“I know how you feel, Bert.”
“Do you now?”
“Let’s talk.”
The newspapers noted that Mr. Bernard, who began his life with nothing, was born in a sod hut on the prairie. The son of a peddler, Aaron Gursky, he owned his first hotel at the age of twenty-one and lived to preside over a distillery with estimated annual sales of more than a billion in fifteen different countries. Reporters observed that some two thousand mourners filed past Mr. Bernard’s coffin. Among them were federal and provincial cabinet ministers, American senators, the Israeli ambassador, and numerous business leaders. The rabbi, in his eulogy, ventured “that Mr. Bernard Gursky’s deeds would survive him locally, nationally and internationally at home and abroad. He was as good at giving away money as he was at making it. Though he supped with kings and presidents, he could also walk humbly with ordinary people, regardless of race, colour or creed. His sense of compassion was personal. We have lost a legend in our time, a man of world renown.”
Obituaries the world over emphasized Mr. Bernard’s generosity, his legitimate claim to being a latter-day philanthropist. They made no mention of his brother Solomon, the notorious Solomon, and mercifully downplayed the Prohibition years.
Harvey, his mood expansive, his shoes new, handled his own interviews with surprising élan. He was grateful that no embittered employee—say old Tim Callaghan—surfaced with the most compromising story of his long tenure with Mr. Bernard. The day the merchant bankers of London were flown in for lunch in the Gursky boardroom to celebrate their underwriting of a five-hundred-million-dollar line of credit that would enable Mr. Bernard to acquire the McEwen Bros. & Ross Distillery in the Scottish highlands. The day that lived in infamy in Harvey’s head, still polluting his dreams.
Mr. Bernard, intimidated for once, was determined that those establishment bankers, including one lord and two knights, would not wink at each other behind his back, putting him down for a reformed ghetto thug. He had gone over the menu endlessly and put on and discarded three suits before he settled on the charcoal grey, with the surprising help of a charming, disconcertingly pretty new receptionist. The young lady actually whistled as he passed, obliging a startled Mr. Bernard to stop and stare.
“It makes you look very distingué,” she said. “Like you were on your way to Windsor Castle.”
“What’s your name, young lady?”
“Why it’s Kathleen O’Brien, Mr. B.”
Nobody called him that. He enjoyed the mischief in it. He chuckled. “Can you type?” he asked.
“Like the wind,” she said. “I can also take shorthand, speak French fluently, and shoot a mean game of snooker.”
“But do you know enough not to repeat what you hear?”
“Try me, Mr. B.”
Transferred to his office for a trial run a week before the bankers’ lunch she teased him into exchanging his diamond-studded, initialled cuff-links for something more subdued, and even managed to talk him out of his black silk socks. “Only for Hungarians of questionable origin,” she said.
Rehearsing him for lunch, Miss O’Brien slapped his hand when he picked up a fork in his accustomed manner. “No, no, Mr. B. Like this.”
“But you’d have to be a real horse’s ass to hold your fork upside down.”
“Ours is not to reason why, Mr. B. It’s comme il faut.”
With the bankers’ lunch only two days away, Mr. Bernard began to pace his office frantically, his sinuses blocked, his stomach knotted, wishing that he had just a fraction of Solomon’s style, Solomon’s wit. The day of the luncheon he hollered at his underlings all morning, throwing ashtrays, kicking wastepaper baskets, chasing secretaries down the hall, lashing them with obscenities. Morrie, a born nosepicker, was banned from the building. In fact with the exception of Mr. Bernard’s own sons and Harvey, whom he needed, only the gentile executives of McTavish were invited to meet the bankers. Even at that Mr. Bernard agonized over the invitation list into the early hours of the morning, crossing out a name, reinstating it, crossing it out again.
To begin with, everything had gone amazingly well, the bankers drawn to the compelling drawing of a radiant Ephraim Gursky that hung in a gold frame over the fireplace. “Of course you know,” Mr. Bernard said, “we are hardly newcomers to this great land of opportunity. My grandfather first set foot in Canada in 1846. That’s the young fellow you’re looking at. Ephraim Gursky at age twenty-nine. He came over looking for the Northwest Passage. Shall we dine now, gentlemen.”
Only a grieving Harvey Schwartz could tell that Mr. Bernard—his speech numbingly formal, Emily Post perfect—was under a terrible strain; and he knew from experience what kind of eruption that could lead to. Then, just as the bankers were sitting down to the table, Harvey pulling out Mr. Bernard’s chair for him, Mr. Bernard relaxed prematurely. He let out a fart. A thundering fart. In the ensuing silence which seemed to last a decade for Harvey, but was actually a matter of seconds, Mr. Bernard, his eyes bulging, glared at Harvey.
“I’m—I’m—so sorry,” an ashen-faced Harvey stammered. “Been up all night—upset stomach—something I ate—sorry sorry—excuse me, gentlemen.” And he rushed off to his own toilet, where he slid to the floor, blinded by tears, quaking and raging and banging his head against the wall, trying to assuage his humiliation by quickly calculating the street value of his shares in Acorn and his McTavish stock options.
Harvey had not returned to the boardroom, but had fled the Gursky Tower, retreating to his bed for three days, pleading a migraine.
Now there was trouble of another kind. Only a day after Mr. Bernard was buried in the Temple Mount Sinai cemetery, his grave was desecrated. Fortunately, it was not the immediate family but Harvey who was contacted at once and hastened to the cemetery, uncomprehending but charged with concern by what he found there. A raven skewered and harpooned to the grave.
Harvey, his stomach churning, pressed a hundred-dollar bill into the cemetery custodian’s hand. He swore the old man to secrecy, established an immediate twenty-four-hour vigil at the graveside, and took his discovery to Walter Osgood, the former museum curator who ran the Gursky Art Foundation.
Osgood, a portly Englishman, troubled by dandruff and halitosis, sported a bushy moustache; he had mocking blue eyes and a manner that Harvey found decidedly condescending for—as he put it—somebody who would never be anything more than a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year prick. Aside from guiding the Gurskys in the acquisition of masters traditional and modern on the world market, Osgood also pronounced on literary matters in the Saturday edition of the Montreal Star. His widely read column, “The Bookworm’s Turn,” was larded with Latin quotations as were his frequent lectures to the St. James’s Literary Society and the Pen Club, some of which were delivered in his apartment or atelier as he preferred, which was on the second floor of a converted warehouse in Old Montreal. He shared his atelier with a lady whom he was fond of introducing as his inamorata. “Seulement,” he once confided to Becky, “pour épater les bourgeois.”
“Good for you,” she had replied, squeezing his hand.
Osgood, bulging out of his safari suit, suppressed amazement when Harvey burst into his office and slammed his burden down on his desk. The raven, Osgood said unequivocally, was rara avis indeed in Montreal, its natural habitat being the north. It was, of course, the royal bird. A raven croaked the warning of a royal death in Macbeth. The raven, he added, was consecrated to the Danish war god. Then, scrutinizing the harpoon, the shaft fashioned of caribou antler, the head made entirely of bear bone, the thong of bearded sealskin, he declared it to be clearly an Eskimo artifact, probably Netsilik in origin, but of a type that hadn’t been in use for a good many years. “Bloody valuable I should think. Where did you get it, old boy?”