henry?”

Henry, his head aching, leaped up. “It’s time for my evening prayers.”

“Henry, you’re an example to all of us. A really exceptional Jew. It’s heart-warming.”

“I’ll say them in the kitchen. I won’t be long.”

So Lionel was left alone with the boy, which he found unsettling.

“What’s your favourite colour, son?” he asked, impatiently tapping his gold Cross pen against the table.

Isaac simply stared.

“Come on, everybody has a favourite colour.”

“Red.”

“How would you like your Uncle Lionel to send you a big red snowmobile?”

“Do you believe the Moshiach is coming?”

“The Messiah?”

Isaac nodded.

“Well, that’s a big question, isn’t it?”

“I do.”

“Hey, that’s very nice. I’ll buy that.”

“Why?”

“Because it speaks very well for your character and your future

development as a caring person.”

The boy continued to stare. “What’s interest?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said my father lost a lot of money in interest by not cashing a cheque.”

“You don’t want to worry about that, son.”

“If my father doesn’t sell, will it all be mine one day?”

“McTavish?” Lionel asked, resisting an inexplicable urge to swat him one.

Isaac nodded.

“I’m afraid not, son.”

Henry was back. He had brought Isaac along for insurance. Alone, he feared that he would agree to everything, sign anything, just to escape Lionel. But with Isaac there, a witness, bound to spill the beans to Nialie, he was safe. He didn’t dare acquiesce. “There’s my son to consider. How could I sell his inheritance?”

“Booze isn’t exactly booming these days. We might even have to report a loss in the third quarter. If you sold, and took good advice, you could double your yield, maybe better. The boy would be bound to inherit more.”

“Please, Lionel, I can’t sell.”

“Would you sell if you were approached by others?”

“No.”

“What if your infallible Rebbe asked you to sell?”

“The Rebbe is not in the takeover business.”

There was a knock at the door. Two men had come with boards that had been hammered together to slide under Lionel’s mattress. “It’s no longer necessary,” Lionel said. “I have to leave within the hour.”

“But what about the commissioner’s dinner party? It’s being held in your honour, Mr. Gursky.”

“Please convey my sincere regrets, but I’ve just had an urgent phone call from my father. He wants me to leave for Montreal at once.”

The men left and Henry, his eyes welling with tears, reached out and touched Lionel tentatively on the shoulder. In spite of everything, he was a cousin: he was entitled to know. “It’s coming to an end,” Henry said.

“Family control?”

“The world.”

“Oh, that,” Lionel said, relieved. “Good to see you again and thanks for the tip. Knowing you it has to be insider’s information.”

A FLOCK OF THE FAITHFUL, on the annual pilgrimage out of Grise Fiord, was camped on the edge of the settlement. It was that time of year. So now, at six P.M., as proscribed during the season of Tulugaq who had come on the wooden ship with three masts, the most pious among them gathered before the front door of Henry’s pre-fab and waited, their heads bowed, until he came out to receive them. A disgruntled Nialie retreated to the bedroom with Isaac and promptly drew the curtains.

“Why can’t I watch for once?” Isaac asked.

“Because I forbid it at your age.”

Isaac parted the curtains defiantly and Nialie, though she was distressed, did not reproach him, but withdrew meekly from the room.

The men wore parkas trailing four fringes, each fringe made up of twelve strands. Beating on their skin drums, they paraded their traditional sabbath eve offerings before them. Some of the older women, plump and gap-toothed, were already drunk. Their cheeks rouged, their lipstick unevenly applied. Two of the younger ones wore imitation-leather miniskirts and red plastic boots with high heels, probably acquired in Inuvik or Frobisher Bay. Henry averted his eyes, he blushed, but listened gravely as one by one the men stepped forward, their manner deferential but their words explicit, calculated to inflame. Effusive in his gratitude, Henry nevertheless declined each offering. Then, signalling that the ceremony was over, he smiled and sang out, “Good shabbos.”

The men gathered in their disappointed and scornful womenfolk and turned to troop back to their camp, beating mournfully on their drums.

“Some shabbos,” one of the women said.

“It will be different when it is the younger one’s time. He was peeking through the curtains.”

Nialie blessed the candles at seven-thirty and the family sat down to their sabbath dinner. Henry regaling Isaac with tales of Moses—“No, no, not your Uncle Moses, but the original. Moses, our Father”—that great angakok of the Hebrews who could turn his red into a serpent, bring forth water from a rock, and part the seas with a command. Only Moses, Henry explained, had seen God plain, as it is written: “And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.”

Later, Henry lowered his son on to the bed he had built for him. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet had been painted into the head-board. It was cleverly done. A seal barked a “shin.” A “resh” was tied to a caribou’s tail. A “daled” danced with a muskox. And out of the raven’s beak there flew the deadly “gimel”. The sign of the great one who had come on the wooden ship with three masts.

Nialie stood in the doorway, watching over them. Her husband, her son. Isaac was stealing again, shop-lifting at the Co-op and the Hudson’s Bay trading post. She had found things that he had hidden. Two packs of Player’s Mild cigarettes, a girlie magazine, a pocket knife, a gold Cross pen. She wanted to talk to Henry about it, but once more she procrastinated. He was so devoted to the boy. He had such faith in him. Nialie wished she could admonish the boy herself, but that was out of the question—impossible—as she was understandably fearful of Isaac’s name-soul or atiq, who was Tulugaq, the name she had cried out immediately before giving birth to Isaac.

While Nialie did the dishes, Henry retired to his rocking chair with the latest copy of Newsweek. In the outside it was still Watergate above all. Eighteen and a half minutes of a Nixon tape had been mysteriously erased. A committee, chaired by a Senator Sam Ervin, was in daily session. The people were perturbed.

Overcome by restlessness, a sudden tug of unease he couldn’t account for, Henry hurried into his parka, slipped outside, and headed for the camp of the Faithful. Mingling with them always calmed his spirits. He could do with that now. But when he got there, he was surprised to find the camp abandoned. They had gone without a word to him. It was odd, very odd. Old Pootoogook was sifting through the camp’s detritus.

“What happened?” Henry asked.

“Somebody came. Somebody from Spence. He was very excited. They gathered their things together fast fast and they were gone,” Pootoogook said, beating his arms to scare off the other scavengers, the swooping ravens.

Ravens, ravens everywhere.

Henry jogged all the way back to the nursing station. When Agnes came to the door in her fading dressing gown he didn’t even apologize for wakening her, which was certainly not like him. All he said was, “I must send a cable. It’s urgent.”

The Faithful had left a message scrawled in the snow:

WE WANT THE MOSHIACH NOW!

Two

Three

Mr. Bernard, as was his habit, charged out of his chauffeured limousine at 7:50 A.M., cursing the driving rain, the unresolved problem of numerous vacancies in his latest Montreal shopping plaza, the high cost of French-Canadian unrest, the uncertainty of sterling, a spread of northern oil leases as barren as his daughter (though penetrated as often, God knows), and Lionel’s foolish investment in a sinking TV series (all in the name of more pussy, no doubt). Lionel had phoned Mr. Bernard at home that very morning, catching him just as he came out of his shower. “How are you feeling this morning, Daddy?”

“Bad news. I didn’t croak during the night. So it isn’t yours yet.”

“I’m returning your call.”

“I’ve enjoyed bigger honours in my time.”

“Aw, come on, Daddy.”

“The Dow-Jones is down again. Everybody knows we’re going to announce a loss this quarter, but my little cabbage patch has put on another two points. Tell me why?”

“Some, raiders out there are buying in New York, Toronto, and London, but your guess is as good as mine.”

“Mr. Bernard doesn’t guess. He knows. I say it’s a real impatient putz, namely you, warehousing shares and hiding behind the skirts of surrogates.”

“Daddy, if you would only sign those trust papers, delegating me as CEO upon your retirement, I’d stop those speculators cold in their tracks.”

“Whatever you’re into I’m not shaking in my boots. But one thing I want to lay on the line, you whoremaster. You absolutely mustn’t try to buy out Henry or Lucy. There are things you haven’t

been told. Family things. So I want your word. No finger-fucking with Solomon’s crazy kids.”

“Daddy, I swear on the heads of my children.”

“From which marriage?”

“I—”

“I-I-I. And I suppose you expect me to believe that I-I-I doesn’t know how many shares changed hands in Tokyo yesterday?”

“Did you say Tokyo?”

“Don’t act innocent with me,” Mr. Bernard said, hanging up. Lionel immediately buzzed Miss Heffernan. “Get me Lubin on line one and get me Weintraub and put him on hold.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought you were in Montreal,” Lubin said.

“I’m flying in this afternoon. Sol, have we been buying McTavish in Tokyo?”

“No.”

“That’s what I thought. I’m putting you on hold. Yes, Miss Heffernan?”

“I’ve got Mr. Weintraub on line three.”

Lionel asked him about Tokyo.

“Not us.”

Shit.

THERE WAS, THEY SAID, ice lodged in Mr. Bernard’s heart, glacial ice, but he had come by it honestly. From Ephraim walking out. A ball of phlegm percolating in his throat, Mr. Bernard negotiated the slippery sidewalk with care, mindful of bones grown brittle with age. Then he swept through the doors of the Bernard Gursky Tower on Dorchester Boulevard, stumbling into unaccustomed darkness—gloom—when he was startled by a sudden and blinding explosion of light.

Oh, my God!

Automatically throwing up his arms to shield his face, Mr. Bernard fell to his knees. He subsided, moaning, to the marble floor, curling into the fetal position, fearing the mindless guns of Arab terrorists even as he had once ridden out the fury of Detroit’s Purple Gang, hunkered down with the bats, two hundred feet below ground, in that freezing talc mine shaft in the Eastern Townships for three terrifying weeks, waiting for Solomon to arrange a truce.

Miss O’Brien, surveying the scene, turned to Harvey Schwartz, flicking him with that special look of hers. “Oh dear,” she said with a certain asperity, “are you ever in for it now, Mr. Schwartz.”

A rattled Harvey Schwartz raced toward Mr. Bernard, helping him to his feet, a shivering blinking Mr. Bernard, whom he nervously pointed at the banner that flowed from wall to wall in the lobby:

The banner was revealed to Mr. Bernard just as one-hundred-odd office employees of James McTavish Distillers Ltd., his corporate creature, burst into “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

His eyes brimming with grateful tears, if only because his body remained unpunctured, Mr. Bernard scampered forward to accept a sterling silver tea service from a delegation of his employees. Applause, applause. Dabbing his eyes, surreptitiously hawking phlegm into his handkerchief—a surprisingly hot wad—Mr. Bernard extended his tiny spindly arms to offer his benediction. “God bless you. God bless each and every one of you.”

Two office girls wheeled out a cake on a trolley—massive—shaped like a bottle of Canadian Jubilee, their most popular rye, and crowned with figures of Mr. Bernard and his wife, Libby.

“I don’t deserve such love,” Mr. Bernard protested. “You’re wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Not my employees,” he cooed, blowing wet kisses as he retreated to the elevator, “but my children, my family.”

Only a bemused Miss O’Brien and Harvey Schwartz, carrying the tea service, rode with Mr. Bernard in the express elevator to the forty-first floor. “Everybody chipped in,” Harvey said, beaming. “From vice-presidents to office boys.”

“But some people didn’t think it was such an inspired idea,” Miss O’Brien said.

“Their idea, not mine. I was enormously touched on your behalf, Mr. Bernard.”

Mr. Bernard began to clack his dentures. “I have to piss,” he said. “I have to piss something terrible.”

“But weren’t you pleased?”

Cursing, Mr. Bernard backed into the elevator wall, gaining purchase before he charged forward to kick Harvey in the shin, sending the tea service flying.

“You little runt, I could have fractured my hip out there. Now pick up that stuff; I hope nothing’s bent.”

Mr. Bernard, a short man, no more than five foot four, bald except for a silvery fringe, had the body of a carp. The wet brown eyes protuberant, his cheeks scaly, bleeding red whenever he was in a temper. Darting into his office, he pinched his nose with two fingers, snot pinging into the florentine tooled leather wastepaper basket. Then he pitched his homburg on to his Queen Anne walnut settee which was upholstered in velvet and had been built in Philadelphia for William Penn. Over the settee there hung a Jackson Pollock, one of his daughter’s fershtinkena acquisitions. Mr. Bernard was fond of using the painting, which reminded him of curdled vomit, to jab petitioners or job applicants who were visiting his office for the first time. “You think it’s good?” he enjoyed asking. “I mean, hoo boy, you’re a Harvard MBA. Tell me. I’d value your considered opinion.”

“It’s first-rate, sir.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it? Take your time, sonny. Have a good look.”

“Wrong? I think it’s lyrical, sir.”

Then, his eyes bright with rancour, he would pounce. “It’s hanging upside down. Now what can I get you?” Mr. Harvard Tuchus-Face MBA.

Only Moses Berger, that drunk, had outmanoeuvred him. Of course that had been years ago, when Mr. Bernard had first discovered that Moses was poking his nose into Gursky family affairs, asking questions about Solomon.

“You don’t think there’s anything wrong with the painting?”

Moses had shrugged.

Shooting forward in his desk chair, Mr. Bernard had barked, “It’s hanging upside down.”

“How can you tell for sure?”

“Hey, you’re some smart cookie,” Mr. Bernard had replied, brightening. “Come work for me and I’ll pay you double what you can get at some shitcan university.”

“I’m not looking for a job, if that’s why you sent for me.”

“I sent for you because I don’t care for strangers trying to dig up dirt about the Gurskys to feed anti-Semites, as if they’re going hungry these days. But if any trouble-maker dares to cross my path I’ll squash him like a bug.”

His face hot, his mood vile, Mr. Bernard ate lunch in his private dining room with his brother Morrie.

Mr. Morrie, who never forgot a cleaning lady’s name, a secretary’s birthday, or the illness of a filing clerk’s wife, was adored by just about everybody who worked for McTavish. He occasionally ate in the employee’s canteen, refusing to allow anybody to fetch for him, but lining up with his tray like the rest. It was amazing, really amazing, that he and Mr. Bernard were brothers. One a saint, they said, the other a demon.

Nobody had seen Mr. Bernard speak to his brother for years. Ever since Mr. Morrie, prodded by his wife, had dared to go to Mr. Bernard’s office to plead Barney’s case.

“I appreciate that eventually it’s got to be Lionel who sits in your chair,” Mr. Morrie said.

“Don’t count Nathan out yet.”

“Or Nathan.”

“What are you talking, Nathan? That boy’s a washout. The things that come out of your mouth. Christ.”

“But what harm would it do for Barney to be a vice-president?”

“I’m not putting a rat in place to scheme against my sons once I’m gone.”

“He won’t scheme. He means good.”

“That boy was once bitten by a bug called ambition and now he’s infected from head to toe.”

“Bernie, I beg you on bended knees. He’s my only son.”

“You want more, make more. I did.”

“I never even told him I signed those papers years ago.”

“Listen, why don’t you go back to your office and do a crossword. I could finish it in half the time it takes you. Or go pull your petzel, you’ll only need two fingers for the job, I’ve seen it, and that should keep you busy until it’s time to go home to that yenta you married like a damn fool.”

“Bernie, please. What do I say to him?”

“Out of here before I lose my temper.”

Also joining Mr. Bernard for lunch were the still-fetching Miss O’Brien, his secretary of twenty-five years, and Harvey Schwartz.

Freckled and pink and plump Harvey was, inordinately vain about his full head of curly ginger hair, even though Becky was fond of announcing at dinner parties that baldness was a sure sign of virility. A short man, but still some two compromising inches taller than Mr. Bernard, Harvey wore shoes especially made for him with paper-thin heels. Only forty-three years old, he also affected a septuagenarian’s stoop, his knees slightly bent.

M. Delorme, the chef, offered steamed Dover sole and boiled new potatoes for lunch. Mr. Morrie, as was the rule, was served the smallest portion last. Somewhat taller than Mr. Bernard, a full five foot five, the Chippendale chair Mr. Morrie was obliged to sit on differed from the others at the table. Two inches had been shaved off the legs.

“Harvey,” Mr. Bernard said, his manner menacingly sweet, “I’m sorry I kicked you in the elevator. I apologize.”

“I know you didn’t mean it, Mr. Bernard.”

“Fetch me the Wall Street Journal,” Mr. Bernard said, nudging Miss O’Brien under the table. “I left it on my desk.”

No sooner did Harvey limp out of the dining room than Mr. Bernard fell on the salt shaker, trailing it over Harvey’s fish again and again, shaking vigorously.

“Naughty, naughty, Mr. B.”

“He’s not allowed. He’s worried about his heart. Watch.”

Harvey returned with the Journal, and Mr. Bernard, all but bouncing with glee as he pretended to be absorbed in the market pages, watched him gag on the first bite. “Anything wrong?”

Harvey shook his head no, no, reaching for the Vichy water.

“How’s your fish, Miss O.?”

“Firm but tender.”

“Eat, Harvey. Low fat. Brain food. Good for you. Eat every bite on your plate or M. Delorme will cry and you know what that does to his mascara.”

After lunch, somewhat mollified but still restive, Mr. Bernard asked Miss O’Brien to bring him the logs for the Gursky jets. When he found the entry that he had foolishly hoped wouldn’t be there, he turned pale. He began to curse. And Solomon stood before him again, his eyes diamond-hard. “Bernie,” he had said, “you’re a snake, but not a complete fool, so I want to make something clear to you before I go. If you or any of your wretched children ever try to diddle Henry or Lucy out of their shares I’ll come back from the grave if necessary and you are finished. A dead man.”

Shivering, sweaty, Mr. Bernard grabbed the nearest thing to hand, a Chinese jade paperweight, and pitched it against the door. Miss O’Brien came running. “Mr. B., if you want me, there is a button on your phone.”

He snatched her hand and led her briskly into the billiards room. They shot a couple of games of snooker, Mr. Bernard sucking on a Popsicle between shots. Then, abruptly, he pulled Miss O’Brien to him, digging his head into her high firm bosom. “I don’t believe in ghosts. Do you?”

“Ssssh,” she said, unbuttoning, unsnapping, stroking his head as he nuzzled there, sucking.

Later, sinking into the chair behind his Chippendale mahogany desk with the cock-beaded drawers and carved gilt handles, a still apprehensive Mr. Bernard began to shuffle through a stack of birthday telegrams. They were from the prime minister, President Nixon, Golda, Kissinger, a brace of Rothschilds, merchant bankers of New York, London, and Paris, and other supplicants, creditors, and enemies. The shank of the afternoon, which passed uneventfully, only served to feed Mr. Bernard’s anxieties. He rang for Harvey. “I want you to tell reception that if any thick letters come for me, you know, parcel size, they’re to be opened by the goy downstairs, even if they are marked ‘private and confidential.’ Wait. Hold it. Especially if they are marked ‘private and confidential.’”

IN THE EVENING there was a banquet in the ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, suitably bedecked for the occasion with Canadian, Québecois (this, in the name of prudence) and Israeli flags. Red roses, flown in from Grasse, festooned every table. There were one-ounce bottles of perfume for the ladies, from a house recently acquired by Gursky, and slim gold cigarette lighters for the men, that were manufactured by yet another Gursky enterprise. Ice sculptures of Gursky-endowed university buildings and hospitals and museums and concert halls, set on side tables everywhere, testified to Mr. Bernard’s largesse.

The centrepiece on each table was a papier-mâché doll of Mr. Bernard, wearing a glittering crown at a jaunty angle. King Bernard. The figure, mounted on a charger, held a lance, banners flowing from it. Each banner broadcast another accomplishment of Mr. Bernard: a directorship, a medal, an award, an honorary degree. Lionel Gursky announced, “If you will be kind enough to turn over your plates, you will find that one plate at each table has a crown stuck on its underside. Whoever has the crown has won the right to take home the figure of Mr. Bernard at their table.”

Everybody, absolutely everybody, who counted in the monied, if not the larger, Jewish community was there. The ladies perfumed, their hair sculpted and lacquered, their eyes shadowed green or silvery, outsize rings riding their fingers; the ladies were breathlessly there, triumphantly there, glittering in gowns of écru silk façonné or shimmering cyclamen satin or purple chiffon, acquired and tactfully altered for them by the Holt Renfrew boutique. The men were harnessed in velvet dinner jackets, wine-coloured or midnight blue or murky green, buttoned punishingly tight; they wore ruffled shirts, edged in black, like condolence cards, ornate satin cummerbunds and twinkly buckled Gucci shoes.

Their antidote for ungrateful children—unwanted polyps—was plaques, plaques and more plaques, which they awarded one another at testimonial dinners once, sometimes twice a month in this very ballroom. At ease in the Ritz-Carlton they took turns declaring each other governors of universities in Haifa or Jerusalem or Man of the Year for State of Israel Bonds. Their worthiness certified by hiring an after-dinner speaker to flatter them for a ten-thousand-dollar fee, the speaker coming out of New York, New York; either a former secretary of state, a TV star whose series hadn’t been renewed or a senator in need. But tonight wasn’t make-believe. This was the real thing. This, after all, was Mr. Bernard, their Mr. Bernard no matter how large his international importance, and they were there to bask in his aura. A pleasure immeasurably sweetened by the knowledge that some people whom they could mention by name if they wanted to, some cherished friends they would be sure to phone tomorrow if only to establish that they had been there, some so-called knackers had been excluded, adjudged unsuitable.

Bliss.

So now they applauded, they cheered, they banged forks against wine glasses as tributes to the great man proliferated, and Mr. Bernard himself sat there inexplicably charged with unease, grinding his dentures.

The Israeli ambassador, delivered from Ottawa in a Gursky jet, presented Mr. Bernard with a Bible, encased in a cover of hammered gold, the flyleaf signed by Golda. There was a bronze plaque testifying that even more forests paid for by Mr. Bernard had been planted in Israel. Zion, soon to be Gursky green from shore to shore. There was a medal from Bolivia, where Mr. Bernard had copper interests, but an OBE, ardently pursued for the occasion on Mr. Bernard’s instructions, had been denied him, just as he had failed in the past to procure a seat in the senate.

One of Mr. Bernard’s most cherished charities was remembered: The Hospital of Hope, which cared for children with terminal diseases.

An official of the Canadian Football League passed Mr. Bernard a ball, a memento of last year’s Grey Cup game, that had been autographed by all the players on the winning team, and then one of the team’s most celebrated players, a behemoth who peddled Crofter’s Best in the off-season, wheeled a paraplegic child to the head table. Mr. Bernard, visibly moved, presented the ball to the boy as well as a cheque for five hundred thousand dollars. Three hundred guests leaped to their feet and cheered. The boy, his speech rehearsed for days, began to jerk and twist, spittle flying from him. He gulped and

began again, unavailingly. As he started in on a third attempt to speak, Mr. Bernard cut him off with an avuncular smile. “Who needs another speech,” he said. “It’s what’s in your heart that counts with me, little fellow.” And sotto voce, he told the player, “Wheel him out of here, for Christ’s sake. People are beginning to feel shitty.”

And hungry too.

Once dinner was done, the lights were dimmed for the ultimate surprise, the specially commissioned birthday film. Mr. Bernard, increasingly tense, his lower lip trembling, yanked out a handkerchief to hide his tears. And in his mind’s eye he saw Solomon jumping off that corral fence again, right into the flow of wild mustangs, only some of them green-broke. Follow me, Bernie, and I’ll buy you a beer.

“Oh my sweetie-pie,” Libby said, patting his hand, “I’m so glad you’re enjoying yourself. The best is yet to come.”

Ignoring her, Mr. Bernard turned on Lionel. “What were you doing in Yellowknife?” he demanded.

“Somebody has to check out the oil-lease properties from time to time, don’t you think?”

“There are no discos in Yellowknife. You went there to see Henry to try to buy his shares. Then you flew to London to try to sweet-talk Lucy out of hen.”

“Vanessa and I took the jet to London to take in Wimbledon.”

“It’s too late to lie. I know now. I know sure as I’m sitting here what you’ve been up to,” he said, and his cheeks bleeding red, he reached out to snatch Lionel’s hand, thrusting it into his mouth and biting down on his fingers as hard as he could. Lionel, groaning, finally wrenched his throbbing hand free, tucking it under his armpit … and the lights were extinguished and the film began.

Jimmy Durante, one of Mr. Bernard’s favourite entertainers, stood before a concert piano, raised a glass of champagne to the old man, a Gursky brand, and then settled down to croak and play “Happy Birthday, Mr. Bernard” followed by a medley of his most famous ditties.

The Schnozz’s impudent image yielded to that of the Chief Rabbi of Israel, who stood before the Wailing Wall and pronounced a blessing in Hebrew. His voice was soon superimposed over a montage of selected Gursky history, beginning with a shot of the sod hut on the prairie (now a museum, a Gursky shrine), the sod hut where Mr. Bernard had been born, and then dissolving to a shot of the first distillery, the St. Jerome distillery, Mr. Bernard and Mr. Morrie posing in the foreground, only the merry bright-eyed figure of the other brother, Solomon Gursky, air-brushed out of the picture, as it was out of all the others.

Next Golda offered a tribute.

Then Harvey Schwartz’s wife Becky was discovered in a golden kaftan seated at her Louis XIV bureau-plat of deal veneered with ebony and boulle marquetry. She turned to the audience, her smile demure, and began to read a tribute she had composed for the occasion, even as the camera tracked in on a prominently displayed copy of her book, a collection of columns about family life first published in the Canadian Jewish Review: Hugs, Pain, and Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Jan Peerce proposed a toast to Mr. Bernard and then sang “The Bluebird of Happiness.”

Zero Mostel raised a laugh extolling the virtues of Gursky blends, even as he staggered about a stage feigning drunkenness, singing, “If I Were a Rich Man”.

A harpist played the theme song from Love Story as Mr. Bernard and Libby were seen strolling hand-in-hand through the streets of Old Jerusalem. The famous star of many a biblical blockbuster sat in the garden of his Coldwater Canyon home and recited Mr. Bernard’s favourite stanzas from Longfellow.

Then there was a slow dissolve to the wine-dark sea. The custom-built one-hundred-and-ten-foot-long Gursky yacht was seen cruising the Greek isles as a voice that sounded like Ben Cartwright’s began to recite:

The camera eye tracked past a snoozing Mr. Bernard to reveal a sixty-five-year-old Libby, lounging on deck in a flower-print halter and pedal pushers, attended by black stewards in white linen jackets.

Laughing, her belly rocking with delight, Libby fed caviar with chopped onion and Coca-Cola to one grandchild, chopped liver on crackers to another.

The image of Libby cavorting with her grandchildren yielded to a longer shot of the yacht at sunset as another voice declaimed, “From William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon.”

Finally the children of a kibbutz in the Negev, photographed from a helicopter, stood in a pattern in the Bernard Gursky Park and spelled l’chaim, the apostrophe raising a bottle of Masada Blanc, a Gursky brand, to Mr. Bernard.

The film done, a spotlight illuminated Mr. Bernard, seemingly crushed by such acclaim, swimming in tears, a sodden handkerchief clenched between his dentures. Everybody was enormously moved, especially Libby, who now rose into the light to sing their song to him:

There wasn’t, Libby would remember, a dry eye in the house, the rest of her song lost in applause, soaring applause as Mr. Bernard leaped to his feet, knocking back his chair, and fled the ballroom.

“He’s just an old softie at heart, you know.”

“Don’t you just want to hug him?”

The truth was Mr. Bernard had to piss again, he had to piss something terrible, there was such a burning inside him, and when it came out it was, to his astonishment, red as Big Sur burgundy, another Gursky brand. A week later they began to cut and a tearful Kathleen O’Brien lighted the first of many candles at the Cathedral of Mary, Queen of the World. Mr. Morrie, responding to a summons, visited his brother at home for the first time in twenty years.

“So,” Mr. Bernard said.

“So.”

“Look at Barney now. I was right about him all along. I want you to admit it.”

“I admit it.”

“No resentments?”

“No.”

“How’s Ida?”

“She’d like to come to pay her respects.”

“Tell her to bring Charna with her. I don’t mind.”

“Charna’s dead.”

“Oh shit, I forgot. Did I go to the funeral?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad.”

“Bernie, I’ve got something to say, but please don’t shout at me.”

“Try me, you little prick.”

“You must make provision for Miss O.”

“A big brown envelope. It’s in the office safe.”

They cut and pared Mr. Bernard a week later, pronouncing him fit, but Mr. Bernard knew better. He sent for Harvey Schwartz. “I want my lawyers here at nine sharp tomorrow morning. All of them.”

Later the same afternoon Mr. Bernard saw Miss O’Brien.

“I’m going to die, Miss O.”

“Would you like me to do your weenie now?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

Four

Passing his parents’ bedroom door, a few years after they had moved into Outremont, Moses stopped, arrested by their voices. His mother was telling L.B. about the intelligence tests at school. A new-fangled notion. Moses had scored so high that the school inspector had asked to meet the bright Jewish lad who was bound to discover the cure for cancer. L.B. sighed. “You don’t know how devoutly I hope he will go into medicine. Or law maybe. Because if Moses is really determined to become a writer he is certain to be compared to me and suffer for it. Possibly I never should have had a child. It was indulgent of me.”

His mother’s answer was lost.

“Costly too, to be frank. I mean do you think I would be singing for my supper at that parvenu’s table if I didn’t have a wife and child to support? I would be living in a garret in Montparnasse, serving nobody but my muse.”

The dreaded self-addressed envelopes continued to rebound. From Partisan Review, Horizon, The New Yorker. Again and again somebody else, a detested rival, would win the Governor General’s Award for Literature.

One morning, three years after Moses had scored so high on the intelligence tests, he discovered his picture in the newspaper: the sixteen-year-old boy who had come first in the province in the high-school matriculation exams, winning a scholarship to McGill. L.B. reacted to the news with a low whistle. He removed his pince-nez, polishing the lenses with his handkerchief. “I see that you made ninety-seven in your French exam. Okay, I’m going to read you the opening paragraph of a French classic and I want you to identify it for me,” he said, turning to a book concealed behind a magazine. “‘Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, est une vielle femme qui, depuis quarante ans, tient à Paris une pension bourgeoise établie rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, entre le quartier Latin et le faubourg Saint-Marceau.’”

All the same L.B. dropped into Horn’s Cafeteria so that old cronies could congratulate him.

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, eh, L.B.?”

Four years after Shloime Bishinsky had denounced him in a high squeaky voice L.B. published a story in Canadian Forum about a pathetic little Jew, unattractive to women, who had bribed his way out of Siberia, across China, into Japan, and from there to Canada, only to be knocked down and killed by a streetcar on his first day in the next-door place to the promised land.

Once Moses had asked Shloime, “How did you manage to walk out of Siberia?”

“Looking over my shoulder,” he replied, and then he tweaked Moses’s nose, making a plum pop out of it. “What kind of boy is this? Sneezing fruit.”

Sometimes, while one of the men was reading a long solemn essay aloud in the dining room, Shloime would gather the children together in the kitchen to entertain them as well as Moses’s mother. He could pluck a silver dollar from behind your ear, swallow a lighted cigarette, or make Bessie Berger squeal by yanking a white mouse out of her apron pocket. He could tear a dollar bill to bits and then only had to close his fist on it to make it whole again. Shloime was also capable of dancing the kazatchka without spilling a drop from the glass of seltzer water balanced on his head. He could comb chocolate-covered raisins out of your hair or stick out his tongue, proving his mouth was empty, and then cough up enough nickels for everybody to buy an ice-cream cone.

Eventually Shloime set up in business for himself, taking a floor in a building on Mayor Street, prospering as a furrier to the carriage trade. He married one of Zelnicker’s shrewish daughters, a social worker, and she bore him two sons, Menachim and Tovia.

Years later, flying to New York, Moses was unable to concentrate on his book because two men, across the aisle, were playing with pocket-size computer games, new at the time, that kept going ping ping ping. Both men carried clutch purses, the top three buttons of their silk shirts undone, revealing sparkly gold necklaces with chai medallions. Finally Moses couldn’t take it any more. “I would be enormously grateful,” he said, “if you put those toys away.”

“Hey, aren’t you Moses Berger?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I thought. I’m Matthew Bishop and this is my yucky kid brother Tracy. Belle de Jour Furs. You want to buy your chick a wrap, I’ll give you some deal.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My father once told me he used to shmooze with you when you were just a kid.”

“Bishop?”

“Shloime Bishinsky.”

“Oh my God, how is he?”

“Hell, didn’t you know? He left for the ultimate fur auction in the sky eight years ago. The big C. Wasn’t he a card though, eh, Moe?”

1951 IT WAS, and as soon as the news was confirmed at McGill, a jubilant Moses tiptoed into the kitchen, embraced his mother from behind, twirled her around and told her.

“Sh,” she said, “L.B.’s working.”

Moses burst into L.B.’s study, daring to disturb him. “Flash. We interrupt this program to announce that dashing debonair Moses Berger has just won a Rhodes scholarship.”

L.B. carefully blotted the page he had been working on and then slowly screwed the top back on his Parker 51. “In my day,” he said, “it would have been considered presumptuous for a Jewish boy to even put himself forward for such an honour.”

“I’m going to apply to Balliol.”

“D.H. Lawrence,” L.B. said, “who managed to get by with no more distinguished a formal education than I had, once wrote that the King’s College chapel reminded him of an overturned sow.”

“King’s is in Cambridge. Besides, I won’t be attending chapel.”

“This country has always been big enough for me. Mind you, I have published over there. The New Statesman. A letter about Ernest Bevin’s anti-Semitic foreign policy that led to a dispute that went on for weeks. You could take my greetings to Kingsley Martin. He’s the editor.”

EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER Moses flew home. L.B. had suffered his first heart attack. Once more he had failed to win the Governor General’s award, his Collected Poems not making the grade.

“It would break their heart to give it to a Jew,” Bessie said.

L.B. was in bed, propped up by pillows, writing on a pad. Pulpy, pale, his eyes wobbly with fear. “How long can you stay?” he asked.

“Ten days. Maybe two weeks.”

“I like the short story you sent me. I think it showed promise.”

“I’ve submitted it to The New Yorker.”

L.B. laughed out loud. He wiped tears from the corners of his eyes with his knuckles. “What chutzpah. Such hubris. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk.”

“If they don’t want it, they’ll send it back. No harm done.”

“You should have rewritten the story with my help and tried it on one of the little magazines here. Had you the sense to consult me, an old hand in such matters, I also would have advised you to use a pseudonym. You don’t want to be compared to L.B.”

“Would you like me to read to you now?”

“I’d better sleep. Wait. I see your friend Sam Birenbaum interviews writers for The New York Times these days. I don’t know how many times I fed that fatty here, but now that he’s a bigshot reporter he can’t even remember my phone number.”

“Paw, I’m sure he’s assigned to do those interviews. He doesn’t pick and choose.”

“And why would he want to interview me anyway? I don’t come from the south and I’m not a pederast.”

“Do you want me to speak to him?”

“Begging is beneath me. Besides, he’s your friend. Do what you think best.”

Things got worse once L.B. found out that Moses had given The New Yorker the house in Outremont as his return address.

“When they turn down your story I don’t want you to be drunk for three days. I don’t need it.”

Moses hid his bottle of Scotch behind books in the library. He sucked peppermint Life Savers.

“Bring me the mail,” his father demanded each morning. “All of it.” One night, after they had both gone to sleep, Moses sat up drinking in the library, going through The Collected Poems of L.B. Berger. So much anger, such feeling. He pitched red hot all right, but he didn’t always find the plate. Many of the poems were clearly vitiated by sentimentality or self-pity. W.B. Yeats he was not. Gerard Manley Hopkins he was not. Yes, but did the poems have any merit? Moses, sliding in sweat, poured himself another three fingers of Scotch. He shirked from deciding, unable to accept such a responsibility. After all, he held a life in his hands. His father’s life. All those years of dedication and frustrated ambition. The sacrifices, the humiliations. The neglect. Moses thrust the book aside. He preferred to remember his father and himself as they once were. Man and boy trudging through snow to synagogue halls, holding hands when they chanced on slippery patches.

Each morning that the postman failed to shove a big brown envelope from The New Yorker through the mail slot L.B.’s mood darkened. Everything Moses did seemed to irritate him. “You’re not on death-watch duty here,” he said. “You don’t have to hang around day and night. Go look up some of your friends.”

But if Moses didn’t return in time for dinner he would say, “Did you come here to comfort your father or to chase the kind of girls who hang around downtown bars?”

L.B. was no longer confined to his bed, but he was wasting, fragile. Told to shed twenty pounds, he had clearly dropped thirty, maybe more. His clothes hung badly on a suddenly scrawny frame. He no longer hurried about the house, a man with appointments to keep and deadlines to meet, but shuffled, his slippers flapping. He seemed to be out of breath a good deal of the day and inclined to wheeze in his sleep. A frightened Moses grasped that his father, that powerhouse of his childhood, pronouncing at the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth, was actually a short man with bad teeth, a bulbous nose, and weak eyes.

Moses took to drinking heavily, often staying out until the early hours of the morning and sleeping in late. His mother spoke to him in the kitchen. “You mustn’t be a disappointment to L.B. It would break his heart his only son a drunkard.”

“What about your heart?”

“If you’re flying back on Thursday you’d better give me your socks and shirts tonight.”

Bessie Berger née Finkelman came from an observant family. Her father had been a ritual slaughterer. When he died L.B. had gone grudgingly to the funeral. “Your grandfather,” he told Moses, “was a very superstitious type. An apostle, if I dare use such a word, of the Ravaruska Rebbe. Your zeyda, the torturer of cattle, was buried with a twig in his hand by those crazies so that when the Messiah comes, blowing on his shofar, he can dig his way out to follow him to Jerusalem. Isn’t that right, Bessie?”

L.B. never brought her flowers or took her to dinner or even told her that she looked nice. Now her hands were rough, angry red, the nails clipped short. Embarrassed by the tracery of protruding veins in her legs she wore surgical stockings even in the heat of summer.

“Maw,” Moses asked, “do we own the house now or is it still heavily mortgaged?”

“Don’t talk foolishness. Go read to him. He likes that.”

The next morning, while a badly hungover Moses slept late, a big brown self-addressed envelope from The New Yorker shot through the front-door slot. L.B. heard the thud, recognized it, and immediately fetched the envelope and took it into his study, shutting the door behind him. He sunk into the chair behind his desk, overlooked by his own portrait: L.B. in profile, pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight. Well, he thought, it was to be expected. If his poetry wasn’t classy enough for Mr. Harold know-nothing Ross, what chance had a first short story by a fumbling neophyte talent? L.B. addressed himself impatiently to opening his own mail first. There was a royalty statement from Ryerson Press with a cheque for $37.25 clipped to it, as well as a note from his editor. He regretted that there seemed to be no copies of The Collected Poems in stock at Ogilvy’s, Classic’s, or Burton’s, but this was not the fault of the Ryerson sales force. Demand for poetry was small. Unfortunately there would be no second edition. A CBC radio producer, another obvious ignoramus, wrote that while he considered L.B.’s notion of dramatizing stories from Tales of the Diaspora for radio an interesting one, his colleagues did not share his enthusiasm. Would he try them again next season? T.S. Eliot, of Faber and Faber, his anti-Semitism a matter of record, thanked him for submitting a copy of The Collected Poems, but.… Infuriatingly, the letter was signed by a secretary in Mr. Eliot’s absence.

Finally L.B. reached for the big brown envelope from The New Yorker and slit it with his leather-handled letter opener which was a gift, in lieu of a fee, for a reading he had given at the B’nai Jacob synagogue in Hamilton, Ontario. Then he retired to his bedroom, removing his pince-nez, rubbing his nose, the small tic of discomfort starting in the back of his neck. It was noon before he heard Moses stumbling about the kitchen and called out to him. “Bring your coffee into my bedroom and shut the door behind you.”

Moses did as he was asked and L.B. took his hand and stroked it. “Moishele,” he said, his eyes shiny with tears, “you think I don’t know how it feels right here?” Withdrawing his hand, he pressed it to his skittering damaged heart. “My work hasn’t always been in such demand. L.B. Berger wasn’t born famous. I’ve also had rejections from editors who print crap, so long as it is written by their friends, but who couldn’t tell Pushkin from Ogden Nash. I have also suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Prizes going to hacks with the right connections when it was obvious I could write circles around them. You have to have a thick skin, my boy. You want to be an artist your motto has to be nil desperandum.”

Then he handed Moses the envelope. It had already been slit open and Moses could just make out the printed rejection slip clipped to his manuscript.

“The next attack could be curtains for me,” L.B. said, squeezing his hand again, “so let me tell you that I have always expected you to follow in my footsteps, but not to be intimidated by them. I have such hopes for you. I have always loved you beyond anybody, including your mother.”

Moses swallowed hard, his stomach rising, bound to betray him he feared. Like father, like son.

“Now this is not to be interpreted as a complaint against a good woman. A loyal woman. A real baleboosteh. But, to be frank, she has never been a true soul-mate for me. What a man like me needed was refinement, intellectual companionship, like Chopin got from Georges Sand or Voltaire from the Marquise du Châtelet. Whatever gossip you hear after I’m gone, whatever letters future biographers turn up, I want you to understand. I was never unfaithful to your mother, not in my heart of hearts. But I had need of ladies from time to time who I could talk to as an equal. My soul cried out for it. Don’t look at me like that. You’re a grown man now. We should be able to talk. You think I feel guilty? The hell I do. My family always came first with me. Costing me plenty. You think I ever would have signed on with Mr. Bernard, that behayma, if it wasn’t because I wanted to do right by your mother, but you above all? Do you have any idea how many hoops I’ve jumped through there? Furnishing that gangster with a library. Feeding that hooligan literary allusions for his speeches. He couldn’t even pronounce the words. I had to coach him. A man who sits glued to the TV for the Ed Sullivan show. You have no idea what I have endured at his table so that your future welfare would not be sacrificed on the anvil of my art. He’s coarse beyond belief, Moishe. Even a sailor would blush to hear him in full flight.”

Moses, about to protest, was dismissed with an impatient wave of the hand.

“Don’t start. I know what your big-shot reporter friend Birenbaum thinks. I heard him say it to you behind my back. ‘Who does he think he is the way he dresses? His hair. Beethoven.’ You buy a poet in this poor excuse for a country, it doesn’t honour its literary giants, you want value for money. Long hair, a cape.”

Moses fiddled absently with the flap of the large brown envelope on his lap.

“Hey, wipe your eyes please. Shed no tears for me. At least your father didn’t have to feign a hunchback or carry a jester’s stick with a bell attached to it. Moishe, I smell talent in you and I have a nose for it.”

“You had absolutely no right to open my mail.”

“And maybe you had a right to give The New Yorker this as your return address? Or are you so self-centred, Mr. Rhodes Scholar, that you didn’t realize it was meant as a provocation?”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Don’t you dare look at me like that. I’m your father and it goes without saying I forgive you this childish business with The New Yorker. It mustn’t upset you either because it was only natural. You know your Oedipus and so do I. I never published there—not that I ever wanted to—so you would, administering a slap in the face to old L.B. Okay, that narishkeit is over with and you know what? You’re goddamn lucky. Had they accepted your story you would have gone on to write more formula fiction tailored to their commercial expectations. Moishe, you have escaped a trap. Now I want you to continue to attempt to write and when the time comes I will try your stories on editors who can be trusted. But let’s get right down to work, eh? Because the next time you come home I could have shuffled off this mortal coil. You know something? I’m really glad we’re having this talk. Letting our hearts speak out before it’s too late. I haven’t felt as close to you since you were a little boy. My page, I used to say. So say something.”

Moses fled the room, his stomach heaving, sinking to his knees before the toilet bowl just in time. Then he dug out his bottle of Scotch from its hiding place. When he finally entered the kitchen he found that L.B., celebrating his escape from a migraine, was already into his favourite meal: scrambled eggs with lox, potatoes fried in onions, bagels lathered with cream cheese. “Sit down, my boy. Maw has made enough for both of us.”

“Some baleboosteh, isn’t she?”

“I thought the conversation we had in there was strictly entre nous.”

Bessie, sniffing trouble, looked closely at her son. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Our neophyte artist here has had his first rejection slip and he’s taking it hard instead of appreciating how lucky he is.”

“I would like to say something,” Moses said. L.B. shot out of his chair, snapping to attention.

“Not all neglected writers are unjustifiably neglected.”

“How dare you speak to your father like that?”

“Here is a boy,” L.B. said, “once my pride and joy, bright with promise, who cannot accept responsibility for his own failures, but would lay them on his father’s white head. Well, I’ve got news for you. I didn’t make you a drunk. I deserved better.”

Five

The night before the big brown envelope from The New Yorker shot through the mail slot Moses had been a guest at Anita Gursky’s first wedding. Actually he hadn’t been invited. He had been strolling aimlessly down Sherbrooke Street, hard by McGill, past the sullen grey limestone mansions built by the Scottish robber barons who had once ruled the country. Self-absorbed, he passed the former homes of shipping and rail and mining magnates who had flourished in a time, sublime for them, when there had been no income tax or anti-trust laws or succession duties. Sir Arthur Minton’s old house, now a private club; the Clarkson home, converted into a fraternity house; Sir William Van Horne’s former residence with its delightfully loopy greenhouse. And then he ran into Rifka Schneiderman, of all people. Rifka Schneiderman, who had used to belt out “The Cloakworkers’ Union Is a No-Good Union” on the other side of the mountain, but a world away, in the dining room of the cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance Street. Rifka, to his astonishment, had grown into a fetching if rather overdressed young lady, her once-unruly hair tamed by a poodle cut. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “I thought you were studying at Oxford or Cambridge or something.”

“My father had a heart attack.”

Rifka was to be a bridesmaid at the wedding. However her fiancé, Sheldon Kaplan, had been struck with one of his allergy attacks. Rifka, her mood sentimental, asked Moses to escort her instead.

“Only if you promise to sing your song,” he said.

Anita Gursky had met her first husband on the ski slopes of Davos. A New Yorker, the wayward son of a German-Jewish banking family, he hoped to make his name as a tennis player. Life came to the wedding at the Ritz-Carlton.

Becky Schwartz leaned closer to Harvey. “Don’t look now,” she said, “but the Cotés just walked in looking like they smelled something bad. How can she wear a backless dress with those shoulders like chicken wings? I said don’t look.”

“I’m not.”

“I thought I told you to cut your nose hairs before we went out. Feh!”

Plump, double-chinned Georges Ducharme, parliamentary secretary to the minister of transport, winked at Mimi Boisvert. “I’m going to be the first to boogie-woogie with the rabbi’s wife.”

“Tais-toi, Georges.”

“Do not talk in the language of the peasantry here. Speak Yiddish.”

Cynthia Hodge-Taylor was there, so was Neil Moffat, Tom Clarkson, a Cunningham, two Pitneys, and other insouciant young Westmounters. Their far more punctilious parents would not have blessed a Gursky wedding with their presence, but for the young set it was sport, and possibly, just possibly, a chance to see their photographs published in Life.

Jim MacIntyre said, “My father, you know, was one of the government prosecutors in the trial. When Solomon was confronted by a particularly damning piece of testimony all he could say was I AM THAT I AM, and right there, my father swore, the temperature in the courtroom dropped by twenty degrees. The judge looked like he was going to have a stroke.”

There were thousands of red roses in vases all over the ballroom. At the appropriate moment, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians swung into “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”, and Mr. Bernard took to the floor for the first dance, tears streaming down his face as he foxtrotted cheek-to-cheek with Anita.

Moses danced with Kathleen O’Brien, whom he had chatted with more than once at The Lantern. “Come on,” she said, “We’re going to get some fresh air.”

“I’m not drunk.”

“Your dad wrote a poem for the bride and groom. In exactly five minutes Becky Schwartz will step up to the microphone and read it aloud.”

Outside, Moses said, “Well, he always wanted to be a poet laureate.”

“I hope you don’t drink like this in Oxford. I believe your father is counting on you to come home with a First.”

“Actually nothing would delight him more than my being sent down.”

“Now now now.”

Back in the ballroom she led him to the table where Mr. Morrie was rooted with his wife, Ida, and their enormous pimply daughter, Charna. “He’s the sweet one,” Kathleen whispered before making the introductions. “Be nice.”

“How’s your father?” Mr. Morrie asked.

“Getting better.”

“Thank God for that.”

“Is his father the writer?” Charna asked.

“And how.”

“Big deal,” she said, glaring at Moses. “I could write a book too. I just wouldn’t know how to put it into words.”

“Bless you,” Ida said.

Mr. Morrie squeezed Moses’s arm. “Don’t think I don’t know all about you from your father, Mr. Rhodes Scholar.”

Responding to a kick from Kathleen, Moses said, “Oh yes, thank you,” but he was watching Barney, who was flirting with Rifka Schneiderman on the dance floor.

Barney, they said, still hoped to be the one to draw the sword from the stone, becoming McTavish’s next CEO. Certainly he had done everything possible to establish his claim. While Lionel fiddled, he had driven a truck for McTavish. He had spent a summer in Skye, working in the Loch Edmond’s Mist distillery, starting out by raking the barley floor, absorbing what he could in the mash house and then moving on to tend to the worm tubs in the stillhouse. On his return to Canada, he had become an expert on cooperage, and travelled out west to sit in on grain purchase negotiations.

Rifka quit the dance floor, leaving Barney standing there in the middle of a number, laughing too loud. Then Barney joined Lionel, the two of them swooping from table to table, drawing closer.

Lionel had bet Barney five thousand dollars that he could drink the most champagne without upchucking and that he could get laid before midnight without having to pay for it. Bottle in hand, he bounced from table to table, Barney trailing after. Lionel saying, “Hi, Jewel, want to stroke my cock?” And at another table, “Any of you girls want to fuck?”

(Years later a best-selling hagiographer of the family wrote, in a chapter titled “Lionel as Prince Hal”, that though many took Lionel to be a vulgarian at the time, lacking the royal jelly, the truth is “he was a lonely young man, lonely as a lighthouse keeper on Valentine’s Day, overwhelmed at a tender age by the secret knowledge that one bright dawn his would be the keys to the Gursky kingdom, even though he would have preferred breeding horses in Elysian fields.” An abiding passion, a footnote pointed out, that led to the establishment of The Sweet Sue Stables in Louisville, Kentucky, the name changed to Big Cat after his first divorce.)

Finally the Gursky scions swayed over the same table and Barney heard his cousin say, “But everything’s settled. It’s all going to be mine one day. So think carefully before you turn me down, honey.”

Barney grabbed Lionel by the lapels and shook him. “What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t your father tell you?”

Barney, the colour drained from his face, descended on Mr.Morrie’s table, but he wasn’t there. Barney found him in the men’s room, washing his hands. Blind to the presence of another man in one of the cubicles, Barney began to curse his father for allowing Mr. Bernard to swindle him out of his patrimony. Soaked in sweat, his chest heaving, Barney said, “If Uncle Bernard put a saucer of milk on the floor you would get down on all fours and lick it up.”

“Please, Barney, don’t be angry with me. I love you.”

“Big fucken deal.”

“When you are thirty-one years old you will inherit millions.”

“I’ll have the money right now or I’ll sue. In fact I might fight this

in court anyway.”

“But, yingele, I signed the papers years ago,” Mr. Morrie said, reaching out to touch him.

“You think it would be difficult to prove that you were mentally incompetent even then?” Barney asked, knocking his father’s hands away and fleeing the men’s room.

Moses, in the cubicle, heard the door slam and thought both men had left. But when he came out Mr. Morrie was still there, looking dazed.

“Oh, my. You must have heard everything.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Barney’s a good boy, the best, he just had too much to drink tonight.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“I’m feeling, well, a little dizzy. You could help me back to my table maybe.”

Moses took his arm.

“Barney’s an outstanding person. I want you to know that.”

Six

1973. Following his humiliating altercation with Beatrice at the Ritz, the insufferable Tom Clarkson behaving impeccably, which only exacerbated matters, Moses had gone out on a bender. Ten days later he found himself being shaken awake by a black cleaning lady. He was lying in a puddle of something vile in the bathroom of a sleazy bar in Hull, his hair knotted and caked with blood, his jacket torn, his wallet open on the cracked tiles, emptied of cash and credit cards. Carleton dismissed him.

Idiot. Blind man. Cuckold. Driving back to the Townships, Moses missed exit 106 and had to continue on the autoroute as far as Magog, backtracking to his cabin, his Toyota riding low, laden with hastily packed suitcases and all the books he had accumulated in Ottawa. A telegram was tacked to his front door. From Henry. The ravens were gathering. Well, the hell with that.

Moses got right back into his car and went to pick up his mail. Legion Hall, who fetched it for him, usually dumped it at The Caboose when he was away.

Legion Hall was an imaginative man. According to Strawberry, Legion Hall and his two brothers, Glen and Willy, had joined the army in the spring of 1940. They were sorting out the barn for their father, shovelling cowshit, black flies feasting on them, blood streaming down their faces, when suddenly Glen threw down his pitchfork. “This guy on the radio this morning said democracy was in peril or some crap like that. He says our way of life is threatened.”

“About time too.”

“I’m joining up.”

“Good thinking. Me too.”

“Mister Man.”

Glen’s head was shot off at Dieppe and Willy was blown apart by a land-mine in Italy. Legion Hall, however, saw real action only once, in Holland, and decided it wasn’t for him. The next morning a colonel found him on his hands and knees with a hammer and chisel outside the field mess tent. “What are you doing, soldier?”

“What does it look like I’m doing, you prick? I’m cutting the grass.” It was the guardhouse for him. “And then,” Strawberry said, “this bunch of tests he done for a Jew doctor before Legion Hall was discharged with a twenty-five percent mental disability pension. I woulda scored him fifty percent easy.”

Now Legion Hall, wearing his regimental beret at a jaunty angle, worked all the bars on the 243 and 105 on Remembrance Day, selling poppies, possibly even turning in some of the money.

For the most part, Moses’s mail was made up of magazines: The New York Review of Books, the TLS, the Economist, the New Republic, and so on. He retrieved it, retreated to his cabin, flopped down on his unmade bed, and slept for eighteen hours, wakening at seven the next morning. Following his second pot of black coffee, fortified with cognac, he sat down at his desk. Sorting out papers he stumbled on a letter he had been unable to find for weeks. It was from the lady of the eyes of a different colour. “Having rambled on at such unpardonable length and to no point, let alone catharsis,” Diana McClure’s letter concluded, “I have taken the liberty of having Mr. Hobson send you a memento. Consider it compensation for my having been elusive for so long and finally proving such a bore. Are you, perhaps, a reader of detective fiction? Patricia High-smith, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James. I am addicted to their work, but I have always found the mysteries far more compelling than their resolutions, and most assuredly that is also the case with my belated ‘confessions.’ The cherry wood table I have arranged to have sent to you (delivery prepaid no matter what they tell you) is the one Solomon finished for me on the Friday that I was unable to pick up the bookcase. Central heating tends to suck the moisture out of the wood. It should be treated regularly with beeswax (available from Eddy’s Hardware, 4412 Sherbrooke St. W.).

“To this day I still vacillate between considering my failure to appear for tea with Solomon that Friday as most unfortunate or, conversely, a blessing for both of us. Of course this is all idle conjecture, quite useless now, but seated in my wheelchair overlooking the garden I can no longer tend, I am much given to it. The roses are badly in need of deadheading, the pods swollen. A boy with a fishing pole has just passed on his way to the brook, his eyes understandably averted. Dr. McAlpine says my hair will grow in again, but I doubt that there will be time enough. I must stop this rambling right away. Goodbye, Moses Berger, and do please remember to treat the table as instructed. Perhaps you could make a note in your desk diary or wall calendar.”

Moses continued to rummage through his desk. In a bottom drawer filled with angry letters-to-the-editor he had written but never mailed, he came across his silver cognac flask and a cheque for one hundred pounds from the TLS, payment for a book review that he had given up for lost. Then, under everything else, he found Mr. Morrie’s handwritten memoir. Getting him to compose it, Moses recalled, had required some fancy footwork. The result was pathetic, a masterpiece of evasion. But things could still be learned from it, even as Kremlinologists pried the occasional pearl of truth out of Pravda. The analogy pleased Moses. For after all was said and done what he had become, if anything, beyond a degenerate drunk and cuckold, was a Gurskyologist. The only one armed with flint among all the hagiographers in the woodpile.

Moses moved to the cherry wood table, his most prized possession, shook the pages free of mouse droppings and began to skim through them. Mr. Morrie, in his opening paragraph, ventured that it was his intention to hit the high spots in his history of the development of the Gursky empire, begging indulgence in advance for any omissions, which could be blamed on an old man’s faulty memory. So in 122 closely written pages there was not a single mention of Bert Smith. Mr. Morrie started out by saying that his father, Aaron Gursky, had decided to emigrate to Canada in 1897 (with his wife, Fanny, who was five months pregnant with Bernard) “so that he could raise his family under the British flag, which was famous for fair play.” But in fact that wasn’t exactly how it happened.

Raw, illicit whisky was not only the well-head of the Gursky billions, it was also what indirectly floated Ephraim’s legal descendants to Canada in the first place. Moses was able to establish as much through a close study of the Royal Commission Report on the Liquor Trade, circa 1860–70, and by chasing down every available history of the formative years of the North West Mounted Police. This led him to RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, where he sweettalked his way into the archives by flaunting his Rhodes scholarship, his First in History at Balliol, and pretending that he was researching an essay on Fort Whoop-Up for History Today.

Sorting through old diaries, journals, and charge sheets until his eyes ached, Moses had been rewarded by the discovery that, in 1861, Ephraim was ensconced in a log cabin in the foothills of the Rockies with a Peigan squaw and three children. He turned his hand to making Whoop-Up Bug Juice from a recipe that called for a handful or two of red pepper, a half-gallon of Jamaica ginger, a quart of molasses, say a pound of chewing tobacco, and a quart of whisky. This lethal brew was then diluted with creek water, heated to the boiling point, and carted off to a tent outside Fort Whoop-Up, hard by the Montana border. Ephraim peddled it by the cupful to Blackfoot Indians in exchange for fur and horses. It was the unhappy combination of unquenchable Blackfoot thirst and an endless need for horses to satisfy it that led to a problem. The Indians were driven to stealing horses from settlers and Hudson’s Bay forts. Crazy drunk they also burned down a trading post or two for sport. They robbed and they raped, and Ephraim, according to one report, had to shoot a couple of them as an example when they had the effrontery to demand undiluted whisky, that is to say firewater that could be ignited by a match.

There were other skirmishes, more shootings and burnings, and eventually news of the unrest reached Canada’s first prime minister in faraway Ottawa. Sir John A. Macdonald, a prodigious drinker himself, created something called the Mounted Rifles to cope with the trouble. However, Washington took umbrage at the aggressive Canadians imposing an armed force of three hundred men so close to the border. The resourceful Sir John A. reached for his pen and renamed the force the Mounted Police. The fabled riders of the plain were born:

Before the North West Mounted Police ever finished their punishing eight-hundred-mile-long march to Fort Whoop-Up, rampaging American whisky-runners slaughtered a band of Assiniboines at Battle Creek. Ephraim, at this point, was being supplied with rotgut whisky out of Fort Benton. Rather than wait to explain himself to the newly formed police corps, possibly being required to answer for the death of two Blackfoot, he obviously thought it more politic to skedaddle. And then, for a long while, Moses lost him, unaware of where he went next.

An enigma that was resolved when Moses came by the journal wherein Solomon recounted the tales he had been told by his grandfather on their journey to the Polar Sea. Tales filtered through an old man’s faulty memory and written down by Solomon many years later. Tales that Moses suspected had been burnished in the service of not one, but two outsized egos.

In any event, according to Solomon, his grandfather next ventured as far as Russia, disposing of a cargo of beaver pelts in St. Petersburg, and then carrying on to Minsk, where his parents had escaped from. Walking out, early in the reign of Nicholas I, when among other decrees it was ruled that Jewish children should be forcibly taken from their parents at the age of twelve and be compelled to serve in the czar’s army for as long as twenty-five years.

Ephraim, wandering into the synagogue in Minsk in time for the Friday evening service, discovered that his father was still remembered fondly. “The best cantor we ever had,” an old man told him.

A week later Ephraim served as cantor for the sabbath services, the congregation amazed by the soaring golden voice of this Jew who didn’t wear a capot, but dressed like a Russian prince and was rumoured to frequent their taverns, demanding service. Wary of his reckless behaviour, they nevertheless offered him his father’s old post in the synagogue. Ephraim declined the honour, but lingered in Minsk long enough to impulsively marry a certain Sarah Luchinsky, who bore him a son called Aaron. Then there was an incident in a tavern and Ephraim was obliged to flee again. He settled his wife and child in reasonable style in a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement and soon, bored with both of them, left the country, but continued to send them funds from France and England and finally Canada.

Ephraim continued to wander, running guns to New Orleans during the American Civil War, he told Solomon, and then dropping out of sight until 1881, the year a swirl of pogroms followed the assassination of Alexander II by terrorists. Ephraim, his nagging wife safely dead, his son now married, eventually sent the feckless Aaron steamship tickets and enough money to come to Canada with Fanny. But Ephraim did not care for the adult Aaron any more than he had for the simpering child, and neither did he warm to Fanny. So he dumped them on a homestead he had acquired on the prairie and disappeared again.

“My dear father,” Mr. Morrie wrote, “had been poorly advised about the Canadian climate and brought cherry and peach tree saplings and tobacco seeds with him.”

They arrived in April, greeted by snow and frost, obliged to retreat to a hotel in the nearest railway town until the thaw. Then Aaron built himself a sod hut, acquired a team of oxen and a cow, and planted his first wheat crop. It froze in the field. So Aaron bought pots and pans, tea, kerosene and patent medicines from a wholesaler and peddled to the farmers. Bernard was born, and then Solomon and Morrie.

Meanwhile Ephraim scaled the Chilkoot Pass into the Klondike. “He told me,” Solomon wrote in his journal, “that he found work as a piano player in a saloon in Dawson, doubling as a cashier. The drunken prospectors paid for their booze and girls with gold dust, Ephraim usually the one to handle the scales, joshing the men, distracting them, even as he ran his fingers through his Vaselined pompadour. Then, before going to bed every night, Ephraim washed the gold dust out of his hair. Eventually he put together a stake of $25,000, most of which he lost in a poker game in the Dominion Saloon.”

It was spring before Ephraim returned to the prairie and settled down in a tarpaper shack on the reservation with Lena Green Stockings. From time to time he looked in on Aaron and his family, mocking him, a Jew peddler; needling Fanny; and teasing the children. His visits, Solomon noted in his journal, were dreaded. But Mr. Morrie wrote, “My grandfather was a very colourful man, more interesting than many you’ve read about in my favourite Reader’s Digest feature, The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Ever Met. How we looked forward to his joining us at the sabbath table! His had been a very hard life, filled with adversity. The poor man lost his beloved wife while he was still in his prime and never found anybody to replace her in his heart. He could speak Indian and Eskimo and set bones better than any doctor. Sadly, though he lived to a very ripe old age, he didn’t last long enough to see his grandchildren succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He would have been very proud for sure.”

On his visits Ephraim reproached his grandchildren for their ignorance, saving his worst sarcasm for Solomon, because he had Ephraim’s hair, his eyes, and his nose.

Ephraim waited and watched and when he adjudged Solomon ready, he was there as the boy came tumbling out of school into the thickly falling snow; he was there standing on the stern of his long sled, stinking of rum, his eyes hot. Instead of turning right at the CNR tracks he took a left fork on the trail leading out to the prairie.

“I thought we were going to Montana,” Solomon said.

“We’re heading north.”

“Where?”

“Far.”

Seven

It depended on whom you talked to. Some said certainly six, seven million, others swore ten, maybe more. Anyway in 1973 that was the scuttlebutt on how much Harvey Schwartz had already made for himself hoeing the hundreds of millions ripening in Jewel, the Gursky family investment trust, as well as riding shotgun over Acorn Properties, the Gursky international real-estate company, its estimated value a billion plus at the time. Mind you, a good chunk of Harvey’s fortune was tied up in vested shares. But it was the weight of the money, they said, that explained why Harvey chewed his fingernails and suffered from insomnia, dyspepsia, and agonizing bowel movements. The gossips, as is so often the case, were wrong. Even before Harvey had accumulated his millions, he had been consumed by the secret fear that one day they would come for him. He would be falsely accused of a crime. Robbery, rape, murder, take your pick. One day he would be framed and they would come for him, his protestations of innocence unavailing unless he had a foolproof alibi. So Harvey, who knew he could be arrested when he was least expecting it (any time, any place) constantly worked at clearing his name. Once, at ease by the poolside of the Tamarack Country Club, on the verge of snoozing, Harvey came quickly alert when he grasped that everybody else was discussing the Kleinfort murder case. “You know,” Harvey said, as soon as he had the group’s attention, “I wouldn’t even know how to handle a gun.”

Harvey’s obsession crystallized when he saw The Wrong Man, an Alfred Hitchcock movie inspired by the true story of a bass-fiddle player at the Stork Club, who was mistakenly identified in a police lineup and charged with robbery, only to be saved at the last moment when the real culprit struck again. Harvey, who had seen the movie three times, suffered with Henry Fonda throughout.

Harvey knew. Harvey understood. So naturally he took precautions. If, for instance, he went to a movie with his wife, Becky (whose testimony in his favour wouldn’t count), he not only held on to the stubs, filing them with the date, but also did his best to make his presence felt. He might thrust a hundred-dollar bill at the ticket seller, apologizing for not having a smaller banknote with him, but making himself known. Once inside, he would look for anybody he knew, greeting even the slightest acquaintance effusively.

—Yes, on the night of the rape I definitely saw Mr. Schwartz at the Westmount Square cinema.

Checking into a hotel in New York, Chicago, or wherever, Harvey donned surgical gloves as soon as the bellboy had set down his bags and departed the suite. He searched the closets, the shower (since Psycho), and every dresser drawer, unwilling to leave his fingerprints about until he was satisfied that no bloodied knives or incriminating guns had been left behind by a previous occupant, setting him up. Harvey also insisted that his chauffeur obey all traffic regulations, especially speed limits, lest some disadvantaged mother, crazed with greed, throw her baby under his wheels, intending to sue for millions. Then, in the days when he was still obliged to fly commercial, he never accepted a seat next to an unaccompanied lady, lest she was a plant, set in place to hit him with an indecent assault suit. Happily, nowadays, he enjoyed access to the Gursky jets, thanks to Mr. Bernard’s largesse.

The truth was Mr. Bernard could be surprisingly caring, treating Harvey like his most favoured acolyte, thinking aloud in his presence. He told him that if he were prime minister he could settle the national deficit one-two-three. He felt strongly that there was too much screwing without rubbers in the Third World and he would put a stop to that. If the Israelis only had the sense to call on him he would also settle the Arabs’ hash.

“You know, Mr. Bernard, we should keep a record of your table talk.”

“For future generations?”

“Yes.”

So the sessions began, Mr. Bernard pontificating.

“You know what’s the greatest invention of western man?”

“No.”

“Interest.”

Mr. Bernard munching cashews, sipping Mascada Blanc, reminiscing.

“Abraham Lincoln (I’m not knocking him, he freed the niggers) he was born in a log cabin in a warm climate, which couldn’t have been that bad. But for Bernard Gursky it was a sod hut on the freezing prairie, which was all my poor father could afford at the time, Ephraim he wouldn’t give him shit. I was Ephraim’s favourite, you know. Big deal. Ephraim always had money for whores and gambling, yesirree, but for his own son? Bupkes. How do I know your tape recorder is working?”

Harvey shifted briefly into playback. It was working. “You think Westmount can be cold? I’ll tell you cold. When it drops to sixty below, even with the kitchen stove roaring all night, the water pails would be solid ice in the morning. Then it’s spring, and no matter how good you fill in the chinks in a sod hut when it rains it pisses on your head. Never mind. You also collect the rain-water in barrels off the sod-and-poplar roof to help with the water supply. Otherwise, kid, you are dragging water up from the spring in galvanized pails day after day.

“In the winter my mother, God bless her soul, she used to melt snow in tubs for water. For heating we collected buffalo chips. The buffalo were long gone, but their skulls were still everywhere. Hey, how did Bernard Gursky, that empire-builder, make his first money? Ordinary people might like to know. I made my first money catching gophers, but now,” Mr. Bernard said, slapping the table and laughing until tears came to his eyes, “now I have my own, eh, you little runt?”

Harvey’s freckled cheeks shone stinging red. “Hey, I was only teasing. I made a funny. No hard feelings, eh?”

“No.”

Another day.

“Every family has a cross to bear, a skeleton in the closet, that’s life.

Eleanor Roosevelt, she’s been to our house, you know. Couldn’t her father afford a dentist? Her teeth. Oy vey. Her people were in the opium trade in China, but you wouldn’t read that in The Ladies’ Home Journal or wherever she wrote ‘My Day’. Joe Kennedy was a whoremaster from day one and he swindled Gloria Swanson, but they never sang about that in Camelot. Take King George V even, an OBE was too good for me. One of his sons was a hopeless drunk, another was a bum-fucker and a drug addict, and that dumb-bell the Duke of Windsor he threw in the sponge for a tart. You want the Duke and Duchess for a charity ball, you rent them like a tux from Tip-Top. Royalty they call that. Me, my cross to bear was Solomon, though God knows I tried my best for him, it’s on the record. He was what they call a bad seed. You think it doesn’t grieve me? It grieves me plenty, my brother to die like that, besmirching the family name to this day. Hey, that Solomon Gursky he ordered Willy McGraw shot dead at the railway station. And those Gursky brothers were once bootleggers. Oh me oh my. Oh dearie me. We can’t have them here for tea and cucumber sandwiches on bread made from Lepage’s glue.

“Did I ever tell you what happened just before I bought our first railroad hotel, and if anybody says that was Solomon’s doing just look it up, eh, and see whose name the deed was in. All we’ve got to our name at this point is my father’s general store and maybe four thousand dollars in the pushke. Correction. We had four thousand dollars until Solomon stole it so’s he can sit in on the biggest poker game in town. He’s going to risk the family’s hard-earned money at the table, everything, and win or lose the bastard’s going to run. Bye bye family. Bye bye family savings. My poor mother and father, and Morrie it goes without saying, are going sob sob sob in the kitchen. Nobody knows where the game is but I know where Solomon’s whores can be found. The old Indian one on the reservation and the Polack with the big knockers at the hotel. I give them a message for my darling brother. Tell him he runs as far as Timbuktu and I’ll find him and have the cops put him in prison and he can rot there. He got the message all right and he comes home but he’s so ashamed to face us he runs away the next day and joins the army. And while he’s making his paid tour of Europe, ending up an officer in the flying corps yet by forging a university degree, I’m putting together a chain of hotels, working eighteen hours a day for me was nothing, putting a third of everything in his name because that’s how Bernard Gursky is built. Family is family. He comes home, does he say, Bernard, I don’t deserve such a big share? Does he observe I’ve done real good? Forget it.

“You know in the bad old days hijacking was a problem we had to contend with. Gangsters. Other people’s greed. Well one day he sends out Morrie, of all people, with a convoy, himself he’s too scared. Morrie’s in the last car, you know, the one that drags a fifty-foot chain behind, it makes one hell of a dust cloud in case anybody is chasing after. The men in this car also have a searchlight they can shine into somebody’s eyes through the back window and they carry submachine guns, but only for self-defence. The shooting starts before they even hit the Montana border. Morrie shits his pants. That’s no disgrace, you know, if you’ve read up on the Great War. Me they wouldn’t take because of my flat feet. I was heart-broken. This country I love it and everybody in it. Anyway I read that happened to men at Vimy Ridge the first time they went over the trenches and they came home some of them had the VC, not VD like Solomon. Big hero Solomon. Did he ever go on about Vimy Ridge. The mud. The lice. The rats in the trenches. You ask me the closest he ever got to those trenches before he transferred to the flying corps was a whorehouse in Montmartre.

“Where was I? Oh yeah. Solomon starts to tease Morrie something awful about what happened to him. Boy, did I ever fix him. I shoved Solomon into the next convoy out, he’s white as a sheet of paper. He’s sweating. A truck backfired he hit the floor. Everybody breaks up. They’re laughing at him, the hero of Vimy Ridge. He doesn’t bother Morrie any more, you bet your ass.”

Yet another day.

“Each generation produces a handful of great men, raised in log cabins or sod huts, who reach to the stars to grasp at impossible dreams. Einstein, Louis B. Mayer, Henry Ford, Tom Edison, Irving Berlin. Men in different fields of endeavour and what they have in common is that they never rest. But how did it all start in Bernard Gursky’s case? Well, I’ll tell you. We were living in Fort McEwen now (hoo boy, plank sidewalks) and among other things my father was dealing in cattle. My father had an understanding with this guy and one week instead of cattle he brings him forty wild mustangs. I had to break them in a corral behind the old Queen Victoria Hotel. My father auctioned them off and after each sale he invited the customer into the hotel bar to seal the deal with a drink. I watched this, sitting on a corral fence. I watched and I thought, which was always my way. Paw, I said, the bar makes more profit than we do, why don’t we buy the hotel? There, right there is where it started. I led the Gurskys across the Rubicon into the liquor business. Have I got the river right?”

“Yes.”

“There are so many lies being told about Bernard Gursky already somebody should be hired to listen to the truth from me and write my biography.”

“I was thinking the same thing, Mr. Bernard.”

“For this job I don’t want a Canadian. I want the best. The hell with the expense.”

“I could consult Becky and draw up a list of names.”

“What about Churchill, who wrote his stuff?”

“He did, Mr. Bernard.”

“Oh yeah?” Mr. Bernard drummed his plump fingers against his desk. “Maybe yes and maybe no. Now this Hemingway fella, how much can he earn?”

“He’s dead.”

“Of course he’s dead. You think I don’t know? You’re getting on my nerves, Harvey. Haven’t you any work to do?”

Yes, yes, certainly he did, but Becky, just back that morning from a two-day trip to New York, phoned to say, “I want to see you and I mean right now.”

Harvey, home within the hour, found Becky seated behind her Louis XIV bureau-plat. The contents of an asbestos-lined box that had been lifted out of Harvey’s wall safe were spread out before her. “I want to know why your precious life as Mr. Bernard’s poodle is insured for three million dollars with various companies while the value put on mine, a published writer, is a piddly one hundred thousand?”

“Actually, I made a note to myself to review the situation this weekend.”

“Let’s see it.”

“I mean a mental note.”

Becky threw the deeds and policies at him and flew out of the room, charging up the stairs to their bedroom. Harvey pursued her as far as the hall, where he stumbled over a stack of boxes from Gucci, Saks, Bendel’s, and Bergdorf Goodman. He retreated into the living room, sinking on to the sofa. The truth was the day he had done his annual review of their life insurance portfolio, intent on fattening her coverage, the newspapers had been full of a Toronto murder case that had given him pause. A real-estate developer, who seemed to have led a blameless life, was on trial for the murder of his wife of twenty years. His story was that driving to Stratford after dark he had wobbled into a rest area off the 401 to attend to a flat tire. While he was bent over a rear wheel another car pulled up behind, two druggies got out, knocked him senseless and shot his wife, who had foolishly put up a struggle. They made off with his wallet, her handbag, and all of their luggage. His defence was compromised by one bit of evidence. Only a month earlier, he had insured his wife’s life for a cool million. Harvey, understandably alert, now balked at doing the same for Becky … because what if a week later, God forbid, she was run down crossing the street or lost in an airplane crash? He would be suspect number one, that’s what. Led out of his own home in handcuffs before the TV cameras. Incarcerated with salivating faggots. His body violated like Peter O’Toole by that creepy Turk in Lawrence of Arabia. Harvey, his heart thudding, started up the stairs in search of an aspirin, and there, lo and behold, was Becky standing in the bedroom door, all smiles. “What do you think, buttercup?”

About what, he thought? Give me a hint.

She twirled around, her hands fluttering round her neck, and then he saw it. A diamond-studded choker.

“From Van Cleef & Arpels,” she said, and then she indicated a little parcel, tied with a golden bow, lying on the bed. “I also brought you something.”

Harvey tore open the wrapping.

“I know you could use a dozen, but I just couldn’t shlepp any more parcels.”

Holding the socks against his chest, Harvey said, “They’re just the right size.”

Eight

Tim Callaghan hoped that Bert Smith would be drawn to Mr. Bernard’s funeral, ending his twenty-five-year-old hunt for him. He must be sixty-five years old now, Callaghan calculated, maybe more. Smith, the righteous rodent. In his mind’s eye, Callaghan saw him in a tiny basement kitchen that reeked of rot and cat piss and Presbyterian virtue. There would be a calendar with a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II on horseback tacked to the wall, the corners curling. The linoleum would be split and worn, the teapot chipped. He would be sitting down to a supper of macaroni or baked beans on toast at a table with a Formica top, sustained by the red-hot coals of hatred. Yes, Callaghan thought, providing that he was still alive, Smith would come to the funeral even if he had to be carried there on a stretcher.

Callaghan, a child of the century, had survived gunshot, two heart attacks and a prostate trim, none of which distressed him so much as the loss of his teeth, an intolerable insult. He was a tall man, an old coin worn thin, his once-blond hair reduced to a fringe of wintry straw, his eyes pale blue, his shoulders stooped, his liver-spotted hands with the busted knuckles prone to trembling. But at least he wasn’t incontinent. He didn’t shuffle like some of the others who had overstayed their welcome. Once he found Bert Smith, and made the necessary arrangements, he himself would be free to die, a prospect he contemplated with a sense of relief. He would leave the rest of his money to the Old Brewery Mission and his mementoes to Moses Berger.

“My God,” Moses had said, the first time he had seen the photographs in Callaghan’s apartment.

Over the mantel there was a faded snapshot of the young Solomon strolling down a country lane with George Bernard Shaw, and another one, somewhat out of focus, showing him seated on a verandah with H.L. Mencken, a malacca cane held between Solomon’s knees, his hands clasped over the handle, his chin resting on his hands.

1956 that was, and Callaghan had shown Moses one of his most cherished souvenirs of that era when he had been most vibrantly alive. It was his edition of the Holy Bible as purified by the incomparable Dr. Charles Foster Kent, professor of biblical history at Yale. The abstemious professor had revised Samuel 6:19 from, “And he dealt among all the people, even among the whole multitude of Israel, as well to the women as to the men, to every one a cake of bread and a good piece of flesh and a flagon of wine,” to read, “And he distributed to the whole assembled multitude a roll of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins.”

Those were the days when Callaghan seldom saw his bed before four A.M., if at all, but, instead, sat enthralled at Solomon’s table, listening to him pronounce on Trotsky’s forging of the Red Army, or Edward Gordon Craig’s theory of the actor as marionette, or the art of breaking a mustang. More often than not the table was festooned with fawning society girls. A de Brisson, a McCarthy, one of the Newton girls. And you never knew what was coming next, what a driven Solomon would decree. A midnight dinner thrown for whatever tacky touring company was playing His Majesty’s Theatre, Solomon flattering the inadequate performers with caviar and champagne, dandling the middle-aged Juliet on his knee, flirting with the girlish Macbeth, and finally dazzling the company with his parody of Barrymore’s Hamlet. Or Solomon crashing a supposedly secret Communist party meeting in some professor’s apartment, playing the speaker like a kitten with a skein of wool before pouncing with his superior knowledge of dialectics, slapping him down with Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.” Or Solomon opting for a breakneck run to Albert Crawley’s hotel in the Townships, playing the piano with the Dixieland band, luxuriating in their astonishment at his skill. Or Solomon disappearing, retiring to brood on that bend in the Cherry River where Brother Ephraim had once set his traps for game and, come to think of it, men as well. The abandoned shafts of the New Camelot Mining & Smelting Co. were still there, the rotting rafters a perch for bats. Or Solomon suddenly turning on his flutter of society girls, seducing one of them into submitting to outrageous sexual acts and then sending her back to her mountainside mansion, himself avenged but also, he would complain to Callaghan, diminished.

“Gerald Murphy got it wrong,” he once said, “living twice, maybe three times is the best revenge.”

Callaghan, sprung from Griffintown, hard by the Montreal waterfront, had once been a club fighter. Possibly because he displayed more spunk than talent in the ring, he developed a following in the west. Solomon, who had watched him lose a semi-final in Regina, invited him to dinner afterward. He fed him beef and banknotes and started him out driving a Hudson Super-Six, laden with booze, to just short of the North Dakota border, where the switch would be made with the waiting Americans. Callaghan proved so proficient that Solomon soon had him managing the Detroit River run, armed with what Eliot Ness once called “The Canadian Print Job”, that is to say, B-13 clearance documents that stipulated the liquor on board was bound for Havana. Because Callaghan had so much on Mr. Bernard he survived at McTavish following Solomon’s death, serving for years as vice-president in charge of nothing for Loch Edmond’s Mist.

Cancer claimed Callaghan’s wife in 1947. He saw her through her last months at home with the help of a night nurse and Kathleen O’Brien and cases of Loch Edmond’s Mist, tolerating the comings and goings of the officious Father Moran for her sake. Kathleen O’Brien read to her every afternoon. Belloc, Chesterton. Then she sat with Callaghan, praising him for proving such a devoted husband.

“But the truth is I wish she’d die and leave me in peace,” he said.

“Shush.”

“And then there’s the nurse.”

“She doesn’t know.”

“I do.”

Frances, Frances. Each time he looked down on her bed, her once-fine flowing mane of black hair reduced to dry scorched patches, her eyes sunken, he was consumed with rage. What he wanted back was his once-glowing Frances, the girl he had first caught a glimpse of emerging from the Cathedral of Mary Queen of the World on a perfect spring morning. Frances, utterly unaware that all the men had turned to look, but not one of them whistled or made a coarse remark. She told him that he would have to speak to her father, a sour plumber with telltale broken veins in his nose. Callaghan told him that he was in transport, which made her blush because she understood and prayed for him. When the RCMP investigators came in the weeks leading up to the trial, she proved surprisingly tough. “But what does your husband do?” one of them asked, smirking.

“Mr. Callaghan provides. Do you take sugar and cream?”

Only a week before she died, swimming out of a morphine undertow, she said, “You shouldn’t have lied at the trial.”

“We owed Solomon everything.”

“You did it to save your own skin.”

“Why bring that up now, after all these years?”

“Find Bert Smith. Make it up to him. Promise me that.”

“I promise.”

She died in his arms, and for a while Callaghan became a drinker to be avoided, seeking out fights at two A.M. in the Normandy Roof or Carol’s or Rockhead’s. Then, stumbling out of Aldo’s late one afternoon, turning into Ste.-Catherine Street, Callaghan saw him. He saw Bert Smith. His chalky pinched face filling the window of a number 43 streetcar, staring right back at him without expression. Callaghan, the back of his neck prickly, took off after the streetcar, catching up with it at the corner of Peel Street. One stop too late. Bert Smith was no longer on board.

Callaghan found 153 Smiths listed in the telephone book, none of them with the Christian name Bert. Probably Bert is still rooted in Regina, he thought, and he was in Montreal only to attend a wedding or an Orangemen’s convention. Something like that. Callaghan sent for the Regina phone book and, on a hunch, the one from Winnipeg as well, but he couldn’t locate any relatives. So he tried another ploy. He had his lawyer place notices in newspapers in Toronto, Montreal, and throughout the west, announcing an unclaimed legacy of fifty thousand pounds for Bert Smith, a former customs agent, residing in Regina. None of the many bothersome claimants who came forward, several of them threatening lawsuits, turned out to be the real Bert Smith. So Callaghan, remembering that he had been drunk at the time, concluded that it had not been Bert Smith’s face filling the streetcar window. It had been an apparition. That’s what he decided. But he didn’t believe it. He knew it had been Bert Smith.

TIM CALLAGHAN RETIRED IN 1965 on a necessarily generous pension and moved into an apartment on Drummond Street. A creature of habit, no matter how late he turned in he wakened at six-thirty every morning, shaved and showered and ate his bacon and eggs, ploughing through the Gazette. Then he took to the streets, searching for Bert Smith in Lower Westmount and N.D.G. and Verdun, sometimes wandering as far as Griffintown, circling back to The Hunter’s Horn or stopping at Toe Blake’s Tavern to chat with the detectives from Station Number Ten, including his nephew Bill.

After a solitary supper in his apartment Callaghan would go out again in the futile hope of running into Bert Smith or at least tiring himself out sufficiently to sleep through the night.

Increasingly, striding those downtown streets, Callaghan mourned for the glittering city he had once known, the fine restaurants and bookshops and watering holes that had been displaced by the ubiquitous fast-food joints (Mike’s Submarines, McDonald’s, Harvey’s) and garish clothing stores, video gamelands, bars where vapid girls danced nude on your table, gay clubs, massage parlours and shops that peddled sexual devices. There were no more cubbyhole shoeshine parlours where you could also get your hat blocked and maybe bet on something good running at Belmont. The last honest barber had retired his pole years ago. Gone, gone were Slitkin’s and Slotkin’s, Carol’s, the Café Martin, the Eiffel Tower, Dinty Moore’s and Aux Délices. Tramping the streets Callaghan sometimes wondered if he were the last man in town to have heard Oscar Peterson play at the Alberta Lounge or to have ended a long night with an obligatory one for the road in Rockhead’s Paradise. Certainly he must be the last Montrealer to have seen Babe Ruth pitch for the Baltimore Orioles in Atwater Park, now a sleazy shopping centre.

If Moses was in town Callaghan usually met him for lunch at Magnan’s or Ma Heller’s, carrying on from there into the night. Years ago an agitated Moses had told him, “I was in Winnipeg last week and dropped into the Tribune and asked the librarian if I could see the Gursky file. But all the newspaper accounts of the murder of Willy McGraw and Mr. Bernard’s arrest and trial had been stolen. I contacted other newspapers and found out that the old bastard had one of his minions go through the west and sterilize all the files.”

“Moses,” Callaghan said, “your father wasn’t drafted, he volunteered. He didn’t have to write those speeches for Mr. Bernard.”

Moses was young then, already a considerable drinker, but able to handle it. Callaghan found him interesting, but he was not sure that he liked him. Moses was too nimble, ever ready to rush to judgement, and there was, Callaghan suspected, too much self-display there, born of insecurity perhaps, but tiresome all the same. Callaghan was also put off by Moses’s silly determination to pass for the perfect British gent. The Savile Row suit. The Balliol College tie. The furled umbrella. Callaghan didn’t understand that Moses, having already adjudged himself ugly, unattractive to women, felt better playing the peacock, his strut defiant. As far as Callaghan was concerned, what redeemed the young Moses, so quick to anger, was that he had not yet grasped that the world was imperfect. He actually expected justice to be done.

Callaghan tried to warn him against pursuing Solomon’s story, but had he anticipated the ruin Moses’s quest would lead him to in the years to come, he would have frogmarched him clear of the Gursky quagmire. “I know damn well why you are so enamoured of Solomon,” Callaghan said, “but you haven’t got it nearly right. Mr. Bernard is vulgar, but all of a piece. Totally consumed by his appetite for riches. But Solomon …”

“Betrayed hopes?”

“Yes.”

Nine

“Good time to invest. Bad time to invest,” Becky said. “I want it.”

So, in 1973, when most of his friends, fearful of French-Canadian unrest, were going liquid, Harvey Schwartz bought an imposing limestone mansion on Belvedere Road in Westmount. Westmount, dug into the mountainside and towering over the city of Montreal, was a traditionally WASP enclave, the most privileged in Canada. Many of its great houses, hewn out of rock, had been built by selfmade grain and railway and beer barons and shipping and mining tycoons. Most of them were originally Scots, their mansions constructed to rival the grandest homes of Edinburgh, colonial sons triumphant, the progeny of crofters, ships’ chandlers and Hudson’s Bay factors chiselling shields of the dimly remembered clan into the stonework. Harvey bought the mansion, with its spectacular view of the city and the river below, from a stockbroker. Tall, stooping, the broker insisted on showing them through the place himself, smiling acrimoniously all the while. He led them upstairs, past a wall of Harvard Classics and a set of Dickens, Becky pausing to admire the leather bindings. “My articles have been published in The Jewish Review,” she said, “and the Canadian Author and Bookman. I’m a member of the P.E.N. Club.”

“Then Mr. Schwartz has reason to be proud.”

“You bet,” Harvey said.

The broker ushered them into the master bedroom, opened a cupboard and said, “Now here’s something that should interest you, Mr. Schwartz. The wall safe. Of course,” he added, “you’ll want to have the combination changed now.”

“We wouldn’t think of it,” Becky said.

Downstairs they met the broker’s wife. The elegant Mrs. McClure, her smile cordial but guarded. Maybe seventy years old now, Harvey figured, but still a beauty. Her ashen hair, streaked with yellow, cut short. She seemed fragile and favoured a cane. Harvey had noticed her crippled leg at once. The leg was as thin as his wrist—no, thinner—and caught in a cumbersome brace. She offered him a sherry, set out on a cherry wood table on which there was a vase of Sweet Williams. Indicating the cheese and crackers, Mrs. McClure apologized for not being able to offer them more, explaining that their maid and chauffeur had preceded them to St. Andrews-by-the-Sea. Westmount, she told them, had once been an Indian burial ground. The first skeletons, discovered in 1898, had been unearthed on the grounds of the St. George Snowshoe Club. “This street,” she said, “wasn’t laid out until 1912. When I was a little girl I could toboggan from here, through Murray Hill Park, all the way down to Sherbrooke Street.”

A portrait of McClure, kilted, wearing the uniform of the Black Watch, hung over the mantelpiece. On the mantelpiece itself, there was a framed photograph of Mackenzie King. It was inscribed. The largest portrait hanging in the room was of the saturnine Sir Russell Morgan, Mrs. McClure’s grandfather.

“I understand that you are retained by the Gurskys,” McClure said. “He runs Jewel,” Becky said, “and serves on the board at McTavish. He is a recipient of the Centennial Medal and a—”

“Do you know Mr. Bernard?” Harvey asked.

“I haven’t had that distinct pleasure.”

“He’s a great human being.”

“But Mrs. McClure once knew the brother who died so tragically young. Solomon, if memory serves.”

Mrs. McClure, favouring her thin misshapen leg, limped three steps toward a chair, managing the move with astonishing grace. Immediately she sat down, her hand sought out the knee-joint of her steel brace and clicked it into place. “I do hope,” she said to Becky, “that you care for tea roses?”

“Are you crazy? We love flowers. Harvey buys them for me all the time.”

“Why don’t you show Mrs. Schwartz the garden? I’m sure she’d appreciate that.”

“Allow me, Mrs. Schwartz.”

Mrs. McClure offered Harvey another sherry, but he declined it. “I’m driving,” he said.

“He made this table.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Solomon Gursky made this cherry wood table.”

Harvey smiled just a little, but he was not really surprised. Strangers were always lying, trying to impress him. It came with the territory. “He did?”

“Indeed, but that was many years ago. Ah, there you are,” she said, smiling at McClure without dropping a stitch. “Back so soon?”

“Mrs. Schwartz was worried about her high heels.”

“Quite right, my dear. How foolish of me.”

His blue eyes frosted with malice, McClure raised his sherry glass.

“For generations this was known as the Sir Russell Morgan house, and then mine. Here’s to the Schwartz manse,” he said, with a little bow to Becky, “and its perfectly charming new chatelaine.”

Outside, Becky said, “Now that we’ve got it, where are you taking me to celebrate?”

He took her to Ruby Foo’s.

“Mrs. McClure,” Harvey said. “Did you notice?”

“That she’s a cripple. You must think I’m blind.”

“No. Not that. Her eyes.”

“What about them?”

“One is blue, one is brown.”

“Don’t look now,” Becky said, “but the Bergmans just walked in.”

“I’ve never seen that before.”

“How can she wear such a dress, she just had a mastectomy, everybody knows. Oh, I see. They make them with nipples now.”

“What?”

“The plastic boobs. I said don’t look.”

“I’m not!”

“And don’t use chopsticks. People are staring. You look like such a fool.”

Ten

“What did you think, Olive?”

“He should go on a diet. Like yesterday. Brando used to be so sexy. Hubba hubba!” Mrs. Jenkins didn’t dare mention Last Tango in Paris, which she had slipped out to see alone. Imagine Bert Smith there when Brando reached for the butter. “But,” she added, “I really go for that Al Pacino.”

“He’s Italian.”

“Yeah, but cute. Those bedroom eyes. Remember Charles Boyer? Come wiz me to ze Casbah. Those were the days, eh, Bert? What did you think?”

“I thought it was shockingly immoral from beginning to end.”

“Said the prioress to the Fuller Brush man. But didn’t you just die when that guy woke up with the horse’s head in his bed?”

“In real life he would have wakened when they came into the bedroom with it.”

Squeezing her beady little eyes shut, puffing out her lower lip, Mrs. Jenkins said, “And what if they put it there while he was out, smarty-pants?”

“Then he would have been bound to notice the bump at the foot of his bed before getting into it.”

“Oh, Bert, it takes seventy-two muscles to frown but only twelve to smile. Try it once.”

As usual, they went to The Downtowner for a treat after the matinee. Smith ordered tea with brown toast and strawberry jam.

“And for you?” the waitress asked.

“Make me an offer I can’t refuse.”

“The lady will have a banana split.”

“One bill or two?”

“Mr. Smith and I always go Dutch.”

No sooner did the waitress leave than Mrs. Jenkins snatched all the little tin foil containers of mustard and ketchup on the table and stuffed them into her handbag. “When that waitress wiped the table with that yucky cloth she leaned over for your benefit.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Her jugs.”

“Please,” Smith said.

“And maybe, just maybe, that guy didn’t hear them put the horse’s head in his bed because he had taken some sleeping pills before retiring like they all do in Hollywood, if you read up on it.”

“Then why did he waken later?”

Mrs. Jenkins sighed deeply and rolled her eyes. “Oh, come off it, Bert. Do cheer up.”

But he couldn’t. The world was out of joint, every one of his cherished beliefs now held in contempt. Once the G-Men, say Dennis O’Keefe or Pat O’Brien, were the heroes in the movies, but today it was Bonnie and Clyde. The guardians of law and order, on the other hand, were portrayed as corrupt. Even in westerns, when they still made one, it wasn’t Randolph Scott or Jimmy Stewart who was the hero, but Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The memoirs of whores and swindlers became best-sellers. Young Americans with yellow streaks down their backs were being welcomed by a fat Jewess in hot pants at a store-front office on Prince Arthur Street, the book brazenly displayed in the window—Manual For Draft-Age Immigrants To Canada—telling them how to lie to gain entry into the country. Uppity French-Canadians wanted the sons of anglophones who had beaten them on the Plains of Abraham to speak their lingo now, a patois that made real Frenchmen cringe. The shelves of Westmount Library were laden with filth and to go for a stroll in Murray Hill Park on a balmy summer evening was to risk tripping over copulating foreigners.

Since his wrongful dismissal from the customs office, Smith had never gone on welfare. He had always managed somehow. He had worked as a bookkeeper for an auto-parts outfit in Calgary until he gathered that he was expected to help Mr. Hrymnak diddle his income tax. He had been employed for eight years as a cashier at Wally’s Prairie Schooner, trusted with the bank deposits, and then a new manager came in, a young Italian who wore his hair in a pompadour. Vaccarelli fired Smith and put a young Polish girl with bleached blonde hair in his place.

Through the wasting years Smith consulted lawyers again and again, the reputable ones nervously showing him the door once he began to rage against the Jews, and the other ones bilking him. Each time a new minister of justice was appointed, he wrote him a voluminous letter, trying to have his case reopened, unavailingly.

Smith first drifted to Montreal in 1948. Answering a want ad in the Star, scraping bottom, he actually found himself working for a Jew. Hornstein’s Home Furniture on the Main. Smith’s first day on the job, he discovered that he was one of six rookies on the floor. Gordy Hornstein gathered them together before opening the doors to the crowd that was already churning outside, jostling for position, rapping on the plate-glass windows. “You see that three-piece living-room set in the window? I took a half-page ad in the Star yesterday advertising it for $125 to our first fifty customers. Anybody who sells one of those sets is fired. Tell those bargain-hunters outside whatever you want. Delivery is ten years. The cushions are stuffed with rat shit. The frames are made of cardboard. Tell them anything. But it’s your job to shift them into pricier lines and to sign them to twelve-month contracts. Now some words of advice because you’re new here and only three of you will still be working for Hornstein’s once the week is out. We get all kinds here. French-Canadians, Polacks, guineas, Jews, hunkies, niggers, you name it. This isn’t Ogilvy’s or Holt Renfrew. It’s the Main. You sell a French-Canadian a five-piece set for $350, ship him only four unmatched pieces from cheaper sets he won’t complain, he’s probably never been into a real store before and he buys from a Jew he expects to be cheated. I trust you have memorized the prices from the sheets I gave you because none are marked on the actual items. You are selling to Italians or Jews, you quote them double, because they don’t come in their pants unless they can beat you down to half-price. One thing more. We don’t sell to DPs here.”

In those days DP was the Canadian coinage for Displaced Persons, that is to say, the trickle of European survivors that had recently been allowed into the country.

“Why don’t we sell to refugees?” one of the rookies asked.

“Oh shit, a DP by me isn’t a greener, it’s a nigger. We call them DPs because all that interests them is the Down Payment. They fork out for that, load my furniture on to their stolen pickup, and it’s goodbye Charlie. Tell them we’re out of anything they want. Whisper they can get it cheaper at Greenberg’s, he does the same to me, may he rot in hell. But do not sell to them. Okay, hold your noses. I’m now gonna open up dem golden gates. Good luck, guys.”

Smith, who didn’t last the week, promptly found a better job, this time as a floorwalker in Morgan’s department store. He had only been at it for a month when, riding a number 43 streetcar, he saw Callaghan staring at him from a street corner. The liar. The Judas. And shortly afterward the Gurskys made a serious attempt to snare him with an obviously spurious notice in the Star, the bait an unclaimed legacy of fifty thousand pounds for one Bert Smith. They must think I’m stupid. Really stupid. Looking to be found lying in a puddle of blood on a railway station floor, like McGraw. Or to be discovered floating down the river. Too clever to be caught out by such a transparent ruse, but alarmed all the same, Smith packed his bag and quit Montreal, fleeing west, his cherished photograph of Archie and Nancy Smith posing before their sod hut in Gloriana, wrapped in a towel to protect the glass. Smith comforted himself on the train by imagining the Gurskys in conclave, fabulously wealthy, yes, but frightened by the knowledge that there was a poor but honest man still out there who had their measure and could not be bought, a man watching and waiting, writing to government officials in Ottawa.

Smith worked the phone for a small debt-collection agency in Regina, he was a department-store security officer in Saskatoon, and rose into a bookkeeping job again, in Edmonton, until his employer discovered that he had once been discharged from the customs office as a troublemaker, maybe worse.

Then, in 1963 he was drawn back to Montreal, wandering up the mountainside to survey the Gursky estates, passing the high brick walls topped with menacing shards of glass, peering through the wrought-iron gates.

Driven by extreme need, Smith approached his bank for a three-hundred-dollar loan. The clerk he was sent to see, a slinky black girl less than half his age, seemed amused. “My God,” she said, “you’re sixty years old and you haven’t got a credit rating. Haven’t you ever borrowed money before?”

“I would like to speak with the manager, please.”

“Mr. Praxipolis doesn’t deal with small loans.”

“And at the Royal Bank I expected to deal with my own kind,” Smith said, fleeing the office.

Fortunately, the affable Mrs. Jenkins accepted a post-dated cheque for his first week’s rent, and now he had been lodged in her house for ten years.

A decade.

Smith darned his own socks, but Mrs. Jenkins did his laundry and, after their first year together, only charged him a token rent. In return, Smith did minor repairs, kept the rent books, made the bank deposits, and filled out Mrs. Jenkins’s income tax returns. He was able to survive on his pension and the occasional odd job, filling in here and there as a temporary night watchman, dishwasher, or parking lot attendant. Mrs. Jenkins allowed him a shelf in her refrigerator. They watched TV together. And then, retiring to his room, Smith often went through his Gursky scrapbooks, thick with the family’s activities.

Over the years Smith saw buildings endowed by the old bootlegger and bearing his name rising everywhere. He read that the prime minister had had him to lunch. Only a few months later Lionel Gursky succeeded in having St. Andrews, the home of the British Open, accept a two-hundred-thousand-pound purse for the Loch Edmond’s Mist Classic Tournament. Lionel’s latest concubine was featured in Queen:

“‘Some spend on things they can use, I splurge on paintings,’ says dazzling Vanessa Gursky, the English beauty, wife of Lionel Gursky, likely the next CEO of the James McTavish Distillery Ltd. Chatelaine of a castle in Connemara, but equally at home in her Fifth Avenue penthouse (‘My crash pad in the Big Apple,’ as she so charmingly puts it) or her Nash terrace flat in Regent’s Park, the peripatetic Vanessa’s portrait has been painted by both Graham Sutherland and Andy Warhol. Here, left, she is seen standing before her favourite, the portrait painted by Annigoni, a picture of beguiling elegance.”

On the occasion of Mr. Bernard’s legendary seventy-fifth birthday party at the Ritz-Carlton, in 1973, the Gazette printed a list of those fortunate enough to be invited. And within months the old bootlegger was dead. Cancer. Smith went to the funeral, mingling with the mourners, and there he was confronted by the Judas himself.

“I’m Tim Callaghan. Remember me?”

“I remember you.”

One morning only a week later Mrs. Jenkins rapped on the door to Smith’s room. “There’s a gentleman here to see you.”

“I’m not expecting anybody.”

“He says it’s important.”

And he was already there, sliding past Mrs. Jenkins, his smile benevolent. “Bertram Smith?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’d like to speak to you alone.”

Mrs. Jenkins, her massive bosom rising to the insult, didn’t budge.

“What’s black and white and brown,” she asked, nostrils flaring, “and looks good on a lawyer?”

“How did you know I was a lawyer?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then?”

“Black and white and brown and looks good on a lawyer?”

“Uh huh.”

“Sorry.”

“A Doberman,” Mrs. Jenkins said, marching out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

“Now tell me what you want here,” Smith said.

“Providing that you are Bert Smith, the only issue of Archibald and Nancy Smith, who came to this country from England in 1902, and that you can produce the necessary documents to prove your identity, what I want, sir, is to tell you that we have been looking for you for years. You are the beneficiary of a considerable legacy.”

“Hold it,” Smith said, inching open the door to his room. But she wasn’t listening outside. “All right, then. Go ahead. Tell me about it.”