Solomon Gursky Was Here (58 page)

The House of Lin's menu, ostensibly mandarin, was shrewdly tilted to accommodate the palate of its clientele. The won ton soup, for instance, was reminiscent of mama's chicken soup with
lokshen
. The steamed dumplings were indistinguishable from
kreplach,
except that they were filled with pork. The General Kang minced beef on a steamed cabbage leaf could pass for an unwrapped
chaleshke
.

Lin, possibly ninety years old now, Moses reckoned, was plump and bright-eyed and reeked of cologne. “It was Solomon's doing, of course. I'm not saying he actually pulled the trigger on McGraw. He was far too, ah, you know …”

“Fastidious?”

“Far too what you said. But he brought in the killers from Detroit.”

“There are people who say it was Solomon they had come to shoot. He was the one who was supposed to go down to the railway station, wasn't he?”

“But he sent McGraw in his place.”

“McGraw was his friend.”

“Until he discovered that he had been swindled at the poker table by a boy who had stolen his stake from his family in the first place.”

“And who told you that?”

Lin smiled his irritating wisdom-of-the-East smile.

“Was it Mr. Bernard?”

“Mr. Bernard is a great human being. King of the Jews. If not for him the family would be nowhere today.”

“Ah, so Harvey Schwartz eats here, does he?”

“When he is in town with his enchanting wife I'm pleased to say, but never Mr. Bernard, though I have extended him the offer of my hospitality more than once.”

“However, he did invest,” Moses said, taking a stab at it.

“I am sole proprietor of The House of Lin.”

“How did Solomon cheat?”

“Let me show you something,” Lin said, dealing cards from a deck he had prepared. “Kozochar had folded and so had Ingram and Kouri. I went out even though I was sitting on nines back to back. It was the only thing to do. McGraw was showing two ladies and a bullet and had been betting those ladies from the start like he had another one in the hole, and let me tell you he wasn't one to bluff, McGraw. Solomon was sitting there with only sevens and a ten showing. He was not only seeing McGraw, he was raising him, shoving thousands into the pot. Then Ingram dealt McGraw another bullet, giving him a full house for sure, and Solomon a deuce, good for nothing. McGraw tossed the deed to the hotel into the pot and Solomon put up the Gursky store, the blacksmith's shop, and the two rooming houses I had lost. And when they turned over the cards McGraw was sitting on only two bullets over ladies, that's all, but that little son of a bitch was holding three sevens.”

“It happens.”

“If you had been sitting on back to back sevens to begin with would you have raised into two and then what looked like three ladies for sure? No, sir. Not unless you knew that all McGraw had in the hole was a lousy eight.”

“And how in the hell would Solomon have known that?”

“Now let me show you something else,” Lin said, motioning to a waiter who promptly brought him two more decks of cards lying on a painted enamel tray. Lin set the decks down on the table immediately before Moses. “Tell me on which one the cellophane and stamp have been steamed off and then resealed.”

“But you weren't playing with Solomon's cards.”

“No. Ingram's.”

“Well, then.”

“But where did Ingram buy them, Mr. Berger?”

“From A. Gursky & Sons, General Merchants.”

“You're not as stupid as I thought.”

“That still doesn't prove anything, least of all that it was Solomon who ordered McGraw shot.”

“Then tell me why Solomon jumped bail, flying off to his death in that Gypsy Moth?”

“Because he knew that you had been paid to lie on the witness stand and, besides, he had other plans.”

“Not long term, I trust.”

“Tiu na xinq.”

Two

As defined by the Electoral Franchise Act of July 20, 1885, “Person” meant a male, including an Indian, but excluding anyone of the Chinese race, among them Charley's father Wang Lin, who was one of Andrew Onderdonk's lambs. More than ten thousand strong they were, these coolies plucked out of Kwangtung province to cut a swathe through the Rocky Mountains for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. Suspended over cliff faces in swaying baskets, they fed sticks of dynamite into crevices and blasted twenty-seven tunnels through Fraser Canyon. Then, their work done, their presence no longer required, many of them drifted into the settlement that was incorporated as Vancouver in April 1886. The same month white navvies employed at Hastings sawmill struck for higher wages. The mill manager responded by hiring more Chinese, rounding up coolies willing to put in ten hours a day for $1.25. This enraged a local drunk named Locksley Lucas. So one night he organized a bunch outside the Sunnyside Hotel and they marched on the tents of Chinatown, bent on breaking heads. Some of the Chinese were tied together by their pigtails and flung over a cliff into the sea, encouraged to swim the rest of the way back to the Middle Kingdom.

Wang Lin, a survivor, fled into the interior of B.C., then over the Shining Mountains into the western heartland, finally settling in the small town where the best bargains were to be had at A. Gursky & Sons, General Merchants.

Wang's son Charley prospered. Then, in the big autumn poker game of 1916, Charlie, as well as Kozochar, Ingram, Kouri, and McGraw were humiliated by Solomon, who rose from the card table the new owner of the Queen Victoria Hotel.

Before Solomon went off to the wars he installed McGraw as bartender, which some said was good of him. But it was hard on McGraw. He took to the bottle. He began to brood. Seated in the five-and-ten with Kouri, Kozochar, and Lin, he complained bitterly about Bernard, who made a point of checking out the cash register every night. He watched, amazed, as that strutting little bastard parlayed Solomon's winnings into a bunch of hotels-cum-bordellos and a couple of mail-order houses that shifted booze from one province to another. Gathered around the hot stove with his cronies, McGraw allowed he never could have done it himself, he lacked the audacity. Yes, Lin countered, but neither could Bernard have managed it without the Queen Victoria as collateral. “And what if Solomon didn't beat you fair and square,” Lin asked, “but he was cheating?”

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.”

O
R 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.”