Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  “I would like to know if your bonded whisky is really for re-export and, if so, I want to see evidence of its final destination.”

  “Papers papers. When it comes to paperwork you’re looking at a guy who takes the booby-prize. Give me a couple of days and I’ll find the documents.”

  “I’ll be back next Wednesday,” Smith said, and on his way out he paid for his own coffee and blueberry pie.

  Bernard, sniffing trouble, was filled with unease. Then, returning to the office, sifting through the monthly bank statements, his unease flared into red-hot anger, and he hurried over to The Victory Hotel, pulling Solomon away from the poker table, and presenting him with the evidence. “I’ve found you out,” he hollered, waving cancelled cheques at him, cheques endorsed by Solomon. “Look at this. $3,000 to Billy Sunday. $3,500 to the Anti-Saloon League. And here’s another one. $2,500 to Alphonso Alva Hopkins. You invented that name. Admit it.”

  “Why, Mr. Hopkins is a writer and editor of great distinction. In 1915 he campaigned to have the name of German measles changed to victory or liberty measles, and now he is even more adamantly opposed to the scum of besodden Europe—people like us, Bernie—corrupting the Christian youth of this once-pure continent with booze.”

  “If you ask me none of these cheques are going where you say, but they are covering your poker losses right here in the hotel.”

  “I’ll get back to my game now.”

  “The hell you will. Tell me what the fuck is going on!”

  “We’re investing in the future.”

  Two days later Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition would be enforced a year later.

  “Bernard, you driven, greedy bastard,” Solomon said, “Bernard, you’re going to be richer than you imagined in your wildest dreams.”

  In his excitement, Bernard forgot to tell Solomon about Bertram Smith, and that he would be coming back the following week.

  Five

  The necessary customs documents for the bonded whisky were not produced, contrary to Bernard’s promise, so Smith had no choice but to report the infraction to the Regina office. He was rebuked for his zeal. Then, patrolling a border road one evening, Smith saw two “Whisky Six” Studebakers racing south, riding low on their springs under a full load of booze. The bootleggers promptly switched on their rear windshield searchlights, trying to blind their pursuer, but Smith pulled ahead and cut them off at the border. The bootleggers turned out to be three defiant, unemployed construction workers out of North Dakota. They giggled at the sight of their scrawny, snaggle-toothed captor. “Jeez, sonny, you ain’t gonna shoot us, are ya?”

  Smith established that the three Americans had crossed the border illegally the night before and, consequently, had to be detained until they paid double duty on their cars, some $1,850, that would be reimbursed once they returned to the States.

  “Hey, why don’t you just be a good boy and take us to town, where the Gurskys will straighten you out.”

  Bernard arranged for Smith to meet with him, Solomon, and Morrie in the warehouse office, Tim Callaghan also in attendance.

  “It was good of you to come here today, Mr. Smith,” Solomon said. “May I pour you a drink?”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “Such a nice boy,” Morrie said.

  “A putz you mean,” Bernard said, “just like you.”

  “Is there anything I can offer you?”

  “No.”

  “How about money. Plenty of it,” Bernard sang out, opening the safe and tossing bundles of banknotes on to the desk. “You could get your teeth fixed. Buy a suit that fits. A car. A house, even. The girls you could get. Wowee!”

  “Precisely how much money is on the table?” Smith asked.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Bernard said, brightening. Smith took out his fountain pen and made a note on his pad.

  “But maybe if I counted it again it could come to fifteen.”

  “I intend to see you and your brothers in prison.”

  “Would that give you pleasure?” Solomon asked.

  “You and your sort will have to learn once and for all that not everybody has his price.”

  “You know what you’re asking for, Mr. Fucken Boy Scout Troop Leader,” Bernard shouted, “Mr. Eighteen-Dollars-a-Week Pipsqueak, you’re asking for trouble, eh? Big big trouble.”

  “I intend to report your threats verbatim,” Smith said, scribbling on his pad again.

  “You heard that? Threats yet. Well fuck you, sonny, I don’t threaten cockroaches. I squash them,” Bernard said, rubbing his heel into the floor, “like this.”

  “Mr. Callaghan, you are a witness to this attempted bribe and to the threats to my person. I expect you to testify accordingly in court.”

  “I’m Tim’s boss, not you, cacker. Jeez, why didn’t you ever do anything about those teeth of yours? Look at him, guys,” Bernard said, heaving with laughter, “I’ll bet he hasn’t even busted his cherry yet.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  Solomon said he wished to speak to Smith alone. Grudgingly, Bernard stepped outside, followed by Morrie, Callaghan starting after.

  “I’m leaving too,” Smith said, “unless Mr. Callaghan stays.”

  “You want a witness?” Solomon asked.

  “Yes.”

  So Callaghan remained behind.

  “I want to assure you, in the presence of Mr. Callaghan, that even if you choose to testify against us nothing will happen to you.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “I admire you for it, honestly, but the deck is stacked against you. Your superiors, grossly underpaid, are not nearly so fastidious. Far from appreciating your ardour they will crush you for it. Don’t testify, Smith.”

  “I was both threatened here and offered a bribe.”

  “Yes, but circumstances will oblige me to deny it, and Callaghan will lie for my sake.”

  “But he’ll be under oath.”

  “Swearing on a Bible?”

  “Yes, sir,” Smith said, infuriated with himself for the “sir,” but there was something in Solomon that compelled it.

  “Oh Smith, Smith, if it’s justice you’re after, don’t bother looking for it in this world, wait for the next. I’ve got enough on my conscience without you. Take the money or leave it, as you see fit, but don’t stick your neck out.”

  Once he had gone, Solomon poured himself a Scotch and then passed the bottle to Callaghan. “Did you know, Tim, that John Calvin attended the same school in Paris as Rabelais? Le Collège de Montaigu.”

  “And what if I don’t care to swear on a Bible and then lie for your sake on a witness stand?”

  “That would really make things interesting.”

  Bernard was back, Morrie trailing after. “Softsoaping him got you nowhere, eh?”

  “He’s a man of principle.”

  “So you’re sending for somebody.”

  “I promised that nothing would happen to him.”

  “Hey, that was big of you, but I didn’t. Meyer would help. Little Farfel owes us. Phone him. Or maybe Longy better.”

  ‘‘Forget it.’’

  “Good good. We’ll go to prison and learn how to sew mailbags or stamp licence plates. Why should other guys have all the fun? Say something, Morrie.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Say you don’t want to go to prison.”

  “I don’t want to go to prison.”

  “With him for a brother who needs a parrot? Come on, Solomon. Send for somebody.”

  “What did you make of Smith, Tim?”

  Callaghan shrugged. He looked troubled.

  “What if that’s the size the saints are now? Bad teeth. Boils on their neck. Consumed with hatred.”

  Morrie approached Solomon. “In your honest opinion,” he asked, “is he dangerous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Watch,” Bernard said, “he’s going to run to the toilet now.”

  Morrie
froze in the middle of the room.

  “What are you going to do? Wet your pants just because I called the shot? Go, for Christ’s sake.” Then Bernard turned on Callaghan. “I’d like to have a word alone with my brothers, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure,” Callaghan said, leaving.

  “Tim could testify against us to save his own neck.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Speak to Meyer. Send for somebody.”

  Solomon poured himself another drink.

  “You think it doesn’t go against my nature?” Bernard asked.

  Six

  Among the dusty stacks of Gursky memorabilia that cluttered Moses’s cabin was a copy of The Cunarder for May 1933. Featured articles included “In Havana, Gay Capital of Cuba” and “Czechoslovakia’s Winter Jollity”. There was also a double-page spread of “Some Trans-Atlantic Personalities” posing on the decks of the Berengaria, Aquitania, Caronia and Mauretania. Among them were the Duchess of Marlborough, the former Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt; Madame Luisa Tetrazzini, a star of the New York Metropolitan Opera House; and Mrs. George F. Gould, “Filiae pulchrae, mater pulcherior might have been coined to describe Mrs. Gould.” The photograph next to that of Mrs. Gould was one of Solomon Gursky. “Nothing at the moment is more in the public eye than a possible end to the enforcement of Prohibition in the United States. Above is seen a prominent Canadian distiller intimately connected with the looming wet invasion of America. He is smiling against the deck plating of the Aquitania, where he allowed himself to be photographed on a recent trip to England.”

  Moses had noted on a file card, attached to The Cunarder with a paper clip, that several months earlier—on February 27, 1933 to be precise—the American House of Representatives and the Senate had passed a resolution to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. The resolution called for ratification of Repeal by a majority vote of state conventions in thirty-six states. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an acknowledged wet, was sworn in as the thirty-second president of the United States on March 4 and early in April it became legal to sell 3.2 percent beer. H.L. Mencken sampled a glass of the new brew in the bar of the Rennert Hotel in Baltimore. “Not bad at all,” he said. “Fill it again.”

  Solomon sailed for England in May, ostensibly bound for Edinburgh, where he was to seek a partnership in the American market with the powerful McCarthy Distillers Limited of Lochnagar, just above Balmoral. But over the next three months there was nothing but the occasional teasing postcard from Solomon. Postcards from Berlin and Munich and London and Cambridge and finally Moscow. Meanwhile a fulminating Mr. Bernard was not idle. He acquired a distillery in Ontario and another in Tennessee. Solomon returned to Montreal early in October.

  “What happened in Scotland?” Mr. Bernard demanded, his eyes bulging.

  “You know damn well I never got there. You go, Bernie.”

  “I need your permission? Like hell I do.”

  Mr. Bernard sailed late in October only to find that the Scots liquor barons considered him not quite the right sort to represent their interests in America now that Prohibition was about to end. In fact, they seemed amused by his presumption. A bristling Mr. Bernard was in London, staying at the Savoy, when Utah became the thirty-sixth Repeal State, making the news official. November 20 that was, and the headline in the Evening News read:

  PROHIBITION IS DEAD—

  THE MORMONS KILLED IT—

  WHOOPEE

  HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN

  Solomon, to Mr. Bernard’s bewilderment, did not mock him for coming home empty-handed. Solomon had put a short-wave radio and a cot into his office. Unsavoury, shifty-eyed little strangers, wearing funny European-style suits, dribbling cigarette ash everywhere, met with him there and left with their pockets bulging with cash.

  “What are we buying?” Mr. Bernard asked.

  “Kikes.”

  “You’ll make fun of me once too often.”

  Solomon had already made the first of what would become many infuriating trips to Ottawa, this time to see Horace MacIntyre, the deputy minister of immigration. MacIntyre, a bachelor and church elder, was celebrated throughout the civil service for his rectitude. If he mailed a personal letter from his office he dropped two cents into a box for the postage.

  MacIntyre listened to Solomon’s plea for the refugees with some impatience. “Let’s not hide behind euphemisms, Mr. Gursky. By refugees you mean Jews.”

  “I had been told that you were a most perspicacious and forthright man.”

  “Jews tend to be classified as ‘non-preferred immigrants’ not because of their race, which prejudice I would find repugnant, but because they consider work in agriculture or mining beneath their dignity.”

  “My grandfather worked in the mines in England before he came here in 1846, and my father was a farmer on the prairies.”

  “But I understand that you have since found more profitable employment.”

  Solomon smiled his gleeful smile.

  “It is because your people are such confirmed city-dwellers, and would usurp positions that could be filled by the native-born, or immigrants from the Mother Country, that we simply cannot open the flood-gates.”

  “As the population of this country is presently constituted, the Jews make up no more than 1.5 percent,” Solomon said, and then he went on to describe some of the things he had seen in Germany.

  “As it happens,” MacIntyre said, “I am an admirer of the writings of Mr. Walter Lippmann, a co-religionist of yours though somewhat demure about it. He is of the opinion that the persecution of the Jews serves a useful purpose by satisfying the German need to conquer somebody. In fact, it’s his considered opinion that it is a kind of lightning rod which protects Europe. Of course it’s a nuisance, Mr. Gursky, but there is no need to panic.”

  Come summer Mr. Bernard was on the boil. It was rumoured that the prime minister intended to put the Gursky brothers in jail and throw away the key. The government case against them pending, the Gurskys bound to be charged with, among other things, avoiding customs duty on smuggled liquor, Mr. Bernard huddled with his lawyers every night, enraged with Solomon who sat silent throughout the sessions, seemingly indifferent to their fate. And now it was Mr. Bernard who flitted between Montreal and Ottawa once, sometimes twice, a week, lugging large sums of cash in his attaché case and returning with paintings by Jean-Jacques Martineau, which he threw into a cupboard. Such was the state of his nerves that a month passed before he noticed Morrie’s absence.

  Charging into their original Montreal offices on Sherbrooke Street one morning, kicking open office doors, searching toilets, he demanded, “Where’s my brother?”

  “Take it easy, Mr. Bernard,” Tim Callaghan said.

  Irish drunk. Christ-lover. “Oh yeah. Why?”

  “Because the way you’re carrying on these days, you’re asking for an ulcer.”

  “I don’t get ulcers. I give them. Where in the fuck is Morrie?”

  Solomon was sent for.

  “Did you actually hit him with an ashtray?” Solomon asked.

  “Only a fool wouldn’t have ducked.”

  “Morrie’s had enough of you. He’s tired of bringing up his breakfast every morning. He’s retired to the country with Ida and the kids.”

  Mr. Bernard descended on Morrie’s secretary. Terrified, she drew a map that would enable him to find Morrie’s place in the Laurentians. Threatened, she told him about Morrie’s workshop. Cursed, spat at, she snitched about the furniture-making. Mr. Bernard fired her. “Take your handbag and that nail file, the sound drives me crazy, and take your ten-cents-a-gallon perfume from Kresge’s and your Kotex box and get the hell out of here.” Then he called for his limousine and sped out to Ste.-Adèle.

  Morrie, forewarned, waited in the living room, his head resting on Ida’s lap. Then he roused himself and stood by the window, cracking his knuckles. When Mr. Bernard finally pulled into the long driveway and pounced out of his limousine, he did not start immediately for the large re
novated farmhouse on the hill overlooking the lake. Instead, a startled Morrie watched him make straight for the vegetable garden. Yanking out tomato plants. Trampling on lettuce beds. Kicking over cabbages. Jumping up and down on eggplants, popping them. Pulling a pitchfork free of a manure pile and swinging away at corn stalks. Then he rushed to the front door, pounding on it with his fists. “Look at my suit! Look at my shoes! I’m covered in farm shit.”

  He squirted right into the dining room, pulling a linen cloth off the table, sending a vase of roses crashing to the pine floor, and wiping his hands and then his shoes clean of eggplant pulp.

  “Tell him that you’re not going back!” Ida shrieked.

  “What was your father? A little Jew in a grocery store with a scale that gave fourteen ounces to the pound, living in a shack that didn’t even have an inside toilet. You went into the outhouse for a crap, you had to guard your balls against bumblebees. Now you wear diamonds and mink I risked life and limb to pay for. Go to your room at once. I have to talk to my brother.”

  Ida fled, pausing at the top of the stairs to shout “Hitler!” before slamming the bedroom door and locking it from the inside.

  “If God forbid she was my wife I’d teach her some manners let me tell you. What did you pay for this dump?”

  Morrie told him.

  “How many acres?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Big deal. If I wanted a place in the country, I’d have a hundred acres at least and I’d be on the sunny side of the lake in a bigger house, where the floors didn’t creak.” He shook with laughter. “They must have seen you coming, you putz.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Mr. Bernard went to the window. “Is that,” he asked, pointing at an obviously new clapboard building, “the workshop where you make the furniture?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m told that you accept orders for bookshelves and that you actually sell the stuff through a shop in Ste.-Adèle.” Mr. Bernard scooped up a delicate side table. “You made this itsy-bitsy fuckshit table?”