Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  Where?

  Right here, somewhere in the Armenian Quarter. Buried in a basement hole.

  And that’s why you wanted to live here? You moved in to be close to it because you wanted to find it?

  I did, I mightily did, but now I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure I really want to see what’s in it. Something along those lines, I just don’t know anymore. Maybe it’d be better to leave it alone. Better to think of it as the story of Haj Harun’s life, and remind myself that I’ve been fortunate enough to have been able to keep the old man company these dozen and one years, better just to let it go at that. There are more than enough mysteries in his life to think about, certainly more than enough for me, so why go on looking?

  Why? asked Cairo.

  Joe smiled.

  Well there you are. I don’t think I will. I think it’s time for me to give up the seeking and the search for lost treasure and go take my ease in the west, Holy City West, wherever that might be. It’s time to become Chief Sipping Bear at home in the setting sun.

  Are we to be treated to a Zuni sun dance now?

  Go on with you, Cairo. We’re hours away from sunup and any dance of that nature could only be a failure at this hour. No, there are other matters before us. Now that it’s midnight and a little more we have to hear from a very important spokesman who goes by the name of Finn MacCool.

  Joe cupped his hands around his mouth and pretended to shout out over the rooftops.

  Hey Finnnnn, he whispered, we’re right here in Jerusalem. Lend us a hand if you will.

  Do you think he heard me? whispered Joe. I was aiming in a generally western direction but I don’t know how well my voice is carrying tonight. What do you think?

  Cairo laughed.

  He heard you, definitely. And I take it he’s some tribal god native to the bogs of Ireland?

  Now why would you be guessing as wildly as that? Well as a matter of fact that’s just what he is, a great strong giant of a man whose favorite pastime on nights like these is telling stories. In fact he’s got so many stories to tell, most of them about himself, that he never runs out of them. He’s been doing it for ages already and it looks like he just might go on doing it to the end of time. Now back home when you want Finn to tell you a story you say, Please relate. Will you do so?

  What?

  What you’re doing, Cairo. I’ve noticed you might be getting tired of the game yourself. The signs are there and of course with my keen eye, I wouldn’t be missing them would I. Why the poker game for you originally? Why did you want control of Jerusalem? Please relate.

  It is true that I will not.

  Joe laughed.

  Ah Cairo, there you go using my very homespun English, bad as it is and getting no better. But with that accent of yours you’ll never be taken for an Irishman, not even in Africa. Your tone is too aristocratic by half. Well then, will you relate?

  I’ll compromise with you, Joe. I’ll go so far as to tell the tale the way your Finn MacCool might.

  Which is to say?

  Stretched and distorted and made outrageous.

  Fine, very fine. That’s tale-telling for sure and nothing could be more accurate anyway. So please to begin. And as you do I think I’ll just be taking a shade more of this drink that looks like water but definitely isn’t, is definitely not.

  That won’t help at this hour of night.

  You’re right, Cairo, it won’t, it surely will not. Makes a good man old before his time and a bad man young before he’s ready, a curse on the race and that’s a fact. But if it’s any help to you I have some of that other stuff here for a smoke, and maybe you’ll be wanting a puff or two before the night’s out. Well maybe you will so I’ll just lay the pipe and the mixings beside you in case you feel the urge sneaking up in the darkness, a late evening in the Holy City being no time to exert yourself unduly. Now, you’re the African Finn MacCool you say?

  I wasn’t aware of saying that.

  Ah come on, Cairo. After all these years of us playing poker together, how could you possibly mislay your name? I’ve always known you weren’t in the game for money, something else has been up. What’s the deed?

  It was going to be Jerusalem first, then Mecca.

  Has a ring to it all right. What in Mecca?

  The Holy of Holies.

  Ah.

  The black meteorite.

  Ah.

  You may not know it, but that black meteorite is the most sacred object in Islam. It’s in the Kaaba. I was going to steal it and take it to Africa and bury it in good rich African soil. Black soil. Where no one would ever find it.

  Why?

  Cairo grew somber then. He described Jidda, for centuries the great depot of the slave trade, and how many of the African children who arrived there had already walked more than twelve hundred miles to reach the Arab ferries on the other side of the Red Sea.

  He described the small wells he had seen across the Sahara, surrounded for miles with dry bleached bones, the skeletons of slaves who hadn’t survived the forced marches of their Arab owners. And although the footprints of the slaves had fled where the earth was hard, straight deep troughs still ran from horizon to horizon to show where the countless slave caravans had passed century after century in the desert, grooves once cut by lumbering camels laden with Arab slavers and their tents and their food and their water, for them, not for those who stumbled starving in the dust behind them.

  Joe listened to it all in silence. And not for the first time he felt the enormous sadness that was in Cairo, a sadness that would have seemed unbearable to Joe had it not been for Cairo’s great strength. Cairo with his brilliant smile, Cairo who laughed so warmly, his huge hands so gentle when he reached out and laid them upon you, when he embraced you in greeting and simply lifted you up off the ground in his exuberance, tenderly, gently, with the natural ease of a man picking up his child. Indomitable in the end. There was no other way to see him.

  So Joe listened in silence, and after a time Cairo broke through his somber mood.

  Anger now, Cairo?

  There was.

  Vengeance too?

  There was.

  Well by God, I can see how you’ve been able to bet all these years without looking at your cards. It’s there in the very name you bear.

  Given to me by my great-grandmother, a slave from the Sudan. I was going to do it for her and all my people, to repay the Arabs for the black gold they’ve carried out of Africa over the centuries.

  But now you’re not so sure that’s what you want to be doing?

  No. Somehow my passion has been spent along the way. Building something would be better. Perhaps it’s because of the game. Perhaps I learned that there.

  From our Munk?

  From Munk, yes.

  I know what you mean. But here now, what’s this? Do I see you filling that pipe and preparing a smoke?

  You do.

  Curious. Never understood the stuff myself. Why would anyone want to bother with that when there’s genuine poteen on the premises? A mystery to me, one more among the many. But since we find ourselves taking our ease in our different ways, shouldn’t we be talking about our futures? You know how Munk does nothing but deal in futures. Well what about us? Isn’t it time we did a little dealing in that line ourselves?

  Cairo smiled. Time, he said.

  Right. How’s that stuff taste by the way?

  Good.

  Now that’s odd, it is. That’s exactly how this tastes and poteen is nothing like that at all.

  It was dawn before Cairo and Joe embraced on the roof and Cairo made his way across the little stone bridge and down the twisting stone stairs to the street, quiet at that early hour but not deserted, the beggars and madmen and pious fanatics of the Old City already out pursuing their vocations as they had been for millennia.

  Cairo walked slowly through the alleys toward the bazaar, thinking he might have something to eat. Soon he would be going back to Africa, he knew that now. He and Joe
had talked away the night making their plans, deciding that December 31 would be the appropriate time to play their last hand with Munk, the twelfth anniversary of the game. They had also agreed to make it a surprise to Munk, what they were going to do on that last hand.

  But would Munk be surprised? wondered Cairo.

  Probably not. They all knew each other too well by now.

  Dawn after a long autumn night. Ten years, thought Cairo, after Joe and Theresa had spent their hours of darkness and light together on a rooftop in Jerusalem, and conceived a child.

  Did Joe know?

  Cairo nodded. Of course Joe knew. No one had told him but he knew. He had admitted as much when describing how Father Zeno had told him that it would be better if he didn’t come to see Theresa anymore.

  Did he say why? Cairo had asked.

  No, answered Joe.

  Did you ask him?

  No, answered Joe.

  And so Joe had known it all these years, a secret borne for the sake of others and never to be spoken, until last night when he had finally shared it with a friend, finally, in his weariness after returning yet again from Aqaba.

  And where, wondered Cairo, would Father Zeno have placed the child? With a family? In a foundling home?

  In any case, not a religious home. That much was certain. From what Joe had said about Father Zeno, Cairo knew that the gentle old priest would never have presumed to choose a faith for the child. Thus no one but he would ever know who the child really was. Cairo was sure of that. Father Zeno would have made the arrangements very carefully and the secret would die with him. And somewhere in Jerusalem, or in an encampment near it, a child would grow up not knowing he or she had been born to Christ and Mary Magdalene.

  Cairo paused in front of a blind beggar and dropped a copper coin in his cup. Ever since that spring when he had come down the Nile to find the lid on top of Menelik Ziwar’s massive sarcophagus, the crinkled smiling face gone, he had never once passed a beggar without giving him something, his way of recalling the kindness an old man had once shown to a frightened twelve-year-old boy, illiterate and without any skills, who had suddenly found himself alone in the world.

  The elderly blind man whispered his thanks and Cairo moved on.

  Only to stop a few yards away and look back. For a long moment he gazed at the beggar where he sat on the worn stones in the dust, then he retraced his steps and placed three gold coins, one after the other, in the beggar’s scarred hand. The beggar heard the coins ring and his blind eyes turned upward. He murmured in disbelief.

  Gold?

  Yes. I would like you to say a prayer for a child, if you will.

  With all my heart. Tell me the name of the child and I will pray.

  I don’t know the name and I’ve never seen the child. Or perhaps I have seen the child and don’t know it. In this I am as blind as you.

  And so are we all, murmured the beggar. But God knows the names that are and will be for all of us, and I will pray and He will hear my prayer.

  Cairo nodded. He placed his hand lightly on the beggar’s shoulder and held it there, then turned and entered the bazaar, now raucously coming to life amidst the cries of merchants and thieves hawking their endless goods and trickeries.

  But there was yet another secret in that house in the Armenian compound next to the cathedral of St James, unknown even to Father Zeno, a secret Joe had discovered some years after seeking refuge there in 1921, when the old priest had given him the rooftop home where he had learned to dream his Jerusalem dreams.

  Early in the nineteenth century, it seemed, a young beggar had turned up at the house one blustery winter night, asking for shelter. The beggar was entirely naked, lacking even a loincloth. He had pretended to be an Armenian although the priest who received him knew he was not. He was given clothes and a blanket and shown to a room.

  The next morning the beggar made a proposition. If he were allowed to live in the cellar of the house for the rest of the winter, he would carry out slops and do other menial tasks around the compound. This offer was accepted as an act of charity.

  It immediately became apparent the stranger was no ordinary man. Before descending into the cellar that night he explained in a humble yet determined voice that he was under strict self-imposed vows of poverty, celibacy and silence. Save for the omitted vow of obedience, in fact, he might well have been a secret Trappist on some solitary mission.

  The priest in the house was skeptical at first, but not when he found the stranger had abandoned the cellar for the even greater deprivation and privacy of a dark basement hole beneath it. Here indeed, then, was one of those anchorites who appeared from time to time in Jerusalem to pursue some personal religious task in isolation.

  The anchorite never spoke again to anyone’s knowledge. For the next twelve years he lived in his basement hole beneath the cellar of the house, performing his lowly duties around the compound and coming and going on occasion, but spending most of his time alone in his subterranean cell.

  Or so it was assumed. Actually the cellar above his basement hole also had a small entrance that opened directly onto an alley outside the compound, so it would have been possible for him to leave without being witnessed by the priests. And in fact there were years when he wasn’t seen by any of them for long periods. Because of the extreme austerity of the anchorite’s existence, the priests, with affectionate humor, had come to refer to him among themselves as Brother Zeno, after the founder of Stoicism.

  Then in 1836, or when the anchorite appeared to be about thirty, he walked out of the compound one morning with his open hand raised in the sign of peace, turned south at the gate without a word, and was never seen again.

  His abrupt disappearance caused the priests in the compound to ponder the significance of this enigmatic man who had lived near the cathedral for twelve years. Now they spoke of Brother Zeno with awe, rather than mild humor. Where had he gone and why? What new role had he sought for himself?

  In the course of the nineteenth century the account gradually acquired the dimensions of a fable around the cathedral of St James. Somehow the priests who later arrived at the Armenian compound found it immensely appealing that an anonymous man of unknown origins, and unknown destiny, had once lived in a basement hole beneath the stones where they walked, oblivious to the strictures of any church yet living the strictest of lives according to the tenets of an unspoken vocation.

  The fable was so appealing it became a tradition for the most respected priest in the compound to be assigned as his residence the house that gave access to the basement hole, and to be known thereafter among the other priests as Father Zeno, in memory of that dedicated man who had mysteriously appeared there early in the nineteenth century, and just as mysteriously disappeared a dozen years later.

  The present Father Zeno had received this honor in 1914 at the age of seventy-nine.

  And I think what most engages our imagination, he had said to Joe, is precisely the puzzle of that man’s disappearance. We here have all openly professed the vows of our vocation. Because of them we have taken our respective places in life, and so we continue in orderly lives of service and prayer until our time on earth passes. But him? What was his vocation? What had he sworn to do and where did he go? Are there callings that can never be revealed to others? And then lingering behind the mystery there is always the question of the man’s apparent age when he left here, which was Christ’s age when He set out on His ministry. Does it have a meaning?

  Father Zeno smiled his gentle smile.

  A priest may wonder about such things. Here in Jerusalem where we keep watch and bear witness to His sacrifice, we may wonder.

  I can understand that, said Joe. It’s a strange and haunting tale.

  And then putting together everything he had learned about the life of the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins, which was more than he had ever admitted to Cairo or anyone else, the dates and disappearances of that pious Albanian Trappist who had left his order and gone
into the Sinai to forge the original Bible, Joe leaned forward and asked his question.

  What do they say Brother Zeno did in that basement hole for twelve years? Is it known?

  It’s assumed he was in prayer, but other than that, no. Out of respect for his privacy none of the priests ever visited him down there.

  Yes of course. And did he ever have someone from outside the compound visit him?

  Father Zeno looked surprised.

  Why do you ask that?

  No reason really. I just wondered.

  Well that’s odd because he did, as it happens. A minor fact but recorded, I suppose, because the visits were so rare. About once a year, according to tradition. And also because the priests at that time wondered what could possibly have gone on during those visits, in view of his vow of silence.

  Perhaps he and his visitor didn’t need words. Is anything remembered about the other man?

  The comment’s vague. He’s described only as very old.

  An Arab?

  Now Father Zeno looked shocked.

  Yes, he whispered.

  The man’s dress, is anything said about it?

  There’s one obscure reference that he wore a faded yellow cloak. Why? Does it mean anything? You can’t imagine how much this interests all of us here. If we only knew more. If only I knew more.

  Father Zeno clasped his hands. He lowered his eyes.

  Forgive me, that was uncalled for. I didn’t mean to act like a child with his first puzzle. There’s much we don’t know in this world and much we can never know, and it’s the same for all of us. For you, for me, for all of us.

  Thus Father Zeno had lowered his eyes in humility, and in humility he had laid aside the questions whose answers seemed unknowable. And Joe had learned that among the people Haj Harun visited on his yearly rounds in the Holy City, along with the nameless cobbler near Damascus Gate whose cubbyhole Haj Harun could never find, along with the nameless muttering man who ceaselessly paced back and forth on the steps to the crypt in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, along with them there had once been a pious linguistic genius with whom Haj Harun had conversed in Aramaic, the language spoken in Palestine two and three thousand years ago.