The Coffee Trader

by David Liss

  Miguel looked around. “I see nothing so pleasurable here.”

  “The Turks don’t look kindly upon women in social places such as a coffee tavern. The pleasures you pay for in those places are the pleasures of boys, not women.”

  “That is a strange way to do things,” Miguel said.

  “To us, but they enjoy themselves. In any case, you must keep me informed about your interest in coffee. If I can be of any help, you may depend on me. But you must remember to be careful. Coffee is a drink that brings out great passions in men, and you may be unlocking great forces if you trifle with it.”

  Miguel drank down the rest of his bowl, swallowing a bit of the powder at the bottom. It coated his mouth uncomfortably. “You’re the second person to warn me off coffee,” he told Alferonda, while he wiped at his mouth with his sleeve.

  The usurer cocked his head. “I hate being second at anything. Who was the first?”

  “My brother, if you can believe it.”

  “Daniel? Reason enough to pursue it if he warns you off. What did he say?”

  “Only that it was dangerous,” Miguel said. “He somehow knew I’d developed an interest. He told some story about me muttering drunkenly, but I’m not sure I believe him. More likely he’s been searching my things again.”

  “I would pay his warning no mind. Your brother, if you will excuse me for saying so, has no more brains than the idiot son Parido keeps locked in his garret.”

  “I thought it odd,” Miguel said. “I wonder if he’s somehow learned that I have been thinking of the coffee trade and wants to set me off out of spite. He doesn’t like that I carry on with his serving girl.”

  “Oh, she’s a pretty one. Are you fond of her?”

  Miguel shrugged. “I suppose. I’m fond of her looks,” he said absently. In truth, Miguel found her somewhat impertinent, but she was the one who had begun the dalliance, and Miguel had known from an early age that a man never turns away an eager serving girl.

  “Not so pretty as the mistress though, eh?” Alferonda said.

  “True enough. My brother doesn’t much like the way I speak to her.”

  “Oh?” A wide grin spread across Alferonda’s face. “What way is that?”

  Miguel had the feeling he’d fallen into a trap. “She’s a pleasant girl. A pretty thing, with a quick mind, but Daniel never has a kind word. I think she takes a great deal of pleasure from the occasional bit of congress with me.”

  Alferonda was now moving his eyebrows up and down and flaring his nostrils. “I, for one, thought it was a fine thing when the rabbis revoked the commandment against adultery.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” Miguel said, turning to hide his blush. “I only feel sorry for her.”

  “I’ve known Miguel Lienzo to have dealings with pretty girls, and what he feels is generally not sorry.”

  “I have no intention of bedding my brother’s wife,” he said. “In any case, she is far too virtuous a woman to allow it.”

  “May the Holy One, blessed be He, help you,” Alferonda said. “When a man starts protesting about a woman’s virtue, it means he’s either had her already or would kill to do so. I will say that it is one way to get back at your brother for his foul temper.”

  Miguel opened his mouth to protest but thought better of it. Justification was for the guilty, and surely he had done nothing wrong.

  from

  The Factual and Revealing Memoirs of Alonzo Alferonda

  I had been plying my trade with a fair amount of success for some time when I was approached by a Tudesco merchant with a proposition that appeared to me both lucrative and rewarding. For some years now the Tudescos, the Jews of Eastern Europe, had been making their presence increasingly felt in Amsterdam, and this development was not at all to the Ma’amad’s liking. While we Jews of the Portuguese Nation have no shortage of beggars among our number, we also enjoy our share of wealthy merchants, and these can afford to be charitable. Our community had struck a deal with the Amsterdam burgomasters to remain a city apart, taking care of our own charitable cases and producing no burden on the metropolis itself. Thus we took care of our own, but the Tudescos had few men of significant wealth, and most were desperately poor.

  Though with our beards and our bright colors we looked different from the Dutch, we thought ours a dignified difference. A Hebrew of Portugal could not go anywhere in the city, no matter how neatly trimmed his beard and no matter how dull his clothes, without being recognized for a member of his nation, but the Ma’amad believed the merchants among us were ambassadors. We might say, in the silence of our finery, Behold us. We are different, but we are worthy people with whom to share your land. More important, they might look on our poor and think, Ah, those Jews feed and dress their own mendicants, relieving us of the burden. They’re not so bad.

  Thus the problem of the Tudescos. They had heard that Amsterdam was a paradise for Jews, so they fled to our city from Poland, Germany, Lithuania, and all manner of other places where they were savagely abused. I had heard that Poland in particular was a land of ghastly torments and scarcely believable cruelties: men made to watch while their wives and daughters were brutalized, children tied in sacks and thrown on burning fires, scholars buried alive with their murdered families.

  The parnassim surely sympathized with these refugees, but they had grown to depend on the comforts of Amsterdam and, like the fat and rich of all nations and beliefs, they were unwilling to sacrifice their ease for the well-being of others. Their concerns were not unfounded, and they dreaded a future in which the streets of Amsterdam were crawling with Jewish beggars and Jewish hucksters and Jewish whores. The Dutch would then surely rescind their former generosity. The Ma’amad concluded that the Tudesco community would be best handled if kept small.

  There were several plans for accomplishing this goal, but they all centered around keeping these troubling people at a distance from Iberian wealth—a maneuver they believed would make Amsterdam less appealing than cities where their own kind thrived. Tudescos were therefore forbidden to enroll their children in schools run by Portuguese Jews. They could have no position of standing in Portuguese synagogues. Their meats were declared unclean and off limits to Portuguese households, so their butchers could not sell to our people. The Ma’amad even declared it a crime, punishable by excommunication, to give charity to any Tudesco except through one of the official charitable boards. These boards believed that the best charity would be passage on ships heading out of Amsterdam, so it could do no good to encourage them to stay by dropping a stuiver or two into their greedy little hands.

  I knew all this, but I did not have it much in my thoughts when I was approached by a member of the Tudesco community. Many of the refugees, he told me, managed to escape from their oppressive lands with a precious stone or two hidden away on their persons. Would I be willing to broker these stones to Portuguese merchants? He suggested that I would ask for a bit more than the lowest price, explaining that the stones belonged to wretched wanderers who longed to begin anew, and take only a fraction of the usual brokering fee. I might make a few extra guilders and still do a good deed that would win me favor in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He.

  For several months I went about this business during what time I could spare for it. A bottle of wine purchased, a smile, a word about the importance of charity, and I soon found most gem merchants willing to pay a few extra guilders for a stone if it would help a poor family enjoy a peaceful Shabbat. So it went until I one day came to my home and found a note for me, composed in florid Spanish, written in a fine hand. I had been summoned to the Ma’amad.

  I still thought nothing of the matter. Sooner or later every man found himself standing before that council: a rumor of unclean food eaten or a Dutch slut got with child. The council itself was little better than a pack of old women, wanting only a soothing word to make them calm again. I knew that my old enemy, Solomon Parido, now held a place on the council, but I hardly thought he would use his po
wer for nefarious ends.

  Yet that is precisely what he did. He sat there, stiff in his laced suit, glaring at me. “Senhor Alferonda,” he said, “you are surely aware of the ruling of the council that no help shall be given to the Tudescos other than through the charitable boards of the synagogue.”

  “Of course, senhor,” I said.

  “Then why have you ensnared men of our nation, law-abiding men, into your wicked schemes of jewel peddling?”

  “My wicked schemes, as you style them, provide aid to the poor. And while you have made it clear that you do not want us throwing our coins to Tudesco beggars, you have said nothing about buying and selling with them.”

  “Is it not the same as tossing coins if you intentionally ask merchants to give more than they wish to pay that the seller might take that money and do with it as he will?”

  “As he will,” I pointed out, “often means buying bread.”

  “That is not your concern,” one of the other members of the council said. “There are charitable boards to see that these people don’t starve.”

  The offense was minor enough, but Parido wished to cast it in the most dire light possible. He turned the other parnassim against me. He prodded me into speaking angrily. And yet, though I saw all that, I could not help but be angry. I had done nothing wrong. I had violated none of the holy laws. Indeed, I upheld the commandment to give charity. Was I now to be punished for doing as the Torah commands? This question, in particular, may have been what set them against me. No one likes to have his hypocrisy exposed.

  After much interrogation, the parnassim asked me to wait outside. When they called me back in, after more than an hour, they announced their decision. I was to ask the men for whom I had brokered to rescind their sales. They were, in other words, to buy back their stones.

  I had seen the men for whom I had brokered. They were poor, dressed in rags, crushed by hardship and despair. Many had lost parents or children or wives to the cruelty of Poles or Cossacks. To go to them and ask them to return money, which they surely no longer had because they had spent it rather than starve or go naked, seemed to me not only preposterous but depraved. I supposed it was meant to be so. To undo these sales, I would have to buy those stones back with my own money, and surely Parido had known I would refuse to do so.

  The council urged me to reconsider, but I swore I would never obey such an unreasonable demand. The parnassim then told me I had forced their hand and they had no choice but to put me under cherem, the ban—to excommunicate me.

  Men fell under the ban frequently. Most times it was but for a day or a week but in some it was permanent. And so they meant it in my case. More than that, Parido made it clear to the Tudescos that if they admitted me into their synagogue they would be made to suffer for their kindness. He wrote to the Ma’amads of every community upon the face of the earth, giving them my name and speaking of my crimes in the most exaggerated terms. I had become an outcast with nowhere to go, the mark of Cain upon me.

  They chose to treat me like a villain. What choice did I have but to become one in earnest?

  5

  Miguel first met Geertruid nearly a year before she proposed a venture in coffee. It was in the Flyboat, a tavern off the Warmoesstraat, close enough to the Exchange that merchants regarded it as adjunct, a place to continue business when the gates of the bourse closed. Though owned by a Dutchman, it catered to Jewish traders by offering drinks that conformed to the dietary codes. Jewish boys of the Portuguese Nation were hired to keep separate the serving glasses for the Jews and to clean them in accordance with Jewish law, and a rabbi would occasionally come to inspect the kitchens, strolling like a general with his hands behind his back as he peered into cabinets and pried open containers. The owner charged almost twice the going rate for wine and beer, but Jewish merchants gladly paid higher prices in exchange for the chance to conduct business in a Dutch tavern with an easy conscience.

  Miguel had been continuing a conversation with a sugar merchant after the close of the Exchange, and the two men had taken a table and talked of their business for hours, all the while drinking with Netherlandish intensity. The sugar merchant was one of those good-natured Dutchmen who found Jews fascinating, as though their alien beliefs and customs made them a puzzle. The Vlooyenburg crawled with these men, who came to learn Hebrew or study Jewish theology, in part because it helped them better to understand their own religion but also because the Dutch were curiously attracted to foreigners. The Ma’amad’s strict injunction against religious debate with gentiles made Miguel only more irresistible, and the merchant had bought drink after drink, with the playful intention of breaking Miguel’s defenses. At last he abandoned the effort, announcing that he must go home to his wife lest he face her fury.

  Warm with beer, Miguel had been in no mood to return to the solitude of his own home, so he remained at his table, quietly drinking while he puffed lazily upon a pipe of good tobacco. Conversations swirled all around him, and he half listened for any useful rumor or tip. Then he heard a fragment of conversation that jolted him out of his stupor.

  “. . . a sad end for the Indian Flower,” a voice pronounced, with the kind of narrative fervor only to be found on the lips of a drunk Dutchman. “Cleaned out to her core, until there was nothing left but a pack of unmanned sailors shitting themselves silly.”

  Miguel turned slowly. He owned shares in the Indian Flower—quite a few, in fact. Wading through a swamp of boozy confusion, he tried to recall how much he had invested. Five hundred guilders? Seven hundred? Not enough to ruin a man who stood as he had at the time, but well enough that he could not count the loss insignificant, particularly since he had already invested his anticipated profits.

  “What did you say?” Miguel demanded of the speaker. “The Indian Flower?”

  He took his first look at the fellow, a grizzled man well into his middle years with the blotchy face of a lifelong sailor. His companions were all the rougher sort of Dutchman who frequented taverns closer to the docks.

  “The Indian Flower’s been taken by pirates,” the older fellow told Miguel. “I heard they were pirates, at any rate. They’re all in service of the Spanish Crown, if you ask me.”

  “How do you know this?” Miguel demanded. He twisted his hands, which felt awkward and spongy from too much drink, but his head had already begun to clear.

  “I’ve got a mate on the Glory of the Palm,” the man explained, “which came into dock late this afternoon. He told me the news.”

  This afternoon. No one knew yet. He might yet salvage this wreck.

  “Have you a particular interest in that ship?” One of the man’s companions spoke. He was younger than the rest, with less of the look of the sea.

  “Suppose I have?” He meant no challenge. The two men were testing each other.

  “I might be able to offer you my services,” the raggedy trader told him. “By this time tomorrow, word will be out and those shares of yours won’t be good for much more than wiping your ass. But tonight they just might be worth something.”

  “Something other than wiping your ass,” one of his friends clarified.

  “What are they worth tonight?” Miguel knew a schemer when he saw one, but schemes were the blood flowing through the city’s veins, and only a fool would refuse to listen.

  “If you want to sell at fifty percent, I’d be willing to unburden you.”

  Miguel had no taste for losing half his investment, but even less for losing all of it. Still, something sat ill with him. “If the ship has been taken, what good are the shares to you?”

  “I’ll sell them, of course. Tomorrow the Exchange opens, and I’ll unload them at seventy-five or eighty percent. By the time the news hits the Exchange, I’ll be rid of them.”

  “Then why should I not do the same?” Miguel asked. “I could have eighty percent back rather than a mere fifty.”

  “You could,” the man said, “but there’s always the chance that the news may beat you to the Excha
nge. Besides, men know you; if you sell, your reputation might suffer. I’m used to plying my trade in The Hague, so I won’t lose for my deeds here.”

  Miguel put his hands to his forehead. He could not entirely ignore the moral issue that presented itself: if he sold his shares to this fellow, he would be knowingly allowing an unknown person to buy something that was worthless. Did the sages not say that the man who robs his fellow of even the smallest coin is as sinful as a murderer? On the other hand, all investment was risk. Miguel did not know when he bought the shares that the ship would be taken by pirates, yet it had been; perhaps it had been destined to be so taken. Surely the Most High knew of the boat’s fate, but Miguel did not believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, had cheated him. What difference did it make if someone knew beforehand?

  The trader read Miguel’s uncertainty. “You do what you like, Jew. I’ll be here for another hour or so. If you want to do business, it had best be done quickly.”

  Before Miguel could respond, a new voice rose up. “Aye, quick enough that this man not learn the truth.” The woman sounded like a heroine from a stage play. There she stood, hands upon her hips, ample bosom thrust outward, her soft features pointed defiantly at these men.

  In her yellows and blacks, she looked like a honeybee and a pretty one at that, if a bit older than Miguel liked his women. He couldn’t decide if she were more wench or virago.

  “What truth is that?” he asked cautiously, not for the first time suspicious of these schemers. Against these grizzled fellows stood this handsome woman, both confident and defiant. Miguel decided in an instant that he trusted her far more than the sailor and his friends.

  “That the ship they speak of remains unharmed,” she announced. “At least it does as best they know.”

  The men at the table exchanged glances. “Have I met you, mother?” the older fellow asked. “I think you ought to think carefully before you accuse a man in public, ruining his trade and such. Otherwise,” he added, with a glance to his companion, “he and those he’s friendly with might take some offense and offer your plump bottom a spanking.”