The Day of Atonement

by David Liss

  Then I reached into my waistcoat and tore at the lining, removing two items, setting them both down on the table near the window. The first was Gabriela’s scarf, the indigo dye faded now to a dull sky blue, the embroidery spotty and the edges fringed with wear. I held it to my nose and breathed in the perfume with which I refreshed it from time to time. It no longer smelled of Gabriela—her scent was long forgotten—but I imagined that the perfume contained something of her essence. This thing, this one artifact, remained of her, but maybe there would be more soon. When I first decided to return to Lisbon, I told myself not to hope she would be here, in the city, unmarried, free to join me. Yet I did hope, and now that I was here, I knew I would seek her out. There was more than one ghost for me to search for in the city.

  The other item was a duodecimo volume of Hebrew prayers. I considered, with some amusement, my conversation with the priest who had sought to make certain I smuggled no Protestant texts. What would he have done if he had suspected the truth, that I was an escaped New Christian, returned as a Jew? The irony would have been lost on him, of course. I had been raised Catholic, as had my father. Perhaps my father’s father or grandfather had cleaved to Jewish practices, observed in secret, but over time the knowledge and commitment had decayed. As a child I knew no faith but that of the Church, and so it was the Inquisition that had, however circuitously, returned me to my people.

  Centuries before, Jews had prospered in Portugal. It had been the country to which persecuted Jews had fled. Once, thousands of voices would have risen up to recite the afternoon prayers, the mincha. Those voices had long ago fallen silent. Though hardly the most observant of Jews back in London, I was now prepared to rekindle a tiny spark of that stifled flame. There would be one who dared pray, if only in a whisper. My voice breathy and trembling, not from fear but from anger, I read, and every syllable was a blow of defiance.

  Chapter 4

  The idea of killing the priest had come to me that night in the alley, but returning to Lisbon had been on my mind for months before that. It had begun in the Bevis Marks Synagogue, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. I had heard the words every year since my relocation to London. It was part of the liturgy taken from the Mishnah. For sins against God, the liturgy says, the Day of Atonement atones, but for sins of one man against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone until they have made peace with each other.

  How could I make peace with the dead? How could I atone for leaving my parents behind to be tortured and die in their prison cells? It had been a strange jumble of ideas. I was not even sure they made sense to me, but I had begun to sense that I needed to leave London and come to Lisbon. I needed to restore order to my broken life, and that could only happen in the city that had broken me. And now here I was. I had left my friend and mentor; I had abandoned everyone and everything in London. I was alone and vulnerable and in danger.

  I was glad I had come.

  I slept for nearly eight hours. When I awoke, I immediately regretted the lack of a servant. Acquiring one would be among my first tasks. For now, I dressed myself and then emerged to the common room to order food. Earlier the tavern had been crowded, but now there were only a half dozen or so haggard-looking men, all residing in the inn itself, I supposed.

  While most of Lisbon was unsafe after sunset, the English streets were not, for they were well lit and patrolled. Even so, it was quickly apparent the Duke’s Arms was not a popular destination beyond the bustle of daylight hours. The food, I discovered, was indifferent, the drink well watered. None of it was appallingly bad, but neither was it particularly good. Mosquitoes hovered about the patrons, and enormous flies gathered in clouds above the dishes. It was an inn for those who could ill afford to bring their business elsewhere.

  I sat alone by the fire, eating cold chicken and crusty Portuguese bread, washing it down with thin porter. The other men in the room were older, with fraying wigs or no wigs at all, several days of beard growth, eyes and noses and cheeks red with lack of sleep and too much drink. In the fine homes and estates of the Bario Alto were those who had played Lisbon’s mercantile lottery and won. These were the men who had lost. None of them showed any interest in talking to the new man, and I was content to return the indifference.

  After I ate and called for a second pot of porter, Kingsley Franklin set down his rag and walked over on stiff legs.

  “All to your liking?” Franklin lowered himself into a chair, grunting and grimacing as he did so.

  “The food could be better,” I said.

  “Couldn’t be worse. But at least there’s plenty of it, eh?”

  “Better a full stomach than a pleased palate,” I opined, saluting my host with my drink.

  “A man after my own heart,” Franklin said with evident pleasure. “Tell me, sir, if I may be so bold as to ask. How do you mean to begin your business here?” He sounded less like he was prying and more like he wished to offer advice.

  “Have you something to suggest?”

  “I know a thing or two.” He shrugged. “You’re used to London and its great size, but Lisbon is a small city. A man can’t help but know his fellows’ business, and what is true for your ordinary João is twice as true for us English. There’s not so many of us that we miss knowing one another, and some keep a better eye upon opportunity than others.”

  There was no reason not to jump in, then. Both feet. No point looking down. “Do you know a man named Charles Settwell?” I had written to my father’s old friend care of the Factory, and Settwell had written back, but our communication had been necessarily guarded.

  Franklin looked as though he’d just bitten into something rancid. “What can you want with him?”

  I felt my pulse begin to race. That was not the reaction I wished to hear when the man who had saved my life was mentioned. “His name was given to me as a merchant of note.”

  Franklin shook his head. “He was once, true enough. But he’s fallen on hard times.”

  “How so?” I asked, making every effort to appear indifferent.

  Franklin shrugged. “I can’t say I know the details, but I can tell you he sold his house in the Bario Alto and now lives in some wretched place on Madeleine Street, on the cusp of the Alfama, the very worst part of the city. Full of Gypsies and escaped slaves and cutthroat Moors, over there. If you want to advance in Lisbon, you’ll need better friends than Settwell. Who you know makes all the difference, and if you make the wrong contacts from the first, you’ll never recover.”

  “My information is clearly not current,” I said, making certain I appeared only vaguely disappointed. It took no small effort. Every instinct I had urged me to rise from my seat and rush to the Rua Madalena. Charles 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 were workmen 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 produce from baskets, I found the man precisely where he had been a decade before, when he’d sold a thirteen-year-old boy a necklace. I approached the stall and remarked how Old Paolo appeared precisely as I recalled him, tall and thin, with strands of brittle white hair plastered to a wrinkled scalp.

  Then, as I grew closer, I saw Old Paolo had in fact changed. The old man’s eyes were red and heavy with bags, the skin loose about his face, and his arm shook as he lifted it in greeting.

  “Englishman, you have a need,” Old Paolo said in broken English. His words whistled through missing teeth. “I see it. What can I sell you?”

  I said, “Old Paolo, I need weapons.”

  When I last lived in Lisbon, Charles Settwell resided in one of the fine detached houses in the Bario Alto, on a street favored by successful factors. The Rua Madalena, however, bordered the dank alleys of the Alfama. Running more or less perpendicular, in a winding sort of way, to the Tagus, the narrow street served as a downhill sewer, and I had to keep close to the walls to minimize the damage to my shoes. The houses here had a decayed look to them, with cracked stone, broken tiles, and rotted wood, warped by time and neglect. Gypsies loitered nearby in the street’s shadows, as did Moors, mulattoes, and other dark-skinned men who were perhaps freed slaves, but had more likely escaped. At one house, a pair of Negro women peered out an open door and beckoned me inside. One pulled down the neckline of her tattered gown to expose a chest so gaunt her ribs protruded more than her breasts. I bowed and removed my hat, and the women giggled. Playing the fool was best. Even starving African whores might be Inquisition informers.

  I soon came to Settwell’s house, close enough to the Street of Tanners that the air was heavy with the scents of dung and offal and lime. I knocked and was met at once by an elderly mulatto woman who beckoned me inside and then reached out for my coat with a trembling hand. Apparently she knew no English and presumed that I, like most Englishmen, knew little enough Portuguese. I was in no hurry to tip my hand, so I contented myself with communicating in exaggerated pantomime and speaking Settwell’s name loudly and slowly.

  Inside, the house was cramped and narrow, with low ceilings as if it had been made for dwarves. I tarried in a small room, smelling of mildew, that served as Settwell’s parlor. There were portraits and Turkish rugs, though these were faded. The paint upon the plaster was chipped, and the paper on the walls peeling. The paintings—none the finest to begin with—were flaking and offered bare patches of canvas. The furnishings were sturdy, but old and battered. The cushion upon my chair belched feathers when I sat.

  I waited no more than two minutes before Settwell came in. He was now in his midfifties, thinner than I recalled, and, like his environs, a faded version of his former self. His skin was pale, his wig shedding, his clothes stained and threadbare in places. I remembered him as a vigorous man, tall and commanding in his posture, the sort whom the ladies followed with their eyes and for whom men parted when he entered a room. Now he was stooped, his brown eyes haggard. Nevertheless, Settwell gave every impression of being unaware of, or indifferent to, these deficiencies. He grinned widely. For a moment his old countenance appeared to superimpose itself upon the new, but it passed quickly.

  “My dear boy. Sebastião Raposa!” He took me in an embrace, and though I did not generally care for such intimacies, I endured this one without complaint. Settwell was one of the few men to have earned my gratitude.

  After an instant he moved away but held on to my shoulders, notably higher than his own. “You’ve grown quite a bit, haven’t you? You were a skinny boy when last I saw you, but you are quite altered.”

  I clasped one of Settwell’s hands. “I am called Sebastian Foxx now.”

  “Of course you are. Your letter indicated as much. Forgive me. Your arrival has left me feeling quite keenly the passage of years. So much has happened, and so much time has fled, but it seems but a year or two since you were a child.”

  Settwell hurried across the room and, with jerky movements that suggested a great eagerness, poured Madeira into crystal goblets with chipped stems. We sat in opposing armchairs, faded and tattered.

  Our conversation began as the sort to be expected between people who have not seen each other for ten years. I spoke of the thanks I had been unable to express years before, but I did not belabor the point because Settwell clearly did not wish to dwell upon it. Instead he directed the conversation toward his own particulars.

  Shortly after I had escaped the country, Settwell had married a Portuguese woman named Mariana, and their daughter of the same name was now seven years old. To satisfy his bride, Settwell had converted to the Catholic religion. He was not a devotee to any church, and at the time it had seemed a small enough concession to affect devotion to one religion rather than another. Soon he discovered that his conversion was not viewed so liberally by fellow English merchants, who immediately treated him as a pariah. Trade opportunities vanished and men with whom he’d done business for years found excuses to avoid his company. The English might trade with the Portuguese, but to worship with them was unforgivable.

  After they had been married for five happy years, Mariana died of a sudden fever. She had been well in the morning, delirious by nightfall, and dead two days later without having regained her senses. Settwell had been raising his daughter on his own since.

  When he finished his tale, Settwell refilled our glasses. “We are but a pair of survivors, then, are we not, Mr. Foxx? We have been assaulted by all life has to throw at us, but we are not yet done.”

  I raised my glass. “I should like to think we are far from done.”

  * * *

  Settwell had his servant bring down his daughter to meet
me. The girl was a delightful creature with black hair and green eyes, and there could be no doubt that she would grow to be a beauty. I often felt more at ease around children than adults, perhaps because I knew it was less likely they would give me cause to break their bones. Quite charmed, I kneeled before the girl and shook her hand. “It is a great pleasure to meet you, senhorita,” I said in Portuguese.

  “And it is a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Foxx,” she answered in English. “Your accent is very good.”

  I laughed. “As is yours.” Observing that she held a wooden doll in her hand, I said, “And who is your friend?”

  “This is Senhorita Catarina,” the girl said very earnestly. “She’s only a doll, though. She’s not real, but my mother gave her to me. My mother is dead, you know. Is yours?”

  “Mariana!” Settwell snapped. “Such questions are impolite.”

  I met the girl’s gaze. “My mother is dead, and so is my father. But your father is a great friend to me and very much like family.”

  “Then I am like family too,” the girl said cheerfully. I stood up again and stroked my chin. “You may be right. I suppose I shall have to buy you something on your birthday, then.”

  “You don’t have to buy me anything if you will only visit,” she said.

  “I should like the liberty to do both,” I told her.

  Settwell sighed. “You are very indulgent, sir. I thank you.” He took his daughter’s hand and led her back to the mulatto serving woman. “Mr. Foxx and I must talk business now.”

  “How dull,” the girl said.

  “Terribly dull.” Settwell kissed her head and shooed her from the room. When he turned back, concern was plainly written upon his face. It had something to do with the girl, I was certain, but I would not press the matter. Not yet. Settwell would tell me what he wished me to know in due time.