for the Armenian they’d picked up in the market was none other*
“We are held captive in this city by the ineffable will of the market,” Moseh de la Cruz began.
These words sounded to Jack like the beginning of a well-rehearsed, and very long presentation, and so he was not slow to interrupt.
“Pah! What market can you possibly be talking about?” But looking around at the others it seemed that he was the only one showing the least bit of skepticism.
“Why, the market in tutsaklar ransom futures, which is three doors down yonder alley-way, on the left,” Moseh said, pointing. “It is a place where anyone with money can buy into the deed of a tutsaklar, which means, captive of war-thereby speculating that one day that person will be ransomed, in which event all of the shareholders divide up the ransom, minus certain duties, taxes, fees, et cetera, levied by the Pasha. It is the city’s primary source of revenue and foreign exchange-”
“All right, pardon me, I did not know that, and supposed you were framing some occult similitude,” Jack said.
“As I watched Yevgeny’s bout this evening,” Moseh continued, “it came to me that said market is a sort of Invisible Hand that grips us all by the testicles-”
“Hold, hold! Are you babbling some manner of Cabbalistic superstition now?”
“No, Jack, now I am using a similitude. For there is no Invisible Hand-but there might as well be.”
“Very good-pray continue.”
“The workings of the market dictate that tutsaklar who are likely to be ransomed, and for large fees, are well-treated-”
“And ones like us end up as galley-slaves,” Jack said. “And ’tis clear enough to me why I am assessed a low value by this market, and my nuts gripped most oppressively by the Invisible Hand of which you spoke. Likewise, Mr. Foot is broke, Yevgeny’s of a daft sect whose members torture one another, Dappa is persona non grata in all lands south of the Sahara, Vrej Esphahnian’s family is chronically ill-funded. Senor Jeronimo, whatever fine qualities he may possess that I haven’t seen evidence of yet, is not the sort that anyone who has spent much time with him would be disposed to pay a lot of ransom for. I know not the tale of Nyazi but can guess it. Gabriel is on the wrong side of the fucking world. All plain enough. But van Hoek is some kind of a naval officer, and you are an intelligent-seeming Jew-why have you two not been ransomed?”
“My parents died of the Plague that ravaged Amsterdam when Cromwell cut off our foreign trade, and so many honest Dutchman were cast out of their homes and took to sleeping in pestilential places-” van Hoek began, rather peevishly.
“Avast, Cap’n! Do I look like a Roundhead? ’Twasn’t my doing!”
“I was suckled by government-issue wet-nurses at the Civic Orphanage. The worthies of the Reformed Church taught me reading and figures, bless them, but in time I grew up into a difficult boy.”
“Fancy that-who would’ve expected it from a short, Dutch, ill-tempered, red-headed step-child?” Jack exclaimed. “Still, I’d think some corsair-captain could find a use for you more exalted than barnacle-scraper.”
“When I was eighteen, the canals froze, and King Louis’s troops swarmed over them on ice-skates, raping everything that moved and burning all else. The Dutch Republic prepared to take ship and move to Asia en masse. Seamen were wanted. I was sprung from jail and compelled to join the V.O.C.* Following the refugees north, I went to Texel, where I was issued a sea-chest containing clothes, pipes, tobacco, a Bible, and a book called The God-Fearing Sailor. Twenty-four hours later I was on a man-o’-war in the Narrow Seas dodging English grape-shot and lugging sacks of gunpowder. That, and a year of manning pumps, made me a sailor. Thrice I sailed to India and back, and that made me an officer.”
“Fine! Why’re you not an officer here?”
“A dozen years I lived in continual fear of pirates. Finally all of my nightmares came true and my ship was stolen from me-you can see her riding at anchor in the harbor some days, flying the Turk’s flag, and if you cock an ear, and the wind’s right, you can hear the lamentations of the captives she has taken, being brought in to wait for ransom.”
“I am beginning to collect that you have a certain dislike of pirates and their works,” Jack said, “as any upright Dutchman should, I suppose.”
“Van Hoek refuses to turn Turk-so he rows alongside us,” Moseh said.
“What of you, Moseh? Reputedly, Jews stick together.”
“I am a crypto-Jew,” Moseh said. “In fact, more Crypto than Jew. I grew up on the Equator. There is an island off the coast of Africa called Sao Tome, which is the sovereign soil of whichever European country has most recently sent a fleet down there to bombard it. But for many years only the Portuguese knew where the hell it was and so it was Portuguese. Now, my ancestors were Spanish Jews. But two hundred years ago, in the very same year that the Moors were finally driven from Spain, and America discovered, Queen Isabella threw all of the Jews out. Those who, in retrospect, were intelligent, put on the stockings of Villa Diego-which is an expression meaning that they ran like hell-and settled in Amsterdam. My ancestors simply edged across the border to Portugal. But the Inquisition was there, too. When Alvaro de Caminha went down to Sao Tome to be its governor, he took with him two thousand Jewish children whom the Inquisition had torn from the bosoms of their families. Sao Tome had a monopoly on the slave trade in that part of the world-Alvaro de Caminha baptized those two thousand and put ’em to work in its management. But in secret they kept their faith alive, performing half-remembered rituals behind locked doors, and muttering in broken Hebrew even as they knelt before the gilded table where the body and blood of Christ were dished up. Those were my ancestors. Almost fifty years ago, the Dutch came and seized Sao Tome. But this probably saved my father’s parents’ lives, for, in all the lands controlled by Spain and Portugal, the Inquisition went on a rampage after that. Instead of being roasted alive in some Portuguese auto da fe, my father’s parents moved to New Amsterdam and worked for the Dutch West India Company in the slave trade, which was all they knew how to do. Later the Duke of York’s fleet came and took that city for the English, but not before my father had grown up and taken a Manhatto lass for his wife-”
“What the hell is a Manhatto?”
“A type of local Indian,” Moseh explained.
“I thought there was a certain je ne sais quoi about your nose and eyes,” Jack said.
Moseh’s face-illuminated primarily by the red glow of his pipe-bowl-now took on a sentimental, faraway look that made Jack instinctively queasy. Undoing the top-most button of his ragged shirt, Moseh drew out a scrap of stuff that dangled round his neck on a leather thong: some sort of heathen handicraft-work. “It is probably not easy for you to see this tchotchke, in this wretched light,” he said, “but the third bead from the edge in the fourth row, here-it is a sort of off-white-is one of the very beads that the Dutchman, Peter Minuit, traded to the Manhattoes for their island, some sixty years ago, when Mama was a little papoose.”
“Jesus Christ, you should hang on to that!” Jack exclaimed.
“I have been hanging onto it,” Moseh returned, showing mild irritation for the first time, “as any imbecile can see.”
“Do you have any conception of what it could be worth!?”
“Next to nothing-but to me, it is priceless, because I had it from Mama. At any rate-getting on with the story-my parents put on the stockings of Villa Diego and ended up in Curacao and there I was born. Mama died of smallpox, Papa of yellow fever. I fell in with a community of crypto-Jews who had collected there, for lack of any other place to go. We decided to strike out for Amsterdam, which was where our ancestors should have simply gone in the first place, and seek our fortunes there. As a group, we bought passage on a slave-ship bringing sugar back to Europe. But this ship was captured by the corsairs of Rabat, and we all ended up galley-slaves together, rowing to the strains of the Hava Negila; which, owing to its tiresome knack for getting stuck in the head, was the only Jewish song we knew.”