Solomon Gursky Was Here (23 page)

“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.

The tabernacles of robbers prosper,

and they that provoke God are secure;

into whose hand God bringeth abundantly.

Driven by extreme need, Smith approached his bank for a threehundred-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: