Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  The sky was brilliant with stars that autumn night above the roof in the Armenian Quarter where Joe sat with Cairo turning over the years amidst the domes and spires and minarets of the Old City, the shadows of the Judean wastes dropping away into blackness.

  Theresa?

  There was the one who’d been Munk’s lover in Smyrna after the First World War, and there was the other Theresa whom Joe had seen during the massacres at Smyrna in 1922, shrieking and beating her head on the floor in the frenzy of her torment.

  Smyrna?

  Joe had gone there for a man named Stern. He was running guns for Stern then and there was a man Stern had wanted him to meet in Smyrna, an elderly Greek who provided Stern with guns, so that Joe could deal with him directly. The Greek’s name was Sivi, Theresa was his secretary. That was in 1922, September. Joe had taken Haj Harun with him.

  But there had never been time to discuss their business in Smyrna, Stern’s cause and Sivi’s cause and Joe running guns from one to the other. The massacre had begun on a Sunday in September and there was nothing but slaughter and fire as the Turks butchered Armenians and Greeks. Joe and Haj Harun had gone to the address they’d been given, Sivi’s villa on the harbor, and there they found Stern and Theresa trying to drag Sivi to safety, the old man bleeding from a head wound and raving incoherently, having been beaten by the Turkish soldiers who were inside his house, looting and setting fires.

  Stern and Joe managed to carry the old man away. Theresa was still calm but later she too collapsed and began raving. And the slaughter went on as the city went up in flames, and Joe shot a Turkish soldier who attacked them, and Haj Harun killed a blinded old Armenian who was burning to death, and Stern slit the throat of a little Armenian girl who was dying in unbearable pain. Screams and smoke in the alleys of Smyrna, screams and death everywhere in that nightmare on the waterfront.

  They all managed to escape. Joe was finished with Stern after that and told him so. Never another rifle smuggled for anyone, not for any cause, no cause was worth the slaughter.

  Sivi?

  He’d gone mad during the massacres.

  Theresa?

  Joe didn’t know what had happened to her after Smyrna. Having broken with Stern, he lost touch with all of them except for Haj Harun. But Munk also knew Stern, as it turned out, and later Joe learned from him that Stern was still running guns and Sivi had never recovered his sanity. Of Theresa, however, Munk knew nothing. She’d simply disappeared.

  For a year. Until she came to visit Joe on his roof a little over a year after Smyrna, on a clear evening early in November. November 5, to be exact. In Theresa’s tortured mind there was a reason for the date, as Joe eventually discovered.

  He didn’t know why she’d sought him out, nor did he ask her. She’d brought a bottle of cognac with her and they sat here where he and Cairo were sitting now, having a drink and talking and neither one of them mentioning Smyrna. It was as if they’d met once pleasantly somewhere, chance acquaintances together again, who knew? A clear night with cognac and stars and stray sounds drifting up from the alleys.

  To Joe it seemed better for them not to have a past that night. Not their past. Not the horrible hours they had known together in Smyrna. Better to have another drink and listen to the murmurs of the Old City, which never quite slept.

  Time passed, they made love. It had been Theresa’s doing but afterward she sat up in bed crying hysterically. Joe thought she was drunk. He tried to quiet her but she was screaming so wildly he had to slap her and slap her a second time, a third time before she stopped. She began talking feverishly then and her voice was terrible to hear.

  She was evil, she said. For a year before Joe had met her she’d been sleeping with every man she could find in Smyrna who had a beard. Because she was obsessed with Christ, she said, laughing hysterically. Because she was obsessed with finding Christ and all she could remember from the paintings in the convent school of her youth was that Christ had a beard. A beard. I’ve lost His face, shrieked Theresa, laughing hysterically.

  Well none of those men in Smyrna had been Christ, she said. Until in the flames and the smoke of the massacres she’d seen a vision, and that’s when she’d collapsed. She’d seen Joe standing over her with his beard and his burning eyes, the fires of Smyrna burning in his eyes, and she thought she’d found a face for Christ at last and that’s why she’d come to him tonight. To make love with him, to use him to fulfill her twisted vision.

  And how do you like that? she screamed. How do you like that?

  Joe moaned.

  Let it go, he whispered sadly. Let it go.

  But she wouldn’t. She kept on screaming and taunting him until finally he could stand it no longer and in another moment he was screaming too, calling her wicked, saying she was evil, shouting that she was damned forever. Damned forever.

  Theresa heard those words and suddenly she was sober, her face grave. She looked up at him.

  I am damned forever, she said simply. And then all at once she was a small naked woman huddled on his narrow iron cot, cowering and terrified and whispering naked words, terrible naked words.

  Normandy. The château where Theresa and her brother had been born. Their father, a count, was a fanatically religious man, their mother a plain and quiet woman. Theresa would one day look like her.

  A whore, shouted their father. That’s what you were when I saved you.

  Little Theresa and her brother crouching in a corner hearing the same dreadful words shouted over and over, their mother with a bowed head never saying anything. Then their mother began to stay in bed all day, and in the kitchen they heard the servants whispering of opium.

  Their father dismissed the servants from the château. He told his children his shame before God was too great to allow anyone to see their mother in such a condition. They would live alone in the château and pray for her redemption, which would come if they prayed hard enough.

  But it didn’t come. Instead the children were out playing one afternoon when they heard pounding in a tool shed. They peeked inside. A cross made out of old lumber was leaning against the wall. Their father was nailing their mother to it.

  They threw themselves at him and he knocked them down. They attacked him again and he drove them off with a hammer. They ran across the fields to the nearest neighbor, a curate, who ran back with them. Their father was sitting at the foot of the cross, weeping. Their mother’s head had fallen. She had already suffocated.

  The curate went to his bishop and it was decided the scandal had to be suppressed because of its religious nature. The bishop made arrangements with a magistrate and it was agreed the count shouldn’t be sent away for fear he might talk about what he had done. He would remain in the château and the curate would move in to live there. The children were made to place their hands on a crucifix and swear under threat of eternal damnation never to say anything about what they had seen. A certificate of death by natural causes was issued for their mother.

  The curate moved into the château. Theresa and her brother almost never saw their father, who went to church seven times a day with the curate, observing the canonical hours. Other than that, obeying the curate’s orders, he stayed in his rooms.

  Their father did penance but no one knew he had carried his fasting to the point of giving up food almost entirely. For sustenance he had turned to raw Calvados, and over the years the small amounts of wood alcohol in the Calvados slowly ate away his brain.

  The sudden outburst of submerged decay occurred five years later in the family chapel on the anniversary of the murder, at the special mass performed each year by the bishop for their mother. During the final benediction the emaciated old count shrieked and suddenly rushed forward. Before anyone could stop him he had climbed up on the altar. His arms were open to the crucifix on the wall and the words he screamed were those of the leper on the shores of Galilee.

  Lord, if thou will thou can make me clean.

  He leapt to embrace the crucifix and m
issed it, crashing through a window at the side and shattering the richly stained colors that had depicted a garden below Jerusalem, and the meeting there of two kinswomen who would one day know sorrow, Mary and Elizabeth.

  The window was gone, the old count’s throat was severed, the chapel was rendered into the silence of its candles.

  Theresa and her brother returned to the château and went on living as they always had, alone with each other in a private world, secluded in their love. And gradually under those gray skies of Normandy, far from the black twisted roots of the past, there was born within them the dream of another and timeless land by the Nile where the blue heavens were unbroken and the distant horizons limitless, an ancient dream of an eternal pharaoh wed to his eternal sister.

  One day Theresa threw herself down the stairs. Her brother carried her to her room and that night he went out into the drenched forest to dig deeply the grave of their hopeless love in the loose stinking earth, there to bury the tiny bundle of unborn flesh wrapped by Theresa in her own Confirmation dress, once spotlessly white and flowing and now bloodied to the ends of its delicate lace, soon to rot in the undergrowth of fallen vines and blind nibbling creatures.

  That winter the howling winds of trapped memory had come to haunt her brother. In the tool shed where their mother had been crucified he soaked himself with kerosene and struck a match.

  And so at the age of nineteen Theresa had left everything behind and fled south to the Mediterranean, by chance to beautiful Smyrna where kindly Sivi had taken her in and where she had known a few peaceful years because of him, only to find the horrors of the past were inescapable, abandoning herself then to her sins and spiraling downward in a life of degradation.

  Until a terrible massacre descended on Smyrna and Sivi was raving in pain, and a wizened ageless man abruptly appeared to defend them, an apparition in a rusty helmet and a faded yellow cloak, trailing a long sword.

  Who is that? she had screamed, and a soft Irish voice had whispered near her that it was all right, the old man thought he was the archangel Gabriel now, come to smote God’s enemies.

  She had turned. She had looked up and seen a small dark man standing over her, a man with the beard and the burning eyes from the paintings on the convent walls of her childhood.

  Christ in the gloom and smoke with a pistol in his belt. Christ in the fires of Smyrna.

  Dawn had come to the roof in the Old City by the time Theresa had finished speaking. Joe stroked her head and wrapped another blanket around her naked body. She had refused to dress until she had told him everything. He rose and went to the door, leaving her sitting on the narrow iron cot. He opened the door and stood there gazing north in the gray light.

  Joe?

  Yes.

  I’ve never told anyone before. Never. Do you mind my having told you?

  No, he said sadly. No. It’s better to tell someone.

  Joe? That stained-glass window in Normandy? The garden beneath Jerusalem where Mary went to meet Elizabeth?

  His shoulders suddenly sagged in the doorway. He leaned against the wood and sighed.

  Yes I know it, Ein Karem. I’ve been to the village. And yesterday was St Elizabeth’s feast day. You chose that day to come here, to come to me. Why?

  Because that’s where I’ve been living, Joe. Since Smyrna, for the whole last year, that’s where I’ve been. There’s a leper colony there and I’ve been working in it. Joe? Please? These hands that held you last night wash lepers. Wash lepers. They’re not good enough for anything else. Joe? Could you forgive me for what I’ve done in life? I know God never will, but could you? I’ve been wretched for so long, and I know I don’t even have the right to walk in these streets where He came to suffer and die for us. Yesterday evening when I entered the gate I thought I’d be struck dead. But I had to come and tell someone here and you’re the only person I dared to speak to, because you’ve never really known me. I’ve been terrified of Jerusalem for so long, Joe, you can’t imagine, no one can. And I’m weak and I’ve done one awful thing after another in life, and I’ve suffered for it, but that was why I went to Ein Karem. To be near Jerusalem, to be able to look up at it, the Holy City that will never be mine. Oh Joe, please? I know what I did to you last night was horrible, but if you say you’ll forgive me I’ll go away and you’ll never see me again, I swear it. I’ll go away and never bother you again, Joe. Only here, now, just once let me be forgiven here. Just once. Please?

  He stood in the doorway. The new sun was touching the domes and the spires and the minarets with gold. The tears were running down his face and his voice was choked.

  Yes, little Theresa, poor tormented little one. Of course I forgive you.

  With His words, Joe? Could you please? I’ll go and you’ll never see me again. In His city? Please?

  Joe nodded. They weren’t his words to give but he repeated them anyway because there was no one else to speak them, no one else to utter the healing words. So he looked at the floor and whispered what Christ had said to the woman in the house of the Pharisee.

  Thy sins are forgiven, thy faith hath saved thee. Go in peace.

  A scream, an almost silent scream that cut through him with all the pain of Smyrna. Joe looked up, he looked at the bed. Theresa was sitting with her hands up in front of her, staring at them and screaming silently.

  Joe stared too. Punctures had appeared in her palms. Christ’s wounds. She was beginning to bleed.

  Joe got up from the wall and paced back and forth.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, Cairo, right there in that doorway. It seemed forever. And she didn’t move either. She sat there naked on the bed with the blankets falling open, her hands in front of her, staring, watching the wounds form, watching the blood come out, both of us watching it happen, not believing it and watching it happen. I don’t even remember whether either of us spoke after that or how I got her down to Father Zeno or why, but I did.

  She was in some kind of shock and I wasn’t much better. He bandaged her and put her to bed and prayed beside her all day and all night. He asked me not to say anything about it and of course I wouldn’t have anyway, we were both pretending it might have been anything.

  But it wasn’t, Cairo. It wasn’t just anything. The wounds went away in a few days but they came back the next month and the month after that, and they have ever since. Ever since that night we made love in there ten years ago.

  What does Father Zeno say?

  Only that he hears her confession and I’m to tell no one what she said that night. She never goes out anymore, she prefers it that way. She has a room down there somewhere, I don’t know where, and she keeps to it most of the time, and after the wounds come she doesn’t see anyone, not even Father Zeno. I respect him. What he’s doing is best for her.

  Do you see her?

  Never.

  Would you like to?

  I don’t know. I did the first three or four months she was there. She seemed to want it, to need it. We wouldn’t do much, hardly even talk, just sit together in the courtyard in the evening. But then one evening Father Zeno met me and said she couldn’t see me then and it would be better if I didn’t come anymore.

  Did he say why?

  No.

  Did you ask him?

  No.

  Cairo nodded. Joe sat down again. The moon was gone now and the domes and spires and minarets of the Old City were waning in the soft starry glow of midnight.

  You know, said Joe, I don’t think I’m going to be in the game much longer.

  How’s that?

  I’m not sure, but it’s been almost twelve years now, hasn’t it. Twelve years in December.

  The last day of December, said Cairo. You were sitting in that coffee shop feeling bitter because you were a few months away from your twenty-second birthday and already eighty-five years old, and I came in with Bongo to get out of the wind, and then Munk turned up with his samurai bow and his three-level watch, and that’s when it all began. A cold win
ter day with snow definitely in the air.

  Yes. You know I was doing some thinking when I was down in Aqaba this time. Thinking it might be time to move on. Thinking that what I’ve been telling myself I wanted for the last dozen years, well maybe it’s not what I want at all.

  Joe waved his arm toward the city.

  The things that happen here, what can you say about them? They happen, that’s all. Have you ever heard of something called the Sinai Bible?

  What is it?

  Well it’s supposed to be the original Bible. Supposedly it was written three thousand years ago, more or less.

  Cairo smiled.

  And how’s that possible?

  Who knows? Who knows what’s possible around here? Not me, I don’t, I’m just a poor fisherman’s son from the Aran Islands, a windswept place and barren and nowhere, so poor that God didn’t even put any soil on them. We had to make it out of seaweed and manure. Well the point is the Sinai Bible is buried near here.

  How did you learn about this Sinai Bible?

  Oh I’ve been hearing about it since I arrived in Jerusalem. It’s the kind of thing that will fascinate me every time. And you can pick up clues when you’re looking for them.

  Joe laughed.

  Ah and I was innocent when I first got here. I actually believed then that this Bible was something Haj Harun had written. I heard about it and got it wrong, and Haj Harun confused me more, and off I was just spinning like a top around the idea of a Sinai Bible. You know what Haj Harun likes to call it when he’s mixing up the ages? The story of my life. But of course it could be, depending on your point of view. It could be that as well as anything else. After all that’s about how long he’s lived, three thousand years or so. So why shouldn’t he think the original Bible is the story of his life?

  It’s a nice way to look at it, said Cairo.

  Yes. Anyway, after a time I learned that such a Bible actually had been found in the last century, in the Sinai I guess, that’s why it has that name. A Trappist monk found it, but that’s all I know about him, and he was so appalled by its chaos he decided to forge a new original and let it be found, then buried the real original here in Jerusalem, the Holy City don’t you see. Well he did that and the fake original was acquired by the czar in the last century, and just this year the Bolsheviks sold it to the British Museum for a hundred thousand pounds. So how’s that for a saga and a half? But the real one, the real one’s still here.