Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  Peke stares, says nothing.

  “You’re going to tell me,” says Nick, cheerily, undeterred. “I can’t have that happening again.” I will be continuing in my mode of existence, even if you won’t.

  Peke says nothing.

  “You will tell me,” the thief says confidently, with no sense of rush or urgency about it.

  “You’ll get nothing,” Peke says defiantly. “My wife will respect the wishes of a dead man.”

  But will Rose listen to him? “Do nothing he tells you. Deny him everything . . .” Will Rose obey? She knows only generally where he is. Up at the fishing cottage, he never revealed exactly where he was going—the knowledge could have been dangerous for her. But now, her sum of not knowing, of desperation, might cause her to give in to their demands. To grab at their dangled promises. Don’t, Rose. Stand mute. Stand firm. That’s what I want.

  You’ll get nothing, says the old man, but he doesn’t know Nick. He doesn’t know how smart—how uncommon—a common criminal can be. Nick is already getting something from Peke. Peke is already giving him more than he thinks.

  Nick is thinking about the old man’s accent. An accent so slight you have to listen closely to be sure you really hear it. A slight accent—banished, buffed away to a residue. Left over from years ago. And that’s the point.

  What kind of rich old man risks so much—discovery, injury, his elderly neighbors’ ridicule—to come after his things? What kind of rich old man doesn’t call the authorities, doesn’t leave it to the police? What kind of rich old man proceeds so intently? Goes to reclaim his possessions in the most primitive way, by simply taking them back just as they were taken? Not a conventional rich old man. A rich old man who’s prepared to risk everything. Who fears nothing. But equally fears having nothing. The old man has revealed more than he might want.

  Nick snickers to himself, shakes his head. A real Jew, Nick promised the skinheads. A Jew in a Mercedes, he told them, having in truth no idea at all about it, nothing but the money and the vague accent to go on. But now he thinks about that accent. And the old man’s age. And the old man’s distrust of the police. And the old man’s absurd sense of self-reliance, his primitive notion of justice and setting things right and self-righteously coming after his belongings. The old man’s arrogant belief in himself, his pride, his self-containment, even as he sits bound to the chair. Nick knows now that his little joke, his cynical, calculating lure to the skinheads, has ended up as truth. Nick the street punk doesn’t doubt for a moment the world’s death and chaos and stink. Nick the career criminal knows how deeply, how universally, such stink runs. He knows there are these people who escaped. This is a real Jew, he knows—the kind that came escaping Europe. Escaping death.

  “When did you arrive here? Before the war, or during?” Expecting to surprise him with his civility, with his worldliness and wisdom.

  Peke doesn’t answer.

  “Without a dime, I’ll bet.”

  Peke stares steadfastly away.

  Nick says it as it occurs to him. “Maybe without a mother or father.”

  Peke suddenly looks up at him, regards Nick as if he has seen him for the first time. “Yes. Without a mother or father.” There is, however, no defiance in it. The hardness of the old man seems to instantly melt. The old man’s eyes seem to float for a moment, warm and soft. It is as if by Nick’s striking so close to the truth, the old man has suddenly—in this single instance—decided to concede it. To reward Nick for his intuition.

  But it could be a ploy, thinks Nick. It could be a ploy on the old man’s part, a ploy for connection, a ploy for mercy. Jews are extremely clever. That is well known. Clever enough to have found Nick here, by some method Nick still doesn’t know. The man has cleverness enough to have fooled Nick once. Nick has to be clever enough not to be fooled again.

  Yet at this moment, at this mention of mothers and fathers, Nick experiences some kind of shift, too. Nick finds—sitting opposite him like this—that he feels a connection to the old man. The connection he felt the edges of on the ride in the Mercedes. A sudden magnetic draw. Peke’s arrival without mother or father; Nick’s string of foster homes and foster neglect. But Nick thinks that their connection may go deeper than that. Because while no one ever beat Nick or abused him, people did not understand him and so stayed cleared of him, left him alone. So he existed without them. He raised himself. Alone. Running wild in the streets. And by the arrogant sense of self-sufficiency that he sees, he senses that the old man lived some version of that, too—if not in ancient European ghettos, then running loose in the cobbled streets of New York or Boston or Philadelphia or Baltimore. No parents: that is a sizable thing to have in common. Monstrously sizable.

  Nick can sense that at the old man’s fancy dinner parties, at social events, gatherings, even to his children, even to his wife, the old man doesn’t say much, if anything, about that former life. As Nick doesn’t say much, if anything, about his own.

  But where the old man’s silence arises from horrible truths, Nick’s own silence is, he knows, centered on falsity. He doesn’t like being cast back like this, because he is cast back into the falsity of his own life.

  Bisexuality—a label whose inadequacy has always enraged him, ever since he came across it as a teen. A definition whose dryness is parched, useless. So at the moment of acceptance, he simultaneously rejected it.

  The neat and orderly term for it came his way long after the disorderly urges. And whatever it is that the term dryly seeks to describe, it is as natural to him as breathing, and he hides it only because of how the world feels, not how he does. As natural to him as breathing, and as comprehensible to him, too. A sexuality that arises out of his own wanton need. Every need, every wish in him unfulfilled, unfulfillable. He is craving. He is need. That is the theme of his life, and though he senses by now that no amount of stuff, no breathtaking quantity and quality of objects, no magical ultimate item, will fulfill it, he is not free to abandon the pursuit. Understanding of is not liberation from. He is a junkie.

  Bisexuality. Because he wants everything. Because he doesn’t know what he wants. Nick is stricken by the clarity and symmetry of the thought.

  And this old man who is willing to risk his life to have back the things he wants. To have his objects. Does this somehow ennoble, legitimize Nick’s pursuit, that this man seems to crave the same? By that fact alone, Nick does not know of—cannot imagine—anyone in this world so much like him as this adversary. His prisoner, it turns out, is his psychological double. Is the old man taped to the chair now providing Nick a chance to further understand himself?

  Nick wants everything, because he doesn’t know what he wants. And is that, in essence, how it is for this old man? This old survivor?

  An unaccustomed calm comes over Nick, brought on by the clarity of his thoughts, the simplicity of this human connection. Nick will cut Peke loose. Let him go. Cut through the layers of duct tape, help him unsteadily to his feet, watch the old man stand there—disoriented, stunned, confused to be free—before stepping tentatively forward. The old man’s gait picking up speed while the reality sinks in—Nick likes picturing that. Is it somehow watching himself, the joy of watching himself freed from himself? He feels it. It feels good. By cutting the duct tape, severing the whole matter. To start clean, with a new theft, maybe, find someone less willful, more docile, more appropriate to and deserving of Nick’s deviousness. Let the old man be like that special piece of prey that was impressive enough—remarkable enough—to be released back into the wild.

  But that would negate everything Nick stands for. Everything that has brought him this life. His organization. His care. And God knows it wouldn’t sit well with his crazy, shaven-headed partners. No, it is too late for changing the plan, releasing the prey. And this making Nick think about his own life, and consider alterations to the old man’s advantage—maybe it’s all just the Jew’s cleverness, too.

  And this man emerges from even a worse mess than Nick
does, climbs out of the destruction and decay, and look what he has made of his life. Look at his home, the sunny family pictures on his Westchester walls. How did that happen to him and this happen to Nick? It makes Nick resent him all the more. He despises looking into this strange mirror. Distorting. Unflattering.

  No, there will be no mercy today.

  Today or ever.

  With no final words, only a faint smile in the way of conclusion, Nick rises silently and heads back to his office.

  The street punk, soaked in reality, knows: it is too late for anything else.

  Rose lies on top of the bed, staring numbly at the ceiling in the dark. The nights, the weeks she spent without him when he traveled on business are many years behind them now. Since his retirement a decade ago, they have spent almost every night together. So while the daylight hours have been expectedly painful—a steady, drawn-out, moment-by-moment suffering—the darkness has brought on, almost unimaginably, an extra layer of anguish.

  What is he going through? What is he subjected to? Kidnapping—like Bogota. Like Lima. Where they have to travel with guards. Yet this is America. And should she listen to the thief? Simply wait for the call? Organize the house? Prepare for the truck? Or find some way to rescue him? But how? Where?

  Should she confide in the kids? They would be there in hours, from their scattered places across the continent, offering consolation, plans of action, contacts. But they would definitely, unquestionably, insist on bringing in the police—this sense of security, this wonderful enviable confidence in the system, in the omnipotence of the authorities, confidence and security that are a credit to the atmosphere her husband and she have raised them in, provided for them. But she knows it’s not what her husband would want—does no good, makes things worse, don’t bring in the children or police, we have resources, we’re still in charge here. He got their things back himself. Certainly the record of his preference—the record of his life—is to do without help. And such a clear purpose of his life has been not to burden his children with his past. For them to have lives contrastingly untroubled, unencumbered, free. Such a clear goal has been for their experiences, their rites of passage, to have no connection to his own. She could never perceive much in him, but she can clearly perceive that.

  So should she try to find the Mercers? She knows only that they’ve left for a vacation in Europe. But even if she could somehow track them down, they, like her children, would undoubtedly advise police intervention, and in their reassuring way, in their dulcet tones, they might even succeed in convincing her of it.

  Events, of course, have shoved aside and submerged for now all her nervous ruminations about their marriage—her doubts and reflections about their silences and disconnections and an irremediable separateness from each other. Yet at the same time, those subjects circle back, come to the fore relentlessly again, because this after all is separation and silence and disconnection, magnified and writ large. Now life is physically playing out, it turns out, the psychological truth of their marriage—and this highlighting of that truth serves only to make the hours in the dark even more painful.

  She can’t escape the logic: if he were not a survivor, if he did not have his past, he would not have gone to retrieve his possessions, and this would not be happening. If he did not have his past, he would not have felt the same need to have everything back, nor felt the capacity or fierceness to get it all, and this would not have occurred, and he would be here with her. He brought this on. He tackled this. He made her explicit and implicit assurances: that if there was trouble, he would back off. And he didn’t. And now look.

  But here, she doesn’t even have the right to her fury. She has to bury it in the moment, too, subsume it to the greater, more pressing needs of the catastrophe. Even in calamity, her life is about his. Even in crisis, when she is his only hope, he is still their life’s subject. She is ashamed of the resentment she feels, ashamed to detect it in herself, and yet crisis makes it clear.

  It’s not resentment of him, though. It’s resentment of how the world took him and held him and still takes him and holds him. Keeping him from her.

  She has resented his slipping away, but now that he truly could be slipping away, she desperately wants him back. As if it is a test. A proof. As if he has arranged it.

  For this calamitous moment, at least, she is a prisoner to his past as much as he. It is that powerful, that relentless, a past. And now she will play an unasked-for role in some twisted repeating of it. The world is proving as fragile as deep down she has always known it to be. A fragility that they have assiduously built a life to avoid, but that his past seems to have rendered unavoidable.

  Damn his past. Damn his baggage. Damn his history.

  The bedside alarm chirps suddenly into the dark. It startles her into alertness and fresh fear. She fumbles for it, shuts it off. Her heart pounds in its aftermath. She must have set it accidentally, fussing with the clock incessantly, checking the time while waiting, praying for a call. Her fussing, her turning the little clock in her hands. A modern, graceless item, plastic, functional. The alarm, chirping into the dark insistently like that, before she could locate and slide the button. A chirp, chirp, chirp of doom.

  She blinks into the dark.

  My God.

  How could she have not remembered? How could she not have thought?

  She throws herself across to her husband’s side of the big canopy bed. Reaches almost desperately into the first drawer of the night table. Rummages through with just her hands, not stopping even to turn on the light, so focused, so hopeful is she.

  But nothing. Kleenex, those little yellow notes, receipts, magazines, books . . .

  She is standing up now, more effective, spry and awake, organized, the mild bedside light is on, as she tries the second drawer . . .

  Clothing. She feels around it. Nothing.

  Her heart sinks. This is torture, she thinks vaguely. Her own tenuous connection to the evil clevernesses of torture—to raise hopes and dash them. If that is its technique, then this, too, is torture—unintended, self-inflicted.

  She tries the third drawer. Looks in, feels around frantically.

  Finds it almost immediately.

  The little device. The odd little radio-ish box.

  She grabs it. Places it sacredly in the middle of the bed. Stares at it.

  Touches the button.

  But there is no little chirp.

  She presses the button again. Nothing.

  She taps at it furiously now, harder and harder, soon punches it desperately. She shakes it. But it remains silent. That stupid insistent chirping that she heard and hated for so long, that accompanied them for almost two thousand miles. Where is it now? Where is it now that she wants to hear it? Please. Please chirp.

  Nothing. No response. The power light indicates that the problem is not with the unit she’s holding. It’s at the other end. The other end is not working. The other end is . . . dead.

  She had thought for a gloriously giddy moment that he would prove to be here beside her the whole time. Here at her bedside. Waiting in the little box.

  But he is lost. Lost like a little boy in the woods of Cracow. Lost to the earth’s surface again.

  And here is what she must wrestle with now:

  Does it not work because its transmitting battery has died at the other end?

  Or because it has been discovered?

  She crumples to the mattress. In pure dread. In pure weight. In utter collapse.

  In a minute, she lifts her head. A small act—functional, automatic, thoughtlessly willful. An action somehow separate from her.

  His worn and battered address book is there in the bedside drawer, next to where the device had been. She begins to leaf through it aimlessly. Names of the departed, of the hospitalized, of the far-flung, names of a lifetime ago, a lifetime gone. His ancient address book is a mocking exercise—like the nonfunctioning device, another form of torture. Their friends are old, infirm. She turns
the pages, coming across names that she expects and names that hold instant and surprising memories for her.

  She slams the book closed.

  It is midnight here. Three in the morning in the East. No matter. She is desperate. She will do anything. Disobey his deepest most basic wishes, risk contradicting what might be his instincts for survival (his proven instincts for survival), because that is what’s required. Because she must act.

  She dials.

  A man’s voice answers stumblingly. Three in the morning, distraught, confused, but alert somehow.

  “I’m so sorry about the hour. He’d kill me if he knew I was calling, but I don’t know where else to turn.”

  “Mom?”

  “He needs you, Daniel.” She pauses. She knows he understands. A tectonic shift occurs in an instant. “He finally needs you.”

  Peke opens his eyes and sees an older man standing over him. About Peke’s age. A similar short haircut. Even, Peke notices, the same squinting, attentive regard as his own. A doppelgänger. And now Peke recognizes him. The old dishwasher from Freedom Café. Standing unstooped, transformed, in this Montana farmhouse. And Peke knows why. Knows only too well. It’s because of the uniform the man is wearing. Lovingly faithful to the original, he can see. Worn proudly. And now, apparently, at last, with some kind of purpose. A Nazi uniform.

  The three skinheads are behind the man. They are proud—expectant—showing off Peke, their prize catch.

  He can tell instantly—by a certain opacity in the man’s eyes—that this is a lunatic. This is not someone who has loosely adopted some ideas for their outrageousness. Not someone who lashes out with shoddy, half-conceived, lazy bigotry, angry and outraged, given too much alcohol at a bar. This is a zealot. Who has pondered and studied, deeply and perversely. Who has carefully arranged and organized his thoughts and actions around a system of beliefs. Peke realizes immediately that—despite the gulf of time and place and circumstance in this man’s core being, or lack of one—this is a Nazi.