David Liss - The Coffee Trader

Later, when they had concluded their business, Alferonda excused himself and Miguel and Joachim remained alone at the table. Here he was, Miguel thought, drinking with a man he would gladly have strangled only a few weeks before.

Joachim must have read the look on Miguel’s face. “You’re not scheming something, are you?”

“Of course we are,” Miguel answered.

“I mean against me.”

Miguel let out a laugh. “Do you really think that all this-these meetings, these plans-are a trick against you? That we have so much invested in your destruction that we would play these games? Are you certain you’ve left your madness behind?”

Joachim shook his head. “I don’t think these schemes are about me. Of course not. But I wonder if I am to be sacrificed on the altar of your vengeance.”

“No,” Miguel said softly, “we are not out to trick you. We have thrown in our lot with yours and so have more to fear from your treachery than you do from ours. I cannot even imagine how we might sacrifice you, as you say.”

“I can think of a few ways,” Joachim said, “but I will keep them to myself.”

When Miguel walked into the entrance hall, he knew Daniel could not be at home. The house had turned shadowy in the dusk, and the inviting scent of cinnamon filled the air. Hannah stood ready to greet him at the far end of the hall, the single candle she held in her hand reflecting off the black-and-white tiles of the floor.

It was not the way she was dressed, for she wore her usual scarf and shapeless black gown, revealing the now undeniable swell of the child growing inside her. There was, however, something in the intensity of her face, the way her dark eyes shone in the candlelight and her jaw jutted forward. She stood unusually still, with her chest pressed out as if to accentuate the heaviness of her breasts, and in his drunkenness he felt dizzy with desire.

“It seems as though it has been weeks since we’ve talked, senhor,” she said.

“I am attempting something on the Exchange. It takes much of my time.”

“It will make you rich, yes?”

He laughed. “I most fervently hope so.”

She looked at the floor for what felt like minutes. “May I speak with you, senhor?”

With her arm holding the candle outward, as though she were a spirit in a woodcut, she led Miguel into the drawing room and set the candle down in one of the sconces. Only one other candle was lit, and the room shimmered with flickering light.

“We must hire another girl soon,” she said, as she sat.

“You are clearly too busy to light candles,” Miguel observed, as he took a seat across from her.

She let out a burst of air, a half laugh. “You make sport with me, senhor?”

“Yes, I do, senhora.”

“And why do you make sport with me?”

“Because you and I are friends,” he said.

Miguel could not see her face clearly, but he detected something of a smile. It was so hard to tell. What did she want of him in this poorly lit room? What if Daniel were to walk through the door now and find them, scrambling to light candles together, brushing off their clothes as though they had been rolling together in sawdust?

He almost laughed aloud. If he were to make a success of himself at this late stage in his life, he had to stop planning for what could never happen. He had outlived the time when he could gamble away guilders he did not have or invest in commodities because of an inexplicable urge. I am a grown man, he told himself, and this is my brother’s wife. There is nothing more to it.

“You wished to speak to me about something,” he said.

Her voice cracked as she tried to talk. “I wish to speak to you about your brother.”

“What about my brother?” His eyes shifted momentarily to her belly.

A moment of hesitation. “He is out of the house,” she said.

When he was a boy, he and his friends had a favorite rock from which they would leap into the waters of the Tagus. They fell five times the length of a man. Who could say how far it was now, but in the thrill of childish excitement it seemed halfway to eternity. Miguel remembered the twisting and terrifying feeling of freedom, like dying and soaring at once.

Without moving he now felt the same terror and excitement. His gut twisted; his humors rushed to his brain. “Senhora,” he said. He rose, planning to escape as quickly as he could, but she must have misunderstood. She stood as well and walked to him until she was only a few inches away. He could smell the sweet perfume of her musk, feel the heat of her breath. Her eyes locked upon him, and with one hand she reached up and pulled the scarf from her head, letting her thick hair fall around her shoulders and down her back.

Miguel heard himself suck in his breath. The urges of his body would betray him. He had been so resolved only an instant before. This beautiful, eager woman could not, he reminded himself, be made any more pregnant than she was already. Her body emitted its own heat and closed in on him. Miguel knew he need only lift his hand and put it upon her arm, or run it along her face, or touch her hair, and nothing else would matter. He would be lost in the mindless revel of senses. All his determination would be for nothing.

And why should he not give in? he asked himself. Had his brother treated him so well that he should not pluck this illicit fruit of his hospitality? Adultery was surely a great sin, but he understood that such sins were born of the need to maintain order in households. It was not bedding another man’s wife that was the sin; it was getting her with child. Since that could not happen, it would be no sin to take her here upon the floor of the drawing room.

And so he leaned in to kiss her, to finally feel the press of her lips. And in the instant he thought to pull her closer to him, he felt something much darker. He knew with perfect clarity what would happen if he kissed her. Would she be able to return to her husband’s bed without revealing what had happened? This poor, abused girl-she would, in a thousand silent ways, betray him before a day had passed.

He took a step backwards. “Senhora,” he whispered, “it cannot be.”

She bit her lip and looked down at her hands, which were twisting her scarf so hard as to almost destroy it. “What cannot be?” she asked.

Let us pretend then, Miguel silently agreed. “I beg your pardon,” he told her, as he took another step back. “I seem to have misunderstood something. Please forgive me.” He hurried out of the room and into the dark hall to feel his blundering way to the cellar.

There, in the damp and the dark, he sat mutely, listening for some sign of her anguish or her relief, but he heard nothing, not even the creaking of floorboards. For all he knew she remained motionless, her hair exposed to the empty space. And strangely, Miguel felt the heat of tears on his own face. Do I love her so much? Perhaps he did, but he did not cry out of love.

He wept not for her sadness, or even for his own, but for the knowledge that he had been cruel, that he had led her to believe what he had always known must be impossible. He had acted out the fancies of his imagination upon her without thinking that for her to abandon those fancies might crush her. He had been cruel to a sad woman who had done nothing worse than be kind to him. He wondered if he had indeed played his hand so badly in all other spheres.

Just before noon, outside the Exchange, excitement was building upon the Dam. Two weeks had passed since Miguel’s conversation with Geertruid. Today was reckoning day on the Exchange, and today Miguel’s investments came due. He stood in the crowd, awaiting the opening of the great gates, and scanned the faces about him: hard and intense stares into the distance. Dutchman, Jew, and foreigner alike all clenched their teeth and maintained a martial watchfulness. Any man who had spent enough time on the Exchange could sense it, like the smell of coming rain. Great schemes were ready to be unleashed that would affect everyone who traded. Every reckoning day was charged, but today something more than the usual would happen. Everyone knew it.