Why? asked Cairo.
Joe smiled.
Well there you are. I don't think I will. I think it's time for me to give up the seeking and the search for lost treasure and go take my ease in the west, Holy City West, wherever that might be. It's time to become Chief Sipping Bear at home in the setting sun.
Are we to be treated to a Zuni sun dance now?
Go on with you, Cairo. We're hours away from sunup and any dance of that nature could only be a failure at this hour. No, there are other matters before us. Now that it's midnight and a little more we have to hear from a very important spokesman who goes by the name of Finn MacCool.
Joe cupped his hands around his mouth and pretended to shout out over the rooftops.
Hey
Do you think he heard me? whispered Joe. I was aiming in a generally western direction but I don't know how well my voice is carrying tonight. What do you think?
Cairo laughed.
He heard you, definitely. And I take it he's some tribal god native to the bogs of Ireland?
Now why would you be guessing as wildly as that? Well as a matter of fact that's just what he is, a great strong giant of a man whose favorite pastime on nights like these is telling stories. In fact he's got so many stories to tell, most of them about himself, that he never runs out of them. He's been doing it for ages already and it looks like he just might go on doing it to the end of time. Now back home when you want Finn to tell you a story you say,
What?
What you're doing, Cairo. I've noticed you might be getting tired of the game yourself. The signs are there and of course with my keen eye, I wouldn't be missing them would I. Why the poker game for you originally? Why did you want control of Jerusalem? Please relate.
It is true that I will not.
Joe laughed.
Ah Cairo, there you go using my very homespun English, bad as it is and getting no better. But with that accent of yours you'll never be taken for an Irishman, not even in Africa. Your tone is too aristocratic by half. Well then, will you relate?
I'll compromise with you, Joe. I'll go so far as to tell the tale the way your Finn MacCool might Which is to say?
Stretched and distorted and made outrageous.
Fine, very fine. That's tale-telling for sure and nothing could be more accurate anyway. So please to begin. And as you do I think I'll just be taking a shade more of this drink that looks like water but definitely isn't, is definitely not.
That won't help at this hour of night.
You're right, Cairo, it won't, it surely will not. Makes a good man old before his time and a bad man young before he's ready, a curse on the race and that's a fact. But if it's any help to you I have some of that other stuff here for a smoke, and maybe you'll be wanting a puff or two before the night's out. Well maybe you will so I'll just lay the pipe and the mixings beside you in case you feel the urge sneaking up in the darkness, a late evening in the Holy City being no time to exert yourself unduly. Now, you're the African Finn MacCool you say?
I wasn't aware of saying that.
Ah come on, Cairo. After all these years of us playing poker together, how could you possibly mislay your name? I've always known you weren't in the game for money, something else has been up. What's the deed?
It was going to be Jerusalem first, then Mecca.
Has a ring to it all right. What in Mecca?
The Holy of Holies.
Ah.
The black meteorite.
Ah.
You may not know it, but that black meteorite is the most sacred object in Islam. It's in the Kaaba. I was going to steal it and take it to Africa and bury it in good rich African soil. Black soil. Where no one would ever find it
Why?
Cairo grew somber then. He described Jidda, for centuries the great depot of the slave trade, and how many of the African children who arrived there had already walked more than twelve hundred miles to reach the Arab ferries on the other side of the Red Sea.
He described the small wells he had seen across the Sahara, surrounded for miles with dry bleached bones, the skeletons of slaves who hadn't survived the forced marches of their Arab owners. And although the footprints of the slaves had fled where the earth was hard, straight deep troughs still ran from horizon to horizon to show where the countless slave caravans had passed century after century in the desert, grooves once cut by lumbering camels laden with Arab slavers and their tents and their food and their water, for them, not for those who stumbled starving in the dust behind them.
Joe listened to it all in silence. And not for the first time he felt the enormous sadness that was in Cairo, a sadness that would have seemed unbearable to Joe had it not been for Cairo's great strength. Cairo with his brilliant smile, Cairo who laughed so warmly, his huge hands so gentle when he reached out and laid them upon you, when he embraced you in greeting and simply lifted you up off the ground in his exuberance, tenderly, gently, with the natural ease of a man picking up his child. Indomitable in the end.
There was no other way to see him.
So Joe listened in silence, and after a time Cairo broke through his somber mood.
Anger now, Cairo?
There was.
Vengeance too?
There was.
Well by God, I can see how you've been able to bet all these years without looking at your cards. It's there in the very name you bear.
Given to me by my great-grandmother, a slave from the Sudan. I was going to do it for her and all my people, to repay the Arabs for the black gold they've carried out of Africa over the centuries.
But now you're not so sure that's what you want to be doing?
No. Somehow my passion has been spent along the way. Building something would be better. Perhaps it's because of the game. Perhaps I learned that there.
From our Munk?
From Munk, yes.
I know what you mean. But here now, what's this? Do I see you filling that pipe and preparing a smoke?
You do.
Curious. Never understood the stuff myself. Why would anyone want to bother with that when there's genuine poteen on the premises? A mystery to me, one more among the many. But since we find ourselves taking our ease in our different ways, shouldn't we be talking about our futures? You know how Munk does nothing but deal in futures. Well what about us? Isn't it time we did a little dealing in that line ourselves?
Cairo smiled.
Right. How's that stuff taste by the way?
Good.
Now that's odd, it is. That's exactly how this tastes and poteen is nothing like that at all.
It was dawn before Cairo and Joe embraced on the roof and Cairo made his way across the little stone bridge and down the twisting stone stairs to the street, quiet at that early hour but not deserted, the beggars and madmen and pious fanatics of the Old City already out pursuing their vocations as they had been for millennia.
Cairo walked slowly through the alleys toward the bazaar, thinking he might have something to eat. Soon he
