Nubar lay on his makeshift couch with his hand on his heart as water dripped down on him from the Grand Canal. His heart was palpitating and he felt dizzy. An unfocused pain moved back and forth behind his eyes. He had barely begun the report in his lap but he knew he was far too weak to go on with it.
He tossed the report into the fire.
Weak, yes. As weak as a flower, a frail Albanian flower withering away in an icy subcellar underneath Venice, driven there by marauding hordes of barbarians bent on destruction and chaos, once there repeatedly and savagely assaulted by the ravings of primitive minds insanely out of control in Jerusalem.
Weak from hunger, close to starvation. Was there anything left in his canteen?
He reached into his rucksack and pulled out what was left of the canteen itself, now about the size of a small drinking cup, holding perhaps half a cup of mulberry raki. He drank the raki and chewed the little cup around the edges, nibbling in nervous bites, gnawing his way to the bottom of this last relic from Gronk, the kind of canteen used by peasant boys when they were out working in the fields.
Nubar gazed at the fire. Barbarians were surging forward on every side threatening civilization, yet still there was no reason to fear what he had just read, none whatsoever. It was all meaningless fantasy, a web of buffoonish tales having nothing to do with reality.
A Zoroastrian operator of a fruit juice stand in the Old City? A naked anonymous pilgrim sprawled on the floor of a convent bakery? A maniacal baking priest piling up bread in four shapes?
Ludicrous.
Then too, the time span was considerable. From a hot August day in Jerusalem in 1933 to Smyrna in 1922, from God in His balloon just before the Great War to a genie-astrologer in Arabia in the first half of the nineteenth century. Finally all the way back to the dusty waysides of Canaan in 930 B.C.
Absurd.
And the ultimate source of all this, none other than Haj Harun. His epic tale weaving up and down the alleys of Jerusalem over the millennia, passing from beggar to beggar in the bazaars with new variations added each time it was retold by another thieving layabout, another shifty-eyed Arab or unscrupulous Jew or hallucinating Christian in that unreal city on the mountaintop where the real Sinai Bible lay buried.
Nubar squeezed his fists in a frenzy.
God in the twentieth century, Stern? The genie in the nineteenth century, Strongbow? The two of them having something about the eyes that showed they were father and son?
And worst of all, that vision of Haj Harun in 930 B.C. Haj Harun as a little boy, peeking over the shoulder of an imbecile scribe and noting that the scribe was happily adding a few thoughts of his own to the original Bible.
Nubar clenched his fists and exploded. He staggered to his feet, shrieking.
In a fury he hurled more reports into the fire that was raging in the pit at his feet. The smoke swirled around him and he fell back weakly on the couch.
So weak after fighting everybody for years, especially those three evil criminals who had set up the Great Jerusalem Poker Swindle to deprive him of immortality. Why had there been that disaster in Gronk simply because he liked to dress up a little? Those three depraved criminals in Jerusalem dressed up, he had read about it in reports long ago. They all dressed up and had their fun, so why had it been wrong when he wanted to wear a uniform? And why did he have to fight everybody in life? Fight endlessly?
Nubar's roving fingers found the tin of rouge and the tube of lipstick in the pocket of his housecoat. He took them out and began to play with them idly, applying a little bit here and there, wondering what Paracelsus would have done in this damp murky cellar on an evening such as this. Ignored the icy drafts and the water dripping on him and gone on to repeat his mercury experiment a thousand times in search of the unique set of circumstances? Two thousand times? Three thousand times?
Breathing those heavy mercury vapors anew on a gloomy winter evening in Venice? Yet again inhaling his beloved fumes beneath the Grand Canal? At last dreaming his way into the philosopher's stone of immortality?
Nubar's gaze fell on a crate that had surfaced from under the stacks of reports he had dumped into the fire, a crate with a vaguely familiar shape. He crawled over and opened it.
Cinnabar. Mercury ore.
A whole crate of cinnabar from his alchemist's workshop in the castle tower room in Albania. Left over from the days when he had performed mercury experiments, shipped here as part of the UIA archives.
Odd that it should happen to turn up in front of him now, just when he was thinking about mercury.
Alchemy in the steps of the master. Six years ago, only that?
Happy days and nights then, he remembered them well. Long hours spent alone at his workbench in his castle tower room, communing over mercury with the master, Bombastus Vonheim the Celsus of Parahohen.
Was that right or was it Bombastus von Ho von Heim?
Parabombast? Paravon? Paraheim and Paraho?
No no, it was Parastein of course, Nubar Wallencelsus Parastein. The incomparable Parastein. What had happened to him in six short years? Where had he gone?
Nubar pushed the crate of cinnabar over to the pit and watched it tumble into the roaring fire. Smoke, fog, dreams. Mercury vapors. Swirling new fumes in the subaqueous archives of the Uranist Intelligence Agency.
Nubar found the medallion depicting Mussolini and the Virgin Mary in his housecoat and turned it over and over, looking for a similarity between the two faces. He found the three one-lira coins and put them into his mouth to suck. He pushed more reports into the fire.
Something was missing. In order to see clearly in the billowing smoke and mercury fumes he needed the third eye of occultism. But where was his small obsidian sphere, the precious ball of black volcanic glass, his primitive third eye?
Lost. He'd never find it now. His fingers touched something round in the pocket of his housecoat. He held it up.
The single earring, fake lapis lazuli, the color of the sky. It looked like a robin's egg.
