Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  Haj Harun touched his arm.

  The one who’s speaking is Godfrey of Bouillon, he whispered.

  Has the voice of an English drill sergeant, thought Joe.

  And the man to his right, whispered Haj Harun, is his brother, Baldwin I, the first Latin king of Jerusalem. The others on the dais are Raymond of Toulouse, Robert of Normandy, Robert II of Flanders, Bohemond and Tancred. In front of them are the two men who started it all, Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless.

  A scruffy lot, muttered Joe, trying to read the slogans on the flags and pennants.

  From what he could make out between the cryptic symbols, the assembly was a gathering of a group called the Order of the Mystic Shrine, a society of Freemasons made up of men with high Masonic degrees. The speaker was saying that Masons from many lodges in many countries had made the long journey to Jerusalem to take part in this international conclave of the Order, the first ever held in the rock chambers beneath the western ramparts of the Old City that had long been popularly known as Solomon’s Quarries, the spot where stonemasons in antiquity are said to have cut and dressed the stone blocks used by Solomon to build his temple.

  And since we trace the origins of Freemasonry back to those very stonemasons, continued the speaker on the platform, it is truly a momentous event in history, albeit a secret one the world will never know about, for us to gather here and perform the mystical rites of our fraternal Order in the lofty chamber where Solomon’s temple was hewed from the earth, a chamber which can honestly be said to be Solomon’s temple in eternity, this spacious area where we now stand, once carved out and emptied by our brothers, being nothing less than the material form of the spiritual shrine we carry within us and treasure in common.

  Flags fluttered and pennants waved. There were cries of here here, yes yes, more more, true true. The speaker smiled beneficently and raised his hand for silence.

  By God that’s cute, thought Joe, the complicated cant of stones. Cant as can and emptied quarries for heads. Mystical all right, at least to me. What’s it all mean?

  Haj Harun was urgently tugging him by the sleeve, so distraught Joe couldn’t understand his frantic whispering.

  What did you say?

  I said we have to stop them now before it’s too late, before they have a chance to return to their armies. There may never be another opportunity like this, all of them in one room together, to be dealt with in a single blow. Come on. We have to go down there.

  We’d be surrounded, whispered Joe. Black and Tans all over us.

  When you’re defending Jerusalem you’re always surrounded.

  But the odds are disastrous. Only two of us against two hundred of them.

  When you’re defending Jerusalem the odds are always like that, whispered Haj Harun hurriedly. They never get better and sometimes they get worse. Come on.

  No, I still think we ought to wait for developments. Maybe they’ll set fire to themselves or something. Those peaked hats will be a definite fire hazard when the torches burn down a bit.

  Haj Harun groaned softly.

  But they killed a hundred thousand of us the last time. We simply can’t let that happen again. The thought of it is making me hear noises in my head.

  Steady man, whispered Joe, easy does it. No unwanted noises in the head at this critical juncture in history.

  Noises, repeated Haj Harun desperately, I can hear them coming. Clanging their swords on the cobblestones and slaughtering the innocent until the streets are running with blood, oh it was horrible. The streets were knee-deep with bodies.

  Haj Harun shuddered. Then his expression changed and he raised his head defiantly.

  They were the ones who first made me wear my yellow cloak. I remember it now.

  Why?

  To set me apart. To try to humiliate me as a Jew.

  Joe looked puzzled.

  Are you telling me you’re a Jew on top of everything else?

  Haj Harun waved his hand vaguely.

  When you’ve been around Jerusalem as long as I have, before people were divided into names like that, you’re whatever the enemy wants to call you. But I absolutely refused to be humiliated. Instead I wore my yellow cloak with dignity. I’ve always worn it with dignity. But all the same, Prester John, the noises in my head are getting worse.

  No, hold on. Close your eyes and they’ll go away.

  Noises, whispered Haj Harun and leapt to his feet. He sounded a tremendous blast on his ram’s horn. The faces in the hall turned up toward the ledge in astonishment. Haj Harun waved his ram’s horn in the air and shouted across the chamber.

  Walter the Penniless. I see you skulking down there, you and all the other scheming Franks planning a new conquest of Jerusalem. But it’s not going to happen so give it up, I say, don’t persist in your wickedness. This city is eternal and can never be conquered by you or anyone else, when will you ever learn that? So take your armed hordes away and never besiege us and starve us and kill us again. We won’t be conquered. We simply refuse to be conquered.

  Haj Harun sounded a second powerful blast on his ram’s horn.

  Hear me down there. If you absolutely refuse to withdraw I hereby challenge the bravest among you to individual combat. Step forward, he who dares. Tancred? Bohemond? Peter the Hermit? Raise your sword, any one of you. I’m ready.

  Haj Harun sounded a third and final blast on the ram’s horn. Joe reached out and tried to stop him, but before he could Haj Harun’s spindly legs went churning out into space. His faded yellow cloak flared as he sailed out over the edge of the ledge and plummeted down toward the crowd of stunned faces below.

  There was a heavy thud and a terrible cracking of bones.

  Joe looked down, horrified. Haj Harun lay crumpled on the stone floor, feebly holding his ram’s horn in the air. There was a shiny new dent in the top of his rusty helmet.

  The Masons began to yell at each other in confusion. Flags and pennants and peaked hats surged forward as they pressed around the extraordinary apparition on the floor. One of them nudged Haj Harun with his foot and the old man twitched, letting out a low moan. He seemed to be trying to get the ram’s horn to his lips for another blast, but he obviously didn’t have the strength to move.

  Alive, thought Joe. There’s that at least.

  All at once he realized they were both still wearing the handkerchief masks they had put on in the cognac cellar.

  Oh help, thought Joe, two bloody bandits in the underworld, that’s what they’ll be thinking we are. Hired subterranean thugs and vicious cutthroats come to disrupt their silly revels and spy on their foolish games. We’re for it now and what would the baking priest be likely to advise at a time like this? Anything, that’s the job. Anything, as long as it’s fast.

  Joe jumped to his feet and raised a clenched fist.

  Hold it right there, he shouted, just hold it, you Freemasonry rabble. This is the Irish Republican Army you’re looking at and this uniform is IRA combat issue for special underground warfare in Jerusalem. We’ve had this quarry mined with heavy explosives for months waiting for you to turn up and reveal your fiendish anti-Jesuit plots, and now that we’ve heard them all we’re taking our information aboveground and going straight to the pope, and dead is the fanatic who tries to stop us. Stand fast or I’ll tell the old man down there to sound a fourth blast on his ram’s horn, which is the signal for the apocalypse as sure as St John ever wrote the Word. One more blast from his horn and the bombs will blow and you’ll all be on your way back to Solomon all right, the world well rid of your black anti-Catholic hearts. Freeze for your lives.

  Joe leapt lightly to the floor and whirled in a circle, glaring at the stupefied Masons. Then he knelt and gathered up the miserable Haj Harun who had been crawling helplessly in circles, his helmet jammed down on his nose, so that he couldn’t see, tears streaming down his face from the rain of rust in his eyes.

  We won, whispered Joe in his ear.

  We did?

  Yes. Not one o
f them dared accept your challenge. Not Bohemond, not Tancred, not even that scheming scoundrel Walter the Penniless. Paralyzed with fear they were and they’re going home without raising a sword. You did it. Jerusalem’s saved.

  Thank God, murmured Haj Harun as Joe lifted the old man’s frail body gently up on his back and staggered away through the masses of pennants and flags and peaked hats, the flickering torches, to limp out the entrance under the northwestern wall of the Old City where the hot July sun was just sinking below the rooftops of the new.

  Part Two

  5. Munk Szondi

  You eat pure garlic?

  Yes.

  How much?

  A large bulb before each meal and two more afterward.

  Some slovenly Mediterranean habit you’ve picked up, I suppose?

  THE MAN WITH THE tri-level watch and the samurai bow hadn’t originally acquired his vast knowledge of Levantine commodities through travel, but rather from the unique library of letters that made up the archives of the House of Szondi.

  The ancestor who had written those letters, Johann Luigi Szondi, had been born in Basle in 1784, the son of a German-Swiss perfectionist who manufactured very small watches. The smaller the watch the more it pleased his father, and in fact his father’s watches were often so small their faces couldn’t be read. For that reason few were sold and most ended up strung along the walls of their house like so many tiny beads, ticking inaudibly and keeping precise time uselessly.

  But fortunately Johann Luigi’s mother was an Italian-Swiss cook who had an unsurpassed talent for baking bread. No better bread could be found in Basle, so while Johann Luigi’s father busied himself reducing time to next to nothing, his mother walked around town selling huge loaves of hot bread so the family could live.

  Both parents died at the end of the century and it was immediately apparent that Johann Luigi was no ordinary Swiss. To support himself he chopped firewood while beginning his studies in chemistry and medicine and languages. He studied Arabic at Cambridge for a year and decided to make a walking tour of the Levant, a precocious and sprightly young man with light blue eyes, still only eighteen years old.

  With his great natural charm, Johann Luigi had no difficulty begging lodgings along the way. In Albania he chanced to knock at the gate of the castle belonging to the head of the powerful Wallenstein clan, where he was duly invited to spend the night. The master of the castle, who bore the Christian name Skanderbeg and was the most recent in a long line of Skanderbegs, was away fighting in some war, as it seemed his predecessors had been doing for the last hundred and fifty years.

  Johann Luigi was therefore entertained by the absent master’s pleasant young wife. After dinner a wild storm broke over the castle and the young woman invited him to view the lightning from her bedroom. Torrential rains lashed the castle the rest of the night.

  By morning the storm had blown itself out. With bright smiles for the young wife, Johann Luigi shouldered his pack to continue his journey, unaware he had planted in his hostess the seed of a pious future hermit, a man whose stupendous forgery of the original Bible four decades later would be universally accepted as authentic, the renegade Trappist and linguistic genius who would be the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins.

  Johann Luigi traveled briefly in the Levant and liked what he saw. By the beginning of the following year he had walked back as far as Budapest, where he decided to enter medical school, again chopping firewood to support himself. He received his medical degree and set himself up in private practice, specializing in cases of hysteria. Before long he converted to Judaism in order to marry one of his former patients, a young Jewish woman of Khasarian extraction whose family had been engaged in petty local trade in Budapest since the ninth century.

  A son was born to the couple and named Munk, a curious tradition his wife’s forebears had brought with them from Transcaucasia before they were converted to Judaism in the eighth century, a custom requiring the first male in every generation to be given the same name. In Sarah’s family the traditional name was Munk, although no one could remember its significance. As for Johann Luigi, he was more than pleased with the name since it appealed to his own rather monkish tendencies.

  About the same time Johann Luigi began planning another brief trip to the Levant. He would travel overland to Aleppo, he told his wife, and spend a few weeks there improving his Arabic. Then he would journey down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf, find a ship bound for Egypt and so back to Europe. In all he would be gone three months, he said, and he promised to write every day, not explaining how his letters could possibly arrive in Budapest before he did, nor how the distances proposed could be covered so quickly.

  But little was known of Middle Eastern geography in those days, and perhaps nothing at all in a Budapest family engaged in petty local trade.

  Nevertheless, Sarah and her family must have suspected more was involved when they saw how the young doctor went about preparing himself for his trip. Instead of writing to shipping agents, Johann Luigi disappeared into the Hungarian countryside for a full year, walking barefoot in all kinds of weather and sleeping in the open without a blanket, feeding himself exclusively on grasses and returning to Budapest only once, to be with his wife when their daughter Sarah was born midway through the year.

  Yet no one mentioned this odd behavior. The women in Sarah’s family had always loved their men well and Sarah wanted Johann Luigi to do whatever would make him happy, even if it meant he would be away from home for a while.

  On a brisk autumn day in 1809, then, Johann Luigi lovingly embraced his wife and two children and left on a brief journey to the Levant, to be traced by daily letters sent home to Sarah.

  That much was true. Johann Luigi did write letters home every day, often five or six times a day.

  And given his passion for details, it wasn’t surprising his letters also contained long reports on everything he observed, down to the smallest items. Thus mixed in with the lyrical passages describing his love for Sarah, there was interminable information on crops and trade, lists of cottage industries and analyses of local customs, all strung together in what was in effect an exhaustive diary of his travels.

  For two years the heavy packets of letters arrived regularly from Aleppo. By then the inquisitive young Swiss had grown a long beard and learned the one hundred and fifty Arabic words for wine, having become to all appearances an erudite Arab merchant, well dressed in the Turkish manner, who went by the name of Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun and explained his merry blue eyes by saying he had Circassian blood.

  So skillful was his grasp of the Arab imagination that before he left his headquarters in Syria, to amuse himself, he transposed an episode from Gargantua into Arabic and inserted it in a privately published edition of the Thousand and One Nights, the tale so cleverly done it was immediately acclaimed as a lost Baghdad original.

  During the next two years Johann Luigi’s letters arrived erratically in Budapest. Nothing would be heard from him for months, then hundreds of letters would descend on Sarah in a single day. Now he was in Egypt, having arrived there by way of Petra, probably the first European to have seen that deserted stone city since the Middle Ages.

  Pink, my love, he wrote of Petra to Sarah. And half as old as time.

  In Cairo he established a reputation as an expert in Islamic law. He was urged to take a high position in the Islamic courts but gently refused, saying he had urgent business up the Nile. He was next heard from in Nubia eating dates, marching ten hours a day, covering nine hundred miles in a month.

  But in 1813, in Nubia, there were also a few quiet weeks for the restless Johann Luigi. There, in a village on the fringe of the desert, he fell in love and lived briefly with the proud young woman who would one day become the great-grandmother of the Egyptian slave, Cairo Martyr.

  Next he pushed south from Shendi down to the Red Sea and across to Jidda, where he disappeared.

  Only for Sarah to find a procession of carts drawing up in fr
ont of her house a year later, heaped with thousands of envelopes and packets. In his guise as Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun, it turned out, Johann Luigi had penetrated both Medina and Mecca during the missing year and actually kissed the black meteorite in the Kaaba.

  He was the first explorer to see Abu Simbel, then mostly buried by sand, and wrote that Rameses’ ear was three feet, four inches long, his shoulders twenty-one feet across, estimating correctly that the pharaoh must have been between sixty-five and seventy feet tall despite his notoriously self-indulgent life.

  Once more Johann Luigi went to Cairo intending to lecture on Islamic law, but the plague struck the city and he went to St Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai to escape it. There in 1817, two years before the great English explorer Strongbow was born in southern England, Johann Luigi Szondi abruptly succumbed to dysentery and was buried without ceremony in an unmarked Moslem grave at the foot of Mt Sinai, within sight of the cave where the Albanian son unknown to him, the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins, would eventually produce his spectacular forgery of the original Bible.

  Johann Luigi was only thirty-three when he died and he had visited Mecca fully half a century before Strongbow, who would be the next European to do so. It was true Strongbow’s vast explorations would surpass those of the remarkable Johann Luigi. But it was also true the Englishman’s haj would stretch over forty years, not a mere eight.

  Long after Johann Luigi’s death, letters in his familiar handwriting continued to arrive in Budapest from all parts of Africa and the Middle East. Tender letters filled with love, always promising that he would be home within the prescribed three months. Year after year they came—the last, four decades after his death.

  But Sarah didn’t know he was dead, and who could say that letter was the last?

  There was always the chance another letter might find its way to Budapest from some obscure corner of the Levant, where Johann Luigi had entrusted it to a sleepy caravan merchant moving slowly through time on the back of a camel.