All Other Nights

by Dara Horn

  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. S
he 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.

  “You’re welcome,” he replied.

  He ought to have felt self-righteous, he supposed, but the entire exchange only left him more ashamed. He sat down quickly and returned to the papers on his desk, crouching back over them. His head was throbbing. He tried to begin reading again, but he couldn’t, not while she was there. He listened as she scrubbed, hoping that she would soon be gone.

  But a moment later the scrubbing paused, and he heard her voice again. “Sir, you’s one of them who’s tryin’ to kidnap Lincoln, ain’t you?”

  The space behind his missing eye was pulsing again, currents of pain coursing through his head. “Pardon me?”

  The girl still knelt on the floor, scrubbing the sides of the fireplace as she spoke. “I heard ’em talkin’ about it upstairs, just like they was talkin’ about it last fall, before you came,” she continued. “That ain’t Christian, you know. Lord Jesus ain’t forgivin’ nobody for that.”

  He sat back in his seat, astounded. Could it be? This is not an assassination plot, he heard Benjamin repeat in his head. He thought of everything he had collected so far—the line of agents from Washington to Richmond, the notices of farmhouses that had been “secured” along the way, the boats and measurements across the Potomac, Little Johnny’s ramblings about hogtying people in barns—and held his breath.

  The girl was still talking as his head reeled. “If you wanna whup me for sayin’ so, go right ahead,” she told him. “But you seem like a good Christian, so I know I oughta try an’ save your soul. You ain’t makin’ it to heaven if you do that. Oh no. If you do that, you gonna be cussed for all time.”

  He couldn’t hold back his smile. He was elated, flying on air. “Unfortunately, I am already cursed for all time,” he said.

  The girl frowned at him. “Don’t you smile like that. You still got time to repent.”

  He kept smiling. He was knee-deep in repentance already, gathering up the pieces of a broken world. “And you’ve still got time to get your new pair of shoes,” he said. “Go now, and save your own soles.” Rose might have laughed, but Sally failed to appreciate his poor attempt at humor. She frowned again. “If anyone misses you,” he added, “I shall tell them you were here the whole time, mopping the floor.”

  She looked doubtful, but all her life she had followed orders. She rose quickly and scurried to the doorway, leaving both mop and bucket behind. “Lord bless you,” she murmured, and rushed out the door.

  He sat in silence, seeing, with his remaining eye closed, how life and death had been set before him, the blessing and the curse. The glimmering possibility unfurled once more before his missing eye: redemption.

  It took all of his strength just to limp back to the rooming house that evening to cipher his message in privacy. When he went to the cobbler’s to deliver it, Jacob found him cutting out a leather sole for a foot about Sally’s size, and smiling. Sally never returned to the office, and Jacob never saw her again. But one week later on Main Street, the Lord blessed him, and that was when he saw Rose.

  2.

  THE PART OF MAIN STREET WHERE JACOB HAD FIRST SEEN ROSE had been nicknamed the Trenches, as a tribute to all the crippled begging veterans languishing on its cobblestones. As the only fool who didn’t thrust a cup in the faces of passersby, he was easily overlooked. The vendors were almost as desperate as the beggars, and Jacob watched every morning as they pulled at their customers’ sleeves and pleaded with them for the price. The customers were beggars too; nearly every transaction began with a long speech from the potential buyer about how there wasn’t anything left to eat and how many children in the household needed to be fed. The entire city was on its knees.

  Jacob had been waiting there each morning for weeks, hoping to see Rose again. But when he actually saw her, it was late afternoon, on a day when he had taken advantage of Benjamin’s absence to leave a bit early, to clear his head. He had just passed through to a quieter part of the street, leaving the largest cluster of beggars about half a block behind him. Across the street, he saw her.

  It was astonishing to him how much she had changed. When he had last se
en her at her father’s house, she had been a little girl, not even twelve years old. But the two years that he had spent in hell had been, for her, the two years during which she had grown into a young woman. It was apparent now that she was the sort of girl who matures quickly; at fourteen, her body was already equal to any woman’s. She was too thin, but nearly everyone in Richmond was. He watched her as she began negotiating with the same potato vendor, turning red with humiliation as he shouted in her face. Today, he noticed, she was wearing an apron tied around her waist, over what was once Jeannie’s dress. He could barely imagine what her life was like now. Was she working somewhere?

  He observed her, holding his breath as she left the vendor’s stand with a bulging burlap sack. He waited, unable to chase after her, praying that she would cross the street as she had the first time he had seen her. She didn’t. Instead she walked toward the end of the block, and he watched, devastated, as she entered a store on the corner. Only a few moments passed before she came out again and crossed to his side of the street. Soon she was approaching him.

  The begging veterans farther down the block heralded her arrival with wolf whistles. In the Trenches, apparently, the rules of chivalry did not apply. It seemed she was used to this. She began walking faster, with her dark eyes fixed right in front of her, not even blushing as she ignored the catcalls of the crippled men on the sidewalks. But she was slowed somewhat by the sack of potatoes she was hauling along, and it was easy for Jacob to intercept her. When she reached the spot where he was standing, he stepped into her path, and extended his hand.

  “Pardon me, miss,” he said.