Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘You’ll have to register a property trust right away, using the three properties you already own, so you can channel your illegal earnings through a legitimate front and eventually use the trust, with its assets and cash flow, to borrow funds. After the initial ten title deeds we can’t have you paying cash or using your own money every time you purchase property.’

  ‘The bank will lend us money? I mean us, Melissa and me?’

  ‘No, of course not, but they’ll lend it to a trust with sufficient equity. That way there will be no awkward questions. Greed is always tight-lipped. The trust will pay taxes, so the government won’t come snooping.’

  The twins took his advice, and at the conclusion of my year away scuffing, they had increased their property portfolio considerably, having bought several downtown workers’ houses. They were becoming increasingly bold and Melissa had spotted a penthouse flat to let, the largest in the block, with its own private lift and entrance at one side of the building. She’d been thinking hard about how to improve their business income and asked Mr Logical for his opinion. It centred on difficulties they had working independently of a brothel.

  ‘Well, my dears, it must be obvious to you from working in both Montreal and Toronto that both are pretty conservative cities, where a brothel by any other name is still a bordello to a city council driven by religious dogma. Both cities are controlled by those invisible religious strictures that decide how everyone will think and behave. In Montreal it’s the rosary-rattling Catholics; here, it’s my lot, the sanctimonious Presbyterians, the evangelical Methodists, the Bible-thumping Baptists and, bringing up the rear, the moribund Anglicans, none of them having yet come to terms with the Industrial Revolution, let alone anything that came after it.’

  Clarissa smiled. ‘You can say that again! Melissa and I entered a beauty pageant in Montreal before we went on the game. Our bathing suit parade and judging was done behind closed doors at a very swanky hotel. At the semi-finals we wore evening dresses and were told there were to be no plunging necklines or slits down the side of the skirt to show a glimpse of stocking.’

  ‘That would have been interesting,’ Mr Logical remarked. ‘However do you judge identical twins in a beauty contest?’

  ‘Oh, they didn’t,’ Melissa replied. ‘They eliminated us in the semifinals. Later we were told they’d thought we were the prettiest, but the judges felt that two identical winners would insult the other girls because it would mean second place would really be third.’

  ‘It’s how we first got into the profession,’ Clarissa explained. ‘One of the judges ran a young ladies’ deportment school and modelling agency and approached us afterwards. We thought we were going to be fashion models, that is, once she’d taught us fancy manners, how to dress, sit, walk and talk in the French manner. Her name was Madame Chastel, and our first client was a millionaire magazine owner and businessman. After we’d done the fashion shoot for his magazine, he invited us to his country estate for the weekend. Madame Chastel said it was an opportunity not to be missed. He sent a chauffeur-driven limousine, a black Cadillac, to fetch us and I guess we were knocked off our feet. His country chateau was a long way up the scale from our aunt’s fish shop. Anyhow, after supper on the first night, and after our first taste of red wine —’

  ‘Which we thought was horrible,’ Melissa interjected.

  ‘But which must have had the desired effect,’ Clarissa continued, ‘he offered us a rather large sum of money to sleep with him in a huge bed he claimed was once owned by Marie Antoinette.’ She laughed. ‘The queen of France must have owned a lot of beds. We’ve supposedly slept in three of them!’

  Melissa shrugged. ‘He must have liked what he saw in us. Goodness knows what – we hadn’t a clue then – but we must have made it seem like fun. Anyhow, he suggested we meet some of his friends, and Madame Chastel said they were useful contacts for young models and would help us earn more. She said fashion parades in department stores, with an occasional magazine shoot, wouldn’t make us a lot of money, and that it was the Depression, after all . . .’

  ‘We simply had to get out of that fish shop,’ Clarissa laughed.

  ‘Little did we know that we, a couple of Cabbagetown kids, had discovered a pot of gold!’ she went on. ‘We were a true double act and the millionaire businessman had, on that first occasion, set the price, so all his rich friends knew the rate. Madame Chastel must have known but she never brought it up; we stayed on her books – even got the occasional modelling job – and she continued to tutor us in how to be perfect ladies.’

  ‘Oh, she knew, all right,’ Clarissa jumped in, ‘because she’d book us for weekends at country chalets or châteaux at the lakes or in the mountains, saying that the male owners were throwing a party and wanted two pretty hostesses to serve drinks and canapés —’

  ‘That’s what she called all the naughty stuff. It was all unspoken but it seems we were by no means the first to pass through her hands. She had a great many rich friends to whom twin “hostesses” in a double act were irresistible.’

  Clarissa took over again. ‘Well, one thing led to another and . . .’ she paused and raised her right eyebrow, ‘here we are at your service, sir.’

  Mr Logical laughed. ‘Well, my dear, you’re quick learners and Madame Chastel obviously taught you well. But what you have yet to learn is how to properly utilise money to purchase or lease real estate.’

  ‘So you think we should rent this penthouse or not?’ Melissa asked.

  ‘Well, that’s hard to say. As I said, you’re in a hostile environment here in Toronto. Hotels and taverns are deliberately unwelcoming places to consume alcohol, gambling is forbidden and the sex trade is forced to operate in a clandestine and underground manner. Supper clubs like the Jazz Warehouse, where I know you often go, are a prime example. They cannot allow women in without a male escort. Furthermore, if a dalliance is to follow, you are forced to bring your clients to a hotel, where I imagine the overheads add greatly to your expenses. I agree. You should think about acquiring your own premises, girls.’

  ‘Buy? But this penthouse is in a very nice neighbourhood. Wouldn’t it be rather expensive?’ Melissa asked. ‘So far we’ve only bought cheap workers’ houses as speculation.’

  ‘Sooner or later someone in the building – there’s always someone – will name it a bordello and the neighbourhood will be up in arms. So why not consider buying the whole building? That way, if there’s any brouhaha with any of your leaseholders, you can account for yourselves as perfectly respectable tax-paying, property-owning citizens. Your clients can then simply be presented as your friends. In my experience, people on a lease tend not to antagonise their landlords if their apartments are well maintained. Incidentally, a building in that area is bound to become a sound investment after the war.’

  With advice and help and the equity they possessed already, the trust fund they’d established was able to buy the entire block, their biggest financial move yet, or, as my mom put it, ‘a pretty big gamble’. They then renovated the penthouse to replicate the premier suite in the Royal York Hotel, Toronto’s swankiest.

  To her delight and surprise, the twins asked my mom to act as caretaker and cleaner, and offered her one of the small flats downstairs rent-free, plus double the salary she earned as an office cleaner, if she’d become the caretaker and cleaner of the penthouse and the girls’ downtown apartment. She was to clean, change the linen, take it to the Chinese laundry and prepare the various rooms each morning, and then repeat the process after the afternoon sessions. In the winter she was to keep the fires going in the two bedrooms and sitting rooms, designed so that when each twin was busy a client could come and go unseen.

  My mom took considerable pride in her new job. As far as she was concerned, working for the twins in such salubrious surroundings was, frankly speaking, money for old rope. She was no prude, and didn’t feel in the least compromised. She’d also been careful not to write and ask my opinion. When I returned from m
y year’s scuffing, she sat me down at once and, to my considerable surprise, explained exactly what was happening. ‘Mom, how long . . . how long have you been doing this job?’

  ‘Long enough to know that for the first time in years I have a day job and the pleasure of listening to the radio beside a gas fire, which the twins put in for me, plus all this.’ She swept her hand to indicate the neat little apartment with its freshly painted interior and new gas stove. ‘Jack, don’t be a prig, please.’

  What could a man say? Besides, she’d become very fond of the twins, who, as I said, often confided in her and trusted her completely. They also proved to be very generous to her in lots of other small ways and one big one. It so happened that one of Clarissa’s civilian clients was an eminent plastic surgeon. Most of his work was skin grafts and reconstructive work on soldiers sent back to Canada with bad facial injuries sustained in combat, but he agreed to work on my mom’s nose as a special favour to Clarissa, who no doubt granted him some special favours of her own. It wasn’t sufficient to fix her nose entirely, but when I got back to Toronto from my travels, I was able to pay for the rest of the work to be done. A year later, when I returned on a week’s leave from the army, I couldn’t believe how pretty she’d become. She was still a woman of only forty. Hard work as an office cleaner had kept her figure trim, her hair was still raven black, and as far as I was concerned, with Miss Frostbite’s teeth and Clarissa’s nose job, she’d turned into a stunner. Joe Hockey later remarked, ‘She be too old to be cheesecake, Jazzboy, but I do declare your mama, she the sweetest dee-sert ice cream wid a cherry on top served in one o’ them parfait glasses!’ Even Miss Frostbite now referred to her as ‘your pretty mother’.

  But, to return to the story of the twins, now that they no longer had to pay for hotel rooms or bribes, they were well and truly on their way, and took advice not only from Mr Logical but also from some of their other powerful business clients.

  Amazingly, they’d managed to repay enough of the apartment block loan for the bank to offer them even more investment finance. Mr Logical and others among their clients advised them against buying properties in Cabbagetown, or anywhere in the centre of Toronto, and suggested that they should be looking to the land surrounding the city. ‘After this war ends, Toronto is going to boom, my dears,’ Mr Logical advised. ‘You have equity in the houses and the apartment block, bricks and mortar you already own; now you should move into cheap land outside the city. The slums are beyond repair, and automobiles will mean that people can live further and further out. You mark my words, after the war Toronto is going to expand. There’ll be mass migration from Europe at least.’

  Accordingly, they purchased great tracts of farmland around Toronto, especially in Scarborough, which they rented back to the farmers on short-term leases or used for agisting stock. What the banks liked was that the twins were surprisingly conservative by nature, and always put down half cash and borrowed the remainder, so the value of their assets amounted to roughly twice their debt. After the war, this ratio often became five times what they owed, and no bank could wish for better or safer clients.

  In later years the twins were often referred to as financial geniuses, but their particular genius lay in their ability to make good use of some of the best business brains in Canada. Under the direction of Mr Logical, they used what they laughingly referred to as their human resources very well. Now, what they had given in pleasure was returned in knowledge, influence and credit guarantees by establishment and entrepreneurial figures, all of whom depended on their utmost discretion. When they left the profession in 1948 at the age of thirty-one as rich and successful property developers, their old clients, with one or two exceptions, took real pleasure in (and even personal credit for) their success in the world of commerce.

  For two slum kids who had left school early, they’d done remarkably well, but they didn’t stop there. As if they weren’t busy enough, each twin studied and passed her remaining high-school grades and entered Toronto University, studying for Bachelor of Commerce degrees, taking turns year and year about: Melissa graduating first in business management and Clarissa a year later in accounting. They were the first members of the McClymont family who had ever attended a university.

  I wasn’t around to witness most of what happened with the twins after the war, but my mom stayed with them and continued to act as their senior housekeeper and confidante. They’d given up their original profession as planned, and their dubious past was disguised by money, as well as the greater social mobility of a new, larger and more diverse population. The two fiery redheads were well on their way to the utmost social respectability.

  However, they had both remained unmarried. When the second wave of the women’s rights movement was a mere ripple, Clarissa was asked to deliver a speech at a women’s college. A student asked her whether she had ever contemplated marriage, and her answer had been unequivocal: ‘There is little about the human male that my twin sister and I don’t understand. Why then would either of us be foolish enough to tie ourselves to one simply for the sake of having children? There are good men, but you should all choose very carefully. Make sure that, as the dependant mother of your children, you don’t become a servant to their father.’ Perhaps the twins had learned more from their mother than they let on.

  Now wealthy and respected as successful businesswomen, the twins never brought up their past, but they also never denied it. Among female academics there was almost a level of admiration for what they’d achieved, a perverse pride in it, so that the context in which Clarissa spoke was not lost on her audience.

  But to return to 1940, I was able to prepare for my trip with a clear conscience now, knowing that my mom could manage in my absence. Apart from the twins, there was Mac, Miss Frostbite and Joe, all of whom she could turn to in an emergency. At seventeen, I was six foot one inch tall and, although I was still growing, my warm clothes would just about last me through the winter. All I needed was a good heavy-duty anorak. So a week before leaving, I’d stopped by the Presbyterian Church Charity Clothing Depot and got one for a song.

  Old Mrs Sopworth, known as ‘The Camel’, ran the depot and was responsible for almost everything I’d ever worn up to that moment. I told her what I was hoping to buy and explained that I was going west to the prairies for a year before I joined the army. ‘It gets pretty cold up that way – down to minus twenty degrees,’ I explained, a touch melodramatically.

  She clapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Oh my goodness, Jack, I have just the thing. It came in several days ago and you won’t believe this, but I actually thought of you.’ She beamed up at me. ‘And here, dear boy, you are!’ She showed me a splendid, almost new anorak, explaining it had come from a church family who had recently lost their grandfather, a man over six foot, which was why she’d thought of me. ‘It’s yours for two dollars, Jack.’ It was an absolute bargain and with a decent warm coat I was finally ready to depart. ‘You’ll be requiring a good grey suit, my dear, for when you play at swanky places. I have one of his that’s practically new, also six white shirts with detachable collars, and his neckties.’

  While I doubted that the sort of scuffing jobs I’d get would require such formal attire, she was so enthusiastic I couldn’t say no. I figured a suit would always come in handy, so I selected three shirts and the box of collars, as well as three neckties, and thanked her sincerely.

  Armed with a battered harmonica, an ability to read music and play piano – jazz and classical – and, as I foolishly saw it at the time, whatever musical corruption fell between these two pure forms, I prepared to head west on my getting-to-know-myself expedition.

  My mom, Miss Frostbite, Joe Hockey and Mac had all promised to see me off at Union Station. I was headed for the prairies, my first stop the town of Moose Jaw in South Saskatchewan.

  Why Moose Jaw? Well, no special reason. Moose Jaw in Southern Saskatchewan read like the opening line of a Rudyard Kipling poem. I was by nature a romantic, and with the cho
ice to go anywhere I desired, I couldn’t pass up a conjunction of names like that. In my mind it evoked wide-open spaces, sun-dried bones, hard men and women who were not afraid to use a gun, the Canada of the tough-minded north-west frontier. Which proves you should never be beguiled by a name and that it might be just as well to do some research before you settle on a destination.

  For a start, Moose Jaw was no small town nestled on the never-ending prairies. It was in the prairies, all right: the rich agricultural part – wheat and meat. It also turned out to be a railway junction for the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway with branch lines heading down into the US and up into northern Canada. If Toronto was the city of the Temperance movement, with evangelical Protestant watchdogs barking Christian dogma, then Moose Jaw was the red-light district of the prairies, actively doing the devil’s own work. I was to discover that Moose Jaw was the Canadian capital of vice, booze, gambling and wayward women.

  If Joe had personally selected my baptism of fire he couldn’t have chosen better. I later realised that when I’d mentioned Moose Jaw to him, he must have quickly decided it was probably a good thing that I be thrown in at the deep end. It was Joe’s intention that I arrive with very little money and then support myself by playing the piano. In truth, I didn’t expect to have much over after I’d paid my second-class rail fare. I’d given my weekly wages from the club kitchen to my mom, so that for once in her life she’d have some money over to spend on herself – a new dress or a pair of shoes or a good winter coat from Eaton’s Department Store – and not have to depend, as she’d done for most of her married life, on second-hand stuff from Mrs Sopworth.