Jerusalem Poker

In the dining room Bach's Mass in B Minor progressed from a chanted solo to a choral response. Sophia accepted two lamb chops, waiting until the empty place at the far end of the table had been served before she picked up her fork. Nubar was already chewing a slice of brown bread and cutting up boiled vegetables.

I wish you'd have just one of these chops, she said gently, but Nubar ignored the comment.

Vegetarianism was one of the important resolutions he had made on his twenty-first birthday.

I've come across a fascinating historical study, he said to change the subject.

Sophia sighed.

What is it this time?

It was written by a Scotsman. It's called, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, llluminati, & Reading Societies.

Sophia shook her head.

Really, Nubar, spare me. What is that supposed to mean?

Just what it says. It turns out, you see, that the Knights Templars weren't really exterminated in 1364 as everyone has always thought. They survived as a secret society dedicated to abolishing all monarchies and overthrowing the papacy in order to found a world republic under their control. From the beginning they were poisoning kings, slowly, so the kings would appear to be insane, as so many have. Then in the eighteenth century they captured control of the Freemasons. In 1763 they created a secret literary society ostensibly led by Voltaire and Condorcet and Diderot. But it wasn't really the Templars who were doing all this. They were behind it.

Plots? asked Sophia. Still more plots? Who were they?

The Jews of course.

Oh Nubar, spare me. Not that kind of nonsense.

But it's not nonsense, Bubba, it's fact. And it goes back much further than the Templars. I can prove it to you.

Now Sophia tried to change the subject.

What was in those crates the workmen were carrying up to your tower this morning?

Cinnabar, Bubba.

Cinnabar? More cinnabar? I thought there was a shipment just last week.

There was, but my experiments use up a great deal of mercury.

Tell me about the experiments. Are they interesting?

Yes, but another time. Have you ever heard of Mani or the Old Man of the Mountain? Or of Osman-Bey?

Sophia looked confused

I'm not sure. Are they local people?

Not at all. Mani founded Manichaeism in Persia in the third century. The Old Man of the Mountain was supreme ruler of the Assassins, the Moslem sect that was also founded in Persia. Both men were Jews.

As for Osman-Bey, he fearlessly exposed the Jewish plot to take over the world.

Oh Nubar. Why don't you try reading the Catholicos Narses IV instead of things like this? It's such gentle poetry. It would soothe your nerves.

And the founder of the Freemasons, continued Nubar excitedly, was also a Jew and so are many of the cardinals in Italy. They're hoping for a majority soon so they can elect a Jewish pope. Didn't you know the French Revolution was a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy?

That's ridiculous. And I thought you just said the Jews captured control of the Freemasons in the eighteenth century. Why would they have to do that if they'd already founded the Freemasons?

It's the same thing. The Jews made a secret pact with the Templars and then took them over, later they did it again with the Freemasons. The grand master of the Freemasons has always been a Jew and every Freemason must assassinate anyone the grand master orders him to, even a member of the inner council.

You can't become a Freemason of the thirty-third degree unless you're a Jew. The symbols they use in their lodges are the snake and the phallus.

You ought to find a wife, Nubar.

Have you ever heard of Sir John Retcliffe?

No.

He was an Englishman who wrote an autobiographical novel called Biarritz. There's a chapter in it that describes the secret meetings held in a cemetery in Prague by twelve Jews, representing the twelve tribes.

The novel has two versions. In the first version Sir John is the chief rabbi at a meeting in the cemetery in 1880, when he delivers a speech calling for world domination by the Jews. He wrote that to try to fool them but it didn't work, so then in the second version he told the truth.

What was the truth?

That he was an English diplomat, a Catholic, and that he might well have to pay with his life for revealing, fictionally, the Prague cemetery plot.

What happened to him?

He paid with his life.

Sophia shook her head.

Such lurid fantasies, Nubar. And you've never even known a Jew, have you?

No one who was openly a Jew or admitted to it. But I have my suspicions.

Oh dear, Nubar. I think it's time you took a vacation with the Melchitarists.

Nubar scowled. The Melchitarists were a monastic literary order of Catholic Armenians, formerly in Constantinople and now in Venice, who published works in Armenian. Sophia admired their combination of monastic piety and literature, perhaps because it reminded her of his grandfather's labor in the Holy Land, and whenever she thought Nubar was becoming overexcited she suggested he go off and visit the Melchitarists. They would have been more than happy to welcome him, Sophia being their chief financial benefactor. But he had no desire to vacation with monks in Venice or anywhere else.

I'll tell you one thing, he said. I'm never going to a city that has underground transportation tubes.

Why not?

Because that's the way the Jews plan to blow up cities when the time comes. They'll take over the subway trains and race around setting off bombs behind them.

Is that bread really good for you, Nubar?

Yes, it's a new kind of whole wheat.

Won't you have even a small glass of wine? It helps the digestion.

No thank you, Bubba. Teetotalism and vegetarianism must go together. Cleanliness within and without is of the utmost importance.

Ah, sighed Sophia, I just don't understand you. But then, I'm old and the world is full of riddles.

Nubar nodded enthusiastically. He leaned forward.

Seemingly insoluble riddles?

It would seem so. Digging for oil is so simple compared to understanding human beings.

Let me quote something to you, Bubba. The whole truth is to be found in this formula, which provides the key to a host of disturbing and seemingly insoluble riddles. What do you think of that?

I think it's nonsense. The whole truth can be found only in God, and He surpasses human understanding.

What does the formula refer to, some Fascist or Marxist ideology?

But Nubar was suddenly evasive.

Not exactly, he said, and went on to ask a question about his grandfather, the spiritual presence at the end of the table whose plate of lamb chops was now being replaced by a bowl of fruit, a subject that was guaranteed to make Sophia forget everything else as she lapsed back over the decades.

Two weeks later on a dark stormy evening, Nubar sat hunched over the workbench in his tower room inhaling toxic mercury fumes, brooding, his mood one of rambling speculation. He had been conducting mercury experiments since the middle of the afternoon and by now his workbench was a complex jumble of pelicans and alembics, crucibles and athanors that seethed and gurgled and hissed and bubbled.

Nubar sniffed. He breathed deeply and coughed.

He was well aware that chronic mercury poisoning could produce a delirium akin to madness, but that in no way deterred him. The dangers inherent in his experiments were unavoidable.

Perhaps it must be repeated thousands of times, Paracelsus had written, in order to achieve the unique set of circumstances that produces the philosopher's stone of eternal life.

The philosopher's stone. Immortality. Had he at last found the way to achieve it? And all because of a bizarre report that had been smuggled out of a communal Polish farm in Palestine?

Nubar had come across the report on New Year's Day, after lunch. Normally he took a nap after lunch, and he always carried a handful of UIA reports to bed with him to help him fall asleep. But there had been no nap that day. Instead he had found himself sitting up in bed reading and rereading an unusual report with a thoroughly odd title.

The Lost Greek and the Great Jerusalem Poker Game

The Greek in question, now lost, was named Odysseus and had been the chief of the UIA station in Ithaca. The previous autumn he had used his annual leave to go to Jerusalem, claiming he wished to make a pilgrimage to the holy sites. But then he had disappeared, simply dropped out of sight. Nothing had been heard from him or about him until this report, in a plain brown wrapper, had suddenly turned up one December morning in the office of the UIA chief of station in Salonika, apparently thrown over the transom by a person of unknown identity. The report was both a confession and a desperate plea for help.

The lost Greek began his report by admitting he hadn't gone to Jerusalem with any intention of visiting holy sites. He couldn't care less, he said, about holy sites there or elsewhere. His sole reason for the trip was to try to make a fortune in the Great Jerusalem Poker Game.

The what? wondered Nubar, never having heard of such a game. Intrigued, he read on.

The lost Greek had entered the game one afternoon with a substantial amount of money. By the end of the afternoon he was well ahead. However, he had made the mistake of drinking while he was playing, which tended to loosen his tongue even though he was normally a wily man with a reputation for shrewd and clever tactics. Overconfident and perhaps a little drunk, he began to brag about his prowess as a burglar and the easy targets to be found in Palestine. In particular he mentioned burglarizing something called a kibbutz on his way to Jerusalem. It had been a small dusty place, very poor. The farmers had been out in the fields and in a matter of minutes he had made away with all their valuables.

If you can call a suitcase of old cracked Polish clocks valuable, he had added with a laugh. That's all they had so I scooped them up.

Most of the players at the table laughed with him but several did not. The one who seemed least amused was a man named Szondi. What followed was a disaster for the lost Greek.

First he lost all the money he had with him to this man Szondi. That took only two hands. Then he lost the reserve he had hidden in his hotel room, in a single hand, with the best cards he had ever held in a poker game, along with the suitcase of old Polish clocks and his shoes and socks. He wanted to leave for Ithaca then, even though it would have meant going barefoot, but he found he couldn't rise from the table.

As soon as the man named Szondi had started betting against him, it seemed, another player at the table had begun pressing a bottle of very old cognac on him. At least this other player, a carefree Irishman, implied it was cognac and the bottle certainly looked very old. The lost Greek had accepted the offer and drunk freely straight from the bottle, emptying it. The drink had seemed smooth enough when it was going down, but obviously the Irishman had tricked him. It turned out the bottle hadn't contained cognac at all but some kind of Irish home brew called poteen. All at once the lost Greek found he was paralyzed below the waist.

It can have such a temporary effect, noted the Irishman merrily, until you become used to it. Then it generally paralyzes from the neck up, rather than the waist down. Do you follow me?

The lost Greek had shaken his head. He knew now he wasn't following anyone anywhere, he was trapped at the table. The deal passed to a black man dressed in an Arab cloak and Arab headgear, a man who smiled broadly, his skin so black it was almost blue. The beaming black man dealt the cards quickly and the lost Greek went on losing to Szondi, who seemed especially adept at gambling commodity futures. The Greek lost the future olive-oil production of his family farm back in Ithaca over the next twenty years. He then lost the olive oil that would be produced by his brothers and uncles and cousins over the same period.

By now the lost Greek was weeping noisily. His family had no future in Greece, the next two decades had disappeared. He begged for mercy, wanting to do so on his knees but unable to move because of his temporary paralysis below the waist.

Finally Szondi made him an offer. They would play one last hand and if the lost Greek won, all his debts would be cancelled. But if he lost, he would have to do manual labor for an unspecified period of time at a place Szondi would designate.

The lost Greek had no choice, he knew that. He had to chance it. So the hand was played and the lost Greek lost.

The designated place for manual labor turned out to be the dusty poor Polish kibbutz where Odysseus had stolen his load of worthless old cracked Polish clocks. He had been laboring there ever since in the fields, in the hot sun, and it might go on forever unless a ransom were paid.

Despite his exhaustion at the end of the day, he had written the report bit by bit by candlelight over the weeks, under a blanket at night, all the while being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Early in December he had managed to persuade someone to smuggle the report out of the country and throw it over the transom of the UIA chief in Salonika.

The report had been written in pencil, and not a very good pencil at that. Nubar noticed there were water stains around the signature, probably tears.

Your most loyal employee in the UIA

And your former chief in Ithaca,

Now somewhere in Palestine farming with Poles in the dust,

Odysseus

The Lost Greek

Beneath that the chief of station in Salonika had typed a few questions asking for guidance.

Ransom acceptable? How high do we go?

Nubar had snorted and fired off a cable immediately.

ARE YOU MAD? NO RANSOM OF ANY KIND FOR THE LOST GREEK. WHO NEEDS A LOST GREEK? AND WHERE DID THIS FOOL EVER GET A REPUTATION FOR BEING

WILY, LET ALONE SHREWD WITH HIS TONGUE OR CLEVER WITH HIS TACTICS? HIS

OWN FAULT ENTIRELY, FORGET HIM.

BUT WHAT IS THE GREAT JERUSALEM POKER GAME? SEND PARTICULARS IF

KNOWN. AND WHY SUCH PRETENTIOUS TERMS FOR A SHABBY GAMBLING

OPERATION?

At the time, on New Year's Day, Nubar hadn't been exactly sure why he had reacted so quickly to the report. But something had been working at the back of his mind, something having to do with Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

The answer to his cable had finally arrived that morning, a thick folder of briefing material, and Nubar found the information in it shocking.

The game, it seemed, was notorious throughout the Middle East. Anyone who hadn't been in it at one time or another had at least heard of it and wanted to be in it. And its reputation had spread far beyond the Levant, witness the lost Greek's eagerness to go there to try to win his fortune. The game had already been going for six full years, in fact it had just entered its seventh year with no end in sight. The money changing hands was incalculable.

Three men had founded the game and were its only permanent members, all mentioned in the lost Greek's report.

Szondi, the defender of old Polish clocks that belonged to poor kibbutz farmers, was a dedicated Zionist.

And as a Zionist, quite naturally, he traded in futures, as noted by the lost Greek, since there was no Jewish homeland at present. His first name was Munk, perhaps because he liked to think of himself as the monk of the coming Jewish revolution.

The Irishman, who merrily offered paralyzing drinks from antique cognac bottles, was one O'Sullivan Beare. He had made a fortune selling spurious Christian artifacts that were undeniably phallic in shape.

And he was still selling them, claiming they were blessed by an ecclesiastic, obviously fictional, known as the baking priest.

The beaming black Arab, actually a Sudanese, had the unlikely name of Cairo Martyr. He was also making a fortune on the side by selling pharaonic mummy dust and mummy mastic, renowned in the Levant as aphrodisiacs and euphoric agents.

As for the grandiloquent name of the game, that came from the fact that the ultimate prize at stake was nothing less than complete clandestine control of Jerusalem. That was the goal sought by each of the three founding members, and of course by anyone who challenged them, whether the challenger realized it or not.

Nubar was stunned.

Complete clandestine control of Jerusalem?

Now he understood why the lost Greek's report had immediately caught his attention. Jerusalem was where his grandfather had buried the original Sinai Bible after producing his forgery of it. The real original was still there and he, Nubar, was its rightful owner.

Jerusalem, the Holy City. The eternal city. Could it be, then, that the Sinai Bible was the philosopher's stone he was seeking? Containing all the ancient eternal truths, the one sure way to immortality?

Was it time to put aside the gaseous, chaotic mercury experiments of his youth and boldly take what belonged to him?

Nubar was beginning to think so. He was ready to make a momentous decision. And that's why he felt that today, Epiphany, 1928, might well be the most important day of his life.

The pelicans and alembics on his workbench, the crucibles and athanors, seethed and gurgled and hissed and bubbled as he hunched over them, engulfed in their mercury fumes. Midnight was near. Around his tower the storm raged. The moment had come for the third eye of occultism to see the unseeable in the darkness.

Nubar took the small sphere of polished obsidian from its hiding place in his workbench. attached to the sphere was a loop of nearly invisible gold thread. He smiled at the black volcanic glass and rubbed it against the side of his nose, the oils of his skin bringing it to a high luster. He placed the gold thread around the top of his head so that the obsidian sphere hung in the middle of his forehead, his third eye.

Now he possessed supernatural powers of perception.

The power to sum it all up. To consider the totality of the universe and make his decision.

Nubar mixed mercury, heated mercury, mechanically repeating the master alchemist's instructions. He lowered his head into the fumes as his mind wandered through the stormy night from plots and strategems to the possibility of joining Paracelsus in an exclusive society of immortals, to Zog, to the Black Book, to the muscular stable boy with curly hair, to teetotalism, the Protocols, a primitive volcanic eye.

To vegetables and black glass and a dark cemetery in Prague, to the Theban Sacred Band and the original Bible discovered by his grandfather in the Sinai, to the moat around the castle and hygiene in general.

The Uranist Intelligence Agency and whole-wheat bread and Krk-Brac, the whole truth and the Great Jerusalem Poker Game, the Assassins and subterranean trains and the Old Man of the Mountain.

Black glass, primitive volcanic eyes. A third eye, bombs.

The Black Book. Said to have been compiled by the German secret service before the war. Said to contain the names of forty-seven thousand English homosexuals in high places, both male and female.

Entrusted to the care of Prince William of Wied when he came to Albania in 1914 to serve briefly as king. Who had the Black Book now? Could it be bought or stolen? Did Zog know where it was?

Zog. Born Ahmed Zogu of the Zogolli clan of the Mati district. Dictator of Albania for the last three years and soon to crown himself King Zog I. Sophia had worked for the liberal leader, Bishop Fan Noli, but Nubar had backed the cause of the reactionary Zog. What rewards would be his after Zog's coronation?

The Uranist Intelligence Agency. His own private network of Paracelsus agents and informers, feared throughout the Balkans and perhaps beyond. Criminals of the highest caliber making up the largest private intelligence service in the world.

The Theban Sacred Band. Three hundred heroic young warriors of noble blood in ancient Thebes, bound together by oath in defense of their ideals and their city-state, an elite homosexual brotherhood that had lived and fought in mutual passion until slaughtered by Philip of Macedonia. Could the Band be reborn in Albania? Would that be the reward he requested from Zog?

The stable boy had rolled his eyes as he lit Nubar's cigarette, forbidden to Nubar according to one of the resolutions he had made on his twenty-first birthday. But Nubar had rapidly inhaled the cigarette anyway in the dizziness of the moment, in the shadows at the back of the stables where he had slipped down onto a pile of damp hay, a sudden weight on him and a fiery pain rushing up to cleanse his body.

Mercury fumes, chronic poisoning, delirium.

Using the crucibles on his workbench, Nubar mixed equal amounts of sulphur and lead and iron and arsenic, copper sulphate and mercury and opium. Equal amounts as he poured and mixed, as he drifted above his workbench through the stormy night numbly repeating the experiment again and again in search of the unique set of circumstances, in search of Paracelsus and his secret society of immortals.

While in a dark cemetery in Prague aging men with long thick noses bent over a little boy, holding him tightly and taunting him, their white beards matted and filthy, the Old Man of the Mountain slowly thrusting a dull rusted knife between the little boy's legs.

Nubar shuddered and found himself standing in front of a military formation, three hundred handsome young men at attention. They wore the helmets and swords and tunics of ancient Greece, identical in cut and color. Courageous invincible warriors waiting for him to address them, to lead them again into victorious battle as only he could do, their immortal commander Parastein von Ho von Heim, Celsus of Bombastus, the incomparable von Wallenbomb.

The handsome young warriors cheered him, holding up their clenched fists in salute. Nubar nodded solemnly and waved for silence. With a flourish he slipped his right hand around his right buttock. The lines and ranks watched him breathlessly.

Wild cheering erupted. Nubar grinned and nodded. For a moment he was able to thrust his whole fist in up to the wrist. The massed young warriors were screaming ecstatically. The muscular stable boy knelt beside him, waiting with bowed head. Nubar carefully wiped his fist on the boy's curly hair.

Whole-wheat bread and vegetables, curly hair and bombs.

Fumes. More mercury fumes and a moat, hygiene in general and the Assassins and subterranean passages. Brac. A dull rusted knife. Explosions.

And across the sea a poker game being played by three ruthless criminals for control of Jerusalem. The Sinai Bible discovered by his grandfather, still buried in Jerusalem, now rightfully his.

The original Bible, the philosopher's stone, and a secret society in Jerusalem plotting against him to get it.

A secret triad of players trying to steal what was his.

Through his third eye Nubar saw it all clearly, through his obsidian eye of primitive glass. Nothing could escape his black volcanic eye on that dark stormy night of Epiphany.

Nubar fell forward. His head struck the boards of the workbench and rested there, his poisoned delirious brain adrift in visions of immortality and the Sinai Bible.

The next evening when they sat at dinner, the Mass in B Minor booming forth from the organ, Nubar was unusually subdued.

I've had a few things checked into, said Sophia. I thought you might be interested in the facts that turned up.

What facts, Bubba?

For one, the English diplomat and autobiographical novelist known as Sir John Retcliffe. His real name was Hermann Goedsche, a former German postal clerk. He later admitted Biarritz was a total fabrication, including of course the chapter set in Prague.

Nubar smiled faintly.

What about Osman-Bey?

An even worse fake. He also used the name Kibridli-Zade, but his real name was Millinger, a crook of Jewish origins from Serbia. He wrote in German and published in Switzerland, peddling his anti-Semitic works door to door from Constantinople to Athens. He was expelled from every country he ever entered for every kind of swindle, always on the move and always being arrested. His career began in 1879 with his expulsion from Venice, and ended with his death in 1898. The Russian secret police sent him to Paris with four hundred rubles to uncover evidence of a Jewish plot to take over the world. He used the money to manufacture World Conquest by the Jews and have it published.

Ritual murder of Christian boys by rabbis? murmured Nubar vaguely.

The most recent documentation of that comes from a Roman Catholic priest of Polish extraction who was defrocked for a variety of offenses, ranging from embezzlement to rape. In 1876 he wrote a book on the subject, then made an offer to some leaders of Russian Jewry to publish a refutation of his own book if they paid him. He also offered to lecture against his book if they paid him a little more. Don't you understand what kind of company you're keeping, Nubar?

The whole truth is to be found in this formula, murmured Nubar, which provides the key to a host of disturbing and seemingly insoluble riddles.

I know. The line refers to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and was written in Paris by one Rachkovsky, head of the Okhrana outside of Russia. He spent his time writing attacks on everyone and then answering his own attacks, all under names of real people. He also had the habit of fabricating nonexistent organizations, issuing pamphlets under their names and then refusing those same pamphlets, using the names of other nonexistent organizations. And so on endlessly. Can't you really see what this kind of thing leads to?

Nubar murmured that he would reconsider his theories of historical conspiracy, but actually he no longer cared much about them. It was the Great Jerusalem Poker Game that now obsessed him, the secret reasons for the game and especially the three evil criminals who had founded it and were now trying to deny him immortality by keeping him from the philosopher's stone, which lay hidden somewhere in the Old City where his grandfather had buried it.

Sophia placed a thin volume of poetry by the Catholicos Narses IV, a twelfth-century Armenian prelate, at his elbow.

Just read a little, Nubar. It will soothe your nerves.

Nubar nodded.

And promise me you'll at least consider a vacation with the Melchitarists in Venice in the not too distant future. I know you'd find it restful.

I promise, Bubba, he said, already immersed in the details of shifting the operations of the UIA from the Balkans to the Middle East.

-11-

Gronk

To counteract the chaos of eternity there, utter order here.

The task Nubar had set for the UIA was to uncover every particle of information related in any way to the Great Jerusalem Poker Game. Once armed with that knowledge, he would then move to destroy the game and ruin its three criminal founders. And with that accomplished he would at last be able to seize clandestine control of the Holy City himself, resurrect the Sinai Bible that had been buried there by his grandfather and use it as the philosopher's stone that would guarantee him immortality.

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

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

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

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

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

Nubar's eyes narrowed.

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

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

Numbingly complex reports, and Nubar spent long days brooding over the confusion of the eternal city.

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

But no, thought Nubar. Not yet. It would be far too dangerous now to enter Jerusalem and confront the three vicious poker players, even in disguise and surrounded by bodyguards. Too much was at stake.

The UIA had to complete its work before it would be safe to venture there. For the present it was necessary to remain hidden securely in his castle tower far away from Jerusalem, methodically perfecting his theories and carefully arranging thick sheaves of charts and numbers.

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

Servants had done that.

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

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

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

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

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

The Sunday afternoon band concerts he had gone to with his first lover. The uniforms worn by the band members, the far grander uniform worn by the conductor whom everyone watched and obeyed.

Returning home at the end of the afternoon to nestle his lips in orderly trays of embalmed butterflies, his lover on duty behind him.

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

Nubar smiled. Of course. A private army.

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

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

A code of conduct?

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

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

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

Uniforms?

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

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

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

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

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

His own uniform would have gold everywhere instead of silver.

Ceremonies?

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

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

Nubar completed his plan in his tower room late on a Sunday night. For the third time that evening he mixed equal amounts of sulphur and lead and iron and arsenic, copper sulphate and mercury and opium.

Tomorrow he would have to return to the unsettling reports from Jerusalem, but now at least he was at peace with himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The psychiatric clinic on the outskirts of Kabul was recommended for intensive observation.

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

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

What are you doing, woman? yelled the doctor.

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

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

Which Mahmud was, although the vacant leer on his face dangerously resembled the demented grin of a congenital idiot. His mother was immediately hustled out of the clinic and told she could never return.

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

Nubar went to the shabby hotel in Tiranë and found his old friend stretched out on a filthy bed, dressed in the shapeless costume of a Turkish peasant. After a separation of ten years, they embraced with tears.

Mahmud then produced a bottle of cheap mulberry raki from under the bed and went on to give an account of himself.

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

Mahmud had just managed to flee the country in disguise, traveling overland by way of Baku and Odessa, distributing heavy bribes along the way, his uncle's jewels and some other valuables he had stolen at the last moment. He still had a small income from a few holdings on the Riviera, but it was absolutely essential that he go into hiding in some obscure place until the scandal was forgotten at home.

He felt there surely must be such a spot in a corner of Albania, and he asked his old friend's help in finding it

Mahmud was equally frank about other things. In the last ten years he had become an alcoholic, he said, and having always had a low opinion of man's bestial nature, he was now slowly starving himself to death.

He totally lacked the courage for a more abrupt departure, and besides, he quite enjoyed the routine he had set for himself. In fact he had adopted the Mediterranean habit of taking a siesta in order to have the pleasure of getting fully drunk twice a day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exquisite little Gronk. Why had he never heard of it before?

A Venetian wall around the village, a crumbling Venetian fort on the promontory. Minarets from the Turkish era rising beyond the small placid harbor, which was ringed by the stately stone arches of what had once been the high narrow houses of Venetian merchants, their walled courtyards set behind them for protection from the winter seas. Tiny alleys wound around and around back there away from the harbor, the overhanging upper stories nearly obscuring the sky.

A brilliant autumn day, the blue water sparkling, the brightly painted fishing boats rocking gently by the quay where a few old fishermen mended nets or rinsed sea urchins and pounded small octopuses on the rocks. There was only one café-restaurant on the harbor, a large simple place with its tables set out by the water, a huge stove at the back and arches inside that showed it had been a boat-builder's shop under the Venetians. In the stillness of the little harbor Nubar ate and drank, warmed by a sun casting soft russet colors over the worn stones of the old Venetian houses.

After lunch he talked with the couple who ran the café. They said the only people who ever visited Gronk were the peasants from the surrounding farmlands bringing in their produce. Other than that men fished and grew oranges, women cared for children and chickens and it was a forgotten corner of the Mediterranean with Venetian and Turkish memories. Half of the houses on the harbor were empty and could be bought for next to nothing if anyone wanted to buy one, which no one ever did.

Nubar was excited and returned at once to Mahmud to describe the beauties of little Gronk. Mahmud liked what he heard but he also had practical questions.

Of course, Nubar assured him, the café would serve him a single baked chicken wing twice a day. And it was well supplied with beer and mulberry raki and wine, and the large stove inside would be warm and cheery during the winter months of rain, the tables by the water lovely the rest of the year. Here Mahmud could happily spend his waking hours following his usual routine. Nubar had already talked to the café owner and he had agreed, in exchange for the steady patronage of a foreign resident, to carry Mahmud back to his house every night and put him to bed.

Mahmud became enthusiastic. They returned to Gronk together and Mahmud bought one of the Venetian villas on the harbor and set about having it repaired. At the pleasant café beside the water that was now his headquarters, Mahmud was also enthusiastic about the idea of an Albanian Sacred Band, when Nubar explained it to him.

But I have a few suggestions, said Mahmud, flashing a swift toothy grin and pouring more wine as their first afternoon in the Café Crabs swirled drunkenly on toward evening.

For one, Mahmud thought the uniforms of the Supreme Field Marshal Generalissimo and his deputy, Nubar's and his own, would be more impressive if the skull hanging from the neck were discarded in favor of a large ivory mask that would fit over the entire head, making their heads look like skeletons'

skulls.

Yes, Nubar? A grinning death's-head in cold carved ivory?

Nubar nodded eagerly.

And for another, said Mahmud, refilling his glass, shouldn't we change the name of our elite corps to the Albanian-Afghan Sacred Band, thereby suggesting an international brotherhood reaching far beyond the confines of Gronk? Indeed, one that goes so far as to embrace the outer limits of the empire created by Alexander the Great?

Nubar nodded dizzily.

As for the secret crimes Nubar wanted committed as final acts of initiation, Mahmud agreed that full-scale Spartan atrocities were simply no longer feasible.

No, Nubar, times do change and we can't kill any children, he said, brushing away an imaginary bat that was nibbling at his ear. But what a noble vision you've had, resurrecting ancient Greece like this in all its glory and even improving upon it. The truth is you must be a mad genius. I've always suspected it and now I know it.

Nubar laughed.

I'm not mad, he said.

Mahmud downed another glass and brushed at his ear.

Do you see anything hovering above my shoulder?

No.

Odd. I could swear something's taking little bites at my ear, and yesterday it was the back of my head.

Anyway, you're going to order the masks and uniforms right away?

Of course, immediately.

Excellent, Nubar, uniforms are crucial. I've never known why exactly, but they are. I've never felt really comfortable except when I'm wearing a uniform or someone else's clothes. Do you know what I mean?

Nubar nodded, Mahmud smiled, and thus as the world sank into the ruinous despair of the Great Depression which would give rise to so many historical extremes, an elite organization devoted to honor and physical cleanliness, homosexuality and fanatical brotherhood, was born in the autumn of 1929 over a daily regimen of beer and mulberry raki, single baked chicken wings and unwatered wine, and the rites and rituals of the Albanian-Afghan Sacred Band, to be known affectionately to its two founders as the AA, came into being beside the beautiful little harbor of Gronk.

Over the next three years during long lazy Mediterranean afternoons, from clear evenings listening to the cicadas down through the soft shadows of night to the brilliant still sunlight of morning, a vast succession of peasant boys passed through Mahmud's stately sixteenth-century Venetian villa on the harbor, being initiated into the wonders of the AA.

In order for darkness to be perpetual in the villa, shutters had been nailed closed over all the windows.

Candlelight played on the pale violet drapes and on the soft low couches where the boys lay while Nubar and Mahmud reclined in their elaborate AA regalia, raising themselves languidly to sip mulberry raki and discourse on ancient Greece.

In practice the boys dressed up only once a year, on Easter at sundown, when the villa's locked closets were thrown open and uniforms and chains and leather fists and truncheons were distributed to everyone, the solemn oaths in the cellar then followed by a feast of lambs roasted over pits in the privacy of the walled courtyard, and thereafter by a long fiery night of drunken dancing in the villa, the anonymous black figures spinning from floor to floor and room to room in an unbroken chain.

But it was the summer scenes on the beaches outside of Gronk, the daring watermelon parties held by moonlight, that were perhaps the most delicious of all to the two founders of the AA. The parties began with a brief lecture by Nubar on some aspect of Greek philosophy while Mahmud hacked up the first watermelon and passed out the slices. But almost at once the two of them dropped out of sight among the boys and rich slippery sounds spilled over the sands as sticky fingers squeezed off seeds, sweet juicy pulp everywhere as more rinds were ripped open amidst the rhythmic munching of mouths and the rhythmic roll of the sea, eager eyes exploring the insatiable sources of blackness and the lapping waves stirring ever more quietly with the late hour, ever more softly, finally washing a summer night into oblivion.

For Nubar and Mahmud, delirious years on the timeless shores of Gronk. Watermelons and rituals and pleasures without end for the two friends in their lavish, ancient dream.

Until one winter morning a cleaning woman entered the stately Venetian villa on the harbor and found Mahmud's mutilated body in all its AA splendor, without a head, disfiguring the orderly lines of his bed.

The terrified woman's hysterical screams shook the little harbor as she came running out onto the street.

When the police arrived they found a grinning ivory skull staring out from under the bed, with Mahmud's head inside it. They broke into the locked closets and discovered racks of black uniforms and heaps of AA medals. Huge AA banners were hung on the walls along with photographs of mass meetings by torchlight, long straight lines of rigid warriors, faceless, seen from the back, being harangued by a small strutting figure in black wearing a death's-head and gold chains and alternately waving truncheons and straight razors and black leather fists in the air, his identity hidden by his ivory mask.

The police went at once to the Café Crabs to learn what they could of Mahmud's last movements, but the moment they entered the café a stolid peasant boy, who was eating breakfast, came forward and confessed to the crime. The boy was led away. An investigation began.

Nubar, asleep in his castle tower room, was awakened by a telephone call as soon as the police left the Café Crabs. Fortunately Sophia was in Istanbul on a business trip so he didn't have to do any explaining.

Immediately he cabled the Melchitarist monks in Venice, signing Sophia's name, saying that he was coming there to marry and that they should find him a suitable wife. Just before noon, after making several confidential calls to Tiranë, he boarded a chartered yacht for Venice.

By the time he arrived there the Melchitarists had found him a respectable young woman to marry from the Armenian community in Venice. The wedding ceremony was performed as soon as Nubar disembarked. That night, terrified by the events he had fled in Albania, he was somehow able to arouse himself briefly through fear, the only time he ever had in his life. The marriage was thus consummated and there could be no grounds for divorce later on charges of impotency, Nubar's lifelong affliction.

As it happened, he also impregnated his wife during that momentary encounter.

The investigation in Gronk was quickly concluded. From the beginning the Albanian authorities had been inclined to believe that a foreigner, and especially a prince from a country as barbaric as Afghanistan, was capable of the most unspeakable behavior. They were therefore more than ready to put most of the blame for the murder on the murdered man himself, the headless Mahmud.

The trial opened and the peasant boy explained that he had accidentally strangled Mahmud with one of the chains Mahmud was wearing around his neck. Unknown to the boy, the chain had become entwined around his foot while they were lying together on the bed. The moment he realized what had happened, said the boy, and that he would be blamed for Mahmud's death, an uncontrollable rage had seized him, directed toward that grotesque mask that was grinning up at him from between his legs, its frozen leer an unbearable mockery. In a frenzy he had rushed to the kitchen to find a cleaver to deal with the death's-head as it deserved. After he had done so, the head had apparently rolled off the bed and under the bed and, still grinning, come to the upright sitting position in which the police had found it.

Other citizens from Gronk then took the stand to describe what they knew of Mahmud's activities and background, although no one could bring himself to utter the dead man's name. Instead, without exception, Mahmud was referred to as that disgusting Afghan, that despicable Easterner, or simply as the filthy foreigner.

And then all at once there was an immediate sensation in the courtroom when it was learned that the filthy foreigner had first arrived in Albania by way of Baku and Odessa, where he might well have acquired secret Bolshevik links, shocking information that somehow managed to emerge in the rambling testimonies of several illiterate Gronk fishermen all of whom were retired and poor and elderly, but who had also been in the habit of loitering around the Café Crabs from time to time, hoping to receive a bone.

By the end of the afternoon the judge was convinced the extenuating circumstances in the case were many. The filthy foreigner's rank perversity had been more than made evident, as had the extreme provocation to violence that he had provided at the time of the crime by his ugly costume and uglier weapons, and especially by his abominable death's-head mask. The peasant boy was therefore sentenced to only twenty years in an agricultural prison where tomatoes were grown, each day of labor to serve as two days off his sentence, so that with good behavior he could be out in only six years.

But meanwhile, and more important for the nation, the entire contents of Mahmud's villa were to be sent under guard to Tiranë for inspection by higher authorities, possibly to include King Zog himself, to see whether the AA might indeed have been a cunningly disguised Bolshevik plot to invade the country and assassinate the king, after entry had been achieved by corrupting youths at a key point on the vulnerable Albanian coastline.

As soon as the trial was over Nubar received detailed reports in Venice on the proceedings. Sophia returned from Istanbul and wrote to him in amazement asking what he was suddenly doing in Italy. Nubar replied vaguely that he had felt the need for a vacation. Lately he had been working too hard on his mercury experiments, he said, and had decided to come to Venice for a rest, following Sophia's long-standing advice. The city enchanted him so much, he added, that he had bought a palazzo on the Grand Canal for other vacations in the future. Sophia, delighted that he was at last getting out of his tower room and into the world, immediately sent him a cable. Over the next few days there was a brief exchange.

WONDERFUL NEWS, NUBAR, I'M SO HAPPY FOR YOU. NOW TRY TO GET OUT AND

ENJOY THE SIGHTS. DON'T SIT INSIDE YOUR PALAZZO ALL DAY BROODING, AND

STAY AWAY FROM MERCURY FOR A WHILE. READ POETRY. IT WILL CLEAR YOUR

MIND.

* * *

MY MIND AND CONSCIENCE ARE PERFECTLY CLEAR, BUBBA. FURTHERMORE, I'M

OUTSIDE A GREAT DEAL. I SPEND MANY HOURS IN THE PIAZZA IN FRONT OF SAN

MARCO'S.

* * *

LOVELY. NOTHING COULD BE BETTER FOR YOU. IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL THERE. DRINK

PLENTY OF MINERAL WATER FOR YOUR GAS, GET A LOT OF SLEEP AND HAVE A GOOD TIME.

* * *

THANKS. GAS UNDER CONTROL. HAVING WONDERFUL TIME IN THE MYSTERIOUS

WINTER MISTS THAT CLOAK THE CITY. PERFECTLY ENCHANTING.

If only she knew, thought Nubar, setting out again in the cold fog at sundown, heading for San Marco's with his stack of thick journals, the rambling testimonials to himself that he spent all day, every day, writing.

The journals contained passages describing his sadness for the fate of the peasant boy convicted of murder in Gronk, who had originally been his lover, not Mahmud's, although no mention was made of that. But most of the pages were devoted to long incoherent attacks on every conceivable aspect of Mahmud's character and behavior.

In addition the journals contained lengthy spurious histories of the AA, which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the organization had been founded and run solely by Mahmud, while he, Nubar, hadn't really known of its existence. In fact, he had never even suspected that it existed. He simply had no idea there could ever have been such a monstrous group as the AA operating secretly in sleepy little Gronk.

Furthermore, the correct name of that foul organization, spelled out in large letters at the top of every page in the journals so no one could mistake it, was the All-Afghanistan Sacred Band, proof of the utterly foreign nature of the conspiracy which had always been completely alien to the Albanian way of life and the Albanian national character, not to mention Albanian ideals and the Albanian work ethic, and in its lazy decadence, even contrary to Albanian efficiency. As Nubar made perfectly clear in the journals, the AA could only have been the product of a filthy foreigner's diseased and totally aberrant mind.

The entire affair, in short, was a frightening case of Afghan mountain madness let loose in a small, quiet, civilized, respectable, law-abiding Albanian fishing community.

And lastly, there were numerous eulogies to the Albanian prison system in the journals, particularly to its agricultural prisons, along with arguments that showed a few years in one of them, growing tomatoes, couldn't help but be a healthy experience for a peasant boy who had previously known only the confines of a small seaside village.

The Boy.

The letters appeared on the covers of each of Nubar's journals. All day long he scribbled illegibly in his journals, sipping mulberry raki to steady his nerves, then gathered up the journals at twilight and went off to San Marco's where he moved from café to café, accosting strangers to read them passages aloud from the journals, or thrusting the journals into the hands of astonished tourists and trying to run away, so they would be trapped with them and perhaps read a page or two.

Spring passed into summer and summer into autumn. Sometime before the whiter fogs descended once more, the Melchitarists informed him that his wife, who had deserted him on their wedding night upon seeing what kind of person he was, had given birth to a son in the Armenian community in Venice where she had returned to live. Nubar told them the boy was to be named Mecklenburg Wallenstein, an effort by Nubar to retain a small measure of self-respect by recalling past family glory, the uncle of the first Albanian Wallenstein having once been created the Duke of Mecklenburg by the Holy Roman Emperor for his extraordinary military services during the Thirty Years War.

But past glories couldn't relieve the restless despair Nubar now felt as he made his nightly rounds of the cafés in the piazza in front of San Marco's, hiding in archways until the waiters were looking the other way and then darting between the crowded tables, quickly squeezing along trying to distribute his journals, trying to make people see the truth, trying to get someone, anyone, to listen to his absolutely accurate account of past events in Gronk.

In what? asked a startled tourist.

Nubar thrust his journals forward.

Gronk, he raved. Are you mad? Are you deaf? Gronk, I said. Gronk.

By now even the most worldly tourists were thoroughly alarmed. Sticky pastries and cups of black coffee came flying, the weapons at hand used by waiters and café patrons who were outraged by his skulking behavior around their tables, his furtive whispers as he sneaked up behind them and tried to drop one of his journals into their laps before they knew what was happening.

So the sticky pastries rained down on him, the cups of thick scalding coffee shot by his head and Nubar had to turn and run, crashing into walls in the darkness, in the eerie fog-bound emptiness of the huge deserted piazza where a distant footfall sounded as if it were right beside him, fleeing around and around through the night on the slippery cobblestones, lost in the mists and the drizzle of a Venetian winter, stumbling and falling and clutching to his chest the precious journals that were capable of explaining Gronk in its entirety, if only someone would read them, which no one ever would.

Just before dawn he collapsed in a gondola and ordered his gondolier to hurry down the Grand Canal so he could reach his palazzo before daylight came. Gliding over the water then with bits of stale pastry clinging to his face, his evening clothes muddied and his opera cloak ripped and his top hat newly dented, he lay in the bottom of the boat haggard and trembling and dizzy, sinking deeper into a stupor, dangerously weak because he now ate only a single baked chicken wing twice a day, a morbid compulsion toward self-starvation that had come to overwhelm him in the last year. And deliriously drunk as well from the mulberry raki he always carried to the piazza at nights in a wooden canteen slung over his shoulder, another compulsion toward self-destruction that had come to overwhelm him in the last year.

But finally home. Nubar lurched for the landing and nearly missed it, lost a shoe and his top hat in the water, lost his opera cape on the landing, muttered incoherently as he staggered across the wet stones pulling off his clothes and disappeared at last, mostly naked, through the door of his elegant palazzo, there to hide until night came once more to cover his movements.

Thus lived Nubar in the closing days of 1933, a crazed phantom figure haunting the winter mists of Venice, never farther from the eternal city of his dreams. Yet soon now, very soon, to achieve his goal of immortality after reading the UIA's last staggering report on the Great Jerusalem Poker Game.

PART FOUR

-12-

Maud

Afraid of Jerusalem, just imagine. Afraid of something, unlike the rest of us.

Not surprisingly, Maud's long friendship with Munk began in Smyrna. Many years later when she looked back on her four decades in the Eastern Mediterranean, it was one of the two cities that meant the most to her, Smyrna in her mind somehow embodying the secrets of profane love just as Jerusalem held the secrets of more sacred dreams.

In fact Maud lived only briefly in each of them, about half a year in Smyrna and a little more in Jerusalem.

Yet so changeable was the flow of time for her in retrospect, reducing whole years to a few experiences dimly recollected, surging elsewhere to transform an afternoon or an evening into months of memories, that the importance of those two cities in her life far surpassed the actual decades spent in Athens and Istanbul and Cairo.

Jerusalem, because she met Joe there. Smyrna, because of Sivi and Theresa.

Munk she met in the one, but she always associated him with the other.

Smyrna, then, in 1921. Maud in flight from the little flowered house in Jericho that Joe had so lovingly found for her so she could escape the wintry blasts sweeping the heights above. The child she was awaiting had been conceived the previous spring in their first days and nights of love in a tiny oasis on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba. One month of exquisite solitude in that tiny oasis, one boundless month in a world of fiery desert sunsets and star-filled darkness, of sun-soaked hours on the brilliant sands, lacing the Sinai and the blue cooling water in the fingers of their love.

Winter in another oasis after that, in flowering Jericho awaiting the birth of their child, Joe away most of the time smuggling arms because he could find no other way to make a living for them as a fugitive in Palestine, away because he had to be, yet Maud's old fears of being abandoned returning from her childhood, asking those terrible questions from childhood.

Why did everyone leave? Why did they go away?

As her card-playing father had done when he left the farm in Pennsylvania to go west. As her mother had done when she swallowed Paris green in despair, and when that failed went out to the barn and hanged herself at supper-time. As her Cheyenne grandmother had done behind the counter of the grimy saloon she ran in a Pennsylvania mining town, the old Indian woman hardly saying a word for days on end as little Maud learned arithmetic by adding up what the miners drank, hearing from them that her grandfather was a convicted murderer who had been sent away, never to return.

And then the dream of her youth, to become the best figure skater in the world, which she still might have become when she escaped to Europe at the age of sixteen as the youngest member of the Olympic skating team. But instead, being totally ignorant of men, she had made the disastrous romantic mistake of marrying a man she knew not at all, a man who lived in a seventeenth-century Albanian castle, the depraved Catherine Wallenstein.

Catherine raging insanely between the twin curses placed upon him by his father, the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins, who had come to think he was God and that his son was therefore Christ, who had named his son after the monastery in the Sinai where he had discovered the original Bible, twin unbearable burdens for Catherine Wallenstein, hopelessly lost as he staggered ever deeper into the symbols attributed to St Catherine, a sword and a crown and a wheel and a book, using a wheel to torture boys in the Albanian forests and a sword to kill them slowly as he bled from a crown of thorns and covered the book of his short violent life with sacrificial human skin, in savage madness reenacting on others the martyrdom of the historical Catherine and her mystical marriage to Christ.

Fated from the beginning, Catherine Wallenstein. Doomed by an intolerably pious act in the last century, his father's forgery of the original Bible, a stupendous task meant to bring order out of chaos and give grounds for faith where there were none.

Maud saved from him by the intercession of a mysterious old woman who had a strange hold over the castle, Sophia the Unspoken, at the time not known to be Catherine's mother, who helped Maud flee the castle in 1906 when her time was coming to give birth to Catherine's child, which Maud did prematurely in a peasant farmhouse, Catherine in pursuit with forty horsemen finding the farmhouse where she lay and slaughtering all the inhabitants before ordering some of his party to carry his newborn son back to the castle, Catherine himself galloping on ahead intending to murder Sophia, who instead at last brought an end to the curses on her son by striking him dead on the road in front of the castle. With her eyes, as she thought, and by making the sign of the cross.

Maud's Wallenstein son, Nubar, thus lost to her on the day of his birth. And seven years later in Athens an infant daughter dead while her second husband, the Greek patriot Yanni, was away fighting in one of his wars, Yanni himself dead in 1916 on the Macedonian front.

After four long years of sadness a dream in Jerusalem, where she met her magical Irishman just as he was emerging for the first time from Haj Harun's mysterious caverns of the past, Joe all whirling words and visions in the shadowy crypt of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Maud in wonder and silence slipping to her knees and performing a first wordless act of Communion there.

To be followed by beautiful Aqaba in the spring, the worn stones of Jerusalem in the summer and flowering Jericho in the autumn when the evenings were turning cold on the heights. And Joe away although he couldn't help it, and the terrible fear tormenting Maud as she gazed into the currents of the Jordan flowing near their little house, the muddy river of miracles by then reaching the end of its brief and steeply falling course from the rich slopes of Galilee down to the utter barrenness of the Dead Sea.

Fear that Joe would leave her. That this love would also go away. At her feet a rushing river and Joe too young to understand the terrified silences that gripped her that winter beside the Jordan, Maud unable to raise her eyes from the water and reach out and touch the man she loved.

So she had run away from the little house where Bernini was born toward the end of winter. She had left before Joe had even seen his son, not leaving a note behind for him because there was no way then that she could explain her dreaded memories of a barn in Pennsylvania and a castle in Albania, a daughter dying when Yanni was away at the front and Yanni's death, all those restless demons that had returned to shatter the dream of peace she thought she had found in the stillness of a crypt in Jerusalem.

Abandoning the little flowered house in desperation and going up to Galilee, where she rested until she could travel with Bernini. And then in April sadly journeying on to the only sanctuary she knew in the world, the lovely villa by the sea in Smyrna that was the home of Yanni's elderly half-brother, the elegant and kindly Sivi.

Sivi was then nearly seventy. He was unusually tall for a Greek, as Yanni had also been, both of them having inherited their large strong frames and deep blue eyes from their father, a famous leader of the Greek war for independence who had come from an isolated corner of Crete where the people were said to be direct descendants of the Dorians. The fierce old man had married twice late in life, fathering Sivi when he was in his fifties and Yanni when he was well over eighty.

So nearly thirty years had separated the half-brothers and much else as well, Yanni a warring patriot who had lived by the Cretan war cry against the Turks, freedom or death, Sivi a sophisticated arbiter of art and society at his famous teas in Smyrna, where everyone seemed to turn up sooner or later.

In the past year Maud had written Sivi only once, soon after returning from Aqaba, a short note saying she had fallen deeply in love in Jerusalem. But later when her fears had begun to paralyze her she hadn't dared to write. So Sivi had no way of knowing who was at the door on that April afternoon when he answered the bell and found her standing in the rain, thin and wasted with a baby in her arms, one battered suitcase at her feet.

Maud had memorized what she was going to say but the words left her the moment she saw Sivi suddenly towering above her. She couldn't speak. She broke into tears.

She didn't remember everything that happened after that. Sivi embraced her and swept her inside, delivered the baby into the care of his housekeeper and helped her upstairs, called Theresa, his French secretary, to draw a bath and provide new clothes, talking happily all the while in a warm excited voice as if the visit had been planned for months, as if the only misfortune on that dark April afternoon was that it had been raining when she arrived.

Later they sat with cognac in front of the fire, Sivi's deeply lined face all smiles as he wagged his massive head and chatted on about Smyrna and his recent adventures, never once mentioning Bernini or alluding to Maud's life during the last year, simply accepting her presence in his home and delving into ever more elaborate anecdotes to distract her.

Constantinople, 1899.

While Sivi was entertaining a young sailor in his hotel room the sailor's regular lover, a hulking customs inspector, had arrived and begun chopping down the door with an ax, shouting that he was going to kill Sivi. The only escape was the window and the door was giving way so fast there was no time to dress.

With an open umbrella over his head to serve as a parachute, Sivi went sailing out the window in a long red nightshirt and nothing else, the hotel room having been cold enough to warrant a nightshirt no matter what activities were under way.

The nightshirt billowed up, revealing his nakedness to the pedestrians below. And what was worse, it made it impossible for him to see where he was going.

To not even know, intoned Sivi, gesturing extravagantly, what manner of grave I was going to fall into? A diabolical trick of fate.

As it happened he found himself landing on his bottom in a pool of water, raising a great spray, in the back of a madly careening water wagon driven by an Armenian whose horses had gone out of control, attacked by a yapping dog. As the customs inspector shook his ax from the hotel window the wagon thundered away up the street followed by the noisy dog, Sivi sitting up to his waist in the water and still holding his umbrella high, his nightshirt spread around him like a gigantic red water lily, smiling and nodding pleasantly at the astonished spectators on the sidewalks who had seen him come sailing out the window at precisely the right moment to make good his escape.

Or Salonika, 1879.

Being given to pranks in his youth, Sivi had not appeared in his box at the opera until just before the end of the first intermission, when he presented himself dressed in an enormous red hat spilling with roses, long red silk gloves and a flowing red gown complete with an impressive bustle, a fake ruby brooch of extraordinary size fitted into the cleavage of his chest.

Whispers were rampant through the tiers of the opera house but Sivi kept his eyes fixed on the stage, ignoring everyone, slowly stroking his thick moustache with a forefinger.

The curtain rose. Siegfried marched to the middle of the stage and spread his arms to proclaim a mighty deed, whereupon Sivi swept dramatically to his feet and thundered out the first bars of the solo in a basso profundo that not only shocked Siegfried into silence and stunned the audience but immediately brought the curtain crashing down.

And Alexandria and Rhodes and Rome, Venice and Cyprus and Florence, Sivi recounting tales from over the years to amuse her until Maud was laughing in spite of herself, whispering as he kissed her goodnight that this was expected to be an especially beautiful spring in Smyrna, his way of saying she was welcome to stay as long as she liked in his villa by the sea.

And later that night as she lay sleepless in bed, sobbing quietly in the darkness as the rain beat down on the house, she marveled anew at this gentle courtly man who had somehow come to accept everything in life, and everyone, without asking why it should be so.

At peace. She wondered if such serenity would ever be hers.

She met Munk for the first time in June and found him to be so close to Sivi as to be almost his adopted son, which surprised her initially because she herself had known Sivi so long and never heard him mention Munk. But then she remembered that had always been Sivi's way. So flagrant in his own behavior, he was yet extremely discreet when he came to others and never talked about one friend to another. And in the same manner, Munk was surprised to learn that Sivi had a sister-in-law.

And an American with beautiful green eyes at that, said Munk, taking Sivi's arm. Why didn't you ever tell me, you old sinner?

Sivi wagged his head and smiled wickedly.

Tell you? Why should I have told you? I didn't want to complicate your lives. A handsome young widow from the New World? An itinerant bachelor from Budapest? No, I would never take responsibility for initiating such an enterprise. Who knows what might come of it? But the truth is my closets are seething with relatives and friends neither of you have ever heard of. The condition is a common one as you'll come to understand when you get to be my age and have a long and varied background behind you. It's just extraordinary how events over the decades can multiply the people in your life. And even when you're just out for a stroll and strictly minding your own business. Come now, this way for tea. Young Munk is bursting to tell us something. The signs are unmistakable.

In fact Munk had come to Smyrna to tell Sivi of his recent conversion to Zionism, and he could talk of nothing else as they all sat together in the garden behind the villa that first afternoon, Sivi nodding paternally at Munk's enthusiasm over what would be done in Palestine, Sivi's secretary Theresa appearing indifferent. But by then Maud knew the young Frenchwoman well enough to understand her exaggerated calm.

When did they stop being lovers? she asked Sivi later, when the two of them were alone and he was preparing to go out for the evening. Sivi smiled happily and came back to sit down beside her, more than ready to tarry, as always, when the talk turned to love.

But my dear, he said, patting his closely cropped white hair, they still are lovers.

I don't think so. He may not know it yet, but she does.

You mean his new interest in politics, a homeland for his people and so forth?

Yes.

Sivi waved his hand majestically.

Nonsense. Passion in one sphere induces passion elsewhere. Our friend Munk has been looking for a cause for years, long before that stately old Empire of his began to crumble in the cold damp mists of central Europe. The blood of the great Johann Luigi Szondi flows in his veins, the indefatigable spirit of exploration, and now that Munk has found his cause on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, his flame will burn ever more brightly casting light in all corners. Love, in short. A lifetime to come exploring the landscape of love. The Mediterranean has him at last.

Sivi, you do carry on so. You should be back on the stage.

I don't recall ever having left it. Now, a wager of a drachma on the case in hand? I say the passion between the two of them will be greater, if anything. And you say it's already gone?

All right, a drachma.

Sivi suddenly leaned forward, his face serious. He put his hand on hers.

No, Maud, don't do that. Don't you see it's wrong? You must never do that, you can never be happy that way. Not even one drachma. Don't you see you're betting against love?

I suppose I am.

Then the bet is summarily withdrawn?

Yes.

Sivi smiled and squeezed her hand.

Excellent. The least we can do on these beautiful Aegean shores is honor our pagan gods, and there's never been any question they're on the side of love. Heavens, how they did carry on. Swans and bulls were no obstacle whatsoever. In comparison our very best efforts are meager indeed.

Your gods, Sivi. I don't know that they're mine.

Not so, my lady, simply not so. They belong to all who pause in this sunlight, and whether for a day or a lifetime is no matter. We have no control over it, you see. Summoned or not summoned, the gods are there.

Yours?

Heavens no, much too profound for me. The words of a revered counselor of antiquity, the Delphic oracle to be exact. Spoken to the Spartans when they were contemplating war against Athens. Well they made their war and they triumphed, but then the Thebans triumphed over them so where did it get them in the end? Ah yes, in the end. In the end we're all sodomites.

Maud laughed.

Sivi. That's awful.

Indeed it is. An atrocious pose to strike early in the evening. But you do see my meaning? You see how impossible it is for us to escape love? Even when we turn our backs we're not safe.

Sivi, that's enough.

The old man wagged his head happily and got to his feet.

You're right of course. In the cafés of this city, where every sort of depraved creature dizzily nurtures his obsession, such mild remarks would go unnoticed. But here, it's true, we're standing beside a hearth in the presence of motherhood, while upstairs an innocent babe waits to be nursed. As for him, by the way, you've already decided it.

What?

His future, by naming him Bernini. With that name there's simply no chance the pagan gods will overlook him. Whether he likes it or not the sunshine of the Mediterranean will be his home and he is blessed with it, I predict it. Yes and now you're off to your maternal concerns on the second floor, and Munk and Theresa have left to relish the mysteries of the harbor by moonlight, and it's time for me to venture into the shadowy recesses of Smyrna to discover what spiritual nourishment this soothing June evening has in store for me. Shouldn't you be wishing me success? I'm not as young as I used to be.

Maud laughed. Sivi stroked his moustache in the doorway.

Well? Not even a wisp of a wish for success?

You don't need it, you old goat.

I don't? In the end? Hmmm. A felicitous turn of phrase. It suggests philosophical resignation. But naturally I've always been a stoic on top of everything else, although naturally I'm not always on top. Now if you chance to hear whispers in the early morning hours, don't be disturbed. It may well be some thoughtful young rogue in search of the wisdom of Smyrna's Zeno, who is rightly famed for living consistently with his nature in darkness as well as light. And the consistency of that nature? Undeviating. Without the confusion of mixed sexes. Addio then. Yet again Smyrna beckons, and who am I to resist love's caressing whispers? Addio, my lady Maud.

That summer Sivi planned to go to Crete to visit his father's village. He asked Maud to go with him but she refused, Yanni's birth there signifying to her all the pain of loss in life that she couldn't bring herself to accept.

Yanni himself had never told her the story. It was Sivi who did after his half-brother's death, when he was trying to help Maud understand why Yanni had lived the way he had.

Sivi's mother had died giving birth to him. A wealthy sister who lived in Smyrna offered to take the baby and raise Sivi as her own. Sivi's father, in despair over the loss of his wife, agreed to this and also decided to give up politics and return to the isolated village in Crete where he had been born.

He became a goatherd again, as he had been in his youth, spending six months of the year alone in the mountains with his flock, running his goats from dawn to darkness to find the meager feeding, in lonely solitude sleeping in one of the huts made of broad flat stones that had been up in those mountains for centuries withstanding the ferocious winds of the lunar landscape, never able to take off his boots or his coarse woolen garments in the frigid nights of those mountain summers, in darkness before the sun rose and again after it set, hurriedly eating his meals of goats'-milk yogurt and twice-baked bread, rock-hard until soaked in water, brought with him from his village in the spring.

Occasionally his keen eyes spied movement on a far slope and there would be a chance to call from peak to peak to other roaming goatherds. And since the distances were too great for words to carry, they didn't use words, rather a shouted singsong code that passed their messages through tone and cadence. As for talking to another man face to face, that opportunity seldom came until the snow began to block the passes in late October and it was time to descend to the villages and await the ebb of the melting snows in April.

Over a quarter of a century passed before Sivi's father, then eighty-four, took a second wife, a woman of nineteen from his village. She conceived and complications appeared toward the end of her pregnancy. In her eighth month the two of them set out across the mountains for the north coast, to the nearest town where a doctor could be found.

It was early October and snow flurries were already worrying the passes. It took them two days to reach the last northern ridge and see the Cretan sea opening up beneath them. That night she went into premature labor and by dawn the baby was breeched and suffocating.

They exchanged a few words, the old man who had lived a long full life and the young woman who was only beginning hers. The wrong one was being taken but there was nothing to be done.

He held her. They both made the sign of the cross. Then he placed a rock in each of her hands and a twisted root of wild thyme between her teeth and cut open her belly with his hunting knife and removed the baby as she went into shock and died.

That morning he walked into the town on the north coast with the infant Yanni in his arms and the rigid body of Yanni's mother strapped to his back.

Oh I know, Sivi had said as she sat with her head in her arms.

It's cruel and brutal and it sounds barbaric, but you have to remember the life those people have. When you're up in those mountains you might as well be on the surface of the moon. There's only a little wild thyme clinging to the rocks here and there and a man has to run all day to find it, from five in the morning until ten at night, so his goats can eat. And they do that, those men, they run up mountains. It's almost impossible to believe unless you've seen it. The life is hard and violent and although they live to be very old when left alone, often they're not left alone and death can be quick.

Not long ago a child in one of those villages was playing and as a joke took the bell off one of his father's goats and put it on a neighbor's. A goat stolen? By nightfall the boy's father was dead and the neighbor was dead and three other men were dead, and by the next morning the village was deserted, not a soul there. Because if all the families hadn't left at once, the killing of brothers and cousins by brothers and cousins would have to go on until all the men in the village were dead. They knew that and they had no choice but to abandon their homes and go away.

So the way life works for them is that everyone has his duty and death can never be feared. Of course Yanni could have come back from the front when your daughter was due to be born, and he could have come back when she was taken ill, but I doubt that he ever even thought of it. To him he was where he belonged as a man, doing what he was supposed to be doing. The mountain people in that corner of Crete were never conquered by the Turks, the only Greeks who never were. For two hundred years the Turks burned down their villages, but they went up into their mountains until they had a new generation of sons to fight, and then they came down and fought, and saw their sons die, and went back up into the mountains again. For two hundred years they did that, and when the resistance was particularly heroic the Turks impaled those they had captured and put mirrors in front of them so they could watch themselves slowly die in the hot sun. The best remembered of all their leaders was a Captain Yanni who died that way when he was a few years younger than your Yanni. So that's where your Yanni came from, and that's what he was.

Maud shuddered. She understood it was a way of life. But she herself never wanted to see those mountains.

When Maud said she hoped to be alone with Bernini that summer, Sivi offered to let her stay in the villa in Smyrna. She quickly accepted, planning now to move back to Athens in the fall and find work as a translator, after Sivi returned in September. As for Theresa, she had already left to spend the summer in the islands, her affair with Munk having abruptly ended in June as Maud had foreseen.

Munk was in Smyrna twice that summer and on his second visit Maud spent a night with him, an evening brought on by wine and loneliness on her part, by wine and uncomplicated need on his. They smiled over it the next day, both aware it wouldn't be repeated, Munk hurrying on with his Zionist concerns and Maud preoccupied as before with beginning a new life in Athens in the fall. But it had been a long, intimate summer night that they both also knew would give rise to friendship.

One of their conversations late that night had turned to Theresa, and they realized all at once that neither of them knew anything about her past. Three years earlier at the age of nineteen, according to Sivi, she had gotten off a boat in Smyrna, alone and friendless and without any money. Another passenger from the boat, whom Sivi knew, had brought Theresa to one of his afternoon teas and Sivi had offered her a job as his secretary, as a way to help. Soon he had become strongly attached to her and now he liked to refer to her, mischievously, as his unnatural daughter.

Another adopted stray, said Munk, like me before the war. And it's been wonderful for him since she moved in. Despite what he says the old sinner has his bouts of gloom and loneliness, and it's made a great difference to him to have her here. She's family to him and he loves her enormously, and I'm sure she loves him in her way. But there's a kind of intensity about Theresa I've never understood. Something hidden. Something that won't allow her to be really close to anyone. I don't know how to describe it.

Is that all Sivi knows about her?

Yes, other than the fact that she was educated in a convent in France, apparently very strictly, although she's not a practicing Catholic now. But about her family or lack of it, or how she happened to turn up in Smyrna, nothing. Of course he never asks people who they are or where they've been. If they want to tell him he's glad to listen, no one could be more sympathetic. But if they don't he just accepts what he sees and plunges ahead without any reserve whatsoever, just assuming you deserve his confidence, his friendship. It's an extraordinary trait, as if he had no guile at all. Of course he must have some or he wouldn't be human. But I've never seen it. And anyway, Maud, surely you already know all this.

She nodded.

Yes. When I came here the first time as Yanni's wife, an American no less with no family, out of nowhere, there wasn't a single question about who or what. And this spring when he found me standing at the door with Bernini, not having heard from me in almost a year and having no idea I'd had a child, well he burst into a smile and threw his arms around me and that was that. Ah, here you are, how lovely. That's all he said, only that. And they weren't just words. I swear there was no question in his eyes, either.

Munk rose from the bed to pour more wine. Maud took a sip and gazed out the open window at the lights in the harbor.

When did it start between you and Theresa?

About a year ago. I've been visiting Sivi since before the war and I suppose it was only natural that Theresa and I should fall in with one another. But I was never in Smyrna for more than a few days at a time, and I didn't think it was a particularly serious matter for anyone. Certainly Theresa didn't act as if it was.

That distance you mentioned?

Yes. Not cold exactly, but as if she didn't really care one way or the other. She never asked me if I could stay another day, for example. In fact she never even asked me when I would be back. When I turned up that was fine, and when I left that was fine too. But when I came here at the beginning of June, she suddenly got all upset and said she didn't want to see me anymore. It was strange though. When she told me that I had the sensation she wasn't there somehow, not with me I mean. She was somewhere else, talking about something else. To be frank I don't think it was me, her interest in me or lack of it, that caused her to become so emotional.

I know, said Maud.

Why? How, I mean.

Well we talked several times too, before she left for the summer. She was terribly guarded but a feeling came through all the same. It's odd, but it almost seemed as if what bothered her were the places you kept talking about. Palestine, I mean. The Holy Land. Particularly Jerusalem. I don't know why I had that impression. Maybe it has to do with the fact that she was religious once and isn't now. Do you think she could be afraid of Jerusalem for some reason?

Maud shook her head. She laughed harshly at herself.

Afraid of Jerusalem, just imagine it. Afraid of something, unlike the rest of us. Aren't you afraid of anything, Munk?

No. What we have to do will take time, but it will happen.

Maud smiled. She put a finger on his nose.

It will? It just has to happen? What's that? The faith of the fathers?

More, my lady, much more. Remember that I became a Zionist because of a former Japanese baron.

And the reason I happened to meet my Rabbi Lotmann was because I once discussed cavalry tactics with his twin brother, Baron Kikuchi, who was a hero of the Russo-Japanese War.

And so?

And so Baron Kikuchi and I chanced to meet in Constantinople while we were both covering the first Balkan war. And then years later he writes to me asking me to check on the well-being of his twin brother, who was converted to Judaism and is supposedly studying medieval Jewish mysticism in Safad.

But the twin isn't there and eventually I trace him to St Catherine's monastery in the Sinai, where he's gone into hiding because of his Zionist activities and is pretending to be a Christian pilgrim, a Nestorian from China. At St Catherine's I listen to the evening concerts on the koto of this man who is now Rabbi Lotmann, and the music is so haunting and strange in that unusual setting that I find I can't sleep at night.

Instead the former Japanese baron and I stay up and talk and talk, and the result is that a Hungarian Jew is converted to Zionism in the Sinai by an aristocratic landowner from northern Japan who was raised as a Buddhist in matters of death, and as a Shintoist in matters of birth.

Maud laughed again.

All true. And so?

And so given these vast implausibilities, geographical and racial and religious and esthetic, it immediately becomes apparent that much more than just the faith of my fathers is involved. Quite obviously, someone with an extraordinary overview has taken a hand in the matter and given me faith in this task.

Maud reached out and tweaked his nose.

It's always useful to have that kind of help, she said. The only thing you haven't explained is why these Japanese twins happen to figure so prominently in God's plan?

But that's easy, said Munk, tapping her nose in turn. The Japanese are a unique people who arrived in their islands more or less as an entity, with a culture of their own, just before and after the time of Christ.

But no one has ever been quite sure where they came from. Now it was suggested more than once in the last century, by them of course, when they'd opened up their country and begun to Westernize themselves, that they just might be the survivors of the ten lost tribes of Israel. No one has ever taken that seriously but the time span wouldn't have to be wrong if you consider a leisurely journey across Asia, with time out to plant crops and care for livestock as a wandering people must, and also with time out to develop their unique culture, so they'll definitely be an Asian people when they eventually arrive in their Asian islands. And lastly, I don't think I mentioned that both Baron Kikuchi and his twin, Rabbi Lotmann, are very small men with very short legs. Legs that short, if not in a hurry, would cover distances sparingly and take some centuries to cross the world's largest continent from its western end to its eastern tip. So in conclusion, God's plan for the last two and half millennia has been to have His chosen people stationed at both extremities of Asia to see that nothing untoward occurs in the interior, which as we know has been a notorious birthplace for marauding tyrants throughout history. And those are the facts, in brief.

Well what do you think?

Maud smiled and filled both their glasses. She raised hers in a toast.

Chapeau, Munk.

Thank you, madame.

Before she moved to Athens in September, Maud saw the changes in Theresa. She couldn't believe it was really as bad as it appeared but in fact it was worse, as Sivi told her the next time they met, in Athens late in the spring of the following year.

She's coming apart, said the old man sadly. She just doesn't care about anything. Drugs and alcohol and practically any man who speaks to her on the street. She told me there were thirty-five last month and she didn't even know the names of most of them. Then she laughed and said they all had beards though.

Beards?

Yes, it's crazy. I don't know what that was supposed to mean, or whether it meant anything at all. But I didn't like the way she said it and that laugh was more a scream of desperation, just horrible to hear. But she won't let me help her, she says it's not my concern and there's nothing I can do. Well if it's not my concern, whose can it be? She doesn't have anyone else. Oh I tell you, Maud, I feel sick about it. It simply can't go on like this much longer. There has to be an end in sight or it will be all over for her. And she's so young, just a child.

Maud took his hand and agreed with him, not knowing the end was indeed in sight because a gunrunner named Stern, the man in Jerusalem who had told Munk where he could find Rabbi Lotmann, had recently arranged for O'Sullivan Beare to meet Sivi in Smyrna in September.

Sivi providing arms for Stern and Joe smuggling them. Sivi a secret patriot with his dreams of a greater Greece, his clandestine life unknown to Maud then and for many years. And Stern, the sad shabby gunrunner who would save Maud's life more than a decade later when she stood in despair beside the Bosporus in the rain, ready to give it all up at last, the past too much for her, ready to throw herself into the currents when night came.

Sivi, Theresa, Stern, Joe. Only a few months from then to be together in Smyrna when a raging massacre would break loose and change all their lives.

Leaving Stern a tormented man forever. Driving gentle Sivi into madness. Theresa's tortured visions in the fire and smoke of that terrible slaughter to be revealed so painfully to Joe when their time came, on the small lonely rooftop where he kept watch in the Old City.

Smyrna and Jerusalem. The profane and sacred cities one day to be inextricably entwined in Maud's memories.

-13-

O'Sullivan Beare

Signal night, he thought, quiet place for sure. Demanding night up here beneath the murmurs of heaven.

And there were other, quieter moments during the twelve-year poker game when one of the three friends would disappear for days or weeks to pursue his dream. Munk Szondi building a future Jewish homeland, Cairo Martyr on his quest for the black meteorite of Islam, O'Sullivan Beare pondering the enigmas of the lost Sinai Bible and his lost love as well, Maud, the woman who had abandoned him in Jericho in 1921, taking with her their infant son.

When those moods came over him Joe left Jerusalem and traveled down to Galilee where he kept his tiny seaplane, a Sopwith Camel.

Joe had won the Camel in a poker game during the great blizzard of '29. That spring he learned to fly the Camel and had a hangar built for it on the shores of the lake, and his first flight that spring became the pattern for all the subsequent ones.

Late in the evening he taxied out onto the still water. He pushed the engine to full power and the Camel broke free to rise above what had once been Beth Jarah or the Temple of the Moon, sped south above the Jordan down the sinking valley past Naharaim and Bethshean and Jabesh-gilead, past Jabbok and Adam and the Jungle of the Jordan where lions had once roared, above the little flowered house somewhere below that he and Maud had once known near Jericho, whose ancient name also spoke of a lunar god, between the Moabite hills and the Dead Sea along the slopes of Mt Nebo where Moses had seen the promised land that he would never enter, rising to speed above the wastes and reaching Aqaba, tracing the west coast of the gulf until the configuration of a promontory and a mountain told him the Sinai oasis was coming up beneath him.

There Joe landed the Camel and pulled it partway up on the sand. He took ashore a small wicker basket and a bottle marked with the cross of St John, dated A.D. 1122, and sat crosslegged under a palm tree eating fresh figs and drinking raw poteen, waiting for the last hours of night to pass and the sun's rays to rise above the mountains of Arabia, to warm the sands and glitter upon the waters where he had long ago spent a month with Maud.

Once he had a strange visitor in that remote spot, and the episode was so curious he wondered later if it might not have been a dream, a vision brought on by poteen and the dark loneliness of his mood.

In the very first light he had seen the figure, small and indistinct, coming out of the Sinai and moving in his direction. The minutes passed and the figure became an Arab, still striding directly toward him. He remembered being puzzled that the Arab had known he was there in the darkness, so complete in that last moonless hour before dawn that even the plane would have been invisible to anyone more than a few hundred yards away. Yet from the time he first saw the Arab, the man's line of march had never changed.

He came walking straight from the night toward Joe, straight from the vast black hills of the desert to the mound where Joe sat on the beach.

A gray light now lay on the sand. The Arab kept coming until he was no more than ten yards away, then stopped and smiled. The stave he carried was that of a shepherd. His cloak was tattered and he was barefoot, his head tied with an old rag, a poor man of indistinct age. Gesturing, smiling, he made friendly signs that Joe was to follow him.

And there was the dream, for Joe got to his feet. Why? He didn't know, it just seemed there was nothing else to do. There were more reassuring nods from the shepherd and Joe found himself trailing along behind the man, down the shore away from his plane.

After they had walked some distance down the sand the Arab stopped and handed Joe his stave. He smiled and pointed at the water. Joe took off his shoes and shirt and trousers and waded in up to his knees, holding the stave.

A sandbar ran along the coast there and after going fifty yards Joe was still only up to his waist. On the beach the Arab was still smiling and nodding and pointing farther out. Joe smiled and took a few more steps, the water now suddenly up to his chest. He had reached the end of the sandbar and the bottom was dropping sharply away.

An absurd thought came to him. What if the shepherd kept pointing to the east? How far would he have to swim? Across the Gulf of Aqaba to Arabia? Around Arabia to the Indian Ocean? From there to the Pacific?

Why? Where would it end? He might have to go on swimming forever. Swimming for the rest of his life until he finally reached the Aran Islands and died. And what would the bedouin think when they found a Sopwith Camel abandoned on the shores of the Sinai, near it a wicker basket containing fresh figs and a bottle of home-brewed Irish liquor dated A.D. 1122, bearing the cross of St John?

The Arab was suddenly shouting in excitement. Joe heard a frightened whine. He turned, the water now up to his chin.

He hadn't noticed it before. Off to his left beyond the end of the sandbar there was a small clump of rocks. The shepherd was gesturing wildly for him to swim over to the clump of rocks.

He began to swim. A terrified dog was huddled on the rocks. The shepherd was shouting and waving his arms and Joe understood. He pushed the stave toward the rocks and the dog leapt for it. He started back toward shore with the stave stretched out behind him, the dog swimming after it. When they reached land the Arab was beaming. Joe smiled and returned the stave. He picked up his clothes and together they walked back up the beach with the dog happily prancing at his master's heels.

Joe offered the shepherd a drink of poteen but the man sniffed it and politely refused. He pointed at the cross on the bottle and laughed. Solemnly, then, he put his hand on his heart and bowed his head before striding off in the direction from which he had come. On the top of the first ridge the shepherd turned and waved his stave in salute and exactly at that moment the new sun rose above the horizon and fell on the barefoot man.

The shepherd was gone. Joe sat down on the sand and watched the sun come up across the gulf, curiously wondering what manner of being could come striding out of the Sinai and have the wordless power, expressed only through smiles and gestures, to cause him to enter the sea without knowing or caring why he did so, even if it meant he might have to go on swimming forever.

The god of dawn? The god of light?

Strange presences, it seemed, on the shores of the Sinai where he and Maud had once known love.

It was late one afternoon in the autumn of 1933 when Cairo made his way through the still streets of the Armenian Quarter and knocked on the door that was Joe's address in the Old City. An elderly Armenian priest appeared. Cairo looked puzzled.

Were you looking for the Irishman? asked the priest gently.

Yes, said Cairo. I thought he lived here.

He does. You take those outside stairs to the left

Cairo thanked the priest and the door closed. He started up the winding stone stairs. Apparently the old house had been added to at different times, for the walls jutted out at irregular levels. The stairs twisted steeply around them and led up to a short stone bridge, an arch connecting the main structure with a smaller one behind it. Cairo crossed the bridge above a narrow courtyard, climbed a last flight of stairs and stopped. Now he was even more puzzled.

He had emerged on a roof and save for a small square shed at one end, low and windowless, there was nothing else there. He tried the door to the shed but it was locked Bewildered, he sat down on the low wall that enclosed the roof and gazed out over the Old City, lost in thought. He didn't know how many minutes had passed when he suddenly heard the soft familiar voice behind him.

Like the view then?

Cairo turned and broke into laughter at the sight. Joe was wearing the baking priest's shabby uniform from the Crimean War, flyer's goggles around his neck and a flyer's leather helmet. The goggles bounced on his Victoria Cross as he bounded up the last few steps and walked across the roof scratching his beard.

Here now, Cairo, what's so funny?

That outfit of yours. I never knew they had fighter pilots in the Crimean War.

Didn't you now. Well I don't think I did either until I was almost thirty. History can be a mystery when you're young. Were you looking for me then?

Not at all. Just roaming the roofs of the Old City in my spare time. You can't see as far up here as you can from the top of Cheops' pyramid, but there's more variety certainly. Where do you live by the way?

Here.

No, I believe an elderly Armenian priest lives here.

Ah, you met Father Zeno downstairs. A fine oul article that one, none better.

I'm sure.

Runs the library in the Armenian compound and also makes pottery. First a baking priest took me in, then a potting priest. Just seems to be how things go for me in Jerusalem. Care for a drink?

Fine. Where did you say you lived?

Joe shrugged. He walked over to the shed and unlocked the door. Cairo followed him and stood outside the door, gazing down at the narrow iron cot, the battered wooden footlocker, the small cracked mirror above a small table that held a basin and a pitcher, a bar of soap, a comb and a toothbrush and a towel neatly folded over a rack. A kerosene lamp hung on one wall beside a shelf of books. There was a crucifix above the head of the cot. The ceiling of the shed was so low Cairo wouldn't have been able to stand up inside, but of course he was much taller than Joe.

A cupboard sat on the floor and there was a little fireplace in one corner. Joe took a bottle and two glasses out of the cupboard and poured poteen. They went back to the wall around the roof and sat down.

Well here we go, Cairo lad, home-brewed and the best poteen in the Holy City by far. But don't go thinking I'm religious just because you saw that crucifix. It's a habit merely, kind of thing I grew up with.

Would you say the view is best to the north? I'm generally of that opinion.

Cairo nodded.

What's the meaning of that anyway?

Of what?

That peasant's hut. That monk's cell.

I don't know what you're talking about. It's where I live, there's no special meaning to it.

There isn't? When one of the richest men in Palestine lives like that?

Oh those schemes of mine, Christ they're nothing really. I was born a peasant you know so there's no reason why I shouldn't live like one.

Joe took off his leather helmet and goggles. He lit a cigarette and sipped from his glass. Cairo clasped one knee with both hands and leaned back, silent for a while, his eyes closed.

Do you cook in there too?

That I do. The very best stews to be found east of Ireland. Hearty and nourishing on a winter night.

What do you do for heat on a winter night?

A nice cozy turf fire, nothing like it.

I can imagine how cozy it is up here when there's a winter gale blowing down from the north.

Anyway, Cairo, aren't you richer than I am?

Probably.

And Munk too?

He might be if he didn't give it all away.

Sure and that's true, Munk's our very own idealist. Knew another man like that once, a man who had that kind of dream, a homeland for his people. But his people were Jews and Arabs and Christians all together, if you can imagine such a hopeless situation. Hated him at the time I did, but I was young then.

Anyway, I've nothing but affection for our dear Munk of the revolution and his three-level watch, time as time is at any hour of the day or night, fast or slow or not even there. And he'll make it too I think, Munk will. Hope so certainly. Be good to see someone who believes in more than money make it. But is that why you came dropping in today? To see if I was properly prepared for winter?

We were worried about you, Joe. Munk thought one of us should look in.

Nothing to worry about. I was just off with the Camel taking in the fine autumn sunsets.

Aqaba?

That's right.

For three whole weeks?

Was it that long now. Yes I guess it was. I was having a snort or two you see.

Drunk for three weeks, in other words.

Couldn't have been that long, I'm sure of that.

Yes you're right. It must have taken at least a sober day or two before you were steady enough to fly back.

It's not being unsteady exactly, that's not the problem, it's the danger of falling down that alarms you.

Who wants to take a terrible tumble? Not me. So you just daren't get in the plane at a time like that. You just have to sit still as still watching the water and holding on to yourself until things get right inside. Even walking is alarming. Dreadful feeling, the falling-down sickness.

Joe tried to smile but his face was sad and weary. He emptied his glass and lit another cigarette.

There's a pome, he said, that describes my last three weeks and it goes like this.

When things go wrong and will not come right,

Though you do the best you can,

When life looks black as the hour of night —

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

Like it, Cairo? Has a ring to it I say, a touch of majesty, and it'll live as long as the tongue is spoken. But since we don't have any plain on the premises, I think I'll just help myself to another glass of this most friendly drink that looks like water, yet is far friendlier than that. Care to join me?

No thanks. It's a little raw for me.

Guess it would be. Guess you have to be born to the stuff. But it can help all right when you're feeling like last winter's turf fire, all cold gray lumps and ashes. Well I'll just be helping myself now.

Cairo squinted at his hands as Joe went inside to fill his glass. Behind him he heard a beating of wings, a pigeon alighting on a little roof just below them. There were two small wooden shelters on the lower roof.

A short ladder led to it.

You keep pigeons, Joe?

For company don't you know. After he eats he'll sleep, so will the others when they arrive. They'll be tired certainly.

Where are they coming from?

Joe shrugged. Aqaba, I suppose.

You take them down there with you?

It's company, and then when I'm getting ready to leave I give them a wave and tell them they can go anywhere they want. Amazing, isn't it, how they can fly all the way back from the Sinai to find a little roof like this? One tiny roof in Jerusalem when they've got the whole world to choose from? Makes you think about home and wonder where it is.

Joe went down the ladder and put out some grain for the pigeons. Cairo was standing outside the door of the shack, gazing at the crucifix, when Joe came back and sat down.

I just knew you'd be going and thinking I was religious when Christ it's just not the truth. Why are you thinking that anyway?

Cairo nodded. He put his hand on Joe's shoulder.

Say, what's the hand for? Am I in need of support or something? Do I look like the falling-down sickness is on me again?

Joe, why don't you tell me about her?

Who?

The woman you went to Aqaba with once. It was when you first came to Jerusalem, wasn't it?

Yes.

Well?

Well I met her here.

Where?

Here. The Old City.

Where exactly?

In a church.

What church?

A church that's all, what's it matter.

Say it, Joe.

Oh all right, my God, it was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I'd been in Jerusalem only a few weeks after spending four years on the run in the mountains of Cork never talking to a soul, and before that nothing but the Dublin post office which we held for a couple of days, and before that just a boy in the Aran Islands. Well that's where we met and she didn't say a word then, she just did this thing in the crypt of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I mean I'd never done a thing with a woman before, not one thing.

Will you understand?

Yes.

All right, so we met, me just out of four years on the run in the bogs fighting the English, cold and wet all the time and sinking up to my knees with every soggy step, and then this woman and I went off to the desert. Haj Harun suggested that. It was spring and Haj Harun said spring was the time for the desert, the flowers were blooming and they only had a couple of weeks before they all died. Well bless his bones, bless the oul article for telling me that because we did go, we went to Aqaba and down the coast of the gulf and we found a tiny deserted oasis and the two of us were alone there, the Sinai red on one side and the gulf blue on the other and the sand so hot and the water so cooling and arak to drink and fresh figs to eat and other than that just nights and days that had no end or beginning. Do you see, Cairo?

A month we were there and I was just twenty years old and I'd never known there could be sun like that and sky like that and nights and days like that. By God, just never knew it, do you see?

Yes.

Well it turned out I didn't know her. After we came back here it wasn't the same and it got worse, me not understanding any of it, and finally she left our little house in Jericho where we'd gone for the winter, taking our baby son with her, I was away and never even saw the lad, had to go to the midwife to find out it was a boy. So that's all there is and that's enough. Twelve and a half years ago she left me and that's how I got into our bloody poker game, by God that's how. Money and power I wanted after that.

What else is there?

Yet you keep going back to Aqaba.

I do, surely I do, and I also go back to the crypt in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Just go back and back for no reason. Makes me tired, going back. Makes me dreadfully tired, Cairo.

Wasn't there ever another woman after that?

Yes, one only, Theresa's her name. And it's strange because Munk knew her before I did. They were together once.

Who was she? Who is she?

Yes, there's that difference all right. When Munk knew her in Smyrna she was young and carefree, and when I knew her in Smyrna she was still young but she was going mad. And here, well here she's something else, Joe looked down at his feet. He tipped his glass.

Now she lives downstairs, he said softly. She lives with Father Zeno. He takes care of her and protects her and keeps anyone from seeing her because of what she has. Good man that he is, he protects her because of that, so the world won't flock and gape at her and make her miserable.

Because of what?

The stigmata. She has a stigmata. I've seen it, and besides him I'm the only person in the world who has.

The sky was brilliant with stars that autumn night above the roof in the Armenian Quarter where Joe sat with Cairo turning over the years amidst the domes and spires and minarets of the Old City, the shadows of the Judean wastes dropping away into blackness.

Theresa?

There was the one who'd been Munk's lover in Smyrna after the First World War, and there was the other Theresa whom Joe had seen during the massacres at Smyrna in 1922, shrieking and beating her head on the floor in the frenzy of her torment.

Smyrna?

Joe had gone there for a man named Stern. He was running guns for Stern then and there was a man Stern had wanted him to meet in Smyrna, an elderly Greek who provided Stern with guns, so that Joe could deal with him directly. The Greek's name was Sivi, Theresa was his secretary. That was in 1922, September. Joe had taken Haj Harun with him.

But there had never been time to discuss their business in Smyrna, Stern's cause and Sivi's cause and Joe running guns from one to the other. The massacre had begun on a Sunday in September and there was nothing but slaughter and fire as the Turks butchered Armenians and Greeks. Joe and Haj Harun had gone to the address they'd been given, Sivi's villa on the harbor, and there they found Stern and Theresa trying to drag Sivi to safety, the old man bleeding from a head wound and raving incoherently, having been beaten by the Turkish soldiers who were inside his house, looting and setting fires.

Stern and Joe managed to carry the old man away. Theresa was still calm but later she too collapsed and began raving. And the slaughter went on as the city went up in flames, and Joe shot a Turkish soldier who attacked them, and Haj Harun killed a blinded old Armenian who was burning to death, and Stern slit the throat of a little Armenian girl who was dying in unbearable pain. Screams and smoke in the alleys of Smyrna, screams and death everywhere in that nightmare on the waterfront.

They all managed to escape. Joe was finished with Stern after that and told him so. Never another rifle smuggled for anyone, not for any cause, no cause was worth the slaughter.

Sivi?

He'd gone mad during the massacres.

Theresa?

Joe didn't know what had happened to her after Smyrna. Having broken with Stern, he lost touch with all of them except for Haj Harun. But Munk also knew Stern, as it turned out, and later Joe learned from him that Stern was still running guns and Sivi had never recovered his sanity. Of Theresa, however, Munk knew nothing. She'd simply disappeared.

For a year. Until she came to visit Joe on his roof a little over a year after Smyrna, on a clear evening early in November. November 5, to be exact. In Theresa's tortured mind there was a reason for the date, as Joe eventually discovered.

He didn't know why she'd sought him out, nor did he ask her. She'd brought a bottle of cognac with her and they sat here where he and Cairo were sitting now, having a drink and talking and neither one of them mentioning Smyrna. It was as if they'd met once pleasantly somewhere, chance acquaintances together again, who knew? A clear night with cognac and stars and stray sounds drifting up from the alleys.

To Joe it seemed better for them not to have a past that night. Not their past. Not the horrible hours they had known together in Smyrna. Better to have another drink and listen to the murmurs of the Old City, which never quite slept.

Time passed, they made love. It had been Theresa's doing but afterward she sat up in bed crying hysterically. Joe thought she was drunk. He tried to quiet her but she was screaming so wildly he had to slap her and slap her a second time, a third time before she stopped. She began talking feverishly then and her voice was terrible to hear.

She was evil, she said. For a year before Joe had met her she'd been sleeping with every man she could find in Smyrna who had a beard. Because she was obsessed with Christ, she said, laughing hysterically.

Because she was obsessed with finding Christ and all she could remember from the paintings in the convent school of her youth was that Christ had a beard. A beard. I've lost His face, shrieked Theresa, laughing hysterically.

Well none of those men in Smyrna had been Christ, she said. Until in the flames and the smoke of the massacres she'd seen a vision, and that's when she'd collapsed. She'd seen Joe standing over her with his beard and his burning eyes, the fires of Smyrna burning in his eyes, and she thought she'd found a face for Christ at last and that's why she'd come to him tonight. To make love with him, to use him to fulfill her twisted vision.

And how do you like that? she screamed. How do you like that?

Joe moaned.

Let it go, he whispered sadly. Let it go.

But she wouldn't. She kept on screaming and taunting him until finally he could stand it no longer and in another moment he was screaming too, calling her wicked, saying she was evil, shouting that she was damned forever. Damned forever.

Theresa heard those words and suddenly she was sober, her face grave. She looked up at him.

I am damned forever, she said simply. And then all at once she was a small naked woman huddled on his narrow iron cot, cowering and terrified and whispering naked words, terrible naked words.

Normandy. The château where Theresa and her brother had been born. Their father, a count, was a fanatically religious man, their mother a plain and quiet woman. Theresa would one day look like her.

A whore, shouted their father. That's what you were when I saved you.

Little Theresa and her brother crouching in a corner hearing the same dreadful words shouted over and over, their mother with a bowed head never saying anything. Then their mother began to stay in bed all day, and in the kitchen they heard the servants whispering of opium.

Their father dismissed the servants from the château. He told his children his shame before God was too great to allow anyone to see their mother in such a condition. They would live alone in the château and pray for her redemption, which would come if they prayed hard enough.

But it didn't come. Instead the children were out playing one afternoon when they heard pounding in a tool shed. They peeked inside. A cross made out of old lumber was leaning against the wall. Their father was nailing their mother to it.

They threw themselves at him and he knocked them down. They attacked him again and he drove them off with a hammer. They ran across the fields to the nearest neighbor, a curate, who ran back with them.

Their father was sitting at the foot of the cross, weeping. Their mother's head had fallen. She had already suffocated.

The curate went to his bishop and it was decided the scandal had to be suppressed because of its religious nature. The bishop made arrangements with a magistrate and it was agreed the count shouldn't be sent away for fear he might talk about what he had done. He would remain in the château and the curate would move in to live there. The children were made to place their hands on a crucifix and swear under threat of eternal damnation never to say anything about what they had seen. A certificate of death by natural causes was issued for their mother.

The curate moved into the château. Theresa and her brother almost never saw their father, who went to church seven times a day with the curate, observing the canonical hours. Other than that, obeying the curate's orders, he stayed in his rooms.

Their father did penance but no one knew he had carried his fasting to the point of giving up food almost entirely. For sustenance he had turned to raw Calvados, and over the years the small amounts of wood alcohol in the Calvados slowly ate away his brain.

The sudden outburst of submerged decay occurred five years later in the family chapel on the anniversary of the murder, at the special mass performed each year by the bishop for their mother. During the final benediction the emaciated old count shrieked and suddenly rushed forward. Before anyone could stop him he had climbed up on the altar. His arms were open to the crucifix on the wall and the words he screamed were those of the leper on the shores of Galilee.

Lord, if thou will thou can make me clean.

He leapt to embrace the crucifix and missed it, crashing through a window at the side and shattering the richly stained colors that had depicted a garden below Jerusalem, and the meeting there of two kinswomen who would one day know sorrow, Mary and Elizabeth.

The window was gone, the old count's throat was severed, the chapel was rendered into the silence of its candles.

Theresa and her brother returned to the chateau and went on living as they always had, alone with each other in a private world, secluded in their love. And gradually under those gray skies of Normandy, far from the black twisted roots of the past, there was born within them the dream of another and timeless land by the Nile where the blue heavens were unbroken and the distant horizons limitless, an ancient dream of an eternal pharaoh wed to his eternal sister.

One day Theresa threw herself down the stairs. Her brother carried her to her room and that night he went out into the drenched forest to dig deeply the grave of their hopeless love in the loose stinking earth, there to bury the tiny bundle of unborn flesh wrapped by Theresa in her own Confirmation dress, once spotlessly white and flowing and now bloodied to the ends of its delicate lace, soon to rot in the undergrowth of fallen vines and blind nibbling creatures.

That winter the howling winds of trapped memory had come to haunt her brother. In the tool shed where their mother had been crucified he soaked himself with kerosene and struck a match.

And so at the age of nineteen Theresa had left everything behind and fled south to the Mediterranean, by chance to beautiful Smyrna where kindly Sivi had taken her in and where she had known a few peaceful years because of him, only to find the horrors of the past were inescapable, abandoning herself then to her sins and spiraling downward in a life of degradation.

Until a terrible massacre descended on Smyrna and Sivi was raving in pain, and a wizened ageless man abruptly appeared to defend them, an apparition in a rusty helmet and a faded yellow cloak, trailing a long sword.

Who is that? she had screamed, and a soft Irish voice had whispered near her that it was all right, the old man thought he was the archangel Gabriel now, come to smote God's enemies.

She had turned. She had looked up and seen a small dark man standing over her, a man with the beard and the burning eyes from the paintings on the convent walls of her childhood.

Christ in the gloom and smoke with a pistol in his belt. Christ in the fires of Smyrna.

Dawn had come to the roof in the Old City by the time Theresa had finished speaking. Joe stroked her head and wrapped another blanket around her naked body. She had refused to dress until she had told him everything. He rose and went to the door, leaving her sitting on the narrow iron cot. He opened the door and stood there gazing north in the gray light.

Joe?

Yes.

I've never told anyone before. Never. Do you mind my having told you?

No, he said sadly. No. It's better to tell someone.

Joe? That stained-glass window in Normandy? The garden beneath Jerusalem where Mary went to meet Elizabeth?

His shoulders suddenly sagged in the doorway. He leaned against the wood and sighed.

Yes I know it, Ein Karem. I've been to the village. And yesterday was St Elizabeth's feast day. You chose that day to come here, to come to me. Why?

Because that's where I've been living, Joe. Since Smyrna, for the whole last year, that's where I've been.

There's a leper colony there and I've been working in it. Joe? Please? These hands that held you last night wash lepers. Wash lepers. They're not good enough for anything else. Joe? Could you forgive me for what I've done in life? I know God never will, but could you? I've been wretched for so long, and I know I don't even have the right to walk in these streets where He came to suffer and die for us.

Yesterday evening when I entered the gate I thought I'd be struck dead. But I had to come and tell someone here and you're the only person I dared to speak to, because you've never really known me.

I've been terrified of Jerusalem for so long, Joe, you can't imagine, no one can. And I'm weak and I've done one awful thing after another in life, and I've suffered for it, but that was why I went to Ein Karem.

To be near Jerusalem, to be able to look up at it, the Holy City that will never be mine. Oh Joe, please? I know what I did to you last night was horrible, but if you say you'll forgive me I'll go away and you'll never see me again, I swear it. I'll go away and never bother you again, Joe. Only here, now, just once let me be forgiven here. Just once. Please?

He stood in the doorway. The new sun was touching the domes and the spires and the minarets with gold. The tears were running down his face and his voice was choked.

Yes, little Theresa, poor tormented little one. Of course I forgive you.

With His words, Joe? Could you please? I'll go and you'll never see me again. In His city? Please?

Joe nodded. They weren't his words to give but he repeated them anyway because there was no one else to speak them, no one else to utter the healing words. So he looked at the floor and whispered what Christ had said to the woman in the house of the Pharisee.

Thy sins are forgiven, thy faith hath saved thee. Go in peace.

A scream, an almost silent scream that cut through him with all the pain of Smyrna. Joe looked up, he looked at the bed. Theresa was sitting with her hands up in front of her, staring at them and screaming silently.

Joe stared too. Punctures had appeared in, her palms. Christ's wounds. She was beginning to bleed.

Joe got up from the wall and paced back and forth.

I don't know how long I stood there, Cairo, right there in that doorway. It seemed forever. And she didn't move either. She sat there naked on the bed with the blankets falling open, her hands in front of her, staring, watching the wounds form, watching the blood come out, both of us watching it happen, not believing it and watching it happen. I don't even remember whether either of us spoke after that or how I got her down to Father Zeno or why, but I did.

She was in some kind of shock and I wasn't much better. He bandaged her and put her to bed and prayed beside her all day and all night. He asked me not to say anything about it and of course I wouldn't have anyway, we were both pretending it might have been anything.

But it wasn't, Cairo. It wasn't anything. The wounds went away in a few days but they came back the next month and the month after that, and they have ever since. Ever since that night we made love in there ten years ago.

What does Father Zeno say?

Only that he hears her confession and I'm to tell no one what she said that night. She never goes out anymore, she prefers it that way. She has a room down there somewhere, I don't know where, and she keeps to it most of the time, and after the wounds come she doesn't see anyone, not even Father Zeno. I respect him. What he's doing is best for her.

Do you see her?

Never.

Would you like to?

I don't know. I did the first three or four months she was there. She seemed to want it, to need it. We wouldn't do much, hardly even talk, just sit together in the courtyard in the evening. But then one evening Father Zeno met me and said she couldn't see me then and it would be better if I didn't come anymore.

Did he say why?

No.

Did you ask him?

No.

Cairo nodded. Joe sat down again. The moon was gone now and the domes and spires and minarets of the Old City were waning in the soft starry glow of midnight.

You know, said Joe, I don't think I'm going to be in the game much longer.

How's that?

I'm not sure, but it's been almost twelve years now, hasn't it. Twelve years in December.

The last day of December, said Cairo. You were sitting in that coffee shop feeling bitter because you were a few months away from your twenty-second birthday and already eighty-five years old, and I came in with Bongo to get out of the wind, and then Munk turned up with his samurai bow and his three-level watch, and that's when it all began. A cold winter day with snow definitely in the air.

Yes. You know I was doing some thinking when I was down in Aqaba this time. Thinking it might be time to move on. Thinking that what I've been telling myself I wanted for the last dozen years, well maybe it's not what I want at all.

Joe waved his arm toward the city.

The things that happen here, what can you say about them? They happen, that's all. Have you ever heard of something called the Sinai Bible?

What is it?

Well it's supposed to be the original Bible. Supposedly it was written three thousand years ago, more or less.

Cairo smiled.

And how's that possible?

Who knows? Who knows what's possible around here? Not me, I don't, I'm just a poor fisherman's son from the Aran Islands, a windswept place and barren and nowhere, so poor that God didn't even put any soil on them. We had to make it out of seaweed and manure. Well the point is the Sinai Bible is buried near here.

How did you learn about this Sinai Bible?

Oh I've been hearing about it since I arrived in Jerusalem. It's the kind of thing that will fascinate me every time. And you can pick up clues when you're looking for them.

Joe laughed.

Ah and I was innocent when I first got here. I actually believed then that this Bible was something Haj Harun had written. I heard about it and got it wrong, and Haj Harun confused me more, and off I was just spinning like a top around the idea of a Sinai Bible. You know what Haj Harun likes to call it when he's mixing up the ages? The story of my life. But of course it could be, depending on your point of view. It could be that as well as anything else. After all that's about how long he's lived, three thousand years or so. So why shouldn't he think the original Bible is the story of his life?

It's a nice way to look at it, said Cairo.

Yes. Anyway, after a time I learned that such a Bible actually had been found in the last century, in the Sinai I guess, that's why it has that name. A Trappist monk found it, but that's all I know about him, and he was so appalled by its chaos he decided to forge a new original and let it be found, then buried the real original here in Jerusalem, the Holy City don't you see. Well he did that and the fake original was acquired by the czar in the last century, and just this year the Bolsheviks sold it to the British Museum for a hundred thousand pounds. So how's that for a saga and a half? But the real one, the real one's still here.

Where?

Right here, somewhere in the Armenian Quarter. Buried in a basement hole.

And that's why you wanted to live here? You moved in to be close to it because you wanted to find it?

I did, I mightily did, but now I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure I really want to see what's in it. Something along those lines, I just don't know anymore. Maybe it'd be better to leave it alone. Better to think of it as the story of Haj Harun's life, and remind myself that I've been fortunate enough to have been able to keep the old man company these dozen and one years, better just to let it go at that. There are more than enough mysteries in his life to think about, certainly more than enough for me, so why go on looking?

Why? asked Cairo.

Joe smiled.

Well there you are. I don't think I will. I think it's time for me to give up the seeking and the search for lost treasure and go take my ease in the west, Holy City West, wherever that might be. It's time to become Chief Sipping Bear at home in the setting sun.

Are we to be treated to a Zuni sun dance now?

Go on with you, Cairo. We're hours away from sunup and any dance of that nature could only be a failure at this hour. No, there are other matters before us. Now that it's midnight and a little more we have to hear from a very important spokesman who goes by the name of Finn MacCool.

Joe cupped his hands around his mouth and pretended to shout out over the rooftops.

Hey Finnnnn, he whispered, we're right here in Jerusalem. Lend us a hand if you will.

Do you think he heard me? whispered Joe. I was aiming in a generally western direction but I don't know how well my voice is carrying tonight. What do you think?

Cairo laughed.

He heard you, definitely. And I take it he's some tribal god native to the bogs of Ireland?

Now why would you be guessing as wildly as that? Well as a matter of fact that's just what he is, a great strong giant of a man whose favorite pastime on nights like these is telling stories. In fact he's got so many stories to tell, most of them about himself, that he never runs out of them. He's been doing it for ages already and it looks like he just might go on doing it to the end of time. Now back home when you want Finn to tell you a story you say, Please relate. Will you do so?

What?

What you're doing, Cairo. I've noticed you might be getting tired of the game yourself. The signs are there and of course with my keen eye, I wouldn't be missing them would I. Why the poker game for you originally? Why did you want control of Jerusalem? Please relate.

It is true that I will not.

Joe laughed.

Ah Cairo, there you go using my very homespun English, bad as it is and getting no better. But with that accent of yours you'll never be taken for an Irishman, not even in Africa. Your tone is too aristocratic by half. Well then, will you relate?

I'll compromise with you, Joe. I'll go so far as to tell the tale the way your Finn MacCool might Which is to say?

Stretched and distorted and made outrageous.

Fine, very fine. That's tale-telling for sure and nothing could be more accurate anyway. So please to begin. And as you do I think I'll just be taking a shade more of this drink that looks like water but definitely isn't, is definitely not.

That won't help at this hour of night.

You're right, Cairo, it won't, it surely will not. Makes a good man old before his time and a bad man young before he's ready, a curse on the race and that's a fact. But if it's any help to you I have some of that other stuff here for a smoke, and maybe you'll be wanting a puff or two before the night's out. Well maybe you will so I'll just lay the pipe and the mixings beside you in case you feel the urge sneaking up in the darkness, a late evening in the Holy City being no time to exert yourself unduly. Now, you're the African Finn MacCool you say?

I wasn't aware of saying that.

Ah come on, Cairo. After all these years of us playing poker together, how could you possibly mislay your name? I've always known you weren't in the game for money, something else has been up. What's the deed?

It was going to be Jerusalem first, then Mecca.

Has a ring to it all right. What in Mecca?

The Holy of Holies.

Ah.

The black meteorite.

Ah.

You may not know it, but that black meteorite is the most sacred object in Islam. It's in the Kaaba. I was going to steal it and take it to Africa and bury it in good rich African soil. Black soil. Where no one would ever find it

Why?

Cairo grew somber then. He described Jidda, for centuries the great depot of the slave trade, and how many of the African children who arrived there had already walked more than twelve hundred miles to reach the Arab ferries on the other side of the Red Sea.

He described the small wells he had seen across the Sahara, surrounded for miles with dry bleached bones, the skeletons of slaves who hadn't survived the forced marches of their Arab owners. And although the footprints of the slaves had fled where the earth was hard, straight deep troughs still ran from horizon to horizon to show where the countless slave caravans had passed century after century in the desert, grooves once cut by lumbering camels laden with Arab slavers and their tents and their food and their water, for them, not for those who stumbled starving in the dust behind them.

Joe listened to it all in silence. And not for the first time he felt the enormous sadness that was in Cairo, a sadness that would have seemed unbearable to Joe had it not been for Cairo's great strength. Cairo with his brilliant smile, Cairo who laughed so warmly, his huge hands so gentle when he reached out and laid them upon you, when he embraced you in greeting and simply lifted you up off the ground in his exuberance, tenderly, gently, with the natural ease of a man picking up his child. Indomitable in the end.

There was no other way to see him.

So Joe listened in silence, and after a time Cairo broke through his somber mood.

Anger now, Cairo?

There was.

Vengeance too?

There was.

Well by God, I can see how you've been able to bet all these years without looking at your cards. It's there in the very name you bear.

Given to me by my great-grandmother, a slave from the Sudan. I was going to do it for her and all my people, to repay the Arabs for the black gold they've carried out of Africa over the centuries.

But now you're not so sure that's what you want to be doing?

No. Somehow my passion has been spent along the way. Building something would be better. Perhaps it's because of the game. Perhaps I learned that there.

From our Munk?

From Munk, yes.

I know what you mean. But here now, what's this? Do I see you filling that pipe and preparing a smoke?

You do.

Curious. Never understood the stuff myself. Why would anyone want to bother with that when there's genuine poteen on the premises? A mystery to me, one more among the many. But since we find ourselves taking our ease in our different ways, shouldn't we be talking about our futures? You know how Munk does nothing but deal in futures. Well what about us? Isn't it time we did a little dealing in that line ourselves?

Cairo smiled. Time, he said.

Right. How's that stuff taste by the way?

Good.

Now that's odd, it is. That's exactly how this tastes and poteen is nothing like that at all.

It was dawn before Cairo and Joe embraced on the roof and Cairo made his way across the little stone bridge and down the twisting stone stairs to the street, quiet at that early hour but not deserted, the beggars and madmen and pious fanatics of the Old City already out pursuing their vocations as they had been for millennia.

Cairo walked slowly through the alleys toward the bazaar, thinking he might have something to eat. Soon he would be going back to Africa, he knew that now. He and Joe had talked away the night making their plans, deciding that December 31 would be the appropriate time to play their last hand with Munk, the twelfth anniversary of the game. They had also agreed to make it a surprise to Munk, what they were going to do on that last hand.

But would Munk be surprised? wondered Cairo.

Probably not. They all knew each other too well by now.

Dawn after a long autumn night. Ten years, thought Cairo, after Joe and Theresa had spent their hours of darkness and light together on a rooftop in Jerusalem, and conceived a child.

Did Joe know?

Cairo nodded. Of course Joe knew. No one had told him but he knew. He had admitted as much when describing how Father Zeno had told him that it would be better if he didn't come to see Theresa anymore.

Did he say why? Cairo had asked.

No, answered Joe.

Did you ask him?

No, answered Joe.

And so Joe had known it all these years, a secret borne for the sake of others and never to be spoken, until last night when he had finally shared it with a friend, finally, in his weariness after returning yet again from Aqaba.

And where, wondered Cairo, would Father Zeno have placed the child? With a family? In a foundling home?

In any case, not a religious home. That much was certain. From what Joe had said about Father Zeno, Cairo knew that the gentle old priest would never have presumed to choose a faith for the child. Thus no one but he would ever know who the child really was. Cairo was sure of that.

Father Zeno would have made the arrangements very carefully and the secret would die with him. And somewhere in Jerusalem, or in an encampment near it, a child would grow up not knowing he or she had been born to Christ and Mary Magdalene.

Cairo paused in front of a blind beggar and dropped a copper coin in his cup. Ever since that spring when he had come down the Nile to find the lid on top of Menelik Ziwar's massive sarcophagus, the crinkled smiling face gone, he had never once passed a beggar without giving him something, his way of recalling the kindness an old man had once shown to a frightened twelve-year-old boy, illiterate and without any skills, who had suddenly found himself alone in the world.

The elderly blind man whispered his thanks and Cairo moved on.

Only to stop a few yards away and look back. For a long moment he gazed at the beggar where he sat on the worn stones in the dust, then he retraced his steps and placed three gold coins, one after the other, in the beggar's scarred hand. The beggar heard the coins ring and his blind eyes turned upward. He murmured in disbelief.

Gold?

Yes. I would like you to say a prayer for a child, if you will.

With all my heart. Tell me the name of the child and I will pray.

I don't know the name and I've never seen the child. Or perhaps I have seen the child and don't know it.

In this I am as blind as you.

And so are we all, murmured the beggar. But God knows the names that are and will be for all of us, and I will pray and He will hear my prayer.

Cairo nodded. He placed his hand lightly on the beggar's shoulder and held it there, then turned and entered the bazaar, now raucously coming to life amidst the cries of merchants and thieves hawking their endless goods and trickeries.

But there was yet another secret in that house in the Armenian compound next to the cathedral of St James, unknown even to Father Zeno, a secret Joe had discovered some years after seeking refuge there in 1921, when the old priest had given him the rooftop home where he had learned to dream his Jerusalem dreams.

Early in the nineteenth century, it seemed, a young beggar had turned up at the house one blustery winter night, asking for shelter. The beggar was entirely naked, lacking even a loincloth. He had pretended to be an Armenian although the priest who received him knew he was not. He was given clothes and a blanket and shown to a room.

The next morning the beggar made a proposition. If he were allowed to live in the cellar of the house for the rest of the winter, he would carry out slops and do other menial tasks around the compound. This offer was accepted as an act of charity.

It immediately became apparent the stranger was no ordinary man. Before descending into the cellar that night he explained in a humble yet determined voice that he was under strict self-imposed vows of poverty, celibacy and silence. Save for the omitted vow of obedience, in fact, he might well have been a secret Trappist on some solitary mission.

The priest in the house was skeptical at first, but not when he found the stranger had abandoned the cellar for the even greater deprivation and privacy of a dark basement hole beneath it. Here indeed, then, was one of those anchorites who appeared from time to time in Jerusalem to pursue some personal religious tack in isolation.

The anchorite never spoke again to anyone's knowledge. For the next twelve years he lived in his basement hole beneath the cellar of the house, performing his lowly duties around the compound and coming and going on occasion, but spending most of his time alone in his subterranean cell.

Or so it was assumed. Actually the cellar above his basement hole also had a small entrance that opened directly onto an alley outside the compound, so it would have been possible for him to leave without being witnessed by the priests. And in fact there were years when he wasn't seen by any of them for long periods. Because of the extreme austerity of the anchorite's existence, the priests, with affectionate humor, had come to refer to him among themselves as Brother Zeno, after the founder of Stoicism.

Then in 1836, or when the anchorite appeared to be about thirty, he walked out of the compound one morning with his open hand raised in the sign of peace, turned south at the gate without a word, and was never seen again.

His abrupt disappearance caused the priests in the compound to ponder the significance of this enigmatic man who had lived near the cathedral for twelve years. Now they spoke of Brother Zeno with awe, rather than mild humor. Where had he gone and why? What new role had he sought for himself?

In the course of the nineteenth century the account gradually acquired the dimensions of a fable around the cathedral of St James. Somehow the priests who later arrived at the Armenian compound found it immensely appealing that an anonymous man of unknown origins, and unknown destiny, had once lived in a basement hole beneath the stones where they walked, oblivious to the strictures of any church yet living the strictest of lives according to the tenets of an unspoken vocation.

The fable was so appealing it became a tradition for the most respected priest in the compound to be assigned as his residence the house that gave access to the basement hole, and to be known thereafter among the other priests as Father Zeno, in memory of that dedicated man who had mysteriously appeared there early in the nineteenth century, and just as mysteriously disappeared a dozen years later.

The present Father Zeno had received this honor in 1914 at the age of seventy-nine.

And I think what most engages our imagination, he had said to Joe, is precisely the puzzle of that man's disappearance. We here have all openly professed the vows of our vocation. Because of them we have taken our respective places in life, and so we continue in orderly lives of service and prayer until our time on earth passes. But him? What was his vocation? What had he sworn to do and where did he go? Are there callings that can never be revealed to others? And then lingering behind the mystery there is always the question of the man's apparent age when he left here, which was Christ's age when He set out on His ministry. Does it have a meaning?

Father Zeno smiled his gentle smile.

A priest may wonder about such things. Here in Jerusalem where we keep watch and bear witness to His sacrifice, we may wonder.

I can understand that, said Joe. It's a strange and haunting tale.

And then putting together everything he had learned about the life of the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins, which was more than he had ever admitted to Cairo or anyone else, the dates and disappearances of that pious Albanian Trappist who had left his order and gone into the Sinai to forge the original Bible, Joe leaned forward and asked his question.

What do they say Brother Zeno did in that basement hole for twelve years? Is it known?

It's assumed he was in prayer, but other than that, no. Out of respect for his privacy none of the priests ever visited him down there.

Yes of course. And did he ever have someone from outside the compound visit him?

Father Zeno looked surprised.

Why do you ask that?

No reason really. I just wondered.

Well that's odd because he did, as it happens. A minor fact but recorded, I suppose, because the visits were so rare. About once a year, according to tradition. And also because the priests at that time wondered what could possibly have gone on during those visits, in view of his vow of silence.

Perhaps he and his visitor didn't need words. Is anything remembered about the other man?

The comment's vague. He's described only as very old.

An Arab?

Now Father Zeno looked shocked.

Yes, he whispered.

The man's dress, is anything said about it?

There's one obscure reference that he wore a faded yellow cloak. Why? Does it mean anything? You can't imagine how much this interests all of us here. If we only knew more. If only I knew more.

Father Zeno clasped his hands. He lowered his eyes.

Forgive me, that was uncalled for. I didn't mean to act like a child with his first puzzle. There's much we don't know in this world and much we can never know, and it's the same for all of us. For you, for me, for all of us.

Thus Father Zeno had lowered his eyes in humility, and in humility he had laid aside the questions whose answers seemed unknowable. And Joe had learned that among the people Haj Harun visited on his yearly rounds in the Holy City, along with the nameless cobbler near Damascus Gate whose cubbyhole Haj Harun could never find, along with the nameless muttering man who ceaselessly paced back and forth on the steps to the crypt in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, along with them there had once been a pious linguistic genius with whom Haj Harun had conversed in Aramaic, the language spoken in Palestine two and three thousand years ago.

The last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins perfecting his skills for twelve years in a basement hole in Jerusalem, teaching himself to write with both hands because he knew the task facing him in a Sinai cave would otherwise surpass any man's endurance. Preparing himself for the creation to come, the most spectacular forgery in history.

So here beneath the rooftop home where Joe had learned to dream his Jerusalem dreams, right here in a basement hole below, lay buried the original manuscript Wallenstein had brought back from the Sinai after completing his forgery of it, that fabulous creation that had been sought by so many, a document that was unchronicled and circular and calmly contradictory, suggesting infinity, the real Sinai Bible.

Behind him his pigeons were trilling quietly as they fell asleep one after the other. Lying flat on his stomach under the stars, on the little stone bridge that led to his rooftop, Joe held his breath and peeked over the edge of the bridge, down at the narrow courtyard where a single lamp was burning, Father Zeno was at his potter's wheel and in front of him in the soft yellow light, sitting on the ground, watching, was Theresa.

Father, she whispered, it's coming again.

Watch the wheel, my child. Watch it turn.

But I'm frightened. I'm always so frightened when it comes.

Keep your eyes here, my child. We're almost finished and then we'll go in and pray together and all will be well.

Joe rolled silently over on his back and gazed up at the sky, listening to the rub and the squeak of the potter's wheel raising its vessel, the echoless rising whirl of the wheel.

Bless our little Theresa, he thought, little one that she is.

A night seemingly like so many others. Father Zeno tending his wheel and Theresa her sainthood, and above them on rooftops, Joe, a silent witness with his sleeping pigeons, minding the dreams of new stars over Jerusalem.

Signal night, he thought, quiet place for sure. Demanding night up here beneath the murmurs of heaven.

-14-

Stern

And if God turns out to be a gunrunner crossing the desert in a balloon in 1914?

Christmas Eve, 1933.

Joe sat in a filthy Arab coffee shop near Damascus Gate, slumped over an empty glass of Arab cognac.

Wisps of snow blew across the windows and the wind groaned in the alleys. Only one other customer was there at that hour, an Arab laborer asleep at a front table with a newspaper over his face.

The door opened and a large shapeless man came in. He stood for a moment with his back to the door and then came shuffling heavily across the room. Joe stood up and put out his hand.

Hello, Stern.

The Arab under the newspaper stirred briefly and began to snore again. A clock on the wall clicked in the stillness. The unshaven proprietor, moving unevenly from the effects of hashish, brought the cognacs and coffee Stern had ordered. After greeting each other the two men sat for a time watching the snow dance across the windows. Joe was the first to speak.

Snow. Just like the last time. And the same night and the same place, only now it's twelve years later.

You know way back then, Stern, I was telling you I was going to become the undercover King of Jerusalem. Power, that's what I wanted. And my father made just such a prophecy on a June night in 1914. Just slipped out of him it did. He had no idea what he was saying, or why, but he said it and he was right so far as what could have been. You know that, Stern? I could have been if I'd wanted to be, but I didn't want it enough. That's a funny thing about prophecy. Even when it's infallible you still have to want it to come true.

Yes.

Yes and just look at this brown oil in our glasses. They're still using it to fuel the lamps like the last time.

Before you came in our staggering host there was going around filling the lamps with his wretched cognac, cheaper than kerosene I suppose and works just as well as he prepares this wreck of a place for Christmas, although why a Moslem should be preparing for Christmas is information that eludes me.

Make any sense to you?

Stern smiled.

You're looking a lot older, Joe.

Me? Go on with you, not a particle of truth in it. You mean just because my beard's going white and my eyes look like a flock of pigeons have been doing a jig around them these last dozen years? No I don't believe it, but if it were true I'd say it's the rarefied air that's done it, up here on top of the holy mountain and all. A few people get younger in Jerusalem, most age. Over time this place has a way of opening up the guts of a man and laying them out for heavenly inspection. Listen, there's something I've been wanting to tell you. I'm sorry what I said to you in Smyrna in '22. That was a bad time for me and I had things mixed up, had them wrong. It's been a while, can we forget it? It was just that I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing.

Nobody was, Joe.

Saints preserve us, that's the truth. Well I'm sorry, that's all, and I wanted to tell you so. It wasn't right, but as you say, nothing was. You still carry those awful Arab cigarettes?

Stern offered the packet.

I'm glad you got in touch, Stern, I really am. And not just so I could say I was sorry, although there's that too. My God but I was young then and didn't know much, nothing in fact, plain zero. Since then I've learned a little. You do playing poker in Jerusalem for twelve years.

Stern took a cigarette and Joe lit it for him. He watched Stern's eyes.

Hey, you all right?

What do you mean; Joe?

Nothing.

No, what is it?

The light's not too good in here for Christmas Eve, that's what it is, but what can you expect when they fuel the lamps with the same liquid shit they serve their customers. Bloody Christmas Eves, I never did like them. New Year's Eve either, they're all the same. Bloody expectations and then boom, you come crashing down into the truth. Eve, is that the problem? The myth was right after all and we should blame her for all our troubles?

What were you going to say before, Joe?

Can't remember. But listen, why don't you tell an old friend how your work's going? It's been a long time and I need some catching up. You've been all over the place and I've just been here, just been doing not much in Jerusalem. Well?

Look, we were there together. What is it?

Nothing.

Nothing. You want me to ask you about Theresa, Joe? She was there too. And tell you about Sivi? He was there too. He finally died two months ago, a blessing. So what was it?

All right then. It was your eyes, Stern.

What about them?

The match. When I lit the match.

Joe stopped and rubbed his head. A match here, a match in Normandy. He saw a match striking in Normandy, in a tool shed with the smell of kerosene and the stink of rotting wood. Wouldn't there ever be an end to Smyrna? Did it always have to lead you back to other things? That afternoon and evening and night in Smyrna with Stern. With Sivi and Theresa and Haj Harun. Couldn't you escape that ever?

Joe sighed.

Listen, Stern. You're not into the heavy stuff are you? I mean, you know there's only one way out of that.

Stern smiled. He pushed back his hair.

There's only one way out anyway, he said.

Joe nodded. He's big, he thought, never realized how big he really is. Bulky and substantial, just large and there and kind of shapeless but there, reassuring in a way, it's strange. And me small and slight, not much to me now or then, now or maybe ever. Just not much there. Just a poor fisherman's son who's learned to play a little poker in the Old City.

Joe?

Well Christ man I know it, know it full well. It's no easy game you're playing what with the fucking Arabs and Jews at each other's throats all the time and you being both of them and trying to make that work, and coming from where you did besides. The Yemen, what a place to grow up. And why didn't you ever tell me Strongbow was your father? I always had him down for a myth.

He was a myth, said Stern quietly.

I know it and you had to live with it. Have to live with it. Too bloody much.

How'd you find out he was my father, Joe?

Cairo Martyr. We play poker together, remember?

Oh yes, the inscrutable mummy dust dealer. But how did he find out?

From the man who adopted him when he was a child, another nineteenth-century myth who went by the name of Menelik Ziwar.

Ziwar? But that was before Strongbow retired to the Yemen. Long before I was born.

Sure, but then they got together again just before they both died. Weren't you aware of that?

No, of course I wasn't. Where was it? In the Yemen?

Not a bit of it. Old Menelik's arthritis was acting up and the best he could do was limp upstream a yard or two. It was in Egypt, in Cairo. At that same filthy, restaurant beside the Nile where the two of them had had their forty-year conversation.

I don't believe it.

All true, all the same.

But I never even knew Strongbow ever left the Yemen. He'd sworn he'd never set foot west of the Red Sea again.

I guess he decided to break his promise in order to see old Menelik. And it wasn't for long, just one Sunday afternoon for lunch. It seems they were catching up on the past.

But that's astounding. When was it?

Maybe 1913? Strongbow wrote that since they were both due to go the other way before long, being in their nineties, they ought to have a last toot in their old haunt and fill up on wine and talk and spiced lamb, and then do a final repeat of their famous jump into the river at the end of the afternoon to clear their heads, so to speak, before they passed on. So that's what the two old gents did, seventy-five years after the first time. Swilled the wine and munched the lamb and raved on in general treating themselves to a scandalous Sunday afternoon, then did their leap into the Nile and went home sober, more or less.

Anyway, Cairo Martyr grew up dreaming about Strongbow and all his exploits because of the things old Menelik had told him. Dreams, don't you see. Dreams. Your father gave them to an orphaned black boy growing up beside the Nile, he gave them to Haj Harun too.

He did?

Sure. What about a genie in the desert in the last century? Haj Harun on his annual haj and suddenly finding the sky strangely dark in northern Arabia, so darkly strange he knew there had to be something unusual going on of a heavenly nature. Could it be so? History making one of its moves with the help of a comet? Sound a chime of time, does it?

Joe winked.

That's right, Stern. A genie in the desert, a genie and his doings and Haj Harun a witness to it And thereafter for Haj Harun, mysteries to dream to.

Stern leaned back and smiled. Strongbow's Comet. It had been one of his father's favorite stories. How he had discovered a comet in northern Arabia, and how a frightened Arab had stumbled upon him while he was taking measurements, and how he had explained the comet to the frightened man.

Yes indeed, said Joe. Haj Harun told me all about the experience and I repeated it to Cairo once and it matched exactly with the account of Strongbow's Comet that he had heard from old Menelik as a boy.

So that's how we identified the genie Haj Harun had met out there in the desert so long ago, the very giant and worker of miracles in question. Dreams for sure, you see. Strongbow the genie just leaving them everywhere.

Stern clasped his hands tightly together on top of the table. He was staring at them, frowning, drifting away. Joe took out a thick envelope and pushed it under Stern's arm. He started for the toilet at the back of the shop.

What's that? asked Stern without looking up.

Nothing. Just put it away and forget about it.

Joe walked away. Of course Stern knew what it was. It was money, a lot of money, much more than Stern would ever have guessed. Everyone knew Stern never had any himself. Always spending what little he had on his hopeless dream of a vast Levantine homeland for Arabs and Christians and Jews together, the peoples of his heritage, Stern's mother a Yemeni Jew and his father an English lord who'd become an Arab.

That kind of homeland? That kind of dream? Hopeless. It could never happen.

But Joe wanted to give him the money all the same. Maybe he'd spend a small part of it on himself. My God it was Christmas Eve after all, at least Stern could treat himself to a new pair of shoes. The ones he was wearing looked like the same pair he'd had on in Smyrna that night on the quay, that awful September night in '22. Joe remembered those shoes, he'd never forget them. He'd been looking at them when the knife came clattering down on the cobblestones beside him, the knife that was covered with blood. Lying on his side on the cobblestones with a broken arm and down came that terrible knife beside those shoes. Worn shoes, cheap shoes, not wearing well even then. He'd have liked to have told Stern that's what the money was for tonight, the whole thick wad of bills just to buy one new pair of shoes, so they both wouldn't have to look at the old ones anymore. But of course he couldn't say that, couldn't say anything about it. You didn't talk to a man about his shoes when you hadn't seen him in over eleven years.

Worn, cheap, walking where? Why? Stumbling to what?

Hopeless, thought Joe. Bloody ideals will ruin a man every time, that's what. Kingdom come, that's what.

Hopeless in this world.

He came back to the table. The envelope was where he had left it.

Joe?

Never mind now, just put it away so we can forget about it. Bloody snow won't let up, will it? Just goes right on blurring the view in this land of milk and honey that isn't. And don't get gloomy on me this Christmas Eve, I know what was bothering you just now. You were thinking how your father used to get mistaken for some marvel of a genie while you're just a gunrunner sliding downhill with a morphine habit or whatever it is you use to get you over the bumps. But let me tell you that's not all there is to it. There's another side to the tale by God, and a remarkable one it is. Makes a man's hair stand on end and maybe even have faith in the wonder of it all. Did you ever know Haj Harun recognized you the minute he laid eyes on you up there in Smyrna?

He couldn't have. We'd never met.

Oh yes you had. You'd met all right, only you were someone else then. And not just a genie out in the desert playing with his comet, nothing so minor as that. Not just a giant magician slapping a certain hue across the sky so the common folk would know a new prophet was on his way up from the wastes.

More than just as Strongbow for sure. In fact you'd be surprised who you were.

Stern smiled.

Who was I?

Well I'll tell you then. The very article, that's who you were. Himself.

What's that?

God. Now how's that for a case of mistaken identity? It beats Strongbow by more than a little and as I've often said, we have to give Haj Harun credit, we do. When he limps out there into the desert to find his way to Mecca, he sees the sights. Well this sight, and none can match it, occurred at dawn. You were up in your balloon running guns and when you came down at dawn to hide out you nearly landed right on top of Haj Harun, who naturally thought you were God coming down to reward him for his three thousand years of trying to defend the Holy City, always on the losing side. It must have been around 1914, remember it now? A broken-down old Arab in the desert at dawn tottering on spindly legs? His eyes permanently feverish with dreams from the Thousand and One Nights? And you coming down in your balloon and him prostrating himself and asking you if you would tell him your name? Remember?

Yes, I do now.

Well how about that then?

Stern smiled sadly. He stared down at his fists and said nothing.

Well?

It's not funny, whispered Stern after a moment. To be rewarded by a petty gunrunner in a balloon. It's not funny. Not when you have faith the way Haj Harun does.

Hold on there, said Joe, you're getting it all wrong. Not rewarded by you, rewarded by God. Listen, you've never seen eyes on this earth shine like Haj Harun's when he talks about meeting Stern in the desert at dawn. Stern, he murmurs, and his whole face glows with strength enough to defend the Holy City, always losing of course, for another three thousand years. Stern, he says, God manifesting Himself at dawn in the desert for me. And I told Him, he says, that I knew God has many names and that each one we learn brings us closer to Him, and I asked Him His name that day in the desert at dawn and He deigned to tell me, finding some virtue in my mission, even though I've always failed. Stern, he murmurs, and he's ready for anything, and nothing can stop him now or ever. And I tell you that's the way he saw it out there so that's the way it was, and you're the one who did it, Stern. Eyes that shine like that, it's enough to make a man cry. So you've got to let him have his due, Stern. He worked hard for that moment to come, and it finally did come, and he deserved it. And if God turns out to be a gunrunner crossing the desert in a balloon in 1914? Well what can we say about that. If that's the way it is, then you and me, we just have to accept it. We might prefer another vision of God but that's the one that came to the man who deserved a vision of God. Me, I've always known Haj Harun sees more than the rest of us.

You wouldn't argue with that, would you?

No.

Of course you wouldn't. Because we're stuck in a time and place and he isn't. We try to believe but he does believe, and that's the whole difference. We're sitting in Jerusalem but he really is up there in the Holy City on the mountaintop. And you're not going to slouch in that chair and tell me that one of us has a better perspective on things than he does, now are you? Balloon or not? Petty gunrunning or not? Poker here or poker there, what does it matter? Not when we're using wretched lamp fuel to light our bellies on Christmas Eve. You wouldn't dare tell me any such thing and I know it. True or not?

True.

Right. Then Haj Harun saw what he saw, he learned what he learned, and that's that. One of God's secret names is Stern and there we are. Haj Harun heard it spoken to him once, and hearing it once is hearing it forever. You just can't undo the past and you just can't argue with the facts in this world and that was a fact for him, therefore is. In all his long life, the old man says, he will always cherish that moment above all others. Stern. One of God's secret names.

Stern looked up from the table. He opened his hands and shrugged, smiled, this time without any sadness in his face.

Joe nodded and laughed. Even though it was only a small step, he was relieved. But he also knew they still had a long way to go that night, eleven years and three months after that other night in Smyrna.

An evening for reminiscing all right, said Joe, drumming his fingers on the table. What with the alleys outside deserted under the snow and this dreadful Arab excuse for a pub doing no business at all but our meager own, not what you'd call exactly a haven of holiday cheer. Tell me now, what do you know about this formerly talking mummy named Menelik? This Ziwar of antiquity who Cairo's always going on about. Did you meet him? You must have.

Of course.

Well?

Among other things, Strongbow left him all his correspondence when he went into the desert to become a holy man.

Joe made a face.

Correspondence, you say? Yellowing letters? I don't know how awakening and arresting that is on a quiet snowy night in Jerusalem near the end of the year. Maybe we should go back to the time when I was smuggling arms for you in Haj Harun's giant hollow stone scarab. Now that was heavy lifting, I can tell you. And hard on the back with very little assistance from the resident companion sorcerer, I can tell you that too.

But this was an unusual correspondence, continued Stern. About twelve thousand letters and all from one man, the White Monk of Timbuktu.

Joe slapped the table. He whooped.

Hold it. Hold it right there. This may be something I've been looking for. The article in question, the said monastic gent in Timbuktu, he didn't also go by the name of Father Yakouba by any chance?

Yes, the same.

And when his nine hundredth child was born your father sent him a pipe of Calvados in honor of the occasion? Say about seven hundred bottles marching right down to Timbuktu, for which the extraordinary item heretofore mentioned sent your father a thank-you note dated Midsummer night, 1840? Said note thanking your father for this most welcome gift of one hundred and fifty gallons of juice?

Timbuktu being as dry as dry with little to relieve the thirst except banana beer?

Stern laughed.

I hadn't heard of that letter, he said. But there was only one White Monk of the Sahara, and he and Strongbow were great friends.

Joe slapped the table again.

My God man, there we have it. Once a long time ago when I first arrived here, Haj Harun turned up with that thank-you note, the way he does you know, being a former antiquities dealer. Well the numbers involved knocked me over they did, since I was still accustomed to thinking of priests as something quite different from what this White Monk was obviously up to down there in Timbuktu. And ever since, I've been eaten with curiosity to know how that White Monk became what he did, where he did. Would you be knowing that?

Stern laughed. He nodded.

You do? Ah and ah, now that's just the job for a Christmas Eve. Just the thing to brighten up this sorry excuse for a village pub on a cold snowy night. Quickly I'll alert our host to bring us a whole bottle of his delicious fuel so we can flame at will. Now then, Stern. Who was this great skin down there in Timbuktu?

And moreover, why?

He started out as a missionary in Tripoli, said Stern, a member of the White Father order. Originally he was from Normandy, a peasant, and he had a taste for Calvados. Well a cardinal came down to Tripoli from Paris, an art collector who was also epileptic. The cardinal was there to smuggle out some valuable mosaics, but while there he thought he should also deliver a sermon for the sake of appearances. He decided to deliver it in the desert outside of Tripoli, because he'd never seen a desert.

Joe held up his hands to interrupt.

Wait. They chose the Calvados peasant-priest's congregation for the event? It came to pass in the desert under a palm tree for shade? The cardinal got underway and had a bloody seizure?

Yes. The congregation was black and the peasant-priest was facing them, doing the interpreting, with the cardinal standing behind him. I forgot to mention that the peasant-priest was a dwarf.

Joe interrupted again.

Wait, I think I'm beginning to see it now. It's bloody hot out there and the cardinal has his fit and begins swinging his arms to keep his balance, and the Calvados peasant-priest's head is fast becoming a kind of lectern. Down rain the blows, just pounding and pounding away on your man's head, and before long he's being battered something terrible. Like this, is it?

Joe stood up and swung his arms, pounding the table.

Do I have it right? Just swinging away at this head beneath him, for Christ's sake, and then the cardinal goes into the final writhing snatch of his seizure and screams something holy? Maybe that the flesh of the lamb is good to eat? And this last blow of his is so holy and determined, has so much passionate religious conviction behind it, it bangs your man right down into the dust, just lays the dwarf flat out in the dust?

True or not?

Have you heard this story, Joe?

I have not, not a word of it, but tales have a way of running true to course and so far this one's holding together as such things should. Now if I'm not wrong, I'd suspect the cardinal collapses in his sedan chair at this point and is wafted away to a cool palace in Tripoli where he can have a glass of wine and a bath and a relaxing snooze. In other words he's finished. He's done what he came to do in the story and now we can forget about him. Yes or no?

Yes.

Still on course then. Still in line and back we go to our hero, our dwarf peasant-priest, who is lying in the dust, flat out and thoroughly dazed, his head singing from the blows of higher authority, trying as best he can to recover from this very holy beating. And his black congregation is staring at him, naturally, and he's staring back at them, and nobody knows what to make of it all. I mean this appears to be a frightful way to spend a morning. True?

Yes.

And those poor blacks sitting there in the dust are starving. Any one of them would be more than happy to have a bite of lamb if they could, just as the cardinal suggested, but they know there's no hope of them ever getting their hands on a morsel, not even the tiniest. Right?

Yes.

And now we find this very same scene, utterly static, a tableau if you like, continuing on through an endless hot afternoon in the shimmering heat under that palm tree, no one moving and nothing but mirages on the horizon, not a cloud in the sky, the black congregation staring at the dwarf priest from Normandy and the dwarf peasant-priest staring at this starving congregation, just on and on as the sun slips lower and lower crushing what shade there had been and burning everyone, until there is no shade, just this hopeless heat and blistering dust, suffocating it is, and that continues for about five thousand hours or until the sun bloody well sets. Is that how it went, Stern?

Yes.

Joe sucked in his coffee and poured more cognac.

All right. Sunset. Here we are then. The sun is gone and now that it's getting dark the people under this palm tree rise like ghosts from the dust, the two sides of them, the dwarf priest on the one side, the starving blacks on the other, nobody having said a thing all day, nobody having moved a muscle all day, and the two sides go their separate ways in the shadows of the night. Correct?

Yes.

Yes, you say? Then I'm beginning to see it clearly now. Well what happens that night is that the peasant dwarf-priest locks himself in his room, lonely as he can be, just lonely as lonely, and breaks out a bottle of Calvados and says to himself, What's going on here? What was all that about? Why is an epileptic cardinal from Paris beating me senseless into the dust? Why is my head being used as a lectern by anyone anyway? Why am I spending an endless afternoon flat out in the shimmering heat, nothing but mirages around me and not a single cloud overhead, while my poor black congregation stares at me and I stare at them? Is there anything Christian about that? says the peasant-priest to himself, pouring another healthy slug of Calvados. Be that the case at hand?

Yes.

Still running to course then. So the next morning we find your man, who's done some thoughtful thinking over his bottle of Calvados in the course of a long lonely night, thinking ahead for sure and ruminating on a more amenable future for himself, we find him respectfully approaching his White Father superiors with a modest proposal. Why don't you send me to Timbuktu as a one-man missionary team, he says, and I'll convert the heathens there. Fact?

Yes.

Good, a fact. Although of course it's also true there's no French army within a thousand miles of Timbuktu, which means converting anyone there is out of the question. But his superiors decide to grant the request anyway, because losing a dwarf peasant-priest from Normandy doesn't mean anything to them, and also because a show of missionary effort so far away to the south would certainly be pleasing news to their cardinal back in Paris, who didn't find their stolen mosaics as valuable as he'd thought they'd be. Still true?

Yes.

All right. Off goes the dwarf peasant-priest, and after adventures that would take hours to recount he finally reaches Timbuktu. There he sets himself up in a dusty courtyard and begins to preach an exceptionally mild message of love that's all-encompassing. Love thy neighbor, sure, that's for certain.

But don't stop there. Love strangers and non-neighbors, in fact love everyone you ever meet. Is that it?

Yes.

Do a certain amount of honest labor, but after that and before that and in between times, love anyone you happen to find on the premises?

Yes.

Joe jumped to his feet. He pushed back his chair and climbed up on it. The snow was falling faster outside. The Arab who had been asleep at the front of the shop belched and scratched his groin and belched again, staring in disbelief at Joe standing on his chair, his arms outstretched, dressed in the baking priest's shabby uniform from the Crimean War.

And it is especially important, intoned Joe, caressing the fetid air with his hands, that no one should ever find himself sitting alone in the dust on a hot afternoon staring at a group of people. Nor should a group of people sit and stare at a poor lonely person, even a dwarf, who happens to find himself alone across the way. Instead both sides should rise at once and mix in the love of God. In short, make love for God's sake. Don't just sit and stare, make love, now and quickly and all together. Was that the ultra-Christian message, Stern, that was heard down there in Timbuktu?

Stern nodded, smiling up at Joe.

Well then, said Joe, that must be a true account of how a former peasant-priest from Normandy came to establish a huge polysexual commune on the far side of the Sahara in the nineteenth century. And by this manner of activity one Father Yakouba, a dwarf more generally known as the White Monk of the Sahara, became the father in time of nine hundred children. On which occasion the legendary explorer Strongbow, your said father, sent to his old friend the said dwarf in Timbuktu, by way of most sincere and congratulatory sentiments, a pipe of the priest's most favored beverage, Calvados, which by a less prodigious man's measurements would be some seven hundred regular bottles of the stuff. Am I still free from error?

Yes.

Joe dropped his arms. He jumped to the floor, coughing, and sat down. He drank and lit a cigarette.

Wretched drink, this lamp fuel, saints preserve us. But it's cold tonight and we need it. Cairo told me all that by the way. He had it from Menelik, who of course picked it up in his forty-year conversation with Strongbow. But my God what a giant of a dwarf, the White Monk of the Sahara. You know what I wish sometimes? I wish I'd known just one of those characters from the last century. Old Menelik, the White Monk, Strongbow the genie, just one of them.

Joe tried to laugh but he coughed instead.

I know, he said, when the coughing subsided, why am I always talking about the past? Bad habit, I'll have to get over it someday. Have to get over all my habits someday. And maybe you'll be wanting to talk to me about Maudie now that you've met her. How she tried to trace Sivi after the massacre in Smyrna and couldn't, and only found out years later that he was living in Istanbul, if you could call it living after what Smyrna had done to him. Poor old Sivi. Christ she must have been shocked finding him like that, living in a tiny squalid room by the Bosporus and working as a laborer in a hospital for incurables, forgetting even to feed himself half the time. And I can understand why she moved there to take care of him, loving him as she did and trying to have that link with the past at least, until he died and she went back to Athens. Sivi would have been that for her even then, giving her life some meaning. Ah the wreckage in this world, what can you say about it? How can you ever explain it to yourself? And Sivi of all people. From what I've heard just about the kindest, gentlest man who ever lived. Always helping everybody and he ended like that. So what's to say? Nothing, that's what.

How'd you know all that about Maud?

Munk. She and Munk have been friends since after the war, you know.

I didn't, but I should have guessed. Through Sivi of course.

Yes. And I've tried to help her, Stern. I gave Munk money to give her, saying it was a gift or a loan or anything from him, not me, but she wouldn't take it. She must have known it was coming from me and couldn't bring herself to accept it after the way she left me. Munk's tried to help her too but she always refuses, still thinking it's coming from me, I suppose.

But, Joe, why haven't you ever gone to see her?

I didn't think it would help. You can't go back, Stern, you just can't. I know that. I'll never love another woman the way I loved her, but still you can't go back. It's just too long ago and I've put it behind me as best I can. You have to do that, you just have to.

Well what about your son?

Joe smiled.

Bernini. That's a lovely name she gave the lad. I'm going to be seeing him soon, but I won't be seeing Maudie and I don't want her to know, it's better that way. She's got some kind of balance worked out in her life and I don't want to upset it, especially with Sivi just dying. He was her family after all. Brother, father, everything. All she ever had. And I know she must still have some painful memories about me.