Jerusalem Poker

ARE YOU SURE, NUBAR?

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ABSOLUTELY. BESIDES, BUBBA, WILD BOAR HAS JUST COME INTO SEASON AND I MUST HAVE GAINED TWENTY POUNDS ALREADY.

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WONDERFUL, NUBAR, KEEP IT UP.

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I WILL, BUBBA, I CERTAINLY WILL. I'M FAT AND SLEEK AND EVERYTHING'S

PERFECT, SO I GUESS THAT'S IT FOR NOW. CHEERIO.

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NOW DON'T GET ANGRY, NUBAR, BUT WILD BOAR IS VERY RICH AND I SIMPLY

MUST KNOW. ARE YOU REGULAR? JUST CABLE YES OR NO.

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YES.

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MARVELOUS. HAVE A NICE WEEKEND.

But when the weekend came there were more worried cables from Sophia. Of course she would have stopped sending them if Nubar had told her that he had married upon his arrival in Venice and fathered a son. But then Sophia would have rushed to Venice to meet his wife and see his son, and she would have discovered that his alarmed wife hadn't set eyes on him since the evening of their wedding, when Nubar, thoroughly distraught over the recent events he had fled in Albania, had suddenly begun to harangue his new wife with one of the interminable AA speeches he had been accustomed to delivering in Gronk, ranting on inappropriately about AA rituals and truncheons and discipline, even going so far as to describe in considerable detail the uniforms he had designed for the AA, whereupon the horrified young woman had abandoned him on the spot, screaming that she would never speak to him again, and returned at once to her home in the Armenian community of Venice, where their son Mecklenburg had been born when the time came.

So naturally Nubar didn't dare to tell Sophia anything about his marriage or his son. Nor could he admit that he had been dangerously deteriorating ever since his arrival in Venice, especially since he had bought his gloomy palazzo on the Grand Canal.

Slowly starving in his palazzo, in fact, amidst a large unruly staff of slovenly servants who added more of their relatives to the payroll each week in order to rob him. Who had gone from stealing simple items such as paintings and silverware to cleaning out whole rooms in the most unscrupulous manner, until finally the entire palazzo had been stripped bare save for a few pieces of furniture left in his own bedroom.

Intolerable behavior on the part of his thieving servants, who found him so preoccupied with his compulsive fantasies they had recently become so bold as to begin ripping out walls to get at the wiring and the copper tubing and the plumbing, anything at all that they could sell for scrap on the mainland.

No plumbing. Not even that. For a month now Nubar had been forced to steal flowerpots at night from the cafes he haunted and smuggle them back to his bedroom closet so he could have something to use as a toilet the next morning.

Fog. The penetrating cold damp fog of a Venetian winter, Nubar adrift in a dream city floating out to sea, lost in the rain and the drizzle on the tides of a landless dream, hiding in bed in his empty palazzo, shivering in a fetal position on a damp December morning.

Nubar jumped. One of the tall bedroom windows was cracking, shattering, cascading down on him, the window frame having apparently been loosened during the night when a gang of his servants had chiseled away a valuable cornice on that side of the palazzo.

Nubar shuddered as the glass splintered noisily and came showering down on the bed. When it was over he peeked out from under the covers. Clouds of dense fog were billowing in through the jagged gaping hole, filling the room with an icy dampness.

Fog, fetal. Nubar felt dizzy. His winter dreams were becoming a nightmare. Soon the fog in the bedroom would be so thick he wouldn't be able to make out the fireplace in the far wall. He had to escape from his bedroom while there was still time, before the fog billowing in through the window swallowed up everything and trapped him in bed for the rest of the winter. With an enormous effort he threw back the covers.

Naked. He hadn't realized that. No wonder he was so cold. He groped his way over to where the chest of drawers was supposed to be.

Gone. The servants must have carried it away during the night so they could sell his shirts and socks. He felt his way along the wall to the closet.

Empty. Nothing but piles of festering flowerpots. They'd taken his suits and shoes and coats to sell as well. He got down on his hands and knees, hoping to find the clothes he'd taken off when he returned at dawn, but after crawling only a few feet he cut his thumb. He popped the bleeding thumb into his mouth.

Glass everywhere from the broken window. He'd have to find clothes elsewhere.

Thus toward the middle of the morning on December 21, 1933, a naked Nubar Wallenstein, sole heir to the largest oil fortune in the Middle East, sucking his thumb and shivering violently in a swirling fog, left his fetal position in the master bedroom of his spacious Venetian palazzo and wandered into the corridor on the second floor, in search of clothes to wear on what would be the longest day of his life, under his arm a stack of incoherent journals, bewilderingly contradictory, titled The Boy.

It was dark in the corridor, the chandeliers having all been removed months ago. Nubar sucked his thumb and worked his way along the wall. Behind him the fog from his bedroom billowed out into the corridor in impressive clouds.

Fog. Ahead to the left a feeble yellow glow came from what had once been the music room. Nubar tiptoed over and peeked in.

A gang of about a dozen servants and their relatives were milling around the room with torches and heavy crowbars, arguing loudly about who should hold the torches and who wield the crowbars to pry up the marble flooring.

One of the women had left a battered old pair of brown galoshes outside the door. Nubar stepped into them. They were torn and cracked and much too large for him, about twice the size of his small feet, but at least walking on rubber would be better than going barefoot on the cold marble floors.

Nubar shuffled forward, slowly moving away from the weak yellow glow that already seemed dimmer.

Behind him the demolition crew in the music room erupted into passionate Italian curses as they bumped into one another and knocked each other down, suddenly unable to see what they were doing because of the thick fog rolling into the room from the corridor.

Somewhere back there a voice screamed, followed by a different scream and a third. Crowbars were striking something solid with heavy thuds. Heads being broken? A falling-out over loot? Why not, the thieves deserved it. Nubar sucked his thumb and giggled. He skated over to the top of the grand staircase, where a torch had been jammed into a hole in the wall.

He removed the torch and examined his finger. It was still bleeding slightly. He put the thumb back in his mouth and waddled down the staircase toward the grand entrance-hall on the ground floor, the volumes of The Boy pressed tightly against his sunken chest.

Disorder on every side. Holes in the walls, craters in the floors. Here and there flickering corners heaped with chunks of rotting bread and gnawed bones and the glittering skeletons of chickens picked clean, stinking salami wrappers and twisted olive-oil tins and mounds of rigid tangled pasta, the debris his servants had left around the makeshift cooking fires they had hastily set up and abandoned on their destructive migrations through the palazzo.

Rampaging Visigoths, thought Nubar. Marauding Ostrogoths. The fools. Didn't they realize that when they pillaged him they were pillaging the very foundations of Western civilization? Idiots. When would they ever learn?

Nubar picked his way carefully around the smoldering campfires toward the lofty devastated space that had once been the salon, through the desolate wasted savanna that had once been the library.

Mad savages, he muttered as he shuffled forward, his destination a small room behind the kitchen where the