Quack quack quack. Harvey, who had been stalking Tom Clarkson all evening, finally saw him alone and closed in quickly.
“Oh,” Tom said, “excuse me, there’s Beatrice.”
Approaching her from behind, Tom slid his arms around Beatrice’s waist. He kissed her neck. “You’re not being very nice to my friends.”
“If you mean McClure, he’s insufferable.”
“He’s so lonely now, darling. His wife was a Morgan. My Aunt Hattie’s cousin.”
Harvey found the toilet door unlocked, but Moffat was on the seat, his head held back, a bloody handkerchief clamped to his nose. Betty Kerr stood over him. “Get out, you little snoop,” she hissed at Harvey.
Joan St. Clair retreated to a corner of the hall with Laura Whitson. “She may be God’s gift between the sheets, but the child can only talk in monosyllables and there’s no family there.”
And Harvey finally cornered Tom in the kitchen. “Your firm put in a huge order for McTavish shares on Monday.”
“I don’t get to see all the slips.”
“I’m talking millions and millions of dollars. I want to know who you’re acting for.”
“That would be privileged information, Harvey.”
It was three A.M. before a portly Neil Moffat, the sole surviving guest at the Clarkson party turned it into a dirge, lamenting the future of the city, their patrimony.
“The party’s over, Thomas m’boy. Montreal Piss Quick is not where it happens any more. It’s all Toronto now, perfectly awful Turrono. Outright separatism doesn’t matter. What we’re going to get is de facto separatism. We’re going to be Boston in the new order of things. Or maybe even Milwaukee.”
Then, overwhelmed by nostalgia, Moffat recalled the good old days, the days when the civil service was still theirs. Not mismanaged by French-Canadians washed and hung out to dry by L.S.E. or the Harvard Business School. Or pushy jewboys out of Winnipeg’s North End. Look at McGill now. Old McGill. Or the Mount Royal Club. In my father’s day they turned down the importuning Mr. Bernard three times. Now Nathan, the old bootlegger’s simpering son, is actually a member. Last Christmas that timorous little twit sent the doorman a case of Crofter’s Best. Compliments of the season. Nobody knew what to say. Where to look.
Moffat began to tick off possible departures from Montreal on plump pink fingers. All the head offices with contingency plans, prepared to sneak out of town tippytoe if the Parti Québecois ever rides into office. “The Gurskys, I hear, are already abandoning the sinking ship, shifting key personnel into Hogtown. And they know those boys, those clever Semitic mice, they can feel balance sheets in the seat of their pants. It agitates the Jew’s sphincter. Like sex for us, eh, Thomas?”
Tom yawned. Beatrice began to empty ashtrays.
“Mind you,” Moffat said, “now that the old bastard’s dead, McTavish is vulnerable. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a takeover bid.”
Tom glanced pointedly at his wristwatch.
“Even before the old man died,” Moffat said, “once it was clear he had begun to slip, maybe six seven years ago, our office had a huge buying order.”
“Oh, that’s interesting. Do you remember who from?”
“A Brit. A Sir Hyman Kaplansky. Is that your client?”
“Mine’s one of those off-shore funds based in Geneva. Corvus Investment Trust.”
“Preparing to mount a raid, no doubt.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Neil. It would take billions to dislodge the family.”
“Providing they hang together.”
Moffat, his nose throbbing, his bladder fit to burst, finally consented to being led to the door, showering benedictions on Tom and his ravishing bride. “You old tomcat, you.”
Tom found Beatrice in the solarium. Self-absorbed, bending to water the plants, her breasts full. He hurried away to get his camera and began to snap pictures of her, just as he had taken pictures of her reading, combing her hair, descending the stairs in an evening gown.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said.
He salvaged a chilled bottle of Montrachet, floating in ice and corks and cigarette butts, and brought her a glass. “I’m told Moses Berger can now usually be found in a bar called The Caboose.”
“We’re going to be fine, Tom. Honestly we are. I have no interest in seeing Moses again.”
When Harvey got home, he was told that Mr. Gursky had phoned twice in his absence. Glaring at him, Becky peeled off a glittering silver slipper and threw it against the wall. “Shmuck. Why didn’t you tell me they’d all be so underdressed?”
Then the phone rang again.
“That must be the massuh,” she said. “Take it, Rastus.”
But it was Moffat.
“That doesn’t tell me anything,” Harvey said. “You’ve got to find out more.”
Harvey retreated to his study, sat down at his desk, and fished a file out of a bottom drawer. There was a killer shark out there somewhere who went into a feeding frenzy, say once every six seven years and then, unaccountably, swam away. A predator of infinite guile and patience who was bound to make a lethal move, sooner or later sinking his teeth into Lionel’s jugular. Well, Harvey reflected, considering his own stake in McTavish, possibly he could be a big gainer in the heat of any takeover bid.
Harvey waited until ten o’clock in the morning before he phoned Lionel. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said.
Then Harvey phoned his banker in Geneva. “I want to know who’s behind something called Corvus Investment Trust.”
“You aren’t the only one,” the banker said.
Five
“Here, if you are interested,” he had said, “is a list of the complete contents of the safe, properly notarized.”
“And were you there when the safe was opened, Mr. Schwartz?”
“There was no envelope addressed to you.”
So Kathleen O’Brien, who had been in charge of transcribing the tapes Mr. Bernard had made with Harvey, slipped the lot into her tote bag when she left the Bernard Gursky Tower on Dorchester Boulevard for the last time.
Tim Callaghan took her to the Café Martin for lunch and listened to her story with interest.
“But what was supposed to be in the envelope?” he asked.
“A certified cheque. Shares. I don’t know how many. All those years of my life. God in heaven.” She lit one cigarette off another. “You don’t understand, Tim. It isn’t the money.”
“I never thought that.”
“I adored the old bastard. Go ahead. Laugh.”
“You’ve hardly eaten a thing and you’re drinking far too much.”
“We held hands in the movies. Once every summer we sneaked off to Belmont Park together. The Hall of Mirrors. Dodge ’em cars. The House of Horrors …”
Her voice broke. Callaghan waited.
“There was a side of him the rest of you didn’t know.”
“Only you.”
“Yes. Only me. Christ.”
“Easy now.”
“He wouldn’t lie to me. Somebody stole the envelope. The little runt, probably. He didn’t like you.”
“Schwartz, for God’s sake.”
“Mr. B. Because you were Solomon’s man, he said. His brother’s death haunted him.”
“I wonder why.”
“I want to know what Moses Berger is up to out there in the woods.”
“Wrestling with his Gursky demons. Hoping to justify man’s ways to God.”
“He’s been here, there, and everywhere, digging up dirt on the family.”
“He’d like to talk to you.”