Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  The lost Greek began his report by admitting he hadn’t gone to Jerusalem with any intention of visiting holy sites. He couldn’t care less, he said, about holy sites there or elsewhere. His sole reason for the trip was to try to make a fortune in the Great Jerusalem Poker Game.

  The what? wondered Nubar, never having heard of such a game. Intrigued, he read on.

  The lost Greek had entered the game one afternoon with a substantial amount of money. By the end of the afternoon he was well ahead. However, he had made the mistake of drinking while he was playing, which tended to loosen his tongue even though he was normally a wily man with a reputation for shrewd and clever tactics. Overconfident and perhaps a little drunk, he began to brag about his prowess as a burglar and the easy targets to be found in Palestine. In particular he mentioned burglarizing something called a kibbutz on his way to Jerusalem. It had been a small dusty place, very poor. The farmers had been out in the fields and in a matter of minutes he had made away with all their valuables.

  If you can call a suitcase of old cracked Polish clocks valuable, he had added with a laugh. That’s all they had so I scooped them up.

  Most of the players at the table laughed with him but several did not. The one who seemed least amused was a man named Szondi. What followed was a disaster for the lost Greek.

  First he lost all the money he had with him to this man Szondi. That took only two hands. Then he lost the reserve he had hidden in his hotel room, in a single hand, with the best cards he had ever held in a poker game, along with the suitcase of worthless old Polish clocks and his shoes and socks. He wanted to leave for Ithaca then, even though it would have meant going barefoot, but he found he couldn’t rise from the table.

  As soon as the man named Szondi had started betting against him, it seemed, another player at the table had begun pressing a bottle of very old cognac on him. At least this other player, a carefree Irishman, implied it was cognac and the bottle certainly looked very old. The lost Greek had accepted the offer and drunk freely straight from the bottle, emptying it. The drink had seemed smooth enough when it was going down, but obviously the Irishman had tricked him. It turned out the bottle hadn’t contained cognac at all but some kind of Irish home brew called poteen. All at once the lost Greek found he was paralyzed below the waist.

  It can have such a temporary effect, noted the Irishman merrily, until you become used to it. Then it generally paralyzes from the neck up, rather than the waist down. Do you follow me?

  The lost Greek had shaken his head. He knew now he wasn’t following anyone anywhere, he was trapped at the table. The deal passed to a black man dressed in an Arab cloak and Arab headgear, a man who smiled broadly, his skin so black it was almost blue. The beaming black man dealt the cards quickly and the lost Greek went on losing to Szondi, who seemed especially adept at gambling commodity futures. The Greek lost the future olive-oil production of his family farm back in Ithaca over the next twenty years. He then lost the olive oil that would be produced by his brothers and uncles and cousins over the same period.

  By now the lost Greek was weeping noisily. His family had no future in Greece, the next two decades had disappeared. He begged for mercy, wanting to do so on his knees but unable to move because of his temporary paralysis below the waist.

  Finally Szondi made him an offer. They would play one last hand and if the lost Greek won, all his debts would be cancelled. But if he lost, he would have to do manual labor for an unspecified period of time at a place Szondi would designate.

  The lost Greek had no choice, he knew that. He had to chance it. So the hand was played and the lost Greek lost.

  The designated place for manual labor turned out to be the dusty poor Polish kibbutz where Odysseus had stolen his load of worthless old cracked Polish clocks. He had been laboring there ever since in the fields, in the hot sun, and it might go on forever unless a ransom were paid.

  Despite his exhaustion at the end of the day, he had written the report bit by bit by candlelight over the weeks, under a blanket at night, all the while being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Early in December he had managed to persuade someone to smuggle the report out of the country and throw it over the transom of the UIA chief in Salonika.

  The report had been written in pencil, and not a very good pencil at that. Nubar noticed there were water stains around the signature, probably tears.

  Your most loyal employee in the UIA

  And your former chief in Ithaca,

  Now somewhere in Palestine farming with

  Poles in the dust,

  Odysseus

  The Lost Greek

  Beneath that the chief of station in Salonika had typed a few questions asking for guidance.

  Ransom acceptable? How high do we go?

  Nubar had snorted and fired off a cable immediately.

  ARE YOU MAD? NO RANSOM OF ANY KIND FOR THE LOST GREEK. WHO NEEDS A LOST GREEK? AND WHERE DID THIS FOOL EVER GET A REPUTATION FOR BEING WILY, LET ALONE SHREWD WITH HIS TONGUE OR CLEVER WITH HIS TACTICS? HIS OWN FAULT ENTIRELY, FORGET HIM.

  BUT WHAT IS THE GREAT JERUSALEM POKER GAME? SEND PARTICULARS IF KNOWN. AND WHY SUCH PRETENTIOUS TERMS FOR A SHABBY GAMBLING OPERATION?

  At the time, on New Year’s Day, Nubar hadn’t been exactly sure why he had reacted so quickly to the report. But something had been working at the back of his mind, something having to do with Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

  The answer to his cable had finally arrived that morning, a thick folder of briefing material, and Nubar found the information in it shocking.

  The game, it seemed, was notorious throughout the Middle East. Anyone who hadn’t been in it at one time or another had at least heard of it and wanted to be in it. And its reputation had spread far beyond the Levant, witness the lost Greek’s eagerness to go there to try to win his fortune. The game had already been going for six full years, in fact it had just entered its seventh year with no end in sight. The money changing hands was incalculable.

  Three men had founded the game and were its only permanent members, all mentioned in the lost Greek’s report.

  Szondi, the defender of old Polish clocks that belonged to poor kibbutz farmers, was a dedicated Zionist. And as a Zionist, quite naturally, he traded in futures, as noted by the lost Greek, since there was no Jewish homeland at present. His first name was Munk, perhaps because he liked to think of himself as the monk of the coming Jewish revolution.

  The Irishman, who merrily offered paralyzing drinks from antique cognac bottles, was one O’Sullivan Beare. He had made a fortune selling spurious Christian artifacts that were undeniably phallic in shape. And he was still selling them, claiming they were blessed by an ecclesiastic, obviously fictional, known as the baking priest.

  The beaming black Arab, actually a Sudanese, had the unlikely name of Cairo Martyr. He was also making a fortune on the side by selling pharaonic mummy dust and mummy mastic, renowned in the Levant as aphrodisiacs and euphoric agents.

  As for the grandiloquent name of the game, that came from the fact that the ultimate prize at stake was nothing less than complete clandestine control of Jerusalem. That was the goal sought by each of the three founding members, and of course by anyone who challenged them, whether the challenger realized it or not.

  Nubar was stunned.

  Complete clandestine control of Jerusalem?

  Now he understood why the lost Greek’s report had immediately caught his attention. Jerusalem was where his grandfather had buried the original Sinai Bible after producing his forgery of it. The real original was still there and he, Nubar, was its rightful owner.

  Jerusalem, the Holy City. The eternal city. Could it be, then, that the Sinai Bible was the philosopher’s stone he was seeking? Containing all the ancient eternal truths, the one sure way to immortality?

  Was it time to put aside the gaseous, chaotic mercury experiments of his youth and boldly take what belonged to him?

  Nubar was beginning to think so. He was ready to make a
momentous decision. And that’s why he felt that today, Epiphany, 1928, might well be the most important day of his life.

  The pelicans and alembics on his workbench, the crucibles and athanors, seethed and gurgled and hissed and bubbled as he hunched over them, engulfed in their mercury fumes. Midnight was near. Around his tower the storm raged. The moment had come for the third eye of occultism to see the unseeable in the darkness.

  Nubar took the small sphere of polished obsidian from its hiding place in his workbench. Attached to the sphere was a loop of nearly invisible gold thread. He smiled at the black volcanic glass and rubbed it against the side of his nose, the oils of his skin bringing it to a high luster.

  He placed the gold thread around the top of his head so that the obsidian sphere hung in the middle of his forehead, his third eye. Now he possessed supernatural powers of perception.

  The power to sum it all up. To consider the totality of the universe and make his decision.

  Nubar mixed mercury, heated mercury, mechanically repeating the master alchemist’s instructions. He lowered his head into the fumes as his mind wandered through the stormy night from plots and stratagems to the possibility of joining Paracelsus in an exclusive society of immortals, to Zog, to the Black Book, to the muscular stable boy with curly hair, to teetotalism, the Protocols, a primitive volcanic eye.

  To vegetables and black glass and a dark cemetery in Prague, to the Theban Sacred Band and the original Bible discovered by his grandfather in the Sinai, to the moat around the castle and hygiene in general.

  The Uranist Intelligence Agency and whole-wheat bread and Krk-Brač, the whole truth and the Great Jerusalem Poker Game, the Assassins and subterranean trains and the Old Man of the Mountain.

  Black glass, primitive volcanic eyes. A third eye, bombs.

  The Black Book. Said to have been compiled by the German secret service before the war. Said to contain the names of forty-seven thousand English homosexuals in high places, both male and female. Entrusted to the care of Prince William of Wied when he came to Albania in 1914 to serve briefly as king. Who had the Black Book now? Could it be bought or stolen? Did Zog know where it was?

  Zog. Born Ahmed Zogu of the Zogolli clan of the Mati district. Dictator of Albania for the last three years and soon to crown himself King Zog I. Sophia had worked for the liberal leader, Bishop Fan Noli, but Nubar had backed the cause of the reactionary Zog. What rewards would be his after Zog’s coronation?

  The Uranist Intelligence Agency. His own private network of Paracelsus agents and informers, feared throughout the Balkans and perhaps beyond. Criminals of the highest caliber making up the largest private intelligence service in the world.

  The Theban Sacred Band. Three hundred heroic young warriors of noble blood in ancient Thebes, bound together by oath in defense of their ideals and their city-state, an elite homosexual brotherhood that had lived and fought in mutual passion until slaughtered by Philip of Macedonia. Could the Band be reborn in Albania? Would that be the reward he requested from Zog?

  The stable boy had rolled his eyes as he lit Nubar’s cigarette, forbidden to Nubar according to one of the resolutions he had made on his twenty-first birthday. But Nubar had rapidly inhaled the cigarette anyway in the dizziness of the moment, in the shadows at the back of the stables where he had slipped down onto a pile of damp hay, a sudden weight on him and a fiery pain rushing up to cleanse his body.

  Mercury fumes, chronic poisoning, delirium.

  Using the crucibles on his workbench, Nubar mixed equal amounts of sulphur and lead and iron and arsenic, copper sulphate and mercury and opium. Equal amounts as he poured and mixed, as he drifted above his workbench through the stormy night numbly repeating the experiment again and again in search of the unique set of circumstances, in search of Paracelsus and his secret society of immortals.

  While in a dark cemetery in Prague aging men with long thick noses bent over a little boy, holding him tightly and taunting him, their white beards matted and filthy, the Old Man of the Mountain slowly thrusting a dull rusted knife between the little boy’s legs.

  Nubar shuddered and found himself standing in front of a military formation, three hundred handsome young men at attention. They wore the helmets and swords and tunics of ancient Greece, identical in cut and color. Courageous invincible warriors waiting for him to address them, to lead them again into victorious battle as only he could do, their immortal commander Parastein von Ho von Heim, Celsus of Bombastus, the incomparable von Wallenbomb.

  The handsome young warriors cheered him, holding up their clenched fists in salute. Nubar nodded solemnly and waved for silence. With a flourish he slipped his right hand around his right buttock. The lines and ranks watched him breathlessly.

  Wild cheering erupted. Nubar grinned and nodded. For a moment he was able to thrust his whole fist in up to the wrist. The massed young warriors were screaming ecstatically. The muscular stable boy knelt beside him, waiting with bowed head. Nubar carefully wiped his fist on the boy’s curly hair.

  Whole-wheat bread and vegetables, curly hair and bombs.

  Fumes. More mercury fumes and a moat, hygiene in general and the Assassins and subterranean passages. Brač. A dull rusted knife. Explosions.

  And across the sea a poker game being played by three ruthless criminals for control of Jerusalem. The Sinai Bible discovered by his grandfather, still buried in Jerusalem, now rightfully his.

  The original Bible, the philosopher’s stone, and a secret society in Jerusalem plotting against him to get it. A secret triad of players trying to steal what was his.

  Through his third eye Nubar saw it all clearly, through his obsidian eye of primitive glass. Nothing could escape his black volcanic eye on that dark stormy night of Epiphany.

  Nubar fell forward. His head struck the boards of the workbench and rested there, his poisoned delirious brain adrift in visions of immortality and the Sinai Bible.

  The next evening when they sat at dinner, the Mass in B Minor booming forth from the organ, Nubar was unusually subdued.

  I’ve had a few things checked into, said Sophia. I thought you might be interested in the facts that turned up.

  What facts, Bubba?

  For one, the English diplomat and autobiographical novelist known as Sir John Retcliffe. His real name was Hermann Goedsche, a former German postal clerk. He later admitted Biarritz was a total fabrication, including of course the chapter set in Prague.

  Nubar smiled faintly.

  What about Osman-Bey?

  An even worse fake. He also used the name Kibridli-Zade, but his real name was Millinger, a crook of Jewish origins from Serbia. He wrote in German and published in Switzerland, peddling his anti-Semitic works door to door from Constantinople to Athens. He was expelled from every country he ever entered for every kind of swindle, always on the move and always being arrested. His career began in 1879 with his expulsion from Venice, and ended with his death in 1898. The Russian secret police sent him to Paris with four hundred rubles to uncover evidence of a Jewish plot to take over the world. He used the money to manufacture World Conquest by the Jews and have it published.

  Ritual murder of Christian boys by rabbis? murmured Nubar vaguely.

  The most recent documentation of that comes from a Roman Catholic priest of Polish extraction who was defrocked for a variety of offenses, ranging from embezzlement to rape. In 1876 he wrote a book on the subject, then made an offer to some leaders of Russian Jewry to publish a refutation of his own book if they paid him. He also offered to lecture against his book if they paid him a little more. Don’t you understand what kind of company you’re keeping, Nubar?

  The whole truth is to be found in this formula, murmured Nubar, which provides the key to a host of disturbing and seemingly insoluble riddles.

  I know. The line refers to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and was written in Paris by one Rachkovsky, head of the Okhrana outside of Russia. He spent his time writing attacks on everyone and then answering
his own attacks, all under the names of real people. He also had the habit of fabricating nonexistent organizations, issuing pamphlets under their names and then refuting those same pamphlets, using the names of other nonexistent organizations. And so on endlessly. Can’t you really see what this kind of thing leads to?

  Nubar murmured that he would reconsider his theories of historical conspiracy, but actually he no longer cared much about them. It was the Great Jerusalem Poker Game that now obsessed him, the secret reasons for the game and especially the three evil criminals who had founded it and were now trying to deny him immortality by keeping him from the philosopher’s stone, which lay hidden somewhere in the Old City where his grandfather had buried it.

  Sophia placed a thin volume of poetry by the Catholicos Narses IV, a twelfth-century Armenian prelate, at his elbow.

  Just read a little, Nubar. It will soothe your nerves.

  Nubar nodded.

  And promise me you’ll at least consider a vacation with the Melchitarists in Venice in the not too distant future. I know you’d find it restful.

  I promise, Bubba, he said, already immersed in the details of shifting the operations of the UIA from the Balkans to the Middle East.

  11. Gronk

  To counteract the chaos of eternity there, utter order here.

  THE TASK NUBAR HAD set for the UIA was to uncover every particle of information related in any way to the Great Jerusalem Poker Game. Once armed with that knowledge, he would then move to destroy the game and ruin its three criminal founders. And with that accomplished he would at last be able to seize clandestine control of the Holy City himself, resurrect the Sinai Bible that had been buried there by his grandfather and use it as the philosopher’s stone that would guarantee him immortality.