“Actually, I made a note to myself to review the situation this weekend.”
“Let’s see it.”
“I mean a mental note.”
Becky threw the deeds and policies at him and flew out of the room, charging up the stairs to their bedroom. Harvey pursued her as far as the hall, where he stumbled over a stack of boxes from Gucci, Saks, Bendel’s, and Bergdorf Goodman. He retreated into the living room, sinking on to the sofa. The truth was the day he had done his annual review of their life insurance portfolio, intent on fattening her coverage, the newspapers had been full of a Toronto murder case that had given him pause. A real-estate developer, who seemed to have led a blameless life, was on trial for the murder of his wife of twenty years. His story was that driving to Stratford after dark he had wobbled into a rest area off the 401 to attend to a flat tire. While he was bent over a rear wheel another car pulled up behind, two druggies got out, knocked him senseless and shot his wife, who had foolishly put up a struggle. They made off with his wallet, her handbag, and all of their luggage. His defence was compromised by one bit of evidence. Only a month earlier, he had insured his wife’s life for a cool million. Harvey, understandably alert, now balked at doing the same for Becky … because what if a week later, God forbid, she was run down crossing the street or lost in an airplane crash? He would be suspect number one, that’s what. Led out of his own home in handcuffs before the TV cameras. Incarcerated with salivating faggots. His body violated like Peter O’Toole by that creepy Turk in Lawrence of Arabia. Harvey, his heart thudding, started up the stairs in search of an aspirin, and there, lo and behold, was Becky standing in the bedroom door, all smiles. “What do you think, buttercup?”
About what, he thought? Give me a hint.
She twirled around, her hands fluttering round her neck, and then he saw it. A diamond-studded choker.
“From Van Cleef & Arpels,” she said, and then she indicated a little parcel, tied with a golden bow, lying on the bed. “I also brought you something.”
Harvey tore open the wrapping.
“I know you could use a dozen, but I just couldn’t shlepp any more parcels.”
Holding the socks against his chest, Harvey said, “They’re just the right size.”
Eight
Tim Callaghan hoped that Bert Smith would be drawn to Mr. Bernard’s funeral, ending his twenty-five-year-old hunt for him. He must be sixty-five years old now, Callaghan calculated, maybe more. Smith, the righteous rodent. In his mind’s eye, Callaghan saw him in a tiny basement kitchen that reeked of rot and cat piss and Presbyterian virtue. There would be a calendar with a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II on horseback tacked to the wall, the corners curling. The linoleum would be split and worn, the teapot chipped. He would be sitting down to a supper of macaroni or baked beans on toast at a table with a Formica top, sustained by the red-hot coals of hatred. Yes, Callaghan thought, providing that he was still alive, Smith would come to the funeral even if he had to be carried there on a stretcher.
Callaghan, a child of the century, had survived gunshot, two heart attacks and a prostate trim, none of which distressed him so much as the loss of his teeth, an intolerable insult. He was a tall man, an old coin worn thin, his once-blond hair reduced to a fringe of wintry straw, his eyes pale blue, his shoulders stooped, his liver-spotted hands with the busted knuckles prone to trembling. But at least he wasn’t incontinent. He didn’t shuffle like some of the others who had overstayed their welcome. Once he found Bert Smith, and made the necessary arrangements, he himself would be free to die, a prospect he contemplated with a sense of relief. He would leave the rest of his money to the Old Brewery Mission and his mementoes to Moses Berger.
“My God,” Moses had said, the first time he had seen the photographs in Callaghan’s apartment.
Over the mantel there was a faded snapshot of the young Solomon strolling down a country lane with George Bernard Shaw, and another one, somewhat out of focus, showing him seated on a verandah with H.L. Mencken, a malacca cane held between Solomon’s knees, his hands clasped over the handle, his chin resting on his hands.
1956 that was, and Callaghan had shown Moses one of his most cherished souvenirs of that era when he had been most vibrantly alive. It was his edition of the Holy Bible as purified by the incomparable Dr. Charles Foster Kent, professor of biblical history at Yale. The abstemious professor had revised Samuel 6:19 from, “And he dealt among all the people, even among the whole multitude of Israel, as well to the women as to the men, to every one a cake of bread and a good piece of flesh and a flagon of wine,” to read, “And he distributed to the whole assembled multitude a roll of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins.”
Those were the days when Callaghan seldom saw his bed before four A.M., if at all, but, instead, sat enthralled at Solomon’s table, listening to him pronounce on Trotsky’s forging of the Red Army, or Edward Gordon Craig’s theory of the actor as marionette, or the art of breaking a mustang. More often than not the table was festooned with fawning society girls. A de Brisson, a McCarthy, one of the Newton girls. And you never knew what was coming next, what a driven Solomon would decree. A midnight dinner thrown for whatever tacky touring company was playing His Majesty’s Theatre, Solomon flattering the inadequate performers with caviar and champagne, dandling the middle-aged Juliet on his knee, flirting with the girlish Macbeth, and finally dazzling the company with his parody of Barrymore’s Hamlet. Or Solomon crashing a supposedly secret Communist party meeting in some professor’s apartment, playing the speaker like a kitten with a skein of wool before pouncing with his superior knowledge of dialectics, slapping him down with Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it.” Or Solomon opting for a breakneck run to Albert Crawley’s hotel in the Townships, playing the piano with the Dixieland band, luxuriating in their astonishment at his skill. Or Solomon disappearing, retiring to brood on that bend in the Cherry River where Brother Ephraim had once set his traps for game and, come to think of it, men as well. The abandoned shafts of the New Camelot Mining & Smelting Co. were still there, the rotting rafters a perch for bats. Or Solomon suddenly turning on his flutter of society girls, seducing one of them into submitting to outrageous sexual acts and then sending her back to her mountainside mansion, himself avenged but also, he would complain to Callaghan, diminished.
“Gerald Murphy got it wrong,” he once said, “living twice, maybe three times is the best revenge.”
Callaghan, sprung from Griffintown, hard by the Montreal waterfront, had once been a club fighter. Possibly because he displayed more spunk than talent in the ring, he developed a following in the west. Solomon, who had watched him lose a semi-final in Regina, invited him to dinner afterward. He fed him beef and banknotes and started him out driving a Hudson Super-Six, laden with booze, to just short of the North Dakota border, where the switch would be made with the waiting Americans. Callaghan proved so proficient that Solomon soon had him managing the Detroit River run, armed with what Eliot Ness once called “The Canadian Print Job”, that is to say, B-13 clearance documents that stipulated the liquor on board was bound for Havana. Because Callaghan had so much on Mr. Bernard he survived at McTavish following Solomon’s death, serving for years as vice-president in charge of nothing for Loch Edmond’s Mist.