Jerusalem Poker

Time, it takes. So someday maybe.

Another time, another place. But listen, I've got a favor to ask you. If she ever needs money, I mean if you can see she really needs it, I'd like you to let me know, write to me, so I can send it to you. She'd accept it from you if she didn't know we knew each other, which she doesn't. I never told her who I was running guns for back when we had that house in Jericho. So will you not tell her? Will you do that for me? So I can get money to her through you, if she needs it?

Stern nodded.

Of course.

Thanks, I appreciate it. Now let me pass on my stirring local news. Cairo and me, we're ending the poker game in a few days. Munk doesn't know it but it's all over at last.

You're leaving Jerusalem?

By the stars, Stern, by the stars.

Where to?

Me? The New World, where else. Ever since I met Maudie and she told me about her Cheyenne grandmother, I've been fascinated by the American Indians. I want to see them. Maybe even try living with them for a while.

Stern smiled.

And Cairo?

He'll be heading back to Africa. You haven't met him, have you?

No.

More's the loss. A fine article, that, totally fine. Holds in trust what you tell him, then hears what you don't tell him and holds that in trust too. Whoever old Menelik was, he should be canonized, bringing up Cairo the way he did. Who was he, Stern?

Strongbow's best friend.

That's a lot.

Yes.

But you shouldn't go on lingering under that burden, Stern. Shouldn't do it. No man can.

I suppose.

Wretched stuff, fuel for lamps. Burns your wick but burns it down and out too.

Joe? What about Haj Harun?

I know, I've thought about that. Munk'll just have to watch out for him. If he wants this bloody place he'll just have to take on the responsibilities.

It'll be all right?

My God how do I know, I guess it'll have to be. Nearly three thousand years he survived here before I met him. Why not now without me?

Because things are changing, Joe.

So they are, so they always are. Changing in Jerusalem, changes in the Old City. How about you. You're going to carry on with what you're doing?

Yes.

No offense, but you know by now it can't work.

Maybe.

Not maybe. You know. The point is you're going to continue doing it anyway?

I have no choice.

Joe leaned forward and placed his hands flat on the table. He gazed at the bulging veins that hadn't shown a few years ago.

No choice, Stern? No choice?

Stern nodded slowly.

Yes. It seems it's that way sometimes.

Joe closed his eyes and shook his bead. Stern was speaking very quietly.

Joe? That time in Smyrna?

I hear you.

The smoke and the fires, you remember?

We had to get to it, didn't we. Shared it and had to get to it. Yes, I remember.

And Sivi going mad.

Going all right, going and never coming back. A September Sunday in 1922.

And Theresa beating her head on the floor and screaming Who is that?

I hear it. I've heard it more than once since then and I hear it now, poor little one.

And Haj Harun?

Yes, trailing his great long bloody sword up there in the garden, weeping and wandering around and around lost in the flowers, lost in the smoke and the flames, just lost, that old blessed sack of bones.

Tears my heart it does, him and his tattered yellow cloak and his rusty Crusader's helmet, standing there in the garden holding up his sword, preparing to charge the Turkish soldier who found us hiding there.

Been dead before he took a step of course, the rifle aimed straight at his middle, but there he was ready to defend the innocent, defending his Holy City of life in terrible Smyrna with an old sword, awful it was, that moment, I died for him a dozen times before I got the pistol up and shot that soldier in the head. And you know what he's been asking me recently? If we shouldn't arm ourselves because of the way the Arabs and the Jews are going at each other here. The two of us I mean, imagine that. The two of us standing up together to defend Jerusalem. What do you say to something like that? It's daft and all too real.

And the other thing, Joe. The other thing up there.

Joe rubbed his eyes. He emptied his glass.

Yes that too. All right, we've got to do that too. The little Armenian girl on the quay that night dressed in her Sunday best, her Sunday black, because it was a Sunday. Maybe eight years old and raped and bloodied within a breath of her life, lying out there all alone in that hell of screams and smoke and dying.

Dying, that's all, the fires on one side and the harbor on the other and no place to go, no place to take her, just dying in unbearable pain. And what you did, Stern, was what I should have done, and I wish I had done it so it wouldn't be tormenting you now. Please, she said in Armenian, and you told me what it meant but I didn't do anything so you did, and I should have done it but I was too angry at you and Maudie and the whole fucking bloody world. Mad at myself I mean, let's keep it honest. So after all, Stern, what did you do but end a dying child's pain? Ended the torture. There was no way she could have lived through that night

Joe?

I tell you Haj Harun did the same thing and that's why he was weeping in the garden. It happened outside the garden. There was an old Armenian man who'd had his eyes torn out and he was walking into the flames, finished. Strands of bloody tissue hanging from his empty eye sockets. Tears of blood, Stern.

Immovable tears. For the love of God, he was screaming, kill me before I burn. And Haj Harun did.

Gentle harmless old soul that he is, he raised his sword and swung it and after that I had to take him by the hand and lead him back to the garden or he never would have found it, he was crying so hard. And Stern, he's been on the losing side for three thousand years defending the Holy City, everybody's Holy City. You're always on the losing side in such a game but he goes on. Always. Losing is all. So what did you do that was so bad? Stern's hands were shaking. He reached out and gripped Joe's arm.

I'll tell you what I did. I took a knife. I slit her throat.

Oh Christ man, screamed Joe, it wasn't your fault.

Stern's chair went crashing backward onto the floor. He lurched to his feet and stared at Joe with wild eyes, backing away from the table. Backing away and stumbling clumsily across the room.

Wait, called Joe, you can't just go on running. We'll talk. Don't go on running.

Stern stared, a trapped animal backing away, big and hunched and shapeless. He knocked over a chair and kept on backing away, hit a table and backed into the door, frantically groping for the door handle behind him, trapped, trying to escape.

Stern, for Christ's sake. Wait.

The door banged open. An empty frame of darkness, snow swirling across it. Joe felt the blast of cold air all the way at the back of the room. He sat there looking at the night and the snow in the empty doorway.

Don't go on running. Once, in this very room, Stern had said the same thing to him. A dozen years ago that was, before Smyrna. Strange, thought Joe, how the words that were meant to help were always the same. Someone said them to you when you were sinking, trying to help, and then a dozen years later you were saying the same words to them. Saying and saying, going around, it never ended, But you just couldn't help running sometimes, just couldn't, you ran away from yourself, just had to, trying to survive in the cold and the darkness. Everyone a victim now or then, everyone, trying to survive.

How long could Stern manage with his morphine? Taking morphine and living with his hopeless dream of a homeland that could never be, Arabs and Christians and Jews together, trying to believe. How long?

Running.

The door banged closed. Wind gusting in the alleys and sucking it closed, sealing the light from the darkness, the warmth from the cold, swirling snow in the land of milk and honey.

He was vulnerable, Stern, and that's why people loved him. Bulky and shapeless and going down yet trying to believe, and that's why people loved him. Everybody longed to believe and wanted to reach out to the man who tried to. But everybody didn't make it. Everybody couldn't. How long for Stern?

Running.

The Arab at the front of the shop was snoring again under his newspaper. Joe pushed back his chair and dragged himself wearily to his feet. He'd tried, but it hadn't worked out. A small step at first, then nothing.

But maybe someday Stern would recall that small step, maybe sometime it would help him just a little as he sank and sank with morphine in his hopeless dream.

Yes, Stern. That too was one of God's secret names.

The proprietor of the shop looked dazed as he staggered over to the table. He managed an oily smile.

Why not? thought Joe. Time for him to collect a tip if he can. More important to him now than the snow and the silence, the darkness, has his troubles like everybody else making a living, making a life. Best he can do. Eyes out of focus and teeth rotting in his head, on the limp and looking to ingratiate himself, best he can do.

Want a woman, sir?

No thanks.

A boy?

No thanks either.

Someone else? It's cold tonight.

I know it.

Snowing, cold. Not a night to be alone out. there.

I know it.

Hashish?

No.

So what do you want?

Nothing, nothing at all. Here. Keep it.

The Arab looked down at the handful of bills. His smile spread.

You Jewish?

No.

Christian?

Born that way, yes.

Merry Christmas then.

Right. Thanks.

-15-

Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun

What is this game we've been playing, Cairo? And where did it really start?

Christmas day and Cairo had brought buckets of lobsters and champagne to the little roof in the Armenian Quarter where Joe lived with his pigeons. The weather was cold and raw, the sky overcast, but they set up a table outside so they could have the city spread out in front of them while they celebrated, their time in Jerusalem almost over now.

Here we are in overcoats again, mused Joe, just like that first day of the game twelve years ago when we sat down on the floor in the back of Haj Harun's shop. Funny how things come around and come together. Speaking of which, Cairo, I'm glad you came. I wouldn't have thought of anything so fine as lobster.

I know you wouldn't have. You'd have been inside crouched over your turf fire nursing some dreadful stew.

True enough, and that would have been all right too, but this is much better. The kind of occasion a man can look back to when he's finishing up and getting ready to go the other way, no doubt off in some bloody unknown corner of the world by then, tottering around on useless legs and creaking in every joint and cursing the day he was born, certainly cursing another Christmas to be faced, for what's the sense of celebrating something and trying to be happy when it's all over and behind you and there's no more to come? And probably in his cups as usual on Christmas because that's a black day in Ireland, which is to say the pubs are closed, and alone at home in a dark mood shaking his head and muttering cross thoughts like the malcontent he is at the end of life, having seen what he thinks he's seen although most of it was a blur, when all at once he stays that glass on its way to his lips and peers down into it, right down into that muddy well of his soul, and takes a good look and says to himself, Hold on there you villainous trickster, what do you mean forgetting that beautiful Christmas years and decades ago when you were sitting on a rooftop in Jerusalem with your feet up, you and a friend feasting like lords with the Holy City itself spread out at your feet? Right there in front of you, you grumbling ingrate. And your man will have to admit it then. He'll have to stop cursing everything in sight and throw a smile back into his glass. Drink I may, he'll say then, but I've known those moments, I have, those beautiful rare moments and it's all been worth it because of them, all worth it and more because of those sweet rare moments, ah just the sweetest. Sure, that's what he's going to have to say in the end, coming around to the truth at last after a wicked and dissolute life. So will you raise a glass to that, Cairo lad? To this very moment and none other?

Cairo laughed. He uncorked another bottle of champagne and the pigeons took flight. The two of them watched the pigeons fly away and slowly return, swooping in ever narrower circles.

By God they're getting little enough rest today with all these champagne shots going off. But it's nice to see them circling overhead all the same, knowing their home and coming back to it.

Who's going to feed them after you leave?

Don't know, but I'll find some unemployed beggar or pious fanatic to do the trick, no shortage of hands like that in Jerusalem. Say Cairo, I was just thinking. Why'd you really suggest we let Munk win all our money?

Why not? Isn't it appropriate? The three of us began the game and we're dropping out, so he should be the winner.

That's fine with me as I said, but I still have this feeling.

What feeling?

That there's something more. Another reason. Let's admit it, Cairo lad, you're shamelessly sentimental.

So what's the other reason?

Cairo tipped his head. He smiled.

Family. That's the other reason.

Joe nodded. He cracked a lobster tail. Juice squirted over his face and he dabbed at it, licking his finger.

Do you tell me that?

Yes. Munk and I are cousins.

Joe waved the lobster tail toward the city.

Hear that, Jerusalem? You just see how it goes around here?

He turned to Cairo and grinned.

Now hold on there, go slow with me today. I'm feasting on a Christmas banquet and not thinking too clearly. Not making a little joke are you?

No.

Cousins, you say? You and the Munk are cousins?

Yes.

Well you wouldn't look to be cousins, that much I'm sure of. But if you say you are, you are. Some years ago I learned it's best not to disbelieve anything you hear around here. So all right then. How do you and Munk come to be cousins?

We had the same great-grandfather.

Joe whistled softly.

And why not, I say. I've always wondered why you had blue eyes. Well he must have been a wandering man. A fair-skinned Sudanese then? Or a dark-skinned Hungarian?

Cairo laughed.

Neither. He was Swiss.

Ah, of course he was, I should have guessed. Traditional neutrality and so forth, not wanting either of you to think he was favored over the other. Clever man he must have been too, keeping his options open in the manner he did, not about to limit his familial future by way of race or continent either. But who was this wandering ancestor with tendencies to father sons in lands as disparate as Hungary and the Sudan?

Albania was another.

Also a son in Albania, you say? I don't think I like that. The only Albanians I've ever heard of are the Wallensteins. Now you're not going to be telling me that nasty little Nubar Wallenstein is also kin to the two of you. Not so much, are you? Tell me it's not the case.

Cairo smiled.

I'm afraid it is.

It is? Then I'm afraid I just went overboard at sea in rough weather with nothing to hold on to. Or maybe what's worse, lost my bearings in a vast bog with the evening light sinking and me having no idea which way is out. Take pity, Cairo, which way is out? Who was this wandering Swiss?

His name was Johann Luigi Szondi. Born in Basle in 1784.

Why do you mention Basle?

Because that's where Strongbow's study was published and burned nearly a century later.

Stop it, Cairo, we'll just leave Strongbow out of this. Go back to this Luigi fellow. Who was he?

A highly gifted linguist with a passion for details.

Details? I believe it. He left enough of them scattered around. So he's born highly gifted, what next?

In 1802, as a student, Johann Luigi made a walking tour to the Levant and asked for lodging one night in an

Albanian castle. The master of the castle was away at war, the master's young wife was alone and friendly. Check an Albanian cousin. Later Johann Luigi became a doctor in Budapest and married Munk's great-grandmother, Sarah the First. Check a Hungarian cousin. Later still he traveled through the Middle East and Africa in disguise, and met my great-grandmother in a village on the fringe of the Nubian desert. Check a Sudanese cousin.

Check, said Joe, I'm suddenly tired. All this moving around and fathering sons at the beginning of the last century is exhausting. Before you tell me any more, can't we just sit still for a moment and contemplate the view?

Of course we can. In fact that's exactly what I was going to suggest.

You were?

Yes. Now let's allow about a hundred years to go by and position ourselves in front of a villa beside the Bosporus.

Why would we want to do that?

To contemplate the view, and also to consider a remarkable event. Tell me, how do you imagine it's known that young Johann Luigi made a walking tour to the Levant in 1802?

I think Luigi might have told his wife about it later when he married her, Sarah the First. She could have passed the information on down and thus Munk would have the fact tucked away today.

Correct. And the night on that walking tour when Johann Luigi stayed in an Albanian castle? Entertained by a young and friendly wife whose husband was away at war?

I think maybe Luigi didn't bother to mention that one to Sarah the First. No reason to alarm her after the fact, marriage being sacred and all. Merely an indiscretion in his youth, and only one night of it at that.

Cairo gazed out over the city.

Hey wait, said Joe, sitting up. Only one night in the Wallenstein castle and then on his way? How did Luigi know he'd made the wife in the castle pregnant?

Cairo flashed his smile.

That's right. How indeed?

Well he couldn't have known. So there's no way he could have passed on that information to anyone.

That information could only have come from the young and friendly wife in the Wallenstein castle.

Correct.

So where are we?

As I said, we're standing in front of a villa beside the Bosporus about a century later, contemplating the view. The year is 1911, to be exact. As we gaze at the last of the sunset over Europe we notice that a carriage is approaching the villa, its curtains drawn.

Which curtains? Carriage or villa?

Both.

Ah.

Now. The gate to the villa is situated in such a way that visitors can draw up to the entrance without being seen by observers such as us, who are seemingly standing beside the Bosphorus gazing at sunsets.

Naturally, considering the nature of the business often conducted by the person or persons unknown who reside in this villa.

Nefarious business, said Joe, that's what. I can see it coming. All manner of pranks, did you say, going on in this villa?

Perhaps. Now the two of us aren't everyday observers, we both know that, and with our superior vision we're able to see this particular visitor who has just alighted from the curtained carriage to enter the curtained villa. And we do so even though the sun has set and the villa is cloaked in impenetrable shadows.

Shadows, muttered Joe, pouring more champagne. I sense a rendezvous in the works that can't bear the light of day. Definitely a clandestine affair. Of course I already suspected that when I took careful note of the curtains over all and sundry.

Correct, said Cairo. Now can you make out the visitor who is emerging from the carriage in the shadows?

I'm peering. I honestly am. My eyes are sharply narrowed and I'm using my best night vision.

And?

And all I see is an indistinct figure.

A very small figure? asked Cairo.

Yes. Most unusually small.

A woman?

How did you know my suspicions were running in that direction? Well just wait a minute, let me check the gait and the movements. Yes, a woman all right. No question about it.

Dressed entirely in black?

Black as the hour of night. But she's not about to fool me even in those impenetrable shadows.

Is she wearing a black veil?

That she is, said Joe. Hiding her face of course. A clever and cautious woman from beginning to end.

What's that you see sticking through a hole in her veil?

How about that. A cigarette maybe? Must be a heavy smoker if she can't even wait until she gets inside to light up.

You're sure it's a cigarette?

To be frank, I'm not. It's hard to make it out from this distance, 1911 being some time ago and all. I was only eleven then and not thinking much about cigarettes.

I think it looks too long for a cigarette, said Cairo.

Precisely my thoughts.

But it could be a long thin cigar. A cheroot maybe.

Has to be a cheroot, said Joe. I was just going to say so.

Some sort of special Turkish cheroot she has made to order?

Makes sense, murmured Joe. After all we are in Turkey.

Exactly. Careful now, is that the door of the villa opening?

It is, and not making a sound in doing so. Wouldn't you just know it? Well-oiled hinges in the curtained villa in keeping with nefarious practices.

Is that a man stepping out to greet the tiny woman dressed entirely in black?

None other. A man and just as cautious and clever as the tiny woman he's greeting. Skulduggery's afoot and a romantic assignation seems a highly likely possibility.

Is the man wearing a uniform? asked Cairo.

No mistaking a uniform, said Joe. I often wear one myself and you can't fool me there.

And this host cuts a dashing figure in his uniform?

Decidedly dashing. Women along the Bosporus probably make fools of themselves when faced with that dashing figure. Although why my own uniform never has that effect I can't imagine.

Would you say he's a young man? asked Cairo.

That he is, unexpectedly so.

Do you recognize the uniform?

I'm trying, but again this distance of twenty-two years is making things less clear than they should be.

Could it be the uniform of a cavalry officer?

Joe turned and looked at Cairo.

Yes.

Dragoons?

Joe stared at Cairo.

Yes.

A lieutenant colonel of dragoons in the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army?

Joe whistled softly.

My God, how about that. We're spying on Munk as a young man.

And his visitor, the tiny woman in black? You still don't recognize her?

No, I don't. In fact I'm pretty sure I've never seen her before.

You haven't, said Cairo emphatically. And I've never seen her either. At this point in time, 1911, there are only a handful of people in the world who would recognize her, and most of them peasants, because she has lived such a reclusive life in her little corner of the world. Only a year or two ago she emerged from strict seclusion after mourning the death of her common-law husband. And before that, and for many decades, she lived so modestly and said so little while doing so, she was generally referred to as the Unspoken. But just give her a few more years, I tell you, and she's going to become notorious. Men in high positions all over the world will know this tiny woman as the Black Hand.

Joe whistled very softly.

Sophia? Is it really Sophia coming to call on Munk?

Cairo smiled.

After emerging from mourning, Sophia has toyed with lignite mines in Albania and decided to look into oil. She's been studying the oil situation in the Middle East and has become convinced that substantial reserves are to be found along the Tigris. She wants to put a syndicate together to exploit this oil, but to do so she first needs a charter from the Ottoman government, which is in a state of terminal decay and is hopelessly corrupt. Who should she approach with bribes? The routes are multiple and devious. It is absolutely essential that she get confidential information from a disinterested observer, someone outside the government, who is both knowledgeable and thoroughly trustworthy. She has made numerous inquiries in Constantinople and the answers coincide. It appears the person to see is the brilliant young Austro-Hungarian military attaché in the capital. It's true that he's astonishingly young to be in such a position, but everyone agrees he is fully cognizant of the intrigues within the Ottoman menagerie.

Furthermore, he happens to be a scion of the most powerful financial family in central Europe, the revered House of Szondi.

That decides Sophia. The House of Szondi is run exclusively by women and therefore she trusts it.

Therefore she will go to the scion even though he is astonishingly young.

Secretly Sophia contacts the young lieutenant colonel and a meeting is arranged at his villa, just after sunset for purposes of security, a few weeks hence. The young lieutenant colonel, meanwhile, checks into Sophia's background and finds she is the head of the important Wallenstein clan in Albania. The political situation in the Balkans, never more unstable than now, is of great interest to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, therefore to its military attaché in Constantinople. Mightn't this head of an important Albanian clan have much to tell him? Mightn't this even be an assignment of the highest priority?

Duty calls. Obviously more could come from this meeting if it were not just a dull business conference in a dull business setting. And so we find certain preparations being made in the villa.

For one, the formal dining room has been rejected in favor of a cozy alcove at one end of the paneled library. Here an array of delicacies have been laid out by the servants, who have then been given the night off. Candles cast a soft glow in the villa. An inviting fire crackles in the library fireplace, in front of which sit two deep leather lounging chairs and a soft deep leather sofa. Joe? Are you all right?

Joe's eyes were wide. Cairo smiled broadly.

Now then, said Cairo. What obviously lies before us is a leisurely dinner for two in a secluded villa beside the Bosporus, a sparkling evening over champagne in a cozy setting. Strictly out of duty, mind you, our young military attaché intends to carry out his mission in a most relaxed atmosphere, bringing all his considerable charm to bear.

Joe broke out of his trance. He pounded the table and began leaping around the rooftop, singing, doing a kind of dance.

Our very own Munk, ho ho ho. Turning on the charm for Sophia, ho ho ho.

Suddenly he stopped in front of the table.

Sophia? Wait a minute. Sophia still the Unspoken? My God, how old was she then?

Sixty-nine, said Cairo dryly. Munk was twenty-one.

Joe roared with laughter and slapped the table. He sat down, only to jump to his feet again.

This is stunning, simply stunning. Here I thought there was going to be a way out of this lurid Luigi bog before nightfall and instead I'm sinking deeper all the time. Candlelight and champagne in Constantinople, you say? Dashing young Munk in his dashing cavalry uniform just leisurely doing his duty at a private sumptuous dinner for two in a villa beside the Bosporus? Fires crackling invitingly and candles casting glows? Soft deep leather lounging chairs and sofas? Delicacies in a cozy alcove? On with it, for God's sake, before I have a liver attack.

Cairo cleared his throat.

It may be you haven't had experience in these matters.

My God of course I haven't, you know that. Just don't ease off now, get on with it.

Yes. Well, you see, when I worked as a dragoman in Egypt back before the war I found there were occasions, not as infrequent as you might think, when an older woman, even a much older woman, could be strongly attracted to a much younger man. Now if she were a wise woman, as Sophia obviously is, she had no illusions about it. She knew perfectly well what was happening and why, but that didn't mean she couldn't enjoy herself.

Oh help, saints preserve us. You don't mean to say the dinner is going to progress from private to intimate?

I do. That's precisely what I mean.

Then here's another quick shot of champagne for both of us. You may not need it but I do. And don't stop. Keep this amazing news churning.

Well, in short, we find the evening taking a vivid course. Dishes are tasted, corks pop, there are pleasantries and laughter. Sophia happens to recall several off-color anecdotes, having to do with itinerant Armenian rug dealers, that have been passed down from mother to daughter in her family for a couple of centuries. Munk, for his part, is able to repeat a number of naughty insinuations currently making the rounds in Constantinople's demimonde. And all the while Sophia is well aware that in return for the attentive favors of this handsome young lieutenant colonel of dragoons, information useful to him is expected. Political and economic information concerning the Balkans.

No, shouted Joe, jumping up and sitting down again. Not another bloody word about the Balkans.

Quickly back to the candlelight dinner and tell me what happened next I know what you're going to say.

What happened next?

They made love, said Cairo quietly.

Joe banged the table. He shrieked.

Ha. I knew it. I just knew you were going to say that. All that cozy candlelight beside the Bosporus, it'll get you every time. But my God, is this true? Did Munk really do that?

Yes, a thoroughly friendly matter. Even so, it took some time to bring off.

What?

Well when a woman gets into her late sixties, you see.

No. Hold it right there, Cairo. I don't see and that's not information I need at the moment, it's not a problem I'm facing. When the time comes, forty years from now if it does, I'll write you a letter and you can fill me in. But will you just imagine Munk up to something like that? And you too when you were back in Egypt, you shameless dragoman-ex. Where's it come from anyway, this scandalous behavior?

Did you both inherit something from this Luigi fellow?

Cairo smiled. Joe was chain-smoking and puffing furiously.

Now just let me calm myself, he said, blowing smoke everywhere. And before we get mixed up with this Luigi fellow again, give me a hint of how the evening in the villa ended. How did it end?

Not until the following morning. The night was a busy one and no one got any sleep. Fortunately the servants weren't due back until noon the next day.

And?

And after some final activities that accompanied the sunrise, Munk fell asleep in his bed. He woke up toward the middle of the morning, hearing water running.

Water?

Sophia was drawing a bath for him.

Ah and ah. What else?

Delicious smells were coming from the kitchen. Munk noticed that his uniform, newly pressed, had been laid out over a chair. His boots, newly polished, stood beside the chair. There was also a bouquet of flowers, freshly picked from the garden, on the night table. Sophia had evidently been bustling about while Munk caught his few hours of sleep. When he finished his bath Sophia appeared with a tray and served him breakfast in bed.

What?

As I recall, freshly squeezed orange juice, eggs and a steak, a pot of strong coffee laced with cognac, and a mountain of hot rolls straight from the oven. Extremely light, he said. Mere fluffs of ambrosia.

Fluffs, yes. Ambrosia. Then?

Then the tiny old woman smiled in the doorway, threw him a wink and was gone. Altogether a singular performance, said Munk. A singular evening, a singular night, a singular morning after. It was his opinion that a woman fifty years younger couldn't have possibly equaled it. There was only one problem.

There was? What?

His back. His back was absolutely covered with long deep scratches. Fingernails, you see.

Uncontrollable passion.

I see.

But of course he was more than ready to suffer that because of what had gone with it.

Of course.

And he also had great difficulty walking. His legs, he said, were like jelly.

Jelly, yes.

And he couldn't really straighten up, and he'd never been so sore. Every muscle in his body ached from the experience, although naturally that was fine too.

Joe sagged in his chair.

I'm limp, he said, I can't move. That's all, I hope.

Not quite. Apparently the heavy scent of Sophia's cheroots lingered in the bedroom for days. Munk said he used to go in there and find himself immediately lost in a reverie. He said it was several weeks before he could pull himself together and get back to working in a proper manner.

Proper? cried Joe. What's proper about any of these goings-on? It's all outrageous, that's what, and should never have been repeated to a sober Christian like myself. Mere fluffs of ambrosia indeed. A scandal.

Cairo laughed.

Now in the course of that very long night Sophia talked about a number of things, including the man she'd loved all her life, the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins. Her mother had been a servant in the Wallenstein castle in 1802, when that young and friendly Wallenstein wife had taken a Swiss stranger to her bed, and had been so excited by it she had to tell some of her female servants about it the next day, after the stranger had gone on his way. Thus Sophia was able to describe the Swiss stranger who'd been the father of her beloved Skanderbeg, the young Swiss student with a passion for details who'd been on a walking tour to the Levant that year. I mean she described his appearance exactly, down to a quite specific and intimate fact.

What fact? asked Joe.

Cairo cleared his throat.

It seems the Hungarian Szondi men all inherited a certain peculiarity from Johann Luigi.

What peculiarity?

A physical one that proved exceptionally pleasurable to the Szondi women.

Move on, Cairo, what specific fact?

It has to do with size, with dimension.

Oh.

And with a change in direction.

Oh?

Highly unusual. About halfway along, it seems, matters take an abrupt turn. Thus movement is going on in many directions at once, so that the love the Szondi man is expressing is being expressed in a whole host of different manners at one and the same time. Apparently you can't speak of thrust in such a case. And in and out is simply out of the question. Apparently there's only one word for the sensation the woman feels inside her in such a case.

Which is?

An explosion. A vast explosion of continuing duration as long as he's inside her. That change of direction, you see, simply strikes everywhere. Apparently it feels as if something about the size of a baby's head is in there, humming and singing and shouting for joy.

Explosions, muttered Joe. These revelations are exhausting me. Back to Munk and Sophia at once.

Yes. Well when Sophia described the young Swiss student who had impregnated the young and friendly Wallenstein wife in 1802, Munk recognized at once that this student was none other than his own great-grandfather, the tireless Johann Luigi Szondi.

Tireless Luigi, said Joe. That's him all right. But hold on there. What about this male Szondi peculiarity you were speaking of?

What about it?

Well Sophia had just spent the night with Munk.

Yes.

And so?

Oh you mean didn't she recognize the similarity, the connection, between Munk and that Swiss student of the early nineteenth century? Of course she did. No woman could mistake that explosion. In fact Munk speculates that was the real reason, once they'd got into bed, that Sophia was so taken with him. He's modest about it and doesn't put it down to his charm. No, he thinks Sophia must have found the idea of it immensely appealing. Erotic to the outer limits, in other words, making love with the great-grandson of the man who'd fathered her beloved Skanderbeg.

I'll never understand the Balkans, said Joe. Go on.

Well Sophia also told Munk how her Skanderbeg, formerly a Trappist by the way, had discovered the original Bible in the Holy Land, been shocked by its chaos and gone on to forge an acceptable version. A new original.

Discovered what? whispered Joe. The wind up here's playing tricks with my head.

The original Bible, repeated Cairo slowly. You know, the Sinai Bible.

Joe choked. He reached for his handkerchief but didn't get it up to his mouth in time. A slug of dark brown phlegm shot out of his throat and landed in his champagne glass. Joe gazed absentmindedly at the glass for a moment and fished in it with a spoon.

You're smoking too much, said Cairo.

Joe nodded vaguely.

I believe it. What I don't believe is this business about the Sinai Bible, Munk knowing about it all these years. Why didn't he ever mention it to me?

Did you ever mention it to him?

No.

Well?

I see. But wasn't he interested in finding it?

Munk's not religious, said Cairo. You know that.

I do. But I'm not religious either.

So?

Joe shook his head. He seemed dazed.

All right, Cairo, so the bog's all around me and I'm sinking fast. Give me a hand and pull me out before my head goes under. In other words, when did you learn all this from Munk? About this Luigi fellow who was your common great-grandfather and what he'd been up to one night in Albania? No I don't mean that, I mean about the Sinai Bible. When did you learn about the Sinai Bible?

When I met Munk.

What? All the way back at the beginning of the poker game?

Yes.

How'd it happen? I'm about to go under for the last time.

I asked Munk about his name. Menelik Ziwar had told me my great-grandfather's real name was Szondi.

He did? Old Menelik the mummy? On his back in the bottom of his sarcophagus conjuring up the past again? Well I thought I was going under for the last time but it seems you can sink forever in this bog. I mean, how did old Menelik know that? I always thought he was ferreting out tombs along the Nile, not spending time down in villages on the fringe of the Nubian desert soliciting accounts of Swiss wanderers who had passed that way in disguise some years before he was born.

Menelik had known my great-grandmother when he was young, when they were both slaves in the delta.

She told him about the father of her child, who'd been a well-known expert in Islamic law in his day.

Later Menelik was able to trace this expert back to Aleppo, where he discovered his real identity.

Aleppo, you see, was where Johann Luigi had lived for several years, perfecting his Arabic, before assuming his disguise and setting out on his wanderings.

Ah sure, someone's real identity. So tell me now in the end when it's almost over, what is this game we've been playing, Cairo? And where did it really start?

Cairo laughed. Any one of those places we've mentioned?

Yes I suppose. And when. When did it start?

Any one of those times we've mentioned?

I believe it, I do. All these years I've been circling around like my pigeons up there. Well why not pop another song of time so we can see the scheme of things over the Old City?

Cairo opened another bottle of champagne and the pigeons scattered in the air. The two men watched them swoop back and slowly begin to circle.

Ah that's better, that's nicely reassuring. For a moment there all this was unsettling my mind. Here I'd been thinking about finding the Sinai Bible these last dozen years and more, thinking no one in the game knew the great secret of its existence but me, and what do I discover all of a sudden? You and Munk both knew about it, that's what. And you, Cairo. Just a couple of months ago we spent a long night up here talking together, deciding to end the game, and you let me run on about the Sinai Bible as if you'd never heard of it. Guilty or not?

Cairo smiled.

No, I never did anything like that.

You didn't? Is my mind adrift and afloat in the manner of Haj Harun? I certainly thought you did.

No. I simply asked you how you'd heard about it. And more important, what it meant to you.

Is that all?

Yes.

And I just ran on and on after that? Well I do that, I know. But why didn't you interrupt me and say you already bloody well knew about the Sinai Bible? That everyone in the game knew about it? Of course, what else, since it's just about the oldest piece of goods in Jerusalem.

About three thousand years old? said Cairo, smiling.

Joe groaned.

Oh all right, so I was running on and you were just being a good listener. But tell me this, Cairo. After you'd heard about the Sinai Bible, why weren't you ever interested in finding it? Why wasn't Munk?

I guess we had our own goals in the game.

And so you did. And so in the end, all we know is where the game ends. Jerusalem naturally. Jerusalem of course. Saith ending of endings end. Jerusalem as it was and will be. And here we are with you and Munk and that nasty little Nubar all cousins today, friends and foes alike related, and where does that leave me? Don't I get to be related to someone?

I would think so. In fact since you were the youngest of thirty-three brothers, I would think you must have quite a few nieces and nephews, not to mention their children.

True, I must. Quite a few. Even though seventeen of my brothers were killed fighting in the Great War, that still leaves room for a number of nieces and nephews and their children.

Where are the rest of your brothers?

America mostly, scattered around something called the Bronx. I'll have to look them up someday. But you and Munk and little Nubar all second cousins a century after the fact. That was some job for one great-grandfather, this tireless young Luigi. Whatever became of him?

He died of dysentery at St Catherine's monastery in 1817. Do you know anything about St Catherine's?

Just that it's quiet and remote. I tramped in there once to have a turn around and climb the mountain.

Wanted to know what it felt like to stand up there, but of course no one spoke to me or gave me any tablets.

A lobster tail cracked in Joe's hands.

Oh my God, wait, you're not going to tell me that's where Skanderbeg Wallenstein found the Sinai Bible?

Of course.

Where else, of course, naturally that was the place. Anything more?

That's also where he did his forgery. In a cave just below the summit.

Joe whistled softly.

Full circle, no stop. St Catherine's it is on all counts, all points touched and none left out, the miracle of the mountain and why not. Luigi fathers everyone and then dies there, having been a Christian and a Jew and a Moslem at one time or another, and then one of his sons finds the original Bible there and forges a new original there. And then one of his great-grandsons, our very own Munk of course, finds his cause there, through the intervention of a Japanese baron of course, just as you'd expect, and soon this said Munk will proceed to win the Great Jerusalem Poker Game, of course and of course. It's the nature of the game assuredly and it's all clear to me now, now that it's behind me. That rogue Luigi has brought it all together, and nicely so. But he must have been a mischievous one, that's what he must have been, carrying on and about the way he did and ordering and disordering things a century later. Ah yes. And tell me, Cairo, speaking of nasty little Nubar, what do you hear about him these days?

He's in Venice and doesn't seem to be faring too well. There could be drastic news soon.

Can't say I wouldn't be ready for that. Never did like the way he tried to tinker with our game. To my mind you either sit down and play or you don't.

And lastly, said Cairo, there's the name Johann Luigi used when he was traveling in disguise.

Do you tell me that? I was just hoping there might be one last tiny item tucked away somewhere. What name could it have been?

Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun.

Was it now. Well well well. I think he deserves a toast for that as well as everything else. Let's hoist a glass to Sheik Luigi and his particular names. I like the idea of him calling himself Abraham, the son of Harun. Who's to say after all? On his way down from Aleppo, when he began his wanderings, he just might have stopped in Jerusalem and met a remarkable gent by the name of Harun, and decided that if he was going to wander in these parts it would be best to become the adopted son of that remarkable elderly gent, honoring the old man too that way and also maybe picking up a little of the old sorcerer's magic by association, just in case a miracle became necessary, which it seems to me his wanderings certainly were. Yes indeed, a striking possibility and worth a toast to cap our Christmas celebration.

They got to their feet beside the table heaped with lobster shells and bottles. Joe was wearing mittens, Cairo had put on his gloves. The weather had grown colder as the afternoon wore on. The sky was dark and it looked like snow again. They stood with mufflers wrapped around their ears, gazing out over the Old City.

To Sheik Luigi, said Joe. Without him there never would have been the longest poker game in the back room of Haj Harun's former antiquities shop.

They drank, then went inside the little hut and threw their glasses into the small grate where a turf fire was slumbering.

A Christmas and was it not, Cairo?

A time, Joe. A good time for all of us.

Joe lowered his eyes. He looked down at the floor.

Ah God willing, for some of us anyway. Peace to seek.

-16-

Venice 1933

And it was here beneath the Grand Canal that he would secretly plan the destruction of the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle and decree the ruin of its three criminal founders.

On a cold December day in 1933, Nubar lay shivering in bed watching the thick winter fog roll up against the windows of his palazzo in Venice. Sophia was now sending him cables almost every day inquiring about his health, asking him what his plans were, wondering how his short holiday in Venice had inexplicably stretched into a stay of nearly a year.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING THERE, NUBAR?

It was terrible. He couldn't possibly tell Sophia what he was doing.

TO BE FRANK, I'M IN HIDING. I HAD TO ESCAPE FROM ALBANIA BECAUSE OF AN

INCIDENT IN A FISHING VILLAGE AND I CAN'T COME BACK RIGHT NOW BECAUSE

OF THE LIES THAT MIGHT BE TOLD ABOUT ME. PEOPLE WILL DO THAT, JUST LIE AND

LIE. BUT NO MATTER HOW OUTRAGEOUSLY I'M SLANDERED, BUBBA, I'LL TRIUMPH

IN THE END, I PROMISE YOU.

And he could even imagine exactly what her response would be.

PROMISES, NUBAR? SPARE ME, DON'T PROMISE ME ANYTHING. JUST TELL ME HOW

YOU SPEND YOUR DAYS. ARE YOU GETTING OUT OF THE HOUSE ENOUGH AND ARE

YOU DRESSING WARMLY?

And another statement of fact.

WELL TO BE FRANK AGAIN, BUBBA, I DON'T DRESS AT ALL DURING THE DAY

BECAUSE I NEVER GET OUT OF BED. DAYLIGHT FRIGHTENS ME. SO I LIE IN BED ALL

DAY SWILLING MULBERRY RAKI, WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY FOUL, THE WORST THING

IN THE WORLD FOR A STOMACH AS GASEOUS AS MINE. BUT YOU SEE I FEEL A NEED

TO DRINK AND A COMPULSIVE NEED TO DRINK ONLY THAT. AND WHILE SPENDING

THESE LISTLESS DAYS IN BED, AS I'VE DONE FOR MONTHS, I CONTINUE TO WORK

ON MY JOURNALS, WHICH ARE TITLED THE BOY.

And another imagined response.

SPARE ME, NUBAR, I KNOW HOW YOU ATE WHEN YOU WERE A BOY. POORLY. NOW

PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME DRAG EVERYTHING OUT OF YOU. ARE YOU EATING

PROPERLY OR NOT?

And a statement of fact again, and a response, and on and on.

I'M EATING A SINGLE BAKED CHICKEN WING TWICE A DAY, BUBBA, ONE AROUND

NOON AND ANOTHER IN THE EVENING, AND THAT'S ALL I EAT. I ADMIT IT DOESN'T

SOUND LIKE MUCH, BUT AGAIN I SEEM TO HAVE A COMPULSIVE NEED TO EAT NO

MORE THAN THAT, AND TO EAT ONLY THAT. IT'S ODD, I AGREE. OBVIOUSLY I'M

STARVING MYSELF TO DEATH.

* * *

PLEASE, NUBAR, SPARE ME YOUR LURID FANTASIES AND TELL ME HOW YOU SPEND

YOUR EVENINGS. ARE YOU WRITING POETRY AGAIN?

* * *

NO, BUBBA, I'D HARDLY CALL MY EVENINGS POETRY. I CONTINUE SWILLING

MULBERRY RAKI AFTER SUNDOWN, BUT THEN I DO SO FROM A WOODEN CANTEEN

THAT I CARRY WITH ME TO THE PIAZZA IN FRONT OF SAN MARCO'S, WHERE, IN THE

RAIN AND THE DRIZZLE, I HAUNT THE VAST FOG-BOUND EXPANSES SEARCHING IN

VAIN FOR SOMEONE, ANYONE, TO GIVE ONE OF MY JOURNALS TO.

* * *

DO YOU WEAR A HAT, NUBAR? AND PLEASE REMEMBER TO TAKE ALONG A SCARF

EVEN IF YOU KEEP IT IN YOUR POCKET.

* * *

OR NOT EVEN THAT, BUBBA, THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE TO TAKE ONE OF THE

JOURNALS. I'D SETTLE FOR VERY LITTLE NOW. IN FACT I'D BE QUITE HAPPY IF

SOMEONE, ANYONE, JUST ALLOWED ME TO READ A BRIEF EXCERPT FROM ONE OF

THE JOURNALS TO HIM OR HER.

* * *

GOOD, NUBAR. I'M GLAD YOU'RE TAKING A SCARF WITH YOU WHEN YOU GO OUT

IN THE EVENING.

* * *

AND IS THAT TOO MUCH TO EXPECT, BUBBA? TO ASK SOMEONE TO STOP FOR JUST

A MINUTE TO HEAR THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT GRONK? AND THE WHOLE TRUTH AS

WELL ABOUT THE DESTRUCTIVE THINGS THAT WERE DONE THERE BY A VILE AND

UTTERLY SELFISH AFGHAN, A MAN SO CONTEMPTIBLE HE WAS OFFICIALLY

DESCRIBED IN AN ALBANIAN COURT OF LAW AS THAT FILTHY FOREIGNER?

* * *

PLEASE DON'T BE SO IMPATIENT WITH FOREIGNERS, NUBAR. I'VE ONLY KNOWN

ONE PERSON FROM AFGHANISTAN, THE PRINCESS WHO VISITED US YEARS AGO, AND SHE WAS AS LOVELY AS ANYONE COULD BE.

* * *

NO, YOU WOULDN'T THINK SO, BUBBA, BUT APPARENTLY IT IS TOO MUCH TO

EXPECT. APPARENTLY THERE'S NOT ONE PERSON ON THIS EARTH WHO'S WILLING

TO LISTEN TO THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT THE AA.

* * *

IS THAT A WORD, NUBAR? WAS THE TRANSMISSION FAULTY OR HAVE I MISSED

SOMETHING?

* * *

THEY'RE INITIALS, BUBBA, AND THERE ARE SOME DEMENTED PEOPLE WHO MIGHT

EVEN CLAIM THEY STOOD FOR THE ALBANIAN-AFGHAN SACRED BAND, A TOTAL

LIE. FROM ITS INCEPTION THAT NOTORIOUS ORGANIZATION WAS ACTUALLY THE

ALL-AFGHANISTAN SACRED BAND, A FOREIGN MADNESS AND A FOREIGN

CONSPIRACY BENT ON DUPING INNOCENT ALBANIAN FARM BOYS INTO

PERFORMING FOUL AFGHAN ACTS. YOU'VE HEARD THE AFGHAN SAYING ABOUT

WOMEN AND BOYS AND GOATS, IN THAT ASCENDING ORDER?

* * *

PLEASE, NUBAR, NO MORE CONSPIRACIES.

* * *

BUT DON'T YOU SEE WHAT I'M GETTING AT, BUBBA? WHEN I VENTURE INTO THE

RAIN AND FOG OF THAT HUGE PIAZZA IN THE EVENING, AND CONTINUE GOING

AROUND AND AROUND IT ALL NIGHT, I'M SHAMEFULLY IGNORED AND EVEN

SHUNNED, AS IF I WERE SOME LOATHSOME CREATURE. AND I'M STARVING AND MY

VISION IS BEGINNING TO BLUR AND ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE I STILL HAVE

ALL MY OLD SYMPTOMS OF MERCURY POISONING. SO YOU SEE MY LIFE HAS

ALMOST BEEN RUINED BECAUSE OF A FILTHY FOREIGNER WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE

FOR EVERYTHING, AND THAT'S THE WHOLE TRUTH. MY JOURNALS EXPLAIN IT

CLEARLY AND SUCCINCTLY.

* * *

TAKE A HOT BATH, NUBAR. GET A GOOD NIGHT'S SLEEP AND TOMORROW THINGS

WILL LOOK BETTER.

To be frank with Sophia? It was out of the question. There was no way he could tell her what he was really doing in Venice. He could only go on making up imaginary activities and receiving Sophia's worried responses. The exchange seemed endless.

I'M VISITING PALACES, BUBBA, STUDYING THE WORKS OF VERONESE.

* * *

ARE YOU SURE, NUBAR? I NEVER KNEW YOU WERE INTERESTED IN ART. WHAT

HAPPENED TO MERCURY?

* * *

AND I'M ALSO VISITING MUSEUMS, BUBBA, MAKING A STUDY OF THE RISE AND

FALL OF MARITIME POWER IN THE MEDITERRANEAN.

* * *

MARITIME POWER IS FINE, NUBAR, BUT ARE YOU DRINKING MINERAL WATER FOR

YOUR GAS?

* * *

MINERAL WATER SUPERB, BUBBA. GAS UNDER CONTROL.

* * *

I'M SO GLAD, NUBAR. AND YOU PROMISE YOU'RE EATING PROPERLY? A NICE PIECE

OF FISH OR VEAL AT LEAST ONCE A DAY? NOT JUST RAW VEGETABLES AND THAT

DREADFUL WHOLE WHEAT BREAD OF YOURS?

* * *

WITH ALL THESE ITALIAN DELICACIES BEFORE ME, BUBBA, I HAVEN'T TOUCHED

WHOLE WHEAT IN MONTHS, AND YOU CAN BE SURE OF THAT.

* * *

ARE YOU SURE, NUBAR?

* * *

ABSOLUTELY. BESIDES, BUBBA, WILD BOAR HAS JUST COME INTO SEASON AND I MUST HAVE GAINED TWENTY POUNDS ALREADY.

* * *

WONDERFUL, NUBAR, KEEP IT UP.

* * *

I WILL, BUBBA, I CERTAINLY WILL. I'M FAT AND SLEEK AND EVERYTHING'S

PERFECT, SO I GUESS THAT'S IT FOR NOW. CHEERIO.

* * *

NOW DON'T GET ANGRY, NUBAR, BUT WILD BOAR IS VERY RICH AND I SIMPLY

MUST KNOW. ARE YOU REGULAR? JUST CABLE YES OR NO.

* * *

YES.

* * *

MARVELOUS. HAVE A NICE WEEKEND.

But when the weekend came there were more worried cables from Sophia. Of course she would have stopped sending them if Nubar had told her that he had married upon his arrival in Venice and fathered a son. But then Sophia would have rushed to Venice to meet his wife and see his son, and she would have discovered that his alarmed wife hadn't set eyes on him since the evening of their wedding, when Nubar, thoroughly distraught over the recent events he had fled in Albania, had suddenly begun to harangue his new wife with one of the interminable AA speeches he had been accustomed to delivering in Gronk, ranting on inappropriately about AA rituals and truncheons and discipline, even going so far as to describe in considerable detail the uniforms he had designed for the AA, whereupon the horrified young woman had abandoned him on the spot, screaming that she would never speak to him again, and returned at once to her home in the Armenian community of Venice, where their son Mecklenburg had been born when the time came.

So naturally Nubar didn't dare to tell Sophia anything about his marriage or his son. Nor could he admit that he had been dangerously deteriorating ever since his arrival in Venice, especially since he had bought his gloomy palazzo on the Grand Canal.

Slowly starving in his palazzo, in fact, amidst a large unruly staff of slovenly servants who added more of their relatives to the payroll each week in order to rob him. Who had gone from stealing simple items such as paintings and silverware to cleaning out whole rooms in the most unscrupulous manner, until finally the entire palazzo had been stripped bare save for a few pieces of furniture left in his own bedroom.

Intolerable behavior on the part of his thieving servants, who found him so preoccupied with his compulsive fantasies they had recently become so bold as to begin ripping out walls to get at the wiring and the copper tubing and the plumbing, anything at all that they could sell for scrap on the mainland.

No plumbing. Not even that. For a month now Nubar had been forced to steal flowerpots at night from the cafés he haunted and smuggle them back to his bedroom closet so he could have something to use as a toilet the next morning.

Fog. The penetrating cold damp fog of a Venetian winter, Nubar adrift in a dream city floating out to sea, lost in the rain and the drizzle on the tides of a landless dream, hiding in bed in his empty palazzo, shivering in a fetal position on a damp December morning.

Nubar jumped. One of the tall bedroom windows was cracking, shattering, cascading down on him, the window frame having apparently been loosened during the night when a gang of his servants had chiseled away a valuable cornice on that side of the palazzo.

Nubar shuddered as the glass splintered noisily and came showering down on the bed. When it was over he peeked out from under the covers. Clouds of dense fog were billowing in through the jagged gaping hole, filling the room with an icy dampness.

Fog, fetal. Nubar felt dizzy. His winter dreams were becoming a nightmare. Soon the fog in the bedroom would be so thick he wouldn't be able to make out the fireplace in the far wall. He had to escape from his bedroom while there was still time, before the fog billowing in through the window swallowed up everything and trapped him in bed for the rest of the winter. With an enormous effort he threw back the covers.

Naked. He hadn't realized that. No wonder he was so cold. He groped his way over to where the chest of drawers was supposed to be.

Gone. The servants must have carried it away during the night so they could sell his shirts and socks. He felt his way along the wall to the closet.

Empty. Nothing but piles of festering flowerpots. They'd taken his suits and shoes and coats to sell as well. He got down on his hands and knees, hoping to find the clothes he'd taken off when he returned at dawn, but after crawling only a few feet he cut his thumb. He popped the bleeding thumb into his mouth.

Glass everywhere from the broken window. He'd have to find clothes elsewhere.

Thus toward the middle of the morning on December 21, 1933, a naked Nubar Wallenstein, sole heir to the largest oil fortune in the Middle East, sucking his thumb and shivering violently in a swirling fog, left his fetal position in the master bedroom of his spacious Venetian palazzo and wandered into the corridor on the second floor, in search of clothes to wear on what would be the longest day of his life, under his arm a stack of incoherent journals, bewilderingly contradictory, titled The Boy.

It was dark in the corridor, the chandeliers having all been removed months ago. Nubar sucked his thumb and worked his way along the wall. Behind him the fog from his bedroom billowed out into the corridor in impressive clouds.

Fog. Ahead to the left a feeble yellow glow came from what had once been the music room. Nubar tiptoed over and peeked in.

A gang of about a dozen servants and their relatives were milling around the room with torches and heavy crowbars, arguing loudly about who should hold the torches and who wield the crowbars to pry up the marble flooring.

One of the women had left a battered old pair of brown galoshes outside the door. Nubar stepped into them. They were torn and cracked and much too large for him, about twice the size of his small feet, but at least walking on rubber would be better than going barefoot on the cold marble floors.

Nubar shuffled forward, slowly moving away from the weak yellow glow that already seemed dimmer.

Behind him the demolition crew in the music room erupted into passionate Italian curses as they bumped into one another and knocked each other down, suddenly unable to see what they were doing because of the thick fog rolling into the room from the corridor.

Somewhere back there a voice screamed, followed by a different scream and a third. Crowbars were striking something solid with heavy thuds. Heads being broken? A falling-out over loot? Why not, the thieves deserved it. Nubar sucked his thumb and giggled. He skated over to the top of the grand staircase, where a torch had been jammed into a hole in the wall.

He removed the torch and examined his finger. It was still bleeding slightly. He put the thumb back in his mouth and waddled down the staircase toward the grand entrance-hall on the ground floor, the volumes of The Boy pressed tightly against his sunken chest.

Disorder on every side. Holes in the walls, craters in the floors. Here and there flickering corners heaped with chunks of rotting bread and gnawed bones and the glittering skeletons of chickens picked clean, stinking salami wrappers and twisted olive-oil tins and mounds of rigid tangled pasta, the debris his servants had left around the makeshift cooking fires they had hastily set up and abandoned on their destructive migrations through the palazzo.

Rampaging Visigoths, thought Nubar. Marauding Ostrogoths. The fools. Didn't they realize that when they pillaged him they were pillaging the very foundations of Western civilization? Idiots. When would they ever learn?

Nubar picked his way carefully around the smoldering campfires toward the lofty devastated space that had once been the salon, through the desolate wasted savanna that had once been the library.

Mad savages, he muttered as he shuffled forward, his destination a small room behind the kitchen where the cooks had once changed into their uniforms before coming on duty, months ago when that was still done. He thought there might be some clothes there but when he finally reached the small room, now a murky cave with assorted shards and bones scattered around the entrance, he found only some underwear hanging on a hook, women's underwear, monstrously large even by Italian working-class standards.

Women's underwear. Monstrous. Nubar poked through the huge damp articles and found mold everywhere. They must have been hanging there for months, at least since the rains of the previous spring.

Still, he had to have something to wear.

An enormous pair of thick brown stockings, too big for him to use as stockings. A scarf? Nubar wound the stockings around and around his neck, making a thick scarf for himself.

Enormous brown bloomers. Nubar stepped into them and found that the waistband came all the way up to his armpits. He wound the bloomers around the top of his chest, tying knots, three or four times around his chest and dozens of knots before the bloomers would stay up. He sucked his thumb and studied the next article.

An immense brown canvas corset, boned. The corset was also big enough to go around him three or four times. Nubar looped the corset ties over his shoulders and knotted them under his armpits. The corset reached down below his knees and was pleasantly warm. Because it restricted his legs he found he had to take small mincing steps, but no matter. He had to take small mincing steps anyway because he couldn't lift the large brown galoshes off the floor, only push them forward a little bit at a time.

A brown canvas brassiere, each cup large enough to held a man's head.

Nubar giggled.

Why not? His ears were aching from the damp cold of the fog that had followed him down the main staircase from his bedroom. Impenetrable fog. Soon it would become so thick it would obscure all the rooms on the first floor as well.

Nubar pulled one of the brassiere cups over his head and fitted it snugly around his ears, tying the strap under his chin. With half of the brassiere now a warm skullcap enclosing his head, the other half hung on his back shaped like a roomy rucksack.

Why not? thought Nubar. He tied the strap from the lower half of the brassiere to an eyelet in the corset, so the rucksack could be steady and not dump out its contents when he moved.

Steady. Nubar floated into the pantry and removed the wooden canteen he kept hidden there behind a broken wagon wheel. Then he filled the canteen with mulberry raki from a demijohn he kept hidden under the decomposing carcass of a sheep that looked as if it had been slaughtered for ritualistic purposes.

Barbarians. You couldn't be too careful. Anything of value had to be hidden from these pillaging hordes.

Steady. Voices approaching. Perhaps a patrol?

Nubar pressed himself against the wall in the pantry and held his breath as a wrecking crew of servants trooped through the kitchen shouting loudly to each other, apparently coming from the direction of the main dining room with something long and heavy, perhaps a beam, going toward the back door. The noisy gang passed no more than a few yards away but Nubar, dull brown and immobile, was able to escape detection in the thick fog.

He dropped the canteen into his rucksack and entered the scullery, there to make his most spectacular find of the morning, a long greasy housecoat propped up on a pole, like an animal skin, beside the dead embers of a campfire, no doubt left behind by some woman vandalizing another wing of the palazzo.

Nubar pulled it down and found that the housecoat was a fine garment in faded violet with a large floppy collar, the collar very soft to the touch after years of being nibbled and chewed. The greasy violet housecoat had a deep pocket on each hip and a smaller pocket on the chest.

Long and warm and greasy, what could be better on a cold winter day? Nubar went through the pockets to see what might turn up.

A large brownish rag, stiff with what looked like dried blood. Nubar closed his eyes and sniffed.

Raw horsemeat, there was no mistaking the smell. Raw horsemeat had been wrapped in this rag.

Probably it had been carried under the saddle of a Tartar horseman as he came wildly galloping out of the steppes of central Asia, the heavy sweat of the animal and the weight of the rider tending to cure the raw meat so the horseman could rip off a digestible hunk at the end of the day for his meal. Barbarians.

Disgusting.

A nearly full packet of Macedonian Extras with a box of matches.

A tube of lipstick and a tin of rouge.

A single earring made for a pierced ear, with a dangling spherical stone of fake lapis lazuli.

Three one-lira pieces.

A medallion stamped with Mussolini's face on one side and the Blessed Virgin Mary's on the other.

Barbarians. Savage plunder. Nubar put everything back into the pockets of the housecoat except the stiff bloodied rag, which he sniffed again. He blew his nose on the rag and dropped it into his rucksack for easy access. Then he put on the housecoat and found it truly magnificent, a stately garment that swept out behind him and trailed along the floor in the manner of a bride's gown, or even a queen's at her coronation.

Nubar giggled. He made several formal turns around the kitchen, smiling haughtily down at his admiring, imaginary subjects. At the door he stopped and uncorked his canteen, taking a long drink of the fiery raki that immediately infused him with strength. His eyes narrowed slyly as he peered into the foggy darkness of the corridor off the kitchen.

A descent into the underworld? Had the time come for the whole truth?

Yes it had, and Nubar was ready. Civilization was going to survive despite the worst efforts of the barbarians.

The idea had come to him while he was putting on his huge brown brassiere, precisely at the moment he had pulled the cup down over his head and made a thinking cap out of it. A brilliant plan for reversing the failures of the last months, those abject and futile efforts to peddle The Boy, at night and alone, to sneering strangers in the rain and the fog in the piazza, in front of San Marco's.

For nearly a year now the reports of the Uranist Intelligence Agency had been accumulating in the subcellar of his palazzo, sent regularly from the Middle East and "stored according to his standing instructions. Nubar had been too busy trying to peddle The Boy to visit the subcellar in the last year, but he knew that in those reports there would be a complete account of the poker game in Jerusalem over the last year.

And more important, there would be detailed descriptions of the activities of those three master criminal degenerates, Martyr and Szondi and O'Sullivan Beare, who were trying to gain control of Jerusalem in order to keep him from the inheritance that was rightfully his, the original Sinai Bible discovered by his grandfather a century ago and buried by him in Jerusalem, the philosopher's stone that would guarantee Nubar immortality when it came into his possession.

What evil new designs, what fiendish plots had those three sinister figures been using against him?

Nubar intended to find out. And then he would issue the order that would end their diabolical twelve-year game and eliminate the three of them for all time.

Order at last, unwavering discipline and correct toilet training, absolute authority. The final solution.

No longer to be obsessed by Gronk dreams and memories, by desperate attempts to have someone, anyone, take The Boy seriously. All of that was behind him now. By an act of will he would do what had to be done in the winter fog of Venice. He would do what was necessary to end the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle. He would bring them total war and then the fools would see what disobedience led to and learn the meaning of the whole truth, his rule that would last a thousand years.

Nubar's smile twisted into a smirk. He raised his torch in front of a mirror in the kitchen and squinted at himself approvingly.

Corset and brassiere and bloomers and stockings, a greasy warm housecoat, all oversized and substantial. A massive study in brown gently overlaid with faded purple.

Still smirking crookedly, the journals of The Boy tucked under his arm, he floated forward and drifted silently down the corridor to the door that led to the cellar.

Twenty steps to the cellar. Nubar opened the door at the bottom of the stairs that led to the subcellar and descended the thirty steep steps to the landing halfway down. A faint light rose from the depths. He changed direction, watching carefully, and started down the last steep stretch of forty steps.

He was almost at the bottom before he could make out the figure. A man in livery was digging with a pickax and shovel, one of his footmen muttering in a maritime Genovese accent about the secret treasures rich foreigners always buried in their deepest cellars.

Peasant swine, thought Nubar. The barbarian had no idea that the treasures here weren't to be found in the ground but in the reports of the Uranist Intelligence Agency.

The footman had removed a section of the cobblestones that paved the subcellar floor and had dug a hole about four feet square. He was now standing in the hole up to his waist, vigorously hacking away at the clay with his pickax. Beside the hole lay the footman's blue satin swallowtail coat. A candle that stood in the clay was dripping wax on the gold braid of the coat, and Nubar was immediately infuriated to see gold braid being treated with so little respect. He stamped his feet and shouted defiantly, his anger directed toward the defilers of civilization everywhere, his voice weirdly distorted by the confines of the subcellar.

Out, peasant swine. Out, you evil creature.

The footman whirled. He stared. Nubar was moving slowly up and down inside his huge stationary galoshes, his long greasy housecoat shaking in rage, the brassiere encasing his head quivering with indignation.

The footman screamed and leapt from the hole in horror. He bolted up the stairs to the kitchen where he threw himself through a casement window and went crashing down into the dark water beside the palazzo, there to be entangled in a sluggish flow of sewerage that was moving out into the Grand Canal under the impenetrable cover of fog.

Nubar, meanwhile, paused by the bottom of the stairs to get his bearings, and what he saw astonished him. The entire subcellar was packed with stacks and stacks of neatly piled papers, dossiers and card files and loose-leaf folders, the unread reports of the Uranist Intelligence Agency over the last seven months.

Extraordinary, thought Nubar as he gazed out over the thousands and thousands of reports, the towering collections of amassed data, realizing for the first time just how productive his intelligence agency really was.

Nubar shuffled over to the hole the footman had dug and stuck his torch in the clay. He knocked over several tall stacks of reports and made a couch for himself out of the paper. The footman's coat, folded, served as an armrest. He took a drink of mulberry raki from his canteen, accidentally biting off some of the wooden spout in his eagerness to begin, not noticing there was wood in his mouth so great was his concentration, chewing the wood and swallowing it along with the mulberry raki. Then he arranged himself comfortably on his paper couch, tucked the tails of the greasy housecoat snugly around his legs and lit a Macedonian Extra, inhaling deeply.

A drop of water fell on his nose. He licked it away. Salt water?

Nubar looked up at the ceiling. He estimated the height of the subcellar staircase with its two directions to the north and east, the height of the regular cellar staircase with its third northerly direction. He recalled the location of the cellar door in the palazzo and calculated its distance from the landing in front of the palazzo.

Nubar smiled. There was no doubt about it.

The archives of the Uranist Intelligence Agency lay directly beneath the Grand Canal. And it was here beneath the Grand Canal that he would secretly plan the destruction of the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle and decree the ruin of its three criminal founders.

Nubar's eyes narrowed.

Jerusalem the Holy City on the heights, above the wastes and the deserts? The eternal city secure on its mountaintop? Well they wouldn't get away with it, those barbaric criminals. Order and alignment and the whole truth would triumph, he would liberate Jerusalem and take what was his.

Nubar licked another drop of salt water off his nose. He picked up a report at random and began to read.

Perhaps it was only the lack of air in that subaqueous cellar, but to Nubar the report in front of him seemed unusually interesting, far above the normal quality of UIA material.

In the beginning, indeed, it was impossible to imagine just what the subject of the report would turn out to be.

It had been submitted by Dead Sea Control, which was responsible for the Jerusalem district, located at a distance from Jerusalem, for security reasons, amidst the sulphur and salt deposits on the south shore of the Dead Sea. The station was housed in a cluster of tin huts that had been erected by a now defunct mining enterprise. Although nicely hidden away behind the huge columns of salt common to the area, the tin huts were unbearably hot most of the year, which perhaps explained the incoherency of many of the station's reports.

Originally Jericho had been considered as a likely location for the reporting center of the Jerusalem district, but Nubar had personally intervened in favor of the sulphur site on the Dead Sea, despite the heat. It pleased him to know the UIA's most important field station was nestled in the lowest spot on earth, within those grotesque geological formations that were generally accepted to be the natural ruins of Sodom.

Dead Sea Control had evaluated the report as POTENTIAL URINE, which meant it had been written by an informer who had shown enough initiative to be considered a potential Ur anist in telligence e mployee. Beneath the formal title was a descriptive caption, uncommonly cryptic by UIA standards.

Submitted as background material only, to illustrate the difficulties faced by Dead Sea Control in collecting relevant information about Jerusalem, in view of the mythical nature of that city up there on the mountain. And especially in view of the view from down here on the shores of what has been referred to, in an important piece of literature, as the dried cunt of the world. (That very long novel, still banned in most countries as obscene, deals exclusively with a single day, June 16, 1904. Amazing, don't you think? Of course we have a lot of time to read long novels down here.) Nubar snorted. Did his agents think they were getting paid to read long novels? He made a mental note to fire off a cable to Dead Sea Control as soon as he had finished reading the report.

ARE YOU MAD? NO MORE REFERENCES TO CUNTS AND NO MORE OBSCURE

LITERARY ALLUSIONS. STICK TO THE TRUTH FROM NOW ON OR YOU CAN EXPECT

IMMEDIATE DISCIPLINARY ACTION.

NUBAR

SUPREME LEADER

He read on.

Submitted, secondly, to illustrate the difficulties faced in separating interesting, relevant information on Jerusalem from the mass of uninteresting, irrelevant details in which it is invariably encased. And lastly, submitted because the report does have some legitimate curiosity value when read with an open mind.

An open mind? Nubar had an open mind and the idea of reading something with curiosity value intrigued him after all these months of lying in bed all day and sneaking around in the rain all night trying to get someone to take The Boy seriously.

He turned the page.

EYES ONLY Jerusalem to Dead Sea Control.

DATE when information was acquired: August 1933.

DATE when information was forwarded to Control: Halloween 1933. (Delay due to time required to write up report.)

TIME when information was elicited: Several hours on a very hot afternoon in August 1933.

PLACE where information was elicited: The Moslem Quarter, the Old City, Jerusalem.

PERSON from whom information was elicited: Name, race and nationality unknown. A man on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. (They're always coming and going by the thousands, these pilgrims, aren't they, and there's certainly no way to know who most of them are. Now this one happens to remain anonymous throughout the report, on the face of it simply because I was never able to find out who he was. But mightn't there be some larger design beyond that? Could it just be, perhaps, that he was meant to be anonymous in order for him to assume the role of the archetypal pilgrim?

One single part in the narrative, thereby, put forward to represent all the seekers who have sought Jerusalem over the millennia?

Not so farfetched, it seems to me, once you get into the entanglements that are coming.) PERIOD covered by information in this report: From 930 B.C. to August 1933.

WHAT follows initially: Unclassified records (public).

WHAT follows in the middle: Top Secret speculations (private).

AND FINALLY WHAT follows in the all-important end. (A note to agents filling out this form.

You have now arrived at the meat of your report and you are warned, here above all, to be brief and to the point. Your ability to describe your meat succinctly is the only reason anybody will ever read your report, if anybody ever does, which is in no way guaranteed by the hierarchy of the UIA. So summarize ruthlessly, in one sentence, making your case in plain language accessible to all. Extravagant attitudes may be allowed elsewhere, but not here. And the same goes for dabbling in fanciful notions or toying with idle speculations, with taking side trips down curious byways or pausing to explore obscure corners, all of the above and more, in fact any device whatsoever that may creep into your reports elsewhere. That's one thing but this is another, and we repeat, it must not happen here. Your meat of the matter, that's what is wanted now.

All right then, we're there, this is it and good luck. State your end product, what valuable contribution you have today to this crazy business we're all in. Go.): True identities of all major figures who have operated clandestinely in Jerusalem during the period covered by this report 930 B.C. to August 1933).

The first records Nubar came to were copies of documents from a Jerusalem tax office, dated from 1921

to 1933. But there was no indication what significance the records might have, or what was being taxed.

Next there were Jerusalem telephone bills and water bills for the same years, evidently purloined, followed by bills of lading for a cheap but sturdy juice squeezer of Czech origin, the squeezer's lever and cup and strainer all detachable for packing and cleaning purposes.

The bills of lading were dated 1921 and traced the juice squeezer from a factory in Prague, by rail, to an outlet on the Black Sea. By Bulgarian lugger, in a load of general cargo, to Constantinople. By cart, overland to Beirut, and by Greek caique down the coast to Jaffa. Whence by rail up to Jerusalem, the ultimate destination of the juice squeezer.

Nubar put his finger on the last bill of lading and gazed into the dark corners of his subcellar.

Jerusalem. A pattern was beginning to emerge.

He tightened the stockings around his neck against the chill, scratched himself thoughtfully and went back to the report. He had finished with the records.

The next page showed a floor plan of what appeared to be a tiny room. The walls were irregular. There was a door and one window, a counter and two chairs. At the end of the counter next to the door was the emblem of the UIA, §, also the symbol of the planet Uranus. Outside the door in a space marked alley was the number 18 and an arrow with an N at the tip. A scale beside the arrow listed foot and yard.

Nubar measured the room with his thumb and found it to be about eight feet long and five feet wide, narrowing to only three feet at the back.

He turned over the diagram. Now the pages began to be numbered for security reasons.

Page 1 of 407 pages, a report on the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle.

1. The preceding diagram shows a fruit juice stand. Mine. I squeeze fresh juice by the glass, on order, and customers generally drink it on the premises. Shops in the Old City are often small and oddly shaped.

2. N indicates north.

3. 18 indicates the street number my shop might have if it were on a street and had a number, which it isn't and doesn't, being situated in a narrow alley and cul-de-sac near the bazaar in the Moslem Quarter, the rent there being about as cheap as can be found inside the walls built around the Old City by Suleiman I in 1542.

Good, thought Nubar. Completeness and unerring accuracy was the motto he had adopted for the UIA way back in 1921 when he had first begun hiring literary agents to steal all the known works of the great doctor and master alchemist, Paracelsus, real name Bombastus von Hohenheim.

4. Trade is reasonably brisk in the summer, almost nonexistent in the winter and more or less half and half at other times.

5. To the east of my shop at a distance of a dozen yards or less, occupying the end of this dead-end alley, stands the entrance to two vaulted rooms owned by an elderly man who claims he was formerly an antiquities dealer. This elderly man wears a faded yellow cloak and a rusty Crusader's helmet, goes barefoot, and calls himself Haj Harun.

Nubar instantly sucked in what was left of his cigarette, inhaling so forcefully it burned both his fingers and his lips. He licked his lips and gasped.

Haj Harun's shop? The actual site of the vicious poker game for the last twelve years? Nubar closed his eyes to concentrate. He took a deep breath, then read on.

6. My clientele comes almost exclusively from the lower classes, but without regard to race, religion or creed. Members of other classes, however, have patronized my shop on occasion, generally because they were lost in the Old City and seeking a way out, as we shall soon see below.

Indeed we will, thought Nubar suspiciously.

7. The constant stream of visitors, many wealthy, who frequent Haj Harun's murky premises at all hours of the day and night, for purposes of poker, never enter my shop. On their way into Haj Harun's they often remark disdainfully that my shop is much too dirty for their patronage. But on their way out, penniless and dazed, stripped of all they own, they just as often sag on my counter and beg for credit. Please? A mere glass of juice? Just a sip? Just a lick of the strainer? No, I answer firmly, cash on the counter having always been my policy.

Excellent, thought Nubar. Sound and businesslike. Why take pity on anyone? It could only lead to disruptions in the social order, and order was all-important.

In fact Nubar was beginning to like this informer and his thoroughly straightforward approach to a problem. No wonder Dead Sea Control had seen fit to evaluate him as POTENTIAL URINE. He was indeed. Nubar thought of another cable that should be sent as soon as he finished the report.

FLASH PRIORITY. BRAVO TO ALL HANDS. OUR MAN AT THE FRUIT JUICE STAND IN

THE OLD CITY IS THE BEST POTENTIAL URINE WE'VE HAD IN YEARS. YOU ARE

HEREBY AUTHORIZED TO PROMOTE HIM IMMEDIATELY TO FULL OFFICER STATUS

WITH ALL MEDICAL AND RETIREMENT BENEFITS.

BY ORDER OF

NUBAR

LEADER,

FIELD MARSHAL,

SUPREME GENERALISSIMO COMMANDING

Nubar smiled. He liked that. Good. He read on.

8. I have no phone. The phone-bill records apply to the phone in a nearby coffee shop where I have made all my personal and business calls over the last twelve years, or since I arrived in Jerusalem.

9. I have paid no taxes over the last twelve years because my cash flow is meager and I have been able to bribe the tax clerk in charge of my alley with free pomegranate juice. Therefore I have included the tax records for this same coffee shop, and also its water bills, because completeness and unerring accuracy are everything to an informer for the UIA.

Perfect, thought Nubar. Maybe the enormous sums of money consumed by the UIA weren't being entirely squandered after all.

10. During the twelve years that I have operated this fruit juice stand, pomegranate juice has outsold orange juice, although not by much. Before coming to Jerusalem I worked briefly in Damascus and for a longer period in Baghdad. In both cities I was a self-employed technician in sputum analysis.

11. The symbol of the UIA, seen on the counter in the diagram of my shop, marks the exact location of my imported juice squeezer.

A fine grasp of detail, thought Nubar, reaching the end of the page. He paused to tug his skullcap more tightly around his ears as protection against the cold drafts sweeping fitfully through the cellar. Time to take a break for a little refreshment? Why not?

He took his canteen out of his rucksack and drank, feeling new warmth from the mulberry raki, at the same time absentmindedly nibbling off what was left of the wooden spout of the canteen, totally absorbed with the methodical reasoning of this informer. The report was unfolding with undeniable logic, and he could see that the informer was determined to do his duty, to tell the whole truth.

Nubar chewed and swallowed the wood.

12. May I just state here that I have always considered it the greatest of honors to serve as an informer for the UIA, which I firmly believe is all that stands between Jerusalem and utter chaos.

Without the UIA, Jerusalem today might well be at the mercy of those three notorious villains who call themselves Martyr, Szondi, and O'Sullivan Beare or Fox, depending on his mood and also on how much he's had to drink, and how long it was since the last drink, and how long it may be to the next.

13. Jerusalem must be saved from the barbarians.

14. Only the UIA, and its Supreme Leader, can do it.

15. Despair and defeat to our enemies.

16. I pledge myself anew to selfless service for the UIA, and above all for its Supreme Leader.

17. Conclusion of the foregoing.

18. The narrative form is herewith adopted for purposes of clarity.

Nubar read on, thoroughly captivated.

The informer was Persian, he said, and an adherent of the Zoroastrian faith, which he admitted one didn't seem to hear much about anymore. He had grown up in a remote hill tribe in Persia and he considered himself lucky to have been born at all, since the tribe had almost been wiped out by a cholera epidemic in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Living in those remote hills at the time was a young foreign lord who had fallen in love with a girl from the tribe. The epidemic had broken out only a few weeks after he met her and the girl had abruptly died.

Thereafter the young man had patiently nursed the sick without regard to his own welfare.

This legendary foreign lord was said to have been seven and a half feet tall. He had used a huge magnifying glass to examine his patients, so large his unblinking eye had been two niches wide behind it.

After making a diagnosis he, would then prescribe medicine according to the hours he read on his portable sundial, a monstrously heavy bronze piece which he wore on his hip. The foreign lord's knowledge of herbal remedies was unsurpassed, and without him no one in the tribe would have survived.

Nubar stirred uneasily. He had the sensation of being here, or somewhere, before.

When the epidemic subsided, continued the informer, the young foreign lord took his leave, never to be seen in those remote hills of Persia again. Quite naturally the thankful survivors in the tribe had come to revere this gentle and merciful giant as Ahura Mazda, chief of the gods of goodness in the ancient Zoroastrian pantheon, who had seen fit to sojourn in their hills in order to deliver them from the forces of darkness and death.

As a result, ever since, everyone in the tribe had been a profound believer in Zoroastrianism.

The informer was including this information, he said, to explain his unusual religious beliefs, which might otherwise be viewed as anachronistic and suspect in this day and age, and thereby bring into question his suitability as an officer-in-training for the UIA, said training to be concluded at the end of this report when he would qualify as a professional UIA officer on duty in a danger zone, Jerusalem, which would entitle him to receive special hazardous-duty pay, in addition to an officer's regular salary and full medical and retirement benefits.

Nubar grinned. He shook his head.

What was this brazenly self-serving attitude? Did this nonentity, this Zoroastrian squeezer of juice, really think he could promote himself in one short paragraph from a petty informer to a full-fledged officer's position in the UIA? Did he really imagine Nubar could be fooled so easily, even here in a cold damp cellar beneath the Grand Canal?

Nubar snorted. No, it hadn't quite come to that yet. Routinely, in his head, he dashed off another cable to Dead Sea Control.

ARE YOU MAD? HAS THE SUN DOWN THERE IN THAT DRIED CUNT OF THE WORLD

BEEN GETTING TO YOUR BRAIN? NO, REPEAT NO, PROMOTION FOR THIS

ZOROASTRIAN CHARLATAN. MEDICAL AND RETIREMENT BENEFITS OUT OF THE

QUESTION AND NO HAZARDOUS-DUTY PAY FOR THIS SHIRKER. FOR ALL I CARE HE

CAN GO THE WAY OF THE LOST GREEK AND THE TWO OF THEM CAN RELIVE THE

PERSIAN CAMPAIGNS AGAINST GREECE AND THE GREEK CAMPAIGNS AGAINST

PERSIA. I ABSOLUTELY REFUSE TO BE DUPED.

NUBAR

SUPREME LEADER AND FIELD MARSHAL,

GENERALISSIMO COMMANDING EVERYTHING

That was better. Much better. He knew he couldn't be too careful. His control had to be absolute, discipline simply couldn't be relaxed for a moment. One instance of even the lowliest lackey promoting himself and everyone in the organization would see it as a sign of weakness on his part, at the top. Then all of them would begin promoting themselves and plucking grandiose new titles out of the air.

This dangerous tendency had to be stopped before it gathered momentum. A follow-up cable to Dead Sea Control was in order.

PRIORITY FROM THE VERY TOP. FREEZE, DOWN THERE. ALL PROMOTIONS BARRED

UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. DID YOU REALLY THINK YOU WERE GOING TO GET AWAY

WITH SOMETHING? WELL YOU'RE NOT. SIT RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE UNTIL YOU HEAR

FROM ME. IT MAY BE A HARDSHIP POST BUT IT'S THE ONLY ONE ANY OF YOU ARE

GOING TO SEE FOR A WHILE AND YOU CAN COUNT ON THAT. NO ANSWER

NECESSARY AND NO EXCUSES TOLERATED.

NUBAR

LEADER AT THE VERY TOP AND CHIEF OF ALL FORCES.

Suddenly Nubar frowned. Something the informer had said was troubling him, working at the back of his brain.

Yes, he remembered it now. He pursed his lips to whistle in surprise but of course he couldn't whistle. It was all coming back from those early historical reports, the background material on the poker game that had been sent to him when the UIA first began to operate in the Middle East.

A huge magnifying glass with an unblinking eye two inches wide behind it?

Menelik Ziwar, the unknown black Copt and foster father of Cairo Martyr, had allegedly used just such a glass when he was lying on his back in retirement in the sarcophagus of Cheops' mother.

But the magnifying glass hadn't originally belonged to Ziwar. It had been a gift from his dearest friend, an unnamed giant of a man who had worn a massive greasy black turban and a shaggy short black coat made from unwashed and uncombed goats' hair, both said to have been gifts from a remote hill tribe in Persia. This friend, mysteriously, had appeared from nowhere on Sunday afternoons to continue a forty-year conversation he was having with Ziwar over drunken lunches in a filthy Arab restaurant beside the Nile, the lunches ending toward sundown when both men jumped over the railing into the river for a swim.

A portable bronze sundial, monstrously heavy?

The one the giant explorer Strongbow had worn on his hip in the nineteenth century? The same sundial that was now on the wall of the former antiquities shop in Jerusalem where the poker game was being played? Chimes attached to it that sounded erratically, confusing time?

A giant in both cases. A giant. An elusive figure who may have secretly owned the entire Middle East at the turn of the century.

Nubar gripped his throat. He was having difficulty breathing. Being so small, he couldn't help but be terrified by the specter of a man seven and a half feet tall.

Or was he a man? Perhaps much more? Did that explain his height and his odd behavior, the sudden appearances and disappearances in a filthy restaurant beside the Nile? In a remote hill tribe in Persia in time of need?

Ahura Mazda, chief of the gods of goodness?

Nubar fell back limply on is paper couch. His unfocused eyes roamed the ceiling.

He had now arrived at the main body of the juice squeezer's report. The direction of the narrative was vague, a tortuous route through the Old City with no hint of its destination. To Nubar under the Grand Canal, mythical Jerusalem seemed to be growing ever more indistinct on its faraway mountaintop.

The informer's account began with the anonymous pilgrim, mentioned at the very beginning, whose name and race and nationality were all unknown.

One hot afternoon in August this pilgrim had lost his way in Jerusalem. He was trying to find a gate out of the Old City, any gate would do, but the maze of alleys had confused him. He wandered into the cul-de-sac where the informer's fruit juice stand was located and collapsed in the doorway. After numerous glasses of pomegranate juice the pilgrim eventually revived. As he did he began to talk about the cause of his near-total disorientation.

The first stop on the pilgrim's itinerary that morning had also been his last, St Savior's Convent, the Franciscan enclave in the Old City that was practically a city in itself. He had arrived in time to join a scheduled tour, but soon after the tour started he became enamored with a statue in an alcove and found himself detached from the group.

The pilgrim opened the nearest door and discovered he had chanced upon the convent bakery, his first serious mistake of the day.

At this point in the narrative, wrote the informer, the pilgrim had begun to twitch violently. He laughed loudly until tears came to his eyes, then all at once stopped laughing and moaned as if in great pain. The informer thought the man was suffering from sunstroke or perhaps some hysterical disorder. In any case it was only after gulping down several more glasses of pomegranate juice, newly squeezed, that the pilgrim was able to resume his account.

Somberly Nubar chewed his lip. A cable had come to mind. Imprecise language could be dangerous, because it might very quickly lead people to make false conclusions.

MY FRIENDS. LET ME MAKE ONE THING PERFECTLY CLEAR.

IT IS ESSENTIAL TO OUR NATIONAL SECURITY, AND TO OUR SURVIVAL AS A FREEDOM-LOVING PEOPLE LIVING UNDER GOD, THAT THE JUICE SQUEEZER BE

WARNED NOT TO USE EXAGGERATED TERMS FOR CONCEPTS HE DOESN'T

UNDERSTAND.

WHAT I MEAN TO SAY IS JUST THIS. STRICTLY SPEAKING, THERE IS NO SUCH THING

AS AN HYSTERICAL DISORDER. THERE IS ONLY DISORDER OF A GENERALLY

LAWLESS NATURE, WHICH IS TO SAY LAWLESSNESS IN GENERAL, AND THAT CAN

ALWAYS BE CONTROLLED BY DISCIPLINE AT THE TOP, IF IT IS IRON DISCIPLINE. SO, MY FRIENDS, LET ME SHARE THESE THOUGHTS WITH YOU. TELL OUR GOOD FRIEND

THE FRUIT JUICE SQUEEZER TO SIT UP STRAIGHT AND CONCENTRATE, AND TO BE

READY. HE TOO WILL HAVE HIS ORDERS, NO LESS THAN YOU DO, FOR THERE IS A PLACE FOR EVERYONE BENEATH ME.

AND SO LET ME SUBMIT AGAIN FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION THE SIMPLE YET VITAL

PROPOSITION THAT WE CANNOT HOPE TO SURVIVE AS A FREEDOM-LOVING PEOPLE

UNDER GOD IF WE ALLOW SELF-DELUDED CITIZENS AND SELF-APPOINTED

ZEALOTS, NO MATTER HOW WELL-INTENTIONED THEY ARE, AND I PERSONALLY

KNOW THEY ARE OFTEN WELL-INTENTIONED, STILL WE CANNOT ALLOW THEM TO

RUN AROUND THE STREETS OF JERUSALEM, OR AROUND THE DEAD SEA FOR THAT

MATTER, EVEN IF IT IS THE DRIED CUNT OF THE WORLD, SHOUTING WHATEVER

COMES INTO THEIR HEADS. BECAUSE, MY FRIENDS, IT JUST WON'T WORK.

NUBAR

THE GENTLE AND UNDERSTANDING,

YET NONETHELESS, BY NECESSITY,

IRON FIST AT THE TOP.

Nubar smiled benignly. He tucked his housecoat more tightly around his legs and read on.

The anonymous pilgrim, wrote the informer, now found himself standing in the doorway of the convent bakery. Inside the bakery a very old priest was doing a jig in front of the oven, while removing loaves of freshly baked bread. All the bread seemed to have been baked in one of four distinct shapes. The pilgrim remarked upon this, upon saying hello, and the old priest readily agreed.

Exactly four, said the old priest merrily, right as right you are. And those four shapes are none other than the Cross and Ireland, and Jerusalem and the Crimea, and what do you think of that?

Here the pilgrim made his second serious mistake of the day. He didn't slam the door and run. Instead he stood there, and shook his head, and said he didn't know what to think of it.

Well the Cross for obvious reasons, said the old priest, still doing his jig, and Jerusalem for equally obvious reasons. And Ireland not only because I was born there but because it's the most beautiful land there is so far as lands in this world go. And the Crimea because I was in a war there once and survived a disastrous cavalry charge there, and as a result of surviving that folly I saw the light and found my vocation in the Church, God's orders being vastly superior to man's at all times but especially so when you've seen service in the Light Brigade. So that's all of it and for the last seventy years I've been serving God soberly here where you see me, in front of this very oven turning out delicious loaves of bread shaped in the four concerns of my life. And after seventy years of such service, I suppose it's not surprising that I should be known to all who know me as the baking priest.

Nubar's head jerked back.

The baking priest. The man who had rescued O'Sullivan Beare when he first arrived in Jerusalem as a fugitive. The mysterious priest whom Nubar's agents had never been able to trace or identify. Was he real or had O'Sullivan Beare made him up?

Nubar had never known until this moment. And with that secret now out in the open, who could imagine what else might follow?

Nubar giggled happily. He congratulated himself.

At last it was all coming together.

In his excitement Nubar snatched up his canteen. He gargled with a mouthful of fiery mulberry raki, chewed some wood off the canteen, lit a soggy Macedonian Extra. He knew success would be his in the end. He'd always known it.

The informer in Jerusalem, meanwhile, was continuing his leisurely account of the conversation between an anonymous pilgrim and an elderly Franciscan known as the baking priest.

Since it was August, the bakery was hot.

Frightfully hot? asked the baking priest. He then said that although he was naturally accustomed to the oven's heat, he could well understand how it might be uncomfortable to others. For this reason he suggested the pilgrim should feel perfectly free, if he wished, to take off his clothes and hang them on the hook by the door.

And here was the pilgrim's third serious mistake of the day, and by far the most disastrous.

He should have realized, as he later told the informer at the fruit juice stand, that the bakery was so unbearably hot his sanity couldn't survive there for long. There was no question that he should have bolted at once, realizing the folly of listening to a man who was nearly a hundred years old, who had been merrily dancing in front of an oven in Jerusalem for seven decades, baking the same four loaves of bread.

But the unfortunate pilgrim, sweating heavily and already dazed, did as he was invited to do. He took off all his clothes and hung them on the hook by the door.

Naked then, he promptly collapsed beside a large water jar, too weak to do anything but splash an occasional handful of water over his burning head, utterly defenseless against any fancy the Franciscan might choose to conjure up as he capered around the room, distributing loaves of bread to its four corners.

On a pilgrimage, are you? sang the old priest. Well let me tell you there be odd events here, odd events within and about our Holy City, and none stranger than the epic tale of a long-term resident of Jerusalem who saw a genie in the last century and God in this one. Know about him? Probably not, but my source is unimpeachable, being the former terror of the Black and Tans in County Cork, and with such noble service behind him we can do nothing but believe him down to the last syllable.

The old priest fixed the helpless naked pilgrim with a maniacal stare. Maniacal, yes. There was no other word for it. After seventy years in front of that hot oven, the old priest's eyes glowed with a disturbing and unmistakable luster.

Are you ready then? said the old priest to the pilgrim. What's that, you are? Good. Well here's how this oddest of odd epics goes when properly told. But before we begin I suppose we should give it a name for itself and that would have to be God and the Genie. And then when you consider the man who saw them both, whose very own epic it is, you just might want to ruminate further and let your imagination go and sense that we have a Holy Trinity on our hands. Just might, I say. No one would want to go all the way with such a thing and claim it for sure. All right then. Our headlong charge is coming up, so hold on now. Tighten your reins, lad, sit tight and smartly. We're about to cover some ground in a breathtaking breakneck gallop as daring as any the world has heard since the plains at Balaklava thundered to the gallant hoofbeats of hopeless heroes. Ho, I say. Ho-o-o-o-o-o-o.

But before I report on what came next, wrote the informer, I think I should mention a funeral that was held in the spring in Haj Harun's back room. It was for Cairo Martyr's little pet, the albino monkey with the bright aquamarine genitals who was in the habit of curling up on Martyr's shoulder and pretending to be asleep, until his name was spoken.

The pet died of old age, in its sleep, and the funeral was quite an event. Szondi and O'Sullivan Beare and Haj Harun joined Martyr as pallbearers, since it seems they all had great affection for the little fellow and sadly mourned his passing. In fact the poker game was closed down for two weeks in tribute to the pet, whose grave is known only to the four of them, the burial party having set out with great stealth one dark moonless night, carefully on the lookout to see that they weren't being followed.

I include this information, wrote the informer, because it may have some significance I don't understand.

Bongo, screamed Nubar.

And immediately regretted it, for the syllables somehow seemed to feel at home in the confines of that subcellar and the echoes twanged around and around Nubar's head even after he had clapped his hands over his ears, bongobongobongo.

If the report went on like this Nubar knew he was going to get upset, possibly even angry. A quick cable to the fruit juice stand in Jerusalem was needed.

FLASH FROM HERE. ARE YOU MAD? HALT ALL FUTURE REFERENCES TO ALBINO

MONKEYS. COLOR OF GENITALS UNIMPORTANT. I NEVER LIKED THE IDEA OF THAT

FREAKISH BEAST FROM THE JUNGLE. UP UNTIL THIS POINT YOU WERE DOING WELL

BUT NOW YOU'RE BEGINNING TO SLIP. GET BACK TO THE EPIC TALE AND NOT

ANOTHER WORD ABOUT THINGS THAT DON'T MATTER.

NUBAR

TOP BONGO.

No. Wrong. Was his mercury poisoning causing his brain to substitute words inadvertently? Or had that loathsome name jumped into the cable because it was echoing around his head?

Either way it was dangerous. He had to be careful. Using the wrong words could lead to confusion in the ranks, even chaos. His absolute authority might come into question. In his mind he crossed out the last line of the cable and wrote TOP LEADER instead.

But that seemed too brief. He pondered the problem for a moment and decided on a longer ending.

GET BACK TO THE EPIC TALE AND NOT ANOTHER WORD ABOUT THINGS THAT

DON'T MATTER.

NUBAR

THE TOP ALL RIGHT AND ALSO JUST PLAIN NUMBER ONE,

SO YOU BETTER GET USED TO THE IDEA FAST.

Nubar scratched himself and turned pages.

The man referred to as a long-term resident of Jerusalem, the witness to the events in the epic, was described by the baking priest in such a way that the informer knew it had to be his neighbor in the alley, Haj Harun. No one else in Jerusalem wore a faded yellow cloak and a rusty Crusader's helmet tied under the chin with two green ribbons.

Both of the unusual occurrences in the epic, sang the baking priest, seeing a genie in the last century and God in this one, took place while this long-term resident, an elderly item, was making his annual haj.

Here the informer interrupted his narrative to make a personal observation. There was no way of knowing, he wrote, whether Haj Harun went to Mecca every spring, as he claimed. He also disappeared at other times, saying he was off exploring imaginary caverns of the past beneath the Old City; something he claimed he had been doing for the last three thousand years. The informer then added a comment on that.

What is one to make of these extravagant claims that seem to pop up every time Haj Harun is mentioned? Can the old man be believed or is he suffering from terminal amnesia? Or perhaps from advanced dementia brought on by acute senility? If you want my opinion, it's the latter.

That's exactly what I think. This Haj Harun is definitely a strange one. And furthermore, I question the legality of anyone skulking around beneath Jerusalem for the last three thousand years. Isn't that against the law? Wouldn't it be a clear and present breach of some existing statute, perhaps the sanitation code, for example?

Nubar snorted furiously. They weren't going to get away with this. Immediately he made a mental note for another cable to Dead Sea Control.

ARE YOU MAD? WHY ARE YOU LETTING THIS INFORMER THINK? I WANT FACTS, NOT SPECULATIONS, AND I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ANYTHING MORE ABOUT

SANITATION CODES OR LEGALITY IN GENERAL, OR IDLE OPINIONS.

ABOUT WHAT'S LEGAL AND WHAT ISN'T, I AM THE SANITATION CODE AND

WHATEVER I DO IS LEGAL BY DEFINITION, REMEMBER THAT. ANYTHING SAID TO

THE CONTRARY IS A SUBVERSIVE CRIME THAT AIDS AND ABETS THE ENEMY, AND

THAT CRIME WILL BE DEALT WITH AS IT DESERVES TO BE, WITH UTTER

RUTHLESSNESS.

THAT IS TO SAY, WITH CRIPPLING FINES AND PURLOINED MAIL FOLLOWED BY

CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE, BY OFFICIAL VERBAL ABUSE AND BREAK-INS AND

SHOOT-OUTS AND OPPRESSIVE HARASSMENT BY ALL AGENCIES, BY PERJURY AND

BLACKMAIL AND INSINUATIONS OF SINISTER FORCES AT WORK, BY SECRET

PHYSICAL BEATINGS WHERE POSSIBLE AND UNRELIEVED THUGGERY ALL AROUND.

AND LET ME MAKE ANOTHER THING PERFECTLY CLEAR. NO ONE IS GOING TO GET

AWAY WITH AIDING THE ENEMY. I REPEAT, WHAT I DO IS LEGAL AND IF ANYONE

ELSE DOES ANYTHING I DON'T LIKE, ESPECIALLY ANYTHING THAT IS IN THE LEAST

WAY THREATENING TO ME, I'LL GRONK THEM AND GRONK THEM GOOD. AND YOU

CAN BET YOUR SWEET ASS ON THAT YOU SHITHEAD ASSKISSING CUNTLICKING

ASSSUCKING CHICKENSHIT COCKSUCKING FUCKOFF ASSHOLES.

THAT'S RIGHT, YOU'RE IN TROUBLE NOW, BOY. AND IF I WERE YOU I'D STAND UP AT

ATTENTION AND START SHOUTING HAIL TO THE CHIEF AND I'D SHOUT IT AS LOUD

AS I COULD AND I'D KEEP ON SHOUTING IT UNTIL THE CHIEF TOLD ME OTHERWISE.

YEAH. YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HAVE ME TO KICK AROUND ANYMORE, YOU

BUNGHOLE COCKSUCKING ASSHOLES. BUT I MAY JUST DECIDE TO DO A LITTLE

ASSKICKING MYSELF AND HOW'D YOU LIKE THAT, YOU CHICKENSHIT SANITATION

FARTS?

YEAH, SO WATCH OUT, BOY. BIG NUMBER ONE MAY JUST TAKE OFF THE GLOVES

AND COME DOWN THERE AND GIVE YOU DEAD SEA SHITS THE KIND OF REAM YOU

DESERVE.

YEAH. ASSHOLES.

NUBAR

FUCK SUCK KILL.

ULTIMATE LEADER AND SUPREME

AUTHORITY AT THE

TOP OF THE HEAP AND ALONE

THERE FOR ALL TIME.

Nubar felt a little better after that, but it only showed you could never relax your authority. They were all ready to go over to the enemy if you showed the slightest weakness, the slightest deviation from absolute iron-fisted control.

He brushed away something that seemed to be nibbling at his ear, an imaginary bat perhaps, then returned to the report.

Now the narrative was back in the Franciscan bakery, the pilgrim sprawled naked on the floor with his head on fire, the baking priest dancing around through the fierce heat bearing fresh loaves of bread in all directions.

Off to Mecca he was all right, sang the baking priest, just as sure as the wind will blow he was going to reach his Mecca, this elderly article on his annual haj in the first half of the nineteenth century. Well he gets himself well down into the desert that spring, well down into Araby and away from the customary tracks as is his custom when on a haj, when what does he find going on down there all of a sudden in Araby? What, you say? He finds the sky turning strangely dark one morning, that's what, darkly strange I say. And all alarmed he is and why not, since he's in the middle of nowhere where no man should be, and what happens then but he stumbles across an apparition of a man who's all of seven and a half feet tall, and what's this striking figure doing but sighting through some complicated astronomical instruments, by way of measuring heavenly bodies. Like it so far?

Nubar groaned. He closed his eyes.

Seven and a half feet tall. Surely not Ahura Mazda again?

He took a long drink of mulberry raki, coughed weakly and read on.

Well, sang the baking priest, clapping his hands and slapping his sandals on the floor, well and then well.

It's not exactly what an honest traveler would expect to run into out there, and with this apparition looming up in front of him with heavenly instruments and the sky so dark and all, well your man is just suddenly very frightened.

Why, you say? Because he knows a thing or two about the world and one thing he knows for sure is that this has to be a genie he's dealing with. But luckily for him this genie is a good genie who takes pity on him and decides straightaway to make things better, not worse. So the genie tells him right off why it's dark out there. It's dark, says the genie, because a comet is passing overhead. But no one knows about the comet except him, the genie, because of course a genie can have his very own comet if he wants one, and it seems this genie did. And now this genie was out there in the desert plotting his comet's cycle of six hundred and sixteen years, taking roundabout measurements of this heavenly plaything of his, so to speak. All this the giant good genie quickly relates to your man the elderly item.

The baking priest did a quick turn in front of the oven. His cassock twirled and he came up with an armful of bread before resuming his tale.

Well that's certainly something now, but although it explains the darkness of the sky out there, it also tends to mystify your man.

Exactly six hundred and sixteen years? he asks the genie, in a humble whisper of course, showing the greatest respect. Why exactly that period of time?

For a good reason, answers the giant good genie, who then goes on to demystify the situation at once. It seems, you see, that this comet he has discovered and made his own is related to certain unexplained events in the lives of Moses and Nebuchadnezzar and Christ and Mohammed, along with a few lesser known passages from the Thousand and One Nights and an obscure reference or two from the Zohar, those literary matters thrown in for balance and good measure.

That is to say, those events in those lives would be unexplained if it weren't for this comet the genie had discovered, which had come over at the proper time in those lives to do the job required of it, said job being to provide heavenly evidence that something important was going on in the lives just mentioned.

Do you follow me? The giant good genie's comet was up there to explain the inexplicable, although no one else knew it, and the genie was down there in the desert using his astronomical instruments to keep our heavenly historical affairs on course, as he always does when his comet comes over every six hundred and sixteen years, no more and no less and will you just imagine that? Will you now?

A case of genuine celestial evidence, the baking priest had added. Makes you think, doesn't it. And since then the man who told me all this has learned the name of the giant good genie in question. Strongbow is his name. And so that heavenly body up there that explains the inexplicable and lets us know that important events are happening in important lives, said celestial evidence has to be known of course as Strongbow's Comet.

Celestial evidence? Nubar didn't like that at all. Who were these people and what did they think they were doing over there in Jerusalem, in Araby, inventing this nonsense? His grandfather had discovered the original Bible and now it was rightfully his, the philosopher's stone belonged to him. It was as simple as that. Decisive action was needed.

SPEEDIEST FLASH. ARE YOU MAD? GENIES DON'T EXIST AND THEREFORE I ABSOLUTELY FORBID A COMET BEING OWNED BY ONE. MAKE THIS EPIC TELL THE

TRUTH OR FACE SEVERE REPRISALS. PRODUCE OR GET OUT. THIS IS MY FINAL

WARNING, YOU DEAD SEA FARTS, AND IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE ME JUST TRY ME.

NUBAR

THE TOP

The top, yes, but he had to be careful all the same. Treachery was everywhere. Betrayal was everywhere. And of course he knew exactly what they were trying to do with their comets and genies and maniacally dancing priests. It was a savage onslaught by the barbarians again with their primitive ideas and their instincts out of control, their profoundly ignorant belief in the superstitions of the heavens and giants to be met in the desert and swaying shamans seen illuminated in a cave, the shadowy figure of primitive brains trying to assault a rational mind. But they wouldn't get away with it, and if they continued to try to delude him they would soon see where it led.

A page from the report in his lap floated loose and rose slowly in the air. Up up and away. Nubar watched it disappear somewhere up there in the gloom.

Drafts. Icy drafts. It was cold in the cellar and getting colder. He needed more light to be able to see in this damp cave beneath the Grand Canal. He needed some heat.

The pit dug by the footman was at his feet. Despite their savagery even the barbarians had known what to do at the end of the day. A fire surely. A blazing roaring fire to warm the fierce horsemen and cheer them after another day of relentless butchery on the way to Europe. There were thousands of UIA reports here, more than he could ever use. Burn some, why not. Nubar pushed a pile of them into the pit and tossed in a match.

Light, heat, the flames shot up. This was much better. He pushed in more reports and settled back comfortably beside the crackling pit, able to see more clearly now, able to think more clearly because he didn't have to worry about the icy drafts.

Mulberry raki, strong and nourishing. He took a second gulp and thoughtfully chewed some of the wooden canteen.

A Macedonian Extra, just right. They thought they could wear him down with their lunatic antics but never had a gang of madmen been more mistaken. The barbarians believed in their primitive magic but Nubar knew better. He could handle it all and he was prepared to do just that.

He smiled shrewdly, not concealing his contempt, and picked up another page.

And now, sang the baking priest, having seen our genie in the last century, we'll be on with this epic tale and skip right up into our century, to just before the Great War. Once again your man the elderly item is off on his annual haj, resolutely making his way through Araby, through the wilderness and wastes and wearing his rusty Crusader's helmet as he does at all times against contingencies, steadfastly trudging through the desert to reach his Mecca, his faded threadbare yellow cloak flaring into a sail now and then to give him a push, a tug, the nudges he so badly needs if he's going to continue to make headway against the vicissitudes.

The baking priest pulled open the oven door and peered in. The blast of hot air struck the pilgrim on the floor and flattened him out a little more, if that was still possible. The oven door clanged shut.

Right we are, all's well. Now where were we? Oh yes, down in Araby of course and your man has just finished walking all night, and just before dawn, being tired naturally enough, he ducks under a rock to catch a nap, to catch forty nods as they say, his spindly legs protruding out from under the rock and looking like nothing so much as two ancient and exhausted lizards intent on dying. When all at once he hears a noise, a most unusual noise for way out there, a kind of whooshing sound as if something big were moving in the air, and he pokes out his head from under the rock. What might that be? he wonders.

The baking priest began to spin in front of his oven. Cassock twirling, sandals flapping, around and around he whirled.

What might that be? Well I'll tell you what that might be. That just might be the happiest moment of his very long life. It just might be ecstasy for him, that's what. Because who's coming down in that place that any other man would call Godforsaken? Any man except him, that is, with his centuries and centuries of faithful service. Who's descending right there on top of this tattered and battered soul, this starving and exhausted and tottering elderly item? Who's just dropping in for a look in that remote corner of the desert formerly and normally forsaken?

Himself, that's Who, do you follow me? Our Lord God and Creator.

The baking priest had stopped spinning when he said that. He stopped and crossed himself solemnly and gazed down at the pilgrim naked on the floor.

And his face was grave as was only to be expected, and the tone of his voice most reverent. Yet the pilgrim saw a twinkle in the priest's eye even then, even then when he was referring to his Maker. Caused by seven decades in front of an oven in Jerusalem, no doubt, enough to bake anybody's brains.

The pilgrim didn't move. He couldn't move. He lay speechless, naked on the floor.

Are you still with me? sang the baking priest as he scooped a load of hot loaves out of the oven and went dancing across the room.

At this point in his account, wrote the informer, the naked pilgrim on the bakery floor had finally succumbed to heat prostration and begun hallucinating.

It was impossible to make any sense out of what the pilgrim later that afternoon, between glasses of pomegranate juice at the informer's fruit juice stand, claimed the baking priest had said after that. Or rather, sung after that. The larger part was incomprehensible gibberish, the remainder incoherent hearsay.

Nevertheless, for purposes of completeness in UIA reporting, a summary of the rest of the epic was being included.

Summarized, the subsequent events in the baking priest's epic tale were these.

Page 17 of 407 pages, a report relating to the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle.

A. Conclusion of the foregoing.

B. The narrative form is hereby temporarily suspended, for purposes of clarity, in favor of itemized notes.

1. The man the baking priest has been referring to throughout as that elderly item or article, obviously Haj Harun, prostrated himself in the desert at dawn the moment he poked his head out from under the rock and saw God above him.

2. God was riding in a balloon.

3. The balloon descended and came to rest beside the rock where Haj Harun, as still as a lizard, had been about to catch forty nods after walking all night. Needless to say, Haj Harun was now alert and not thinking about forty nods, having waited three thousand years for this moment.

4. God stepped out of His balloon and saw that Haj Harun was terrified as well as ecstatic. God immediately offered Haj Harun food and water from a supply He was carrying in His balloon.

5. Haj Harun refused in the humblest of whispers.

6. God then offered to give Haj Harun a ride in His balloon to the nearest oasis, if Haj Harun were too weak to walk, as seemed likely.

7. Haj Harun again refused in the humblest of whispers.

8. God asked Haj Harun if there were anything He could do for him out there in the desert. Haj Harun finally had the courage to rise to his knees, as God had been begging him to do, and speak.

9. Haj Harun said that he knew this world was a desert compared to God's kingdom. He said he also knew that God has many names, and that every name we learn brings us closer to Him. He said that he was a pathetic creature who had spent the last three thousand years futilely defending Jerusalem, always on the losing side, as was the case when you were trying to defend everybody's Holy City. So he had failed in his mission, yet he had never given up hope. In fact he was still trying.

10. Haj Harun admitted it was a sorry effort that deserved to go unrewarded. Yet if God could find any merit in his failure, and would be so gracious as to tell him His name that day, then it would be a blessing to Haj Harun that would make up for all his suffering over the last three thousand years in the cause of Jerusalem.

11. Apparently God did find merit in Haj Harun's futile efforts, for He decided to grant the request. He said His name that day was Stern.

Nubar stopped reading. He was appalled. Stern? Stern? He knew who that was, the name had turned up years ago in a report, and after that several other times. Stern was a petty gunrunner of no importance whatsoever. Moreover, he was a morphine addict. At the time Nubar had immediately dismissed him as inconsequential.

No, not even that. Dismissed him as nothing, a nonentity. The kind of shuffling forgotten wreckage you could expect to find anywhere in the world. No money, no power, some ideals maybe and a friend or two but going nowhere, just stumbling downhill with his morphine habit. A cipher, nothing, to be dismissed and forgotten.

So what was he doing turning up here being mistaken for God?

Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. This simply couldn't be allowed to go on for another minute. A cable was in order, succinct yet all-inclusive.

FLASH FROM THE TOP. YOU'RE ALL MAD. GOD ISN'T STERN. STERN IS A PETTY

GUNRUNNER WITH A MORPHINE HABIT. WOULD GOD BE LIKELY TO BE RUNNING

GUNS ACROSS THE DESERT IN A BALLOON? WOULD GOD BE LIKELY TO BE A MORPHINE ADDICT? NOW WOULD HE? WOULD HE?

NUBAR

GOD AS HE SHOULD BE.

Nubar rubbed his eyes wearily. Another page of the report was floating away in the gloom. He reached out and grabbed it as it tried to escape. He was getting tired of this. Why not be done with it once and for all?

FINAL FLASH FROM THE TOP. YOU'RE ALL FIRED, EFFECTIVE LAST MONTH. NO

SEVERANCE PAY, NO RETIREMENT BENEFITS, NO MORE UIA, NO MORE NOTHING.

DIE DOWN THERE ON THE DEAD SEA FOR ALL I CARE, AND DON'T SAY I DIDN'T

WARN YOU. MY PATIENCE IS GONE, YOU DROVE ME TO THE LIMIT ON THIS ONE.

ONE OF GOD'S SECRET NAMES IS STERN? IF YOU CAN BELIEVE THAT YOU CAN

BELIEVE ANYTHING. ASSHOLES.

NUBAR

ALONE AS ALWAYS.

That made him feel better. He decided to read a few more pages before he went upstairs and fired all his servants as well. He didn't know what time it was but it must be getting on toward the hour for a baked chicken wing. Ah yes, here he was.

12. While talking to God, Haj Harun had noticed something about His eyes that reminded him of the giant good genie, seven and a half feet tall, whom he had met in this same desert while on a haj in the nineteenth century.

13. Thus Haj Harun understood at that moment that God and the genie were father and son.

14. Haj Harun thanked God profusely for telling him His name that day and wept with joy. He backed away from God on his knees and continued in this manner for the rest of the morning, until God and His balloon were no longer visible beyond the sea of sand.

15. Nearly a decade later Haj Harun met God again, this time in Smyrna during the fires and massacres in 1922. To defend the innocent and protect God's children, Haj Harun had transformed himself into the Holy Ghost and carried a sword, in a smoky burning garden, God's children at the time being named Theresa, Sivi, and O'Sullivan Beare.

16. Before the massacre in Smyrna, Haj Harun had already survived the sacking of the Holy City by Assyrians and Babylonians, Persians and Greeks and Romans and Crusaders, Arabs and Turks, encouraging the citizenry as best he could.

17. (As you can see, there was a good reason back at the beginning of this report for indicating that the number of my fruit juice stand would be 18, if the shop had a number which it hasn't, being located in a dead-end alley too small for numbers.

It should be noted here, if the UIA hierarchy is unaware of it, that 18 means life in Hebrew.) 18, then. In addition to everything else, Haj Harun claims he witnessed the original Bible being written in his youth, say around 930 B.C.

The primary author of the Bible was a blind storyteller who recited tales in the dusty waysides of Canaan in exchange for a few copper coins from those who tarried to hear him. During the recitals these tales were recorded by a friendly imbecile scribe, who was the blind man's traveling companion.

However, what the blind storyteller didn't know was that he wasn't the sole author of those Holy Scriptures. The imbecile, being friendly, had also wanted to play a part in the production.

Haj Harun, as a little boy, had peeked over the scribe's shoulder.

And yes, sure enough, the imbecile scribe was happily adding a few thoughts of his own to the pages.

Nubar lay on his makeshift couch with his hand on his heart as water dripped down on him from the Grand Canal. His heart was palpitating and he felt dizzy. An unfocused pain moved back and forth behind his eyes. He had barely begun the report in his lap but he knew he was far too weak to go on with it.

He tossed the report into the fire.

Weak, yes. As weak as a flower, a frail Albanian flower withering away in an icy subcellar underneath Venice, driven there by marauding hordes of barbarians bent on destruction and chaos, once there repeatedly and savagely assaulted by the ravings of primitive minds insanely out of control in Jerusalem.

Weak from hunger, close to starvation. Was there anything left in his canteen?

He reached into his rucksack and pulled out what was left of the canteen itself, now about the size of a small drinking cup, holding perhaps half a cup of mulberry raki. He drank the raki and chewed the little cup around the edges, nibbling in nervous bites, gnawing his way to the bottom of this last relic from Gronk, the kind of canteen used by peasant boys when they were out working in the fields.

Nubar gazed at the fire. Barbarians were surging forward on every side threatening civilization, yet still there was no reason to fear what he had just read, none whatsoever. It was all meaningless fantasy, a web of buffoonish tales having nothing to do with reality.

A Zoroastrian operator of a fruit juice stand in the Old City? A naked anonymous pilgrim sprawled on the floor of a convent bakery? A maniacal baking priest piling up bread in four shapes?

Ludicrous.

Then too, the time span was considerable. From a hot August day in Jerusalem in 1933 to Smyrna in 1922, from God in His balloon just before the Great War to a genie-astrologer in Arabia in the first half of the nineteenth century. Finally all the way back to the dusty waysides of Canaan in 930 B.C.

Absurd.

And the ultimate source of all this, none other than Haj Harun. His epic tale weaving up and down the alleys of Jerusalem over the millennia, passing from beggar to beggar in the bazaars with new variations added each time it was retold by another thieving layabout, another shifty-eyed Arab or unscrupulous Jew or hallucinating Christian in that unreal city on the mountaintop where the real Sinai Bible lay buried.

Nubar squeezed his fists in a frenzy.

Lies. All lies.

God in the twentieth century, Stern? The genie in the nineteenth century, Strongbow? The two of them having something about the eyes that showed they were father and son?

And worst of all, that vision of Haj Harun in 930 B.C. Haj Harun as a little boy, peeking over the shoulder of an imbecile scribe and noting that the scribe was happily adding a few thoughts of his own to the original Bible.

Nubar clenched his fists and exploded. He staggered to his feet, shrieking.

Lies and more lies. They think they'll get me but they won't. I'll get them.

In a fury he hurled more reports into the fire that was raging in the pit at his feet. The smoke swirled around him and he fell back weakly on the couch.

So weak after fighting everybody for years, especially those three evil criminals who had set up the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle to deprive him of immortality. Why had there been that disaster in Gronk simply because he liked to dress up a little? Those three depraved criminals in Jerusalem dressed up, he had read about it in reports long ago. They all dressed up and had their fun, so why had it been wrong when he wanted to wear a uniform? And why did he have to fight everybody in life? Fight endlessly?

Nubar's roving fingers found the tin of rouge and the tube of lipstick in the pocket of his housecoat. He took them out and began to play with them idly, applying a little bit here and there, wondering what Paracelsus would have done in this damp murky cellar on an evening such as this. Ignored the icy drafts and the water dripping on him and gone on to repeat his mercury experiment a thousand times in search of the unique set of circumstances? Two thousand times? Three thousand times?

Breathing those heavy mercury vapors anew on a gloomy winter evening in Venice? Yet again inhaling his beloved fumes beneath the Grand Canal? At last dreaming his way into the philosopher's stone of immortality?

Nubar's gaze fell on a crate that had surfaced from under the stacks of reports he had dumped into the fire, a crate with a vaguely familiar shape. He crawled over and opened it.

Cinnabar. Mercury ore.

A whole crate of cinnabar from his alchemist's workshop in the castle tower room in Albania. Left over from the days when he had performed mercury experiments, shipped here as part of the UIA archives.

Odd that it should happen to turn up in front of him now, just when he was thinking about mercury.

Alchemy in the steps of the master. Six years ago, only that?

Happy days and nights then, he remembered them well. Long hours spent alone at his workbench in his castle tower room, communing over mercury with the master, Bombastus Vonheim the Celsus of Parahohen.

Was that right or was it Bombastus von Ho von Heim?

Parabombast? Paravon? Paraheim and Paraho?

No no, it was Parastein of course, Nubar Wallencelsus Parastein. The incomparable Parastein. What had happened to him in six short years? Where had he gone?

Nubar pushed the crate of cinnabar over to the pit and watched it tumble into the roaring fire. Smoke, fog, dreams. Mercury vapors. Swirling new fumes in the subaqueous archives of the Uranist Intelligence Agency.

Nubar found the medallion depicting Mussolini and the Virgin Mary in his housecoat and turned it over and over, looking for a similarity between the two faces. He found the three one-lira coins and put them into his mouth to suck. He pushed more reports into the fire.

Something was missing. In order to see clearly in the billowing smoke and mercury fumes he needed the third eye of occultism. But where was his small obsidian sphere, the precious ball of black volcanic glass, his primitive third eye?

Lost. He'd never find it now. His fingers touched something round in the pocket of his housecoat. He held it up.

The single earring, fake lapis lazuli, the color of the sky. It looked like a robin's egg.

Nubar attached the hook of the earring to his skullcap so the robin's egg would rest on his forehead. Yes, that was better. His head was expanding, his supernatural powers of perception were beginning to return.

He could feel his brain growing, swelling like an egg to encompass all of life.

Ultimate thoughts now in the underworld, the time had come. His left eye, the eye that had bothered Wallenstein men for three centuries in times of stress, automatically sealed itself shut as Nubar considered the ultimate enemies arrayed against him.

Ahura Mazda, chief of the gods of goodness, the secret owner of the Middle East who had also been known as Strongbow, a giant genie who was implacably pursuing him from the nineteenth century. Why?

Why had he, Nubar, been singled out for persecution by the giant good genie?

God his son, father of the genie, Himself, in the twentieth century disguised as a petty gunrunner and morphine addict named Stern. Years ago Nubar had dismissed Stern as too insignificant to bother with.

And lastly, Haj Harun, that timeless ghostly figure who had witnessed everything, even the writing of the original Bible.

Nubar smiled and his right eye also sealed itself shut. With both eyes closed in the smoke, in the billowing mercury fumes rising from the pit, he could at last see the universe as it was through his mystical third eye.

And? Was it going to turn out the way that maniacally prancing baking priest had suggested at the beginning of his epic tale? Were the ultimate enemies arrayed against him the Holy Trinity? The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost?

An idea came to him. Even though the Holy Trinity was arrayed against him, that still left the Virgin Mary, and where was the Virgin Mary? Was he the Virgin Mary in disguise? It was true, after all, that in some parts of Greece there was the belief that when Christ was born again He would be born of a man, which was why the men there all wore trousers with a large sack in the seat, to catch the Savior when He appeared.

Extraordinary. A fascinating new possibility with limitless ramifications, not only for him but for the world.

As he turned over the medallion in his hand the black volcanic eye in his forehead stared blindly at the roaring fire in the pit, oblivious to the smoke and the flames and the fumes in the cave.

A move to Greece at once? The sun and the sea, lucidity and the Savior?

Nubar grinned and the grin froze.

The astounding event that was the talk of Venice that winter occurred precisely at twelve o'clock noon on December 22. Some claimed it had to do with the fact that the previous night had been the longest night of the year. Others, calling this mere superstition, argued that darkness and night had played no part, rather high noon and broad daylight had.

In any case, whether one or the other, Nubar would never have been found without it, his strange fate never known.

The heavy fog that had hung over Venice for days began to clear toward the middle of that morning, December 22. Tourists eager to see the wonders of the city were quick to take advantage, and by eleven-thirty a modest but steady traffic of gondolas was plying the Grand Canal.

In one of the gondolas was a party of Argentines, of German descent and strongly in favor of Mussolini's Fascist policies, the only actual witnesses to the event

What made it seem so eerie, they said later, was that the stately palazzo had collapsed without a sound.

One moment they were admiring its beautiful lines as they passed through the water, an ornate and dignified structure on the Venetian skyline that was typical of what they had always imagined a palazzo on the Grand Canal would look like, and the next moment it was simply gone, no longer there, having silently disappeared before their very eyes in a puff of smoke.

They blinked. They couldn't believe it. There was nothing but sky where the palazzo had been, sky and a mysterious puff of smoke that was already wafting away on the wind.

The clocks in the church towers all over Venice were striking noon. The palazzo had disappeared as if it were an empty dream.

The experience was uncanny, said the Argentines. For several minutes they sat dumbly in their gondola, too stunned to speak, staring into that patch of newly empty sky.

Of course the palazzo had made some noise collapsing, but not enough to be heard above the loud pealing of the city's church bells, which engineers later speculated might have upset the palazzo's delicate balance with their combined vibrations. And there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the smoke, although it would take twenty-four hours to discover it.

While the stunned Argentines sat immobile in their gondola, other parties of tourists began to arrive on the scene from up and down the Grand Canal. The gondoliers landed and what they found astonished them, just as it astonished the police who arrived some minutes later.

For it seemed the Argentines' strange impression had not been wrong at all, rather it was based on airy fact. The floors and interior walls of the palazzo had all been removed, indeed, its insides in their entirety.

There had been absolutely nothing at all left in there.

The palazzo had been an empty dream before it collapsed.

It didn't take the police long to find out what had happened. When they went to question the servants who had worked in the palazzo, they found them all living in richly decorated villas far beyond their means, as were many of their relatives. One servant after another broke down and confessed.

The pillage, they admitted, had been going on since the beginning of their employment there. It had progressed from single objects to stripping whole rooms, to ripping out the plumbing and wiring, then to the marble in the floors and the wood and stonework in the walls.

The previous night they had finally made an end to the job by carrying away what was left of the floors and interior walls, leaving an empty shell behind.

By the evening of December 22, the scandal had taken on enormous proportions, particularly because the palazzo had been owned by a foreigner. The ability of the Fascist government to maintain law and order was being held up to ridicule, and tourists were leaving by train for Switzerland and by ship for Patras, outraged that a foreigner in Italy could be treated in such a manner. The police had to act immediately or the situation would have become intolerable.

Thus by ten o'clock that night seventeen former servants and several hundred of their relatives, screaming and weeping and shouting, had been dragged before judges and arraigned for a multitude of offenses ranging from unpremeditated theft and similar crimes of passion, to the systematic defacement of a national landmark, which an urgent cable from Rome, received just after dark, indicated the palazzo had secretly been for about the last one hundred years, unknown to anyone in Venice.

Meanwhile the search went on for the victim of this terrible conspiracy, who was described by the former servants as an Albanian millionaire, about twenty-seven years old, of extremely eccentric habits.

By gondoliers who for months had been carrying the little millionaire back to the palazzo just before dawn, he was identified as that bizarre figure who had been haunting the piazza in front of San Marco's through the hours of darkness for almost a year, dressed in evening clothes and a top hat and an opera cape and thoroughly drunk from some powerful alcoholic beverage, which he carried in a wooden canteen slung over his shoulder.

As for his activities at night in the piazza, thousands of witnesses were ready to testify that they had seen the little millionaire sneaking up behind tourists in cafés and annoying them in the most flagrant manner by whispering on endlessly about something called Gronk, as if this single word, unrecognizable to anyone, not only conveyed a whole host of meanings but also implied unlimited possibilities of an unknown nature.

And always he had carried in his arms a stack of journals titled The Boy, which he had tried to give away but never could, it apparently being the little millionaire's destiny to go on carrying The Boy around with him forever.

These furtive nightly performances were known to thousands in Venice, but other than that the police could learn only one other fact concerning the little millionaire's public life. Several restaurant owners stated that he had been in the habit of dropping in around midnight to order a single baked chicken wing, which he then carried off into the darkness in a paper bag.

Yet even though he hadn't come to the piazza in front of San Marco's on the night before his palazzo collapsed, the servants reported that he definitely wasn't to be seen in the empty dream when they had carried out the last supporting beam. Nor had a body been found in the ruins.

WHERE IS THE MAD NIGHTLY PEDDLER OF GRONK? screamed the headlines in the newspapers.

The police intensified their search on the morning of December 23. Lists were checked and it was found that a footman from the palazzo was not among those arrested. The footman hadn't returned home and had last been seen by other servants on the morning before the collapse, dressed in blue satin livery and carrying a pickax and shovel in the vicinity of the kitchen.

The police put out an alarm for the man and before noon they were led to a Communist laborer in a cheap café on the mainland, drunk on grappa, who was wearing blue satin knee breeches. At first the laborer sullenly denied any knowledge of his satin breeches, saying they would never exist in a Communist state. But under threat of a sound beating from the Fascist police crowding around him, he soon admitted he had taken the breeches off a delirious man who had washed up on the shore two days ago, thinking they would add a little color to his life. After hiding the breeches under his shirt he had hailed a passing group of mendicant monks, who had carried the delirious man back to their monastery to care for him.

The monks were traced and the footman was found lying in a corner of the monastery garage, just emerging from a coma caused by excessive ingestion of Grand Canal water. The police slapped him to bring him around and the footman told a confused tale.

One morning, he said, days or weeks or months ago, he had no idea when the catastrophe had befallen him and how long he had been in a coma, he had been carrying out his normal duties in the subcellar of the palazzo when he had met an apparition of womanhood so horrifying, so unnatural, that he had run upstairs in terror and jumped through a casement window to swim for his life. But the sewerage had been sluggish that morning around the palazzo. As he swam out into the Grand Canal the fumes overwhelmed him, he lost consciousness and didn't know anything after that.

But he did remember that terrible, ghastly apparition he had seen in the subcellar by torchlight.

And never before that moment, swore the footman, crossing himself again and again and shaking violently as putrid bubbles popped out of his mouth, could I have imagined such a female figure existed on this earth, Hail Mary, mother of God.

A subcellar beneath the palazzo? The policemen were amazed, but not so one of the learned mendicant monks who had been listening with them in the monastery garage.

Yes indeed, observed the monk. That palazzo was once shared by Byron and his favorite pimp and catamite, Tito the gondolier, which I happen to know about because Tito was a granduncle on my mother's side. Well to escape the hordes of women and boys who were always besieging Byron in his living quarters, he had a secret subcellar built where he could retire late at night and write his poetry.

Undoubtedly that's why the palazzo was a secret national landmark that none of us knew about until yesterday evening. Some of Byron's greatest poetry must have been written down there.

The police rushed back to their launch and quickly roared away from the mainland, sirens howling, making for the Grand Canal. With little difficulty they found the entrance to the cellar in the palazzo ruins.

Twenty steps down stood the entrance to the subcellar, a low narrow door hidden behind a blanket, exactly as described by the footman. They pushed it open.

Immediately mountainous clouds of thick acrid smoke belched from that gloomy cave and went stirring up over the city, obscuring the sun, Nubar having burned the entire archives of the Uranist Intelligence Agency in his mercury pit, to keep warm, during the cold damp night of the winter solstice.

Firemen arrived with masks and emergency equipment. They found Nubar stretched out beside his smoldering mercury fire, alive but unconscious, and carried him up to the surface where curious crowds had gathered. The canal in front of the ruined palazzo was now thronged with the bobbing boats of eager sightseers from all over the world.

Somberly the Fascist firemen brought Nubar forward on a stretcher and laid him out on a high platform they had erected beside the water, in full view of everyone, not only because their countrymen loved a spectacle but also, in this case, to impress the masses of foreign tourists with the Fascist efficiency of their rescue operations.

The sightseers sighed and were silent. Waves lapped gently against the assembled boats and gondolas.

Respiratory and other equipment quietly wheezed beside the raised platform, which had been hung with bunting and Fascist banners for the occasion.

Then the Fascist mayor, the Fascist chief of police and the Fascist chief of the fire department took turns announcing in loud voices what they saw before them, shouting the facts up and down the Grand Canal and describing in considerable detail the thick layers of rouge and lipstick, the various large brown garments and the even larger purple one, the single blue earring resting on Nubar's forehead and the three one-lira coins resting on his tongue, in one hand the medallion depicting Mussolini and the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in the other hand the most curious object of all, a Jerusalem water bill, paid, dated 1921, on which he had scribbled some words before losing consciousness, poker and Jerusalem and Haj Harun, Paracelsus and Bombastus and immortality, Ahura Mazda and Stern, genie and God, the Sinai Bible.

The presence of the coins in Nubar's mouth suggested that he might have been swallowing foreign objects while in the subcellar. A stomach pump was therefore immediately wheeled into position, but all it brought up was a large amount of chewed wood impregnated with alcohol.

This mysterious piece of information proved too much for one of the spectators, a French thief and former dealer in stolen ikons who had arrived in Venice not so long ago after an extended stay in the Holy Land.

It was true that he had been accosted by Nubar more than once in the piazza in front of San Marco's late at night, which he had found insulting enough in itself. But the real cause of that Frenchman's passionate dislike for Nubar was a period he had once spent in purgatory, after being hired by the UIA to infiltrate the Great Jerusalem Poker Game. The Frenchman had entered the game as ordered and had lost disastrously to an American Indian chief, who resented his trafficking in stolen Christian artifacts. Part of his loss included being assigned to slave in front of a hot oven in the Old City, his purgatory, with a man known as the baking priest serving as his parole officer.

A very hot oven. The Frenchman remembered every dripping minute he had spent in that fierce heat baking bread in the same four shapes, as directed by his ancient parole officer who all the while had danced back and forth in a merry way, which had only infuriated him more.

All those horrible experiences he blamed on Nubar for getting him into the game in the first place. So it was with unrestrained glee that the high-pitched French cry came floating down the Grand Canal.

Shit my God. He ate his canteen.

On the last day of the year Nubar regained consciousness in the hospital and it was apparent he would never be normal again. His frozen grin was directed toward the ceiling, his stony stare fixed on some invisible quarry. Every twelve minutes or so he stirred and softly whispered parts of the words he had scribbled on the Jerusalem water bill, paid, dated 1921.

And those were the only syllables Nubar ever uttered again, rearranging them endlessly in senseless mercurial anagrams that were somehow pleasing to him, Parabastus Bombhaj and Sinaisalem Bombpoker, Ahurahaj Paramazda and Sternpoker Bibletality, Jerugenie and Immorharun, Hajstern, Jerupoker.

Jumbled private words that seemed to soothe him in the airless stillness of the eternal dimensionless rock encasing his head, a secret and solitary philosopher's stone that no one would ever penetrate.

For Nubar, safety at last, peace at last, immortality at last. All his enemies defeated and Stern dismissed, Ahura Mazda dispelled and Haj Harun forgotten in the dream of stone he had finally entered.

-17-

Crypt, Cobbler

The whole point, is that all? Well of course I was getting around to it. I was just sort of sizing up the countryside along the way. What's the point of taking a trip if you don't see the sights?

The last night in December, 1933. Twelve years to the day since the three of them had met by chance in a cheap Arab coffee shop in the Old City, seemingly by chance then, the three of them escaping the wind on a blustery afternoon that had been cold and heavily overcast with snow definitely in the air. And now they sat around the poker table in Haj Harun's back room, one or the other of them shuffling the cards for a while before passing the pack along.

An ambling affair, said Joe. Just one of those quiet rambling evenings that comes along sometimes. I mean it is the last day of the year so it's only natural a man might want to take a moment to look back a bit, just to see how things went maybe, insofar as they did.

Sure, said Joe, shuffling the cards. And that's some news all right about the end of our little Nubar.

Losing his head like that under the Grand Canal and finding a stone to put in its place. With him out of the way I guess we could go on playing poker forever, if we wanted to. Yes, well I can't say I'm sorry for him. Always was a nasty little piece of goods by any account. But I'll tell you something else. I do feel sorry for Sophia, even though I've never met her. From all you hear she sounds right to me, and I imagine she must be taking it hard.

Yes, said Munk. But she also knows she indulged him too much from the beginning.

Habit both good and bad, murmured Joe. Can run both ways, indulging a man, depends on the man, like most things. Hey there, Munk. Not recalling a breakfast in bed beside the Bosporus, are you? Dashing young officer of dragoons being served steak and eggs and a pot of strong coffee laced with cognac?

Not to mention a mountain of hot rolls straight from the oven and light as light? Ah yes, mere fluffs of ambrosia, no less, in your wicked youth. And your uniform pressed and your boots polished and a bath drawn? Never crossed your mind once, you say, in all these years?

Munk smiled.

I talked to her yesterday, he said.

My God, you what? How's that? You talked to Sophia?

On the telephone, yes. I thought I should call her as one old friend to another. It was over twenty years ago, and only one night at that, but all the same.

Of course all the same. Well quick man, out with it. What'd she say?

She was in Venice. We didn't talk about Nubar, mostly about his baby son. There was one, it seems, and Sophia had just found out about it. She was excited about that and also happy about the baby's mother, who happens to be Armenian. So perhaps the good news has made up for the bad. She plans to take them both back to Albania with her.

And you? What'd she say about you?

She asked me to come pay her a visit at the castle in the spring. I said I would.

Joe hooted. He reached over and slammed down the pack of cards in front of Munk.

Your turn to shuffle, and did you catch that, Cairo? Catch our former dashing young officer of dragoons still in action? The lady in question's over ninety, so what's he going to do about it? Pay a friendly visit for old times' sake, that's what, console the old dear because of the memories. Now is that what ambrosia does for you or isn't it? One taste and you can't ever forget? Just never? Ah but that's fine, truly fine, I love the whole idea of it. And you do a little reminiscing with her, Munk, you do that. A woman her age, she'd like that for sure.

Munk smiled as he shuffled the cards.

Business isn't going well for her, he said. The syndicate's breaking up, not that she cares much about that sort of thing anymore. It was setting it up that was a challenge to her, not making money once it was going. So yes, I'll journey up and see her, and she can straighten me out on the situation in the Balkans, and I'll have another chance to smell those cheroots I remember from my younger days.

Forget the Balkans, said Joe, I never could understand what they were. But the rest of it is marvelous, just marvelous, I love it. You do that and let us know. By God, isn't it true we can get lucky now and then and time doesn't pass at all? Or rather it passes all right, it just doesn't take all the good things with it. Now and then only, but it's comforting to know it can happen at least. And speaking of your younger days, Munk, what news from the Sarahs lately in their various outposts in the New World, mostly Brazil?

They're getting along, back on their feet in business.

Sure, we all knew that would happen. And the all-male Szondi baroque ensembles? Are they getting back on their feet and into their chairs after a decade or two in the discount dry goods trade?

They seem to be.

Well then, Munk, it seems you're just situated here for good and ready to get on with your affairs, building a homeland and so forth, a sober matter certainly after the spew of cards we've had here for the last twelve years. Trading in futures from the beginning, you were, just dealing away like a madman in the market. Hey, where're you going, Cairo?

Cairo had gotten to his feet. He went swaying into the front room in his stately robes and came back with a stone box, which he placed on the table. He smiled and held out his hand. Munk gave him the cards and Cairo began to shuffle.

What's that? asked Joe.

A box, said Cairo.

A man can see that. Why stone?

They made them that way so they'd last. Menelik gave it to me once. He'd found it in a royal tomb he'd excavated.

Well what's in it then?

Ashes.

From what?

From a forty-year conversation beside the Nile. Long Sunday afternoons over wine and spiced lamb in a filthy open-air restaurant on the banks of the Nile, with placid ducks paddling in circles and squawking peacocks getting ready to mate and scurrilous evidence richly woven under the trellises of leafy vines and flowers, and waiters who got so high on their flying carpets over the years they simply didn't move anymore, couldn't move anymore, couldn't imagine why anyone would want to move anymore. Long Sunday afternoons that always ended with drunken plunges into the cooling water.

Sure, said Joe, we know about that. But what are the ashes?

The ashes of two friends who met in an Egyptian bazaar in the nineteenth century, both young then, both just starting out on their separate paths. One a black slave, the other an English lord. Joe whistled softly.

You've got the ashes of old Menelik and Strongbow in there?

I have.

Where did you get them?

I just went and got them. And what are you going to do with them?

Cairo smiled.

Early in the spring when Munk goes to pay his call on Sophia, I'm going to take this box down to Egypt.

I'll choose a Sunday that pleases me and go back to that filthy restaurant beside the Nile where they had their forty-year conversation, or if it's gone, to one like it. Then I'll order wine and spiced lamb and stuff myself, and lean back and while away the afternoon listening to Menelik and Strongbow carry on the way they used to. I'll listen to them tell the story again of the incredible White Monk of the Sahara and his nine hundred children, and the Numa Stone that scandalized Europe after Strongbow planted it in the temple at Karnak, and I'll pound the table and order more wine and roar with laughter with them at all the old tales, all the wonderful tales. Menelik smuggling Strongbow's study into Egypt in the bowels of a giant hollow stone scarab, and Strongbow striding off to the Hindu Kush and returning to stride off to Timbuktu, and Menelik building a spacious retreat for himself in the top of Cheops' pyramid and finding he was afraid of heights, and retiring instead to the sarcophagus of Cheops' mother with Strongbow's magnifying glass in hand. And Strongbow finally finding peace on a hillside in the Yemen, in the simple tent of a Jewish shepherd's daughter. Empires bought and empires sold and an unknown scholar who was the wisest of his century, a former slave so brilliant he spoke a language that's been extinct for eleven hundred years, a young explorer who began his haj by shouting that he had once loved well in Persia.

And all the rest of it, all the wonderful old tales they shared. And that final reunion when they both came back for one last Sunday afternoon together in their filthy haunt beside the Nile. Both in their nineties then and knowing they'd go soon, which they did, within a few months of each other just before the Great War. Just all of it. With all the wine and the food and the stories that never stopped, because they could never get enough of them.

Cairo paused. He looked down at the table and shuffled the cards slowly.

And then? asked Munk after a few moments.

And then a time will come toward the end of the afternoon to jump over the railing into the river, the way they did. And I'll go over the railing with them for a last plunge, a last swim at the end of the afternoon to clear my head or perhaps just to celebrate life. And when I come out I'll no longer have the box. The Nile will.

Cairo nodded solemnly.

Once I thought I wanted to carry something quite different back to Africa. The black meteorite that's in the Kaaba in Mecca, the Holy of Holies. I wanted to bury it in rich black African soil as payment for the slaves the Arabs took out of Africa. But this box is what I'll carry back, and I'll give it to the Nile. The two of them would have liked that, I know it. As for me, it's the right thing to do.

Cairo finished shuffling the cards. He smiled and placed them in front of Joe. Joe looked at him, then whistled very softly.

Now if that isn't something. And all because the two of them taught you to dream when you were a little boy. Only that, nothing more. Well, Cairo, I'm glad for you and I'm glad for them. It's good you know where you're going and why, and when we have to look back it's better this way than the other. Better to be going to the river and giving it your gift, rather than burying something.

Joe turned toward the door.

Here now, what's this?

They listened to the chimes attached to the sundial in the front room strike the hour. While they were striking Haj Harun wandered in and began roaming around in distraction.

Twelve times, said Joe when the chimes stopped. Just right for nine in the evening. Hey wait.

The chimes had begun to strike again. They tolled twelve more times, creaked and repeated it, creaked and repeated it.

Four times in all, said Joe, once for everybody. By God that portable sundial hasn't missed a trick in the years we've been playing cards here. It's the business all right. Daft time out of control as usual in the eternal city. Haj Harun?

The old man stopped pacing.

Prester John?

I was just thinking the three of us wanderers here ought to have one friendly little hand tonight by way of welcoming out the old year. How would you like to take your place on top of the safe and bear witness as Clerk of the Acts?

The old man smiled shyly.

If that's what you want.

We do, we certainly do. Can't have a proper friendly little hand without our guardian knight in his place.

The old man nodded and slowly climbed up the ladder to the top of the tall antique Turkish safe. He sat down and straightened his faded yellow cloak, adjusted his rusty Crusader's helmet, retied the two green ribbons under his chin. Then he turned and peered into the nonexistent mirror in the wall.

Wanderers of the era, he announced. Travelers and countrymen and fellow Jerusalemites, I am ready.

Fine, said Joe, just fine. Well then, gents, I might as well do the honors since I find the cards sitting in front of me. Let's see, how does straight five-card poker strike you? Nothing wild and nothing stray, the customary three to draw. Only one hand now, so look smartly and here they come.

Joe dealt the cards and he and Munk fell to studying their hands. Cairo, as usual, left his cards face down on the table, untouched. After a moment of deliberation, he selected the first and the third and the fifth for discard.

Hold on, he said suddenly to Joe. You didn't announce an ante.

No reason to, that's why, just a friendly game tonight. Symbolic and nothing more on New Year's Eve.

No need for any money to change hands.

No good, said Cairo firmly. I can't play poker that way. If you won't ante, I will.

You will? What is it then?

The goats in the Moslem Quarter, said Cairo.

The two men looked at him.

Those used for sodomy, he added solemnly. Joe whooped and Munk broke into laughter.

Do you tell us that, Cairo lad. Well now, why didn't you say before you were thinking along such lines? If that's the kind of friendly hand we're playing then I'll be glad to make a friendly ante of my own. Sure, let's see. I'll throw in the goats in the Christian Quarter. Meat. Which leaves you shy, Munk. Don't you have something to sweeten the pot? Or can't you contain yourself long enough to say.

Munk was still laughing, wiping the tears from his eyes.

The goats in the Jewish Quarter, he managed to gasp at last. Milk.

Good, said Joe, even better than good. This is the way to start a hand off for sure. Beats playing with silly money when you're sitting at a poker table in the eternal city. What use can money be anyway, in such a place? None's the answer, contradiction in terms. No need for money in eternity. On the other hand there's always a need for real goods and services, which is why Haj Harun has spent so much of his long life in the service trades. A Holy City needs them more than most places and that's a fact, what with pilgrims and conquering armies and the just plain curious forever trooping up the mountain to have a look around and catch the sights.

Joe glanced slyly across the table.

You're not supposed to do this, gents, it's against all rules and I know it. But for once I'm going to drop my poker face at this table and come right out and say it, straight fact. You better both be careful in the next few minutes. What I mean is, watch it. Don't be foolish, keep a steady rein on, don't get carried away. Why, you say? Well I'll tell you why. Because I think I'm going to win. I've got this feeling coming over me, a suspicion amounting to a conviction, that fate is casting a lascivious glance in my direction. So that's all, you're warned. How many new cards then?

He pushed aside the discards.

Three to you, Cairo, although you don't know what you're holding or what you threw away. And here are your three new beauties, Munk, and lastly three for the dealer. And are they?

Ha, shouted Joe. Didn't I warn you? That lascivious glance has opened into a smile and the smile has burst into a grin that's holding nothing back. In other words I made it and you can both drop out right now. Fold up your tents and save your strength for another day. Fate's got me in her embrace and that's that. Good night to the both of you.

Cairo cleared his throat.

I haven't looked at my cards yet, but then I never look at my cards until the betting's over. There's been no need to before and there's no need to tonight. I'll win anyway.

Joe snorted.

By God, is that mad arrogance or not. Do you hear that, Munk? And after I just warned him too. What do you make of it? Doesn't he deserve to lose with that kind of attitude? Reminds me of that colonel out of central Europe a few years back, the one with the double monocles and the blond wig who liked to play with the joker wild and would throw anything away to get his hands on an ace. He was mad arrogant too.

Munk nodded. He smiled slightly and said nothing. When he had picked up his new cards a quizzical expression had come over his face. Now he was frowning, gently rubbing his chin, lost somewhere in thought.

Mad arrogance, muttered Joe, that's what. Well the bet's to you, Cairo, yours for starters. What manner of real goods and services are you going to wager for openers?

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

The mummy dust king is about to strike, muttered Joe.

Well do I or don't I?

You do. Agreed.

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

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

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

People? asked Munk, shaking himself out of his trance.

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

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

Jaysus all right, shouted O'Sullivan Beare, all right I say. If that's what you're up to I'll put down the Christian Quarter. And it goes without saying the Armenian Quarter automatically goes to the reckless devil here who owns the best cards. In other words it's finally a case of winner take all in the eternal city, is that it? Jerusalem is on the table and one of us is going to pick it up in the next few minutes? Is that what we're doing?

Munk smiled, he nodded. Cairo nodded and frowned.

Well then it's time, said Joe. By God if the moment hasn't sneaked right up on us, just sneaked in out of the night when no one was looking on this last day of the year. Now I hate to disappoint you both but you shouldn't have done that, shouldn't have gone so far by half. Here. Just look at this lineup I'm holding.

Joe turned over his cards. Four jacks and a queen. He touched each one of them lightly with his forefinger.

Like it? Isn't that something? Heaven laboring once again for a beleaguered Irishman? Yes I do believe it, just look at that regal party. The crown prince has come to inherit the kingdom for sure and the queen is along to ease the transition, to let all of us know all affairs are ongoing and cordial in the royal palace now that the heir apparent is to receive the land and the jewels. Not bad I say, just as it should be, and I'm ready for the succession and the ascent. So Cairo lad, do I take you or no?

One at a time, Cairo slowly turned over his cards.

A king. A queen. A king and a king and a king.

He looked up and smiled at Joe, who sighed.

Well my God I do not take you, do not even begin to. It seems the crown prince can't succeed to the throne after all, because it's still occupied by the incumbent. Bloody outrage, that's what. Regicide would have been in order but it's too late for that now. And I've only myself to blame. I should have suspected just such a scheme on your part, considering how you've been hawking pharaohs for years by the pinch and the snort. Undone, as simple as that. The king keeps his kingdom and the crown prince will have to go begging for a realm. The king also keeps his queen and will allow no ascent on that score either. So then, Munk, it's to you now. Time. Reverse and relate.

Munk stared at the two of them for almost a minute. Finally he turned over his cards and spread them out on the table.

Joe whistled very softly.

Do you tell us that now. It seems, Cairo, there may be higher powers at work in Jerusalem. It seems our Munk has called on them to intervene and they've done just that. It seems even royalty is powerless in the presence of a higher cause such as Munk's. Four aces, would you believe it. Aces, some kind of unit above the human plane. Yet even so Munk puts a queen with them for reproductive purposes, so his aces can take the form of a swan or a bull or a zephyr or God knows what in the Eastern Mediterranean manner, and impregnate the queen with the heroes of future generations. It's just beyond our scope and ability, Cairo, and there we are with our legacies gone, our ambitions dashed, twelve years of honest labor and dishonest endeavor simply finished. It's back to the bazaars for us. Munk takes Jerusalem and we're forced by events to make our way elsewhere.

Cairo nodded pensively. Joe scratched his beard.

Hey Munk, he said, could you take out your special watch for a moment?

Why?

Oh you know, in case we have to find out in a hurry whether time is slow or fast or nonexistent tonight.

Nothing really, that's all.

Munk took out his watch.

Now then, said Joe, shouldn't we hear it officially from the top of the safe? The final judgment on this table where three men have striven mightily in their purposes? Hello up there, Haj Harun?

Yes?

Fate is upon us and must be spoken, and the best cause wins. That was the last hand the three of us will ever play. And so after twelve busy years, if you would, the ultimate pronouncement.

Haj Harun straightened his helmet.

From the top of the safe, he said, I see that the man holding the watch with three levels is the winner.

Just like that, murmured Cairo.

Game of chance, added Joe. Sometimes it comes and sometimes it goes and it seems it's come for our partner here, our own very own Munk. Seems he's just up and taken it all. Ah well, somebody has to win in the end. Isn't it so, Cairo?

Yes.

Munk pushed back his chair. He began walking around the room.

What's this about it being our last hand? The two of you aren't serious, are you?

By God we are, of course we are. Was anybody ever more serious than Cairo and me?

But what's going on? I don't think I see it.

What's to see? Game of chance and you won it.

That's right, Munk. That's all there is.

All the same, said Joe, it's frightening to drop over a million pounds like that. I'll never see that kind of money again but of course it all started with a fraud, fishes in the shape of what? Perfectly dreadful thing to be doing in the Holy City and I don't deny it. The baking priest went along with me out of the kindness of his heart, casting a blessing here and another there, saying there was no harm to it, but I wasn't really representing the early Christians.

Haj Harun stirred and looked down at Joe.

What's this? asked the old man. You're not doubting yourself, are you? Questioning what you've done here?

To be frank, I am.

But you've helped defend Jerusalem.

Joe moved uneasily in his chair.

Don't know that I have. Can't say I've done that particularly.

But it's true, I know you have. You've believed in the miracle of Jerusalem. You've had faith.

Well you're more forgiving than most. But listen, what would you say if I told you I were going on a trip.

And not coming back?

Yes.

The old man shook his head sadly on top of the safe, his spindly legs dangling. His helmet went awry and a shower of rust fell into his eyes. He began to weep quietly.

I'd miss you, Prester John. But I've always known you'd have to leave someday, to return to your lost kingdom in the east.

Ah yes, my lost kingdom, I almost forgot. But if I were to leave, and Cairo here too, wouldn't you still have someone to talk to?

Haj Harun looked down at Munk. He smiled.

Of course, there'd still be Bar Cocheba. He'd understand.

Yes, said Joe, I'm sure he would. So will you do that for us, Munk? Will you?

Munk, stopped circling the table. He stood still, gazing at the two men at the table.

So that's it, that's what you meant. You were serious, this was the last hand. You're both leaving Jerusalem?

Yes we're off, Cairo and me. I've been here long enough. After all I only came by accident because a freighter in Cork happened to be carrying some nuns to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage, and I just happened to be a nun at the time.

And you, Cairo?

After I spend my Sunday afternoon beside the Nile I'm going back to the Sudan. I'll find a village on the edge of the Nubian desert, like the one where Johann Luigi Szondi met my great-grandmother. After all I'm a good deal older than the two of you. I'm fifty-three and if I'm going to have a family, it's time to start.

Joe?

Oh I'll just go ambling one way or another looking for Prester John's lost kingdom. The old country first I think, I'd like to dig up the musketoon I buried long ago in an abandoned churchyard. Then the New World I think, like the Sarahs. Out west maybe, you know how I've always wondered about the Indians. Childish isn't it. Amazing how a man can grow older and still have the child inside him, but there you are. And so too with the Sinai Bible that I wanted to find so much for so long, because of its treasure maps don't you know.

Joe smiled.

Amazing isn't it. Treasure maps? That was the child inside again. But I've got a confession to be making to you now, and it's just this. I know exactly where that Bible is, I've known for some time. And I won't tell you right now how I found out, but I will ask you to keep that information to yourselves. You see I've decided it should stay where it is for a while, until the right moment comes. Then I'll ask Haj Harun to go and get it for me.

And when will be the right moment? asked Cairo.

Ha, said Joe. Can't say, can I. Don't know, do I. Not now I don't, but when that moment comes it may well have to do with family. You're not the only one at this table, Cairo, who's thinking along those lines.

And the treasure maps you wanted so much? asked Munk.

Sure, said Joe, and there are such things, they do exist. But they're not to be found in books, I've learned that. Time it took me, being such a young and innocent one and all, you Munk having ten years on me and you Cairo having twenty, and Haj Harun, well just plain close to three thousand. But I did learn the truth of the matter finally, and it's that the treasure maps around here are to be found in Haj Harun's head, right behind those shining eyes, naturally, so, it's the only safe place for articles so precious, so rare. And they've been there for a long time, ever since way back then when Melchizedek, the primary priest of antiquity, was the first and the last King of Salem, City of Peace, reigning on this mountain long before Abraham journeyed out of the dawn of the east with his flock and came to seek him out and receive his blessing and father the sons called Ishmael and Isaac in this land, long before Arabs and Jews ever existed with their troubles or even had names like that to divide them, long before then Melchizedek had already dreamed his gentle dream here on the mountain, Haj Harun's dream, and in so doing given it life forever, without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life.

On top of the antique Turkish safe, Haj Harun smiled shyly.

I told you that, he whispered. Those were my words. We were sitting out on a hillside east of the city one evening, watching the sunset.

That's what we were doing, said Joe, and it was only this spring, and you pointed at the city as the sun went down and said that. And you said you were Melchizedek, because you both had and have the same dream, and I couldn't understand any of that at first and I said you were all mixed up, mixing up time again. But you weren't. You were right. Time works your way and not the other, and it took me a while to get used to the idea, to really know it, but now I have and do. Now I've learned the truth of it, the truth of the treasure maps too. Peace is the treasure, peace to seek, Melchizedek's gentle dream on the mountain. So a time will come for the Sinai Bible, gents, but it's not here and now. Here and now is for you to pick up your winnings, Munk, and let me tell you we've made it perfectly respectable for you, just very tidy and respectable.

Respectable?

Yes, your winnings. For my part, I knew you wouldn't want to be caught handling those dreadful religious articles I peddle on the side, so I've arranged to sell the concession to that shifty-eyed Frenchman who used to come to the game sometimes. All proceeds from the sale to go to you, to be paid in full over the next year. And what's more, he'll be working out of Beirut so you won't even have to look at him around here. I convinced him it was a more reliable business than dealing in stolen ikons, safer too, and he said he didn't want to live in Jerusalem anyway. Bad memories, he said. Especially that time back in '29 when Chief Sipping Bear wiped him out at this very table and sentenced him to work at an oven in purgatory, with the baking priest as his parole officer. Didn't much care for that apparently, did not, said the Frenchman with the shifty eyes.

As for pharaonic mummy dust, murmured Cairo.

Munk smiled.

Yes?

I knew you wouldn't want to be involved with that either. For philosophical reasons of course. It does speak of a distant past, after all, and what you're looking to is a future, the more immediate the better. So you won't have to deal with the pharaohs, Munk, neither in their powdered nor their mastic form. I've found a man who is buying all my mummies, and the mummy operation in its entirety, for a very handsome price. And he'll be headquartered in Alexandria, so you won't have to see him around here either.

Have I also met this man by chance?

By chance, you have. He was in the game the same evening when the Frenchman fared so poorly against Chief Sipping Bear. An elderly Egyptian landowner, cotton-fat, spastic when excited, said to be impotent if his favorite hunting falcon, hooded, isn't perched on the mirror that runs the length of his bed.

I remember him, said Munk. The black English judge found him guilty of having made a fortune by exploiting his workers. As I recall, the judge took away his cotton crop for the next ten years.

Precisely. Well now he's suddenly come up with the money to buy the entire mummy dust trade in the Middle East. And although spastic at times, he does have a keen business mind. And although elderly, he does have a large brood of what he calls nephews, who could and should be put to work. The falcon problem, it seems, was merely an eccentricity of his later years.

I see.

And there we have it, said Joe. We seem to be right all around, Munk, with no questionable affairs for you to worry about. You just take this money you've won at honest poker and use it to build those irrigation ditches you like so much. How Cairo and I come by the money has to do with us and a spastic elderly item in Alexandria and a shifty-eyed item in Beirut. Sure. And now the money will go to dig irrigation ditches in the wastes, so the wastes can be crops, and the truth is that's a nice way for money to go when it's going somewhere. So what's left but our rounds?

Rounds? asked Munk.

Right. It's New Year's Eve, isn't it? And one thing I've discovered along with everything else here, is that making the rounds on New Year's Eve is a regular ritual. So tonight we might as well all do it together, all four of us.

Cairo smiled. Munk looked mystified.

What rounds?

Haj Harun's annual inspection tour. Tell him, Aaron.

I will, said the wizened old man from the top of the safe. On the last night of the year I always go around the Old City to pay my respects to the elders of Jerusalem and see how the past year has fared for them.

That's all?

Yes, said Joe, but it might be more of a task than you'd suspect at first. Even though there are only two stops.

Only two? asked Munk.

Sounds minor, doesn't it. And so it does sound that way, but it's not. Far from it.

The first place we go, said Joe, is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to the top of the steps that lead down to the crypt. There's a man there on top of the steps who paces back and forth muttering to himself. He's been doing that for two thousand years, according to Haj Harun, and he's the first one we want to talk to.

What about? asked Munk.

Nothing, as it turns out.

No, I mean what does he say?

That's just it, he doesn't say anything. Nothing at all. He's so mysterious he doesn't even see us when we come up to him. Just goes right on pacing and muttering, in his own world altogether, some kind of holy vocation, don't you see. Now the other stop is a cubbyhole not far from Damascus Gate. A cobbler works in that cubbyhole, and according to Haj Harun he's been here much longer than the man on the top of the stairs, ever since the beginning in fact. He was already a man when Haj Harun was still a boy, and that dates him certainly. So he has a great deal to say. But the odd thing is, we can never find him.

Why? asked Munk.

Because Haj Harun can never remember where his cubbyhole is. It's near Damascus Gate, but exactly where he can't recall. Of course the configurations of the alleys have changed a bit since then. The last time Haj Harun did find the cobbler on a New Year's Eve, you see, was just before the Captivity. But the cobbler's here all right. Has to be. It's his home. So we keep looking.

Joe smiled. He drummed his fingers on the table.

That's right, Munk. A case of the crypt and the cobbler. Now this cobbler, as Haj Harun remembers, is just about the most talkative fellow you'll ever meet. He talks and talks and brings the events of a year up to date in minutes. And why not, dealing with soles the way he does? Having been around since the beginning the way he was? To him the world's a shoe just walking and walking and never standing still, what else does he see? No solitary silent crypt for him, not hardly. He's out there in the turmoil with the shouts and the cries of the hawkers, out there amidst the peddlers of commerce and empires, right out there where the crowds never cease to pass, sitting in his cubbyhole not far from Damascus Gate, a witness to it all.

While that other fellow, Munk, the one with the mysteries, he just mutters and paces in the gloom on top of the stairs in the church, going no place to outward appearances but guarding his crypt all the same.

Pondering the darkness down there, I suppose. So what's that make them, do you think, opposites in the game? Partners therefore?

I've asked myself that question, Munk, and when I did, quick came the answer. Joe you unsteady bogman, said this voice inside me, listen to your own unsteady conscience. The reason you have the one is because you have the other. No way to do it without both, not if you're going to have an eternal city. A mysterious crypt, you say, and a man devoted to it? Just dandy, all fine and good. But what about everyday people and their everyday chores and concerns? That's the world too and the truth of it.

Granted, I say. Assuredly. And then the voice comes back and says to me, all right then, and what's the view from the opposite side of the bog? If the world were nothing but turmoil and cries and shouts, nothing but commerce and peddlers and emperors and so forth, just walking and walking around, would that do us? Would it really now?

Well no, I answer at once. In all truth, it wouldn't.

And so? says this voice inside me, this person thinking his and her thoughts. And so?

And so you've got me, I answer. Just walking around won't do. We have to have this other fellow who minds the crypt. Or mines it or whatever. It's all the same with a dark silent crypt containing mysterious secrets, mining it or minding it, who can say. And if all this sounds to you like a bloody convoluted description of the situation, Munk, I can only say it is. But no more convoluted than the situation itself, which is those alleys near Damascus Gate where Haj Harun has been on the lookout for his cobbler friend these last two thousand five hundred years. Where you're dealing with an eternal city, in other words, you've got to know its basic professions, cobbler and crypt minder-miner.

Makes you dizzy does it, Munk, the simplicity of these professions? It does me, I can tell you that, it makes me dizzy up here on top of the mountain. Of course it'd be different if I were like Haj Harun up there on his safe and could take the long view the way he does, but I wonder if I'd want to? Seems to me one Babylonian invasion is enough. Seems to me watching the Crusaders clank around with their bloody awful swords, just once, would be more than enough. Me, I don't want to go back on the run in the hills of southern Ireland. Don't want to crawl onto that terrible quay in Smyrna again and see Stern pick up a knife and slit a girl's throat out of kindness. I just can't manage it. I'm a bogman and I'm down there and this mountain is too high for me. I can't really climb it, can't ever reach the top. I don't have the cause that would allow me to do that. You've got a cause all right but I've just been a visitor here, and the visit's up and now I'm leaving.

Munk had been gazing thoughtfully at Joe. All at once Cairo burst out laughing. Joe looked at him and pretended to scowl.

By God what's this, laughing at such tender sentiments right to a man's face? You mummy thief and obvious blackguard; everyone knows you've stolen as much time here as I have with your mummy dust traffic through the ages. So what's so funny about what I just said?

Cairo laughed even harder. Joe threw his hands in the air.

Hear that, Munk? No respect at all for a man's inner feelings, just none. Just hoots and howls like an emperor looking down on the lesser folk. Well out with it, you Nilotic ghoul, what's so funny? Try to get hold of yourself. We're waiting.

Cairo's laughter finally subsided. He rubbed his chest, smiling broadly.

Waiting, that's right, we all are. In another moment poor Munk is going to think you're the cobbler in question.

Me? Why would he ever think such a thing?

Because of the way you've been carrying on, just talking and talking. You tell him we have to accompany Haj Harun tonight, but you don't even tell him why, the whole point of the thing.

Oh, said Joe, pretending to make another face. The whole point, is that all? Well of course I was getting around to it. I was just sort of sizing up the countryside along the way. What's the point of taking a trip if you don't see the sights? What's the point of sitting down to a stew if you don't sniff it and savor the aroma and sip it slowly around the edges first to get a hint of all the flavors? What would you have me do? Boil down the stew and reduce the trip to one word?

Haj Harun does, said Cairo, beginning to laugh again.

Well of course he does but that's because he takes the long view, as I was saying, unlike you and me.

Now Munk here's different from us, he's got his cause to take him up the mountain. And sure there it is coming right on, I can see the future now. Haj Harun and Bar Cocheba together again fending off the Roman hordes and their monstrous siege machines, rolling and rumbling machines, simply monstrous. The two of them manning the ramparts against the enemy and racing along the walls and jogging around and around through the alleys of the Old City, resolutely so, keeping on the move for sure because a moving target is harder to hit than a stationary one, I can see it now for sure. And here come the Romans hurling their monstrous boulders and insults at the city, I can see that too.

Joe, hold on there. Where are you going this time?

Me? No place. Who ever suggested such a thing? You mummy ghoul, how can you say that when you know I'm just sitting here as sober as can be. It's just that I don't like to see an era ending, that's all. I enjoyed this poker game.