Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [25]
My five-foot-ten father, who had been to see Naughty Marietta starring Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald maybe five times, and whose favourite tune was “Indian Love Call,” wished to join the RCMP, but he was pronounced too short. And so, having decided to settle for the Montreal police force, he went to see The Boy Wonder on Schnorrers’ Day.
Jerry Dingleman, a.k.a. The Boy Wonder, usually conducted business from the penthouse suite of his plush gambling establishment on the far shore of the St. Lawrence River, but on Wednesdays he was available to local losers in a poky little office off the dance floor of the Tico-Tico, one of several nightclubs he owned. Wednesdays were known to The Boy Wonder’s inner circle as Schnorrers’ Day, and from ten to four the supplicants came and went.
“Why do you want to become a cop, of all things?” Dingleman asked my father, amused.
“I would be grateful to you for life, Mr. Dingleman, if, you know, like you would help me with my chosen endeavour.”
The Boy Wonder put in a phone call to Tony Frank, and then told my father he had to report to Dr. Eustache St. Clair for a medical. “And what do you remember to do first, Izzy?”
“Take a bath?”
“Why, a man with your acumen will make detective in no time.”
But a month later The Boy Wonder, stopping for two medium-fat on rye at Levitt’s on the Main, was surprised to see my father still cutting meat behind the counter. “Why aren’t you in uniform?” he asked.
“Dr. St. Clair said I wasn’t acceptable because of the holes I got left in my face from acne.”
Dingleman sighed. He shook his head. “Didn’t he tell you that it could be cured?”
So Izzy Panofsky made another appointment with Dr. St. Clair, and this time, as instructed, he clipped a hundred-dollar bill to his application form, and passed the medical. “In them days,” my father once told me, chewing on a mushy White Owl, “if you was a goy and had flat feet and a big belly, well, they used to bring them in from the Gaspé, all over the place, big fat guys, and you had to pay to get on the force.” From the beginning, he said, pinching one nostril and shooting a payload out of the other, there was trouble. “The judge who swored me in, a lush with popping eyes, looked startled sort of. ‘Aren’t you a Jew?’ he asked. And at the police school, where I was taught jujitsu and wrassling, the goys were always testing me. Irish shikers and French-Canadian chazerim. Dummies. Ignorantuses. I mean like I had at least finished seventh grade and was never held back, not once.”
On his first beat, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, my overeager father made too many arrests, so he was shifted downtown. Strolling on St. Catherine Street, watchful, he promptly apprehended a pickpocket outside the Capitol Theatre, where Helen Kane, the one and only Boop-Boop-a-Doop Girl, was starring. My upright dad anticipated a citation for his diligence, but, instead, he was pulled into a back room in the station and threatened by two detectives. “ ‘If you want to stay here,’ they said, ‘Christ, don’t you ever bring in one of these guys again.’ They was licensed, if you get my meaning.”
Other cops fattened on vigorish from crooks and their lawyers, but my pappy couldn’t be bought. “Like I had to be straight, Barney,” he said. “I mean my name was Panofsky and I couldn’t afford to have them say ‘the goddamn Jew.’ That’s all I needed, Christ, they used to say if I slipped on a hair, you know what I mean, they would have me hung.”
Over the years my straight-shooting father soured as he witnessed Irish shikers and French-Canadian chazerim, guys he’d broken into the force himself, being promoted over him. Izzy remained a detective-sergeant for nine years. “When I was finally promoted to inspector, you know what they done,