The Coffee Trader Read Free Page B

as much as any Dutchman alive, she might neglect her affairs and tromp barefoot around the countryside like a girl, but in matters of business she was as serious as any man. A businesswoman such as she would have been an impossibility back in Portugal, but among the Dutch her kind was, if not precisely common, hardly shocking.
    “This is what I think,” she said, her voice hardly loud enough to rise above the din of the tavern. “Beer and wine may make a man sleepy, but coffee will make him awake and clearheaded. Beer and wine may make a man amorous, but coffee will make him lose interest in the flesh. The man who drinks coffee fruit cares only for his business.” She paused for another sip. “Coffee is the drink of commerce.”
    How many times, conducting business in taverns, had Miguel’s wits suffered with each tankard of beer? How many times had he wished he had the concentration for another hour’s clarity with the week’s pricing sheets? A sobering drink was just the thing for a trading man.
    An eagerness had begun to wash over Miguel, and he found his foot tapping impatiently. The sounds and sights of the tavern drifted away. There was nothing but Geertruid. And coffee. “Who now drinks it?” he asked.
    “I hardly know,” Geertruid admitted. “I’ve heard there is a coffee tavern somewhere in the city—frequented by Turks, they say—but I’ve never seen it. I know of no Dutchmen who take coffee, unless it be prescribed by a physician, but the word will spread. Already, in England, taverns that serve coffee instead of wine and beer have opened, and men of trade flock to them to talk business. These coffee taverns become like exchanges unto themselves. It can’t be too long before those taverns open here as well, for what city loves commerce so well as Amsterdam?”
    “Are you suggesting,” Miguel asked, “that you want to open a tavern?”
    “The taverns are nothing. We must put ourselves in a position to supply them.” She took his hand. “The demand is coming, and if we prepare ourselves for that demand, we can make a great deal of money.”
    The coffee’s scent began to make him light-headed with something like desire. No, not desire. Greed. Geertruid had stumbled upon something, and Miguel felt her infectious eagerness swelling in his chest. It was like panic or jubilance or something else, but he wanted to leap from his seat. Was this energy from the strength of her idea or the effect of the coffee? If coffee fruit made a man unable to keep from fidgeting, how could it be the drink of commerce?
    Still, coffee
was
something marvelous, and if he could dare to hope that no one else in Amsterdam plotted to take advantage of this new drink, it could be the very thing to save him from ruin. For six dismal months, Miguel had at times felt himself in a waking dream. His life had been replaced with a sad imitation, with the bloodless life of a lesser man. Could coffee restore him to his rightful place?
    He loved the money that came with success, but he loved the power more. He relished the respect he had commanded on the Exchange and in the Vlooyenburg, the island neighborhood where the Portuguese Jews lived. He loved hosting lavish dinners and never inquiring of the bill. He took pleasure in giving to the charitable boards. Here was money for the poor—let them eat. Here was money for the refugees—let them find homes. Here was money for the scholars in the Holy Land—let them work to bring in the age of the Messiah. The world could be a holier place because Miguel had money to give, and he gave it.
    That
was Miguel Lienzo, not this wretch at whose failings children and beefy housewives smirked. He could not much longer endure the anxious stares of other traders, who hurried away from him lest his ill fortune spread like plague, or the pitying looks from his brother’s pretty wife, whose moist eyes suggested she saw kinship between her misery and his.
    Perhaps he had suffered enough, and the