Edward Whittemore: Jerusalem Poker

In the first light of an early summer day a naked Junker baron and his naked wife, both elderly, both heavily overweight and sweating, stood on top of the Great Pyramid waiting for the sunrise.

The air was warm and the desert still, the year was 1914 and the noble couple from Behind Pomerania had just fulfilled a lifelong dream of making love on the summit of the Great Pyramid at dawn, to the point of a final and exhaustive satisfaction.

A few blocks down from the summit sat the man who had performed these various acts upon them, an experienced black dragoman and former slave named Cairo Martyr. For the baron and his wife it was the rarest moment in their long lives, but for Martyr it was just another routine sunrise that had earned him twenty pounds sterling for services rendered.

He yawned and lit a cigarette.

The sun slipped above the horizon and the baron and baroness spread their arms wide to receive it, their skin and hair so fair they were all but invisible in the desert dawn.

Glistening sweat and decaying fat. Sunrise. Cairo Martyr puffed lazily and turned his gaze north when he heard the distant drone of an airplane.

It was a small triplane carrying the morning mail from Alexandria up the Nile to the capital.

Martyr watched it grow larger and realized it was heading straight toward the pyramid. In another moment he could make out the dashing figure in the open cockpit, a grinning English pilot in a leather helmet and flying goggles, his white scarf flowing on the wind.

Down, he yelled. Down.

But the delirious baron and baroness heard neither him nor the airplane. The great red ball on the horizon had hypnotized them with the heat it sent rushing through their aging bodies. Gaily the plane dipped its wings in salute to the most impressive monument ever reared by man, then gracefully rolled away and sped on south.

Cairo Martyr got to his feet, not believing what he saw. The nearly invisible man and woman still stood on the summit with their arms outstretched, but now they were headless, cleanly decapitated by the slashing lowest wing of the triplane. The hulking bodies lingered a few seconds longer, then slowly toppled over and disappeared down the far side of the pyramid.

Cairo Martyr stared at the new sun. The cigarette burned his fingers and he dropped it.

The morning mail in 1914.

A gay salute to antiquity.

And an astonishing new flying machine smartly cutting a swath through the leisurely old order of the nineteenth century, a world that could no longer survive in a speeding mechanical age suddenly wagging its wings and rolling in raffish chance.

In the dizzying shock of recognition that came that morning on top of the Great Pyramid, Martyr realized that his days of Victorian servitude were gone forever. Never again would he perform for vacationing Europeans in bazaar back rooms or in rowboats listlessly adrift on the Nile. The era of colonialists sunning themselves on the pyramids was over. The Victorian age had lost its head.

For the Junker baron and baroness, and for Martyr as well, the nineteenth century had abruptly come to an end in that early summer dawn in 1914, although elsewhere in the world a few more weeks were to pass before the radical new state of affairs was generally recognized.

— 1-

Jerusalem 1933

The end had come. Jerusalem lay on the table. At last it was a case of winner take all in the eternal city.

The Great Jerusalem Poker Game for secret control of the city, the ruin of so many adventurers in the period between the two world wars, continued for twelve years before it finally spent itself.

During that time thousands of gamblers from around the world lost fortunes trying to win the Holy City, but in the end there were only three men at the table, the same three who had been there in the beginning.

Twelve years of ferocious poker for the highest stakes after an initial hand was dealt by chance one cold December day in 1921 — seemingly by chance, to pass the time that gray afternoon in Jerusalem when the sky was heavily overcast and wind whipped through the alleys, snow definitely in the air.

A cheap Arab coffee shop in the Old City where young O'Sullivan Beare sat crouched in a corner over a glass of wretched Arab cognac, a disillusioned Irish patriot who had fought in the Easter Rebellion at the age of sixteen and gone on to be revered as the biggest of the little people when he was terrorizing the Black and Tans in the hills of southern Ireland, a fugitive who had escaped to Palestine diguised as a Poor Clare nun on a pilgrimage.

A lonely hero still only twenty-one years old, wearing as an unlikely disguise that day the uniform of an officer of light cavalry in Her Majesty's expeditionary force to the Crimea, 1854, the medals on his chest showing he had survived a famous suicidal charge and been awarded the Victoria Cross because of it, far from home now huddled over a glass of Arab cognac that helped not at all, finding life bleak and meaningless on that cold December afternoon, simply that.

Dice clattered around the smoky room.

Bloody Arab excuse for a pub, he muttered. Just bloody awful, that's what. Not an honest pint in the house and no one to drink it with anyway.

A sudden gust of air struck him. The door had opened.

A tall black man in a stately Arab cloak and Arab headgear, so black he was almost blue, stood rubbing his hands after escaping the wind. On his shoulder crouched a small ball of white fluff, some kind of little animal. The man's eyes roamed the shop looking for empty tables but there were none, only densely packed Arabs sweating over games of backgammon. Then he caught sight of the corner where O'Sullivan Beare slouched alone in the dimness. He made for the table, smiling as he sat down.

Coffee, he said to the waiter.

Dice clattered. O'Sullivan Beare's head jerked back. The smiling black man had light blue eyes.

Hey what's this, thought O'Sullivan Beare. Things just aren't supposed to be like that. Someone's up to tricks again in the Holy City. And what's that little white animal curled up on his shoulder? White as white and as furry as can be, head and tail tucked away ever so nicely out of sight.

He nodded at the black Arab.

Cold out, wouldn't you say?

I would.

Yes, you're right. And who might this little friendly creature be you're carrying around to see the sights? A traveling companion, I suppose. Seems to be sleeping soundly enough despite the wind out there. Has a wicked bite, that wind.

He's a monkey, said the black man.

Oh I see.

An albino monkey.

O'Sullivan Beare nodded again, his face serious.

Sure why not, he thought. A black Arab with a white monkey on his back? Sure, makes as much sense as anything else. Why not, I say.

A few minutes later another man entered the shop escaping the wind and the cold, this time a European, his nationality difficult to place. In his hand he carried a longbow of exquisite workmanship.

Now what's this twist? thought O'Sullivan Beare. What's going on around here? More confusion and things seem to be spinning out of control already. That item's not English for sure, not French or German or anything natural. And armed with a bow no less, just in case a spot of archery practice turns up while he's out for a stroll on a dreadful winter afternoon. Some bloody devious article up to no good in the Holy Land, that's certain. By God, it's pranks for sure and somebody's bent on something.