All Other Nights (14 page)

“No, it isn’t. It’s true. I’ve been thinking about this for eight long years.” Philip turned to him. “You saw my cellmate,” he said.

“The Negro?” Jacob asked. He couldn’t imagine what Philip wanted to talk about. Just being reminded of the cell made him uneasy.

“His name is Caleb,” Philip said. “He’s very well-educated. You would be shocked to hear him speak—he sounds like he could be a man working in our office. Apparently his master’s son is an abolitionist, and has been helping him for years. He’s here now because his master was ruined. He has to stay here until someone buys him, so his master can pay back the debt.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “No one has guessed it, but he’s working for the North.” The guard on the bench across from them let out a loud snore.

Jacob was astounded—not merely by the information, but by the fact that Philip had shared it with him, and had assumed him to be sympathetic. What else did Philip know? He heard the guard shift on the bench, his snores growing louder. The smell of stale liquor seeped across the room.

“I challenge you to show me a Prussian prison where the guards are asleep,” Philip said. To Jacob’s relief, he was smiling. “Now tell me how the girls are. And don’t lie to me.”

Philip tried to lift his hand to rest it on Jacob’s, but the shackles made his movements ridiculous. Jacob flinched, and looked away.

“Everyone is managing well, under the circumstances,” Jacob told him. “Even Rose isn’t crying anymore. Please don’t worry. I—I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for what you did for me, and for Eugenia.”

Philip looked down at his shackles. “I know what Eugenia has been doing,” he said softly.

For a moment Jacob wondered what he meant, and hesitated. But soon the pause became too long. “She hasn’t been in any plays, if that’s what you mean,” he said quickly. “She told me you thought she had been working again in the theater somehow.”

Philip looked at him, leaning toward him so that his unaided eyes focused on Jacob’s. “I’m not nearly the old fool you all imagine me to be,” Philip said. “Do you think I don’t know what happens in my own house?”

Jacob froze in his seat.

“Jacob, I am relying on you to make her stop. She’ll find a way, even without that bastard Williams. This isn’t a game. Part of the reason I let you marry her was because I needed someone to stop her. I couldn’t do it myself.” Jacob listened, astonished. “You must convince her to stop, before anything worse happens. Believe me, the wedding was nothing compared to what might be coming next. She’ll get you both killed.”

Jacob felt himself turning pale. “I—I don’t know that I can do anything about it,” he stammered.

“You have to, Jacob. It isn’t a choice. You have to turn her around. Or else you’ll both be dead.”

A key turned in the lock, and the sleeping guard suddenly opened his eyes and straightened in his seat, his hand on the pistol at his hip as the warden came in.

“Come back,” Philip said to Jacob as the warden escorted him back to his cell.

“I shall,” Jacob promised, and wondered if he ever could.

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER THE WEDDING—THREE WEEKS OF JACOB AND
the Levy girls making every petition they could think of to hasten Philip’s release, and three weeks of failing—Major Stoughton returned from behind the lines, his carriage bells ringing outside the Levy house one evening in the deadening summer heat. Lottie went with him eagerly, climbing into his carriage for an evening tour of the town. Philip would never have let her ride in the carriage with him, Jacob was sure, but no one remained to say no. Jacob was the man of the house now. Rose and Phoebe went up to their bedroom while he and Jeannie waited in the front room for Lottie to return. When she did, instead of the two sisters running upstairs, they remained in the front room with Jacob.

“What did you hear?” Jeannie asked.

Lottie eyed Jacob cautiously. She and Jeannie looked very much alike, Jacob had long noticed, but Lottie rarely smiled. When she did, there was something of Judah Benjamin’s perpetual smile in her expression: aloof, defiant, calmly and maddeningly aware of the limitations of others. She gave the impression that she already knew what everyone else was thinking before they themselves did, and that she already disdained it. During his time with the Levys, Jacob had often thought of Lottie as an alternate version of Jeannie—the version that sat in the audience, coolly observing everything around her, while the real Jeannie performed onstage on her behalf. Lottie hesitated before she spoke. The cabal was different now, and Jacob sensed that she didn’t accept it.

“He told me something quite significant this time,” she finally said. “The Yankee retreat in June was just a ruse. The Federal navy is going to massively increase its forces at Norfolk, and then they expect to send fifty thousand troops back toward Richmond. Under McClellan again, but this time he’s really going to move. They’re going to cut all the rail lines and burn everything in their way.”

This was astonishing to Jacob, but Jeannie remained surprisingly composed. “When?” she asked.

“Two weeks,” Lottie answered. “We have to get the message out immediately.”

Jeannie took Jacob’s hand. “Jacob can do it.”

Jacob had dreaded this moment, but now he almost enjoyed it. He squeezed Jeannie’s hand in his.

Lottie nodded, then looked away. Something seemed odd about her, though perhaps it was just that Jacob was seeing her honestly for the first time. When she looked back at him, he saw that she was close to tears. “Jacob, I don’t know how much longer I can continue with Major Stoughton,” she said.

“But Lottie, you’ve been marvelous,” he murmured, unsure of what she meant. Was she testing him?

“He’s right. You always have been,” Jeannie added. “Why, Lottie? He doesn’t suspect, does he?”

Lottie looked down at her lap. “No, but—oh, I can barely say it. He—he put his hand up under my dress.”

Jacob was both amazed and ashamed to hear this; surely this sort of detail ought to have been for her sisters’ ears alone. Or did she expect him to defend her somehow, now that her father couldn’t? Jacob’s opinion of Lottie had been painfully low: he wouldn’t even have thought that something like this would trouble a girl who had been duping men for months and even seemed to relish it. Both Jeannie and Lottie looked at him, waiting for him to respond.
Draw noses onward
, he thought.

“It will be worth it,” he told her. “I promise you.”

An instant later he saw that he had said the wrong thing, that he was merely reassuring her of her high price as a Rebel whore. Lottie refused to look him in the eye.

“Lottie, think of what you’ve accomplished already,” Jeannie said. “If you don’t wish to continue with him, don’t. He won’t be the last.”

“No, he won’t be,” Lottie said simply. Finally she looked up and smiled at Jacob, an odd, cold smile. “Thank you, Jacob, for everything,” she said. She kissed his cheek, and walked upstairs.

When they heard her bedroom door thump closed above them, Jeannie turned to Jacob, taking him by the hands. “You can’t even imagine what this means to us, Jacob,” she said, her voice hushed. “It was always so difficult with William. He was only happy if I complied with everything he said, exactly as he said it. He wouldn’t even deliver the messages for us if he didn’t find me cooperative enough.” For a moment Jacob wondered what she meant by this, before deciding that he did not want to know. “I was always expecting him to turn on me in a rage.”

“It seems he surpassed your expectations,” Jacob said. “But that was my fault.” He bit his lip, tripping on the edge of truth.

Jeannie shook her head. “It had nothing to do with you. He would have turned on me regardless. I always expected it,” she told him. “I’ve always expected it from everyone, I suppose. Ever since what happened to our mother, I’ve felt like I have to look over my shoulder all the time. All of us have.” She was gripping his fingers tighter now, he noticed, thin blue veins rising on the backs of her talented hands. “But I’m so grateful to be with you, Jacob. I—I’ve never felt so free before. Like I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

On another night, Jacob might have taken the time to be ashamed of himself. But that night he cast every hesitation from his mind. All he could think of was that he and Jeannie were now absolutely alone in the front room of the house, sitting side by side, with no prospect whatsoever of being interrupted by Philip on his way home.

ROSE GAVE JACOB
the message the following morning, rendered into code. Jacob was alarmed to notice that the message wasn’t written in one of her silly anagrams, but actually in a genuine Rebel cipher, the Vicksburg Square. The commanders had briefed him about it before he left, a lifetime ago. It was a surprisingly simple code that one deciphered with a square made of ordinary alphabets laid out along the horizontal and vertical axes, so that the letters lined up in a diagonal pattern, and one simply had to trace one’s finger along the opposite axis to decipher the letters in the message. The code used key-phrases for further encryption, but there were only three key-phrases—
complete victory, come retribution
, and
Manchester Bluff
—and to decipher that layer of the code, one only needed to try each of the three. The key-phrase here, he could tell, was
come retribution
, and by using it, he managed to decipher enough of the first few words to convince himself that what Rose had given him wasn’t a joke. It would have taken many, many hours to decipher all of it, so he didn’t try. The larger dilemma, he knew, was that the paper he now held in his hands was what he had been waiting for, the entire purpose of his venture into the land of the Levys: evidence.

He went to Philip’s office that morning and sat at Philip’s desk, looking at the paper in Rose’s neat handwriting. The jumbled letters seemed to rise from the page, flying free in the air, forming words he had heard before.
We doubted your trustworthiness at first, Rappaport, but you have succeeded in putting our doubts to rest. Please, Jacob, please trust me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.
He sat for a long time with his eyes fixed on the message, immobile as a corpse. There was nothing to do at the office, of course. He left, and paced the streets, trying to think.

New Babylon was a wretched place for thinking. The only businesses that were still running well were the slave auctions. In Jacob’s wanderings around town, he passed, as usual, a storefront with a broadside proclaiming
AUCTIONS AND NEGRO SALES
, where a steady stream of people was moving inside. He had never been inside before, and he had no intention of going inside at that point either, and certainly no reason to do so. But that day, with Rose’s message burning in his breast pocket, he stopped on the sidewalk in front of it, hesitating about fifteen feet from the door.

Alongside the storefront was a sort of gated alleyway which he had passed many times on his way through town. In the alleyway was a row of iron doors with bolts on them, each spaced about eight feet apart. Jacob had always assumed that these were horse stables, though presumably for very valuable racehorses or thoroughbreds. But as he stood by the alleyway that morning, dragging his heavy mind through town along with Rose’s coded message, he saw something he had never happened to see before. A man in a smart suit came out of the storefront and rounded his way to the alley gate, which he unlocked with a key from a large ring on his belt. Jacob was standing just a few feet away, and out of embarrassment he pulled out his pocket watch, pretending to wind it so as to have a reason to remain there on the sidewalk. The man approached one of the iron doors and unlocked it, yelling something that Jacob couldn’t hear. Instead of horses, Jacob saw a row of slaves, chained to each other and wrapped in ragged blankets, shuffling out of the cell. He backed across the street, nearly getting himself run down by a carriage, as the man led the group out of the alleyway and into the storefront. Jacob stood there for at least five minutes, watching men in suits proceeding inside, until, without thinking at all, he crossed the street again and walked through the open door.

What shocked him most was that they were naked. On the platform at the front of the room stood eight Negroes—at first he counted seven, but as he edged his way up toward the front of the room, he saw that the platform simply wasn’t high enough, and he hadn’t been able to see the head of the two-year-old girl above the crowd. Other than the child, there were four men and three women, the men stripped to the waist and the women, to Jacob’s astonishment, stripped completely, their skin strangely shining in the daylight from the windows. The women stood with their arms crossed in front of them until buyers began climbing up onto the platform to squeeze and pinch their arms and not very accidentally brush against their breasts, all before pulling open their mouths to inspect their teeth. Jacob moved toward the platform, almost unconsciously. As he moved closer he saw that both the men’s and women’s torsos were slicked heavily with grease, to hide their scars. The soft shine this gave their bodies made the entire scene even more compelling. Jacob had never been inside a brothel, but many of his fellow soldiers in the camp had brought dirty pictures with them, and in the long dull months before he was sent to New Orleans he had naturally stared at them all. The greased naked women on the platform, and the men squeezing and pinching them, gave him a feeling familiar from seeing those pictures: a thin, weak veneer of shame barely hiding a terrifying core of animal thrill. He shuddered, trying to control it. In his first conscious movement since he had seen the auctioneer lead the slaves out of the alleyway, he slunk toward the back of the room as the auction itself began.

The first chattel on the block was “Dabney, field hand,” who, when his name was called, stepped forward, almost to the platform’s edge, and immediately began pacing the platform and even jumping up and down at the auctioneer’s command. Apparently he had done this before. He looked to be about Jacob’s age, though with a muscular body that Jacob’s office work had never afforded him. The auctioneer read off a brief description of Dabney, which mainly seemed to consist of how many bushels of tobacco he was able to carry and how far he could carry them, along with a brief mention of his history of good behavior and his lack of attempts at escape. The bidding went quickly, until the price reached a thousand fifty dollars—sold.

The winner was a man about ten years older than Jacob, wearing a linen suit and a large pocket-watch chain across his vest. He stepped up onto the platform to hand some sort of ticket to the auctioneer. But he had barely done so when Dabney took a step toward him, head bowed.

“Young mas’r,” Dabney suddenly said.

Jacob was struck by how odd it was to hear his voice; a voice somehow seemed utterly alien coming from one of these greased naked beings on the platform. But what was even more unexpected was what he began to say.

“Young mas’r, I—I loves Dorrie, young mas’r,” he said, and pointed toward one of the naked women in the row behind him.

The woman he pointed at was tall, almost Jacob’s height and Dabney’s, and about their age as well. She hugged herself, and bowed her head. Among the three women on the platform, she was by far the youngest and also the prettiest; she had been the one who had attracted the most buyers to check her teeth.

“I loves her well an’ true; de good Lord knows I loves her better than I loves anyone in de wide world,” Dabney continued. His voice was trembling now, and Jacob saw that Dorrie was trembling too. “Please buy Dorrie, young mas’r. We’ll be married right soon, and de chillun will be healthy an’ strong, an’—an’—Young mas’r, Dorrie prime woman. Dorrie, come show how strong you is.”

To Jacob’s surprise, no one interrupted this display. When Jacob glanced at the auctioneer, the man even seemed to smile; presumably it was in his interest to sell off the whole platform as efficiently as possible, and this sort of drama might somehow drive up a price. The winner turned, following Dabney’s pointing finger.

Dorrie stepped forward, shivering, and slowly unfolded her arms, stretching them out in front of the winner’s face. This proved to be a colossal mistake, for the result of it was to expose her breasts once more, and dramatically, to the entire crowd. Jacob’s own throat throbbed as he felt the animal thrill surge again within him. Her body was phenomenal.

Dorrie folded her arms back over herself as the auctioneer began reading her description, something involving field work and breeding years, but it no longer mattered. The bidding for her began, and the price quickly went through the roof; soon she was more expensive than Dabney. The previous winner’s face fell as the price moved past twelve hundred. As a businessman, Jacob had long learned to tell when someone is bluffing, and he could see that the winner wasn’t. To his credit, he tried.

“Young mas’r, please buy Dorrie,” Dabney called, from the back of the platform this time, but his new owner simply shook his head, with a pained expression on his face.

The bidding slowed, and soon the auctioneer was calling for a final price. Suddenly Dabney moved forward and dropped to his knees beside Dorrie. “Young mas’r, please,” he said one more time, and Dorrie knelt down beside him. Jacob saw him try to take her hand, but her arms were wrapped tightly around herself, her eyes fixed on the floor. The gavel fell, and it was over.