St. Urbain's Horseman

  “Yes. Sure I did.”

  Which earned him a benevolent smile.

  “And on your trip to Canada in February you hired a writer, I suppose. Took options on this and that. Kept a secretary, paying her in cash.”

  “Damn right I did.”

  “And here I see you were in Paris … 1959 … The George V, from the twelfth of April to the fifteenth …”

  Nancy in a light blue Givenchy negligée with white lace cuffs and a high collar, tied in a bow around her neck, seated by the dressing table, head inclined, combing out her long black hair.

  “… was that not to meet with a producer, which would have made the trip deductible?”

  Producer of my first-born son.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Very good, Mr. Hersh. Now you take these accounts home again and try to recall any other business trips, properties and options paid form cash, and so forth and so on.”

  In his attic aerie, Jake opened the Horseman’s cupboard and removed the journal. The entry on the first page read, “The Horseman: Born Joseph Hersh in a miner’s shanty in Yellowknife, Yukon Territories. Winter. Exact date unknown.” Following, there was a list of Joey’s aliases. Jake flipped to another section, still sadly incomplete.

  JEWS AND HORSES:

  Babel, Isaac. Sunset.

  LEVKA: You’re an idiot, Arye-Leib. Another week, he says. Do you think I’m in the infantry? I’m in the cavalry, Arye-Leib, the cavalry … Why, if I’m even an hour late the sergeant will cut me up for breakfast. He’ll squeeze the juice out of my heart and put me up for court-martial. They get three generals to try one cavalry man; three generals with medals from the Turkish campaign.

  ARYE-LEIB: Do they do this to everyone or only the Jews?

  LEVKA: When a Jew gets on a horse he stops being a Jew …

  There was a cross-reference to Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Last Tycoon. Monroe Stahr “guessed that the Jews had taken over the worship of horses as a symbol – for years it had been the Cossacks mounted and the Jews afoot. Now the Jews had the horses …”

  Another entry, this one penciled in, read:

  See Alberto Gerchunoff: The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas.

  Also Rothschild’s horsemen. The web of messengers.

  The Horseman. Right now, Jake thought, maybe this very minute, he is out riding somewhere. Over the olive-green hills of the Upper Galilee or maybe in Mexico again. Or Catalonia. But, most likely, Paraguay.

  “All right, then,” Uncle Abe had said, seething. “Chew on this, Jake. From what I know of your cousin, if he is actually searching for Mengele, which I don’t believe for a minute, if he is hunting this Nazi down and finds him,” Uncle Abe had shouted, pounding the table, “he won’t kill him, he’ll blackmail him.”

  No, Jake thought, shutting out the obtruding voice, Uncle Abe was only trying to justify his own chicanery, no, no, and Jake imagined the avenging Horseman seeking out the villa with the barred windows off an unmarked road in the jungle, between Puerto San Vincente and the border fortress of Carlos Antonio López, on the Paraná River.

  Joey, Joey.

  In his mind’s eye, Jake saw him cantering on a magnificent Pleven stallion. Galloping, thundering. Planning fresh campaigns, more daring maneuvers.

  5

  SHE CONTINUED:

  “So I says to the fella, what do you think, I’ve never flown before, I don’t know how other airlines do things? You’re talking to a world traveler, a jet-setter yet. He doesn’t even crack a smile, I tell you it takes all kinds. With Air Canada I says if you had to wait two hours for the take-off there would be sandwiches, individually wrapped. (We have this Saran Wrap now, I don’t know if you get it here, I’ll send you some, you can’t do without it. Honestly, doll, what they can do nowadays, it’s remarkable, who has to slave over a hot stove any more like I did?) With Air Canada I says to him, we wouldn’t be treated like cattle, we would be served tea. Well, you should have seen him jump. Yes, madame. Certainly, madame. Good for you, the Indian lady says when I sit down again. Who even knew she could speak English, we’d been sitting side by side for an hour maybe? So I says I hope you don’t mind me asking, but why is it you people paints dots on your forehead? Forgive me, I’m not the nosy type, but if you don’t ask you never find out, isn’t that so? Is it a Christian symbol, I says? No, she says, in India they’re Hindu. You know, like the Beatles. And the dot means she’s married. Oh, isn’t that fascinating, I says. Now I’ve learned something. So we get to talking and she tells me that in India, you know, there is respect for the mother. Such respect. Her mother is a widow, she says, and they all live in one house, her family, her brother’s family, her younger sister’s family, all in one house, and the mother, well, the mother is the head of the family and everybody respects her, it’s a time-honored Indian custom. Now isn’t that interesting?”

  Mrs. Hersh and Nancy reached the top of the stairs, Jake flitted into the bedroom, unseen he hoped.

  Heh-heh-heh.

  The bedroom door opened. Oh God, no, Jake thought. But it was Nancy. “Ketzelle,” she squealed, “nipple-biter, so there you are!”

  Jake giggled.

  “Let me come to court today.”

  “Absolutely no.”

  “Jake,” she began tentatively, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you …?”

  “Harrod’s?” he countered, grinning.

  “Yes.”

  The handsomely appointed oak and marble toilets adjoining the men’s hairdressing salon.

  “They can’t bring it up. It never made the charge sheet, duckie.”

  “And what about your friend Sergeant Hoare?”

  “I no longer think it’s bad luck that Hoare’s involved. He’s a surprisingly sympathetic type, really, and he’s not holding a grudge.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because we joked about it.”

  “Oh, you are such an innocent, Jake!”

  Then, just as he was about to embrace her, Mrs. Hersh was with them. Immediately Jake stiffened.

  “Good luck in court today.”

  “It’s Harry who’s going to need the luck today.”

  “May he rot in hell.”

  “He’s my friend, Maw. We are in this together. Comrades. Look at it this way, me and Harry, we’re saints in the new order of things. Lamed vovs. Like Jean Genet. You explain that to her, Nancy.” And slamming the door, he was gone.

  Mrs. Hersh sunk to the bed. “You don’t know what it is to be a mother. What an agony …”

  “I have children too, Mrs. Hersh. And if he goes to prison –”

  “You mustn’t even think that.”

  “But I have to think that.”

  “I wouldn’t go home, you know. I’d stay right here and stick by you for as long as I was needed. I’d stay, you can count on it. You married into a Jewish family, doll, and we stick together, you know. In a crisis we always stick together.” Mrs. Hersh lowered her eyes and smoothed out her pajamas. “Many outstanding sociologists have observed that.”

  Nancy retrieved Jake’s brown cashmere jacket from the floor and slid open the door to his built-in cupboard. Too late, she realized that Mrs. Hersh had come up softly behind her to peer inside.

  “What is that?” Mrs. Hersh asked.

  “Nothing,” Nancy said, flushing.

  “Nothing. Some nothing.”

  The military kit, including a rifle with a long-range sight, was stacked in a corner. With the body-building equipment.

  “Oh, that,” Nancy said, simulating laughter, “that’s not Jake’s. It’s a friend’s – yes, an actor’s – he left it here.”

  “But the lying little bitch, I know she’s a whore, yesterday in court didn’t her lawyer say –”

  “It’s an actor’s.”

  “Oh, an actor’s. You mean it’s for a play?”

  “Yes,” Nancy said. Emphatically yes. And glancing out of the window she caught Jake edging cautiously toward the terrace, where the
baby, unsuspecting, was playing in his pram.

  Smiling down at his five-month-old son, Jake extended his right arm surreptitiously and then flicked his fingers. No reaction. Shit, he thought, a clear case of LOCOMOTOR ATAXIA (also called Tabes Dorsalis or Posterior Spinal Sclerosis), a disease of the nervous system, manifested principally by disordered movements of the limbs in walking. Among the earlier symptoms are disorders of vision.

  Perplexed, Jake brought his hand in closer, flicking his fingers again. Fiercely. The baby, who had been gurgling happily, frowned. His frown, Nancy witnessed from the window above, was just as severe as Jake’s, and, unaccountably, her eyes filled with tears.

  “Will you please stop tormenting the baby,” Nancy called out.

  “I’m playing with my son.”

  “I saw you. Now lay off, Jake.”

  Banging the window shut Nancy all but collided with Mrs. Hersh behind her. A hand held to her cheek, her eyes stricken, Mrs. Hersh asked, “Is he cruel to the baby?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, Mrs. Hersh.”

  Sammy, still in his pajamas, slid into the bedroom – braking – Topper comics clutched in one hand. “What begins with an ‘E’ and has only one letter in it?” he asked.

  “You hear,” Mrs. Hersh said, her eyes filled with reverence, “at his age.”

  “Oh, Sammy, please. You must get dressed. You’ll be late for school.”

  “There’s a trick in it,” Sammy said.

  “A trick in it, you hear?”

  “What begins with an ‘E’ and has –”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She doesn’t know. Me too.”

  “Give up?”

  “Yes, doll.”

  “An envelope.”

  “An envelope!” Mrs. Hersh clapped her hands, she hugged Sammy. “Delicious one,” she said.

  Nancy retreated around the other side of the bed to her bathroom but Mrs. Hersh followed her, scanning the glass shelves, sucking in every detail avidly, finally lifting a bottle of Arpège. “Such a big bottle of perfume.”

  “It’s cologne.”

  Mrs. Hersh shrugged, lowering her eyes. Everything I do is wrong. Her gaze fell on the bidet; quickly, she averted her eyes.

  To her way of looking, Nancy knew, the bidet was some sort of sinister gentile contrivance. For the orgies. “I’m going to wash now,” Nancy said evenly. “Would you excuse me?”

  “I’ll get Sammy ready for school. It’s my pleasure.”

  While he was waiting in the study for the black Humber with his solicitor Ormsby-Fletcher to come and pick him up, Jake flicked open the rest of the morning mail, hoping for a token of concern from Luke. Nothing. The first letter he opened was written on a round piece of stationery.

  Sept 21, 1967

  Dear Mr Hersh,

  I trust you will gather from this circular letter that I am no square, though all I ask is a square deal, not necessarily a great deal.

  Jake began to skip.

  Despite the serious state of the Theatre today, I still have to live by my one and only talent, hence I throw myself at your mercy and beg you not to condemn me to a professional death.

  TV or not TV – that is for you to answer.

  Yours swingingly,

  JUDD WARD

  Next came some overdue bills. Rose catalogues from the nursery in Sunningdale. Barclay’s Bank reminder about his overdraft. Quarterly report from Investor’s Growth Fund. Request for money from Anti-Apartheid Movement. Saturday Night magazine. DEBATE: OUR MONEY … OR UNCLE SAM’S? ALSO FRENCH CANADIAN ATTITUDES TO SEX. There was a letter from the secretary of a recently formed minorities’ society who wrote to say he had been following Jake’s case with keen interest and wished him the best of British luck. He also asked Jake to lend his name to a Sexual Bill of Rights that would be just the job for those who require visual stimulation or who must inflict or receive pain; for necrophiles and for those who enjoy troilism or transvestism. The society’s program called for the establishment of clubs which would arrange meetings between so-called deviants with complementary sex needs. Exhibitionists, for instance, would be encouraged to expose themselves before a select audience of voyeurs. The society also intended to petition M.P.’s, especially the known deviants among them, for a start on the pornographic social services. Taking the long view, it was hoped to establish mobile brothels to provide for hospitals, institutions, the paralyzed, the crippled, the aged and the inhibited.

  There was also the usual quota of obscene letters from strangers who had been following the case in the newspapers, but this morning only one correspondent had enclosed a photograph. It showed a lumpy nude lady, probably in her thirties, kneeling on a mussed-up bed. She smiled grossly at the unseen photographer, her hands cupping her enormous globular breasts, squeezing the nipples. HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO FUCK ME, PERVERT? was scrawled over the photograph with lipstick.

  Sammy skittered into the room, demanding, “Why aren’t you taking me to school this morning?”

  “I can’t. I’ve got to be in the West End early again. Granny will take you.”

  “Have you got a hangover?”

  “Yes.” Jake motioned him closer. Lowering his voice, he asked, “Anything new on Tibbett?”

  Tibbett, a schoolmate, was splendid at football.

  “You won’t tell Molly?”

  Jake promised.

  “He’s being transferred to Leeds. They got twenty-one pounds for him.”

  “But he must be worth more than that.”

  Mrs. Hersh was calling.

  “Will you take me to school tomorrow, then?”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday … Oh, Sammy!”

  “Yes.”

  What do you say to him? I never got to know my father and now it’s too late. Or, look here, starting next week I may be a boarder at Dartmoor for a while. Until I get home, walk tall.

  “I enjoy you. I like taking you places with me. You’ve got style. Now hurry or you’ll be late.”

  Five minutes later the doorbell rang and Jake opened his window and shouted down to Ormsby-Fletcher, “Coming.”

  Your lordship, look at it this way. There’s a sexual revolution going on outside. All this switched-on lean hungry alienated white Negro cat wanted –

  Quite, Mr. Hersh.

  Ormsby-Fletcher, disconcertingly cheerful this (and every) morning, continued to chirp, making reassuring noises, as Jake alighted from the black Humber before the Old Bailey.

  Cut into stone over the main entrance was the inscription:

  Defend the children of the Poor;

  Punish the Wrong-doer.

  And if the Wrong-doer, like Harry, is a child of the Poor? Ormsby-Fletcher gave Jake the thumbs-up sign and Jake responded with a wink. His most ebullient wink.

  Jew boys and WASP Canadians, Jake knew, had a long and dishonorable association with the Number One Court of the London Assizes. He wasn’t the first.

  In 1710, when Jonathan Wild, the Prince of Robbers, was the unquestioned numero uno of the London underworld, his indispensable aide was a macher named Abraham. “This Israelite,” according to the Newgate Calendar, “proved a remarkable, industrious and faithful servant to Jonathan, who entrusted him with matters of the greatest importance.” Traditionally, coiners and highwaymen, footpads, sharpers, and rogues of every description, pleaded – once apprehended – that they had flogged their ill-gotten gains to a Jew boy in Whitechapel. And, speaking of Jews, latter-day Jews, there was also Lord George Gordon, instigator of the riots of June 2, 1780. Lord Gordon’s followers set fire to Newgate, laying it in ruins, and plundered the Sessions-house at the Old Bailey. Lord Gordon himself went on to libel Marie-Antoinette and Count d’Amédar, but did not reveal himself as certainly deranged until he “… was discovered, in the habit of a Jew, at Birmingham, with a long beard; and having undergone circumcision … (having) firmly embraced the Jewish faith.” Once Lord, now Reb, Gordon lingered on in Newgate for some years, praying daily, keeping a kosher cell,
until he died of jail fever. Once the most popular idol of the mob, he perished, as the Newgate Calendar put it, in the company of the very refuse of society, “… negros, Jews; gypsies, and vagabonds of every description.”

  The social tone hadn’t much improved by 1880, when the fastidious Montagu Williams, Q.C., complained in his memoirs of the “shabby Jews with anxious faces” who loitered outside the courthouse. Shabby Jews who had knit into defiant gangs, in 1903, and declared their intention to free the accused murderer Lipski, which obliged the warders of Newgate to carry guns for the first time in history on the Polish Jew’s hanging day.

  Among WASP Canadian precursors, Jake, of necessity, identified most closely with the cross-eyed sex nut, junkie, and McGill alumnus, Thomas Neill Cream, debauched habitué of the fleshpots of South Lambeth about which Hollingshead wrote in Ragged London: “The houses present every conceivable aspect of filth and wretchedness” and “the faces that peer out of the narrow windows are yellow and repulsive: some are the faces of Jews, some of Irishwomen …”

  Thomas Neill Cream, begot in Glasgow, in 1850, came to Montreal as a child and, at the age of twenty-two, entered McGill, emerging four years later, another immigrant fulfilled, with his M.D. degree. “An excellent worker, a brilliant boy,” his professor wrote, “but he has some queer ideas: monstrously queer ideas, and I don’t know which way they may lead him.”

  They led Tommy, for openers, to murder with morphine the Toronto girl an irate father forced him to marry at pistol point. As the girl lay dying in Cream’s arms, he sobbed in apparent grief, and then lit out for Illinois, where he did in an elderly rancher with strychnine, the better to savor his rambunctious wife, for which indulgence he endured ten years in the pen, after which he sailed for London. Swinging London (Eng.), where the cross-eyed doctor poisoned at least six filles de joie within a year, four of whom died in agony, before he was apprehended and hanged in 1892, falsely claiming on the gallows to be Jack the Ripper.

  Yet another Canadian bigmouth trying to make his mark in London.