The Coffee Trader

35

Miguel hardly knew the layout of his furniture, and there were trunks of clothes and boxes of newly bought goods scattered about the rooms. The knock came at his door early in the morning, before the sun had only just burned off the dew, and he sensed that his serving woman had already left for the morning milk and bread. His head ached and the nagging sense of something terrible, something he dare not recall, haunted the outer reaches of his thoughts.

Geertruid. He had destroyed Geertruid for nothing-for Alferonda’s petty revenge against a man who had truly wanted to make things right and be Miguel’s friend. Parido had been but a merchant looking to preserve his investments. Miguel had been the villain.

Better to go back to sleep and think of it no more, if only for a few hours.

The pounding at the door would not let him be. He rolled out of his bed-for the first time since he moved in not relishing the comfort of a full-sized bed instead of one of those cupboard monstrosities-and quickly wrapped himself in a dressing coat and found a pair of wooden slippers. The house was a maze of trunks and misplaced furniture, and he tripped twice before reaching the back door in the kitchen.

At last he had made his way to the kitchen, and opened the top portion of the door. The pleasant odors of the early morning-fish and beer and freshly baked bread-burst in upon him so strongly his stomach turned forcibly, and he had to close his eyes to keep from vomiting. When he looked again, there to greet him was the haggard face of Hendrick. He had lost his hat, and his hair hung filthily around his face. He had a cut just below his eye that had clotted nastily, and blood smeared his shirt. Miguel somehow knew at once that the blood was not Hendrick’s.

“I haven’t the luxury of time,” he said, “so I won’t make you ask me in.”

“What do you want?” He had begun his new life, and he did not want to be seen having a conversation with one such as this. And the distant memory of a conversation echoed on the fringes of his consciousness. Hadn’t Hendrick promised to kill Miguel if he betrayed Geertruid?

But it seemed Hendrick had not come for murder. “I’ve come for my fifty guilders,” he said, smoothing some dirt out of his mustache.

“I don’t understand you.”

“We had a contract, you and I. A deal. You offered me the money, and I took you up on it. Last night. I found the fellow, and I did the business.”

Joachim. He had beaten up Joachim. “But I never told you to carry on with that. I merely asked you about it.”

“Well, it’s too late for quibbling back and forth, arguing over this detail or that. The deed is done, and I need the money. There you have it.” He let out a throaty half laugh that turned into a cough. “The fellow is beaten, and I’d best leave town as quick as I can before the constable’s men catch up with me.”

“I won’t give you a thing,” Miguel said. “I never asked for this.”

The violence that always lurked in Hendrick now rose to the surface. His face reddened and his eyes grew wide. “Listen to me, Jew Man. You’ll give it to me, or there will be more trouble than you reckoned on. If they do catch up with me, I’ll not hesitate to say you were the one to set me upon the task, so you had better think about that, and think about it quickly. I know you don’t want me to be seen here, so let’s just have this over with.”

Miguel knew it was well worth fifty guilders to make him disappear, so he excused himself and found the money in metal, presuming Hendrick would not care for a banknote.

“How badly did you hurt him?” he asked, as he handed over the purse.

“That’s the thing,” Hendrick said. He patted at the cut on his face with his sleeve. “More than I intended. I don’t suppose he needed both eyes, though, did he? One will do quite nicely.”

Miguel swallowed. “You took out an eye?”

“I didn’t take it out,” Hendrick corrected him. “It came out on its own. These things happen from time to time, and there isn’t much point lamenting what can’t be undone.”

“Get out of here,” Miguel said quietly.

“He didn’t know what was going on, why I should just grab him and throw him down and kick him in his face. He kept asking me why, why, why-like a little girl being fucked for the first time. But I believe in honesty. I told him to ask the Jew Man. The Jew Man would tell him why, since the Jew Man paid for it.”

Miguel closed his eyes and looked away. After a moment-too long a silence, he thought-he turned back to the wretch. “Why would you do such a thing? Why did you tell him that?”

“Because Madame Damhuis made me promise not to hurt you, despite your treatment of her. So I decided it was well enough: I would not hurt you, but I would have my own way with something. And there it is.”

“Get out of here,” Miguel said again.

“Oh, that I’ll have no trouble doing, you can depend on it. Best to you, Jew Man. ” Hendrick pretended to tip the hat he had lost and then took off in a happy skip along the canal side. Miguel stood at the door and watched him go, and even after he had been long gone, he stood by the door watching the space where he had disappeared.

Later on he could not say how long he stood there in cheerless and nauseated silence. He finally looked behind him and saw his servant woman cooking in the kitchen, ignoring him out of fear and confusion, pretending that men always stood by the open door in their bedclothes, staring out into the morning. Later that day, he looked up and saw himself doing business on the Exchange and wondered how he had come to be there, what trades he had made already, and if in such a state he traded with more prudence than when his wits were about him. How could he think of business? His friend Geertruid, ruined and exiled forever. Joachim beaten and perhaps in danger of dying. His brother ruined and humiliated.

He waited for the Watch to come and question him about his role in the beating, but they never came. When he went in search of Joachim a few days later, to bring him gifts, to make certain he had the best surgeon, he found that he and his wife had left town, scurrying away with their share of the coffee scheme money before Miguel could, as he surely now suspected, find some way of taking it back. He had left believing, as always, that these gestures of friendship were but a prelude to treachery.

The thought weighed him down, a dourness that no triumph on the Exchange could extinguish. But in a few weeks’ time, when Hannah was free of Daniel, he took her for his wife and vowed he would be dour no more. In the comfort of married life, he found it easy to forget Joachim and Geertruid by turns and to once more take pleasure in his business. He put a hand to his temple. Alferonda had surely been right about one thing: it would be madness for him to let coffee go. Already, buoyed by the fame of Miguel’s duel against Parido on the Exchange, the drink’s fame had begun to spread. Already he saw jittery merchants, animated by the wondrous fruit, shouting out their business maniacally. At taverns all over the city, traders had begun to demand the brew in place of beer or wine. Miguel might make his fortune yet.

Though Hannah found, after the baby was born, she had no time to learn to read as she had planned, she did not complain, not even in her heart. Miguel knew she had wanted a girl, but she loved the boy, Samuel, all the same. They discussed the problem of hiding from Daniel that the boy was his, but there was no way to undo what had been done. And Miguel loved the boy as though he were his own. But later, when they had their second son, whom they named for his true father, Miguel found himself favoring this child. At times it sat ill with him that he repeated the arbitrary preferences with which he found such fault in his own father, but what could he do? Some things, he had come to conclude, were merely in a person’s nature.