All Other Nights (32 page)

“There are few people to whom I can say this frankly, Rappaport, but perhaps you are one of them,” Benjamin said, his hands on his knees. “I shall say it directly: These men are fools. They would honestly prefer to lose the entire war, as long as they can lose ‘honorably.’ Their idea of ‘honor’ is absurd, but they won’t hear it. They would rather keep their slaves, maintain the principle—even though, if they lose this war, they will become slaves themselves. But Rappaport, you understand this. You may be young, you may have been born in America, but you are still a Hebrew. You know what it means to lose.”

Benjamin ate the last remaining bite of cake. “All Hebrews know that there is nothing honorable about subjugation and defeat,” he said. “History does not care whether one had the foresight to lose with style. No one is ever forgiven for losing a war.”

They sat for a moment in silence, each contemplating the other, the weight of thousands of years of losses burdening the air between them. Then the room reverberated as the deafening peals of church bells flowed through the walls, the happy triumphant music of those accustomed to victory. The magical hour was up.

Benjamin rose from his seat. “I am sorry to end our conversation, but I am expected at the Davises’ for Sunday dinner,” he said, with unmistakable pride. “I shall see you in my office tomorrow morning at nine. It’s the building just across from the Capitol. First floor, the last door on the left. Thank you, Rappaport.”

“And thank you, Secretary,” Jacob said.

He left Benjamin’s home in a daze, with the sound of church bells around the city resonating through his damaged head, wondering whether he would win.

B
ENJAMIN’S OFFICE, IN A LARGE STONE GOVERNMENT BUILDING
on Capitol Square, was even more neatly organized than the study in his home, and even more impersonal. Two walls of the room were occupied by bookshelves, full of bound volumes and bundled papers. The mantel above the fireplace held another bronze bust, this time of George Washington. The last wall, behind his desk, was occupied by a large window looking out onto Capitol Square. Beside the window hung a floor-to-ceiling map of the Confederacy, with thousands of blue and gray painted pins stuck into it. Jacob had never before seen the war laid out in such a large format, and it was impossible not to notice how unforgiving the Northern stranglehold had become: blue pins ran along all the coasts and half the rivers, up and down the Mississippi and the Atlantic and the Potomac and the Gulf, and now more blue pins had encroached inland, a long deadly parade of them all across the country, straight through Georgia and now progressing up into South Carolina. The entire South dangled over Benjamin’s desk like a tortured voodoo doll, pricked by blue pins everywhere it bled. This bleak image hovered just over his shoulder as he sat at his impeccable desk, which had nothing on it but a single sheet of paper. Benjamin, as always, was smiling.

“I am quite grateful to have you here, Rappaport,” he said. “As you must be aware, the age for impressments has been lowered to seventeen and raised to sixty-five. It is almost impossible to find men to fulfill even the most basic duties in the office, let alone men of competence. We are forced to make do with old men and boys, or the occasional wounded soldier, most of whom are considerably less literate than you. I do have a clerk of my own, but he is quite ill this week. Thus I apologize if some purely clerical work is involved in the tasks I assign to you today.”

Jacob nodded as his remaining eye burned. “No apologies are necessary,” he announced, trying to keep his voice cheerful, nonchalant.

“You may use the clerk’s room immediately to the left of this one. There is an empty desk there for you,” Benjamin said. “But first let me give you everything you will need.” He stood and turned to his left, scanning the shelves. “Here are the account books with records of the available funds for this project,” he told him, pulling two ledger books off a shelf along the wall. “And here are the names of the six agents whom we would like to engage at present,” he said. He lifted the single page on his desk, and handed it to Jacob. Jacob took it in his free hand as he leaned on his cane. It couldn’t possibly be this simple, could it? Benjamin turned to another shelf and removed a large bundle of papers. “This file has their current addresses and other information that the courier will require for each of them in order to deliver the funds. Some are still in Canada, but some are already in Maryland and Washington. They move quite frequently, as you can imagine, and unfortunately I haven’t had time to sort out their current addresses on my own, but I assure you that they are all here in these papers. You must look through them yourself to ascertain each person’s whereabouts, I’m afraid.”

“I would be pleased to do so,” Jacob said. He meant it. It was all he could do to stop himself from drooling.

“Your first task shall be to devise the payment schedule as you proposed to me, based on the finances recorded in these books. You will see in the records that we have some credit pending from private sources in Europe, so you will have to calibrate at least some of the payments based on when the funds become available to us here. And keep in mind that there will be perhaps two score more agents whose services we may need to engage in the future.” Two score? “So do be certain to reserve resources accordingly.” Jacob eyed the documents and ledger books in his arms. How many lives could be saved by the briefest glance at the contents of those papers, with his single eye?

“Once you have devised the payment schedule, I would like you to draw up a letter for each agent describing the payment options, along with indications of where he will be able to draw future payments in liquid. You may sign the letters yourself, on my behalf. There is also information in these papers about which banks and other locations can be used for deposits. Those currently in Canada will draw from the Washington banks when they arrive. For those already in Maryland, you can correlate the deposit points to their addresses, based on these maps,” he said, and removed some rolled-up maps from a drawer before turning back to Jacob, the little smile still lingering on his lips. “At five o’clock, the courier will come by for the gold. The gold is in this safe.”

Benjamin opened a wooden cabinet below the window to reveal a thick iron strongbox, padlocked shut. Jacob knew, somewhere deep in his addled brain, that it was impossible that Benjamin was doing this, that something must be horribly wrong. But he was enraptured, hypnotized. Without intending to, he returned Benjamin’s smile.

“I shall only be here in my office today at intervals, I’m afraid,” Benjamin said. “I must meet with Mr. Davis upstairs, and we must not be disturbed. Should I be absent when the courier arrives, I shall entrust the key to the safe beneath the bosom of our founding father,” he said, pointing to the bust on the mantel. Jacob nodded, his head bobbling as though he were drunk. “I’ve sent the courier a note to expect you, in the event that I am otherwise engaged. I trust that you will handle this additional responsibility with equal discretion.”

“Of—of course,” Jacob stammered. It occurred to him that someone else might have immediately begun planning a robbery. But now he had just one reason for living, and that reason might be in this city somewhere, if he could stay long enough to find her. The only way he could possibly hope to stay was to do exactly what Judah Benjamin told him to do. Benjamin kept smiling at him as he pressed the cabinet closed.

“The courier’s name is Little Johnny. He should receive fifteen dollars gold for his services. Give him his fee along with the letters and the gold for each agent, and send him on his way. For today, that ought to be all. Is everything clear?”

“Yes,” Jacob replied.

“Good, then. Here is your desk.”

He took Jacob by the elbow, steering him out of his impeccable office and into a rather ramshackle clerk’s room down the corridor. The room consisted of two bare, scratched desks with nothing but inkwells and empty ledger books on them, and many bundles of documents stacked on shelves around the room. Benjamin placed the books and bundled papers on the desk, then turned back to Jacob. “Thank you for all of your assistance, Rappaport. I greatly appreciate it,” he said. “And now I must be off to Mr. Davis upstairs. If I do not see you earlier, I shall stop by before the end of the day. Until then.” And with that, he patted Jacob’s shoulder as if Jacob were his young son, ambled delicately around Jacob’s crippled body, and hurried out the door.

Alone at last, Jacob breathed, dropping down into the chair of the closer desk. The officers were right; he was exhausted, and not merely from standing for so long as Benjamin delivered his instructions. His heart was pounding, a cloud of anxiety hovering above his head. But now some of his anxiety took the form of excitement, a terrifying thrill at what he held in his hands. Surely it couldn’t be this simple. Or could it?

He touched the papers on the desk. First he examined the handwritten list of names. These, he knew, he had to report immediately, whoever they might be. He was too frightened to write them down, aware that Benjamin might return unannounced at any moment. Instead he committed them to memory, reading them again and again:
Sgt. Thomas Harney, Rev. Kensey Stewart, Chaplain Thomas Conrad, Mr. David Herold, Mr. Lewis Powell, Mr. T. F. Macduff
. None of these names meant anything to him.

Then he untied the bundle of papers that Benjamin had given him and began to look through it. It was a large packet stuffed with hundreds of pages’ worth of documents. He could see why Benjamin hadn’t bothered to find the agents’ addresses himself. If they were indeed buried in this packet of papers, it was going to take a great deal of time to find them. The documents inside were assorted: a group of messages from Canada, a list of banks in Maryland, a topographic map of a hilly area that Jacob couldn’t identify, an unlabeled photograph of an old man. Many of the papers were receipts for laughably small shipments of quinine, which was apparently being smuggled into the Confederacy from Canada. The thought of it unexpectedly moved Jacob, a swell of sympathy rising in his chest for those poor boys whose suffering could easily be cured but for the stubbornness of others. As for the letters in the file, they were mostly requests for money, some for astonishingly large sums, and written in language that suggested the correspondents’ confidence in receiving them—though perhaps that was merely a symptom of the quintessential Southern illness, delusional optimism. The messages that didn’t deal with money were maddeningly unrevealing: “Secretary: Dr. Blackburn is in place in New York with materials from Bermuda,” or “Secretary: A farmhouse has been secured in Dent’s Meadow, with assist. of Rev. Stewart,” or “Secretary: I have arrived in Washington, and have placed a classified advertisement in the
Washington Daily Chronicle
informing J. Wilkes of same.” Many times he resisted the temptation to copy anything down. Instead he read each page several times as he worked for his two masters, memorizing what he could for the command, and recording addresses and bank information for each of the names on the list for Benjamin. It took hours. But as he reached the end of the packet for the sixth time, he looked down at the list of addresses he had compiled and could no longer deny what had become obvious. No matter how many times he read through the documents, he could not find a single mention of a Mr. T. F. Macduff.

The fireplace across from his desk provided inadequate heat in the winter chill, yet he was sweating. He flipped through the papers one more time, but there was no question that the name hadn’t been there. Was it a mistake? If so, whose? He considered his options. If he went to Benjamin to inquire about it and he had simply missed the name somehow, then he would be dismissed as incompetent. But if the name truly wasn’t there—and as he turned the pages again, it seemed clear that this was the case—then it would be incompetent not to inquire. He had to ask. Biting his lip, he rose from his seat and limped down the hall to Benjamin’s office.

Benjamin wasn’t there. Jacob waited for a time, but Benjamin did not return. Once more Jacob considered his choices. Was it worth going upstairs, to interrupt his meeting with Davis? Fascinating though that would be, it was surely a poor gambit for one trying to prove himself as an able assistant. He decided that he would continue checking for Benjamin, and in the meantime take care of the mindless task of putting together the payment plan.

But it was far from mindless. As Jacob discovered to his great dismay upon opening the ledger books, the finances were vastly more complicated than he had anticipated. Benjamin may not have been a man of numbers, but one would have to be a man of advanced calculus to extricate any sense from the tangle of digits knotted in the ledgers. Jacob perused the figures, probing the barely decipherable mess of gold specie, tobacco reserves, promissory notes, unsold cotton bales warehoused in an apparently endless wait for higher prices, a complicated series of loans from the house of Baron Erlanger in Paris (a bank he knew from his work at his father’s firm), credit, more credit, even more credit—and debt, debt, debt. It would take days to translate it all into an even slightly more realistic sense of what was actually there. But a cursory glance suggested that the prognosis was indeed bleak. He found it staggering that Baron Erlanger had been foolish enough to risk his own capital on an enterprise that appeared, to Jacob at least, to show all the signs of financial disaster. He later learned that Baron Erlanger was married to the Confederate ambassador’s daughter.

Jacob barely had time to think. Devising even a basic payment plan took the remainder of the afternoon. Over several hours, he made three more trips down the hall to Benjamin’s office, each one a physical and mental agony. Each time Benjamin’s office was empty. Jacob set aside the problem of the missing agent and composed the letters quickly, trying his best to sound as much like Benjamin as possible. He had just finished the fifth one when someone knocked on the open door.

Jacob looked up to see a lanky man his age loitering in the doorway, a dark stylish mustache bridging the narrows of his face. “Pardon me, sir,” the man said, with an adolescent swagger. “Is the Secretary here?”

Jacob swallowed. “No, I’m afraid he isn’t available at the moment,” he replied. “May I be of assistance?”

The man smiled. “You must be the new fellow. Rappaport, was it?”

Jacob smiled back, surprised by how pleased he was that the man didn’t flinch at his wounds. It was as though he had found a friend. “Yes, it was. And is.”

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Little Johnny.”

Jacob stifled a laugh. Little Johnny was over six feet tall. He had to take off his hat in order to fit through the low door to the room. Once he entered, Jacob could see that his height was matched by his slimness, as though a man of Judah Benjamin’s build had been grasped at both ends and stretched. He had long fingers, deep-set brown eyes, and a chest so narrow that it was almost indented beneath his vest. Jacob imagined him thirty years older, and could picture no one but Abraham Lincoln.

“So where are the goods?” Little Johnny asked. His pronunciation was almost comically distinct, but his diction was slightly vulgar, like a man with little education and much talent for mimicry. “Show me what you’ve got.”

“Here,” Jacob said, fanning out the unsealed letters on the desk. “These are the messages for each of the agents on the list I was given, with addresses indicated,” he told him, passing him the envelopes. “We shall have to draw the payments from the safe. The Secretary left me the key.”

“Bully for us,” Little Johnny said, as though Jacob had just offered him a free tankard of beer. His grin reminded Jacob of the men in the camp when he had first enlisted—of how he and his fellow soldiers would speak to each other when the officers weren’t present, finally free to reveal to one another that they were nothing more than boys. Little Johnny rubbed his hands together. “Let’s get that gold.”