“Yeah, I know about this,” Jack said, but Artan could not be stopped: there were piles of silver lying on the ground in Porto Belo, he insisted-consequently its value, compared to that of gold, was plunging-so in Spain (where they used silver money) there was inflation, because it was not worth as much as it had been, whereas in France all gold coins were being hoarded, because gold was expected to be worth more in the future. So now Monsieur Esphahnian had lots of rapidly depreciating silver. He should have sailed to the Levant where silver was always in demand, but he didn’t. Instead he sailed for Amsterdam expecting to make some kind of unspecified, brilliant commodities deal that would more than recoup his exchange-rate losses. But (as luck would have it) his ship ran aground, and he got his nuts caught in the mangle of the Thirty Years’ War. Sweden happened to be just in the act of conquering Holland when Monsieur Esphahnian’s ship eased up onto the sandbank and stopped moving; and, to make a long story short, the Esphahnian dynastic fortune was last seen northbound, strapped to the ass of a Swedish pack-horse.

This, by the way, was all first-act material- beforethe first act, really-if it were a play, it would open with the young Monsieur Esphahnian, huddled in the beached wreckage of a ship, spewing expository pentameter, gazing miserably off into the audience as he pretended to watch the Swedish column dwindle into the distance.

The upshot, anyway, was that Monsieur Esphahnian, at that point, fell from the graces of his own family. He somehow made his way back to Marseille, collected Madame Esphahnian and her (already!) three sons, and perhaps a daughter or two (daughters tended to be shipped east at puberty), and, in time, drifted as far as Paris (end of Act I), where, ever since, they’d all been trying to work their way off the shit list of the rest of the family in Isfahan. Primarily they did this by retailing coffee, but they would move just about anything-

“Ostrich plumes?” Jack blurted, not really trusting himself to be devious and crafty around such as the Esphahnians. And so at that point the selling of those ostrich plumes, which Jack could’ve accomplished in a trice a year and a half ago in a thieves’ market in Linz, became a global conspiracy, yoking together Esphahnians as far away as London, Alexandria, Mocha, and Isfahan, as letters were sent to all of those places and more inquiring as to what ostrich-plumes were selling for, whether the trend was up or down, what distinguished a Grade A ostrich-plume from a B, how a B could be made to look like an A, et cetera. While they waited for the intelligence to come back, Jack had very little to do on the plume front.

His addled brain forgot about Turk for a while. When he finally went back to the livery stable, the owner was just about to sell him off to pay for all the hay he’d been eating. Jack paid the debt, and began to think seriously about how to turn the war-horse into cash.

NOW IN THE OLD DAYSit was like this: he would go and loiter around the Place Dauphine, which was the sharp downstream tip of the Ile de la Cite, spang in the center of the Pont-Neuf. It was the royal execution grounds and so there was always something to see there. Even when there were no executions underway, there were mountebanks, jugglers, puppeteers, fire-eaters; failing that, you could at least gawk at the dangling remains of people who’d been executed last week. But on days of big military parades, the aristocrats who were supposedly in command-at least, who were being paid by King Looie to be in command-of various regiments would issue from their pieds-a-terre and hotels particuliers on the Right Bank and come across the Pont-Neuf, recruiting vagrants along the way to bring their regiments up to strength. The Place Dauphine would become a vigorous body-market for a few hours. Rusty firelocks would be passed out, money would change hands, and the new-made regiments would march south over to the Left Bank, to the cheers of the patriotic onlookers. They’d follow those aristocrats’ high-stepping chargers out through the city gates, there at the carrefours where the meaner sorts of criminals dangled unconscious from the whipping-posts, and they would come into St. Germain des Pres, outside the walls: a large quadrangle of monks’ residences surrounded by open land, where huge fairs of rare goods would sometimes convene. Following the Seine downstream, they’d pass by a few noble families’ hotels, but in general the buildings got lower and simpler and gave way to vegetable- and flower-patches tended by upscale peasants. The river was mostly blocked from view by the piles of timber and baled goods that lined the Left Bank. But after a while, it would bend around to the south, and they would cross the green before Les Invalides-surrounded by its own wall and moat-and arrive at the Champs de Mars where King Looie would be, with all of his pomp, having ridden up from Versailles to inspect his troops-which, in those pre-Martinet days, basically meant counting them. So the passe-volantes (as people like Jack were called) would stand up (or if unable to stand, prop themselves up on someone who could) and be counted. The aristocrats would get paid off, and the passe-volantes would fan out into innumerable Left Bank taverns and bordellos and spend their money. Jack had become aware of this particular line of work during a ride from Dunkirk to Waterloo with Bob, who had spent some time campaigning under John Churchill, alongside the French, in Germany, laying waste to various regions that had the temerity to lie adjacent to La France. Bob had complained bitterly that many French regiments had practically zero effective strength because of this practice. To Jack it had sounded like an opportunity only a half-wit would pass up.

In any case, this procedure was the central tent-pole holding up Jack’s understanding of how Paris worked. Applied to the problem of selling Turk, it told him that somewhere in the southern part of the Marais, near the river, there lived rich men who had no choice to be in the market for war-horses-or, if they had any brains in their heads at all, for stud-horses capable of siring new ones. Jack talked to the man who managed the livery stable, and he followed hay-wains coming in from the countryside, and he tailed aristocrats riding back from the military parades at the Champs de Mars, and learned that there was a horse-market par excellence at the Place Royale.

Now this was one of those places that Jack’s kind of person knew only as a void in the middle of the city, sealed off by gates through which an attentive loiterer could sometimes get a flash of sunlit green. By trying to penetrate it from all sides, Jack learnt that it was square, with great barn-doors at the four cardinal compass-points, and high grand buildings rising above each of these gates. Around its fringes were a number of hotels, which in Paris meant private compounds of rich nobles. Twice a week, the gates were jammed solid with carts bringing hay and oats in, and manure out, and an astounding number of fine horses being burnished by grooms. Some horse-trading went on in surrounding streets, but Jack could plainly see that this was little more than a flea-market compared to whatever was going on in the Place Royale.

He bribed a farmer to smuggle him into the place in a hay-wain. When it was safe to get out, the farmer poked him in the ribs with the handle of a pitchfork, and Jack wriggled and slid out onto the ground-the first time he had stood on growing grass since he’d reached Paris.

The Place Royale was found to be a park shaded by chestnut trees (in theory, that is; when Jack saw it the leaves had fallen, and been raked off). In the center was a statue of King Looie’s dear old pop, Looie the Thirteenth-on horseback, naturally. The whole square was surrounded by vaulted colonnades, like the trading-courts at Leipzig and the Stock Exchange at Amsterdam, but these were very wide and high, with barn-doors giving way to private courtyards beyond. All of the gates, and all of the arcades, were large enough, not merely for a single rider, but for a coach drawn by four or six horses. It was, then, like a city within the city, built entirely for people so rich and important that they lived on horseback, or in private coaches.