Then Solomon sailed home and, without consulting Bernard, appointed McGraw manager of the Duke of York Hotel in North Portal, Saskatchewan, only a few feet from the border and immediately across the road from the railroad station for the Soo Line, which connected with Chicago.
Bernard was outraged when he discovered that McGraw had been promised twenty percent of the hotel’s take. “In the future,” he told Solomon, “such decisions are to be made by me, you, and Morrie together.”
No answer.
“I am considering offering my hand in marriage to Miss Libby Mintzberg of Winnipeg.”
Solomon whistled.
“Her father is president of the B’nai Brith synagogue. He’s a shoimer shabbos.”
“In that case, we must introduce him to Levine.”
Sammy “Red” Levine, out of Toledo, was strictly orthodox: he was never without a yarmulke and didn’t murder on the sabbath.
“Miss Mintzberg and I plan to have a family and then my needs will be greater than yours or Morrie’s.”
“Piss off, Bernie.”
During the Prohibition years Solomon was out of Saskatchewan more often than not, looking in on Tim Callaghan who was competing with Harry Low, Cecil Smith and Vital Benoit on the Windsor-Detroit Funnel, running into disputes with the Little Jewish Navy or the Purple Gang that only Solomon could settle by calling for a meeting in the Abars Island View or inviting everybody to dinner at Bertha Thomas’s Edgewater Thomas Inn.
Bertha Thomas died in 1955 and her roadhouse burnt down in 1970, but when Moses finally got to Windsor he managed to track down Al Hickley, who had once been her bouncer. In his seventies now, Al was rheumy-eyed, his speech thickened by a stroke, reduced to drinking what he called Ontario horsepiss, nesting in a rotting rooming house on Pitt Street. Al, who had been a rum-runner himself once he had quit the roadhouse, led Moses to a bar near the corner of Mercer Street that still reeked of last night’s vomit. “Hey, when I worked the Reaume Dock at Brighton Beach we not only ran booze across the river, but Chinks too. We loaded the Chinks in big bags, see, weighted, so’s a patrol boat got too close we had to throw ’em overboard with the booze. Shit, Moe, I think of all the booze lying at the bottom of the river it breaks my heart.”
“Did you ever meet Solomon Gursky in the old days?”
“I shook hands with Jack Dempsey himself once and I still got Babe Ruth’s autograph somewheres. The Yankees they was at Brigg’s to play the Tigers used to drink at Bertha’s. I talked to Al Capone a couple of times you never met a nicer guy. He could handle a thousand cases a day.”
“Gursky.”
“Used a cane and read books?”
“That’s the one.”
“Solly you mean. Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Hell’s bells, he was one of Bertha’s favourites. You know, we had a system at the Edgewater. The spotter buzzes us the cops are coming, Bertha lays a trail of ten-dollar bills from the front entrance to the back and those lardasses they’re bent over double going scoop scoop scoop. Pigs in a trough. Other times there’s a raid the shelves of booze behind the bar slides down a chute and waiters and members of the band are emptying customers’ glasses like crazy on to the thick thick carpet. But one time the fat little piano player he was, you know, a drug fiend, I’m dead against that, he misses naturally and there’s booze all over the dance floor. The cops they mop it up and they’re going to bring charges against Bertha, but Solly it was he saves her sweet ass. Why, Bertha, he says, I could have sworn you varnished the dance floor last night and didn’t that stuff contain alcohol? The judge, a good customer himself, laughs the cops out of court. Didn’t Solly die in an airplane crash?”
“Yes.”
“But his brothers are rich rich rich now?”
“Right.”
OR SOLOMON WAS IN CHICAGO, consulting with Al Capone’s financial adviser, Jacob “Greasy Thumb” Guzik. Or he was bound for Kansas City to cut a deal with Solly “Cutcher-Head-Off” Weissman. In Philadelphia, he handled the needs of Boo Boo Hoff and Nig Rosen and in Cleveland he supplied Moe Dalitz. Then he would meet with Bernard in Winnipeg or North Portal or the Plainsman Hotel, in Bienfait, and they would quarrel, Bernard spitting and cursing, and Solomon would take off again. He would check into the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for a couple of weeks, partying with Dutch Schultz and Abbadabba Berman at the Embassy or Hotsy-Totsy Club. Then he would drive to Saratoga to join Arnold Rothstein at the races, once wiring Bernard for fifty thousand dollars and another time for a hundred, sending Bernard into a rage.
The summer following the Chicago Black Sox scandal, Solomon joined with Lee Dillage, a North Dakota liquor dealer, in bankrolling an outlaw baseball team. The team that toured the border towns of Saskatchewan numbered among its players Swede Risberg and Happy Felsch, both former members of the notorious Black Sox. The games were a welcome distraction to the locals as well as the bootleggers, mostly out of North Dakota, who had to hang around one-horse towns like Oxbow and Estevan until after dark, before loading up their stripped-down Studebakers and Hudson Super-Sixes at the Gursky boozatoriums. Heading for the border without lights, their only problem the potholes prairie yokels had deliberately dug into tricky curves, hoping to shake loose a case of Bonnie Brew or Vat Inverness.
Meanwhile, a frustrated Bernard was on the boil, convinced that his courtship of Libby Mintzberg was foundering. Libby’s father, Heinrich Benjamin Mintzberg, BA, principal of the Winnipeg Hebrew Academy, president of the B’nai Jacob synagogue, treasurer of the Mount Sinai Beneficial Loan Society, invited Bernard into his study. A pouting Mrs. Mintzberg served tea with sponge cake and sat down to join them.
“When you first solicited my beloved daughter’s hand in matrimony,” Mr. Mintzberg began, “a matter of some consequence to my spouse and I—”
“If there’s a bigger catch in respectable Winnipeg society I’d like to know about it,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.
“—it grieved me, a professional man, that a potential future son-in-law of the Mintzbergs hadn’t even graduated high school.”
“And our precious one with her head always buried in a book,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.
“But then you assured me that you were the owner of The Royal Pure Drug Company, an impressive achievement considering your father’s origins in the shtetl—”
“And your own lack of a formal education.”
“—but now I hear that it’s really Solomon who is the boss.”
Putz. Mamzer. Yekke.
“Even though you’re the eldest,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.
Yachne. Choleria. “Well you heard wrong. I’m the real boss, but we’ve always had a partnership that also includes my brother Morrie.”
“So the materialistic proceeds of your various endeavours are shared in three equal parts?”
“Something like that.”
“Correct me if I err because I’m not well-versed in commercial arrangements, but I always surmised that the boss was somebody who owns more than fifty percent of the shares, the company properly registered.”
“Which will certainly be the case, sir, once the legal partnership papers are drawn up.”
“And when can we anticipate that auspicious day?”
“As soon as Solomon returns from Detroit, where I sent him to iron out certain bottlenecks in distribution.”
“Then I suggest we resume our deliberations once this matter has been resolved with your siblings. Meanwhile, Libby will continue to see you.”
“But no more than once a week.”
“And not exclusive of other beaux of good family.”
“Listen here, for shit’s sake, I earn more in a week than that fucken Saltzman does in a good year. Excuse me. I’m sorry.”
“Dr. Saltzman’s dental practice will undoubtedly grow.”
“And don’t take this personal, but he’s not shorter than Libby on the dance floor.”
“Neither am I if she isn’t wearing those goddamn high heels.”
?
??You see, Bernard, I’m taking the long view. I am thinking of the Mintzberg grandchildren.”
“God bless them,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.
“In a partnership shared equally among three brothers who are merely mortal the progeny are bound to squabble over their inheritance unless the line of succession is as clear as it is in the House of Windsor.”
MORRIE WAS no problem.
“Bernie, if you say I’m entitled to no more than twenty percent it’s hunky-dory with me, honest to God.”
“I love you, Morrie, and I’ll always take good care of you and yours.”
Bernard waited until Solomon had been back from Detroit for a couple of days before he went to see him in his suite in The Victory Hotel. Noon, and he was still lying in bed that one, reading newspapers. “Marcel Proust died yesterday. He was only fifty-one. What do you think of that?”
Empty champagne bottles drifted upside down in a silver bucket and there came a splashing from the bathroom, a girl in the tub, singing “April Showers”.
“We’ve got to talk.”
“No, we don’t. Shut the door after you and have them send up scrambled eggs for two and another bottle of Pol Roger.”
“Put down that newspaper and listen to me for a change. I pay all your gambling debts.”
“Do you think Boston did the right thing, trading Muddy Ruel like that?”
“You trust me. I trust you. Everybody trusts Morrie. But if any one of us was knocked down by a car, God forbid, nothing is clear, we have no legal partnership papers.”
“So you’ve got some right there in your briefcase,” Solomon said, reaching for it.
Even as Solomon scanned the documents, Bernard reminded him once more of how he had parlayed one hotel into nine, working eighteen hours a day while Solomon was gallivanting around Europe in an officer’s uniform. Furthermore, he pointed out, he was the eldest son with certain traditional rights going back to biblical times.
“Fifty-one percent for you, thirty for me, and nineteen for Morrie.”
“I could get him to settle for fifteen and I’d be satisfied with fifty point five-o, which would boost you to thirty-four and a half points.”
Solomon began to laugh.
“You whoremaster, you gambler, what if I lost my Libby because of you?”
“Then you’d have something else to thank me for.”
“I hate you,” Bernard hollered, scooping up an ashtray and throwing it at him, kicking open the bathroom door, “Give him the syph, he deserves it,” and taking a peek at the alarmed girl in the tub, slapping his cheek, amazed. “Oh, my God,” he said, fleeing the room.
Clara Teitelbaum snatched at the robe that hung from a hook on the door and spun out of the bathroom, wailing. “My father will throw me out in the street now and I don’t blame him one bit I’m dying of shame.”
“Don’t worry,” Solomon said, his mind elsewhere.
“I’m a respectable girl. I never even let another boy kiss me, but you, you animal, even a nun wouldn’t be safe with you.”
“I promise you Bernie won’t say a word to anybody.”
“And didn’t you promise me if I came here you’d know when to stop this time, you think I don’t know what they say about you?”
Solomon waited until her tears had subsided. “You’re not only ravishing, Clara, but you are so bright. Now tell me why I’m always so nasty to my brother.”
“He’ll blab to Libby and she’ll get on the phone to Faigy Rubin and my father, oh my God, you might as well hire me for the bar that’s all I’m good for now,” she said, thrusting her head deep into the pillows and beginning to quake with sobs again.
“Clara, please, you’re beginning to get on my nerves.”
“At least if I could say, Paw, I know I shouldn’t have let him, but we’re engaged.”
“If you don’t hurry, Clara, you’ll be late for your skating lessons. I’ll pick you up at eight and we’ll go to see Dream Street at the Regal.”
“I saw it,” she said, sniffling.
“The new Fairbanks then.”
“Better seven-thirty. But I’ll meet you there, I’ll say I’m going with a girlfriend, my father could be waiting at the door with a horsewhip. I wish I’d never met you and that’s the truth.”
Four o’clock in the afternoon Solomon was wakened by a soft scratching on the door. “Come on in, Morrie, the door’s unlocked.”
Morrie was followed by a waiter wheeling a table heaped with bagels and lox and cream cheese and a jug of coffee.
“Morrie, would you do me a favour?”
“Name it.”
“Would you marry the beautiful, but unbelievably dense Clara Teitelbaum for me?”
“Hey, what are you talking? She’s some number, Clara, very hoidytoidy too. Have you ever caught a look at her on the rink doing those figure-eights in that little skirt?”
“Unfortunately yes.”
“Her father leans against the fence, making sure nobody even talks to her.”
“What if I could fix you up with Clara tonight?”
“I’m glad to see you’re in such a good mood.”
“Oh yeah. Why?”
“Bernie’s really, really in love with Libby, but the Mintzbergs are giving him a hard time.”
“If you so much as mention those ridiculous contracts he’s drawn up I’ll throw you out of here.”
“Hold on. Don’t give me that look. But supposing that in order to win Libby’s hand he has to show those contracts to Mintzberg, but he also gave you a covering letter, nullifying the contracts, which would be torn up right after the marriage.”
“How could I be a party to deceiving the delightful daughter of such a worthy family of German Jews?”
So Morrie trudged back to the warehouse office and reported to Bernard that Solomon wouldn’t budge.
“I should have known better than to trust you with such an important thing, you little putz,” Bernard said, punching him in the stomach. Then grabbing his homburg and beaver coat, Bernard went flying out of the office.
Head lowered into the wind, Bernard went striding down Portage Street, cursing at anybody he banged into. Once more, in his mind’s eye, he saw Solomon, Ephraim’s anointed one, jump down from the fence into the flow of wild nervy horses in the corral. “Follow me, Bernie, and I’ll buy you a beer.” Turning a corner, tears freezing on his cheeks, he was confronted again by Lena Green Stockings. “It’s the boy with the two belly buttons.” Minnie Pryzack, seeing him reach for the towel, smiled at him, a tubby little man with wet fishy eyes who would have to scratch and bite to get what he wanted out of life, but never cheat, he thought, like Solomon certainly did in that card game, and yet to this day McGraw looks at me like I’m dog shit but would eat out of Solomon’s hand.
Bernard sat down in a booth in The Gold Nugget and ordered coffee and blueberry pie with a double helping of vanilla ice cream.
My God Lanksy phones and asks for Mr. Gursky.
Speaking, Bernard says.
I meant Solomon.
Well last time I looked I was Mr. Gursky too I’ll have you know.
Tell Solomon I called.
Click.
Hardly anybody in town could even qualify for a date with the unattainable Clara Teitelbaum, but Solomon was screwing her black and blue in the hotel. Yeah, sure. While he could win the Irish Sweepstakes easier than collecting a little good-night kiss from Libby.
“We all have to learn to control our desires,” she said.
“Yeah, well maybe not all. I could tell you something about your friend Clara Teitelbaum guaranteed to turn your hair white.”
“Like what?”
“Somebody is doing it to her.”
“Shame on you for making up such a thing. She isn’t even allowed out at night there isn’t a chaperone with.”
“So what about before lunch she’s supposed to be shopping?”
“You’re crazy.”
“About you, yes.”
“Then stop futzing around and get my father’s approval for the match.”
“There are problems.”
“Listen, Bernie, I’d marry you if you didn’t have even a dime to your name, but I can’t go against my father’s wishes. So get a move on, please, and you’ll see how warmly I can respond to your caresses,” she said, shutting the front door on him.
Goddamn it to hell. Working eighteen hours a day, Morrie more hindrance than help. Keeping the books. Sorting out cashier’s cheques drawn on banks in New York and Detroit and Chicago, everybody scared to carry too much cash now because of the hijackers. Checking out the boozatoriums and watching the tills in the hotels, every manager born to steal. Keeping the drivers from Minnesota happy, they got nothing to do all day but wait for dark, so suddenly they’ve started to rob the small-town banks and the yokels blame the liquor trade in general and the Gurskys in particular for welcoming such lowlifes into town. And meanwhile if Solomon isn’t shtupping Clara (her father finds out he’ll kill him for sure) or putting together a poker game, he’s in New York at Texas Guinan’s or better yet Mr. La De Da Himself is stuffing his kishkas at the Jockey Club with Arnold Rothstein and then wiring me for a hundred thousand here, fifty there, to settle his losses. He’s a menace. A makke. If I let him he’ll destroy everything I worked so hard to build and there will be nothing for my wife and children yet to come.
The following Tuesday night Bernard, wearing his homburg, grey serge suit, spats, and new wingtip shoes with elevator heels, called for Libby, as arranged, to take her to see The Kid at the Regal. A grim Mr. Mintzberg greeted him at the front door. “I’m afraid Miss Mintzberg can’t go out with you tonight.”
“She isn’t well?”
“God forbid,” Mrs. Mintzberg said.