December 31, 1921, three people sit down in Jerusalem to play poker: a blue-eyed black man who controls the Middle Eastern market for ground mummies; a young Irishman who made a fortune selling phallic-shaped Christian amulets; and a former colonel of the Austro-Hungarian intelligence service, a maniacal garlic eater. Their game, which will last twelve years in the shop of the antiquities dealer Haj Haroun, will lure hundreds of powerful tycoons and dashing adventurers from all over the world, because the stake in it is control over the eternal city, secret power over all of Jerusalem. For the first time in Russian - the second novel of the “Jerusalem Quartet” by Edward Whitmore, a former CIA agent and impeccably clear stylist, who nevertheless was compared to the “number one postmodernist” Thomas Pynchon and the Latin American magical realists.