Edward Whittemore - Jerusalem Poker

Someday, he decided, he too would have a gorgeous uniform.

That winter he found himself attracted to one of the mechanics who maintained the automobiles at the castle, a hairy man who was always covered with grease. By then Nubar knew how to embalm butterflies so the Italian tutor was sent back to Venice. Throughout the chill rainy weather little Nubar's experiences in the grease pit of the garage, his hands pressed against the cold slimy walls for support as the hairy mechanic bucked and grunted behind him, were far more delirious than the languid summer encounters he had known with the slender young Italian over trays of butterflies.

By the end of the Great War, Nubar had grown into a small adolescent with an unusually large head, a narrow sunken chest and a prominent potbelly. His face was small and round and pinched, and his tiny weak eyes were very close together. He wore round glasses, wire-framed in gold, that seemed to push his eyes even closer together. Two of his front teeth were gold.

He had a small nose and a small mouth and lips so thin he couldn't make them whistle. He cultivated a short straight moustache and combed his straight black hair low over his forehead to hide his baldness, his hairline having already begun to recede by the time he was fifteen.

A mild December day in 1927, in the tower room of the ancestral Wallenstein castle.

Nubar finished putting his books in order with a frown on his face, having recalled the dream that was disturbing his sleep lately. In the dream he entered a restaurant carrying a baby and asked the chef to cook it rare. The chef, in a tall white hat, bowed respectfully while three young men sat at a table crunching chicken and grinning up at him with lascivious expressions, their hands and mouths dripping with grease. The unpleasant noise of the chicken bones cracking in their mouths woke him up and he found he had a painful need to urinate.

Mercury poisoning again?

Parabombheim von Ho von Celsus. Immortal Bombastus.

The gong sounded in the courtyard announcing lunch with Sophia. Nubar gathered up his queries on the Krk-Brac operation and started down the long winding stairway.

— 10-

Sophia the Black Hand

She put her tiny right fist in the fragile porcelain cup of crude, wiggled it around and brought it out dripping. With a gesture of authority she flattened her hand in the very center of the map.

When Sophia entered the dining room the opening chords of Bach's Mass in B Minor boomed forth from the organ in the balcony at the far end of the room. That piece of music had been the favorite of her common-law husband, Nubar's grandfather, and Sophia always had it played during meals at the castle.

Nubar kissed his grandmother lightly on the lips and went to his chair in the middle of the table. At the far end, nearer the organ and facing Sophia, the usual place had been set for his dead grandfather.

Sophia was then in her eighty-sixth year. She was dressed entirely in black as she had been for half a century, ever since the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins had ceased to recognize her upon the birth of their natural son, Catherine, Nubar's insane dead father. She wore a flat black hat and black gloves and a thin veil, raised only at meals. But the firmness of her unlined face made her look much younger than she was.

Her stature gave the same impression. Sophia was a tiny woman who had shrunk with age, and who kept on shrinking, until now she was not much bigger than a large doll. In fact Nubar sometimes wondered what would happen to her if she lived another ten or fifteen years. At the rate she was disappearing, wouldn't she be the size of a baby by then?

Or was that the point. There was no denying Sophia's whimsical eccentricities. Having been grown up for decades, had she now decided to retrace the stages of her extraordinary life back to its origins?

In order to sit at the table, Sophia used a special high chair with a folding stepladder built into it. Except when eating she chain-smoked black Turkish cheroots through a hole in her veil, an extremely mild cigar made to order for her in Istanbul. Nubar's earliest memories were of a soft white face in black lace hovering over his cradle, a mixture of lavender scent and pungent cigar fumes suddenly engulfing him.

Then she had seemed large to Nubar, but of course he hadn't been aware that she was standing on a chair beside his cradle.

Once long ago when she had been rebuilding the Wallenstein fortune lost by his grandfather, and modestly saying very little as she did so, she had become known in the district as Sophia the Unspoken.

The name had lingered into Nubar's youth, but now she was always referred to as Sophia the Black Hand.

Various explanations for the name existed. Among the local peasants it was assumed she was called this because she always wore black gloves. Farther afield in the Balkans it was suspected she must have played some decisive part in the Black Hand terrorist organization that had been active in Serbia before the war. While elsewhere in Europe the name was considered a natural epithet for someone whose manipulations in oil were vast and conclusive.

All of these explanations were true as far as they went. Sophia obviously did wear black gloves and she had assisted the Balkan nationalist movements before the war. And her influence in the Middle East had made her the single most powerful oil merchant in the world.

But none of these facts had given birth to her epithet, which had actually come from an unpublicized meeting that took place on a lemon barge in 1919, an event so ruthlessly suppressed only a few men in the world knew about it.

And with reason, they felt, since it proved that an international oil cartel of scandalous proportions did indeed exist in Europe after the First World War.

The steps that led to that highly secret meeting had begun a decade earlier. For three years after the death of her beloved husband in 1906, Sophia had remained in absolute seclusion in the castle caring for Nubar, who had been born prematurely the day after his grandfather died. But then the resilient powers of her forebears had reexerted themselves.

Although no one in the twentieth century suspected the truth, Sophia wasn't an Albanian but an Armenian, the descendant of a woman who had been brought to the castle two hundred years ago by an illiterate Wallenstein warrior serving in the forces of the Ottoman sultan. That Skanderbeg had helped crush an uprising in Armenia, and for his part in the brutal slaughter he was offered the pick of some captured prisoners. As would any of the Skanderbegs save for the last, he naturally chose only very young girls of eight or nine. With a half-dozen of these little girls roped behind his horse he began the journey back to Albania, looking forward to a lusty military holiday.

But that early Skanderbeg fared poorly. Before he reached the Black Sea a raiding party of Armenian patriots managed to free three of the girls. While waiting for a sailing vessel a fourth girl escaped in a rowboat, and the following night a fifth slipped away while he was getting drunk in order to rape her.

Thus only Sophia's ancestress reached the castle in Albania, still a virgin because the Wallenstein warrior could only rape when thoroughly drunk, and he had been too afraid of losing the last of his spoils to drink on the latter part of the journey.

By the time he sighted his castle, that Wallenstein was desperate with craving. He locked the girl and himself in a tower room and emptied a flagon of arak in a frenzy.

After weeks of abstinence, the drink had an immediate effect. He was insensible and slobbering, the room a blur, his mind a cave of swirling bats. His left eyelid was drooping heavily and an unmistakable tightness was in his groin. On his hands and knees he groped his way ecstatically across the room toward the little girl cowering by a window.