by Tim Willocks
“I won’t go to Messina until you tell me,” said Amparo. “Shall we play for him or not?”
Carla’s heart quickened at the thought. Such things weren’t done. To invite a man—a man of dubious reputation—to a strange villa and without so much as an introduction subject him to their Art? It was unheard-of. Tannhauser would consider them mad. Her mind told her that to play for him would be folly. Her heart said it would be magnificent. Amparo waited for her answer.
“Yes,” said Carla, “we’ll play for him. We’ll play as we’ve never played before.”
Amparo said, “You will take me with you, won’t you? If you left me behind, I couldn’t bear it.”
She’d asked this question innumerable times since they’d started on this journey but from now on things might change. Would Starkey permit it? Would Tannhauser? For the first time, Carla answered without knowing if she could keep her promise. “I’ll never leave you behind.”
Again, the unsmiling glow of joy illuminated Amparo’s face, and another inspiration sprang forth. “Wear the red dress,” she said.
She saw Carla’s face.
“Oh yes, the red dress,” insisted Amparo. “You must.”
Carla had commissioned the dress, during their sojourn in Naples, for reasons she couldn’t fathom even at the time. The bolt of silk had captured her: a fantasy of color that had traveled across desert and sea from Samarkand. The tailor had seen its reflection in her eyes and had clasped his hands in communion with some vision of her own that she couldn’t yet see, and he’d promised her a union between the silk and her heart’s desire whose harmony would delight a pillar of stone.
When she’d first donned the dress a week later, her skin had sighed and her heart had hammered and something close to panic had choked her throat, as if she’d been reminded of something in herself that she feared above all things, and which she’d long since determined to forget. When she’d left the dressing room, Amparo’s eyes had widened and swum with tears. When she’d stood before the looking glass, she’d seen a woman she didn’t know, and who could not be. And though at once she prized it more than anything she owned, she knew she’d never wear the exquisite garment, for the moment in which she might become the woman in the glass—would dare to be that woman—would never come. The dress was made for a woman in bloom, and she was a woman whose spring and summer had gone. The dress lay in her trunk, swaddled by the tissue in which its maker had wrapped it.
“The occasion has never been apt,” said Carla. “And surely is not so now.”
“If not now, then when?” asked Amparo.
Carla blinked and looked away. Amparo persisted.
“If Tannhauser is to walk the razor’s edge, then you must match him.”
There was logic to this, but it was Amparo’s logic. “No matter how remarkable he may be, he’ll not be wearing red silk.”
Amparo took this in and shook her head with sadness.
“Now, enough of these foolish fancies,” said Carla. “Please, be on your way.”
She watched Amparo run toward the house and wondered what it must be like to live without fear. Without guilt or shame. As Amparo lived. Carla had felt an intimation of such a life on that morning in the springtime recently passed, when they’d started out for Sicily from Aquitaine. Two madwomen on a journey that she knew they’d never complete. That morning she’d felt as free as the wind in her hair. Carla walked back to the guesthouse. She’d go to the villa’s chapel and say her rosary and pray that the girl succeeded. If Amparo returned from the Oracle alone, their quest would be over.
Tuesday, May 15, 1565
The Oracle Tavern—Messina—Sicily
Harsh white light and the sewage-tainted stench of the harbor spilled through the warehouse doors across a mongrel horde of nations and men, its members drawn from the criminal and military classes, and among them a sense of excitement was general. Pickers, sailors, smugglers, soldiers, bravi, painters, and thieves crowded the rough-hewn trestles and poured their wages down their gullets with the gusto of the long and justly damned. Their talk, as always, was of the imminent invasion of Malta and of the cruel and degenerate Turks and the perversions of Islam. Their ignorance of all these topics might well have bordered on perfection, but as long as they kept drinking, Tannhauser had no reason to complain. He intended to profit from the war no matter who was victorious, so he kept his own peace, as is a wise man’s practice, and invested his attention in his customary late breakfast: today an exceedingly tasty blood sausage from the Benedictines of Maniacio, washed down with a raw red wine brewed by the same.
His shoulders filled a massive walnut chair, upholstered in shabby green leather and embellished in gold leaf with the legend “Usque ad finem.” It was known as “Tannhauser’s Throne” and a brisk thrashing, followed by violent ejection into the reeking gutter without, awaited any sot drunk enough to imagine he might rest there. He had only lately come to be a man of business and property, and that against all previous expectations, but he felt that his new vocation fitted him well and, as in every endeavor in which he engaged, he gave himself up to it body and soul.
The tavern had evolved, as if of its own accord, from the anteroom of the warehouse from which Tannhauser plied his trade as a dealer in arms. The table at which he ate stood in an alcove among the gantried casks to the rear and from whence he could observe the whole room. This alcove was draped in carpets of exotic origin and fabulous design, which lent his office the air of a caravanserai. On the table was a broken clock from Prague, whose innards he intended to repair with components of his own manufacture, and beside it a brass astrolabe, by which one could calculate the position of celestial bodies, and which Professor Maurolico in person had taught him how to use; and heaped around these instruments were tomes of curious provenance, written in a variety of languages—not all of which, admittedly, Tannhauser could understand—and from certain of which, when in his cups, he would declaim ghazals in Turkish and laments by Fuzuli and Baki. His library also included Brucioli’s banned translation of the New Testament—a feat for which the man had died in the Inquisition’s jails—and tractates by Ramon Llull and Trithemius of Sponheim, and books of Natural Magick, wherein were expounded the opinions of ancient philosophers and the causes of Wondrous Effects. Amid these quaint paraphernalia, with his densely thewed forearms and their heathen tattoos, and his scarred countenance and bronze hair and lapis lazuli eyes, Tannhauser seemed to his fellows like a Mogul from some remote and outlandish demesne, and this was to his liking, for in mystery lay the notion of power, and in power lay his own notion of freedom.
As Tannhauser finished the sausage and drained his wine, Dana sashayed over to take his plate. She was supple and full and all abloom with youth. Along with the three other women who served the tables, Dana was from Belgrade. The four had been saved from a corsairs’ brothel in Algiers when their ship was captured by the galleys of the Religion. Tannhauser, in his turn, had saved the girls from the brothels of Messina, though not without some violence on the docks, all of it to the cost—it hardly need be said—of a gaggle of thwarted pimps. For this deed the ladies considered him gallant, not least because they were surprised to discover that whoremongering, along with vomiting and pissing, were forbidden within the Oracle. Even so, the girls made a handsome contribution to his business, for men came to slake their eyes as much as their thirsts, the latter intensified greatly by frustrated lust. Since the girls knew that unwelcome attention was punished with even greater severity than the use of their master’s chair, they paraded their charms without shame and with a singular lack of pity, both of which attitudes Tannhauser wholeheartedly admired.
Dana raised a glazed earth jug and gave him a smile that was demure by design alone. He resisted more wine by placing one hand over his beaker but failed to prevent the other from caressing the calf beneath her skirt. Her skin was cool and smooth and luscious to his touch, and she brushed her breast against his cheek and murmured some Serbian endearmen
t beneath her breath. He shifted in his seat, admirably aroused, and slid his hand up higher beneath the cotton. She’d shared his bed, and a number of spontaneous assignations in the bowels of the warehouse, for the last several weeks, and with the frequency of these trysts now climbing to several times a day, he knew he should know better; but the idea of a visit to his chamber, with the wine and sausage settling on his stomach, presented itself as one whose attractions were vast. Love was good for the digestion and while he had a number of chores to perform he could think of none, at that moment, that could claim great urgency. He inhaled her body’s perfume and sighed. A short nap afterward and what further joy could the Cosmos possibly offer?
His palm cupped her buttock and his fingertips settled in the muscular cleft of her arse, and he was inspired to wonder at the boundless perfection of Creation when it took such form. Dana tugged at his hair and he pushed back his chair. Yet in his erotic reverie he’d lingered too long. Before he could take her arm and steal away, Sabato Svi emerged from the Oracle’s depths and sat himself down at the table.
Beyond a courteous nod, Sabato paid Dana and the glare with which she fixed him no mind at all. He spread a place among the books for his elbows and shook the oily curls that dangled from under his yarmulke and smiled with the deep-set eyes in which there always burned a flame of Divine Madness. Sabato plucked a letter from his sleeve and Tannhauser flinched. He could not quite bring himself to withdraw his hand, but out of a vague sense of etiquette he kneaded Dana’s flesh with lesser vigor and mustered a greeting.
“Sabato,” said Tannhauser. “What news?”
“Pepper,” said Sabato Svi.
Sabato was a Jew of fearless temper from the Ghetto of Venice. At twenty-seven he was ten years Tannhauser’s junior and his senior in matters vital to their prosperity. They’d been partners for half a decade yet in all that time had never quarreled, even when some oversight had left them facing slavery or worse. He delighted in provoking outrage by slyly calculated slurs, by walking out in mimed fury as an arduous negotiation reached its climax, by asking impertinent questions of ruffians thrice his size. Yet with few, if memorable, exceptions, Sabato contrived to emerge in a position of advantage. Tannhauser was chary in his affections, for those he’d favored had proved themselves too prone to calamity, but if anyone was destined to bury him it was Sabato Svi. Tannhauser loved no man more.
“I’ve told you before,” said Tannhauser, “I know little or nothing of pepper and have no great itch to learn more.”
“And I have told you—before—everything you need to know,” Sabato replied, “which is that its price better than quadruples between a warehouse floor in Alexandria and the market stalls of Venice.”
“If, that is, I can avoid the tonnage tax and the bastinado—”
“Which, as always, you will.”
“—and if I’m not taken and chained to the oar of a galley by El Louck Ali—”
“Who is on his way to join the Sultan’s armada, along with Torghoud Rais, Ali Fartax, and every other corsair in the Mediterranean.”
“And from where will Suleiman’s Mamelukes sail to Malta? Alexandria!” countered Tannhauser, with satisfaction.
Sabato waved the letter toward the dockyards beyond the doors. “Look at the Genoese. They cower in the bay like cockle pickers—but for a man like you the sea has never been safer.”
Tannhauser, always a fool for any challenge to his prowess, paused in his fondling. Dana flexed her buttocks to signal disappointment and he continued, but more pensively than before. If he could avoid the Moslem fleets converging on Malta—which with timing and luck was likely—the rest of the sea, for these few weeks, would indeed be uncommonly quiet. With the uncanny timing he’d come to expect of women, Dana ran her fingers through his hair.
“I have no love of the sea,” Tannhauser said. “It’s a stony field I’ve plowed for far too long and I have many essential duties to occupy me here.”
Sabato glanced at Dana’s breasts and she pouted obscenely in riposte.
“Mattias, my friend,” said Sabato, “eighty-five quintals of Javanese pepper lie waiting for us in Egypt.” He fluttered the letter below his nostrils as if it were perfumed with myrrh. “And in a warehouse exclusively favorable to our suit.”
Tannhauser caught a glimpse of the Hebrew script. “Moshe Mosseri?”
Sabato nodded. “Eighty-five quintals—and in a month it will be gone forever.” He leaned forward. “Every city in Europe screams for pepper. The French won’t even eat soup without it. Imagine Zeno, D’Este, and Gritti trying to outbid each other. Have you any idea how much they’ll pay?”
Tannhauser scowled.
“You’ll be in Alexandria in three weeks—make up the lading with mace, beeswax, silks—and in eight we’ll be counting our gold in San Marco’s square.” Sabato had a wife and two sons in Venice, for whom he pined, but Tannhauser knew him, and sentiment alone wasn’t reason enough to go home. “Would you like to hear my estimate? A conservative estimate?”
“If I must.”
“Fifteen thousand florins. More likely, twenty.”
The sum was so enormous that Tannhauser was moved to withdraw his hand from Dana’s skirt and massage his jaw. Stubble rasped on his fingers, and Dana clucked with outrage, but the sum remained just as fabulous as before.
Almost as an afterthought, Sabato added: “For the outbound leg I’ve secured a load of sugarcane.”
Sabato sprang these enterprises at such an advanced stage of planning that Tannhauser was left with little option but to carry them through. The success of the Oracle had been conspicuous enough that they were able to open up new lines of credit, and quarry their old ones, more or less as they pleased. Tannhauser probed, without conviction, for another impediment.
“A sailing master? A ship? A well-found ship, mind, not one of the worm-raddled sieves you’ve sent me out in before.”
“Dimitrianos. The Centaur.”
The thought of the evil stench, the weeks of boredom and blistering sun, and the Greek’s interminable puling over his losses at cards and backgammon provoked an unwelcome squall through Tannhauser’s digestive organs. Out of consideration for Dana, he suppressed the urge to break wind. “Put too many irons in the fire and some will cool,” he said. “Besides, I’ve no love of the Greek, either.”
As expected, this demurrer was ignored. “The Greek is waiting and his pockets are empty. We can load within three days. The best time to embark”—Sabato shrugged and smiled as he passed the burden to Tannhauser—“depends as always upon your information.”
Tannhauser had one foot in each of two hostile worlds. To the Venetians, the Spanish rulers of Sicily, and the Knights of Malta, he was a condottieri captain of infantry, late of Alva’s Italian campaign and the slaughter of the French at Saint Quentin, and now an estimable merchant in opium, arms, and munitions. To the Moslems he was Ibrahim Kirmizi—Ibrahim the Red—veteran of the bloodbaths of Eastern Anatolia and Iran. He knew the Ottoman way, its manners and languages and rituals. He moved amongst them as the native he once had been and, in some regions of his heart, would always remain. He had associates in Bursa, Smyrna, Tripoli, and Beirut; he’d shipped silks and opium out of Mazandaran; and no man in Christendom knew the Stambouli shore—and Eminonu and Uskudar and the Buyuk Carsi, and their baths and hostelries and bazaars—as well as he. In Messina he was thick with those of the pilots, overseers, and sailing masters who might supply valuable intelligence—of goods and vessels in transit, of competitors on the rise or fall, of confiscated cargoes up for auction, of raiders and intrigues abroad, of changes of political fortune overseas. He also canvassed the slaves in their dockside jails, and the Moslems most of all, for they were mute to everyone else. These men brought tidings from the Barbary Coast that no one else could provide. When news traveled so slowly, a few days’ foreknowledge could be precious, and that of a few weeks without price.
It was thus that his dealings with the Knights of Malta h
ad begun, when he’d seen with his own eyes from the Unkapani quay of the Stambouli shore the raw timber keels of Suleiman’s new fleet, and had realized that such intelligence might make him and Sabato Svi wealthy men.
They’d embarked from Old Stambouli that very night, Sabato for Venice to broker a supply of powder and arms, and Tannhauser for Messina to lease the warehouse, and thence on to Malta to treat with the Religion. The priceless advance news of Suleiman’s fleet he gave them for free, to establish his bona fides and to secure a lucrative contract to supply them with arms. “War is a river of gold,” he’d promised Sabato, “and we will stand with buckets on its bank.” And so it was, for the Religion’s appetite for gunpowder, cannon, and ball had proved insatiable, and with rich lands all over Catholic Europe their pockets were deep.
“My information,” Tannhauser said, to Sabato Svi, “is that we’re rich and getting richer whether the French put pepper in their soup or sprinkle it over their privities for the pox.”
Sabato laughed, with the infuriating cackle he inflicted on those he had bested. Dana bumped her haunch into Tannhauser’s shoulder, but the pleasures of her skirt had been soured. With a gesture he sent her away and she acquiesced with another rancorous glare at Sabato Svi. Tannhauser watched her hips swing out of sight then turned and planted a forefinger on the tabletop.
“You ask me to spend two months at sea when the bloodiest contest of arms in the memory of the living is about to take place on our doorstep.”
“So now we come to the nub. Rather than advance our station, you’d sit prattling with the wine swillers and sifting gossip from the docks.” Sabato tossed his head at the scurvy entourage crowding the trestles. “You’ve spent so much time with these swinish guzzlers you’re taking on their virtues.”
