Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

  Taped to the chair, the Colonel watched it all. He is sure that his watching was the intent.

  The Colonel begins to whimper.

  “Whimpering is how we begin,” the voice says.

  From brutal woods to brutal woods. From persecution to persecution. Has he moved nowhere in more than sixty years? Has he not advanced?

  His life has come full circle. And a little bit more, hasn’t it?

  He remembers the games, he finds. Games that involve fingernails. Toenails. Fifth fingers. Earlobes. The tongue. The tips of ears. Artful scarifications with a knife on white skin. Hearing about them first, boys’ holy voices in the dark. And then seeing them played—with, against others—watching from the distance and safety of the darkness, mesmerized, transfixed.

  He remembers the games. Buried deep, stored, waiting—whether they only seized and irreparably deformed a childhood imagination, or whether they were observed and suppressed, or whether in some now-indecipherable mixture of the two, here they are, pure, unchanged, recalled, returned to him, summoned up complete like nursery rhymes. His own peculiar nursery rhymes, his own strange childhood games, like songs not sung in a lifetime, and one is amazed to hear oneself sing them first note to last without missing a word or a beat.

  He is outside himself. He is someone else. He has stepped whole, weirdly, unnaturally, into the slanted shadows, the opaque blackness of his past, and then beyond it somehow. There is a narrow, pale, small remnant of who he actually is, standing by inert, observing but barely there. Someone else will carry out these duties. Someone, it seems, who has stood by patiently, waiting to carry them out. Someone he doesn’t recognize but who has apparently been there all along.

  In a part of his brain—a human, reflective part—he knows it is some kind of dissociation, because he senses himself looking on from a distance. Maybe through the distance of time. Maybe through the distance of history. Someone else is taking over from Stanley Peke. And Stanley Peke hardly dares to interrupt.

  He can see already, before he even begins: droplets of blood binding in globules, like mercury patterns, on the cold floor of the barn.

  Fingernails. Earlobes.

  The authentic Nazi experience, with all the trimmings.

  He can provide it undiminished, unabbreviated, to the naked, shaking, sobbing man taped to the chair.

  The big white truck rolls up to the barn at dawn. Nick makes a quick three-point turn in the dirt—truck ballet—and backs the white beast toward the overhead doors.

  LaFarge jumps out, goes behind the truck to unlock and pull open the barn bays.

  LaFarge is slightly nervous. He remembers the last time. When the last load suddenly wasn’t there. But this time, he notices, the dogs are barking, scampering in the yard as usual when they arrive. Roaming and guarding as they’re supposed to be. A sign of normal. He herds them into their pen, the way Nick likes, getting them out from underfoot before they begin unloading.

  In a perfectly coordinated effort, as LaFarge is hiking up the first of the barn’s overhead doors, Chiv pulls open the rear gates of the white truck.

  Four men in black ski masks leap out.

  One of them lands on top of Chiv, and Chiv crumples. He is on the ground, in the dusty dirt, almost instantly, and as he struggles to get up, a swift kick to the stomach and then the groin puts him back on the ground.

  The dogs howl ferociously, attack the fencing of their pen uselessly.

  LaFarge looks around from the overhead door to the truck in time to see a black-ski-masked man coming at him full speed, and there’s hardly time to put up his arms to defend or swing before the man’s body plows into his. Though LaFarge manages somehow to remain upright for a moment, blows start landing in his solar plexus, swift and hard, and he is down, too, moaning into the dirt, his hands taped behind him in an instant. He doesn’t know yet it’s with packing tape.

  Hearing the dogs’ ferocious howling, looking in the driver’s side mirror, Nick sees LaFarge go down, a black-hooded figure over him. For a moment, it doesn’t seem actual—it’s something occurring only in the mirror. He doesn’t know what’s happening, or how, or why, but he nevertheless responds intuitively, slamming his palm at the truck’s big gearshift, gunning the truck forward.

  Too late. Another black-hooded figure is already up next to him, as if suspended outside the driver’s side window. Still partly mesmerized by the implausibility of events, a half-beat behind in shock, Nick watches the figure pull the cab door open, and—holding the steering wheel, unable to defend himself—Nick watches a boot get pressed against his rib cage, forcing him out of the driver’s position and across the truck’s bench seat. As Nick reaches to the glove compartment for his gun, the black hood, now fully inside the cab, elbows him hard in the diaphragm. Uhhh . . . Smart . . . , Nick thinks, as he fights for breath, and the man applies the brakes and brings the truck to a stop. Then he kicks Nick—still struggling for oxygen—hard against the passenger door, and somewhat awkwardly pulls handcuffs from his belt behind him, and cuffs Nick to the passenger door’s interior handle, before sliding the truck’s key out of the ignition. It is he, not Nick, who pops the glove compartment to take the gun he correctly assumed Nick was reaching for.

  Al must have been put down, too, Nick thinks vaguely, somewhere along the passenger flank of the truck.

  The dogs snap and snarl, howl with frustrated fury.

  It is all instantaneous. Over in moments. The advantage of surprise.

  And despite its admirable efficiency, Nick senses something loose about it all. It’s not a sleek, professional violence. It’s more passionate. Like a bottle uncorked. Barroom brawl–ish. Enthusiastic.

  And Nick—a tactician even amid this confusion, this disaster—has a single refrain looping in his head, pressing hard against his skull:

  How in fuck’s name is this happening to me?

  Days earlier, at his folder-strewn wooden desk in the plant’s still-modest back offices, Daniel hung up the phone, stunned.

  They’ve taken him, his mother said. They called to prove they had him. In her voice was a peak of franticness that she was fighting to quell. Attempting to suppress insuppressible thoughts and images. They want their things back, his mother said. That’s how they put it. They want their things back.

  But even as she was speaking, even as she was whimpering over the phone line, struggling not to break down, to remain at least coherent, even as Daniel was processing the fact that she had finally picked him to call, as had his father, each unbeknownst to the other—even as Daniel was trying to allay her fears and feeling his own fears forming, even as he was on the verge of tears himself, thinking of it—my father, after all he has suffered and survived—even with all of it, the plan was already forming in his head.

  They want their things back. So they’ll come in their truck, reasoned Daniel.

  He gets up from his desk, heads down to the loading dock.

  Grady. Where’s Grady?

  He passes, as he walks along the loading dock, dozens of the immigrants working there, a haphazard UN, their workforce a rough-hewn experiment in discord and harmony, a spicy human stew, rough and tumble, as such men generally are. A hiring practice begun by his father—in sympathy, in connection—and a tradition continued by Daniel. He has transformed the business, but hasn’t altered the philosophy.

  Daniel finds Grady, pulls him aside. They kidnapped the old man, Daniel tells him. They called my mother. And if they smell police, he’s dead. Crazy fuckers, they’re coming to get everything again.

  Quietly: I need you to go again. To take a truck again. But this time, it won’t be our truck.

  Grady looks at Daniel, waiting for more.

  And this time, there’s going to be a fight.

  Grady doesn’t flinch. Seems, if anything, a notch more interested.

  You don’t have to do it, says Daniel. Knowing that it’s the only way he can think of. The only way there is.

  You’ll hide in the back of
their truck, Daniel explains. Jump in the back when they’ve finished loading, when they’re in my parents’ house, making a last sweep. My mother will help you. She’ll know. It’s the only way we can find out where they’re keeping my father. It’s probably the same place you were, but might not be. This guy is careful, a planner, pretty sharp. He may have other places, other hideouts. And we can’t risk being wrong.

  Grady shrugs. It’s cold enough out, he says. We won’t melt like Mexicans crossing the border. We’ll stretch out on the furniture. Bring battery lanterns. Radios. Relax. Grady’s blue eyes twinkle. He gives a quick bravado smile.

  Who do you want? asks Daniel.

  My same crew, says Grady.

  You want more? Take more.

  Grady thinks a moment. Maybe Avi, he says.

  Daniel looks at Grady for a moment. The hothead Israeli? The most erratic personality on the loading floor? Compounding risk with risk?

  Then again, no one’s more ready for a fight.

  Sure, Daniel says. Take Avi.

  The crew decided, Daniel is already on to other things. Logistics. Timing. Not thinking about Avi or the others anymore, but about the plan.

  At the same time that LaFarge and Chiv have been put to the dirt and Nick has been cuffed to the truck’s passenger door, another figure in a black ski mask hikes open the overhead barn door that LaFarge had just finished unlocking. Traveling in moments from the darkness of the truck bed to the sudden daylight of the Montana morning, and now into the barn’s deep interior dark, the black-ski-masked, charging figure at first has difficulty seeing.

  But as his eyes adjust, there is little doubt about what he sees.

  The sight penetrates his experience, awakens his history, nauseates him.

  There is an old man bent in a chair, naked, and a Nazi in full uniform standing over him.

  Avi stares, thunderstruck.

  The loading-dock joke is that Europe couldn’t handle him, so he went to Israel. Then Israel couldn’t handle him, so he came to them.

  Daniel, son of a survivor, student of survivorship, sees it differently:

  There are three kinds of survivors. There’s the Stanley Peke kind. Who arrive with nothing and remake themselves from nothing, succeed on determination and intelligence and sheer will, make you believe anew in the power of the human spirit, in the triumph of man. Walking miracles.

  The second kind—no less remarkable, in a way—arrive with their old-world crafts and old-world beliefs and set up shop and set up house and continue their lives as if nothing has happened, as if there’s been no upheaval, no rupture at all. There was a jeweler in the town he grew up in—Itzhak something, his father knew him—who was that kind of survivor.

  But the third kind of survivor. The third kind never again find who they are. Never regain their footing. Spend their days and nights lost, adrift. Furious at what has been taken, angry at the universe that has robbed them, trying to get even. Lurching desperately from difficulty to difficulty, place to place. Trying to find an existence. The congenitally lost. The severed. Avi is one of those. So Daniel takes him in. As he has seen his father do. He will try to help whomever, though this third kind of survivor is a far different proposition than the other two. Orphaned Avi, who lost all four grandparents and numberless aunts and uncles and cousins in the camps, and then lost his destitute settlement parents—scraping a refugee existence from the desert land—to a Syrian raid in the months before the ’67 war. Daniel thinks about Avi’s parents—cast off from a continent penniless to meet extermination on another continent a generation later. Avi, who has stayed lost. Drifting in and out of a succession of menial jobs—grocery clerk, bike delivery boy, landscaping crew—lasting only weeks at a time, until some fistfight or other infraction ends it. Daniel can’t begin to know what that is like. He can at least try to help. Who would he be if he didn’t try?

  It is like a rip in the fabric of time. Like a living exhibit in a perverse museum. Or an incriminating snapshot stumbled onto in a raid. Or a painting, its dramatic, self-conscious interplay of light and dark, its admirable fidelity to the past, evident in its detail—the authenticity of the dagger, the naked torso’s glistening sheen. A moment of capture, a captured moment—the uniformed Nazi and the prisoner both looking up, united in their surprise, actors in the same drama, their performance intruded upon, their script interrupted.

  Time is stopped, suspended, but emotion is propelled headlong. Revulsion. Shock. All the immediate feeling the painter surely intended. The scene is magically static. But the emotion it produces tumbles and screams, bounces and sears.

  Avi feels his fury surge. He knows his own fury well, and though it has been his continual adversary, it has also been his constant companion.

  He has the knife. It is for self-defense, they’ve said, but he has it, and from the moment he has held it, it has felt comfortable, has felt right. And he is in his black ski mask, unrecognizable, worn to give them all the element of surprise and the aura of terror, worn to free them up for any action necessary, but the point is, no one knows who he is.

  And here is a Nazi. A Nazi torturing an old man.

  He sees the dagger sheathed in the Nazi’s uniform. Technically, it is knife for knife, but the dagger is nothing, he knows. Avi is faster, stronger, than the old Nazi.

  History has cursed him. Now it offers him sly redemption.

  History has abused and humiliated him. Now he can get even with it.

  You’ve been a fuckup all your life. Here’s your chance at last.

  All of it in a mere beat, a single pulse. Almost instant.

  We’re commandos, they’d said quietly into the blackness, sprawled on the moving blankets they’d pulled off the furniture, arranged in the back of the truck. Repeating it into the dark, a half joke, but only half, a mantra to summon their own bravery. Taking leaks in the dark into the empty bottles of soda they’d already drunk.

  At a certain point, Grady’s cell phone had gone out. They’d lost touch with Daniel. We’re out of cell range, Grady had told them. It means we’re getting close.

  Yes, a commando. With a black mask and knife.

  Crouched, sharklike, unthinking, a honed weapon in human trim . . .

  And now he draws his knife and presses forward to a swift, silent justice . . .

  To reach its blade across a generation. Across history. A small, quiet retribution across time.

  “Do it now!” the naked man screams—all his suffering of the past hours, the past night, rolled, apparently, into a single note of retaliation.

  As Avi draws back his knife, the Nazi officer starts to recite it softly.

  Maybe he means it to be too soft to hear.

  Avi will wonder about that, in rooming houses, on loading docks to come. He will reflect on it, sitting alone in bars, stretched out on benches in closed city parks at night, staring up at the stars.

  Because it will seem so unlikely to him, ruminating on it years from now, that he—who never listens, never hears, who his whole life has been accused of paying no attention—should hear it. Oh, it will eventually make at least some sense to him: to experience at that intense moment a hyperalertness, a heightened receptivity of the five senses, that a mammal—a man, in this case—discovers access to, on decisive, life-and-death occasions. He will learn eventually that it is an effect well documented by those in certain lines of work—mercenaries, rescue workers, emergency personnel, Special Forces soldiers in close combat. Human beings in extreme situations.

  But the question will remain. Did the old man in the uniform intend him to hear it? Or intend him not to? He will never know.

  But Avi does hear it.

  “Shema yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad.” Little more than a whisper.

  And Avi looks into the uniformed Nazi’s eyes—black, liquid, floating, warm, he will reflect. As he will remember the uniformed Nazi looking back into his own eyes, isolated and exposed in his black ski mask.

  He has never practic
ed his own religion. In truth knows little about it. He knows his own rage at what it has cost him, knows its ultimate cost to two generations of his family and therefore to his life. But the actual religion itself has played no role in his upbringing. His own life has been entirely secular, nonobservant. Taken up with arguments with neighbors and bosses, fights with landlords and lovers, with recklessness and insolence, with the difficulties of living.

  But though he knows nothing of his own religion, he does know that.

  It is the prayer of Jews at the moment of death. A declaration of faith at the moment of expiring.

  Tears well up. Tears he didn’t think he possessed after all that has happened to him, after the tangle and tumble and harshness of his life. Tears that run from those black exposed eyes down his cheeks, beneath the black ski mask.

  Thank God he knows that stupid fucking prayer.

  He feels his right hand shudder for a moment, involuntarily. The hand holding the knife. An uncontrollable physical shudder, from somewhere beyond him, a shudder sent from the past. A shudder of consolation and retribution, of righteousness and evil, rolled into one.

  He straightens. Breathes deep once. Pivots. Steps toward the naked man taped to the chair.

  The rest of his crew are still occupied outside. He is fully aware of the figures on the floor, as he is somehow aware that they are of no consequence.

  No one will see except the two of them: the Survivor wearing the Nazi uniform, and the naked Nazi whose uniform it is.

  You are the people of darkness. We are the people of the light. The ugly children of Satan, the chosen children of Adam . . .

  He holds the knife to the naked man’s throat.

  He looks at the Survivor.

  Who looks back at him, and turns away . . .

  To some other place, some other world.

  With a single, clean, fluid stroke, Avi slashes the naked man’s throat.