Jerusalem Poker

Bible discovered by his grandfather, still buried in Jerusalem, now rightfully his.

The original Bible, the philosopher's stone, and a secret society in Jerusalem plotting against him to get it.

A secret triad of players trying to steal what was his.

Through his third eye Nubar saw it all clearly, through his obsidian eye of primitive glass. Nothing could escape his black volcanic eye on that dark stormy night of Epiphany.

Nubar fell forward. His head struck the boards of the workbench and rested there, his poisoned delirious brain adrift in visions of immortality and the Sinai Bible.

The next evening when they sat at dinner, the Mass in B Minor booming forth from the organ, Nubar was unusually subdued.

I've had a few things checked into, said Sophia. I thought you might be interested in the facts that turned up.

What facts, Bubba?

For one, the English diplomat and autobiographical novelist known as Sir John Retcliffe. His real name was Hermann Goedsche, a former German postal clerk. He later admitted Biarritz was a total fabrication, including of course the chapter set in Prague.

Nubar smiled faintly.

What about Osman-Bey?

An even worse fake. He also used the name Kibridli-Zade, but his real name was Millinger, a crook of Jewish origins from Serbia. He wrote in German and published in Switzerland, peddling his anti-Semitic works door to door from Constantinople to Athens. He was expelled from every country he ever entered for every kind of swindle, always on the move and always being arrested. His career began in 1879 with his expulsion from Venice, and ended with his death in 1898. The Russian secret police sent him to Paris with four hundred rubles to uncover evidence of a Jewish plot to take over the world. He used the money to manufacture World Conquest by the Jews and have it published.

Ritual murder of Christian boys by rabbis? murmured Nubar vaguely.

The most recent documentation of that comes from a Roman Catholic priest of Polish extraction who was defrocked for a variety of offenses, ranging from embezzlement to rape. In 1876 he wrote a book on the subject, then made an offer to some leaders of Russian Jewry to publish a refutation of his own book if they paid him. He also offered to lecture against his book if they paid him a little more. Don't you understand what kind of company you're keeping, Nubar?

The whole truth is to be found in this formula, murmured Nubar, which provides the key to a host of disturbing and seemingly insoluble riddles.

I know. The line refers to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and was written in Paris by one Rachkovsky, head of the Okhrana outside of Russia. He spent his time writing attacks on everyone and then answering his own attacks, all under names of real people. He also had the habit of fabricating nonexistent organizations, issuing pamphlets under their names and then refusing those same pamphlets, using the names of other nonexistent organizations. And so on endlessly. Can't you really see what this kind of thing leads to?

Nubar murmured that he would reconsider his theories of historical conspiracy, but actually he no longer cared much about them. It was the Great Jerusalem Poker Game that now obsessed him, the secret reasons for the game and especially the three evil criminals who had founded it and were now trying to deny him immortality by keeping him from the philosopher's stone, which lay hidden somewhere in the Old City where his grandfather had buried it.

Sophia placed a thin volume of poetry by the Catholicos Narses IV, a twelfth-century Armenian prelate, at his elbow.

Just read a little, Nubar. It will soothe your nerves.

Nubar nodded.

And promise me you'll at least consider a vacation with the Melchitarists in Venice in the not too distant future. I know you'd find it restful.

I promise, Bubba, he said, already immersed in the details of shifting the operations of the UIA from the Balkans to the Middle East.

-11-

Gronk

To counteract the chaos of eternity there, utter order here.

The task Nubar had set for the UIA was to uncover every particle of information related in any way to the Great Jerusalem Poker Game. Once armed with that knowledge, he would then move to destroy the game and ruin its three criminal founders. And with that accomplished he would at last be able to seize clandestine control of the Holy City himself, resurrect the Sinai Bible that had been buried there by his grandfather and use it as the philosopher's stone that would guarantee him immortality.

The first step, relocating the UIA in the Middle East, turned out to be surprisingly easy. In fact Nubar's network functioned far more effectively in the bazaars of the Levant than it ever had in the bookstores of Bulgaria and the private libraries of Transylvania. His agents began collecting information on the poker game in Jerusalem with an enthusiasm they had never shown when dealing with Paracelsus and alchemical mysteries.

One of the most disturbing facts they uncovered initially concerned the sundial that hung by the door in the vault where the game was being played. In the nineteenth century, according to information collected by his agents, this monstrously heavy bronze piece had been a portable sundial, the property of a fabled English explorer named Strongbow who was said to have been the secret owner of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the century.

That immediately struck Nubar as important. So too the fact that this sundial had chimes attached to it that sounded erratically, belying any orderly concept of time and thoroughly disorienting visitors to the game. But not, apparently, confusing the three founders of the game. On the contrary, they obviously thrived in the chaotic atmosphere caused by this unnatural timepiece.

What was the connection then? Was it possible his three enemies were using this strange sundial to try to negate time in order to recreate Strongbow's nineteenth-century empire? Secretly playing with time in the eternal city not just for control of Jerusalem, but with the aim of controlling the entire Middle East?

Oil. Not only were they trying to deny him immortality, they wanted all the money he was going to inherit as well. The cunning of those three men was appalling.

Nubar's eyes narrowed.

The poker game was even more dangerous than he had suspected. Never would he have imagined the conspiracy against him in the Holy City could be so vast.

The massive reports Nubar's agents sent to Albania proved to be stunning mixtures of hearsay and hints and shadowy allegations, each more improbable than the last. And even when hard factual evidence was available, it seemed to drift away almost at once and lose itself in the twisting alleys of Jerusalem with the ease of a Haj Harun, that unreal phantom figure who somehow embodied the spirit of the mountaintop, everybody's mythical Holy City.

Numbingly complex reports, and Nubar spent long days brooding over the confusion of the eternal city.

In the beginning he toyed with the idea of making a journey there, in disguise, to assess the situation himself. If he did go to Jerusalem he might even enter the game one evening with some of his stronger agents along as bodyguards, cleverly passing himself off as deaf and dumb so as not to reveal anything he knew.

But no, thought Nubar. Not yet. It would be far too dangerous now to enter Jerusalem and confront the three vicious poker players, even in disguise and surrounded by bodyguards. Too much was at stake.

The UIA had to complete its work before it would be safe to venture there. For the present it was necessary to remain hidden securely in his castle tower far away from Jerusalem, methodically perfecting his theories and carefully arranging thick sheaves of charts and numbers.

And perhaps not just for the present. Nubar was already beginning to sense that the myth of a Holy City might always remain as allusive as a butterfly in flight, forever defying order in its eternal quest. As a boy he had been fascinated by butterflies, but only when they were dead. Their erratic passages when they were free on the wind, colors suddenly flashing and just as quickly gone, had always disturbed him, and as a result he himself had never caught the butterflies that were to be embalmed for his collection.

Servants had done that.