All Other Nights (2 page)

“It seems that Benjamin is his first cousin. But not yours, apparently, your being related through the wife, of course. We’re quite pleased about that.” He smiled again.

Jacob smiled back. An unexpected ease flowed down into his spine, and he stood taller. He felt a sudden and acute awareness, hovering above the intimate taste of pipe smoke, of his own rightful presence in the room: alive and attuned in every nerve and hair to these officers, pleased by what pleased them, dismayed by what dismayed them, his living body a breathing expression of all of their hatreds and hopes. For a single beautiful instant, he imagined himself as the general’s son.

“Hyams has been in and out of the border states in the past few months,” the general continued. “As you know, he used to do frequent business in the North, before the war, and has many contacts there.” He paused, and looked at Jacob. Jacob couldn’t help but look down, dodging the man’s eye. Was it a reference to his father? “He has also slipped over the border itself many times, and now we have managed to intercept his communications with Richmond. Unfortunately he is involved in a plot.” He waited for Jacob, a melodramatic pause that Jacob might have resented if he weren’t so entranced.

“What sort of plot, sir?” Jacob asked.

“An assassination plot. Against President Lincoln.”

Lincoln?

“That’s—that’s not possible, sir,” Jacob stammered.

“Why?” the colonel asked.

Jacob saw that the three officers were genuinely interested—certain, it seemed, that he had something to tell them that they did not already know. He tried to remember his father’s comments about Harry and the sugar business, but he recalled nothing; the subject had always bored him. All he could remember were the arguments between the guests at the Passover table the previous year: how Otto Strauss wouldn’t stop arguing that the abolitionists were right, that the slave question wasn’t only a moral problem but an economic one, that no business run on slave labor would survive the new industrial developments, and how Hermann Seligman wouldn’t stop arguing that Otto was wrong on the business point even if he was right on the moral point, that as much as he might agree with Otto in principle, Otto ought to admit he was advocating a revolution, and revolutions nearly always ended in disaster, as his cousin’s prison sentence in the German states so clearly demonstrated, and anyone heading down that path ought to have a plan quite far in advance for what he intended to do once the world, however corrupt it had been, came to an end, and nothing in Otto’s argument suggested that he was even the slightest bit prepared—and then Jacob remembered how his father had silenced his fighting guests by pointing out, as he did to Jacob with irritating frequency, that with or without a war, they all ought to be grateful to God simply for the fact of America, for the astonishing reality that they could even have this conversation, that they all ought to stop arguing and accept whatever might happen and be willing to devote absolutely everything to this country under any circumstances whatsoever, simply out of gratitude for the unimaginable truth that all of them were here, sitting with their own free children around a Passover table, with no one to terrify them, and no one to make them ashamed. But none of it had interested Jacob in the least. He had been busy at the time, avoiding eye contact with Emma Jonas. “Mr. Hyams is—he’s not that sort of man, sir,” Jacob finally said.

“We could show you rather convincing evidence to the contrary,” the major said, “though we hope that will not be necessary.”

“But it’s impossible,” Jacob insisted. It really was, he knew. It had to be.

“That is precisely what we propose that you ensure,” said the general, still smiling, “by assassinating Harris Hyams before the plot can progress.”

The three men watched Jacob, grinning at him, as the blood in Jacob’s body began draining into his shoes. The room swayed before him. But the men continued to smile.

“Are you suggesting that I kill my uncle, sir,” Jacob said slowly. It wasn’t a question, of course. The veil of smoke in the air between them parted, dissipated.

“Your actions would do honor to your race,” the major said.

“Do—do you mean my country, sir,” Jacob stammered, this time trying to make it sound like a question, but without succeeding. In his memory Harry’s hands held him under the armpits again, but now his body would not move.

“Both your country and your race, of course,” the general said brightly, warming to his theme. “Judah Benjamin and his kin have done your race a great disservice. Every Hebrew in the Union will reward you if you undo what he has done.”

The three officers looked Jacob in the eye, and under their gaze, he realized what they saw. While he looked in the mirror and saw a tall, blond, nineteen-year-old American boy, the three men at this table looked at him and saw Judah Benjamin. And Jacob suddenly knew that he would do anything not to be that man. The three officers continued speaking, their words buzzing through Jacob’s brain in a blur. But as he listened, he felt himself stepping onto the stage, becoming the other Jacob Rappaport: the Jacob Rappaport whom no one expected, the one who surpassed all expectations, the one who could prove beyond all doubt that his life was entirely his own.

“It is dearly hoped that this is not a death mission for you.”

“Though if it should prove to be so, we are confident that you would not refuse the call of duty.”

“It is essential that it appear accidental.”

“Shooting is no good.”

“No one should discover that it was you.”

“You will be pleased to know that a plan has been devised.”

“Sergeant Mendoza has informed us of a Hebrew holiday several weeks from now.”

“The holiday coincides nicely with the navy’s plan to take New Orleans.”

“You would be a guest at his holiday table.”

“A dose of poison would be placed in his drink.”

“The effect would be gradual rather than immediate.”

“We would provide the lye, or whatever poison is deemed most suitable.”

“If you were to be captured, you might consider using the lye yourself.”

“You would never consider disgracing yourself by returning without success.”

“If you succeed, the entire Union will immortalize you.”

“Lincoln himself will thank you, on behalf of your entire race.”

“Imagine yourself written up in the history books.”

“You would be another Hebrew spy, like in Scripture.”

“Cunning.”

“Inscrutable.”

“Judas Benjamin has done your race a great disservice.”

“It can all be corrected with a little lye.”

Later Jacob would not recall saying yes. But it did not matter. Their words enveloped him, became him. The curtain rose, and the old Jacob Rappaport disappeared.

I
T WAS MIDNIGHT BEFORE THE EVE OF PASSOVER IN
1862
WHEN
the barrel was finally removed from the smuggler’s boat and hidden in a stable near a dock in New Orleans. Following instructions, Jacob waited several hours before prying his way out. Through a tiny imperfection in the barrel’s lid, he could glimpse the emerging light of a streetlamp nearby. After nearly two days of being entombed in the barrel at the bottom of the boat, he was almost blinded. With his arms numb, it took longer than he had expected to force the barrel open. He emerged, standing on his crimped legs, and crept out of the stable into the empty southern night.

It was a warm night, and very humid, though Jacob was already soaked with sweat. The breeze on that almost-full-mooned night was pure freedom. But his ecstasy at feeling his limbs unfold faded quickly, as he remembered that now the real horror would begin. He hurried out onto the street and past the first stilts of the piers, and climbed down to the riverbank below them. It was a few hours before daybreak, and despite this being cosmopolitan New Orleans, no one but Jacob seemed to be out near the river, not even a drunk. He stripped, buried the filthy rags from inside his trousers under a rock by the edge of the water, and dipped his sweating arms and legs into the Mississippi. The water rushed against his limbs like waves of black ink in the darkness. He felt so dirty that he might have dived right in, if the current hadn’t seemed strong enough to drown him. After dressing himself again in a Confederate uniform (borrowed from a corpse who had had the gentility to bleed exclusively onto his hat), he slept for a few hours beneath one of the piers, knowing his nerves would wake him before dawn, and they did. He watched as the first hints of sunlight grayed the air above the river, the sky seething into full daylight as the first few people stepped out onto the docks. He finished off the water he had been so carefully rationing out of his canteen, reached into one of the pockets of the dead man’s uniform, and pulled out a paper sign, which he hung around his neck. The sign had been his own brilliant plan. It read:

P
LEASE EXCUSE THIS
HERO,
W
HO HAS BEEN RENDERED
DEAF
AND
DUMB
BY
YANKEE CANNONFIRE,
T
HO’ THE
T
UNE OF
“DIXIE”
RINGS IN HIS
E
ARS.

The major had questioned the plausibility of cannonfire rendering someone dumb, but Jacob quickly discovered that the very suggestion rendered those who read it even dumber. Once he had freed himself from bondage, this ingenious sign not only prevented him from becoming involved in awkward conversations with anyone eager to speak to a man in uniform, but it also allowed the Rebels themselves to reimburse a Union spy. By slackening his face into an idiotic smile, pointing to his sign, bowing grandly to the ladies, and holding out his Rebel army cap (collected from a corpse who had been less than punctilious about the blood on the rest of his uniform, but very genteel when it came to his hat), Jacob managed to amass a small fortune in alms—enough Confederate money to provide for whatever needs he might have during his time in the haunted ghost town that was New Orleans.

By midday it was hot. Jacob had never felt humidity like this in his entire life. The whole city was dripping with sweat; there were beaded droplets of moisture on every crooked porch railing of every house in town. And everything drooped. The wooden porches of every house, even the newest ones, sagged in the center, as if giving up on life. Old people sat on these sagging porches, the skin on their frail bodies sagging to match. There were grand mansions here and there, but even the grand mansions looked like abandoned estates, enveloped in cobwebs with bulging, bubbling paint on the walls, the paint itself peeling off in large, hopeless patches in the thick miasma of heat. Low, heavy trees drooped their long branches almost down to the sidewalks. In the streets downtown, where Jacob strolled for some time before heading toward the Garden District, the air was heavy with pipe smoke, sweat, and sloth. Following his memorized mental map, Jacob began the long walk uptown. And it was there, after passing many drooping houses and many elderly men as he walked along his way, that he came across the Hebrew cemetery.

Cemeteries in New Orleans are like small cities of the dead. The ground is too soft and flood-prone for underground graves, so the departed are instead interred in stone mausoleums, some of which are grander than the homes of the living. Hebrew custom demands burial directly in the ground, but because they lived in a swamp, the Jews of New Orleans had developed their own solution, as Jacob discovered as he glanced through the Hebrew cemetery gates. Forced to inter their dead in ground too soft for burial, they had created their own necropolis, where each of the graves consisted of a small elevated mound of mud covered in a layer of grass, tiny raised mausoleums made to look like part of the earth. Each plot was a little grassy plateau marked with a modest stone plaque, forming a city of small truncated mountains: small hopes, small fears, small triumphs and failures, all.

Jacob had never been inside a cemetery. His family was descended from the biblical high priest, and there was a Hebrew law that forbade them any contact with the dead. But it seemed foolish to Jacob to follow such an inane rule now, given what he was about to do. The entire edifice of law and custom dissolved before his eyes. And so he entered, walking among the graves as the sun sank over the drooping trees. He was surprised by how much it disturbed him to stand among the dead, as though he were a child afraid of ghosts. The branches of the low trees around the graveyard’s edge swayed in the faint breeze, and each slight movement of the air reminded him that the ground beneath his feet was alive, the earth itself breathing, rising and falling with the most contaminating anguish of both the dead and the living, regret. It wasn’t long before he came across the Hyams family plot, under a vine-draped tree. Three generations’ worth of Hyamses lay waiting for the messianic age beneath this small piece of soggy land. He paused above them, and began, out of fear, to recite the mourner’s prayer. Then he saw the empty space to the side of the most recent grave, blank grassy earth, and he realized that he was the only person in the world who knew precisely who would occupy it.

The words of the prayer left his lips. He glanced up at the sky, where the sun was setting the tops of the trees on fire. If he had been a braver man, or a wiser man, he might have asked God what he was doing, or why he was doing it, or whether the dead around him, eternally burdened with their own remorse, envied him the chance to choose. But instead he looked at the sun and merely saw that the hour was growing late, and that it was time to continue, to do as he was told. He turned away from the disappearing sun, hurried out of the cemetery, and continued on to St. Charles Avenue, remembering to remove his sign just before he reached the large and decrepit wooden mansion that was the home of Harry Hyams.

A SLAVE OPENED
the door. Jacob wasn’t sure who he was expecting—Harry Hyams himself, perhaps, presenting him with a dagger to insert into his chest?—but this narrow-eyed Negro took him by surprise. The man looked to be about fifty years old, and he was standing with one foot bent to the side. Jacob had wondered at first why a slave this man’s age wouldn’t be working on a plantation somewhere, but perhaps a cripple had been a discount as a house servant. The slave eyed Jacob’s uniform, letting his gaze roll up and down Jacob’s chest. Then he looked at Jacob with an expression of astonishing contempt, sweat beading on his forehead. The look on the Negro’s face unnerved Jacob. It was the face of a man who was done pretending to please. And Jacob, a novice at pretending, was just starting to accustom himself to absorbing contempt. He narrowed his own eyes, and grinned.

“Mrs. Hyams, please,” he said. He didn’t know whether Harry Hyams would be home at that hour, and even if he were, Jacob wasn’t ready to look him in the eye. Beyond the doorway, he could see an ornate foyer with carved, painted moldings and pale square patches on the walls between the sconces; he wondered if paintings had been sold.

The Negro looked at Jacob again, his gaze crossing Jacob’s chest, and for a moment Jacob imagined that the man could see the poison in his pocket. “Who’s callin’?” he growled.

For an instant Jacob hesitated, startled to discover that he didn’t have an answer. After playing the deaf and dumb war hero, his own real name eluded him, a forgotten line from a script. He paused and glanced down to evade the man’s scowl, slipping his left hand into his pocket and fidgeting with the chain of his watch. His skin crawled inside the uniform, the nerves of the dead man alert beneath it as his right hand withered at his side.

“Rappa—Rappa—Rappaport,” he stammered. His tongue clung to the roof of his mouth. “Mr. Jacob Rappaport.”

The Negro stared again, and for a moment Jacob thought he might be about to spit at his feet. Then he turned his head. “Miz’ Hyams!” he shouted. “They’s a soldja heah! Mista Rappa!” He grunted and then, as if dismissing Jacob himself, turned and went into the house, letting the door drift closed behind him. Jacob caught the swinging door with his foot and watched the slave progressing down the hall with an agonizing limp, until he could see an enormous blue dress moving into the foyer. As the dress approached, he saw a woman’s head affixed to the top of it, hair piled in a tower adorned with shoddy-looking false pearls. Presumably there was also a face somewhere, though the place where it would be was obscured by an enormous fan made of turquoise peacock feathers.

The peacock feathers moved toward Jacob as if the bird itself were strutting in his direction, waving its gaudy tail in a delicate mating dance. “Rappa? Who is Rappa?” a voice behind them asked. The feathers slowly lowered, and Jacob saw her face: the pale green eyes, the full-lipped mouth stretched into a society smile, the guarded greeting and the kindness lurking far beneath it. And then he almost wept, because in the face of Elizabeth Hyams, Jacob saw his own mother standing before him.

It had been several years since he and Elizabeth Hyams had seen each other, and Jacob looked quite different now than he had looked when he was fourteen. But he did resemble his mother. People had always told him so, especially in the year or two before he ran away, when he was still barely able to grow a beard. Elizabeth Hyams must have thought so too, because she didn’t even say hello to him. Instead, she looked at his eyes and said, “Dear God.” And fainted.