Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  Nubar shuffled forward, slowly moving away from the weak yellow glow that already seemed dimmer. Behind him the demolition crew in the music room erupted into passionate Italian curses as they bumped into one another and knocked each other down, suddenly unable to see what they were doing because of the thick fog rolling into the room from the corridor.

  Somewhere back there a voice screamed, followed by a different scream and a third. Crowbars were striking something solid with heavy thuds. Heads being broken? A falling-out over loot? Why not, the thieves deserved it. Nubar sucked his thumb and giggled. He skated over to the top of the grand staircase, where a torch had been jammed into a hole in the wall.

  He removed the torch and examined his finger. It was still bleeding slightly. He put the thumb back in his mouth and waddled down the staircase toward the grand entrance-hall on the ground floor, the volumes of The Boy pressed tightly against his sunken chest.

  Disorder on every side. Holes in the walls, craters in the floors. Here and there flickering corners heaped with chunks of rotting bread and gnawed bones and the glittering skeletons of chickens picked clean, stinking salami wrappers and twisted olive-oil tins and mounds of rigid tangled pasta, the debris his servants had left around the makeshift cooking fires they had hastily set up and abandoned on their destructive migrations through the palazzo.

  Rampaging Visigoths, thought Nubar. Marauding Ostrogoths. The fools. Didn’t they realize that when they pillaged him they were pillaging the very foundations of Western civilization? Idiots. When would they ever learn?

  Nubar picked his way carefully around the smoldering campfires toward the lofty devastated space that had once been the salon, through the desolate wasted savanna that had once been the library.

  Mad savages, he muttered as he shuffled forward, his destination a small room behind the kitchen where the cooks had once changed into their uniforms before coming on duty, months ago when that was still done. He thought there might be some clothes there but when he finally reached the small room, now a murky cave with assorted shards and bones scattered around the entrance, he found only some underwear hanging on a hook, women’s underwear, monstrously large even by Italian working-class standards.

  Women’s underwear. Monstrous. Nubar poked through the huge damp articles and found mold everywhere. They must have been hanging there for months, at least since the rains of the previous spring. Still, he had to have something to wear.

  An enormous pair of thick brown stockings, too big for him to use as stockings. A scarf? Nubar wound the stockings around and around his neck, making a thick scarf for himself.

  Enormous brown bloomers. Nubar stepped into them and found that the waistband came all the way up to his armpits. He wound the bloomers around the top of his chest, tying knots, three or four times around his chest and dozens of knots before the bloomers would stay up. He sucked his thumb and studied the next article.

  An immense brown canvas corset, boned. The corset was also big enough to go around him three or four times. Nubar looped the corset ties over his shoulders and knotted them under his armpits. The corset reached down below his knees and was pleasantly warm. Because it restricted his legs he found he had to take small mincing steps, but no matter. He had to take small mincing steps anyway because he couldn’t lift the large brown galoshes off the floor, only push them forward a little bit at a time.

  A brown canvas brassiere, each cup large enough to hold a man’s head.

  Nubar giggled.

  Why not? His ears were aching from the damp cold of the fog that had followed him down the main staircase from his bedroom. Impenetrable fog. Soon it would become so thick it would obscure all the rooms on the first floor as well.

  Nubar pulled one of the brassiere cups over his head and fitted it snugly around his ears, tying the strap under his chin. With half of the brassiere now a warm skullcap enclosing his head, the other half hung on his back shaped like a roomy rucksack.

  Why not? thought Nubar. He tied the strap from the lower half of the brassiere to an eyelet in the corset, so the rucksack could be steady and not dump out its contents when he moved.

  Steady. Nubar floated into the pantry and removed the wooden canteen he kept hidden there behind a broken wagon wheel. Then he filled the canteen with mulberry raki from a demijohn he kept hidden under the decomposing carcass of a sheep that looked as if it had been slaughtered for ritualistic purposes.

  Barbarians. You couldn’t be too careful. Anything of value had to be hidden from these pillaging hordes.

  Steady. Voices approaching. Perhaps a patrol?

  Nubar pressed himself against the wall in the pantry and held his breath as a wrecking crew of servants trooped through the kitchen shouting loudly to each other, apparently coming from the direction of the main dining room with something long and heavy, perhaps a beam, going toward the back door. The noisy gang passed no more than a few yards away but Nubar, dull brown and immobile, was able to escape detection in the thick fog.

  He dropped the canteen into his rucksack and entered the scullery, there to make his most spectacular find of the morning, a long greasy housecoat propped up on a pole, like an animal skin, beside the dead embers of a campfire, no doubt left behind by some woman vandalizing another wing of the palazzo. Nubar pulled it down and found that the housecoat was a fine garment in faded violet with a large floppy collar, the collar very soft to the touch after years of being nibbled and chewed. The greasy violet housecoat had a deep pocket on each hip and a smaller pocket on the chest.

  Long and warm and greasy, what could be better on a cold winter day? Nubar went through the pockets to see what might turn up.

  A large brownish rag, stiff with what looked like dried blood. Nubar closed his eyes and sniffed.

  Raw horsemeat, there was no mistaking the smell. Raw horsemeat had been wrapped in this rag. Probably it had been carried under the saddle of a Tartar horseman as he came wildly galloping out of the steppes of central Asia, the heavy sweat of the animal and the weight of the rider tending to cure the raw meat so the horseman could rip off a digestible hunk at the end of the day for his meal. Barbarians. Disgusting.

  A nearly full packet of Macedonian Extras with a box of matches.

  A tube of lipstick and a tin of rouge.

  A single earring made for a pierced ear, with a dangling spherical stone of fake lapis lazuli.

  Three one-lira pieces.

  A medallion stamped with Mussolini’s face on one side and the Blessed Virgin Mary’s on the other.

  Barbarians. Savage plunder. Nubar put everything back into the pockets of the housecoat except the stiff bloodied rag, which he sniffed again. He blew his nose on the rag and dropped it into his rucksack for easy access. Then he put on the housecoat and found it truly magnificent, a stately garment that swept out behind him and trailed along the floor in the manner of a bride’s gown, or even a queen’s at her coronation.

  Nubar giggled. He made several formal turns around the kitchen, smiling haughtily down at his admiring, imaginary subjects. At the door he stopped and uncorked his canteen, taking a long drink of the fiery raki that immediately infused him with strength. His eyes narrowed slyly as he peered into the foggy darkness of the corridor off the kitchen.

  A descent into the underworld? Had the time come for the whole truth?

  Yes it had, and Nubar was ready. Civilization was going to survive despite the worst efforts of the barbarians.

  The idea had come to him while he was putting on his huge brown brassiere, precisely at the moment he had pulled the cup down over his head and made a thinking cap out of it. A brilliant plan for reversing the failures of the last months, those abject and futile efforts to peddle The Boy, at night and alone, to sneering strangers in the rain and the fog in the piazza in front of San Marco’s.

  For nearly a year now the reports of the Uranist Intelligence Agency had been accumulating in the subcellar of his palazzo, sent regularly from the Middle East and stored according to hi
s standing instructions. Nubar had been too busy trying to peddle The Boy to visit the subcellar in the last year, but he knew that in those reports there would be a complete account of the poker game in Jerusalem over the last year.

  And more important, there would be detailed descriptions of the activities of those three master criminal degenerates, Martyr and Szondi and O’Sullivan Beare, who were trying to gain control of Jerusalem in order to keep him from the inheritance that was rightfully his, the original Sinai Bible discovered by his grandfather a century ago and buried by him in Jerusalem, the philosopher’s stone that would guarantee Nubar immortality when it came into his possession.

  What evil new designs, what fiendish plots had those three sinister figures been using against him?

  Nubar intended to find out. And then he would issue the order that would end their diabolical twelve-year game and eliminate the three of them for all time.

  Order at last, unwavering discipline and correct toilet training, absolute authority. The final solution.

  No longer to be obsessed by Gronk dreams and memories, by desperate attempts to have someone, anyone, take The Boy seriously. All of that was behind him now. By an act of will he would do what had to be done in the winter fog of Venice. He would do what was necessary to end the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle. He would bring them total war and then the fools would see what disobedience led to and learn the meaning of the whole truth, his rule that would last a thousand years.

  Nubar’s smile twisted into a smirk. He raised his torch in front of a mirror in the kitchen and squinted at himself approvingly.

  Corset and brassiere and bloomers and stockings, a greasy warm housecoat, all oversized and substantial. A massive study in brown gently overlaid with faded purple.

  Still smirking crookedly, the journals of The Boy tucked under his arm, he floated forward and drifted silently down the corridor to the door that led to the cellar.

  Twenty steps to the cellar. Nubar opened the door at the bottom of the stairs that led to the subcellar and descended the thirty steep steps to the landing halfway down. A faint light rose from the depths. He changed direction, watching carefully, and started down the last steep stretch of forty steps.

  He was almost at the bottom before he could make out the figure. A man in livery was digging with a pickax and shovel, one of his footmen muttering in a maritime Genovese accent about the secret treasures rich foreigners always buried in their deepest cellars.

  Peasant swine, thought Nubar. The barbarian had no idea that the treasures here weren’t to be found in the ground but in the reports of the Uranist Intelligence Agency.

  The footman had removed a section of the cobblestones that paved the subcellar floor and had dug a hole about four feet square. He was now standing in the hole up to his waist, vigorously hacking away at the clay with his pickax. Beside the hole lay the footman’s blue satin swallowtail coat. A candle that stood in the clay was dripping wax on the gold braid of the coat, and Nubar was immediately infuriated to see gold braid being treated with so little respect. He stamped his feet and shouted defiantly, his anger directed toward the defilers of civilization everywhere, his voice weirdly distorted by the confines of the subcellar.

  Out, peasant swine. Out, you evil creature.

  The footman whirled. He stared. Nubar was moving slowly up and down inside his huge stationary galoshes, his long greasy housecoat shaking in rage, the brassiere encasing his head quivering with indignation.

  The footman screamed and leapt from the hole in horror. He bolted up the stairs to the kitchen where he threw himself through a casement window and went crashing down into the dark water beside the palazzo, there to be entangled in a sluggish flow of sewerage that was moving out into the Grand Canal under the impenetrable cover of fog.

  Nubar, meanwhile, paused by the bottom of the stairs to get his bearings, and what he saw astonished him. The entire subcellar was packed with stacks and stacks of neatly piled papers, dossiers and card files and loose-leaf folders, the unread reports of the Uranist Intelligence Agency over the last eleven months.

  Extraordinary, thought Nubar as he gazed out over the thousands and thousands of reports, the towering collections of amassed data, realizing for the first time just how productive his intelligence agency really was.

  Nubar shuffled over to the hole the footman had dug and stuck his torch in the clay. He knocked over several tall stacks of reports and made a couch for himself out of the paper. The footman’s coat, folded, served as an armrest. He took a drink of mulberry raki from his canteen, accidentally biting off some of the wooden spout in his eagerness to begin, not noticing there was wood in his mouth so great was his concentration, chewing the wood and swallowing it along with the mulberry raki. Then he arranged himself comfortably on his paper couch, tucked the tails of the greasy housecoat snugly around his legs and lit a Macedonian Extra, inhaling deeply.

  A drop of water fell on his nose. He licked it away.

  Salt water?

  Nubar looked up at the ceiling. He estimated the height of the subcellar staircase with its two directions to the north and east, the height of the regular cellar staircase with its third northerly direction. He recalled the location of the cellar door in the palazzo and calculated its distance from the landing in front of the palazzo.

  Nubar smiled. There was no doubt about it.

  The archives of the Uranist Intelligence Agency lay directly beneath the Grand Canal. And it was here beneath the Grand Canal that he would secretly plan the destruction of the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle and decree the ruin of its three criminal founders.

  Nubar’s eyes narrowed.

  Jerusalem the Holy City on the heights, above the wastes and the deserts? The eternal city secure on its mountaintop? Well they wouldn’t get away with it, those barbaric criminals. Order and alignment and the whole truth would triumph, he would liberate Jerusalem and take what was his.

  Nubar licked another drop of salt water off his nose. He picked up a report at random and began to read.

  Perhaps it was only the lack of air in that subaqueous cellar, but to Nubar the report in front of him seemed unusually interesting, far above the normal quality of UIA material.

  In the beginning, indeed, it was impossible to imagine just what the subject of the report would turn out to be.

  It had been submitted by Dead Sea Control, which was responsible for the Jerusalem district, located at a distance from Jerusalem, for security reasons, amidst the sulphur and salt deposits on the south shore of the Dead Sea. The station was housed in a cluster of tin huts that had been erected by a now defunct mining enterprise. Although nicely hidden away behind the huge columns of salt common to the area, the tin huts were unbearably hot most of the year, which perhaps explained the incoherency of many of the station’s reports.

  Originally Jericho had been considered as a likely location for the reporting center of the Jerusalem district, but Nubar had personally intervened in favor of the sulphur site on the Dead Sea, despite the heat. It pleased him to know the UIA’s most important field station was nestled in the lowest spot on earth, within those grotesque geological formations that were generally accepted to be the natural ruins of Sodom.

  Dead Sea Control had evaluated the report as POTENTIAL URINE, which meant it had been written by an informer who had shown enough initiative to be considered a potential Uranist intelligence employee. Beneath the formal title was a descriptive caption, uncommonly cryptic by UIA standards.

  Submitted as background material only, to illustrate the difficulties faced by Dead Sea Control in collecting relevant information about Jerusalem, in view of the mythical nature of that city up there on the mountain. And especially in view of the view from down here on the shores of what has been referred to, in an important piece of literature, as the dried cunt of the world.

  (That very long novel, still banned in most countries as obscene, deals exclusively with a single day, June 16, 1904. Amazing, don’t you think?
Of course we have a lot of time to read long novels down here.)

  Nubar snorted. Did his agents think they were getting paid to read long novels? He made a mental note to fire off a cable to Dead Sea Control as soon as he had finished reading the report.

  ARE YOU MAD? NO MORE REFERENCES TO CUNTS AND NO MORE OBSCURE LITERARY ALLUSIONS. STICK TO THE TRUTH FROM NOW ON OR YOU CAN EXPECT IMMEDIATE DISCIPLINARY ACTION.

  NUBAR

  SUPREME LEADER

  He read on.

  Submitted, secondly, to illustrate the difficulties faced in separating interesting, relevant information on Jerusalem from the mass of uninteresting, irrelevant details in which it is invariably encased.

  And lastly, submitted because the report does have some legitimate curiosity value when read with an open mind.

  An open mind? Nubar had an open mind and the idea of reading something with curiosity value intrigued him after all these months of lying in bed all day and sneaking around in the rain all night trying to get someone to take The Boy seriously.

  He turned the page.

  EYES ONLY Jerusalem to Dead Sea Control.

  DATE when information was acquired: August 1933.

  DATE when information was forwarded to Control: Halloween 1933. (Delay due to time required to write up report.)

  TIME when information was elicited: Several hours on a very hot afternoon in August 1933.

  PLACE where information was elicited: The Moslem Quarter, the Old City, Jerusalem.

  PERSON from whom information was elicited: Name, race and nationality unknown. A man on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. (They’re always coming and going by the thousands, these pilgrims, aren’t they, and there’s certainly no way to know who most of them are. Now this one happens to remain anonymous throughout the report, on the face of it simply because I was never able to find out who he was. But mightn’t there be some larger design beyond that? Could it just be, perhaps, that he was meant to be anonymous in order for him to assume the role of the archetypal pilgrim? One single part in the narrative, thereby, put forward to represent all the seekers who have sought Jerusalem over the millennia?