Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  The one he had chosen for himself was a particularly massive block of stone originally occupied by the mummy of Cheops’ mother. Upon his retirement in 1880, Menelik Ziwar had the sarcophagus lowered into a sepulcher he had discovered in Cairo under a public garden beside the Nile. And this was where he had held court ever since, on his back in a bed at the bottom of the sarcophagus. Petitioners were ushered into the sepulcher one at a time for consultations that might last a few minutes or most of a day, depending on how often the old scholar dozed off in his soundproof and nearly airless subterranean vault.

  Little Cairo stood in line in the public garden for several weeks, waiting for his turn to come. At last it did and an attendant pointed down the steep stairs that led to the vault. He was told to close the door behind him at once, the master’s eyes being no longer accustomed to daylight. He tiptoed down the stairs, took a deep breath and slipped inside the door.

  He found himself standing in a small gloomy chamber with the dim outline of a gigantic sarcophagus looming up in front of him, a single taper at its head. He took another deep breath and tiptoed across the floor to peek inside.

  He gasped. Far down in the hollow depths of that massive block of stone, amidst piles of books and mysterious inscriptions five thousand years old, lay a withered mummy with a huge magnifying glass on its chest. Little Cairo was terrified. Abruptly the mummy’s withered hand floated up in the air and clasped the magnifying glass, then raised it. Behind the lens the enormous unblinking eye from antiquity was fully two inches wide.

  Caught you, cackled the mummy.

  Little Cairo began to shake. His teeth chattered and sweat ran down his face. A dry crinkled smile spread across the mummy’s mouth.

  There there, son, stop carrying on like that. I’m only the man you came to see. What’s your name?

  Little Cairo whispered his name.

  Is that a fact? said the mummy. Well you certainly didn’t get that from your master, so where did you get it?

  From my great-grandmother, sir.

  Her last name was Martyr?

  No sir. She didn’t have a last name, sir. But that’s the one she gave me, sir.

  Odd. Why?

  I don’t know, sir.

  Never gave you a hint?

  No sir.

  She raised you?

  Yes sir.

  Everyone else died before their time?

  Yes sir.

  Dysentery?

  Yes sir.

  Hm, that’s the paradox isn’t it. The Nile gives us the land but takes its toll in return. Good water is also bad water. Now admit it, son. A moment ago I caught you frightened by the past and that’s not the way to get ahead when you’re black the way we are. And speaking of the past, what do you know about yours?

  I know where my great-grandmother came from, sir.

  Nubia, I’d say, by the looks of it. Except for those eyes of yours. Where did you get them?

  From my great-grandfather, sir. A wandering Circassian, sir.

  Is that what he told her? What else do you know about him?

  He was an expert in Islamic law, sir.

  He told her that too, did he?

  Yes sir.

  I see. Did he happen to have a name?

  Yes sir. His name was Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun, sir.

  The mummy’s dry smile crinkled across his face again.

  Ah, yes, I do see. That young man was a wanderer, there’s no doubt about that. In any case he picked himself up and went on his way and your great-grandmother was subsequently captured and sold into slavery?

  Yes sir.

  The Mamelukes?

  Yes sir.

  Oafs, all of them. Dazed pederasts running to fat. She wasn’t very fond of them, was she?

  No sir.

  I daresay. But all this happened at the beginning of the century and that’s hardly the past. For all practical purposes the past ends with the destruction of the New Kingdom. Know when that was?

  No sir.

  The XXX Dynasty. An unfortunate period. Yes, I can see it now.

  The mummy closed his eyes. After about ten minutes of silence he stirred and scratched his nose. He raised the huge magnifying glass once more and the eye two inches wide reappeared behind the lens.

  Did you say you were looking for work, son?

  Yes sir.

  Any English?

  No sir.

  No matter, you’ll pick it up. You’re Moslem, I take it.

  Yes sir.

  Of course. Your great-grandmother had a long memory and she wanted to see some scores settled. An extremely proud woman?

  Yes sir.

  It fits, but that’s for the future. Right now you need a trade and I think you should start as a dragoman, as I did. There aren’t many trades open to us and that’s a good way to begin. You need contacts.

  Yes sir.

  Right. You’ll begin as an apprentice and work your way up. Now listen carefully, here are the rules. Be dignified, never cringe or whine or roll your eyes. Be correct but solicitous with the ladies, correct but slightly less stiff with the gents. When you don’t understand something always say, Yes sir, and nod vigorously, pretending you do. Upon receiving a tip bow deeply and murmur how happy you are to have performed this service, ending with an air of undefined suggestion, a momentary hesitation will do it, that even more complex services are available, should you be called upon for them. Above all, smile. Smile and smile and look as if you thoroughly enjoy what you’re doing no matter how tedious and silly it is. At the same time be absolutely discreet, going only so far as to hint that European travelers often find the desert air invigorating. And be gentle. Never harm anyone in any way. Did your great-grandmother tell you that?

  Yes sir.

  I thought so. When it comes to settling scores she had bigger things in mind. Well on your way then. The attendant outside will give you an address. Tell them I sent you and return in a week to give me a progress report. In fact return every week until further notice.

  Yes sir.

  And you ought to know I wasn’t asleep when you came in, nor a few minutes ago either. People think I’m sleeping when actually I’m just taking a trip. You can’t understand a particular dynasty without spending time in it. Do you see?

  Yes sir.

  Nod vigorously when you say that.

  Yes sir.

  Good. Come around next week.

  Yes sir, whispered little Cairo, tiptoeing away from the massive block of stone.

  He became an apprentice dragoman and to his surprise he found the profession had little to do with guiding tourists or haggling for them in the bazaars. Instead his duties were largely sexual.

  Most Europeans who wintered in Egypt, it seemed, seldom left the spacious verandas of their hotels, where they moved graciously in circles, favorably remarking on the weather and unfavorably deploring the slack manner and slovenly appearance of the natives. The minority who hired dragomen to venture into back streets were those seeking the sexual license associated with the East, an anonymous debauchery far from home, exactly what a dragoman could provide.

  In this stolid atmosphere of overt Victorian gentility and covert imperial vice, young Cairo learned his trade without particular ambition. Each day at noon he went to the office of the Clerk of the Acts, the senior dragoman in the city and the head of their benevolent association, whose job it was to advise apprentices and distribute assignments. The appointments were spaced well apart, in keeping with the leisurely pace of life pursued by the English in Egypt. And in any case a dragoman’s clients spent a considerable amount of time sleeping, both because they found the heat enervating and because of the opium they took.

  So there were many quiet hours in which young Cairo could dream of the future during those first lonely months in the city, while listening to a man or a woman snore, and inevitably his dreams turned to the astonishing event so often recalled by Menelik, the forty-year conversation the old man had once held with his dearest friend
, an English lord and legendary explorer, Plantagenet Strongbow.

  Menelik had first met Strongbow in the summer of 1838, a few weeks after the explorer returned from one of his mysterious early excursions, this time to outer Persia.

  With his seven-foot, seven-inch frame topped by a massive greasy black turban, and his lean torso wrapped in a shaggy short black coat made from unwashed and uncombed goats’ hair, both said to be gifts from a remote hill tribe in Persia, the haughty young English duke was a preposterous figure striding through the dusty native quarters of Cairo. His face was already deeply scarred from his travels and his body, in addition, was severely wasted from a recent encounter with cholera which had nearly been fatal.

  But perhaps it was the portable sundial strapped to Strongbow’s hip that most amazed Menelik, a monstrously heavy bronze piece inscribed with Arab aphorisms and a legend noting that it had been cast in Baghdad during the fifth Abbasid caliphate.

  Menelik had never seen a European dressed in such a manner, let alone an English duke, and never anyone wearing such an outrageous costume in the stifling heat of an Egyptian summer. Immediately he was intrigued.

  The young English duke was known to disdain his countrymen but was said to enjoy the company of genuine Levantines, particularly the poor and the devious who made their living as conjurers and gossips and refuse carters. On the basis of this rumor Menelik approached Strongbow in the bazaar one sultry day and introduced himself. Strongbow was on guard as always, carrying under his arm a short heavy club, a kind of polished twisted root which he raised menacingly whenever someone said something irrelevant to his needs.

  At the time Menelik was twenty, a year older than Strongbow. He was still a slave and a common dragoman, but he did speak Coptic and clearly possessed the keen powers of observation that would one day decipher the secrets of so many tombs. In fact there were probably very few Cairenes who could have described the lowlife of their city with as much accuracy and gusto as Menelik.

  He stepped forward smiling. As Strongbow automatically raised his club, Menelik shouted out an earthy Coptic greeting unheard in over a thousand years, an intricately vulgar expression once used by Nile boatmen who were on the most intimate terms with one another. Strongbow couldn’t understand the words of course, but he sensed their trend and liked it. He lowered his club and smiled, whereupon Menelik switched to a raffish Arab dialect and launched into a scandalous diatribe against certain Englishmen involved with criminal elements along the riverfront, which Strongbow enjoyed even more.

  The oppressive heat in the bazaar was becoming intolerable. The two young men decided they needed something to drink and entered the first place they came to beside the Nile, as it happened a refuge for off-duty dragomen, a filthy open-air restaurant with trellises of leafy vines and flowers overhead, a pool where drowsy ducks paddled and a cage housing squawking peacocks listlessly twitching their tails. The cheap wine was strong, the spiced lamb tasty, the shrunken Arab waiters somnambulant as they puffed opium and drifted ever more helplessly with the hours.

  There in the soothing hum of the shade Strongbow and Menelik spent a long summer Sunday afternoon, eating and drinking and feeding the placid ducks, watching the nervous peacocks mate and enthusiastically discussing whatever stray topic came to mind, the two of them so drunk by the end of the afternoon they threw themselves over the railing into the muddy river before staggering off to late naps.

  A firm friendship was established that afternoon by the Nile. Thereafter, when he was in Lower Egypt, Strongbow always sent a runner to notify Menelik and the two of them would meet again on a Sunday in the same filthy open-air restaurant under the trellises of leafy vines and flowers, always at the same table where they had sprawled the first time, picking up their swirling raucous conversation as if they had never left it, heckling the peacocks and feeding the ducks as they gorged themselves on spiced lamb and endless carafes of wine, which they had to replenish themselves, the waiters having become too weak to carry anything as the years went by, Menelik making his way in a career of increasingly brilliant scholarship, Strongbow forever broadening the track of his daring explorations that reached from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush.

  On his weekly visits to the sepulcher beneath the public garden, little Cairo listened in awe to the stories recounted by Menelik Ziwar, these seemingly unimaginable adventures and bewildering changes of fortune that were far beyond anything a lonely boy, only twelve years old and a stranger in a great city, could ever hope to know.

  Or so little Cairo felt. Old Menelik thought differently.

  Not so, said the wrinkled mummy at the bottom of the sarcophagus, smiling and encouraging the little boy. It may look that way now, son, but we can never be sure what fate may breathe into life. Achievements? Startling transformations? Just consider the Numa Stone for a moment.

  Little Cairo was standing with his chin resting on the edge of the sarcophagus. Enchanting names, exotic memories, it was always like this in Menelik Ziwar’s quiet vault. A faraway look came into the little boy’s eyes.

  The Pneuma Stone? he whispered.

  Deep down in the sarcophagus amidst the stacks of books and the strange inscriptions five thousand years old, the mummy raised his magnifying glass to produce the gigantic eye of antiquity. He cackled dryly.

  Are you saying Numa or Pneuma? Breath is involved all right and a breath of fresh air at that, but the Greeks are in the game only for purposes of scholarship, or by association, you might say. Anyway, it should be Numa and Strongbow told me about it on a Sunday afternoon four or five decades ago. He was coming back from the kitchen with another carafe of wine and another plate of spiced lamb, happily swinging his portable sundial on his hip as he threaded his way between the paralyzed waiters, when all at once a devilish grin came across his face. We were getting on toward the end of the afternoon by then and I was so dizzy I almost didn’t see it. But when he collapsed in his chair and planted his enormous head in front of me, holding it in those enormous hands, there was no way to miss it. The grin was simply wicked. Roguery itself.

  Here, I said, what’s this bit of mischief?

  Menelik you notorious Nilotic ghoul, he shouted, grabbing my arm and knocking the plate of lamb to the floor as he drew me into the conspiracy, Menelik you astounding black Copt, promise me that if you’re ever asked about the Numa Stone, you won’t say a word.

  Why? I asked, mystified, having never heard of such a stone.

  All the while Strongbow was grinning ever more wildly. So wildly that anyone who didn’t know him as well as I did would have thought he was in the grip of some terminal fever. The grin was that demented. Then he suddenly made an extravagant gesture that swept across the table, his sundial going with it and sending everything flying. The carafe smashed into the duck pond and stained the water, the glasses crashed against the peacocks’ cage and ended their nervous copulations in a shower of splintering shards. He brought his fist down on the table with a roar of laughter that shook everything in the place, even the waiters, it seemed. Of course it might have been only the wine playing tricks with my vision, but I swear I actually thought I saw them quiver at that moment, the first time they’d shown any life in years.

  Why? thundered Strongbow. For the sake of Europe. We’re going to save Europe from its own unspeakable hypocrisy.

  Little Cairo listened, wide-eyed.

  Yes, hissed the mummy, the Numa Stone. That vastly controversial slab so named after its discoverer, Numa Numantius, the German erotic scholar and defender of homosexuality. His critics were in the habit of referring to him contemptuously as Aunt Magnesia. But it was also true that no one in Europe at the time was more outspoken on sexual matters than Numantius, a fact that was certain to engage Strongbow’s sympathy.

  For weeks, continued Menelik, this Numa Numantius or Aunt Magnesia had been up the Nile searching through the ruins at Karnak, trying to find some small inscription in the temple that would suggest the ancient Egyptians had disavowed the pers
ecution of homosexuals. But without success. The hieroglyphs on the columns listed innumerable public works undertaken by various pharaohs, and the innumerable virtues of those pharaohs, without mentioning sex even once.

  Numantius was thoroughly discouraged the evening Strongbow happened to come upon him, sitting alone in the ruins of the temple and sighing over and over. Strongbow was traveling in disguise as a poor bedouin navvy from the area of the first cataract, and he began asking Numantius questions as was his habit with anyone he met. He learned what the German was seeking and decided to interrupt his journey in order to help.

  The next morning Numantius moved his operations to some ruins on the other side of the river. Strongbow, meanwhile, broke into several nearby tombs to find a basalt slab suitable for his purposes. After inscribing the slab to his satisfaction he treated it with certain chemicals, then buried it in front of the temple entrance, one corner just above the drifting sand so that its appearance would seem to be the chance work of the wind.

  A few days later, heaving with sighs and more discouraged than ever, Numantius returned to Karnak for a last reverie in the temple by moonlight. The inscribed corner of the basalt slab caught his eye and he quickly dug it up, Strongbow watching all the while from his hiding place behind a pillar.

  Numantius clapped his hands. There on the unearthed basalt slab were three long neat rows of language carved one beside the other, in hieroglyphs and ancient demotic Egyptian and Greek, simultaneous translations of a legal statute from the XXXI Dynasty. In impressive detail the statute guaranteed the right of consenting adults to practice homosexuality to the best of their abilities, when said acts were performed in view of the Nile and were witnessed by a baboon or a dung beetle or some other sacred creature, said best abilities in no way to contravene the pharaoh’s divine right to wage interminable wars of aggression in order to acquire more slaves to build more public works to honor the pharaoh.

  The statute had been formally promulgated by the priests of Ptolemy V to revive a traditional law of the land that had fallen into disrepute over recent millennia, when recurring conquests from the barbaric north had introduced uncivilized sexual attitudes into the eternal kingdom of the sun.