Only O’Sullivan Beare played according to mathematical percentages, or said he did, claiming he had adapted to poker the ballistic tables once memorized when he was on the run in the hills of southern Ireland, needing distance then because he was fighting the Black and Tans alone and couldn’t afford to approach the enemy directly, instead firing his old musketoon high in the air from far away, in the manner of a howitzer, so that the bullets of his just cause traversed a steep arc and came plunging down on the target as if from heaven.
Inscrutable bluffing in Cairo Martyr’s case.
An awesome knowledge of Levantine trade when it was Munk Szondi’s turn.
The scientific trajectory of heavenly bullets when the betting passed to O’Sullivan Beare.
Highly individual methods of play, further complicated by unorthodox thrusts at chance, all of it equally baffling to outsiders. Nor did there seem to be any limit to the financial resources the three founders brought to the table.
Cairo Martyr was said to have been looting the tombs of the pharaohs for years and had an immense store of mummies at his disposal. As was well known, pharaonic mummy dust when snorted, or when smoked in its mastic form, was an infallible Levantine aphrodisiac.
If used in sufficient quantities daily it could also provide previously barren women with large families, assure a man of long life and wisdom, and in general serve as a powerful substitute for anything.
And even if the supplies of genuine pharaonic mummy dust were exhaustible, there was still the large number of royal cats the Egyptians had also mummified. And lastly, no one doubted that Cairo Martyr would be more than ready to manufacture powder from old rags, now that he had established himself as the supreme purveyor of mummy dust in the Middle East.
As for Munk Szondi, a Khasarian Jew, it was inconceivable that anyone could ever unravel his arcane knowledge of the values relating Yemeni rugs and Damascus figs with the upcoming spring production of Levantine lambs, the worth of these and a thousand other items bound together in inextricable laws that only he could fathom.
And finally there was O’Sullivan Beare’s much more recent wealth, the stupendous business he was doing in religious artifacts, symbolic wooden fish being just one of his profitable lines. The fish were smoothly carved in a cylindrical shape with a nob of greater girth at one end. They came in various sizes but on the average were about the length of an open hand. The Irishman claimed these abstract wooden fish were an exact replica of ones used by the early Christians to secretly identify themselves to their coreligionists in those dangerous times.
But if a mere primitive symbol, why had they suddenly become so popular in modern Jerusalem, spreading from there throughout the Middle East? And if Christian, why were they in equal demand among Jews and Arabs and nonbelievers?
It was true women carried them secretly more often than not, hiding them in their handbags and even appearing embarrassed if a shopkeeper chanced to spy one when they were digging for coins. But men displayed them openly enough in the bazaars, where their uses seemed far from abstract. On the contrary, when greeting one another, men seemed to take pleasure in boldly waving these wooden objects in the air. And when they adjourned to a coffee shop they rapped them loudly on the tables to attract the attention of waiters.
In fact after coffee and tobacco, the Irishman’s symbolic wooden fish were the largest-selling staple in the Middle East. They could be found everywhere, in the tents and palaces of all known races, even among bedouin who had never seen a fish.
Mummy dust. Trading in futures. Religious symbols.
With that kind of backing the three men seemed unbeatable. Year after year they stripped visitors to Jerusalem of all they owned, bewildered emirs and European smugglers and feuding sheiks, devout priests and assorted commercial agents and pious fanatics, every manner of pilgrim in that vast dreaming army from many lands that had always been scaling the heights of the Holy City in search of spiritual gold, Martyr and Szondi and O’Sullivan Beare implacably dealing and shuffling and dealing again, relentlessly plunging Jerusalem into its greatest turmoil since the First Crusade with their interminable poker game in the vaulted chamber where they had moved that very first night, after the coffee shop closed.
We shouldn’t quit just because it’s midnight, Munk Szondi had said.
No reason to stop just because a new year is upon us, Cairo Martyr had agreed.
Well if both you gents see it that way, Joe had said, I know just the place to set up a more permanent table here in the Old City. It’s a former antiquities shop that belongs to a good friend of mine, the place largely empty now because this friend is no longer in the business except in his head, an odd proposition as you’ll see.
And thus the Great Jerusalem Poker Game came to be played in the back room of an empty shop owned by an obscure dealer in time known as Haj Harun.
On that final day after twelve years of play, O’Sullivan Beare had the deal. His call was for straight poker, three-card draw, and both Cairo Martyr and Munk Szondi nodded with approval when he announced it. A hard and basic hand with nothing wild and nothing stray, the appropriate way to end the game.
And knowing the moment had finally come, they approached it in a leisurely manner. O’Sullivan Beare opened a bottle of poteen and took his time sipping it down. Cairo Martyr filled his hookah with a potent dose of mummy mastic and puffed contentedly. Munk Szondi placed a large bowl of garlic bulbs in front of him and methodically crunched his way to the bottom.
The Druse warriors who guarded the game were paid off and dismissed. In the middle of the table sat a new deck of cards ordered from Venice for the event. Each man tapped the pack once before the cellophane wrapping was carefully removed.
The shuffling began, each man spending fifteen or twenty minutes over the pack to get the feel of it, and after that they spent another fifteen or twenty minutes cutting it in turn. With twelve years behind them no one was in a hurry. Gone were the cunning maneuvers of the past. More than skill was needed now.
The empty hookah, the empty bottle of poteen and the empty bowl of garlic bulbs were set aside. Cairo Martyr gazed at the ceiling and announced his ante.
The goats in the Moslem Quarter, he said.
The other two men looked at him.
Those used for sodomy, he added solemnly.
O’Sullivan Beare’s eyes narrowed.
The goats in the Christian Quarter, he countered. Meat.
The goats in the Jewish Quarter, said Munk Szondi. Milk.
The three men watched each other. Over the years it had become customary for them to open a hand in this way, as a reminder to outsiders that only real goods and services had any ultimate value in the Holy City. Because sooner or later the conquering army presently in the city would have to retreat as its empire shrank and collapsed, as all empires had done since the beginning of time, thereby rendering its currency foreign and useless in Jerusalem.
But as the gentle Haj Harun had airily noted once, even a Holy City needs the service trades. In fact it needs them more than most places.
O’Sullivan Beare dealt the cards. He and Munk Szondi raised theirs slowly and held them close to the chest, revealing them one at a time. After a few minutes of study they both chose three for discard. Cairo Martyr, as always, had left his cards lying face down on the table, untouched. With some deliberation he now separated the first and the third and the fifth for discard.
Three new cards were dealt to each man. Munk Szondi’s face was grave as he rapidly weighed the comparative values that day of every known Levantine commodity. O’Sullivan Beare seemed a trifle feverish as he calculated patriotic ballistic arcs. Only Cairo Martyr, with his immense self-assurance, seemed completely at ease with what lay before him.
And since he was sitting on the dealer’s left, he had the right to open the betting. Again, as usual, he didn’t look at his new cards.
No openers, said Cairo Martyr, not this time. I have no intention of wasting time tonight trying to i
nch the stakes up. I’ll start at the top and the two of you can play or not, as you choose. Now I think you’ll both agree that through my various illicit enterprises, I control the Moslem Quarter in this city.
The mummy dust king is about to strike, muttered O’Sullivan Beare. But at the same time he knew the claim was true, just as was his own secret control over the Christian Quarter and Munk Szondi’s over the Jewish Quarter, religious symbols and trading in futures being just as essential to Jerusalem as mummy dust.
Well do I or don’t I? said Cairo Martyr.
You do. Agreed.
Correct. Now then, that’s my bet. Control of the Moslem Quarter. I’m putting the Moslem Quarter on the table. If either of you wins, which you won’t, it belongs to you. But first you have to match my bet. No openers. The real thing.
O’Sullivan Beare whistled softly.
That’s arrogance and then some, he muttered. You mean the whole Moslem Quarter?
That’s right. Down to the last sun-baked brick.
People? asked Munk Szondi.
Down to the last unborn babe asleep in its mum’s belly, not knowing what it’s in for when it has to wake up.
Fair enough, said Munk Szondi, gesturing extravagantly. If that’s the way it is I’m betting the Jewish Quarter.
Jaysus all right, shouted O’Sullivan Beare, all right I say. If that’s what you’re up to I’ll put down the Christian Quarter.
He said the last two words in Gaelic but they both understood him. By now they all knew enough of each other’s languages to recognize a bet in any one of them.
So there it was. The three men leaned back to savor the moment, a chance that came once in a lifetime, if ever. They had each bet what they controlled and it went without saying that the fourth section of the Old City, the Armenian Quarter, would automatically go to the player who held the best cards.
The end had come. Jerusalem lay on the table. At last it was a case of winner take all in the eternal city.
But twelve years of unscrupulous poker had to pass before that final showdown could take place in the former antiquities shop of Haj Harun, an ancient defender of Jerusalem who even then was wandering around the room in distraction, just a few years short of his three thousandth birthday.
2. Cairo Martyr
Going far? asked Cairo.
All the way, whispered the mummy with a resigned expression.
FROM HIS EARLIEST YEARS Cairo Martyr had picked cotton as a slave in the Nile delta alongside his maternal great-grandmother, a proud indomitable woman whose passions in life dated from 1813.
In that year, as a young woman in a village on the fringe of the Nubian desert, she had taken into her hut a charming wanderer by the name of Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun. The sprightly young sheik, who said he was an expert in Islamic law, also claimed his blue eyes were the result of Circassian blood.
But as Cairo Martyr was one day to learn, his wandering great-grandfather had actually been a European in disguise, a highly gifted Swiss linguist with a passion for details whose other descendants, known and unknown, were also to play a crucial part in the Great Jerusalem Poker Game over a century later.
Young Sheik Ibrahim, as always, soon grew restless in the village on the fringe of the Nubian desert. With tears he parted from his new wife to resume his wanderings, promising to return in three months. But when he did come back at the end of that time he found the village had been savagely destroyed and its inhabitants carried off by a Mameluke raiding party.
These dwindling remnants of medieval warfare, originally Mongolian and Turkish slaves who later became the rulers of Egypt, had been driven south into the desert by Napoleon some fifteen years earlier. Although the conditions prevailing on the Russian steppes were fully nine centuries behind them, the memories of frosty gales remained deeply embedded in their sluggish brains and they still wore thick woolen underwear in the ferocious Nubian heat. Dressed in gorgeous robes and enormous jeweled turbans, their swords inlaid with precious stones and their saddlebags stuffed with gold, they rode ponderously through the haze into battle carrying all their riches, their catamites running on foot beside them waving the green banners of the Prophet.
Since the Mamelukes were pederasts, they couldn’t reproduce. When they were the rulers of Egypt they had purchased boys in southern Russia and fattened them to be their successors, but with that source no longer open to them they were dying out as a Moslem warrior caste.
Those who survived were aging bloated men, elderly asthmatics tormented by malignant rectal tumors and virulent skin diseases, which flourished particularly in their groins and armpits. In this rampant state of decay, so advanced it could warn local tribesmen of approaching danger when the wind was right, the Mamelukes supported themselves in barbaric luxury by laying waste to the countryside and selling the Africans they captured to Arab slave-traders. After briefly arousing themselves for a sortie they would return to their barges on the Nile and relapse into a deathlike stupor, stretched out under awnings their retainers doused with water day and night in a useless effort to cool their wheezing mountainous bodies.
Since they never took off their underwear, scratching couldn’t help. Even flicking a fly away seemed useless. Instead they lay with their glazed eyes fixed on the wilderness, dully wondering how their once lavish life on the Mediterranean, so rich in soothing breezes and perfumes and other extravagant splendors, had been reduced to the parched oblivion of this lizard’s existence hundreds of miles from nowhere.
On one of these barges in 1813, Martyr’s great-grandmother gave birth to a daughter as black as she but with the light blue eyes of her beloved Sheik Ibrahim. The Mamelukes had no use for a girl, so mother and daughter were sold to an Arab slave-trader who included them in a shipment to the Nile delta, where they were bought to pick cotton. In due time the daughter gave birth to a daughter and that daughter to a son, also deep black with light blue eyes. Both those mothers died of dysentery soon after they bore their children and the boy was therefore raised by his great-grandmother, who finally succumbed to dysentery herself in 1892, after nearly eight decades of servitude.
Upon her death, little Cairo Martyr was freed by his master as an act of Islamic mercy.
Thus thrown alone into the world at the age of twelve, illiterate and without any skills, the boy did what any other black child in Egypt would have done in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He wrapped his kerfiya around his head and walked through the dust to the capital to seek the advice of a former slave named Menelik Ziwar.
Among Egyptian blacks, Menelik Ziwar’s position was unusual in several ways.
Since slaves were brought up in the religion of their masters, the vast majority were Moslem. But Menelik’s branch of the Ziwars happened to be Copts, and Menelik had taken the trouble to teach himself to speak Coptic, the extinct form of Egyptian that had been used in the country during early Christian times.
He shared this distinction with only one other man, the head of the Coptic Church or Patriarch of Alexandria, whose duty it was to appoint the head of the Church in Ethiopia, the only country where this Christian sect was the state religion, and also the only country in Africa not ruled by Europeans.
Since no one else understood the tongue except Menelik and the Patriarch, they took the opportunity to confer in it whenever they met. Of course no one knew what they were saying, but it was widely assumed among Egyptian blacks that Menelik’s influence in independent black Africa, by way of his relationship with the Coptic Patriarch, surpassed that of any other black in the world.
Even his name tended to confirm this special status, the historical Menelik having been the first emperor of Ethiopia.
Nor was it just his political influence that enhanced his standing in the black community. Menelik Ziwar was also the greatest Egyptologist of the nineteenth century.
Menelik’s master long ago, a wealthy cotton broker named Ziwar, had sent his own son at an early age to be educated in England. The Ziwar son had
returned to Alexandria with a sound knowledge of archeology, but having been away so long he knew nothing of everyday Egyptian corruption. In order to do fieldwork he needed a competent dragoman, or guide and interpreter, who could oversee his thieving workmen and hand out baksheesh up and down the Nile. The Patriarch of Alexandria immediately pointed out that he had to look no farther than his own household and the sagacious slave Menelik.
The Ziwar son and Menelik joined forces in digs throughout the delta. Menelik quickly learned to read hieroglyphs and was soon offering suggestions about where they should dig. Natural intelligence exerted itself and before long the apparent slave was the teacher, the apparent master the pupil.
Yet Menelik remained the perfect dragoman in every respect, even after he was freed. He stayed modestly in the background, so much so that although his discoveries eventually made his master’s name famous in all the academic centers of Europe, no one outside the black community in Egypt, and no one at all in Europe, had ever heard of the Ziwar who was important—Menelik, secret scholar and revered African folk hero.
When little Cairo went to seek his advice the black Egyptologist was already an old man. After years of stooping in cramped tombs he had developed severe arthritis and now he never went on digs himself. Instead he instructed others where to look and interpreted the findings they brought to him, dictating the monographs they subsequently published under their own names, anonymity having long since become a habit with him.
Between times there was an endless stream of respectful young petitioners arriving from all over Africa, black boys and girls starting out in life who wanted to know what to do and how to do it.
Due to his arthritis Menelik was most comfortable when stretched out flat on his back. And since so much of his life had been spent in tombs, not surprisingly he found a sarcophagus most to his liking as a bedchamber.
Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2) Page 4
