It rippled thickly in the bowl, dark and hot and uninviting. Miguel Lienzo picked it up and pulled it so close he almost dipped his nose into the tarry liquid. Holding the vessel still for an instant, he breathed in, pulling the scent deep into his lungs. The sharp odor of earth and rank leaves surprised him; it was like something an apothecary might keep in a chipped porcelain jar.

"What is this?" Miguel asked, working through his irritation by pushing at the cuticle of one thumb with the nail of the other. She knew he had no time to waste, so why had she brought him here for this nonsense? One bitter remark after another bubbled up inside him, but Miguel let loose with none of them. It wasn't that he was afraid of her, but he often found himself going to great lengths to avoid her displeasure.

He looked over and saw that Geertruid met his silent cuticle mutilation with a grin. He knew that irresistible smile and what it meant: she was mightily pleased with herself, and when she looked that way it was hard for Miguel not to be mightily pleased with her too.

"It's something extraordinary," she told him, gesturing toward his bowl. "Drink it."

"Drink it?" Miguel squinted into the blackness. "It looks like the devil's piss, which would certainly be extraordinary, but I've no desire to know what it tastes like."

Geertruid leaned toward him, almost brushing up against his arm. "Take a sip and then I'll tell you everything. This devil's piss is going to make both our fortunes."

It had begun not an hour earlier, when Miguel felt someone take hold of his arm.

In the instant before he turned his head, he ticked off the unpleasant possibilities: rival or creditor, an abandoned lover or her angry relative, the Danish fellow to whom he'd sold those Baltic grain futures with too enthusiastic a recommendation. Not so long ago the approach of a stranger had held promise. Merchants and schemers and women had all sought Miguel's company, asking his advice, craving his companionship, bargaining for his guilders. Now he wished only to learn in what new shape disaster would unfold itself.

He never thought to stop walking. He was part of the procession that formed each day when the bells of the Nieuwe Kerk struck two, signaling the end of trading on the Exchange. Hundreds of brokers poured out onto the Dam, the great plaza at Amsterdam's center. They spread out along the alleys and roads and canal sides. Along the Warmoesstraat, the fastest route to the most popular taverns, shopkeepers stepped outside, donning wide-brimmed leather hats to guard against damp that rolled in from the Zuiderzee. They set out sacks of spices, rolls of linen, barrels of tobacco. Tailors and shoemakers and milliners waved men inside; sellers of books and pens and exotic trinkets cried out their wares.

The Warmoesstraat became a current of black hats and black suits, speckled only with the white of collars, sleeves, and stockings or the flash of silver shoe buckles. Traders pushed past goods from the Orient or the New World, from places of which no one had heard a hundred years before. Excited like schoolboys set free of the classroom, the traders talked of their business in a dozen different languages. They laughed and shouted and pointed; they grabbed at anything young and female that crossed their path. They took out their purses and devoured the shopkeepers' goods, leaving only coins in their wake.

Miguel Lienzo neither laughed nor admired the commodities set out before him nor clutched at the soft parts of willing shop girls. He walked silently, head down against the light rain. Today was, on the Christian calendar, the thirteenth day of May, 1659. Accounts on the Exchange closed each month on the twentieth; let a man make what maneuvers he liked, none of it mattered until the twentieth, when the credits and debits of the month were tallied and money at last changed hands. Today things had gone badly with a matter of brandy futures, and Miguel now had less than a week to pluck his fat from the fire or he would find himself another thousand guilders in debt.

Another thousand. He already owed three thousand. Once he had made double that in a year, but six months ago the sugar market collapsed, taking Miguel's fortune with it. And then -- well, one mistake after another. He wanted to be like the Dutch, who regarded bankruptcy as no shame. He tried to tell himself it did not matter, it was only a little while longer until he undid the damage, but believing that tale required an increasing effort. How long, he wondered, until his wide and boyish face turned pinched? How long until his eyes lost the eager sparkle of a merchant and took on the desperate, hollow gaze of a gambler? He vowed it would not happen to him. He would not become one of those lost souls, the ghosts who haunted the Exchange, living from one reckoning day to the next, toiling to secure just enough profit to keep their accounts afloat for one more month when surely all would be made easy.

Now, with unknown fingers wrapped around his arm, Miguel turned and saw a neatly dressed Dutchman of the middling ranks, hardly more than twenty years of age. He was a muscular wide-shouldered fellow with blond hair and a face almost more pretty than handsome, though his drooping mustache added a masculine flair.

Hendrick. No family name that anyone had ever heard. Geertruid Damhuis's fellow.

"Greetings, Jew Man," he said, still holding on to Miguel's arm. "I hope all goes well for you this afternoon."

"Things always go well with me," he answered, as he twisted his neck to see if any prattling troublemaker might lurk behind him. The Ma'amad, the ruling council among the Portuguese Jews, forbade congress between Jews and "inappropriate" gentiles, and while this designation could prove treacherously ambiguous, no one could mistake Hendrick, in his yellow jerkin and red breeches, for anything appropriate.

"Madam Damhuis sent me to fetch you," he said.

Geertruid had played at this before. She knew Miguel could not risk being seen on so public a street as the Warmoesstraat with a Dutchwoman, particularly a Dutchwoman with whom he did business, so she sent her man instead. There was no less risk to Miguel's reputation, but this way she could force his hand without even showing her face.

"Tell her I haven't the time for so lovely a diversion," he said. "Not just now."

"Of course you do." Hendrick grinned widely. "What man can say no to Madam Damhuis?"

Not Miguel. At least not easily. He had difficulty saying no to Geertruid or to anyone else -- including himself -- who proposed something amusing. Miguel had no stomach for doom; disaster felt to him like an awkward and loose suit. He had to force himself each day to play the cautious role of a man in the throes of ruin. That, he knew, was his true curse, the curse of all former Conversos: in Portugal he had grown too used to falseness, pretending to worship as a Catholic, pretending to despise Jews and respect the Inquisition. He had thought nothing of being one thing while making the world believe he was another. Deception, even self-deception, came far too easily.

"Thank your mistress but give her my regrets." With reckoning day soon upon him, and new debts to burden him, he would have to curb his diversions, at least for a while. And there had been another note this morning, a strange anonymous scrawl on a torn piece of paper. I want my money. It was one of a half dozen or so Miguel had received in the last month. I want my money. Wait your turn, Miguel would think glumly, as he opened each of these letters, but he was unnerved by the terse tone and uneven hand. Only a madman would send such a message without a name -- for how could Miguel respond even if he had the money and even if he were inclined to use what little he had for something so foolish as paying debts?

Hendrick stared, as though he couldn't understand Miguel's good, if thickly accented, Dutch.

"Today is not the day," Miguel said, a bit more forcefully. He avoided speaking too adamantly to Hendrick, whom he had once seen slam a butcher's head into the stones of the Damplatz for selling Geertruid rancid bacon.

Hendrick gazed at Miguel with the special pity men of the middle rank reserved for their superiors. "Madam Damhuis told me to inform you that today is the day. She tells me that she will show you something, and when you set your eyes on it, you will forever after divide your life into the time before this afternoon and the time after."

The thought of her disrobing flashed before him. That would be a lovely divide between the past and the future and would certainly be worth setting aside his business for the afternoon. However, Geertruid loved to play at these games. There was little chance she meant to take off as much as her cap. But there was no getting rid of Hendrick, and urgent as his troubles might be, Miguel could make no deals with this Dutchman lurking in his shadow. It had happened before. He would trail Miguel from tavern to tavern, from alley to canal side, until Miguel surrendered. Best to have this over with, he decided, so he sighed and said he would go.

With a sharp gesture of his neck, Hendrick led them off the ancient cobbled street and across the steep bridges toward the new part of the city, ringed by the three great canals -- the Herengracht, the Keizersgracht, and the Prinsengracht -- and then toward the Jordaan, the most rapidly growing part of town, where the air echoed with the ring of hammer on anvil and the chipping of chisel on stone.

Hendrick led him along the waters of the Rozengracht, where barges pierced the thick canal mist as they headed toward the docks to unload their goods. The new houses of the newly wealthy stood on either side of the murky water, facing the oak-and linden-lined waterway. Miguel had once rented the better part of so fine a house, red-brick and steeple-gabled. But then Brazilian production of sugar had far exceeded Miguel's expectations. He'd been gambling on low production for years, but suddenly Brazilian farmers unleashed an unexpected crop, and in an instant prices collapsed. A great man of the Exchange as instantly became a debtor living off his brother's scraps.

Once they departed from the main street, the Jordaan lost its charm. The neighborhood was new -- where they stood had been farmland only thirty years before -- but already the alleyways had taken on the decrepit cast of a slum. Dirt replaced the cobblestones. Huts made of thatch and scraps of wood leaned against squat houses black with tar. The alleys vibrated with the hollow clacking of looms, as weavers spun from sunup until late into the night, all in the hope of earning enough to keep their bellies full for one more day.

In moments of weakness, Miguel feared that poverty would claim him as it had claimed the wretched of the Jordaan, that he would fall into a well of debt so deep he would lose even the dream of recovering himself. Would he be the same man then -- himself, yet penniless -- or would he become as hollow as the beggars and luckless laborers he passed on the streets?

He assured himself it would not happen. A true merchant never gives in to gloom. A man who has lived as a Secret Jew always has one more trick to save his skin. At least until he fell into the clutches of the Inquisition, he reminded himself, and there was no Inquisition in Amsterdam. Just the Ma'amad.

But what was he doing here with this inscrutable Dutchman? Why had he allowed his will to collapse when he had business, important business, to pursue?

"To what sort of place are you taking me?" Miguel asked, hoping to find a reason to excuse himself.

"A miserable sort of place," Hendrick said.

Miguel opened his mouth to voice an objection, but it was too late. They had arrived.

Though he was not, like the Dutch, inclined to believe in omens, Miguel would later recall that his venture had begun in a place called the Golden Calf, surely an unpromising name. They climbed down a steep and viciously low-ceilinged stairwell to the cellar, a little room that might comfortably have held thirty souls but now contained perhaps fifty. The choking smoke of cheap West Indian tobacco and musty peat stoves nearly suppressed the scent of spilled beer and wine, old cheese, and the odor of fifty unwashed men -- or, rather, forty men and ten whores -- whose mouths puffed out onions and beer.

At the bottom of the stairs, an enormous man, shaped remarkably liked a pear, blocked their passage, and sensing that someone wished to get by he moved his bulk backwards to prevent anyone from squeezing past. He held a tankard in one hand and a pipe in the other, and he shouted something incomprehensible to his companions.

"Move your monstrous bulk, fellow," Hendrick said to him.

The man turned his head just enough to register his scowl and then looked away.

"Fellow" -- Hendrick tried again--"you are the hard turd in the ass of my journey. Don't make me apply a purgative to flush you out."

"Go piss in your breeches," he answered, and then belched laughter in his friends' faces.

"Fellow," said Hendrick, "turn around and see to whom you speak so rudely."

The man did turn around, and as he saw Hendrick the grin melted from his jowly three-days-unshaved face. "Begging your pardon," he said. He pulled his cap down off his head and moved quickly out of the way, knocking clumsily into his friends.

This newfound humility wasn't enough to satisfy Hendrick, who reached out like the lash of a whip and grabbed the man's filthy shirt. The tankard and pipe fell to the floor. "Tell me," Hendrick said, "should I crush your throat or not crush your throat?"

"Not crush," the drunk suggested eagerly. His hands flapped like bird wings.

"What do you say, Jew Man?" Hendrick asked Miguel. "Crush or not crush?"

"Oh, let him go," Miguel answered wearily.

Hendrick released his grip. "The Jew Man says to let you go. You remember that, fellow, next time you think to toss a dead fish or rotten cabbage at a Jew. A Jew has saved your hide today, and for no good reason, too." He turned to Miguel. "This way."

A nod from Hendrick was enough, and the crowd gave way for them as the Red Sea parted for Moses. Across the tavern, Miguel saw Geertruid, sitting at the bar, pretty as a tulip in a dung heap. When Miguel stepped forward she turned to him and smiled, wide and bright and irresistible. He could not help but return the smile, feeling like a fool boy, which was how she regularly made him feel. She had an illicit charm about her. Spending time with Geertruid was like bedding a friend's wife (something he had never done, for adultery is a most dreadful sin, and no woman he'd ever met had been tempting enough to lead him down that path) or giving a virgin her first kiss (which was something he had done, but only once, and that virgin later became his wife). The air around Geertruid always tingled with forbidden and elusive desire. Perhaps it was because Miguel had never spent so much time with a woman to whom he was unrelated without bedding her.

"Madam, I'm honored you wished to see me, but I'm afraid I haven't time for these diversions just now."

"Reckoning day approaches," she said sympathetically. She shook her head with a sadness that bordered somewhere between maternal and mocking.

"It approaches, and I've a great deal to put in order." He thought to tell her more, that things had gone badly and, unless he could devise a remarkable scheme, he would be another thousand in debt within a week. But he didn't say that. After six months of brutal, relentless, numbing indebtedness, Miguel had learned a thing or two about how to live as a debtor. He had even considered writing a little tract on the matter. The first rules were that a man must never act like a debtor and he must never announce his troubles to anyone who did not need to know them.

"Come, sit next to me for a moment," she said.

He thought to say no, he preferred to stand, but sitting next to her was much more delicious than standing nearby, so he felt himself nodding before he'd realized he'd made a decision.

It was not that Geertruid was more beautiful than other women, though she certainly had some beauty about her. At first glance she seemed nothing unusual, a prosperous widow of her middle thirties, regally tall, still quite pretty, particularly if a man gazed upon her from the proper distance or with enough beer in his belly. But even though she was past her prime, she yet retained more than her share of charms and had been blessed with one of those smooth and circular northern faces, as creamy as Holland butter. Miguel had seen youths twenty years her junior staring hungrily at Geertruid.

Hendrick appeared from behind Miguel and removed the man sitting next to Geertruid. Miguel moved in as Hendrick led the fellow away.

"I can only spare a few minutes," he told her.

"I think you'll give me more time than that." She leaned forward and kissed him, just above the border of his fashionably short beard.

The first time she had kissed him they had been in a tavern, and Miguel, who had never before had a woman for a friend, let alone a Dutchwoman, thought himself obligated to take her to one of the back rooms and lift her skirts. It would not have been the first time a Dutchwoman had made her intentions known to Miguel. They liked his easy manner, his quick smile, his large black eyes. Miguel had a rounded face, soft and youthful without being babyish. Dutchwomen sometimes asked if they could touch his beard. It happened in taverns and musicos and on the streets in the less fashionable parts of town. They claimed they wanted to feel his beard, neatly trimmed and handsome as it was, but Miguel knew better. They liked his face because it was soft like a child's and hard like a man's.

Geertruid, however, never wanted anything more than to press her lips against his beard. She had long since made it clear that she had no interest at all in having her skirts lifted, at least not by Miguel. These Dutchwomen kissed anyone they liked for any reason they liked, and they did so more boldly than the Jewish women of the Portuguese Nation dared to kiss their husbands.

"You see," she told him as she gestured to the crowd, "even though you've been in this city for years, I still have new sights to show you."

"I fear your stock of the new may be running thin."

"At least you needn't worry about that Hebrew council of yours seeing us in this place."

It was true enough. Jews and gentiles were permitted to conduct business in taverns, but what Jew among the Portuguese would choose this foul pit? Still, a man could never be overly cautious. Miguel took a quick look around for the telltale signs of Ma'amad spies: men who might be Jews dressed as Dutch laborers, conspicuous fellows alone or in pairs, eating none of the food; beards, which hardly anyone but Jews wore, cut close with scissors to resemble clean shaves (the Torah forbade only the use of razors on faces, not the trimming of beards, but beards were so out of fashion in Amsterdam that even the hint of one marked a man as a Jew).

Geertruid slid her hand along Miguel's, a gesture that came just short of the amorous. She loved freedom with men above all else. Her husband, whom she spoke of as the cruelest of villains, had been dead some years now, and she'd not yet finished celebrating her liberty. "That sack of fat behind the bar is my cousin Crispijn," she said.

Miguel glanced at the man: pale, corpulent, heavy-lidded -- no different from ten thousand others in the city. "Thank you for letting me witness your bloated kinsman. I hope I may at least ask him to bring me a tankard of his least foul beer to drown the stench?"

"No beer. I have something else in mind today."

Miguel did not try to suppress a smile. "Something else in mind? And is this where you have decided I might finally know your secret charms?"

"I have secrets aplenty -- you may depend on it -- but not such as you're thinking." She waved over to her cousin, who replied with a solemn nod and then disappeared into the kitchen. "I want you to taste a new drink -- a wondrous luxury."

Miguel stared at her. He might have been in any one of half a dozen other taverns now, speaking of woolens or copper or the lumber trade. He might be working hard to repair his ruined accounts, finding some bargain that he alone could recognize or convincing some drunkard to sign his name to the brandy futures. "Madam, I thought you understood that my affairs are pressing. I have no time for luxuries."

She leaned in closer and looked him full in his face, and for an instant Miguel believed she meant to kiss him. Not some sly buss on the cheek but a true kiss, hungry and urgent.

He was mistaken. "I didn't bring you here idly, and you will find that I offer you nothing ordinary," she told him, her lips close enough to his face that he could taste her fine breath.

And then her cousin Crispijn brought out something that changed his life.

Two earthen bowls sat steaming with a liquid blacker than the wines of Cahors. In the dim light, Miguel gripped the lightly chipped vessel with both hands and took his first taste.

It had a rich, almost enchanting, bitterness -- something Miguel had never before experienced. It bore a resemblance to chocolate, which once he had tasted years ago. Perhaps he thought of chocolate only because the drinks were both hot and dark and served in thick clay bowls. This one had a less voluptuous flavor, sharper and more sparing. Miguel took another taste and set it down. When he had sampled chocolate, he had been intrigued enough to swallow two bowls of the stuff, which so inflamed his spirits that even after visiting two satisfactory whores he had felt it necessary to visit his physician, who restored his unbalanced humors with a sound combination of emetics and purges.

"It's made of coffee fruit," Geertruid told him, folding her arms as though she had invented the mixture herself.

Miguel had come across coffee once or twice, but only as a commodity traded by East India merchants. The business of the Exchange did not require a man to know an item's nature, only its demand -- and sometimes, in the heat of the trade, not even that.

He reminded himself to say the blessing over wonders of nature. Some Jews would turn away from their gentile friends when they blessed their food or drink, but Miguel took pleasure in the prayers. He loved to utter them in public, and in a land where he could not be prosecuted for speaking the holy tongue. He wished he had more occasions to bless things. Saying the words filled him with giddy defiance; he thought of each openly spoken Hebrew word as a knife in the belly of some Inquisitor somewhere.

"It's a new substance -- entirely new," Geertruid explained when he was done. "You take it not to delight the senses but to awaken the intellect. Its advocates drink it at breakfast to regain their senses, and they drink it at night to help them remain awake longer."

Geertruid's face became as somber as one of the Calvinist preachers who railed from makeshift pulpits in town plazas. "This coffee isn't like wine or beer, which we drink to make merry or because it quenches thirst or even because it is delightful. This will only make you thirstier, it will never make you merry, and the taste, let us be honest, may be curious but never pleasing. Coffee is something... something far more important."

Miguel had known Geertruid long enough to be acquainted with her many foolish habits. She might laugh all night and drink 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?

Copyright © 2003 by David Liss