Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  In style and layout the flat was massively Victorian. Martyr went on to inspect the large library and the formal dining room on the second level down, the well-equipped workshop for archeological restoration on the third level down, the master bedroom and the two guest bedrooms on the fourth level, the kitchen and pantries on the fifth, the servants’ quarters on the sixth and the storerooms on the seventh.

  Beneath that was a cellar where firewood was stored. Altogether a roomy seven-story apartment, inverted and impressively solid, in the top of Cheops’ pyramid.

  Martyr spent the rest of the night transferring tinned meat into his new quarters.

  In bequeathing the flat to Martyr only a month before his death, Menelik Ziwar had reconstructed its history as effortlessly as if he had been a witness to those events three and a half thousand years ago.

  Evidence speaks for itself, the old Egyptologist had said. Remove yourself to the XVI Dynasty if you will, a lawless era. The mysterious Hyksos have conquered the kingdom, the shepherd kings as they’re sometimes called, and although we don’t know where they came from the epithet does seem apt. That is to say they don’t seem to have been too bright, as we’ll see. Well as usual when foreigners arrive and take over in Egypt, a lot of them are on the lookout for loot. Tomb-robbers lurk in the countryside waiting for opportune targets, and then as now none loom as large as Cheops’ pyramid. Numerous tunnels have already been dug into the pyramid in search of its treasure chambers, but always laterally or uphill. I mention this not because it was hard work, but because direction is essential to our story.

  All right, Cairo. One night we find ourselves in a Memphis tavern where a gang of sturdy but not very bright Hyksos adventurers are conspiring over beer. The tavern owner, a native Egyptian, overhears them talking about lost treasure. Now since he is a native Egyptian, and not just another Hyksos who has come out of history from nowhere and will inevitably go back there again, these rootless shepherds turned adventurers naturally respect the tavern owner. They look up to him and that’s going to cause trouble, because he happens to have idealistic religious views. You wouldn’t know it today but once there were actually Egyptians who had ideals.

  Well, whispers the tavern owner as he serves another round of beer to the gang of conspirators, if it’s treasure that’s on your mind, what about the treasure in the Great Pyramid?

  The Hyksos adventurers shake their heads gloomily. Everyone has already tried to look for that, they say, and no one has ever been able to find it.

  True, says the tavern owner, but the reason they’ve all failed is because they always dug their tunnels uphill. Whereas a pharaoh, being a god, wouldn’t have allowed his mummy to be dragged uphill to reach his burial chamber. Naturally he would have descended into it with his hands crossed on his chest, a much more dignified position. If you’re a god you don’t crawl uphill, you descend from the heavens.

  In other words, said the tavern owner, the mummy would have been lowered from the top down, and that’s how we should dig.

  Menelik Ziwar had cackled lightly.

  The poor man’s deluded idealism at work, you see. And although it seems witless today, that Hyksos gang with their dense shepherd heads believed him. They had another round of beer and that very night followed the tavern owner out to the Great Pyramid with all their tools.

  The first thing he had them do was hollow out a base camp, or in this case a top camp, where they could live in secret while sinking their shafts. Then they dug tunnels down toward the bottom, all the way down to the bedrock beneath the pyramid. But they missed the burial chambers and instead broke through into a subterranean stream.

  Bad luck for the Hyksos gang, good luck for us. The Nile was flooding and if it hadn’t been, who knows? They might have gone on digging vertical tunnels until the pyramid had become structurally unsound and collapsed.

  Menelik Ziwar had smiled.

  The Great Pyramid suddenly collapsing in on itself? Simply deflating like a balloon? Do you realize there are six and a half million tons of rock in there? Can you imagine the noise it would make?

  He sighed.

  Pollution saved us. Once again that paradox of the Nile. The Nile was flooding and sewerage from Memphis had infected the subterranean stream. Crazed by thirst after their long dusty dig down from the summit, the Hyksos gang and the tavern owner threw themselves into the sluggish stream to drink their fill and then some.

  Ziwar had nodded thoughtfully.

  A matter of minutes, I’d imagine. The dysentery endemic to subsurface Nilotic tributaries is particularly virulent. They had enough strength to crawl back up to their top camp, but not enough to budge the block of stone over the entrance when they got there. And that’s where I found their skeletons, the bones of the Hyksos telling us nothing as usual, the tavern owner having spent his last moments, by now no longer an idealist, tracing the hieroglyph for beer in the dust.

  Menelik Ziwar then briefly concluded his tale.

  The top camp and vertical tunnels had remained lost until he deduced their existence in 1844 by studying the irregular air currents in the known shafts and chambers of the pyramid. Finding them was a simple matter once he knew they existed. He examined the large top camp and decided it would make an appropriate country retreat and eventual retirement home for the world’s leading unknown Egyptologist. Accordingly, he made plans to furnish it, sparing no expense.

  The work had taken sixteen years. During that time Strongbow had often stayed in the unfinished flat when passing through Lower Egypt and had always greatly enjoyed it, as he wrote in a letter from Aden around the middle of the century.

  My Dear Menelik,

  The air at your future country retreat is simply incomparable. And among its many other attributes I would also have to mention the superior quality of the view, the serenity of the sunrises and sunsets as seen from the doorstep, and in general that pervasive sense of solitude men of our nature find so invigorating. Lastly there is the aura of tranquillity that one cannot help but feel when going to bed in the summit of the greatest monument on earth.

  Congratulations, my friend. An altogether admirable project. Many thanks for a lovely weekend in this superb perch you have found for your old age.

  Yours etc,

  Plantagenet

  P.S. I enclose a rare Solomon’s-seal as a token of my appreciation. I came across it last month in the Hindu Kush and have never seen a lily-of-the-valley quite like it.

  P.P.S. Are we still on for next Sunday?

  Indeed, Menelik Ziwar was convinced he had found the perfect country home for himself. So much so he waited until every detail was completed before he went up to spend his first night in the flat.

  He chose his forty-third birthday for the occasion, Christmas, 1860. He would have liked to have asked Strongbow to join him for the celebration, but the explorer was off somewhere in disguise and couldn’t be reached.

  Ziwar spent the day happily roaming through his new apartment. At the end of the afternoon he prepared a feast of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding accompanied by three wines and two vegetables, a baked potato and a savory, ending with a magnum of champagne and a large serving of his favorite greens, a weed common to the poorer sections of Alexandria where it grew wild in vacant lots, a nostalgic reminder of his youth when there had often been little else to eat.

  After dinner Ziwar set up a canvas chair on the summit of the pyramid to watch the sunset while smoking a cigar.

  A thoroughly successful day, or so it seemed. Drowsy from his meal and the wine, he retired early to the master bedroom and quickly fell asleep, only to find himself awake in terror a few minutes later, overcome by a sensation of falling, this sudden irrational fear of heights evidently brought on by a lifetime spent in confined subterranean spaces.

  In any case, Ziwar knew he could never spend another night in his lofty flat. Sleeping that high in the air was out of the question. When the time came for him to retire, he decided, he would resort to the snug se
curity of an underground sarcophagus, preferably that of Cheops’ mother, rather than Cheops’ chamber in the sky.

  Here Martyr moved with his albino monkey and his tins of meat on August 14, sleeping and reading and exploring the interior of the pyramid by day, sitting on top of the pyramid devising his plans by night, oblivious to the monstrous new war in Europe where massed armies were savagely destroying each other in muddy trenches.

  And there in the clear dry air of that ancient pinnacle above the Nile, methodically and relentlessly, Cairo Martyr pondered the injustices suffered by Africans over the centuries, historical crimes he intended to repay in full measure.

  Considering where he was living, it wasn’t surprising he decided to deal with the pyramids first. Slave labor had built them for pharaohs who thought they were gods, but a pharaonic god was nothing without his mummy and Martyr owned the largest cache of pharaonic mummies in the world.

  About the time of the first battle of the Marne, he moved all his mummies in sealed cases to the top of the pyramid. There, in Ziwar’s workshop for archeological restoration, he proceeded to grind them down into a fine powder.

  So much for the eternal gods of ancient Egypt. He had reduced them to dust but that wasn’t enough. After prolonged meditation, coincidental with the second battle of Ypres, he decided to desecrate the once holy remains of the pharaohs as well.

  During the Somme offensive he converted Ziwar’s workshop into a pharmacy and carefully mixed half of his mummy powder with mastic gum, producing a balm he intended to sell as an aphrodisiac with general magical properties. Thus the tyrannical builders of the pyramids would end ignominiously with a pinch of their dust lodged in the nostrils of wheezing old men greedy for longer life, another pinch served up as mastic to be smeared on the unwashed pudenda of barren women, a third encrusting the slack sexual organs of nervous merchants unable to obtain an erection.

  The formerly glorious pharaohs sordidly sold as mummy dust and mummy mastic in back alleys. Available to any corrupt illiterate who could pay for them, just as African slaves had once been.

  Martyr now moved forward from ancient to modern Egyptian tyrants. The Mamelukes, as pederasts, had simply disappeared from history. But the Arabs had been their coreligionists in the slave trade and it was therefore through Islam that he would strike. Since he was nominally a Moslem he had access to all the holy places.

  A desecration here too then? Some intolerable act that would outrage the entire religion?

  Cairo Martyr smiled. He lit a cigarette. The second battle of the Marne had just ended and the Great War would soon be over. And so too the night. Dawn was coming and he was sitting on top of the pyramid, contemplating the last minutes of darkness, when the revelation came to him. Significantly, he was facing east.

  Mecca, of course. The navel of Islam inside the Kaaba. The Holy of Holies, a black meteorite.

  He inhaled deeply.

  Black. Islam deprived of its most sacred object. The stone that pilgrims came from all over the world to kiss. To steal the black meteorite from the Kaaba and render the Holy of Holies utterly empty.

  Utterly.

  Cairo Martyr laughed. And the black stone itself?

  To Africa, of course. He would carry it to Africa where the Arabs had grown rich for centuries on black gold, his people. A black meteorite now to pay for black gold then.

  Justice.

  It had taken him four years to work out his master plan but it had been worth it, no one could hope for more. He intended to steal the black meteorite from heaven and bury it in rich black African soil, where it belonged.

  At the end of the First World War a brooding Cairo Martyr, sleek from four years of solid meat, emerged from seclusion at the top of the Great Pyramid and descended into the raucous crowds and swirling flies of the bazaars of the Middle East, there to hire the wholesale dealers who would receive his smuggled mummy dust and mummy mastic in bulk, cut the first with quinine and the second with glue or glucose and distribute both to retailers who would sell them on the open market in tiny oilskin bags, five pounds sterling per bag.

  The dose was small and an impotent man or a barren woman needed more than a bag a day for treatment. Three or four bags a day was a common dosage, but habits running to eight or nine bags were far from rare.

  Prices varied with the season. In general spring with its illusions of hope was the most profitable sellers’ market, winter with its lethargy the worst. But an outbreak of local tribal warfare could drive sales up at any time. Highly spiced foods tended to do the same in the summer, as did aggressive athletic contests in the autumn.

  Usage also varied by region and ethnic background. Desert bedouin, the fierce Kurds and religious Jews seemed immune to the benefits of mummy dust and were almost total abstainers. But the sedentary Arabs of the cities, wealthy Persians and lazy Turks of all classes were heavy consumers.

  Sales increased substantially near large rivers, near mosques, on Saturday evenings and during full moons, declining dramatically in the weeks before lambs were slaughtered in the spring. Mummy dust was generally preferred by men and women under thirty, mummy mastic by those over that age. But a confirmed user was more than happy to get his mummy any way he could.

  The European authorities in the Middle East moved to suppress the clandestine trade as soon as they became aware of it. Both mummy dust and mummy mastic were declared dangerous drugs and treated accordingly in the courts, but the profits involved in handling them were so huge Martyr had no difficulty establishing a marketing network that reached into every corner of the Levant.

  Petty dealers were frequently picked up and jailed for mummy-mastic possession, but due to the precautions Martyr had taken it was nearly impossible for his major wholesalers to be prosecuted.

  And on the rare occasions when one was, the English or French magistrate in charge of the case immediately received a large anonymous bribe along with detailed dossiers on a dozen underworld figures in his city, previously unknown criminals who could easily be convicted of any crime because they were guilty of every crime.

  The wholesaler was then released for lack of evidence and quickly went abroad to the French Riviera for a vacation arranged by Martyr, after which he would turn up with a different name in another Arab capital, where his expertise could be put to work in some other aspect of the overall operation.

  In only three years Cairo Martyr’s secret balm network was smoothly functioning throughout the Levant, assuring him a large income for life. The time then came for him to launch the second phase of his master plan, the series of deadly steps that would ultimately lead to the theft of the black meteorite from the Kaaba in Mecca.

  With typical patience Martyr intended to approach his goal by degrees. First he would gain clandestine control of Jerusalem, the third holy city of Islam. When that was accomplished he would move on to Islam’s second city, Medina. And only then, with all flanks secure, would he take his campaign to Mecca for his final triumph.

  But when Martyr arrived in Jerusalem in the autumn of 1921, he found he wasn’t alone in seeking secret control of the city. Other clandestine operators were at work in the confusion that had followed the war, in particular a Khasarian Jew from Budapest, Munk Szondi by name, who seemed to have immense resources of his own.

  If he had been faced with just this one competitor, Martyr was confident he could have made a deal with the man for an equable division of spoils. In fact he had worked out most of the details for a compromise proposal when he accidentally met Szondi for the first time in a Jerusalem coffee shop where they had both chanced to seek shelter on a cold December afternoon when snow was definitely in the air.

  But he couldn’t make an offer to Szondi then because a third man happened to be sitting with them in the crowded shop, a young Irishman who also agreed to the game of poker Szondi had suggested as a diversion against the gloomy weather.

  A game of poker. A diversion. The wind outside whipping through the alleys. Snow definitely in th
e air.

  And somehow a strange design descending upon the three of them that night after they moved the game to the curiously empty shop of Haj Harun, where Martyr soon made another discovery. For some reason as yet unknown, the Irishman was also seeking secret control of Jerusalem.

  Chance had apparently brought them together on the last day of 1921, but now none of them seemed able to leave the game, to escape the mysterious spell that had suddenly locked them in around a poker table.

  Why? What was the spell? Did it have something to do with Haj Harun?

  Cairo Martyr shrugged. He smiled.

  There were complications he didn’t yet understand but he was as patient as ever, as patient as his great-grandmother and Menelik Ziwar had been. So patient he never looked at his cards before he bet on them, because he knew in the end he wouldn’t win out of luck.

  In the end he would win because he had to.

  Because his cause was just. Because no one could have a cause more just than his.

  Even if it meant facing a siege in the Holy City more arduous than any since the First Crusade.

  By the closing days of January 1922, with a month of steady play behind them, the three gamblers had begun to realize they were involved in more than ordinary chronic poker. And it had also become apparent they would have to bring outsiders into the game if they were to make any money, the three of them being too evenly matched to win from each other.

  It was Munk Szondi who made the suggestion one night when he had the deal.

  What about it, Joe?

  Suits me.

  Cairo?

  An excellent idea.

  As Munk shuffled the cards he gazed at the tall antique Turkish safe in the corner.

  I’ve been wondering about that, he said.

  Have you now, murmured Joe. Well I recall doing some wondering about it myself when I walked in here the first time and saw it standing there so tall and thin. That doesn’t look to be a safe, I said to myself. It looks more like an impregnable sentry box on local guard duty.