“Turbans are advisable for going abovedecks,” Jack pointed out, “as my hair’s sandy, and van Hoek’s is red, and that of Moseh—”
They all stood and looked dubiously at Moseh until finally he said, “Get me a dagger and I’ll cut off the forelocks—crypto-Jews can expect no better.”
“May you become free and rich and grow them until you must tuck them into your boot-tops,” Jack said.
They spent the last hour before sunset up on the towering quarterdeck turbaned, and covered in the long loose garments of Algerines. The town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda rose above them on the south bank where the river flowed into the gulf. It resembled a feeble miniature rendition of Algiers—it was encompassed by a wall, and below it spread a beach of river-sand where some fishermen had spread out their nets to inspect them. Van Hoek gave the town but a glance, then seized a glass from the raïs, climbed up the mast, and devoted much time to scanning the water: apparently reading the currents, and fixing in his mind the location of the submerged bar. Moseh’s attention was captured by a suburb that spread along the bank upstream of the town, outside the walls: Bonanza. It seemed to consist entirely of large villas, each with its own wall. After a while the avid Jeronimo spied the Viceroy’s coat of arms flying from one of these, or so they all assumed from the invective that geysered forth.
Jack, for his part, was looking for a place to land their little rowboat after it got dark. In the interstices between walled places he could easily make out a fungal huddle of Vagabond-shacks, and with some concerted looking it was not difficult to make out a scrap of mucky, useless river-bank where those persons came down to draw water. Jack got a compass bearing to it, though it remained to be seen how this would serve them when it was dark and the current was pushing them downstream.
“’Twere foolish to go ashore in daylight,” Jeronimo said, “and, when night falls, ’twere foolish not to. For smuggling and illicit trade are the only reasons for anyone to visit Sanlúcar de Barrameda nowadays. If we don’t try to do something illegal the night we arrive—why, the authorities will become suspicious!”
“If someone asks…what kind of illegal thing should we say we are undertaking?” Jack asked.
“We should say we have a meeting with a certain Spanish gentleman—but that we do not know his real name.”
“Spanish gentlemen, as a rule, are insufferably proud of their names—what sort refuses to identify himself?”
“The sort who meets with heretic scum in the middle of the night,” Jeronimo returned, “and fortunately for you, there are many of that sort in yonder town.”
“That schooner is strangely over-crowded with Englishmen and Dutchmen of high rank,” van Hoek offered, pointing with his blue eyes at a rakish vessel anchored a few hundred yards downriver.
“Spies,” Jeronimo said.
“What is to spy on here?” Jack asked.
“If Spain took all of the silver on those treasure-galleons in the harbor of Cadiz, and locked it up, the foreign trade of Christendom would wither,” Moseh explained. “Half the trading companies in London and Amsterdam would go bankrupt within the year. William of Orange would declare war on Spain before he allowed such a thing to happen. Those spies are here, and probably in Cadiz as well, to inform William of whether a war will be necessary this year.”
“Why would the Spaniards want to hoard it?”
“Because Portugal has opened vast new gold mines in Brazil, and—as Dappa can tell you—supplied them with numberless slaves. In the next ten years, the amount of gold in the world will rise extravagantly and its price, compared to that of silver, will naturally decline.”
“So the price of silver is certain to rise…” Jack said.
“Giving Spaniards every incentive to hoard it now.”
Night came over Spain as they stood there and talked, and lights were lit in the windows of Sanlúcar de Barrameda and in the great villas of Bonanza, where dinners were being cooked—Jeronimo had told them of the queer Spanish practice of dining late at night, and they had already made it part of the Plan. The rhythm of the waves, heaving themselves sluggishly against the beach at the foot of the town, underwent some sort of subtle change, or so van Hoek claimed. He spoke words in Dutch that meant “the tide is running out” and climbed down a pilot’s ladder into the galleot’s tiny skiff, which had been let down into the water. Here he took a kilderkin—a small keg, having a capacity of some eighteen gallons—removed one end, ballasted it with rocks, and planted a few candles in it. After lighting the candles he released it into the Guadalquivir, and then spent the better part of an hour watching it glide slowly out to sea. Jack meanwhile kept his eyes fixed on the landing-place that he had picked out on the river-bank, as slowly it faded and became a black void in a constellation of distant lanthorns.
They doffed their turbans and cloaks and changed into European clothes, of which there was no shortage in the dress-up sack. Then they moved down into the skiff and began rowing across the river’s current. Jack directed them towards the spot he’d picked out. Twice van Hoek insisted that they pause in midstream, backing water with the oars, while he threw a sounding-lead overboard to check the depth. Jeronimo spent the voyage winding a long strip of cotton around his head, lashing his jaw shut—a task not made any quicker by his tendency to think out loud. Thinking, for him, amounted to making florid allusions to Classical poetry until everyone around him had fallen into a stupor. In this case he was Odysseus and the mountains of Estremaduras were the Rock of the Sirens and this gag he was putting on himself was akin to the ropes by which Odysseus had bound himself to the mast.
“If the Plan is as leaky as that similitude, we are all as good as dead,” Jack muttered, once the gag was finally in place.
The arrival of all four of them would cause a commotion in the Vagabond-camp, or so Jack had managed to convince the other nine. So he waded into shore from a few yards out, then (reckoning no one could see him, and he was safe from mockery) fell to his knees on the strand, like a Conquistador, and kissed the dirt.
Here was the moment when he would simply disappear. He had never traveled down this way, but he had heard of this camp: it was supposed to be small but rich, an entrepôt for the better sort of Vagabond. A few days’ travel up the coast, then, a vast Vagabond city clung to the walls of Lisbon—from there, the way north was well-known. He reckoned that he could be in Amsterdam before winter, if he used himself hard. From there, the passage to London had always been easy, even when England and Holland had been at war—and now they were practically a single country.
This had been his secret Plan all along, and he’d spent more time working it out in his mind than he had following the numberless permutations and revisions of the Plan of Moseh. All he need do was walk up into the brush, and keep walking. This might be the doom of Moseh’s plan, or not—but (to the extent he’d paid attention at all) he suspected it was doomed anyway. Nothing that relied upon so many people could ever work.
But Jack’s feet did not move him thus. After a few moments he stood, and began to move carefully away from the river-bank, pausing every two steps to listen for movement or breathing around him. But he did not simply bolt. Somehow the commands that his mind sent toward his feet were blocked by his heart, or other organs. It might have been because others in the Cabal had shown him mercy and loyalty where Eliza had not. It might have been the smell of this Vagabond-camp and the wretched and loathsome appearance of the first people he spied, which reminded him of how poor and dirty Christendom was in general. Too, he was strangely curious to see how the Plan came out—somewhat like a spectator at a bear-baiting who was willing to pay money just to see whether the bear tore the dogs to bloody shreds, or the other way round.
But what really addled his mind—or clarified it, depending on one’s point of view—was his certainty that the Duc d’Arcachon had become involved, somehow. This much had been obvious from the evolutions of the Plan during the nine months since they’d presented it to the Pasha
. By hiding the fact that he could understand Turkish, Dappa had learned much.
Now, Jack really had no particular reason to care so much about said Duke—he was an evil rich man, but there were many of those. However, at one point when he’d been stupefied by Eliza, he had volunteered to kill that Duke one day. This was the closest he’d ever come to having a purpose in life (supporting his offspring was tedious and unattainable), and he had rather enjoyed it. D’Arcachon had now been so helpful as to reciprocate by attempting to hunt him down to the ends of the earth. Jack took a certain pride in that, seeing in it what his Parisian friend St.-George would call good form. To slink away now and live like a rat in East London, forever worrying about the Duke’s homicidal intentions, would be bad form indeed.
When Jack and his brother Bob, as boys, had done mock-battle in the Regimental mess-hall in Dorset, they had been rewarded for showing flourish and élan; and if soldiers threw meat at boys for showing good form, might not the world shower Jack with silver for the same virtue?
Even so, Jack’s mind was not entirely made up until he had been ashore for perhaps a quarter of an hour. He had been edging quietly round the nimbus of light cast by a Vagabond campfire, counting the people and judging their mood, straining to overhear snatches of zargon. Suddenly a silhouette rose up between him and the fire, no more than five yards away: a big man with a strangely mummified head, carrying a crossbow, drawn back and ready to shoot. It was Jeronimo—who must have been sent ashore, as part of the Plan, to hunt Jack through the woods and launch a bolt through his heart if he showed any sign of treachery.
This confirmed in Jack’s mind that he really must remain faithful to the Plan. Not out of fear—he could easily slip away from Jeronimo—but out of sentimentality of the cheapest and basest sort. For Jeronimo wanted to go back to Estremaduras as badly as any man had ever wanted anything, and yet he was about to turn his back on that place, which was almost within sight, and go off to face (in all likelihood) death. It was the most abysmally poignant thing Jack had ever witnessed outside of a theatre, it made his eyes water, and it settled his mind.
So, slipping away from Jeronimo, he made his way into the fire-light and (after calming the Vagabonds down just a bit) told them he was an Irishman who, along with several other Papists, had been press-ganged in Liverpool (this was likely and reasonable-sounding to the point of being banal) and that before setting out for America he and some of the other sailors wanted to pay their respects at Our Lady of Buenos Aires, a mariners’ shrine inside the town (this was also very plausible, according to Jeronimo), and there would be a few reales in it for anyone who could sneak them into the town. This offer was taken up enthusiastically, and within the hour, Jack, Moseh, van Hoek, and Jeronimo (sans crossbow) were inside Sanlúcar de Barrameda.
Now Jeronimo and van Hoek went off towards a smoky and riotous quarter near the waterfront while Jack and Moseh went to reconnoiter in a finer neighborhood up the hill. Moseh had no particular idea where they were going and so they walked up and down several streets, looking in the windows of the white buildings, before slowing down in front of one that was adorned with a golden figure of Mercury. Remembering Leipzig, Jack instinctively looked up. Though there were no mirrors on sticks here, he did see the red coal of a cigar flaring and then blurring into a cloud of exhaled smoke—a watcher on the rooftop. Moseh saw it, too, and took Jack’s arm and hustled him forward. But as they hurried past a window Jack turned his face toward the light and glimpsed a molten vision from his pox-scarred memories: a bald head surmounting wreaths of fat, looming above a table where several men—mostly fair-haired—sat eating and talking.
When they had gotten some distance down the street, Jack said: “I saw Lothar von Hacklheber in there. Or perhaps it was a painting of him, hung on the wall to preside over the table—but no, I’m sure I saw his jaw moving. No painter could’ve captured that cannonball brow, the furious eyes.”
“I don’t doubt you,” Moseh said. “So van Hoek must have been right. Let us go and find the others.” Moseh turned his steps downhill.
“What was the purpose of that reconaissance?”
“Before you make mortal enemies, it is wise to know who they are,” Moseh said. “Now we know.”
“Lothar von Hacklheber?”
Moseh nodded.
“I should’ve thought our enemy was the Viceroy.”
“Outside of Spain, the Viceroy has no power. The same is hardly true of Lothar.”
“Why does the House of Hacklheber have aught to do with it?”
Moseh said, “Suppose you live in a house in Paris. You have a water-carrier who is supposed to come once a day. Usually he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes his buckets are full, sometimes they are half-empty. But your house is a large one and requires water in small amounts all the time.”
“That is why such houses have cisterns,” Jack said.
“Spain is a large house. It requires money all the time, to purchase goods from other countries, such as quicksilver from the mines of Istria and grain from the north. But its money arrives once a year, when the treasure-fleet drops anchor at Cadiz—or, formerly, here. The treasure-fleet is like the water-carrier. The banks of Genoa and of Austria have, for hundreds of years, served—”
“As money-cisterns, I see,” Jack said.
“Yes.”
“But Lothar von Hacklheber is not a Genoese name, unless I am mistaken,” Jack said.
“About sixty years ago Spain went bankrupt for a time, which amounts to saying that the Genoese bankers did not get paid what was due them, and fell on hard times. Various mergings and marriages of convenience occurred as a result. The center of banking moved northward. That, in a nutshell, is how the Hacklhebers came to have a fine house in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. And, I would guess, a finer one in Cadiz.”
“But Lothar is here,” Jack said, “meaning—?”
“He probably intends to take delivery of the silver pigs that we are going to steal tomorrow, and pay the Viceroy with something else—gold, perhaps, which would be better for one who wanted to spend much soon.”
In a few minutes’ nosing around the lower precincts, dodging brawlers and politely declining offers from whores, they located van Hoek and Jeronimo, who were posing, respectively, as a Dutch commerçant wanting to smuggle cloth to America on the next outgoing ship (which would have been illegal, because the Dutch were heretics), and his Spanish conspirator, who’d recently had his tongue cut out for some reason. They were in a tavern, conversing with a seamy-looking Spanish gentleman who, oddly enough, spoke good Dutch—a cargador metedoro who acted as a Catholic front man for Protestant exporters. Jack and Moseh walked past the table to let it be known that they were here, and then staked out the tavern’s exits in case of trouble—which was not really much use, since they were still unarmed, but seemed like good form. There they waited for a while, as van Hoek conversed with the cargador. The conversation proceeded fitfully in that this Spaniard appeared to be participating in two card-games at once, and losing money at both. Jack could see he was one of those men who are not right in the head when it comes to gambling, and was tempted to join in and fleece him, but it did not seem meet just now.
Not that propriety had ever shaped Jack’s actions in the past. But only now was it coming clear to him that he had forgone his one opportunity to escape, and thereby gambled his life upon the success of the Plan: a Plan that, only an hour ago, he was silently mocking as inconceivably complex, and dependent upon too many persons’ exhibiting sundry rare virtues, such as cleverness and bravery, at just the right times. It was, in other words, a Plan that only desperate men would have come up with, a Plan in which it made no sense to participate unless one had no alternatives whatsoever. Jack had only gone along with it, to this point, because he’d always known he could jump ship before the worst parts of it were put into action.
Yet these others were not like John Cole.* Moseh and van Hoek and the others were more in the mold of John Church
ill.†
Accordingly, Jack did not gamble, but contented himself with a tankard of cerveza—the first liquor that had passed his lips in something like five years—and simply gazing at the whores and barmaids, who were the first human females he had seen (other than the bat-like phantasms of Algiers) since Eliza. And his view of her had been obstructed by an incoming harpoon.
Suddenly van Hoek was on his feet, but he was smiling. A few moments later the four were outside on a tavern-street running along the foundations of the wall that faced the water—this looked as if sailors had been trying to undermine it, for hundreds of years, by burrowing tunnels through the stone with their urine.
“It is arranged,” van Hoek said. “He believes that my cargo will arrive tomorrow, or possibly the next day, on a jacht, and that she will be in a desperate hurry to cross the bar and unload. He says that ships from the north do this all the time, and that he can bribe the soldiers to fire signals during the night-time.”
They walked beneath Our Lady of Buenos Aires, which was disappointing: a fleck of stone in a bushel-sized niche. They departed the city the way they had entered into it, through a series of sneakings and petty briberies. An hour later they were in Bonanza, marking a path from the Vagabond-camp to the landward gates of the Viceroy’s villa by slashing blazes on tree-trunks. The sky above Spain was just beginning to dissolve the faintest stars when they returned to the galleot. The Corsairs, and the other members of the Cabal, were giddy that they’d actually come back; then excited, knowing that the Plan would actually go forward; then moody and apprehensive. They all tried to get some sleep, and most of them failed.
The Confusion: Volume Two of the Baroque Cycle Page 22