Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  The light from his candle seemed suddenly weaker. Perhaps the lack of air was going to make him faint. Maybe he was already trapped on this immobile express train beside the Nile.

  He giggled. Where was the express going?

  To eternity of course. Here under the desert a party of pharaohs and their entourages were on a trip to eternity, and if only briefly he was joining them.

  A mummy next to him stirred. Its shoulders were pinned between four or five other passengers and it looked exhausted.

  Going far? asked Cairo.

  All the way, whispered the mummy with a resigned expression.

  Cairo giggled and nodded and pushed on through the compartment. A cat got in his way and he gave it a kick. The cat dissolved. He came to a royal gold-encased armchair that was blocking the aisle.

  Excuse me, madame, he said, trying to elbow his way around the queen who sat stiffly on her throne with a haughty suggestion of a smile. She wore a large emerald on what once must have been an ample chest, now withered.

  Cairo had an urge to touch one of her breasts. He did so and his fingers punched through the gold-encrusted rags into an empty cavity. He held his nose as the gases escaped and the queen’s smile faded. Her mouth fell open revealing bad teeth and only a stump of a tongue. Martyr laughed and pushed on down the train.

  Guv’nor?

  He stopped and turned. A mummy pressed into a corner was watching him, a small stooped man with a sorrowful face.

  For some reason Cairo wasn’t surprised at the working-class English accent. The mummy certainly appeared to be no more than a common laborer, and in any case, if he’d spoken in ancient Egyptian there would have been no way to understand a word he said.

  The mummy’s narrow concave chest suggested weak lungs, perhaps even tuberculosis. Definitely working class, thought Cairo, and treated no better then than now. The mummy abjectly touched his fingers to his forehead. He seemed to be trying to show respect.

  Don’t mean to bother you, guv’nor, but could you spare a navvy a light? We don’t get many visitors down here.

  Cairo lowered the candle in front of the mummy’s sickly face and saw him take a deep puff of something, slowly exhaling with a sigh. In your condition, thought Cairo, that’s not going to do you any good.

  Ah that’s better, said the mummy. Thanks, guv. You can’t imagine how dull it gets down here. We used to keep each other company all right, but after a few centuries of carrying on no one had much to say anymore. Know what I mean? Down here the party ran out of conversation about three thousand years ago.

  Cairo nodded.

  And of course I didn’t buy this trip in the first place, they put me on it. I mean I can understand why a pharaoh would want to make the trip, being a god, but what’s in it for me? You can see how we’re packed in down here, the air already stifling and getting worse as time goes on, and you realize what kind of time we’re talking about.

  The mummy looked down the chamber in disgust.

  Like I said, guv, what’s in it for me? If you’re not a god what’s the sense of living forever? But they don’t care about that, they don’t care how you feel. One morning you happen to be sweeping up an antechamber, a room in the flat belonging to one of the king’s third-class concubines, strictly on temporary assignment and minding your business you are, when word comes down that the king has croaked and all of a sudden you’re a member of the royal funereal household and being hustled off in official mourning to be mummified. So here I am to no end, an endless no end, and all because I was doing my job one morning. It’s not fair and you can’t help feeling resentful.

  Cairo nodded. The mummy made a face.

  What’s more, guv, the high priests had it all wrong up there. The pharaoh dies and being a god they’re going to send him on his eternal trip. Right. But why do they assume he’d naturally like to have his queen and his playmates and servants on the trip with him? For company? Well they’re crazy. We’re packed in down here and there’s nothing natural about the situation at all. Did they really think we were going to tiptoe around serving him while the concubines flopped on their backs and the queen smiled and the cats did appreciative somersaults? Wrong. Dead wrong. Things don’t work that way. He may be a god and used to living forever but the rest of us are just tired to death of this trip of his. Tell the truth. Have you ever seen so many bored faces as you see down here?

  Cairo shook his head.

  Of course you haven’t. They all resent this trip as much as I do. There’s not a concubine here who’s even looked in his direction in three thousand years. Not a cat who’s done a tumble one way or the other, not a servant who’s lifted a finger. Why should we? He can play with himself for all the concubines care. As for the queen, you saw what happened when you gave her a poke. Nothing but foul gases inside and her teeth are going bad and she’s lost her tongue. Her smile was a fake, as you saw. In fact can you guess what it was that made her teeth go bad and withered her tongue down to a stump? That’s right, that’s the kind of king our Djer was and drinking all the time too. Her smile was always a fake. But now that Djer’s on his trip he can’t get even a little cup of drink to help him face the truth. He’s dry, as dry as I am, and you can’t imagine how dry that is. Well that’s some joke on him, but you’re not staying down here are you, guv? You’d be a fool to do that. You may think you’d like to live forever, but I can tell you this is no kind of a party to be in.

  I’m lost, said Cairo. Where’s the exit?

  Two cars forward. Look for a large sedan chair on the left, it’s right beneath the shaft. Put there a long time ago to serve as a stepladder. He must have caught his though, we never saw him again. Got away with my mistress’s right arm but not much else.

  Thanks, said Cairo, I’ll be going. By the way, how many pharaohs are there down here?

  Counting that lout I used to work for, thirty-three in all. And Egypt is well rid of their kind. They did nothing but watch us build monuments to them. Strictly thinking of themselves, and now on this trip that’s all they can do forever, and you wonder how satisfying that really is. Well good luck, guv.

  The candle flickered. The mummy’s face drooped sorrowfully. Cairo waved from the end of the compartment and pushed his way to the sedan chair two cars forward. He lifted himself into the shaft and made the long climb back up through the arms and legs and detached heads, the clouds of dust, to the desert night.

  The next morning he boarded a steamer down the Nile. But when the boat finally docked in Cairo on that clear spring day in 1914, when he rushed to the sepulcher beneath the public garden beside the river to deliver his spectacular news, he found an unfamiliar lid on the massive sarcophagus he had visited so often, a painted carving of Cheops’ mother in place of the dry crinkled smile he knew so well.

  Menelik Ziwar, former slave and unique scholar and absentee discoverer of thirty-three pharaohs, had quietly died in his sleep leaving Cairo Martyr sole owner of the largest divine cache in history, a pantheon of ancient gods with which to avenge the injustices done to his people.

  The last day of December 1921.

  Snow flurries came and went outside the smudged windows of the Arab coffee shop where Cairo Martyr and Munk Szondi and O’Sullivan Beare were playing poker. They played into the evening and were still playing the following morning, having moved on at midnight to a curious apartment in the Moslem Quarter which the Irishman said belonged to a friend of his.

  The apartment had two lofty vaulted rooms. The front room was empty save for an enormous bronze sundial set into the wall near the door, a set of chimes attached to it. In the back room where they played there was a tall narrow antique Turkish safe in one corner, a giant stone scarab with a sly smile on its face in another corner, and nothing else.

  They recessed for a few hours on New Year’s Day and were back before twilight, sitting on the floor in their overcoats between the safe and the scarab, Martyr and Szondi wearing gloves, O’Sullivan Beare in mittens. It was almost as col
d in the room as it was outside but no one seemed to notice it. Cairo Martyr had the deal. He turned to O’Sullivan Beare.

  Who exactly is the friend of yours who owns this place?

  Goes by the name of Haj Harun, said Joe. Formerly an antiquities dealer, now on permanent duty patrolling the Old City.

  For what?

  Possible invasion attempts. These days the Babylonians are worrying him but you can never be sure, tomorrow it could be the Romans or the Crusaders. Keeps a sharp eye out for them. Has to, he says. Knows what kind of havoc they can wreak in a Holy City.

  How long has he been on patrol?

  Almost three thousand years, answered Joe, studying his poker hand. Cairo smiled and examined the backs of his untouched, downfaced cards. He singled out one for discard.

  Now it may be, said Joe, that you’re disinclined to believe me, about such an enormous period of time and all, a tour of duty lasting that long I mean. Many are those who have been disinclined over the millennia. In fact he says I’m the first person to believe in him in the last two thousand years, and how’s that for a streak of bad luck? I think I’ll be taking two don’t you know.

  Cairo smiled more broadly and dealt the extra cards, three to Szondi and two to Joe and one to himself. He leaned down and patted the giant stone scarab on the nose.

  Genuine?

  Nothing but. Straight from the XVI Dynasty, according to the old article.

  What old article?

  Haj Harun, the great skin heretofore mentioned.

  Is that a fact. Well why does the scarab have such a sly smile on its face?

  Don’t know, do I. But my guess is the scarab must be in on a secret we’re not. Cunning piece of goods, no doubt about it. Jacks or better you said? Well I think I’ll just open with this tidy pile of authentic pounds sterling.

  All at once the chimes attached to the sundial in the front room creaked noisily and began to strike. Cairo and Munk raised their heads, counting.

  Twelve? asked Cairo. At six-thirty in the evening?

  Pay no mind, said Joe. That sundial has a habit of sounding off when it pleases, disregarding the rest of us. It loses track of the hours you see, due to darkness and cloudy days and so forth, and then it makes up for them later. Either that or the other way around, makes up for time beforehand so it can take a nap later on. Confusing, isn’t it. Those extra hours we just heard could be already past or yet to come, who’s to say.

  Cairo nodded.

  Was it a portable sundial once?

  Strange you should be asking such a question because that’s exactly what it was. And a hugely heavy piece it must have been to the soul who was lugging it around. Why such crazed activity I couldn’t imagine.

  Where did it come from originally?

  Baghdad, I’m told. Some era called the fifth Abbasid caliphate, according to the old skin. That is to say, it must have played some role in the Thousand and One Nights, which just happens to be Haj Harun’s favorite collection of fancies. It was a present to him in the last century from a man who once rented this very room to write a study in.

  O’Sullivan Beare smiled.

  Haj Harun tried to tell me at first that the man only rented the room for an afternoon. But that didn’t seem likely, and then when I heard how big the study was I knew the old man was mixing up time again. More like a dozen years, it must have been.

  Why? How big was the study?

  Enough to fill a camel caravan that stretched halfway from here to Jaffa. When the gent finished his study, it seems, he packed it up in this camel caravan and sent it down to Jaffa, whence both caravan and manuscript were shipped to Venice to be on their way to publication somewhere in Europe. But here we are on New Year’s Day in Jerusalem and aren’t either of you two joining me in this interesting game of chance at hand?

  Cairo Martyr laughed.

  Strongbow’s portable sundial? Strongbow writing his thirty-three-volume study, Levantine Sex, in this very room? The hollow stone scarab Strongbow had later borrowed from someone in Jerusalem so Menelik Ziwar could use it to smuggle a set of the banned volumes into Egypt?

  An uncommon setting, it struck him, for a poker game in the Holy City.

  Without looking at his cards, Cairo Martyr raised the bet.

  3. Cheops’ Pyramid

  Petty dealers were frequently picked up

  and jailed for mummy-mastic possession.

  FOR SOME WEEKS AFTER Menelik Ziwar’s death in 1914, while continuing to perform his Victorian dragomanning duties in a perfunctory manner, Cairo Martyr pondered the question of what to do with his spectacular cache of pharaonic mummies.

  Before Ziwar died he had told Martyr the amazing fact that in his youth he and Martyr’s great-grandmother had briefly been lovers. She had vowed then one day to avenge her humiliating life as a slave, and thus Ziwar had understood from the beginning the significance of Martyr’s name when he came to him as a frightened boy only twelve years old, alone in the world, seeking the great black scholar’s advice.

  A proud woman with a long memory, Ziwar had said. She wanted to see some scores settled with those oafish Mamelukes who sold her down the Nile. But time passed and both her daughter and her granddaughter died in slavery, and she knew she would die in slavery, so the best she could do was to give you the name she did, in the hope you might redress the wrongs done to her. So don’t deny her, Cairo. Hers was a stubborn, lifelong courage. Honor her wishes if you can.

  Martyr wanted to, but how? He was still a common dragoman, although now he had the mummy cache. But what role did mummies have in his life?

  And then all at once that stunning incident occurred in the first light of an early summer day in 1914, on top of the Great Pyramid.

  An English triplane carrying the morning mail to the capital. An anonymous pilot grinning in flying goggles and leather helmet, white scarf fluttering on the wind. The triplane skimming the top of the pyramid and gaily wagging its wings, gaily saluting the most impressive monument ever reared by man and cleanly decapitating an aging overweight German baron and his aging overweight wife, as if to signal the end of the leisurely old order of the nineteenth century. In the dizzying shock of recognition that came with dawn that morning, Martyr realized that his Victorian servitude had ended forever. And he also understood why Ziwar had sent him to Luxor when he had. Undoubtedly the old scholar had long known the secret pharaonic chamber was there, yet he had waited until he was about to die before he asked Martyr to go find it, so that Martyr would be the sole owner of the mummy cache. Thus had Ziwar placed in Martyr’s hands a priceless instrument for retribution, and all for the sake of a woman the old scholar had loved briefly long ago.

  Patience.

  Extraordinary patience.

  His great-grandmother waiting through the nineteenth century for justice to come. After she died, Menelik Ziwar waiting until 1914 before he told Martyr about the love affair of his youth and sent him up the Nile to take charge of the secret pantheon waiting there.

  The patience of slaves and former slaves. And now he was determined to be equally patient in devising a master plan for the use of his instruments of power.

  Cairo Martyr smiled. He was standing on the summit of the Great Pyramid, the headless naked bodies of the fat German aristocrats having come to rest some yards below him. The sun was on the horizon and he was on top of the Great Pyramid. A new age had arrived.

  The mummies, instruments of power. What better place to ponder their future use than the unique hideaway bequeathed to him by old Menelik, sage of sages?

  By the second week in August his caravan was ready, the camels laden with a huge supply of tinned meat, exclusively meat, Martyr having early gotten into the habit of eating only protein in order to survive the rigors of dragomandom.

  The camels were unloaded at the base of the Great Pyramid and a band of porters labored over a weekend carrying the supplies up to the summit. When the entire top of the pyramid was heaped with tinned meat, Martyr paid off t
he foreman.

  Why up here? asked the dazed man, breathing heavily.

  Martyr smiled.

  An airplane is picking me up here tomorrow morning. I’m taking this meat to my village in the Sudan. There’s a severe drought down there this summer.

  The foreman laughed slyly, expecting no better answer from a black man.

  And what’s that animal asleep on your shoulder? asked the foreman. It looks like a little ball of white fluff.

  Martyr smiled more broadly.

  He looks like he’s asleep but he’s not. He’s my guardian spirit and he watches over me and warns me if danger is near. Bongo, shake hands with this thieving fellaheen.

  Upon hearing his name the little albino monkey instantly leapt to his feet on Martyr’s shoulder, masturbating vigorously with his bright aquamarine genitals thrust forward, both tiny fists flailing away.

  The foreman screamed and fled with his porters. But all the same Martyr watched them through his binoculars until they were out of sight, porters carrying goods to tombs and returning later to pillage them having always been a curse in Egypt.

  After dark he tripped the combination of latches hidden in the crevices around one of the massive blocks of stone near the summit.

  Powerful springs creaked. The block pivoted on an unseen iron post and gently swung open. He stepped into the foyer, struck a match and lit the lamp.

  At the bottom of a short formal staircase lay the sunken parlor of Menelik Ziwar’s spacious nineteenth-century flat.

  Martyr gazed at the rich dark wood of the furniture that crowded the parlor, heavy solid pieces arm to arm and back to back, everywhere tassels and laces and doilies, legs that ended in claws crushing the heads of rodents in the thick carpets, lamps thickly shaded and standing only a few feet apart between the innumerable hunting prints on the walls, between the dozens of lacquered Chinese screens that were dividing spaces for no reason, the furniture in this room alone surpassing that to be found in the entire native quarter of any African city.