All Other Nights (30 page)

“S
ERGEANT RAPPAPORT, YOU UNDERSTAND THE POTENTIAL CONSEQUENCES
of this mission, don’t you?”

On the day Jacob arrived in Washington, his old tribunal was in session, just as it had been two years before. But things had changed. As Jacob soon learned, the major had died in the battle at Wilderness. Jacob had avoided reading the newspapers as much as possible during the past two years, but Wilderness had been so horrifying that everyone had talked about it for weeks, even in New York. The rains in the months before the battle had washed out the soil in the woods before the regiments arrived, uncovering the decomposing bodies of the men who had died there the previous year. But the summer had been dry, and when the underbrush caught fire, the living soldiers, running with their rifles over old and new corpses, were quickly enveloped in flying curtains of flame that consumed both the living and the dead. The major’s replacement was scarcely older than Jacob, a young man with an eye patch of his own.

“So you and Judas Benjamin shall at last have an opportunity to meet again,” the general said.

The reference to Judas was so commonplace by now that Jacob hardly heard it. He was more surprised by how pleased they were to see him. During the years since they had exiled him westward, everyone had become increasingly desperate. Jacob may have been maimed, but within the dwindling pool of potential agents, he at least had experience in the field and a record of success. As a further cause for wonder, he had even returned from the dead. The three Christian men at the table looked at his wounded Hebrew body and saw salvation incarnate.

“Benjamin is their spymaster, or at least one of them. We’re quite aware of that now,” the colonel announced.

“The longer you are able to stay with him, the more useful your services would be,” the new major said. “Ideally you should remain there indefinitely.”

“In your current condition, any emergency escape of the sort you undertook on your last mission would likely be impossible,” the general added.

“Consider it in this fashion: we do not expect to see you again until the war ends.”

“Unless someone smuggles out a photograph of your body on the gallows.”

“You must to be prepared to stay there.”

“Surely you are already aware that this sort of life can be mentally exhausting.”

“Some agents have reported suffering from neuralgia.”

“Consumption.”

“Nervous attacks.”

“Lunacy.”

“Hysteria.”

“That’s not including the ones who are captured and hanged.”

“Fifteen have been hanged, to date.”

“It will require a great deal of dedication on your part.”

“Unconditional fidelity.”

“Absolute devotion.”

“Are you prepared for it?”

He was.

If Edwin Booth had the most perfect physical head in America, Judah Benjamin had the most perfect mental one. He was widely regarded as one of the most intelligent men in America, North or South, and he was going to be harder to fool than Edwin Booth. Yet it had been done before. Three years earlier, Benjamin had made the colossal mistake of hiring Timothy Webster, a Union agent, as one of his own Confederate spies. For six months, Webster was the Union secret service’s greatest hero. After that, Benjamin noticed his error and Webster went from hero to martyr, hanged in Richmond in 1862. Jacob was aware of this. But he believed that he had a very slight advantage. He knew that on Sunday mornings, all Hebrews let down their guard.

Every American Hebrew, including Jacob, knew the strange freedom of Sunday mornings. At first the streets would be crowded, the peals of church bells crowding the air as horses and carriages crammed the roads, one after another, loaded with families wearing their best clothes and their most serious faces, even the children chastened into little sorrowful adults. These sad children and their sad parents, along with their sad grandparents and sad uncles and aunts, would then all assemble on the steps of the churches, waiting for the doors to be thrown open. Then the owners of these sad faces would shuffle inside to devote the next hour of their lives to the praise of God. For that magical hour of every week, Hebrews in every American city were free to be themselves. On Sunday mornings they took to the empty streets, the empty courtyards, the empty squares, and breathed. Even as a child in New York, Jacob was aware of the paradise of that precious hour. It was the only time when Hebrew children were allowed to be children, released into the wilds of the gardens, streets and fields, talking as loudly as they wanted without their parents warning them to lower their voices, free to argue and rampage without the haunting fear of embarrassing their parents and thereby ruining their prospects for the lives of their dreams. The adults were more demure, but even they would at last raise their voices, amazed by the existence of an entire hour when absolutely nothing was required of them by either God or man, laughing loudly at the children and each other, talking about whatever they wanted in whatever language they wanted, casting their hands wildly through the air as they spoke, delirious with freedom, relieved, for an entire hour, of the everlasting burden of worrying what others would think. For that magical hour each week, America was theirs. And that was the time when Jacob chose to meet Judah Benjamin, Confederate Secretary of State.

BECAUSE IT WAS
Sunday morning, Jacob was not surprised when he rang the bell at the Davenport house on West Main Street and saw Benjamin himself open the door. What surprised him was how awful he looked. When Jacob had last seen him, he had had a stylish cuff of a beard just along the edge of his jaw; now the whole of his chin, jowls, and cheeks was scraggly with dark hair, graying in places and thinning grotesquely in others, as though some sort of ailment had created irregular bald patches on his face. His dark eyes were sunken into his shadowed skin, and his complexion was even darker in the layered bags beneath his eyes. Jacob remembered him being short, but now he seemed even smaller than Jacob remembered. He was hunched like an old man, the weight of years pressing down on his low shoulders. He was in his shirtsleeves, though he still wore a dark vest, with a thick watch chain draped across his belly. His broad waist seemed to sag. But everything he had endured showed only in his body, not in his demeanor. His pose was steady as he stood in the doorway, and he peered at Jacob curiously, his expression cheerfully alert, as if he were anticipating some delightful surprise. He had a little piece of cake with him, and he was nibbling on it even as he looked at Jacob. Jacob had read that he was often mocked for his childish sweet tooth, for nibbling at every opportunity on the cakes and candies that always seemed to fill his pockets. The caricatures in the newspapers depicted him as grotesque, stuffing himself while his fellow Confederates starved. It was only many years later that Jacob learned that he suffered from diabetes.

“Good morning, Secretary,” Jacob announced, with a slight bow. “My name is Jacob Rappaport. I had the honor of meeting you once several years ago, though I looked a bit better at the time.”

Benjamin’s dark eyes examined him, but Jacob soon saw that the Secretary was smiling—a warmer smile than Jacob remembered. It was Sunday morning, the hour of refuge from the assumptions of others. In a sense at once superficial and profound, he knew who Jacob was.

“Good morning to you, Mr. Rappaport,” he replied, and clasped Jacob’s hand in both of his as though they were old friends. He scrutinized Jacob as he grasped his fingers, still smiling, searching for clues before at last giving up. “I do apologize, but I am afraid you must remind me of our acquaintance,” he finally said. “Where did we meet?”

Jacob swallowed, prepared. “On Passover in ’62, at a seder in the home of Harry Hyams,” he said, and added, with great effort, “may his memory be a blessing.”

A dark shadow crossed Benjamin’s face. For an instant Jacob’s throat tightened as he sensed the noose around his neck. But Benjamin’s eyes lit up, thrilled. “Ah, yes, you were the young Rebel private, the turncoat from New York!” he cried. Jacob breathed as Benjamin added, “Please, do come in.”

He took Jacob’s coat himself, hanging it carefully on a clothes tree beside the door as they entered. The house was silent. Jacob followed him down a short corridor and into a small study. The corridor was lined with books, but the study was positively vomiting them. Jacob looked around the room and saw nothing but books, hundreds of volumes in English, Latin, Greek, and French—almost all law books, though here and there a volume of Tennyson or Balzac peeked inauspiciously out from between the larger folios. The shelves were stuffed to bursting, additional volumes crammed into the spaces above the rows of books. If there was a rug on the floor, it had been rendered invisible by neatly organized piles of papers—newspapers, magazines, telegrams, printed documents, and personal letters, all meticulously arranged in enormous stacks, each carefully bundled, as if the papers were regenerating themselves back into trees. The room was a veritable firetrap, and clearly a realm where no lady had ever set foot: as Jacob glanced at the walls and shelves again, he noted that there were no portraits of any family members anywhere, not even a lady’s cameo or silhouette. Jacob remembered that Benjamin was theoretically married and even had a daughter, though both wife and daughter lived in France; one of the more gratuitously vicious rumors Jacob had heard was that the daughter wasn’t his. Their absence felt oddly irrelevant. Jacob later learned that Benjamin lived with his wife’s brother, a dandyish man fifteen years his junior whom he treated as half companion, half ward. There was a pair of upholstered armchairs in front of the exceedingly neat desk, and the small table between the two chairs was occupied by a dish of cake, half-eaten, and a copper tea set, dregs of tea leaves already curling at the bottom of one of the cups. As Jacob glanced at the walls and shelves once more, he noted again that the man seemed to have no commitments in evidence beyond the books and papers that surrounded him, no signs of any more personal cause for devotion. At length Jacob noticed a bronze bust perched on the mantel above the fireplace. The bust was the only human likeness in the room, the closest thing to an image of a beloved. It was of Thomas Jefferson.

“It was tragic, what happened to Harry,” Benjamin was saying as he gestured to Jacob to take a seat.

Jacob lowered himself carefully into a chair and nodded as he helped himself to a piece of cake. The cake was dry in his mouth, like the tasteless unleavened confections that Jewish women serve on Passover. His stomach swayed, black bile churning his gut. “It was terrible,” he agreed.

“And also tragic in the literary sense,” Benjamin said, sitting down across from him. “That runaway slave had a sickening sense of humor, to do that at the seder. One must give him credit for timing and wit.” Jacob focused his attention on the cake, though he was puzzled. Benjamin’s attachment to his dead cousin seemed minimal at best. “Of course, we ourselves are descendants of runaway slaves,” Benjamin added, “and runaway slaves always ought to look over their shoulders. Harry’s mistake was that he stopped looking.”

Jacob glanced at Benjamin, feeling his heart pound as Benjamin poured him a cup of tea. He was surprised by how intimate it felt to have this familiar little man hovering over him, trying his best to make him feel at home. For a bizarre instant, as Jacob brought the tea to his lips, he did.

“So what brings you here?” Benjamin asked at last. He sat back, comfortable and expectant.

Jacob steeled himself before he spoke. “I’ve come with a message from New York,” he announced, and withdrew the envelope from his pocket. “From Edwin Booth.”

“Hmph,” Benjamin grunted. “Edwin Booth.” His tone imparted just the slightest touch of disgust. He still maintained his Sunday morning ease, taking the envelope from Jacob with delicate fingers, as if insulted that its contents might disturb the magic of the hour. Jacob watched as Benjamin inspected the seal and reached over to his desk for a letter opener, with which he dissected the envelope with a single graceful slice. He removed the note and took in its contents almost instantaneously, absorbing its few lines in a single glance. Benjamin looked back at him, and Jacob could see how he was weighing him in the balance of his mind.

“As you can see, I too have been somewhat incapacitated since we last saw each other, while serving in the line of duty,” Jacob said.

Benjamin blushed, his face reflecting the shame of a man who had taken on God’s task of determining who would live and who would die. His patchy beard hid it well, but not well enough. “So I surmised,” he said. “We are eternally grateful for your service.”

“I appreciate your gratitude,” Jacob replied, and glanced down in a display of feigned humility before staring Benjamin in the eye. Successful lying requires full eye contact, with however many eyes one is privileged to own. Jacob had learned that from his wife. “I was able to spend much of my convalescence at my parents’ home in New York, and for a time I was in a position to assist Mr. Booth in disbursing the Toronto funds, in connection with my work at my family’s firm,” he said, without hesitation. “Mr. Booth asked me to come here in person on his behalf, to ensure that you would trust me as his substitute. I apologize that so much time has passed since the date of his letter. I could not find safe passage through the lines, and had to come on a blockade runner via Bermuda.” The real reason for the delay, of course, was that the command had insisted on retraining him; the code system had evolved considerably since the officers had last engaged his services, as had other protocols. He had also had to master everything he could about the resources available in Richmond, paltry though they were: which rooming houses wouldn’t ask him questions; which segments of society to avoid at all costs; which neighborhoods were poor or rich or black or white; which bakery he would use to send his messages back over the lines. He held his breath and prayed that Benjamin would believe him.