The Coffee Trader (34 page)

The blockade had loosened. A sell-off had begun, and Parido knew he could not stop Miguel merely by keeping his men near.

“Thirty barrels of coffee to buy,” Parido shouted in return, “at forty guilders.”

The Tudescos would be fools not to turn around and sell for an immediate profit. They had never agreed to act as Miguel’s combination, only to break the blockade, motivated by the promise that their assistance would yield its own profitable opportunities. Miguel could see that they considered selling, which would stabilize the price for Parido. Portuguese Jews stood by and waited to see which way the prices went, which faction had command. The odds surely favored Parido. The only thing he could not counter would be a general sell-off. If too many men moved to sell, he could not stem the tide alone, and the men in his combination would not sacrifice their own money for him.

Here was the pivotal moment for the coffee scheme, and the whole of the Exchange sensed it.

Miguel looked up and, unexpectedly, locked eyes with his brother. Daniel stood at the far reaches of the circle of spectators, his lips moving silently as he calculated the odds against a gen-eral sell-off. Daniel tried to look away, but Miguel would not let him go. He wanted to see that his brother understood. He wanted to see it in his brother’s eyes.

And Daniel did understand. He knew that if he chose, at that moment, to join sides with Miguel, to throw himself in with his brother, to call out a sale of cheap coffee, the scheme would succeed. The momentum from Daniel’s participation would tip the scales in Miguel’s favor. Here was the time at last in which family might rise above petty interests. Daniel might say that yes, Parido was his friend, and friendship should be honored, but family was another matter and he could not stand by while his brother faced ruin, permanent ruin—not while he had the power in his hands to prevent it.

They both knew it. Miguel could see that his brother knew it. He had asked Daniel once if he would choose his brother or his friend, and Daniel had not answered, but he would answer now. One way or another. Miguel could see from the look on his brother’s face that Daniel, too, recalled that conversation. He could see the look of shame on Daniel’s face as he turned away and allowed this coffee business to unfold without him.

A strange quiet fell within the walls. Certainly not what would have passed for quiet in any other part of the world, but for the Exchange the noise reduced to a mere din. Traders moved in close as though they watched a cockfight or a brawl.

They would get good sport, Miguel told himself. When Parido had moved to buy, he had himself given the signal for Miguel’s next move, one the
parnass
could not have anticipated.

“Selling coffee! Fifty barrels at thirty-six!” Joachim shouted.

Parido stared in disbelief. He had not seen Joachim arrive upon the Exchange, or perhaps he had not noticed him. Having lost his peasant’s attire, he was once more dressed like a man of means, looking every bit the Dutch trader in his black suit and hat. No one who did not know him would have guessed that a month ago he had been less than a beggar. Now he was surrounded by a crowd of buyers whose eager calls he engaged with one at a time, calm as any seasoned merchant upon any bourse in Europe.

This move had been Alferonda’s inspiration. Parido could easily assert his influence over the traders of the Portuguese Nation. Every man knew of his rivalry with Miguel, and few would willingly cross a vengeful man with a seat on the Ma’amad. Alferonda knew he would be able to encourage a few foreign Tudescos to begin the trading, but there were not enough of them to sustain the sell-off, and most would be unwilling to invest heavily in so unknown a commodity or do too much to irritate Parido. But Joachim could entice the Dutch market into seeing that this conflict was a matter of business, not some internal Portuguese contest. He could bring in the Dutch traders willing to make a profit off this new product. They might be sheepish about jumping into a fray where Jew battled Jew over a commodity hardly anyone had ever heard of, but once they saw one of their own intrepid countrymen joining in, they would fall in line lest they lose the chance to profit.

Another Dutchman called out to sell. Miguel had never seen him before. He was only some unfortunate trader who had taken a chance on coffee and now found himself caught in the crossfire. Desperate to get rid of his goods before the price dipped even further, he let his fifteen barrels go at thirty-five. Miguel was now only two guilders per barrel away from the price he needed to survive, five guilders from what he needed to defeat Parido. But even if he brought the price to thirty, he would have to keep the price stable until two o’clock, the end of the trading day.

A new man shouted out in Dutch, but his accent sounded French. Then another, this one Danish. Thirty-five. Thirty-four. Miguel need only look on and monitor. He had sold eighty barrels that he did not own. It was no matter. Far more barrels had already changed hands than the warehouses of Amsterdam could hope to house.

Now Miguel would have to wait to see how low the price went and then buy enough to protect himself. If a buyer chose, he might file an appeal so that he would not have to buy his coffee at the now-high prices of thirty-eight and thirty-nine, but that hardly mattered to Miguel. Let them keep their money. Only the price of the barrels mattered now.

Parido looked on, his face blank. He had stopped shouting orders, for one man could not buy everything, not without ruining himself. He had artificially raised the price himself, and he knew that if he bought back enough barrels at a price to bring coffee back to thirty-nine, he would surely lose a great deal of money, even if he factored in the profit of his put.

The price began to stabilize, so Miguel bought at thirty-one and then sold at once for thirty. The loss was nothing, and it set off another frenzy of selling.

Miguel smiled at Parido, who turned away in disgust. But Miguel would not let him walk away. He pushed through the crowd. He heard sales at twenty-nine and twenty-eight. He looked at the clock on the church tower. Half past one. Only thirty minutes remaining.

“I believe the day is mine,” Miguel called.

Parido spun around. “Not yet, Lienzo. There’s still time.”

“There may be time, but I don’t believe you have any more options.”

Parido shook his head. “You think your little tricks will save you? Relish this moment, Lienzo. I think you’ll find you are not nearly so clever as you think.”

“No, probably not. But I have the distinct pleasure this day of being cleverer than you. I wish to take possession of those barrels of coffee you promised me by this time tomorrow.”

“You haven’t the money to pay for them,” he spat. “If you look at your copy of our contract, you will note it specifies the exchange must take place within seventy-two hours of the end of market today. I frankly don’t believe you will be able to raise the money. Indeed, in seventy-two hours in the eyes of the Ma’amad you may no longer be a Jew.”

So Parido planned to use the council to avoid his debts. The council would never stand for it. “You may believe what you wish, but I’ll transfer the amount to your account by this time tomorrow. I expect you to transfer ownership with a similar punctuality, or you will have to honor the contract and pay me an additional thirty-eight hundred.”

Miguel stepped away and glanced toward the crowd of buyers and sellers. The price appeared now to have stabilized at a remarkable twenty-six, with very little time left to trade. If the price only stayed there, he would earn a profit of almost seven hundred guilders from his puts alone, another two thousand from the futures. Now, too anxious to simply stand and observe, he thought to take care of one last bit of business.

Isaiah Nunes had been speaking quietly with some acquaintances, attempting to ignore the selling frenzy. Miguel smiled and asked Nunes to walk with him a moment privately. The two stepped away behind a pillar.

Miguel allowed his face to brighten into his best merchant guise. “I would like you to transfer ownership of the coffee I contracted with you to deliver. I would like ownership papers in my hands no later than tomorrow morning.”

Nunes straightened his posture, as though making some effort to align himself perfectly with the earth, and then took a step forward. “I’m sorry you find yourself in a difficult situation, Miguel, but I can’t help you. I told you the shipment never arrived, and your needs cannot undo what has been done. And if I may be so bold, you are hardly a man to demand prompt action in any regard. Getting you to pay what you owed me has been no easy task, and I feel that you’ve abused my friendship unforgivably.”

“An odd comment from a man who sold my contracted goods to Solomon Parido.”

Nunes tried to show no expression. “I cannot understand you. You are talking like a madman, and I’ll not be insulted.”

“You’re overplaying your part, senhor. You should appear confused, not horrified.”

“Nothing you say may horrify me.” He took a step forward. “I once looked upon you as a friend, but I see you are only a cheat and I’ll discuss nothing further with you.”

“You’ll discuss it with me, or you will discuss it in the courts,” Miguel answered. He saw at once that he had Nunes’s attention. “You took the coffee I had contracted for and delivered it to Solomon Parido. You then lied and told me my shipment had never been acquired. I presume you then arranged for another shipment, but I know the cargo that belongs to me by legal right came in on a ship called the
Sea Lily
. I have witnesses who will testify to hearing Parido discuss the matter. If you refuse to comply, my only question will be whether to bring you before a Dutch court or the Ma’amad, or both, and force you to provide not only the coffee but pay such damages that result of my not having the original shipment.” Miguel showed Nunes the contract he had made with Parido. “If I lose money on this contract, I’ll be able to sue you for the losses, for if you had not deceived me I should surely have won. And you may wager that once this matter goes to court, your reputation as a trustworthy merchant will be utterly dashed.”

Nunes flushed. “If I withhold the coffee from Parido, he will make me an enemy. What of my reputation then?”

“Surely you can’t expect me to care. You’ll transfer ownership to me by morning, or I’ll see you ruined.”

“If I give you what you ask, you’ll say nothing? You’ll not tell the world of this?”

“I ought not to keep quiet, but I’ll do so out of memory of our friendship. I never would have expected this from you.”

Nunes shook his head. “You must understand how difficult it is to resist Parido when he wants something. I dared not say no to him. I have a family, and I could not afford to put myself at risk by protecting you.”

“I understand his influence and power,” Miguel said, “and I have resisted him just the same. And he did not ask you to refrain from protecting me, he asked you to lie to me and cheat me, and you agreed. I never thought you a particularly brave man, Isaiah, but I was still shocked to learn the extent of your cowardice.”

As he walked away he heard the clock tower strike two. He asked a man standing near him how coffee had closed: twenty-five and a half guilders per barrel.

Miguel would look at once into renting a splendid house on the shores of the Houtgracht. He would contact his debtors to offer some small payment to the most anxious. Everything would be different now.

And there was his brother. He turned around. Daniel stood no more than an arm’s length away. Daniel looked at his brother, tried to lock eyes with him, but Miguel could not bring himself to say anything. The time for reconciliation was over; there could be no forgiveness. Daniel had bet his own future against his brother’s, and he had lost.

Miguel moved away. Crowds of men swarmed around him. Word had begun to spread; already every man upon the Exchange understood he had had a great victory. Even if they did not know what he had won or whom he had defeated, these traders knew they stood in the presence of a trader in his glory. Strangers whose names he barely knew clapped him on the shoulder or pumped his hand or promised they would call upon him soon to speak of a project whose value he could scarce believe.

And then, through the thickness of the traders, he saw a haggard Dutchman in fine clothes grin widely at him. Joachim. Miguel turned away from a triumvirate of Italian Jews who wanted to speak to him about figs, uttering some polite excuse and promising to call on them at a tavern whose name he forgot the moment the men spoke it. He pushed on until he stood facing Joachim, who appeared both greater and smaller than he had in his impoverished madness. His grin appeared not so much triumphant as sad. Miguel returned it with a smile of his own.

“I told you I would make things right,” he said, “if you would but trust me.”

“If I had done no more than trust you,” Joachim replied with equal cheer, “I would still be a poor man. It is only because I hated you and hounded you that you have won this victory. There is a great lesson to be learned here, but I shall burn in hell if I know what it may be.”

Miguel let out a bark of a laugh and stepped forward to embrace this man who, not so long ago, he had wished dead with all his heart. For all he knew, he might wish him dead again, and soon. For the moment, however, he did not care what Joachim had done or would do, and he did not care who knew of their hatred and their friendship. He cared only that he had righted his own wrongs and unmade his ruin in the process. Miguel would have hugged the devil himself.

32

The new girl spoke no Portuguese but made herself content with a rough exchange of signs. Catryn had a dour face, closer to plain than homely, but unpleasant enough to suit her mistress. It hardly mattered. Miguel was out of the house now, and the prettiness or plainness of the maid meant nothing to anyone.

In the mornings, Daniel left the house almost before she was awake, and Hannah was left to her breakfast with the girl hovering over her. Catryn gestured toward the decanter of wine on the table. She seemed to believe that a woman with child could never take too much wine, and Hannah had been disordered with drink every morning for a week before she had found the will to say no. Now she just shook her head. When she drank so much the baby quieted down inside her, and she liked to feel it kicking and squirming. When it lay still, even if just for a few minutes, Hannah feared the worst. If the baby died, what would Daniel do? What would he do
to her
?

She sent Catryn to the market outside the Dam to buy coffee and had the girl prepare it for her each afternoon. One day Daniel came home early and grew so enraged when he saw her drinking it that he struck her until she cried out for the well-being of their child. Now she only drank it during Exchange hours when she knew Daniel would not be there.

Sometimes she saw Miguel on the street, dressed as he was now in his fine new suits, walking in his familiar way with the great merchants of the Vlooyenburg. He looked content, youthful in his triumph. Hannah didn’t dare look too long. If she went to his house, if she told him she wanted to leave her husband and be with him, what would he say? He would tell her to be gone. Maybe if he had failed in his mighty scheme and had nothing more to lose, maybe then he might have taken her, but not now.

After Catryn cleared away the breakfast things, she and Hannah went out to the markets. The girl could not cook half so well as Annetje, and she knew less about picking meats and produce. Hannah had a better eye than the girl, but she didn’t speak her mind. Let her pick bad vegetables and turning beef. What did it matter to her if their meals were bland or sour?

This was her life now, pale carrots and rotten fish. These things were her only pleasures. She had her husband and she would have her daughter, whom she prayed would be born healthy and fit. Those things would have to be enough. They would have to be enough, because there could be nothing else.

Moving from his brother’s house was sweet. Miguel had rented a fine home across the canal, and though it was smaller than his brother’s, he thought it far more elegant and perfectly suited for his needs. He hardly even knew what he would do with the space he had, though he hoped soon enough to fill it with a wife and children. The marriage brokers had already begun to pound on his door.

The day after his victory on the Exchange, his last in his brother’s house, he had climbed up from the cellar and walked through the kitchen and then up again to the main level, where he saw Daniel sitting in the front room, pretending to look at letters. Daniel said nothing to him. Not a word of kindness. Miguel had told him that morning that he would be moving out and had thanked Daniel for his hospitality. Daniel had merely nodded and advised Miguel to be certain not to take anything that was not his.

There was still one order of business, and Miguel wanted it put to rest before he left. He cleared his throat and waited while Daniel slowly raised his head.

“Is there something?” he asked.

“I wanted to talk to you about a matter of money,” he said. “It is an awkward thing, and I would not have you think me overeager. Right now my affairs are quite healthy, thank the Holy One, blessed be He, but I am told that you owe me some money.”

Daniel rose to his feet. “
I
owe
you
? What nonsense is that? After I sheltered you for the past six months, you would say that I owe you?”

“Your shelter has been very generous, Daniel, but such generosity is not worth two thousand guilders. Ricardo has explained everything to me.”

“I cannot believe you would fly in my face with this!” he shouted. “I lent you money when no one else would, when your name was a byword for failure. I took you in and gave you shelter when you had nowhere to turn. And now you dare tell me I owe you.”

“I have not said when you must pay me. I know your finances to be in disorder.”

“Who told you such a lie? Now that you have a few coins jingling in your pocket you think yourself the finest man in Amsterdam. I must tell you, brother, it does not work thus. Because you are now solvent does not mean I must be ruined.”

“I had not thought it worked that way,” Miguel said quietly.

“And I will tell you something else. That little scheme of yours on the Exchange would never have worked had you not taken my name and done with it as you ought not to, promising my money to back your ventures. I suppose you thought yourself too clever to be discovered.”

“I thought it only fair,” Miguel said, “considering you had the effrontery to demand that I pay you what you lent me when you knew yourself to be my debtor.”

“Well, I won’t forgive you,” Daniel said. “The money you claim I owe you was made by stomping upon Senhor Parido’s plans, plans in which I was also invested. While you profited from whale oil, I lost—but I never chastised you for your trickery. And while you profited from your little scheme with coffee, you have cost Senhor Parido a great deal of money. Can you only profit, Miguel, by tricks and schemes that injure others?”

“How can you speak of tricks and schemes when all this time Parido’s interest in coffee was based on nothing but revenge? That is no kind of way to do business, I assure you. It would have been far better had he looked to making money rather than to making me lose it.”

Daniel shook his head. “I had always thought you lax and undisciplined, too free with drink and women, but I had never before thought you a villain.”

“Tell yourself what lies you like,” Miguel said bitterly. “I won’t take you before the Ma’amad. I leave it to your own sense of right and wrong to act as you see fit.”

The letters had gone out to all the agents Miguel had hired: agents in London, Paris, Marseilles, Antwerp, Hamburg, and half a dozen other exchanges. He had not contacted those agents to which Geertruid was responsible, those secured in Iberia with the aid of her lawyer. Geertruid handled those herself, and she had no idea her own letters contained something very different from Miguel’s.

On the day that Miguel had indicated, Geertruid’s agents in Lisbon, Madrid, and Oporto were to buy as much coffee as they could. Word of the Amsterdam sell-off would have trickled to the foreign exchanges already. Prices would have dipped after Miguel’s maneuver, and Geertruid’s agents would be prepared to pounce on the low price.

Geertruid arrived at the Amsterdam Exchange at midday. She was not the only woman to set foot there, but her sex was rare and she attracted some small attention as she strolled across the courtyard in her flowing red skirts, imperious as a queen. During the early stages of their planning, Miguel had suggested that she come to the Exchange to watch the buying take place and witness the birth of their wealth. Miguel had never repeated the suggestion, but Geertruid had not forgotten it.

She beamed, tilting her head just slightly in the way that drove Miguel mad. There was Miguel, her partner, her friend, her puppet. She had sent him out to do her bidding, and he had done it.

Except she now saw he did something else entirely. Her partner was selling. He stood amid a crowd of traders who called out their price. Miguel sold off his ninety barrels piecemeal—ten to this merchant, five to that. Since the recent upheaval, coffee had come to be regarded as a risky venture and no one bought in any great quantity.

“What are you doing?” She rushed over as soon as Miguel had finished the transaction. “Have you gone mad? Why aren’t you buying?”

Miguel smiled. “With a little manipulation and a carefully placed rumor here and there, I’ve managed to raise the price of coffee to thirty-seven guilders to the barrel, so I’m unloading the barrels I bought from Nunes. I’ll make a tidy profit, which will enhance the wealth I acquired from my puts. After the events of last closing day, I bought some short-term futures, and I believe I should profit quite nicely from those as well.”

“A profit? Your puts and short-term futures? You’ve been gazing at the moon. When the other markets learn that Amsterdam has not gone down, we’ll lose money across Europe.”

“Oh, I’m not worried. The agents will buy nothing. I’ve dismissed them.”

Geertruid stared at him. She began to speak but choked on her words. She tried again. “Miguel, what game are you playing? Please tell me what is happening.”

“What is happening,” Miguel said calmly, “is that I have changed the scheme to my advantage, and I have left you to muddle through as best you can.”

Geertruid opened her mouth but nothing came out, so she turned away for a moment to master herself. “Why would you do such a thing to me?” Her eyes blinked and she stared into nothingness. “Why would you do this?”

Miguel smiled. “Because you deceived me and betrayed me. You thought, even now, that I would never have learned that our chance meeting was no accident. You have manipulated me since the day we met, but now I have manipulated you. You sought to use this coffee scheme to ruin me, but I have found you out and made a handsome profit. It is not the profit I dreamed of, I grant you, but it is certainly enough to restore my reputation, resolve my debts, and give me the freedom to trade as I like. You, on the other hand, have committed yourself to your agents in Iberia, and I believe they will turn to you to repay them.”

This time Geertruid could not find her voice at all.

“Of course, I shall return your capital. Though you sought my ruin, I’ll not steal from you. The money should go a little way toward repaying your agents for their purchases.”

“I am undone,” Geertruid whispered. She took hold of his arm, as though he were a witness to her ruin and not its architect.

“Perhaps your master will rescue you. Surely it is his responsibility to do so. I suspect the three thousand guilders you laid out were his to begin with. Of course, this incident has not left Parido untouched, and he may not find himself as generous as he once was. But that is no concern of mine.”

Geertruid still said nothing but only stared ahead in disbelief. Miguel, who had more coffee to unload, turned away.