Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  Peke picks up the new key from Earl, exchanges a few sunny pleasantries, and is led personally by Earl to the lovely red-carpeted foyer that is the entrance to the safe-deposit box vault room. Here Earl leaves him with a deferential smile. The VIP treatment, small-town version. Relaxed. Informal.

  Peke walks straight to the box—Earl has looked up what number it is, but Peke thinks he might have remembered anyway by his sense of its position on the far wall. Damn it. So why did he bother to record it in his bottom desk drawer?

  Well, this is all precautionary, so far-fetched anyway. The thief probably won’t have the cleverness for this. Or might have more cleverness than this and stay away.

  But a crow is drawn to sparkle—some instinct in Peke suspects such a bird, such a flight.

  Peke opens the lock, pulls out the drawer.

  Some bearer bonds, old stock certificates, a copy of a superseded will. He’s forgotten about half this stuff. And nestled among the papers, clumped and curled, several pieces of jewelry too heavy and impractical and gaudy to wear.

  What should he leave in here, as a lure? Only a little of it? Then the thief might suspect that Peke—or somebody—was on to him, and might withdraw. Might not take the bait.

  Or does Peke risk leaving all of it, letting the thief feel overwhelmed by his good fortune, letting him try to stuff his pockets? Unfortunately, the more that is in the metal box—the more camouflage, the more distraction—the better the chance that what he’s thinking will work. It’s best, unfortunately, to leave it all.

  He knows at least this about the thief: the thief will take it all. Whatever is in there. A thief who cleans out a home down to its bare walls, down to its dust, is a thief who empties out a safe-deposit box.

  So Peke removes, for now, only the gaudy gold watch. Puts it in his pocket. Closes the drawer. Feels nothing in particular, he notices, about the contents. About the objects. He is onto something bigger now.

  Itzhak had been a jeweler’s apprentice when the war began. Here in town, he has a little local store. He’s a different nationality from Peke. A very different background, a very different person. But they are nevertheless bound. As far as Peke knows, since Myra Goldtharp’s passing, they are the only two survivors in town. The survivors’ club. Exclusive. Lifetime membership. The dues are high.

  Itzhak has had the little store for fifty years. It says so in the window. He has not become an industrialist or a philanthropist. But he has had a success. He has had a life.

  Peke stands in the cool shop, amid the glass display cases lined with dramatically lit objects. Bowls and vases of porcelain and cut glass. Necklaces and bracelets and rings, mantel clocks and heirloom watches.

  As if somehow knowing, as if without even being informed by the shopgirl or by his daughter, Itzhak emerges from the back.

  Seeing each other inevitably summons the past for both of them. It’s all they can mean to each other. Peke lived in the fancy section. Itzhak has his store and lives very simply, Peke knows. They are different stories from the same war. A war with fewer and fewer stories.

  “I’m sorry to hear,” says Itzhak. His accent still prominent after all these years here, while Peke’s is almost gone.

  “Thank you.”

  If anyone knows, Itzhak knows. How it is everything, a thing like this. And how at the same time, it is nothing.

  “What brings you?” Itzhak says.

  “What else? I have a jewelry job for you.” He hears a slight return of his own accent, as if reengaged by Itzhak’s. The slight harshness, the slight clipped challenge in his words. He takes out the gold watch. “My watch.”

  “What is it?”

  “Can I show you in back?” Peke says. Clearly meaning privately.

  Itzhak nods, leads him.

  It is a dark, cramped little alley of a room. Broken clock faces; springs and gears and coils; dusty, chaotic, untended, particularly compared with the rest of the neat little shop. Time indeed seems stopped here. A fairy-tale workshop out of another era, and Peke can feel that it is Itzhak’s alone—that the pretty shopgirl and Itzhak’s daughter come only to the doorway, never step in, as if fearing they will be lost in time.

  Itzhak frowns, looking at the watch. “But it seems to be working.”

  Peke takes a small, clear, unopened package from his jacket pocket. “But not with this.”

  Itzhak squints at the no-nonsense black lettering on the small, clear packaging. Beneath the plastic is a small sensor, half the diameter of a dime, about as thin.

  Peke ordered it from the electronics catalog. He dialed the 800 number and spoke to the pleasant, midwestern woman operator.

  A section of the catalog features security devices. Tiny cameras. Tracking and homing devices. Antibugging equipment. Seeing-through-walls surveillance. He’s never gone in for any of these devices. He has insurance. It’s America. He has felt safe, and with the devices, he would not have felt as safe.

  “I want you to put that into the watch. Can you do that?”

  Itzhak looks and nods with barely a delay.

  “How long will the sensor run?”

  Itzhak’s low, inflectionless voice. The accent so thick it’s slurry. “If I attach it to the watchworks, it should run when the watch does. But who’s to say, exactly? It’s a little bit experimental, yes?”

  Itzhak opens the tiny package.

  While Peke, standing next to him, simultaneously opens the somewhat larger package that came with it. An antenna on a small black box. Like a palm-size transistor radio.

  As he watches Itzhak work, pushing and poking at different angles with the tiny jeweler’s tools, he can see the little green row of numbers on Itzhak’s inner forearm. Smudged, but still there. You can have them removed nowadays, easily, but what would be the point now for Itzhak? He may want to look at the numbers, be aware of them. Peke has no numbers. Escaped the numbers. Had an entirely different experience. His survival bears no physical evidence like Itzhak’s. His survival is invisible.

  Peke thinks how astonishing it is that Itzhak can come here and carry on the same craft in the same way—a world and a half century away. Still a jeweler. Picking up where he left off. Whereas Peke has had to remake himself entirely. Become a new person. Peke from Pecoskowitz. The world has inverted, turned inside out, ignited within the crucible of history and emerged transformed and unrecognizable, and yet Itzhak is still standing at his jeweler’s table. How is that possible?

  He watches Itzhak work, and it takes only a minute, but in an idle, waiting minute a lot of thinking can get done.

  Itzhak inevitably makes Peke consider his own assimilation. An assimilated American Jew. An identity, he thinks resentfully, as profoundly and unfairly reductive as any previous European one. Assimilating completely, into the dreams, the values, the spirit of the place, losing himself in it, abandoning himself to the new as much as Itzhak does not.

  Once Itzhak is done with the minute work, Peke switches on the black, palm-size device to test it.

  There is immediately a consistent little beep. The tiny setup screen flashes GPS—GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM for a quick moment, before a grid of coordinates appears. He and Itzhak look at each other.

  No, a thief is unlikely to equate an old man like Peke, an old Jew like Pecoskowitz, with the vanguard in electronic surveillance. But Peke is himself a product of the unpredictable, a subject of the incongruent, and he therefore knows its power.

  “What do I owe you?”

  Itzhak slaps away the question like an annoying insect buzzing around his head. You owe me nothing.

  And Itzhak never asks why. Because, Peke knows, he can perhaps imagine. And something they both know—something that informs both of their existences so deeply that they never need speak of it, and never would: anything now is inconsequential, is mere coda, to before.

  “I’ll just set the time . . . ,” says Itzhak, the final step, indicating he’s finished.

  “No,” instructs Peke sharply. “Leave th
e time wrong. And don’t wind it any more. I want it to run down.”

  Itzhak leaves the hands alone, regards the rare watch another moment, before passing it wordlessly back to Peke.

  Peke knows that the tiny device represents much more to him than a chance to find this thief. He has known that since the moment he saw it in the electronics catalog, when he felt it immediately sidling up to his soul.

  Global positioning. It’s symbolic of being found.

  It’s a powerful talisman, an electronic amulet, for one who was once so lost. One who was once a seven-year-old waif, a child wandering the earth . . .

  Peke feels a stirring in himself—a momentary uplift—a brief, blind optimism that the world actually progresses, that man’s knowledge, his science, his efforts, make life better, make it good . . .

  Now, you could be located anywhere on that earth’s surface . . . Now, no one is lost . . .

  A watch, thinks Peke. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Every moment relentlessly marked. And with this special watch, marked in time and space.

  He still recognizes how unlikely the scenario is. Absurd, far-fetched. This is something he’s doing merely for himself, to fashion some response, to be doing something in preparation, in defense. And the watch is appropriate for that, too, he realizes. Its slow ticking. Its limitless patience. Its countdown quality. All appropriate to a rendezvous. One that will probably never come.

  Tick, tock, tick, tock.

  So entertain me,” Nick says to the blandly handsome man and the pale-skinned, oval-faced woman who have just slid together into Nick’s booth in a dimly lit working-class bar in Yonkers, a town at the forgotten blue-collar edge of Westchester. “Let me see. Entertain me,” he says, without a smile, so they understand he has no interest in entertainment.

  It has come together smoothly up to now. Not surprisingly, Nick knows quite a few experts on keys and locks. One of them told him, simply from the vintage of the key, what year the issuing bank went into business. That made it easy. First County it is.

  He has hired Constantine to case the bank for a couple of days. Constantine—neat, silent, morose, accurate. A human tomb, with the knack of invisibility. To make sure no one is watching the safe-deposit boxes. To check on bank procedures and make sure they stay in place. Casing it to make sure no one else is casing it. Being careful. These rich old guys. They’re rich for a reason, after all. And the old man might very well at some point remember that his key is in his desk drawer, the safe-deposit box number taped on it.

  Per Nick’s specific instructions, Constantine has in turn hired the man and woman in the dark booth with Nick now. Nick wouldn’t go into the bank himself, of course. That would be foolish. It is, after all, a small town. And the old guy—if he’s still around—would certainly remember what Nick looks like. He might be ingrained by now in the old man’s angry memory.

  Per Nick’s instructions to Constantine, the man and woman rented a safe-deposit box together at First County a week ago. It’s a small-town bank—the new rented box and the old man’s box aren’t far from each other, as it happens. It’s such a small-town bank, according to Constantine, some longtime customers still go unaccompanied to their boxes. The signature cards with the box numbers are kept in a Rolodex outside the entrance to the vault room. The way it’s been for decades, no doubt.

  When the man and woman now opposite Nick rented their box, they signed the signature card together. As husband and wife. Making themselves immediately less suspicious, and giving themselves twice the time to get a good look at the signature card itself. Its card stock. Its layout. Its typefaces. To confirm each other’s perceptions of it. In order to help Constantine make a duplicate of the signature card over the next few days—an exact duplicate, with only one small, important detail different. A different box number printed on it. Stanley Peke’s box number.

  “Go ahead. Let’s see,” Nick says now in the booth in the bar—humorless, insistent—and the man obediently reaches into his pocket and takes out a deck of playing cards.

  Nick has even checked the house once more, just to be sure. The Mercedes sedan wasn’t in the garage. He half expected to see a Volvo station wagon or a minivan, young kids in the yard, a new life, turnover, but found the house still empty. In any case, no first-class mail in the mailbox. The Pekes seem to be long gone. Santa Barbara, didn’t the old man say?

  The man shuffles the playing cards expertly. Here in the dark, stifling bar, Nick feels the air from the cards as the man shoots them showily from one hand to the other.

  It will take place, in fact, before anyone even enters the vault room. When a half-attentive small-town bank employee pulls out their signature card, and while they are all engaged in the process of signing names and verifying signatures, they will—again, the advantage of two of them—cause the signature card to innocently drop and, retrieving it, will replace it with the duplicate signature card, identical to their own, except for Peke’s box number on it. Signatures verified, the employee will then ask for their safe-deposit key. They will hand Peke’s key to the employee. The employee will bring them Peke’s box.

  In the dark bar, the man holds up a card, buries it in the pack, takes it out of his shirt pocket a moment later. He shows another card, fans the deck to show it’s no longer there, pulls the card out from under the booth’s table.

  “So, what do you do?” asks Nick.

  “Small after-dinner shows. Adult parties. Business functions. Local Rotarian stuff.”

  “But not around here,” Nick confirms.

  “Never around here,” says the magician.

  It should be nothing. The simplest switch—either beneath the Rolodex table or even as they are signing. The most rudimentary sleight of hand. An ace for an ace. Compared with an attentive, eager after-dinner crowd looking for their secrets, a distracted small-town bank employee not expecting magic should be a simple audience.

  The man holds up the king of hearts. Drops it on the floor next to the booth. Bends down, picks it up, and turns it over. It is the king of diamonds.

  Nick nods with satisfaction. It’s very Nick. It’s in Nick’s style. Utterly simple. Low-tech. Try as he does, Nick can’t resist a smile.

  And hey, if they can’t pull it off, if they smell something wrong, they can always back off. They don’t have to go through with it. They do some piece of business at their legitimate box and exit the bank. But they’ve been hired specifically for their manipulative dexterity. And they know there’s significant reward for their performance. They’ll decide when they get in there.

  Nick stands across the street from First County, thinking it all through one last time. He wants to be sure he’s considered everything. He watches a well-dressed, lucky-looking yuppie couple head up the steps and through the bank’s big, twin white doors. The young couple, he notices, seem carefree, cheerful. For their exuberance, their attentiveness to each other, they could be crossing a threshold. Even from across the street, they appear untouched by hardship. He’s always felt resentful of people like that. They bring out his bitterness, stir his ire.

  He’s been as careful as he can. So when his yuppie-looking couple enters the bank, heading to their new safe-deposit box, there’s no reason to stand there anymore. Nick heads down the street.

  Time for them to deal their one-card hand.

  An hour later, as agreed, they meet Nick at a different bar in Yonkers. He searches their faces as they sit down. They look to him and smile—the blandly handsome man, the oval-faced woman—and a feeling of power and satisfaction flushes through Nick. It worked. Christ! It fucking worked. So the old man didn’t remember, apparently. Did not even think of it. Some were that rich: they forgot about their safe-deposit boxes. It took their children to remind them.

  In the parking lot behind the bar, the man and woman transfer the contents casually from their pockets into an empty manila envelope Nick has for the occasion. They know to hold nothing back, these yuppie magicians. It isn’t even a question in Nick�
��s mind. The old brass key that Nick mailed to Constantine, the man hands back to Nick separately. Nick gives the man a small white envelope of cash.

  Alone in the rental car, Nick spills the manila envelope contents onto the passenger seat. A few faded, folded bonds, perhaps redeemable, perhaps worthless now—he’ll have to see. A thick gold bracelet. A ruby necklace and ornate matching earrings.

  And look at this. Glittering in the sun streaming through the windshield. You don’t see them like this anymore. Hands and numbers composed of tiny diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, perimeter crusted with gold. Some small, defunct, and elite German maker. One of a kind. It needs to be set. Has been sitting there for years, undoubtedly. Time. Time inside a safe-deposit box, waiting to tick again.

  He sets it by his own cheap Timex. Winds the ruby stem carefully. With satisfaction sees the second hand begin to move. Time. Time released. Time to let the good times roll.

  In an intensely floral, aggressively cheerful room (immense green and yellow swells of curtains, bedspreads and blankets and armchair and hassock, a riot of matching bloom), in a steep-dormered inn near the Delaware Water Gap, Stanley Peke and his wife are awakened from an afternoon nap by a small but insistent cell phone–like beeping emanating from his side of the bed.

  “Turnitoff . . . ,” Rose mumbles irritably from beneath her pillow, assuming it’s the clock radio set by a previous guest, as she rolls over and adjusts the pillow on her head for a few more minutes of rest. It’s a reaction to what has happened, he knows, this need of hers for extra sleep. Her unconscious physiological defense. A way of pushing events away.

  Peke gets up, feels around for the little, black beeping device buried in the bottom of the suitcase of new clothes, takes it out and into the bathroom with him. He closes the bathroom door, turns on the light, squints at its tiny buttons, and unfolds the paper directions next to it. He sets the directions down on the edge of the sink. His hands are trembling—with excitement, with disbelief—an extension, a manifestation, of the trembling in his chest, in his being.