Jerusalem Poker

always buried in their deepest cellars.

Peasant swine, thought Nubar. The barbarian had no idea that the treasures here weren't to be found in the ground but in the reports of the Uranist Intelligence Agency.

The footman had removed a section of the cobblestones that paved the subcellar floor and had dug a hole about four feet square. He was now standing in the hole up to his waist, vigorously hacking away at the clay with his pickax. Beside the hole lay the footman's blue satin swallowtail coat. A candle that stood in the clay was dripping wax on the gold braid of the coat, and Nubar was immediately infuriated to see gold braid being treated with so little respect. He stamped his feet and shouted defiantly, his anger directed toward the defilers of civilization everywhere, his voice weirdly distorted by the confines of the subcellar.

Out, peasant swine. Out, you evil creature.

The footman whirled. He stared. Nubar was moving slowly up and down inside his huge stationary galoshes, his long greasy housecoat shaking in rage, the brassiere encasing his head quivering with indignation.

The footman screamed and leapt from the hole in horror. He bolted up the stairs to the kitchen where he threw himself through a casement window and went crashing down into the dark water beside the palazzo, there to be entangled in a sluggish flow of sewerage that was moving out into the Grand Canal under the impenetrable cover of fog.

Nubar, meanwhile, paused by the bottom of the stairs to get his bearings, and what he saw astonished him. The entire subcellar was packed with stacks and stacks of neatly piled papers, dossiers and card files and loose-leaf folders, the unread reports of the Uranist Intelligence Agency over the last seven months.

Extraordinary, thought Nubar as he gazed out over the thousands and thousands of reports, the towering collections of amassed data, realizing for the first time just how productive his intelligence agency really was.

Nubar shuffled over to the hole the footman had dug and stuck his torch in the clay. He knocked over several tall stacks of reports and made a couch for himself out of the paper. The footman's coat, folded, served as an armrest. He took a drink of mulberry raki from his canteen, accidentally biting off some of the wooden spout in his eagerness to begin, not noticing there was wood in his mouth so great was his concentration, chewing the wood and swallowing it along with the mulberry raki. Then he arranged himself comfortably on his paper couch, tucked the tails of the greasy housecoat snugly around his legs and lit a Macedonian Extra, inhaling deeply.

A drop of water fell on his nose. He licked it away. Salt water?

Nubar looked up at the ceiling. He estimated the height of the subcellar staircase with its two directions to the north and east, the height of the regular cellar staircase with its third northerly direction. He recalled the location of the cellar door in the palazzo and calculated its distance from the landing in front of the palazzo.

Nubar smiled. There was no doubt about it.

The archives of the Uranist Intelligence Agency lay directly beneath the Grand Canal. And it was here beneath the Grand Canal that he would secretly plan the destruction of the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle and decree the ruin of its three criminal founders.

Nubar's eyes narrowed.

Jerusalem the Holy City on the heights, above the wastes and the deserts? The eternal city secure on its mountaintop? Well they wouldn't get away with it, those barbaric criminals. Order and alignment and the whole truth would triumph, he would liberate Jerusalem and take what was his.

Nubar licked another drop of salt water off his nose. He picked up a report at random and began to read.

Perhaps it was only the lack of air in that subaqueous cellar, but to Nubar the report in front of him seemed unusually interesting, far above the normal quality of UIA material.

In the beginning, indeed, it was impossible to imagine just what the subject of the report would turn out to be.

It had been submitted by Dead Sea Control, which was responsible for the Jerusalem district, located at a distance from Jerusalem, for security reasons, amidst the sulphur and salt deposits on the south shore of the Dead Sea. The station was housed in a cluster of tin huts that had been erected by a now defunct mining enterprise. Although nicely hidden away behind the huge columns of salt common to the area, the tin huts were unbearably hot most of the year, which perhaps explained the incoherency of many of the station's reports.

Originally Jericho had been considered as a likely location for the reporting center of the Jerusalem district, but Nubar had personally intervened in favor of the sulphur site on the Dead Sea, despite the heat. It pleased him to know the UIA's most important field station was nestled in the lowest spot on earth, within those grotesque geological formations that were generally accepted to be the natural ruins of Sodom.

Dead Sea Control had evaluated the report as POTENTIAL URINE, which meant it had been written by an informer who had shown enough initiative to be considered a potential Ur anist in telligence e mployee. Beneath the formal title was a descriptive caption, uncommonly cryptic by UIA standards.

Submitted as background material only, to illustrate the difficulties faced by Dead Sea Control in collecting relevant information about Jerusalem, in view of the mythical nature of that city up there on the mountain. And especially in view of the view from down here on the shores of what has been referred to, in an important piece of literature, as the dried cunt of the world. (That very long novel, still banned in most countries as obscene, deals exclusively with a single day, June 16, 1904. Amazing, don't you think? Of course we have a lot of time to read long novels down here.) Nubar snorted. Did his agents think they were getting paid to read long novels? He made a mental note to fire off a cable to Dead Sea Control as soon as he had finished reading the report.

ARE YOU MAD? NO MORE REFERENCES TO CUNTS AND NO MORE OBSCURE

LITERARY ALLUSIONS. STICK TO THE TRUTH FROM NOW ON OR YOU CAN EXPECT

IMMEDIATE DISCIPLINARY ACTION.

NUBAR

SUPREME LEADER

He read on.

Submitted, secondly, to illustrate the difficulties faced in separating interesting, relevant information on Jerusalem from the mass of uninteresting, irrelevant details in which it is invariably encased. And lastly, submitted because the report does have some legitimate curiosity value when read with an open mind.

An open mind? Nubar had an open mind and the idea of reading something with curiosity value intrigued him after all these months of lying in bed all day and sneaking around in the rain all night trying to get someone to take The Boy seriously.

He turned the page.

EYES ONLY Jerusalem to Dead Sea Control.

DATE when information was acquired: August 1933.

DATE when information was forwarded to Control: Halloween 1933. (Delay due to time required to write up report.)

TIME when information was elicited: Several hours on a very hot afternoon in August 1933.

PLACE where information was elicited: The Moslem Quarter, the Old City, Jerusalem.

PERSON from whom information was elicited: Name, race and nationality unknown. A man on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. (They're always coming and going by the thousands, these pilgrims, aren't they, and there's certainly no way to know who most of them are. Now this one happens to remain anonymous throughout the report, on the face of it simply because I was never able to find out who he was. But mightn't there be some larger design beyond that? Could it just be, perhaps, that he was meant to be anonymous in order for him to assume the role of the archetypal pilgrim?

One single part in the narrative, thereby, put forward to represent all the seekers who have sought Jerusalem over the millennia?

Not so farfetched, it seems to me, once you get into the entanglements that are coming.) PERIOD covered by information in this report: From 930 B.C. to August 1933.