“You’re going downhill. We’re leaving.”
Molony was now losing as quickly as he’d been winning. He was almost out of his own chips. “Give me some money.”
“You can pay off what you owe. Let’s take a break.”
“If you want to go, go. Give me the money.”
“Molony, look at me. What is this bullshit?”
Others were glancing their way. The floorman fixed Doug with a reptilian glare. Doug glared right back. He didn’t care, he wanted Brian out of there.
“You just told me not to give it to you.”
“It’s my money.”
“Remember what you told me? Soon as you lose three in a row, walk away. You’ve lost five in a row. Come on. We’re going.”
“Give me my fucking money.”
Everyone was watching. He and Brian were holding up the game. Doug had no choice. He handed over the money and stormed out. Across the street he rented a car. Fuming, he drove down the Strip, then into the desert. The look on Brian’s face. Doug had always been able to pull him back. If he put his foot down, Brian listened. This was different. Brian may as well have said, “Screw you. I value the chips more than I value your friendship.”
Doug drove aimlessly, cooling out, then went looking for Brian. He found him at the sports book next to their hotel, a dismal place that smelled of desperation and disinfectant. Brian was dispirited. He’d lost most of the money at the crap table and put the rest on the ball games. Doug didn’t like football but he took the molded seat next to Brian’s, half afraid to leave him. While the parade of losers shuffled in and out, discarding old slips and buying new ones, Brian and Doug watched game after game on the elevated screens, eight straight hours of NFL football. Of the ten games Brian had bet, he lost nine. Doug couldn’t believe it. To be in debt, win back what you owe, and lose the whole works again? How could anyone with Brian’s smarts be so dumb?
On the plane home Doug said he had something important to say. They were best friends, right? “If you’ve got money problems, I don’t think gambling’s going to solve them. Why not borrow and pay off what you owe? Your parents will give you a loan. I’ll loan you what I can. We just took out a mortgage, and Nicole’s expecting again, but I could scrape up a few thousand. What do you say?”
Brian almost blurted, “I owe a hell of a lot more than you think, and I owe it where they don’t know I’ve borrowed it.” It would have been such a relief to tell someone.
“I appreciate your concern, Doug. I’ll look after it myself.”
Doug shrugged. What can you do? Let the guy know he’s your best buddy, tell him you think he’s got a problem, try to get him talking. Offer to help, that’s about it. Doug ordered a drink, put on his earphones, and looked out the window. They’d still talk at Christmas and on their birthdays. Brian would drive down to Sarnia now and then. When Doug came to Toronto they’d go for lunch. He would never go gambling with Brian again, though, never even raise the subject — it was up to Brian now. They’d carry on as if it hadn’t happened, but the friendship would never be quite the same.
When they landed in Toronto, Brian took Doug aside and said, “Listen, I’ve got something to tell you. Something important. I’m … I’m sorry you didn’t have a more enjoyable holiday. Glad you came.”
When Brian asked to borrow twenty bucks, Doug assumed it was cab fare home. It was something to put on the Monday night triactor.
“When I was growing up, our family lived a couple of blocks from Brian’s family,” recalled Andy Williams, now a chartered accountant and general manager of an outdoor furniture manufacturing company. “Brian and I both went to Our Lady of Perpetual Help for grade school, and we went to the same boarding school. The Molonys were a fine family, highly regarded in the community, in the Catholic community, and I’m sure also in the medical community. My brother went out with Brian’s sister, and I knew most of Brian’s brothers. Dr. Molony was our family doctor for various throat ailments. Mrs. Molony was very kind, very loving. Always supportive of her family. A really fine woman. Brian was a bright boy and I’m sure they were very proud of him.
“Dr. Molony was into horse racing, but I don’t think he was much of a gambler. He was in it more for the sport, the breeding. You come along as the son and you get caught up in it. My father was into it and I have the gambling bug myself — haven’t missed a Queen’s Plate in twenty years. Brian and I used to take the newspaper and go through the next day’s races. Brian would pick a horse and I’d pick a horse. We’d play for a quarter or fifty cents a race. He was very good at it and I wasn’t, so of course he wanted to do it all the time. He was an expert handicapper at an early age. I remember him bent over his Racing Form, studying it at length. He was a serious gambler, in the sense that he went about it carefully and took pride in the results.
“We also played a lot of cards at a young age. Mostly poker. I think that’s where Brian got the nickname ‘Weasel.’ He was shrewd in everything he did, and he was also lucky. He was brighter than the rest of us and he took it more seriously. We were doing it for the fun and excitement, but he was doing it for the challenge and the victory. He hated to lose. It seemed to mean more to him than to the rest of us.
“I was kind of incorrigible at that age and my marks weren’t very good. My father heard about Regina Mundi from Brian’s father, and my parents sent me down there a year after Brian’s parents sent him. Back then there were only about a hundred and twenty-five kids at the school, so basically you knew everybody. Brian’s best friend was Doug, no question. They were inseparable. Anywhere Doug went, Brian went. I mean almost to an insufferable level. Doug was outgoing, more of a lady killer and a jock, but they had the same sense of humour. Brian had his father’s sense of humour, very dry, and he and Doug found the same things funny. You have to be on a certain wavelength to appreciate certain people, and they seemed to be on the same wavelength.
“At Regina Mundi I remember Brian telling me about going to the track with a girl he was seeing and Doug’s girlfriend. The girls couldn’t decide which horse to bet on. Brian said, ‘Close your eyes, see which one your pen lands on.’ The pen slipped across two horses, so he said, ‘OK, we have to bet the exactor. Those two horses.’ Damned things finished one-two and paid a hundred and fifty dollars. How’s that for luck?
“Brian always had the ability to con, no question. He must have conned me a zillion times. Never in a mean way, but he’d take any edge he could get. He knew how to get what he wanted. If you were up against him you got the feeling you were going to lose, he was going to do whatever it took to win. And you knew that in his quiet, unassuming way, he had the balls to do it.
“You certainly never would have thought of him as doing anything illegal. He was a very moral and honest person, but at the same time he had a streak you could almost call ruthless. Maybe that’s too strong a word. I’ll give you an example. At Regina Mundi one year I won the golf tournament. Brian was editor of the newspaper, and he presented me with the prize. It was thirty dollars, I think. At the time I owed him twenty because I’d been short of cash or whatever. So I go up to the podium in front of everybody and Brian presents me with the envelope. Most guys would have cracked a joke, you know, ‘Congratulations, glad to see you won enough money to pay me what you owe me.’ Not Brian. He’d already taken the twenty. I got a net figure in the envelope.”
“Eli, it’s Brian. I wonder if I could ask a favour.”
Molony had met Eli Koharski at a poker game shortly after starting at the bank. Koharski’s marriage had collapsed; he filled the void with cards and dice and pari-mutuel tickets. The camaraderie of gamblers developed into friendship. They often went to the races together, shot craps in hotel rooms, watched sports. Sometimes Eli and a pal of his played euchre with Brian and Brenda. Brenda thought they were playing for dimes — each dime was a hundred dollars. Unlike some denizens of the track, Koharski was utterly reliable. An immigrant’s son, he had risen from a janitorial position to vi
ce-president and part owner of an importing company. Molony admired his self-made career. He had given Koharski a bank loan to consolidate his debts, and Koharski had offered Molony the use of his townhouse before Brenda got her apartment. They viewed each other with warmth and respect, though they hadn’t spent much time together since Molony stopped attending the poker games.
“I’m taking cash out of my account,” said Molony, “but I don’t want to do it through my own branch. I sold some stock and I don’t want people here to know my affairs. I thought I’d arrange it through your branch, if you wouldn’t mind picking up an envelope for me.”
Molony had set up a loan account and a current account in Koharski’s name and given him a $19,500 advance. The money had been debited from the loan account and credited to the savings account. Koharski had $19,500 in the bank he knew nothing about.
“No problem,” said Koharski. “I have to go today anyway. Do I have to sign anything?”
“It’s all looked after,” said Molony. “I know you’re busy. Appreciate the favour. I’ll call you back with the name of the woman you should ask for.”
Molony called the Dufferin and Ranee branch of the CIBC and said a valued customer was making a withdrawal from Bay and Richmond but would pick up the cash there. Molony supplied the account number and asked that the money be readied for pickup.
That evening Molony dropped by Koharski’s place. Koharski invited him in, but Molony was late for a rendezvous at Yorkdale Shopping Centre. Nick Beck insisted on meeting in busy, open places, and Molony had suggested the CIBC branch in the plaza.
Beck had grown up in the area. It was where he’d done his first boosting, slipping through basement windows and unlocking back doors for the older guys. It was where he’d been revered by the other kids for telling the teachers to fuck themselves, where he’d bought grass in half pounds and moved it in half ounces, where he’d cruised around in his black Mustang and challenged anybody to anything. “Wanna bet?” he’d say, pulling out a wad of twenties and fifties. Sixteen years old. The others moved on, but Nicky never left. Once the area had been a neighbourhood — low-cost housing, hardware stores that smelled of sweeping compound, corner marts where you got smokes and, if you knew the magic word, a bottle of rye on Sunday. Now it was a commercial wasteland — Burger King and Radio Shack and Yorkdale Mercury. But these were still his streets. He and his wife had an apartment not far from Yorkdale, and her dress shop — his office — was a few blocks away.
Beck was usually punctual, but Molony couldn’t find him. The TransAm was nowhere in sight. Molony got out and walked back and forth in front of the branch. Idleness was deadly: it brought the loans to mind. There were now three bad accounts, three sums to pay down. Three ways to be found out. Where was Beck? Had he got the time screwed up? Could something have happened to him? Something that might involve Molony? Paranoid guy, Beck. What if his paranoia wasn’t paranoia after all?
“Here comes The Banker, saving ground on the inside.”
He’d been into the cocaine. He stood there, not two feet away, unshaven and wild-eyed, radiating nervous energy. He might have materialized out of thin air.
“You scared hell out of me.”
“What you got for me, Banker?”
Molony passed him the envelope. “You going tonight?”
“I have to see that creep.”
“I’ll give you a ride,” said Molony. “If you’d been on time we might have even made the first race.”
“Your car’s a mess. Take my car.”
“Mine’s right here.”
“Junk that piece of shit, Banker. I’ll sell you the TR6. Hardly any mileage on it. Beautiful little car.”
“Great car,” Molony agreed, spirits soaring. His miserable anxiety had vanished — twenty minutes to post time. “But tell me, Nicky, and I want you to be perfectly honest. A red convertible? Do you really think it’s me?”
3
LUCK BE A LADY
“Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself.”
– Katherine Mansfield
s a young girl, Sherry Brydson lived with her mother, aunt, and cousins at her grandfather’s house in Port Credit, Ontario. It was a wonderful place, with nanny’s quarters, servants’ quarters, and a gardener’s cottage. When Sherry was six, her grandfather moved to Scotland, but he returned to the house each summer, spending as much time with his family as his busy schedule allowed. Sherry visited him in Scotland; every summer he took her and her mother on a trip. One year they drove to Rome, where they met her uncle Ken and his new wife; another they went to the World’s Fair in Brussels.
At the University of Toronto, Sherry studied political science and economics, served as news editor on the student paper, and immersed herself in radical politics. She considered the world in terms proposed by Chairman Mao: “What is the central contradiction?” She worked summers as a journalist for Canadian Press. On graduation she was hired by CP, but soon moved to London with her boyfriend, an editor on The Globe and Mail.
Brydson’s grandfather had moved down from Scotland, and she saw him often. He was no longer just Roy Thomson, a barber’s son from Toronto who had launched his business career selling radios. He was Lord Thomson of Fleet, having been made a baron in 1964 by Queen Elizabeth. During Sherry’s lifetime he had built an empire of holdings — newspapers (including The Times of London), television and radio stations, insurance companies, travel agencies, merchandising chains, computer data services, book and magazine publishing companies, trucking outfits, North Sea oil — that girdled the globe. Nearing eighty, he peered out through impossibly thick glasses and hopped on planes to wherever impulse took him. “Let’s go see Sally Aw,” he’d say, and next thing you’d be in Hong Kong. He had lived his three score and ten and considered this part of life a bonus. If he fell down dead in the middle of Burma, so be it.
Often he took one of his grandchildren with him, to Florence or Karachi, Beirut or Madrid. He disapproved of Sherry’s politics, her habit of wearing slacks, and her “arrangement” with her beau, and he voiced his displeasure strenuously. At least, she told herself, their relationship was not based on indifference. They frequently argued but liked each other, and Sherry saw a good deal of the world in his company. When she wasn’t travelling with him, she and her boyfriend got around, spending five months in Paris learning French, travelling overland to Katmandu. In England they did freelance work for CBC Radio. Eventually Paul returned to Toronto and Sherry went off to Australia.
In Sydney she got a job on one of the newspapers in Rupert Murdoch’s chain, News Limited. A year later, at a convention in Hong Kong, she got an offer to work in Bangkok. She had visited Thailand with her grandfather and been seduced by the diversity, beauty, and complexity of the country. Might there be two openings, one for her boyfriend? There were. The only hitch was that her employer would be Allied Newspapers, which her grandfather owned. She did not feel it would be proper to live common law. She phoned Paul in Toronto and said, “Let’s get married and go to Bangkok.”
They spent three years working on The Bangkok Post and exploring the country. Sherry edited a coffee-table book on the handicrafts of Thai hill tribes. She studied Thai cooking. She learned photography. The life appealed on many levels, but she and Paul began to fear losing touch with their backgrounds, becoming as disaffected and rootless as the dipsomaniacs in the diplomatic corps. In 1977, with mixed feelings, they returned to Toronto. Paul resumed his editing job at The Globe and Mail, and Sherry pondered her future.
At the family cottage on Georgian Bay, she scratched her leg on a thorn, developed an infection, and was treated with penicillin. The drug triggered an allergic reaction. Pancreatic complications undermined her body’s immune system. Her food allergies, which had been mild, became devastating — she could not have sugar, beer, wine, cheese, bread, anything brewed with mould or fermented with yeast — and she was gri
evously ill for almost a year.
As she was getting back on her feet, eager for new challenges, she learned she was to receive a substantial disbursement from the trust Roy Thomson had established for his grandchildren. Brydson had always been comfortable — if she wanted to take six months off, she could apply to the trustees for money — but she had worked for a living and did not have expensive tastes. Her grandfather had been confusingly ambivalent about where she fit in, one day proposing a toast to her at a huge formal dinner, the next expecting her to do his laundry. He urged her to attend the Harvard School of Business; he asked why she hadn’t had children. For all his attempts to overcome his Victorian attitudes, he believed she really should have found a nice chap from Upper Canada College and made babies — boy babies. Her exposure to wealth didn’t mean she had been encouraged to learn its management. Nor did she know anything about Canadian banks, having lived ten years abroad. The cash portion of the disbursement amounted to $4-million. The day she received the cheque, she couldn’t have told you how a trust company differed from a merchant bank. She had no idea what to do with all this money.
John Tory would have been a good person to ask. One of Canada’s eminent corporate lawyers, Tory had been Roy Thomson’s personal advisor and estate planner. He administered the trust that disbursed the funds, having left the Toronto firm he headed with his twin brother — Tory, Tory, DesLauriers and Binnington — to oversee the Thomson empire. After Roy Thomson’s death in 1976 the second Lord Thomson, Sherry’s uncle Ken, decided to restructure the family holdings and move headquarters from Britain to Canada. Tory helped engineer the International Thomson takeovers of The Hudson’s Bay Company (Thomson acquired a 75 per cent interest for $641-million) and FP Publications (it purchased the newspaper chain, which included The Globe and Mail, for $165-million). Because Tory represented the grandchildren collectively in the trust, he would have had a conflict of interest if he represented any one of them. He told Sherry she’d best get her own advisors.
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