All Other Nights (19 page)

As he wrote out the words, he felt himself burning with glory. He read it over once, then handed it back to Caleb.

Caleb looked at the page, reading slowly, mouthing the words the way his son had read the Bible, like someone who only learned to read poorly, or late. Then he looked back at Jacob. His face was grave.

“Charlotte Levy?” he asked. “She isn’t Philip’s daughter, is she?”

The question surprised Jacob. The idea of Lottie as Philip’s daughter, rather than merely Jeannie’s sister, seemed strange to him now. He thought of his first evening in Philip’s house, of meeting the Levy sisters, how they had all lined up before him next to their father, a row of beautiful dark curls. “Yes, she is,” he said.

“Your wife?” Caleb asked.

“No, no,” he said quickly, and looked back at Caleb again. “Philip has four daughters.”

“I remember,” said Caleb, in a measured, careful tone. His voice filled Jacob with unease.

“My wife is named Eugenia. Charlotte is her older sister,” Jacob said. He looked back at Caleb, anticipating relief.

But it didn’t come. The scar on Caleb’s neck throbbed. “She’s Philip’s daughter. Your wife’s sister,” Caleb said slowly. “Your own sister, in effect. And you are handing her over.” He kept his eyes on the paper in his hand.

Jacob swallowed. “She’s a danger to the Union,” he heard himself say.

Caleb pursed his lips, then let out a breath. “You know that this will break Philip’s heart all over again.”

Jacob thought for a moment of defending himself, of reciting for Caleb an entire litany of Lottie’s betrayals, but he knew it didn’t matter. He looked at the bare dirt floor.

“It isn’t a choice,” he said.

Caleb frowned. “There are always choices.”

Jacob was silent.

Caleb looked at the message one more time, and finally shook his head. He folded it carefully and placed it in his pocket. “We are supposed to envy the white men for their freedom,” he said. “But I have to say that I will never, ever envy you.”

J
ACOB’S TIME IN THE BASEMENT ROOM PASSED IN A SLOW AGONY
.
Caleb and Ellis were free men now, or at least freed by the assumptions of others, none of whom imagined the immense liberty of will that the two of them enjoyed. With the help of a friend of his former master’s son, Caleb had gotten himself placed cleaning latrines in Longstreet’s encampment, conveniently reunited with his wife, while Ellis was still ostensibly the property of the baker Achilles Fogg, delivering goods of various kinds to and from headquarters as well. Occasionally Caleb came back too, ostensibly on some errand for his masters. But now it was Jacob who was the fugitive, imprisoned in the little underground tomb on the graveyard’s edge, with nothing to do but read Ellis’s Bible and alternately anticipate and dread his return. Sometimes Ellis would return at night, bringing food from the bakery, though not nearly often enough. Jacob was famished, his empty stomach aggravating his frayed nerves. At last the day arrived when Caleb would come, at midnight, to help him escape. The taste of forthcoming freedom was so intense that Jacob almost clawed at the walls of the basement room.

As the endless day wore on, he perched on a crate and peered out through the crack in the planks that gave him a view just above the ground level. There he could see a little sliver of the graveyard outside, the daylight fading over the graves. He had done this for many hours during his imprisonment, and not once had he seen a single living creature, except an occasional squirrel. But as the daylight drained into dusk, he squinted through the planks and saw a small figure moving toward the graveyard, one that eventually resolved into a person, and then into a woman, a dark-haired woman in a long dark dress.

His heart pounded. For an instant he was sure he was about to be discovered. Then he saw the woman crouch next to one of the last graves in the row, touching a pebble that had been perched on the gravestone.

“Jeannie!” he shouted.

She jumped, startled, as she turned toward where he was hidden. But she didn’t run away. He scrambled down from the crate and rushed to the door, struggling to unlock the chain that held it closed. When he finally pushed open the door and emerged from the ground, Jeannie was standing before him.

He was close enough to touch her now. In those dark two weeks in his graveyard cell, he had forgotten the smell of her, the deep sweet smell of the side of her neck, like overripe fruit. He watched her, breathing in. Something in her demeanor made him hesitate to reach for her. Instead he followed her, like an obedient child, as she led him a few steps from the open cellar door to sit with her in the weedy grass beside her mother’s grave.

“Jeannie,” he said. “How did you find me?”

She swallowed before she spoke. “The lawyer brought me a message from Papa,” she answered, slowly. “It said you might be here.”

Her face was severe, solemn, as though she had aged in merely two weeks. For a moment he wondered whether something awful had happened, more awful than she could ever tell him. “I didn’t believe it, but I came anyhow,” she said. “I saw the stone on the grave, and I knew you had been here.”

She took him in her arms, and he devoured her, unable to stop kissing her. Then he pulled back, glancing around the graveyard in the graying daylight.

“Jeannie, how could you come here on your own?” he asked. He tried not to sound suspicious, but he couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder, searching for Lottie’s posse in the late afternoon shadows. Or had Lottie already been captured? “Do your sisters know you’re here?”

“No, I didn’t tell any of them,” she said.

So no one had yet come for Lottie. That meant he was still in danger. Was Jeannie here as a lure, to draw him into a trap? He searched her face; her eyes were still on his. He decided, for no reason and for every reason, to believe her.

“They all think I’m in the house,” she added.

This confused him. “But—but aren’t they at home?” Usually at least Rose and Phoebe would be home at this hour, even if Lottie was out with some unsuspecting suitor. Had Rose and Phoebe now taken on gentleman callers too, for the cause?

“No, they went to the synagogue,” she said. “I told them I was feeling too sick to go. It will be another two hours before they come back, maybe more.”

“Synagogue?” He was baffled. He had never seen the girls go to synagogue during all the time he had lived with them. He hadn’t even seen Philip go, except on the anniversary of his wife’s death. Had someone else died?

“Jacob, you’ve forgotten everything,” Jeannie said. “How could you not know that tonight is Yom Kippur?”

The Day of Atonement, of all things. The late afternoon light was fading, long shadows stretching across the soft yellowed grass. Jacob hadn’t been outside in two weeks, and now even the dying light terrified him. He imagined men waiting to capture him behind the trees just past the graveyard, rustling footsteps in the woods. “Jeannie, I can’t stay here with you,” he told her. “I have to go back inside.”

Her fingernails dug into his hands. “Please don’t make me go home,” she said. “I want to stay with you.”

He looked down at the grass. “It’s impossible,” he said. “I’m leaving tonight.”

She clutched his hands, pleading: “Take me with you.”

For one brief, delusional moment, he considered it. He imagined bringing her into the little cellar room below the graves, telling Caleb that he needed to arrange for her passage, meeting her in a few days somewhere across the lines, and then somehow living out his life with her as if none of the events of the past year had ever occurred, as if he had simply met a daughter of one of his father’s business associates and married her like a normal human being, as if there had been no war.

“I can’t.”

Now her face changed. She released his hands, looking at her mother’s grave. When she spoke, her voice was perfectly even, flat, cold. “You told them about me and Lottie, didn’t you,” she said.

It wasn’t a question. He tried to lie, but to his astonishment he couldn’t. “I told them about Lottie,” he said, finally. “Only about Lottie.”

Jeannie’s face turned pale. She looked down at her lap, and he saw her mother’s wedding ring glimmering in the fading light. “Anyone who comes to capture Lottie will take me too.”

He shook his head, desperate. “That isn’t necessarily—”

“Please, Jacob. Save us, even if we don’t deserve it.” Jeannie said, her eyes still on her hands. She was begging now, turning into her own version of old Isaacs, pleading on her knees. “I’m not asking for myself. I’m asking for Rose and Phoebe. Even if they weren’t taken too, they can’t run the house alone. They’re—they’re children.”

Jacob avoided her eyes. “I had to tell them about Lottie,” he said. “She tried to have me hanged.”

“I know, and she should have,” Jeannie said. “It was the right thing for her to do.”

He understood then, with staggering clarity, that his dream of living a real life with Jeannie had been only that, a dream. They lived in different countries now. “You can’t stay here with me, Jeannie,” he told her. “I wish you could, but you can’t.”

She clutched his hands again. “I haven’t been well since you left,” she said. “I feel so ill that I have to leave the table at meals, so that I don’t become sick in front of the boarders.”

He could feel how cold her fingers were. “You—you’ve been ill?”

“Yes,” she said. “Because of our baby.”

Or at least that was what he thought she said. “Because of what?”

“Our baby,” she repeated, and smiled.

This should not have been unfathomable, yet it was. “You—you can’t be serious,” he stammered. A baby?

“Of course I am. I’m your wife.”

She was! “Jeannie,” he gasped. It was impossible, but it was true. Everything could be rebuilt. “Did you tell your family?” he asked. The question was giddy, delirious—as though they were living in some other realm where reality didn’t apply, where her mother hadn’t been murdered, where her father wasn’t in jail, where her sister wasn’t trying to have him hanged, where there was nothing but family and love.

“Jacob, don’t be cruel.”

The graveyard was dark now, generations of Gratzes sleeping underground, with the weight of two more generations seated just above them. Jeannie sat rooted to the earth, her dark dress spilling over the soft shadowed grass. When she spoke again, her voice quivered in the darkness: “What are we going to do?”

Jacob’s vision reeled, overwhelmed by everything and everyone to whom his life was owed. He made a decision. He stood, and Jeannie rose beside him, watching.

“Some—some people have been hiding me here,” he told her, afraid to say more, and pointed to the shed. He could barely make it out now in the shadows. He put his arm around Jeannie’s waist, clasping her against him in the dark. “They’ve arranged to take me back to Washington tonight at midnight. Perhaps they can take us both. If they can’t, then at least you might hide here until they could arrange it. Once we cross the lines, I will find you.”

In the dark he heard her breathe. “Thank you,” she whispered.

He held her in his arms and imagined the child suspended within her. “Come with me,” he said. He began moving toward the shed, with Jeannie beside him. He held her tight, cleaving to her, his skin electric with unexpected joy.

For a few steps she walked with him, her arm threaded around his waist. But then she stopped. In the darkness, her hand slipping from his back made him lose his footing for a moment, unsupported, falling through space.

“I must go home first,” she said.

“Why?”

There was the briefest of pauses before she answered. “There’s evidence in the house that I need to destroy,” she said, her voice an odd whisper. “It won’t take long.”

He jolted, wounded. Then he understood why she was going back: to warn Lottie. “Jeannie, stay here,” he told her.

But she had already removed her hand from his. “I will come back in an hour. I promise,” she said. “Consider it a vow, for Yom Kippur.” She kissed him, so briefly that he barely had a chance to feel her lips against his. And she ran.

“Jeannie!” he shouted.

He started to run after her, but he couldn’t keep up with her; his legs were crimped and crippled from two weeks of being buried alive in the little cellar room. He gasped, feeling like a fool.

“I’ll come back,” Jeannie called over her shoulder, and hurried onto the path down to the valley.

He stood in the graveyard, watching her shadow vanish in the dark toward the dim lights of the town. He ought to have returned immediately to the cellar. But instead he remained beside her mother’s grave. The cemetery had become a small dark room, walled in by blackened tree trunks. The only light came from the fat curve of the moon rising above the trees, the looming white smile of Yom Kippur eve. Although the night was cool, there were still many fireflies in the graveyard, their tiny greenish lights buzzing on and off in subtle rhythms, as though the dead below the earth were sending up telegraph signals to the living. He watched the sparks in the darkness, and for the first time in months he was liberated from shame. He stood in front of Jeannie’s mother’s grave and asked for her blessing for her daughter, and for the child. Then he returned to the cellar room, and waited for Jeannie.

He waited an hour, then two, then three, then four. Then it was midnight, and Caleb came for him. Jeannie never came back.

“C
ONGRATULATIONS, RAPPAPORT. YOUR MISSION WAS A GREAT
success.”

The journey over the lines had happened in a matter of hours. After all his time in the Confederacy that summer and fall, it was astounding to Jacob how short the trip was back into the Union, how little time was required to travel between two worlds. He rode in the back of a cart, folded into a locked steamer trunk, and then another member of the Legal League—one whose voice he heard from inside the trunk, but whose face he never saw—took the trunk aboard a makeshift raft and floated him up the Potomac in the dark. At daybreak, he was in Washington, where a Negro boy Ellis’s age opened the trunk, helped him out of it, and ran away before Jacob could thank him. He made his way to the camp alone.

He spent those hours in shock. When Caleb arrived to take him, he was afraid to tell him about Jeannie. Instead he told him that he had seen someone in Confederate uniform come by the graveyard that afternoon, and that the hideout might be compromised. During the long night of Yom Kippur, with his body folded into the trunk, he thought through thousands of improbable possibilities in order to avoid thinking the truth: that despite him, despite the baby, despite everything, Jeannie had realized where she belonged. Every route through his maze of thoughts led to that same inevitable end. In desperation he recited as much as he could remember of the Yom Kippur evening prayers, begging God to forgive him, sending his prayers up into an imagined night sky just past the lid of the trunk, pleading for absolution when daylight arrived. By noon on Yom Kippur, he was standing in the officers’ headquarters in front of the same three men who had sent him to the Levys, in the same filthy suit he had been wearing that morning a lifetime ago when he had first freed Caleb from the jail, and in every buried moment since. He was a corpse dragged out of the ground, awaiting judgment.

The officers’ headquarters was precisely as it had been the very first time Jacob had stood inside it: the same wooden tables and chairs arranged exactly the same way around the room, the same large boards with maps full of metal pins against the walls, the same spotless planks on the floor, the same three officers still seated before him at the same long table with its brass spittoons on either end, the table still littered with papers, inkwells, pen nibs, pipe-holders, and trays full of ash. It was as if this room had been exempt from the passage of time. The three officers were still sitting precisely as before, straight and unbroken, their brass buttons and decorations gleaming in the shining daylight from the windows, a divine tribunal hovering over a sinning world. Only Jacob had changed.

“Our most sincere congratulations,” the general repeated. He looked at Jacob’s filthy suit and smirked. “Of course, there was no need for you to dress for the occasion.”

The officers on either side of him chuckled, waiting for Jacob to laugh, or at least to smile. Jacob looked at them, his face blank.

They stopped laughing. The general turned to the colonel, who passed him a sheet of paper. He glanced down at the paper, then back at Jacob. “You will be pleased to know that as of this morning, we have the Levy sisters in custody here in Washington.” On either side of him, the colonel and the major nodded and grinned, their beards flecked with ashes from their pipes.

Jacob was still staring blankly, his body bedraggled from the long painful night, but as the words registered in his brain, his stomach lurched to life. “The Levy
sisters
, sir?”

“Two of them, that is,” he said, consulting the paper in front of him. “Miss Charlotte and Miss Eugenia.”

Jeannie?

“Regrettably, the younger ones managed to escape,” the general said. Jacob was shaking now, bracing his feet against the floor. “A loss, to be sure. But Pinkerton is confident that the younger ones are useless without the older ones. The spy ring has been broken. And the return of Caleb Johnson to the field is valuable to us as well.” The general refilled his pipe, then lit it again. “Congratulations, Rappaport. We are pleased with what you’ve accomplished.”

There it was again, the phrase that had apparently provided Jacob’s entire motivation for murdering Harry Hyams, and now for destroying the lives of the Levys:
We are pleased
. But Jeannie! Could she really be here, in Washington?

“Not only are we pleased, but we would also like to offer you a promotion in recognition of your service. As of today, your new rank is sergeant,” the colonel added.

Jacob remembered how he had longed for this very announcement a lifetime ago, how he had come before this same tribunal as an arrogant boy, awaiting what he thought was his due. But now the concept was repulsive. The words condensed in the air in front of him, gathering on his filthy suit like congealed tar.

The three officers looked at him, waiting for his gratitude. He held his breath. Then, as they watched him, he heard himself say, “I only requested the capture of Charlotte Levy, sir, not Eugenia.”

The general waved a hand. “Accept the credit, Rappaport. You deserve it.”

The major cleared his throat. “We have the report that arrived by telegraph of their capture. Perhaps you’d like to hear it.”

“Yes, sir, yes, I would, sir,” Jacob stammered, nearly biting his own tongue.

The major passed the paper to the general, who looked down at it carefully, scanning it for details before reading aloud.

“‘Miss Charlotte Levy was successfully apprehended by Federal cavalry squad on 2 October at nine o’clock in the evening, at the entrance of the rented house used as a place of worship by Congregation Shanga—Shangar—’”

“Sha’arey Tzedek,” Jacob said.

The general shook his head. “It says here ‘Shangarai Zedeck,’” he said, following the words on the paper with his finger.

“It’s just the way it’s spelled in English, sir,” Jacob muttered, then wished he hadn’t spoken at all. They had taken them from the synagogue? On Yom Kippur?

The general continued reading. “‘Miss Charlotte Levy was apprehended as worshipers departed the building at the conclusion of prayers. Miss Eugenia Levy was apprehended in the family residence approximately a quarter-hour later, as she prepared to depart the house in an apparent attempt at flight.’”

She had tried to come with him after all! He listened, momentarily exultant. Then he saw the general’s smug smile as he continued with further details of the cavalry’s successful evasion of local militia and its arrival in Washington, and he thought of how Jeannie was likely arrested in the front room of the house—the room where she had first kissed him, where they had gotten married, where Philip had killed William, where Jeannie’s mother had been murdered, and where now the cavalry had dragged Jeannie off to prison, for the cause.

“We congratulate you on the successful capture of two lady spies, Rappaport. It will be noted on your record that you brought about the downfall of two enemy agents, Charlotte and Eugenia Levy.”

Jacob heard himself speak. “My wife’s name is Eugenia Rappaport, sir.”

The general snorted, a sound that was almost a laugh. He glanced at the colonel and the major, exchanging smiles with them, and then looked back at Jacob, apparently waiting for him to smile back. When he didn’t, the general laughed out loud.

“You may relax now, Rappaport,” he said. “We appreciate that you have become rather accustomed to this performance during the past few months, but now you may finally feel free to return to reality. That lady is no more your wife than I’m the emperor of China.”

Jacob looked the general in the eye. The general continued to smile, though he did stop laughing. “Really, it is quite honorable of you, Rappaport. Your chivalry is to be admired by all.” He struck a match, wedging his pipe between his lips. “But you may be confident that we can annul any legal status the marriage might have, should that be necessary. If for some reason that should prove inadequate for your future needs, rest assured that we shall make whatever provisions may be required to facilitate your divorce.” He smiled again, puffing on his pipe.

His divorce? Jacob thought of Jeannie, pregnant and in prison, less than ten miles from where he was standing at that very moment, and could hardly breathe. He longed to ask if he might visit the prison, but it was too obvious that that would be absurd; even he knew that he would have to be kept as far from her as possible while she awaited trial. And what the general said next made it even more impossible yet.

“Meanwhile, we do feel that it is too dangerous for you to continue serving in the Virginia theater at this time,” he said. The theater, Jacob thought. The colonel and the major both nodded. “We have reassigned you to the western campaign until we have further need of your services.”

“The western campaign?” Jacob repeated. The west—Tennessee, Missouri, Mississippi, other improbable, uncivilized places—loomed in his mind like a wide empty wilderness. They were getting rid of him.

“It ought to be a more rewarding assignment for you than combat in Virginia,” the colonel said brightly. “General Grant is expected to cut off the upper Mississippi soon. Your services were already quite useful at the delta this past spring. We expect you will excel anywhere. You are scheduled to depart by train tomorrow morning for the Department of the Tennessee.”

“Congratulations again, Sergeant Rappaport,” the general said, slapping a hand on the table. “We look forward to engaging your services in the future, should the need arise. Unless there is anything else you would like to discuss with us, you are dismissed.”

That was all? An entire family destroyed, his own life a burning wreckage, and he was dismissed?

The officers sat filling their pipes, waiting for him to leave. But Jacob did not move. Instead, he said, with his voice as steady as he could make it, “I would like to ask for clemency, sir.”

The three men paused, each holding his pipe in midair, a tableau vivant in the bright noon light streaming through the windows. “Clemency for whom?” the general finally asked.

“For—” Jacob paused. He had almost said “Eugenia Rappaport” again. “For Miss Eugenia Levy, sir.”

The general grunted. “On what grounds should we offer her clemency?”

“Miss Levy enabled me to escape, sir,” Jacob said, at last. “She warned me that her sister planned to have me arrested. I would have been captured if it weren’t for her. She saved me, sir. Surely one must consider that to be a service to the Union.”

The three officers looked at each other, their pipes still levitating in air. The major spoke. “Surely that was only because she hoped you might return the favor, precisely as you are attempting to do now.”

Jacob did not reply. The general leaned forward, twirling his pipe in his fingers. “There is a possibility that her sentence will be lenient, particularly as it appears that her sister bore most of the responsibility,” he said thoughtfully. “But she will have to be held for six months at least, so that any information she might still have would become useless to the other side.”

Six months! He imagined Jeannie growing rounder, with guards insulting her changing shape in prison. Six months
at least
? Who would deliver the baby behind bars?

“After that, depending on her case, she might be traded for one of our own agents behind the lines, although fortunately none of our agents are being held by the enemy at the moment.”

Somewhere deep in Jacob’s brain, crawling out of the ruins of his thoughts, something emerged that might be called a plan. “Sir, in exchange for my services, may I make a request?” he asked.

The general grunted again. “You’ve already received a great deal for your services, Rappaport.”

The well of goodwill had apparently run dry. But Jacob needed to try, at least. “I would like to request a particular prisoner exchange, sir, based on my time in the field.”

“You may request it, though that doesn’t mean we will honor it.”

He held his breath before he spoke. “I would like to suggest that Miss Eugenia Levy be exchanged for her father, sir.”

The general’s eyes narrowed. “Her father?”

“Mr. Philip Levy, sir. He’s being held there in the county jail.”

Three pipes entered their respective mouths, and three pairs of lungs simultaneously inhaled. Three wisps of smoke filtered the air, drawing thin curtains over the light that poured through the windows between their eyes and his.

“We aren’t in the business of granting favors, Rappaport,” the general finally said. His tone was harsh now, almost angry. “If Miss Levy’s father is a criminal under Virginia law, that is not our concern. We don’t hand out free passes for scoundrels.”

Jacob watched him through the veil of smoke. “By that reasoning, sir, Caleb Johnson ought to be returned to jail behind the lines,” he said, surprising even himself. “He was being held quite legitimately according to Virginia law.”

The veil of smoke parted, and the general spoke again, stung. “I believe we can all confidently distinguish between Federal agents and common criminals, Rappaport.”

Jacob could see the general’s hand rising, about to wave him out the door. “Sir, Mr. Levy has already served independently as a Union agent,” he said, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “He was the one who arranged for me to free Caleb Johnson. He is currently in jail for killing a Rebel agent who was part of his daughter’s espionage ring, one who had attempted to kill me. Mr. Levy is responsible for my return as well as Agent Johnson’s, and at least as responsible as I am for the dissolution of the ring. Without his efforts, Agent Johnson would still be incarcerated, and I would have been killed.”

This interested them. Three pipes returned to their respective mouths, and once again the veil of smoke fell. At last the general removed his pipe. “Does Agent Johnson know this?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Jacob said.

The three of them looked at each other again, though Jacob could read nothing in their faces. Finally the general spoke. “We shall consider it,” he said, his tone blank. “Is there anything else we ought to discuss?”