So, slipping away from Jeronimo, he made his way into the fire-light and (after calming the Vagabonds down just a bit) told them he was an Irishman who, along with several other Papists, had been press-ganged in Liverpool (this was likely and reasonable-sounding to the point of being banal) and that before setting out for America he and some of the other sailors wanted to pay their respects at Our Lady of Buenos Aires, a mariners’ shrine inside the town (this was also very plausible, according to Jeronimo), and there would be a few reales in it for anyone who could sneak them into the town. This offer was taken up enthusiastically, and within the hour, Jack, Moseh, van Hoek, and Jeronimo (sans crossbow) were inside Sanlúcar de Barrameda.
Now Jeronimo and van Hoek went off towards a smoky and riotous quarter near the waterfront while Jack and Moseh went to reconnoiter in a finer neighborhood up the hill. Moseh had no particular idea where they were going and so they walked up and down several streets, looking in the windows of the white buildings, before slowing down in front of one that was adorned with a golden figure of Mercury. Remembering Leipzig, Jack instinctively looked up. Though there were no mirrors on sticks here, he did see the red coal of a cigar flaring and then blurring into a cloud of exhaled smoke—a watcher on the rooftop. Moseh saw it, too, and took Jack’s arm and hustled him forward. But as they hurried past a window Jack turned his face toward the light and glimpsed a molten vision from his pox-scarred memories: a bald head surmounting wreaths of fat, looming above a table where several men—mostly fair-haired—sat eating and talking.
When they had gotten some distance down the street, Jack said: “I saw Lothar von Hacklheber in there. Or perhaps it was a painting of him, hung on the wall to preside over the table—but no, I’m sure I saw his jaw moving. No painter could’ve captured that cannonball brow, the furious eyes.”
“I don’t doubt you,” Moseh said. “So van Hoek must have been right. Let us go and find the others.” Moseh turned his steps downhill.
“What was the purpose of that reconaissance?”
“Before you make mortal enemies, it is wise to know who they are,” Moseh said. “Now we know.”
“Lothar von Hacklheber?”
Moseh nodded.
“I should’ve thought our enemy was the Viceroy.”
“Outside of Spain, the Viceroy has no power. The same is hardly true of Lothar.”
“Why does the House of Hacklheber have aught to do with it?”
Moseh said, “Suppose you live in a house in Paris. You have a water-carrier who is supposed to come once a day. Usually he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes his buckets are full, sometimes they are half-empty. But your house is a large one and requires water in small amounts all the time.”
“That is why such houses have cisterns,” Jack said.
“Spain is a large house. It requires money all the time, to purchase goods from other countries, such as quicksilver from the mines of Istria and grain from the north. But its money arrives once a year, when the treasure-fleet drops anchor at Cadiz—or, formerly, here. The treasure-fleet is like the water-carrier. The banks of Genoa and of Austria have, for hundreds of years, served—”
“As money-cisterns, I see,” Jack said.
“Yes.”
“But Lothar von Hacklheber is not a Genoese name, unless I am mistaken,” Jack said.
“About sixty years ago Spain went bankrupt for a time, which amounts to saying that the Genoese bankers did not get paid what was due them, and fell on hard times. Various mergings and marriages of convenience occurred as a result. The center of banking moved northward. That, in a nutshell, is how the Hacklhebers came to have a fine house in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. And, I would guess, a finer one in Cadiz.”
“But Lothar is here,” Jack said, “meaning—?”
“He probably intends to take delivery of the silver pigs that we are going to steal tomorrow, and pay the Viceroy with something else—gold, perhaps, which would be better for one who wanted to spend much soon.”