The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (149 page)

“’Tis not an English name.”

“It is a sort of cryptical reference to a character in the
Thousand and One Nights
: a notorious thief of Cairo. Time and again the police tried to entrap him but he always squirted free, like a drop of quicksilver when you try to put your finger on it.
Zaybak
is the Arabic word for quicksilver—accordingly, this character was given the
sobriquet
of Ali Zaybak.”

“A pleasant enough sounding færy-tale. Yet Cairo is a long way from England…”

“Now you are playing stupid, Jack—which in some jurisdictions is as good as a signed confession.” Dappa glanced up at the wall of the Kasba where the man squirmed on the hook.

“Perhaps you are right about
Jack,
Dappa, but
my
confusion is wholly genuine,” said Moseh.

“In Paris, Jack has a reputation,” put in Vrej Esphahnian. “There is a Duke there who does not love our Jack ever since he crashed a party, strangled one of the guests, chopped off the hand of the Duke’s first-born son and heir, and made a spectacle of himself in front of the Sun King.”

“Then perhaps this Duke got wind of Jack’s misadventures on the high seas,” Dappa said, “and began to make inquiries.”

“Well, as a lost Janissary, recovering from a grievous head injury, I know nothing of such matters,” Jack said. “But if it will help our chances, by all means let it be known that information as to the whereabouts of Ali Zaybak is to be had—if the duc d’Arcachon will only invest in the Plan.”

10
DECEMBER
1689

A
FTER
C
ARDINAL
R
ICHELIEU HAD RECOGNIZED,
and Louis XIII had rewarded, the genius of Monsieur Antoine Rossignol, he had built himself a little château. In later years he had hired no less a gardener than Le Nôtre to fix up the grounds. The château was at Juvisy. This had made sense at the time, as the King’s court had been in Paris, and Juvisy lay just outside of it.

When the son of Louis XIII had moved his court to Versailles, the son of Antoine Rossignol—who had inherited Antoine’s château, his knowledge of cryptanalysis, and his responsibilities—had found himself exiled.
He
had not moved, but the center of power had, and Juvisy had all of a sudden begun to seem like a remote outpost. Another man might have sold the place at a loss, and built a new château somewhere around Versailles. But Bonaventure Rossignol had been content to remain in the old place. His work did not require continual attendance at Court. If anything, the distance, and the peace and quiet that came with it, made him more productive.
Le Roi
had ratified the younger Rossignol’s decision by coming to visit him at Juvisy from time to time. In its smallness, its seclusion, and the prim perfection of its walled garden, the château at Juvisy seemed to Eliza like a perfect little kingdom of secrets, with Bon-bon its king, and Eliza its queen, or at least concubine.

The garden was of an altogether different style from what Le Nôtre had done at Versailles, being, of course, much smaller, with fewer sculptures. But it had in common with the King’s garden that it was made to look splendid when seen from the high windows of the château, which was how Eliza was seeing it. Bon-bon’s bedchamber was on the upper storey, in the center of the building, so that when Eliza climbed out of his bed she could walk three paces over a cold floor and stand in a dormer and gaze straight down the path that formed the garden’s axis. Of course the plantings were dead and brown now, but the curlicues of its sculpted hedges still drew
her eye, and gave her something to stare at while she began to answer a question that Bon-bon had just asked her.

He wanted to know, in effect, what the hell she was doing here. For some reason the question irked her a little bit.

She had showed up exhausted and dirty last night, with no thought of doing anything save putting Jean-Jacques to bed somewhere, and then collapsing into some bed of her own and sleeping for a few decades. Instead she’d been up half the night making love to Bon-bon. Yet she felt more awake, more refreshed now than if she’d spent the same amount of time slumbering. And so perhaps what she had taken for tiredness, yester evening, had been some other condition.

He’d had the good grace not to inquire what was going on. Instead he had accepted, with grace and even humor, the sudden arrival of Eliza and her entourage at his gates. She’d liked it that way, and she’d liked what had happened after. But now that the sun was up and they had gotten the sex out of their systems, there was this tedious need to explain matters. Certain parts of her mind had to be woken up, and were not happy about it. She stared at the dead garden, tracing the patterns of the hedges with her eyes, and mastered her annoyance.

“You had mentioned in a note to me that you contemplated a journey to Lyon,” Rossignol said, trying to prime the pump. “That was six weeks ago.”

“Yes,” Eliza said. “The journey to Lyon took ten days.”

“Ten days! Did you walk?”

“I could have done it faster by myself, but I was traveling with a five-month-old. The train consisted of two carriages, a baggage-cart, and some outriders and footmen borrowed from Lieutenant Bart and from the Ozoirs,” Eliza said.

Rossignol grimaced. “Unwieldy.”

“The first twenty miles were the most difficult, as you know.”

“Dunkerque is scarcely connected to France at all,” Rossignol agreed.

“Have you been to Lyon?”

“Only a little, passing through en route to Marseille.”

“And did you find it strangely bleak and austere compared to Paris?”

“Mademoiselle, I found it bleak and austere even compared to the Hague!”

Eliza did not laugh at the witticism, but only turned her back on the window, for a moment, to regard Rossignol. He was propped up in bed on a mountain of pillows, exposed to the chilly air from the
waist up. The man burned food like a forge burned coal, and never grew fat, and never seemed to feel cold.

“That is because you have no regard for commerce. I found it most interesting.”

“Oh. Yes, I know about that,” Rossignol conceded. “The great crossroads where the Mediterranean trades with the North. It sounds as if it ought to be interesting. But if you go there, you see only warehouses and silk-factories, and tracts of plain open ground.”

“Of course it seems boring if all you do is look at it,” Eliza said. “What renders it interesting is to take part in what goes on in those boring warehouses.”

Rossignol’s black eyes strayed to some papers resting on a bedside table. He was already regretting having asked her to explain this, and was hoping she’d make it quick.

Eliza stepped over to the side of the bed and swept the papers off onto the floor. Then she got a knee up on the bed and crab-walked across it until she was straddling Rossignol, sitting down firmly on his pelvis. “You asked,” she reminded him. “and I have got an answer for you, which you are going to listen to, and what is more, by the time I am finished, you will confess that it is interesting.”

“You have my attention, mademoiselle,” said Rossignol.

“Lyon. I suppose they used to hold sprawling country-style fairs there, two hundred years ago. It was colonized, you know, by Florentines hoping to make fortunes selling goods to this wild northern place called France. There are still fairs, four times a year, but it is not so rustic. It is more like Leipzig now.”

“That means nothing to me.”

“It means people standing in courtyards of trading-houses, screaming at each other, and trading goods not physically present.”

“But the warehouses—?”

“Silly, the goods are not present
in the trading-houses.
But neither can they be terribly remote, for they must be inspected before and delivered after the sale. Much of the traffic on the streets is
commerçants
going to this or that warehouse to look at a shipment of silks, herring, figs, hides, or what-have-you.”

“That helps me to understand some of what was, to a gentleman, so incomprehensible about the place.”

“You’d never guess that the place does more business than all of Paris. From the street it is desolate. You can die of loneliness or starvation there. It is not until you get inside the houses that you discover the inner life of the place. Bon-bon, all of the people who have been lured here by trade have created, behind their iron-bound doors and shuttered windows, little microcosms of the worlds they
left behind in Genoa, Antwerp, Bruges, Geneva, Isfahan, Augsburg, Stockholm, Naples, or wherever they came from. When you are in one of those houses, you might as well be in one of those faraway cities. So think of Lyon as a capital of trade, and the streets around the
Place au Change
as its diplomatic quarter, where the Jews, Armenians, Dutch, English, Genoans, and all the other great trading-nations of the world have established their embassies: shards of foreign territory embedded in a faraway land.”

“What were you doing there, mademoiselle?”

“Buying timber for Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir. I required some expert help. After I had been a week in Lyon, I was joined by my Dutch associates: Samuel and Abraham de la Vega and their cousin. I had sent a letter to them before I left Dunkerque, for I knew they were in London. It had caught up to them at Gravesend. They had changed their plans and made direct for Dunkerque, which they passed through five days after I had departed. As they passed through Paris they enlisted their cousin, one Jacob Gold, and the three of them followed me down and encamped at the house of a man they knew there—a wholesaler of beeswax that he imports from Poland-Lithuania.”

“Now I see why this thing took six weeks! Ten days to creep down to Lyon, a week to wait for all of these Jews to show up—”

“The delay was not a problem for me. It took me and my staff that long anyway to recover from the journey, and to set up housekeeping in Lyon. Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir, bless him, had sent word ahead, and arranged for us to stay at the
pied-à-terre
of someone who owed him a favor. Once we had established ourselves, I had begun to make contacts among the crowd who frequent the
Place au Change.
For I knew that the brothers de la Vega would spare no effort in ransacking the wholesale timber market and finding the best wood on the best terms. But their efforts would be of no use unless I had made arrangements for a bill of exchange to be drawn up, transferring the agreed-on sum from the King’s treasury to whomever sold us the timber. Likewise we would need to strike a deal with the shipper, and to purchase insurance,
et cetera.
So even if the de la Vegas had arrived at the same time as I, they should have little to do for a few days. And the need to feed little Jean-Jacques posed the most absurd complications.”

It was a mistake to mention this, for now Rossignol’s eyes drifted from Eliza’s face down to her left breast. Earlier she had wrapped herself in a sheet, but this had slipped down as she wrestled with him.

“The de la Vegas invited me to visit them at the beeswax-warehouse where they were lodging.”

Rossignol scoffed, and rolled his eyes.

“It would have seemed a very odd invitation to my ears before I had gotten to know Lyon,” Eliza admitted, “but when I reached the place, I found it to be perfectly congenial. It is on a meadow that rises up above the Rhône to the east of the trading district. They have more land than they need, and let it out to an adjacent vineyard. The growing season was over and so the vines were not much to look at, but the weather was fine, and we sat under a bower on the terrace of this stone building full of wax and drank Russian tea sweetened with Lithuanian honey. The daughters of the wax-magnate played with Jean-Jacques and sang him nursery-rhymes in Yiddish.

“To Samuel and Abraham de la Vega and Jacob Gold, I said that Lyon struck me as a very strange town.”

“I could have told you that, mademoiselle,” said Rossignol.

“But you and I think it is strange for different reasons, Bon-bon,” said Eliza. “Listen, and let me explain.”

“What of these Jews? What did they think?”

“They felt likewise, but had been reluctant to say anything. And so what I was trying to do, Bon-bon, was to get them talking.”

“And so were these Jews responsive to your gambit, mademoiselle?” Rossignol asked.

“You are impossible,” Eliza said.

S
AMUEL DE LA
V
EGA,
at twenty-four, was the senior man present—for the elders of the clan had more important things to do. He shrugged and said: “We are here to learn. Please say more.”

“I phant’sied you were here
to make money,
” Eliza said.

“That is always the object in the long run. Whether we make a profit on this matter of the timber remains to be seen; but we have heard of this place and want to know more of its peculiarities.”

Eliza laughed. “Why should I say more, when you have said so much? You come here not knowing whether it is possible to make money. It is a place you
have heard of,
which is no great testimony to its importance, and you approach it as a sort of curiosity. Would you speak thus of Antwerp?”

“Let me explain,” Samuel said. “In our family we do not recognize a profit—we do not put it on the books—until we have a bill of exchange payable in Amsterdam or (now) London, drawn on a house that maintains a well-reputed agency in one or both of those cities.”

“To put it succinctly: hard money,” Eliza said.

“If you will. Now, as we rode down here with Jacob Gold, he told us of the system in Lyon, and how it works.”

Jacob Gold looked so nervous, now, that Eliza felt she must make some little joke to put him at ease. “If only I could have eavesdropped on you!” she exclaimed. “For yesterday at dinner at the home of Monsieur Castan, I was treated to a description of that same system—a description so flattering that I asked him why it was not used everywhere else.”

They found this amusing. “What was Monsieur Castan’s reaction to that?” asked Jacob Gold.

“Oh, that other places were cold, distrustful, that the people there did not know one another so well as they did in Lyon, had not built up the same web of trust and old relationships. That they were afflicted by a petty, literal-minded obsession with specie, and could not believe that real business was being transacted unless they saw coins being physically moved from place to place.”

The others looked relieved; for they knew, now, that they would not have to break this news to Eliza. “So you are aware that when accounts are settled in Lyon, it is all done on the books. A man seated at a
banca
will write in his book, ‘Signore Capponi owes me 10,000
ecus au soleil
’—a currency that is used only in Lyon, by the way—and this, to him, is as good as having bullion in his lock-box. Then when the next fair comes around, perhaps he finds himself needing to transfer 15,000
ecus
to Signore Capponi, and so he will strike that entry from his ledger, and Signore Capponi will write that he is owed 5,000
ecus
by this chap, and so on.”

“Some money must change hands though!” insisted Abraham, who had heard all of this before but still could not quite bring himself to believe it. He was fourteen years old.

“Yes—a tiny amount,” said Jacob Gold. “But only after they have exhausted every conceivable way of settling it on paper, by arranging multilateral transfers among the different houses.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler just to use money?” Abraham asked doggedly.

“Perhaps—if they had any!” Eliza said. Which was meant as a jest, but it stilled them for a few moments.