Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  They have spent time with some old friends, Manny and Sylvia Walsh, who preceded them here, have become closer to them lately, now that all of them seem to understand—unspoken—that they will spend the remainder of their lives with one another. They have already been to dinners and local theater with some of their new neighbors. They already command respect. They are already welcome, as they have been welcome everywhere, as worldly success makes one quickly welcome, as simple civility makes one welcome. It has taken almost no time. This is already their life. Educated, civilized retirees fit in instantly in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is for them.

  Though he can’t help thinking about Montana, of course. He debates whether to now inform the police, afraid that if he does, the story will get out somehow, the local press will somehow sniff out the appealing, irresistible tale of an old man retrieving his things from a master thief. He will be made into some representation of bravery or revenge, something abstract and unreal. The police, regardless, will not like that he acted alone, took matters into his own hands, no doubt illegally at several stages, and he will make them look bad and incompetent besides. At the least, he will have to testify, his wife will have to testify, it will be time-consuming, ugly. The police will be annoyed, and maybe more than that. He is willing to trust policemen as individuals, but not the police as an institution. He hasn’t had fond experiences with institutions of authority.

  But if he doesn’t tell the police, will the thief come find him? He came back for the safe-deposit box, after all. Came back as if it were an item he’d simply forgotten, or an item he’d simply dropped, traveled back across the country to scoop it up. He is possessive, this thief. So will he come find Peke?

  Peke eats his granola on the porch, the redwood decking beneath his slippered feet. From this high perch lording over the Pacific, commanding it, owning it, but thoroughly humbled by it, too. Once again, the vista sweeps away his darker thoughts, as if with a glittery, foamy wave.

  He smiles, remembering the moment when he pulled their old Mercedes convertible up to the fishing cabin and Rose came out the screen door, onto the porch.

  It felt like a date. Neither of them knowing exactly what to expect of the other.

  A prince arriving in a carriage.

  Bearing a gift. And no mere trinket. The gift of their past. The gift of their lives, retrieved.

  “Get in,” he said to Rose. Meaning, Just get in—leave the bags in the cabin, leave everything else behind.

  It had been a moment that sparkled not for its time or place but for its feeling, for its instant lubrication of the soul. And he noticed soon after, and notices again now, how it was a moment balanced between possessing his things and being free of them, having them again and not having them. A moment poised between both victory and freedom, awash in the two.

  Seeing him in the Mercedes, she knew, of course, that there’d been some sort of victory. She accepted that. It was enough to know. She really didn’t need any further details, and he didn’t feel any urge to supply them.

  “The Ford?” she asked.

  “Left it at the side of the road.”

  And they had driven west, into the setting sun, the top down, one with the Western highways, the wind noise around them mostly too loud to speak above, but what would they say anyway? What was the point of words amid the Western magnificence? They would not drive like this again. They had never been here before; they would not be here again. A sentiment one began to experience more regularly at this stage of life.

  Back in their own Mercedes. Driving west, like any other Americans. Like any other older American couple. Meeting their belongings at their new home in Santa Barbara, California.

  And now, on his redwood porch. Like any other American retiree.

  Looking over the blue Pacific.

  Thinking, for a foolishly serene, blissful moment—for a high, clean, cool moment, in the high, clean, cool air—that this can last.

  The alarm screams at three in the morning.

  Peke sits up as if shocked into sitting.

  He has the circuit rigged to everything. Threaded like a string through the house. The two alarm engineers—oddball electronics-whiz kids who seemed by their pallor never to have stepped out into their native Southern California sun—at first resisted such a thorough residential system, then got absorbed by the challenge and eventually were proud of their handiwork. Dozens of sensors. Redundancy circuits. The latest electronics that—once again—could hardly be expected of a seventy-two-year-old survivor.

  His heart and pulse thump so forcefully, it occurs to him sharply that a heart attack is probably a greater risk than the break-in itself.

  In a few seconds he orients to the dark and the situation and swings his legs off the bed assertively to head to the stairs to see.

  “No,” says Rose, trying to hold him from behind, her hands surprisingly forceful around his forearm, trying to restrain him from getting off the bed.

  “Yes,” he says, pulling his arm away, in a way she knows there is no choice.

  The alarm whines and moans insistently. Wails like a sackclothed widow, sings its perfectly repetitive song of human disaster. He heads to the top of the stairs, pulse still pounding.

  It’s ringing at the police station, too, he knows. They’ll be here in less than two minutes. They timed it—two friendly, suntanned officers did a practice run when he had them over to demonstrate and integrate the system. The Pekes live in the hills above town. The station house is down in the coastal flats. On the one hand, two minutes is pretty good. On the other hand, a lot can happen in two minutes.

  He looks through the windows onto the street. The house is so much glass. Easy for a thief to see into. But easy for an owner to see out of, too.

  From this angle, he does see something. Feet disappearing up the sidewalk. Gone. Like wildlife retreating. Human wildlife.

  The police arrive in two minutes precisely.

  This patrolman is deeply suntanned, too, despite the night shift. A movie cop. Peke sits in his robe, helps fill out the paperwork. Forms to be buried and forgotten, he’s sure.

  Whoever it is didn’t get very far, thinks Peke with satisfaction. This time. But someone smart could use this as reconnaissance. Whoever it is now knows what they are up against.

  Someone smart . . .

  Is it him? Is he back?

  “You fuckhead.” Nick curses Pork crisply, three blocks away, where they are panting for breath, diving into their rental car. Pork, who, listening to no one, motivated by nothing in particular, started to mess with a downstairs bathroom window.

  Nick should have figured. He should have figured on foolish impulses, on kindergarten capacities, a childish lack of control. They’d been difficult all the way. As difficult to listen to as Nick had known they would be. He’d known they would drive him crazy. But he didn’t know how crazy. There was almost a capital crime outside the old man’s new home. Nick killing Pork and his idiot Nazi friends. Christ Al-fucking-mighty. They have used up any well of affection he had for them. Their lack of impulse control is stirring his own.

  They are back in the fleabag motel. Sitting in the dark by the algae-crusted pool, whose pool lights don’t work—smoking, drinking, regrouping. He made them cover up and mask their swastikas. Made Dustin cake makeup over the one on his forehead. Too identifiable, too alarming, even in seedy, low-life Southern California. Now they merely look like thugs, and so they blend in. Nick smirks. That these guys can fit in. What a planet.

  “He was expecting me,” says Nick, finally, slowly exhaling.

  The skinheads look at him. No comprehension in their eyes. Foot soldiers. Cannon fodder.

  “That alarm system,” Nick says. “Jesus Christ.” By Pork’s foolish and incompetent fussing at the window, Nick has at least learned something useful—that the alarm system is elaborate, thorough. But he knows his temporary partners don’t understand.

  He stares into the scummed, green pool water, the surface stirri
ng, restless, troubled up in the night breeze. He had intended primarily to case the house. To check street routes. He had considered breaking in and taking a few choice items, straight theft, to frighten Peke, let the old man know that Nick knew where he was. A small theft, ominous and open-ended. Nick didn’t want to risk more just yet. The old man knew where the farmhouse was, after all, and obviously called in some kind of help, and that’s why Nick was thinking of only a little theft, theft as threat, and nothing more for now. He’d figured Pork and Dustin and Lee were up to that. And when and if they encountered the old man during it, Nick would have the skinheads to scare him. Maybe even rough him up. But after driving 1,200 miles with these idiots, Nick is impatient, annoyed, on edge. He feels his mind’s cogs and wheels oiled by anger. He knows it’s not his usual care and consideration. He’s usually wary of his quick temper, but events are moving faster now, and he’s going to move with them.

  “There’s only one item we can get out of there,” says Nick, his general annoyance a lubricant now, his irritation rendered useful, as he adjusts their plan on the fly, accelerates his timetable. “The most valuable item in there.” He starts to see it, to understand it himself, and thus to elaborate—first obliquely, but then the edges of his vision filling in. “There’s only one item in there that gets out beyond the alarm’s security perimeter. It penetrates the perimeter every day; it’s there for the taking anytime. And it’s the most valuable of all . . .” He is expansive now. Feeling the rounded, satisfying weight of the simplicity of the idea. He looks at them. “Him.”

  He sees it suddenly clearly now. The man’s full value. The way to get it all back. Not some mere token of victory. All.

  He leans forward. It is time for a lesson here at the low-rent, algae-infested poolside. “Hitler was wrong.” He watches them shift uncomfortably at his assertion. They don’t want to tangle with Nick on this. “He thought the Jews were worthless,” he tells them. “But a Jew is worth a lot.”

  Their smiles of comprehension are painfully slow to arrive, but when they do, they seem sweeter.

  It’s all getting simple again, thinks Nick. That’s good. Given his current company, simple is good.

  I’m going with Melinda Carlson to Los Angeles tomorrow,” says Rose. “We’re going to see the new exhibit at the Getty and then shop. You’ll be OK here alone?”

  “Of course,” says Peke. “You go.” The warm Jewish inflections that he hears frequently in other Jewish voices and is occasionally surprised to detect in his own. Irony and warmth in sweet, inseparable accompaniment.

  “It’s OK with you?” she asks again. “I’ll be back by dinner.”

  Paradoxically, this little trip of hers symbolizes their settlement here, he thinks. It symbolizes their new home. That this is now the place to go away from and come back to.

  “Of course. You go,” he says, warm insistence.

  “Use your keys. Lock up behind you,” she says.

  Of course. Of course he will.

  After she leaves the next morning, Peke finishes his breakfast, glancing through the Journal, watching the financial-news channel. He put his dishes in the sink, makes his way through the pile of mail, pays the bills. He waters the plants. They have a woman come in each day to clean, straighten up, and check on them. He writes her a note, takes the keys, locks up behind him, heads weightless outside into the California sunshine, stepping—he feels it no less each time—into a sunny dream.

  The gardeners are there in the yard. Every morning. In the East, they would putter, chatter, plant, and trim laboriously, but out here it’s a professional crew, sweeping through like a commando brigade with weapons blazing. Peke’s Spanish is too rudimentary, too rusty, to connect with them. He nods and smiles apologetically. They smile and nod back energetically but blankly, the bridge across cultures too rickety, too far.

  The Mercedes rolls out of the garage with its top down and is soon heading down the wide, clean boulevard past kindred Mercedes, models both classic and sleekly new. Here in Santa Barbara, his classic Mercedes belongs at last. Peke doesn’t quite know whether its driver does, but he has a better chance here than elsewhere, at least.

  He rolls into the post office to mail a birthday gift to a grandchild.

  He gets gasoline. Self-serve. Gets out to pump it, to give himself something to do. Stops at the pharmacy. A new toothbrush. Some reprints of pictures of his grandkids. Gets a prescription refilled.

  An old man’s errands, he knows. Part of the cycle of an old man’s day. Where the pleasure must be in the ability to do them at all.

  He picks up the dry cleaning. He happened to see the ticket on the refrigerator.

  He pulls into a sunny downtown lot. Puts the roof back up, because it feels strange to him to leave an open car, though he can see there are other convertibles left open in the lot around him.

  He sits with a cappuccino in a shady café with a book. Winston Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War. Reads a few pages. Puts it down. Watches the street life around him. Watches it at the remove from which he has always watched life.

  Though he feels a distance from Montana’s events, he feels a closeness to them, too. A pull toward them. It is odd, he knows, contradictory, given its remoteness in geography and circumstance, to still feel Montana so powerfully. The scare of the alarm two nights ago brought back the strong emotions of the theft in Westchester, but that was a different kind of invasion, after all. There is no real reason to think that the foiled break-in and Montana are at all related.

  He walks back to the car, unlocks and opens the door, gets in.

  As he settles into the driver’s seat, he pulls the door to close it but can’t. He looks over to the door to see what new mechanical problem the increasingly temperamental Mercedes is presenting, and he is suddenly face-to-face with the leering, puffy features of a shaved-headed youth, holding the door open.

  Heartless unseeing eyes, and between the eyes, at the bridge of the youth’s nose, inches from Peke’s own eyes, a green swastika . . .

  As if through some increased perception from the convergence of surprise and terror—or the convergence of past and present—Peke manages to take in the features, and the incendiary marking at their center, in a single visual swallow.

  Then beefy white hands are pushing on his chest, shoving him deeper into the car. At the same time, Peke feels himself pulled brutally backward, by other hands under his arms, over the handbrake and into the passenger seat, and then the beefy hand has ripped the key ring from Peke’s own hand and the shaven-headed youth has spryly tucked himself in behind the wheel of the Mercedes, and by the time, a moment later, Peke is fully aware of another figure—at least one more—in the backseat behind the driver, they are in motion through the bright California parking lot.

  He turns to reach for the passenger door handle.

  But a hand comes down onto the door lock and holds it down. A short, wide, white hand, knuckles covered with hair. And a voice comes almost simultaneously from behind Peke’s head, into his ear, enough above a whisper to immediately recognize it.

  Brusque. The message concise, businesslike: “3901 Pacific View. Your address was still on the invoice.”

  The voice goes through him like a toxin. He feels a kind of general collapse within him.

  It’s him. It’s the thief.

  But when Peke tries to turn to look back, the hairy hands grab his head from behind and hold him facing forward, primitive, wordless instruction not to try that again. It is strange, in a life now largely without physical contact, to be touched so roughly, in so short a time, by so many strangers. This, oddly, is what occurs to him.

  “Got us a Jew,” says the brusque voice, addressing the other occupants now, indicating its leadership, its authority. “A Jew in a Mercedes. What more could you want than that?”

  They drive all day and all night. They switch drivers. There is silence. Demon focus, demon purpose. Although Peke cannot look behind him, within a few minutes he realizes
—from the breathing and shifting of bodies—that there are actually three of them squeezed into the backseat. The air-conditioning is blasting, but the Mercedes is hot and stuffy—dense with bodies, and dense with tension. The tension of avoiding notice by other cars. The tension of having elevated the stakes. A live prisoner. Kidnapping. They all have to adjust to the feeling of kidnapping.

  Only two hours north of LA’s frenzy, the Western highways are already empty. Interstate 5, through California desert, changes to Nevada in only a single, colorful road sign and the slightly different shade and sound of macadam, but not at all in the vast topography. They avoid the little traffic there is, the rare vehicle alongside them; they watch alertly for state troopers. But shaved heads in a Mercedes do not necessarily arouse suspicions in Southern California, thinks Peke, nor does a packed car on the road to Las Vegas.

  He knows where they are going. He knew well before they turned north.

  They are headed back to Montana.

  In the Nevada desert, Swastika Between the Eyes—still at the wheel—can contain himself no longer.

  From the driver’s seat, with no warning, he backhands Peke in the stomach. Peke gasps. Goes to swing in defense. But his arm is grabbed and held from the back, and he is pinned against his seat.

  “Let’s kill him,” says the driver, with sudden childlike, unrestrained zeal.

  “What’s wrong with you?” a backseat voice counters. “Where’s the fun in that?” They drive for a moment in a chaotic, unbalanced silence. “First, we have some laughs,” proposes the same backseat voice. “Then we can kill him.” The binary logic parsed out carefully, as if it is a complex sequence of events.

  It would be mere bravado, but it’s said cold, without affect. Devoid of human connection. Like kids pulling legs off a frog. Said in that flat, unplaceable, vaguely American accent. Southern, Texan, Californian, could be anywhere. Soft, easy, languid, relaxed tones—the accent of combat heroes. But talking about killing a seventy-two-year-old man.