Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Normandy.

  Where Nick’s right leg is buried and they pinned the Military Cross on my chest, to go with the rest of the fruit salad, forgetting that I was a Hebe, born and bred. “For valour beyond the call …” Forget it, kid. War’s over. With my MC and fifty cents I could buy myself a burger and fries and a cup of java.

  Time for a snort.

  Maybe two.

  Trouble was my tab at Nick’s was already longer than a night in a fox-hole and my cash box emptier than my .45 after I had pumped six of the best into Spider Moran’s fat gut. But that’s another yarn.

  Anyway there I stood, six foot two, reaching for my chapeau, when Myrna opens the door. “There’s a dame here to see you.”

  I was in no mood for another splitsville case, tailing some henpecked sucker until I caught him with a bimbo in a motel room. “Tell her to come back Monday morning.”

  “She’s got gams that go all the way and then some, and I think she’s in trouble, Hawk,” she opinioned.

  Next thing I knew in sashayed Tiffany Waldorf smelling like the day the swallows came back to Capistrano. Flaming red tresses you want to walk through barefoot. Blazing green eyes. Class written all over her, but stacked. Breasts fighting her tight silk dress. Hour-glass waist. Curves in all the right places.

  “Sit down,” I said

  Tiffany shook off her sable wrap and poured herself into a chair, crossing those million-dollar legs. Then she opened her handbag that cost some poor alligator its skin and peeled off five c-notes. “Will this do as a retainer, Mr. Steel?”

  “That depends on how many rats you want me to exterminate. Tell me about it, kid.”

  “There’s a body lying on my bedroom floor with a shiv planted where his heart used to go pitter-patter.”

  “Then you’ve been a naughty girl.”

  “I am a naughty girl,” she said, tossing her head high, “but I didn’t do it.”

  “Then why don’t you go to the cops?”

  “Because that shiv happens to belong to yours truly. It’s a priceless, diamond-studded sixteenth-century dagger worth one hundred thousand dollars. It was presented to me by Crown Prince Hakim at Monte Carlo last season.”

  “For services rendered?”

  “I ought to slap your face,” she said, casting her eyes at me.

  “You look good when you’re angry.”

  “I didn’t get in until very late last night and there he was lying on my bedroom floor. The body was still warm.”

  “I take it you recognized the hombre?”

  “I was his chick until I found out what a louse he was.”

  “What’s his monicker?”

  “Lionel Gerstein.”

  I had bought myself trouble. A ton of it.

  Lionel Gerstein was the number-one son of old Boris Gerstein, a former bootlegger, worth zillions, who had crawled out of his sewer and gone legit some years back. But he was still connected. You could bet the farm and your beloved Granny’s Maidenform bra on that one. Old BG was meaner than a rattlesnake with a hangover and just as dangerous.

  Originally there had been three Gerstein brothers. Boris, Marv, and Saul. Marv, no more than knee-high to a mouse in his elevator shoes, was weaker than a bar Scotch. A born boot-licker. But Saul was a hell-raiser. So old BG, who didn’t care to share the wealth, had him taken out. Erased. He had a bomb planted on Saul’s private airplane.

  “I hope,” Tiffany said, “taking on the Gersteins isn’t too much for you, Hawk.”

  “I think we’d better go and take a gander at that stiff, kid.”

  But my feelings were mixed. Whoever had planted that shiv in Lionel had done a good deed. The Gersteins were a bad bunch. Except for Marv’s boy, Brad, who had fought with me in Normandy, but wasn’t ever coming home. Lost an argument with a Nazi machine-gun nest.

  “If I ever get God in a corner,” I said to Tiffany, taking her arm, “I’ve got a hot one for him. Namely, why do the good and the beautiful die young?”

  Six

  Madness, Moses thought. Unforgivably loopy. A fifty-two-year-old man turning his cabin inside out searching for a salmon fly. A bloody Silver Doctor that could be replaced for three dollars. Yes, but the missing one had been lucky for him, once hooking him a sea-bright eighteen-pound hen on the Restigouche and another time an even friskier fish on the Miramichi. Reaching under his bed, Moses found his other slipper. He caught his finger in a mouse trap. He retrieved a mouldy pizza carton, an empty bottle of Macallan Single Highland Malt, a broken glass, a pair of Beatrice’s panties (sloppy bitch, that one), a letter from Henry, his baseball glove, and the copy of Encounter with his essay on Yiddish etymology.

  Excellent, I thought.

  Thank you.

  Fool. Moses considered banging his head against the stone fireplace. My God, how could he have been so naïve when he was at Balliol? Manipulated in the first place by Sir Hyman and later by Mr. Morrie. The calculating Mr. Morrie—spontaneously, as it were—foisting Barney’s manuscript on him. But Saul was a hell-raiser. So old BG, who didn’t care to share the wealth, had him taken out. He had a bomb planted on his private plane.

  Gurskys. Gurskys.

  “If you have to go to the toilet, you ask me and I’ll show you where there is one for the guests.”

  As L.B. had been indentured to Mr. Bernard, so Moses acknowledged, he had come to be in thrall to Solomon, Ephraim’s anointed one. Furthermore, he had been led like a lamb to Ephraim by Sir Hyman. At the time, Moses had been vain enough to believe that McGibbon’s diary had just happened to be open on the pedestal and that Ephrim Gor-ski had been his discovery.

  Ho ho ho.

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” the doctor in the clinic in New Hampshire had once said, “that your obsession with Solomon Gursky can be explained by your self-evident search for a father, having dismissed your own as unacceptable?”

  “The food here is abominable. Do something about it.”

  “You seem to require the admiration,” the doctor said, “even the love, of older men. Take your friendship with Callaghan, for instance.”

  How to explain, Moses thought, emptying a cardboard carton on the bedroom floor, that it had all started years ago as an attempt to discredit the Gurskys, digging up dirt to shove at L.B.

  Then there had been Henry.

  Lucy.

  Sir Hyman Kaplansky, as he then styled himself.

  Two A.M. Collapsing onto his unmade bed, sinking into sleep, Moses dreamt he was in New Orleans again, not there to see if he could find any record of a Civil War gun-runner called Ephraim Gursky, no, no, but as a treat for Beatrice. He was in New Orleans again, splurging on a breakfast with Beatrice at Brennan’s, restitution for last night’s sins. Only this time the waiter didn’t return his American Express card. “Sorry, sir, but—”

  A humiliated Beatrice saying, “Take mine,” and then turning on him. “I suppose you threw out the bill with the junk mail again or your envelope with the cheque in it is in a jacket pocket somewhere.”

  Only this time a small embarrassment didn’t escalate into tears and recriminations. He dreamt he was in New Orleans with Beatrice again only this time he didn’t disappear after lunch, turning up at the hotel three hours late in a sorry state. Only this time they got to Preservation Hall, where benign old black musicians were doing nothing more than going through the motions until a saucy little white man rested his malacca cane against the wail and sat down to the piano, stomping his foot one, two, three, four … and suddenly the band was transported, digging deeper. Moses, his quarry in sight at last, just out of reach, was set to make a grab for him, but his legs wouldn’t work. He couldn’t budge. Then, even as he was gaining control over his limbs, the gleeful piano player faded and Moses came awake, sweaty and trembling.

  It was still dark, but he got up all the same, reheating what was left of the coffee and lacing it with a shot of Macallan. Then he dug into the bedroom closet again, emptying another carton, and out tumbled the Faberg
é humidor that Lucy had once bought him. Inside he found the letter Henry had sent him a week after he had ruined Lucy’s debut at the Arts Theatre. A clipping from the Edmonton Journal was enclosed.

  NEW ICE AGE THREATENED

  AFTER 10,000 YEARS

  GENEVA (Reuter)—Many scientists believe a new ice age is coming but they cannot agree when or how hard it is going to hit us.

  Some climate specialists studying clues as varied as volcanic dust, the earth’s wobble, tree rings, and sunshine have concluded the world is about due for a big freeze after 10,000 years of comparative warmth.

  If they are right, countries like Canada, New Zealand, Britain, and Nepal could be covered by ice sheets and France would look like Lapland.

  But others predict no more than a mini-freeze, like the “little ice age” which seized Europe between 1430 and 1850. It froze all the rivers of Germany in 1431 and iced up villages near the present French alpine resort of Chamonix in the early 17th century.

  During the American War of Independence nearly 200 years ago, British troops were able to slide their guns from Manhattan to Staten Island across the ice.

  A report by the CIA in May spelled out the possible effects of a little ice age throughout the world.

  In India 150 million people would die during droughts if the average temperature dropped by one degree centigrade. China would fact a major famine every five years. Soviet Kazakhstan would be lost for grain production and Canada’s grain harvest would drop by 50 percent, the report said.

  The report stated the world is already cooling, but scientists will not answer how near is the next ice age. “We just don’t know. Nobody knows,” said a leading climatologist.

  Seven

  In his prime, nibbling cashews or sucking on a Popsicle, pontificating for the benefit of a Fortune reporter or a hotshot from the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bernard had been fond of saying, “Lewis and Clark, Frémont hoo ha, my grandpappy Ephraim was right up there with them. He came to this country to help Sir John Franklin in his search for the Northwest Passage. My enemies—I know you will have to listen to their slanders, it’s your job—will tell you Bernard Gursky he came out of nowhere. Not like them, eh? Don’t make me laugh. Westmount oy vey. It doesn’t fool me that they get into a skirt once a year for the St. Andrew’s Ball, pretending they come from quality and that they didn’t get the shit kicked out of them at Culloden.

  “And the Frenchies? The higher one of them holds his perfumed nose in the air the more likely it is that his great-grandmama was a fille de roi, a little whore shipped over by the king so that she could marry a soldier and have twenty-five kids before she was forty. To this day you know what a French-Canadian family gives the daughter for a wedding present she’s only sixteen years old? Hold on to your hat, fella. They send her to a dentist to have all her teeth yanked out and to fit her with false ones, which they consider prettier. Where was I? The Gurskys, yeah. Well the Gurskys didn’t come here steerage fleeing from some drecky shtetl. My family was established here before Canada even became a country. We’re older, how about that?”

  But in a more mischievous mood, dandling one grandchild on his lap, the others gathered round his chair, he would say, “Your great-great-grandpappy, hoo boy, he was something else. I was his favourite, you know. But I have to say that Ephraim, that old son of a gun, why he never did an honest day’s work in his life.”

  Actually that was not the case. Ephraim’s first job, after he had run away, was in a coal mine in Durham. He was a scrawny thirteen-year-old at the time and his duties were twofold. Working deep underground, near the heading of a new road, he had to convey oxygen from the shaft by opening and closing ventilator doors, regulating the air current. He also had to maintain traffic on the courses, clearing the mullock for the man labouring at the face. The area he was obliged to crouch in was only three feet high and wide. The coal dirt was loaded into sledges known as dans with an iron ring welded to each end. It was dark down there, dark as a raven’s wing, the only available candles fixed to the ends of the stages. And in those days the sledges didn’t ride the rails, but had to be dragged along wet clayey soil to the gob, where they would be emptied. Ephraim, stripped to the waist in the heat and the dark, wore a sturdy rope belt with a chain attached. Hooking the chain to the sledge, sinking to all fours, mindful of scuttling rats, he would crawl along, dragging his load, singing the songs he had learned at his father’s table:

  Strong and Never Wrong is He,

  Worthy of our Song is He,

  Never failing,

  All prevailing.

  Built the Temple in our days.

  Speedily, O speedily,

  Built that all may sing Thy praise.

  Twice a day at fixed times during his twelve-hour shift he would stop to gorge himself on huge chunks of pulpy white bread, a gristly beef bone, and cold coffee gulped out of a tin canteen that unfailingly tasted of anthracite grit. The crash of shifting rock and coal above his head was alarming, but the pay was excellent—ten pence a day, five shillings in a good week. When he got to the top, panting, sucking air, he could always flirt with the pitbrow girls, who sorted and graded the coal at the surface. Among themselves the girls called him Little Lucifer. They were afraid of him. Not Kate, however. Once a week Ephraim paid Kate, one of the County Clare girls, a sixpence to go with him to the leaky shack at the far end of the slag heap. Standing on a box, he would have her against the wall, the earthen floor too mucky for such sport.

  Ephraim had only been employed in the mine for six months when he became a trapper-boy, minding the doors to allow putters to pass with their ponies and coal-tubs. This called for quickness of feet as empty tubs came hurtling down a steep incline toward him in trains of sixty.

  The miners taught him bawdy songs.

  Even randy little duchesses have lured me to their arms,

  And crumby little countesses have yielded me their charms.

  Then, only give me leave to go a-fishing in your pond,

  I’ve got a rod so long and strong, and such fine bait, Mrs. Bond.

  Ephraim became a putter himself. His new job was to push, or put, the trains of coal that had been filled by the hewers as far as the crane, where they were hoisted on wagons to be hauled the rest of the way by ponies. The average heft of a loaded tub was six to eight hundredweight, and Ephraim, paid by the number of tubs he put, now earned as much as three shillings, six pence a day. He supplemented this by delivering newspapers for a newsagent in an adjoining village, which is how he came to meet the affable Mr. Nicholson, the schoolmaster. Mr. Nicholson was astonished to learn that Ephraim could read and write. In spite of Mrs. Nicholson’s objections, he began to lend the boy books. Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Robinson Crusoe. “Tell me, boy,” Mr. Nicholson asked one day, “did you know that your namesake was the second son of Joseph, born of Asenath, the daughter of Potipherah?”

  Confused by the names pronounced in English, Ephraim refused to commit himself.

  Mr. Nicholson brought out the family Bible, turned to Jeremiah, and read aloud what the Lord had said unto his prophet. “‘I am a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.’” Moving his finger lower down the page, he found the other passage he wanted. “Jeremiah, you know, foretold the coming of Christ. ‘Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah, with the seed of man …’”

  Ephraim leaped up as Mrs. Nicholson brought them tea with bread and strawberry jam.

  “‘… and with the seed of beast,’” she said.

  Considerably younger than Mr. Nicholson, she was pale, her manner severe, disapproving.

  “Joshua, the son of Nun, was descended from your namesake,” Mr. Nicholson said, all twittery.

  Mrs. Nicholson set down her teacup, shut her eyes, and swaying just a little in her chair recited, “‘And Joshua the son of Nun sent out of Shittim two men to spy secretly, saying, Go and view the land, even Jericho. And they went and came i
nto an harlot’s house, named Rahab, and lodged there.’”

  The colour rising in his cheeks, Mr. Nicholson said, “When Jacob was ailing he acknowledged the two sons of Joseph, blessing Ephraim with his right hand and Manasseh with his left.”

  “Do you know why, boy?” Mrs. Nicholson demanded.

  “It was to show that the descendants of Ephraim would become the greater people.”

  “Hip hip hurrah,” Mr. Nicholson said, “you have read your Old Testament.”

  “Only in Hebrew, sir.”

  “Fancy that.”

  Shutting her eyes, swaying again, Mrs. Nicholson declaimed, “‘Gilead is a city of them that work iniquity, and is polluted with blood. And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way by consent: for they commit lewdness.’” Her eyes fluttered, they opened, and she stared at Ephraim. “‘I have seen an horrible thing in the house of Israel: there is the whoredom of Ephraim, Israel is defiled.’”

  “Yes, yes, my dear. But surely not this sweet little Ephraim. Where are you from, boy?”

  “Liverpool.”

  “Is that where your parents be?”

  “They are dead, sir.”

  “Or have been transported, more likely,” Mrs. Nicholson said.

  “And where did they come from?”

  “Minsk.”

  Mrs. Nicholson snorted.

  “I would like to study Latin and penmanship with you, sir, providing you set a fair price.”

  Mr. Nicholson rocked on his heels. “Oh dear me,” he said, shaking with laughter, “a fair price, is it?”

  Mrs. Nicholson managed to convey her disapprobation by the manner in which she swept up the tea things, and then retreated into the kitchen.

  “I will take you on, boy,” Mr. Nicholson said, “but I cannot, in conscience, accept an emolument.”

  “I will do chores for Mrs. Nicholson.”

  “You will find,” Mrs. Nicholson said, her face hot, “that I am most particular.”

  Mr. Nicholson proved kindly to a fault, irrepressibly jolly, and Ephraim’s lessons with him went exceedingly well. He earned pats on the head, playful little jabs and tickles, and exclamations of joy. “Well done, my pretty one!” But when Mrs. Nicholson chose to join them, seated darkly behind their deal table doing needlework in her rocking chair, Mr. Nicholson would become abrupt, impatient, his back stiffening each time her rocking chair creaked. One evening Mr. Nicholson, having quite forgotten his wife’s presence, covered Ephraim’s hand with his own to guide him in a penmanship exercise. Ephraim, fully aware that she was there, contrived to draw his head closer to Mr. Nicholson, their cheeks brushing. Mrs. Nicholson spoke out: “‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God.’”