The Coffee Trader

1

It rippled thickly in the bowl, dark and hot and uninviting. Miguel Lienzo picked it up and pulled it so close he almost dipped his nose into the tarry liquid. Holding the vessel still for an instant, he breathed in, pulling the scent deep into his lungs. The sharp odor of earth and rank leaves surprised him; it was like something an apothecary might keep in a chipped porcelain jar.

“What is this?” Miguel asked, working through his irritation by pushing at the cuticle of one thumb with the nail of the other. She knew he had no time to waste, so why had she brought him here for this nonsense? One bitter remark after another bubbled up inside him, but Miguel let loose with none of them. It wasn’t that he was afraid of her, but he often found himself going to great lengths to avoid her displeasure.

He looked over and saw that Geertruid met his silent cuticle mutilation with a grin. He knew that irresistible smile and what it meant: she was mightily pleased with herself, and when she looked that way it was hard for Miguel not to be mightily pleased with her too.

“It’s something extraordinary,” she told him, gesturing toward his bowl. “Drink it.”

“Drink it?” Miguel squinted into the blackness. “It looks like the devil’s piss, which would certainly be extraordinary, but I’ve no desire to know what it tastes like.”

Geertruid leaned toward him, almost brushing up against his arm. “Take a sip and then I’ll tell you everything. This devil’s piss is going to make both our fortunes.”

It had begun not an hour earlier, when Miguel felt someone take hold of his arm.

In the instant before he turned his head, he ticked off the unpleasant possibilities: rival or creditor, an abandoned lover or her angry relative, the Danish fellow to whom he’d sold those Baltic grain futures with too enthusiastic a recommendation. Not so long ago the approach of a stranger had held promise. Merchants and schemers and women had all sought Miguel’s company, asking his advice, craving his companionship, bargaining for his guilders. Now he wished only to learn in what new shape disaster would unfold itself.

He never thought to stop walking. He was part of the procession that formed each day when the bells of the Nieuwe Kerk struck two, signaling the end of trading on the Exchange. Hundreds of brokers poured out onto the Dam, the great plaza at Amsterdam ’s center. They spread out along the alleys and roads and canal sides. Along the Warmoesstraat, the fastest route to the most popular taverns, shopkeepers stepped outside, donning wide-brimmed leather hats to guard against damp that rolled in from the Zuiderzee. They set out sacks of spices, rolls of linen, barrels of tobacco. Tailors and shoemakers and milliners waved men inside; sellers of books and pens and exotic trinkets cried out their wares.

The Warmoesstraat became a current of black hats and black suits, speckled only with the white of collars, sleeves, and stockings or the flash of silver shoe buckles. Traders pushed past goods from the Orient or the New World, from places of which no one had heard a hundred years before. Excited like schoolboys set free of the classroom, the traders talked of their business in a dozen different languages. They laughed and shouted and pointed; they grabbed at anything young and female that crossed their path. They took out their purses and devoured the shopkeepers’ goods, leaving only coins in their wake.

Miguel Lienzo neither laughed nor admired the commodities set out before him nor clutched at the soft parts of willing shop girls. He walked silently, head down against the light rain. Today was, on the Christian calendar, the thirteenth day of May, 1659. Accounts on the Exchange closed each month on the twentieth; let a man make what maneuvers he liked, none of it mattered until the twentieth, when the credits and debits of the month were tallied and money at last changed hands. Today things had gone badly with a matter of brandy futures, and Miguel now had less than a week to pluck his fat from the fire or he would find himself another thousand guilders in debt.

Another thousand. He already owed three thousand. Once he had made double that in a year, but six months ago the sugar market collapsed, taking Miguel’s fortune with it. And then-well, one mistake after another. He wanted to be like the Dutch, who regarded bankruptcy as no shame. He tried to tell himself it did not matter, it was only a little while longer until he undid the damage, but believing that tale required an increasing effort. How long, he wondered, until his wide and boyish face turned pinched? How long until his eyes lost the eager sparkle of a merchant and took on the desperate, hollow gaze of a gambler? He vowed it would not happen to him. He would not become one of those lost souls, the ghosts who haunted the Exchange, living from one reckoning day to the next, toiling to secure just enough profit to keep their accounts afloat for one more month when surely all would be made easy.

Now, with unknown fingers wrapped around his arm, Miguel turned and saw a neatly dressed Dutchman of the middling ranks, hardly more than twenty years of age. He was a muscular wide-shouldered fellow with blond hair and a face almost more pretty than handsome, though his drooping mustache added a masculine flair.

Hendrick. No family name that anyone had ever heard. Geertruid Damhuis’s fellow.

“Greetings, Jew Man,” he said, still holding on to Miguel’s arm. “I hope all goes well for you this afternoon.”

“Things always go well with me,” he answered, as he twisted his neck to see if any prattling troublemaker might lurk behind him. The Ma’amad, the ruling council among the Portuguese Jews, forbade congress between Jews and “inappropriate” gentiles, and while this designation could prove treacherously ambiguous, no one could mistake Hendrick, in his yellow jerkin and red breeches, for anything appropriate.

“Madam Damhuis sent me to fetch you,” he said.

Geertruid had played at this before. She knew Miguel could not risk being seen on so public a street as the Warmoesstraat with a Dutchwoman, particularly a Dutchwoman with whom he did business, so she sent her man instead. There was no less risk to Miguel’s reputation, but this way she could force his hand without even showing her face.

“Tell her I haven’t the time for so lovely a diversion,” he said. “Not just now.”

“Of course you do.” Hendrick grinned widely. “What man can say no to Madam Damhuis?”

Not Miguel. At least not easily. He had difficulty saying no to Geertruid or to anyone else-including himself-who proposed something amusing. Miguel had no stomach for doom; disaster felt to him like an awkward and loose suit. He had to force himself each day to play the cautious role of a man in the throes of ruin. That, he knew, was his true curse, the curse of all former Conversos: in Portugal he had grown too used to falseness, pretending to worship as a Catholic, pretending to despise Jews and respect the Inquisition. He had thought nothing of being one thing while making the world believe he was another. Deception, even self-deception, came far too easily.

“Thank your mistress but give her my regrets.” With reckoning day soon upon him, and new debts to burden him, he would have to curb his diversions, at least for a while. And there had been another note this morning, a strange anonymous scrawl on a torn piece of paper. I want my money. It was one of a half dozen or so Miguel had received in the last month. I want my money. Wait your turn, Miguel would think glumly, as he opened each of these letters, but he was unnerved by the terse tone and uneven hand. Only a madman would send such a message without a name-for how could Miguel respond even if he had the money and even if he were inclined to use what little he had for something so foolish as paying debts?

Hendrick stared, as though he couldn’t understand Miguel’s good, if thickly accented, Dutch.

“Today is not the day,” Miguel said, a bit more forcefully. He avoided speaking too adamantly to Hendrick, whom he had once seen slam a butcher’s head into the stones of the Damplatz for selling Geertruid rancid bacon.

Hendrick gazed at Miguel with the special pity men of the middle rank reserved for their superiors. “Madam Damhuis told me to inform you that today is the day. She tells me that she will show you something, and when you set your eyes on it, you will forever after divide your life into the time before this afternoon and the time after.”

The thought of her disrobing flashed before him. That would be a lovely divide between the past and the future and would certainly be worth setting aside his business for the afternoon. However, Geertruid loved to play at these games. There was little chance she meant to take off as much as her cap. But there was no getting rid of Hendrick, and urgent as his troubles might be, Miguel could make no deals with this Dutchman lurking in his shadow. It had happened before. He would trail Miguel from tavern to tavern, from alley to canal side, until Miguel surrendered. Best to have this over with, he decided, so he sighed and said he would go.

With a sharp gesture of his neck, Hendrick led them off the ancient cobbled street and across the steep bridges toward the new part of the city, ringed by the three great canals-the Herengracht, the Keizersgracht, and the Prinsengracht-and then toward the Jordaan, the most rapidly growing part of town, where the air echoed with the ring of hammer on anvil and the chipping of chisel on stone.

Hendrick led him along the waters of the Rozengracht, where barges pierced the thick canal mist as they headed toward the docks to unload their goods. The new houses of the newly wealthy stood on either side of the murky water, facing the oak- and linden-lined waterway. Miguel had once rented the better part of so fine a house, red-brick and steeple-gabled. But then Brazilian production of sugar had far exceeded Miguel’s expectations. He’d been gambling on low production for years, but suddenly Brazilian farmers unleashed an unexpected crop, and in an instant prices collapsed. A great man of the Exchange as instantly became a debtor living off his brother’s scraps.

Once they departed from the main street, the Jordaan lost its charm. The neighborhood was new-where they stood had been farmland only thirty years before-but already the alleyways had taken on the decrepit cast of a slum. Dirt replaced the cobblestones. Huts made of thatch and scraps of wood leaned against squat houses black with tar. The alleys vibrated with the hollow clacking of looms, as weavers spun from sunup until late into the night, all in the hope of earning enough to keep their bellies full for one more day.

In moments of weakness, Miguel feared that poverty would claim him as it had claimed the wretched of the Jordaan, that he would fall into a well of debt so deep he would lose even the dream of recovering himself. Would he be the same man then-himself, yet penniless-or would he become as hollow as the beggars and luckless laborers he passed on the streets?

He assured himself it would not happen. A true merchant never gives in to gloom. A man who has lived as a Secret Jew always has one more trick to save his skin. At least until he fell into the clutches of the Inquisition, he reminded himself, and there was no Inquisition in Amsterdam. Just the Ma’amad.

But what was he doing here with this inscrutable Dutchman? Why had he allowed his will to collapse when he had business, important business, to pursue?

“To what sort of place are you taking me?” Miguel asked, hoping to find a reason to excuse himself.

“A miserable sort of place,” Hendrick said.

Miguel opened his mouth to voice an objection, but it was too late. They had arrived.

Though he was not, like the Dutch, inclined to believe in omens, Miguel would later recall that his venture had begun in a place called the Golden Calf, surely an unpromising name. They climbed down a steep and viciously low-ceilinged stairwell to the cellar, a little room that might comfortably have held thirty souls but now contained perhaps fifty. The choking smoke of cheap West Indian tobacco and musty peat stoves nearly suppressed the scent of spilled beer and wine, old cheese, and the odor of fifty unwashed men-or, rather, forty men and ten whores-whose mouths puffed out onions and beer.

At the bottom of the stairs, an enormous man, shaped remarkably liked a pear, blocked their passage, and sensing that someone wished to get by he moved his bulk backwards to prevent anyone from squeezing past. He held a tankard in one hand and a pipe in the other, and he shouted something incomprehensible to his companions.

“Move your monstrous bulk, fellow,” Hendrick said to him.

The man turned his head just enough to register his scowl and then looked away.

“Fellow”-Hendrick tried again-“you are the hard turd in the ass of my journey. Don’t make me apply a purgative to flush you out.”

“Go piss in your breeches,” he answered, and then belched laughter in his friends’ faces.

“Fellow,” said Hendrick, “turn around and see to whom you speak so rudely.”

The man did turn around, and as he saw Hendrick the grin melted from his jowly three-days-unshaved face. “Begging your pardon,” he said. He pulled his cap down off his head and moved quickly out of the way, knocking clumsily into his friends.

This newfound humility wasn’t enough to satisfy Hendrick, who reached out like the lash of a whip and grabbed the man’s filthy shirt. The tankard and pipe fell to the floor. “Tell me,” Hendrick said, “should I crush your throat or not crush your throat?”

“Not crush,” the drunk suggested eagerly. His hands flapped like bird wings.

“What do you say, Jew Man?” Hendrick asked Miguel. “Crush or not crush?”

“Oh, let him go,” Miguel answered wearily.

Hendrick released his grip. “The Jew Man says to let you go. You remember that, fellow, next time you think to toss a dead fish or rotten cabbage at a Jew. A Jew has saved your hide today, and for no good reason, too.” He turned to Miguel. “This way.”

A nod from Hendrick was enough, and the crowd gave way for them as the Red Sea parted for Moses. Across the tavern, Miguel saw Geertruid, sitting at the bar, pretty as a tulip in a dung heap. When Miguel stepped forward she turned to him and smiled, wide and bright and irresistible. He could not help but return the smile, feeling like a fool boy, which was how she regularly made him feel. She had an illicit charm about her. Spending time with Geertruid was like bedding a friend’s wife (something he had never done, for adultery is a most dreadful sin, and no woman he’d ever met had been tempting enough to lead him down that path) or giving a virgin her first kiss (which was something he had done, but only once, and that virgin later became his wife). The air around Geertruid always tingled with forbidden and elusive desire. Perhaps it was because Miguel had never spent so much time with a woman to whom he was unrelated without bedding her.

“Madam, I’m honored you wished to see me, but I’m afraid I haven’t time for these diversions just now.”

“Reckoning day approaches,” she said sympathetically. She shook her head with a sadness that bordered somewhere between maternal and mocking.

“It approaches, and I’ve a great deal to put in order.” He thought to tell her more, that things had gone badly and, unless he could devise a remarkable scheme, he would be another thousand in debt within a week. But he didn’t say that. After six months of brutal, relentless, numbing indebtedness, Miguel had learned a thing or two about how to live as a debtor. He had even considered writing a little tract on the matter. The first rules were that a man must never act like a debtor and he must never announce his troubles to anyone who did not need to know them.

“Come, sit next to me for a moment,” she said.

He thought to say no, he preferred to stand, but sitting next to her was much more delicious than standing nearby, so he felt himself nodding before he’d realized he’d made a decision.

It was not that Geertruid was more beautiful than other women, though she certainly had some beauty about her. At first glance she seemed nothing unusual, a prosperous widow of her middle thirties, regally tall, still quite pretty, particularly if a man gazed upon her from the proper distance or with enough beer in his belly. But even though she was past her prime, she yet retained more than her share of charms and had been blessed with one of those smooth and circular northern faces, as creamy as Holland butter. Miguel had seen youths twenty years her junior staring hungrily at Geertruid.

Hendrick appeared from behind Miguel and removed the man sitting next to Geertruid. Miguel moved in as Hendrick led the fellow away.

“I can only spare a few minutes,” he told her.

“I think you’ll give me more time than that.” She leaned forward and kissed him, just above the border of his fashionably short beard.

The first time she had kissed him they had been in a tavern, and Miguel, who had never before had a woman for a friend, let alone a Dutchwoman, thought himself obligated to take her to one of the back rooms and lift her skirts. It would not have been the first time a Dutchwoman had made her intentions known to Miguel. They liked his easy manner, his quick smile, his large black eyes. Miguel had a rounded face, soft and youthful without being babyish. Dutchwomen sometimes asked if they could touch his beard. It happened in taverns and musicos and on the streets in the less fashionable parts of town. They claimed they wanted to feel his beard, neatly trimmed and handsome as it was, but Miguel knew better. They liked his face because it was soft like a child’s and hard like a man’s.

Geertruid, however, never wanted anything more than to press her lips against his beard. She had long since made it clear that she had no interest at all in having her skirts lifted, at least not by Miguel. These Dutchwomen kissed anyone they liked for any reason they liked, and they did so more boldly than the Jewish women of the Portuguese Nation dared to kiss their husbands.

“You see,” she told him as she gestured to the crowd, “even though you’ve been in this city for years, I still have new sights to show you.”

“I fear your stock of the new may be running thin.”

“At least you needn’t worry about that Hebrew council of yours seeing us in this place.”

It was true enough. Jews and gentiles were permitted to conduct business in taverns, but what Jew among the Portuguese would choose this foul pit? Still, a man could never be overly cautious. Miguel took a quick look around for the telltale signs of Ma’amad spies: men who might be Jews dressed as Dutch laborers, conspicuous fellows alone or in pairs, eating none of the food; beards, which hardly anyone but Jews wore, cut close with scissors to resemble clean shaves (the Torah forbade only the use of razors on faces, not the trimming of beards, but beards were so out of fashion in Amsterdam that even the hint of one marked a man as a Jew).

Geertruid slid her hand along Miguel’s, a gesture that came just short of the amorous. She loved freedom with men above all else. Her husband, whom she spoke of as the cruelest of villains, had been dead some years now, and she’d not yet finished celebrating her liberty. “That sack of fat behind the bar is my cousin Crispijn,” she said.

Miguel glanced at the man: pale, corpulent, heavy-lidded-no different from ten thousand others in the city. “Thank you for letting me witness your bloated kinsman. I hope I may at least ask him to bring me a tankard of his least foul beer to drown the stench?”

“No beer. I have something else in mind today.”

Miguel did not try to suppress a smile. “Something else in mind? And is this where you have decided I might finally know your secret charms?”

“I have secrets aplenty-you may depend on it-but not such as you’re thinking.” She waved over to her cousin, who replied with a solemn nod and then disappeared into the kitchen. “I want you to taste a new drink-a wondrous luxury.”

Miguel stared at her. He might have been in any one of half a dozen other taverns now, speaking of woolens or copper or the lumber trade. He might be working hard to repair his ruined accounts, finding some bargain that he alone could recognize or convincing some drunkard to sign his name to the brandy futures. “Madam, I thought you understood that my affairs are pressing. I have no time for luxuries.”

She leaned in closer and looked him full in his face, and for an instant Miguel believed she meant to kiss him. Not some sly buss on the cheek but a true kiss, hungry and urgent.

He was mistaken. “I didn’t bring you here idly, and you will find that I offer you nothing ordinary,” she told him, her lips close enough to his face that he could taste her fine breath.

And then her cousin Crispijn brought out something that changed his life.

Two earthen bowls sat steaming with a liquid blacker than the wines of Cahors. In the dim light, Miguel gripped the lightly chipped vessel with both hands and took his first taste.

It had a rich, almost enchanting, bitterness-something Miguel had never before experienced. It bore a resemblance to chocolate, which once he had tasted years ago. Perhaps he thought of chocolate only because the drinks were both hot and dark and served in thick clay bowls. This one had a less voluptuous flavor, sharper and more sparing. Miguel took another taste and set it down. When he had sampled chocolate, he had been intrigued enough to swallow two bowls of the stuff, which so inflamed his spirits that even after visiting two satisfactory whores he had felt it necessary to visit his physician, who restored his unbalanced humors with a sound combination of emetics and purges.

“It’s made of coffee fruit,” Geertruid told him, folding her arms as though she had invented the mixture herself.

Miguel had come across coffee once or twice, but only as a commodity traded by East India merchants. The business of the Exchange did not require a man to know an item’s nature, only its demand-and sometimes, in the heat of the trade, not even that.

He reminded himself to say the blessing over wonders of nature. Some Jews would turn away from their gentile friends when they blessed their food or drink, but Miguel took pleasure in the prayers. He loved to utter them in public, and in a land where he could not be prosecuted for speaking the holy tongue. He wished he had more occasions to bless things. Saying the words filled him with giddy defiance; he thought of each openly spoken Hebrew word as a knife in the belly of some Inquisitor somewhere.

“It’s a new substance-entirely new,” Geertruid explained when he was done. “You take it not to delight the senses but to awaken the intellect. Its advocates drink it at breakfast to regain their senses, and they drink it at night to help them remain awake longer.”

Geertruid’s face became as somber as one of the Calvinist preachers who railed from makeshift pulpits in town plazas. “This coffee isn’t like wine or beer, which we drink to make merry or because it quenches thirst or even because it is delightful. This will only make you thirstier, it will never make you merry, and the taste, let us be honest, may be curious but never pleasing. Coffee is something… something far more important.”

Miguel had known Geertruid long enough to be acquainted with her many foolish habits. She might laugh all night and drink as much as any Dutchman alive, she might neglect her affairs and tromp barefoot around the countryside like a girl, but in matters of business she was as serious as any man. A businesswoman such as she would have been an impossibility back in Portugal, but among the Dutch her kind was, if not precisely common, hardly shocking.

“This is what I think,” she said, her voice hardly loud enough to rise above the din of the tavern. “Beer and wine may make a man sleepy, but coffee will make him awake and clearheaded. Beer and wine may make a man amorous, but coffee will make him lose interest in the flesh. The man who drinks coffee fruit cares only for his business.” She paused for another sip. “Coffee is the drink of commerce.”

How many times, conducting business in taverns, had Miguel’s wits suffered with each tankard of beer? How many times had he wished he had the concentration for another hour’s clarity with the week’s pricing sheets? A sobering drink was just the thing for a trading man.

An eagerness had begun to wash over Miguel, and he found his foot tapping impatiently. The sounds and sights of the tavern drifted away. There was nothing but Geertruid. And coffee. “Who now drinks it?” he asked.

“I hardly know,” Geertruid admitted. “I’ve heard there is a coffee tavern somewhere in the city-frequented by Turks, they say-but I’ve never seen it. I know of no Dutchmen who take coffee, unless it be prescribed by a physician, but the word will spread. Already, in England, taverns that serve coffee instead of wine and beer have opened, and men of trade flock to them to talk business. These coffee taverns become like exchanges unto themselves. It can’t be too long before those taverns open here as well, for what city loves commerce so well as Amsterdam?”

“Are you suggesting,” Miguel asked, “that you want to open a tavern?”

“The taverns are nothing. We must put ourselves in a position to supply them.” She took his hand. “The demand is coming, and if we prepare ourselves for that demand, we can make a great deal of money.”

The coffee’s scent began to make him light-headed with something like desire. No, not desire. Greed. Geertruid had stumbled upon something, and Miguel felt her infectious eagerness swelling in his chest. It was like panic or jubilance or something else, but he wanted to leap from his seat. Was this energy from the strength of her idea or the effect of the coffee? If coffee fruit made a man unable to keep from fidgeting, how could it be the drink of commerce?

Still, coffee was something marvelous, and if he could dare to hope that no one else in Amsterdam plotted to take advantage of this new drink, it could be the very thing to save him from ruin. For six dismal months, Miguel had at times felt himself in a waking dream. His life had been replaced with a sad imitation, with the bloodless life of a lesser man. Could coffee restore him to his rightful place?

He loved the money that came with success, but he loved the power more. He relished the respect he had commanded on the Exchange and in the Vlooyenburg, the island neighborhood where the Portuguese Jews lived. He loved hosting lavish dinners and never inquiring of the bill. He took pleasure in giving to the charitable boards. Here was money for the poor-let them eat. Here was money for the refugees-let them find homes. Here was money for the scholars in the Holy Land -let them work to bring in the age of the Messiah. The world could be a holier place because Miguel had money to give, and he gave it.

That was Miguel Lienzo, not this wretch at whose failings children and beefy housewives smirked. He could not much longer endure the anxious stares of other traders, who hurried away from him lest his ill fortune spread like plague, or the pitying looks from his brother’s pretty wife, whose moist eyes suggested she saw kinship between her misery and his.

Perhaps he had suffered enough, and the Holy One, blessed be He, had put this opportunity before him. Did he dare to believe that? Miguel wanted to agree to anything Geertruid proposed, but he had lost too many times in recent months for acting on foolish hunches. It would be madness to forge ahead, particularly when he would be plunging with a partner whose very existence would make him vulnerable to the Ma’amad.

“How is it that this magic potion has not swept through Europe already?” he asked.

“All things must begin somewhere. Must we wait,” she added in a conspiratorial voice, “until some other ambitious merchant learns its secret?”

Miguel pushed back from the counter and sat up straight. “Tell me what you propose.” He waited with startling hunger for Geertruid’s words; she could not answer quickly enough, and Miguel wanted to reply before the words had even been uttered.

Geertruid rubbed her long hands together. “I have determined to do some sort of business with coffee, and I have some capital, but I have no idea how to proceed. You are a man of business, and I need your help-and your partnership.”

It was one thing to call this high-spirited widow his friend when they were private together, to drink and gamble with her, to stand for her on the Exchange and make small trades now and again-despite the Ma’amad’s having forbidden Jews to broker for gentiles on pain of excommunication. It was another thing to take her as a partner in business. Some Jews might emerge unscathed from so unusual an arrangement, but Miguel could not count on his luck, not without money or influence to protect him.

Once Miguel had scoffed at the council’s humorless censures, but the Ma’amad had begun to carry out more of its threats. It sent its spies in pursuit of violators of the Sabbath and eaters of unclean food. It cast out those, like the usurer Alonzo Alferonda, who broke its arbitrary rules. It hounded those like poor Bento Spinoza, who uttered heresies so vague that almost no one even understood that his words were heretical. More than that, Miguel had an enemy on the council who surely only waited for the flimsiest excuse to strike.

So many risks. Miguel bit his lip, forcing back the urge to smirk. He could live with the risks if he could promise himself not to think of them too often.

Miguel began to tap the counter. He wanted to act immediately. He could begin at once to secure contacts and agents upon almost any important exchange in Europe. He could juggle coffee by the barrelful, moving it from this port to that. This was the true essence of Miguel Lienzo; he made deals and connections and arrangements. He was no coward to shrink from an opportunity because bitter and hypocritical men told him that they knew better than the Sages what was right and wrong.

“How shall we do this?” he said at last, suddenly aware he had not spoken for several minutes. “The coffee-fruit trade belongs to the East India Company, and we can’t hope to take control away from men of their power. I don’t understand what you’re proposing.”

“Nor do I!” Geertruid threw her hands into the air excitedly. “But I am proposing something. We must do something. I won’t allow the fact that I do not know what I am proposing stand in my way. As they say, even the blind may stumble upon Heaven. You worry about the twentieth-you owe money? I am offering you riches. A great new venture with which to rebuild and make your current debt seem trivial.”

“I’ll need time to think about it,” he told her, though he needed nothing of the kind. A man does not get many such opportunities in his life, and to ruin his chances out of impatience would be madness. “We’ll discuss these things again after the twentieth. In a week.”

“A week is a long time,” the widow said thoughtfully. “Fortunes are made in a week. Empires rise and fall in a week.”

“I need a week,” Miguel repeated softly.

“A week, then,” Geertruid said, in her amiable way. She knew not to push further.

Miguel realized he had been fidgeting with the buttons of his coat. “And now I must leave and tend to my more immediate concerns.”

“Before you go, let me give you something to help you consider the enterprise.” Geertruid signaled to Crispijn, who hurried over and set down before her a rough woolen sack.

“He owes me some money,” she explained, once her cousin had walked away. “I agreed to take a little of this as payment, and I wanted to give you something to think about.”

Miguel looked in the bag, which contained perhaps a dozen handfuls of brownish berries.

“Coffee,” Geertruid said. “I’ve had Crispijn cook the berries for you because I know a Portuguese hidalgo cannot be expected to roast his own fruit. You merely need grind them to a powder, which you mix with hot milk or sweet water, then filter out the powder if you like, or just let it settle. Don’t drink too much of the powder itself, lest you agitate your bowels.”

“You did not mention bowel agitation when you sang its praises.”

“Even nature’s greatest glories can harm if taken in the wrong dose. I wouldn’t have said anything, but a man with uneasy bowels makes a poor business partner.”

Miguel let her kiss him again, and then he squeezed through the tavern and stepped out into the misty cool of the late afternoon. After the stench of the Golden Calf, the salty air off the IJ felt as wonderfully cleansing as the mikvah, and he let the mist fall on his face for a moment until a boy, not six years old, began to pull on his sleeve and weep piteously about his mother. Miguel tossed the boy a half stuiver, already relishing the wealth coffee would bring: freedom from debt, his own home, a chance to marry once more, children.

In an instant he chastised himself for indulging in these fancies in light of the day’s setbacks. Another thousand guilders in debt. He owed three thousand already throughout the Vlooyenburg, including fifteen hundred to his brother, borrowed after the sugar market collapsed. He’d allowed the Bankruptcy Office at the Town Hall to settle his debts to Christians, but the Jews of his neighborhood ordered their own accounts.

High tide had begun to move in, and the waters had crept up beyond the Rozengracht to slick the streets. Across town, in his brother’s house, the cavernous cellar where Miguel now slept at night would soon begin its own flooding. That was the price of living in a city built in the water upon piles, but Miguel now thought nothing of the discomforts of Amsterdam that had troubled him when he had first arrived. He hardly noticed the dead-fish stench of canal water or the squish of walking on wet ground. Dead fish was the perfume of Amsterdam ’s riches, the squish of water its melody.

The prudent thing would be to go home at once and write a note to Geertruid explaining that the risks of working with her were too great and might well lead to his ruin. But he would never free himself from debt with prudence, and ruin was already upon him. Only a few months ago his sugar had crammed canal-side warehouses; he had strutted across the Vlooyenburg like a burgher. He had been ready to set the loss of Katarina behind him, to take a new wife and have sons, and the marriage brokers had clawed at one another to gain access to him. But now he was in debt. His standing had collapsed to worse than nothing. He received threatening notes from a man who must be mad. How could he turn his fortune if not by doing something daring?

He had taken risks all his life. Was he to stop because he feared the arbitrary power of the Ma’amad, those men who, entrusted to uphold the Law of Moses, valued their power above God’s Word? The Law had nothing to say about Dutch widows. Why should Miguel avoid making his fortune with one?

He might have tried to conduct a little more business that day, but he suspected his agitation would lead to nothing productive, so instead he went to the Talmud Torah synagogue for afternoon and evening prayers. The now-familiar liturgy soothed him like spiced wine, and by the time he left he felt renewed.

As he walked the short distance from the synagogue to his brother’s house, keeping close to canal-side houses to elude both thieves and the Night Watch, Miguel listened to the click of rat claws on the wooden planks stretched over the sewers. Coffee, he chanted to himself. He hardly needed a week to give Geertruid his answer. He only needed time to convince himself that any scheme he embarked on with her would not complete his ruin.

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The Factual and Revealing Memoirs of Alonzo Alferonda

My name is Alonzo Rodrigo Tomas de la Alferonda, and I brought the drink called coffee to the Europeans-gave birth to its usage there, one might say. Well, perhaps I phrase that too strongly, for coffee surely would have made its murky way without my efforts. Let us say instead that I was the man-midwife who eased its passage from obscurity into glory. No, you will say, that was not me either; it was Miguel Lienzo who did that. What role, then, could Alonzo Alferonda have played in the triumph of this great fruit? More than is generally believed, I assure you. And for those who say I made nothing but mischief, that I thwarted and hindered and harmed rather than advanced, I can only say I know more than my detractors. I was there-and you, in all likelihood, were not.

My true name is Avraham, as was my father’s name and his father’s. All firstborn Alferonda men have secretly called their firstborn sons Avraham for as long as Jews have had secret names, and before that, when the Moors ruled Iberia, they called themselves Avraham openly. For much of my life, I was not permitted to speak my name aloud except in dark rooms, and then only in whispers. Those who would question my actions should remember that. Who would you be today, I ask you who judge me harshly, if your own name was a secret whose revelation could cost your life and the lives of your friends and family?

I was born in the Portuguese city of Lisbon to a family of Jews who were not allowed to pray as Jews. We were called New Christians, or Conversos, for our ancestors had been made to take the Catholic faith or surrender their property-and often their lives. Lest we face torture and ruin and perhaps even death, we prayed publicly as Catholics, but in shadows and in cellars, in secret synagogues that moved from house to house, we prayed as Jews. Prayer books were rare and precious to us. In the light of day a man might measure his wealth in gold, but in the dark of those dark rooms, we measured wealth in pages and in knowledge. Few among our number could read the Hebrew of what few books we had. Few knew the right prayers for the holy days or for Shabbat.

My father knew, or at least he knew some. Having spent the first part of his childhood in the East, he had grown up among Jews unrestrained by the law from practicing their religion. He had prayer books that he lent out freely. He owned a few volumes of the Babylonian Talmud, but he knew no Aramaic and could make little sense of its pages. The Secret Jews in Lisbon came to him for instruction in the rudiments of reading the holy tongue, of the prayers for Shabbat, of fasting on fast days and feasting on feast days. He taught them to eat out-of-doors during Succoth, and of course he taught them to drink themselves to a merry stupor on Purim.

Let me be direct: my father was no holy man or sage or saint. Far from it. I admit this freely and think it no insult to his name. My father was a trickster and a cheat; in his hands, trickery and cheating were beautiful and marvelous things.

Because he was schooled in the ways of our faith-no scholar, mind you, but simply a man with an education-my father was tolerated among the Secret Jews of Lisbon in ways he might not have been otherwise, for he brought far more attention upon himself than was wise for any New Christian. Wherever merchants with a few spare coins might find themselves, my father would be there with his potions to lengthen life, improve virility, or cure any malady. He knew tricks with cards and balls and dice. He could juggle and rope-dance and tumble. He knew how to train dogs to add and subtract simple numbers and how to train cats to dance on their hind legs.

A natural leader of men, my father attracted to him others who made their living through countless deceptive and curious entertainments. He commanded an army of cardsharps and dice cheats, fire-eaters and blade swallowers. Those who could earn a living simply by displaying the shapes with which nature had burdened them also rallied to my father’s banner. Among my earliest childhood companions were dwarfs and giants, the monstrously fat and the horrifically gaunt. I played games with the snake boy and the goat girl. As I grew older I developed an unhealthy curiosity about a person my father knew who had the anatomy of both a man and a woman. For a few coins, this unfortunate would allow anyone to watch it fornicate with itself.

When I was but ten years of age my father received a late-night visit from an older boy, Miguel Lienzo, whom I recognized from synagogue worship. He was a roguish fellow, as much drawn to my father’s company of tricksters and oddities as he was to my father’s learning. I say he was roguish, for he loved always to defy one authority or another, and in the time I knew him in Lisbon those authorities he loved defying most were his own family and the Inquisition itself.

This Lienzo came from a line of relatively sincere New Christians. There was no shortage of these: men who, out of either genuine belief or merely a desire to avoid persecution, conformed entirely to the Christian way and shunned those of us who sought to live as Jews. Lienzo’s father was a successful trader and had, in his opinion, too much to risk the ire of the Inquisition. Perhaps for this reason alone, Miguel came eagerly to our secret prayer meetings and struggled to learn what my father could teach him.

More than that, young Miguel used his father’s connections with the Old Christian community to learn what he could of the Inquisition. He had a keen ear for rumor, and he delighted in providing warnings where he could. I knew of a half dozen families who had fled the night before the Inquisitors pounded on their doors-all because Lienzo had known where to lurk and listen. I believe he did these great deeds both from a desire to see justice done in the world and for the pleasure of treading where he had no business. Years later, when I saw him again in Amsterdam, he never recognized me or even remembered what he had done for my family. I have never forgotten his kindness, though some have insisted otherwise.

Miguel came to warn us after he had volunteered to help our priest scrub his private chambers in the church (he always volunteered for these thankless tasks in the hopes of gaining some intelligence) and had then chanced to hear a conversation between that wretch and an Inquisitor who had developed an interest in my father.

And so, in the dark of night, we left the only home I had known, taking many of our friends with us. We were Jew and Christian and Moor and Gypsy all, and we traveled to more cities than I can now enumerate. For years we lived in the East, and I was fortunate to spend many months in the holy city of Jerusalem. It is but a shadow of its former glory, but there were times in my unfortunate life when the memory of those days, of walking the streets of my nation’s ancient capital, visiting the place where the holy Temple once stood, have sustained me when I could find meaning in nothing else. If it be the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, I shall return sometime to that sacred place and live out my remaining days there.

In our travels we also traversed Europe, and we were in London when my father died of a brain fever. I was then five-and-twenty, grown to a man but not a man of my father’s disposition. My younger brother, Mateo, wanted to take command of the army of outcasts, and I knew he had the character to lead them. Though I had wandered for years, I was not myself a wanderer. I could perform card cheats and dice tricks, but not half so well as Mateo. I could get a dog to do nothing but show me its belly and a cat to do nothing but knead upon my lap. My father had always spoken of the importance of Jews to live as Jews and among Jews, and I recalled from a visit to Amsterdam some years earlier that in that city Jews enjoyed a degree of freedom unrivaled in the rest of Christendom.

So I crossed the North Sea and found myself embraced by the large community of Portuguese Jews who lived there. I was, at any rate, embraced at first. And that is why I write this memoir. I wish to make clear why I was unjustly exiled from a people I loved. I wish to tell the world that I am not the villain it thinks me. And I wish to set on paper the true facts regarding Miguel Lienzo and his dealings in the coffee trade, having been much blamed in that sphere, and blamed very unfairly too. It is my intention to describe my doings in Amsterdam, the conditions of my excommunication, my life in that city afterward, and precisely what role I played in Lienzo’s affairs.

It is true that before I knew how to walk I could hide a card in my clothes and make the dice roll the way I wished, but I vow to practice no trickery in these pages. I will be like the Bear Man, a petulant fellow with whom I traveled for years. I will disrobe to show you nature’s truth. If you like, reader, you may even pull on the fur to see that it is no deception.