Solomon Gursky Was Here (62 page)

“So had somebody threatened to compromise your no doubt enviable reputation as an honourable player it would have been a serious matter?”

“A very serious matter.”

“That's all for the moment, Mr. Gursky, and I do thank you for the patience and of course the unfailing courtesy of your replies.” But as Solomon got up, MacIntyre motioned for him to sit down again.
“Sorry. Just one more thing. Going back to that game in which you were lucky enough to win the Queen Victoria Hotel—”

“From
the late
Willy McGraw?”

“Yes. From the late Mr. McGraw. Can you tell me did you use new playing cards?”

“Yes.”

“And where were they purchased?”

“Why, from A. Gursky and Sons, General Merchants.”

Charley Lin wasn't summoned to the stand until late in the afternoon. He averted his eyes as he waddled past Solomon, who smiled and whispered something that made Charley stumble and then turn to the judge to protest that he had had a long journey and did not feel well.

Judge Leclerc, noting the late hour, adjourned the court, asking Mr. Lin to resume the stand at ten the next morning.

But the next morning Solomon Gursky did not turn up in court at the appointed hour and was not to be found at home, either. He had met with Mr. Bernard the previous evening, according to Clara Gursky, the brothers quarrelling bitterly, and then he had gone out for a stroll at six in the morning and hadn't been seen since.

“Did he take a suitcase with him, Mrs. Gursky?”

“No.”

It was late in the afternoon before the RCMP established that Solomon had taken a taxi to Cartierville airport and flown off in his Gypsy Moth with the raven painted on the fuselage.

Bound for where?

North was all Mr. Gursky said.

Where north, for Christ's sake?

Far, he said.

Refuelling in Labrador, it was later discovered, heading still farther out in appalling weather conditions, a whiteout predicted.

The next day's newspapers featured page one photographs of the late Willy McGraw, lying in a puddle of blood on the railway station floor. There were interviews with Charley Lin. Photographs of Solomon seen seated with “Legs” Diamond in the Hotsy-Totsy Club; Solomon standing on a corner of Third Avenue, kibitzing with Izzy
and Moe, the fabled Prohibition agents; and, finally, a photograph of Solomon in his flier's uniform, standing before his Sopwith Camel, on an airfield “somewhere in France.”

Reporters speculated that McGraw had discovered Solomon was playing with marked cards acquired from his father's general store. Fearful of exposure, or possibly responding to blackmail, Solomon appointed McGraw manager of the Duke of York Hotel in North Portal and then had him murdered, his own alibi foolproof.

RCAF search planes hunted for Solomon's Gypsy Moth, which seemed to have disappeared after refuelling in Labrador, where the mechanic who had serviced the plane was sharply questioned.

“Didn't he tell you where he was heading?”

“North.”

“We know that, damn it, but where?”

“Far, he said.”

A bush pilot, consulted by the RCMP, said that the day Solomon had taken off nothing else was moving, because it was as good as flying through a bottle of milk. In a whiteout, he explained, there is absolutely no horizon, and even the most experienced pilot, riding it out, wheeling and turning, his sense of gravity gone, is inclined to fly upside down into the ground. And that, he felt, is what happened to Gursky somewhere in the barrens, where only an Eskimo had a chance to survive.

Shuffling into court three days after Solomon's disappearance, Mr. Bernard apologized to Judge Leclerc for being unshaven and for wearing a suit jacket with a torn collar and slippers. It was not, he assured him, out of disrespect for the court, but in deference to the tradition of his people when mourning the death of an immediate family member, in this case a cherished brother, no matter what his sins.

Five days later, the Gypsy Moth still missing, Judge Gaston Leclerc delivered his verdict to an attentive court:

“The Crown claims that the accused maintained agencies in Newfoundland and St. Pierre et Miquelon for the purpose of smuggling and that the sales made there were proof of an illegal conspiracy. However, the accused were jolly well within their rights. They
were legally entitled to maintain such agencies in such places, and it is no secret that at the time many Canadian distilleries sold as many of their products as they could outside of Canada. These acts, I'm bound to point out, were legal and the vendors were not obliged to verify the destination of the goods they sold, nor was there any obligation upon them to inquire of the buyers what they intended to do with the goods.” The judge concluded, “There is no evidence that the accused committed a criminal act. I am of the opinion that there is not, prima facie, proof of a conspiracy as alleged, and the accused are herewith discharged.” However, he did add that if Solomon Gursky were to be found alive there would be other charges that he would have to answer to in court.

The next morning an RCMP inspector subpoenaed Judge Leclerc's bank records and raided his safety-deposit box. No incriminating evidence was found. In any event, Judge Leclerc retired the following year, stopping in Zurich before proceeding to the Cotswolds, where the estate he acquired had a walled rose garden, masses of rhododendrons, a labyrinth and apple and pear trees.

The long-awaited verdict on the Gurskys didn't even make page one, because the same day charred pieces of a disintegrated Gypsy Moth were found strewn over a three-mile area in the barrens. Many of the airplane parts were brought in by a wandering band of Eskimos, all of them wearing sealskin parkas with fringes hanging from the corners, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands. One of the Eskimos had found an attaché case embossed with the initials S.G. It contained Solomon's passport and close on two hundred thousand dollars in American banknotes. Solomon's body was never found. It was assumed to have been blown apart when the Gypsy Moth exploded, the pieces dragged off and consumed by the white wolves of the barrens.

The next morning Mr. Bernard summoned Morrie to his house. “Before Solomon ran away,” he said, “he was good enough to sign these new partnership papers.”

Fifty-five percent of McTavish for Mr. Bernard, thirty percent for Solomon and his descendants, and fifteen percent for Morrie.

“I thought my share was going to be nineteen percent.”

“I fought for you like a tiger, but he wouldn't budge.”

Mr. Morrie signed.

“There's only the two of us left now,” Mr. Bernard said.

“Yes.”

“But you mustn't worry about me. I've decided to start having regular check-ups.”

“Should I do the same you think?”

“Aw. Why go to the expense? You look terrific.”

Four

Becky Schwartz's name was now a fixture in E.J. Gordon's Social Notes in the
Gazette,
most recently in a column celebrating an anniversary of the Beaver Club; Harvey, like the other achievers who had been invited, bedecked in a beaver hat and a tailcoat and sporting a goatee for one of the grandest nights an the city's high society calendar.

“Boy, do you ever look like a
shmuck,
” Becky had said before they started out.

“I'm not going.”

“We're going. But would you please line the inside of that hat with paper or something. It looks like you have no forehead.”

The Beaver Club was founded in 1959 to recreate the riotous dinners held two centuries earlier by Montreal's fur traders. “Welcoming the guests,” E.J. Gordon wrote, “were Caughnawaga Indians, clad in doeskins, the men wearing feathered headdresses, standing beside their tepee in an encampment in the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.” Seated cross-legged immediately before the tepee, beating the drums, was a fetching young girl, actually a great-great-granddaughter of Ephraim Gursky and Lena Green Stockings, who would later enchant the guests with her rendition of “Hava-negilla”.

Becky studied E.J. Gordon's column in her four-poster bed the next morning, reclining against satin pillows, picking at a bran muffin. She was in a sour mood. Problems with the children. Bernard, into coke and God knows what else, was falling behind with his studies at Harvard. Libby, at Bennington, wouldn't come home until Harvey divested his shares in any company with holdings in
South Africa. And Becky, her outsize donations to the art museum and symphony orchestra notwithstanding, had still failed to crack the right dinner-party lists. She insisted that Harvey take her to dinner at the Ritz.

“The Moffats are watching our table. Order caviar.”

“But I don't like it.”

“And don't you dare mash chopped onions into it.” Then she told him what she had decided. “We're going to redecorate the house and then hold a masked ball and invite
le tout
Montreal.”

Becky went after the best that money could buy, the much soughtafter Giorgio Embroli of Toronto and Milan. Giorgio, a master of rectilinear circuitry, did not undertake commissions just like that. He had first to explore the physic boundaries of the three-dimensional space involved and to test the stream of kinetic energy bound to flow between him and his clients. Harvey flew him into town in a Gursky Challenger jet. He and Becky welcomed him to their house by cracking open a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé that came out of a Napa Valley vineyard only recently acquired by McTavish. Giorgio raised his glass to the light, took a sip, swished it around in his mouth and grimaced. “Sadly,” he said, “most Californian wines are completely incapable of producing a sensory shock. They never surprise you. They tell you how they were made, but not how they came into existence.” Then, patting his ruby lips with a handkerchief, he said, “Show me, please, where I can rinse out the palate.”

Harvey didn't blink at Giorgio's fees. He stood by as the interior decorator floated out of the house, pausing at the front door, offering a pale scented cheek to Becky to be kissed. But once he was gone, Harvey threw out the Baccarat wine glass that had touched his lips and the Pratesi towel that he had used in the hall toilet. “I know they say that you can only get it from an exchange of bodily fluids,” he said, “but until they know for sure we're not taking any chances.”

Giorgio's live-in companion, Dov HaGibor, was a talented painter out of Ramat Aviv. He had started out as an abstract impressionist, determined to create work that celebrated a collision of ur-references as well as trapping infinity and assigning a linguistic function to colour. Recently, however, HaGibor had confounded his admirers by
converting to high-voltage realism, his pictures interpreting fractured rather than unified space. He found his subjects by seeking out junk shops wherever he travelled, never knowing what he was looking for but recognizing it immediately he found it. An old photograph, discovered in a Salvation Army sale in Montreal, was the
causa causans,
as Walter Osgood, curator of the Gursky Art Foundation put it in his essay in
Canadian Art,
of the famous 14 × 8-foot canvas that was to dominate the redecorated Schwartz living room, its value escalating once HaGibor had died of AIDS.

There had been a barely legible inscription on the back of the original photograph that HaGibor had burnt once his painting was done: “Gloriana, October 10, 1903”. And “Gloriana” is what HaGibor called what came to be recognized as his masterpiece, the title an enigma, a matter of contention. Some critics argued that it made the artist's satirical intent clear, but others insisted just as forcibly that HaGibor had meant his work to stand as a complaint against
la condition humaine,
as witness the Hebrew words flying off to the right. The words, translated, read: My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope.

In any event, the undeniably striking canvas showed a bewildered couple, the husband dour, the wife looking stricken, standing before a sod hut, the landscape bleak as it was bare. Though the couple in the original photograph had hardly ever seen each other nude in thirty-two years of marriage, they were naked to the world in the painting, the woman's breasts desiccated and her genitals bald; the man pigeon-chested with a penis like a withered worm.

Harvey was determined to dump the canvas as soon as that hysterical Italian faggot was out of their house for good, but he relented once Walter Osgood came to inspect “Gloriana” and clearly coveted it. Then “Gloriana” was photographed for the cover of
Canadian Art
. Westmount matrons who had cut Becky at the annual museum ball now vied for invitations to view HaGibor's last statement. The curator of the National Gallery in Ottawa requested permission to exhibit the painting, assuring Becky that a notice mounted alongside would read, “From the private collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Schwartz.” Dealers began to make unsolicited
offers that would have enabled Harvey to quadruple his original investment, but he was not prepared to sell. Instead he increased the insurance on “Gloriana” five-fold. A risky move, as far as he was concerned, because if the picture were stolen anti-Semites would whisper that he had arranged it to collect the money. Harvey Schwartz would be blamed. Count on it.

Eight

One

“According to the Haidas, of the unfortunately named Queen Charlotte Islands, more properly Haida Gwai, the Islands of the People,” Sir Hyman once said to Moses, “according to them, before there was anything, before the great flood had covered the earth and receded, before the animals walked the earth or the trees covered the land or the birds flew between the trees, there was the raven. Because the raven had always existed and always would. But he was dissatisfied as, at the time, the whole world was still dark. Inky black. The reason for this was an old man living in a house by the river. The old man had a box which contained a box which contained an infinite number of boxes, each nestled in a box slightly larger than itself until finally there was a box so small all it could contain was all the light in the universe. The raven was understandably resentful. Because of the darkness on the earth he kept bumping into things. He was slowed down in his pursuit of food and other fleshly pleasures and in his constant and notorious need to meddle and change things. And so, inevitably, he took it upon himself to steal the light of the universe from the old man.”