“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.”