Jerusalem Poker

Jerusalem Poker

by Edward Whittemore

For Abby and Sarah

Copyright © 1978

by Edward Whittemore

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.

He yawned and lit a cigarette.

The sun slipped above the horizon and the baron and baroness spread their arms wide to receive it, their skin and hair so fair they were all but invisible in the desert dawn.

Glistening sweat and decaying fat. Sunrise. Cairo Martyr puffed lazily and turned his gaze north when he heard the distant drone of an airplane.

It was a small triplane carrying the morning mail from Alexandria up the Nile to the capital.

Martyr watched it grow larger and realized it was heading straight toward the pyramid. In another moment he could make out the dashing figure in the open cockpit, a grinning English pilot in a leather helmet and flying goggles, his white scarf flowing on the wind.

Down, he yelled. Down.

But the delirious baron and baroness heard neither him nor the airplane. The great red ball on the horizon had hypnotized them with the heat it sent rushing through their aging bodies. Gaily the plane dipped its wings in salute to the most impressive monument ever reared by man, then gracefully rolled away and sped on south.

Cairo Martyr got to his feet, not believing what he saw. The nearly invisible man and woman still stood on the summit with their arms outstretched, but now they were headless, cleanly decapitated by the slashing lowest wing of the triplane. The hulking bodies lingered a few seconds longer, then slowly toppled over and disappeared down the far side of the pyramid.

Cairo Martyr stared at the new sun. The cigarette burned his fingers and he dropped it.

The morning mail in 1914.

A gay salute to antiquity.

And an astonishing new flying machine smartly cutting a swath through the leisurely old order of the nineteenth century, a world that could no longer survive in a speeding mechanical age suddenly wagging its wings and rolling in raffish chance.

In the dizzying shock of recognition that came that morning on top of the Great Pyramid, Martyr realized that his days of Victorian servitude were gone forever. Never again would he perform for vacationing Europeans in bazaar back rooms or in rowboats listlessly adrift on the Nile. The era of colonialists sunning themselves on the pyramids was over. The Victorian age had lost its head.

For the Junker baron and baroness, and for Martyr as well, the nineteenth century had abruptly come to an end in that early summer dawn in 1914, although elsewhere in the world a few more weeks were to pass before the radical new state of affairs was generally recognized.

PART ONE

-1-

Jerusalem 1933

The end had come. Jerusalem lay on the table. At last it was a case of winner take all in the eternal city.

The Great Jerusalem Poker Game for secret control of the city, the ruin of so many adventurers in the period between the two world wars, continued for twelve years before it finally spent itself.

During that time thousands of gamblers from around the world lost fortunes trying to win the Holy City, but in the end there were only three men at the table, the same three who had been there in the beginning.

Twelve years of ferocious poker for the highest stakes after an initial hand was dealt by chance one cold December day in 1921 — seemingly by chance, to pass the time that gray afternoon in Jerusalem when the sky was heavily overcast and wind whipped through the alleys, snow definitely in the air.

A cheap Arab coffee shop in the Old City where young O'Sullivan Beare sat crouched in a corner over a glass of wretched Arab cognac, a disillusioned Irish patriot who had fought in the Easter Rebellion at the age of sixteen and gone on to be revered as the biggest of the little people when he was terrorizing the Black and Tans in the hills of southern Ireland, a fugitive who had escaped to Palestine diguised as a Poor Clare nun on a pilgrimage.

A lonely hero still only twenty-one years old, wearing as an unlikely disguise that day the uniform of an officer of light cavalry in Her Majesty's expeditionary force to the Crimea, 1854, the medals on his chest showing he had survived a famous suicidal charge and been awarded the Victoria Cross because of it, far from home now huddled over a glass of Arab cognac that helped not at all, finding life bleak and meaningless on that cold December afternoon, simply that.

Dice clattered around the smoky room.

Bloody Arab excuse for a pub, he muttered. Just bloody awful, that's what. Not an honest pint in the house and no one to drink it with anyway.

A sudden gust of air struck him. The door had opened.

A tall black man in a stately Arab cloak and Arab headgear, so black he was almost blue, stood rubbing his hands after escaping the wind. On his shoulder crouched a small ball of white fluff, some kind of little animal. The man's eyes roamed the shop looking for empty tables but there were none, only densely packed Arabs sweating over games of backgammon. Then he caught sight of the corner where O'Sullivan Beare slouched alone in the dimness. He made for the table, smiling as he sat down.

Coffee, he said to the waiter.

Dice clattered. O'Sullivan Beare's head jerked back. The smiling black man had light blue eyes.

Hey what's this, thought O'Sullivan Beare. Things just aren't supposed to be like that. Someone's up to tricks again in the Holy City. And what's that little white animal curled up on his shoulder? White as white and as furry as can be, head and tail tucked away ever so nicely out of sight.

He nodded at the black Arab.

Cold out, wouldn't you say?

I would.

Yes, you're right. And who might this little friendly creature be you're carrying around to see the sights? A traveling companion, I suppose. Seems to be sleeping soundly enough despite the wind out there. Has a wicked bite, that wind.

He's a monkey, said the black man.

Oh I see.

An albino monkey.

O'Sullivan Beare nodded again, his face serious.

Sure why not, he thought. A black Arab with a white monkey on his back? Sure, makes as much sense as anything else. Why not, I say.

A few minutes later another man entered the shop escaping the wind and the cold, this time a European, his nationality difficult to place. In his hand he carried a longbow of exquisite workmanship.

Now what's this twist? thought O'Sullivan Beare. What's going on around here? More confusion and things seem to be spinning out of control already. That item's not English for sure, not French or German or anything natural. And armed with a bow no less, just in case a spot of archery practice turns up while he's out for a stroll on a dreadful winter afternoon. Some bloody devious article up to no good in the Holy Land, that's certain. By God, it's pranks for sure and somebody's bent on something.

The man took in the tables at a glance and headed directly toward the corner where O'Sullivan Beare sat with the black Arab. Slung over his shoulder on a cord was a long cylindrical case made of red lacquer.

He clicked his heels with a slight nod and sat down. An unmistakable cloud of garlic fumes engulfed the table.

Excuse me for interrupting your meditations, gents, but it seems this is the only table in the room free from backgammon. On the other hand it is a dreary afternoon. Do either of you play poker?

He looked at O'Sullivan Beare, who nodded without interest.

Yes, I daresay you must have picked it up in the army. And you, my friend?

The black Arab smiled pleasantly and spoke with a cultivated English accent.

I used to play before the war, but I'm not sure I recall the rules.

No? Well perhaps we could refresh our memories.

The European brought out a pack of cards, shuffled and dealt five to the black Arab and five to himself.

He turned over his cards and set aside what he had, a pair of kings. Then he turned over the black Arab's cards and set aside what he had, a pair of aces.

You win, it's as simple as that. Care to try a deal yourself?

The black Arab clumsily put the pack back together, shuffled slowly and dealt. This time when the cards were turned over he had the same two aces as before, plus an additional one. The European had his same two kings and a third to go with them.

The black Arab smiled.

It seems I win again.

Indeed you do, murmured the European thoughtfully. A case of excellent recall. Munk Szondi's my name.

From Budapest.

And that's the truth, thought O'Sullivan Beare. Devious pranks sneaking out of the mists of central Europe and lurking on every side. Right you are and I could see that mischief coming.

Cairo Martyr, said the black Arab. From Egypt, a pleasure. Tell me, what in the world is that case you're carrying?

A quiver.

For arrows?

Yes. The Japanese samurai used them in the Middle Ages. And that little creature asleep on your shoulder?

A monkey. An albino monkey.

The two men studied each other for a moment. Then the Hungarian turned back to O'Sullivan Beare who was slumped despondently over his glass, fidgeting with his Victoria Cross. With the eye of a professional military man he took in the rows of medals on the Irishman's chest.

The Crimean War, if memory holds.

It's holding all right. That was the one.

My sympathy, a truly appalling disaster. Pure folly, that charge at Balaklava. But you did survive it after all. And since that was the middle of the last century, perhaps the time has come to put aside the memory of your fallen comrades. Sadness can't bring them back, now can it.

No it can't, that's true. But all things considered I'm still feeling glum today. Gloomy and glum and that's a fact.

How so, my friend?

Don't know, do I. Just guessing though, I'd say it has something to do with having been through too much for my age. Excessive experience, I mean. It's worn me down until now I'm worn out. Here I am only twenty-one years old and I'm already a veteran of a war that was fought nearly seventy years ago. And that's a weight for a man to carry. Do you follow me?

I think so, said Munk Szondi. Are you Irish by any chance?

Not at all, not a bit of it, by no chance whatsoever. By strict calculations at the top, one of those incomprehensible decisions made by Himself and passed on to my long-suffering mother and father, he being a poor fisherman who ate mostly potatoes and had thirty-three sons, me being the youngest and the last. The name's Joe when said in short, but when proclaimed over a proper pint of stout it runs to Joseph Enda Columbkille Kieran Kevin Brendan O'Sullivan Beare, those being saints who came from my island, which isn't much of anyplace you'd ever want to be. The barren Aran Islands, they're called, because they're so rainy and windswept and so poor God didn't bother to put any soil on them, instead leaving it up to His believers to make the soil if they wanted it, figuring somebody in His universe should believe that much. Mere slips of rock in the Atlantic, that's all, outposts against the terrible tides and gales of the Western seas. And now that you know all that, you can see it's not just because of the weather that I'm sagging today. Although young I've had a stormy soilless life, if you catch my meaning.

How bad is it?

Very. Just so bloody awful I can't revive. To be honest, I think it's all over for me.

At only twenty-one?

That's apparent age. The spirit inside is dreadfully elderly and creaking, a regular tottering veteran of the wars at least eighty-five years old. The Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea, remember? I'd have to be more or less that old.

The black Arab interrupted their conversation, turning to O'Sullivan Beare.

Those moments of despair come of course, but they can be overcome. Have you ever heard of an English explorer named Strongbow?

I have. I've heard some fanciful reports on more than one occasion and some whimsical allegations too.

But the truth is, he never existed. Couldn't have, impossible on any account. No Englishman was ever that daft. A myth in the neighborhood pubs of the Holy Land, no more. Mad tales conjured up by the local Arabs when they're high on their flying carpets, which is most of the time. Opium, it's called. No offense meant to present company.

The black Arab smiled.

And none taken.

Good, we're right then. Now why this reference to the mythical Strongbow who never existed?

The black Arab was about to answer when the Hungarian interrupted him. He also turned to O'Sullivan Beare.

Poker, my friend. That was the subject at hand, not Levantine fables from the last century. And speaking of the last century, why not put your painful Crimean experiences behind you and try your luck today with a spot of cards in Jerusalem? Who knows, it might well be a way of getting things started again.

Well what do you think? Will you join us?

Started? said Joe. I was by way of thinking I already had started here, and what it amounts to is heavy lifting that's bloody hard on the back.

He looked down at his hands, rough from handling the giant stone scarab he used on his smuggling trips.

A few days ago he had arrived back in Jerusalem with the huge scarab, its hollow bowels stuffed with a secret shipment of arms for the Haganah. And soon there would be another clandestine trip, another load of dismantled Czech rifles, more English pounds for services rendered.

Anyway, he had nothing to do that afternoon.

But there was something else that intrigued him, another possibility. The black Arab was undoubtedly a Moslem and the Hungarian must be a Jew, the Star of David in his lapel showed that.

So just what did they think they were up to in Jerusalem? Working out a little private deal between themselves, was that it? Imagining they could do in a poor Christian just because the weather was cold and gray and bloody awful, not at all what it was cracked up to be in the land of milk and honey? Just doing a quiet little turn by themselves in the Holy City? Pranks and tricks and thinking they could leave him out of the game with their albino monkeys and their samurai bows and arrows?

Hold on, said Joe, I'm in from the beginning. But shouldn't we be giving ourselves a time limit then? Just to keep the winner honest?

Cairo Martyr seemed not to care one way or the other. But Munk Szondi was evidently pondering the matter as he picked up Joe's glass, sniffed it, made a face and poured it out on the floor. He ordered three empty glasses and filled them with cognac from a flask he was carrying in his overcoat.

I just happen to have some of the real thing with me.

Of course you do, said Joe. Now what was that you were saying about a time limit? I don't think I caught it. My ears have a way of ringing sometimes, crowding out all else. It's been that way since the war.

Why? asked Munk Szondi.

That terrible tumble I took when my horse was shot out from under me during the Charge of the Light Brigade. Landed right on my head, I did, and it's never been the same since, this overworked head of mine. It seems to be under a continual siege of unknown nature, by unknown forces, and it just goes right on whistling and shouting and howling and doing all kinds of things I have no control over. But then too, that's how I survived, because my horse went down and I couldn't keep up on foot. Somewhere way back then, you see, the charge went elsewhere and I got left behind. So bless those noises in my head I say, without them I wouldn't be here. Now what manner of time limit did you mention?

The Hungarian brought out a tiny gold pocket watch and placed it in the middle of the table. He pressed the button that opened the lid and they all leaned forward.

They were looking at a blank enamel face, a full moon unmarred by hands or numbers or quarters. Munk Szondi pressed the button again and the blank face clicked back to reveal another watch, the face normal in appearance but with the minute hand moving at the speed of a second hand, the second hand a whirling blur.

I see, said Munk Szondi.

He pressed the button once more to reveal a third face, also normal in appearance but with both hands seemingly stationary. Actually the second hand was moving but with exaggerated slowness. The three men gazed at it for several minutes and in that time it had moved only a second or two.

Cairo Martyr leaned back and roared with laughter. Even O'Sullivan Beare managed to smile. With the same solemnity as before, Munk Szondi clicked all three levels closed and returned the tiny gold watch to his vest pocket. He picked up the cards and began to shuffle.

The way I see it, gents, what we have ahead of us here is a long gray afternoon. Just why we all happen to be in Jerusalem I wouldn't know, other than the obvious fact that it's everybody's Holy City. But in any case here we are on the last day of December, a cold afternoon with snow definitely in the air, a new year upon us tomorrow. So as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't much matter whether time passes slowly or quickly or not at all. How do the two of you feel about it?

Cairo Martyr laughed and cut the pack once. O'Sullivan Beare smiled despite himself and cut the pack a second time. Munk Szondi put aside his bow and arrows and the first cards of their twelve-year game went down on the boards in the Old City, in a smoky Arab coffee shop, where it all began.

Early in the game it became apparent the playing styles of the three founders couldn't have been more different.

Cairo Martyr's was the most unorthodox, since he never looked at his cards until all the betting was over, relying instead on some private law of averages to bring him his winnings. Of course he had to be always bluffing, but outsiders found it next to impossible to outguess a man who could honestly say he didn't know what he was holding.

Munk Szondi used his unique knowledge of Levantine commodities to make money. According to the rules of the game, anything of value could be used in the betting. Thus when a pile of Maria Theresa crowns and chits representing Egyptian dried fish futures were on the table, Szondi would overplay his hand simply to get the fish.

For Szondi invariably knew that Persian dinars were due to weaken in the next few days in relation to dried fish, and that a handsome profit would be his if he discounted the Maria Theresa crowns in Damascus, doubled the value of his fish futures by buying dinars on the margin in Beirut, sold a quarter and a third of each in Baghdad as a hedge against customs interference on the Persian border, and then saw to it that his courier with the fish futures arrived in Isfahan on Friday, a market day, when the fish futures would be most in demand.

Only O'Sullivan Beare played according to mathematical percentages, or said he did, claiming he had adapted to poker the ballistic tables once memorized when he was on the run in the hills of southern Ireland, needing distance then because he was fighting the Black and Tans alone and couldn't afford to approach the enemy directly, instead firing his old musketoon high in the air from far away, in the manner of a howitzer, so that the bullets of his just cause traversed a steep arc and came plunging down on the target as if from heaven.

Inscrutable bluffing in Cairo Martyr's case.

An awesome knowledge of Levantine trade when it was Munk Szondi's turn.

The scientific trajectory of heavenly bullets when the betting passed to O'Sullivan Beare.

Highly individual methods of play, further complicated by unorthodox thrusts at chance, all of it equally baffling to outsiders. Nor did there seem to be any limit to the financial resources the three founders brought to the table.

Cairo Martyr was said to have been looting the tombs of the pharaohs for years and had an immense store of mummies at his disposal. As was well known, pharaonic mummy dust when snorted, or when smoked in its mastic form, was an infallible Levantine aphrodisiac.

If used in sufficient quantities daily it could also provide previously barren women with large families, assure a man of long life and wisdom, and in general serve as a powerful substitute for anything.

And even if the supplies of genuine pharaonic mummy dust were exhaustible, there was still the large number of royal cats the Egyptians had also mummified. And lastly, no one doubted that Cairo Martyr would be more than ready to manufacture powder from old rags, now that he had established himself as the supreme purveyor of mummy dust in the Middle East.

As for Munk Szondi, a Khasarian Jew, it was inconceivable that anyone could ever unravel his arcane knowledge of the values relating Yemeni rugs and Damascus figs with the upcoming spring production of Levantine lambs, the worth of these and a thousand other items bound together in inextricable laws that only he could fathom.

And finally there was O'Sullivan Beare's much more recent wealth, the stupendous business he was doing in religious artifacts, symbolic wooden fish being just one of his profitable lines. The fish were smoothly carved in a cylindrical shape with a nob of greater girth at one end. They came in various sizes but on the average were about the length of an open hand. The Irishman claimed these abstract wooden fish were an exact replica of ones used by the early Christians to secretly identify themselves to their coreligionists in those dangerous times.

But if a mere primitive symbol, why had they suddenly become so popular in modern Jerusalem, spreading from there throughout the Middle East? And if Christian, why were they in equal demand among Jews and Arabs and nonbelievers?

It was true women carried them secretly more often than not, hiding them in their handbags and even appearing embarrassed if a shopkeeper chanced to spy one when they were digging for coins. But men displayed them openly enough in the bazaars, where their uses seemed far from abstract. On the contrary, when greeting one another, men seemed to take pleasure in boldly waving these wooden objects in the air. And when they adjourned to a coffee shop they rapped them loudly on the tables to attract the attention of waiters.

In fact after coffee and tobacco, the Irishman's symbolic wooden fish were the largest-selling staple in the Middle East. They could be found everywhere, in the tents and palaces of all known races, even among bedouin who had never seen a fish.

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 sheiks, 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 with their interminable poker game in the vaulted chamber where they had moved that very first night, after the coffee shop closed.

We shouldn't quit just because it's midnight, Munk Szondi had said.

No reason to stop just because a new year is upon us, Cairo Martyr had agreed.

Well if both you gents see it that way, Joe had said, I know just the place to set up a more permanent table here in the Old City. It's a former antiquities shop that belongs to a good friend of mine, the place largely empty now because this friend is no longer in the business except in his head, an odd proposition as you'll see.

And thus the Great Jerusalem Poker Game came to be played in the back room of an empty shop owned by an obscure dealer in time known as Haj Harun.

On that final day after twelve years of play, O'Sullivan Beare had the deal. His call was for straight poker, three-card draw, and both Cairo Martyr and Munk Szondi nodded with approval when he announced it. A hard and basic hand with nothing wild and nothing stray, the appropriate way to end the game.

And knowing the moment had finally come, they approached it in a leisurely manner. O'Sullivan Beare opened a bottle of poteen and took his time sipping it down. Cairo Martyr filled his hookah with a potent dose of mummy mastic and puffed contentedly. Munk Szondi placed a large bowl of garlic bulbs in front of him and methodically chunched his way to the bottom.

The Druse warriors who guarded the game were paid off and dismissed. In the middle of the table sat a new deck of cards ordered from Venice for the event. Each man tapped the pack once before the cellophane wrapping was carefully removed.

The shuffling began, each man spending fifteen or twenty minutes over the pack to get the feel of it, and after that they spent another fifteen or twenty minutes cutting it in turn. With twelve years behind them no one was in a hurry. Gone were the cunning maneuvers of the past. More than skill was needed now.

The empty hookah, the empty bottle of poteen and the empty bowl of garlic bulbs were set aside. Cairo Martyr gazed at the ceiling and announced his ante.

The goats in the Moslem Quarter, he said.

The other two men looked at him.

Those used for sodomy, he added solemnly.

O'Sullivan Beare's eyes narrowed.

The goats in the Christian Quarter, he countered. Meat.

The goats in the Jewish Quarter, said Munk Szondi. Milk.

The three men watched each other. Over the years it had become customary for them to open a hand in this way, as a reminder to outsiders that only real goods and services had any ultimate value in the Holy City. Because sooner or later the conquering army presently in the city would have to retreat as its empire shrank and collapsed, as all empires had done since the beginning of time, thereby rendering its currency foreign and useless in Jerusalem.

But as the gentle Haj Harun had airily noted once, even a Holy City needs the service trades: In fact it needs them more than most places.

O'Sullivan Beare dealt the cards. He and Munk Szondi raised theirs slowly and held them close to the chest, revealing them one at a time. After a few minutes of study they both chose three for discard. Cairo Martyr, as always, had left his cards lying face down on the table, untouched. With some deliberation he now separated the first and the third and the fifth for discard.

Three new cards were dealt to each man. Munk Szondi's face was grave as he rapidly weighed the comparative values that day of every known Levantine commodity. O'Sullivan Beare seemed a trifle feverish as he calculated patriotic ballistic arcs. Only Cairo Martyr, with his immense self-assurance, seemed completely at ease with what lay before him.

And since he was sitting on the dealer's left, he had the right to open the betting. Again, as usual, he didn't look at his new cards.

No openers, said Cairo Martyr, not this time. I have no intention of wasting time tonight trying to inch the stakes up. I'll start at the top and the two of you can play or not, as you choose. Now I think you'll both agree that through my various illicit enterprises, I control the Moslem Quarter in this city.

The mummy dust king is about to strike, muttered O'Sullivan Beare. But at the same time he knew the claim was true, just as was his own secret control over the Christian Quarter and Munk Szondi's over the Jewish Quarter, religious symbols and trading in futures being just as essential to Jerusalem as mummy dust.

Well do I or don't I? said Cairo Martyr.

You do. Agreed.

Correct. Now then, that's my bet. Control of the Moslem Quarter. I'm putting the Moslem Quarter on the table. If either of you wins, which you won't, it belongs to you. But first you have to match my bet.

No openers. The real thing.

O'Sullivan Beare whistled softly.

That's arrogance and then some, he muttered. You mean the whole Moslem Quarter?

That's right. Down to the last sun-baked brick.

People? asked Munk Szondi.

Down to the last unborn babe asleep in its mum's belly, not knowing what it's in for when it has to wake up.

Fair enough, said Munk Szondi, gesturing extravagantly. If that's the way it is I'm betting the Jewish Quarter.

Jaysus all right, shouted O'Sullivan Beare, all right I say. If that's what you're up to I'll put down the Christian Quarter.

He said the last two words in Gaelic but they both understood him. By now they all knew enough of each other's languages to recognize a bet in any one of them.

So there it was. The three men leaned back to savor the moment, a chance that came once in a lifetime, if ever. They had each bet what they controlled and it went without saying that the fourth section of the Old City, the Armenian Quarter, would automatically go to the player who held the best cards.

The end had come. Jerusalem lay on the table. At last it was a case of winner take all in the eternal city.

But twelve years of unscrupulous poker had to pass before that final showdown could take place in the former antiquities shop of Haj Harun, an ancient defender of Jerusalem who even then was wandering around the room in distraction, just a few years short of his three thousandth birthday.

-2-

Cairo Martyr

Going far? asked Cairo. All the way, whispered the mummy with a resigned expression.

From his earliest years Cairo Martyr had picked cotton as a slave in the Nile delta alongside his maternal great-grandmother, a proud indomitable woman whose passions in life dated from 1813.

In that year, as a young woman in a village on the fringe of the Nubian desert, she had taken into her hut a charming wanderer by the name of Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun. The sprightly young sheik, who said he was an expert in Islamic law, also claimed his blue eyes were the result of Circassian blood.

But as Cairo Martyr was one day to learn, his wandering great-grandfather had actually been a European in disguise, a highly gifted Swiss linguist with a passion for details whose other descendants, known and unknown, were also to play a crucial part in the Great Jerusalem Poker Game over a century later.

Young Sheik Ibrahim, as always, soon grew restless in the village on the fringe of the Nubian desert.

With tears he parted from his new wife to resume his wanderings, promising to return in three months.

But when he did come back at the end of that time he found the village had been savagely destroyed and its inhabitants carried off by a Mameluke raiding party.

These dwindling remnants of medieval warfare, originally Mongolian and Turkish slaves who later became the rulers of Egypt, had been driven south into the desert by Napoleon some fifteen years earlier.

Although the conditions prevailing on the Russian steppes were fully nine centuries behind them, the memories of frosty gales remained deeply embedded in their sluggish brains and they still wore thick woolen underwear in the ferocious Nubian heat. Dressed in gorgeous robes and enormous jeweled turbans, their swords inlaid with precious stones and their saddle bags stuffed with gold, they rode ponderously through the haze into battle carrying all their riches, their catamites running on foot beside them waving the green banners of the Prophet.

Since the Mamelukes were pederasts, they couldn't reproduce. When they were the rulers of Egypt they had purchased boys in southern Russia and fattened them to be their successors, but with that source no longer open to them they were dying out as a Moslem warrior caste.

Those who survived were aging bloated men, elderly asthmatics tormented by malignant rectal tumors and virulent skin diseases, which flourished particularly in their groins and armpits. In this rampant state of decay, so advanced it could warn local tribesmen of approaching danger when the wind was right, the Mamelukes supported themselves in barbaric luxury by laying waste to the countryside and selling the Africans they captured to Arab slave-traders. After briefly arousing themselves for a sortie they would return to their barges on the Nile and relapse into a deathlike stupor, stretched out under awnings their retainers doused with water day and night in a useless effort to cool their wheezing mountainous bodies.

Since they never took off their underwear, scratching couldn't help. Even flicking a fly away seemed useless. Instead they lay with their glazed eyes fixed on the wilderness, dully wondering how their once lavish life on the Mediterranean, so rich in soothing breezes and perfumes and other extravagant splendors, had been reduced to the parched oblivion of this lizard's existence hundreds of miles from nowhere.

On one of these barges in 1813, Martyr's great-grandmother gave birth to a daughter as black as she but with the light blue eyes of her beloved Sheik Ibrahim. The Mamelukes had no use for a girl, so mother and daughter were sold to an Arab slave-trader who included them in a shipment to the Nile delta, where they were bought to pick cotton. In due time the daughter gave birth to a daughter and that daughter to a son, also deep black with light blue eyes. Both those mothers died of dysentery soon after they bore their children and the boy was therefore raised by his great-grandmother, who finally succumbed to dysentery herself in 1892, after nearly eight decades of servitude.

Upon her death, little Cairo Martyr was freed by his master as an act of Islamic mercy.

Thus thrown alone into the world at the age of twelve, illiterate and without any skills, the boy did what any other black child in Egypt would have done in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He wrapped his kerfiya around his head and walked through the dust to the capital to seek the advice of a former slave named Menelik Ziwar.

Among Egyptian blacks, Menelik Ziwar's position was unusual in several ways.

Since slaves were brought up in the religion of their masters, the vast majority were Moslem. But Menelik's branch of the Ziwars happened to be Copts, and Menelik had taken the trouble to teach himself to speak Coptic, the extinct form of Egyptian that had been used in the country during early Christian times.

He shared this distinction with only one other man, the head of the Coptic Church or Patriarch of Alexandria, whose duty it was to appoint the head of the Church in Ethiopia, the only country where this Christian sect was the state religion, and also the only country in Africa not ruled by Europeans.

Since no one else understood the tongue except Menelik and the Patriarch, they took the opportunity to confer in it whenever they met. Of course no one knew what they were saying, but it was widely assumed among Egyptian blacks that Menelik's influence in independent black Africa, by way of his relationship with the Coptic Patriarch, surpassed that of any other black in the world.

Even his name tended to confirm this special status, the historical Menelik having been the first emperor of Ethiopia.

Nor was it just his political influence that enhanced his standing in the black community. Menelik Ziwar was also the greatest Egyptologist of the nineteenth century.

Menelik's master long ago, a wealthy cotton broker named Ziwar, had sent his own son at an early age to be educated in England. The Ziwar son had returned to Alexandria with a sound knowledge of archeology, but having been away so long he knew nothing of everyday Egyptian corruption. In order to do fieldwork he needed a competent dragoman, or guide and interpreter, who could oversee his thieving workmen and hand out baksheesh up and down the Nile. The Patriarch of Alexandria immediately pointed out that he had to look no farther than his own household and the sagacious slave Menelik.

The Ziwar son and Menelik joined forces in digs throughout the delta. Menelik quickly learned to read hieroglyphs and was soon offering suggestions about where they should dig. Natural intelligence exerted itself and before long the apparent slave was the teacher, the apparent master the pupil.

Yet Menelik remained the perfect dragoman in every respect, even after he was freed. He stayed modestly in the background, so much so that although his discoveries eventually made his master's name famous in all the academic centers of Europe, no one outside the black community in Egypt, and no one at all in Europe, had ever heard of the Ziwar who was important — Menelik, secret scholar and revered African folk hero.

When little Cairo went to seek his advice the black Egyptologist was already an old man. After years of stooping in cramped tombs he had developed severe arthritis and now he never went on digs himself.

Instead he instructed others where to look and interpreted the findings they brought to him, dictating the monographs they subsequently published under their own names, anonymity having long since become a habit with him.

Between times there was an endless stream of respectful young petitioners arriving from all over Africa, black boys and girls starting out in life who wanted to know what to do and how to do it.

Due to his arthritis Menelik was most comfortable when stretched out flat on his back. And since so much of his life had been spent in tombs, not surprisingly he found a sarcophagus most to his liking as a bedchamber.

The one he had chosen for himself was a particularly massive block of stone originally occupied by the mummy of Cheops' mother. Upon his retirement in 1880, Menelik Ziwar had the sarcophagus lowered into a sepulcher he had discovered in Cairo under a public garden beside the Nile. And this was where he had held court ever since, on his back in a bed at the bottom of the sarcophagus. Petitioners were ushered into the sepulcher one at a time for consultations that might last a few minutes or most of a day, depending on how often the old scholar dozed off in his soundproof and nearly airless subterranean vault.

Little Cairo stood in line in the public garden for several weeks, waiting for his turn to come. At last it did and an attendant pointed down the steep stairs that led to the vault. He was told to close the door behind him at once, the master's eyes being no longer accustomed to daylight. He tiptoed down the stairs, took a deep breath and slipped inside the door.

He found himself standing in a small gloomy chamber with the dim outline of a gigantic sarcophagus looming up in front of him, a single taper at its head. He took another deep breath and tiptoed across the floor to peek inside.

He gasped. Far down in the hollow depths of that massive block of stone, amidst piles of books and mysterious inscriptions five thousand years old, lay a withered mummy with a huge magnifying glass on its chest. Little Cairo was terrified. Abruptly the mummy's withered hand floated up in the air and clasped the magnifying glass, then raised it. Behind the lens the enormous unblinking eye from antiquity was fully two inches wide.

Caught you, cackled the mummy.

Little Cairo began to shake. His teeth chattered and sweat ran down his face. A dry crinkled, smile spread across the mummy's mouth.

There there, son, stop carrying on like that. I'm only the man you came to see. What's your name?

Little Cairo whispered his name.

Is that a fact? said the mummy. Well you certainly didn't get that from your master, so where did you get it?

From my great-grandmother, sir.

Her last name was Martyr?

No sir. She didn't have a last name, sir. But that's the one she gave me, sir.

Odd. Why?

I don't know, sir.

Never gave you a hint?

No sir.

She raised you?

Yes sir.

Everyone else died before their time?

Yes sir.

Dysentery?

Yes sir.

Hm, that's the paradox isn't it. The Nile gives us the land but takes its toll in return. Good water is also bad water. Now admit it, son. A moment ago I caught you frightened by the past and that's not the way to get ahead when you're black the way we are. And speaking of the past, what do you know about yours?

I know where my great-grandmother came from, sir.

Nubia, I'd say, by the looks of it. Except for those eyes of yours. Where did you get them?

From my great-grandfather, sir. A wandering Circassian, sir.

Is that what he told her? What else do you know about him?

He was an expert in Islamic law, sir.

He told her that too, did he?

Yes sir.

I see. Did he happen to have a name?

Yes sir. His name was Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun, sir.

The mummy's dry smile crinkled across his face again.

Ah, yes, I do see. That young man was a wanderer, there's no doubt about that. In any case he picked himself up and went on his way and your great-grandmother was subsequently captured and sold into slavery?

Yes sir.

The Mamelukes?

Yes sir.

Oafs, all of them. Dazed pederasts running to fat. She wasn't very fond of them, was she?

No sir.

I daresay. But all this happened at the beginning of the century and that's hardly the past. For all practical purposes the past ends with the destruction of the New Kingdom. Know when that was?

No sir.

The XXX Dynasty. An unfortunate period. Yes, I can see it now.

The mummy closed his eyes. After about ten minutes of silence he stirred and scratched his nose. He raised the huge magnifying glass once more and the eye two inches wide reappeared behind the lens.

Did you say you were looking for work, son?

Yes sir.

Any English?

No sir.

No matter, you'll pick it up. You're Moslem, I take it.

Yes sir.

Of course. Your great-grandmother had a long memory and she wanted to see some scores settled. An extremely proud woman?

Yes sir.

It fits, but that's for the future. Right now you need a trade and I think you should start as a dragoman, as I did. There aren't many trades open to us and that's a good way to begin. You need contacts.

Yes sir.

Right. You'll begin as an apprentice and work your way up. Now listen carefully, here are the rules. Be dignified, never cringe or whine or roll your eyes. Be correct but solicitous with the ladies, correct but slightly less stiff with the gents. When you don't understand something always say, Yes sir, and nod vigorously, pretending you do. Upon receiving a tip bow deeply and murmur how happy you are to have performed this service, ending with an air of undefined suggestion, a momentary hesitation will do it, that even more complex services are available, should you be called upon for them. Above all, smile. Smile and smile and look as if you thoroughly enjoy what you're doing no matter how tedious and silly it is. At the same time be absolutely discreet, going only so far as to hint that European travelers often find the desert air invigorating. And be gentle. Never harm anyone in any way. Did your great-grandmother tell you that?

Yes sir.

I thought so. When it comes to settling scores she had bigger things in mind. Well on your way then. The attendant outside will give you an address. Tell them I sent you and return in a week to give me a progress report. In fact return every week until further notice.

Yes sir.

And you ought to know I wasn't asleep when you came in, nor a few minutes ago either. People think I'm sleeping when actually I'm just taking a trip. You can't understand a particular dynasty without spending time in it. Do you see?

Yes sir.

Nod vigorously when you say that.

Yes sir.

Good. Come around next week.

Yes sir, whispered little Cairo, tiptoeing away from the massive block of stone.

He became an apprentice dragoman and to his surprise he found the profession had little to do with guiding tourists or haggling for them in the bazaars. Instead his duties were largely sexual.

Most Europeans who wintered in Egypt, it seemed, seldom left the spacious verandas of their hotels, where they moved graciously in circles favorably remarking on the weather and unfavorably deploring the slack manner and slovenly appearance of the natives. The minority who hired dragomen to venture into back streets were those seeking the sexual license associated with the East, an anonymous debauchery far from home, exactly what a dragoman could provide.

In this stolid atmosphere of overt Victorian gentility and covert imperial vice, young Cairo learned his trade without particular ambition. Each day at noon he went to the office of the Clerk of the Acts, the senior dragoman in the city and the head of their benevolent association, whose job it was to advise apprentices and distribute assignments. The appointments were spaced well apart, in keeping with the leisurely pace of life pursued by the English in Egypt. And in any case a dragoman's clients spent a considerable amount of time sleeping, both because they found the heat enervating and because of the opium they took.

So there were many quiet hours in which young Cairo could dream of the future during those first lonely months in the city, while listening to a man or a woman snore, and inevitably his dreams turned to the astonishing event so often recalled by Menelik, the forty-year conversation the old man had once held with his dearest friend, an English lord and legendary explorer, Plantagenet Strongbow.

Menelik had first met Strongbow in the summer of 1838, a few weeks after the explorer returned from one of his mysterious early excursions, this time to outer Persia.

With his seven-foot, seven-inch frame topped by a massive greasy black turban, and his lean torso wrapped in a shaggy short black coat made from unwashed and uncombed goats' hair, both said to be gifts from a remote hill tribe in Persia, the haughty young English duke was a preposterous figure striding through the dusty native quarters of Cairo. His face was already deeply scarred,from his travels and his body, in addition, was severely wasted from a recent encounter with cholera which had nearly been fatal.

But perhaps it was the portable sundial strapped to Strongbow's hip that most amazed Menelik, a monstrously heavy bronze piece inscribed with Arab aphorisms and a legend noting that it had been cast in Baghdad during the fifth Abbasid caliphate.

Menelik had never seen a European dressed in such a manner, let alone an English duke, and never anyone wearing such an outrageous costume in the stifling heat of an Egyptian summer. Immediately he was intrigued.

The young English duke was known to disdain his countrymen but was said to enjoy the company of genuine Levantines, particularly the poor and the devious who made their living as conjurers and gossips and refuse carters. On the basis of this rumor Menelik approached Strongbow in the bazaar one sultry day and introduced himself. Strongbow was on guard as always, carrying under his arm a short heavy club, a kind of polished twisted root which he raised menacingly whenever someone said something irrelevant to his needs.

At the time Menelik was twenty, a year older than Strongbow. He was still a slave and a common dragoman, but he did speak Coptic and clearly possessed the keen powers of observation that would one day decipher the secrets of so many tombs. In fact there were probably very few Cairenes who could have described the lowlife of their city with as much accuracy and gusto as Menelik.

He stepped forward smiling. As Strongbow automatically raised his club, Menelik shouted out an earthy Coptic greeting unheard in over a thousand years, an intricately vulgar expression once used by Nile boatmen who were on the most intimate terms with one another. Strongbow couldn't understand the words of course, but he sensed their trend and liked it. He lowered his club and smiled, whereupon Menelik switched to a raffish Arab dialect and launched into a scandalous diatribe against certain Englishmen involved with criminal elements along the riverfront, which Strongbow enjoyed even more.

The oppressive heat in the bazaar was becoming intolerable. The two young men decided they needed something to drink and entered the first place they came to beside the Nile, as it happened a refuge for off-duty dragomen, a filthy open-air restaurant with trellises of leafy vines and flowers overhead, a pool where drowsy ducks paddled and a cage housing squawking peacocks listlessly twitching their tails. The cheap wine was strong, the spiced lamb tasty, the shrunken Arab waiters somnambulant as they puffed opium and drifted ever more helplessly with the hours.

There in the soothing hum of the shade Strongbow and Menelik spent a long summer Sunday afternoon, eating and drinking and feeding the placid ducks, watching the nervous peacocks mate and enthusiastically discussing whatever stray topic came to mind, the two of them so drunk by the end of the afternoon they threw themselves over the railing into the muddy river before staggering off to late naps.

A firm friendship was established that afternoon by the Nile. Thereafter, when he was in Lower Egypt, Strongbow always sent a runner to notify Menelik and the two of them would meet again on a Sunday in the same filthy open-air restaurant under the trellises of leafy vines and flowers, always at the same table where they had sprawled the first time, picking up their swirling raucous conversation as if they had never left it, heckling the peacocks and feeding the ducks as they gorged themselves on spiced lamb and endless carafes of wine, which they had to replenish themselves, the waiters having become too weak to carry anything as the years went by, Menelik making his way in a career of increasingly brilliant scholarship, Strongbow forever broadening the track of his daring explorations that reached from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush.

On his weekly visits to the sepulcher beneath the public garden, little Cairo listened in awe to the stories recounted by Menelik Ziwar, these seemingly unimaginable adventures and bewildering changes of fortune that were far beyond anything a lonely boy, only twelve years old and a stranger in a great city, could ever hope to know.

Or so little Cairo felt. Old Menelik thought differently.

Not so, said the wrinkled mummy at the bottom of the sarcophagus, smiling and encouraging the little boy. It may look that way now, son, but we can never be sure what fate may breathe into life.

Achievements? Startling transformations? Just consider the Numa Stone for a moment.

Little Cairo was standing with his chin resting on the edge of the sarcophagus. Enchanting names, exotic memories, it was always like this in Menelik Ziwar's quiet vault. A faraway look came into the little boy's eyes.

The Pneuma Stone? he whispered.

Deep down in the sarcophagus amidst the stacks of books and the strange inscriptions five thousand years old, the mummy raised his magnifying glass to produce the gigantic eye of antiquity. He cackled dryly.

Are you saying Numa or Pneuma? Breath is involved all right and a breath of fresh air at that, but the Greeks are in the game only for purposes of scholarship, or by association, you might say. Anyway, it should be Numa and Strongbow told me about it on a Sunday afternoon four or five decades ago. He was coming back from the kitchen with another carafe of wine and another plate of spiced lamb, happily swinging his portable sundial on his hip as he threaded his way between the paralyzed waiters, when all at once a devilish grin came across his face. We were getting on toward the end of the afternoon by then and I was so dizzy I almost didn't see it. But when he collapsed in his chair and planted his enormous head in front of me, holding it in those enormous hands, there was no way to miss it. The grin was simply wicked. Roguery itself.

Here, I said, what's this bit of mischief?

Menelik you notorious Nilotic ghoul, he shouted, grabbing my arm and knocking the plate of lamb to the floor as he drew me into the conspiracy, Menelik you astounding black Copt, promise me that if you're ever asked about the Numa Stone, you won't say a word.

Why? I asked, mystified, having never heard of such a stone.

All the while Strongbow was grinning ever more wildly. So wildly that anyone who didn't know him as well as I did would have thought he was in the grip of some terminal fever. The grin was that demented.

Then he suddenly made an extravagant gesture that swept across the table, his sundial going with it and sending everything flying. The carafe smashed into the duck pond and stained the water, the glasses crashed against the peacocks' cage and ended their nervous copulations in a shower of splintering shards.

He brought his fist down on the table with a roar of laughter that shook everything in the place, even the waiters, it seemed. Of course it might have been only the wine playing tricks with my vision, but I swear I actually thought I saw them quiver at that moment, the first time they'd shown any life in years.

Why? thundered Strongbow. For the sake of Europe. We're going to save Europe from its own unspeakable hypocrisy.

Little Cairo listened, wide-eyed.

Yes, hissed the mummy, the Numa Stone. That vastly controversial slab so named after its discoverer, Numa Numantius, the German erotic scholar and defender of homosexuality. His critics were in the habit of referring to him contemptuously as Aunt Magnesia. But it was also true that no one in Europe at the time was more outspoken on sexual matters than Numantius, a fact that was certain to engage Strongbow's sympathy.

For weeks, continued Menelik, this Numa Numantius or Aunt Magnesia had been up the Nile searching through the ruins at Karnak, trying to find some small inscription in the temple that would suggest the ancient Egyptians had disavowed the persecution of homosexuals. But without success. The hieroglyphs on the columns listed innumerable public works undertaken by various pharaohs, and the innumerable virtues of those pharaohs, without mentioning sex even once.

Numantius was thoroughly discouraged the evening Strongbow happened to come upon him, sitting alone in the ruins of the temple and sighing over and over. Strongbow was traveling in disguise as a poor bedouin navvy from the area of the first cataract, and he began asking Numantius questions as was his habit with anyone he met. He learned what the German was seeking and decided to interrupt his journey in order to help.

The next morning Numantius moved his operations to some ruins on the other side of the river.

Strongbow, meanwhile, broke into several nearby tombs to find a basalt slab suitable for his purposes.

After inscribing the slab to his satisfaction he treated it with certain chemicals, then buried it in front of the temple entrance, one corner just above the drifting sand so that its appearance would seem to be the chance work of the wind.

A few days later, heaving with sighs and more discouraged than ever, Numantius returned to Karnak for a last reverie in the temple by moonlight. The inscribed corner of the basalt slab caught his eye and he quickly dug it up, Strongbow watching all the while from his hiding place behind a pillar.

Numantius clapped his hands. There on the unearthed basalt slab were three long neat rows of language carved one beside the other, in hieroglyphs and ancient demotic Egyptian and Greek, simultaneous translations of a legal statute from the XXXI Dynasty. In impressive detail the statute guaranteed the right of consenting adults to practice homosexuality to the best of their abilities, when said acts were performed in view of the Nile and were witnessed by a baboon or a dung beetle or some other sacred creature, said best abilities in no way to contravene the pharaoh's divine right to wage interminable wars of aggression in order to acquire more slaves to build more public works to honor the pharaoh.

The statute had been formally promulgated by the priests of Ptolemy V to revive a traditional law of the land that had fallen into disrepute over recent millennia, when recurring conquests from the barbaric north had introduced uncivilized sexual attitudes into the eternal kingdom of the sun.

Specifically un-Egyptian attitudes, emphasized the carved inscriptions, the word heavily underscored with chisel marks in the Greek and demotic texts and deeply circled in the hieroglyphs.

Numantius was triumphant. He sailed down the Nile with his precious slab and at once returned victoriously to Europe, where his unique find shocked scholars everywhere. The debate raged and raged, and although the authenticity of the Numa Stone was eventually disproved, Numantius by then had firmly established his reputation in the fields of antique homosexual jurisprudence and homosexual Egyptology.

Yes indeed, mused Menelik Ziwar happily at the bottom of his sarcophagus, smiling up at little Cairo through his magnifying glass, his unblinking eye two inches wide.

Yes, son. A fateful stone from antiquity discovered in a temple beside the Nile. Fate breathing variety into life.

Cairo was twenty before Menelik Ziwar chose to discuss the books he kept stacked in his sarcophagus, which in fact were none other than the thirty-three volumes of Strongbow's monumental study of Levantine sex, published in Basle about the time Cairo was born, and banned throughout the British Empire in perpetuity for being despicably un-English.

There were tears in the old man's eyes when he told Martyr how he had spent months smuggling a complete edition of the work into Egypt, using a giant hollow stone scarab Strongbow had lent him for that purpose. And how, on the very day he had at last assembled the entire set and safely stored it away in his sarcophagus, a special courier had arrived from Constantinople bearing a note from Strongbow along with the explorer's huge magnifying glass, a memento from his old friend who explained he wanted Menelik to have the glass now that he had decided to disappear into the desert forever, to live the life of an Arab holy man.

Included in the note was a request that the giant stone scarab be returned to a certain party in Jerusalem from whom Strongbow had borrowed it, which Ziwar had done.

But never to see him again? croaked the mummy, tears running down his cheeks. Never to listen to him roaring with laughter and pounding the table over some recent discovery? Eating and drinking away those glorious Sunday afternoons beside the Nile when we were young and had our hopes before us? Instead just this magnifying glass, even though it had traveled so far and seen so much?

As the old man wept Cairo realized the deep sadness that gripped the scholar even now, two decades later, when he recalled the loss of his friend. But he also knew Menelik Ziwar would always have the memories of his forty-year conversation with Strongbow, those long Sunday afternoons of wine and scurrilous evidence so richly woven under the trellises of leafy vines and flowers, among placid ducks and statuesque waiters and squawking peacocks, in a filthy open-air restaurant on the banks of the Nile, always ending with drunken plunges into the cooling water.

Yes, Menelik had those memories, thought Martyr, and he also had Strongbow's magnificent study. And a magnifying glass powerful enough to read it.

At the bottom of the sarcophagus the mummy wiped the tears from his eyes. It was New Year's Day, 1900. The mummy sighed and opened one of Strongbow's volumes. Briefly he gazed at Martyr through the magnifying glass, then lowered it to the page.

A new century today, he said. I thought I might read to you a few excerpts from the last one.

I'd like that, Menelik.

Good. Here we are then, Volume One.

The author's preface wherein he lays forth his reasons for discussing in three hundred million words an historical topic of general interest heretofore ignored and denied, sex in the Levant or what might more accurately be called Levantine sex, some two-thirds of the entire endeavor being devoted to the author's personal experiences with a gentle Persian girl, once his beloved common-law wife, many years distant but never forgotten.

Magnifying glass in hand, Ziwar read on.

And so it went for the next fourteen years when Martyr made his weekly visits to the sepulcher beneath the public garden beside the river, the old Egyptologist lying at the bottom of his sarcophagus reading aloud passages from Strongbow's study, laughing when he came across incidents he recognized from things Strongbow had said on Sunday afternoons in the course of their forty-year conversation, Martyr totally absorbed as he leaned dreamily against the massive block of stone, listening and listening to the improbable events of an heroic past.

Thus Strongbow's tales were the abiding dreams of Cairo Martyr's early years, yet somehow he was never able to direct his own destiny as Strongbow had done. Decades passed and he was still a common dragoman.

As for Menelik Ziwar, he had taken a special interest in Martyr from the beginning because of a long-ago love affair at the age of sixteen, his first experience with a woman.

She had been much older than he was. Indeed, her blue-eyed daughter was older than he was. Like Menelik, she had been a slave in the delta, although originally she came from a village on the fringe of the Nubian desert. And he would always lovingly remember the gentle way she had initiated him into manhood.

The woman had also told him about her lost husband, and how soon after meeting him she had been carried away by a Mameluke raiding party, and after the birth of her blue-eyed daughter, sold into slavery.

She would never forget that, she said. One day she intended to repay the Mamelukes for their savagery.

Years later when he was able to do so, Ziwar had looked into the background of her dead husband, in his day well known as an expert in Islamic law in Egypt, and discovered that the wanderer known as Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun had actually been a Swiss linguist traveling in disguise.

So when a frightened Nubian boy came to him some six decades later seeking advice, an ex-slave with blue eyes called Cairo Martyr, Ziwar immediately understood the significance of the peculiar name bestowed on him by his great-grandmother. Here, in the form of her great-grandson, was the means of revenge against the Mamelukes chosen by that proud and gentle older woman who had introduced Ziwar to sex at the age of sixteen.

Ziwar was determined to honor her memory by helping Martyr when the time came. Yet he remained patient with Martyr, knowing that the tasks his great-grandmother had secretly willed upon him could only be undertaken by a mature man with much experience behind him.

In fact not until 1914 did he decide to act, and even then he did so in a roundabout manner.

It was during one of Martyr's weekly visits and Ziwar had just finished reading aloud a footnote on the gentle Persian girl whom Strongbow had loved in his youth for a few weeks, no more, before she was carried away in a cholera epidemic. Ziwar sighed and laid aside his magnifying glass. He licked his lips thoughtfully. After the silence had gone on for several minutes, Martyr shook himself and emerged from his trance.

What is it, Menelik?

That recurring phrase in Strongbow's study, a few weeks, no more. Isn't it extraordinary how such a brief period of time could have come to mean so much to him? Think of the tens of thousands of experiences he had in the course of a haj spread over a lifetime, yet always he comes back to those few weeks. Don't you find it odd in a way?

Yes, said Martyr.

So do I, in a way. But then, time itself is odd. I learned that when I was younger than you, working in tombs. Did you know mummies can grow hairs?

No.

They can. All at once you'll find a fresh hair growing right in the middle of a bald head that's three or four hundred years old. Now that's odd too. By the way, Cairo, how old were you when your great-grandmother died and you first came here?

Twelve.

Yes that's right, and now you're already in your middle thirties. A dragoman then, a dragoman still. What should we make of that? Not stuck in time, are you?

I don't know. I seem to be but I just don't know what else to do.

You're not looking forward to becoming the Clerk of the Acts, are you? To be the senior dragoman in the city in your old age? Is that your ambition?

Certainly not.

I wouldn't think so. I would think you'd want something more meaningful in life than that, and if you do it's about time you got started. When I was your age my name was already famous throughout Europe.

Although of course nobody knew it belonged to me.

But you're Menelik Ziwar.

True. And it's also true that notoriety, known or unknown, is worthless. Perhaps no one will ever hear of you when you decide what it is you want to do. Perhaps that's why you'll be so successful at it.

At what, Menelik? What can I do? What should I do?

Hm, let's give it some thought. But in the meantime could you do me a small favor?

Of course.

It concerns a theory of mine. Recently I've begun to wonder whether there isn't a secret cache of royal mummies somewhere. We made a great deal of progress in the last century but it still seems to me the number of pharaohs discovered to date is just too small. Can you get up to Thebes now and then in the course of your work? Luxor, I mean?

Yes.

Well there's a tomb on the west bank that's being excavated. If you can, take your clients there and poke around near the entrance. At night naturally. Unwitnessed. We don't want to alert anyone.

Naturally.

Yes. Just see if you can find anything that looks like it might be covering up a secret passageway. Frankly I'm sure this theory of mine is correct

In the next few months Cairo Martyr took all his clients to Luxor, to the excavation on the west bank where he said the entranceway to a tomb was especially romantic in the moonlight. There, while squatting and standing and crouching in the entranceway servicing his clients, he dug behind their backs and over their heads but discovered nothing.

Until one night a heavy Italian woman turned her face to the mud brick wall and whispered that she wanted him to mount her from behind, which he did. The woman then redirected him higher according to her pleasure and pushed against the wall with her powerful arms for added thrust, the first outward heaves of her huge thumping buttocks so ferocious Martyr had to grab the wall himself to keep from being thrown backward onto the ground.

He grabbed and his fist went straight through a brick into a hole, around something stiff and straight and thick.

He had his balance now, there was no need for a handhold. As the woman bucked and groaned he removed the object from the hole and gazed at the silver rings and wrappings in the moonlight, at the bracelets of gold and cornelian inlaid with lapis lazuli and light green malachite.

A mummy's arm. Perhaps that of a queen?

Cairo Martyr removed his shirt and carefully wrapped the arm in it. Meanwhile the Italian woman went through four or five howling spasms, shrieked her praise for the mother of God and collapsed on the ground, beginning to snore immediately. Cairo Martyr fixed another brick in the hole he had uncovered and filled the chinks around it.

Had he actually discovered a secret cache of buried pharaohs?

Indeed you have, said Menelik Ziwar, so excited he sat up in his sarcophagus to examine the arm more closely through his magnifying glass, the first time Martyr had seen him rise from his pillows since the old scholar had begun reading Strongbow's study aloud to him fourteen years earlier.

To be exact, continued Ziwar, this belongs to a third-ranked concubine of a pharaoh by the name of Djer. Know him? No? Just as well, rather a drunken dolt. Anyway the history of the tomb is this. It became a shrine to Osiris during the XVIII Dynasty, and since then innumerable people have passed by that brick wall where you found the arm and never suspected it was there. Who was your client by the way?

An Italian woman.

Large and heavy?

Very.

Enormous buttocks?

Yes.

Wanting it in the Mediterranean manner?

Yes.

And with that massive hindside suddenly bucking against you, you had to reach out for support? Your fist smashed through a brick into the hole in the wall? That's how you found the concubine's arm?

Yes.

Menelik Ziwar nodded. He laughed. What a fine headline that would make in an academic journal.

Picture it in impressive type.

In hindside, Mediterranean manner leads to most

Important archeological discovery of twentieth century.

Well I congratulate the heavy Italian woman. She's proved my theory.

She has?

Yes. You see the mummies of Djer and his women have never been found. Now that shrine to Osiris is of no interest to us. What is of interest is that around 1300 B.C. grave-robbing was becoming such a problem that the high priests had to take steps, because without his mummy a pharaoh's not a god, he's nothing. So they gathered up all the mummies they could and carried them off for reinterment to a secret chamber they'd dug across from Thebes, the present home of our missing mummies. That was my theory and now it's been proved correct.

But what was the concubine's arm doing out there all by itself?

Waiting for a heavy Italian woman's thrusts and groans in the moonlight to make history. Despite the precautions taken by the high priests in 1300 B.C., chanting sacred texts while they slaughtered the workmen and so forth, some clever grave-robber must have found out about the new secret chamber.

He was making away with a load of loot when the priests surprised him. He stuffed the concubine's arm into a hole and covered it with a brick, intending to return for it later, but instead he was killed on the spot So the secret was kept and that was that for three millennia, until your heavy Italian woman squarely faced the wall and revealed the truth to us.

Exhausted with excitement, Ziwar sank back on his pillows and crossed the concubine's arm and the magnifying glass on his chest.

Now listen to this. If my calculations are correct there'll be no less than thirty-three pharoahs in that chamber, not to mention their women and servants and cats. In short, the greatest mummy cache of all time.

He closed his eyes.

What a discovery. What a way to culminate my career. Now listen carefully, Cairo. I want you to go back there at once, alone, and dig behind the hole where the arm was. There has to be a shaft leading to the secret chamber. But just imagine it, thirty-three pharaohs. I'm going to have a lot of traveling to do, a great many eras to visit. This heavy Italian woman simply has no idea what her anal appetites will eventually contribute to our knowledge of ancient history.

She certainly doesn't, murmured Cairo. Quite the opposite.

What makes you say that?

The present she gave me. A little monkey.

Menelik Ziwar opened his eyes. He looked disappointed.

A monkey? You let an Italian woman give you, an African, a monkey as a token of her esteem for your performance? Don't you have any more self-respect than that?

An albino monkey, added Cairo mischievously. Pure white except for his genitals, which are bright aquamarine. He has an extraordinary trick of curling up on your shoulder into a little ball of white fluff, pretending to be asleep, his head and tail tucked away out of sight so that no one can see what kind of animal he is. But when you whisper his name he jumps to his feet on your shoulder and instantly whips into action.

Doing what?

Vigorously masturbating. And with both hands no less. It can be quite a surprise.

Menelik Ziwar smiled dryly.

What name does the little fellow go by?

Bongo.

The old scholar snorted at the bottom of the sarcophagus.

Well Bongo may be bright, Cairo, but all the same we have to find you another profession. I'm more convinced of it than ever. You're just not taking life seriously enough.

Menelik Ziwar nodded with authority and closed his eyes. As the heavy Italian woman had done in the moonlight, he immediately began to snore.

On a dark night, having searched the desert around the tomb to be certain he was alone, Cairo Martyr removed the outer layer of bricks from the wall and started digging. He had only gone a few feet when his shovel broke through into space.

He widened the opening and held a candle inside. Ahead lay a shaft about three feet high and just wide enough for a man's shoulders. He climbed in on his stomach.

The passage was packed with mummies on each side and the only way he could pass through them was by putting his face next to theirs, nose to nose and mouth to mouth. It might have been difficult to move at all if the shaft hadn't sloped downward, allowing the weight of his body to push him through the mass.

He slid and gathered momentum, plummeting down and down for two or three hundred yards in a shower of bones and legs and arms, heads rolling after him, cats flattened under his chin. Abruptly the shaft opened into a chamber and he went crashing down to the bottom, smashing through rags and wooden cases and coming to rest in a suffocating cloud of debris.

When the dust had settled he lit a candle and lay in the stench, staring at the blackened walls and the mummies crowded everywhere in confusion, lying and standing and some on their heads grinning, others slouched against the walls holding on to the stones with shriveled hands. There were gold armchairs and gold sedan chairs, gold drinking cups and gold plates, jewels and necklaces and occasionally, sitting on top of a dusty head, the gold cobra headpiece that was the mark of a pharaoh.

Martyr raised his candle and saw a black square opening at the end of the long narrow chamber. He elbowed his way over to it and pushed through the opening, finding himself in another compartment exactly the same size and shape as the first, also crowded with mummies.

Martyr wiped the dust out of his eyes. What was that at the far end of this chamber? Another door?

Numbly he struggled on through a third compartment, a fourth and a fifth and a sixth, a seventh. Or had he lost count? The chambers were all identical. He started back, barely able to breathe in the stench.

In one of the doorways he paused to lean against a stone and think. Had there been a door at the other end of the original chamber? Did the compartments stretch in both directions? Could he find the way out again or would he have to stumble back and forth forever through the packed compartments of this subterranean train?

The light from his candle seemed suddenly weaker. Perhaps the lack of air was going to make him faint.

Maybe he was already trapped on this immobile express train beside the Nile.

He giggled. Where was the express going? To eternity of course. Here under the desert a party of pharaohs and their entourages were on a trip to eternity, and if only briefly he was joining them.

A mummy next to him stirred. Its shoulders were pinned between four or five other passengers and it looked exhausted.

Going far? asked Cairo.

All the way, whispered the mummy with a resigned expression.

Cairo giggled and nodded and pushed on through the compartment. A cat got in his way and he gave it a kick. The cat dissolved. He came to a royal gold-encased armchair that was blocking the aisle.

Excuse me, madame, he said, trying to elbow his way around the queen who sat stiffly on her throne with a haughty suggestion of a smile. She wore a large emerald on what once must have been an ample chest, now withered. Cairo had an urge to touch one of her breasts. He did so and his fingers punched through the gold-encrusted rags into an empty cavity. He held his nose as the gases escaped and the queen's smile faded. Her mouth fell open revealing bad teeth and only a stump of a tongue. Martyr laughed and pushed on down the train.

Guv'nor?

He stopped and turned. A mummy pressed into a corner was watching him, a small stooped man with a sorrowful face.

For some reason Cairo wasn't surprised at the working-class English accent. The mummy certainly appeared to be no more than a common laborer, and in any case, if he'd spoken in ancient Egyptian there would have been no way to understand a word he said.

The mummy's narrow concave chest suggested weak lungs, perhaps even tuberculosis. Definitely working class, thought Cairo, and treated no better then than now. The mummy abjectly touched his fingers to his forehead. He seemed to be trying to show respect.

Don't mean to bother you, guv'nor, but could you spare a navvy a light? We don't get many visitors down here.

Cairo lowered the candle in front of the mummy's sickly face and saw him take a deep puff of something, slowly exhaling with a sigh. In your condition, thought Cairo, that's not going to do you any good.

Ah that's better, said the mummy. Thanks, guv. You can't imagine how dull it gets down here. We used to keep each other company all right, but after a few centuries of carrying on no one had much to say anymore. Know what I mean? Down here the party ran out of conversation about three thousand years ago.

Cairo nodded.

And of course I didn't buy this trip in the first place, they put me on it. I mean I can understand why a pharaoh would want to make the trip, being a god, but what's in it for me? You can see how we're packed in down here, the air already stifling and getting worse as time goes on, and you realize what kind of time we're talking about.

The mummy looked down the chamber in disgust.

Like I said, guv, what's in it for me? If you're not a god what's the sense of living forever? But they don't care about that, they don't care how you feel. One morning you happen to be sweeping up an antechamber, a room in the flat belonging to one of the king's third-class concubines, strictly on temporary assignment and minding your business you are, when word comes down that the king has croaked and all of a sudden you're a member of the royal funereal household and being hustled off in official mourning to be mummified. So here I am to no end, an endless no end, and all because I was doing my job one morning. It's not fair and you can't help feeling resentful.

Cairo nodded. The mummy made a face.

What's more, guv, the high priests had it all wrong up there. The pharaoh dies and being a god they're going to send him on his eternal trip. Right. But why do they assume he'd naturally like to have his queen and his playmates and servants on the trip with him? For company? Well they're crazy. We're packed in down here and there's nothing natural about the situation at all. Did they really think we were going to tiptoe around serving him while the concubines flopped on their backs and the queen smiled and the cats did appreciative somersaults? Wrong. Dead wrong. Things don't work that way. He may be a god and used to living forever but the rest of us are just tired to death of this trip of his. Tell the truth. Have you ever seen so many bored faces as you see down here?

Cairo shook his head.

Of course you haven't. They all resent this trip as much as I do. There's not a concubine here who's even looked in his direction in three thousand years. Not a cat who's done a tumble one way or the other, not a servant who's lifted a finger. Why should we? He can play with himself for all the concubines care. As for the queen, you saw what happened when you gave her a poke. Nothing but foul gases inside and her teeth are going bad and she's lost her tongue. Her smile was a fake, as you saw. In fact can you guess what it was that made her teeth go bad and withered her tongue down to a stump? That's right, that's the kind of king our Djer was and drinking all the time too. Her smile was always fake. But now that Djer's on his trip he can't get even a little cup of drink to help him face the truth. He's dry, as dry as I am, and you can't imagine how dry that is. Well that's some joke on him, but you're not staying down here are you, guv? You'd be a fool to do that. You may think you'd like to live forever, but I can tell you this is no kind of a party to be in.

I'm lost, said Cairo. Where's the exit?

Two cars forward. Look for a large sedan chair on the left, it's right beneath the shaft. Put there a long time ago to serve as a stepladder. He must have caught his though, we never saw him again. Got away with my mistress's right arm but not much else.

Thanks, said Cairo, I'll be going. By the way, how many pharaohs are there down here?

Counting that lout I used to work for, thirty-three in all. And Egypt is well rid of their kind. They did nothing but watch us build monuments to them. Strictly thinking of themselves, and now on this trip that's all they can do forever, and you wonder how satisfying that really is. Well good luck, guv.

The candle flickered. The mummy's face drooped sorrowfully. Cairo waved from the end of the compartment and pushed his way to the sedan chair two cars forward. He lifted himself into the shaft and made the long climb back up through the arms and legs and detached heads, the clouds of dust, to the desert night.

The next morning he boarded a steamer down the Nile. But when the boat finally docked in Cairo on that clear spring day in 1914, when he rushed to the sepulcher beneath the public garden beside the river to deliver his spectacular news, he found an unfamiliar lid on the massive sarcophagus he had visited so often, a painted carving of Cheops' mother in place of the dry crinkled smile he knew so well.

Menelik Ziwar, former slave and unique scholar and absentee discoverer of thirty-three pharaohs, had quietly died in his sleep leaving Cairo Martyr sole owner of the largest divine cache in history, a pantheon of ancient gods with which to avenge the injustices done to his people.

The last day of December 1921.

Snow flurries came and went outside the smudged windows of the Arab coffee shop where Cairo Martyr and Munk Szondi and O'Sullivan Beare were playing poker. They played into the evening and were still playing the following morning, having moved on at midnight to a curious apartment in the Moslem Quarter which the Irishman said belonged to a friend of his.

The apartment had two lofty vaulted rooms. The front room was empty save for an enormous bronze sundial set into the wall near the door, a set of chimes attached to it. In the back room where they played there was a tall narrow antique Turkish safe in one corner, a giant stone scarab with a sly smile on its face in another corner, and nothing else.

They recessed for a few hours on New Year's Day and were back before twilight, sitting on the floor in their overcoats between the safe and the scarab, Martyr and Szondi wearing gloves, O'Sullivan Beare in mittens. It was almost as cold in the room as it was outside but no one seemed to notice it. Cairo Martyr had the deal. He turned to O'Sullivan Beare.

Who exactly is the friend of yours who owns this place?

Goes by the name of Haj Harun, said Joe. Formerly an antiquities dealer, now on permanent duty patrolling the Old City.

For what?

Possible invasion attempts. These days the Babylonians are worrying him but you can never be sure, tomorrow it could be the Romans or the Crusaders. Keeps a sharp eye out for them. Has to, he says.

Knows what kind of havoc they can wreak in a Holy City.

How long has he been on patrol?

Almost three thousand years, answered Joe, studying his poker hand. Cairo smiled and examined the backs of his untouched, downfaced cards. He singled out one for discard.

Now it may be, said Joe, that you're disinclined to believe me, about such an enormous period of time and all, a tour of duty lasting that long I mean. Many are those who have been disinclined over the millennia. In fact he says I'm the first person to believe in him in the last two thousand years, and how's that for a streak of bad luck? I think I'll be taking two don't you know.

Cairo smiled more broadly and dealt the extra cards, three to Szondi and two to Joe and one to himself.

He leaned down and patted the giant stone scarab on the nose.

Genuine?

Nothing but. Straight from the XVI Dynasty, according to the old article.

What old article?

Haj Harun, the great skin heretofore mentioned.

Is that a fact. Well why does the scarab have such a sly smile on its face?

Don't know, do I. But my guess is the scarab must be in on a secret we're not. Cunning piece of goods, no doubt about it. Jacks or better you said? Well I think I'll just open with this tidy pile of authentic pounds sterling.

All at once the chimes attached to the sundial in the front room creaked noisily and began to strike. Cairo and Munk raised their heads, counting.

Twelve? asked Cairo. At six-thirty in the evening?

Pay no mind, said Joe. That sundial has a habit of sounding off when it pleases, disregarding the rest of us. It loses track of the hours you see, due to darkness and cloudy days and so forth, and then it makes up for them later. Either that or the other way around, makes up for time beforehand so it can take a nap later on. Confusing, isn't it. Those extra hours we just heard could be already past or yet to come, who's to say.

Cairo nodded.

Was it a portable sundial once?

Strange you should be asking such a question because that's exactly what it was. And a hugely heavy piece it must have been to the soul who was lugging it around. Why such crazed activity I couldn't imagine.

Where did it come from originally?

Baghdad, I'm told. Some era called the fifth Abbasid caliphate, according to the old skin. That is to say, it must have played some role in the Thousand and One Nights, which just happens to be Haj Harun's favorite collection of fancies. It was a present to him in the last century from a man who once rented this very room to write a study in.

O'Sullivan Beare smiled.

Haj Harun tried to tell me at first that the man only rented the room for an afternoon. But that didn't seem likely, and then when I heard how big the study was I knew the old man was mixing up time again. More like a dozen years, it must have been.

Why? How big was the study?

Enough to fill a camel caravan that stretched halfway from here to Jaffa. When the gent finished his study, it seems, he packed it up in this camel caravan and sent it down to Jaffa, whence both caravan and manuscript were shipped to Venice to be on their way to publication somewhere in Europe. But here we are on New Year's Day in Jerusalem and aren't either of you two joining me in this interesting game of chance at hand?

Cairo Martyr laughed.

Strongbow's portable sundial? Strongbow writing his thirty-three-volume study, Levantine Sex, in this very room? The hollow stone scarab Strongbow had later borrowed from someone in Jerusalem so Menelik Ziwar could use it to smuggle a set of the banned volumes into Egypt?

An uncommon setting, it struck him, for a poker game in the Holy City.

Without looking at his cards, Cairo Martyr raised the bet.

-3-

Cheops' Pyramid

Petty dealers were frequently picked up and jailed for mummy-mastic possession.

For some weeks after Menelik Ziwar's death in 1914, while continuing to perform his Victorian dragomanning duties in a perfunctory manner, Cairo Martyr pondered the question of what to do with his spectacular cache of pharaonic mummies.

Before Ziwar died he had told Martyr the amazing fact that in his youth he and Martyr's great-grandmother had briefly been lovers. She had vowed then one day to avenge her humiliating life as a slave, and thus Ziwar had understood from the beginning the significance of Martyr's name when he came to him as a frightened boy only twelve years old, alone in the world, seeking the great black scholar's advice.

A proud woman with a long memory, Ziwar had said. She wanted to see some scores settled with those oafish Mamelukes who sold her down the Nile. But time passed and both her daughter and her granddaughter died in slavery, and she knew she would die in slavery, so the best she could do was to give you the name she did, in the hope you might redress the wrongs done to her. So don't deny her, Cairo. Hers was a stubborn, lifelong courage. Honor her wishes if you can.

Martyr wanted to, but how? He was still a common dragoman, although now he had the mummy cache.

But what role did mummies have in his life?

And then all at once that stunning incident occurred in the first light of an early summer day in 1914, on top of the Great Pyramid.

An English triplane carrying the morning mail to the capital, An anonymous pilot grinning in flying goggles and leather helmet, white scarf fluttering on the wind, The triplane skimming the top of the pyramid and gaily wagging its wings, gaily saluting the most impressive monument ever reared by man and cleanly decapitating an aging overweight German baron and his aging overweight wife, as if to signal the end of the leisurely old order of the nineteenth century. In the dizzying shock of recognition that came with dawn that morning, Martyr realized that his Victorian servitude had ended forever. And he also understood why Ziwar had sent him to Luxor when he had. Undoubtedly the old scholar had long known the secret pharaonic chamber was there, yet he had waited until he was about to die before he asked Martyr to go find it, so that Martyr would be the sole owner of the mummy cache. Thus had Ziwar placed in Martyr's hands a priceless instrument for retribution, and all for the sake of a woman the old scholar had loved briefly long ago.

Patience.

Extraordinary patience.

His great-grandmother waiting through the nineteenth century for justice to come. After she died, Menelik Ziwar waiting until 1914 before he told Martyr about the love affair of his youth and sent him up the Nile to take charge of the secret pantheon waiting there.

The patience of slaves and former slaves. And now he was determined to be equally patient in devising a master plan for the use of his instruments of power.

Cairo Martyr smiled. He was standing on the summit of the Great Pyramid, the headless naked bodies of the fat German aristocrats having come to rest some yards below him. The sun was on the horizon and he was on top of the Great Pyramid. A new age had arrived.

The mummies, instruments of power. What better place to ponder their future use than the unique hideaway bequeathed to him by old Menelik, sage of sages?

By the second week in August his caravan was ready the camels laden with a huge supply of tinned meat, exclusivety meat, Martyr having early gotten into the habit of eating only protein in order to survive the rigors of dragomandom.

The camels were unloaded at the base of the Great Pyramid and a band of porters labored over a weekend carrying the supplies up to the summit. When the entire top of the pyramid was heaped with tinned meat, Martyr paid off the foreman.

Why up here? asked the dazed man, breathing heavily.

Martyr smiled.

An airplane is picking me up here tomorrow morning. I'm taking this meat to my village in the Sudan.

There's a severe drought down there this summer.

The foreman laughed slyly, expecting no better answer from a black man.

And what's that animal asleep on your shoulder? asked the foreman. It looks like a little ball of white fluff.

Martyr smiled more broadly.

He looks like he's asleep but he's not. He's my guardian spirit and he watches over me and warns me if danger is near. Bongo, shake hands with this thieving fellaheen.

Upon hearing his name the little albino monkey instantly leapt to his feet on Martyr's shoulder, masturbating vigorously with his bright aquamarine genitals thrust forward, both tiny fists flailing away.

The foreman screamed and fled with his porters. But all the same Martyr watched them through his binoculars until they were out of sight, porters carrying goods to tombs and returning later to pillage them having always been a curse in Egypt.

After dark he tripped the combination of latches hidden in the crevices around one of the massive blocks of stone near the summit.

Powerful springs creaked. The block pivoted on an unseen iron post and gently swung open. He stepped into the foyer, struck a match and lit the lamp.

At the bottom of a short formal staircase lay the sunken parlor of Menelik Ziwar's spacious nineteenth-century flat.

Martyr gazed at the rich dark wood of the furniture that crowded the parlor, heavy solid pieces arm to arm and back to back, everywhere tassels and laces and doilies, legs that ended in claws crushing the heads of rodents in the thick carpets, lamps thickly shaded and standing only a few feet apart between the innumerable hunting prints on the walls, between the dozens of lacquered Chinese screens that were dividing space for no reason, the furniture in this room alone surpassing that to be found in the entire native quarter of any African city.

In style and layout the flat was massively Victorian. Martyr went on to inspect the large library and the formal dining room on the second level down, the well-equipped-workshop for archeological restoration on the third level down, the master bedroom and the two guest bedrooms on the fourth level, the kitchen and pantries on the fifth, the servants' quarters on the sixth and the storerooms on the seventh.

Beneath that was a cellar where firewood was stored. Altogether a roomy seven-story apartment, inverted and impressively solid, in the top of Cheop's pyramid.

Martyr spent the rest of the night transferring tinned meat into his new quarters.

In bequeathing the flat to Martyr only a month before his death, Menelik Ziwar had reconstructed its history as effortlessly as if he had been a witness to those events three and a half thousand years ago.

Evidence speaks for itself, the old Egyptologist had said. Remove yourself to the XVI Dynasty if you will, a lawless era. The mysterious Hyksos have conquered the kingdom, the shepherd kings as they're sometimes called, and although we don't know where they came from the epithet does seem apt. That is to say they don't seem to have been too bright, as we'll see. Well as usual when foreigners arrive and take over in Egypt, a lot of them are on the lookout for loot. Tomb-robbers lurk in the countryside waiting for opportune targets, and then as now none loom as large as Cheops' pyramid. Numerous tunnels have already been dug into the pyramid in search of its treasure chambers, but always laterally or uphill. I mention this not because it was hard work, but because direction is essential to our story.

All right, Cairo. One night we find ourselves in a Memphis tavern where a gang of sturdy but not very bright Hyksos adventurers are conspiring over beer. The tavern owner, a native Egyptian, overhears them talking about lost treasure. Now since he is a native Egyptian, and not just another Hyksos who has come out of history from nowhere and will inevitably go back there again, these rootless shepherds turned adventurers naturally respect the tavern owner. They look up to him and that's going to cause trouble, because he happens to have idealistic religious views. You wouldn't know it today but once there were actually Egyptians who had ideals.

Well, whispers the tavern owner as he serves another round of beer to the gang of conspirators, if it's treasure that's on your mind, what about the treasure in the Great Pyramid?

The Hyksos adventurers shake their heads gloomily. Everyone has already tried to look for that, they say, and no one has ever been able to find it.

True, says the tavern owner, but the reason they've all failed is because they always dug their tunnels uphill. Whereas a pharaoh, being a god, wouldn't have allowed his mummy to be dragged uphill to reach his burial chamber. Naturally he would have descended into it with his hands crossed on his chest, a much more dignified position. If you're a god you don't crawl uphill, you descend from the heavens.

In other words, said the tavern owner, the mummy would have been lowered from the top down, and that's how we should dig.

Menelik Ziwar had cackled lightly.

The poor man's deluded idealism at work, you see. And although it seems witless today, that Hyksos gang with their dense shepherd heads believed him. They had another round of beer and that very night followed the tavern owner out to the Great Pyramid with all their tools.

The first thing he had them do was hollow out a base camp, or in this case a top camp, where they could live in secret while sinking their shafts. Then they dug tunnels down toward the bottom, all the way down to the bedrock beneath the pyramid. But they missed the burial chambers and instead broke through into a subterranean stream.

Bad luck for the Hyksos gang, good luck for us. The Nile was flooding and if it hadn't been, who knows?

They might have gone on digging vertical tunnels until the pyramid had become structurally unsound and collapsed.

Menelik Ziwar had smiled.

The Great Pyramid suddenly collapsing in on itself? Simply deflating like a balloon? Do you realize there are six and a half million tons of rock in there? Can you imagine the noise it would make?

He sighed.

Pollution saved us. Once again that paradox of the Nile. The Nile was flooding and sewerage from Memphis had infected the subterranean stream. Crazed by thirst after their long dusty dig down from the summit, the Hyksos gang and the tavern owner threw themselves into the sluggish stream to drink their fill and then some.

Ziwar had nodded thoughtfully.

A matter of minutes, I'd imagine. The dysentery endemic to subsurface Nilotic tributaries is particularly virulent. They had enough strength to crawl back up to their top camp, but not enough to budge the block of stone over the entrance when they got there. And that's where I found their skeletons, the bones of the Hyksos telling us nothing as usual, the tavern owner having spent his last moments, by now no longer an idealist, tracing the hieroglyph for beer in the dust.

Menelik Ziwar then briefly concluded his tale.

The top camp and vertical tunnels had remained lost until he deduced their existence in 1844 by studying the irregular air currents in the known shafts and chambers of the pyramid. Finding them was a simple matter once he knew they existed. He examined the large top camp and decided it would make an appropriate country retreat and eventual retirement home for the world's leading unknown Egyptologist.

Accordingly, he made plans to furnish it, sparing no expense.

The work had taken sixteen years. During that time Strongbow had often stayed in the unfinished flat when passing through Lower Egypt and had always greatly enjoyed it, as he wrote in a letter from Aden around the middle of the century.

My Dear Menelik,

The air at your future country retreat is simply incomparable. And among its many other attributes I would also have to mention the superior quality of the view, the serenity of the sunrises and sunsets as seen from the doorstep, and in general that pervasive sense of solitude men of our nature find so invigorating. Lastly there is the aura of tranquility that one cannot help but feel when going to bed in the summit of the greatest monument on earth.

Congratulations, my friend. An altogether admirable project. Many thanks for a lovely weekend in this superb perch you have found for your old age.

Yours etc, Plantagenet

P.S. I enclose a rare Solomon's-seal as a token of my appreciation. I came across it last month in the Hindu Kush and have never seen a lily-of-the-valley quite like it.

P.P.S. Are we still on for next Sunday?

Indeed, Menelik Ziwar was convinced he had found the perfect country home for himself. So much so he waited until every detail was completed before he went up to spend his first night in the flat.

He chose his forty-third birthday for the occasion, Christmas, 1860. He would have liked to have asked Strongbow to join him for the celebration, but the explorer was off somewhere in disguise and couldn't be reached.

Ziwar spent the day happily roaming through his new apartment. At the end of the afternoon he prepared a feast of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding accompanied by three wines and two vegetables, a baked potato and a savory, ending with a magnum of champagne and a large serving of his favorite greens, a weed common to the poorer sections of Alexandria where it grew wild in vacant lots, a nostalgic reminder of his youth when there had often been little else to eat.

After dinner Ziwar set up a canvas chair on the summit of the pyramid to watch the sunset while smoking a cigar.

A thoroughly successful day, or so it seemed. Drowsy from his meal and the wine, he retired early to the master bedroom and quickly fell asleep, only to find himself awake in terror a few minutes later, overcome by a sensation of falling, this sudden irrational fear of heights evidently brought on by a lifetime spent in confined subterranean spaces.

In any case, Ziwar knew he could never spend another night in his lofty flat. Sleeping that high in the air was out of the question. When the time came for him to retire, he decided, he would resort to the snug security of an underground sarcophagus, preferably that of Cheops' mother, rather than Cheops'

chamber in the sky.

Here Martyr moved with his albino monkey and his tins of meat on August 14, sleeping and reading and exploring the interior of the pyramid by day, sitting on top of the pyramid devising his plans by night, oblivious to the monstrous new war in Europe where massed armies were savagely destroying each other in muddy trenches.

And there in the clear dry air of that ancient pinnacle above the Nile, methodically and relentlessly, Cairo Martyr pondered the injustices suffered by Africans over the centuries, historical crimes he intended to repay in full measure.

Considering where he was living, it wasn't surprising he decided to deal with the pyramids first. Slave labor had built them for pharaohs who thought they were gods, but a pharaonic god was nothing without his mummy and Martyr owned the largest cache of pharaonic mummies in the world.

About the time of the first battle of the Marne, he moved all his mummies in sealed cases to the top of the pyramid. There, in Ziwar's workshop for archeological restoration, he proceeded to grind them down into a fine powder.

So much for the eternal gods of ancient Egypt. He had reduced them to dust but that wasn't enough.

After prolonged meditation, coincidental with the second battle of Ypres, he decided to desecrate the once holy remains of the pharaohs as well.

During the Somme offensive he converted Ziwar's workshop into a pharmacy and carefully mixed half of his mummy powder with mastic gum, producing a balm he intended to sell as an aphrodisiac with general magical properties. Thus the tyrannical builders of the pyramids would end ignominiously with a pinch of their dust lodged in the nostrils of wheezing old men greedy for longer life, another pinch served up as mastic to be smeared on the unwashed pudenda of barren women, a third encrusting the slack sexual organs of nervous merchants unable to obtain an erection.

The formerly glorious pharaohs sordidly sold as mummy dust and mummy mastic in back alleys.

Available to any corrupt illiterate who could pay for them, just as African slaves had once been.

Martyr now moved forward from ancient to modern Egyptian tyrants. The Mamelukes, as pederasts, had simply disappeared from history. But the Arabs had been their coreligionists in the slave trade and it was therefore through Islam that he would strike. Since he was nominally a Moslem he had access to all the holy places.

A desecration here too then? Some intolerable act that would outrage the entire religion?

Cairo Martyr smiled. He lit a cigarette. The second battle of the Marne had just ended and the Great War would soon be over. And so too the night. Dawn was coming and he was sitting on top of the pyramid, contemplating the last minutes of darkness, when the revelation came to him. Significantly, he was facing east.

Mecca, of course. The navel of Islam inside the Kaaba. The Holy of Holies, a black meteorite.

He inhaled deeply.

Black. Islam deprived of its most sacred object. The stone that pilgrims came from all over the world to kiss. To steal the black meteorite from the Kaaba and render the Holy of Holies utterly empty.

Utterly.

Cairo Martyr laughed. And the black stone itself?

To Africa, of course. He would carry it to Africa where the Arabs had grown rich for centuries on black gold, his people. A black meteorite now to pay for black gold then.

Justice.

It had taken him four years to work out his master plan but it had been worth it, no one could hope for more. He intended to steal the black meteorite from heaven and bury it in rich black African soil, where it belonged.

At the end of the First World War a brooding Cairo Martyr, sleek from four years of solid meat, emerged from seclusion at the top of the Great Pyramid and descended into the raucous crowds and swirling flies of the bazaars of the Middle East, there to hire the wholesale dealers who would receive his smuggled mummy dust and mummy mastic in bulk, cut the first with quinine and the second with glue or glucose and distribute both to retailers who would sell them on the open market in tiny oilskin bags, five pounds sterling per bag.

The dose was small and an impotent man or a barren woman needed more than a bag for treatment.

Three or four bags a day was a common dosage, but habits running to eight or nine bags were far from rare.

Prices varied with the season. In general spring with its illusions of hope was the most profitable sellers'

market, winter with its lethargy the worst. But an outbreak of local tribal warfare could drive sales up at any time. Highly spiced foods tended to do the same in the summer, as did aggressive athletic contests in the autumn.

Usage also varied by region and ethnic background. Desert bedouin, the fierce Kurds and religious Jews seemed immune to the benefits of mummy dust and were almost total abstainers. But the sedentary Arabs of the cities, wealthy Persians and lazy Turks of all classes were heavy consumers.

Sales increased substantially near large rivers, near mosques, on Saturday evenings and during full moons, declining dramatically in the weeks before lambs were slaughtered in the spring. Mummy dust was generally preferred by men and women under thirty, mummy mastic by those over that age. But a confirmed user was more than happy to get his mummy any way he could.

The European authorities in the Middle East moved to suppress the clandestine trade as soon as they became aware of it. Both mummy dust and mummy mastic were declared dangerous drugs and treated accordingly in the courts, but the profits involved in handling them were so huge Martyr had no difficulty establishing a marketing network that reached into every corner of the Levant.

Petty dealers were frequently picked up and jailed for mummy-mastic possession, but due to the precautions Martyr had taken it was nearly impossible for his major wholesalers to be prosecuted.

And on the rare occasions when one was, the English or French magistrate in charge of the case immediately received a large anonymous bribe along with detailed dossiers on a dozen underworld figures in his city, previously unknown criminals who could easily be convicted of any crime because they were guilty of every crime.

The wholesaler was then released for lack of evidence and quickly went abroad to the French Riviera for a vacation arranged by Martyr, after which he would turn up with a different name in another Arab capital, where his expertise could be put to work in some other aspect of the overall operation.

In only three years Cairo Martyr's secret balm network was smoothly functioning throughout the Levant, assuring him a large income for life. The time then came for him to launch the second phase of his master plan, the series of deadly steps that would ultimately lead to the theft of the black meteorite from the Kaaba in Mecca.

With typical patience Martyr intended to approach his goal by degrees. First he would gain clandestine control of Jerusalem, the third holy city of Islam. When that was accomplished he would move on to Islam's second city, Medina. And only then, with all flanks secure, would he take his campaign to Mecca for his final triumph.

But when Martyr arrived in Jerusalem in the autumn of 1921, he found he wasn't alone in seeking secret control of the city. Other clandestine operators were at work in the confusion that had followed the war, in particular a Khasarian Jew from Budapest, Munk Szondi by name, who seemed to have immense resources of his own.

If he had been faced with just this one competitor, Martyr was confident he could have made a deal with the man for an equable division of spoils. In fact he had worked out most of the details for a compromise proposal when he accidentally met Szondi for the first time in a Jerusalem coffee shop where they had both chanced to seek shelter on a cold December afternoon when snow was definitely in the air.

But he couldn't make an offer to Szondi then because a third man happened to be sitting with them in the crowded shop, a young Irishman who also agreed to the game of poker Szondi had suggested as a diversion against the gloomy weather.

A game of poker. A diversion. The wind outside whipping through the alleys. Snow definitely in the air.

And somehow a strange design descending upon the three of them that night after they moved the game to the curiously empty shop of Haj Harun, where Martyr soon made another discovery. For some reason as yet unknown, the Irishman was also seeking secret control of Jerusalem.

Chance had apparently brought them together on the last day of 1921, but now none of them seemed able to leave the game, to escape the mysterious spell that had suddenly locked them in around a poker table.

Why? What was the spell? Did it have something to do with Haj Harun?

Cairo Martyr shrugged. He smiled.

There were complications he didn't yet understand but he was as patient as ever, as patient as his great-grandmother and Menelik Ziwar had been. So patient he never looked at his cards before he bet on them, because he knew in the end he wouldn't win out of luck.

In the end he would win because he had to.

Because his cause was just. Because no one could have a cause more just than his.

Even if it meant facing a siege in the Holy City more arduous than any since the First Crusade.

By the closing days of January 1922, with a month of steady play behind them, the three gamblers had begun to realize they were involved in more than ordinary chronic poker. And it had also become apparent they would have to bring outsiders into the game if they were to make any money, the three of them being too evenly matched to win from each other.

It was Munk Szondi who made the suggestion one night when he had the deal.

What about it, Joe?

Suits me.

Cairo?

An excellent idea.

As Munk shuffled the cards he gazed at the tall antique Turkish safe in the corner.

I've been wondering about that, he said.

Have you now, murmured Joe. Well I recall some wondering about it myself when I walked in here the first time and saw it standing there so tall and thin. That doesn't look to be a safe, I said to myself. It looks more like an impregnable sentry box on local guard duty.

Joe nodded to himself. He smiled, recalling that afternoon nearly two years ago when he had rapped on the safe and heard the echoes from deep in the ground. Haj Harun had then told him the truth.

The safe was bottomless. Inside it was a ladder that led down to the caverns of the past, the ruins of a dozen Old Cities, two dozen Old Cities. Because Jerusalem was on a mountaintop, as Haj Harun explained it, and since it had been endlessly destroyed and rebuilt over the millennia, no one had ever bothered to dig away what was left from before. Instead they had built over the ruins, raising the holy mountain ever higher. And only Haj Harun knew the caverns existed, because he alone had lived in all those former Jerusalems.

But he had shared the secret with Joe because Joe had not only befriended him but even believed the things he said, the first person to have done so in two thousand years, which had mystified Haj Harun in the beginning.

Why do you believe what I say, he had asked, instead of beating me when I say it? That's what everyone else does. They call me an old fool and beat me.

No reason not to believe you, Joe had answered. I haven't been long in our Holy City, everybody's Holy City, but I've learned enough to know you have to accept twists here the way you might not elsewhere.

Different kind of place, that's all. Eternal city and so forth, daft time spinning out of control for sure on top of the holy mountain. Now you say you've lived here three thousand years and who am I to say you haven't? No one, that's who. A man has to be in charge of his own memories all right, otherwise nothing would work. So if you say it I'll believe it and that's the shape of things.

There had been tears in Haj Harun's eyes then, and ever since he had been eager to reveal all he knew to his new young friend. The only problem was that Haj Harun was so old the years seemed to slip and slide together for him, and he could seldom remember what he knew.

Munk Szondi was still gazing at the tall antique Turkish safe in the corner.

What does the old man keep in it? he asked.

Now there's an item for you, said Joe, and would you believe me if I told you? The past. Yes that's right.

He keeps the past, no less, in that tall and narrow safe.

Munk smiled.

Is that so?

It is indeed. What he's got in there is three thousand years of history, the Holy City's history, and what do you think of that? You see he's by way of considering himself the custodian of Jerusalem, the one and only legitimate article. And me myself, I'm by way of thinking he's right.

Munk shuffled the cards.

Who appointed him to this exalted position?

Self-appointed he was. Had to be. No one else had been around long enough to do the honors. Not that he wasn't voted into the job too, he was. By general acclamation of the citizenry, accompanied by great applause.

When was that? asked Munk.

Well let's see, it must have been a little before 700 B.C. Seems about that time the accursed Assyrians were ready to make their move in their monstrous chariots, accosting the lands to the north on their way down to a-conquer Jerusalem and everyone in the city was a-scared and agog at the danger. Commerce and the assorted religions were coming to a standstill, don't you see, so maybe soon there would be no Holy City at all here, nothing but gnashing of teeth and lamentations. Do you follow me, Munk?

Yes.

Now first you have to remember Haj Harun wasn't then at all what you see today. He was a greatly respected figure here, a veritable local hero and especially renowned for his oratory. Are you remembering, Munk?

Yes.

All right. He squares his shoulders and strides down into the marketplace to assay the Assyrian situation and assail all doubts and provide assurances or assumptions as the case may be, assuming his role in other words, assiduous defender that he be, just going right out there to arrest the Assyrian confusion with his powerful voice and presence.

Citizens, he shouts, take heart with me.

He stands there smiling and nodding with confidence, shouting this over and over, but his fellow Jerusalemites aren't assimilating any of it. They're just plain scared so there are more teary dirges and dreary threnodies.

The Assyrians are a-coming, scream the citizens.

But we can save ourselves, shouts Haj Harun.

How? scream the citizens.

By hiding the city's sacred objects, shouts Haj Harun.

Well of course, the sacred objects, no one had thought of that. If they could hide the city's precious sacred objects for a while, say a century or two or three, then the Assyrian danger would surely pass as all dangers do and the Assyrians would have to lug their monstrously heavy chariots back up north where the came from. Then the citizens could bring out their sacred objects once more and be as prosperous as ever, a proper Holy City with its proper holy goods in place.

So it's right you are, the sacred objects, and a powerful sigh of relief passes around the marketplace.

Good, scream the citizens, let's hide them for two or three centuries. But where?

Consternation then. Doubt all around. Everyone knows the Assyrians have a dreadful reputation for breaking things up and down to get their hands on sacred objects, especially those of a Holy City, for the Assyrians are nothing if not unholy. So the mob screams again.

Hide them by all means. But where?

Here, shouts Haj Harun in triumph, whipping up his cloak to reveal a gigantic money belt strapped around his waist and a huge shepherd's sack on his back, both previously unsuspected although the citizenry was thinking their hero had looked a trifle overweight and hunch-backed that morning when he got up to address them.

A ruse, they scream. Will it work?

Haj Harun smiles. It will, he shouts. I used the same belt and the same sack in a similar situation some time ago when the Egyptians were coming.

The Egyptians, scream the citizens in dismay, you must have been younger and stronger then. Younger, shouts Haj Harun, but I'm still strong.

A queasy lot, the citizens of Jerusalem, then as now. So many prophets are always passing through here saying this or that is the absolute truth of the matter, and always contradicting each other, that the citizens naturally tend to be suspicious.

Is the money belt big enough? they scream. Is the shepherd's sack? And are you going to sign receipts?

Well Haj Harun shouts he is and all is well and in another minute they're bringing their sacred objects from every corner of the city, jewels and gold in all shapes and sizes and even some wood, and Haj Harun stuffs it all away in his money belt and his shepherd's sack and signs the receipts they wanted.

Then he tries to get to his feet.

Groans from the crowd, groans all around.

Can't you even stand up? they scream. If you have to sit there for the next century or two you're certainly not much of a hiding place.

Well it's hard, God knows. It's the hardest thing your man's ever done but he does it, he manages, he gets to his feet. After all he has to, the future of the eternal city depends on it. So he lets fall his cloak and takes one staggering step and then another, looking fat and terribly deformed, not unlike a Jerusalem merchant trying to waddle away from the marketplace under the weight of his profits.

And just in time, because up there on the ramparts the ram's horns are beginning to sound announcing the imminent arrival of the advance Assyrian assault force, which is to say their ferocious and justly a-feared cavalry.

The mob scatters for cover. The marketplace is empty. Only Haj Harun is left behind because he can't move fast enough. Stumbling crookedly with his burden of public safety, he slips into a side alley. Do you see it, Munk?

Yes.

Good. Well the gates bang open and the dreaded Assyrian cavalry comes thundering down the street shaking the cobblestones, and now your man knows why their accursed cavalry is so justly a-feared. I mean, my God, can you believe it? The Assyrians don't ride horses, that's why. They ride winged lions just like you've seen in the pictures. Great roaring bounding lions with manes a-flowing and wings a-spreading. So it's here come the bloody Assyrians all right. Are you still there, Munk?

Yes.

I thought so. Now here's the difficulty. Your man only thought he was slipping into that side alley.

Actually he wasn't. Actually that side alley was far too narrow to accommodate both him and the gigantic stuffed money belt and the huge stuffed shepherd's sack. Actually he's still out there in the open, Jerusalem's portable altar bearing all the goods, right there in the middle of the street with the cavalry bounding toward him, those wicked winged lions breathing fire and looking for a fresh piece of meat to guzzle. Guzzle meat? Of course they could with that fiery breath of theirs, easily and more. What next, you say?

What happened next, Joe?

A miracle of faith, that's what. He wasn't about to drop the goods and run the way you or I would. No, he stayed right there in the open and thought fast. Listen, he said, reassuring himself, if Belteshazzar could do it so can I. He had faith and so do I. I've always served the Holy City and I'm not stopping now, winged lions or no. Jerusalem forever, that's the job. His very words. Are you still with me, Munk?

I am, but who's this new character on the scene?

You mean this fellow Belteshazzar? Apparently he was some gent who was thrown to the lions by an unjust king but who survived because he was innocent and knew it, just as Haj Harun did. Faith, you see.

Anyway Haj Harun stands his ground in the middle of the street as the onslaught approaches at a frightful pace. The cavalry comes thundering down on him and the lead lion, near starved for real Jerusalem meat, opens his jaws wide and takes a terrifying snap at Haj Harun.

Well saints preserve us, you could just hear those jaws crack. The lion had aimed at Haj Harun's middle, you see, and planted his vicious bite on the money belt, and with all those precious sacred objects packed so tightly together in there, the thing was harder than stone. So crack went the lead lion's teeth, snap went its jaw, and the beast rolled over on the cobblestones at Haj Harun's feet, whining pathetically.

Well that slowed the advance. The next lion took a more tentative snap at what looked like a huge succulent deformity growing out of Haj Harun's back, hitting the stuffed shepherd's sack where it hurt and down he went with his front teeth broken off, howling between the roars, letting the other lions know this article in the middle of the street wasn't worth the biting.

Well to make a long story short, a couple of more lions gave it a try and lost their teeth, so that was that.

The cavalry charge was broken, toothless lions were whimpering all over the place, and Haj Harun was able to make his slow escape to a remote corner of the Old City. Then some decades or centuries later the Assyrians were no longer the arrogant power they had been, and sure enough they went slinking away to the north with their chariots, as predicted. Haj Harun brought out the city's sacred objects and redistributed them to the best of his memory, commerce and the assorted religions got underway again and all was well once more in the Holy City. The citizens gave Haj Harun a standing ovation and acclaimed him the unofficial savior of Jerusalem, official status only being temporary and only assigned to prophets before they're discredited and killed.

And that's what I meant, Munk, by the job not being just self-appointed. He did appoint himself all right but later the appointment was approved by all concerned, as you've just heard. For a time, at least. A while after that, during the Persian occupation, things took a turn for the worse for Haj Harun. In fact he went into a straight decline from which he's never recovered.

Why the decline?

Don't know, do I. Time's tricky, tricky times, all manner of possibilities. But I think the money belt was the culprit. You see it weighed on his kidneys something terrible when he was serving as Jerusalem's portable altar during the Assyrian afflictions, so badly he had to urinate every minute or two. And you do that over some decades or centuries and it could well cause your ruin. I mean who could accomplish much of a positive nature if they had to leave every minute or two to go to the bog? In such dire circumstances I think anybody would go into a decline. Well then, Munk. In sum, what do you think of this striking Assyrian adventure?

I think Haj Harun showed extraordinary courage.

He did, assuredly.

But there's one small fact that's out of place.

Do you tell me that? What could the small item be?

When the lions came charging down the street, Haj Harun was reminded of how someone called Belteshazzar had been saved by his faith.

True.

And it was that recollection that allowed him to stand his ground.

Very true. And so?

That was the man's Babylonian name. In the West he's better known by his Hebrew name, Daniel. He was taken to Babylonia at the beginning of the Captivity.

Joe looked confused.

I know the story of Daniel in the lions' den, Munk, I just didn't connect it with this other name Haj Harun used. But why's that matter?

Because it happens that Daniel lived in the sixth century B.C. Did you know that?

I didn't and I'm always glad to have new information, but I still don't see why that matters. Why does it, Munk?

Because the Assyrians conquered Palestine in the eighth century B.C. Now how could Haj Harun have recalled Daniel's exploits two centuries before they happened?

Joe smiled and tapped his nose.

Oh is that all, is that all you had on your mind. Well shouldn't I cut this deck so you can get on with the deal?

Munk put the pack on the table and Joe cut it. The cards began dropping around the table.

Joe?

Hm?

Well what's the solution to that?

To what? Haj Harun recalling something that hadn't happened yet? Something that was still a couple of hundred years in the future?

Yes.

But that's the whole point, Munk. There's no solution necessary for Haj Harun. I mean the past is what's passed and it's all part of Jerusalem to him, and him defending it although always on the losing side, as you always are when defending the Holy City. A Babylonian king throwing someone to the lions? The Assyrians sooner or later charging up these streets with their lions? All just pieces of the same job, defending Jerusalem, a task he says is both immense and perpetual, which is why he fails. Jacks to open, did you say?

No.

Fair enough, I'll open anyway. Hey there, what's the cause of this laughter, Munk?

The idea of Haj Harun keeping the past in a safe.

No laughing matter, as you can see now. And you can also see why he keeps that safe locked. If everyone were to go rifling around through the past the way he does, recalling events before they happen and sorting out confusion to his liking, Jerusalem would be nothing but bloody chaos I say, not able to stand up and do a straightforward job as a Holy City. So it's no bloody wonder the old man keeps that sentry box on duty, on guard and locked so things will be clear for the rest of us. Now just look at these cards. I've no business holding royalty like this, but since I am I'll just add a little sweetness to the pot before we see what you're up to, Cairo lad.

-4-

Solomon's Quarries

Ah yes, cognac brought to the Holy Land by the Crusaders to ease the pains of pilgrims. Well how's it taste then? Gone off a bit in eight hundred years?

On a hot July day in 1922, O'Sullivan Beare lay slumped against the wall in the back room of Haj Harun's shop. The poker table was bare, the game having been recessed because of the severe heat.

Listlessly he inspected the empty glass of poteen in his hand and decided it wasn't worth the effort to cross the room to refill it.

Haj Harun wandered in, barefoot as usual. An area of crumbling plaster in the wall caught his eye and he stopped to gaze at himself in a nonexistent mirror. He adjusted his rusty Crusader's helmet, muttering all the while, and re-tied the two green ribbons under his chin. He also did what he could to straighten his faded yellow cloak, mostly in tatters and hanging unevenly.

A black day, he muttered. Black. A black day for me. Black. A black day for Jerusalem. Black.

Is it now? said Joe from the corner. My sentiments exactly and no wonder in this heat. Just merciless, that's what.

Haj Harun jumped and looked down in surprise.

I didn't know you were here.

Well I think I am, although it's too hot to admit to more.

What are you doing on the floor?

Gravity pulled me down, I'm feeling grave today. Then too the stones down here are cooler than a chair.

Then too heat rises, so the lower you are the better, which is also in keeping with my lowly mood. Why don't you try it? It's not half bad.

I can't, said Haj Harun. I can't sit still today. I'm much too restless. It's a black day. Black.

I see.

Haj Harun nodded at himself in a nonexistent mirror on the wall and his helmet went awry again, releasing a shower of rust into his eyes. The tears began to flow and be went on muttering to himself as he drifted out the door.

Black, thought Joe, wiping his face with his sleeve. Black and that was half of it for sure.

It had been only a little over two years ago that he'd been fighting the Black and Tans in the hills of southern Ireland, and all because of something his father had said, his father who'd been the seventh son of a seventh son and therefore had the gift of prophecy.

It was too hot to move, too hot to be in Jerusalem.

Joe closed his eyes and went back to the windswept Aran Islands, to a cool June night in 1914.

It had been a party night, one of the few each year. As usual all the poor fishermen had gathered at Joe's house for singing and dancing and drinking, Joe's father being the undisputed king of the little island, both because he had the gift and because he had thirty-three sons, Joe at fourteen being the youngest and last and the only one still at home. What should have been a wondrous evening of prophecies together with tales of pookas and banshees and the little people.

But not so that June night in 1914. On that cool evening his father had stared into his mug without a word, gloomily stared at the floor without a word, until finally toward midnight he began to relate.

All right, said his father, all right now. If you want to know the shape of things I'll tell you what I see. I see a great war coming in two months time. And seventeen of my sons are going to fight in that war and die in that war, one in every army that makes up that bloody war. But that's not what eats at this old heart.

They're men now and can decide for themselves. What eats at this old heart is that not one of them is going to die fighting for Ireland. And that's our people for you, everyone's cause but our own.

Terrible, whispered the neighbors.

Terrible it is, said his father. But wait now, there's more. I also see a rising of the Irish nation in two years time, and then at last I'm going to have one son fighting for his country, a mere lad it's true but he'll be there all the same, that small dark boy you see standing perfectly straight in the corner behind you, his destiny now foretold.

And then, added his father, the lad having done his duty here, he's going to go on and become the King of Jerusalem for some reason.

Don't blaspheme, warned the shocked neighbors.

And none intended, said his father at once in embarrassment. I have no idea why I said that.

Nor did Joe. But in 1916 the Easter Uprising came as predicted and Joe was there helping to hold the Dublin post office before it fell, escaping then to the south and fighting alone in the hills of Cork for four long years before the Black and Tans tracked him down and he had to flee the country in the only way he could, disguised as a Poor Clare nun among a dozen Poor Clares sailing on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

To Jerusalem. Where he lay in a gutter outside the Franciscan enclave in the Old City, penniless and knowing no one, whispering into the dirt in Gaelic the name of the Irish revolutionary party, We ourselves, praying one of the priests who passed would be Irish and take pity on him.

As one did. The former MacMael n mBo, a whimsical man far advanced in years who in the folly of his youth had served as an officer of light cavalry in a British brigade in the Crimea. Who had survived a famous suicidal charge there when his mount fell, and as a result been awarded the first Victoria Cross ever given. Who now for the last six decades had been the priest in charge of the Franciscan bakery in Jerusalem.

Who are you really, lad? the elderly priest had asked Joe as he lay in that Jerusalem gutter, starving and exhausted. And to identify himself with the little breath he had left, Joe had whispered the legend of the O'Sullivan Beare clan.

Love, the forgiving hand to victory.

The baking priest had rescued Joe from that Jerusalem gutter and given him his old army uniform and his army papers so that Joe could move into the Home for Crimean War Heroes, a charity in the Old City.

The baking priest, eighty-five years old at least and dancing and singing in front of his oven as he baked his loaves of bread in four shapes, the four concerns of his life, the Cross for God and Ireland for home, the Crimea where he had given up war and Jerusalem where he had found peace.

Singing and dancing in front of his oven and telling Joe not to worry about the date of birth on his army papers. Not to worry about apparent age here because nothing was as it seemed in the Holy City, everybody's Holy City.

Bread for brains? Joe had wondered. Simply gone the other way after six decades of sweating and dancing and singing in front of an oven in Jerusalem?

But he discovered the baking priest had been right about Jerusalem when he made his second friend there, a wizened old man who wore a faded yellow cloak and a rusty Crusader's helmet tied under his chin with two green ribbons, who appeared half-starved and tottered on spindly legs that seemed too weak to support him, a gentle knight named Haj Harun who roamed through the ages recalling the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor and other heroes of old, who remembered the building of Solomon's temple in his youth, and who for the last three thousand years had been hopelessly defending his Holy City against all enemies, always on the losing side.

On that day when they'd met in front of Haj Harun's shop, the old man had taken one look at Joe's Victoria Cross and decided that he was Prester John, the legendary priest-king of an ancient lost Christian kingdom somewhere in Asia.

Come right in, Haj Harun had said happily. I've been expecting you, Prester John. I knew you'd turn up in Jerusalem sooner or later in search of your lost kingdom. Everyone does.

Then Maud. An American and the first woman he had ever really known. Maud and love in the spring.

They met in Jerusalem in the spring and went down into the desert to be alone together. To a tiny oasis on the shores of the Sinai, and to Joe that month on the Gulf of Aqaba was the happiest he had ever known in his life. But Maud was different after they returned to Jerusalem. And she refused to marry him, even though she was going to have his child.

When the weather on the heights turned cool in the autumn he found a house for them in the warm Jordan valley, a little house with flowers and lemon trees near Jericho, another oasis it seemed to Joe, where their child would be born toward the end of winter.

But no, he hadn't found another oasis as it turned out. In Jericho he couldn't seem to do anything right, anything that pleased her. No matter what he did Maud seemed angry, often even refusing to speak to him.

Joe couldn't understand any of it. It was true he was away much of the time smuggling arms, had to be away, as a fugitive it was the only way he could find to make a living for them. And his absences especially seemed to infuriate Maud. That and his dream of finding the Sinai Bible, the original Bible with its treasure maps of the riches buried beneath the Old City, which he'd heard about soon after coming to Jerusalem.

The original Bible? Discovered in the Sinai in the nineteenth century? Just knowing it existed had been a curse and a hope for Joe, a dream as it had been for so many others before him.

So it became worse and worse in Jericho. Joe totally bewildered, only twenty years old, and Maud more distant than ever, afraid of something perhaps but unable to talk to him about it, ignoring him as he sat up alone late at night in the garden behind the little house, drinking until he fell asleep. Drinking until was time to leave once more to smuggle arms into Palestine.

And then toward the end of winter Maud left him. Abandoned the little house in Jericho without even leaving a note behind, not even that. Taking with her the son he had never seen. Born while Joe was away running guns to make money.

Money. That's what he needed, he knew that then. Money had kept him away from Jericho. If only there'd been money it wouldn't have turned out the way it had, or so he thought. And he wouldn't have lost the only woman he'd ever loved, or so he thought.

Money. The treasure maps of the Sinai Bible, the original Bible that was now buried somewhere in the Old City. To find it he needed secret control of Jerusalem, and since Maud had left him, the clues to the past that it contained had become his sole interest in life, or so he thought.

Years ago his father had prophesied that he would become the King of Jerusalem. His father had said it unintentionally, not knowing why he said it. But his father's prophecies were never wrong, so Joe knew he could become the secret king. He knew he could win the Great Jerusalem Poker Game and go on to recover the Sinai Bible. He only had to want it enough.

And he did want it enough, he wanted nothing else. Money and power and the Sinai Bible, they were everything to him.

Or so he thought.

A black day, thundered Haj Harun, suddenly bursting into the room and angrily stamping his bare feet oh the floor.

Black and blacker and blackest, he shouted. As black as the bowels of the devil. Black. Black.

Joe stirred and looked up in surprise. He'd never known the gentle old knight to speak so vehemently.

Listen man, why do you keep saying that in all this heat?

Gloomily Haj Harun stared at a wall and retied the two green ribbons under his chin.

Because I can't forget it, he said. I'll never forget it and it happened on a July day just like this one.

When was that?

Haj Harun frowned.

About eight hundred years ago? Is that right?

It could be. Which event are we referring to?

Haj Harun groaned. Joe could see he didn't want to say it, even the words seemed detestable to him.

And when the old man finally did say it, cringing as he did so, he spat out the words as if they were the most abominable curse in the world.

The Crusaders taking Jerusalem.

Joe paused, feeling sorry for the old man. He nodded grimly.

Ah, that occasion. And to think a moment ago I was imagining I had troubles. Just nothing compared to the unholy carnage you're talking about.

Haj Harun scowled at the wall.

I wonder if they still have the arrogance to celebrate their conquest.

Where?

In the caverns.

Joe raised his head. He smiled.

The caverns, of course. Why didn't I think of that before? It'd have to be a lot cooler down there. They used to celebrate, you say?

They did. Just shamelessly gloating over their brutal victory.

Well, well, cooler at least. Why don't we make a descent to that level and see what's doing?

At the bottom of the ladder that led down from inside the antique Turkish safe, Haj Harun's wizened smile suddenly flared in the solid blackness. He had lit the torch. Joe jumped.

My God man, don't scare a poor soul like that in the underworld. Who's to know whether you're real or not? You could be a caveman's painting or a ghost on the loose or just about anything.

No task, murmured Haj Harun, affords more happiness than being a servant of light. This way now to the Crusades. Just please don't make any noise, Prester John. We don't want them to hear us.

We do not, whispered Joe. And quiet I am in the tunnels of the past, reverent as well. Just please don't get too far ahead of me with that torch. You know where we're going but I don't. And as hot as it is up there above, I don't want to find myself left behind down here in some corner of history.

They walked down tunnels and made innumerable turns. Joe was becoming nervous.

Are you sure you remember the way?

Yes. We're close now.

How can you tell?

The smell.

There was a strange smell in the air. Joe had noticed it. Something very sour and growing stronger every moment. Haj Harun's faded yellow cloak floated around a corner and all at once they were in darkness.

Joe bumped into a wall.

Jaysus it's all over now, he muttered. Blind in the underworld with a ghost for my guide.

He groped his way around the corner and was struck by a blast of cool air.

Jaysus again.

Where's Prester John?

Here for God's sake. Where's the bloody torch?

The wind blew it out. Just a minute.

Joe heard a rustling sound. Somewhere nearby Haj Harun cleared his throat. Suddenly an enormous mournful wail shook the blackness. Joe could feel it vibrating against his skin.

Jaysus Joseph and Mary, what's that?

The lighted torch reappeared. A few yards away stood Haj Harun smiling triumphantly, holding a ram's horn.

Did you like it? he asked.

Like it, you say. Like it? No I did not. It almost scared me to death.

That's what it's for. I keep it here to frighten the knights away just in case. They don't seem to know about this cellar anymore but it's best to be safe.

Safe, said Joe and choked, overwhelmed by the stench he had forgotten in the excitement. Haj Harun was tying a handkerchief over his face and Joe did the same. They were standing in a large vaulted room lined with shelves cut into the rock, the shelves piled high with rows of dusty bottles. Haj Harun took down a bottle and showed Joe the label, a peculiar white cross on a black background, the arms of the cross in the shape of arrowheads, their points not quite touching at the center. Beneath the cross was a date in Latin, A.D. 1122.

Recognize it?

No. But I'd say it must have belonged to a medieval tippler with a Christian bias.

Indeed it did, they all did. The Knights of St John, no less. Also known as the Knights of Jerusalem and the Knights of Rhodes and finally as the Knights of Malta, since that's where they ended up, but their proper name was the Knights Hospitalers. They became the most powerful of all the warring orders, but originally they were founded here to run a charitable hospital for pilgrims.

What's in the bottles?

Cognac.

True?

Yes, they brought it from France eight hundred years ago. They said it was for medicinal purposes. To ease the pains of pilgrims.

Joe whistled softly.

Ah yes, cognac brought to the Holy Land by the Crusaders to ease the pains of pilgrims. Well how's it taste then? Gone off a bit in eight hundred years?

I'm afraid it has, said Haj Harun. I know cognac is supposed to improve with age but that doesn't seem to have happened here. But it was delicious once, as I well know.

Had a nip or two, did you, over the eras?

Well not regularly. I haven't been able to do much real drinking since my liver gave out during Hellenistic times.

What did it then?

Bad shellfish. A Greek grocer said the mussels were fresh from Cyprus, which they might have been, they certainly made a delicious soup. But they were also polluted.

Oh I see, polluted muscles. Well I guess we all have to expect some toxins creeping in over time. As for me, if my liver had given out twenty-two hundred years ago, I think I'd be an unrecognized wreck by now.

But there was a period, mused Haj Harun, when this cognac saved my life. It was when I had tuberculosis.

Dastardly, that. When was it?

In the sixteenth century when the Turks arrived. Their breath was so appalling it weakened my lungs.

Bad breath can do that?

When it's as bad as theirs was, yes. I can't imagine the state of their stomachs in the sixteenth century.

Excited, I suppose, over all their victories. Anyway, I was employed by the Turks as a distributor of hashish and goats, and as a result of my customers breathing in my face I developed a severe case of tuberculosis.

Dreadful.

So I consulted my local physician and he prescribed plenty of rest and liquids and no heavy lifting.

Sound advice.

So I came down here and spent a year resting and drinking cognac and smoking cigars, catching up on my reading and lifting nothing heavier than a book and a bottle, and by the end of the year I was totally cured.

Does it every time.

And I haven't had a relapse since then. Not one.

It's true, you haven't. You know, there must be thousands of bottles in this Crusader wine cellar.

There are.

Yes, thought Joe, and the baking priest knows his Latin so what's to keep me from getting him to forge a letter from someone to someone, dated in A.D. 1122, proving the stuff is authentic Crusader cognac worth a fortune? There's money in that for sure, and we're talking about treasure even though I haven't found the map to it yet.

Who ran the Knights Hospitalers?

They had a grand master.

A letter from the grand master, thought Joe, that's the job. A formal yet tasty document to the king of France offering warm thanks for his Christmas contribution to the good works being done by the boys in Jerusalem, in keeping with the spirit of charity ten thousand pleasing bottles of much appreciated rare cognac for thirsty pilgrims in the Holy City.

Haj Harun slammed a bottle against the wall and broke off its neck.

Care for a sip?

The fumes rushed up at Joe. He gagged and doubled over, coughing at what might have been vinegar five or six centuries ago but was now a noxious gas unique in the world. He pulled Haj Harun out of the room and the old man followed, still clasping his ram's horn. After walking for another two or three minutes, Haj Harun stopped and whispered that it was just around the corner.

What is? asked Joe.

The great assembly hall of the Crusaders. And we have to be careful now, they carry all sorts of lances and swords and spiked maces. Just terrible to see, more frightening than the Babylonians.

Joe looked down at his shabby patched uniform. He fingered his Victoria Cross uneasily.

The VC was a cross all right and no mistaking it, which might help to establish his Christian piety. But the uniform? How could they know it belonged to an officer of light cavalry in the Crimean War? A hero who'd survived a famous suicidal charge launched on behalf of Christian righteousness? They wouldn't even have heard of that charge.

Are you ready? whispered Haj Harun.

Unarmed, muttered Joe. But as ready as I'll ever be against the combined might of the First Crusade.

Haj Harun got down on his hands and knees and gestured for Joe to do the same. The torch was extinguished. Joe peered down the tunnel and saw a faint light at the end.

The ceiling of the tunnel sloped down to meet them as they crawled quietly forward and squeezed through a hole, emerging on a smooth ledge flat on their stomachs. Joe noticed the rocks around them had been cut away in neat rectangular blocks. They peeked over the edge of the ledge.

Joe's eyes narrowed. They were facing a high square chamber, not a cave but man-made, carved out of the rock. Torches lined the walls and there no more than ten feet below them was an impressive crowd of several hundred men wearing brightly colored robes and a bewildering array of hats, most of them tall and peaked.

Flags and pennants were everywhere. At one end of the subterranean hall an elevated wooden platform had been erected. On it sat a half-dozen potentates in particularly ornate robes, listening attentively as one of their number addressed the assembly.

The new and enlarged College of Cardinals, thought Joe. Rome lost out after all. They've brought their business back here and that must be the new pope who's just been elected. Jerusalem wins in the end.

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 of 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 of 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 front 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 succumbled 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.

So when Sarah looked back on her life she couldn't help but consider her marriage perfect. As she passed into her eighth decade, well after most of her sisters and cousins had been widowed by husbands who had never left home, her husband was still sending her love letters. And even though he had wandered a bit, he had never failed to write home.

So Sarah died embracing his memory, listening to one of her granddaughters read aloud what was in fact Johann Luigi's last letter, delivered on the morning of the day she died, an exquisite description of a sunset at Mt Sinai that ended with the customary promise that soon, very soon now, he and his beloved Sarah would be together again.

And so they were. Smiling gently, she closed her eyes. Those sweet words from her husband the last she heard in life.

For years an exact count couldn't be made of Johann Luigi's love letters. But not long after he left Budapest, two facts had become apparent to Sarah.

First, the love letters were beginning to fill the floor-to-ceiling bookcases she had built in her kitchen so his letters would be near her while she was cooking.

And second, the love letters were likely to become the most complete source of information on the Middle East to be found anywhere in Europe.

By nature Sarah was an imaginative and energetic woman who found housework tedious. Therefore as soon as her children were no longer infants she began to cast about for a project that could engage her talents.

One Friday afternoon while reading a letter from her husband on Damascus cutlery, an idea struck her.

As was obvious, the amount of detail on purely commercial matters in her husband's love letters was no less than astonishing. Why not use this information for a trading venture?

Secretly she went to a moneylender and mortgaged her house to raise funds. The sale of imported Damascus cutlery was a success and with the profits she turned to a second scheme, rugs from Persia, as described in another love letter. The rugs paid off her mortgage and after that came cotton from Egypt and jewels from Baghdad.

With business growing, Sarah began employing her sisters and aunts and female cousins as bookkeepers.

Momentum gathered as more love letters arrived from the wandering Johann Luigi, detailing possibilities of new markets. Paying interest on bank loans seemed a waste of resources, so Sarah decided to found her own merchant bank.

Banking soon intrigued her as much as trade, so she opened a commercial bank as well. Its operations multiplied and she bought several other banks. By the age of forty her banking assets were the largest in Budapest, and by the age of fifty her branches in Vienna and Prague and elsewhere accounted for the bulk of financial business in those cities. Assets swelled, as did trade with the Levant, based on her husband's love letters.

Until by the time of her death the House of Szondi, as it had come to be called, was the single most powerful financial institution in central Europe.

The executive pattern of the House of Szondi remained the same after her death. From the beginning the boards of the banks had been staffed exclusively by her female relatives, first sisters and aunts, later nieces and grand-nieces.

The senior managing board for all the banks, known collectively when in session as the Sarahs, in honor of the founder, met upon her death and naturally chose not Sarah's son but her daughter to be the new head of the House.

Sarah the Second assumed her position as managing directress, but being less single-minded than her mother she also took into consideration the men of the family. Now that the House of Szondi had become so rich it seemed ridiculous, to her, for the husbands and sons and fathers of the directors to be still working as petty local traders, the only life they had known since the ninth century.

Even her own older brother Munk was still running a discount dry goods store on the lower east side of Budapest, where he labored long hours stacking imperfect sheets and pillowcases.

Sarah the Second knew that her brother had always secretly loved the violin, which he played at home in a tiny windowless room no bigger than a closet, music being widely viewed as a frivolous pastime in his trade, where men were supposed to have strictly practical interests.

So Sarah the Second made her brother an offer. If Munk would come out of the closet and devote himself full-time to his real passion, music, she would support him for the rest of his life. Naturally Munk was enthusiastic and readily agreed.

At the next meeting of the Sarahs she announced what she had done, thereby in effect setting the course for a new family pattern. The directors were quick to follow her example and other secret musicians soon emerged from among the males in the family. Munk himself was immediately joined by three cousins, equally talented men who had also been running discount stores on the lower east side of Budapest.

Together they formed a competent string quartet, which was soon in demand on the concert circuit.

The next generation of male Szondis was surrounded by music from childhood. Brothers and nephews and grand-uncles took to practicing together, under the baton and guidance of the reigning Munk, and over the following decades the all-male Szondi Symphonic Philharmonic, not to mention the numerous Szondi baroque ensembles, became as famous in the musical circles of central Europe as the all-female House of Szondi had become in the world of banking.

Thus while the women of the family made money, led by the reigning Sarah, the men of the family made music, led by the reigning Munk. But in keeping with the new matriarchal traditions of the family the first-born male in each generation, the new Munk, was never the son of a Munk but always the son of a Sarah, and therefore the eldest nephew of the last Munk, a confusing line of descent not easily understood by anyone but the Szondis.

The Szondi women naturally spent long hours doing research in the family archives in connection with their business training, but the Szondi men also had a special obligation in that regard.

Each spring they put aside their music and returned to the roomy old kitchen of Sarah the First, there to spend the months of annual awakening immersed in the bookshelves that contained the sources of the family's material and artistic success, amidst the twitterings of the birds outside in the garden and the heady fragrances of new flowers wafting into the kitchen on gentle breezes, perusing at their leisure those thousands and thousands of tender love letters a wandering Szondi husband had once sent to his loyal Szondi wife.

The future Munk of Jerusalem poker, born in 1890, chose the cello as his musical instrument and naturally he mastered it. But he was also an exception among male Szondis, because music didn't seem enough to him in life. Vaguely he yearned for something quite different, although what it might be he didn't know.

In fact as a boy, young Munk tried every conceivable occupation for a week or a month, avidly pursuing his new role. For a while he was a postman, then a fireman, then a railroad conductor. In the spring of his ninth year he was a surgeon operating in his bedroom, only to turn that summer to hunting lions and elephants in public gardens. By the following autumn he had already tried horticulture and painting and carpentry, and served as a distinguished judge.

When he was eleven he fell under the spell of the letters of his great-grandfather, the tireless Johann Luigi Szondi, and proceeded to relive those prodigious travels up and down the Nile and across the Middle East. He too marveled at the deserted stone city of Petra and marched through Nubia eating dates, covering nine hundred miles in a month, then paused to measure Rameses' ear as three feet, four inches long before pushing south from Shendi to the Red Sea.

But eventually none of these lives satisfied him, not even the splendid journeys of his great-grandfather, perhaps because those journeys weren't originally his. He did come to learn, however, that he wanted to get away from his family and their traditions, which he was beginning to find oppressive. Yet the Szondis never sensed this because young Munk lived so much within himself as a boy. Had they known him better, they might have realized he strikingly combined the qualities of the first Sarah and her wandering husband, energy and imagination and a passion for details.

What are you going to do, young Munk? his relatives asked him again and again in exasperation.

But Munk only smiled and shrugged and said he didn't know, then returned to the family archives to try to discover the secret he knew must be there, the secret of an unusual life, made unique because lived according to its own nature and nothing else.

What was the secret that had driven his great-grandfather to do all the incredible things he had done?

Simple curiosity? A fascination with strange customs? To see what others hadn't seen?

In the comfortable kitchen of Sarah the First, surrounded by the enormous bookshelves with their thousands and thousands of love letters, young Munk sat gazing out the window not really seeing what lay beyond it. Certainly his great-grandfather must have had all those feelings, he was aware of that. But what else had there been for Johann Luigi? What had driven him? What was the secret?

At the age of eighteen, with his family insisting he choose a profession, he finally made a decision. And when he announced his choice they received it in utter amazement.

But why that, Munk? If you're not interested in being a musician, then trade at least would be understandable. We certainly did that for a long time. Or scholarship or one of the professions. Your great-grandfather was both a scholar and a medical doctor, after all. Or chemistry or languages, he did that too. But a Szondi in the army? In the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army? A Szondi pursuing a military career? It's unheard of.

Yes, said Munk quietly, smiling. I thought so myself.

But after being trained and serving for a short time with a regiment of dragoons near Vienna, young Munk realized everyday soldiering wasn't for him either.

He applied for duty overseas, and as luck would have it an aide to the Austro-Hungarian military attaché in Constantinople died that very week as a result of having eaten bad Turkish meat. Thus in the summer of 1908, Munk found himself seconded to the capital of the Ottoman Empire.

He had been there little more than a month when the Austrian annexation of Bosnia brought on yet another Balkan crisis, causing the Turks to undertake secret military preparations. Lieutenant Szondi's reports from the field proved so valuable he was promoted to captain early in December.

Then on Christmas the attaché and his entire staff, except for Munk, were violently stricken by food poisoning while consuming a holiday feast of contaminated wild Turkish boar. Munk escaped the poisoning because he had been eating large amounts of garlic since entering Turkey, having learned of this simple yet effective antidote to bad meat from the letters of his great-grandfather, who had used the remedy successfully throughout his travels.

A few of his fellow officers lingered into the new year, but all were dead by Epiphany. Since there was no one else in Constantinople who could fill the position, the ambassador named Munk acting military attaché, an astonishing responsibility for one so young.

But Munk's rapid rise had only begun. The former attaché had not had time to submit his annual summary of the situation in the Ottoman Empire, and Munk took the opportunity to completely revise it.

Of course his superiors had no way of knowing he was able to draw on the vast accumulation of information he had learned as a boy while studying the secret Szondi archives in Budapest. What they did know was that another incident involving foul Turkish meat, a hazard faced by all Europeans in Constantinople, had suddenly brought to their attention a brilliant young officer with an unsurpassed knowledge of the Ottoman Empire.

Munk received a letter of commendation. He was promoted to major and made the permanent acting attaché.

Now Munk had found something that did interest him. For the next four years, eating handfuls of garlic and happily indulging his passion for details, he traveled extensively in the Balkans analyzing the impossible confusion there as Ottoman power disintegrated. None of the other European military attachés could keep up with him, crippled as they were by bad Turkish meat. In recognition of his achievements he was duly promoted to lieutenant colonel.

Then in the autumn of 1912 the Turks announced maneuvers near Adrianople and all the Balkan states mobilized. The first Balkan war broke out with the Bulgarians and the Serbs and the Montenegrins, the Albanians and the Macedonians all rising up against the Turks. Meanwhile Russia and Austria-Hungary prepared for war against each other to support their various interests.

In this vast maze of intrigue and threats and sudden attacks, young Munk moved recklessly from front to front gathering information, all the while pursuing clandestine meetings in Constantinople and elsewhere with equal abandon.

Tireless and daring, young Lieutenant Colonel Szondi acquired a notoriety that would soon become intolerable to the chief enemy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

One of his frequent companions during those last hectic weeks of 1912 was the Japanese military attaché in Constantinople, one Major Kikuchi, a diminutive aristocrat who had become a hero of the Russo-Japanese War by ordering his men to pile up the dead horses of the Cossacks on a barren Manchurian plain, as a barrier against their incessant attacks, a desperate move that had allowed his company alone to survive the massacre of a Japanese regiment, safe behind the eight-foot-high walls of rotting meat that Kikuchi had erected.

Either because he was a Buddhist, or because of the indelible memory of that stench on a Manchurian plain, Major Kikuchi never ate meat, which allowed him to be as mobile as Munk in Turkey.

So they often traveled together, comparing their notes and talking late into the night in the clumsy wagons and lurching trains they shared while moving from front to front, developing a brief but lasting friendship that would one day lead Munk to find what he had always sought in the strange music of a desert monastery.

Late in November, Munk acquired the documents that brought an end to the first Balkan war, certain secret communications from Moscow that proved Russia would not go to war for the sake of the Balkan Slavs. Despite Russian mobilization, the territorial claims of the Serbs were to be abandoned.

These disclosures humiliated and outraged the Russians, and as a price for taking part in peace negotiations they insisted upon a cruel and unusual revenge. The notorious Austro-Hungarian military attaché who had operated so successfully in the Balkans had to be expelled from the army. Furthermore, in order to make certain he was no longer playing a part in Balkan military affairs, he had to be sent into exile in the Ottoman Empire where Russian agents could keep an eye on him.

Munk's orders arrived early in the new year and he sadly boarded the Orient Express for Vienna, where he would experience his last day of military service.

A full color guard greeted him at the station. He was driven to the headquarters of the chief of staff, with a cavalry escort, and ceremoniously promoted to colonel, at the age of twenty-two by far the youngest in the Imperial Army. He was also awarded the Order of the Golden Fleece.

After a formal luncheon with the officers of his old regiment, the dragoons mounted a dress parade in his honor. Finally at sunset he returned to the headquarters of the chief of staff, again with a cavalry escort, to hear read aloud the order of his expulsion from the army, along with an edict from the emperor expressing condolences and decreeing his exile within the week in the cause of peace.

When Munk arrived in Budapest that evening to say good-bye to his family he found only the men at home, some event of great importance having caused the directors of the House of Szondi to gather in emergency session.

Instructions awaited him. Ex-Colonel Szondi responded at once and galloped off to the rambling old house above the Danube that had once been the home of Sarah the First.

The Sarahs were meeting in their boardroom, the kitchen, where the windows between the floor-to-ceiling family archives gave broad views of commercial traffic on the river.

Munk did a sharp military half-turn in the middle of the kitchen and came to attention facing his grandmother, the reigning chairwoman, Sarah the Second. To the old woman's right sat the heiress apparent, his mother Sarah the Third. Ranged elsewhere around the spacious room were Munk's aunts and grandaunts and female cousins, the entire governing board of the House of Szondi.

Good evening, Grandmother, he said, clicking his heels and saluting smartly. It's a pleasure to see you looking so well.

The old woman grimaced.

So well? Stop that nonsense, I look awful and I know it. I can't do a thing with my hair in this damp weather. And what is that perfectly dreadful smell coming out of your mouth?

Garlic.

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?

Not at all. It's strictly therapeutic.

Bad Ottoman meat?

Yes.

Oh I remember now, it's in the archives. Well direct the fumes toward the floor as much as you can and say hello to everyone.

Good evening, Mother, said Munk. Good evening, he repeated, nodding politely around the kitchen to the collected assembly of the Sarahs, all of whom had knitting in their laps. Those who weren't working their needles in quick agitated strokes were patting their hair nervously or tugging at their bodices. The dozens of women were all dressed in black, without makeup, their hair drawn back into tight buns fixed by a single stickpin with a triangular diamond head. Each also wore a black hat, black gloves, and a modest diamond brooch of triangular shape above the left breast, the customary dress for a formal board meeting of the Sarahs.

Outrageous folly, exclaimed his grandmother, opening the meeting. For years now we've asked nothing more from the men of the family than to practice their music and stay out of the way, to behave themselves, and to give a performance or two at family gatherings. Little enough, one would think. But what do we find you doing down in this disreputable place called the Balkans? Making a spectacle of yourself. Attracting international attention. We're bankers, young Munk, and bankers don't like notoriety of any kind.

The knitting needles clicked furiously around the room. The crescendo was becoming deafening when his grandmother cleared her throat. Abruptly the clicking stopped.

The old woman leaned forward and everybody watched her. She winked.

We heard you were awarded the Order of the Golden Fleece today. Congratulations.

Thank you, Grandmother.

How was the dress parade your old regiment gave you?

Very impressive.

And the luncheon? How many courses?

Twelve.

You didn't hold back, did you?

No.

Well you're looking a little pale all the same. You should be eating more. Is it true you had a cavalry escort coming and going?

Yes.

And the chief of staff himself read the order of exile? His Imperial Highness sending personal condolences?

Yes.

The old woman leaned back and rolled her eyes. She smacked her lips. Around the room the knitting needles softly assumed a rhythmic clicking.

A grandson of mine, she murmured, just think of it. The youngest colonel in the Imperial Army. Aren't you proud?

Yes. Very.

As well you should be. The Russians are barbarians and not to be trusted. You treated them exactly as they deserved. Now then, down to business.

The old woman stroked her chin thoughtfully. Around the room his female relatives somberly studied their knitting. When his grandmother spoke again the needles clicked quietly.

To be frank, young Munk, your military career has ended at a most opportune time for us. The House of Szondi finds itself facing an extremely grave situation, and a woman just can't do the things in Arab and Turkish lands that she can do in Europe. Even though you've spent time down there I hadn't thought of you before because you're so young, but when we learned of your exile it seemed more than coincidental. One of our musicians would be useless on a mission like this, but with your military experience you might be able to accomplish something even though you are young. Anyway, I've decided it's going to be you.

Munk saluted.

At your service, madame.

His grandmother suddenly frowned and his mother's face was all at once troubled. Others in the room looked variously perplexed or fearful. Again all clicking stopped. The kitchen was hushed as his grandmother spoke.

We haven't told any of the men in the family about this, not wanting to worry you, but we've been aware of the situation for some time. Our information began coming in about twenty years ago. The first clues we had were fragmentary and haphazard, yet even then we filed them away. You can't be too careful in this business. You're not versed in the intricacies of banking and you wouldn't understand such financial subtleties anyway, so I won't bother to go into detail. I'll just say there are definite ways of knowing when a consortium or some other group is buying into an enterprise. Especially if the acquisition is a major one, so large it can only be acquired piece by piece. Can you follow that?

Yes, Grandmother.

All right, that's what happened in this case. During the last twenty-odd years when we've been aware of it, and obviously before that when we weren't, the enterprise in question has been cleverly bought piece by piece. Bought right out from under our noses. And since our very foundations were long ago established there, the effect on the House of Szondi could be catastrophic.

What enterprise was bought from under your noses?

The old woman glared through her spectacles. Her face darkened.

The Ottoman Empire, she hissed.

The what?

That's right, you heard me correctly. The evidence is there and there can no longer be any doubt about it.

A little over thirty years ago, as unreal as it seems, someone secretly began to buy up the Ottoman Empire.