Edward Whittemore - Jerusalem Poker

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.