Chapter 154: City of Bells and Thieves
A customs man in a coat worn thin at the elbows climbed the gangway from the wharf, papers still in hand. Williams met him halfway down with his tally board, and Tomás came alongside to help with any terms that might be lost in the conversation. Ned followed a step behind, looking considerably happier to count casks than he was ever likely to be walking into a city of this size.
"Declare your cargo, señor," the official said, in English that had plainly been made to work for its living.
Williams began reciting figures for sugar and molasses which had, at best, a passing acquaintance with what was actually sitting below decks.
James left them to their business.
The merry band this time would be him, Kit, Sam and Jim, plus two more men from the Marianne’s crew, big and unlovely fellows whom nobody had ever kept aboard for the sake of their manners.
James looked them all over.
"Right then, to find a man who don’t officially exist."
The streets beyond the wharf narrowed in a hurry, stone and timber leaning close overhead until a man could nearly touch both walls with his arms spread. Some wooden balconies stuck out above them, leaving the sky no more than a blue strip overhead.
James ducked beneath one without slowing, stepping around a handcart loaded with fruit that some poor bastard was trying to keep from spilling onto the uneven stones.
The heat had got itself trapped between the walls and was considerably thicker than it had been out on the water.
A few streets farther on, the crowd parted open into a broad square. Plaza de Armas was cut into a stone marker, with stalls packed beneath canvas awnings and selling everything from salt fish to fine cloth.
Beyond the rooftops stood the pale bulk of the Real Fuerza, old walls sitting behind newer ones, the fort watching over the city’s business as she had watched over for more than a century.
Soldiers made their rounds through the crowd with muskets slung over their shoulders, looking more troubled by the heat than by some strangers walking through their city.
Along one warehouse row, a row of men carried sacks of tobacco leaf beneath a foreman’s eye, iron showing at more than one pair of wrists. James let his gaze pass over them as a man passes over something he has already made his peace with hating.
Church bells rolled out somewhere behind them, tolling the hour.
"Christ, it never stops movin’," Kit said, twisting his head toward every new stall they passed.
"Neither does Nassau." James kept walking. "Just louder here."
Jim saw his chance beside a stall selling dried fish. The woman behind it was broad, her sleeves rolled past the elbows, and looked up at the four sailors without so much as blinking, then went back to her fish.
"Watch this," Jim muttered.
He stepped forward before anybody could stop him, drew himself up the very way he’d claimed to stand off Trinidad, stuck out his chest, and delivered his famous four words with all the confidence a man could carry.
"Ron. Plata. Mujer. Luego."
The woman’s face went from bored to murderous in the space of one breath. She snatched up a wooden paddle from beside the fish and swung it straight at Jim’s head.
He ducked, missing the blow by the width of a hand, while she unleashed a stream of Spanish so fast James caught perhaps one word in five.
"I reckon that’s not what happened off Trinidad," James laughed.
"It’s the same four words!"
"Aye, and apparently they mean a good deal ruder when said to a woman sellin’ fish than to a drunk colonial captain."
James stepped between them with both hands raised and tried his own rough Spanish on the woman.
Her eyes narrowed another degree. She answered slowly, with a word for husband somewhere in the middle of it that James was fairly certain had not been part of the arrangement.
"What’d she say?" Kit asked.
"Maybe she wants to marry Jim? I don’t think I helped."
Sam already had both hands on Jim’s shoulders, to haul him bodily from the stall before an engagement could be made.
"We move lads, before she finds somethin’ sharper than a fish paddle."
Jim shrugged, entirely untroubled. "Reckon Cuban Spanish is different from Trinidad Spanish, that’s all."
His eyes wandered down the street, looking for another woman upon whom to test the theory.
Kit kept up a running commentary the whole way, loud enough that half the street probably knew his opinion of Havana’s paving before they’d gone another block.
"Look at the size of that door! Ye could sail the Rose through it broadside! And would ye look at them roof tiles, red as a fresh cut, must take a whole..."
The bigger of the two sailors, built like a ship’s mast and possessed of about as much conversation most days, interrupted without even turning his head.
"Women worth the whole trip alone, this port, ye can smell it on the air."
His mate, a rat-faced little fellow missing enough teeth to whistle without meaning to, shook his head. "Any port this far from home is bad luck, and women don’t change it. Should’ve stayed aboard with the rum, where the Devil can’t find a man so easy."
Kit put in. He wasn’t about to let two grown men out-talk him on his own walk through a city.
"The Devil’s found ye plenty of times, and ye’re still standin’."
"Aye, and I mean to keep it that way," the rat-faced sailor said, then spat once for good measure.
That was when the mule interrupted them.
Something frightened her, whether it was a dog underfoot or a shout too close, and she reared in her traces hard enough to drag the cart sideways into a stall stacked with clay jars.
The whole business came down in one long crash of pottery and cursing. Jars shattered across the stones, the mule fought her harness, and half the street scattered to get clear of her hooves.
In the middle of it, a boy no older than Kit slipped past the rat-faced sailor close enough to brush his coat.
By the time the mule had calmed down, the sailor’s purse had gone with the boy, and the boy was nowhere to be seen.
"Me purse!" the sailor bellowed. "Some little bastard’s had me purse!"
Sam waded into the wreckage, trying to calm the mule’s owner before the man came at one of them with the broken axle.
"Kit, help the man with his mule. Jim, for God’s sake, don’t say another word to anybody."
He pointed toward the two sailors.
"You two, forget the purse. We’re not chasing a boy through a city we don’t know."
The incident over, and two more turns brought them somewhere entirely different.
James stopped at the corner and raised a hand, more from old habit than from any particular need to warn them away.
The noise of the market fell behind them like a door shutting.
The street ahead was narrow and clean, its houses freshly whitewashed, iron grates covering the windows instead of open shutters, with not a stall or hawker along its whole length. There were no beggars working this stretch, no soldiers bothered with it either.
Even Jim stopped talking, and the rat-faced sailor let his complaint about the stolen purse die halfway through. Whatever the two men noticed, neither seemed able to put a name to it.
James led the way down without making a single wrong turn, never pausing to squint at a corner or ask a passing soul for directions.
The street ended at a door with no sign above it, plain timber set into a plain wall.
Two men stood before it who had nothing soldierly about them. No uniforms, no muskets properly slung, only cutlasses at their hips and the angry stare that they were paid well enough to use them without asking too many questions first.
James stepped forward alone, leaving the others a pace behind, and stopped close enough to the nearer guard that the man’s hand drifted toward his blade.
The words came out plain, without any flourish, exactly as they’d sat waiting in James’s head since the night at sea when he’d bought them.
I see you managed to repeat a sentence without embarrassing yourself. I have raised my expectations by a hair, though the sentence was short, and there was not much room to fail even for you.
The guard’s shoulders eased. He looked past James toward the door, whispered to his partner, and the two men stepped aside without another word, leaving the entrance clear.
Behind James, Sam let out a breath he’d plainly been keeping to himself.
"How in God’s name did you know to say that?" Sam started.
Kit stared at James as though he’d grown a second head.
Jim had gone silent for once in his life, lips half open around whatever question he’d been about to ask.
James only grinned and stepped toward the open door.
"Later, lads. Later."