Free The Coffee Trader by David Liss

Spanish adventures, translated French romances, marvelous travel stories, and, most of all, salacious tales of crime. Of these accounts of murderers and thieves, Miguel loved best the pamphlets recounting the adventures of Charming Pieter, the clever bandit who had been playing his wily tricks on the foolish rich in and around Amsterdam for years. Geertruid had first introduced him to the adventures of this scoundrel hero who, she said, along with his Goodwife Mary, embodied the very core of Dutch cleverness. She read the pamphlets eagerly, sometimes aloud to her man, Hendrick, and sometimes to an entire tavern of men, who laughed and hooted and toasted this thief. Were the stories true, were they mere fictions like
Don Quixote,
or something in between?
    Miguel had resisted the allure of these stories at first. In Lisbon he had never bothered with lurid accounts of murderers and executions, and now he had reading enough with his studies of Torah. Nevertheless, Charming Pieter had won him over; Miguel had become enchanted by the bandit’s celebration of his own duplicity. The Conversos of Lisbon had been duplicitous by necessity, even those who fully embraced the Catholic Church. A New Christian could be betrayed at any time by a victim under an Inquisitor’s knife. Miguel had habitually lied, hidden facts about himself, eaten pork in public; he had done anything to prevent his name from being the one to come to a prisoner’s lips. Deception had always been a burden, but Pieter reveled in his duplicity. Miguel was enchanted by these tales because he longed, like Charming Pieter, to be a trickster instead of a liar.
    Now he tried to lose himself in one of his favorite stories, that of a rich burgher who, entranced by Goodwife Mary’s beauty, had thought to cuckold Pieter. While she provided a distraction with her wit and artful ways, Pieter and his men carried off all of the burgher’s possessions. After turning the burgher out of his own home, naked to the world, Pieter and Mary opened up the man’s larder to the people of the village and allowed them to feast upon his wealth. And so, in his own way, Charming Pieter carried out the justice of the common folk.
    When he closed the little volume, Miguel was still thinking about brandy and about coffee.
    That afternoon, he received a letter from the usurer Alonzo Alferonda, with whom he maintained a cautious friendship. Alferonda had a reputation as a man dangerous to neglect—dozens of blinded and lamed debtors in Amsterdam would testify to that—but Miguel found Alferonda’s hobbled victims hard to reconcile with the plump and jovial fellow who seemed to have an infinite store of kindness. The Ma’amad would have destroyed Miguel for his congress with a man it had expelled, but Alferonda’s company was too merry to set aside. Even in his exiled state, he had knowledge and information, and he never hesitated to pass it along.
    Some months ago, Miguel had mentioned a rumor he’d heard, and Alferonda volunteered to find out what he could. Now he claimed to have learned something important and requested that they talk—always a tricky business, but usually managed well enough with a bit of caution. Miguel wrote to Alferonda suggesting they meet in the coffee tavern, which he had found by inquiring of a few men in the East India trade.
    Miguel knew only that the place was located in the Plantage, which stretched out east of the Vlooyenburg, endless walks cutting through sculpted gardens. Square paths crisscrossed walkways, peopled with the high and the low alike. The burgomasters had ruled that no permanent buildings might stand on its verdant grounds, so all structures here were made of wood, ready to be taken apart should the city so decree. On pleasant evenings, the Plantage became a garden of delights for those who had the coin and the inclination. Strollers could walk among bands of fiddlers and fife players. On the well-lighted paths, entrepreneurs had set up tables