City of Dreams (56 page)

“Guess not,” the dwarf said.

DaSilva made no reply. The seconds went by, the only sound the clink of the various coins. Along with the
daalders
and pieces of eight there were English crowns and guineas, Danish ducats, a few Portuguese cruzados, and Spanish doubloons, and Dutch guilders—all brought by the seamen who sailed into New York harbor.

Brinker began to tremble. The chink-chink of the coins grew steadily more terrifying.
Jesu Cristo,
what did the Jew want with him?

A few more seconds. Brinker tried again. “Be a lot of money you got there, Mijnheer DaSilva. A whole big lot. All the money in New York, maybe. I think—” Brinker couldn’t say what he thought. He began to cough. His little body shook and he didn’t seem able to stop.

“Mind the smoke, do you?” DaSilva’s tone was friendly, but he didn’t stop puffing on the pipe. “A Dutchman’s not supposed to mind smoke. Never heard of such a thing.”

“Tobacco be doing something to me. Makes me eyes tear.” Brinker wheezed, pulling his coat over his face again. “Sorry for the noise, Mijnheer DaSilva,” he said through the cloth.

“So, smoking’s another pleasure that’s denied you, little Jan Brinker? Pity.”

The dwarf was said to be twenty-some years old, but his head was entirely bald, he had no body hair, and his sweat did not stink like that of a grown man. He had balls like tiny pebbles, and his prick never grew bigger than the finger of a full-size male. DaSilva knew those things because Jan Brinker was a favorite among the women who worked in the bordellos.

The whores petted and indulged the dwarf, giving him choice tidbits to eat and cuddling him as if he were a doll, passing him from hand to hand so each in turn could offer him a plump breast to suckle. Brinker seemed to enjoy that. And snuggling between their legs and licking their twats. He liked that as well. So did the women, apparently.

DaSilva didn’t give a damn what his employees did when they weren’t working. He never tried to curb Jan Brinker’s access to the whorehouses. He’d always known a time might come when he could use someone like the dwarf. That time had arrived.

He picked up a handful of gold sovereigns bearing the stamp of the reigning British monarch, His Most Gracious Majesty George II, and leaned on his elbows, transferring the coins rhythmically from hand to hand. The pipe expelled another cloud of smoke. “All together … Call it four hundred pounds,” he said through teeth still clenched around the pipe stem. “I can’t be absolutely accurate. I never try to count every last penny.”

“Jesu Cristo,”
Brinker whispered. He’d never dreamed of such wealth. If you had that much money you’d never be cold or hungry again.

“I’ve had better weeks,” DaSilva said, “but times, as we know, aren’t good.”

“Jesu Cristo.”
Weeks when the profit was better than four hundred pounds. Unbelievable. He knew the Jew was rich, but this … Brinker made a gesture with his little hands, as if he couldn’t stop them from reaching toward the money.

“Go ahead,” DaSilva said. “I wouldn’t have asked you to come here if I didn’t mean for you to have some. Take what you like.” He might have been offering Brinker a mug of ale.

The Dutchman hesitated, not quite ready to believe what he’d heard.

“Don’t hold back, Jan. Take it.”

A few more seconds passed. Brinker put out one hand and gingerly took a wooden penny.

DaSilva removed the pipe from his mouth and chuckled. “That’s it? A whore is lying here with her legs spread, and you kiss the top of her ear? Are you no more man than that, Jan Brinker? Go on, take a handful. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

The penny had disappeared into the pocket of Brinker’s coat. He stretched out his hand a second time, hesitated. DaSilva nodded. Brinker scooped up three New England bronze shillings, each stamped “XII” to signify its worth in pennies. “Go on,” DaSilva said softly. “A bit more is in order.”

Brinker removed a few Dutch guilders from the table one by one and secreted them in various pockets in his clothing. He now had more money about his person than he’d possessed in his entire life. “Good,” his benefactor murmured. “Very good. You may have some more, Jan Brinker. Go on, take it.”

The Dutchman waited a second or two longer, then his body jerked and he jumped off the stool. He stood closer to the table and reached up and began sweeping coins and notes toward himself with both hands.

DaSilva lunged. In one savage, swift motion he captured both Brinker’s childlike wrists and yanked him forward, lifting his feet off the ground.

“I be sorry!” Brinker screamed. “Sorry I be, mijnheer. You said … I didn’t know … I thought …” He kicked wildly, but it did him no good. The table separated the two men, protecting DaSilva’s shins from Brinker’s boots. The dwarf was helpless.

DaSilva reached behind him and grabbed a pair of tongs, then scooped a ruddy coal from the brazier, exactly as if he were going to light his pipe. Instead he pressed the glowing coal to the dwarf’s palm. Brinker screamed.

“Be silent,” DaSilva growled. “And listen well. Greed is a mistake, my small friend. Wanting too much and taking more than your due is always a mistake. Remember that.”

“You said—
Jesu Cristo,
Mijnheer DaSilva, I be a white man and you be burning me alive!”

“I said to help yourself. To take some. Some, Jan Brinker. A reasoned and reasonable amount.”

The little room smelled of roasted meat. The Dutchman stopped wailing and began a continuous whine of anguish. DaSilva lessened the pressure on the tongs. For a moment the coal wasn’t in such close contact with the skin. The respite lasted only a second or two; then DaSilva leaned forward and attacked the same spot a second time. Brinker screamed once, then relapsed into moans. “A fair share,” his tormentor said. “Accept that and you’ll be better off than you’ve ever been. Cheat me or lie to me and you’re a dead man.”

“Please, mijnheer … Me hand. Please …” Tears streamed down Brinker’s cheeks.

DaSilva looked at his victim a moment longer, then relaxed the pressure on the tongs and released his grip on the dwarf’s wrists. The little man fell to the floor on the other side of the table. He struggled to his feet, blowing on his burned hand.
“Jesu Cristo.
Gonna be having a terrible sore. Terrible.”

Solomon pushed a coin toward him. “Here, add this to your collection. It’s one of those new pennies they’re making up in the Connecticut colony. Says right on it,
I am good copper.
Should be enough to buy you a bit of salve at Tamsyn’s apothecary.”

With his good left hand Brinker scooped up the shiny copper coin. Still grasping it, he dragged his sleeve across his face, wiping away the snot and the tears. “You be telling me what this is about, Mijnheer DaSilva? What you want me to do for all this money?”

“Of course.” The scuffle had upset the neat piles of coins. DaSilva began restoring them to order. “Sit down again for a moment and I’ll explain.”

The August sky was darkening when the pounding on the door began. It was late in the evening, well after nine. Phoebe had been sure no one else would arrive that day. She’d been working with the large containers of herbs on the shelves, dusting the pewter and glass and tin jugs and tightening the covers. The one in her hands was marked
Foeniculum dulce
and filled with black seeds.

She shoved the container back into place and turned and went to the door, but she didn’t open it. She was tall, very slender, much like Amba had been when she was young. Phoebe had to bend her head to speak against the crack between the thick door cut from a single slab of oak and the brick wall. “Shop be closed. Come back tomorrow.”

“Can’t,” a muffled high-pitched voice said. “Be needing help now. Tomorrow be too late. It be me, Jan Brinker. Please, Phoebe, open up.”

Everyone in New York knew the dwarf. When she was growing up in the house on Hall Place her mother had slipped the little fellow food whenever he came to the back door. “He be
haptoa,”
Amba told her daughter, using the word that signified great holiness among her own people. “Folks like that don’t be growing big ’cause the spirit be entering into them. They be staying like a child because they got the
obeah.”

Phoebe had been raised a black slave in a white master’s house, but she had heard about the
obeah
the same way her mama had, from the West Indians who came and went in their world. Even as a child Phoebe knew you must never let the
obeah
be turned against you. Otherwise, like Phoebe’s father, you might die in a slow fire after ten hours of screaming agony.

She yanked open the door. “What you be wanting here at this hour, Mr. Jan Brinker? How come you don’t be waiting till tomorrow and come do your business in the day, like decent folks?”

“Look.” The dwarf held out his damaged hand.

It was almost too dark to see. Phoebe had to look closely to make out the perfect circle of red and puckered flesh in the middle of the dwarf’s palm. “That’s a bad burn. How did you come by a burn like that, Jan Brinker?”

“Never mind that. I got it. You got something to fix it?”

Phoebe looked up. In the dimness she could see that Pearl Street was empty as far as the corner of Coenties Alley. Judging from the muffled sound of his bell, the night watchman was just beginning his rounds a few streets away. “Best you be coming inside.” She tugged Brinker into the shop and closed and bolted the door. “Wait here. I be getting something for that hand.”

She knew exactly what she needed, but Phoebe went first to listen at the door that separated the shop from the part of the house where the family lived. There were only the normal sounds of a husband and wife and their three children preparing for bed. That was good. Mistress Tamsyn wouldn’t like her letting the dwarf in after curfew, much less treating him for free. She’d have to do that; Jan Brinker, he never had no money. But Mistress Tamsyn, she be white. White folks didn’t understand about the
obeah.
And the master, Dr. Zachary, he don’t be knowin’ nothin’. ’Cept the whip.

Brinker watched Phoebe and stayed where he was, with his back to the door, surveying the small shop.

It had changed little since being opened by Sally Turner Van der Vries sixty-eight years before. All the jugs and jars and bottles on the shelves still bore the labels Sally had written. The wooden counter was the one she’d installed the day after Jacob Van der Vries was found covered in pitch and hanging from the old gibbet down by the fort.

Then, as now, there was at least one slave under this roof. When Van der Vries arrived from Holland he bought Hetje from the old compound in the woods. Red Bess kept slaves, though she’d tried to free them in her will. When Tamsyn and Zachary Craddock moved into the house on Pearl Street and took over the shop, they brought four slaves with them. Blacks had always served behind this counter. But Turner’s Phoebe, as she was known even after Christopher leased her to Tamsyn, was the first who was clever in the art of simpling. That’s why Tamsyn wanted her.

No one had deliberately set out to make Amba’s child an apothecary. She was two when Bess died and Christopher Turner bought her and her mother and took them to live on Hall Place. In those days Jane Turner wanted to get Amba out of the house as often as possible; she frequently sent her to Pearl Street to purchase some simple Jane couldn’t concoct in her own kitchen. “Take the child with you,” she’d always say, wanting to be rid of both.

Phoebe liked visiting the shop. She enjoyed the opportunity to study the different containers on the shelves. As soon as one was opened she would ask to sniff it. Gradually, over time, the little girl came to know what smell and purpose were connected to each label, and what the label sounded like when spoken aloud. It wasn’t exactly reading—there was a law against teaching blacks to read—but it served the same purpose.

Before she was nine, Phoebe knew the names of all the herbs on the shelves, and knew how the words looked when they were written out. After that it was easy to discover what the plant looked like when it was growing. The little girl spent every moment she could dogging the footsteps of the slaves who tended Tamsyn’s gardens.

“Being born in that house be doing somethin’ to you,” Amba always said. “Mistress Red Bess, after she pull you out o’ me, she don’t be letting me give you a name like our home people. I be wanting to call you Quashee, ’cause it means Sunday and that be the day you be borned. But Mistress Red Bess, she say in this place nobody name babies for the day they be born.”

“What day does Amba mean, Mama?”

“How often I have to tell you I be different, child? Amba be my marriage name. Means queen.” Amba smiled at the thought that all the whites who thought themselves her masters called her queen every day of their lives.

“Mistress Red Bess, she say you be Phoebe, and giving you your name mean she be putting her spirit in you. Now you be knowing the white people’s magic better than they do. You hang tight to what you know, child. It be protecting you. Old Hetje taught me that what you know, that be the only thing as keeps you safe in this white man’s world.”