Jerusalem Poker

cooks had once changed into their uniforms before coming on duty, months ago when that was still done. He thought there might be some clothes there but when he finally reached the small room, now a murky cave with assorted shards and bones scattered around the entrance, he found only some underwear hanging on a hook, women's underwear, monstrously large even by Italian working-class standards.

Women's underwear. Monstrous. Nubar poked through the huge damp articles and found mold everywhere. They must have been hanging there for months, at least since the rains of the previous spring.

Still, he had to have something to wear.

An enormous pair of thick brown stockings, too big for him to use as stockings. A scarf? Nubar wound the stockings around and around his neck, making a thick scarf for himself.

Enormous brown bloomers. Nubar stepped into them and found that the waistband came all the way up to his armpits. He wound the bloomers around the top of his chest, tying knots, three or four times around his chest and dozens of knots before the bloomers would stay up. He sucked his thumb and studied the next article.

An immense brown canvas corset, boned. The corset was also big enough to go around him three or four times. Nubar looped the corset ties over his shoulders and knotted them under his armpits. The corset reached down below his knees and was pleasantly warm. Because it restricted his legs he found he had to take small mincing steps, but no matter. He had to take small mincing steps anyway because he couldn't lift the large brown galoshes off the floor, only push them forward a little bit at a time.

A brown canvas brassiere, each cup large enough to held a man's head.

Nubar giggled.

Why not? His ears were aching from the damp cold of the fog that had followed him down the main staircase from his bedroom. Impenetrable fog. Soon it would become so thick it would obscure all the rooms on the first floor as well.

Nubar pulled one of the brassiere cups over his head and fitted it snugly around his ears, tying the strap under his chin. With half of the brassiere now a warm skullcap enclosing his head, the other half hung on his back shaped like a roomy rucksack.

Why not? thought Nubar. He tied the strap from the lower half of the brassiere to an eyelet in the corset, so the rucksack could be steady and not dump out its contents when he moved.

Steady. Nubar floated into the pantry and removed the wooden canteen he kept hidden there behind a broken wagon wheel. Then he filled the canteen with mulberry raki from a demijohn he kept hidden under the decomposing carcass of a sheep that looked as if it had been slaughtered for ritualistic purposes.

Barbarians. You couldn't be too careful. Anything of value had to be hidden from these pillaging hordes.

Steady. Voices approaching. Perhaps a patrol?

Nubar pressed himself against the wall in the pantry and held his breath as a wrecking crew of servants trooped through the kitchen shouting loudly to each other, apparently coming from the direction of the main dining room with something long and heavy, perhaps a beam, going toward the back door. The noisy gang passed no more than a few yards away but Nubar, dull brown and immobile, was able to escape detection in the thick fog.

He dropped the canteen into his rucksack and entered the scullery, there to make his most spectacular find of the morning, a long greasy housecoat propped up on a pole, like an animal skin, beside the dead embers of a campfire, no doubt left behind by some woman vandalizing another wing of the palazzo.

Nubar pulled it down and found that the housecoat was a fine garment in faded violet with a large floppy collar, the collar very soft to the touch after years of being nibbled and chewed. The greasy violet housecoat had a deep pocket on each hip and a smaller pocket on the chest.

Long and warm and greasy, what could be better on a cold winter day? Nubar went through the pockets to see what might turn up.

A large brownish rag, stiff with what looked like dried blood. Nubar closed his eyes and sniffed.

Raw horsemeat, there was no mistaking the smell. Raw horsemeat had been wrapped in this rag.

Probably it had been carried under the saddle of a Tartar horseman as he came wildly galloping out of the steppes of central Asia, the heavy sweat of the animal and the weight of the rider tending to cure the raw meat so the horseman could rip off a digestible hunk at the end of the day for his meal. Barbarians.

Disgusting.

A nearly full packet of Macedonian Extras with a box of matches.

A tube of lipstick and a tin of rouge.

A single earring made for a pierced ear, with a dangling spherical stone of fake lapis lazuli.

Three one-lira pieces.

A medallion stamped with Mussolini's face on one side and the Blessed Virgin Mary's on the other.

Barbarians. Savage plunder. Nubar put everything back into the pockets of the housecoat except the stiff bloodied rag, which he sniffed again. He blew his nose on the rag and dropped it into his rucksack for easy access. Then he put on the housecoat and found it truly magnificent, a stately garment that swept out behind him and trailed along the floor in the manner of a bride's gown, or even a queen's at her coronation.

Nubar giggled. He made several formal turns around the kitchen, smiling haughtily down at his admiring, imaginary subjects. At the door he stopped and uncorked his canteen, taking a long drink of the fiery raki that immediately infused him with strength. His eyes narrowed slyly as he peered into the foggy darkness of the corridor off the kitchen.

A descent into the underworld? Had the time come for the whole truth?

Yes it had, and Nubar was ready. Civilization was going to survive despite the worst efforts of the barbarians.

The idea had come to him while he was putting on his huge brown brassiere, precisely at the moment he had pulled the cup down over his head and made a thinking cap out of it. A brilliant plan for reversing the failures of the last months, those abject and futile efforts to peddle The Boy, at night and alone, to sneering strangers in the rain and the fog in the piazza, in front of San Marco's.

For nearly a year now the reports of the Uranist Intelligence Agency had been accumulating in the subcellar of his palazzo, sent regularly from the Middle East and 'stored according to his standing instructions. Nubar had been too busy trying to peddle The Boy to visit the subcellar in the last year, but he knew that in those reports there would be a complete account of the poker game in Jerusalem over the last year.

And more important, there would be detailed descriptions of the activities of those three master criminal degenerates, Martyr and Szondi and O'Sullivan Beare, who were trying to gain control of Jerusalem in order to keep him from the inheritance that was rightfully his, the original Sinai Bible discovered by his grandfather a century ago and buried by him in Jerusalem, the philosopher's stone that would guarantee Nubar immortality when it came into his possession.

What evil new designs, what fiendish plots had those three sinister figures been using against him?

Nubar intended to find out. And then he would issue the order that would end their diabolical twelve-year game and eliminate the three of them for all time.

Order at last, unwavering discipline and correct toilet training, absolute authority. The final solution.

No longer to be obsessed by Gronk dreams and memories, by desperate attempts to have someone, anyone, take The Boy seriously. All of that was behind him now. By an act of will he would do what had to be done in the winter fog of Venice. He would do what was necessary to end the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle. He would bring them total war and then the fools would see what disobedience led to and learn the meaning of the whole truth, his rule that would last a thousand years.

Nubar's smile twisted into a smirk. He raised his torch in front of a mirror in the kitchen and squinted at himself approvingly.

Corset and brassiere and bloomers and stockings, a greasy warm housecoat, all oversized and substantial. A massive study in brown gently overlaid with faded purple.

Still smirking crookedly, the journals of The Boy tucked under his arm, he floated forward and drifted silently down the corridor to the door that led to the cellar.

Twenty steps to the cellar. Nubar opened the door at the bottom of the stairs that led to the subcellar and descended the thirty steep steps to the landing halfway down. A faint light rose from the depths. He changed direction, watching carefully, and started down the last steep stretch of forty steps.

He was almost at the bottom before he could make out the figure. A man in livery was digging with a pickax and shovel, one of his footmen muttering in a maritime Genovese accent about the secret treasures rich foreigners