For the third time that morning Nubar read through a perplexing document that had arrived just after breakfast, an appendix to the monthly summary of activities submitted by his control center in the Bulgarian seaport of Varna, which was responsible for monitoring all activities on the Black Sea.
The appendix was purported to be a verbatim record, taken down in shorthand, of a conversation between one of his Bulgarian agents and an underworld informer on the Adriatic island of Brač. The agent had gone to the island to investigate a rumor provided by a confidential source in Varna.
The rumor claimed that an unemployed Croatian peasant on the Adriatic island of Krk, after stealing a well-worn manuscript from a tourist, had gone into hiding on Brač. The stolen manuscript was said to be Paracelsus’ Three Chapters on the French Disease, dated 1529, which had appeared in Nuremberg in 1530.
The underworld informer said the Croatian peasant in Brač was drunk most of the time on slivovitz. Nevertheless, despite his drunken incoherency, he was still stubbornly insisting on a fee of three thousand Bulgarian leva just to let the manuscript be reviewed by an expert.
And the underworld informer, added the agent, although just as drunk as the peasant and also on slivovitz, was being just as stubborn, demanding a fee of three thousand Bulgarian leva for himself before he would reveal the peasant’s hiding place in Brač, so the agent could contact the man directly.
The agent concluded by recommending payment of both sums, and his chief in Varna concurred. Routine permission to proceed was requested.
Routine?
Nubar snorted. Was there ever anything routine about a manuscript that just might possibly be a genuine Bombastus? In fact the longer Nubar considered the report the more suspicious he became.
Why hadn’t this Adriatic information, for example, come from Belgrade Control? With the whole Black Sea to monitor, what was Varna Control doing conducting an operation all the way over on the other side of the Balkans?
More specifically, how competent was the agent’s shorthand? As a Bulgarian, did he speak Croatian that well?
There were other seeming irregularities.
Could there really be any need for an underworld informer on an island as small as Brač? Could there even be any role for an underworld there?
Why was a peasant on Krk stealing well-worn manuscripts from tourists and then fleeing to Brač? How did he happen to be interested in learned sixteenth-century speculations, written in Latin, on the French disease? Would a drunken Croatian peasant know what the French disease was? Or did the peasant have the disease himself, and in that case was it so advanced his mind had already deteriorated to the point of insanity?
Would a tourist be likely to carry such a valuable document with him while taking a holiday on a tiny island like Krk?
Or to approach the problem differently, how did a confidential source in Bulgaria happen to be familiar with rumors on Brač? And how could an unemployed Croatian peasant from Krk, in the first place, afford to stay drunk on imported plum brandy in Brač, in the second place? The third place being reserved for the fact that the plum brandy everyone was drunk on, curiously enough, just happened to be Bulgarian.
And along that same line of reasoning, why was everybody involved in the case asking to be paid in Bulgarian leva when the two islands in question were both Yugoslavian? What was the matter with good Yugoslavian dinars?
Nubar sat very straight in his chair, his pencil poised, well aware of his role in history. The great doctor had cloaked his discoveries to confuse the unworthy, but Nubar intended to be worthy and he wouldn’t be so easily fooled. Could anyone in Krk be trusted? Could anyone in Brač? What were his people over there on the Black Sea really up to with their routine requests to proceed in the Adriatic?
Krk-Brač. In short, what was the truth?
Nubar wrote down an extensive list of questions to be answered before any more money was spent on the Krk-Brač operation. Having done so, he felt much better. He left his workbench to go to the window for a breath of air.
In the distance lay the Adriatic. Nubar looked down on the valleys where peasants were farming the Wallenstein land, at the workers several hundred feet below who were clearing the castle moat so that it could be filled with water again, a little more than a century after his grandfather had disappeared in the Holy Land and caused the castle to fall into ruin.
It had been his idea and Sophia was enthusiastic, but he hadn’t suggested it out of devotion to his grandfather’s memory. Rather, having turned twenty-one and become legally a man, he wanted the added protection of the moat, a hygienic insulation between himself and the outside world.
As he leaned on the windowsill Nubar noticed that one of the stones in the sill had become loose. Abruptly his left eyelid drooped in excitement. He worked the stone free and leaned out the window with it, taking aim at a peasant laboring in the moat.
Down and away, down and down. The stone didn’t hit the peasant on the head as he had hoped, it struck him on the shoulder. But from that height it was enough to knock the man down. There was a roar of pain far below, then one of anger. When last seen the man was scrambling out of the moat swinging a pickax, heading toward the workmen on top of the embankment.
Nubar giggled and pulled in his head.
Order. Alignment. Hygiene.
Nubar spent the rest of the morning straightening his bookshelves, nudging the books forward or backward so the bindings made a perfectly flat surface. To facilitate this daily task, tiny metal conductors had been inserted at the base of the bindings in all his books, the conductors resting on metal contacts in the shelves that led in series to a circuit breaker. Ceramic insulators had been installed at both ends of every shelf. Nubar only had to stretch an electric wire taut down the length of a shelf, and throw a switch, to know whether the alignment was perfect or not.
Buzz.
Nubar nudged the offending book into place and moved to the next shelf.
When he was a little boy he had liked to lean forward on the toilet bowl and peek through his legs to see what was happening. A brown round head appeared and slowly lengthened, longer and longer. He held his breath. Plop. Another. The little brown logs circled peacefully down there. He pulled the chain and waved as they spiraled away.
Good-bye, little friends.
When he was nine he had become fascinated with butterflies and wanted to learn how to embalm them. Sophia wrote to Venice and soon a slender young Italian lepidopterist arrived at the castle to assume his duties as Nubar’s private embalming tutor. The Italian also taught him other things as Nubar, wide-eyed, bent over the trays of butterflies, his lips nestled between their richly colored spread wings.
On Sunday afternoons the Italian tutor took him to band concerts in towns on the Adriatic. Nubar sat sorely but happily on the hard wooden chairs, entranced by the uniforms, especially the conductor’s with its cascading loops of gold braid.
Someday, he decided, he too would have a gorgeous uniform.
That winter he found himself attracted to one of the mechanics who maintained the automobiles at the castle, a hairy man who was always covered with grease. By then Nubar knew how to embalm butterflies so the Italian tutor was sent back to Venice. Throughout the chill rainy weather little Nubar’s experiences in the grease pit of the garage, his hands pressed against the cold slimy walls for support as the hairy mechanic bucked and grunted behind him, were far more delirious than the languid summer encounters he had known with the slender young Italian over trays of butterflies.
By the end of the Great War, Nubar had grown into a small adolescent with an unusually large head, a narrow sunken chest and a prominent potbelly. His face was small and round and pinched, and his tiny weak eyes were very close together. He wore round glasses, wire-framed in gold, that seemed to push his eyes even closer together. Two of his front teeth were gold.
He had a small nose and a small mouth and lips so thin he couldn’t make them whistle. He cultivated a short str
aight moustache and combed his straight black hair low over his forehead to hide his baldness, his hairline having already begun to recede by the time he was fifteen.
A mild December day in 1927, in the tower room of the ancestral Wallenstein castle.
Nubar finished putting his books in order with a frown on his face, having recalled the dream that was disturbing his sleep lately. In the dream he entered a restaurant carrying a baby and asked the chef to cook it rare. The chef, in a tall white hat, bowed respectfully while three young men sat at a table crunching chicken and grinning up at him with lascivious expressions, their hands and mouths dripping with grease. The unpleasant noise of the chicken bones cracking in their mouths woke him up and he found he had a painful need to urinate.
Mercury poisoning again?
Parabombheim von Ho von Celsus. Immortal Bombastus.
The gong sounded in the courtyard announcing lunch with Sophia. Nubar gathered up his queries on the Krk-Brač operation and started down the long winding stairway.
10. Sophia the Black Hand
She put her tiny right fist in the fragile porcelain cup of crude, wiggled it around
and brought it out dripping. With a
gesture of authority she flattened her
hand in the very center of the map.
WHEN SOPHIA ENTERED THE dining room the opening chords of Bach’s Mass in B Minor boomed forth from the organ in the balcony at the far end of the room. That piece of music had been the favorite of her common-law husband, Nubar’s grandfather, and Sophia always had it played during meals in the castle. Nubar kissed his grandmother lightly on the lips and went to his chair in the middle of the table. At the far end, nearer the organ and facing Sophia, the usual place had been set for his dead grandfather.
Sophia was then in her eighty-sixth year. She was dressed entirely in black as she had been for half a century, ever since the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins had ceased to recognize her upon the birth of their natural son, Catherine, Nubar’s insane dead father. She wore a flat black hat and black gloves and a thin black veil, raised only at meals. But the firmness of her unlined face made her look much younger than she was.
Her stature gave the same impression. Sophia was a tiny woman who had shrunk with age, and who kept on shrinking, until now she was not much bigger than a large doll. In fact Nubar sometimes wondered what would happen to her if she lived another ten or fifteen years. At the rate she was disappearing, wouldn’t she be the size of a baby by then?
Or was that the point. There was no denying Sophia’s whimsical eccentricities. Having been grown up for decades, had she now decided to retrace the stages of her extraordinary life back to its origins?
In order to sit at the table, Sophia used a special high chair with a folding stepladder built into it. Except when eating she chain-smoked black Turkish cheroots through a hole in her veil, an extremely mild cigar made to order for her in Istanbul. Nubar’s earliest memories were of a soft white face in black lace hovering over his cradle, a mixture of lavender scent and pungent cigar fumes suddenly engulfing him.
Then she had seemed large to Nubar, but of course he hadn’t been aware that she was standing on a chair beside his cradle.
Once long ago when she had been rebuilding the Wallenstein fortune lost by his grandfather, and modestly saying very little as she did so, she had become known in the district as Sophia the Unspoken. The name had lingered into Nubar’s youth, but now she was always referred to as Sophia the Black Hand.
Various explanations for the name existed. Among the local peasants it was assumed she was called this because she always wore black gloves. Farther afield in the Balkans it was suspected she must have played some decisive part in the Black Hand terrorist organization that had been active in Serbia before the war. While elsewhere in Europe the name was considered a natural epithet for someone whose manipulations in oil were vast and conclusive.
All of these explanations were true as far as they went. Sophia obviously did wear black gloves and she had assisted the Balkan nationalist movements before the war. And her influence in the Middle East had made her the single most powerful oil merchant in the world.
But none of these facts had given birth to her epithet, which had actually come from an unpublicized meeting that took place on a lemon barge in 1919, an event so ruthlessly suppressed only a few men in the world knew about it.
And with reason, they felt, since it proved that an international oil cartel of scandalous proportions did indeed exist in Europe after the First World War.
The steps that led to that highly secret meeting had begun a decade earlier. For three years after the death of her beloved husband in 1906, Sophia had remained in absolute seclusion in the castle caring for Nubar, who had been born prematurely the day after his grandfather died. But then the resilient powers of her forebears had reexerted themselves.
Although no one in the twentieth century suspected the truth, Sophia wasn’t an Albanian but an Armenian, the descendent of a woman who had been brought to the castle two hundred years ago by an illiterate Wallenstein warrior serving in the forces of the Ottoman sultan. That Skanderbeg had helped crush an uprising in Armenia, and for his part in the brutal slaughter he was offered the pick of some captured prisoners. As would any of the Skanderbegs save for the last, he naturally chose only very young girls of eight or nine. With a half-dozen of these little girls roped behind his horse he began the journey back to Albania, looking forward to a lusty military holiday.
But that early Skanderbeg fared poorly. Before he reached the Black Sea a raiding party of Armenian patriots managed to free three of the girls. While waiting for a sailing vessel a fourth girl escaped in a rowboat, and the following night a fifth slipped away while he was getting drunk in order to rape her. Thus only Sophia’s ancestress reached the castle in Albania, still a virgin because the Wallenstein warrior could only rape when thoroughly drunk, and he had been too afraid of losing the last of his spoils to drink on the latter part of the journey.
By the time he sighted his castle, that Wallenstein was desperate with craving. He locked the girl and himself in a tower room and emptied a flagon of arak in a frenzy.
After weeks of abstinence, the drink had an immediate effect. He was insensible and slobbering, the room a blur, his mind a cave of swirling bats. His left eyelid was drooping heavily and an unmistakable tightness was in his groin. On his hands and knees he groped his way ecstatically across the room toward the little girl cowering by a window.
The girl was frightened but not incapable of thought. She was ready to jump out the window, but first she wanted to see if she could take advantage of his drunkenness as others had done. In particular she noticed how the drooping left eyelid seemed to confuse his movements.
She therefore praised his magnificent virility. She said she had been waiting weeks for this moment and offered him another flagon of arak, hoping, she said, that this would double the time he spent on top of her. The Wallenstein warrior, laughing hysterically at his own prowess, staggered to his feet and drank off the arak.
His left eye snapped shut. He lunged and smashed into the wall, reeled backward blindly and went crashing through the window, landing on his face in the moat several hundred feet below, instantly dead in his sexual frustration.
The little Armenian girl was put to work in the castle stables until she was ten, old enough not to attract the attention of the next Skanderbeg. When she was fifteen she began to sneak down into the villages at night, determined to find an Armenian who could father a child for her and thereby keep alive her Armenian heritage in the barbaric foreign land where fate had brought her. Before long an itinerant Armenian rug dealer chanced to pass through the district and was happy to oblige her. A girl was born and fifteen years later another itinerant Armenian rug dealer spent a pleasurable week with another young Armenian woman in one of the villages.
Thus these mothers and daughters, while cleaning the Wallenstein stables, maintained their pur
e Armenian blood down to the middle of the nineteenth century, when Sophia broke the tradition by becoming the common-law wife of the last of the Skanderbegs, the forger of the Sinai Bible.
In 1909 Sophia ended her period of formal mourning and emerged from seclusion in the castle. Agriculture no longer interested her so she turned her attention to the problems of energy, opening several low-quality lignite mines on her estate. Then when the British navy switched from coal to oil in 1911, Sophia decided she should go to Constantinople and learn what little was known about oil in the Middle East. She studied diligently there and became convinced that oil could be found along the Tigris.
In 1914 she executed the second most brilliant maneuver of her career by putting together a syndicate, in Constantinople, of English oil companies and German banks to exploit the oil along the Tigris, obtaining a charter from the Ottoman government for that purpose.
As broker of the agreement, Sophia retained for herself a share of seven per cent of all future profits.
Because of the war the syndicate was inactive for the next five years. Then in 1919 Sophia convened the highly secret meeting of its members.
The English responded eagerly and so did the French, new partners in the syndicate, Sophia having cleverly transferred to them the shares formerly owned by the defeated Germans. England and France now administered the Middle East through various mandates. And the oil companies of the two countries, at her insistence, had successfully persuaded their governments that the syndicate’s charter should apply not just to the Tigris valley, but to all the lands that had previously been a part of the Ottoman Empire.
The meeting was to be held on a barge in the middle of Lake Shkodër, on the Albanian-Yugoslav border, thereby allowing members to approach the meeting from different countries for added diplomatic security. Sophia herself spent the night before the meeting in the city of Shkodër.
Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2) Page 22