Edward Whittemore - Jerusalem Poker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last day of December 1921.

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

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

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

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

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

For what?

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

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

How long has he been on patrol?

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

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

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

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

Genuine?

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

What old article?

Haj Harun, the great skin heretofore mentioned.

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

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

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

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

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

Cairo nodded.

Was it a portable sundial once?

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

Where did it come from originally?

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

O'Sullivan Beare smiled.

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

Why? How big was the study?

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

Cairo Martyr laughed.

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

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

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

— 3-

Cheops' Pyramid

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

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

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

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