Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  Something was missing. In order to see clearly in the billowing smoke and mercury fumes he needed the third eye of occultism. But where was his small obsidian sphere, the precious ball of black volcanic glass, his primitive third eye?

  Lost. He’d never find it now. His fingers touched something round in the pocket of his housecoat. He held it up.

  The single earring, fake lapis lazuli, the color of the sky. It looked like a robin’s egg.

  Nubar attached the hook of the earring to his skullcap so the robin’s egg would rest on his forehead. Yes, that was better. His head was expanding, his supernatural powers of perception were beginning to return. He could feel his brain growing, swelling like an egg to encompass all of life.

  Ultimate thoughts now in the underworld, the time had come. His left eye, the eye that had bothered Wallenstein men for three centuries in times of stress, automatically sealed itself shut as Nubar considered the ultimate enemies arrayed against him.

  Ahura Mazda, chief of the gods of goodness, the secret owner of the Middle East who had also been known as Strongbow, a giant genie who was implacably pursuing him from the nineteenth century. Why? Why had he, Nubar, been singled out for persecution by the giant good genie?

  God his son, father of the genie, Himself, in the twentieth century disguised as a petty gunrunner and morphine addict named Stern. Years ago Nubar had dismissed Stern as too insignificant to bother with.

  And lastly, Haj Harun, that timeless ghostly figure who had witnessed everything, even the writing of the original Bible.

  Nubar smiled and his right eye also sealed itself shut. With both eyes closed in the smoke, in the billowing mercury fumes rising from the pit, he could at last see the universe as it was through his mystical third eye.

  And? Was it going to turn out the way that maniacally prancing baking priest had suggested at the beginning of his epic tale? Were the ultimate enemies arrayed against him the Holy Trinity? The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost?

  An idea came to him. Even though the Holy Trinity was arrayed against him, that still left the Virgin Mary, and where was the Virgin Mary? Was he the Virgin Mary in disguise? It was true, after all, that in some parts of Greece there was the belief that when Christ was born again He would be born of a man, which was why the men there all wore trousers with a large sack in the seat, to catch the Savior when He appeared.

  Extraordinary. A fascinating new possibility with limitless ramifications, not only for him but for the world. As he turned over the medallion in his hand the black volcanic eye in his forehead stared blindly at the roaring fire in the pit, oblivious to the smoke and the flames and the fumes in the cave.

  A move to Greece at once? The sun and the sea, lucidity and the Savior?

  Nubar grinned and the grin froze.

  The astounding event that was the talk of Venice that winter occurred precisely at twelve o’clock noon on December 22. Some claimed it had to do with the fact that the previous night had been the longest night of the year. Others, calling this mere superstition, argued that darkness and night had played no part, rather high noon and broad daylight had.

  In any case, whether one or the other, Nubar would never have been found without it, his strange fate never known.

  The heavy fog that had hung over Venice for days began to clear toward the middle of that morning, December 22. Tourists eager to see the wonders of the city were quick to take advantage, and by eleven-thirty a modest but steady traffic of gondolas was plying the Grand Canal.

  In one of the gondolas was a party of Argentines, of German descent and strongly in favor of Mussolini’s Fascist policies, the only actual witnesses to the event.

  What made it seem so eerie, they said later, was that the stately palazzo had collapsed without a sound.

  One moment they were admiring its beautiful lines as they passed through the water, an ornate and dignified structure on the Venetian skyline that was typical of what they had always imagined a palazzo on the Grand Canal would look like, and the next moment it was simply gone, no longer there, having silently disappeared before their very eyes in a puff of smoke.

  They blinked. They couldn’t believe it. There was nothing but sky where the palazzo had been, sky and a mysterious puff of smoke that was already wafting away on the wind.

  The clocks in the church towers all over Venice were striking noon. The palazzo had disappeared as if it were an empty dream.

  The experience was uncanny, said the Argentines. For several minutes they sat dumbly in their gondola, too stunned to speak, staring into that patch of newly empty sky.

  Of course the palazzo had made some noise collapsing, but not enough to be heard above the loud pealing of the city’s church bells, which engineers later speculated might have upset the palazzo’s delicate balance with their combined vibrations. And there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the smoke, although it would take twenty-four hours to discover it.

  While the stunned Argentines sat immobile in their gondola, other parties of tourists began to arrive on the scene from up and down the Grand Canal. The gondoliers landed and what they found astonished them, just as it astonished the police who arrived some minutes later.

  For it seemed the Argentines’ strange impression had not been wrong at all, rather it was based on airy fact. The floors and interior walls of the palazzo had all been removed, indeed, its insides in their entirety. There had been absolutely nothing at all left in there.

  The palazzo had been an empty dream before it collapsed.

  It didn’t take the police long to find out what had happened. When they went to question the servants who had worked in the palazzo, they found them all living in richly decorated villas far beyond their means, as were many of their relatives. One servant after another broke down and confessed.

  The pillage, they admitted, had been going on since the beginning of their employment there. It had progressed from single objects to stripping whole rooms, to ripping out the plumbing and wiring, then to the marble in the floors and the wood and stonework in the walls.

  The previous night they had finally made an end to the job by carrying away what was left of the floors and interior walls, leaving an empty shell behind.

  By the evening of December 22, the scandal had taken on enormous proportions, particularly because the palazzo had been owned by a foreigner. The ability of the Fascist government to maintain law and order was being held up to ridicule, and tourists were leaving by train for Switzerland and by ship for Patras, outraged that a foreigner in Italy could be treated in such a manner. The police had to act immediately or the situation would have become intolerable.

  Thus by ten o’clock that night seventeen former servants and several hundred of their relatives, screaming and weeping and shouting, had been dragged before judges and arraigned for a multitude of offenses ranging from unpremeditated theft and similar crimes of passion, to the systematic defacement of a national landmark, which an urgent cable from Rome, received just after dark, indicated the palazzo had secretly been for about the last one hundred years, unknown to anyone in Venice.

  Meanwhile the search went on for the victim of this terrible conspiracy, who was described by the former servants as an Albanian millionaire, about twenty-seven years old, of extremely eccentric habits.

  By gondoliers who for months had been carrying the little millionaire back to the palazzo just before dawn, he was identified as that bizarre figure who had been haunting the piazza in front of San Marco’s through the hours of darkness for almost a year, dressed in evening clothes and a top hat and an opera cape and thoroughly drunk from some powerful alcoholic beverage, which he carried in a wooden canteen slung over his shoulder.

  As for his activities at night in the piazza, thousands of witnesses were ready to testify that they had seen the little millionaire sneaking up behind tourists in cafés and annoying them in the most flagrant manner by whispering on endlessly about something called Gronk, as if this single word, unrecogni
zable to anyone, not only conveyed a whole host of meanings but also implied unlimited possibilities of an unknown nature. And always he had carried in his arms a stack of journals titled The Boy, which he had tried to give away but never could, it apparently being the little millionaire’s destiny to go on carrying The Boy around with him forever.

  These furtive nightly performances were known to thousands in Venice, but other than that the police could learn only one other fact concerning the little millionaire’s public life. Several restaurant owners stated that he had been in the habit of dropping in around midnight to order a single baked chicken wing, which he then carried off into the darkness in a paper bag.

  Yet even though he hadn’t come to the piazza in front of San Marco’s on the night before his palazzo collapsed, the servants reported that he definitely wasn’t to be seen in the empty dream when they had carried out the last supporting beam. Nor had a body been found in the ruins.

  WHERE IS THE MAD NIGHTLY PEDDLER OF GRONK? screamed the headlines in the newspapers.

  The police intensified their search on the morning of December 23. Lists were checked and it was found that a footman from the palazzo was not among those arrested. The footman hadn’t returned home and had last been seen by other servants on the morning before the collapse, dressed in blue satin livery and carrying a pickax and shovel in the vicinity of the kitchen.

  The police put out an alarm for the man and before noon they were led to a Communist laborer in a cheap café on the mainland, drunk on grappa, who was wearing blue satin knee breeches. At first the laborer sullenly denied any knowledge of his satin breeches, saying they would never exist in a Communist state. But under threat of a sound beating from the Fascist police crowding around him, he soon admitted he had taken the breeches off a delirious man who had washed up on the shore two days ago, thinking they would add a little color to his life. After hiding the breeches under his shirt he had hailed a passing group of mendicant monks, who had carried the delirious man back to their monastery to care for him.

  The monks were traced and the footman was found lying in a corner of the monastery garage, just emerging from a coma caused by excessive ingestion of Grand Canal water. The police slapped him to bring him around and the footman told a confused tale.

  One morning, he said, days or weeks or months ago, he had no idea when the catastrophe had befallen him and how long he had been in a coma, he had been carrying out his normal duties in the subcellar of the palazzo when he had met an apparition of womanhood so horrifying, so unnatural, that he had run upstairs in terror and jumped through a casement window to swim for his life. But the sewerage had been sluggish that morning around the palazzo. As he swam out into the Grand Canal the fumes overwhelmed him, he lost consciousness and didn’t know anything after that.

  But he did remember that terrible, ghastly apparition he had seen in the subcellar by torchlight.

  And never before that moment, swore the footman, crossing himself again and again and shaking violently as putrid bubbles popped out of his mouth, could I have imagined such a female figure existed on this earth, Hail Mary, mother of God.

  A subcellar beneath the palazzo? The policemen were amazed, but not so one of the learned mendicant monks who had been listening with them in the monastery garage.

  Yes indeed, observed the monk. That palazzo was once shared by Byron and his favorite pimp and catamite, Tito the gondolier, which I happen to know about because Tito was a granduncle on my mother’s side. Well to escape the hordes of women and boys who were always besieging Byron in his living quarters, he had a secret subcellar built where he could retire late at night and write his poetry. Undoubtedly that’s why the palazzo was a secret national landmark that none of us knew about until yesterday evening. Some of Byron’s greatest poetry must have been written down there.

  The police rushed back to their launch and quickly roared away from the mainland, sirens howling, making for the Grand Canal. With little difficulty they found the entrance to the cellar in the palazzo ruins. Twenty steps down stood the entrance to the subcellar, a low narrow door hidden behind a blanket, exactly as described by the footman. They pushed it open.

  Immediately mountainous clouds of thick acrid smoke belched from that gloomy cave and went swirling up over the city, obscuring the sun, Nubar having burned the entire archives of the Uranist Intelligence Agency in his mercury pit, to keep warm, during the cold damp night of the winter solstice.

  Firemen arrived with masks and emergency equipment. They found Nubar stretched out beside his smoldering mercury fire, alive but unconscious, and carried him up to the surface where curious crowds had gathered. The canal in front of the ruined palazzo was now thronged with the bobbing boats of eager sightseers from all over the world.

  Somberly the Fascist firemen brought Nubar forward on a stretcher and laid him out on a high platform they had erected beside the water, in full view of everyone, not only because their countrymen loved a spectacle but also, in this case, to impress the masses of foreign tourists with the Fascist efficiency of their rescue operations.

  The sightseers sighed and were silent. Waves lapped gently against the assembled boats and gondolas. Respiratory and other equipment quietly wheezed beside the raised platform, which had been hung with bunting and Fascist banners for the occasion.

  Then the Fascist mayor, the Fascist chief of police and the Fascist chief of the fire department took turns announcing in loud voices what they saw before them, shouting the facts up and down the Grand Canal and describing in considerable detail the thick layers of rouge and lipstick, the various large brown garments and the even larger purple one, the single blue earring resting on Nubar’s forehead and the three one-lira coins resting on his tongue, in one hand the medallion depicting Mussolini and the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in the other hand the most curious object of all, a Jerusalem water bill, paid, dated 1921, on which he had scribbled some words before losing consciousness, poker and Jerusalem and Haj Harun, Paracelsus and Bombastus and immortality, Ahura Mazda and Stern, genie and God, the Sinai Bible.

  The presence of the coins in Nubar’s mouth suggested that he might have been swallowing foreign objects while in the subcellar. A stomach pump was therefore immediately wheeled into position, but all it brought up was a large amount of chewed wood impregnated with alcohol.

  This mysterious piece of information proved too much for one of the spectators, a French thief and former dealer in stolen ikons who had arrived in Venice not so long ago after an extended stay in the Holy Land.

  It was true that he had been accosted by Nubar more than once in the piazza in front of San Marco’s late at night, which he had found insulting enough in itself. But the real cause of that Frenchman’s passionate dislike for Nubar was a period he had once spent in purgatory, after being hired by the UIA to infiltrate the Great Jerusalem Poker Game. The Frenchman had entered the game as ordered and had lost disastrously to an American Indian chief, who resented his trafficking in stolen Christian artifacts. Part of his loss included being assigned to slave in front of a hot oven in the Old City, his purgatory, with a man known as the baking priest serving as his parole officer.

  A very hot oven. The Frenchman remembered every dripping minute he had spent in that fierce heat baking bread in the same four shapes, as directed by his ancient parole officer who all the while had danced back and forth in a merry way, which had only infuriated him more.

  All those horrible experiences he blamed on Nubar for getting him into the game in the first place. So it was with unrestrained glee that the high-pitched French cry came floating down the Grand Canal.

  Shit my God. He ate his canteen.

  On the last day of the year Nubar regained consciousness in the hospital and it was apparent he would never be normal again. His frozen grin was directed toward the ceiling, his stony stare fixed on some invisible quarry. Every twelve minutes or so he stirred and softly whispered parts of the words he had scribbled on the Jerusalem water bill, p
aid, dated 1921.

  And those were the only syllables Nubar ever uttered again, rearranging them endlessly in senseless mercurial anagrams that were somehow pleasing to him, Parabastus Bombhaj and Sinaisalem Bombpoker, Ahurahaj Paramazda and Sternpoker Bibletality, Jerugenie and Immorharun, Hajstern, Jerupoker.

  Jumbled private words that seemed to soothe him in the airless stillness of the eternal dimensionless rock encasing his head, a secret and solitary philosopher’s stone that no one would ever penetrate.

  For Nubar, safety at last, peace at last, immortality at last. All his enemies defeated and Stern dismissed, Ahura Mazda dispelled and Haj Harun forgotten in the dream of stone he had finally entered.

  17. Crypt, Cobbler

  The whole point, is that all? Well of

  course I was getting around to it. I was just

  sort of sizing up the countryside along

  the way. What’s the point of taking a

  trip if you don’t see the sights?

  THE LAST NIGHT IN December, 1933. Twelve years to the day since the three of them had met by chance in a cheap Arab coffee shop in the Old City, seemingly by chance then, the three of them escaping the wind on a blustery afternoon that had been cold and heavily overcast with snow definitely in the air. And now they sat around the poker table in Haj Harun’s back room, one or the other of them shuffling the cards for a while before passing the pack along.

  An ambling affair, said Joe. Just one of those quiet rambling evenings that comes along sometimes. I mean it is the last day of the year so it’s only natural a man might want to take a moment to look back a bit, just to see how things went maybe, insofar as they did.

  Sure, said Joe, shuffling the cards. And that’s some news all right about the end of our little Nubar. Losing his head like that under the Grand Canal and finding a stone to put in its place. With him out of the way I guess we could go on playing poker forever, if we wanted to. Yes, well I can’t say I’m sorry for him. Always was a nasty little piece of goods by any account. But I’ll tell you something else. I do feel sorry for Sophia, even though I’ve never met her. From all you hear she sounds right to me, and I imagine she must be taking it hard.