“Oh, no. How is he?”
“Dead is how he is the last time I looked.”
“Did they catch the killers?”
“No.”
Bernard began to curse.
“I didn’t want you to worry. I wanted you to know I was safe.”
“Thank God for that.”
“Something else while I’m at it,” Solomon said, remembering to coat the blade with honey. “Mintzberg has been buying the wrong stocks on margin from Duncan, Shire & Hamilton. Considering he has to be managing it on a parochial school principal’s salary, I’d say he’s heavily over-committed.”
“With God’s help he’ll lose his shirt, that fucken yekke.”
“Possibly he’d be grateful for a loan from an understanding son-in-law.”
Afraid he might doze off in spite of himself, Solomon shoved his bureau against the door to his room and laid his gun on the bedside table, alongside his bottle of cognac and gold pocket watch that was inscribed:
From W.N. to E.G.
de bono et malo.
The murderer of Willy McGraw was never caught, but, so far as the RCMP was concerned, the motive was obvious. McGraw had been stripped of his diamond ring and, Solomon estimated, some nine thousand dollars in cash. However, within weeks, more than one cockeyed story about the murder was being floated in speakeasies as far away as Kansas City. McGraw, one theory had it, had been killed by hijackers in reprisal for his informing on a couple of them to the RCMP. Another theory ran that McGraw had been shot by mistake, the intended victim Solomon for having seduced the wife of a politician in Detroit. In support of that farrago there were witnesses who swore that the getaway car had a Michigan licence plate. Still others whispered that it was Solomon himself who had ordered the killing because McGraw had something dirty on him that went back years. Lending credence to that theory was the undeniable fact that it was Solomon who had sent McGraw to the railway station. Finally, some said that the killer had indeed been after Solomon, hired by the father of a girl he had ruined in Winnipeg.
In any event, Solomon was not seen on the prairie for months, and when he came back it was, to everybody’s surprise, to marry a girl in Winnipeg. She was six months’ pregnant at the time, living in seclusion in The Victory Hotel, her parents having disowned her. Solomon, they said, married her merely to give the child a name. An unnecessary gesture, as it turned out, because the baby girl was stillborn. Libby Gursky pronounced that a blessing in disguise, because otherwise the poor child would have been bound to live out her life under a cloud of shame.
Three
Moses Berger never visited a city without seeking out its second-hand bookshops, not satisfied with scanning the shelves but also rummaging through unsorted cartons in the basement. One of his most cherished discoveries was a memoir of R.B. Bennett, the New Brunswick-born prairie lawyer who led the Tories into office in Ottawa in 1930, ending a nine-year reign by Mackenzie King. The memoir, written by the prime minister’s secretary, Andrew D. MacLean, began:
The Right Honourable Richard Bedford Bennett, P.C., LL.D., D.C.L., K.C., M.P., Prime Minister of Canada, foremost statesman in an Empire of over four hundred million people, rises at seven-thirty, enjoys an ample breakfast, and is at his office, every morning, a few minutes before nine.
At sixty-four years of age, he works fourteen hours a day, and plays not at all. His admirers fear for his health; his political enemies delight in spreading stories of his impending collapse; yet he carries on—for such has been his habit for twenty years—in his quiet way; occasionally complaining of the trials of public life; doing three men’s work, with little outward indication of the strain put upon his powerful mind or his clean body.
Struggling for clients in a little Western town—when the West was wild and when clients were usually found in the bar room; “Dickie” Bennett did not drink, did not smoke, yet his friends were legion, and I should imagine that the majority of them are not averse to the uses of strong spirits, and of nicotine.
R.B. Bennett, descendant of United Empire Loyalists, a Methodist millionaire, a bachelor and former Sunday School teacher, was pledged to bring to justice the bootleggers who had been coddled by the Liberals for so long, but he didn’t get round to it until 1934. By that time the Gurskys, directors of the thriving James McTavish & Sons, were happily ensconced on the Montreal mountainside. Mr. Bernard’s mansion was dug into the highest ground, enabling him to look down on the adjoining homes of Solomon and Morrie as, one spring morning, he sat down to breakfast with Libby, three months’ pregnant. The maid announced that there were two men at the door who wished to see him. “They’re from the RCMP, sir, and wish to speak with you at once.”
They had warrants for the arrest of Bernard, Solomon, and Morrie, who were taken to RCMP headquarters to be fingerprinted and photographed and then escorted to the Montreal Court of the King’s Bench Chambers, where they were released on bail of $150,000 each. The Gursky boys, as the newspapers called them, were charged with the evasion of $7 million in customs duties and a further $15 million in excise taxes. Mr. Bernard was also charged with attempting to bribe Bert Smith, a customs officer.
It was the murder of Willy McGraw that ignited the prairie fire, politicians in faraway Ottawa sniffing the smoke that eventually led to the Gursky boys being scorched by a humiliating arrest. Following a plague of bank robberies instigated by bored American rum-runners, the murder of McGraw infuriated the law-abiding citizens of three prairie provinces, vociferous members of the Loyal Orange Lodge in particular. Prime Minister Mackenzie King heard the cry of his western children, consulted his crystal ball and the hands of his wall clock, and decreed an end to the export liquor trade in Saskatchewan, giving the Gurskys a month to shut down their operations there. However, King was too late to save the provincial Liberals from electoral defeat. A Tory candidate, taking to the stump, declared, “The Liberals have been in cahoots with the booze peddlers from the very beginning. Take Bernard Gursky, for instance, a millionaire many times over. He is alleged to have offered Inspector Smith a bribe of fifteen thousand dollars. Then how much do you think he and his brothers paid into Liberal coffers for immunity from prosecution all these years?” Next the Bishop of Saskatchewan, Cedric Brown, a former chaplain to the intrepid settlers of Gloriana, took to the pulpit. “Of the forty-six liquor export houses in Saskatchewan,” the bishop proclaimed, “sixteen are run by people of the Hebrew persuasion. When the Jews form one half of one percent of the population, and own sixteen of the forty-six export houses, it is time they were given to understand that since they have been received in this country, and have been given rights enjoyed by other white men, they must not defile the country by engaging in disreputable pursuits.” Then he quoted from a dockside sermon by the legendary Reverend Horn, who had led a company of God-fearing Britons westward ho to Gloriana. We are bound, the reverend had said, for the land of milk and honey. Not, the bishop added, for the fleshpots of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The bishop’s condemnation of the Jew bootleggers swiftly turned into a chorus, joined by the United Grain Growers, the Loyal Orange Lodge, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Ku Klux Klan and the Tories. The Tories sailed into office in the provincial election, promising to bring the Gurskys to the bar of justice.
That had been tried before, of course, by Bert Smith, who claimed that, as a consequence, Mr. Bernard had attempted to bribe him. The charge would be vehemently denied by Mr. Bernard before the Royal Commission on Customs and Excise, but the commission ruled that in their view a prima facie case had been made sufficient to warrant prosecution being entered against Bernard Gursky. Unfortunately, such was the press of other business, the commission neglected to set a date for the trial.