“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?”
Then Solomon sailed home and, without consulting Bernard, appointed McGraw manager of the Duke of York Hotel in North Portal, Saskatchewan, only a few feet from the border and immediately across the road from the railroad station for the Soo Line, which connected with Chicago.
Bernard was outraged when he discovered that McGraw had been promised twenty percent of the hotel’s take. “In the future,” he told Solomon, “such decisions are to be made by me, you, and Morrie together.”
No answer.
“I am considering offering my hand in marriage to Miss Libby Mintzberg of Winnipeg.”
Solomon whistled.
“Her father is president of the B’nai Brith synagogue. He’s a shoimer shabbos.”
“In that case, we must introduce him to Levine.”
Sammy “Red” Levine, out of Toledo, was strictly orthodox: he was never without a yarmulke and didn’t murder on the sabbath.
“Miss Mintzberg and I plan to have a family and then my needs will be greater than yours or Morrie’s.”
“Piss off, Bernie.”
During the Prohibition years Solomon was out of Saskatchewan more often than not, looking in on Tim Callaghan who was competing with Harry Low, Cecil Smith and Vital Benoit on the Windsor-Detroit Funnel, running into disputes with the Little Jewish Navy or the Purple Gang that only Solomon could settle by calling for a meeting in the Abars Island View or inviting everybody to dinner at Bertha Thomas’s Edgewater Thomas Inn.
Bertha Thomas died in 1955 and her roadhouse burnt down in 1970, but when Moses finally got to Windsor he managed to track down Al Hickley, who had once been her bouncer. In his seventies now, Al was rheumy-eyed, his speech thickened by a stroke, reduced to drinking what he called Ontario horsepiss, nesting in a rotting rooming house on Pitt Street. Al, who had been a rum-runner himself once he had quit the roadhouse, led Moses to a bar near the corner of Mercer Street that still reeked of last night’s vomit. “Hey, when I worked the Reaume Dock at Brighton Beach we not only ran booze across the river, but Chinks too. We loaded the Chinks in big bags, see, weighted, so’s a patrol boat got too close we had to throw ’em overboard with the booze. Shit, Moe, I think of all the booze lying at the bottom of the river it breaks my heart.”
“Did you ever meet Solomon Gursky in the old days?”
“I shook hands with Jack Dempsey himself once and I still got Babe Ruth’s autograph somewheres. The Yankees they was at Brigg’s to play the Tigers used to drink at Bertha’s. I talked to Al Capone a couple of times you never met a nicer guy. He could handle a thousand cases a day.”
“Gursky.”
“Used a cane and read books?”
“That’s the one.”
“Solly you mean. Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Hell’s bells, he was one of Bertha’s favourites. You know, we had a system at the Edgewater. The spotter buzzes us the cops are coming, Bertha lays a trail of ten-dollar bills from the front entrance to the back and those lardasses they’re bent over double going scoop scoop scoop. Pigs in a trough. Other times there’s a raid the shelves of booze behind the bar slides down a chute and waiters and members of the band are emptying customers’ glasses like crazy on to the thick thick carpet. But one time the fat little piano player he was, you know, a drug fiend, I’m dead against that, he misses naturally and there’s booze all over the dance floor. The cops they mop it up and they’re going to bring charges against Bertha, but Solly it was he saves her sweet ass. Why, Bertha, he says, I could have sworn you varnished the dance floor last night and didn’t that stuff contain alcohol? The judge, a good customer himself, laughs the cops out of court. Didn’t Solly die in an airplane crash?”
“Yes.”
“But his brothers are rich rich rich now?”
“Right.”
OR SOLOMON WAS IN CHICAGO, consulting with Al Capone’s financial adviser, Jacob “Greasy Thumb” Guzik. Or he was bound for Kansas City to cut a deal with Solly “Cutcher-Head-Off” Weissman. In Philadelphia, he handled the needs of Boo Boo Hoff and Nig Rosen and in Cleveland he supplied Moe Dalitz. Then he would meet with Bernard in Winnipeg or North Portal or the Plainsman Hotel, in Bienfait, and they would quarrel, Bernard spitting and cursing, and Solomon would take off again. He would check into the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for a couple of weeks, partying with Dutch Schultz and Abbadabba Berman at the Embassy or Hotsy-Totsy Club. Then he would drive to Saratoga to join Arnold Rothstein at the races, once wiring Bernard for fifty thousand dollars and another time for a hundred, sending Bernard into a rage.
The summer following the Chicago Black Sox scandal, Solomon joined with Lee Dillage, a North Dakota liquor dealer, in bankrolling an outlaw baseball team. The team that toured the border towns of Saskatchewan numbered among its players Swede Risberg and Happy Felsch, both former members of the notorious Black Sox. The games were a welcome distraction to the locals as well as the bootleggers, mostly out of North Dakota, who had to hang around one-horse towns like Oxbow and Estevan until after dark, before loading up their stripped-down Studebakers and Hudson Super-Sixes at the Gursky boozatoriums. Heading for the border without lights, their only problem the potholes prairie yokels had deliberately dug into tricky curves, hoping to shake loose a case of Bonnie Brew or Vat Inverness.