“Yes, I know, introduced coffee to France,” said Jack, who knew the rest of the tale at least as well as Vrej himself. “Now excuse me for tacking upwind, as it were, against the general direction of your narration. But according to your brother’s version of this story, your father acquired that boat-load of coffee in Mocha.”
Vrej, taken aback: “Yes-Mocha is where coffee from Ethiopia, silver from Spain, and spices from India all come together.”
“I have seen maps,” said Jack impressively, “maps of the whole world, in a library in Hanover. And I seem to recollect that Mocha lies on the Red Sea.”
“Yes-as Nyazi can tell you, it lies in Arabia Felix, across the Red Sea from Ethiopia.”
“And furthermore I am under the impression that the Red Sea empties into the ocean that extends to Hindoostan.”
Vrej said nothing.
“If it is true that Cairo is the end of the line-that no vessel can go farther east than that-then how did your father manage to get his ship from Mocha, on the Red Sea, to here?”
Vrej was now sitting with his eyes tightly shut, cursing under his breath.
“There must be a way through!” Jack said, then stood up to shout the news to the others. As he did, he noticed, in the corner of his eye, a movement of Vrej’s hand. It was subtle. Yet any man in the world would notice it, and many would step away in response, or even reach across toward his sword-hilt, because Vrej was unmistakably reaching towards the handle of the dagger that was bound in his waist-sash. His hand moved no more than a finger’s breadth before he mastered the impulse and moved it back. But Jack noticed it, and faltered, and looked into the eyes of Vrej Esphahnian, red and swollen from weeping. He saw sadness there (of course), but he did not see murderous passions; only a kind of surrender. “That’s the spirit, Vrej!” he said, giving him a hearty shoulder-slap, and then Jack stepped away and called the Cabal to council.
THAT NIGHT THE PEACE of the Street of the Wigmakers in the souk of Rosetta was wrecked by the sound of a pistol-butt being hammered against an old wooden door. The head of an angry man was thrust out between shutters above, and became much less angry when he saw that two of the three visitors were Turks (or at least dressed that way), and one of those a Janissary. Pieces of eight jangled in a purse improved his mood even more. Door-bolts were removed, the visitors admitted.
The dwelling was clean and well-tended, but it smelt as if the floor-sweepings of every barbershop in the Ottoman Empire had been stuffed into its back room and left to ripen. Tea was brewed and tobacco proffered. After some half an hour of preliminaries, the visitors made a business proposal. Once the owner got over his astonishment, he accepted it. A boy was sent off to the Street of the Barbers at a dead run. While they waited, the wigmaker lit some lamps and displayed his wares. The finished products were big wigs mounted on wooden block-heads, destined for export to Europe; but they looked almost as strange to the European visitors as they did to any Arab, for during the years that they had spent pulling oars, fashions had been changing: wigs were now tall and narrow, no longer flat and broad.
Deeper in the shop were the raw materials, and here choices had to be made. Even the finest Barbary horse-hair was too coarse for tonight’s project. At the other end, hanks of fine, lustrous human hair from China were available-but these were the wrong color and it would take too long to dye them.
A bleary-eyed Turkish barber came in and began heating water and stropping razors. The customers settled on some sandy brown goat hair, intermediate in price.
The Janissary’s head and face were now shaved clean by the barber, and the fine fuzz on the upper cheeks burned away, dramatically but painlessly, using spirits of wine soaked into wads of Turcoman cotton. The barber was paid off and sent home. The wigmaker then went to work, painting the naked skin with pine gum one tiny patch at a time and stabbing tufts of goat hair into the goo. After two hours, the Janissary smelled overpoweringly of goats and pine-trees, and looked like he hadn’t had a shave or haircut in years. And when he was stripped to the waist, revealing a back ridged with whip-scars, anyone would have identified him not as a Janissary but as a wretched oar-slave.
PIERRE DE JONZAC RETURNED to the bank of the Nile an hour after dawn, just as he had promised or threatened to, and he brought with him his entire squadron of dragoons. Yesterday they’d galloped headlong to the very edge of the quay and pulled up just short of charging across the gangplanks, all panting and sweaty and dust-caked from having galloped up and down the Canopic Way for a night and a day trying to follow the maneuvers of the galleot.
Using Monsieur Arlanc as interpreter, Nasr al-Ghurab complimented de Jonzac on the splendid appearance of his self and his troops this morning-for it was obvious that the menials at the French Consulate had been up all night grooming, scrubbing, starching, and polishing. The rais went on to apologize for the contrastingly dismal state of his ship and crew. Some of them were “enjoying the shade of the vines,” which was a poetic way of saying they were in the bazaar (which had a leafy roof of grapevines) buying provisions. Others were “sipping mocha in the Pasha’s house.” De Jonzac looked on this (as he was meant to) as a crashingly unsubtle way of claiming that members of the Cabal were inside the stone fort built by the Turks to control the river, showering baksheesh upon officialdom. The fort was nearby enough to literally overshadow them, and scores of resplendent Janissaries were peering down from its battlements, casting a cold professional eye on the French dragoons. The point being that Rosetta was very different from Alexandria; here the French might have a consulate, and some troops, but (as the saying went) that and a few reales would buy them a cup of Mocha.
This point was entirely sound, but al-Ghurab had spoken only lies so far. The real reason that only a few Cabal members were visible on the galleot’s quarterdeck was that four of them (Dappa, Jeronimo, Nyazi, and Vrej) had been riding south, post-haste, all through the night, hoping to cover the hundred and fifty miles to Cairo in two days. And another of them was chained to an oar.
“It was uncommonly humane of you to set free a third of your oar-slaves last night,” de Jonzac commented, “but since my master owns part interest in them, we have made arrangements, among our numerous and highly placed Turkish friends in yonder Fort, to have them all rounded up and sent back to Alexandria.”
“I hope that your Navy will be able to find benches for them to sit on,” shouted van Hoek.
De Jonzac’s face grew red and stormy-looking, but he ignored the cruel words of the Dutchman and continued: “Some of them were eager to talk to us, even before we put thumbscrews on them. So we know that you have been hiding certain metallurgical information from us.”
The night before-needing some ready cash to pay wigmakers and horse-traders-they’d broken open a crate, and pulled out a gold bar, in full view of certain oar-slaves who’d later been set free. This had been done in the hope and expectation that they’d later divulge it to de Jonzac.
The rais shrugged. “What of it?”
De Jonzac said, “I’ve sent a message to Alexandria informing my master that certain numbers mentioned in the Plan must now be multiplied by thirteen.”
“Alas! If only the calculation were that simple, your master could relax in the splendor of his Alexandrian villa while you went to Cairo to balance the books. In fact it is much more complicated than that. Our friend in Bonanza turns out to have diversified his portfolio far beyond the usual metal goods. The hoard will require a tedious appraisal before we can reckon its value.”
“That is a routine matter-you forget my master is well acquainted with the workings of the Corsair trade,” de Jonzac sniffed. “He has trusted appraisers who can be dispatched hither-”