Considering where he was living, it wasn't surprising he decided to deal with the pyramids first. Slave labor had built them for pharaohs who thought they were gods, but a pharaonic god was nothing without his mummy and Martyr owned the largest cache of pharaonic mummies in the world.
About the time of the first battle of the Marne, he moved all his mummies in sealed cases to the top of the pyramid. There, in Ziwar's workshop for archeological restoration, he proceeded to grind them down into a fine powder.
So much for the eternal gods of ancient Egypt. He had reduced them to dust but that wasn't enough.
After prolonged meditation, coincidental with the second battle of Ypres, he decided to desecrate the once holy remains of the pharaohs as well.
During the Somme offensive he converted Ziwar's workshop into a pharmacy and carefully mixed half of his mummy powder with mastic gum, producing a balm he intended to sell as an aphrodisiac with general magical properties. Thus the tyrannical builders of the pyramids would end ignominiously with a pinch of their dust lodged in the nostrils of wheezing old men greedy for longer life, another pinch served up as mastic to be smeared on the unwashed pudenda of barren women, a third encrusting the slack sexual organs of nervous merchants unable to obtain an erection.
The formerly glorious pharaohs sordidly sold as mummy dust and mummy mastic in back alleys.
Available to any corrupt illiterate who could pay for them, just as African slaves had once been.
Martyr now moved forward from ancient to modern Egyptian tyrants. The Mamelukes, as pederasts, had simply disappeared from history. But the Arabs had been their coreligionists in the slave trade and it was therefore through Islam that he would strike. Since he was nominally a Moslem he had access to all the holy places.
A desecration here too then? Some intolerable act that would outrage the entire religion?
Cairo Martyr smiled. He lit a cigarette. The second battle of the Marne had just ended and the Great War would soon be over. And so too the night. Dawn was coming and he was sitting on top of the pyramid, contemplating the last minutes of darkness, when the revelation came to him. Significantly, he was facing east.
Mecca, of course. The navel of Islam inside the Kaaba. The Holy of Holies, a black meteorite.
He inhaled deeply.
Black. Islam deprived of its most sacred object. The stone that pilgrims came from all over the world to kiss. To steal the black meteorite from the Kaaba and render the Holy of Holies utterly empty.
Utterly.
Cairo Martyr laughed. And the black stone itself?
To Africa, of course. He would carry it to Africa where the Arabs had grown rich for centuries on black gold, his people. A black meteorite now to pay for black gold then.
Justice.
It had taken him four years to work out his master plan but it had been worth it, no one could hope for more. He intended to steal the black meteorite from heaven and bury it in rich black African soil, where it belonged.
At the end of the First World War a brooding Cairo Martyr, sleek from four years of solid meat, emerged from seclusion at the top of the Great Pyramid and descended into the raucous crowds and swirling flies of the bazaars of the Middle East, there to hire the wholesale dealers who would receive his smuggled mummy dust and mummy mastic in bulk, cut the first with quinine and the second with glue or glucose and distribute both to retailers who would sell them on the open market in tiny oilskin bags, five pounds sterling per bag.
The dose was small and an impotent man or a barren woman needed more than a bag for treatment.
Three or four bags a day was a common dosage, but habits running to eight or nine bags were far from rare.
Prices varied with the season. In general spring with its illusions of hope was the most profitable sellers'
market, winter with its lethargy the worst. But an outbreak of local tribal warfare could drive sales up at any time. Highly spiced foods tended to do the same in the summer, as did aggressive athletic contests in the autumn.
Usage also varied by region and ethnic background. Desert bedouin, the fierce Kurds and religious Jews seemed immune to the benefits of mummy dust and were almost total abstainers. But the sedentary Arabs of the cities, wealthy Persians and lazy Turks of all classes were heavy consumers.
Sales increased substantially near large rivers, near mosques, on Saturday evenings and during full moons, declining dramatically in the weeks before lambs were slaughtered in the spring. Mummy dust was generally preferred by men and women under thirty, mummy mastic by those over that age. But a confirmed user was more than happy to get his mummy any way he could.
The European authorities in the Middle East moved to suppress the clandestine trade as soon as they became aware of it. Both mummy dust and mummy mastic were declared dangerous drugs and treated accordingly in the courts, but the profits involved in handling them were so huge Martyr had no difficulty establishing a marketing network that reached into every corner of the Levant.
Petty dealers were frequently picked up and jailed for mummy-mastic possession, but due to the precautions Martyr had taken it was nearly impossible for his major wholesalers to be prosecuted.
And on the rare occasions when one was, the English or French magistrate in charge of the case immediately received a large anonymous bribe along with detailed dossiers on a dozen underworld figures in his city, previously unknown criminals who could easily be convicted of any crime because they were guilty of every crime.
The wholesaler was then released for lack of evidence and quickly went abroad to the French Riviera for a vacation arranged by Martyr, after which he would turn up with a different name in another Arab capital, where his expertise could be put to work in some other aspect of the overall operation.
In only three years Cairo Martyr's secret balm network was smoothly functioning throughout the Levant, assuring him a large income for life. The time then came for him to launch the second phase of his master plan, the series of deadly steps that would ultimately lead to the theft of the black meteorite from the Kaaba in Mecca.
With typical patience Martyr intended to approach his goal by degrees. First he would gain clandestine control of Jerusalem, the third holy city of Islam. When that was accomplished he would move on to Islam's second city, Medina. And only then, with all flanks secure, would he take his campaign to Mecca for his final triumph.
But when Martyr arrived in Jerusalem in the autumn of 1921, he found he wasn't alone in seeking secret control of the city. Other clandestine operators were at work in the confusion that had followed the war, in particular a Khasarian Jew from Budapest, Munk Szondi by name, who seemed to have immense resources of his own.
If he had been faced with just this one competitor, Martyr was confident he could have made a deal with the man for an equable division of spoils. In fact he had worked out most of the details for a compromise proposal when he accidentally met Szondi for the first time in a Jerusalem coffee shop where they had both chanced to seek shelter on a cold December afternoon when snow was definitely in the air.
But he couldn't make an offer to Szondi then because a third man happened to be sitting with them in the crowded shop, a young Irishman who also agreed to the game of poker Szondi had suggested as a diversion against the gloomy weather.
A game of poker. A diversion. The wind outside whipping through the alleys. Snow definitely in the air.
And somehow a strange design descending upon the three of them that night after they moved the game to the curiously empty shop of Haj Harun, where Martyr soon made another discovery. For some reason as yet unknown, the Irishman was also seeking secret control of Jerusalem.