Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler

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, it made me sick, they went to the union and made up a story that I hadn’t passed my exams in shooting. I used to check out my men, you know. I was sincere. They hated me like hell. So they went to the union and complained about me.”
    Izzy Panofsky’s problems on the force were endless.
    â€œHey, when I went to pass an exam on promotions, Gilbert was on the board then, he says to me, how come the Jews are smarter? I got two answers, I says. You’re wrong. There’s no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he’s got to be alert, he’s got to be more sharper than you. Well, we’ve been kicked around for two thousand years. We’re not more smarter, we’re more alert. My other answer is the story about the Irishman and the Jew. How come you’re smarter? the Irishman asks the Jew. Well, we eat a certain kind of fish, the Jew says. In fact, I’ve got one right here, and he shows it to the Irishman. Christ, the Irishman says, I’d like to have that fish. Sure, the Jew says, give me ten bucks. So he gives it to him. Then the Irishman looks at it good and says, hey, that’s no fish, that’s a herring. So the Jew says, you see, you’re getting smarter already.”
5
    Last night I dreamt that Terry McIver had been nicked on the ankle by a deer tick, and had stupidly dismissed it as a mosquito bite. Lying in his bed on the twentieth floor of The Four Seasons Hotel inToronto a month later, the dreaded Lyme’s disease pulsing through his bloodstream, flooding it, McIver was wakened by a horn honking in his room and then a panicky voice coming over the PA system: “We have a serious fire here. The elevators aren’t working. Black smoke has made the stairways temporarily impassable. Guests should remain in their rooms and spread wet towels under the door. Good luck and thank you for choosing The Four Seasons Hotel.” Choking smoke began to seep