by Allan Levine
“You can count on me, Mama,” declared Bernice.
Sarah smiled. “I know I can,” she said, kissing her daughter’s forehead.
From the front of the shop came the sound of a loud laugh. Sarah peered around the corner and her eyes widened. Standing beside Betty Kingston was Saul Sugarman.
Sarah left the children and marched towards them. Her eyes never left Sugarman.
“I was explaining to your friend here that he’s what I call a sharpshooter. He says he’s a good dancer and that he likes to spend money! Nothing better in a man than that.”
Sugarman grinned.
“Is that so?” asked Sarah. Her body tightened and her eyes narrowed.
“He also likes my bob,” said Betty, brushing her bangs. “You should try it, Sarah. Giselle’s Salon on Carleton Street, that’s where I go. You see how nicely she did the fingerwaves.” She pointed to the S-shaped waves on the side of her hair.
“They do suit you,” said Sarah as politely as she could muster.
“I just love these new, slim-fitting, cream dresses you have, and with such wonderful beadwork,” said Betty, holding up the knee-length, sleeveless dress against her. “With rolled stockings and black Mary Janes with a bow, I’ll look like a real brooksy, classy, you know what I mean?”
“You will indeed,” said Sugarman. He bowed slightly and kissed the top of Betty’s right hand.
Betty whistled. “Aren’t you fluky?”
Saul shrugged.
“May I speak to you outside, please,” Sarah said to Sugarman.
At that moment, Bernice came running up. “I want another cookie, Mama.”
“Niecee, Mama’s busy. Go back to the room and I’ll be there in a moment.”
“Here, young lady, how about this?” Sugarman handed Bernice a quarter.
Sarah immediately grabbed it away from her. “She doesn’t need that. Niecee, back in the room. Now.”
Tears welled in Bernice’s eyes, but she did as her mother said, waving to both Sugarman and Betty as she departed.
“She’s a darling, Sarah,” said Betty.
“If you’ll excuse me for a moment, Betty.”
“Take all of the time you need. I’m not going anywhere.”
Sarah followed Sugarman out the door of the shop. As soon as she reached the walkway, she reached for Sugarman’s left shoulder and spun him around.
“How dare you. How dare you come into my shop unannounced like this. What are you doing here, Saul?”
“I just came to check on my little investment.”
Sarah shook her head. “You have no idea how much I regret taking that money from you.”
“Well, if you didn’t, my dear, you wouldn’t have your shop, now would you? You know I only want good things for you.”
“I’ll pay you back every penny. I swear it.”
“I’m sure you will. I see you’re wearing the watch.”
Sarah undid the strap of the watch and threw it at him. “I don’t want this … Saul, did I not make myself clear? I don’t need this and I don’t want anything more from you.”
Sugarman picked up the watch and stared at her. “You are beautiful. You do know that?”
“Saul, stop please,” she said, her voice rising. “There’s nothing between us.” Several passers-by took notice. “It was a mistake, what happened. You must accept that and move on. Please. I have a family and a husband.”
“Yes. Your daughter’s precious. It’s like this, Sarah,” he said with his eyes narrowed and a wolfish smirk. “I always get what I want. And I want you. And I will have…”
Sarah’s right hand slapped him hard across the face. Stunned more than hurt, Sugarman’s face turned a deep red. “You shouldn’t have done that. But I suppose I’d expect nothing less from a woman like you.”
Sarah ignored the taunt. “Leave me and my family alone.” Her voice was shaking. She pushed him to the side, ripped open the door, and entered the shop.
4
The streetcar ride back to the North End was uneventful save for a stray hound which wandered onto the tracks and nearly got run over. Sitting again at the back of the car, Klein hardly noticed the dog’s yelp or the other few passengers. He tried hard to focus on the Sugarman-Roter case, reviewing the various permutations and combinations of possibilities. Yet the truth was, he could not get Sarah out of his head. The two of them had been through a lot together, but this seemed the worst. He loved her, he knew that. He just wasn’t certain he could ever trust her again.
He got off the streetcar when it reached Selkirk in front of Elliot and Hazel’s grocery store.
“Here’s a few apples for you, Sam,” said Hazel Brown, the store’s always-cheery owner. She handed Klein a paper bag.
“How much do I owe you?”
“Next time, Sam. For those adorable kids of yours.”
Klein thanked her. He dashed across Main and headed about a block down Selkirk, passing the usual crowd. They were either waiting for the Royal Bank to open or patients coming and going from the office of Dr. Frank Rodin, who’d repaired Klein more times than he cared to remember. Next to Dr. Rodin’s office was the headquarters of the Israelite Press, or Dos Yiddishe Vort, which covered all things Jewish in the city. Its feisty editor, Mark Selchen, was not shy about criticizing the community’s many machers, who, in Klein’s opinion, believed they were the self-appointed rulers of their own prairie fiefdom.
Next to the newspaper office was the Queen’s Theatre, one of Sam and Sarah’s favourite haunts. In fact, many years ago, Klein recalled, Sarah had first enticed him with an invitation to accompany her to the Queen’s. There was nothing quite like seeing a Yiddish play at the theatre, despite the constant commotion throughout most performances. Members of the audience rarely refrained from talking loudly and eating everything and anything—including full course dinners of roasted chicken, kugel, and knishes.
Two months ago, before things had become tense at home, Klein and Sarah had attended the play Mirele Efros, otherwise known as “the Jewish Queen Lear.” The play by the New York-based Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin was admittedly sentimental, but even Klein was moved by the depiction of the mother, Mirele, and the hardships of Jewish life in the New World she experienced. It brought back fond memories of his mother, Freda, gone now so many years. The family home on Flora Avenue had permanently had the exquisite aroma of Freda’s delicious chicken soup.
Just past the Queen’s, at 249 Selkirk Avenue, Klein entered Isaac Badner’s sign shop.
“G’d morning, Klein,” Badner grunted. Bald, short, and stocky with a full beard, Badner was busy cutting a piece of plywood.
“Isaac, how’s the day going?” asked Klein with a nod.
“Same as yesterday.” It was the response that Badner offered nearly every day.
“Geller here yet?”
“You think I keep track of that kid’s comings and goings? I got work to do.”
Badner was never one for small talk. Two years ago, Badner’s youngest son, Abe, a gambler and all-around pain in the ass in Klein’s view, was accused of killing a Point Douglas bookie by the name of Krask. Young Badner claimed he had been framed. He swore that he was miles from Krask’s house on Euclid Avenue when the murder had occurred. Nevertheless, the police arrested him. Detective Bill McCreary had assured Klein that Abe Badner was guilty. Isaac had refused to believe it and urged Klein to look into the case. Sure enough, with the able assistance from his old boss, Madam Melinda, Klein proved to McCreary’s satisfaction that the real culprit was Lucy Jackson, a prostitute who worked at a brothel close to Melinda’s. Krask had hit her one too many times and she claimed she stabbed him in self-defence. Isaac was so grateful to Klein that he offered him rent-free the use of a small office at the back of his shop.
“Alec, wake up,” Klein said loudly as soon as he was in th
e small room.
“What? Oh, Sam. Sorry. I was out late last night. Just dozed off.”
“Well sleep on your own time,” said Klein. “No doubt you were courting Miss Kravetz.”
A wide grin crossed Geller’s face. “What can I say, Sam? I’m smitten. It doesn’t matter what she says or does, I can’t seem to take my eyes off of her. Smart as a steel trap, too.”
Klein whistled. “You’re head over heels in love, Alec. She works for Saul Sugarman, doesn’t she?”
Geller nodded. “I know what you think about him. But she says he’s good to her. Pays her $1.25 an hour. That’s close to fifty dollars a week, ten times more than she’d get working twelve to sixteen hours a day at a sewing machine for Jacob & Crowley, Hurtig, or the Freeds.”
“You’re beginning to sound like my sister. However, your sweetheart may prove useful on our new case.”
Geller removed his tweed flat cap, exactly the same type that Klein wore, and sat upright. “I wouldn’t want Shayna to get in any trouble. She needs that job. But, tell me about the case. What’s going on?”
Klein smiled at Alec’s eagerness. He genuinely liked Geller. Just under six feet tall, lean and muscular with a rugged look that young women found attractive, Alec had spunk. In fact, the first time Klein met Geller was in 1918 and he was in the middle of a scrap. Some neighbourhood kids had decided to pick on another kid from the Jewish orphanage, a regular occurrence in the North End—except that day they picked on the wrong orphan. Geller knew how to handle himself. He had a bloody nose from that altercation, though as Klein recalled, his antagonists looked a lot worse.
Alec was then fifteen years old and had been at the orphanage only a couple of months. His father had died when he was five and his mother, Sylvia, had died in the spring of 1918 during the influenza epidemic that had gripped the city and country. That year, there likely wasn’t a Winnipegger who didn’t lose a parent, sibling, or friend to the ravaging virus. For a time, Klein’s daughter Freda had shown symptoms. She came down with a high fever, terrible headaches, and had pains everywhere. Then, a week or so later, her fever broke and she miraculously recovered. Sam and Sarah thought they were going to lose her. Geller wasn’t so lucky. His mother, thirty-six years old, died three weeks after becoming ill. The family had no relatives or friends who could take Alec in, so he ended up in the orphanage.
Located in the three-and-a-half-storey house on Matheson east of Main Street, the orphanage wasn’t quite a military camp, but it was close, as Alec had told Klein on many occasions.
“Every day, we were up at 6:45 a.m. Tardiness was not tolerated and there were loud bells and shouting for those who failed to get out of bed quickly enough,” Geller had related. “Breakfast was porridge except on Thursdays when we received Red River cereal with a dash of honey. One of the few meals I enjoyed. On Saturdays, because it was the Sabbath, there was only cold food since cooking was not allowed.”
Alec had attended St. John’s Technical High School where all the male orphans were referred to by the other students as “Abie.” Geller did not tolerate that either and a few too many fist fights landed him in trouble with the school’s principal, Alexander Campbell.
After Klein broke up that scrap on the street, young Alec started following Klein around like a puppy dog. Sam brought him home for dinner one night and Geller never really left. After he turned eighteen and was old enough to leave the orphanage, he boarded with an elderly woman on Magnus Avenue. She was not only known in the North End for her strong bootleg whisky, but as fate would have it, she was also Shayna Kravetz’s grandmother—which was how the two met.
To pay the ten dollars room and board, Geller started doing odd jobs for Klein. First, it was fetching coffee, and then tidying up the office. Finally, Klein had him discreetly track a husband, whose distraught wife had hired Klein to ascertain if her husband was cheating on her. Geller had done so without being detected and predictably discovered that the culprit in question, Eddie Goldstein, a shoe salesman, was indeed having an affair with his voluptuous next door neighbour Delores, who also happened to be the close friend of his wife, Stella. It was messy, though Alec acted like a real professional. Since then, he had become Klein’s assistant, working on a contingency basis; he was paid fifteen per cent of Klein’s fee and twenty if it was more than five hundred dollars—which was rare.
“You’re taking a train ride to Vera, Alec,” said Klein. “You ever hear of that?”
Geller shook his head. “Where the hell is it?”
“About eighty miles due south, close to the North Dakota border.”
“And I’m going there, why?”
Klein filled Geller in on the details of Max Roter’s murder, who he was, and why Lou Sugarman had hired Klein to investigate his death.
“It’s all about booze,” said Klein. “Money and booze, a very dangerous combination. Go to Vera. Talk to Roter’s neighbours and see what you can find out. There might be a chance that this bootlegger Taylor, Roter’s last customer, had nothing to do with this, or any other bootlegger for that matter. Perhaps this was a simple case of a robbery gone wrong. Someone found out about the payoff Roter was getting that night and decided to steal it from him.”
“Sounds likely,” said Geller, trying very hard to be nonchalant about his first out-of-town assignment
“There’s a train leaving from the CPR station late tomorrow morning you can take. But I need your help right now. At about one o’clock Max Roter’s widow is arriving with his body for the funeral being held on Friday morning. I’d like to be there, maybe have a quick word with her. Meet me in the middle of the rotunda in an hour and a half—at twelve thirty. I want you to stand back and determine if anything’s not right when Mrs. Roter and her children arrive.”
“Not right?” asked Geller, his eyes widening.
“Easy Alec, just taking precautions. That’s all.”
Any time Klein entered the imposing CPR station on Higgins Avenue, he felt as if he was entering a European cathedral. The power of the Almighty was clearly evident as soon as you passed through the three sets of wooden doors. Klein paused for a moment, as he usually did, and felt genuinely humbled by the station’s magnificent stone portico. The engraving held by the columns, “AD CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY 1904,” was a constant reminder of the CPR’s dominating presence on the prairies. If Winnipeg was truly the “Gateway to the West,” as the city’s leaders boasted, then this was where it all began.
There was a time, before the Great War, when the stream of immigrants arriving at the station from all parts of Europe never let up. These newcomers reshaped the character of the city, though in ways Winnipeg’s elite did not especially appreciate. Who needed more Poles, Ukrainians, Galicians, and Jews? Certainly not the barons at the Grain Exchange or the lords of Rosyln Road, who feared their city was under siege by the “scum of Europe,” as Klein remembered the old Winnipeg Telegram putting it.
But that was more than a decade ago. Yes, Klein was still occasionally referred to as a “dirty kike” and his daughter Freda had been told more than once by the Gentile students at Luxton School that she had “killed Christ.” Eaton’s, the Hudson’s Bay, and a dozen other stores still refused to hire Jewish clerks and Sandy Hook, the beach resort on Lake Winnipeg, promoted itself to prospective cottage owners as “a Jew-free area.”
Nonetheless, things were changing, in Klein’s view, and for the better. There were Jewish members of the Grain Exchange as well as Jewish doctors and lawyers. Klein had done some investigative work for Max J. Finklestein, known around the city as “MJ,” a big-time lawyer. He was a Jew who had one foot in the Jewish North End and another in the WASP Winnipeg of Portage and Main. That was definitely progress. Jews had been elected to city council and Abe Heaps, one of the leaders of the General Strike—who had been arrested by the Mounties and locked up briefly in Stony Mountain Penitentiary—was now fighting for labo
ur as a city alderman. The gossip on Selkirk Avenue was that Heaps was thinking of running for Parliament in the Winnipeg North constituency as an independent labourite. As a British-born Jew, Heaps did not speak Yiddish, but he was perceived positively among the North End Jewish community. His chances of winning a seat, Klein figured, were excellent.
Klein peered up at the station’s ornate clock. It was twelve thirty on the dot. He looked in every direction. It was quieter than it used to be, that was certain. In the old days, the station buzzed with the steady arrival of newcomers. A babel of languages echoed through the grand station’s rotunda fifteen hours a day. This multitude was generally disoriented, poor, and unable to speak English. Yet somehow, and with a lot of hard work, most of them persevered, adapted, and survived.
The war had put a halt to the immigration wave and even when the conflict ended and the country’s gates opened again, the number of newcomers never reached what it was in 1912 and 1913. There were 9,000 Jews in Winnipeg in 1911 and only 6,000 more in 1921. Klein didn’t pay much attention to these community issues. He took a more philosophical approach and always remembered an old Yiddish expression his mother used to tell him: tsum glik, tsum shlimazel—for better, for worse. Life went on.
“Sam, I’m here,” said Alec Geller. He was fixing his hair and adjusting his shirt as he walked.
“You look like you just got out of bed, Alec. Where the hell were you?”
Geller grinned.
“You just came from Saul Sugarman’s office, didn’t you? You saw Shayna?”
Geller’s grin widened. “What can I say? I can’t seem to get enough of that woman.”
“Alec, it’s the lunch hour, for God’s sake.”
“You’re getting old, Sam. When I arrived, Sugarman was in a foul mood and left the office. It was just Shayna and me there. The other office girl also went out to lunch. One thing led to another…”