The Reckoning

The counting house on the Rua Nova dos Mercadores was, in the first week of December, the only meeting room available to the Factory that was not someone's temporary bedroom. Croft had made it available because it was his building and because the alternative was the British embassy, where Castres was already housing six displaced merchants and had made clear, with the courtesy of a man who has exhausted his patience, that he could accommodate no further disruption.

Fourteen men came. Croft had expected twelve. Two he did not recognise — friends of Hawthorn's, he supposed, or of someone else's; it no longer mattered. They were British, they had been trading in Lisbon, and they had lost things. These were the relevant criteria.

He had arranged the room as well as its current condition allowed. The water line from the tsunami was still visible on the lower walls — a dark tidemark at shin height, with a fringe of debris below it that he had not yet had cause to remove. He had put chairs around the table and a fire going in the grate, which was functional. He had not put out wine, because this was not that kind of meeting.

Bristow arrived last.

Croft had met Bristow twice before the earthquake, at Factory dinners where Bristow occupied the position that the most important man in a room occupies: not at its centre, but at the point around which its centre organised itself. He was a broad man, heavy through the shoulders, with the solidity of someone who has always known his own weight in a room. He was not that now. He had lost his house — the strong house built on stone arches, the one everyone in the Factory had agreed was impregnable to anything short of an act of God, which had proven to be precisely the relevant category — and with it most of his stock and his working records and the man who kept them. He was lodging with the consul. He came in without greeting anyone and took the chair nearest the door, which was the chair no one else had wanted.

Croft called the meeting to order, which was a formality; the men were already silent, with the silence of people who have been sitting with numbers they do not know how to present aloud.

He said: We need a figure. For the parliamentary brief, for Castres's correspondence to London, and for our own purposes. What we lost and what we are owed. I'll take them in order of loss if someone will begin.

Someone began. Then someone else. The figures accumulated on Croft's notepad in a column that grew longer and larger than he had expected, which was saying something, because he had expected a great deal. Warehouses. Stock. Buildings. Debts that could no longer be called in because the debtors were dead or displaced or buried under their own rubble. Credit extended to Portuguese merchants who could not pay because their businesses no longer existed. The Methuen Treaty had made the British the dominant trading presence in Lisbon and the earthquake had made that dominance into a precise measure of what there was to lose.

He added the column three times. He wrote the total at the bottom of the page and looked at it. Thirty-two million Spanish dollars, roughly. It would be refined later. For now the figure was what it was.

He said: Thirty-two million, approximately. The total Portuguese loss is in the range of forty-eight.

A man across the table — one of the ones he didn't know — said: We're two-thirds of the total loss of a city.

Croft said: Yes.

The room was quiet for a moment. Outside, in the Rua Nova, he could hear the clearance teams working — the rhythmic sound of rubble being shifted, men's voices, the creak of a cart. The street outside his window had been impassable three weeks ago and was now merely damaged. The city was reassembling itself at a rate that was either impressive or alarming depending on who was assembling it and toward what end.

A Portuguese court official named Figueiredo had been invited to attend, as a courtesy — or perhaps as a signal, Croft was not certain which — by Castres. He sat at the far end of the table and had said nothing since his arrival, which was itself a kind of statement. He was a young man for his position, neatly dressed in a way that suggested the earthquake had been an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe, and he had the quality of attentiveness that Croft associated with men who reported what they observed to someone important.

One of the men said: The emergency price controls. They apply to us as much as to anyone.

Another said: They apply to us more than to anyone. We're the ones with stock to sell.

Croft said: The controls are temporary. They will be lifted.

The man said: When?

Croft said: When the Secretary decides they should be.

Figueiredo, at the far end of the table, shifted slightly in his chair. He did not speak. Croft noted the shift.

The meeting continued for another hour without resolving anything, which was what Croft had anticipated. Thirty-two million dollars could not be resolved in a December afternoon in a room with a waterline on the walls. What it could do — and did — was establish that the scale of the loss was real, documented, and would be formally communicated to London. This was, for the present, sufficient.

The men left in ones and twos. Figueiredo left without speaking to anyone, which seemed to require a small act of deliberate intent — to move through a room of men who had lost a collective fortune and not catch any of their eyes. He was good at it. Croft watched him go and then turned to find Bristow still in his chair by the door.

He said: Will you stay for a drink.

It was not quite a question. Bristow looked at him for a moment, with the expression of a man deciding whether the drink was worth the conversation that would accompany it, and then pulled his coat tighter and stayed where he was.

Croft found the bottle he had kept back and poured two glasses. He set one in front of Bristow and took the chair across the corner of the table — not directly opposite, which would have been confrontational, but not beside him either. A working distance.

Bristow said: Figueiredo.

Croft said: Yes.

Bristow said: He's Carvalho's. Not the court's — Carvalho's specifically.

Croft said: I assumed so.

Bristow said: He was at the Factory dinner in September. Before the earthquake. He spoke to the consul for twenty minutes and I watched him do it. He was listening more than he was talking.

Croft said: Men in his position generally are.

Bristow turned his glass without drinking from it. He said: The diamond arrangement is finished. The crown can't honour the contract terms — they haven't said so yet but they will. Six years of arrangement, finished. He said it without emotion, the way you state an equation. Which was, Croft thought, rather more alarming than if he had said it with feeling.

He said: You'll have recourse.

Bristow said: Against what? The arrangement was with the crown. The crown's records burned. My copies of the arrangement burned. He paused. Almost all of my copies burned.

Croft heard the almost and filed it.

Bristow drank. He said: There is also the other matter. But that can wait.

He said this as if Croft knew what the other matter was. Croft did not know. He did not ask, because asking would have told Bristow that he didn't know, and because the statement had been made in the manner of something to be returned to rather than opened now. He would let it sit.

They drank in silence for a while. Outside, the clearance teams had stopped for the evening. The street was quiet. The counting house smelled of damp plaster and the mustiness of the tide mark on the walls, and underneath that, still, the smell that was in everything: the city.

Croft said: The figure. Thirty-two million. Will London act on it?

Bristow said: London will write letters. He considered. Then: London may send ships. Which is something.

Croft said: Relief ships.

Bristow said: And after the relief ships, ships with goods to sell to a city that needs to rebuild everything it had. He looked at Croft. Which is also something.

He said it without irony. Or with an irony so complete that it had cycled back to being simply a statement of fact. Croft found that he could not tell the difference, and decided that this was probably Bristow's intention.

He refilled the glasses. Neither of them said anything further. The fire settled. On the table between them, Croft's notepad lay open to the page with the column of figures and the total at the bottom, and in the margin beside the total he had written, without particularly deciding to, a question mark.

He had not written it as a question. It was more in the nature of a note to himself: that the number was real, and also that the number was only the number he had been given, which was not necessarily the same thing.