Fantastic Metropolis

Joe is assigned the code identity of A. O. Gulbenkian, an itinerant Armenian dealer in Coptic artifacts, an identity previously used by his brother Columbkille O’Sullivan; his brother is affectionately remembered in the army as “Our Colly of Champagne,” for heroic acts performed during the First World War. Joe arrives in Egypt and is met by Liffey, a sad clown, and is driven to his accommodation at the Hotel Babylon in an old delivery van painted on the side with the words “AHMADS Greasy Fish & Levantine Chips.” In the Hotel Babylon, a former brothel, Joe starts to unravel the strands of Stern’s life. Liffey advises “Your journey now involves time, my child, not space. Not rivers and mountains and deserts to be crossed, but memories to be explored.” Joe begins his journey into the past by making the acquaintance of Ahmad, the silent Egyptian counterman at the Hotel Babylon who spends his days reading thirty-year-old newspapers, “open as always at the society page.” Ahmad’s recollections take him thirty years into the past, and even further, revealing a network of relationships through two generations.

In Ahmad’s youth, he, Stern, and David Cohen were boon companions, lively members of Cairo’s cafe society, a friendship that lasted until one of them died and the other was betrayed through a breakdown in understanding. This betrayal has something to do with what is continually referred to through the novel as Stern’s Polish Story. The heart of the mystery is a daring escape Stern made from a Damascus prison in 1939. It is inexplicable because Stern was due to be released within twenty-four hours. A few weeks later Hitler invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War, thus posing the question of which side was Stern working.

Joe’s investigations draw him deeper and deeper into the past. The influence of Strongbow extends to this novel as well, through the long friendship he enjoyed with Menelik Ziwar. Ziwar’s magnifying glass also rates a mention. It was fashioned by Cohen’s great-grandfather, who was a crony of both Menelik and Strongbow, forming another triumvirate representing the three main faiths of the Middle East—an echo of that other threesome of Joe, Cairo, and Munk during their twelve-year relationship running the great Jerusalem Poker game. Fathers and sons re-form connections across the generations with Ahmad’s father also being part of Menelik Ziwar’s circle through their common occupation as dragomen back in the nineteenth century. Joe’s visit to the Cohens provides him with a further clue to the mystery of Stern’s Polish Journey, which is later solved by the sisters Big Belle and Little Alice. It is a dangerous secret which proves lethal to others, and it threatens Joe’s life as well.

The mystery of Stern’s life is finally unraveled, and Joe comes to realize how Stern, being the person he is, has had an impact on everyone who knew him, and how his life was not as meaningless as he, Stern, has imagined. As the Waterboy major remarks to his colonel, “It’s almost as if to them, to Joe and Liffey and the other people Joe spoke of… almost as if Stern’s life is a kind of tale of all our hopes and failures. Living and trying as he did, failing and dying as he did. Ideals that may lead to and yet still contain within them… Oh I don’t know what.” Joe’s final task is to convince Stern of this before he dies.

Nile Shadows, though more somber than the two previous novels, has its bizarre moments. When Joe is being transported by Bletchley through the desert to the Monastery, they pass through a dreamlike landscape where old engines of war lie discarded on the wayside, and a battery of British howitzers are bombarding the empty desert, facing the wrong way. Joe remarks on this to Bletchley, whose response is “The wrong way? How can there be a right way to slaughter people? And anyway, mirages are common enough in the desert.”

This novel and Jericho Mosaic are ostensibly espionage novels, but it’s almost as if they are also metaphors for life, the secret agents a code for our inner selves. Joe comments to Stern, “It has to do with the tiny glimpses we’re given of people, and the fact that everyone seems to be a secret agent in life in a way. With their own private betrayals and their own private loyalties that we don’t know anything about, and their own secret code copied down from a private onetime pad, which we both know is all but unbreakable.”

It is interesting to note, that towards the end of the novel, Whittemore has Maud quote a passage from an ancient Chinese account of caravans in the Gobi desert. Whittemore first quoted this passage in Quin’s Shanghai Circus, so it must have meant a great deal to him. It is indeed a remarkable piece of prose. It speaks of secret agents, sandstorms, vanishing caravans in the trackless desert, among other things.

The Jerusalem Quartet IV: Jericho Mosaic

The Quartet culminates in Jericho Mosaic (1987). The story focuses on events which occurred during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s in the Middle East, and is loosely based on the exploits of the master Israeli spy Eli Cohen, who operated out of Syria during the 1960s. None of the original characters are in this novel, but two survive from Nile Shadows—Bletchley, now called Bell, and David Cohen’s sister Anna. As usual, there are new characters to fill the absence of those the reader has come to know and love, and they all have interesting histories.