The Coffee Trader (8 page)

6

Miguel arrived at the Dam a quarter of an hour before noon, when the Exchange gates would open. Already the din of trade had begun to echo off the walls of the surrounding buildings. The burgomasters had limited the hours of trade from noon until two because the guilds complained that the din of commerce disturbed all manner of business across the city. Miguel thought the charges absurd. The sound of trade was a monetary aphrodisiac; it drove men to empty their purses. If the hours of trade were twice as long each day, the city would be twice as rich.

Miguel loved the excitement that spread across the plaza in the moments before the Exchange gates opened. The conversation quieted to a hum. Dozens of men looked like racers, awaiting the signal to begin their sprint.

All along the Dam, peddlers hawked bread and pies and trinkets in the shadow of the great wonders of the plaza, the monuments of Dutch grandeur: the massive and imposing Town Hall, which stood like a civic cathedral; the Nieuwe Kerk and the Exchange; and, puny by comparison, the Weigh House. Along the Damrak, fishmongers shouted their wares in the busy market, and whores cast their lines for amorous investors; moneylenders operating outside the law looked for the eager and desperate; fruit and vegetable sellers wheeled their pushcarts through the maze of merchants eager to spend newly got money on anything polished or juicy or bright with color. Tradesmen joked amiably with fat-pursed merchants, and women attempted to shock men into purchases with talk so bawdy that even Miguel blushed to hear it.

Among the brokers and speculators, black suits such as Miguel always wore remained the height of Dutch fashion. Here was perhaps the height of the austere influence of the Calvinist divines. The preachers of the Reformed Church ruled that gaudy fashions and bright colors only indulged vanity, and thus the men of Amsterdam dressed in modest black but spiced their dark ensembles with fine cloth, expensive lace, silk collars, and costly hats. The sea of black occasionally sparkled with an Iberian Jew in red or blue or yellow or perhaps a defiant Dutch Catholic who dressed in what colors he liked. In other lands the locals would gawk at foreign dress, but there were so many aliens in the city that strange clothes were admired more often than ridiculed. Miguel believed the Dutch the most curious of all races—the perfect blend of Protestant faith and business ambition.

As Miguel gazed out at the crowd he noticed a desperate-looking fellow moving directly toward him. He thought the man might be a petty tradesman, perhaps in the midst of a dispute with a customer, but as he stepped aside the ruffian continued to fix his gaze on Miguel.

The fellow stopped and flashed a mouth full of wretched teeth. “You don’t know me, Lienzo?”

The sound of the voice steadied him. Miguel saw that he did indeed know the man: Joachim Waagenaar. Joachim, who had once dressed like a gentleman in velvet suits and fine lace, now wore the close-fitting leather cap of a farmer, a stained doublet of rough cloth, and torn, baggy breeches. Once a man to wear perfume and trim his mustache just so, Joachim now smelled of piss and sweat like a beggar.

“Joachim,” he said after a moment. “I didn’t recall you at first.”

“I suppose not.” He unfurled another strained grimace. He’d always had unhealthy teeth, but several that had been broken before were now gone, and along the bottom they were all cracked and had the rough edges of gravel. “Times haven’t gone well with me.”

“I was sorry to hear of your losses,” Miguel answered, speaking so quickly that his Dutch sounded garbled even to his own ears. “I lost greatly too,” he added hastily, in answer to unspoken charges. He had, after all, urged Joachim to put his fortune in Miguel’s failing sugar futures, believing that if he found enough investors he could keep the price of sugar buoyant, but these efforts were like sandbags set against the force of a flood, and the price had tumbled all the same. Joachim had not lost nearly as much as Miguel, but his fortune had been much smaller, so he had fallen fast and hard.

“Those are fine clothes you have upon your back.” Joachim looked him up and down and ran a hand along his own face, which was rough with a beard that grew in a great diversity of lengths, as though he had taken to shaving by hacking at himself with a dull blade. “They did not take your clothes,” he said. “They took my clothes. They forced me to sell them.”

Who might
they
be—creditors, pawnbrokers? Miguel had been abducted and taken to taverns where he was held prisoner until he agreed to pay bills. He had suffered the humiliation of having his hat knocked into the mud by a particularly angry wine merchant. He had been threatened and insulted and angered beyond all reason. But he’d never been made to sell his clothes.

Who could say what might happen to an odd fellow like Joachim. The son of a fishmonger who had profited in the tulipomania thirty years before, Joachim had come of age believing that only fools labored for their money when they might buy and sell for it instead. Even so, he seemed to know nothing of the Exchange but which taverns were closest, and he always depended on brokers to do his thinking. But for a man who was little more than a drunk with money, he was remarkably anxious about holdings, and he’d always fretted over a stuiver lost here and there, suspicious of the very means by which he chose to make his money.

“The business of the Exchange is like the weather,” Miguel had told him once. “You might see signs of rain, but then nature delivers sunshine.”

“But what has happened to my guilders?” Joachim had asked him, after losing a trifling fifty guilders in an East India deal that had not gone quite as Miguel had expected.

Miguel forced a laugh. “Where is the wind after it blows on your face?” He almost added that any man who wonders such things should remove his money from the Exchange and return to selling. Joachim seemed to Miguel ill-suited for this new species of investment, but Miguel did not have so many clients that he could afford to send one away.

Joachim now stood there, panting like a dog, letting his breath blow in Miguel’s face. In the distance the gates to the Exchange opened, and the traders began to file inside, some of the more eager men shoving like unruly boys.

Although everyone had his own affairs to tend to, Miguel worried that someone might see him with this wretch. The burghers of Amsterdam had forbidden Jewish traders to broker for gentiles, and though the Ma’amad claimed to punish this crime with excommunication, Miguel believed it to be the second most violated law in the city (just after the law prohibiting brokers to trade for their own profit as well as their clients’). Nevertheless, a man in Miguel’s situation had to fear being prosecuted for crimes that others could perpetrate with impunity. This conversation with Joachim would have to end quickly.

“I am sorry things have gone hard with you, but I haven’t the time to speak of it now.” Miguel took a tentative step back.

Joachim nodded and stepped closer forward. “I would like to do a little business with you to make up for what I’ve lost. Perhaps, as you say, everything was unintentional.”

Miguel could not think quite how to respond.
Perhaps everything was unintentional.
Did this man have the audacity to accuse Miguel of deceiving him, of having set some sort of trap, as though Miguel’s losses in sugar had been some ruse to get Joachim’s five hundred guilders? Not a day goes by that a broker does not give unsound advice, perhaps ruining those he aims to serve. Those who cannot live with risk have no business in trade.

“I want what you owe me,” Joachim insisted.

At once Miguel recognized Joachim’s ragged voice. He could see it transposed in his mind into an awkward hand, scratchy and uneven. “
You’ve
been sending me those notes.”

“I want my money,” Joachim affirmed. “I want you to help me get back my money. It’s no less than what you owe me.”

With no more room in his life for debt, Miguel disliked this talk of what he owed. He’d made an error in judgment, nothing more. They had both suffered; it should end there.

“What manner of business is this when you send such notes? What am I to make of your strange communications?”

Joachim said nothing. He looked at Miguel the way a dog looks at a man who lectures it.

Miguel tried once more. “We will talk about this when I am at leisure,” he told Joachim, looking about nervously for signs of Ma’amad spies.

“I understand that you are a busy man.” Joachim spread his hands wide. “I, as you can see, haven’t many demands on my time.”

Miguel cast a glance at the Exchange. Every minute here could mean lost money. What if, even now, the man on whom he could unload his brandy futures, at perhaps not too significant a loss, was buying those shares from someone else?

“But I have,” he said to Joachim. “We’ll talk later.” He took another exploratory step backwards.

“When!”
It came out hard, a command more than a question. The word had a power to it, as though he had shouted
stop
! Joachim’s face had changed, too. He now gazed at Miguel sternly, like a magistrate issuing a decree. In the butcher stalls, several people halted in their steps and looked over. Miguel’s heart began to thump a panicky beat.

Joachim moved along with him in the direction of the Dam. “How will you contact me when you don’t know how to find me?”

“Very true,” Miguel agreed, with a foolish laugh. “How thoughtless of me. We’ll speak on Monday, after the close of the Exchange, at the Singing Carp.” It was a little out-of-the-way tavern that Miguel visited when in need of a quiet spot for drink and contemplation.

“Good, good.” Joachim nodded eagerly. “I see it will all be made right. What’s done can surely be undone, so now we’ll shake on it like men of business.”

But Miguel was not about to touch Joachim’s flesh if he could help it, so he hurried away pretending he had not heard. After pressing into the crowd outside the Exchange, he risked a look behind him and saw no sign of Joachim, so he took a moment of rest before entering. Merchants filed past him, many shouting a greeting as they headed through the gates. Miguel straightened his hat, caught his breath, and muttered in Hebrew the prayer said upon receiving ill news.

7

He should have known better than to stand still in the Exchange, for the moment Miguel stopped moving he found himself descended upon by a dozen traders of the lowest sort, each out to test the limits of his indebtedness. “Senhor Lienzo!” A man he hardly knew stood inches away, nearly shouting. “Let’s take a moment to talk of a shipment of copper from Denmark.” Another edged the first aside. “Good senhor, you are the only one I would tell this to, but I have reason to believe that the price of cinnamon will shift dramatically in the next few days. But will it go up or down? Come with me to learn more.” A young trader in Portuguese attire, probably not even twenty years of age, tried to pull him from the crowd. “I want to tell you how the syrup market has expanded these past three months.”

After the unnerving encounter with Joachim, Miguel was in no mood for these scavengers. They were of all nations, the fellowship of desperation requiring no single language or place of origin, only a willingness to survive by leaping from one precipice to the next. Miguel was attempting to force his way past when he saw his brother approach, the
parnass
Solomon Parido by his side. He hated for Daniel and Parido to see him in such low company, but he could hardly run off now that he had been spotted. It is all posture, he told himself. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he told his gathering of unfortunates, “I think you mistake me for a man who might have interest in doing business with you. Good day.”

He pushed off and nearly collided with his brother, who now stood inches away.

“I’ve been looking for you,” said Daniel, who, since the sugar collapse, had rarely so much as glanced at Miguel during Exchange hours. Now he stood close, leaning in to avoid having to shout above the clamor of trade. “I did not, however, expect to see you dealing with miserable men such as these.”

“What is it you gentlemen wish?” he asked, directing his attention in particular to Parido, who had thus far remained silent. The
parnass
had developed a habit of turning up far too frequently for Miguel’s taste.

Parido bowed to Miguel. “Your brother and I have been discussing your affairs.”

“The Holy One has truly blessed me, that two such great men take the time to discuss my dealings,” Miguel said.

Parido blinked. “Your brother mentioned that you were having difficulties.” He ventured a half smile, but he looked no less sour for it.

Miguel looked at him icily, not quite sure how to respond. If that fool brother of his had been talking about coffee again, he would strangle him in the middle of the Exchange. “I think,” he said, “that my brother is not so well informed of my business as he would like to believe.”

“I know you’re still receiving letters from that heretic, Alferonda,” Daniel said blithely, as though unaware that he revealed information that could put Miguel under the
cherem
.

Parido shook his head. “Your correspondence is of no interest to me, and I think your brother, in his eagerness to help you, speaks of family matters best kept private.”

“We are in agreement there,” Miguel said cautiously. What did this new generosity mean? It was true that Parido’s anger seemed to have abated somewhat since Miguel lost money in the sugar collapse. He no longer approached merchants—even while Miguel stood there speaking to them—to advise them to pursue their affairs with a more honest broker. He no longer left a room simply because Miguel entered it. He no longer refused to speak to Miguel when Daniel invited the
parnass
to dinner.

Even after Miguel’s losses, however, Parido would find ways to inflict injury. He would stand with his friends and openly mock Miguel from across the Dam, pointing and smirking as though they were schoolboys. Now he wished to be friends?

Miguel did not bother to conceal his doubt, but Parido only shrugged. “I think you’ll find my actions more convincing than any suspicions. Take a walk with me, Miguel.”

There was nothing to do but agree.

Miguel’s difficulties with the
parnass
had begun because he had followed Daniel’s advice to take Parido’s only daughter, Antonia, as his wife. At that time, nearly two years before, Miguel had been a successful trader, and it had seemed both a good match and a way of solidifying his family’s standing in Amsterdam. Already married himself, Daniel could not make himself part of Parido’s family, but Miguel could. He had gone too long without remarrying, the wives of the Vlooyenburg said, and he grew weary of matchmakers hounding him. Besides, Antonia came with a handsome portion and with Parido’s business connections.

He had no reason to dislike Antonia, but neither did she appeal to him. She was a handsome woman, but he did not find being with her a handsome experience. Miguel had seen a picture of her before they met, and he had been most pleased by the miniature portrait, but though it was a good likeness, the painter had rendered her features far more animated than nature had done herself. Miguel would sit in Parido’s front room, taking stabs at conversation with a girl who would not meet his eye, asked no questions not directly related to the food or drink set out by the servants, and could answer no questions with words other than “Yes, senhor” or “No, senhor.” Miguel soon became intrigued by the idea of teasing her and began asking her questions touching on theology, philosophy, and the political skullduggery of the Vlooyenburg. Such inquiries produced the far more entertaining “I could not say, senhor.”

He knew he ought not to take such pleasure in torturing his future wife, but there was little else of interest to do with her. What it would be like to be married to so dull a woman? Surely he could mold her more to his liking; he could teach her to speak her mind, to have opinions, possibly even to read. And in the end, a wife was merely someone to produce sons and keep an orderly house. An alliance with his brother’s patron would be good for his own business, and if she was good for nothing more, there were whores enough in Amsterdam.

So, possessed of every intention of following through on his promise, Miguel had been discovered by Antonia in her maid’s room—he with his breeches down, she with skirts lifted. The shock of walking into the room and facing Miguel’s bare ass aimed in her direction had proved overwhelming, and she had let off a shriek before fainting and knocking her head against the door on her way down.

The planned marriage between the two was certainly ruined, but disgrace could have been avoided, and Miguel considered it entirely Parido’s fault that the incident had turned to scandal. Miguel wrote him a long letter, begging forgiveness for having abused his hospitality and unwittingly bringing embarrassment upon him:

I cannot ask you to think no more of these events or to put them from your mind. I can only ask that you believe I never wished to see either you or your daughter harmed, and I hope the day may come that will provide me with an opportunity to demonstrate the extent of both my respect and my remorse.

Parido had sent back only a few harsh lines:

Make no effort to contact me again. I care nothing for what you imagine as respect or how you scheme to frame your meager remorse. You and I must be now opposed in all things.

The letter did not mark the end of the conflict, much to the delight of the gossiping wives of the Vlooyenburg. The maid, it was soon discovered, was with child, and Parido publicly insisted that Miguel provide for the bastard once born. With popular sentiment on Parido’s side, for he had kept his breeches on through the whole affair, Miguel endured a week in which old women hooted at him and spat in his direction and children tossed rotten eggs at his head. But Miguel would not accept these accusations. Experience had taught him a thing or two about reproductive rhythms, and he knew the child could not be his. He refused to pay.

With a mind set to vengeance rather than justice, Parido insisted that Miguel be brought before the Ma’amad, to which Parido had not yet been elected. The council was well used to these paternity disputes, and its investigators revealed the father to be Parido himself. Finding himself publicly humiliated, he retired to private life for a month, waiting for some new scandal to entertain the neighborhood. During that month, believing that Antonia could never find a husband in a city that knew she had seen Miguel Lienzo with no breeches, he sent his daughter to marry his sister’s son, a merchant of moderate standing in Salonika.

The world knew the story—that Miguel was to have married Antonia Parido, that the engagement had fallen into ruin, and that Parido had made accusations that had come back to haunt him. There was something that the world did not know.

Miguel had been unwilling to sit idly by while the Ma’amad decided the case, for Parido was a powerful man, destined for the council, and Miguel was but an upstart trader. So he had gone to see the little doxy and conducted his own inquiry. After Miguel had prodded her for some time, she finally admitted that she could not name the child’s father. She could not name him because there was no child; she only claimed that one grew in her belly because she wanted something for her trouble, being cast out on the street as she was.

Miguel might have tried to convince her to tell the truth, and in doing so perhaps restore himself somewhat in Parido’s eyes, but Parido might also have spat upon that gesture. Instead, Miguel explained to the girl that if she convinced the Ma’amad investigators that the child was Parido’s, she would profit most handsomely for her trouble.

Parido, in the end, gave the girl a hundred guilders and sent her on her way. Miguel could once more walk the streets of the Vlooyenburg without fear of assault from grandmothers and children. However, a new disquiet had taken the place of the old. If Parido were ever to learn of Miguel’s treachery, he would show no mercy.

The great open-air Exchange spread out before them, in structure no different from every other bourse in every trading center in Europe. Amsterdam’s Exchange was an enormous rectangle, three massive red-brick stories in height, with an overhang along the inner perimeter. The center remained exposed to the elements, such as the misting rain that now fell, so light as to be indistinguishable from fog. Along the interior and beneath the overhang supported by thick and magnificent columns, scores of men gathered to shout at one another in Dutch or Portuguese or Latin or a dozen other tongues of Europe and beyond, to buy and sell, to trade rumors, and to attempt to predict the future. Each section of the Exchange had, by tradition, its own designated business. Along the walls, men traded in jewels, real estate, woolens, whale oil, tobacco. A merchant could converse with dealers in goods of the East Indies, the West Indies, the Baltic, or the Levant. In the less prestigious roofless center gathered the wine merchants, paint and drug sellers, traders with England, and, toward the far south end, dealers in brandy and the sugar trade.

Miguel regularly saw Spaniards and Germans and Frenchmen. Less frequently, he might encounter Turks and even East Indians. It was something of a mystery why this city should have emerged in the last fifty years as the center of the world’s trade, attracting merchants from every land of importance. It should hardly have been a city at all; the locals liked to say that God created the world, but the Dutch made Amsterdam. Carved out of swamp, plagued with a port only the most skillful pilot could navigate (and then only with luck on his side), lacking any native wealth except for cheese and butter, Amsterdam rose to its place of greatness because of the sheer determination of its citizens.

Parido walked silently for only a few moments, but Miguel could not shake the feeling that the
parnass
derived some pleasure from withholding his business.

“I know your debts weigh heavily on you,” Parido began at last, “and I know you’ve been trading in brandy futures. You’ve gambled that the prices will rise. By closing, two days hence, however, they will surely remain as low as they are now. If I calculate correctly, you stand to lose close to fifteen hundred guilders.”

This was about brandy, not coffee, thank the Most High. But what did Parido know about it—or care, for that matter? “It is closer to a thousand,” he said, hoping to keep his tone even. “I see you’re well informed of my business.”

“The Exchange is little able to hide secrets from the man who wishes to learn them.”

Miguel let out a barking laugh. “And why should you wish to know my secrets, senhor?”

“As I said, I want to make things more comfortable between us, and if you are to trust me, to believe that I will not use my influence as a
parnass
against you, you must see me act in your benefit. Now, as to the problem at hand, I may know a buyer, a Frenchman, who will relieve you of your futures.”

The irritation dropped away. Here was just the sort of lucky turn for which Miguel had hardly dared to hope. Based on rumors of an impending shortage, received from a very reliable source, he had bought the brandy futures at a 70 percent margin, paying only 30 percent of the value of the total quantity up front, and then either losing or gaining as though he had invested the entire sum. Come reckoning day, if brandy increased in value, he would profit as though he had gambled on a much larger amount, but if brandy lost value, as now appeared inevitable, he would owe far more than he had already invested.

An eager buyer was just what he needed, a gift from the heavens. To be rid of this new debt would surely be a sign that the tide of his misfortune had turned. Could he really believe that his enemy had, out of the goodness of his heart, decided to present the solution to Miguel’s most urgent problem? Where could he produce a buyer for these futures, futures that the world knew would only bring debt to their owner?

“I cannot imagine that any man, French or otherwise, would be mad enough to buy my brandy holdings when the market has turned against them. The value of brandy won’t much change in the few days between now and the monthly reckoning.” Unless, Miguel thought, a trading combination plotted to manipulate the price. More than once Miguel had lost when he thought he saw a new trend in prices and only later learned that he had become the victim of a combination’s plot.