Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  The chimes attached to the sundial in the front room creaked and began to strike at four o’clock on that rainy afternoon. In all they chimed twelve times.

  Midnight, said Joe. I think we better be adjourning in about an hour. Is the time limit agreed?

  That’s a good idea, said Munk. I’m rather tired tonight.

  So am I, added Cairo, suppressing a yawn.

  The other players, who had been heavy losers in the three hours since the session began, were on their feet protesting. A wealthy French merchant from Beirut was particularly angry.

  Fraud, he shrieked, shaking his fists. How do you know it’s midnight? It could just as well be twelve o’clock noon.

  Could be but it isn’t, said Joe, smiling. The chimes struck off noon an hour before you arrived. What time did you think you got here?

  I know when I got here, shrieked the Frenchman. It was at one o’clock.

  Well there you are. The chimes have to be striking midnight, couldn’t be anything else. Bets now anyone? We’ve still got a good hour of fast playing ahead before closing time. Munk, isn’t the bet to you?

  I believe it is. And since Haj Harun has found lunar evidence for my success in this game, I’m going to take advantage of it by tripling this wager our princely guest from Baghdad has just ventured. Gentlemen, the stakes rise in the cause of lunacy.

  Fine, said Joe, very fine. We’re off again. No reason to hold back just because there are only three hours between noon and midnight on a rainy day in February. That happens all the time in bad weather. But spring will be coming soon and then we can make up for it.

  6. St. Catherine’s Monastery

  Choice is the arrow.

  EARLY IN 1913, MUNK arrived back in the Middle East and traveled widely on his mission for the Sarahs. Before the end of the year he was able to report to them that although there was evidence someone might have owned the Ottoman Empire once, it was equally obvious no one owned it now, least of all the Ottomans.

  The old jade is tottering to her grave, he wrote in a letter to Budapest. Once stately, now exhausted, she laments in the twilight, abused and humiliated on every side. Soon night must take her.

  Munk sensed he was also describing the approaching collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, although he couldn’t possibly have guessed how quickly that would happen. Yet in the next few years not only did the Empire of the Sarahs disappear but with it the once powerful House of Szondi, both swept away in the First World War.

  Young Munk watched it all from afar, no longer interested in soldiering yet still searching as always for a role in life and pondering the question that had been with him since childhood, the mysterious force that had driven his great-grandfather, Johann Luigi, a century ago.

  Munk traveled alone during the war years, trading throughout the Middle East and sharing his confidences with only one man, an unlikely friend yet also his closest during that period, a wealthy old Greek satyr who lived in Smyrna.

  Unlikely on the surface of it, for Sivi was then a man already in his sixties, nearly forty years older than Munk. But he seemed to have known everyone in his time, having long been intimate with every manner of Levantine intrigue, and despite his notorious sexual excesses he was a wise and gentle friend, who adopted Munk as easily as if that had been his purpose in life.

  So Munk found himself returning again and again to Sivi’s beautiful seaside villa in Smyrna, an exile now from a European era that would soon cease to exist.

  It’s almost over, he said to Sivi one afternoon in the spring of 1918. My family has lived in Budapest since the ninth century, but with this war a whole way of life will disappear.

  They were sitting in Sivi’s garden and Sivi was pouring tea, elegant as always in one of the long red dressing gowns that he habitually wore until after sunset, when he dressed for the theater or the opera. He paused to admire the large ruby rings on his fingers. As usual a smile hovered around his eyes and there was a touch of mischief in his voice.

  How’s this, young Munk? You’re not surrendering to melancholy, are you? If I were you I’d look at the matter quite differently. Ten centuries locked in the rain and mist of central Europe? Time to make an escape, I should think, and what better season for it than this one? Ah yes, spring and the sea and a distant shore. Exactly what’s needed to stir unexpected juices. But you always said you wanted to get away, and now you have. For good, certainly. Still, a touch of nostalgia perhaps?

  Munk shrugged.

  I guess so.

  Of course, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I may say so, this twinge of nostalgia you feel has nothing to do with a place really, with a sudden longing for Budapest. It has to do with time, I suspect, with having been a child there, innocent and protected. That rare condition can cause nostalgia in all of us. Am I right?

  I suppose. It’s true I feel I’m getting old.

  Sivi laughed wickedly.

  As indeed you are, young Munk. Late twenties? An absolutely ancient age. I had a friend once who felt the same way as he drew near thirty. His youth was behind him and suicide seemed the only answer. He asked me to find him the necessary pills and I said I would, but it might take a few hours. In the meantime I suggested he go out and buy himself a new dress and hat, I mean a quite extravagant dress, and position himself in one of the better cafés on the harbor and wait for me there. I told him if he was going to die he ought to look his best when he went.

  So he bought the dress?

  He did. But by the time I arrived at the café he was no longer there. It seems a handsome young Greek sailor had come strolling by and winked at him, and they had an aperitif together and one thing led to another, and I couldn’t find him anywhere for three days. When I did I told him I had the pills. What pills? he said, I’m in love. And that was that, although of course this occurred around 1880 when gowns were much more lavish than today, and had bustles as well that could give a man an immediate lift.

  Munk laughed.

  Was this friend a tall man?

  He was.

  Large and bulky?

  More or less.

  With an impressive moustache he twirled on occasion?

  Indeed, it was probably just such an action that caught the eye of the handsome young Greek sailor as he went strolling by.

  How long did the love affair last?

  Until the young sailor’s ship sailed, a week or so. And my friend was heartbroken when it was over.

  Did you consider pills again?

  Certainly not. I’d learned what to do. I went out and bought another extravagant gown and positioned myself once more in one of the better cafés. Within the hour events had taken a turn as they will, and a whole new adventure had begun to unfold. You see there’s a moral to this tale, although of course it doesn’t apply to everyone. I contemplated suicide because I felt my youth was behind me, but the solution was much simpler. All I had to do was put another youth behind me.

  Munk laughed again as Sivi happily wagged his head.

  That’s terrible, Sivi. You’re unspeakable.

  True. But I’ve continued to follow this wisdom and it’s kept me going quite well.

  Sivi delicately raised his teacup and sipped.

  And what news do you have from the Sarahs, Munk? Have they been making any plans for after the war?

  Yes. They’ve decided to emigrate.

  What? All of them?

  Yes, all of them.

  Extraordinary. Where to?

  A few to Canada and Australia and the United States. Most of them to South America.

  Sivi sighed.

  A new Diaspora, they seem never to end. Yes, well, I guess it isn’t all that extraordinary. The banks are finished, I take it? The war has been that hard on them?

  Yes.

  Sivi nodded gently.

  It happens, of course. The Old World becomes too old for some. I have cousins in Argentina whom I’ve never met. And what of the men in the family? Will there now be all-male Szon
di baroque ensembles in various corners of the New World, mostly South America?

  Not for a while, I would think. They’ll have to give up music and go back to running discount dry goods stores to support the Sarahs. Petty local trade again, only this time in São Paulo and Sydney and New York.

  But surely only for a time, Munk. The Sarahs are too clever not to get something going again before long.

  I imagine.

  Oh yes, they’ll fare well, we know that. It’s you I’m concerned about. Dare I be frank?

  Munk smiled.

  You old sinner. Have you ever been anything else?

  Sivi wagged his head appreciatively and examined the flow of his dressing gown, straightening a fold here and there.

  Well not for the last four or five decades, in any case. Not since I decided at an early age to recognize the creature I saw leering at me every morning in the mirror. But then too, I had the advantage of growing up in beautiful Smyrna where the light is so pure and the sea so sparkling, well, all things seem natural, even me. So it wasn’t that difficult to admit that the lascivious beast I saw in the mirror wasn’t a beast at all, just me, basically harmless and in love with love, merely insatiable when it comes to the pleasures to be found on a secluded stretch of beach when the sun is high and the white sand softly burns your skin, and the brilliant blue sea whispers now and later, now and always, love and life and the all-healing sea.

  Munk smiled. He held his left hand out to the side and strummed with his right in front of him, reciting a verse.

  Gaily the troubadour touched his guitar,

  as he was wandering home from the wars.

  Singing from Palestine, hither I come.

  Lady love, lady love, welcome me home.

  Sivi laughed.

  Quite, he said. The aging troubadour forever wanders, forever singing that sins aren’t sins when seen naked in the sun, singing that only darkness and despair can twist an act of love into regret. But we were talking about you, young Munk, and I was going to be frank. Well it’s simply this. It’s obvious you want something and don’t know what it is. I mean something more than an occupation, a home and a family and friends or whatever. That’s so, isn’t it.

  Of course.

  Yes, blood tells. Mine is that of the ancient Greeks who reveled in their lucid sunlight, yours is that of your remarkable great-grandfather, Johann Luigi Szondi, his very name suggesting contradictory antecedents, a mysterious explorer whose tireless journeys you’ve never been quite able to comprehend. All that in only eight short years? Penetrating Medina and Mecca and measuring Rameses’ ear? Eating dates in Nubia while covering nine hundred miles a month? Gazing upon the stones of a deserted rose-red city half as old as time? Yes, astonishing exploits.

  I don’t want to leave, announced Munk abruptly, the words said with such force they startled Sivi.

  Leave? Indeed, nor do I. But what are we referring to? Life? Smyrna? This garden with its spring flowers in bloom?

  This part of the world, added Munk.

  Sivi relaxed in his chair.

  Ah, of course, the Eastern Mediterranean. No one in his right mind would want to leave it. But who ever suggested such a preposterous notion?

  You did.

  Me? said Sivi, even more startled than before. Me? Impossible. Out of the question.

  Yes you did. You were talking earlier about spring and the sea and a distant shore, but I have no intention of going to America or anyplace like that.

  Sivi tipped his head and laughed happily.

  Oh, is that all. It seems you missed my meaning completely, young Munk. Come along and I’ll point it out to you. As it happens it’s only a few yards away.

  Munk followed Sivi across the garden and into his villa. They walked to the second floor where Sivi threw open the doors to the balcony. The sun was slipping toward the harbor, which was still busy with boats. Strolling crowds thronged the quays in the evening promenade.

  There, young Munk, that’s the sea I had in mind. The Aegean. And you’re already on its distant shore, cold damp Europe is far away to the north. So you see you’ve already set sail, here and now in sun and light, that’s all I was suggesting. It’s true, isn’t it?

  Sivi smiled. Munk smiled too.

  Yes it’s true.

  Good. Now I’m told you’re very successful at a special kind of trading, commodity futures are they called? Well then, if you’re already trading in futures, why not trade in your own?

  Trading doesn’t mean anything to me, said Munk. You have your dream of a greater Greece. But as you’ve said, I don’t know what I want

  Sivi laughed. He spread his arms as if to embrace the sea.

  What you want? Of course you know what you want. You want a dream like anyone else. But a dream, is that all? Just look out there at what lies at your feet, look and be reassured. For was there ever a man who stood on these shores and didn’t dream? This is the Eastern Mediterranean, young Munk, the birthplace of dreams. The men who gave our Western world its gods and civilizations came from here, and with good reason.

  What is the reason?

  I thought you’d never ask. Odd how the young disregard the wisdom of age in order to discover things for themselves. It’s almost as if matters of the spirit could never be transmitted, only experienced. The reason, Munk? Light. The purity of the light here. In this light a man senses there are no limits for him in the world. He can see forever, and that vision intoxicates him. It fires his heart and makes him want to go and do, never to stop but to go farther, to go deeper, more. Thus the curiosity of the Greeks of old and their fearless explorations of the soul. Never has man surpassed the dramas enacted on these shores twenty-five hundred years ago, three thousand years ago. That was laughter, that was tragedy, and it is what we know of life. Even today we know no more. And strangely, modestly, they attributed their laughter and their tragedy to the intervention of the gods. But it just wasn’t so. The miracle of it all was theirs. It was them. They stood on these shores and wept and laughed and lived those lives.

  The old man smiled and stroked his moustache.

  Well now, what do you think of that?

  You’re shamelessly romantic, Sivi, that’s what I think.

  It may be so. Yet all the same the light here is different. It’s a palpable thing and its effect is inescapable, which is why Greece has always been more of an idea than a place. When the modern nation was founded in the last century, Alexandria and Constantinople were the great Greek cities in this world, and Athens was but a lonely plain where a few shepherds grazed their flocks at the foot of the Acropolis. But no matter. An idea doesn’t die. It only slumbers and it can always be resurrected. Tell me, would anyone have ever heard of the Dorians if they’d stayed up there in the north puttering around the Danube? Just one more minor central European tribe three thousand years ago, passing the time with their crops and domestic animals and setting out for an occasional foray a few miles downstream? Exactly, and enough to put anyone to sleep. But the Dorians didn’t stay up there. They had the luck or good sense to come trotting down here where they could learn to dream, and dream they did, and the result was ancient Greece in all its splendor. Ah yes, Munk, the Dorians should be a lesson to you. By the way, when you were on your mission for the Sarahs, how far were you able to trace Strongbow?

  South of the Holy Land, that’s all. Nothing more specific than that.

  No? Well it was the Yemen where he ended up, and died.

  Strongbow’s dead?

  Yes, four years ago, just before the war broke out. Appropriate, wasn’t it. One of the towering figures of the nineteenth century, and the successor to the explorations of Johann Luigi Szondi in this part of the world, dies on the eve of the Great War that will bring an end to his century.

  How did you find that out?

  How? murmured Sivi. Don’t I have a reputation for knowing everyone’s secrets? Well so I do, but in this case it was simpler than that. Strongbow’s son told me.


  His son? I didn’t even know he had a son.

  He did, but the son’s identity is a confidence I can’t reveal. He’s always gone by a different name.

  Munk laughed.

  Is there anyone at all in this part of the world who hasn’t come to you with their confidences at one time or another?

  They had returned to the garden. Sivi uncorked the bottle of ouzo standing on the table and sniffed it. He nodded approvingly and filled two glasses.

  Tea won’t help us now. Ouzo is definitely wanted, a substantial measure over ice to cloud the clear liquid, the better to clear our minds as evening falls. As for people confiding in me, there must be some who haven’t yet, but then I wouldn’t be surprised if they were getting ready to do so this very evening, after dark of course. You see the truth is, a juxtaposition of facts in my case tends to reassure people. On the one hand it’s known that my father was a leader of the Greek war for independence and a great friend of Byron. Masculine heroics, in other words, the sound of the bugle and the charge against the oppressor, flowing capes and drawn swords and fierce eyebrows, the poet-warrior in a headlong gallop and all that. Yet on the other hand, it’s equally well known that when I attend the opera and take off my evening cape, the gown and jewels I will be wearing will be so elegant no woman could possibly hope to match them. I am, in short, an embodiment of life’s bizarre contradictions. Therefore trustworthy.

  Munk laughed.

  What brought Strongbow to mind, Sivi?

  Dreams, of course. The dreams we have when we’re young.

  Ah yes, mused Sivi. My dream at your age was to become a great scholar, and all because of Strongbow’s study.

  What? You’re not going to tell me you own a set too?

  Certainly. Thirty-three volumes on Levantine sex and I shouldn’t own them? Is such a thing conceivable? But why me too?

  It turned out the Sarahs had a set. None of the men in our family ever knew it.

  Sivi chuckled happily.

  Is that so? Well apparently life wasn’t as bleak up there as I’d thought. It seems there were certain diversions on rainy evenings by the Danube when the Sarahs had to stay late at the office. But they were probably just being sentimental. The study isn’t exactly what people think. Two-thirds of it, in fact, is devoted to describing a love affair Strongbow had with a gentle Persian girl when he was nineteen, the most complete love story ever told and a pastoral idyll that could make any woman swoon. Anyway, what I wanted to do was compose a companion study on Byzantine sex. Levantine is one thing, but Byzantine? It could have been truly arresting.