“What did you make of Smith, Tim?”
Callaghan shrugged. He looked troubled.
“What if that’s the size the saints are now? Bad teeth. Boils on their neck. Consumed with hatred.”
Morrie approached Solomon. “In your honest opinion,” he asked, “is he dangerous?”
“Yes.”
“Watch,” Bernard said, “he’s going to run to the toilet now.”
Morrie froze in the middle of the room.
“What are you going to do? Wet your pants just because I called the shot? Go, for Christ’s sake.” Then Bernard turned on Callaghan. “I’d like to have a word alone with my brothers, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure,” Callaghan said, leaving.
“Tim could testify against us to save his own neck.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Speak to Meyer. Send for somebody.”
Solomon poured himself another drink.
“You think it doesn’t go against my nature?” Bernard asked.
Six
Among the dusty stacks of Gursky memorabilia that cluttered Moses’s cabin was a copy of The Cunarder for May 1933. Featured articles included “In Havana, Gay Capital of Cuba” and “Czechoslovakia’s Winter Jollity”. There was also a double-page spread of “Some Trans-Atlantic Personalities” posing on the decks of the Berengaria, Aquitania, Caronia and Mauretania. Among them were the Duchess of Marlborough, the former Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt; Madame Luisa Tetrazzini, a star of the New York Metropolitan Opera House; and Mrs. George F. Gould, “Filiae pulchrae, mater pulcherior might have been coined to describe Mrs. Gould.” The photograph next to that of Mrs. Gould was one of Solomon Gursky. “Nothing at the moment is more in the public eye than a possible end to the enforcement of Prohibition in the United States. Above is seen a prominent Canadian distiller intimately connected with the looming wet invasion of America. He is smiling against the deck plating of the Aquitania, where he allowed himself to be photographed on a recent trip to England.”
Moses had noted on a file card, attached to The Cunarder with a paper clip, that several months earlier—on February 27, 1933 to be precise—the American House of Representatives and the Senate had passed a resolution to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. The resolution called for ratification of Repeal by a majority vote of state conventions in thirty-six states. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an acknowledged wet, was sworn in as the thirty-second president of the United States on March 4 and early in April it became legal to sell 3.2 percent beer. H.L. Mencken sampled a glass of the new brew in the bar of the Rennert Hotel in Baltimore. “Not bad at all,” he said. “Fill it again.”
Solomon sailed for England in May, ostensibly bound for Edinburgh, where he was to seek a partnership in the American market with the powerful McCarthy Distillers Limited of Lochnagar, just above Balmoral. But over the next three months there was nothing but the occasional teasing postcard from Solomon. Postcards from Berlin and Munich and London and Cambridge and finally Moscow. Meanwhile a fulminating Mr. Bernard was not idle. He acquired a distillery in Ontario and another in Tennessee. Solomon returned to Montreal early in October.
“What happened in Scotland?” Mr. Bernard demanded, his eyes bulging.
“You know damn well I never got there. You go, Bernie.”
“I need your permission? Like hell I do.”
Mr. Bernard sailed late in October only to find that the Scots liquor barons considered him not quite the right sort to represent their interests in America now that Prohibition was about to end. In fact, they seemed amused by his presumption. A bristling Mr. Bernard was in London, staying at the Savoy, when Utah became the thirty-sixth Repeal State, making the news official. November 20 that was, and the headline in the Evening News read:
PROHIBITION IS DEAD—
THE MORMONS KILLED IT—
WHOOPEE
HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN
Solomon, to Mr. Bernard’s bewilderment, did not mock him for coming home empty-handed. Solomon had put a short-wave radio and a cot into his office. Unsavoury, shifty-eyed little strangers, wearing funny European-style suits, dribbling cigarette ash everywhere, met with him there and left with their pockets bulging with cash.
“What are we buying?” Mr. Bernard asked.
“Kikes.”
“You’ll make fun of me once too often.”
Solomon had already made the first of what would become many infuriating trips to Ottawa, this time to see Horace MacIntyre, the deputy minister of immigration. MacIntyre, a bachelor and church elder, was celebrated throughout the civil service for his rectitude. If he mailed a personal letter from his office he dropped two cents into a box for the postage.
MacIntyre listened to Solomon’s plea for the refugees with some impatience. “Let’s not hide behind euphemisms, Mr. Gursky. By refugees you mean Jews.”
“I had been told that you were a most perspicacious and forthright man.”
“Jews tend to be classified as ‘non-preferred immigrants’ not because of their race, which prejudice I would find repugnant, but because they consider work in agriculture or mining beneath their dignity.”
“My grandfather worked in the mines in England before he came here in 1846, and my father was a farmer on the prairies.”
“But I understand that you have since found more profitable employment.”
Solomon smiled his gleeful smile.
“It is because your people are such confirmed city-dwellers, and would usurp positions that could be filled by the native-born, or immigrants from the Mother Country, that we simply cannot open the flood-gates.”
“As the population of this country is presently constituted, the Jews make up no more than 1.5 percent,” Solomon said, and then he went on to describe some of the things he had seen in Germany.
“As it happens,” MacIntyre said, “I am an admirer of the writings of Mr. Walter Lippmann, a co-religionist of yours though somewhat demure about it. He is of the opinion that the persecution of the Jews serves a useful purpose by satisfying the German need to conquer somebody. In fact, it’s his considered opinion that it is a kind of lightning rod which protects Europe. Of course it’s a nuisance, Mr. Gursky, but there is no need to panic.”
Come summer Mr. Bernard was on the boil. It was rumoured that the prime minister intended to put the Gursky brothers in jail and throw away the key. The government case against them pending, the Gurskys bound to be charged with, among other things, avoiding customs duty on smuggled liquor, Mr. Bernard huddled with his lawyers every night, enraged with Solomon who sat silent throughout the sessions, seemingly indifferent to their fate. And now it was Mr. Bernard who flitted between Montreal and Ottawa once, sometimes twice, a week, lugging large sums of cash in his attaché case and returning with paintings by Jean-Jacques Martineau, which he threw into a cupboard. Such was the state of his nerves that a month passed before he noticed Morrie’s absence.
Charging into their original Montreal offices on Sherbrooke Street one morning, kicking open office doors, searching toilets, he demanded, “Where’s my brother?”
“Take it easy, Mr. Bernard,” Tim Callaghan said.
Irish drunk. Christ-lover. “Oh yeah. Why?”
“Because the way you’re carrying on these days, you’re asking for an ulcer.”
“I don’t get ulcers. I give them. Where in the fuck is Morrie?”
Solomon was sent for.
“Did you actually hit him with an ashtray?” Solomon asked.
“Only a fool wouldn’t have ducked.”