Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

When the overhead door had opened and the light had flooded in and Stanislaw Shmuel Pecoskowitz had turned to see the charging, black-hooded figure, he had known it was the devil’s messenger. An angry God’s emissary. His escort to hell, here at last. He’d been expecting this, in some form or another, all his life, and he stood fascinated, momentarily transfixed.

  He had discovered he could not do it. Could not, would not, go through with the Nazi games. He had every intention. He had started. Taken off an earlobe, held its softness in his fingers. He’d begun with that, knowing that it hardly hurt to lose an earlobe, caused relatively little pain, but it would have the requisite shock value, the desired effect, to hold it in front of the victim, as a starting point. I guess you hear me now. I guess I have your ear now. The shock of flesh: a little test for the victim, and the perpetrator, too.

  And there, something had stopped him.

  He doesn’t know what, exactly. He will never know. The Colonel’s terrified screams as he approached, which were after all only screams of anticipation? Maybe a sudden sense of futility, of uselessness, in holding that small piece of flesh? Or simply some sudden realness of events—some wave, some assault of actuality, of the here and now? The vivid realness of the past days and hours, after being so long without it.

  Or simply his life, he will think later. Its comforts, its pleasures, its vistas, its minutenesses, its dailyness, its ironies, its tenor, its confusions, seeping into him steadily, inevitably, over the past sixty years. Its continual washing up against previous events like cool, clean water flowing over a hard rock. Smoothing the edges into a new shape, barely recognizable.

  Or Rose. Maybe it was simply his Rose.

  Whatever the reasons, he can’t do it. The fingernails, the toenails, the scarifications, any of it. Each time he approaches the naked Colonel, knife drawn, intent, he finds he cannot. Can’t, or won’t. (He knows he will never be able to sort out the difference, the relationship between the two.) Although the Colonel, permanently shivering with cold and fright, seems sure Peke will pull away each time holding another piece of him, Peke discovers that he can’t—but notices that he nevertheless retains his threat.

  Anticipation. He knows its power. Thinking in some sense all his life that they would come for him at any moment. Living a lifetime with hot breath at the back of his neck.

  Anticipation. The fear of what’s coming, which can be as terrifying, as effective, as what does eventually come.

  Which is when it occurs to him. Something much simpler and more apt. Something that lets him move away from the Colonel, move back, makes any of his actions seem purposeful, pointed. Something that gives him the time, the reason to continue to wear the uniform. To experience, to understand the urge. And maybe to feel the lessening of its effects, of its aura, by familiarity with it, by the steady loss of its allure.

  Something more satisfying. Perhaps by being more insidious.

  “Dawn,” he says to the Colonel simply—a single word, leaning forward, serving it up on a pleasant little smile. “Dawn.”

  No light penetrates the barn. And as dawn approaches, he can even throw a tarpaulin over the Colonel’s head. A sensory deprivation, so the Colonel will not know when dawn arrives. Can only . . . anticipate.

  Precisely what the Colonel and the skinheads inflicted on Peke only hours before, as they had been marking time until Nick’s return, waiting for the appointed moment, the permission to unleash. The marking of time, the excruciating ticking of the clock, now turned neatly back on the Colonel.

  “Dawn,” he repeats to the Colonel as he walks by him.

  The implication clear. An appointment with mortality. A long military tradition of such appointments, thinks Peke in his uniform. And no one knows military tradition like the Colonel.

  Dawn. Meaning night for you, Colonel. Eternal night.

  Dawn. A beginning that means the end. An irony of the spheres. The misty meeting point of day and night. You are the people of the darkness, and we are the people of the light. Oh yes? Then we’ll meet in the middle, rendezvous at dawn, when it is something else—not day, not night, not darkness, not light, but both and neither, inextricably . . .

  He secures the ties on the neo-Nazis. Climbs up and lies down in the catwalk loft. And mutters the word as if under his breath, as if with pleasurable anticipation, within earshot of the Colonel:

  “Dawn.”

  When we fulfill tradition.

  Having no clear sense, of course, what dawn will actually bring.

  And wishing—vaguely, uselessly—that dawn will bring some kind of dawn for him.

  And through that strange, fractured night in the barn, up through roiling floodwaters of memory released by the night’s events and by the barn itself, it surfaced. It loomed up, rendered visible at last in the contrast provided by this reliving, the contrast between this time and that time, this barn and those barns, between now and then. A tiny darkness that had plagued him, inexorable but unnameable. The little black secret that had torn at him for more than sixty years, gnawed at him across a lifetime:

  It was fun.

  For a seven-year-old boy, pure exhilaration. No rules, no laws, no conventions, no boundaries, the rule only of stark feeling and brute impulse. A rawness, an impulsiveness of existence. Every morsel a feast. Every sip a coursing pleasure. Every moment pure excitement, an adrenaline thrill, a boy’s wild dream. Existence itself as a never-ending game. Fun. God, what fun! Induplicable. But how could you tell the stylish guests in a chandeliered room it was fun? How could you tell guests in a chandeliered room—or your sweet, smiling child in your lap, or your wife curled snug against you in bed—that it had been fun? That the violence, the passion, the surprise, the energy, had galloped through you every moment. How could you describe the rush of feeling—the exhilarating confusion, the wild pound of blood—when that old guard strolled beneath the underpass and you and Abel dropped the stone? Watching the old guard crumple instantly, silently, into a puddle of coat and backpack and boots and gun. A perfect hit. A stunned exhilaration coursing through your seven-year-old body. A shock of elation that a seven-year-old body isn’t built for. The suddenness of power, the momentary reversal of all your weakness and fear. Delivering a mortal blow from above. Godlike.

  How could he explain that? Killing when there was no threat, killing for no reason. How that had been some of the best fun of all?

  Abel had been shot the next day. Unceremoniously. No warning. An impulsive round fired by a frustrated sergeant, fed up with these ragamuffins, these trash-bin scavengers. A single bullet, while Abel’s wild young companion looked on.

  There the fun had ended.

  And the two events—the stone dropped from the bridge, his friend’s execution—had linked into perfect justice in the mind of a seven-year-old. Perfect justice, retribution swift and precise. The truest evidence of Nazi power: to render justice in even the darkest forgotten corner, even to little boys. Oh, they were powerful. Oh, they were righteous. Oh, he longed for that power.

  The simple psychology of the seven-year-old: I want that. I want what they have. But attached to what a seven-year-old should never have to attach it to. Should never have to know in a lifetime, much less live by hour to hour. Life. Death. Oh, to control life and death like that, in warm uniforms and shiny boots.

  And then to drop the stone off the bridge—challenging, undermining, the very power you crave. In that victorious instant, to experience triumph yet suffer shame, and then a swift, godly seeming retribution—all packed together in a single drop of the stone. A stone dropped off a bridge. A universe falling into a void.

  As he lies there in the dark barn, pondering those stark boyhood joys and their stark ending, the games come floating back to him. Not the Nazi games. Boys’ games. A world of games that ended only with the game of the stone. Games of aggression and dominion and camaraderie and trust and testing that boys play. With one twist. Playing them for real. Go out in the woods and play. Go play, keep playing, don’t
come back. His mother’s final instruction. Her last words, with meaningful looks, to her dutiful son. Go out in the woods and play and don’t come back.

  But he disobeyed. Disobeyed his mother’s explicit instructions and went back. In a few days wound his way back, with a boy’s growing competence in the woods.

  Entered stealthily from the backyard bramble. Moved cautiously around to the front of the stone farmhouse. Stepped up the familiar rough-hewn stone front steps to the stone-and-timber landing. Stepped over the shards of glass from the broken windows. Stepped in through the wide-open front door, its wooden panels smashed. Looked numbly at the casually burned interiors. Regarded the patterns of black char.

  There was nothing there. The young boy understood. Everything of value had been taken. The paintings. The silver. The objects and possessions of his parents’ pride. He knew what those were. And saw they were gone. He experienced not disbelief at what had happened, so much as a wholesale evaporation of the idea of believing. He had entered a realm of dream, and he had the sense—even then, as a seven-year-old boy—that to some degree, he would never leave it.

  He walks, of course, down the dark hallway to his bedroom. He steps over the shattered lamp—the lamp in whose flickering light his mother once removed a deep splinter, freeing him suddenly from pain. He glides past a broken hallway table—the little round chestnut table where the family left each other notes and jokes and riddles. He runs his finger along the hallway wall as he always has, but this action from before does not restore anything from before, nor does it help to tether him to the ground. He is floating. He is disconnected from himself. Taking exactly the same steps that a little boy who once lived in this house took, but he is someone else, someone ancient, coming to look, temporarily retracing a little boy’s footsteps.

  The bed is upended. The toys are scraped from the toy shelf in what is clearly a single, summary motion. The clothes have been taken in a single armful from the narrow closet and tossed onto the floor. He is surprised that they have found his little sanctuary at the end of the hall. He had always thought it was safely hidden, tucked away, forgotten even by his parents. It will occur to him later that they were only there looking for valuables—salable treasures that the clever, deceitful Jews might have hidden in a child’s room. He will understand later that such searching is why the bed’s mattress is so brutally punctured. But that is not what the seven-year-old boy thinks then, seeing all the mattress’s wounds. He thinks it is him they are looking for. Hoping to puncture him. Stabbing at his ghost.

  His home is gone, his parents are gone, his toys are broken, his bed is upended. But those facts aren’t separate from one another. Home, mother, father, room, bed: it is all the same thing to a seven-year-old. All tendrils of security, of being, of one’s place in the world. Home, mother, father, toys, things: all hopelessly inextricable and intertwined, all lost together. Everything, gone. Everything in his life—except his life.

  It happened early to them, he would later learn. His family was among the first. It was perhaps a local, specific vendetta—he would never know, of course. Yet his mother had anticipated it, had powers of intuition. Perhaps that was her legacy, his only inheritance: an intuition for survival.

  He stood alone in the ruined, looted house. (His feral friends, a couple of years older, had hung back, afraid of ghosts or some kind of spooky contagion.) He felt life shift inside him as profoundly, as suddenly, as his life had externally changed. He can’t articulate—even to this day—precisely what that change was. But he felt it. Felt its rearrangement even physically.

  Had he misunderstood? Had he played too long? Had he missed her call to come home? Go out in the woods and play and don’t come back. He had heard her say it, but he now doubted that was what she had said. It seemed impossible now, too unlikely, and yet the words rang in his head. And he had gone out in the woods and played the games so long that the games had become real.

  Uniformed men. The empty house. It had happened to him before.

  But he never saw the uniformed men. He never saw the truck they loaded. He never saw his parents again.

  Gone, swept violently off the shelf of existence, packed up and carted off as if with their belongings, as if along with the valuables, with the items he was always instructed not to touch.

  What is all this, really, here in the woods of Montana? Seeking a second justice for Abel? Seeking a second justice for himself? Or merely, futilely, seeking a resolution that can never come?

  In a moment, he knows what it is that has come charging into the barn.

  No supernatural emissary. No divine escort.

  It is simply the world. The world beyond the barn. The world as always. Here to save him. Here to imprison him again.

  The Shema. The prayer by which they died. The prayer by which he lived.

  Bursting into the barn moments later, the blue-eyed, black-ski-masked leader drops his backpack of bottled water, flashlights, half-eaten sandwiches, Dramamine. He rips off the ski mask. Reaches deep into the backpack, pulls out a satellite phone, and dials.

  “Got him,” says Grady. His familiar Irish lilt, in just those two words.

  Never more sparkling or twinkling, thinks Daniel on the other end.

  “And he’s OK?” Daniel pleads, heart beating, breathing labored, back muscles like broad arcs of pain, they are so tense. “He’s OK?” Asking again, to be sure he’s been heard as the signal bounces across the sky, to be sure he can believe the response.

  Grady looks around. Takes in the scene. Considers a moment. Sees now that they have some work to do. A few things to take care of. They will need a vehicle to get out. He sees immediately that the blood is fresh, and knows that Avi did it, and can tell by Avi’s silence and shrugging stance that Avi plans to say nothing, to imply—or say outright, if forced to say—that the man was dead already. Avi has upped the stakes, hasn’t he? It doesn’t surprise Grady. It doesn’t unnerve him. Grady is up to it. He welcomes it. All the better. But he doesn’t mention any of this to Daniel. Nor does he mention the German uniform. Why confuse the moment?

  “Yes,” says Grady, in his twinkling Irish lilt. “Yes, your old man’s OK.”

  The local police, having received an anonymous and suspiciously well-informed tip, will two hours later find a black man and two white men arrayed in the dirt around the truck, their wrists and ankles bound with packing tape. They will find a barn filled with stolen goods. They will find blood on the barn floor but no figures to attach it to. They will reasonably suspect bodies somewhere on the compound, but how would they ever find them? One hundred fifty acres of Montana scrub. How could they even begin to search it?

  For the next two years, they will field calls from insurance companies and small police departments across the country. Rich little enclaves that they never knew existed. They will be busy, so busy they will grow somewhat resentful, but that will be tempered by their reception as heroes, which they will find absurd and ironic, since they were simply responding to a phone call from someone with some kind of English accent whom they will never meet and never see. Their investigation into whoever made that call—which they can’t trace and therefore assume was a satellite phone—will go nowhere.

  They will know immediately of the disappearance of three local skinheads, troublemakers they’d been watching anyway. One of the skinheads’ beat-up pickup trucks is gone. Maybe they drove it into the gorge. Maybe they’ve skipped town. Maybe there was some conflict between the skinheads and one of the local militias. Some white-supremacy dispute settled among themselves. That wouldn’t much surprise the local police. That wouldn’t surprise anyone. No one will be too upset if they rid the world of each other. In any case, there is never much motivation to find them.

  The empty handcuffs in the moving truck will always intrigue them. Not because of how whoever was in them got out of them. That was obvious. The crowbar must have been kept under the bench seat, and that must have done the job, though not without considerable pa
in. But what happened to whoever was in them. His name was Nick Pelletiere, according to the black man and the two white men. But what happened to him, they couldn’t say. Their own faces had been put into the dirt. They couldn’t see. They didn’t know. Probably wouldn’t ever know. Because if Nick escaped, the black one pointed out from his holding cell, he wasn’t about to contact any of his old crew anytime soon.

  Wrists searing with pain, the left one broken, he thinks, stomach still knotted and burning from the blow, Nick trots, bent over, toward the woods. The pain rips through him, encases both hands, climbs up his forearms, shoots rampantly around his body.

  His timing, though, is perfect. Through the truck’s rearview mirror, he watched the black-ski-masked leader heading into the barn, then saw the other black ski masks enter the barn a few moments later, probably called by the leader, at which point Nick—simmering in pain, pain so great he is fighting to stay conscious, but now with a chance, a chance—slipped down from the cab of the truck.

  Now, he ducks into the woods. The foliage hides him momentarily. He has made it to the woods, knows the temporary safety of the tree line, where he stops for a moment to breathe and to assess.

  He looks back. He sees it all. Everything. Everything he has, everything that’s his, in the middle distance behind him. The truck. The barn. The crummy house. The thousand objects inside them. Everything is gone now. Everything has been suddenly taken from him. He hasn’t even got a wallet or a dollar of cash. Nothing. He has nothing. He is starting over. But he can do it. He will limp, tramp through the woods to the roadway. He will commandeer or sweet-talk his way into a ride. He will reach Freedom Café. He will make it. He will live.

  Peke is standing outside the barn when he hears the barking suddenly intensify and sees the dogs’ noses jerk in their pen. Exhausted from the long night, he has been waiting out here, as instructed by Grady, who is in the barn with the others, attending to whatever it is that he doesn’t want Peke to see. So Peke has been watching the dogs, listening to them bark at him in frustration, in misery, still out of their reach. He has been vaguely pondering the dogs’ possible fates, for no matter how fearsome, they are innocent creatures, after all. And then the barking intensifies and their noses shift. Something—some movement, some smell detected by these highly tuned black machines—has triggered it. He remembers hearing the soldiers’ dogs in their pens. Learning to tell if they had heard you or not. If it was you they heard, or something else.