“Fancy that—who would’ve expected it from a short, Dutch, ill-tempered, red-headed step-child?” Jack exclaimed. “Still, I’d think some corsair-captain could find a use for you more exalted than barnacle-scraper.”
“When I was eighteen, the canals froze, and King Louis’s troops swarmed over them on ice-skates, raping everything that moved and burning all else. The Dutch Republic prepared to take ship and move to Asia en masse. Seamen were wanted. I was sprung from jail and compelled to join the V.O.C.* Following the refugees north, I went to Texel, where I was issued a sea-chest containing clothes, pipes, tobacco, a Bible, and a book called The God-Fearing Sailor. Twenty-four hours later I was on a man-o’-war in the Narrow Seas dodging English grape-shot and lugging sacks of gunpowder. That, and a year of manning pumps, made me a sailor. Thrice I sailed to India and back, and that made me an officer.”
“Fine! Why’re you not an officer here?”
“A dozen years I lived in continual fear of pirates. Finally all of my nightmares came true and my ship was stolen from me—you can see her riding at anchor in the harbor some days, flying the Turk’s flag, and if you cock an ear, and the wind’s right, you can hear the lamentations of the captives she has taken, being brought in to wait for ransom.”
“I am beginning to collect that you have a certain dislike of pirates and their works,” Jack said, “as any upright Dutchman should, I suppose.”
“Van Hoek refuses to turn Turk—so he rows alongside us,” Moseh said.
“What of you, Moseh? Reputedly, Jews stick together.”
“I am a crypto-Jew,” Moseh said. “In fact, more Crypto than Jew. I grew up on the Equator. There is an island off the coast of Africa called Sáo Tomé, which is the sovereign soil of whichever European country has most recently sent a fleet down there to bombard it. But for many years only the Portuguese knew where the hell it was and so it was Portuguese. Now, my ancestors were Spanish Jews. But two hundred years ago, in the very same year that the Moors were finally driven from Spain, and America discovered, Queen Isabella threw all of the Jews out. Those who, in retrospect, were intelligent, put on the stockings of Villa Diego—which is an expression meaning that they ran like hell—and settled in Amsterdam. My ancestors simply edged across the border to Portugal. But the Inquisition was there, too. When Alvaro de Caminha went down to Sáo Tomé to be its governor, he took with him two thousand Jewish children whom the Inquisition had torn from the bosoms of their families. Sáo Tomé had a monopoly on the slave trade in that part of the world—Alvaro de Caminha baptized those two thousand and put ’em to work in its management. But in secret they kept their faith alive, performing half-remembered rituals behind locked doors, and muttering in broken Hebrew even as they knelt before the gilded table where the body and blood of Christ were dished up. Those were my ancestors. Almost fifty years ago, the Dutch came and seized Sáo Tomé. But this probably saved my father’s parents’ lives, for, in all the lands controlled by Spain and Portugal, the Inquisition went on a rampage after that. Instead of being roasted alive in some Portuguese auto da fé, my father’s parents moved to New Amsterdam and worked for the Dutch West India Company in the slave trade, which was all they knew how to do. Later the Duke of York’s fleet came and took that city for the English, but not before my father had grown up and taken a Manhatto lass for his wife—”
“What the hell is a Manhatto?”
“A type of local Indian,” Moseh explained.
“I thought there was a certain je ne sais quoi about your nose and eyes,” Jack said.
Moseh’s face—illuminated primarily by the red glow of his pipe-bowl—now took on a sentimental, faraway look that made Jack instinctively queasy. Undoing the top-most button of his ragged shirt, Moseh drew out a scrap of stuff that dangled round his neck on a leather thong: some sort of heathen handicraft-work. “It is probably not easy for you to see this tchotchke, in this wretched light,” he said, “but the third bead from the edge in the fourth row, here—it is a sort of off-white—is one of the very beads that the Dutchman, Peter Minuit, traded to the Manhattoes for their island, some sixty years ago, when Mama was a little papoose.”
“Jesus Christ, you should hang on to that!” Jack exclaimed.
“I have been hanging onto it,” Moseh returned, showing mild irritation for the first time, “as any imbecile can see.”