Edward Whittemore - Jerusalem Poker

Nubar nodded dizzily.

As for the secret crimes Nubar wanted committed as final acts of initiation, Mahmud agreed that full-scale Spartan atrocities were simply no longer feasible.

No, Nubar, times do change and we can't kill any children, he said, brushing away an imaginary bat that was nibbling at his ear. But what a noble vision you've had, resurrecting ancient Greece like this in all its glory and even improving upon it. The truth is you must be a mad genius. I've always suspected it and now I know it.

Nubar laughed.

I'm not mad, he said.

Mahmud downed another glass and brushed at his ear.

Do you see anything hovering above my shoulder?

No.

Odd. I could swear something's taking little bites at my ear, and yesterday it was the back of my head.

Anyway, you're going to order the masks and uniforms right away?

Of course, immediately.

Excellent, Nubar, uniforms are crucial. I've never known why exactly, but they are. I've never felt really comfortable except when I'm wearing a uniform or someone else's clothes. Do you know what I mean?

Nubar nodded, Mahmud smiled, and thus as the world sank into the ruinous despair of the Great Depression which would give rise to so many historical extremes, an elite organization devoted to honor and physical cleanliness, homosexuality and fanatical brotherhood, was born in the autumn of 1929 over a daily regimen of beer and mulberry raki, single baked chicken wings and unwatered wine, and the rites and rituals of the Albanian-Afghan Sacred Band, to be known affectionately to its two founders as the AA, came into being beside the beautiful little harbor of Gronk.

Over the next three years during long lazy Mediterranean afternoons, from clear evenings listening to the cicadas down through the soft shadows of night to the brilliant still sunlight of morning, a vast succession of peasant boys passed through Mahmud's stately sixteenth-century Venetian villa on the harbor, being initiated into the wonders of the AA.

In order for darkness to be perpetual in the villa, shutters had been nailed closed over all the windows.

Candlelight played on the pale violet drapes and on the soft low couches where the boys lay while Nubar and Mahmud reclined in their elaborate AA regalia, raising themselves languidly to sip mulberry raki and discourse on ancient Greece.

In practice the boys dressed up only once a year, on Easter at sundown, when the villa's locked closets were thrown open and uniforms and chains and leather fists and truncheons were distributed to everyone, the solemn oaths in the cellar then followed by a feast of lambs roasted over pits in the privacy of the walled courtyard, and thereafter by a long fiery night of drunken dancing in the villa, the anonymous black figures spinning from floor to floor and room to room in an unbroken chain.

But it was the summer scenes on the beaches outside of Gronk, the daring watermelon parties held by moonlight, that were perhaps the most delicious of all to the two founders of the AA. The parties began with a brief lecture by Nubar on some aspect of Greek philosophy while Mahmud hacked up the first watermelon and passed out the slices. But almost at once the two of them dropped out of sight among the boys and rich slippery sounds spilled over the sands as sticky fingers squeezed off seeds, sweet juicy pulp everywhere as more rinds were ripped open amidst the rhythmic munching of mouths and the rhythmic roll of the sea, eager eyes exploring the insatiable sources of blackness and the lapping waves stirring ever more quietly with the late hour, ever more softly, finally washing a summer night into oblivion.

For Nubar and Mahmud, delirious years on the timeless shores of Gronk. Watermelons and rituals and pleasures without end for the two friends in their lavish, ancient dream.

Until one winter morning a cleaning woman entered the stately Venetian villa on the harbor and found Mahmud's mutilated body in all its AA splendor, without a head, disfiguring the orderly lines of his bed.

The terrified woman's hysterical screams shook the little harbor as she came running out onto the street.

When the police arrived they found a grinning ivory skull staring out from under the bed, with Mahmud's head inside it. They broke into the locked closets and discovered racks of black uniforms and heaps of AA medals. Huge AA banners were hung on the walls along with photographs of mass meetings by torchlight, long straight lines of rigid warriors, faceless, seen from the back, being harangued by a small strutting figure in black wearing a death's-head and gold chains and alternately waving truncheons and straight razors and black leather fists in the air, his identity hidden by his ivory mask.

The police went at once to the Café Crabs to learn what they could of Mahmud's last movements, but the moment they entered the café a stolid peasant boy, who was eating breakfast, came forward and confessed to the crime. The boy was led away. An investigation began.

Nubar, asleep in his castle tower room, was awakened by a telephone call as soon as the police left the Café Crabs. Fortunately Sophia was in Istanbul on a business trip so he didn't have to do any explaining.

Immediately he cabled the Melchitarist monks in Venice, signing Sophia's name, saying that he was coming there to marry and that they should find him a suitable wife. Just before noon, after making several confidential calls to Tiranë, he boarded a chartered yacht for Venice.

By the time he arrived there the Melchitarists had found him a respectable young woman to marry from the Armenian community in Venice. The wedding ceremony was performed as soon as Nubar disembarked. That night, terrified by the events he had fled in Albania, he was somehow able to arouse himself briefly through fear, the only time he ever had in his life. The marriage was thus consummated and there could be no grounds for divorce later on charges of impotency, Nubar's lifelong affliction.

As it happened, he also impregnated his wife during that momentary encounter.

The investigation in Gronk was quickly concluded. From the beginning the Albanian authorities had been inclined to believe that a foreigner, and especially a prince from a country as barbaric as Afghanistan, was capable of the most unspeakable behavior. They were therefore more than ready to put most of the blame for the murder on the murdered man himself, the headless Mahmud.

The trial opened and the peasant boy explained that he had accidentally strangled Mahmud with one of the chains Mahmud was wearing around his neck. Unknown to the boy, the chain had become entwined around his foot while they were lying together on the bed. The moment he realized what had happened, said the boy, and that he would be blamed for Mahmud's death, an uncontrollable rage had seized him, directed toward that grotesque mask that was grinning up at him from between his legs, its frozen leer an unbearable mockery. In a frenzy he had rushed to the kitchen to find a cleaver to deal with the death's-head as it deserved. After he had done so, the head had apparently rolled off the bed and under the bed and, still grinning, come to the upright sitting position in which the police had found it.

Other citizens from Gronk then took the stand to describe what they knew of Mahmud's activities and background, although no one could bring himself to utter the dead man's name. Instead, without exception, Mahmud was referred to as that disgusting Afghan, that despicable Easterner, or simply as the filthy foreigner.

And then all at once there was an immediate sensation in the courtroom when it was learned that the filthy foreigner had first arrived in Albania by way of Baku and Odessa, where he might well have acquired secret Bolshevik links, shocking information that somehow managed to emerge in the rambling testimonies of several illiterate Gronk fishermen all of whom were retired and poor and elderly, but who had also been in the habit of loitering around the Café Crabs from time to time, hoping to receive a bone.