Solomon Gursky Was Here (25 page)

The lawyer's two confederates, Darcy Walker and Jim Clarkson, seated at the back of the hall, immediately grew restive. One of them pulled out an enormous linen handkerchief and did not so much blow his nose as honk it. The other one banged his cane against the plank floor.

“Mind you,” Russell Morgan, QC, added hastily, betrayed only by a rush of blood to his jowls, “Gursky certainly didn't find those nuggets in Township streams. He brought them with him.”

“He wasn't a Hebrew,” a boy called out. “He was a Four by Two.”

“That happens to be Cockney argot for Jew, young fella, and Ephraim Gursky is one of the worst of that nefarious race. He is not only wanted by the police here, but also by the authorities in England and Australia.”

A murmur rose among the Millenarians, a murmur that a gratified Russell Morgan, QC, took for outrage, but was actually prompted by naked admiration.

“No shit!”

“Tell us more.”

“Ephraim was transported from London, England, to Van Diemen's Land in 1835, a forger of official documents. The rest is understandably murky. We don't know how he came to this great land of ours.”

“What would your services cost us, Mister Man?”

“Why not a penny, sir.”

“We may be stupid,” Abner Watson said, “but we ain't crazy. How much?”

Russell Morgan, QC, explained that if he lost the case, which was unthinkable given his brilliant record and fabled courtroom eloquence, then his services—much sought after, he needn't point out—would come to them
pro bono publico
.

“Come again?”

“Free”

But if he proved to be their saviour, all the timber land adjoining the Cherry River—including mineral rights, he put in quickly—would be signed over to him.

Once saved, twice shy, the Millenarians began to walk out one by one, drifting over to Crosby's Hotel. Watching from a window, they saw Russell Morgan endure a tongue-lashing from his two confederates, one of whom actually reached into a pocket of Morgan's beaver coat, yanked out the sterling silver flask, and flung it into a snowbank. As a contrite Morgan retrieved his flask, “Ratty” Baker rushed up, said something, and the three Montrealers immediately set out for Sherbrooke. On arrival, they repaired to the bar of the Prince of Wales Hotel, and there they discovered a short fierce man with hot eyes and an inky black beard drinking alone at a table in a dim corner. They did not so much approach the table as surround it.

“What can I do for you, my good fellows?”

Morgan wagged a finger at him. “You are Ephraim Gursky!”

The fierce little man, his eyes darting, tried to rise from his chair but was quickly knocked back, wedged into place, the three men having joined him at his table. Morgan, charged with glee, took his time lighting an Havana, watching the little wretch begin to sweat. Cornered, they were all the same. That lot. Laughing aloud, his belly bouncing, Morgan blew smoke in his face. “I am trying to decide,” he
said, “whether to escort you back to Magog, where you would undoubtedly be hanged from the nearest tree, or whether I should show you a modicum of Christian charity and merely hand you over to the authorities. What do you think, Hugh?”

“Oh, heavens, what a conundrum.”

“Please,” a tearful Ephraim whined just before he slumped forward in a faint.

The waiter was hastily summoned. “I'm afraid,” Morgan said, “that our companion has overindulged himself. I assume that he is a guest of your establishment.”

Darcy retrieved the room key from the desk and the three men, supporting Ephraim between them, led him back to his room, dumped him in a chair and slapped him awake.

“Well, my little man,” Morgan said, “I'd say, not to put too fine a point on it, that you are a rat caught in a trap.”

Darcy began to go through Ephraim's suitcase. Hugh searched the bureau drawers.

“What little money I've got is under the mattress. You can have it, if you let me go.”

“Now isn't that rich, boys. He takes us for common thieves.”

“You are obviously gentlemen of quality. But I don't know what you want with me.”

“Possibly we wish to buy your illicitly gained properties on the Cherry River.”

“They're worthless, sir.”

“Oh, why don't we just take him back to Magog and be done with it?”

Ephraim watched, his eyes bulging with anguish, as Darcy pulled out a heavy pine chest from under the bed. “It's locked,” Darcy said.

“The keys, Gursky.”

“Lost.”

Morgan dug the keys out of Ephraim's jacket pocket.

“I collect rocks,” Ephraim said. “It's a passion of mine.”

“That's rich. That's very rich. I should tell you that Mr. Walker is a geologist, and Mr. Clarkson a mining engineer.”

The pine box unlocked, the rock samples lay bare.

“You will find a gold nugget or two in there,” Ephraim said, “but I swear they do not come from any creek near here.”

“Where from, then?”

“The north, my good fellows.”

The men passed the rocks from hand to hand.

“You can beat me,” Ephraim suddenly lashed out. “You can turn me over to the police or take me back to Magog to be hanged, but unless I'm offered a fair price I will not sign over deeds to properties that took me three long years of hard work to accumulate.”

T
HE MILLENARIANS
, their properties lost, were in a hallelujah mood. Brother Ephraim, who had promised to save them, had been as good as his word so far as they were concerned. No sooner did the snows melt than most of the dispossessed packed their wagons and headed south. Free free. Free at last. Free to put the unyielding wintry land behind them. Some struck out for Texas, which they had read so much about in dime novels, but others made it no further than the “Boston-States”, where eight years later a few accepted money to replace rich Yankees in the Union Army.

One of the volunteers, Hugh McCurdy, had been related to Strawberry on his mother's side. A letter of his survived on threecoloured newspaper from a
Magnus Ornamental and Glorious Union Packet
. It had been written on the eve of the battle of Shiloh, where McCurdy fell, and one night Strawberry brought it to The Caboose to show Moses.

Dear Bess,

Bess, there is grate prospect of my Being Called into Battle Tomorrow—And for fear of it and not knowing how I may come out I will incloes 15 dollars and in Cayse of my Being Short of Money, which I may be, I will rite you if Necessary. You better give Father the little pocket Charm in Cayse only if its necessary. Tell Amos to Be a good boy and take Care of him Self, and I advise him as a Brother never to inliss for this is not a place for him. Tell Luke to Be Contented where he is and never to inliss and Battle all day. Bess!
will you kiss little Frankie for me for I may never have that ocasion to do so my Self. I don't think of Enything more very important. This is from Your Dear Husban,

HUGH MCCURDY

The next morning Moses had hiked to Strawberry's house on the hill and together they had rooted through an attic trunk, surfacing with other intriguing items, among them a traveller's account, from an 1874 issue of
Harper's Magazine,
of a trip through the Lake Memphremagog country following its short-lived mining boom. “From Knowlton to South Bolton extends a wilderness. Small bears have been seen, foxes are often killed and the trout brooks yield up their treasures. From there we moved on to Cherry River. Gold was once thought to be abundant in the streams feeding the Cherry River, a Magog banker having displayed several large nuggets as evidence. But sadly for the many investors in New Camelot Mining & Smelting this turned out not to be the case. Therein, however, lies a tale. We sought out Sir Russell Morgan at his Peel Street residence in Montreal, the proud family coat-of-arms emblazoned over the portico. We hoped Sir Russell might enlighten us over what still remains a subject of some controversy. Unfortunately, he was unavailable.”

New Camelot Mining & Smelting was the rock on which three considerable Montreal family fortunes were founded, that of the Morgans, the Clarksons and the Walkers. The mining stock, originally issued at 10¢, soared to $12.50 before it crashed. Radical members of parliament called for an inquiry at the time, arguing that Morgan and his partners had sold before the bubble burst, but nothing came of the protestations.

Sir Russell Morgan, in his privately printed autobiography,
A Country Gentleman Remembers,
dwelled at length on his progenitors, whom he had no difficulty tracing back to the Norman Conquest of 1066, even though—or just possibly because, some wags ventured—surnames had not yet been introduced in England. But he devoted only two paragraphs to the short, febrile life of New Camelot Mining & Smelting, the company he had founded in partnership with
Senator Hugh Clarkson and Darcy Walker, MP. The three of them had been misled in the first place, he noted, by an Israelite renegade who had assured them that the hills were veined with gold. He deeply regretted that many investors had endured a beating. Mining, alas, was a risky business. Mind you, he added, he had never heard so much as a peep from the many more who had made money trading the stock or from those who had profited on his later ventures, but—he reflected—
c'est la vie,
as our charming habitant friends are so fond of saying.

Two

Hungover, unable to concentrate, Moses reckoned the day would not be utterly lost if he put the books in his cabin into some kind of order, beginning with those scattered on the floor. The first book he picked up was
The Unquiet Grave; A Word Cycle by Palinurus
. “The more books we read,” it began, “the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having made the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked!”

Well, flick you, Cyril, Moses thought, flinging the slender volume across the room and then, because he held Connolly in such high regard, promptly retrieving it. There was a Blackwell's sticker on the first page and a notation in his own handwriting: “Oxford, 1956.”

That, of course, was the year Moses caught his first glimpse of the fabulously rich Sir Hyman Kaplansky, seated at Balliol's High Table, chattering with two of the most tiresome of the dons. Several weeks passed before Moses ran into Sir Hyman again, this time in Blackwell's bookshop, a malacca cane tucked under the old man's arm. Sir Hyman introduced himself. “I read your essay on Yiddish etymology in
Encounter,
” he said. “Excellent, I thought.”

“Thank you.”

“So I hope you won't take offence if I point out a small error. I fear you missed the mark on the origin of ‘kike'. Mind you, so did Partridge, who cites 1935 as the year of its first usage in English. As I'm sure you know, Mencken mentioned it as early as 1919 in his
American Language
.”

“I thought I said as much.”

“Yes. But you suggest the word was introduced by German Jews as a pejorative term for immigrants from the
shtetl,
because so many of their names ended in ‘sky' or ‘ski.' Hence ‘ky-kis' and then ‘kikes'. Actually the word originated on Ellis Island, where illiterates were asked to sign entry forms with an ‘X'. This the Jews refused to do, making a circle or a
‘kikel'
instead, and soon the inspectors took to calling them
‘kikelehs'
and finally ‘kikes'.”

Another month passed before there came the summons from Sinai.

“There's no accounting for taste,” Moses's history tutor said, “but it seems that Sir Hyman Kaplansky has taken a fancy to you.”

Sir Hyman, the tutor explained, was a collector of rare books, primarily Judaica, but also something of an Arctic enthusiast. He owned one of the largest private collections of manuscripts and first editions dealing with the search for the Northwest Passage. A Canadian university, the tutor said, McGill, if memory served, had asked to exhibit his collection on loan. Sir Hyman acquiesced and now required somebody to compile a catalogue. “I imagine,” the tutor said, “that you could manage the job nicely in a fortnight. He will pay handsomely, not that you were about to inquire.”

On his next trip down to London, Moses made directly for Sam Birenbaum's office in Mayfair. Sam, overworking as usual, if only to prove himself to the network, had barely time for a quick pint and shepherd's pie in the pub section of the Guinea. Then, back at the office, he had the librarian feed Moses the thick file on Sir Hyman.

The elusive Sir Hyman was reported to have been born in Alexandria, the son of a cotton broker, and seemed to have made his fortune speculating on the currency market in Beirut, before settling in England shortly before World War Two. He was knighted in 1945 for his services to the Conservative party, it was said, and went on to amass an even greater fortune as a merchant banker and property developer. The immediate post-war period, however, appeared somewhat murky, Sir Hyman entangled in at least two botched ventures. In 1946, operating out of Naples, Sir Hyman bought two superannuated troop ships and a number of freighters of dubious
seaworthiness, incorporating a shipping line. In the end, he had to write off his fleet, selling his tubs for a pittance. Then one of the freighters, still bearing the emblem of his defunct line, a raven painted on the funnel, was caught trying to run the Palestine blockade and diverted to Cyprus by a British destroyer. Fortunately Sir Hyman was able to prove that he had unloaded the ship in question six months earlier, and said as much in his letter to the
Times
.

Then, in early 1948, there was another unsuccessful flutter, this time in film production. Sir Hyman, known to be an aviation buff ever since he had learned to fly in Kenya, confounded his admirers in the City again, acquiring a villa in Valletta and announcing that he was going to produce a film about the air war over Malta. With this in mind, he began to recruit former World War Two pilots and to assemble a small air force, comprised largely of Spitfires. But the film never went into production, Sir Hyman unable to settle on a satisfactory script. He returned to London in May, assuring a reporter from the
Financial Times
that he would not plunge into unfamiliar waters again, and allowing that his air force had ended up in a knacker's yard, costing him a pretty penny. A day later David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel, which he said would be “a light unto the nations.” The new state was immediately attacked by troops from Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Egypt, and Iraq.