The Royal Commission, as a matter of fact, did not convene until several years after the alleged bribe attempt, but only a week following Smith’s confrontation with the Gurskys in the warehouse, he was, to his astonishment, reprimanded by his superiors and transferred to Winnipeg. He had only been in Winnipeg for a month when he discomfited the Gurskys again, this time impounding another bootlegger’s car on a back road, the culprit fleeing into the bush. When Mr. Bernard heard the news, taking the call in Morrie’s office, he ripped the telephone off the desk, flinging it out of the window. “I’m stuck with a little goyishe splinter under my fingernail.”
“Aw, he’s just a kid doing his job. One car. Big deal. You make a fuss and you’ll draw even more attention to us from the newspapers.”
“And I don’t make a fuss the word will get out that a fucken Boy Scout can make trouble for Bernard Gursky and get away with it.”
So Mr. Bernard went to Ottawa to meet the plump, rosy-cheeked Jules Omer Bouchard, chief preventive officer for the Department of Customs. Though Bouchard earned only four thousand dollars a year, he managed to maintain a mansion across the river in Hull, looked after by a niece; a retreat in Florida; and a riverside cottage in the Gaspé, a cabin cruiser tied up at the dock, the estate cared for by yet another of his nieces. He would end his days as a prison librarian, driven out of office by Tory scourges who pronounced him “a debauched public official, rolling in opulence like a hippo in the mud.” Actually, he was a most affable fellow, prescient as well. Once having adjudged the liquor laws unenforceable, a Presbyterian perversion, he saw no reason why he shouldn’t benefit from them. He was not avaricious, but savoured the good life, lavishing expensive gifts on his nieces and impecunious painters and writers whose work gave him pleasure.
A discerning art collector, Bouchard was an early patron of the work of Jean-Jacques Martineau, possibly the most prodigiously talented painter ever to emerge from French Canada. Alas, Martineau was unrecognized until years after the debt-ridden artist committed suicide in Granby in 1948. An event that led in 1970 to a seminal essay by a Parti Québecois metaphysician, “Qui a tué Martineau?”, in which it was charged that the painter had been murdered by anglophone indifference, which would be the lot of all Québecois artists, the white niggers of North America, until they were free to paint in their own language.
Bouchard paid Martineau four hundred dollars a month, and never descended to his cabin on the Baie de Chaleur without bringing a crate of Beaujolais, a quarter of venison or a freshly caught salmon, as well as a couple of his nieces. In exchange, he was allowed his choice of five canvases a year, one of which always hung behind his desk.
“Hey,” Mr. Bernard said, after describing his troubles with Smith, “that’s a wonderful painting you’ve got hanging there!” Pea-soup cod fishermen bringing in their catch. What a life, he thought. “You know, I’d give ten thousand dollars to own a picture like that.”
“You must be joking.”
“Fifteen. Cash,” Mr. Bernard shot back grumpily, indignant because he had seen better on the cover of many a jigsaw puzzle box which would have set him back only twenty-five cents.
A week later the bootlegger’s car that Smith had seized in Winnipeg was released by the Department of Customs and Excise and Smith was rebuked for having been seen driving the car for his personal use, a stain on the department’s honour. A fulminating Smith wrote back to Ottawa to protest that he had been seen driving the car to the garage and that there had already been an attempt to bribe him by the Gurskys. Furthermore, his apartment had been burgled, documents stolen. Everything possible, he wrote, was being done to hinder his investigation of the Gurskys and their ilk.
Without waiting for a reply to his letter, an aroused Smith took it upon himself one evening to raid the United Empire Wholesalers, the Gursky warehouse in Winnipeg. He stumbled on Morrie, seated on a stool, straining a drum of alcohol through a loaf of rye bread.
“What are you doing?” Smith asked, coming up behind him.
“I have to. The stuff’s rusty. Oh my God, it’s you.”
Smith found illegal compounding equipment on the premises, as well as a cardboard carton filled with counterfeit U.S. revenue stamps and a tea chest laden with forged labels for famous brands of American whiskies. He packed the evidence in a box, secured it with an official seal, and drove it down to the CPR express office to be shipped to Ottawa.
“What have you got there?” the clerk asked.
“Enough evidence to put the Gurskys in prison where they belong.”
“Then I’d better keep a sharp eye on it and get it on the first train out.”
Unfortunately by the time the box reached Ottawa much of the evidence was missing. Bouchard wired Smith to take no further action but to report directly to him in Ottawa at once. However, when Smith got to Bouchard’s outer office he was told to wait. Mr. Bernard was already seated with the chief preventive officer.
“Holy cow,” Mr. Bernard said, leaping out of his chair for a closer look, “where in the hell did you get another Martineau, my Libby is crazy for his stuff.”
“Oh, I couldn’t part with this one,” Bouchard said. “It’s a favourite of mine. His masterpiece.”
A sugaring-off party in the woods, fat women lugging pails, men boiling the maple syrup, kids cooling the stuff off in a snowbank and eating it, an old fart playing the fiddle, everybody freezing their balls no doubt but for them a whoopee time. Some bunch.
“I’m talking fifteen thousand dollars,” Mr. Bernard said, clicking open his attaché case.
“You’ve got to be joking. This one is a lot bigger than the first one you talked me out of.”
Fucking frog chiseller. “How much bigger would you say, my good friend?”
“Twice.”
“I’d say only as much again. Shake on it, Jules.”
Mr. Bernard and Bouchard retired to a restaurant in Hull for lunch and then a dozy Bouchard stumbled back to his office, aching for his sofa, but reconciled to dealing with Smith first. “The fact is,” he told Smith, “your action against the United Empire Wholesalers, while not constituting illegal entry, has shown a failure of judgement that reflects badly on this office and, therefore, I must tell you that you are temporarily suspended from further duty in excise work. Until we rule otherwise you are confined to customs work at the Port of Winnipeg and you are not authorized to undertake any outside investigations unless ordered by me.”
On his return to Winnipeg, Smith composed a long letter to the minister of justice asking why, after a Royal Commission had established that there was a prima facie case against Bernard Gursky for attempting to bribe him, no trial date had yet been set. The minister wrote back to say, unfortunately many of the Crown witnesses were ill and in any event the matter was really the concern of Saskatchewan’s attorney-general. So Smith wrote to the attorney-general who replied that in his humble opinion the problem was one of federal jurisdiction. Smith also wrote to his MP. He wrote to the prime minister. Several weeks later Smith received a letter discharging him from the Customs and Excise service. A cheque for three months’ salary was enclosed.
Smith moved into a rented room, setting his photograph of his parents standing before their sod hut in Gloriana on his bedside table, his Bible alongside, and began pecking away with two fingers at his second-hand Underwood, writing letters to cabinet ministers in Ottawa, proffering evidence of Gursky transgressions and querying the integrity of Jules Omer Bouchard. He had proof, he said, that the Gurskys had acquired a farm straddling the border in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, where one Albert Crawley had been wounded in a gun fight. He speculated about the Gurskys’ activities on the Detroit River and observed that they owned a shipping company in Newfoundland, with as many as thirty schooners on charter, each one bound for St. Pierre and Miquelon.