“I appreciate your words,” Miguel said. “I’d be happy if things could become easy between us.”
“The next time we see each other,” Parido pressed, “we will meet if not as friends then at least as countrymen.”
“Agreed,” Miguel said, with a bit more warmth. “I thank you for this gesture.”
Hannah heard scraping sounds, like feet shuffling toward the door, and dared not risk remaining in the hall any longer.
Women were not made privy to business affairs, but she knew that Parido had long done what he could to harm Miguel’s dealings. Could he now trust this offer of friendship, coming as it did so suddenly? It put Hannah in mind of children’s stories, of witches who lured children into their homes with promises of sweets, or hobgoblins who tempted greedy travelers with gold and jewels. She thought to warn Miguel, but he scarcely needed her wisdom. Miguel knew a witch or a hobgoblin when he saw one. He would not be easily fooled.
4
Though he had more pressing things to consider, Miguel visited a bookseller near the Westerkerk and found a translation of an English pamphlet extolling the virtues of coffee. The author wrote with an enthusiasm that dwarfed Geertruid’s. Coffee, he insisted, has all but destroyed the plague in England. It preserves health in general and makes those who drink it hearty and fat; it helps the digestion and cures consumption and other maladies of the lung. It is wonderful for fluxes, even the bloody flux, and has been known to cure jaundice and every kind of inflammation. Besides all that, the Englishman wrote, it imparts astonishing powers of reason and concentration. In the years to come, the author said, the man who does not drink coffee may never hope to compete with the man who avails himself of its secrets.
Later, down in his space in Daniel’s cellar, Miguel fought back the urge to pick up a pewter pitcher and hurl it against the wall. Should he give his attention to coffee or brandy? Could he separate the two? The brandy business pulled him down like a weight on a drowning man, but coffee could be the very thing to buoy him up.
He turned for comfort, as he increasingly did, to his collection of pamphlets. Since coming to Amsterdam, Miguel had discovered a love of Spanish adventures, translated French romances, marvelous travel stories, and, most of all, salacious tales of crime. Of these accounts of murderers and thieves, Miguel loved best the pamphlets recounting the adventures of Charming Pieter, the clever bandit who had been playing his wily tricks on the foolish rich in and around Amsterdam for years. Geertruid had first introduced him to the adventures of this scoundrel hero who, she said, along with his Goodwife Mary, embodied the very core of Dutch cleverness. She read the pamphlets eagerly, sometimes aloud to her man, Hendrick, and sometimes to an entire tavern of men, who laughed and hooted and toasted this thief. Were the stories true, were they mere fictions like Don Quixote, or something in between?
Miguel had resisted the allure of these stories at first. In Lisbon he had never bothered with lurid accounts of murderers and executions, and now he had reading enough with his studies of Torah. Nevertheless, Charming Pieter had won him over; Miguel had become enchanted by the bandit’s celebration of his own duplicity. The Conversos of Lisbon had been duplicitous by necessity, even those who fully embraced the Catholic Church. A New Christian could be betrayed at any time by a victim under an Inquisitor’s knife. Miguel had habitually lied, hidden facts about himself, eaten pork in public; he had done anything to prevent his name from being the one to come to a prisoner’s lips. Deception had always been a burden, but Pieter reveled in his duplicity. Miguel was enchanted by these tales because he longed, like Charming Pieter, to be a trickster instead of a liar.
Now he tried to lose himself in one of his favorite stories, that of a rich burgher who, entranced by Goodwife Mary’s beauty, had thought to cuckold Pieter. While she provided a distraction with her wit and artful ways, Pieter and his men carried off all of the burgher’s possessions. After turning the burgher out of his own home, naked to the world, Pieter and Mary opened up the man’s larder to the people of the village and allowed them to feast upon his wealth. And so, in his own way, Charming Pieter carried out the justice of the common folk.
When he closed the little volume, Miguel was still thinking about brandy and about coffee.
That afternoon, he received a letter from the usurer Alonzo Alferonda, with whom he maintained a cautious friendship. Alferonda had a reputation as a man dangerous to neglect-dozens of blinded and lamed debtors in Amsterdam would testify to that-but Miguel found Alferonda’s hobbled victims hard to reconcile with the plump and jovial fellow who seemed to have an infinite store of kindness. The Ma’amad would have destroyed Miguel for his congress with a man it had expelled, but Alferonda’s company was too merry to set aside. Even in his exiled state, he had knowledge and information, and he never hesitated to pass it along.
Some months ago, Miguel had mentioned a rumor he’d heard, and Alferonda volunteered to find out what he could. Now he claimed to have learned something important and requested that they talk-always a tricky business, but usually managed well enough with a bit of caution. Miguel wrote to Alferonda suggesting they meet in the coffee tavern, which he had found by inquiring of a few men in the East India trade.
Miguel knew only that the place was located in the Plantage, which stretched out east of the Vlooyenburg, endless walks cutting through sculpted gardens. Square paths crisscrossed walkways, peopled with the high and the low alike. The burgomasters had ruled that no permanent buildings might stand on its verdant grounds, so all structures here were made of wood, ready to be taken apart should the city so decree. On pleasant evenings, the Plantage became a garden of delights for those who had the coin and the inclination. Strollers could walk among bands of fiddlers and fife players. On the well-lighted paths, entrepreneurs had set up tables and poured beer and served sausage or herring or cheese; in houses hardly more than huts, a man could buy delicacies of a more human kind.
Miguel located the meeting place with difficulty, after asking several other proprietors for directions. Finally he came upon what he suspected was the right building, a poor wooden structure built at crazed angles, hardly looking fit to withstand a rainstorm. Miguel found the door locked, but a nearby brothel keeper had assured him that it was the right place, so he knocked loudly.
Almost at once the door opened a crack and Miguel stared at a dark-skinned Turk in a yellow turban. The man said nothing.
“Is this the coffee tavern?” Miguel asked.
“Who are you?” the Turk grunted in muddled Dutch.
“Is the tavern private? I did not know.”
“I did not say it was. I did not say it wasn’t. I only asked who you are.”
“I’m not sure my name will mean anything to you. I am Miguel Lienzo.”
The Turk nodded. “Senhor Alferonda’s friend. You may come in. Senhor Alferonda’s friends will always find themselves welcome here.”
Senhor Alferonda’s friend? Miguel had no idea that Alferonda had even heard of coffee, but apparently he was well known among the Mohammedans. Miguel followed the Turk into the building, hardly more impressive on the inside than the outside. Rough chairs and tables sat on a damp earth floor. At once he was overwhelmed by the scent of coffee, far more intense and pungent than what he had smelled at Geertruid’s cousin’s tavern. On a half dozen or so benches sat an odd assortment of men: Turks in turbans, seafaring Dutchmen, a hodgepodge of foreigners-and one Jew. Alonzo Alferonda sat conversing with a tall Turk in faded blue robes. He whispered something as Miguel approached, and the Turk departed.
Alferonda stood to greet Miguel, though standing only emphasized his shortness. He was a rounded fellow with a wide face and large eyes hidden behind a thick beard of slightly graying black. Miguel could scarce believe there were many men who trembled before this pudgy face. One night they had walked together after drinking at a tavern near the docks. A pair of thieves had leapt from an alley, knives brandished, set to take their purses. One look at Alferonda, and they scurried away like frightened cats.