Originally there had been three Gerstein brothers. Boris, Marv, and Saul. Marv, no more than knee-high to a mouse in his elevator shoes, was weaker than a bar Scotch. A born boot-licker. But Saul was a hell-raiser. So old BG, who didn’t care to share the wealth, had him taken out. Erased. He had a bomb planted on Saul’s private airplane.
“I hope,” Tiffany said, “taking on the Gersteins isn’t too much for you, Hawk.”
“I think we’d better go and take a gander at that stiff, kid.”
But my feelings were mixed. Whoever had planted that shiv in Lionel had done a good deed. The Gersteins were a bad bunch. Except for Marv’s boy, Brad, who had fought with me in Normandy, but wasn’t ever coming home. Lost an argument with a Nazi machine-gun nest.
“If I ever get God in a corner,” I said to Tiffany, taking her arm, “I’ve got a hot one for him. Namely, why do the good and the beautiful die young?”
Six
Madness, Moses thought. Unforgivably loopy. A fifty-two-year-old man turning his cabin inside out searching for a salmon fly. A bloody Silver Doctor that could be replaced for three dollars. Yes, but the missing one had been lucky for him, once hooking him a sea-bright eighteen-pound hen on the Restigouche and another time an even friskier fish on the Miramichi. Reaching under his bed, Moses found his other slipper. He caught his finger in a mouse trap. He retrieved a mouldy pizza carton, an empty bottle of Macallan Single Highland Malt, a broken glass, a pair of Beatrice’s panties (sloppy bitch, that one), a letter from Henry, his baseball glove, and the copy of Encounter with his essay on Yiddish etymology.
Excellent, I thought.
Thank you.
Fool. Moses considered banging his head against the stone fireplace. My God, how could he have been so naïve when he was at Balliol? Manipulated in the first place by Sir Hyman and later by Mr. Morrie. The calculating Mr. Morrie—spontaneously, as it were—foisting Barney’s manuscript on him. But Saul was a hell-raiser. So old BG, who didn’t care to share the wealth, had him taken out. He had a bomb planted on his private plane.
Gurskys. Gurskys.
“If you have to go to the toilet, you ask me and I’ll show you where there is one for the guests.”
As L.B. had been indentured to Mr. Bernard, so Moses acknowledged, he had come to be in thrall to Solomon, Ephraim’s anointed one. Furthermore, he had been led like a lamb to Ephraim by Sir Hyman. At the time, Moses had been vain enough to believe that McGibbon’s diary had just happened to be open on the pedestal and that Ephrim Gor-ski had been his discovery.
Ho ho ho.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” the doctor in the clinic in New Hampshire had once said, “that your obsession with Solomon Gursky can be explained by your self-evident search for a father, having dismissed your own as unacceptable?”
“The food here is abominable. Do something about it.”
“You seem to require the admiration,” the doctor said, “even the love, of older men. Take your friendship with Callaghan, for instance.”
How to explain, Moses thought, emptying a cardboard carton on the bedroom floor, that it had all started years ago as an attempt to discredit the Gurskys, digging up dirt to shove at L.B.
Then there had been Henry.
Lucy.
Sir Hyman Kaplansky, as he then styled himself.
Two A.M. Collapsing onto his unmade bed, sinking into sleep, Moses dreamt he was in New Orleans again, not there to see if he could find any record of a Civil War gun-runner called Ephraim Gursky, no, no, but as a treat for Beatrice. He was in New Orleans again, splurging on a breakfast with Beatrice at Brennan’s, restitution for last night’s sins. Only this time the waiter didn’t return his American Express card. “Sorry, sir, but—”
A humiliated Beatrice saying, “Take mine,” and then turning on him. “I suppose you threw out the bill with the junk mail again or your envelope with the cheque in it is in a jacket pocket somewhere.”
Only this time a small embarrassment didn’t escalate into tears and recriminations. He dreamt he was in New Orleans with Beatrice again only this time he didn’t disappear after lunch, turning up at the hotel three hours late in a sorry state. Only this time they got to Preservation Hall, where benign old black musicians were doing nothing more than going through the motions until a saucy little white man rested his malacca cane against the wail and sat down to the piano, stomping his foot one, two, three, four … and suddenly the band was transported, digging deeper. Moses, his quarry in sight at last, just out of reach, was set to make a grab for him, but his legs wouldn’t work. He couldn’t budge. Then, even as he was gaining control over his limbs, the gleeful piano player faded and Moses came awake, sweaty and trembling.
It was still dark, but he got up all the same, reheating what was left of the coffee and lacing it with a shot of Macallan. Then he dug into the bedroom closet again, emptying another carton, and out tumbled the Fabergé humidor that Lucy had once bought him. Inside he found the letter Henry had sent him a week after he had ruined Lucy’s debut at the Arts Theatre. A clipping from the Edmonton Journal was enclosed.
NEW ICE AGE THREATENED
AFTER 10,000 YEARS
GENEVA (Reuter)—Many scientists believe a new ice age is coming but they cannot agree when or how hard it is going to hit us.
Some climate specialists studying clues as varied as volcanic dust, the earth’s wobble, tree rings, and sunshine have concluded the world is about due for a big freeze after 10,000 years of comparative warmth.
If they are right, countries like Canada, New Zealand, Britain, and Nepal could be covered by ice sheets and France would look like Lapland.
But others predict no more than a mini-freeze, like the “little ice age” which seized Europe between 1430 and 1850. It froze all the rivers of Germany in 1431 and iced up villages near the present French alpine resort of Chamonix in the early 17th century.
During the American War of Independence nearly 200 years ago, British troops were able to slide their guns from Manhattan to Staten Island across the ice.
A report by the CIA in May spelled out the possible effects of a little ice age throughout the world.
In India 150 million people would die during droughts if the average temperature dropped by one degree centigrade. China would fact a major famine every five years. Soviet Kazakhstan would be lost for grain production and Canada’s grain harvest would drop by 50 percent, the report said.
The report stated the world is already cooling, but scientists will not answer how near is the next ice age. “We just don’t know. Nobody knows,” said a leading climatologist.
Seven
In his prime, nibbling cashews or sucking on a Popsicle, pontificating for the benefit of a Fortune reporter or a hotshot from the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bernard had been fond of saying, “Lewis and Clark, Frémont hoo ha, my grandpappy Ephraim was right up there with them. He came to this country to help Sir John Franklin in his search for the Northwest Passage. My enemies—I know you will have to listen to their slanders, it’s your job—will tell you Bernard Gursky he came out of nowhere. Not like them, eh? Don’t make me laugh. Westmount oy vey. It doesn’t fool me that they get into a skirt once a year for the St. Andrew’s Ball, pretending they come from quality and that they didn’t get the shit kicked out of them at Culloden.