All Other Nights (33 page)

But Jacob was no longer a boy. “Before we do, I must ask you something,” he said. Little Johnny looked at him with deep suspicion as he turned the list around on the desk. “The Secretary requested that I include a message and payment for this gentleman,” Jacob told him, pointing to the final name on the list. “But I couldn’t seem to find his address.”

Little Johnny looked at the name, and shrugged. “Can’t say I’ve heard of the fellow,” he said, with casual cheer. “What else have you got on him?”

“Nothing, I’m afraid,” Jacob said. “Only the name.”

“Well, a name isn’t worth much, now, is it,” Little Johnny replied. It wasn’t a question. His cheerful tone had dissipated; there was something sinister in his voice.

“Nothing is worth more than a good name,” Jacob parried, attempting a joke. Little Johnny grimaced at him. Jacob retreated. “Might there be some way for you to find him?” he asked.

Suddenly Little Johnny flared with temper, slamming his fists onto Jacob’s desk before throwing his arms in the air, his eyes burning with fury. “What am I expected to do, knock on the door of every farmhouse between here and Washington, just to see who will turn me in first? Do you have any idea of just how impossible my work already is?” His face turned purple, making Jacob shrink into his seat as he raged. “I go out before dawn to pay off some drunken boatman to break the godforsaken ice on the godforsaken river for me; I get shot at by Yankee gunboats; I pass myself off as a country doctor and have to look down sick old men’s throats just to get into their houses; I dress up as a French ambassador until someone notices that I don’t speak a word of French; I pose as a preacher and walk around quoting the Gospels until some farmer’s wife hears me quote something wrong and runs after me with a shotgun; I barely make it to my mother’s boarding house alive—and despite all that,
despite
all that, I have never missed a single delivery, never lost a single word of a message or a single ingot of gold. But that isn’t enough for you, is it? It’s never enough! Now I need to find some bloody Scotsman’s
address
, somewhere behind enemy lines, simply because you can’t be bothered to dig it up yourself? Am I expected to get myself hanged just because you can’t find something in your goddamned
papers
? Forgive me, but I thought I was doing this for my country. I didn’t know that I was risking my backside merely for a bunch of sniveling, condescending, conniving little—”

Jacob cut him off. “Just pay these five agents, then, please,” he told him.

“How very gracious of you,” Little Johnny replied, his voice a parody of haughtiness. Jacob watched Little Johnny’s face return to its original color, and felt sweat beading on his own temples. The courier was one of those secretly volatile men, Jacob saw—the sort who seem like models of propriety and discretion just up until they burst. William Williams the Third had been like that too. So had Edwin Booth. Was there a way to provoke him again?

Little Johnny watched with utter disdain as Jacob struggled to his feet. “Please come with me to the Secretary’s office,” Jacob said. “The Secretary gave me the authority to open the safe.”

The courier sniffed. Provocation was unnecessary, Jacob saw: Little Johnny resumed his tirade with gleeful resentment, loping and lambasting beside him as he limped down the corridor. “He gave
you
the authority to open the safe,” he sneered. “And all he gave
me
the authority to do was to risk my goddamned hide, to dress up like a circus clown or a goddamned French mime, to show up half-dead on my mother’s doorstep in Washington, to leave a trail of cash like breadcrumbs all the way through Maryland, to run from the Yankees with my tail between my legs every time someone notices that I’m not a goddamned French mime—”

Jacob entered Benjamin’s office for the fifth time that afternoon. Benjamin wasn’t in. Dusk had already fallen outside; Jacob took a match from his own pocket and lit the room’s lamps in the fading twilight from the window. He made his way to the mantel and tipped back the bust of George Washington. A little brass key was lodged beneath its base. Jacob blushed as he returned the former president to his regal pose, wincing under his honorable eyes while Little Johnny continued to babble. His hands were sweating as he opened the safe. He half expected to find it empty. Instead he was temporarily blinded, his good eye blinking at the tall columns of coins, carefully arranged and stamped with their denominations. He held his breath and began counting, reminding himself of the cause.

Little Johnny was still rambling. “No, all
I
have the authority to do is to make sure all of these goons get paid, to measure the currents in the goddamned river myself as though I’m some kind of goddamned ancient mariner, to find every godforsaken barn within ninety miles where someone could be hogtied with no one noticing, to figure out how in hell to hide a hostage in the bottom of a goddamned canoe—”

A hostage?

“—and
I’m
the one who needs to ask
you
for the key to the safe!”

Jacob had lost count of the coins. He took several piles of them in various denominations and placed them on Benjamin’s desk before sinking into Benjamin’s chair. As he crouched down beneath Little Johnny’s gaze, he was suddenly aware of the picture he made: he was reduced to a living version of the ancient caricature, a hideous man counting out gold. “These are for the agents, and this is for you,” he said, grimacing as he separated out fifteen dollars from the pile and added it to the columns he had made for the five agents on the list.

Little Johnny swept his hand across the desk, dumping the coins into his satchel in a huff. “I suppose I’m meant to kneel down before you in endless gratitude,” he sneered.

The courier was playing a part, too; everyone was. “That won’t be necessary,” Jacob said. “Just sign a receipt for the Secretary, please.”

Little Johnny snorted, taking a piece of paper from a shelf and helping himself to the pen in the inkwell. Jacob watched as the courier scratched out a few words, printing them in the childlike hand of someone for whom schooling was a very minor part of youth:
I got the gold and left. John Surratt.

Without saying goodbye, he did exactly that. Jacob quickly locked up the safe and put away the key. He had just lowered himself again into the large chair behind Benjamin’s desk when a knock on the open door startled him. It was Benjamin. He began to struggle to his feet, but Benjamin quickly waved at him to sit down.

“I’m so sorry not to have come by earlier,” Benjamin said, the perpetual smile still on his lips. “I trust you were able to complete your tasks.”

Jacob felt his scars throbbing. “Yes. I—I hope you will forgive me for taking your seat momentarily. It is difficult for me to remain standing for long.” Benjamin nodded, indifferent. “The courier just departed with the gold a moment ago,” Jacob added. “In fact, you might even still see him yourself if you hurry to the door.”

Benjamin pursed his lips, rubbing at his beard. “That ought to be unnecessary,” he announced. “Assuming everything went as expected, of course.”

Jacob breathed as he steadied himself, fighting hard to keep the unease out of his voice. “In fact, there was one difficulty,” he replied.

“What was that?” Benjamin asked. He seemed genuinely curious, rather than critical—as if he, rather than Jacob, were the young apprentice trying to determine the facts.

“There was a name on the list that I couldn’t locate,” Jacob said. He leaned over the desk, looking at the names again before placing his finger under the last one. “This gentleman, Mr. Macduff. There was no information about him in any of the files you provided. I assure you that I was quite thorough, and I was still unable to find him.”

“Hm,” Benjamin said. The half-smile lingered on his lips, making Jacob even more uneasy. “So did you give the funds for Mr. Macduff to the courier?”

For a moment Jacob considered lying. Perhaps it had been a mistake not to send the money along? But surely there was a way that he could cast his failure as prudence. “No, I did not,” he said. “The courier didn’t know any more about the gentleman, and it seemed unwise to me to disburse further funds without confirmation of an accurate address,” he continued and ingratiated himself. “I had been intending to speak with you about it, but I visited your office several times in the hopes of finding you, and never succeeded. And I did not think it important enough to merit interrupting your work with Mr. Davis, though perhaps I misjudged on that point. I apologize if I was insufficiently vigilant.”

“Hm,” Benjamin replied, his voice utterly blank.

It was becoming hard for Jacob to control his unease. He wiped his remaining eye. Benjamin placed his hands on the desk, and leaned forward. Jacob was caught between Benjamin’s elbows, the paper framed between the Secretary’s thick hands.

“Rappaport, I must say that your difficulty in locating Mr. Macduff does not surprise me,” he said.

His words terrified Jacob. Jacob breathed in, and for an instant he felt his entire soul being sucked out of his body, drawn into the poisoned air between them. Benjamin added, with a smile, “Because the poor gentleman doesn’t exist.”

“He—he doesn’t exist?”

“Not outside of Shakespeare’s Scottish play,” Benjamin said, still grinning. “You might recall that in Shakespeare’s version, the murderer is warned to beware of him.”

Jacob’s scars tingled along his cheek. Benjamin stood up straight, still looking at Jacob. “Another man might have adjusted the account books to reflect Mr. Macduff’s payment, particularly during my anticipated absence, and helped himself to the gold,” Benjamin said. “Surely for the unscrupulous, that would have been the obvious course.” He paused, and finally leaned down on the desk again. “There are two possible explanations for your failure to do so. Either you are not as bright as I was led to believe, or you are truly devoted to the cause.”

There were, of course, several more explanations beyond these two, though if Benjamin were aware of them, he chose not to share. Jacob’s head throbbed. “I should hope to claim the latter, Secretary,” he replied.

Benjamin smiled—the same perpetual smile, the mask. “That remains to be seen,” he said. Jacob swallowed, frightened. He had become Benjamin’s captive. “I would like you to be here every morning at nine o’clock. As you have surely noticed today, our finances would benefit from your organizational skills. Tomorrow you may proceed with sorting through the accounts.”

“Gladly, sir,” Jacob murmured.

“Until tomorrow, then,” Benjamin said.

“Thank you, sir,” Jacob replied, and struggled to his feet. “I wish you a pleasant evening.”

Benjamin didn’t say goodbye. Instead, he simply nodded and stepped back toward his desk. In awkward silence, Jacob turned and began limping out. Just as he reached the door, he heard Benjamin say to the back of his head, “Rappaport, I am watching you.”

Jacob looked back, but Benjamin was already seated at his desk in front of a new stack of papers, immersed in his work. Jacob hobbled out the door and into the suffering city, shivering in the cold winter air, looking over his shoulder like a runaway slave.

A
S WINTER FADED INTO MARCH, JACOB BEGAN TO DISCERN, IN
almost imperceptible outline, the workings of the plan.

Nearly all of the funds were being directed toward Maryland and northern Virginia—most of them toward small plantations and farms, though some went to other establishments too, like a tavern or a boarding house or a doctor’s home. Many of these were so isolated that the closest towns were miles away. At first Jacob could perceive no pattern to the payments, nor to the sorts of people who appeared to be receiving them. The recipients were both men and women, soldiers and civilians, landowners and laborers, planters and tavernkeepers, officers and privates, elderly widows and adolescent boys, with no apparent rhyme or reason to any of it. But over time a thought occurred to him. Among the papers he had been given was a detailed map of Maryland and Virginia. One morning when he knew that Benjamin would be giving a speech to the Congress, he spread the map out on his desk. Afraid to mark it, he began plotting points with scraps of paper, labeling each recipient’s most recent location with little removable flags. A picture unfurled before his remaining eye as he connected the dots: a clear, solid advance marching in perfect formation, the farmhouses and taverns and post offices and boathouses and barns assembling single file in an uninterrupted line from Richmond to Washington—or, perhaps, in the other direction. They were building a road. But was the road being built for invasion, or for escape?

Then there was the matter of the munitions. Another series of payments—at first it appeared to be the same project, but soon it was clear that none of the names overlapped—went toward the delivery of gunpowder and the like to the Northern Neck, a no-man’s-land in northern Virginia where the only soldiers were supposed to be those on furlough. A very active furlough, it seemed. Then there were the boatmen, the river current and tide measurements, the schedules for the Union gunboat patrols on the Potomac. It was a raid of some sort, clearly. But what kind of raid?

Reporting the situation back to the command was becoming more and more difficult. Jacob avoided the bakery entirely during his first week, too terrified of who might be following him. He moved through the teeming city as though he were being watched. When he finally did go to the bakery, the messages he sent back to Washington were cautious, reticent, listing only facts. In exchange he received cash baked into rolls, along with the occasional request for specific information that he could never manage to provide. Each time he went to deliver a message, he was frightened. At one point he arrived at the bakery to find it closed. A sign on the door explained that the baker was ill, but Jacob had seen the man the day before, in perfect health. The next message he received from the command, delivered by a private courier who demanded an exorbitant sum, informed him that he could no longer use the bakery for communications. Instead he was asked to deliver his messages to a certain grocer, but only on Thursdays. Then the grocery was shut down. Jacob pictured the grocer and the baker sharing a prison cell, awaiting hanging. After that he had to send messages through a cobbler, a free Negro who mainly occupied himself with passing along messages between slaves, and who could only send Jacob’s coded letters when he had enough leather to make an extra pair of shoes in which to hide them—far too infrequently for comfort. Each time Jacob went to him, he wondered how many days either of them had left. The weather was cold, but Jacob’s clothing was soaked with sweat. He wandered the streets of the city like a rat in a dark cellar full of traps, waiting to be caught. And when he found the courage, he started searching for his wife.

THE CITY HAD SWELLED
to over a hundred thousand people, with refugees of every description filling every attic and basement and street corner. The city registries were unreliable; he managed to locate an address for a Mrs. Cardozo who might have been Jeannie’s aunt, but when he knocked on the door one evening, another family was living there. He decided he would ask at the synagogues. Surely someone there would know of the Levys, he hoped, even if the Levys were rarely in attendance themselves. His first instinct was to go to the German synagogue—the larger one, and the more familiar to him. But he was unlikely to find anyone there named Cardozo. So he went to the Spanish synagogue, Beth Shalome.

The congregation was sparse. When Jacob walked in on a cold Saturday morning, he was counted as the tenth man, the one whose presence made it possible to continue the prayers. The other nine men present were all quite old, and those who arrived later were mostly elderly as well, with a few his father’s age among them. There were almost no younger men, save a few boys. He looked up to the women’s balcony behind him and noticed some young ladies—all strangers to him, of course. Each saw his blond hair, along with his scars, and quickly turned away. They were an aristocracy among the Hebrews, above the likes of him. His own ancestors in Germany had been fools, refusing conversion during the Crusades and dying by the sword, but the Spanish Jews during their own Inquisition had been smart enough to feign conversion, pretending to serve one master while actually serving another—an entire community of secret agents. But now even the old aristocrats suffered. He listened as every single person in the room recited the mourner’s prayer.

When the service ended, the old man beside him greeted him gruffly, tipping his hat without offering his hand. “I don’t believe we’ve met before. Are you new to the city?” he asked.

This was Jacob’s chance, and he embraced it. “Yes, and perhaps you can help me,” he said, before the man could ask his name. “I would like to inquire after a family named Levy.”

“Levy,” the man repeated, as the congregants began to file out of their seats. Jacob followed him to the aisle, limping at his side. “Which Levys?”

“The Levys from New Babylon. Relations of the Cardozos.”

He drew his eyebrows together. “The ones who had the shipping company?”

He knew them! Jacob stumbled, then regained his footing, overwhelmed by sudden joy. “Yes. I—” He searched for the right words, afraid to say too much. “I was acquainted with the family some time ago, but I haven’t heard any word of them in more than two years. I was concerned about one of the daughters. I had heard a dreadful rumor that—”

The man cut him off, and saved his life. “Oh, of course. You want to know about Miss Charlotte,” he said. “She’s safe here in Richmond now, thank God.”

“Miss Charlotte?” Jacob stuttered.

“She was in a Union prison for two years. They accused her of espionage! Can you imagine? If you know her yourself, then you know just how outrageous that is. I’ve never met a more honest, forthright young lady in my entire life.” The room blurred in Jacob’s half-vision, shifting its shape until it had become the front room of the Levys’ house, the walls rattling with Lottie’s Rebel yell. “She was only released when the beasts finally admitted they had no evidence against her,” he heard the man say. Lottie’s lies were apparently being disseminated, and accepted. Who knew what anyone here might have heard about him? “But I assure you she is quite well, and with her family. Thank God.”

“Thank God,” Jacob repeated, mindlessly.
With her family
? With whom? But he couldn’t ask anything more; he saw now that the danger was too great. He began edging his way toward the door.

“So are you from New Babylon too? It must be difficult being away from home. Please, won’t you join us for dinner?”

The women had begun descending from the balcony. Once the women were involved, Jacob knew, there would be no way out. “Oh, thank you, but I can’t,” he answered, thinking quickly. “I am staying with a family from the German congregation, and they are expecting me.”

The man smiled, though Jacob could see he was insulted. “All right, then. But I hope we shall see you again soon. What is your name?”

“Sergeant Samuels,” Jacob said. He tipped his hat to the man and hobbled out the door.

It was clear that each of his two missions was fatal to the other: there was no way to ask anyone about Jeannie without risking his life. Now he knew that he could find her. The question was whether he should.

THE PUZZLE PIECES
in the office were accumulating far too slowly. Benjamin had bogged Jacob down with sorting out the accounts; it was a tedious, endless task which left precious little time for further explorations. He was able to gather a few more names of agents, and at one point he even managed to identify Edwin Booth’s brother—not his brother-in-law, as Jacob had originally thought, but his actual flesh-and-blood brother, the actor Philip had mentioned, who had sold off the oil drilling company. As an actor he was apparently quite well known outside of New York, though he spent most of his time offstage smuggling quinine over enemy lines. But the nagging problem was that the nature of the larger project still eluded him. Thus far, he could not even discern any activity with which to accuse these people, other than their fondness for accepting small sums of Confederate gold. One afternoon when he knew Benjamin wouldn’t be in, he was immersed in documents that he had no right to see when someone knocked at his door.

At first he panicked, but when he looked up, he saw that it was only the Negro girl. She was holding a mop and a bucket, and wearing a stained dress beneath an apron stuffed with rags. Her hair was covered with a kerchief, but Jacob could see dark pigtails bristling beneath it. She was very short, and thin as a rail—a child. She couldn’t have been older than twelve.

He had seen her before, of course. She came to the office several times a week to clean the soot from the fireplaces, and each time Jacob resented how awkward he felt in her presence. He had grown up in a home with paid servants, but this was different: this girl was a slave, and worse, a child. Usually he chose the moment she entered to hobble out into the hallway on some imaginary errand, too ashamed to watch this scrap of human property scrubbing his office floor. But this time he needed to keep reading, while he still could. He swallowed, and waved a hand.

“Come in,” he muttered. Then he averted his good eye, trying to ignore her as he flipped through the papers. She interrupted him.

“Sir, you packin’ up?”

He looked at her. It was odd to hear her voice. “What?”

“You packin’ up? Upstairs, they all tyin’ up papers, rearrangin’ everythin’. I need to know if you gonna be packin’ up too. ’Cause if you gonna be packin’ up, then I ain’t gonna mop this floor.” She looked at him, waiting.

Was it true? If it was, then why? And what else might this girl know?

“Why are they packing upstairs?” he asked.

The girl shrugged. “No idea, sir. That ain’t my business,” she said. Her dark eyes were vacant, tired, bored.

“Well, don’t mop the floor, then,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

She left the mop in the doorway and carried the bucket with her as she entered the room. Her bare feet slapped the floorboards as she carefully hauled the bucket, struggling to keep the soapy water from sloshing out. Now he was watching her, suddenly unable to look away, as she plunked the bucket down beside the mantel and fished a thick scrub brush out of the water. Then she got down on her knees beside the unlit fireplace and began scrubbing out the soot from the previous day, when the weather had been cold. As he watched, he was captivated by the revolting ease of how she knelt on the floor. The torn collar of her dress hung open, revealing too much of her childlike chest as she pushed the scrub brush back and forth. The pale bottoms of her bare toes, encrusted with calluses and dirt, peeked out from beneath the skirt of her soot-smeared dress. It occurred to Jacob that even his parents’ scullery maid had worn shoes. He saw that row of little toes and felt a surge of unexpected pity rising within him.
What cause
, he heard Philip Levy say in his head,
could be worth more than a child
? Ignoring her made him feel filthier than her filthy feet.

“What is your name?” he asked.

She looked up, startled. “Sally, sir.”

He examined her, noticing her tiny, callused child’s hands, and wondered what more he could say to her. What do children care about? “Sally, do your mother and father work here too?” he asked.

Sally looked back down at her scrub brush. “I ain’t seen them in a long time, sir. They got sold some years ago.”

He glanced at the papers on his desk, ashamed to look her in the eye. But then he looked back at her, watching her as she knelt before him.

“Sally, there’s a Negro cobbler on Thompson Street,” he said, surprising even himself. The cobbler was his contact, but now Jacob was thinking of his other trade. “I’ll write you a pass to go there. I would like you to go to him and tell him to make you a pair of shoes. I’ll pay for them.”

She stopped scrubbing and looked up at him, speechless.

“I shall give you the money for it now, and the pass,” he said. He scribbled out a few words on printed stationery, aware of the risk, but no longer caring. The girl was still gaping at him. He reached into his pocket and took out a silver dollar. This was much more than the shoes would actually cost her, but the shoes were not the point. “This cobbler, he—he knows many people, and he sends messages between—between servants,” he stammered. (“Servants,” he had long noticed, was what polite Southerners called their slaves.) “I would like you to ask him about your parents. Perhaps he could find them for you.” With great effort, he stood up and leaned over his desk toward her, offering her the paper and the coin.

For a moment she did not move. She stared at the pass and the coin, her mouth hanging open. Then, gingerly, as though he were some sort of dangerous animal, she straightened, reached out with her little hands and snatched them both from him, her eyes wide as she quickly stuffed them into the pocket of her apron. She kept her hand pressed against her apron pocket for another long moment, as if he might take them back.

“Thank you, sir,” she finally said, her voice low as she looked back down at the floor. He watched as her eyes filled with tears.