Since his wrongful dismissal from the customs office, Smith had never gone on welfare. He had always managed somehow. He had worked as a bookkeeper for an auto-parts outfit in Calgary until he gathered that he was expected to help Mr. Hrymnak diddle his income tax. He had been employed for eight years as a cashier at Wally’s Prairie Schooner, trusted with the bank deposits, and then a new manager came in, a young Italian who wore his hair in a pompadour. Vaccarelli fired Smith and put a young Polish girl with bleached blonde hair in his place.
Through the wasting years Smith consulted lawyers again and again, the reputable ones nervously showing him the door once he began to rage against the Jews, and the other ones bilking him. Each time a new minister of justice was appointed, he wrote him a voluminous letter, trying to have his case reopened, unavailingly.
Smith first drifted to Montreal in 1948. Answering a want ad in the Star, scraping bottom, he actually found himself working for a Jew. Hornstein’s Home Furniture on the Main. Smith’s first day on the job, he discovered that he was one of six rookies on the floor. Gordy Hornstein gathered them together before opening the doors to the crowd that was already churning outside, jostling for position, rapping on the plate-glass windows. “You see that three-piece living-room set in the window? I took a half-page ad in the Star yesterday advertising it for $125 to our first fifty customers. Anybody who sells one of those sets is fired. Tell those bargain-hunters outside whatever you want. Delivery is ten years. The cushions are stuffed with rat shit. The frames are made of cardboard. Tell them anything. But it’s your job to shift them into pricier lines and to sign them to twelve-month contracts. Now some words of advice because you’re new here and only three of you will still be working for Hornstein’s once the week is out. We get all kinds here. French-Canadians, Polacks, guineas, Jews, hunkies, niggers, you name it. This isn’t Ogilvy’s or Holt Renfrew. It’s the Main. You sell a French-Canadian a five-piece set for $350, ship him only four unmatched pieces from cheaper sets he won’t complain, he’s probably never been into a real store before and he buys from a Jew he expects to be cheated. I trust you have memorized the prices from the sheets I gave you because none are marked on the actual items. You are selling to Italians or Jews, you quote them double, because they don’t come in their pants unless they can beat you down to half-price. One thing more. We don’t sell to DPs here.”
In those days DP was the Canadian coinage for Displaced Persons, that is to say, the trickle of European survivors that had recently been allowed into the country.
“Why don’t we sell to refugees?” one of the rookies asked.
“Oh shit, a DP by me isn’t a greener, it’s a nigger. We call them DPs because all that interests them is the Down Payment. They fork out for that, load my furniture on to their stolen pickup, and it’s goodbye Charlie. Tell them we’re out of anything they want. Whisper they can get it cheaper at Greenberg’s, he does the same to me, may he rot in hell. But do not sell to them. Okay, hold your noses. I’m now gonna open up dem golden gates. Good luck, guys.”
Smith, who didn’t last the week, promptly found a better job, this time as a floorwalker in Morgan’s department store. He had only been at it for a month when, riding a number 43 streetcar, he saw Callaghan staring at him from a street corner. The liar. The Judas. And shortly afterward the Gurskys made a serious attempt to snare him with an obviously spurious notice in the Star, the bait an unclaimed legacy of fifty thousand pounds for one Bert Smith. They must think I’m stupid. Really stupid. Looking to be found lying in a puddle of blood on a railway station floor, like McGraw. Or to be discovered floating down the river. Too clever to be caught out by such a transparent ruse, but alarmed all the same, Smith packed his bag and quit Montreal, fleeing west, his cherished photograph of Archie and Nancy Smith posing before their sod hut in Gloriana, wrapped in a towel to protect the glass. Smith comforted himself on the train by imagining the Gurskys in conclave, fabulously wealthy, yes, but frightened by the knowledge that there was a poor but honest man still out there who had their measure and could not be bought, a man watching and waiting, writing to government officials in Ottawa.
Smith worked the phone for a small debt-collection agency in Regina, he was a department-store security officer in Saskatoon, and rose into a bookkeeping job again, in Edmonton, until his employer discovered that he had once been discharged from the customs office as a troublemaker, maybe worse.
Then, in 1963 he was drawn back to Montreal, wandering up the mountainside to survey the Gursky estates, passing the high brick walls topped with menacing shards of glass, peering through the wrought-iron gates.
Driven by extreme need, Smith approached his bank for a three-hundred-dollar loan. The clerk he was sent to see, a slinky black girl less than half his age, seemed amused. “My God,” she said, “you’re sixty years old and you haven’t got a credit rating. Haven’t you ever borrowed money before?”
“I would like to speak with the manager, please.”
“Mr. Praxipolis doesn’t deal with small loans.”
“And at the Royal Bank I expected to deal with my own kind,” Smith said, fleeing the office.
Fortunately, the affable Mrs. Jenkins accepted a post-dated cheque for his first week’s rent, and now he had been lodged in her house for ten years.
A decade.
Smith darned his own socks, but Mrs. Jenkins did his laundry and, after their first year together, only charged him a token rent. In return, Smith did minor repairs, kept the rent books, made the bank deposits, and filled out Mrs. Jenkins’s income tax returns. He was able to survive on his pension and the occasional odd job, filling in here and there as a temporary night watchman, dishwasher, or parking lot attendant. Mrs. Jenkins allowed him a shelf in her refrigerator. They watched TV together. And then, retiring to his room, Smith often went through his Gursky scrapbooks, thick with the family’s activities.
Over the years Smith saw buildings endowed by the old bootlegger and bearing his name rising everywhere. He read that the prime minister had had him to lunch. Only a few months later Lionel Gursky succeeded in having St. Andrews, the home of the British Open, accept a two-hundred-thousand-pound purse for the Loch Edmond’s Mist Classic Tournament. Lionel’s latest concubine was featured in Queen:
“‘Some spend on things they can use, I splurge on paintings,’ says dazzling Vanessa Gursky, the English beauty, wife of Lionel Gursky, likely the next CEO of the James McTavish Distillery Ltd. Chatelaine of a castle in Connemara, but equally at home in her Fifth Avenue penthouse (‘My crash pad in the Big Apple,’ as she so charmingly puts it) or her Nash terrace flat in Regent’s Park, the peripatetic Vanessa’s portrait has been painted by both Graham Sutherland and Andy Warhol. Here, left, she is seen standing before her favourite, the portrait painted by Annigoni, a picture of beguiling elegance.”