by Dara Horn
When he arrived at the cobbler’s, he discovered that there was already a message waiting for him from the command—a response, he knew, to Sally’s revelation. He hobbled back to his rented room to open it, amazed by how elated he felt. It was as if the leather harness he had just purchased was itself the medal they planned to pin to his chest. But when he pried open the seams of the doubled leather and excavated the message, he deciphered it four times, each time unable to believe what he read:
REGARDING YOUR LAST MEMORANDUM: PINKERTON IS SKEPTICAL OF YOUR INFORMANT, WHOSE INTELLIGENCE WE CANNOT CONSIDER RELIABLE. WE REQUEST CONFIRMATION FROM A MORE REPUTABLE SOURCE. UNTIL THEN WE SHALL HOLD OFF FURTHER PURSUIT.
He read it again and again. Hold off further pursuit? But what if the plot were already in motion, the deed about to be done, and no one prevented it—merely because no one would believe a twelve-year-old Negro girl?
Over the next few days, he wrote back urgently, each time explaining how Sally’s remarks corroborated what he had found before, insisting that they believe him. In each response he received, he was addressed like a child: gently reprimanded, scolded for his naïveté in accepting an unknown Negro girl’s ramblings as fact, accused of concealing his own failures behind a child’s fantasies (or, one message insinuated, perhaps even inventing the story himself ), instructed not to panic, reminded that he needed to be more thorough, more dependable, more certain. His own certainty was driving him mad. At length they reassured him that Lincoln was about to embark on a riverboat for a conference, where he would be guarded very closely for several days; at the least, this would give Jacob time to try to gather more reputable evidence. In the meantime, the following Thursday arrived, and Jacob waited for evening, when he at last would see his wife.
“RAPPAPORT, I HAVE an important task for you.”
It was late Thursday afternoon, and Jacob could not have been more agitated when Benjamin walked in the door and planted himself across from his desk. Since Sally’s revelation, no further details had emerged about the potential kidnapping. Jacob couldn’t stop denigrating himself for allowing her to escape, or thinking of all the ways he might have used her to his advantage. Of course, everyone had always used Sally to their advantage; for her entire life, she had been nothing more than an advantage, to everyone but herself. He felt like a fool for setting her free.
He tried to concentrate on corroborating the evidence, but with each passing day he became more and more frustrated. To distract himself, he often took out the invitation Rose had given him, counting down the hours until he would finally see Miss Eugenia Van Damme. But now, just as he was preparing to leave the office, Benjamin had walked in, ready to assign him yet another “important task.” He held back a groan.
Benjamin stood in front of him with a pile of papers under his arm. Jacob looked up at him as he always did, summoning his most obsequious expression. He noticed that something seemed different about Benjamin, though at first he could not determine what. The Secretary was dressed as impeccably as ever, his suit perfectly pressed; his face was as haggard and weary as it always was, with its usual perpetual smile. Then Jacob saw that Benjamin’s hands were trembling.
“There is a small possibility,” Benjamin said, “that we may need to briefly relocate certain government offices to Danville.”
“Danville?”
Benjamin coughed, taking the papers out from under his arm. “Danville, Virginia. It’s about a hundred and fifty miles south of here. It would simply be a precaution.”
Jacob paused, wondering what this might mean. “Which offices?” he asked.
For the first time, he saw Benjamin’s perfect equanimity falter. His smile vanished as he cleared his throat, his careful gaze averted to his feet. He replied, under his breath, “All of them.”
Jacob bit his lip, unable to believe it. The information he had been receiving from the command had been severely limited; all he knew about the front was what he read in the Richmond papers, various delusions recorded on newsprint. But now it was clear that the Union army was at the door. He saw Benjamin blush, his sallow skin taking on an almost purplish tone. “Davis’s clerk has left instructions for the local militia in the event of our departure. I am entrusting a copy to you as well,” he said, and handed Jacob the sheaf of documents. His hands fluttered quickly to his sides as Jacob took the papers, as though he were relieved to be rid of them. “Should circumstances require our relocation, I expect you to remain here, to address any problems that may arise in our absence.”
Suddenly Jacob understood. The government officials would escape, and leave him behind to take the fall.
“I expect that I can trust you to handle any contacts with our agents in the event of our temporary displacement,” Benjamin said. “If our displacement is even required, that is. Most likely it will prove unnecessary, but I think it wise to be prepared.”
“Certainly,” Jacob said. He was hardly able to keep the cheer from his voice. But then, almost by accident, he glanced down at the first few paragraphs of the instructions on the pages Benjamin had handed him. In the event of a governmental evacuation, all supplies are to be burned…all manufactories are to be burned…all river vessels are to be burned…all bridges are to be burned…all warehouses are to be burned… Jacob turned one page, then the next, his vision faltering. They had arranged for the end of the world. He looked down at his shattered legs and wondered how he could ever save himself from a fire, when he could no longer run.
Benjamin was still speaking as Jacob turned pale before him. “Little Johnny is scheduled to depart for Washington this coming Sunday evening at midnight,” he said. Now his voice was bland again, as if all of this were perfectly routine. “He will meet his transport at the old burial ground on Shockoe Hill. I selected this meeting point myself. It’s not as frequented as the newer cemeteries, and the hill makes it a good lookout point.” Benjamin was digressing now. “It’s both a Christian and a Hebrew burial ground, you may be interested to know,” he added. “The two graveyards are distinct, but they sit side by side. Perhaps that is another reason why I selected it. The dead have achieved an equivalence to which the living only aspire.” Jacob nodded as Benjamin stiffened, as if waking from a dream. “In the event that we are obliged to relocate the government before Sunday, I would like you to deliver this message to him prior to his departure,” Benjamin said. He held up an envelope, already closed with his own seal. “Under those circumstances, this message would become rather urgent. If we depart, I shall leave it for you in the safe.”
“You—you may depend on me,” Jacob stammered, looking at the envelope. Benjamin was already putting it into his own vest pocket, changing the subject.
“There is one more very minor favor I would like to request of you, Rappaport, should this relocation occur,” he said.
“I am at your service,” Jacob replied.
Benjamin’s eyes were wide, almost childlike. He looked toward the window beyond Jacob’s desk, as if speaking to someone who wasn’t in the room. “My older sister is in New Orleans,” he said. “Her name is Rebecca Kruttschnitt, but the family calls her Penny. I haven’t seen her since ’62, before the city fell. If—if all seems lost, please notify her that I shall find my way to England. She will want to know that I am safe.”
“England?” Jacob asked.
He smiled. “I was born in St. Croix in the West Indies, so I am a British subject. My family came here when I was two years old.”
Jacob waited for Benjamin to return to the matter at hand. But Benjamin preferred to evade the inevitable, and continued his retreat into the certainty of the past. “I grew up in South Carolina, in Charleston. My parents owned a fruit store near the harbor,” Benjamin said brightly, as though Jacob had asked. “Penny and I used to go swimming in the harbor’s older section whenever there weren’t too many boats, off the abandoned docks.”
Jacob wondered why Benjamin was telling him this. For a moment he tried to think of an innocuous reply.
But Benjamin kept talking, his words flowing one after another until their happy irrelevance filled the doomed and quiet room. “Our parents didn’t allow us to swim there, and of course that was precisely why I always wanted to do it. And Penny always agreed to come along, just to indulge me, even though she knew how foolish it was,” he said, apropos of nothing. Jacob had never seen Benjamin like this before; perhaps no one had. He listened, captivated, as Benjamin continued.
“One afternoon we were swimming there when a storm broke,” he said. “It came very suddenly. I remember that I was swimming rather far from the docks, and I was floating on my back when I noticed that the sky had turned into a slab of slate, right above my head. The rain broke through it and started pouring down in torrents, with the wind whipping the waves into hideous squalls. The water churned quite violently, and soon it was pulling down on my arms and legs. I was sure I was about to die. I was on the verge of sinking when I felt someone dragging me back to the dock. Penny was always a stronger swimmer than me, and always better at judging risks. I was lying on the dock beside her like a living shipwreck when I saw our father running toward us. I was more afraid of him than I was of the storm. He brought us both back to the store, and when I saw his face I knew he was ready to beat the life out of me. And then Penny told him that she had been the one who swam out in the storm and nearly drowned, and that I had saved her. My father always admired me after that. Two years later, when I was fourteen, I had the opportunity to attend the law school at Yale. My mother was always very ambitious on my behalf, but she hesitated. She thought that I would leave the family forever. But my father told my mother that he trusted me, that anyone who risked his own life to save his sister was a person who knew the meaning of devotion.”
Benjamin was blushing now, his eyes cast down at the floor. Jacob lowered his scarred face before him. The only thing that made either of them matter was the presence of someone else’s love.
“I shall tell your sister where to find you,” Jacob said.
“Thank you,” Benjamin replied, and at last raised his eyes. “Tell me, Rappaport, do you have a family?” he suddenly asked. “Besides your parents, I mean. Harry Hyams’s wife had mentioned that you were widowed, that night in ’62.” Jacob winced, remembering the lies. But Benjamin was looking at him with curiosity, empathy. “Are you—are you married now?”
For a moment Jacob held his breath, before deciding to tell the truth. “Yes,” he said.
“Do you have children?” Benjamin asked.
Jacob swallowed. “A daughter,” he answered.
“I made a grave mistake with my own daughter,” Benjamin said. “I hope you will never make one like it.” His candor was strange, disarming, a fortress of pretense suddenly dissolving into sand. Now he was leaning over Jacob, his melancholy clouding the air between them. “One night many years ago, my wife asked me if she could take our daughter away with her, to Paris. We had a long argument about it. I am very good at winning arguments; my entire career has been built on winning arguments. But that night I gave in. I suppose I thought that I had merely lost the battle that night, and that on some other night in the future, everything would be different. I have since learned that there are no exceptions. What you allow to happen one night will happen on all other nights as well. The person you are tonight is the person you will always be.”
Benjamin stepped back from Jacob’s desk, suddenly embarrassed. He coughed, and pulled a watch out of his vest pocket. “Excuse me, but I am expected upstairs,” he said. “I wish you a pleasant evening.”
With that, he walked away, leaving Jacob drowning in wonder.
When the day faded, Jacob limped out the door. As the invitation warned, he was prepared to be astounded. But, as he knew when he rang the bell at 23 Clay Street that evening, no one is ever really prepared.
4.
JACOB HAD WORRIED, AS HE RETURNED TO HIS CHEAP ROOMING house and changed his suit in preparation for a society evening, that he would attract more attention than he might want at the Cary sisters’ ball. Except for his own wedding, he hadn’t been to any sort of party since before the war, and his wedding had hardly been a society event. He peered into the dirty mirror on the wall of his rented room, observing the long red scars that radiated from the patch that covered his missing eye, examining how deeply his shoulders hunched as he leaned onto his cane. How could he make any kind of society appearance, looking the way he looked now?
He arrived at half past eight, both out of fear of being the first guest and out of adherence to the Manhattan society stricture instilled in him before the war—that only persons of no consequence have the naïveté to arrive on time. He didn’t know, then, that the New York custom of arriving “fashionably late” was actually the sole invention of August Belmont, the Rothschilds’ New York agent and the great playboy of the circles to which his parents aspired. If Belmont had remained, as he was initially destined, a rabbinical student in Bavaria named Schoenberg, then no one in New York would have ever felt that appearing on time was a sign of social weakness. Richmond society, Jacob immediately discovered, had remained untouched by his influence. At half past eight, he entered the Cary sisters’ home to find the party well underway, the enormous front hall crowded with people dancing and laughing as musicians played the most upbeat tunes. As he looked around the room, he saw that all of his fears about high society were entirely misplaced.
He had nothing to be ashamed of with his eye patch and cane at the Cary sisters’ starvation ball, because there was barely a man there who had all of his limbs. As he entered the room, bumping his elbows into arms that stopped at the elbow or higher, he saw that the One-Legged Orchestra—a lively string quartet, exhibited on the exceedingly grand and wide staircase landing that served as a dramatic stage in the enormous marble-tiled front hall—was, as advertised, composed entirely of one-legged musicians, performing proudly in their Rebel army caps. There were a few able-bodied men here and there, most of them either old or dressed in officers’ uniforms. But the hobbled and the crippled ruled the room, perching on stools and chairs that were scattered around the dance floor. The one-armed men were dancing with ladies who gracefully endured their flapping sleeves, while the men with crutches each attracted their own share of ladies who gathered at their sides. Everyone was in the highest of spirits; if anyone knew of the horrifying possibility Benjamin had mentioned to Jacob that afternoon, no one let on. A slave approached him, holding out a platter of wineglasses full of white wine. He took one and had already brought it to his lips before he noticed that what he thought was wine was nothing but water, dyed a slight golden color by filth. He discreetly poured it into a houseplant. But when he looked around the room, he saw that the other guests were holding their glasses full of dirty water, toasting one another with them. It was all an elaborate game, a dream. He was still distracted by this delirious scene when two blond young ladies, one tall and one short, approached him, smiling. At first Jacob looked behind him, unable to believe that they could be smiling at him.
“Good evening, sir,” the taller one said. Both of them, he noticed, were the sort of women who reminded him of pieces of straw: flat blond hair, pale pink complexions, blank smiles, and figures straighter than his own. But he was hardly in a position to be critical of anyone’s looks. “I do hope you won’t mind if we take the liberty of introducing ourselves. It’s always a pleasure to see new faces. My name is Antonia, and this is my sister Imogene,” she said. Imogene curtsied, and blushed. “We’re cousins of the Carys,” Antonia added. Face powder, it seemed, had become a luxury item; the two sisters had made up for it by scrubbing their skin so brightly that they almost shone. They looked at him, smiling, anxious.
Never in his life had Jacob been approached so directly by women; it had always been his burden to chase after them himself, and it seemed to him that the ladies had always been trained to be pursued, not the reverse. But here only the women were able-bodied enough to follow anyone around a room. He adjusted his c
ane, and bowed. “A pleasure, ladies. My name is Jacob.” He had thought for an instant of using an alias, but decided against it. Perhaps Benjamin was part of these circles as well. But he hoped they wouldn’t ask for his surname, in case he needed to reserve a way out.
They didn’t. “Jacob, you said?” Imogene asked. The orchestra had stopped playing, but it was still quite noisy in the room.
“Yes, Jacob. Like the patriarch,” he replied, injecting as much drawl as he could into his voice. He had become a master at the accent, if nothing else.
Antonia smiled as she and Imogene curtsied again. Their faces were almost painfully strained by the scrubbing and the smiles; being this carefree with nothing but dirty water at one’s disposal required the utmost effort. “And I see you’ve also been wrestling with angels,” she said.
“Only with the better angels of my nature,” he replied. The sisters laughed. Jacob was flattered, and cheered. It had been years since he had heard a woman laugh.
“Where were you wounded?” Antonia asked.
This, it seemed, had become the latest and most fashionable version of “Where are you from?” He was relieved to have a neutral answer. The command had been right; the constant lying was exhausting. “Mississippi,” he said. “At Holly Springs.”
“Holly Springs!” Antonia cried, and gestured to her sister, whose mouth was hanging open. “Imogene’s husband was captured there! Major Rufus Halliday. Did you know him? She’s quite anxious for any word of him, anything at all.” The two women gaped at him, eager, and suddenly he understood why they had cornered him. Every new face was an excuse for fresh hope, a renewal of delusion.
“No,” he said.
He watched as Imogene’s face fell, her gaze fixed to the floor. “Do—do excuse me, please,” she murmured. She turned and quickly crossed the room, escaping into a corridor. Jacob watched as her fingers fluttered up to her eyes, and felt the space behind his own missing eye throb with someone else’s pain.
