The Coffee Trader (32 page)

Annetje had been in my employ at the time, and it had been
my
design that Senhora Lienzo should not speak of the widow to Miguel. That she had done so, in the end, would prove immaterial.

30

Miguel had been ignoring notes from Isaiah Nunes for weeks, and had been doing so self-righteously since he learned that Nunes was in league with Parido. But then Nunes’s notes began to talk of the Ma’amad, and Miguel wondered if he ought not take these threats more seriously. In all likelihood, Nunes only meant to add verisimilitude to his ruse, but it was also possible that Parido might want to see Miguel brought before the board. It would be difficult to prove the trickery Miguel suspected, and he could not begin to do so without revealing his connection to Geertruid.

Miguel had come to believe there was only one way to obtain the money he needed. He therefore dashed off a quick note and three hours later found himself in the coffee tavern meeting with Alonzo Alferonda.

“I’ll be direct with you,” Miguel said. “I would like to borrow some money.”

His companion’s eyes narrowed. “Borrowing from Alferonda is a dangerous business.”

“I’m prepared to take the risk.”

Alferonda laughed. “Very bold of you. How much did you have in mind?”

Miguel swallowed a gulp of Turkish coffee. “Fifteen hundred guilders.”

“I am a kind man with a generous heart, but you must think me a fool. With all the difficulties you face, why would I give you such a sum?”

“Because,” Miguel said, “by doing so you will help me ruin Solomon Parido’s plans.”

Alferonda ran a hand across his beard. “I don’t know that there could have been another answer quite so effective.”

Miguel smiled. “Then you’ll do it?”

“Tell me what you have in mind.”

Miguel, who had not bothered to formulate a plan fully, began to talk, but what came out was greatly to Alferonda’s liking.

Miguel sat in the Three Dirty Dogs awaiting Geertruid. Like all the Dutch, she thrived on punctuality, but not this time. Perhaps she had found out that Miguel knew of her deception. Miguel tried to think of the ways that might possibly happen. It seemed unlikely that Joachim and Geertruid would have any contact, and he felt fairly certain that Alferonda could not have betrayed him. Had Hendrick seen Miguel observing him in the tavern that night? What if he had, and then he had held off telling Geertruid for some reason of his own? Or perhaps Geertruid had waited to see how Miguel would respond to that knowledge.

When she showed up she appeared disordered and out of breath. He had never seen her so shaken. Lowering herself down, she explained what had happened. A man had fallen and broken his leg in front of her on the Rozengracht, she said, and she and a gentleman who happened to be there had helped to take him to a surgeon. It was shocking stuff, she said. The man had screamed with agony the whole time. She called at once for a beer.

“It makes you think about the preciousness of life,” she said, while awaiting her drink. “A man is going about his business, and the next thing he falls and has a broken leg. Will he survive its repair but walk for the rest of his life with a cane? Will he have to have it off? Will it heal and be as it once was? No one can say what God has in store.”

“That much is certain,” Miguel agreed, without much enthusiasm. “Life is full of unexpected turns.”

“By Jesus, I am glad we’re doing this thing.” She squeezed his hand. The serving girl put the beer down, and Geertruid drank down half the contents at once. “I’m glad. We’ll make our fortunes and live in luxury. Perhaps we’ll die next day or next year, no one knows. But I’ll have my fortune first, and we’ll laugh while my husband looks on from hell.”

“Then we must go ahead,” Miguel began humorlessly. “We must send the letters at once. We can’t delay any longer. The time must be set. Eleven in the morning, three weeks from today.”

“Three weeks from today? The ship has not yet made port.”

“It must be three weeks from this day,” he insisted, looking away. She had betrayed him. He knew it was true, but his own act of betrayal tasted bitter in his mouth.

“Senhor, have you decided to get forceful with me?” She reached out and began to run a finger lightly along Miguel’s hand. “If you’re going to thrust something upon me, I should like to know what I shall be receiving.”

“You shall be receiving a great deal of money,” he told her, “if you do what I say.”

“I should always like to do what you say,” she told him. “But I must know why.”

“I have been assured the shipment will be here by that time. I have reason to believe there are others who take an interest in coffee, and if we wait too long, they may make it more difficult for us to manipulate the prices as we planned.”

Geertruid considered this for a moment. “Who are these people?”

“Men of the Exchange. What does it matter who they are?”

“I only wonder why, at this time, they take an interest in something that hardly anyone has taken an interest in before.”

“Why did
you
take an interest in it?” Miguel asked. “Things happen all at once. I’ve seen it countless times. Men from all over the city, from all over Europe, will suddenly decide this is the time to buy timber or cotton or tobacco. Maybe it’s the stars. All I know is that this may be coffee’s moment, and we may be but one party to have recognized it. If we are to do what we planned, then we had better act decisively.”

Geertruid remained quiet for a moment. “You say you’ve been given assurances about the shipment, but those assurances cannot predict pirates or storms or any of a thousand things that can make a ship late. What if the shipment is not yet in port when our agents begin?”

Miguel shook his head. “It won’t matter. I have been on the Exchange too long to let it matter. I know it as though it were my own body, and I can make it do what I want, just as I move my arms and legs.”

Geertruid smiled. “You speak with such confidence.”

“I only speak the truth. Our only enemy now is timidity.”

“I love to hear you talk so”—she leaned forward and touched his beard—“but you can’t risk putting yourself in a position in which you must sell what you do not have.”

“You needn’t worry about that. I’ll not be caught unprepared.”

“What do you plan?”

Miguel smiled and leaned back. “It’s very simple. If need be, I’ll cover my own losses as the price drops and therefore simultaneously acquire the very goods I will promise to sell, only I’ll buy when the price dips below the price at which I have promised to sell, so I might profit on the sales while lowering the value. It is something I would not have known how to do before, but now I believe I can order it effectively.”

This plan was nonsense. Miguel would never have attempted anything so foolish, but he doubted Geertruid had sufficient business sense to know it.

She didn’t say anything, so Miguel pushed harder. “You asked me to join you because you needed someone who understood the madness of the Exchange, someone who could navigate its peculiarities. I am doing the very thing you sought me out to do.”

She let out a sigh. “I don’t like taking this risk, but you’re right: I did ask you to order these things, and I’ll have to trust you. But,” she added with a grin, “when we are rich, I’ll expect you to obey me in all things and treat me as your mistress.”

“It will be my pleasure to do so,” Miguel assured her.

“I understand you must be cautious, but there is no need for you to be so grim. Have you no laughter to spare until you are rich?”

“Very little,” Miguel said. “From now until all this is settled, you will find me to be a man of business and very little else. You’ve done your part; now it is time for me to do mine.”

“Very well,” Geertruid said, after a moment. “I admire and appreciate your dedication. In the meantime, I’ll have to seek out Hendrick, who has nothing to lose by being jolly. We’ll make merry on your behalf.”

“Please do,” he said sadly. He had once thought Geertruid the jolliest woman in the world, but he had just made her complicit in his plans to destroy her.

Perhaps they should have gone to the coffee tavern in the Plantage. It would have been more appropriate, and it would surely have made it easier for Joachim to concentrate. But they’d let him pick the tavern, and here they were, all three—two of them marked by their beards as Jews—in a tiny room full of drunken Dutchmen who stared and pointed. One even came over and examined Miguel’s head by gingerly lifting his hat and then, when he was done, politely replacing it.

Joachim’s months of hardship now compelled him to drink all the beer that someone else was willing to buy, so only an hour after the meeting began, he was already slurring his words and having some difficulty remaining on his splintered bench.

What surprised Miguel was how much Joachim did not irritate him. Now that he, as Joachim had phrased it, was no longer mad, he had demonstrated an endearing warmth Miguel had never seen in him before. He laughed at Alferonda’s jokes and nodded approvingly at Miguel’s suggestions. He raised his tankard to toast the two of them, “and Jews everywhere,” and did so without irony in his voice. He treated Miguel and Alferonda like men who had pulled him aboard their vessels when he had believed himself left to drown.

Now they sat together in planning, all of them having had too much to drink. It would not be long now, only a few weeks, and they were equal to the task. It would tax them and torment them, but it could be done.

“I understand,” Joachim said, “how it is we are to buy and sell what it is that no one wants to buy and sell. What I do not understand is how we are to sell what we do not have. If this Nunes has sold your fruit to Parido, how can we affect the price through sales?”

Miguel had wanted to avoid speaking of this, for it was the hardest thing. He would have to do something he had vowed he would never do on the Exchange—a practice that, no matter how desperate he became, would always be the height of madness.

“By a
windhandel,
” Alferonda explained, using the Dutch word.

“I was told they were dangerous,” Joachim said. “That only a fool would attempt such a thing.”

“True on both counts,” Miguel said. “That is why we will succeed.”

Windhandel:
the wind trade. A colorful term for something dangerous and illegal, it was when a man sold what he did not have. The burgomasters had outlawed the practice, since it added chaos to the Exchange. It was said that any man who engaged in a
windhandel
might just as readily throw his money into the Amstel, for these sales could easily be voided if the buyer provided proof. The seller would then have worse than nothing for his pains. But in their coffee trade, they would have an advantage—the buyer would be guilty of too many tricks of his own, and he would not dare to contest the sale.

Later, when they had concluded their business, Alferonda excused himself and Miguel and Joachim remained alone at the table. Here he was, Miguel thought, drinking with a man he would gladly have strangled only a few weeks before.

Joachim must have read the look on Miguel’s face. “You’re not scheming something, are you?”

“Of course we are,” Miguel answered.

“I mean against me.”

Miguel let out a laugh. “Do you really think that all this—these meetings, these plans—are a trick against you? That we have so much invested in your destruction that we would play these games? Are you certain you’ve left your madness behind?”

Joachim shook his head. “I don’t think these schemes are about me. Of course not. But I wonder if I am to be sacrificed on the altar of your vengeance.”

“No,” Miguel said softly, “we are not out to trick you. We have thrown in our lot with yours and so have more to fear from your treachery than you do from ours. I cannot even imagine how we might sacrifice you, as you say.”

“I can think of a few ways,” Joachim said, “but I will keep them to myself.”

When Miguel walked into the entrance hall, he knew Daniel could not be at home. The house had turned shadowy in the dusk, and the inviting scent of cinnamon filled the air. Hannah stood ready to greet him at the far end of the hall, the single candle she held in her hand reflecting off the black-and-white tiles of the floor.

It was not the way she was dressed, for she wore her usual scarf and shapeless black gown, revealing the now undeniable swell of the child growing inside her. There was, however, something in the intensity of her face, the way her dark eyes shone in the candlelight and her jaw jutted forward. She stood unusually still, with her chest pressed out as if to accentuate the heaviness of her breasts, and in his drunkenness he felt dizzy with desire.

“It seems as though it has been weeks since we’ve talked, senhor,” she said.

“I am attempting something on the Exchange. It takes much of my time.”

“It will make you rich, yes?”

He laughed. “I most fervently hope so.”

She looked at the floor for what felt like minutes. “May I speak with you, senhor?”

With her arm holding the candle outward, as though she were a spirit in a woodcut, she led Miguel into the drawing room and set the candle down in one of the sconces. Only one other candle was lit, and the room shimmered with flickering light.

“We must hire another girl soon,” she said, as she sat.

“You are clearly too busy to light candles,” Miguel observed, as he took a seat across from her.

She let out a burst of air, a half laugh. “You make sport with me, senhor?”

“Yes, I do, senhora.”

“And why do you make sport with me?”

“Because you and I are friends,” he said.

Miguel could not see her face clearly, but he detected something of a smile. It was so hard to tell. What did she want of him in this poorly lit room? What if Daniel were to walk through the door now and find them, scrambling to light candles together, brushing off their clothes as though they had been rolling together in sawdust?

He almost laughed aloud. If he were to make a success of himself at this late stage in his life, he had to stop planning for what could never happen. He had outlived the time when he could gamble away guilders he did not have or invest in commodities because of an inexplicable urge. I am a grown man, he told himself, and this is my brother’s wife. There is nothing more to it.