Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  The last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins perfecting his skills for twelve years in a basement hole in Jerusalem, teaching himself to write with both hands because he knew the task facing him in a Sinai cave would otherwise surpass any man’s endurance. Preparing himself for the creation to come, the most spectacular forgery in history.

  So here beneath the rooftop home where Joe had learned to dream his Jerusalem dreams, right here in a basement hole below, lay buried the original manuscript Wallenstein had brought back from the Sinai after completing his forgery of it, that fabulous creation that had been sought by so many, a document that was unchronicled and circular and calmly contradictory, suggesting infinity, the real Sinai Bible.

  Behind him his pigeons were trilling quietly as they fell asleep one after the other. Lying flat on his stomach under the stars, on the little stone bridge that led to his rooftop, Joe held his breath and peeked over the edge of the bridge, down at the narrow courtyard where a single lamp was burning. Father Zeno was at his potter’s wheel and in front of him in the soft yellow light, sitting on the ground, watching, was Theresa.

  Father, she whispered, it’s coming again.

  Watch the wheel, my child. Watch it turn.

  But I’m frightened. I’m always so frightened when it comes.

  Keep your eyes here, my child. We’re almost finished and then we’ll go in and pray together and all will be well.

  Joe rolled silently over on his back and gazed up at the sky, listening to the rub and the squeak of the potter’s wheel raising its vessel, the echoless rising whirl of the wheel.

  Bless our little Theresa, he thought, little one that she is.

  A night seemingly like so many others. Father Zeno tending his wheel and Theresa her sainthood, and above them on the rooftops, Joe, a silent witness with his sleeping pigeons, minding the dreams of new stars over Jerusalem.

  Signal night, he thought, quiet place for sure. Demanding night up here beneath the murmurs of heaven.

  14. Stern

  And if God turns out to be a gunrunner crossing the desert

  in a balloon in 1914?

  CHRISTMAS EVE, 1933.

  Joe sat in a filthy Arab coffee shop near Damascus Gate, slumped over an empty glass of Arab cognac. Wisps of snow blew across the windows and the wind groaned in the alleys. Only one other customer was there at that hour, an Arab laborer asleep at a front table with a newspaper over his face.

  The door opened and a large shapeless man came in. He stood for a moment with his back to the door and then came shuffling heavily across the room. Joe stood up and put out his hand.

  Hello, Stern.

  The Arab under the newspaper stirred briefly and began to snore again. A clock on the wall clicked in the stillness. The unshaven proprietor, moving unevenly from the effects of hashish, brought the cognacs and coffee Stern had ordered. After greeting each other the two men sat for a time watching the snow dance across the windows. Joe was the first to speak.

  Snow. Just like the last time. And the same night and the same place, only now it’s twelve years later. You know way back then, Stern, I was telling you I was going to become the undercover King of Jerusalem. Power, that’s what I wanted. And my father made just such a prophecy on a June night in 1914. Just slipped out of him it did. He had no idea what he was saying, or why, but he said it and he was right so far as what could have been. You know that, Stern? I could have been if I’d wanted to be, but I didn’t want it enough. That’s a funny thing about prophecy. Even when it’s infallible you still have to want it to come true.

  Yes.

  Yes and just look at this brown oil in our glasses. They’re still using it to fuel the lamps like the last time. Before you came in our staggering host there was going around filling the lamps with his wretched cognac, cheaper than kerosene I suppose and works just as well as he prepares this wreck of a place for Christmas, although why a Moslem should be preparing for Christmas is information that eludes me. Make any sense to you?

  Stern smiled.

  You’re looking a lot older, Joe.

  Me? Go on with you, not a particle of truth in it. You mean just because my beard’s going white and my eyes look like a flock of pigeons have been doing a jig around them these last dozen years? No I don’t believe it, but if it were true I’d say it’s the rarefied air that’s done it, up here on top of the holy mountain and all. A few people get younger in Jerusalem, most age. Over time this place has a way of opening up the guts of a man and laying them out for heavenly inspection. Listen, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you. I’m sorry what I said to you in Smyrna in ’22. That was a bad time for me and I had things mixed up, had them wrong. It’s been a while, can we forget it? It was just that I wasn’t doing what I wanted to be doing.

  Nobody was, Joe.

  Saints preserve us, that’s the truth. Well I’m sorry, that’s all, and I wanted to tell you so. It wasn’t right, but as you say, nothing was. You still carry those awful Arab cigarettes?

  Stern offered the packet.

  I’m glad you got in touch, Stern, I really am. And not just so I could say I was sorry, although there’s that too. My God but I was young then and didn’t know much, nothing in fact, plain zero. Since then I’ve learned a little. You do playing poker in Jerusalem for twelve years.

  Stern took a cigarette and Joe lit it for him. He watched Stern’s eyes.

  Hey, you all right?

  What do you mean, Joe?

  Nothing.

  No, what is it?

  The light’s not too good in here for Christmas Eve, that’s what it is, but what can you expect when they fuel the lamps with the same liquid shit they serve their customers. Bloody Christmas Eves, I never did like them. New Year’s Eve either, they’re all the same. Bloody expectations and then boom, you come crashing down into the truth. Eve, is that the problem? The myth was right after all and we should blame her for all our troubles?

  What were you going to say before, Joe?

  Can’t remember. But listen, why don’t you tell an old friend how your work’s going? It’s been a long time and I need some catching up. You’ve been all over the place and I’ve just been here, just been doing not much in Jerusalem. Well?

  Look, we were there together. What is it?

  Nothing.

  Nothing. You want me to ask you about Theresa, Joe? She was there too. And tell you about Sivi? He was there too. He finally died two months ago, a blessing. So what was it?

  All right then. It was your eyes, Stern.

  What about them?

  The match. When I lit the match.

  Joe stopped and rubbed his head. A match here, a match in Normandy. He saw a match striking in Normandy, in a tool shed with the smell of kerosene and the stink of rotting wood. Wouldn’t there ever be an end to Smyrna? Did it always have to lead you back to other things? That afternoon and evening and night in Smyrna with Stern. With Sivi and Theresa and Haj Harun. Couldn’t you escape that ever?

  Joe sighed.

  Listen, Stern. You’re not into the heavy stuff are you? I mean, you know there’s only one way out of that.

  Stern smiled. He pushed back his hair.

  There’s only one way out anyway, he said.

  Joe nodded. He’s big, he thought, never realized how big he really is. Bulky and substantial, just large and there and kind of shapeless but there, reassuring in a way, it’s strange. And me small and slight, not much to me now or then, now or maybe ever. Just not much there. Just a poor fisherman’s son who’s learned to play a little poker in the Old City.

  Joe?

  Well Christ man I know it, know it full well. It’s no easy game you’re playing what with the fucking Arabs and Jews at each other’s throats all the time and you being both of them and trying to make that work, and coming from where you did besides. The Yemen, what a place to grow up. And why didn’t you ever tell me Strongbow was your father? I always had him down for a myth.

  He was a myth, said
Stern quietly.

  I know it and you had to live with it. Have to live with it. Too bloody much.

  How’d you find out he was my father, Joe?

  Cairo Martyr. We play poker together, remember?

  Oh yes, the inscrutable mummy dust dealer. But how did he find out?

  From the man who adopted him when he was a child, another nineteenth-century myth who went by the name of Menelik Ziwar.

  Ziwar? But that was before Strongbow retired to the Yemen. Long before I was born.

  Sure, but then they got together again just before they both died. Weren’t you aware of that?

  No, of course I wasn’t. Where was it? In the Yemen?

  Not a bit of it. Old Menelik’s arthritis was acting up and the best he could do was limp upstream a yard or two. It was in Egypt, in Cairo. At that same filthy restaurant beside the Nile where the two of them had had their forty-year conversation.

  I don’t believe it.

  All true, all the same.

  But I never even knew Strongbow ever left the Yemen. He’d sworn he’d never set foot west of the Red Sea again.

  I guess he decided to break his promise in order to see old Menelik. And it wasn’t for long, just one Sunday afternoon for lunch. It seems they were catching up on the past.

  But that’s astounding. When was it?

  Maybe 1913? Strongbow wrote that since they were both due to go the other way before long, being in their nineties, they ought to have a last toot in their old haunt and fill up on wine and talk and spiced lamb, and then do a final repeat of their famous jump into the river at the end of the afternoon to clear their heads, so to speak, before they passed on. So that’s what the two old gents did, seventy-five years after the first time. Swilled the wine and munched the lamb and raved on in general treating themselves to a scandalous Sunday afternoon, then did their leap into the Nile and went home sober, more or less. Anyway, Cairo Martyr grew up dreaming about Strongbow and all his exploits because of the things old Menelik had told him. Dreams, don’t you see. Dreams. Your father gave them to an orphaned black boy growing up beside the Nile, he gave them to Haj Harun too.

  He did?

  Sure. What about a genie in the desert in the last century? Haj Harun on his annual haj and suddenly finding the sky strangely dark in northern Arabia, so darkly strange he knew there had to be something unusual going on of a heavenly nature. Could it be so? History making one of its moves with the help of a comet? Sound a chime of time, does it?

  Joe winked.

  That’s right, Stern. A genie in the desert, a genie and his doings and Haj Harun a witness to it. And thereafter for Haj Harun, mysteries to dream to.

  Stern leaned back and smiled. Strongbow’s Comet. It had been one of his father’s favorite stories. How he had discovered a comet in northern Arabia, and how a frightened Arab had stumbled upon him while he was taking measurements, and how he had explained the comet to the frightened man.

  Yes indeed, said Joe. Haj Harun told me all about the experience and I repeated it to Cairo once and it matched exactly with the account of Strongbow’s Comet that he had heard from old Menelik as a boy. So that’s how we identified the genie Haj Harun had met out there in the desert so long ago, the very giant and worker of miracles in question. Dreams for sure, you see. Strongbow the genie just leaving them everywhere.

  Stern clasped his hands tightly together on top of the table. He was staring at them, frowning, drifting away. Joe took out a thick envelope and pushed it under Stern’s arm. He started for the toilet at the back of the shop.

  What’s that? asked Stern without looking up.

  Nothing. Just put it away and forget about it.

  Joe walked away. Of course Stern knew what it was. It was money, a lot of money, much more than Stern would ever have guessed. Everyone knew Stern never had any himself. Always spending what little he had on his hopeless dream of a vast Levantine homeland for Arabs and Christians and Jews together, the peoples of his heritage, Stern’s mother a Yemeni Jew and his father an English lord who’d become an Arab.

  That kind of homeland? That kind of dream? Hopeless. It could never happen.

  But Joe wanted to give him the money all the same. Maybe he’d spend a small part of it on himself. My God it was Christmas Eve after all, at least Stern could treat himself to a new pair of shoes. The ones he was wearing looked like the same pair he’d had on in Smyrna that night on the quay, that awful September night in ’22. Joe remembered those shoes, he’d never forget them. He’d been looking at them when the knife came clattering down on the cobblestones beside him, the knife that was covered with blood. Lying on his side on the cobblestones with a broken arm and down came that terrible knife beside those shoes. Worn shoes, cheap shoes, not wearing well even then. He’d have liked to have told Stern that’s what the money was for tonight, the whole thick wad of bills just to buy one new pair of shoes, so they both wouldn’t have to look at the old ones anymore. But of course he couldn’t say that, couldn’t say anything about it. You didn’t talk to a man about his shoes when you hadn’t seen him in over eleven years.

  Worn, cheap, walking where? Why? Stumbling to what?

  Hopeless, thought Joe. Bloody ideals will ruin a man every time, that’s what. Kingdom come, that’s what. Hopeless in this world.

  He came back to the table. The envelope was where he had left it.

  Joe?

  Never mind now, just put it away so we can forget about it. Bloody snow won’t let up, will it? Just goes right on blurring the view in this land of milk and honey that isn’t. And don’t get gloomy on me this Christmas Eve, I know what was bothering you just now. You were thinking how your father used to get mistaken for some marvel of a genie while you’re just a gunrunner sliding downhill with a morphine habit or whatever it is you use to get you over the bumps. But let me tell you that’s not all there is to it. There’s another side to the tale by God, and a remarkable one it is. Makes a man’s hair stand on end and maybe even have faith in the wonder of it all. Did you ever know Haj Harun recognized you the minute he laid eyes on you up there in Smyrna?

  He couldn’t have. We’d never met.

  Oh yes you had. You’d met all right, only you were someone else then. And not just a genie out in the desert playing with his comet, nothing so minor as that. Not just a giant magician slapping a certain hue across the sky so the common folk would know a new prophet was on his way up from the wastes. More than just a Strongbow for sure. In fact you’d be surprised who you were.

  Stern smiled.

  Who was I?

  Well I’ll tell you then. The very article, that’s who you were. Himself.

  Who’s that?

  God. Now how’s that for a case of mistaken identity? It beats Strongbow by more than a little and as I’ve often said, we have to give Haj Harun credit, we do. When he limps out there into the desert to find his way to Mecca, he sees the sights. Well this sight, and none can match it, occurred at dawn. You were up in your balloon running guns and when you came down at dawn to hide out you nearly landed right on top of Haj Harun, who naturally thought you were God coming down to reward him for his three thousand years of trying to defend the Holy City, always on the losing side. It must have been around 1914, remember it now? A broken-down old Arab in the desert at dawn tottering on spindly legs? His eyes permanently feverish with dreams from the Thousand and One Nights? And you coming down in your balloon and him prostrating himself and asking you if you would tell him your name? Remember?

  Yes, I do now.

  Well how about that then?

  Stern smiled sadly. He stared down at his fists and said nothing.

  Well?

  It’s not funny, whispered Stern after a moment. To be rewarded by a petty gunrunner in a balloon. It’s not funny. Not when you have faith the way Haj Harun does.

  Hold on there, said Joe, you’re getting it all wrong. Not rewarded by you, rewarded by God. Listen, you’ve never seen eyes on this earth shine like Haj Haru
n’s when he talks about meeting Stern in the desert at dawn. Stern, he murmurs, and his whole face glows with strength enough to defend the Holy City, always losing of course, for another three thousand years. Stern, he says, God manifesting Himself at dawn in the desert for me. And I told Him, he says, that I knew God has many names and that each one we learn brings us closer to Him, and I asked Him His name that day in the desert at dawn and He deigned to tell me, finding some virtue in my mission, even though I’ve always failed. Stern, he murmurs, and he’s ready for anything, and nothing can stop him now or ever. And I tell you that’s the way he saw it out there so that’s the way it was, and you’re the one who did it, Stern. Eyes that shine like that, it’s enough to make a man cry. So you’ve got to let him have his due, Stern. He worked hard for that moment to come, and it finally did come, and he deserved it. And if God turns out to be a gunrunner crossing the desert in a balloon in 1914? Well what can we say about that. If that’s the way it is, then you and me, we just have to accept it. We might prefer another vision of God but that’s the one that came to the man who deserved a vision of God. Me, I’ve always known Haj Harun sees more than the rest of us. You wouldn’t argue with that, would you?

  No.

  Of course you wouldn’t. Because we’re stuck in a time and a place and he isn’t. We try to believe but he does believe, and that’s the whole difference. We’re sitting in Jerusalem but he really is up there in the Holy City on the mountaintop. And you’re not going to slouch in that chair and tell me that one of us has a better perspective on things than he does, now are you? Balloon or not? Petty gunrunning or not? Poker here or poker there, what does it matter? Not when we’re using wretched lamp fuel to light our bellies on Christmas Eve. You wouldn’t dare tell me any such thing and I know it. True or not?