Edward Whittemore - Jerusalem Poker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your most loyal employee in the UIA

And your former chief in Ithaca,

Now somewhere in Palestine farming with Poles in the dust, Odysseus

The Lost Greek

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

Ransom acceptable? How high do we go?

Nubar had snorted and fired off a cable immediately.

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

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

OWN FAULT ENTIRELY, FORGET HIM.

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

KNOWN. AND WHY SUCH PRETENTIOUS TERMS FOR A SHABBY GAMBLING

OPERATION?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nubar was stunned.

Complete clandestine control of Jerusalem?

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

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

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

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

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

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