Chapter 155: Business with a Son of a Diseased Goat
James pushed through the bead curtain hung across the far end of the passage, ducking beneath a low arch as shadow gave way to warm afternoon light. The noise grew louder with every step.
Sam stayed close behind him, Kit and Jim crowded at his back, and the two sailors brought up the rear like men walking into a fight whose rules nobody had thought worth mentioning.
The passage parted open into a courtyard bright with afternoon sun, tiled underfoot, with a gallery running around the second floor behind wrought-iron rails. There were men sitting, scattered at low tables, dice hanging in the air at one, a cup halfway to some fellow’s mouth at another, cards spread across a third man’s hand.
Wine and rum moved freely between them, while laughter rolled from table to table, chairs scraped over tile, and every man talked loud enough to make sure the whole courtyard heard him.
Nobody had noticed the five of them yet.
Then one of the lads caught their shadows with the corner of his eye.
Some dice failed to land where they had been thrown, one hand stopped halfway to a cup. From there, the silence traveled outward, table by table.
The noise vanished in pieces until the whole courtyard had gone silent, every eye in the place on the newcomers standing in the doorway.
James let it sit for a moment. There was some emotion about being stared down by a whole room full of armed strangers that he did not forget in a hurry.
At the center of it all sat the man the whole courtyard seemed built around.
He was fat, his coat straining across a belly that pushed hard against the buttons, his hair lay oiled and combed flat, and his mustache had been waxed into two fine points, each curl sharp enough to suggest a morning spent fussing over them.
Various rings crowded his fingers, three or four to a hand. That very hand lay on the bare hip of the woman straddling his knee, her dress bunched high on her thighs, while another woman pressed herself against his shoulder, silk slipping low across her breasts as her fingers combed lazily through the hair at his neck.
He turned a coin between two fingers of his free hand, slow and easy.
"Can you speak English?" James asked.
The man’s mustache twitched with something very nearly like delight. "But of course, señor. I speak the English beautifully, better than most Englishmen, I think, though it is a language built for men who have never learned to enjoy anything properly."
He set down the coin and spread both hands, rings flashing in the sun. "I am Don Ambrosio Quintanilla. And you have walked into my house looking like who has come to do business, or as who has come to rob me. I do hope, for your own sake, it is the first."
"Business, aye."
James kept his hands loose at his sides. "I’ve a mighty deal of cargo needing a reasonable man to move it. Was told you might be exactly that man."
"Reasonable."
Don Ambrosio laughed, a deep rolling noise that shook the woman on his knee. "I have been called many things in this city, señor. Greedy, dangerous. Once, memorably, a son of a diseased goat, by a man who did not live long enough to regret it."
He waved a ringed hand.
"Reasonable is new. I think I like it."
"Aye, well, ye’ll like it better once ye hear the offer."
"Perhaps."
His eyes narrowed, genuine curiosity replacing the performance for a moment. "But first, señor, you will forgive an old man his suspicion. My door has no sign and my street has no beggars. Strangers do not simply find their way here by walking in circles until luck takes pity on them."
He leaned forward, the woman at his shoulder shifting with him.
"How did you come to knock on my door?"
"I heard tell of ye through Juan de Ayala."
The name landed harder than James had expected.
Don Ambrosio’s hand stopped on the coin and his mustache did not move for three good seconds. James kept his face easy, betting the whole conversation on a man three hundred miles away who would never know his name had just been spent like currency.
Then the mustache twitched back into a grin, wider this time.
"Juan?"
Don Ambrosio said the name like a fond old debt. "That man could sell sand to a beach and have the beach thanking him for the bargain. If Juan sent you, señor, then you are already halfway to being a friend of mine, whether you have earned it or not."
He gestured toward an empty chair across from him, the woman on his knee shifting aside just enough to make room.
"Sit. Tell me what kind of misfortune has brought a man like you so far from home."
James took the seat.
Behind him, Sam stood coiled and vigilant, one hand never straying far from his coat, his eyes moving from table to table without settling anywhere for long.
Jim had already found something more interesting than the conversation, his gaze wandering toward a woman two tables over who was paying him considerably less attention than he was paying her.
Kit stood straighter than his spine strictly let him, chin up, doing his best to look like he belonged in a room full of killers rather than a wee boy.
The two sailors stood rigid as posts, eyes darting between every armed man in the courtyard like they were counting the odds and had taken a dislike to the sum.
"Cargo came my way through the misfortune of some friends from Jamaica."
James said. "Sugar, rum, molasses, dyewood, more besides. Good goods, honest goods, save for the part where they’ve already been sold once, and I’d rather Nassau’s market not choke on the rest."
Don Ambrosio’s eyes drifted for a moment as he turned the words over. Then something clicked behind them, and his grin sharpened into genuine interest.
"From Jamaica."
He let the words hang there a moment, tasting them. "Señor, I have heard whispers these past weeks of a convoy that sailed proudly out of Kingston and did not arrive anywhere at all. A whole fleet, they say, taken apart like a fat hen at a feast, escort ships and all, off the Bahama Channel."
His eyes stopped on James, sharper now than they had been through the whole conversation.
"This misfortune of your friends. It would not, by any chance, be that misfortune?"
James said nothing, which said plenty.
Don Ambrosio’s laugh rose from deep in his belly, loud enough that half the courtyard looked over before deciding it was none of their business.
"Madre de Dios."
He clapped both ringed hands together once.
"I am entertaining a very interesting man today."
He rose, the woman sliding from his knee without complaint, and straightened his coat over his belly with evident satisfaction.
"Come, señor. We should not discuss numbers here, in front of so many idle ears. Let us go somewhere private and discuss terms properly."