Solomon Gursky Was Here (57 page)

“I'll take care of it,” Smith said.

“I've got a couple would take this room on Monday and pay me forty dollars a week in advance.”

Quitting the house in a rage, Smith hurried down the street, passing neighbours, not one of whom greeted him with a wave or even a smile. Grabby cheeky foreigners. Bloody ungrateful, that lot. If one of their women got on the same bus as he did, never mind she was merely an ignorant cleaning lady, pilfering from her betters, he immediately offered her his seat. Why, once he had even carried parcels home from the Metro for Mrs. Donanto. But if he ever slipped on the ice, breaking an ankle, the neighbours would probably cheer. Certainly they would leave him lying there with the poo from the Reginelli dog who did his business anywhere.

Smith went to the bank, withdrew his weekly two hundred dollars, and then treated himself to coffee and a blueberry muffin at Miss Westmount. He had his pride. He would not submit to the indignity of that two-by-four room with a slit of a window overlooking the rats feasting on the garbage in the back lane. Instead he popped in on Mrs. Watkins and inquired about the vacant room in her house. Then he splurged on lunch at Ogilvy's and went home for a nap.

“Thinking of moving out, are we, old buddy of mine?”

Smith, startled, felt the room begin to sway.

“Go ahead. Make my day. The reason Mrs. Watkins has a vacant room is an old guy conked out in bed. Probably froze to death. Or didn't you know she sets her thermostat at sixty-five?”

“I have no interest in your back room.”

“Guessy guessy why Mrs. Watkins phoned the minute you left her cockroachy place? Because she's put up with old fusspots got one foot in the grave before and she wanted to know did you pee in bed?”

“Have you quite finished, Mrs. Jenkins?”

“Mrs. Jenkins is it now? Ha! I found an empty Laura Secord box in your wastepaper basket last week as well as a takeout bag from the Shangri-la and three Lowney's Nut Milk wrappers. Where did you get the do re me, Bert?”

“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.