Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  “None of your business.”

  “Well it’s my bee’s-wax if you’re shop-lifting or maybe peddling dope to school kids in the Alexis Nihon Plaza and the cops will be coming to my door to make inquiries.”

  Smith didn’t emerge from his room until noon the next day. After looking at a number of places, he settled on something in N.D.G. in a rambling old house that had been converted into self-contained one-room flatlets, each with its own bathroom and a cupboard kitchenette with a two-plate electric burner. Feeling sinful, he bought a small refrigerator and a colour TV and an electric blanket. Then, exhausted, he took a taxi home, slipping out at the corner, only to be totally undone when he discovered that his key no longer fit the lock to his room. Worse news. His increasingly frantic struggling with what was obviously a new lock wakened somebody inside. A whining feminine voice. “Is that you, Herb?”

  Before Smith, dizzy with despair, could answer, Mrs. Jenkins was there.

  “We moved everything into the back room for you nice and tidy. Even your precious strongbox full of marijuana and dirty postcards I’ll betcha.”

  “I’ve got to get into my room.”

  “But everything’s here,” she said, leading him to the back room.

  “Please,” Smith said, “I’ve got to get into my room.”

  “This is your roomy-doomy-do now. Besides, Mrs. Boyd is in bed with the grippe, poor kid.”

  Smith shut the door and subsided on to his bed. Shivering under his blankets even though the radiator was on the sizzle, he realized that he couldn’t move out tomorrow as he had planned. He would have to wait until Mrs. Boyd got better, went out shopping with her husband, and he could break into the room to retrieve his money. Meanwhile, he calculated it was safe. They would never look under the floorboard. But it squeaked. Oh, God.

  Early the next morning Smith opened his door a crack. Soon enough he was rewarded with his first glimpse of Betty Boyd, a frail creature in a faded nightgown, hurrying to the toilet, a hand cupped to her mouth. Morning sickness, Smith thought.

  Betty couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. Herb, easily ten years older, was a big man, his hockey sweater no longer stretching over his beer belly.

  MONCTON WILDCATS

  Eat McNab’s Frozen Peas

  Herb had a job at Pascal’s Hardware and came straight home from work every night with a pizza or a couple of submarine sandwiches, a six-pack of O’Keefe, and a quart of milk. Except for hurried flights to the toilet, Betty lingered in bed all day, playing her radio loud. The Boyds had only been installed in Smith’s old room for a week when he contrived to run into Herb in the hall. “You ought to take her out one night,” he said. “Put some colour in her cheeks.”

  “She don’t like you peeping from behind your door when she has to crap.”

  Two nights later Smith saw them leave their room. He waited until he heard the outside door open and shut and then he reached for his hammer and screwdriver. Mr. Calder in number five was out. So was Miss Bancroft. Bingo night. Mrs. Jenkins was watching TV in her parlour, but what if she heard the door being forced? Or what if the Boyds had only gone to the corner store and would be back in five minutes? Smith decided to wait for a night he could be sure they had gone to a movie. Meanwhile, he would time how long they stayed out. But when he fell asleep at two A.M. there was still no sign of them.

  It was seven A.M. before Mrs. Jenkins opened the door to the room with her master key and saw that the Boyds hadn’t taken anything with them.

  A stricken Smith joined her.

  “Don’t touch anything,” she said. “Fingerprints. They could be the victims of foul play.”

  But Smith knew, without even looking, that the Boyds had lifted a squeaky floorboard and were now on the road to Toronto richer by two thousand three hundred and fifty-eight dollars.

  Still mourning his loss, Smith arranged for his things to be picked up while Mrs. Jenkins was out having her hair done by Lady Godiva. He left a brief note and two weeks’ rent on the table, but no forwarding address, and his last best hope was that she would slip on the ice, breaking an ankle, and there would be nobody to take care of her when she got out of the hospital.

  Good riddance, Mrs. Jenkins thought, crumpling the note, and then she stepped right out again, stopping for a banana split at the Alexis Nihon Plaza and then going to a movie, The Day of the Jackal. It was ruined for her by two glaring flaws. The assassin, crossing from Italy to France, never could have spray-painted his sportscar so easily. Another scene began with the sun at twelve o’clock, but ended with it at three, though the scene only lasted a minute, if that. Filmmakers must think everybody is an idiot.

  Installed in his new flatlet, his colour TV and refrigerator in place, the photograph of his parents in Gloriana sitting on the mantel, Smith prepared his breakfast, gratified that he no longer had to respond to how many Newfies it took to screw in a light bulb or how do you tell the bride from the groom at a Polish wedding. It was a pleasure to have his own Gazette delivered to the door, not a crumpled copy, pages stuck together with marmalade. There were other benefits. He didn’t have to wipe the blood off his butter, because she had shoved her leaky lamb chops on the shelf above his own, instead of putting it in the meat drawer. Neither was he obliged to spread paper on the seat before sitting on the toilet. Tomorrow, he decided, he would have his phone disconnected. He didn’t want Mrs. Jenkins coming round to snoop just because he was listed in the book. Let her worry about what had become of her best friend in this vale of tears.

  Lionel Gursky beamed at him from the front page of the Gazette. His newly established Gursky Foundation (yet another tax dodge, Smith thought) would offer a hundred university scholarships to needy students across Canada. This, in everlasting memory of Mr. Bernard. “My father,” Lionel said, “loved Canada and everybody in it.”

  Said the call girl to the judge, Smith thought, a pain shooting up his arm.

  Seven

  One

  Inevitably, Gitel Kugelmass’s daughter and her husband, the dentist, joined the exodus of English-speaking people from Montreal, fleeing down the 401 to Toronto. The Nathansons did not take Gitel with them. Instead they secured a place for her in the Mount Sinai, an apartment-hotel in Côte St. Luc with everything for Jewish seniors. A kosher dining room, a shul, arts and crafts classes, a health-atorium where a nice young girl led them in aerobics, a convenience store, twenty-four-hour security, and a room set aside for lectures, pinochle, funeral services, and dances on Saturday nights. Die Roite Gitel, tricked out in a big floppy hat and a flowing black cape, was anathema to those wives still lucky enough to have husbands in this world. A coquette. A menace on the dance floor. She was also known to invite men up to her apartment who were not yet incontinent or confined to walkers, serving them peach brandy. According to rumour, that choleria received the men in her black negligee trimmed with lace, slipping a Mick Jagger disc on the record player, that shaygetz howling, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction”.

  Gitel’s only other visitors were bouncy cemetery salesmen armed with lyrical graveyard photographs and casket price lists, urging her not to end up a burden to her family. Or round-shouldered rebbes in smelly caftans who guaranteed to light a memorial candle on each anniversary of her death for a mere twenty-five dollars. So once a week Moses drove into town to take Gitel to lunch. What began as a happy excursion, the two of them gabbing away in Yiddish, evolved into a melancholy duty. Following her second minor stroke, die Roite Gitel, who had once led the workers out against Fancy Finery, lost her compass. The first inkling Moses had that she was now somewhat addled came when she insisted he drive into Montreal a day early. “I’m calling from a pay phone,” she said. “My own line isn’t secure any more.”

  Once seated with him at a table in Chez La Mère Michel, she showed him the letter. It was from her daughter in Toronto, inviting Gitel out for the High Holidays, and enclosing photographs of the grandchildren, Cynthia and Hilary.

  “Well,
that’s all very nice,” Moses said.

  “Can’t you see this letter is an almost perfect imitation of Pearl’s handwriting?”

  “Are you telling me she didn’t write it?”

  “Pearl would die before inviting me to their house for Rosh Hashana. Either the CIA or the KGB is behind this letter.”

  “Gitel, please, you don’t really think that.”

  “I don’t think it. I know it.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “If it’s the CIA it’s because they know I was a Party member the same time as the Rosenbergs and if it’s the KGB it’s because they know I left.”

  Moses ordered another Scotch. A double.

  “Were you followed to my place?” she asked.

  “I took precautions.”

  “My apartment’s bugged.”

  On occasion, however, Gitel was her adorable self at lunch. “Moishe,” she said, “I only want one thing more, to live long enough to see you publish your biography of Solomon Gursky.”

  Then one night she wakened him with a phone call at two A.M. “I found it.”

  ‘‘What?’’

  “The bug.”

  Feeling foolish, but concerned for her sake, Moses drove to Montreal immediately after breakfast. Gitel, who had been pacing up and down, waiting, rolled back her living-room carpet. Protruding from the centre of the floor was an ominous copper cap. Gitel handed him a screwdriver and he got down on his hands and knees and unfastened it. Fortunately the Farbers, who lived in the apartment below, were in the kitchen when their living-room chandelier fell to the floor. Even so, it took a good deal of explaining.

  Quitting the autoroute at exit 106 late the same afternoon, Moses pulled in for a drink at The Caboose. Gord Crawley’s second wife, the former widow Hawkins, was drunk again. When Gord edged past her, lugging a trayful of beer, she called out in a booming voice, “First marriage I never had time to take off my stockings, now I could knit a pair easy.”

  Moses retreated to his cabin. He no longer kept regular hours. Instead he might work around the clock, or even longer, and then pass out, drunk, on his bed and sleep for twelve hours. And now, overcome by ill-temper and impatience, he lit a Monte Cristo, poured himself a Macallan, and sat down at his desk. Sorting, sifting, he came across a file card with a passing reference to Mr. Bernard, discovered in a biography of Sir Desmond McEwen, the Scots liquor baron. “Bernard Gursky struck me as just what one would expect a person of his birth and antecedents to be, intelligent, but without any personal charm that I could discover, in fact the reverse.” The lost file card had been serving as a bookmark in Trebitsch Lincoln’s scurrilous Revelations of an International Spy, which Moses had read hoping against hope that the notorious conman, a.k.a. Chao Kung, né Ignacz Trebitsch, had run into Solomon in China, but seemingly they had never met. Too bad.

  Moses got up to stretch. He rubbed his eyes. Then he opened Solomon’s journal to the pages that dealt with the trial, Bert Smith, the shooting of McGraw, and Charley Lin.

  Fat Charley.

  Once proprietor of Wang’s Hand Laundry and two bedbug-ridden rooming houses, a survivor of the big autumn poker game of 1916, Charley received Moses at his own table in the House of Lin on a wintry night in 1972. The restaurant on Hazelton Avenue adjoined Mr. Giorgio’s showroom on one side and Morton’s Men’s Boutique on the other. An elongated, twisting papier-mâché dragon, breathing fire and smoke, was suspended from the silken ceiling from which there also hung a tracery of teardrop purple lights and bambooframed pink lanterns.

  The House of Lin was favoured by Toronto’s film crowd. Slender, scented Chinese girls, wearing brocaded silk sheaths slit to the thigh, led the short rolypoly producers and their willowy young ladies to The Great Wall of China bar, where gathered around the rickshaw, its centrepiece, they sipped kirs or champagne as they studied their menus. Eventually the producers and their girls were escorted to tables according to rank. On each table there stood an enormous snifter in which rose petals floated in perfumed water.

  The House of Lin’s menu, ostensibly mandarin, was shrewdly tilted to accommodate the palate of its clientele. The won ton soup, for instance, was reminiscent of mama’s chicken soup with lokshen. The steamed dumplings were indistinguishable from kreplach, except that they were filled with pork. The General Kang minced beef on a steamed cabbage leaf could pass for an unwrapped chaleshke.

  Lin, possibly ninety years old now, Moses reckoned, was plump and bright-eyed and reeked of cologne. “It was Solomon’s doing, of course. I’m not saying he actually pulled the trigger on McGraw. He was far too, ah, you know …”

  “Fastidious?”

  “Far too what you said. But he brought in the killers from Detroit.”

  “There are people who say it was Solomon they had come to shoot. He was the one who was supposed to go down to the railway station, wasn’t he?”

  “But he sent McGraw in his place.”

  “McGraw was his friend.”

  “Until he discovered that he had been swindled at the poker table by a boy who had stolen his stake from his family in the first place.”

  “And who told you that?”

  Lin smiled his irritating wisdom-of-the-East smile.

  “Was it Mr. Bernard?”

  “Mr. Bernard is a great human being. King of the Jews. If not for him the family would be nowhere today.”

  “Ah, so Harvey Schwartz eats here, does he?”

  “When he is in town with his enchanting wife I’m pleased to say, but never Mr. Bernard, though I have extended him the offer of my hospitality more than once.”

  “However, he did invest,” Moses said, taking a stab at it.

  “I am sole proprietor of The House of Lin.”

  “How did Solomon cheat?”

  “Let me show you something,” Lin said, dealing cards from a deck he had prepared. “Kozochar had folded and so had Ingram and Kouri. I went out even though I was sitting on nines back to back. It was the only thing to do. McGraw was showing two ladies and a bullet and had been betting those ladies from the start like he had another one in the hole, and let me tell you he wasn’t one to bluff, McGraw. Solomon was sitting there with only sevens and a ten showing. He was not only seeing McGraw, he was raising him, shoving thousands into the pot. Then Ingram dealt McGraw another bullet, giving him a full house for sure, and Solomon a deuce, good for nothing. McGraw tossed the deed to the hotel into the pot and Solomon put up the Gursky store, the blacksmith’s shop, and the two rooming houses I had lost. And when they turned over the cards McGraw was sitting on only two bullets over ladies, that’s all, but that little son of a bitch was holding three sevens.”

  “It happens.”

  “If you had been sitting on back to back sevens to begin with would you have raised into two and then what looked like three ladies for sure? No, sir. Not unless you knew that all McGraw had in the hole was a lousy eight.”

  “And how in the hell would Solomon have known that?”

  “Now let me show you something else,” Lin said, motioning to a waiter who promptly brought him two more decks of cards lying on a painted enamel tray. Lin set the decks down on the table immediately before Moses. “Tell me on which one the cellophane and stamp have been steamed off and then resealed.”

  “But you weren’t playing with Solomon’s cards.”

  “No. Ingram’s.”

  “Well, then.”

  “But where did Ingram buy them, Mr. Berger?”

  “From A. Gursky & Sons, General Merchants.”

  “You’re not as stupid as I thought.”

  “That still doesn’t prove anything, least of all that it was Solomon who ordered McGraw shot.”

  “Then tell me why Solomon jumped bail, flying off to his death in that Gypsy Moth?”

  “Because he knew that you had been paid to lie on the witness stand and, besides, he had other plans.”

  “Not long term, I trust.”

  “Tiu na xinq.”

 
Two

  As defined by the Electoral Franchise Act of July 20, 1885, “Person” meant a male, including an Indian, but excluding anyone of the Chinese race, among them Charley’s father Wang Lin, who was one of Andrew Onderdonk’s lambs. More than ten thousand strong they were, these coolies plucked out of Kwangtung province to cut a swathe through the Rocky Mountains for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Suspended over cliff faces in swaying baskets, they fed sticks of dynamite into crevices and blasted twenty-seven tunnels through Fraser Canyon. Then, their work done, their presence no longer required, many of them drifted into the settlement that was incorporated as Vancouver in April 1886. The same month white navvies employed at Hastings sawmill struck for higher wages. The mill manager responded by hiring more Chinese, rounding up coolies willing to put in ten hours a day for $1.25. This enraged a local drunk named Locksley Lucas. So one night he organized a bunch outside the Sunnyside Hotel and they marched on the tents of Chinatown, bent on breaking heads. Some of the Chinese were tied together by their pigtails and flung over a cliff into the sea, encouraged to swim the rest of the way back to the Middle Kingdom.

  Wang Lin, a survivor, fled into the interior of B.C., then over the Shining Mountains into the western heartland, finally settling in the small town where the best bargains were to be had at A. Gursky & Sons, General Merchants.

  Wang’s son Charley prospered. Then, in the big autumn poker game of 1916, Charlie, as well as Kozochar, Ingram, Kouri, and McGraw were humiliated by Solomon, who rose from the card table the new owner of the Queen Victoria Hotel.

  Before Solomon went off to the wars he installed McGraw as bartender, which some said was good of him. But it was hard on McGraw. He took to the bottle. He began to brood. Seated in the five-and-ten with Kouri, Kozochar, and Lin, he complained bitterly about Bernard, who made a point of checking out the cash register every night. He watched, amazed, as that strutting little bastard parlayed Solomon’s winnings into a bunch of hotels-cum-bordellos and a couple of mail-order houses that shifted booze from one province to another. Gathered around the hot stove with his cronies, McGraw allowed he never could have done it himself, he lacked the audacity. Yes, Lin countered, but neither could Bernard have managed it without the Queen Victoria as collateral. “And what if Solomon didn’t beat you fair and square,” Lin asked, “but he was cheating?”