The Confusion

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 Sanlucar 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 commercant 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.