would be going back to Africa, he knew that now. He and Joe had talked away the night making their plans, deciding that December 31 would be the appropriate time to play their last hand with Munk, the twelfth anniversary of the game. They had also agreed to make it a surprise to Munk, what they were going to do on that last hand.
But would Munk be surprised? wondered Cairo.
Probably not. They all knew each other too well by now.
Dawn after a long autumn night. Ten years, thought Cairo, after Joe and Theresa had spent their hours of darkness and light together on a rooftop in Jerusalem, and conceived a child.
Did Joe know?
Cairo nodded. Of course Joe knew. No one had told him but he knew. He had admitted as much when describing how Father Zeno had told him that it would be better if he didn't come to see Theresa anymore.
Did he say why? Cairo had asked.
No, answered Joe.
Did you ask him?
No, answered Joe.
And so Joe had known it all these years, a secret borne for the sake of others and never to be spoken, until last night when he had finally shared it with a friend, finally, in his weariness after returning yet again from Aqaba.
And where, wondered Cairo, would Father Zeno have placed the child? With a family? In a foundling home?
In any case, not a religious home. That much was certain. From what Joe had said about Father Zeno, Cairo knew that the gentle old priest would never have presumed to choose a faith for the child. Thus no one but he would ever know who the child really was. Cairo was sure of that.
Father Zeno would have made the arrangements very carefully and the secret would die with him. And somewhere in Jerusalem, or in an encampment near it, a child would grow up not knowing he or she had been born to Christ and Mary Magdalene.
Cairo paused in front of a blind beggar and dropped a copper coin in his cup. Ever since that spring when he had come down the Nile to find the lid on top of Menelik Ziwar's massive sarcophagus, the crinkled smiling face gone, he had never once passed a beggar without giving him something, his way of recalling the kindness an old man had once shown to a frightened twelve-year-old boy, illiterate and without any skills, who had suddenly found himself alone in the world.
The elderly blind man whispered his thanks and Cairo moved on.
Only to stop a few yards away and look back. For a long moment he gazed at the beggar where he sat on the worn stones in the dust, then he retraced his steps and placed three gold coins, one after the other, in the beggar's scarred hand. The beggar heard the coins ring and his blind eyes turned upward. He murmured in disbelief.
Yes. I would like you to say a prayer for a child, if you will.
With all my heart. Tell me the name of the child and I will pray.
I don't know the name and I've never seen the child. Or perhaps I have seen the child and don't know it.
In this I am as blind as you.
And so are we all, murmured the beggar. But God knows the names that are and will be for all of us, and I will pray and He will hear my prayer.
Cairo nodded. He placed his hand lightly on the beggar's shoulder and held it there, then turned and entered the bazaar, now raucously coming to life amidst the cries of merchants and thieves hawking their endless goods and trickeries.
But there was yet another secret in that house in the Armenian compound next to the cathedral of St James, unknown even to Father Zeno, a secret Joe had discovered some years after seeking refuge there in 1921, when the old priest had given him the rooftop home where he had learned to dream his Jerusalem dreams.
Early in the nineteenth century, it seemed, a young beggar had turned up at the house one blustery winter night, asking for shelter. The beggar was entirely naked, lacking even a loincloth. He had pretended to be an Armenian although the priest who received him knew he was not. He was given clothes and a blanket and shown to a room.
The next morning the beggar made a proposition. If he were allowed to live in the cellar of the house for the rest of the winter, he would carry out slops and do other menial tasks around the compound. This offer was accepted as an act of charity.
It immediately became apparent the stranger was no ordinary man. Before descending into the cellar that night he explained in a humble yet determined voice that he was under strict self-imposed vows of poverty, celibacy and silence. Save for the omitted vow of obedience, in fact, he might well have been a secret Trappist on some solitary mission.
The priest in the house was skeptical at first, but not when he found the stranger had abandoned the cellar for the even greater deprivation and privacy of a dark basement hole beneath it. Here indeed, then, was one of those anchorites who appeared from time to time in Jerusalem to pursue some personal religious tack in isolation.
The anchorite never spoke again to anyone's knowledge. For the next twelve years he lived in his basement hole beneath the cellar of the house, performing his lowly duties around the compound and coming and going on occasion, but spending most of his time alone in his subterranean cell.
Or so it was assumed. Actually the cellar above his basement hole also had a small entrance that opened directly onto an alley outside the compound, so it would have been possible for him to leave without being witnessed by the priests. And in fact there were years when he wasn't seen by any of them for long periods. Because of the extreme austerity of the anchorite's existence, the priests, with affectionate humor, had come to refer to him among themselves as Brother Zeno, after the founder of Stoicism.
Then in 1836, or when the anchorite appeared to be about thirty, he walked out of the compound one morning with his open hand raised in the sign of peace, turned south at the gate without a word, and was never seen again.
His abrupt disappearance caused the priests in the compound to ponder the significance of this enigmatic man who had lived near the cathedral for twelve years. Now they spoke of Brother Zeno with awe, rather than mild humor. Where had he gone and why? What new role had he sought for himself?
In the course of the nineteenth century the account gradually acquired the dimensions of a fable around the cathedral of St James. Somehow the priests who later arrived at the Armenian compound found it immensely appealing that an anonymous man of unknown origins, and unknown destiny, had once lived in a basement hole beneath the stones where they walked, oblivious to the strictures of any church yet living the strictest of lives according to the tenets of an unspoken vocation.
The fable was so appealing it became a tradition for the most respected priest in the compound to be assigned as his residence the house that gave access to the basement hole, and to be known thereafter among the other priests as Father Zeno, in memory of that dedicated man who had mysteriously appeared there early in the nineteenth century, and just as mysteriously disappeared a dozen years later.
The present Father Zeno had received this honor in 1914 at the age of seventy-nine.
And I think what most engages our imagination, he had said to Joe, is precisely the puzzle of that man's disappearance. We here have all openly professed the vows of our vocation. Because of them we have taken our respective places in life, and so we continue in orderly lives of service and prayer until our time on earth passes. But him? What was his vocation? What had he sworn to do and where did he go? Are there callings that can never be revealed to others? And then lingering behind the mystery there is always the question of the man's apparent age when he left here, which was Christ's age when He set out on His ministry. Does it have a meaning?
Father Zeno smiled his gentle smile.
A priest may wonder about such things. Here in Jerusalem where we keep watch and bear witness to His sacrifice, we may wonder.
I can understand that, said Joe. It's a strange and haunting tale.
And then putting together everything he had learned about the life of the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins, which was more than he had ever admitted to Cairo or anyone else, the dates and disappearances of
