Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  After being shown around the rocky quarters, not much more than elaborate caves, and consuming some dreadful retsina (the monks didn’t drink it themselves) we continued to Jericho and a typical lunch of dried figs, a bread-like pastry and melon and hot fragrant tea. Then we made our way to the Negev. Over the years Ted had befriended some of the local Bedouins and we were greeted like old friends at several encampments. We spent one night at an Israeli meteorological center/desert inn near a Nabatean ruin. There seemed to be antennae and electric sensors everywhere, and as we used to say in those days, gray men in London, Washington, Moscow, and Beijing could probably hear every sparrow-fart in the desert. In retrospect, I sometimes wonder if Ted had ever really retired? Was he still, in this case, visiting his “controller,” and using me as his cover?

  Several months later, when Ted sent me a post card urging me to save a spot on an upcoming list for his next novel, the design on the card was a Byzantine mosaic of “the Tree of Life” Ted and I had seen on the stone floor of a ruin in Jericho. I took it to the art director at Norton where I was then a senior editor. He agreed with me that it would make an excellent design for a book jacket. All we needed was a manuscript.

  Jericho Mosaic arrived before the end of the year, a fitting culmination to Whittemore’s marvelous Quartet. In my opinion, Jericho Mosaic is the most original espionage story ever written. The novel is based on events that actually took place before the Six Day War and Whittemore demonstrates his total knowledge of the craft of intelligence and its practitioners, his passion for the Middle East, his devotion to the Holy City, and his commitment to peace and understanding among Arabs, Jews, and Christians. The novel and the novelist maintain we can overcome religious, philosophical, and political differences if we are ready to commit ourselves to true understanding for all people and all ideas.

  This humanistic message is imbedded in a true story involving Eli Cohen, a Syrian Jew who sacrificed his life (he managed to turn over to Mossad the Syrian plans and maps for the defense of the Golan Heights) in order that Israel might survive. In the novel Whittemore tells the story of Halim (who is clearly based on Eli Cohen) a Syrian Jew who returns to his homeland from Buenos Aires where he has been pretending to be a Syrian businessman to forward the Arab revolution. Halim becomes an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, he is the conscience of the Arab cause, “the incorruptible one.” But Halim is an agent for the Mossad; his code name is “the Runner,” his assignment to penetrate the heart of the Syrian military establishment. At the same time the novel is a profound meditation on the nature of faith in which an Arab holy man, a Christian mystic, and a former British intelligence officer sit in a garden in Jericho exploring religion and humanity’s relation in its various facets.

  There were fewer reviews of Jericho Mosaic and even fewer sales than before. Arabs and Jews were involved in a bloody confrontation on the West Bank, there were lurid photographs in the newspapers and magazines and on television every day, and even more horrific stories. The times were not propitious for novelists defending the eternal verities, no matter how well they wrote. One critic did, however, proclaim Whittemore’s Quartet “the best metaphor for the intelligence business in recent American fiction.”

  Shortly after Jericho Mosaic was published Whittemore left Jerusalem, the Ethiopian compound, and the American painter. He was back in New York living during the winter with Ann, a woman he had met years before when her husband had been teaching at Yale. In the summers he would take over the sprawling, white, Victorian family home in Dorset, Vermont. The windows had green shutters, and an acre of lawn in front of the house was bounded by immense stately evergreen trees. Twenty or so rooms were distributed around the house in some arbitrary New England Victorian design, and the furniture dated back to his grandparents, if not great-grandparents. Ted’s brothers and sisters by now had their own houses and so Ted was pretty much its sole occupant. It was not winterized and could only be inhabited from May through October. But for Ted it was a haven to which he could retreat and write.

  In the spring of 1987 I became a literary agent and Ted joined me as a client. American book publishing was gradually being taken over by international conglomerates with corporate offices in Germany and Great Britain. They were proving to be more enamored of commerce than literature and it seemed to me I could do more for writers by representing them to any of a dozen publishers rather than just working for one.

  I regularly visited Ted in the fall in Dorset. “The foliage season,” late September, early October, is a very special time of year in New England: crisp clear days, wonderfully cool moonlit nights. We walked the woods and fields of southern Vermont by day, sat in front of the house after dinner on solid green Adirondack chairs, drink in hand and smoking. Actually I was the one drinking (usually brandy) because Ted had stopped years ago. While we talked I would smoke a cigar or two, Ted would merely smoke one evil-looking cheroot. Comfortably ensconced on the lawn near the United Church, where his great-grandfather had been a minister, within sight of the Village Green and the Dorset Inn, our talk would turn to books and writing, family and friends. To his family, Ted must have cut a romantic figure, the Yalie who had gone off to the CIA, had, so to speak, burned out, had come home via Crete, Jerusalem, and New York as a peripatetic novelist whose books received glowing reviews that resulted in less than glowing sales. But they, and “his women,” supported him and continued to believe in him.

  It was during these early fall visits that I discovered that his Prentiss great-grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister who had made his way up the Hudson River by boat from New York to Troy and then over to Vermont by train and wagon in the 1860s. In the library of the white, rambling Victorian house in Dorset there were shelves of fading leather-bound volumes of popular romances written by his great-grandmother for shop girls, informing them how to improve themselves, dress, and find suitable husbands. I gathered she was the Danielle Steele of her day, and the family’s modest wealth was due to her literary efforts and not the generosity of the church’s congregation.

  We talked about the new novel. It was to be called Sister Sally and Billy the Kid and it was to be Ted’s first American novel. It was about an Italian in his twenties from the Chicago of the roaring Twenties. His older brother, a gangster, had helped him buy a flower shop. But there was a shoot-out, the older brother was dead, and Billy has to flee to the West Coast where he meets a faith healer not unlike Aimee Semple McPherson. The real-life McPherson disappeared for a month in 1926, and when she returned claimed she had been kidnapped. The stone house in which Billy and his faith healer spend their month of love (from the beginning it is clear that the idyll must be limited to one month) has a walled garden behind it full of lemon trees and singing birds. Although that house is in southern California, the garden bears a close resemblance to another garden in the Ethiopian compound in Jerusalem with a synagogue on one side and a Cistercian convent on the other.

  Then one day in early spring 1995, Ted called me. Could he come by the office that morning? I assumed it was to deliver the long-awaited manuscript. There had been two false starts after Jericho Mosaic. Instead Ted told me he was dying. Would I be his literary executor? A year or so earlier Ted had been diagnosed as having prostate cancer. It was too far along for an operation. His doctor had prescribed hormones and other medication and the cancer had gone into remission. But now it had spread. Less than six months later he was dead. They were terrible months for him. However, during those last weeks and days while he slipped in and out of consciousness, he was looked after by Carol, who had never really left his life.

  There was a hushed memorial service in the United Church in Dorset that August. Afterwards, a reception was held on the large lawn in front of the family house. It was there that the disparate parts of Ted’s world came together, perhaps for the first time; there was his family, his two sisters and two brothers and their spouses, nieces, and nephews with their own families (but not Ted’s former wives or
the two daughters who had flown to New York to say “goodbye”); there were neighbors, Yale friends, and a couple of colleagues from the Lindsay years. Were there any “spooks” in attendance? One really can’t say, but there were eight “spooks” of a different sort from Yale, members of the 1955 Scroll and Key delegation. Ann and Carol were, of course, there.

  Jerusalem and Dorset. The beautiful Holy City on the rocky cliffs overlooking the parched gray-brown desert. A city marked by thousands of years of history, turbulent struggles between great empires and three of the most enduring, vital religions given by God to mankind. And the summer-green valley in Vermont (covered by snow in the winter and by mud in the spring) where Dorset nestles between the ridges of the softly rolling Green Mountains. Once one of the cradles of the American Revolution and American democracy, and later a thriving farming and small manufacturing community, it is a place where time has stood still since the beginning of the twentieth century. One was the subject of Whittemore’s dreams and books; the other the peaceful retreat in which he dreamt and wrote the last summers of his life.

  Ted had finally come home to New England. It had been a long journey: Portland, New Haven, Japan, Italy, New York, Crete, Jerusalem, New York, and now Dorset. Along the way he had many friends and companions; he was not a particularly good husband or father and disappointed many. But gradually he had found his voice, written his novels, and fallen in love with Jerusalem. I would like to think that Ted died dreaming of his Holy City. In a sense he was at one with that stonecutter turned medieval knight, turned antiquities dealer, Haj Harun. For Whittemore was the eternal knight-errant who “made it” at Yale in the 1950s, “lost it” in the CIA, and then made himself into a wonderful novelist with the voice of a mystic. The voice of a mystic who had absorbed the best of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His great-grandfather the minister and his great-grandmother the writer would have been equally proud of him. His spirit rests peacefully in Dorset, Vermont.

  Tom Wallace

  New York City, 2002

  INTRODUCTION

  JERUSALEM IN THE LATE SEVENTIES. Caught eternally, it seemed, between war and peace. That’s when a small group of us—writers, journalists, historians, commentators gathering every Friday in a downtown café—discovered Edward Whittemore.

  None of us had met him, except through his fiction, but we needed him. We needed him badly. Bogged down in the particularities of daily events, in the hourly newscasts and mind numbing series of military and political skirmishes, we needed someone who could soar above it all. Someone who could take the absurd reality in which we lived and weave it into a rich tapestry of realist absurdity.

  More precisely, Whittemore didn’t soar so much as tunnel. He tunneled under the surface of Jerusalem, following the three-thousand-year-old antiquities dealer Haj Harun in his tattered yellow cape and dented Crusader helmet down through the physical layers of the place—one era’s stones laid on top of the previous one’s to create a vertical history—and into the existential city, the one we really inhabited if we could only escape daily reality long enough to see it.

  Funny, scabrous, magical, cynical, romantic, clear-eyed—Whittemore was all these and more. Reading him, we felt as though finally someone had come along who could grasp the madness in which we lived. Who could take it and run with it, celebrating its delirious complexity, its fantastic twists and turns, its ramifications though the centuries and across the globe.

  Later, when he moved to Jerusalem and lived right by the domed Ethiopian church, a hidden compound where black-robed monks swayed and chanted as they had for centuries, it seemed as though Whittemore were the Pied Piper of the city, playing the hidden tune that would make it dance. He wrote out of an immense affection for the place, its inhabitants and their foibles. Out of pity for the bloodshed yet with calm, Zen-like insight into the passions that led to it. His Jerusalem quartet, now nearly complete, had become a symphony of time and history, innocence and experience.

  By then, he could himself have been a character from the Quartet: the ex-CIA agent secluded in the peaceful oasis of the Ethiopian compound, speaking Geez with the monks, juggling the story of Jerusalem at his desk by the arched stone window. There was always something pixie-like about him, but now it seemed he had become a master conjuror who could take your mind and stretch it through time and space, then bring it back again in an arcing circularity, wiser and sadder and yet at the same time happier.

  And then he disappeared. And later resurfaced in New York. And in terribly short order, died. Perhaps he knew of the cancer when he walked away from Jerusalem literally in the middle of the night, leaving behind this lovely, wild, time- and mind-bending series of novels.

  I was the first in that Friday group to discover Whittemore, quite by the kind of chance he loved. On a break from a year’s wandering round the Sinai in research for a book, I strayed into Jerusalem’s main bookstore and found, in the remainder bin, a paperback titled Sinai Tapestry. The cover was luridly sci-fi—the publisher had served him ill—but nevertheless I read the first few pages and knew I had to read them all.

  Determined to make the book last, I allowed myself no more than twenty pages an evening. And each day, I’d tell friends what I’d read the night before.

  They accused me of making it up.

  I wish I’d been able to.

  I went back to the store, bought every copy, and handed them out. We became a kind of Whittemore cult, tracing shades of Vonnegut and Borges, Pynchon and Lawrence Durrell in the man who’d been called “America’s best least-known writer.”

  And then a year or so later, passing by the same store, I saw Jerusalem Poker in the window. In hardback—a major investment at the time for a struggling wordsmith. But I had no choice: I walked right in and bought it. And knew instantly that this would be my favorite of the planned Quartet.

  If you had to describe the novel in one line, you could say it’s about a twelve-year poker game for control of the holy city. But that, of course, is only the top layer, as you realize if you take just the three main players in the Great Jerusalem Poker Game: Moslem, Christian, and Jew.

  First, Cairo Martyr, the Nubian dragoman with pale blue eyes who has made a fortune selling mummy dust cut with quinine as an aphrodisiac. Then Joe O’Sullivan Beare, an Irish patriot who now smuggles arms for the Haganah inside giant hollow scarabs, and trades in sacred phallic amulets. And then Munk Szondi, the scion of a powerful Budapest-based banking house run by a matriarchal directorate known as The Sarahs, who trades in futures—any and all futures.

  “Mummy dust. Trading in futures. Religious symbols. With that kind of backing, the three men seemed unbeatable. Year after year, they stripped visitors to Jerusalem of all they owned, bewildered emirs and European smugglers and feuding sheikhs, devout priests and assorted commercial agents and pious fanatics, every manner of pilgrim in that vast dreaming army from many lands that had always been scaling the heights of the Holy City in search of spiritual gold, Martyr and Szondi and O’Sullivan Beare implacably dealing and shuffling and dealing again, relentlessly plunging Jerusalem into its greatest turmoil since the First Crusade.”

  Familiar and half-familiar characters swirl in and out of the narrative as it arcs from Jericho to Smyrna, Venice to Cairo, the pendulum swinging inexorably back and forth through Jerusalem. There’s the seven-foot-tall Plantagenet Strongbow, an English lord who purchased the whole of the Ottoman Empire and wrote a 33-volume study of Levantine sex. Avraham Stern of the eponymous Stern Gang. A Japanese nobleman who becomes a revered rabbi in seclusion beneath Mount Sinai. King Zog of Albania. Warlords and pederasts, eunuchs and bishops, lovers and thieves and soldiers and spies all dancing to Whittemore’s tune of time infinite and ineffable.

  This is a Jerusalem where time expands and contracts. Where it may suddenly, unpredictably, speed up or slow down. “Eternal city and so forth,” says O’Sullivan Beare. Daft time spinning out of control for sure on top of the holy mountain.” But always in the worl
d of Whittemore, time’s swoops and spirals come full circle—as they have now for Jerusalem Poker, back in print after the mere eye blink of twenty-odd years.

  —Lesley Hazleton

  Seattle, 2002

  Lesley Hazleton’s books include the award-winning Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Where Mountains Roar. She lived thirteen years in Jerusalem, reporting on the Middle East for Time, The New York Times, Esquire, The Nation and many other publications. In a Whittemoreish move, she now lives and writes on a houseboat in Seattle.

  Prologue

  IN THE FIRST LIGHT of an early summer day a naked Junker baron and his naked wife both elderly, both heavily overweight and sweating, stood on top of the Great Pyramid waiting for the sunrise.

  The air was warm and the desert still, the year was 1914 and the noble couple from Behind Pomerania had just fulfilled a lifelong dream of making love on the summit of the Great Pyramid at dawn, to the point of a final and exhaustive satisfaction.

  A few blocks down from the summit sat the man who had performed these various acts upon them, an experienced black dragoman and former slave named Cairo Martyr. For the baron and his wife it was the rarest moment in their long lives, but for Martyr it was just another routine sunrise that had earned him twenty pounds sterling for services rendered.