Free The Day of Atonement by David Liss

Settwell had risked everything to smuggle me out of Lisbon. Perhaps there was nothing I could do for him, but if I sought to rebalance the world’s scales, I knew that before anything else, I would have to call upon this man and, at the very least, assess the situation.
    The next day, I began my work. In the busy streets outside the inn, it was not hard to find a boy willing to run an errand. I handed him a note: for Charles Settwell, I told him, on the Rua Madalena. It was a big enough street, but there would not be many Englishmen upon it. The residents would know him.
    The note was spare, saying only that I had arrived and would like to meet. Settwell wrote back with equal reserve, agreeing that he would like to discuss our business, and giving a time and directions.
    Having settled that matter, I decided I had already gone unarmed in Lisbon far too long. There was no more delaying it, and so I left the inn and headed into the very heart of Lisbon.
    I did not fear discovery. I knew what I looked like—a young Englishman, perhaps with more money than sense. I wore a fine white wig, well powdered, a handsome velvet coat with silver buttons, and black shoes with glittering buckles. I was a gentleman, almost—but not quite—a dandy. No one took more notice of me than my appearance warranted.
    The city of hills smelled of the sea and fish and herbs and filth. The streets, as I recalled, rang with the sound of church bells and the sight of clergy—men and women—swarming like beetles in the many colors of their orders. Franciscan browns and Jesuitical black, of course, but also men in reds and blues and yellows and whites, and nuns in their wimples and robes. And among these clusters of clerics wereworkmen in their plain browns and Gypsies in their ragged finery. Mules and sheep and cattle had their run of the streets, which ran thick with their dung. Unlike in London, few carriages were to be seen—certainly not away from the palaces—and only slightly more people on horse. Here and there, however, were great men or women of the city within palanquins, drawn by heavily muscled Negroes whose owners treated them no better than beasts.
    There were beggars—the sick and the wounded, the legless and the armless. There was a bearded man, his face almost fully encased in hair, entirely without limbs, ministered to by an emaciated girl not ten years of age. I had seen all this and worse in London, but here the destitute and desperate were more plentiful and more pitiful, the meat of the city’s stew rather than the swirling grease. Here too were lepers with their tattered robes and tinny bells, shunned by all, sometimes pelted with stones by children or holy fools. Many of the beggars were soldiers, still in the king’s service, who had gone years without wages while rivers of gold and mountains of diamonds came from Brazil to pay for palaces and cathedrals.
    None were so desperate or crippled that they refused to clear the roads when a holy procession passed. It happened twice on my brief walk. The most wretched and wicked men fell to their knees, providing they had knees upon which to fall. Once as a dozen monks transported a communion host in a great monstrance of gold to the home of an ailing
fidalgo
. Another time as a diamond-encrusted casket containing the skull and pelvic bone of a saint was moved from one church to another. Like the rest of the crowd, I removed my hat and kneeled. I felt no remorse or hypocrisy. I was maintaining my disguise, as Mr. Weaver had taught me. In London, the ability to blend in meant success. Here it meant survival. Every bow, every removed hat, every sign of deference, brought me closer to my goal as I ventured upward, ever upward, to the fringes of the Alfama, past the old castle, to where the city began to fade into country.
    There, on a dirt road populated mostly by farmers selling producefrom baskets, I found the man precisely where he had been a decade before, when he’d sold a