The Confusion (16 page)

“Why don’t they?” Abraham demanded.

“It depends on whom you ask,” Eliza said. “The most common answer is that they do not need it because the system works so smoothly. Others will tell you that when any bullion does become available here, it is immediately smuggled out to Geneva.”

“Why?”

“In Geneva are banks that, in exchange for bullion, will write you a bill of exchange payable in Amsterdam.”

Abraham’s eyes blossomed. “So we are not the only ones who are worried about how to extract hard money profits from Lyon!”

“Of course not! For that, we are competing against every other foreign merchant in Lyon who does not share the belief, common here, that entries in a ledger are the same as money,” said Samuel.

“What kind of person
would
believe such a thing, though?” Abraham asked.

Jacob Gold answered, “The kinds of people who have been here for so long and who make a comfortable living off of those ledgers.”

Eliza said, “But the only reason this system works is that these people know and trust each other so well. Which is fine for them. But if you are on the outside, as we are, you can’t take part in the
Dépôt,
as this system is called, and it is difficult to realize profits.”

Jacob Gold added, “It is fine for those who have the houses here, the land, the servants. They transact an enormous amount of business and they find ways to live well. The lack of hard money is only felt when one wants to cash out and move somewhere else. But if that is the kind of person you are—”

“Then you don’t live in Lyon and you are not a member of the
Dépôt,
” Eliza said.

“We can talk about this all day, going in circles like the Uroburos,” said Samuel, clapping his hands, “but the fact is that we’re here and we want to buy some timber for the King. And we don’t have any money. But we have credit from Monsieur Castan who in turn has credit because he lives here and is very much a member of the
Dépôt.
”

“Thank you, Samuel,” Eliza said. “You are correct: people trust Monsieur Castan; when one of the other members of this
Dépôt
writes in his ledger ‘M. Castan owes me such-and-such number of
ecus,
’ to them that’s as good as gold. And what we need to do is turn that ‘gold’ into some timber arriving at Nantes.”

“Thanks to Monsieur Wachsmann,” said Jacob Gold, referring to our host, “we have some ideas as to where we might go and make inquiries about who has timber, and might be willing to sell it to us; but how do we actually transfer the money to them from the King’s Treasury?”

“We need to find someone who is a member of this
Dépôt
and who is willing to write in his ledger that the King owes him the money,” Eliza said.

“But that still doesn’t get the money into the hands of him who sells us the timber, unless he is a member of the
Dépôt,
and I do not phant’sy that lumberjacks are invited,” said Samuel.

“And it provides no way for us to realize a profit,” Abraham, the ever-vigilant, reminded them.

Eliza reached out and pinched him on the nose to shut him up while she pointed out, “True, and yet wax, silk and other commodities are sold here in immense quantities, so there must be some way of doing it! And some
do
realize hard money profits, as is proved by the covert transfers of bullion to Geneva!”

Monsieur Wachsmann was therefore brought in. He was a stolid gray-headed Pomeranian of about threescore years. They explained their puzzlement to him and asked how
he
sold his goods, given that he was not a member of the
Dépôt.
He replied that he had a sort of relationship with an important businessman in town, with whom he kept a running account; and whenever the account stood in Monsieur Wachsmann’s favor, he could leverage that to get what he needed. The same would be true, he assured his visitors, of any timber wholesaler big enough for them to consider doing business with.

“So a plan begins to take shape,” said Samuel. “We will negotiate terms with a timber-wholesaler, denominated in
ecus au soleil,
never mind that they are a wholly fictitious currency, and then take the matter to the
Dépôt
and allow them to clear it on their ledgers. We end up with the timber; but is is possible for us to extract any profit?”

Monsieur Wachsmann shrugged as if this was not something he paid much attention to; and yet his estate showed that he had profited abundantly. “If you would like, you can route the profits to my account, and I will owe them to you, and we may plow these into later trades within the
Dépôt,
which may eventually turn into some material form, such as casks of honey, that you could sell for gold in Amsterdam.”

“This is how people move to Lyon, and never leave,” muttered Jacob Gold, combining in this one remark the Amsterdammer’s amazement at Lyon’s business practices with the Parisian’s disdain for its culture.

Monsieur Wachsmannn shrugged, and looked at his château. “Worse fates can be imagined. Do you have any idea what Stettin is like at this time of year?”

“What about getting some bullion and running it to Geneva for a bill of exchange?” Abraham demanded. “Much quicker, and easier to carry to Amsterdam than casks of honey.”

“There is a lot of competition for the small amount of bullion that exists here, and so you will have to accept a large discount,” Monsieur Wachsmann warned him, “but if that is really what you want, the house that specializes in such transactions is that of Hacklheber.
They are at the Sign of the Golden Mercury, cater-corner from the
Place au Change.
”

“Now, there is a familiar name,” Eliza said. “I have been to their factory in Leipzig, and been ogled by Lothar himself.”

“I have never heard of them,” said Samuel, “but if this Lothar was ogling you it means he is not altogether stupid.”

“They are metals specialists,” said Jacob Gold, “I know that much.”

“When the Genoese here went bankrupt,” said Monsieur Wachsmann, “it happened because the Spanish mines had hiccuped in their delivery of silver to Seville. Bankers of Geneva and other places came to Lyon to fill the void left by the Genoese. They had connections to silver mines in the Harz and the Ore Range, which flourished for a brief time, until Spanish silver once again flooded the market. Anyway, one of those banking-families had an agency in Leipzig, and the people they sent thither to look after it became linked by marriage to this family of von Hacklheber. Because of the Hacklhebers’ connections to the mines, they had older ties to the Fuggers. Indeed, it is said that this family goes all the way back to the time of the Romans…”

Abraham snorted. “
Ours
goes back all the way to Adam.”

“Yes; but to them this is all very impressive,” said Monsieur Wachsmann patiently, “and by the way, now that you have had your bar mitzvah you might spend less time poring over Torah and more learning social graces. At any rate, fortune favored the Leipzig branch, and before long the Hacklheber tail was wagging the Geneva dog. It is a small house, but reputed extraordinarily clever. They are in Lyon, Cadiz, Piacenza: anywhere there is a large flux of money.”

“What do they
do
?” Abraham wanted to know.

“Lend money, clear transactions, like other banks. But their real specialty is maneuvers such as the one we are talking about now: shipment of bullion to Geneva. Do you remember when I warned you that there would be a discount if you converted your earnings to bullion here? It should have occurred to you to wonder just where the missing money disappears to in such a case. The answer is that it goes into the coffers of Lothar von Hacklheber.”

Monsieur Wachsmann rolled to his feet, and paced across the terrace once or twice before going on.

“I trade in wax. I know where wax comes from and where it goes, and how much wax of different types is worth to different people in different times and places. I say to you that what I am to wax, Lothar von Hacklheber is to money.”

“You mean gold? Silver?”

“All kinds. Metals in pig, bullion, or minted form, paper, moneys of account such as our
ecus au soleil.
To me, money is frankly somewhat mysterious; but to him it is all as simple as wax. Or so it would seem; like honeycombs in a boiler, it melts together and is con-fused into one thing.”

“Then we shall go and talk to his agent here,” Eliza said.

“Agreed,” said Samuel de la Vega, “but I say to you that if they simply had a few coins lying about the place, we could get this whole thing done in an hour. That this system works, I cannot deny; but this
Dépôt
reminds me of certain towns up in the Alps where people have been marrying each other for too long.”

“T
HE NEXT DAY,”
Eliza continued, “I met Gerhard Mann, who is the Hacklheber agent in Lyon.”

She now relaxed her grip on Bonaventure Rossignol’s testicles. For in the end, this was the only way she had found to maintain Bon-bon’s attentiveness as she had discoursed of
ecus au soleil
and the
Dépôt
and so forth. But the mention of the name Hacklheber brought Rossignol to attention.

“Lothar von Hacklheber,” she continued, “is not the sort who gladly suffers an employee to while away the afternoons sipping coffee in the café.”

“I should think not!”

“He has so arranged it that Mann has more work than he can handle. This forces him to make choices. He is always dashing about town on horseback like a Cavalier. Carriages are too slow for him. Arranging the meeting was absurdly difficult. It required half a dozen exchanges of notes. Finally I did what was simplest, namely remained still at the
pied-à-terre
and waited for him to come to me. He galloped up, naturally, just as I was beginning to suckle Jean-Jacques. And so rather than send him away, I invited him in, and bade him sit down across the table from me even as Jean-Jacques was hanging off my tit.”

“Appalling!”

“But I did this as a sort of test, Bon-bon, to see if he’d be appalled by it.”

“Was he?”

“He pretended not to notice, which was not an easy thing for him.”

Rossignol shuddered. “What did you talk about?”

“We talked about Lothar von Hacklheber.”

“Y
OU MET
HIM
IN
L
EIPZIG?”
Mann asked.

“It had to do with a silver-mining project in the Harz,” Eliza said, “in which
he
elected not to invest: a typically shrewd decision.”

Eliza explained to Mann what she had in mind. He pondered it for a few moments. At first she saw concern, or even fear, on his face, which made her suspect that he did not really wish to do it, yet was loath to refuse, for fear of what
he
might say, were Eliza to go to
him
and pout. Mann was a young man—indeed, would have to be, to last for very long, working as he did—and Eliza saw clearly enough that he had been posted to this place to prove himself, or to fail, so that
he
could decide where to send Mann next. Mann had blue eyes a little too close together, and a broad brow, so expressive that in its creases and corrugations she could read his feelings like sonnets on parchment. He was intelligent, but lacking in resolution. She guessed that someone of strong personality would one day get the better of him, and that he would end up sitting at a
banca
on an upper floor of the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig, peering down into the courtyard with a mirror on a stick.

After a few moments’ thought, Mann relaxed, and began to sift through the vocabularies of diverse languages to express his thoughts. “It would be—” he began, and then switched to German in which Eliza could make out the word-part
“sonder,”
which to them meant “special” or “exceptional” or “peculiar.” This was his polite way of telling her that the sum involved was too small to be worth his time. “But we are encouraged to make such transactions. Sometimes they are like the first trickle of water coming through a tiny crevice in a dike; the amount that comes through is not as important as the channel that it cuts along its way, which presently carries a much greater volume.” Which was his way of saying that he had heard she was backed by the French government, and wanted to participate in what she was doing, now that expenditures were rising because of the war.

“It is not a similitude that shall be of any comfort to Dutchmen,” Eliza said, having in mind her colleagues, the de la Vegas.

“Ah, but if you cared about the comfort of Dutchmen you would not be on such an errand,” Gerhard Mann reminded her.

“S
O THROUGH HIS OWN CLEVERNESS
Gerhard Mann had devised a way to escape from the interview without giving me or
him
any cause to be angry,” Eliza said. Tired of sitting on Bon-bon, she now rolled back and sat cross-legged on the bed between his spread knees.

“I let the de la Vegas know that we had now a way to get hard money out of Lyon,” she continued. “Within a few hours, they were making the rounds of the timber wholesalers, and within a day, had struck two separate deals: one for a shipment of
Massif Central
oak logs, which were stacked near the bank of the Saône a mile
upstream, another for some Alpine softwood at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône. If you’d like, Bon-bon, I can devote an hour or two, now, to explaining in detail the negotiations amongst ourselves, the two merchants who sold us the timber, Monsieur Castan, various other members of the
Dépôt,
Gerhard Mann, and certain insurers and shippers.”

Rossignol said something under his breath about
la belle dame sans merci.

“Very well then,” said Eliza, “suffice it to say that some entries were made in some ledgers. A fast coach went to Geneva, which is some seventy-five miles away as the crow flies, though considerably farther as the horse gallops. Abraham got his Bill of Exchange, though the margin of profit was scarcely enough to cover their time and expense. The timber was ours.