Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  The first step, relocating the UIA in the Middle East, turned out to be surprisingly easy. In fact Nubar’s network functioned far more effectively in the bazaars of the Levant than it ever had in the bookstores of Bulgaria and the private libraries of Transylvania. His agents began collecting information on the poker game in Jerusalem with an enthusiasm they had never shown when dealing with Paracelsus and alchemical mysteries.

  One of the most disturbing facts they uncovered initially concerned the sundial that hung by the door in the vault where the game was being played. In the nineteenth century, according to information collected by his agents, this monstrously heavy bronze piece had been a portable sundial, the property of a fabled English explorer named Strongbow who was said to have been the secret owner of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the century.

  That immediately struck Nubar as important. So too the fact that this sundial had chimes attached to it that sounded erratically, belying any orderly concept of time and thoroughly disorienting visitors to the game. But not, apparently, confusing the three founders of the game. On the contrary, they obviously thrived in the chaotic atmosphere caused by this unnatural timepiece.

  What was the connection then? Was it possible his three enemies were using this strange sundial to try to negate time in order to recreate Strongbow’s nineteenth-century empire? Secretly playing with time in the eternal city not just for control of Jerusalem, but with the aim of controlling the entire Middle East?

  Oil. Not only were they trying to deny him immortality, they wanted all the money he was going to inherit as well. The cunning of those three men was appalling.

  Nubar’s eyes narrowed.

  The poker game was even more dangerous than he had suspected. Never would he have imagined the conspiracy against him in the Holy City could be so vast.

  The massive reports Nubar’s agents sent to Albania proved to be stunning mixtures of hearsay and hints and shadowy allegations, each more improbable than the last. And even when hard factual evidence was available, it seemed to drift away almost at once and lose itself in the twisting alleys of Jerusalem with the ease of a Haj Harun, that unreal phantom figure who somehow embodied the spirit of the mountaintop, everybody’s mythical Holy City.

  Numbingly complex reports, and Nubar spent long days brooding over the confusion of the eternal city. In the beginning he toyed with the idea of making a journey there, in disguise, to assess the situation himself. If he did go to Jerusalem he might even enter the game one evening with some of his stronger agents along as bodyguards, cleverly passing himself off as deaf and dumb so as not to reveal anything he knew.

  But no, thought Nubar. Not yet. It would be far too dangerous now to enter Jerusalem and confront the three vicious poker players, even in disguise and surrounded by bodyguards. Too much was at stake. The UIA had to complete its work before it would be safe to venture there. For the present it was necessary to remain hidden securely in his castle tower far away from Jerusalem, methodically perfecting his theories and carefully arranging thick sheaves of charts and numbers.

  And perhaps not just for the present. Nubar was already beginning to sense that the myth of a Holy City might always remain as allusive as a butterfly in flight, forever defying order in its eternal quest. As a boy he had been fascinated by butterflies, but only when they were dead. Their erratic passages when they were free on the wind, colors suddenly flashing and just as quickly gone, had always disturbed him, and as a result he himself had never caught the butterflies that were to be embalmed for his collection. Servants had done that.

  So perhaps even then Nubar suspected that he would never dare to go to Jerusalem and subject himself to the realities of that myth with its worn cobblestones beyond time, its massive walls that had drifted over the ages sheltering hope and safeguarding in their shadows the cherished water of sacred wells, the secret byways of faith and promise, a mountain of many dreams reared above the wastes by many peoples.

  No, the implications of the myth were abhorrent to Nubar and the myth itself was intolerable, too mysterious and too intangible, too far beyond the control of any power on earth. So even in the beginning he sensed that he would never be able to deal with the city and its players except from afar, in order for the players to remain faceless and the myth remote, while the UIA served as his net for catching the changing colors of life. Butterflies, but only when embalmed for Nubar. Order and alignment and the safety of abstractions, the security of concepts, and as with butterflies, so too with Jerusalem.

  Thus the bulky UIA reports arrived month after month, endlessly piling confusion upon confusion as his three distant enemies across the sea laughed and joked and dealt the cards that spun out their game over the years in the eternal city, as Nubar brooded over hearsay and hints and shadowy allegations in his castle tower in Albania, safe and far away as he wanted to be, as indeed he had to be so great was his fear of the conflicting clues of the Old City that rose above time and the desert, at home in his castle tower safely handling charts and numbers to his satisfaction, safely arranging concepts.

  But at the same time finding it increasingly difficult to relax in the evening, unable to escape the contradictions in the reports he read during the day. To be able to do that Nubar decided he needed a practical diversion that would be the exact opposite of the chaotic poker game in the Holy Land, a diversion that would be wholly under his control. To counteract the chaos of eternity there, utter order here.

  But what form should it take? Nubar’s mind wandered and a number of boyhood memories nudged one another.

  The Sunday afternoon band concerts he had gone to with his first lover. The uniforms worn by the band members, the far grander uniform worn by the conductor whom everyone watched and obeyed. Returning home at the end of the afternoon to nestle his lips in orderly trays of embalmed butterflies, his lover on duty behind him.

  Band members. Embalmed butterflies in neat rows. Colors and uniforms, the conductor.

  Nubar smiled. Of course. A private army.

  An elite private corps devoted to pomp and regularity, to discipline, recruited by him and commanded by him and bound by the strictest oaths of obedience, to be ruled with an iron fist by Generalissimo Nubar Parastein von Ho von Heim, Celsus of Bombastus, the incomparable Field Marshal von Wallenbomb, Maximum Leader and Number One, future Supreme Commander of the Albanian Sacred Band.

  Nubar lounged happily at his workbench far into the night playing with crayons. Nothing could have been more soothing to him than pondering the uniforms of his elite corps and musing over its ceremonies.

  A code of conduct?

  Naturally similar to that of the Theban Sacred Band, those noble warriors of ancient Greece with their traditions of honor and physical cleanliness, homosexuality and fanatical brotherhood. But couldn’t he add to that a final irrevocable act of initiation? Something along the lines of the vicious crimes perfected by the Spartan aristocracy?

  In ancient Sparta each young officer had been responsible for planning and committing an atrocity at the end of his military training, sneaking out at night alone to secretly massacre an entire Spartan peasant household as brutally as possible, this crime against his own people seen as proof that he was worthy of being a leader for his country in battle.

  Probably out of the question in modern Albania, thought Nubar. But still, the idea of secret crimes binding his men together strongly appealed to him.

  Uniforms?

  Nubar spent more time designing them, coloring everything in with crayons, than he did on any other aspect of the future Albanian Sacred Band. After all, uniforms were vital. Nothing was more important for the pride and bearing of men, for the sense of honor his elite corps would feel. It took Nubar months but finally he developed a portfolio of crayoned sketches that satisfied him.

  The black leather tunic was skin-tight with a high round black leather collar. The black leather pants were skin-tight. The black leather jackboots flared above the knee, and the black leather milit
ary cap rose high in front with a massive silver skull mounted over the visor. A black leather trenchcoat was to be worn at all times, indoors and out, as were black leather gloves long enough to reveal no flesh at the wrists.

  An animal skin would be thrown over the right shoulder and gathered together by a silver skull on the left hip. The rank and file would wear leopard skins, the officers tiger, he himself, as king of the jungle, lion.

  The belt of the trenchcoat would be a heavy silver chain. Hanging from it would be a large spiked mace and a rusty straight razor in a thick cylindrical black leather sheath, a leather blackjack, a black leather fist and a long black leather truncheon.

  Loops of heavy silver chain would gird the chest between medals awarded for merit, the medals depicting stags and stallions and bulls, wolves and jackals and hyenas. A large silver skull would hang around the neck on a silver chain.

  His own uniform would have gold everywhere instead of silver.

  Ceremonies?

  They would be held exclusively at night, by torchlight, his men facing him in perfect lines and ranks. The ceremonies would consist of him ranting at the top of his lungs, strutting back and forth, while the men listened. He would deliver interminable speeches detailing all his theories and concepts, talking as long as he liked about whatever he liked, while the massed corps remained rigidly at attention, expressionless, the slightest movement by anyone cause for immediate disgrace and expulsion. Then when it suited him he would distribute awards for obedience and give everyone minute instructions about what they were going to do next.

  An elite private army. Spiked maces and skulls and truncheons, fists and black leather by torchlight, iron discipline.

  Nubar completed his plan in his tower room late on a Sunday night. For the third time that evening he mixed equal amounts of sulphur and lead and iron and arsenic, copper sulphate and mercury and opium. Tomorrow he would have to return to the unsettling reports from Jerusalem, but now at least he was at peace with himself.

  Nubar marched to the window and stood with his hands on his hips staring defiantly out at the darkness, at nothing, profoundly immersed in visions of order and obedience and deeply satisfied with himself, unaware that his old friend Mahmud would be responsible for both the initial success and the sordid destruction of the Albanian Sacred Band.

  He had first met Mahmud when he was twelve and Mahmud a year older.

  In the spring of that year Sophia had vacationed in Rhodes. One evening at sunset on the walls of the Crusader fortress there, Sophia had chanced to fall into conversation with another tourist, an elderly princess connected to the Afghan royal family. The two old women took an immediate liking to one another and retired to Sophia’s hotel to dine. The princess was on her way to the Riviera but promised to stop in Albania on her return in September, bringing with her a young grandson as a playmate for Nubar.

  When they arrived at the castle Nubar thought the Afghan prince looked much more than a year his senior. Mahmud was a head taller than he was, his voice had deepened and there was hair growing on his flabby chest. Nubar, still without body hair and speaking in a high squeaky voice, hid in the castle in embarrassment and refused to come out and play.

  At the time Nubar was fascinated with bad Albanian poetry as a result of having met a man named Arnauti, a young French national of Albanian descent who had shown him a battered yellow volume of his poems while passing through the country on his way to Alexandria. The poems were grossly sentimental but they had beguiled Nubar and he was now writing poems himself, imitating Arnauti by cramming his verses with the names of rare minerals and semiprecious stones, a device Arnauti had developed to make commonplace colors seem exotic.

  After hiding for several days Nubar finally agreed to show Mahmud his poems. Mahmud said he liked them very much. The boys began giggling and before long they were panting together on a couch, whispering lurid accounts of real and imagined experiences with animals and household objects and adult male servants.

  Of all Mahmud’s tales the one that intrigued Nubar the most was his account of an exclusive medical clinic outside of Kabul. Nubar had never been treated in a hospital and the descriptions of somber men in white coats, coming and going with strange instruments, fascinated him.

  When he was eleven, it seemed, Mahmud had begun to manifest signs of a nervous disorder. He laughed hysterically at inappropriate moments and then broke into tears for no apparent reason. Afghan specialists were called in and diagnosed dementia praecox with possible overlays of adolescent catatonia. The psychiatric clinic on the outskirts of Kabul was recommended for intensive observation.

  Mahmud spent the next year and a half at the clinic, which was situated in a pastoral setting that included brooks and ponds, sheep and goats and many wild flowers. Every morning the doctors treated him with hypnotism and every afternoon his mother faithfully visited him, to take him for a walk on the grounds of the clinic. But no progress was made. If anything Mahmud wept more violently and laughed more inappropriately.

  One fine sunny day Mahmud had been out for the usual afternoon walk with his mother when a doctor had stumbled upon them behind a bush next to a bubbling brook. The doctor had suddenly begun shouting at his mother and angrily waving his arms.

  What are you doing, woman? yelled the doctor.

  Mahmud was lying on his back in the grass giggling inaudibly, gazing up at the rays of sun slanting through the bush while his kneeling mother performed fellatio on him. His mother, an unsophisticated Tadzhik woman whom his father had married for political reasons, raised her head in confusion and wiped her mouth.

  But he began to cry, she said simply. I always do this when he cries. Look, now he’s smiling again.

  Which Mahmud was, although the vacant leer on his face dangerously resembled the demented grin of a congenital idiot. His mother was immediately hustled out of the clinic and told she could never return. Within a month Mahmud was pronounced cured and sent to the Riviera with relatives for a rest.

  The Albanian sojourn of the Afghan princess and her grandson ended in late October. They left the castle to return to Afghanistan and there the elderly princess soon died from a concussion suffered when her horse went out of control on a cliff. Nubar wrote to his friend once or twice but Mahmud was too lazy to answer. So Nubar knew nothing of him until he turned up in Albania unexpectedly in the autumn of 1929, in disgrace, his furtive note to Nubar from a cheap hotel in Tiranë saying that he had just arrived in the country and was badly in need of help.

  Nubar went to the shabby hotel in Tiranë and found his old friend stretched out on a filthy bed, dressed in the shapeless costume of a Turkish peasant. After a separation of ten years, they embraced with tears. Mahmud then produced a bottle of cheap mulberry raki from under the bed and went on to give an account of himself.

  It seemed the coming world economic crisis had already been anticipated in the palaces of the Afghan royal family. Various speculative ventures were collapsing and Mahmud had been implicated in a plot to poison the minister of finance, his paternal uncle, with whom he had been maintaining a secret sexual relationship in order to gain access to economic information.

  Mahmud had just managed to flee the country in disguise, traveling overland by way of Baku and Odessa, distributing heavy bribes along the way, his uncle’s jewels and some other valuables he had stolen at the last moment. He still had a small income from a few holdings on the Riviera, but it was absolutely essential that he go into hiding in some obscure place until the scandal was forgotten at home. He felt there surely must be such a spot in a corner of Albania, and he asked his old friend’s help in finding it.

  Mahmud was equally frank about other things. In the last ten years he had become an alcoholic, he said, and having always had a low opinion of man’s bestial nature, he was now slowly starving himself to death. He totally lacked the courage for a more abrupt departure, and besides, he quite enjoyed the routine he had set for himself. In fact he had adopted the Mediterranean habit o
f taking a siesta in order to have the pleasure of getting fully drunk twice a day.

  His regimen was orderly. Upon awakening in the morning he drank several quarts of warm beer, in bed, to soothe his stomach. By the middle of the morning his stomach was sufficiently inactive for him to get out of bed and go to a café for mulberry raki, which he drank by the tumbler until noon while reading literary reviews. His intellectual work for the day thus accomplished, he went to a restaurant and ate one baked chicken wing with his fingers because his hands shook so badly a knife and fork made too much noise clattering around the plate.

  After lunch he returned to the café and drank unwatered wine until he went to bed toward the end of the afternoon, reawakening around eight in the evening to repeat his earlier cycle, this time minus the literary reviews of course. His second performance ended in oblivion sometime after midnight, when by prearrangement a waiter carried him home and dumped him in bed.

  And there you have it, said Mahmud with a smile, emptying the bottle of mulberry raki and going down under the bed to look for another.

  Nubar listened to all this with sympathy and agreed to do whatever he could. Accordingly, the next morning, he donned his white duster and racing goggles and set off through the mountains in his Hispano-Suiza in search of an Albanian hideout for Mahmud.

  He found it that very day but not in the mountains. After driving for several hours through one drab village after another, Nubar decided he needed some grilled crabs for lunch to buoy his spirits. He asked for the nearest fishing village and was given directions to a place called Gronk.

  The olive groves gave way to orange trees as he dropped down out of the hills and sped along a flat sandy stretch of coast, a beautiful deserted beach that must have been five miles long. And then all at once he came around a headland and stopped the car in amazement.