All Other Nights

by Dara Horn

  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.

  4.

  “CONGRATULATIONS, 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 gene
ral 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?”

  We shall consider it. As recompense for the destruction of his life, it wasn’t much better than We are pleased. He knew they wouldn’t give him anything more. But he still needed to ask.

  “Could you please tell Miss Eugenia Levy that I am alive, sir?” he said, his voice almost a whisper. “Just that I am alive.”

  He expected them to laugh again, but this time they didn’t. The general looked at him, and for the first time Jacob saw mercy in his eyes. “We shall,” he said. Then he stiffened, embarrassed. “And now you are dismissed.”

  The colonel took a piece of paper and scribbled something on it, to which he then affixed a seal. He handed the paper to Jacob. “Congratulations on your promotion, Sergeant Rappaport. Report to the quartermaster for your uniform and supplies. You will be escorted to the train tomorrow morning at eight o’clock.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Jacob murmured, and left. There were no more choices to be made.

  5.

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON, AS THE DAY WANED INTO DUSK, JACOB returned to the infantry tents, hoping, in the remaining moments before his departure, to find some of the men he remembered from the time before the last few months. But it was as though he had fallen asleep, only to wake up and find the entire world replaced. He walked through the camp again and again, and each time he recognized no one. Even in the barracks where his own company had slept, he saw no one he knew. The camp was the same, but occupied by new regiments: the soldiers were all strangers to him, and young ones at that, even younger than he was, like a new crop of students arriving at school in the fall. He looked at the faces of the soldiers around the camp—lounging on the grass, smoking, playing cards, drinking moonshine out of their canteens—and was shocked to see that they were nothing more than boys. He walked among them like a ghost.