Dara Horn - All Other Nights

Chapter One

Inside a barrel in the bottom of a boat, with a canteen of water wedged between his legs and a packet of poison concealed in his pocket, Jacob Rappaport felt a knot tightening in his stomach -- not because he was about to do something dangerous, but because he was about to do something wrong. He was nineteen years old, and he was accustomed to believing that he wasn’t responsible for what he did, that there were all sorts of considerations and complications that didn’t apply to him. So he had told himself that one knot was the other knot, that there was no distinction between fearing others and fearing oneself. But as he waited through his second endless night with his chin pressed against his knees and his arms pressed against the barrel’s wooden sides, listening to the waves slap against the hold of the smuggler’s boat that was carrying him to New Orleans, he knew the difference. It had begun on Passover of the previous year, when he first could have said no.

That cold March night in 1861 hung before his eyes like a curtain, the entire evening a hushed held breath of waiting for life to begin. In his parents’ townhouse in Madison Square in New York, the long dining table was laden with wine and food, and lined with his father’s business associates and their wives and children -- and as always, Jacob was seated across from Emma Jonas. Emma was one year younger than Jacob, and utterly homely. At seventeen she was still a child, playing with dolls; it was clear that she suffered from some sort of mental deficiency, but the Rappaports and Jonases were high society, or desperately trying to be, and no one ever mentioned it. After the ritual fourth cup of wine, the conversation returned to the long, dull debate over whether or not a war was imminent, which Jacob pretended to follow so as to avoid Emma’s vacant, childish eyes. But he barely heard any of it until Emma’s father, who had been silent for most of the evening, suddenly spoke.

“What do you think, Marcus?” David Jonas asked Jacob’s father. “I must admit, I’ve become quite nervous. Shipping is a disaster when you have blockades to worry about.”

Jacob watched as his father smiled. Marcus Rappaport was leaning back in his cushioned seat, his full head of blond hair crowning the round boyish face that made him look much younger than he actually was. At that moment Jacob envied his father’s happiness, how his father was completely accountable for his own life. Twenty-five years earlier, when he was Jacob’s age, he had come from Bavaria as a human pack mule, and walked from farm to farm across New Jersey with a hundred pounds of fabric on his back to sell to the farmers’ wives. By the time his only son was born, he was the founder of Rappaport Mercantile Import-Export. For years Jacob worshiped him. Later he became ashamed of him: embarrassed by his father’s accent, and, worse, by how his father used him as a showpiece for clients, presenting Jacob with the same pride he displayed when sharing a collection of rare cigars. Jacob was increasingly disturbed by the possibility, which had seeped into his awareness like a very slight but pervasive and lingering smell, that he was nothing more than one of his father’s acquisitions, another hard-earned marvel that America, in its infinite bounty, had allowed his father to possess. In the time since he had started working at the firm, Jacob had detected a casual dismissiveness in his father’s tone, as though his father somehow sensed Jacob’s uncertainties, and disdained them. His father held the maddening conviction that self-doubt was the surest sign of a fool.

“I disagree,” Marcus Rappaport said, and turned his smile to David Jonas. “It’s all a matter of opportunity. Suppose there’s a blockade on shipping from here to the South along the coast. One simply has to rearrange some assets, and become the first to run alternate routes through the Caribbean. Some people might worry about having to adjust so many different accounts, but I’m lucky enough to have Jacob at my disposal. Jacob is brilliant with numbers.”

Jacob winced, a gesture he tried to conceal by adjusting his necktie. Across the table, Emma was holding one of the prayer books from the evening’s service, cradling it in her stubby, chapped fingers while she lovingly, delicately, and pointlessly folded and unfolded a single page again and again.

“I believe we all agree on Jacob’s talents,” David Jonas said. Then he turned back to Jacob’s father. “And that is why I have an opportunity for you, Marcus.”

Now Jacob looked at Emma’s father, curious. His face was long and thin, the opposite of his daughter’s, his dark eyes quick and alert behind round spectacles, his black hair combed across the protruding peak of his balding head. He was holding out his hand toward Jacob’s father, his fingers steady and confident above the wine glasses on the table. “Marcus, I know you’ve always been interested in my firm,” he said. “I’ve decided that I’d like to sell it to you. At half its value.”

Jacob watched as his father raised his eyebrows, his expression just short of a laugh. “You can’t do that in good conscience,” he said.

“In fact I can,” David Jonas replied, “because I would be gaining something else as well.” He smiled as the other guests around the table listened. “I propose to give you all of Jonas Mercantile Shipping, at half value, as a wedding gift when Miss Emma Jonas becomes Mrs. Jacob Rappaport.”

Jacob’s eyes bulged. Surely this was some sort of joke. The service that evening had required everyone to drink four cups of wine; was Emma’s father drunk? No, it didn’t seem so. David Jonas was leaning forward with both hands braced on the edge of the table, his long, thin face expectant.

Jacob’s father laughed. Jacob smiled at him, unspeakably relieved, and was about to laugh himself when he heard his father’s answer. “A wonderful, wonderful idea, David,” his father announced. “I accept.”

Now Jacob stopped breathing. He stared at his father, unable to keep his hands from shaking under the table. Then he looked at Emma, who hadn’t even raised her eyes to the company, too absorbed in folding and unfolding the page in her book. His stomach swayed. But now everyone was watching him. His father raised his half-empty glass and leaned toward him, smiling.

“So, Jacob, to the Union , then?” he asked, with a grin.

Everyone around the table was still watching him, waiting. Jacob swallowed and glanced at Emma once more; she remained preoccupied with the paper between her fingers. He looked at his father, at his mother, at the Jonases, at the table with its prayer books and silver and food, at this astonishing new world that his parents had labored so mightily to bring into being, at the vast promises that had been lavished upon him and the vast obligations required to fulfill them. He looked at Emma again, and understood what was expected of him, what had always been expected. How could he say no?

“To the Union,” he said.

His parents and Emma’s parents laughed and broke a plate together, an old engagement tradition, and everyone cheered. Jacob Rappaport had been sold.

During the seven weeks before his wedding, he often imagined that he was not one person, but two -- one Jacob Rappaport seated in the audience of a theater, quietly fulfilling expectations, while the other Jacob Rappaport stood onstage, about to upend them. He endured night after night of dinners, discussions, arguments, agreements, and then lists of figures that he was asked to disentangle, divining his own purchase price. The ordinary Jacob Rappaport observed the events unfolding before him as he held Emma Jonas’s hand, smiled at his father, worked diligently through the figures, stirred sugar into Emma’s tea. But on the stage in his mind, the other Jacob Rappaport cursed his father aloud, sent the business into ruin, tipped poison into Emma’s cup. He watched these imagined scenes unfold with a fascination that frightened him. On the night before his wedding, he escaped to the 18th Infantry Regiment of New York, unable to understand that he could have said no.

To Jacob’s astonishment, army life suited him. He was surprised by how simple it was to reinvent himself, by how relieved he was when everyone assumed he was just another farmer’s or cobbler’s or dockworker’s son whose reason for enlisting was nothing more than a deep love of country combined with a deep need of cash. That summer and autumn he suffered through several battles, as shocked and silenced by them as everyone else. But one night when spring returned, he was called to the officers’ headquarters on an evening when a rumor had spread that the general was visiting the camp. He was certain that he was going to receive a promotion. And when he entered the room on that cold evening and saw the major, the colonel, and the general seated at a table before him, each with a pipe in his mouth, he felt even more certain. He could hardly stifle a smile as he waited for the major to address him, while the general blew a cloud of smoke into the air. But it was the general who spoke.

“Sergeant Mendoza has reported to us that you have relations in New Orleans ,” he said, resting his pipe in a wooden holder on the table. “Specifically, a Mr. Harris Hyams. Is that correct, Rappaport?”

Jacob paused to breathe, tasting the smoke of the officer’s pipe. The mention of Sergeant Mendoza made him slightly uncomfortable. Abraham Mendoza was twenty-one, also from New York City, also a Hebrew, but a sixth-generation American and embarrassingly proud of it. Jacob found him insufferable and assumed the feeling was mutual. Yet one night in the camp, when Jacob was exhausted and lonely and very slightly drunk, he had confided in Mendoza, speaking for the first time about everything he had left behind. Mendoza had been curious, and Jacob had indulged him, grateful for the relief of telling the truth. But then Mendoza had gotten nosy, asking him all about the business, about his father’s friends, about his aunts and uncles and cousins -- and Jacob, irritated, had finally told Mendoza to leave him alone.

“Yes, sir. Mr. Hyams is my uncle, sir,” Jacob said.

“By blood or marriage?” the general asked.

“Marriage, sir. His wife is my mother’s sister,” Jacob replied, both disappointed and baffled. It seemed unlikely that an announcement of a promotion would commence with a review of his family tree -- and with Harry Hyams, of all people. Jacob hadn’t seen Harry since he was fourteen years old, but he remembered him as a kind man, one who for years had brought him toys and books and candies from places he had traveled, entertaining him with exotic stories about ghosts who lived in the Louisiana swamps. Now Jacob looked at the officers before him and tried to suppress a shudder. He thought of his parents, and delusion took over: he imagined that his mother had somehow written to her sister to have him sent back home.

The major noticed his trembling, and smiled. “At ease,” he said, taking up his pipe.

Jacob put a foot to one side and folded his hands behind his back, but he felt even more uneasy than he had felt before. He grimaced slightly as the general continued.

The officer noticed. “No one is holding you accountable for your relatives south of the Mason-Dixon line, Rappaport,” the general said, in an almost fatherly tone. The officer’s voice was soothing, comforting, and a familiar relief seeped into Jacob’s shoulders. It was a feeling that he had once associated with closing the door to his father’s office after a difficult client departed -- with being, at last, among family. He breathed as the officer spoke again. “We simply wondered what your opinion might be of this Harris Hyams.”

It occurred to Jacob then that perhaps this was a promotion after all, simply preceded by a test that he needed to pass. The illogic of this idea -- that a visiting officer would ask him these questions in order to promote him, or that such an examination would require a special visit to the officers’ headquarters at such an odd time of day, or that these questions were in any way pertinent to his future in the regiment -- did not occur to him. He didn’t even think of Harry Hyams; the man himself was irrelevant. Instead he thought of the countless patriotic speeches he had heard in the nine months since he had enlisted, and smartly answered, “Harris Hyams is a slaveowner and a Rebel, sir, and therefore deserving of every disdain.”

The three officers smiled. At nineteen, Jacob could not yet tell the difference on strangers’ faces between admiration and condescension, and he did not yet know that he ought always to expect the latter. He suppressed a smile of his own, certain that he had triumphed.

Another puff of smoke. “What does he do, this Hyams of yours?”

Jacob winced at the “of yours.” Then he felt a memory, the kind that is sensed physically in the body rather than envisioned in the mind. At that moment his body was a small boy’s, and Harry’s strong hands were reaching down to lift him up. He felt the grip of those hands in his armpits, and the breeze at the nape of his neck as those hands hoisted him high in the air. He pushed the memory aside. “I haven’t seen him in years, sir,” he answered, still hoping to pass the test. “My father’s firm worked with him on occasion. He was a sugar dealer out of New Orleans.”

The general chewed on his pipe as the three of them eyed Jacob from what now seemed like a judges’ bench. When he spoke again, his voice was slow and deliberate, enunciating each word. “It seems that his professional aspirations have changed since you and he were last in contact,” the general said, with a slight smirk. Jacob was disturbed to notice that the two other officers smirked along with him. With deliberate, slow movements, the general placed the pipe back in the holder, letting the smoke weave itself into a smooth veil before Jacob’s eyes. Then he looked back at Jacob and said, “Harris Hyams is a Confederate spy.”

He might as well have said that Harris Hyams was the king of Scotland. It was preposterous, Jacob thought. “A spy, sir?” Was this another test?

“A very highly placed one, in fact,” the major said, and tapped a finger on the table. “With ties to Judah Benjamin.”

“What -- what ties, sir?” Jacob asked. The name itself had nauseated him: Judah P. Benjamin, the first Hebrew to serve in the United States Senate, and now the first Jewish Cabinet member in history -- but one who had chosen to devote his talents to, of all supposed countries on earth, the Confederacy, where he served passionately as the Secretary of State and was the closest confidant of Jefferson Davis himself. Every Hebrew in the Union blanched at his name. As for Jacob, he nearly vomited.

“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.

"Slam-bang ... superb ... masterful ... gripping ... marvelous" -The Washington Post

"Rare and memorable" -The Wall Street Journal * "Stellar ... propulsive, suspenseful" -New York Post

"Enthralling ... sublime" -Publisher's Weekly * "Vibrant and compelling" -Los Angeles Times

"A novel rich in human emotion and ambiguity. A triumph" -Booklist * "Stunning" -Library Journal