Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  This life on the run from the age of seven, because he was Jewish. Because he was something that he didn’t even comprehend. He knew the fact but had no understanding to accompany it.

  So Judaism was for him, more than anyone, an act of faith. When people called it a faith—well, yes, exactly, he was taking it entirely on faith.

  He has had the sense it actually makes his faith stronger. Because he has never failed it, and it has never failed him. His heritage is for him purely an act of faith. Purely a belief in something greater. Something worth surviving for, yet something that he does not understand. It has no edges, no definition. So it’s unconfined by definition. Bigger than that.

  He knows next to nothing about Judaism. Which, on one level, is simply one of those wartime absurdities. Part of the suspension of rationality and reason and civility that is always a corollary of war.

  For him his Judaism is nothing. Holds no meaning. And therefore is everything. Holds all meaning.

  In a lifetime filled with the ironies of opposites, this one made all others pale.

  At a social gathering once, after a lot of wine, when he mentioned to a young American rabbi this irony of no knowledge, no custom, and yet persecution, the rabbi—instead of nodding with the acceptance and understanding and blind respect that Peke was usually met with—told him the ancient legend of Rabbi Akiba. Herded out with captured slaves and criminals and enemies of the Caesars onto the blood-soaked wooden floor of the Colosseum, the frail, elderly rabbi had recited only the Shema, a Jewish prayer, over and over, and it could be heard above the bloodthirsty din of the mob, even as his skin was raked from his bones, even as the lions came roaring and charging. He told Peke that Judaism could be distilled to that single six-word assertion. Shema yisrael Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. “That’s all you need to know,” the American rabbi said matter-of-factly. “That’s faith in a nutshell. A simple declaration of the authority of the spirit. An acceptance of meaning—above idols, above objects, above kings and emperors, above facts, above actuality, above all.” And with a friendly smile, the rabbi turned to engage in the party again, a particularly undevout rabbi, it seemed to Peke, flirting openly with the most provocative women, with their thigh-slit black dresses and sumptuous busts—quite taken with the party’s secular pleasures. As if perhaps the few minutes with Peke had been an interruption to his fun.

  The rabbi’s nearly incidental Judaism. His natty houndstooth sport coat. But something about the moment, something about the rabbi’s genial informality, had stuck with Peke. And as a result, Peke knew the Shema.

  The muscled middle one’s inadvertent, absent “Nick said” points out to Peke that except for this apparent slip, he has not been touched or spoken to directly since being taped to the chair. It is obvious to him that, at least for now, there are instructions to that effect from the thief. The fact that he is temporarily off-limits, out of bounds, brings him no relief, though, because if that is the case, then it is likely a part of a broader arrangement, an implicit agreement struck, wherein at a certain point, the skinheads will get to finally exercise their side of the bargain. He has the sense that he is, for the moment, collateral. An object like any other that can be transported in the back of a truck.

  So it’s purposeless for him to be taped to the chair. There’s nothing to learn from him, no interrogation. It is only a small torture. It is just a waiting. Quite possibly, a waiting to die.

  While he can speak, while they must bear him, while he has the chance, this is the time to make inroads, he senses. Needle, wheedle, cajole, command, annoy. Become a thousand voices—a platoon, an army, a comedy, a tragedy. From the chair, unleash, use the only weapon he has. Mind and words. Both barrels. Fire at will.

  So the Dutch Christian recites the Lord’s prayer aloud. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. “Do you know what that is? You don’t, do you? You’re not Christians, are you? You’re not decent, God-fearing, churchgoing Americans who accept Jesus. Jesus, our Savior.”

  They are trying not to listen, he can see. They want to respond, but they can’t, and they have heard, no doubt, have grown up on the inanity that the Jews crucified Jesus, that the Jews despise Jesus, and a preemptive strike, allying himself with their beliefs, will confound them, he’s sure. They have mothers, grandfathers, crazy aunts, who espouse their Christian fundamentalist tenets. Who may have driven these three along some winding thorny path to this. “You don’t believe in Jesus? So you’re heathen, then?”

  The big, beefy one blinks, looks over to Nick’s office as if hoping for help. It confirms for Peke some sort of arrangement that the beefy one is barely managing to live by. It is the first that Peke has seen him at all rattled.

  Needle, wheedle, cajole, command, annoy.

  Out the narrow slat of living-room window, which is all Peke can see of the outdoors from his nailed-down chair—his privileged throne—he watches the light giving out across the scarred land. There is only a slow fading—no greater demarcation, no signal sunset, no great, colorful, dying end of the day. There is only the slow, indistinguishable turning of light to dark, day to night. Nothing to separate one from the other, to declare one day and one night, to label one light and one dark, except human judgment, an individual human decision. Light, dark, human judgment. The metaphors vibrate in Stanley Peke.

  “I was a Nazi,” Peke says. He looks around at the squalid room, darker now, layers of night’s texture, a multiplicity of shadow cast by two floor lamps with dim bare bulbs. “I was a friend of Hitler, you know.”

  “Shut up,” says the beefy one, with an irritation finally erupted, written on him.

  “We knew each other well,” Peke continues, thinking, in a whisper at the back of his mind, how that is partly true.

  “I grew up under the Nazi system,” he tells them, light, conversational, another tack, another tone. “I’m a child of Nazism. Which makes me more of a Nazi than any of you will ever be.” True in effect. It was his world. He says it with exaggerated pride, chest puffed out against the duct tape. Watches while the tenuous logic seeps into them as if chemically.

  They are afraid of listening. They are afraid not to. They are quiet. He is quiet along with them, for a moment, studying them.

  “I have killed smarter Nazis than you. Real Nazis,” he informs them flatly.

  They can’t help themselves. There is a flicker of interest from them.

  He’s never said it to anyone. Not Rose, not anyone. And he’s going to tell this vermin? Is that one of God’s cosmic jokes? That this scum in this godforsaken place will be his confessor? But he must engage them, to stand any kind of chance, he knows. Coddle. Confide. Infuriate. Humiliate. But engage—above all, engage.

  The office door finally opens, and Nick enters, looks at them, looks at him, smiles urchinly. “Turning your crazy Nazi heads around, is he?” As if he has read their stricken expressions. Though probably he has simply overheard, while in his office in the next room. He is the one to deal with, Peke knows. But cautiously. Because Nick has the intelligence that, unfortunately, could translate into more effective and ingenious torture than these brutes are capable of conceiving.

  Nick pulls a small table up next to Peke. Sets on top of it a small battery-powered clock, one with an analog face and a sweep second hand. They all look at it, not sure of its purpose, while Nick pulls from his back pocket a black wireless phone. Larger than a cell phone. Peke gathers—from his new familiarity with GPS and from his previous discovery that there are no cell towers or cell reception out here—that’s it’s a satellite phone. Nick looks at the clock as he dials. Obviously his purpose is to time the call. To not stay on long enough to trace.

  Once he dials, he holds the phone to Peke’s ear. “A quick, loving hello,” he instructs Peke curtly. “Then it’s my turn.”

  “Hello?” Rose’s voice. In that one word, Peke hears so muc
h. Confusion. Caution. Hope. Pleading. Paralysis. Femininity. Fragility. Beauty. The voice in his ear in the middle of the night for a lifetime. In overheated Village apartments. In high-rise hotels. In their Westchester bedroom for forty years. A voice woven into the fabric of his brain.

  “Do nothing he tells you . . . Deny him everything . . . We’ve had a good life . . .” Peke tells her, an urgent rush of instruction, pointed and summary.

  The satellite phone is pulled away. The thief is not angry, only annoyed, as he puts the phone to his own ear.

  “That’s just like him, isn’t it, Rose?” he says with a familiarity, a presumptive intimacy, that Peke has not expected, that has Peke pulling fiercely, uselessly, at the duct tape on his wrists. “The hero. The lone wolf. Well, you certainly know we’ve got him. You know it’s no impostor.” He smiles at his own wit. “Childish, isn’t he? Now, let’s let the adults talk, you and me.” Symbolically, he turns away from Peke, walks across the room—maybe also to keep Peke from hearing his wife’s answers, to let him imagine them, to not know. Because Peke can no longer hear.

  “You don’t know who this is,” Nick says, “but you know why I’m calling.”

  “I know who this is,” she corrects him. “The moving man.”

  “You haven’t called the police, have you? That would be a problem.”

  “The police weren’t interested. An old man lost in his Mercedes,” she says curtly, angrily. “But now they’d be interested, of course.” He likes that—her anger making her honest. Honest even in revealing her intent to inform the police.

  “Don’t bring them in. It’s not necessary,” Nick says.

  It will be a waste of their time, your time, everyone’s time and energy, thinks Nick. There’ll be no chance for heroism. Because your husband will be dead by then. He debates actually saying this to her, but it seems crude. “It will be easier without them,” he says, cooingly, wooingly, and he turns back to look at Peke briefly—to frustrate him at being out of earshot.

  “I don’t want money,” says Nick, looking at the clock, needing to stay on subject.

  “What then?” asks Rose.

  “I want my stuff back.” Nick feels the amusement of it on his lips, at the back of his throat. “My abstract impressionists. My Louis the Fourteenth chairs. My nice things.” He looks at the clock, picks up the pace. “Your job is to keep the police and kindly neighbors out of it. It should be easy—just tell them if there’s any involvement from any of them, your husband will die.”

  He clicks off the satellite phone. There is a moment of stillness. Then, with an instantly summoned fury, called up like a skill on a resume, he smashes the phone against the little table. There is a splintering of the plastic. A plastic piece of the phone flies up off the table, pirouettes in the air. The little battery-powered clock jumps off the table as well. He continues smashing the phone against the little table until the table collapses, then smashes it against a doorjamb, until the phone’s pieces are sufficiently numerous. A sudden fury, Peke knows, partly orchestrated for Peke’s own benefit—showing Nick’s brutal instincts, cutting off future communication, all that—but the destruction fulfilling a necessary function that he calmly explains in a moment.

  “They emit a signal, you know,” says Nick. “Satellite phones.”

  Peke thinks for a black, sinking moment that the thief must know about the other signal. That this is a fully intended ironic introduction to the thief’s knowledge. But Nick says nothing more. And Peke gathers the secret might still be intact.

  They all stare at the phone’s pieces on the floor. Nick looks at Peke while he addresses his three witless Nazi rats. “We get my stuff back, then you can kill him if you want,” he says emotionlessly. Making clear that his reasonableness on the phone was only for Rose’s benefit. Rose’s trust. “Or maybe we kill him, then get the stuff back. I haven’t decided yet. Let me think about that.” Is it a mockery of the inane binary logic of the skinheads in the car? Kill first = no fun. Fun first, then kill. Or is it a tacit endorsement of it? Nick heads back into his office.

  Annihilation. Thoroughness. Peke was right about that. He read the personality correctly from two thousand miles away. The way the thief would come back for the contents of the safe-deposit box. Taking everything. Annihilation—it was even in the very nature of the scam.

  This is the beginning of the torture, Peke knows. A psychological torture tailored to him. Weighing whether the thief means it or not. To decide, to decipher, if it’s only a game, or a plan. The thief knows it is torture of the most effective kind. For Rose to make a deal, to behave in good faith, and then to be denied. While Peke must witness the truth, must see the other side from his nailed-down chair, must hear the whispers behind the curtain, and then be hung with it.

  For what is worse than death? Only one thing: death with foreknowledge.

  She paces, distraught. She doesn’t know what to do. Her husband, who in one sense has asked so little of her all these years, and in another has asked everything of her, has asked it all: her loyalty, her obedience, and now her willingness and preparation to continue without him.

  Do nothing he says. Deny him everything. We’ve had a good life.

  And should she obey her husband? Was it bluster and bluff for the kidnappers’ benefit, or did he truly want her to say no, to refuse to cooperate? Did he simply want to control the situation, to win, out of some immaturity, some irremediable male impulse? Or did his wish reflect a higher moral stance? One that was somehow beyond her ken? Was he putting his own wishes ahead of his responsibilities to her, to his family? Or did he see one’s greatest responsibility as being true to oneself?

  Damn his history. Damn his past. It skews and burdens every judgment, makes it impossibly layered, textured. Should she call the police, try to save him? Or leave them out of it, as the thief warned?

  Who is to be taken at his word here? The thief, or her husband, or neither? Hard to believe that she is treating them together, that they are two points of a strange, tight triangle, equal suitors to her “affections,” to her reason.

  She paces. She realizes there are no answers. You make a judgment and go on. Your own judgment is all you have.

  She realizes that, from this thousand-mile distance, she has never been closer to her husband. To the ontological dilemmas of his barely spoken past. When there is no map, no guide. She is inhabiting a similar dilemma now. She is in a vast, featureless land of no answers. He entered it, inhabited it, from the very first years of his war-tossed life. She is finally forced to inhabit it only toward the end of her easy, civilized, coddled own.

  She paces. She looks at the objects around her. The gilded, the polished, the cherished, the symbolic, the retrieved. All about to disappear again. The objects around her, mutely mocking her.

  To all of them she says: Good riddance. Take them all. Just give him back.

  Morning. Clean, sunny, deceptive morning. Merely a few jagged hours later. Rose sits in their other Mercedes, the sedan they bought to replace the one they sold in Boise. She is parked across the street from the police station. The quaint, old brick entrance, shaded by evergreens and deciduous trees, looks more like a stylish shop or a tony private school than a police station. She watches the doors. Secretaries, support staff, going in. A few cops—tanned, relaxed, ambling, friendly.

  “Can I help you?”

  Rose turns, and there is a cop—hang-jowled, sweetly hound-like, friendly—looking in at her through the passenger side. Smiling. A little flirty, even.

  “I see you watching the station,” he says, sufficient explanation for his inquiry. “Help you with anything?”

  She looks, shakes her head. “No. It’s nothing.”

  “You sure?”

  She smiles in resignation. My husband’s been kidnapped. They’ve taken him to Montana. They stole all our possessions. He stole them all back. If I speak to you, they’ll kill him.

  “I’m sure,” she says.

  His smile disappe
ars. Goes flat, businesslike, competent, a little annoyed. He knows she is not saying something. “You change your mind, you try us.”

  LaFarge passes by Peke.

  Peke looks at him. The friendly black one. Peke remembers. He knows LaFarge does, too.

  LaFarge glances at him and glances away.

  LaFarge, Chiv, Al—Nick has told them to stay away from Peke and the skinheads. He has told them this doesn’t concern them. As if it is assumed that they don’t have the stomach for this, whatever this will turn out to be.

  LaFarge, who said that maybe it wasn’t right to take the old man’s pictures. Who bantered with the old man. Now the old man himself is here, tied up.

  LaFarge wonders what Nick is doing. Couldn’t whoever came for the old man’s things the first time come back to get him? This is so risky, so unlike Nick. It could bring down the whole enterprise. Something has gotten under Nick’s skin, LaFarge can tell. Then again, Nick probably has it covered: the old man is the collateral. Nick will make it clear: you come for him, he dies. But Jesus, it’s all changed so fast. It ain’t what it was.

  LaFarge thinks for a moment about cutting the old man free. But he’d be caught. He’d be figured out. So does he cut the tape and leave? Walk out? Would Nick and the crew come after him?

  “You’re not so friendly now, I see,” comments Peke.

  LaFarge says nothing. Wants to say something, anything, but doesn’t know what—and anyway knows he’d better not. He learned his lesson from Nick. Nick taught him his lesson. Nick knows what’s right, what works.

  “Nice chatting with you,” says Peke, as LaFarge walks silently out the door into the yard.

  Nick, passing by, suddenly sits down on the shredded-up couch nearest Peke. He assumes an air of familiarity. “You weren’t following us. I would have seen you. How did you do it?” He asks it almost cheerily, a chipper interviewer, as if he never asked in the car. As if the question has never occurred to him before.