Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  The adjusters gone, Peke closes the door of their home for the final time in forty years, slips the key for the last time into the lock, and at that moment—only then—thinks of the other key. The key in the corner of his desk drawer. The key to their safe-deposit box.

  His heart clutches a little. He can picture it in the very corner of the right desk drawer, under the papers. He can picture it there, in its little box. Shiny, a brass invitation . . .

  How can he have forgotten? But the answer is obvious. Because he is seventy-two. Because what’s in the safe-deposit box hasn’t been thought about by either of them for years. Because the annual charge for the box is simply deducted from one of the monthly bank statements that he barely checks anyway.

  In a moment, though, he is calm again. Not alarmed. It’s easy enough for Peke to have the box’s lock changed. It’s late afternoon; the bank is closed now. He can take care of it first thing in the morning. It seems unlikely that the thief will even come across the key.

  The prudent thing will be to change the lock. The safe thing.

  Peke thinks for a moment about this.

  If he did find the key, would a creature like this thief actually return for the items in the safe-deposit box? It seems preposterous. Clearly, the thief’s scam calls for planning and care, and to come back to the scene of the crime would be outside the plan, unnecessarily risky. Nevertheless, the key is there, and Peke can’t remember for sure, but he has the nagging sense that he actually Scotch-taped the box number to the key at some point, years ago, so that he wouldn’t forget it. There are only a couple of main banks in town, so it isn’t out of the question that the thief could locate the safe-deposit box.

  Peke sits for the last time on the front steps of his former home. He forces himself to watch that day—moving day—again, carefully, in his mind’s eye. To listen again. To observe again the care, the thoroughness, the precision of the operation. All of which he appreciated as he watched them work. All of which now have a different meaning, now seen in a different light. The calculation. The mechanical coldness of the short, broad man’s smile.

  Yes. The thoroughness, the completeness, seem somehow, for this man, part of the point. Maybe for this man it is a necessary annihilation. Maybe it’s merely the perverse satisfaction of a job well done. He remembers men like that. He remembers that particular character trait, having observed it a long time ago.

  Thoroughness, completeness. Admirable qualities in your employees, your colleagues—except when those qualities stand for something else, hostile and unresolved. Something more than thoroughness and completeness. Some effort to prove something, to combat some inner messiness, to deny some inner sense of incompletion. Yes, Peke could see how a man like this might actually return. Come back to finish the job.

  To be sure, the odds are vastly against it, but just to be safe, change the lock. That is what any cautious, just-victimized, seventy-two-year-old man would do.

  He has brought the stack of catalogs outside with him. He was going to take them back to the inn, to Rose, not knowing what else to do with them, exactly. He had set them down on the flagstone step next to him, while he fiddled with locking the door. Now, sitting on the cool steps of the flagstone landing, he begins to thumb through the stack, until he reaches the electronics catalog once again. He opens it, thumbs through, then begins to squint closely . . .

  His seventy-two-year-old heart ticks a little faster.

  And in counterpoint to his quickened heartbeat, Peke feels a momentary calm. The day seems suddenly supernally quiet, the wind and birds caught in a momentary pause, as he squints at the electronics catalog—its communication and information gadgetry, its security devices, its pages of protective paranoia—in the fading afternoon light . . .

  The Pekes’ safe-deposit box is at a local bank called First County. It’s a small town. Peke knows the bank president from local charity functions. “Earl? Stan Peke.”

  “Yes, Stan, hello.” Then a shift in tone. The formal, appropriate condolence, and within it, an authentic one, too. “So sorry to hear what happened, Stan. Jesus. What a world.” So the news has made its way around, thinks Peke. Well, really, how could it not?

  “Well, thank you. I appreciate that.” His slow, authoritative tones. People always seemed to believe him. To accept his authority. To defer. That was good. A small usefulness of his past in the present. There was good reason to believe him. “Listen, the reason I’m calling. We’ve got a safe-deposit box over there at First County. And the key . . .”

  “You’ve lost your key,” Earl cuts in, hearing the first note of a familiar refrain. “You need a new one . . .” Earl’s spry, neighborly eagerness to be helpful.

  “The key was in my desk,” Peke explains, “and everything in the desk was stolen . . .”

  “Oh, OK, then. You need a new box and key. Just to be safe. You never know these days. I’ll waive all the usual ID requirements for you; I’ll see to that, you know, in light of what happened, and not having your documentation, I’m guessing . . .”

  Peke goes a little slower now. Says it pleasantly, but as though he doesn’t plan to say it again. “Yes, I’d like another key. That’d be nice of you, Earl.” Now very slowly. “But no, see, I want to keep the same safe-deposit box.”

  “But . . .”

  “I still want the stolen key to work.”

  “But . . . they could get into it,” Earl says bluntly, not understanding. He sounds disturbed, distraught, as if it could be his own loss. “They could go through your effects, Stan, and they could figure out where that key goes. It’s a long shot, but they could. I’m assuming you wrote down the number of the box somewhere—most people do—and isn’t it possible they could come across that?” The fantasy of the thief’s return, growing in the cautious banker, gaining in vividness, an increasing momentum of colorful alarm. “Don’t you see, Stan, if they know what box it is, and if one of them can learn to copy your signature and uses your desk contents to put together some ID . . .” He calms down a degree. “I guess I could alert the employees to anyone using your name. But that’s hardly foolproof or secure, Stan . . . I don’t know.” He pauses. “Christ, we’re a local bank. Can’t we just change the box?” Peke can tell that Earl is concerned Peke doesn’t quite understand the nature of the danger. That Peke’s not putting two and two together. Indicating Earl’s doubt about Peke’s mental capacity. Probably now guessing at his long-standing customer’s age. Early seventies? So he could be a little senile, a little irrational. Not unlike the thief, Peke realizes, with his false concern that the Pekes had a place to sleep that night. Only cleverly gathering the information.

  “I understand,” says Peke, assuring him, then repeating the odd request once more, just so it’s clear to the banker. “I want a new key, but I want to keep the old box. I promise you, Earl, I understand.”

  Peke knows already.

  It will be the watch.

  A man’s gold watch. From some Monaco estate sale, the money going to charity. Too gaudy to wear.

  Practically speaking, the police won’t—can’t—simply station a man at the bank. The thief’s return is too unlikely. Merely the paranoia, the vivid fantasy, of an old man recently violated, the police would say. And—assuming it is not paranoia—even if the thief does return, it could be weeks. Months. And an officer stationed there might prove useless anyway. Because someone this smart wouldn’t come himself. He’d find a way to send a well-dressed woman. Or an old man. Someone inconspicuous. Couldn’t Peke’s signature be easily forged? Or could the thief find some other way to circumvent the old-fashioned bank’s old-fashioned security? The more Peke thinks of Earl’s initial alarm, the more Peke doesn’t doubt the vulnerability. If he has the key and knows the box number, won’t he be able to work out the rest? But the thief’s return is hardly enough of a prospect to have the bank watched, or to make a special case of Peke’s safe-deposit box, or to change the bank’s safe-deposit box arrangements.

  But
the gold watch. This thief—whoever, wherever he is—probably can’t display most of the items. The furniture. The paintings. They’re fenced, undoubtedly, or kept privately, personally, perhaps in some kind of hidden, supersecure Shangri-la.

  Yet the watch could be worn. It’s gaudy enough. And this guy—whoever he is—he’s like a crow, isn’t he? Loves objects. Shiny things. It’s one proof of his success that he can safely display, probably. The one item, perhaps, that he can risk having out in public. A constant reminder on his wrist—a reminder to himself and to anyone close enough—of his own success.

  Peke needs to be sure, though, that he is not gravitating to it merely for its symbolic perfection. Time stopped, time collapsed, time upended, time repeating. Earlier time and later time, merging now, inseparable. Time circling on itself, lapping and overlapping, its hands dancing with one another on the watch face. No, this needs to be a practical choice. But it is, he decides. The symbolism is incidental.

  The watch is perfect.

  “This will be a long process,” says the young insurance man morosely to Peke over the phone. “A claim like this, police reports, the research—I wish it could be simpler, faster, but,” he says resolutely, “it won’t be.”

  Peke nods. He knew as much. That’s how insurance is set up. All possible process, all possible delay. If you’re old enough, they probably hope you won’t live long enough to see the settlement. At which point they can play new games with your estate.

  There is, on the other hand, a certain lightness to owning nothing, he is quickly discovering. To living without objects. Without any possessions to weigh you down, to take care of. So much of their lives had become custodial, menial, in a way—luxuriously menial. Taking care of financial matters, attending to the grounds, lining up the service people—the tree people, the landscape people, the pond people, the cleaning people, the plumber for the old pipes, the painters, the electrician. That is all gone. Lifted. Which was, of course, a large part of the reason for moving in the first place. The absence of objects serves only to accentuate, to verify, the decision to sell and move.

  Yes, there is a lightness. This thief, whoever he is, has returned Peke and Rose to a lighter, simpler time. Maybe he should thank him, Peke thinks for a moment. But only cynically. Because the lightness, the simplicity, is just a by-product. Of a rapacious violation. A lawless Mongol plunder.

  The objects, the possessions, had measured the progress of their life in some way. This seemed true, in at least a superficial sense, for their friends and neighbors, for much of their social class. Their possessions marked the progress of their life not in a pure volume of accumulation—which in itself was somewhat embarrassing, foolish-looking, potentially imprisoning (one could be a slave to the abundance of one’s own possessions). But the possessions measured progress in the way in which certain objects stood for certain stages in one’s life, in one’s evolving taste. Objects commemorated certain events—a painting for a birthday, a necklace for a celebration. Objects reminded one of enthusiasms—a favorite golf iron, a ratty sweater, a son’s old catcher’s mitt and mask, a stuffed animal that slept for years next to one’s daughter. They signified what had mattered to you, and what mattered still. For Peke, that had particularly been the case. And that means of measurement was gone.

  The symmetry occurs to Peke. The perfect, clean symmetry. That he who had everything now has nothing. And this thief—this thief who would otherwise have nothing, Peke presumes—now has everything. There is something big, pure, about it.

  And for Stanley Peke, there is a special reverberation to it. An extra harmonic. Arriving in New York Harbor on a trunk steamer at the end of the war with literally nothing. Not just the proverbial nothing in his pockets, as he has joked latterly at elegant dinner parties in chandeliered rooms, but less than that, because in fact he had no pockets. Holes in both pockets of his only pair of pants, pockets that, as a nine-year-old boy, he couldn’t foresee needing to hold anything in anyway—so onboard the trunk steamer he’d borrowed a knife to cut out the extra pocket fabric, and with the needle and thread and the assistance of a woman in the middle bunk of the strangely musty women’s cabin, he had sewn knee patches with it, which he needed far more. He can still feel those pocketless pants when he tries to. The cold New York air reaching in to his bony white thighs. New York winter wind off the Hudson, entering through the pocket holes, finding his white skin. He has gone back to those streets with Rose, in winter, as it happened, pointing out all the places while the heat of the big black Mercedes poured out of the vents onto him and his wife, the big efficient heat of their big efficient German car. The enemy’s car. (People seem puzzled about it sometimes, his having two Mercedes, but to him it’s simple: he enjoys occupying the enemy’s car—being at the wheel of, in control of, their prize creation. As if he has taken it. As if he is a thief.) The heat and the Berlioz symphony pouring into the passenger cabin, tumbling over the light tan, buttery leather and swirling around them, a personal, warm, supple atmosphere.

  The freezing wind whipping outside was in fact rendered completely silent, inconsequential, by the Mercedes’s double-thick window glass. He had pointed at his past through the windows with a mildly arthritic, liver-marked hand, pointed as if through a protective membrane, as if through a shield, as if through time . . .

  He started with nothing, and has now been returned to nothing. As if the thief is some perverse incarnation of the Fates, howling down at him cruelly, whispering to him through this incident. But this thief is not the Fates. This thief is a thief. Preying on the old.

  Stanislaw Shmuel Pecoskowitz. Another existence, which this clever thief has summoned back. Something that a thief has inadvertently returned to its owner. Should Peke thank him for that, too, as for the sudden sense of lightness?

  Of course, they were going to live more simply anyway. They had spoken to some nice people at Sotheby’s, some educated, diffident men and women who ran the relevant collections. They had mutually decided on a schedule for sales to begin, for tax reasons, about a year after setting up in Santa Barbara. They were going to live more simply—but on their own terms. Not on the terms of a thief. The proceeds would go to charities. Not to this . . . this clever, sneaky little animal.

  Yes, it is just things, primarily. Just objects. But for him, for a survivor, they mean something more. The objects have a purpose beyond themselves—beyond their quiddity, as philosophers call it: the merely literal properties of the things themselves. He is doubtful, suspicious, of this extra layer of meaning but at the same time can’t deny that he feels it. This connection of the objects to him, and him to them.

  Perhaps it’s simple. They furnish proof. It’s evidence. Proof of life. Proof of his life.

  And for him there is something even beyond that. Something that transcends his personal involvement. It has to do with wrongness in the abstract. Sheer wrongness and violation—and the opportunity to address it. An opportunity that, as a survivor, as a victim of history, he hasn’t had before.

  The opportunity to address a wrong. But he doesn’t experience it as a moral imperative. A moral imperative would involve choice, and this is somehow beyond choice. Somehow beyond his will. In fact, he feels powerless to act otherwise.

  The uniformed men. The empty house.

  It is not even worth thinking about, in a way. Although it is uniquely tied up, he knows, with being a survivor—with how he experiences his human responsibilities as a survivor. It’s impossible to describe or understand or pin down. No, it’s not a moral imperative for Peke, but it’s an imperative nonetheless. It is deeper, more basic, more primal, than moral.

  He needs his things back.

  Nick has a cup of coffee at Freedom Café, at the dirt crossroads of Rural Routes 102 and 33.

  In a surrounding, unvarying universe of mud and dust and crusty dirt, of rutted tarmac and thick woods and rusty pickup trucks and bitter wind and harsh sky, Freedom Café, it seems, is true north. Locus and epicenter.
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  A wooden counter. Cracked linoleum tables. Inexplicable crater-like holes in the ceiling. An ancient refrigerator and griddle top, recipient of a cursory weekly wipe. All of it in proud, defiant violation, Nick is sure, of every building, fire, safety, food, and beverage code of the state of Montana.

  Any time of day or evening, he’s noticed, there’s a smattering of the militia types in here. You can pick them out easily, because they’re always sporting some degree of paramilitary garb. Sometimes head-to-toe camouflage, sometimes just an armband or a military utility belt beneath their rancher’s jacket or dirty parka, sometimes just a DON’T TREAD ON ME collar pin. He doesn’t like their smug, proofless pride, their meaningless swagger. But he contributes to their crazy cause. Slips cash into a plain envelope, gives it to the counterman, who obviously passes it on to an appropriate party, because of the modest, wordless head nods he gets. He gives what must be—here amid the dirt and scrub—a notable amount of money.

  Nothing is ever said about it. Not much besides a head nod of acknowledgment ever passes between him and any of them. But Nick, with his mean-streets mentality, considers it protection. The dirt and scrub, the acres of dense brush and infinity of trees, are an alien landscape to a kid who grew up on cracked macadam, jumping in and out of abandoned buildings, sprinting gleefully through a paved-over universe. You never know what will happen out here. What will come. And he knows it’s a good investment. Although nothing has ever been said, he knows these nuts can’t wait to defend him. Are just itchy to show him their appreciation someday. To show him what they’re made of. Come Armageddon.

  These characters make him nervous. So do the local skinheads, who are louder and more boisterous and have at best a loose, looping connection to any philosophy or point of view. But he recognizes this is where he belongs. He bought his Dobermans from a skinhead who raises and trains them out of his trailer. This is the home of lawlessness. It’s where lawlessness is the unofficial law. This is what’s happened to the Wild West, he supposes. This is where it’s gone. So this is where he’s gone with it.