Jerusalem Poker

PART FOUR

— 12-

Maud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did everyone leave? Why did they go away?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Constantinople, 1899.

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

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

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

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

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

Or Salonika, 1879.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sivi wagged his head and smiled wickedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

Sivi waved his hand majestically.

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

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

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

All right, a drachma.

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

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

I suppose I am.

Then the bet is summarily withdrawn?

Yes.

Sivi smiled and squeezed her hand.

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

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

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

Yours?

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

Maud laughed.

Sivi. That's awful.

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

Sivi, that's enough.

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

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

What?

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

Maud laughed. Sivi stroked his moustache in the doorway.

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

You don't need it, you old goat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that all Sivi knows about her?

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

She nodded.

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

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

When did it start between you and Theresa?

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

That distance you mentioned?

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

I know, said Maud.

Why? How, I mean.

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

Maud shook her head. She laughed harshly at herself.

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

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

Maud smiled. She put a finger on his nose.

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

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

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

And so?

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

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

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

Maud laughed again.

All true. And so?

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

Maud reached out and tweaked his nose.

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

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

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

Well what do you think?

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

Chapeau, Munk.

Thank you, madame.

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

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

Beards?

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

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

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

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

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

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

— 13-

O'Sullivan Beare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The god of dawn? The god of light?

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

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

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

Yes, said Cairo. I thought he lived here.

He does. You take those outside stairs to the left

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

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

Like the view then?

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

Here now, Cairo, what's so funny?

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

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

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

Here.

No, I believe an elderly Armenian priest lives here.

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

I'm sure.

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

Fine. Where did you say you lived?

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

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

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

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

Cairo nodded.

What's the meaning of that anyway?

Of what?

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

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

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

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

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

Do you cook in there too?

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

What do you do for heat on a winter night?

A nice cozy turf fire, nothing like it.

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

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

Probably.

And Munk too?

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

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

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

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

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

Aqaba?

That's right.

For three whole weeks?

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

Drunk for three weeks, in other words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When things go wrong and will not come right,

Though you do the best you can,

When life looks black as the hour of night —

A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

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

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

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

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

A short ladder led to it.

You keep pigeons, Joe?

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

Where are they coming from?

Joe shrugged. Aqaba, I suppose.

You take them down there with you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who?

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

Yes.

Well?

Well I met her here.

Where?

Here. The Old City.

Where exactly?

In a church.

What church?

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

Say it, Joe.

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

Will you understand?

Yes.

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

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

Yes.

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

What else is there?

Yet you keep going back to Aqaba.

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

Wasn't there ever another woman after that?

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

Who was she? Who is she?

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

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

Because of what?

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

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

Theresa?

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

Smyrna?

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

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

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

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

Sivi?

He'd gone mad during the massacres.

Theresa?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe moaned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord, if thou will thou can make me clean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe?

Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does Father Zeno say?

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

Do you see her?

Never.

Would you like to?

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

Did he say why?

No.

Did you ask him?

No.

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

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

How's that?

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

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

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

Joe waved his arm toward the city.

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

What is it?

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

Cairo smiled.

And how's that possible?

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

How did you learn about this Sinai Bible?

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

Joe laughed.

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

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

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

Where?

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

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

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

Why? asked Cairo.

Joe smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cairo laughed.

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

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

What?

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

It is true that I will not.

Joe laughed.

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

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

Stretched and distorted and made outrageous.

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

That won't help at this hour of night.

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

I wasn't aware of saying that.

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

It was going to be Jerusalem first, then Mecca.

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

The Holy of Holies.

Ah.

The black meteorite.

Ah.

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

Why?

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

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

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

There was no other way to see him.

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

Anger now, Cairo?

There was.

Vengeance too?

There was.

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

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

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

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

From our Munk?

From Munk, yes.

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

You do.

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

Cairo smiled. Time, he said.

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

Good.

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

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

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

But would Munk be surprised? wondered Cairo.

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

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

Did Joe know?

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

Did he say why? Cairo had asked.

No, answered Joe.

Did you ask him?

No, answered Joe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gold?

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

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

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

In this I am as blind as you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father Zeno smiled his gentle smile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father Zeno looked surprised.

Why do you ask that?

No reason really. I just wondered.

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

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

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

An Arab?

Now Father Zeno looked shocked.

Yes, he whispered.

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

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

Father Zeno clasped his hands. He lowered his eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

Father, she whispered, it's coming again.

Watch the wheel, my child. Watch it turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

— 14-

Stern

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

Christmas Eve, 1933.

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

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

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

Hello, Stern.

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

Make any sense to you?

Stern smiled.

You're looking a lot older, Joe.

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

Nobody was, Joe.

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

Stern offered the packet.

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

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

Hey, you all right?

What do you mean; Joe?

Nothing.

No, what is it?

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

What were you going to say before, Joe?

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

Look, we were there together. What is it?

Nothing.

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

All right then. It was your eyes, Stern.

What about them?

The match. When I lit the match.

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

Joe sighed.

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

Stern smiled. He pushed back his hair.

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

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

Joe?

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

He was a myth, said Stern quietly.

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

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

Cairo Martyr. We play poker together, remember?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't believe it.

All true, all the same.

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

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

But that's astounding. When was it?

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

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

He did?

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

Joe winked.

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

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

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

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

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

What's that? asked Stern without looking up.

Nothing. Just put it away and forget about it.

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

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

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

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

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

Hopeless in this world.

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

Joe?

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

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

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

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

Stern smiled.

Who was I?

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

What's that?

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

Yes, I do now.

Well how about that then?

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

Well?

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

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

You wouldn't argue with that, would you?

No.

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

True.

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

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

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

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

Of course.

Well?

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

Joe made a face.

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

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

Joe slapped the table. He whooped.

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

Yes, the same.

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

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

Stern laughed.

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

Joe slapped the table again.

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

Stern laughed. He nodded.

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

And moreover, why?

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

Joe held up his hands to interrupt.

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

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

Joe interrupted again.

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

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

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

True or not?

Have you heard this story, Joe?

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

Yes.

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

Yes.

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

Yes.

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

Yes.

Joe sucked in his coffee and poured more cognac.

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

Yes.

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

Yes.

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

Yes.

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

Yes.

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

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

Yes.

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

Yes.

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

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

Stern nodded, smiling up at Joe.

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

Yes.

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

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

Joe tried to laugh but he coughed instead.

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

How'd you know all that about Maud?

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

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

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

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

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

Well what about your son?

Joe smiled.

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

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.

Munk laughed.

That's enough from the two of you. What's the one word? Why are we going out with Haj Harun tonight?

Joe sighed.

I guess it's the same with you both, nothing but facts and down to business, straight and dry facts and nothing else. Won't allow a man to properly savor his stew. Well anyway, Munk, you know the one word already but just to make it official, just to sum it all up at the end of twelve years of poker, we'll have it formally proclaimed by the source. An official announcement that the game at this table is officially over. Haj Harun, guardian of the past and the future?

Yes?

You're sitting up there on top of the safe with a better view than the rest of us. What's the one word that sums up Jerusalem?

Haj Harun straightened his faded yellow cloak, his spindly legs dangling. He adjusted his rusty Crusader's helmet and gazed at the nonexistent mirror in the crumbling plaster of the wall.

Dreams, he said happily.

Yes, sighed Joe, and so it is. And the reason we're going out with Haj Harun tonight, to look up these two senior citizens, is because it just so happens they secretly keep this city on the mountaintop going.

The pacing muttering man at the top of the stairs to the crypt and his partner in time, the garrulous cobbler? The one unspoken and the other unfound? Well you see, Munk, tonight they have a dream, a special dream, and we have to wish them well with it. Tonight they dream there is a Jerusalem. And because they do, it will be here when we wake up tomorrow, dreamed into existence for another year.

So there you have our task on New Year's Eve, if you want it in a word.

Munk nodded. Haj Harun stirred on top of the safe.

Prester John? You mentioned earlier that I haven't been able to locate the cobbler's cubbyhole for some time, but tonight I have a curious feeling I just may find it. In fact I think there's a very good chance I'll remember where it is tonight.

Well of course there is. I never believed anything else.

You'll like him, the cobbler, you'll all like him. He has amusing stories to tell and he's much better on dates than I am, and also he goes back much further, having already been a man when I was still a boy.

I know we will. Certainly we will.

Haj Harun smiled distantly.

Well I think I'll come down now. I think it's time we began our rounds.

Truly, yes do that. According to the once portable sundial in the front room, it's almost o'clock.

— 18-

Bernini

They'll all tell you that, straight off and no question about it. We go right on in the lives of others and there's no end to it for sure.

On a late winter morning so brilliant it could only be found in Attica, the flat white sunlight hard on the glittering sea, a small dark man made his way slowly down a beach near Piraeus to the spot where a small dark boy stood scaling stones out over the water. About five yards away the man sat down on the sand and shaded his eyes.

Hello there.

Hello yourself.

Good day for that. The sea's just right

That's what it is.

What's your record then?

Nine so far but I'll get up to eleven or twelve, I always do. Say, what's that funny old uniform you're wearing?

Officer of light cavalry, acquired in the wars.

Must have been a long time ago to look that old and ragged and have so many patches on it.

It was. I was just thinking so myself as I was walking down the beach.

And the uniform doesn't even fit you. It's too big in the chest and you've had to roll up the sleeves.

I know it. Maybe I was bigger once.

You mean you've shrunk.

Well as a matter of fact it wouldn't surprise me at all to hear that I've shrunk or grown, one or the other perhaps, but both is far more likely. After all, genies do that so why shouldn't we? They go from being great huge giants striding across the earth from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush, talking to everyone along the way more or less, to being so small and quiet they can spend seven full years in a tiny Sinai cave, speaking only once in all that time and then only to a mole. Sure, that's what they do.

The boy laughed. He scaled another stone out over the water and held his breath. He clapped his hands.

See that? Eleven, what'd I tell you.

A good one all right. You're getting there.

That's a funny accent you have. Is that from the wars too?

Sometimes I think it is, one war or another. Seems likely don't you know.

Do you always talk like that?

How?

Kind of around and around.

Don't know that I do, can't say that I don't. Must be that I circle things sometimes, because it's hard to get your hands on them. Tell me now, would you happen to be knowing the woman who lives in that small house up there on the edge of the beach? Maud's her name.

Of course I know her, she's my mum. You work in town with her or something?

No, I knew her a long time ago. In Jerusalem it was. Yes that's right, lad. I'm your father.

Bernini's hand held a scaling stone in the air. He smiled and there was nothing but joy in his face.

Are you really Father?

I am, lad. The very one.

Bernini shouted and laughed. He lunged toward Joe who swept him up in his arms and swung him around. They fell together on the sand, laughing and breathless.

I knew you'd be coming soon. I didn't say anything about it but I knew.

Of course you knew it, lad. What else would I be doing?

Were you famous in the wars? Is that where you've been?

Nothing of the sort. When I was fighting, back before I met your mother, nobody knew my name or even knew I had one. I wore a flat red hat then, and a green jacket, and shoes that had buckles on them, and I stayed up in the hills of southern Ireland with my old musketoon, talking to no man, hiding during the day and on the run through all the hours of darkness. And because of that, you see, they thought I was one of the little people when they chanced to catch the barest glimpse of me far far away in the distance at dusk or dawn, and because I was at least getting on toward being the size of a man, as I still am, they came to call me the biggest of the little people. The little people have no names, you see, and the farmers didn't know who it was up there in those hills who was helping them out by arching bullets into the air from a great distance, in the manner of a howitzer, so that the bullets came down to strike the enemy from above, thereby putting the very fear of heaven in the hearts of the enemy, maybe even the fear of God if they believed in one. No, the farmers didn't know who it was, but they certainly liked what that unseen presence was doing, so they paid me a great compliment and called me that.

But who are the little people really, Father? Are they elves?

Well they wouldn't take kindly to being called merely that, because they're so much finer and grander and cleverer than any elf could ever be. Who are they then? They're wondrous beings and spirits with the most mysterious of manners. And besides that, behind and beneath it all, they really run the land and the country.

Any country?

Joe looked thoughtful.

I'm not so sure about that. I wouldn't say all that much, I don't believe. But they do run the land and the country where your forebears on my side came from. Secretly of course. I don't have to tell you that.

Why secretly?

Because that's the way of the world, lad. Isn't it always so?

I don't know. I thought kings and parliaments and presidents ran countries.

So it seems from afar, but that's only for the sake of appearances, only on the surface of things. In actual fact the little people are in charge, always have been and always will be. But you don't ever see them, so much as experience them. When you're out in the woods you hear them whispering and dancing and playing their games, but you daren't go investigate the event right then, because they wouldn't like it. They don't take kindly to people peeking in on their revels and games, that just won't do. So you tiptoe away and come back the next day to have a look around in that glen or dell, and one glance is enough, one glance tells all, you know immediately they've been there. You can see that all right, but of course you haven't seen them. And so it goes, and that's the way it always goes. Never in your whole life do you actually see them, but that doesn't mean they're not always out there, just out of sight, whispering and humming and singing and carrying on in general, playing away and mischievously passing the ages the way their kind does, feasting and dancing and holding their hurling matches brazenly on the strand, at night of course, in the soft moonlight, when you're at home in bed falling asleep and can't catch them at it. And they're not alone out there. There are pookas and banshees and the whole lot of them, all of them passing the ages in the ways that amuse them. But tell me something frankly, lad. Before I ever mentioned them, didn't you already know about them?

Bernini smiled.

Why do you say that?

Just wondering, just guessing. Well?

I've never told anyone, whispered Bernini seriously.

Of course you haven't

It was a secret.

And it's a good one. Well?

Bernini nodded. He smiled.

You're right, I did know they were there. I didn't know that's what they were called, and I didn't know what they wore, but I knew about them.

Well it's a pretty outfit, isn't it. Just right for ones so fine and grand and clever, so mysteriously watching over us in their pursuits. Although it's also true the ones you know may wear quite a different costume.

There's no limit, of course, to how they can carry on.

Bernini was smiling rapturously now.

Will you tell me all about them, Father? About the games they play and the dancing and the singing and all of it?

I will, lad. From beginning to end we'll discuss their sly mischievous ways, always off where they can't be seen having their fun and winking at the sky as they tip their heads so gaily and set their feet to flying in a whirling whirligig so fine, so grand, the very sunshine itself flutters and laughs.

Bernini clapped his hands.

Oh yes, just whirling and whirling in their flying shoes with buckles. But what's this uniform then? This queer old one you're wearing?

Ah, lad, another whole place and time. We'll get to that too. The man who owned this one before me is known as the baking priest, as fine an item as ever walked in the streets of the Holy City. Saved my life, he did, when I was on the run and arrived in Jerusalem starving and penniless, a fugitive from injustice and the youngest by far of the Poor Clares who were making that dreadfully shocking pilgrimage that year.

What's a Poor Clare?

A nun, lad, a nun from the strictest of orders. That's why the pilgrimage was so shocking. Because normally Poor Clares can't even leave their convents, not ever, let alone travel to a place like Jerusalem with its unlimited sights and sounds and smells. Anyway, I went to the Holy Land as a nun.

But a man can't be a nun, can he?

That's right, he can't. He simply cannot. But apparently Himself decided to make an exception that year so I could escape from the city of Cork and be transported to the Holy Land in order to fulfill a prophecy made by my father.

Who's himself?

God. Chose to intervene, He did, the baking priest told me all about it when he made me a hero of the Crimean War and awarded me the first Victoria Cross ever given, which until then had been his own.

Here you see it. A Victoria Cross for defending Ireland against the English.

So you're a great rich man now?

Not at all, none of it. I'm just a poor fisherman's son from the Aran Islands who's been adrift and afloat in our Holy City for fourteen long years. Just one O'Sullivan Beare who found himself in Jerusalem by chance, although it's also true we're known as the O'Sullivan Foxes on occasion, for what reason I can't imagine. But with a name like Bernini now, with a fine name like that, you'll be going on someday to build fountains and stairways to heaven and beautiful colonnades for the pope. Good lad. If it had been up to me I might have called you Donal Cam, and that's not half so ringing.

Who was Donal Cam?

The famous bear and fox among your ancestors on my side, known in his time as the O'Sullivan Beare.

Some centuries ago he walked a thousand of his people out of the south of Ireland to the north, in the dead of winter and fighting all the way, escaping, the English and starving too, just as I was doing three hundred years later as a nun. Well he limped and he fought and he led his people, and after two weeks they arrived where they were going. And they were safe now, the thirty-five who had survived out of the thousand. So he was a hero because of what he did. But for all that, I still like Bernini better as a name.

Your name's Joe.

That's what it is, that's mine, as simple as can be. And after that the names of half a dozen other saints, same as my father who had the gift.

What gift?

Prophecy. To see the world as it was and shall be. He was the seventh son of a seventh son, you see, and when you are you have the gift. While me, I was just the thirty-third son and last.

Bernini's eyes shined when he heard the numbers. Joe gazed into them and saw something. A shadow flickered across Joe's face.

Good with figures are you, lad? Quick, what's five plus eight?

Eleven or twelve, said Bernini.

Is it now. And how's that? How can it be both?

Because some days I scale a stone eleven times and some days twelve. I know Mother says that's not the way you're supposed to do arithmetic, but that's the way I do it. At different times, to me, different numbers answer better. When I have a feeling about one, I use it. But then if I don't have a special feeling, a number turns up anyway. Do you know what I mean?

Joe gazed at his son and his frown slowly changed to a smile.

Do you tell me so. Is it always that way with you? In other things besides arithmetic?

Yes, I'm afraid it is. Does it make you angry?

Nothing of the sort, lad. I'm here to love you and accept you as you are. And it strikes me you just might be a poet, did you ever think of that? In poetry all things slip and slide, just as they do when you're hearing the whispers of the little people, and knowing they're there behind the wall all right, but not seeing them.

Well I don't think I'm a poet, most of the time I don't seem to be anything. Do you know? Most of the time I'm just here by the sea. And even when I'm not, I still am really, down here looking at the sea and listening. Do you know where it goes?

Sometimes. And sometimes I'm also just like you. I just sit and look at it and listen. I used to do that a lot down on the coast of the Sinai, in a little oasis on the Gulf of Aqaba. I used to fly my Camel down there and sit for days listening and watching, just keeping watch through the hours of light and dark.

Bernini laughed.

You flew a camel? The same way they have flying carpets in the stories?

Does sound strange, doesn't it. But that's also the name of an airplane, you see, a Sopwith Camel it's properly called. Now tell me, do you like that looking and listening more than anything else?

Yes.

Joe knelt on the sand and put his arms around Bernini's waist.

Well lad, then I'm surely glad I found you here. Right here on this very spot by the sea.

Bernini put his fingers in his father's beard.

I'm glad too, for a special reason. I knew you'd be coming soon but not just today, and that's a wonderful surprise. Today I mean. It's my birthday.

I know it is, lad, that's why I'm here. Thirteen years ago you were born on this very day in Jericho, a place of sunshine and flowers near the River Jordan, another kind of oasis it is. And our little house was near the Jordan, on a path to it, we weren't far away from it at all. So close it was then, that river of miracles, so close it seemed, nearly at our feet it seemed. Ah it's true what the old man says. The years slip away and slide together.

Why are you crying, Father?

Not crying really. Just happy to have found you, here by the sea. Just happy. That's all.

Who were you talking about who says that?

The old man? Someone like no other. A friend I had in Jerusalem. He showed me the world and showed me what it's all about. Haj Harun is his name. So gentle and frail, you wonder how he's ever done it.

Done what?

Lived three thousand years in Jerusalem. He has done that, you see. It may be hard to imagine over here, away from that holy mountain, but it's true. Do you believe me when I tell you so?

Yes. Haj Harun. The man who's lived for three thousand years in Jerusalem.

Joe smiled. Bernini smiled.

Maybe when you grow up, lad, you'll be like him. What do you think?

I don't know. Maybe I will.

Joe sighed.

A wonder, that's what.

Father?

Yes.

Are you going to stay here with us now?

Well as it happens, lad, I'm not. When a time comes it comes, you see, and that's what it's done for me.

So I'm off to look at new places, the New World probably, which is to say America. I'm going to find out about it and then when I do, you and I will discuss it. In the meantime you've got your mum and she's a wonderful woman. God never made better.

I love her.

I know you do, and in my way, so do I.

Then why are you leaving?

Ah you are a clever little piece of goods, on the foxy side of the O'Sullivans, I'd say. But the answer is straightforward. It's that I must. Haying been born a fisherman's son, I'm bound for the desert. You may not understand that now, but someday you will.

Oh no, I understand it now.

You do? How's that?

A man named Stern told me. He's a new friend of Mother's.

Did he now? What'd he say?

Well he was leaving here once and I asked him the same thing, and he said that sometimes a man has travels to make.

Well well, it's true I guess. Not that your mother doesn't have her own to make, she does. But aren't you a smart one to be knowing all that at your age.

Bernini hung his head.

I'm not smart, he whispered.

Why do you say that?

Because I'm not.

Bernini hesitated, staring at the sand.

What is it? said Joe quickly. You mean your not being able to read? I already know about that.

Bernini nodded.

That and the other things, he whispered. Not being able to do arithmetic the way you're supposed to.

Here here, said Joe in a soft voice, stop hanging your head like that and take a look out to sea. There are all kinds of ways of being smart, we both know that. Take Haj Harun. Most of the time he doesn't even know what century he's in. You go for a walk with him through the streets of Jerusalem and he may be back somewhere a couple of thousand years ago, rambling through alleys no one else is smart enough to recognize. All lost it would appear, but he's not, not really. It's just that he sees things we don't. The rest of us, we see what's around us, he sees more. So you can't say what's smart and what isn't, there are all kinds of different ways. A lot of people would say Haj Harun isn't smart, and he wouldn't be if it came to selling vegetables by the pound or cloth by the yard. Hopeless, he'd be, there'd be no profit ever. But if you want to know who the holy men were and what they thought, or better than that, what they felt in their hearts, or even the unholy Assyrians or anybody else, then you take a wander with him through the streets of Jerusalem and you'll find out, you'll know. Our gentle knight he is, watching over the eternal city.

Bernini looked up. He smiled.

You talk as if Jerusalem wasn't a place.

Oh it is all right, it's just that it's more as well. Something you carry with you, inside of you, whenever you go. And as for those travels we mentioned, you'll be having your very own someday.

I hope so.

You will, I know it. When I was your age I was just bursting with the dream of them. Just dying to get out in the world and try my hand.

And you did.

Yes I did, I tried. Funny thing is, that's still what I'm doing.

A shadow suddenly came across Bernini's face. He was gazing up the beach toward the little house. Joe looked quickly away and back again. There was pain in his eyes.

Say it, he whispered.

Bernini shook his head, his mouth set.

No say it, lad, whispered Joe. You know it's always best to say things. People hear them anyway. What is it?

Well all I meant was, she'll be home at five or six.

Yes.

Well aren't you even going to come and see her?

Joe took a deep breath.

No.

Not even for a few minutes?

No.

But we're going to have a birthday party and there's a beautiful cake. I saw it on the shelf.

No. I can't, lad.

Just for a few minutes? To have a piece of cake?

Ah, a few minutes or a lifetime. It seems there's no difference.

But then you're not going to see her at all?

Not this time. A time will come, but it's not now.

But why? Won't you tell me why? She's my mother and you're my father. Why?

I'll try to tell you, it's hard to explain. You see she has a life of her own now and I'm not in it. You are, and old friends like Munk, and new friends like Stern, and the people she works with and others, they make up her life now. Especially you. But I'm somewhere else. I mean I've been somewhere else so long, I'm somewhere else now.

But she'd like to see you.

I don't think so.

Are you afraid to see her?

Not afraid, no, I just don't think it would be for the best at the moment. Someday, but not now. Your mother and I haven't seen each other in thirteen years, and some things are too recent. Scars take time to heal. You have to treat the past gently.

What's too recent?

Sivi's death, for one.

But he was such a sad old man. He almost never talked and he never smiled, not even once. He just sat and stared at walls, at nothing. It made me uncomfortable to be in the same room with him.

That was when you knew him, lad, but it wasn't always so. Things change. There was a time when Munk knew him long ago, and your mother and Stern, when he was always smiling and laughing and telling stories, amusing everybody and making things better than they had been before. I didn't know him myself then, but they say there was never anyone, never anyone who enjoyed life more. Just accepted everything and everyone and put people at ease right away, and made them laugh and was kind and generous, and was always saying funny things. But then the fires of Smyrna got in the way, and the slaughter and the screams, and soldiers beat him with rifles and he was never the same after that. What I'm saying is that he was a good man, and that he and your mother go back a long way, long before I ever met her, and it can hurt terribly when someone like that is taken from you. When they die. It just seems then that nothing is right in the world, just nothing at all, and you feel that nothing will ever be right again. It takes time to get over that. And you know how she spent these last years taking care of him.

Bernini nodded.

Yes you do, you saw it. Without her he wouldn't have had much of anything these last years. And before that it was the other way around. Before that he helped her, along with all the others. Sivi was her link to the past, to bad days as well as good, but a link in any case, giving life some continuity, a dimension, a meaning. After all he'd been the brother of her husband, the one who died in the war before your mother and I met, and later he took her in when she left Jericho with you just after you were born. Just so many things he did for her, just so many memories she shared with him. So his going is more than it seems, more than you can imagine. When you lose someone like that, someone who's been so much a part of your life for so long, it's as if all those years have suddenly been taken away from you. Your own past, taken away from you. You feel cheated and robbed, it's just terrible to go through. Son?

Yes?

I've gone on about this because I think you should understand it. There's no way you could know it yourself, from what you saw of Sivi. No way you could realize what his death must mean to her. So that's enough of the past for her to deal with right now. She doesn't need me walking in.

Bernini nodded. He looked out to sea.

Why did she leave Jericho with me?

Well that's a direct question, isn't it. She'd have to give you her answer, but I guess mine would be that I didn't know enough. I'd had no experience with a woman, you see. Only twenty when I met her and we were together less than a year, and I didn't know what things meant. I just didn't know what people were doing when they did them. So I got things mixed up, got them wrong. I did that with your mother.

Did what?

Didn't understand the silences, the anger. I was so dumb I thought it was something I'd done. We do that when we're young. We think that anything that happens, happens because of us. So I thought I'd done something and she didn't love me anymore. Of course it was just the opposite. She did love me but she was afraid, because love had always hurt her before. So she pulled away from me and I didn't know why. Leaving me because she loved me. Terrible pain for the both of us coming out of the love we had for each other. Life can be like that, it can do that. Just turn on itself. It's the strangest thing. You have to be so careful with someone you love. People are fragile when you get that close to them. Living alone is easier by far in this world, or even living with someone but keeping yourself alone all the same. There aren't any risks then, but you're always the poorer for it. The riches are in the risks and that's the truth, you'll find them nowhere else. Not ever, as I well know.

I still don't see what you got wrong.

Joe smiled.

You don't now? Well nothing more than myself of course. That's always it. Whatever you do or don't do, you're the one who's done it. Did you know the O'Sullivan Beare clan used to have a lovely legend?

What's that?

A saying, a motto. Love, the forgiving hand to victory. That's the legend and none was ever better. It says everything that has to be said. Well I've always known the words, but when I was younger I didn't really understand them. I took people for what they said and did, and that's not enough in this world. You also have to take people for what they don't say and don't do. Sounds simple, but it's not until you learn it.

I think I've already begun to learn it.

Bernini's face was serious, intent. Joe nodded.

How's that, lad?

Well I don't listen to people's words so much. I listen to what's inside.

What's that now? What you call inside?

Bernini put his hand in the sand. He pushed it back and forth, making a trough. All at once he seemed faraway.

What's inside, lad?

Have you ever seen the fishermen throwing those little octopuses against the rocks by the harbor after they catch them?

I have.

The octopuses are so small, you wouldn't think they could be that tough. But they have to keep smashing them against the rocks over and over before they're ready to be hung up to dry. But then later when they're grilled over charcoal and cut in little pieces with olive oil over them, aren't they the best thing in the world?

They are, the very best. A feast in themselves.

Yes, said Bernini, beginning another trough in the sand Joe watched the trough grow.

But now I think I've missed your meaning, lad. What was it you were telling me about what's inside?

Just that. That's all. That even though the octopuses are small, someone has to work very hard to make them good to eat. But when they do, they're the best thing in the world.

Joe smiled. He drew a line in the sand and capped it with a shorter line, then made a loop at the top.

Know it?

A cross with a circle on top of it?

Well it's not quite a cross, is it, not quite a circle either. It's an old mark, called an ankh. In ancient Egypt it was the sign for life, or maybe the sun, same thing. My friend Cairo told me about it, and he had it from a living mummy called old Menelik.

Are there really living mummies?

It seems so. Why?

Because I've always wanted to think so.

Have you now. And why is that?

I like the idea of people not dying.

Do you? Then I think you're going to like the story of my friend Cairo being brought up by his foster father, who was in fact a living mummy.

Wait a minute. Cairo's a city, not a person.

Things can be different for different people. For me, Cairo will never be a city but a man, a great huge black man who's so strong and friendly he lifts you right up off the ground when he greets you. Puts his arms around you and hugs you, and all of a sudden you find you're up there dangling in the air. It's his way of shaking hands, of saying hello.

Really?

Yes. Anyway, this living mummy, old Menelik, brought up Cairo with a grin as dry as dry while lying at the bottom of a sarcophagus where he'd been residing through the ages beside the Nile, endlessly talking away to Cairo and telling him all there was to know about secret tombs and temples and what went on inside of pyramids, not to mention his friend the genie, Strongbow by name, who had a comet of his own as an eternal plaything.

Bernini clapped his hands.

Old Menelik? The genie Strongbow?

Exactly, lad. The stuff of dreams, that's what they are. Men have fallen by the wayside trying to keep up with the likes of them. There's magic in those tales that flies, that leaps across time with its sparkling visions, the magic that comes at one and the same time from the songs of long ago and the lovely tunes yet to be sung.

Bernini got up and began to walk around in a circle, looking for stones to scale. He stopped for a moment and raised his head.

Is that really the way it is?

How's that, lad?

It never ends?

Oh no blessed be, it never does. Just keeps right on going. I'll tell you that and so will Haj Harun and the baking priest, and the potting priest and all the rest of them. Stern and Munk whom you know, and Cairo whom you don't know, and a cobbler in Jerusalem whom I don't even know myself although we went looking for him last New Year's Eve, looked hard and didn't find him that time, but there'll be another time because Haj Harun has never forgotten him, hasn't and won't. So yes indeed, just ask any one of them and the answer will always be the same. They'll all tell you that, straight off and no question about it.

We go right on in the lives of others and there's no end to it for sure.

Why?

Ah, now you're getting to it and I can see why you like to spend your time down here on the shore, just watching and listening until you have it all. And the sea will whisper the answers, lad, it will do that for you. Gently, don't you see. Quietly, don't you know. Whispering away just for you. Because it's here for no other reason.

Bernini smiled.

Aren't you going to choose a stone, Father? Aren't you going to scale even one?

I am. That's why I'm here. To see you on your birthday and scale a stone across the water. Like to hear something else while I'm looking for a stone?

Sure.

You've got a brother or a sister in Jerusalem.

Bernini smiled.

No I haven't.

Yes it's true. Of course the child is only a half-brother or a half-sister.

Well which is it?

I don't know.

How old?

Almost eleven. Do you like the idea of it though?

Sure. But why all the mystery?

It just seems that's the way it is sometimes. It just seems some things are always a mystery.

Well who's the mother?

A saint. That's why I can't see her anymore and don't know anything about the child. She's a saint and she lives with God.

Bernini frowned. He laughed.

I don't think I should believe everything you say.

Don't you now? Can't imagine why you'd tell me that. Although of course the world is full of facts, and we're all free to choose the ones we want to believe.

Bernini went on laughing.

Father, haven't you even found a stone yet? They're all over the place.

I know they are and I'm looking. I'm looking. Now here's a possibility and here's another, but I want to take my time, I want to find one that's just right for now. Mind you, it's not always the same one that's wanted. It depends on the shape of the waves and the cast of the wind and the slant of the sunlight as well. Sometimes a skimmer will do the job, light and fast, and sometimes one with more weight to it is in order. There's no way of knowing beforehand. You just have to dream.

You're talking in riddles again, Father.

Am I now. Just jokes and riddles and scraps of rhymes? But you see a life without dreams is no life at all, a loss for sure and sadly so. Or as Haj Harun used to like to say, time is. And always said in a very ethereal manner, it was.

What's it supposed to mean?

Oh I don't know, that we're here by the sea together? That we're sharing the sun and the sea and finding our stones to scale over the water? It's not much, what we're doing. On the other hand, it's everything.

Scaling stones is the tale.

What tale?

Haj Harun's tale, I guess. And the baking priest's and the potting priest's, and Cairo's and Munk's and Stern's, and your mother's, and my own and yours. All of them about to be told, when I find the stone I'm looking for.

Sometimes you have a queer way of talking, Father.

I do, it's true. It comes from those times when I was a boy straining so hard to hear the whispers of the little people, trying so hard to catch the sounds of their singing and dancing, even though I knew I'd never see them. Whispers, that's right. Whispers, that's all. But once you hear those whispers, lad, you never forget them and you're never the same. Because they remind you of birds soaring free in the sun, and sea gulls gliding in your wake, and a fine strong tide running you home in your little boat after a night at sea, running you home to the new flowers smiling in the green green grass. And then home you are at last on your little island and it's dancing you think of and singing and making your feet fly in the sun, and maybe later, when the moon has risen softly, even holding your hurling matches brazenly on the strand.

And feasting through the ages, even that. Ah yes you do, that's what you think of. And you strain so hard to hear those whispers as the years go by. You want so much to hear them again and you do try, just try and try, you do that even though the whispers are dimmer, are farther away this year than last, last than the year before. And yes, it's true, even though you know the wonders of their world are beyond you, always were and always will be. You'll just never see them, just never, never have and never will, but still you go on believing in them and trying to hear the tunes of their dancing and the songs sung at their feasts, mysterious whispers in the sparkling sunlight, the whispers you heard when you were a child so long ago.

So long ago.

Bernini saw the tears in Joe's eyes again. He was going to run over and hug him but suddenly it was all right. Suddenly Joe was jumping up and down and laughing, running on the sand and laughing, the man his mother had told him about, the magical Irishman she had once met in Jerusalem.

Well no, not told him. Not in those words. But he had heard it anyway.

What is it, Father? What did you find?

Joe whooped. He leapt in the air and held up a stone.

Do you see it, lad? Flat and thin and just right for the asking? A wafer to fly and fly for sure. Now how many times would you say it's going to skim on the sunlight out there before we no longer see it? Before it slips beneath the waves and speeds away as fast as a fish swimming from one end of the world to the other? Just going and going where the sea goes. How many times, Bernini?

Nine times?

Nine times easy. Eleven and twelve times easy. And then after that, one more time in honor of this special day. Watch it and you'll see I'm right, lad, and it will always be so, skimming on the sunlight, swimming and swimming from here where we stand by the sea as you've learned to do, looking and listening now thirteen times easy on your birthday, as Haj Harun has done these three thousand years in Jerusalem, as the baking priest said right there in the Holy City while leavening the four concerns of his life, the four winds and the four corners of his holy kingdom. Yes, our holy kingdom. Made for us if we'd only believe it. So watch this hand of mine fly now. Watch it, Bernini lad. And watch this precious stone skip for us in the sunlight to the very ends of the earth.

It can't go that far, Father.

Oh yes it can and much more. Twice that, to tell all. In fact it will go so far it will circle the world and come back to us. That's right, that's what it will do. And if you look hard tomorrow you'll find this very same precious stone right here on the beach, right here by the sea where you watch and listen, its long journey made and a long list of marvels witnessed for sure. So watch now. Here flies our dream on the sun.

The End