Moving Day: A Thriller

by Jonathan Stone

Nick senses the black masks closing in.

  This is his only chance. It’s all the diversion and distraction he has available to him. He must time it exactly right.

  He says the word he’s never said before but has always remembered, from the look in the crazy skinhead’s eyes, proudly demonstrating the dogs’ abilities.

  Remembered it as someone else might remember a prayer.

  “Angriff!” Nick shouts to the dogs.

  German for attack, the crazy skinhead had said.

  And it’s only at the moment he says it that he finally, fully realizes that the old man is wearing a German uniform.

  Which only confirms for him the old Jew’s wiliness.

  “Angriff!”

  A phrase uttered at the moment of death.

  A phrase lodged in thousands of Jewish souls.

  Just like the Shema, thinks Stanley Peke.

  An inverse Shema.

  A last thought.

  The opposite of a prayer.

  Stanley Peke curls into his seventy-two-year-old body and enters the darkness.

  He tucks into his body, tucks into his past, tucks into the darkness so deeply, so far, he is barely aware of the shots.

  A few of them. He hasn’t heard shots in over sixty years, but their sound hasn’t changed. They’re fired from close by, he knows from over sixty years ago. Close as Abel. Close as the shot that took Abel.

  He can feel Abel next to him. Can feel his breath stop. Can feel the last beat of his breath. Can feel Abel collapse on top of him. Abel’s warmth. Protecting him again.

  Stanley Peke stays curled in the darkness. Until he feels a hand on him. A big hand, like those unknown hands that passed him in the wooden trunk to safety, pulling him up again.

  Through a haze of being—an uncertainty that is at once physical, emotional, and mental—he is only partly aware of the dogs’ bodies lying next to him.

  The warm blood. The stink to come. Abel. Oh, Abel.

  “Walk away, Stanley,” Grady says, the gun in Grady’s hand. Peke hears the words, the unplaceable lilt of them. He looks up to see the thief limping desperately away, hunched over, already fifty yards ahead.

  Grady turns, narrows his eyes at the thief, turns back to Peke, and instructs him again, the brogue not lilting or sparkling but brusque, urgent, stern. “Walk away, Stanley. Time to walk away. Time to walk out of the woods.”

  And only half-aware, Stanley Peke does begin to walk away. Still curled partway into the black, but then—beginning gradually to see, smell, taste the woods around him—uncurling slowly from the blackness.

  He sheds the uniform. Rips the polished buttons open, tears off the stiff epauletted jacket as if sloughing a diseased, relentlessly itching skin. Without looking, he lets it fall to the ground. He feels the shock of brisk Montana air on his arms and torso. The blackness still lifting, he senses a kind of levitation of both body and soul, a sudden, weightless moment of profound calm, of grace, that he will liken, in the days ahead, to what others refer to as religious experience.

  Shedding the past—literally. Leaving it to the mud and rain.

  In a minute, he hears one more shot. A last shot, ringing through the woods, as if merely ceremonial. It is, he senses, the last shot he’ll ever have to hear.

  Stanley Peke hikes back through the woods. In a few minutes, he emerges from them at last.

  He sees a familiar figure across the muddy field.

  He thinks he must be mistaken, or delirious. But in a moment, a few yards closer, he knows he’s not.

  It’s Daniel. His son, Daniel.

  Something in the vision of his only son solidifies the world around him, brings it back together before him.

  Daniel. Here. With him.

  The doorbell rings.

  Stanley Peke moves to the big door slowly. He finds himself moving everywhere a step slower these days.

  He opens the door. A man and woman are standing there. Small, dark. South American. They are tentative, nervous. They both stand with shoulders slightly hunched forward, in a kind of static bow—a modest, deferential immigrant stance.

  “Mister Stanley Peke?” the man asks tentatively.

  “Yes,” he says cautiously. What now? God, what now?

  The man smiles. “We look all over for you.”

  And now Peke focuses on the carton in the man’s hands.

  “We are driving across from New Jersey to Los Angeles, and we play football in a parking lot—getting gas and hamburgers, you know?—and our ball go into a Dumpster, and I jump in to get it. And this”—he holds the carton—“this, it’s what I found,” explaining in a rush. “Is your box. Is your pictures.”

  The thief. The thief, for some reason, must have cast it off along the way.

  Peke is stunned. Confused. “How . . . how did you ever find me?”

  The man smiles proudly. “We look through. And, sir, see here . . .”

  He takes out a photograph from his shirt pocket. It is Daniel’s high school graduation. Mortarboards, gowns, a family snapshot, and the name of the high school and the town and state lettered proudly on the banner draped in back.

  Place. Belonging. Identity. Home. Some powerful amalgam of them all kneads within him, fills him instantly.

  The man smiles. “We call to your town. We tell them what we find, where we find it. They believe it, I guess—is so crazy, you know? They know where you are moving to. So when we are coming out here, to seeing our cousins, we are coming to see you.”

  Resourceful. Resourceful immigrants in a new land.

  “Where are you from?” asks Peke.

  “Peru,” they tell him.

  “I came from Poland,” he tells them. And realizes: he’s never told another immigrant that before.

  He looks at the carton. At them.

  “And you . . . you brought these to me.” He states the obvious, summarizes foolishly, because he can think of nothing else to say.

  “What good they gonna do to us? Is your pictures! Your things! You gotta have them.” As if the alternative is unthinkable.

  He understands who is standing there. He understands completely. It is him. In a different skin, from a different hemisphere, a half century later, but the same. He feels some unspoken comprehension pass between the short, dark-skinned man and him. Something travels the vast and inconsequential distance between the man’s brown eyes and his own. He knows it.

  “Would you . . . would you like to come in?” he asks them.

  “Oh, no.” They smile, big, deferential grins, stepping backward. “No, thank you. We just happy to bring you pictures back.”

  He is hurt for a moment. There is so much hospitality he could show them. A tall, cool drink. A comfortable place to rest from their long trip. But he sees that is not how they have imagined this. They have imagined it their own way—without imposition, without asking a thing.

  He takes the carton. “Thank you.”

  They are still smiling broadly. The compact man and woman. Unable not to. “Yes. Yes. Thank you.” Holding to that slight bowing. Their awkwardness, their charm.

  In the decade still ahead of him, lying awake in the dark at night, he will sometimes ponder the thin veneer of civilization. The nature of loss. The complexity of memory. The porousness of time and place.

  Caught in the crosshairs of history, he will think. The phrase will echo in him, haunt him. Caught in the crosshairs of history.

  But he will feel the sunlight every day, and the cool Pacific breeze every evening. And the skin of Rose, his wife—the still-beautiful, swooping planes of it, hot, cool, variable, infinite, soft, sweet, alive.

  He will return to his dinners with close friends. His wines. His reading. His high-spirited visiting grandchildren. His life.

  Treasure it. Love it.

  Know security. Know serenity. Know peace.

  A version of it, at least.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many friends and readers championed this book along the way. Special th
anks, though, to Liz Paley, Jim Todd, and Jacques de Spoelberch, for their active support, unflagging enthusiasm, and unwavering belief.

  Special thanks also to Clay Stafford and the whole gang at Killer Nashville, whose writing contest emboldened me to pull this unwanted, abandoned manuscript out of the drawer after twelve years (actually, to retrieve it from an old flash drive), send it off to Tennessee, and voila!

  And to the memory of David Brown, legendary Hollywood lion, whose offhand suggestion led to this book’s ending. A belated, distant, thank you, sir.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2013 Sue Stone

  Jonathan Stone writes his books on the commuter train between his home in Connecticut and his advertising job in midtown Manhattan. Honing his writing skills by creating smart and classic campaigns for high-level brands such as Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, and Mitsubishi has paid off, as Stone’s first mystery-thriller series, the Julian Palmer books, won critical acclaim and was hailed as “stunning” and “risk-taking” in Publishers Weekly starred reviews. He earned glowing praise for his novel The Cold Truth from The New York Times, which called it “bone-chilling” and added that “Stone plays cruel and cunning mind games.” He’s the recipient of a Claymore Award for Best Unpublished Crime Novel and a graduate of Yale, where he was a Scholar of the House in fiction writing.