Moving Day: A Thriller (14 page)

Driving west through South Dakota, amid the startling sparseness, the Mercedes is becoming more and more conspicuous, claiming too much attention. For significant stretches, it is the only car to be seen, which makes it more noticeable than Peke would like. Peke sees a farmer point to it from his dusty pickup.

Selling it, though, will be conspicuous, too. Out here, its own provenance might follow it—that old man with the accent in the expensive Mercedes. He is tempted to simply leave it in the lot of a bed-and-breakfast one morning—check out at the front desk, come out into the sunshine, call a cab to take them to a car dealership, simply pretend the Mercedes isn’t there. But that would attract undue attention, too:
a man just left his Mercedes one morning
.

West of Pierre, they drive along the strip of car dealerships, flags and banners waving in the Western breeze in a proud and antic display of local spirit, standing firm against the windswept barren plains.

Peke pulls into a Ford dealership, parks the Mercedes right at the door. He and Rose enter politely, respectfully, as if into the hushed foyer of a funeral home.

“It’s starting to give me trouble,” he explains to the salesman. “I’m seventy-two. I’m too old for car trouble. I want to drive out of here in a Ford.”
There’s an American sentiment for you, Rose
, he thinks with some amusement.
Is that American enough for you?

“You want to go from that Mercedes to a Ford?” A prairie frankness. The salesman doesn’t bother to hide his confusion. His bland startlement and obvious disapproval.

“A used Ford,” adds Peke, even less comprehensibly. The salesman nods, not knowing what else to do. “A used but reliable Taurus, for example,” Peke explains. “Except we don’t like the new body style.” Pretending some forethought to this seeming impulsiveness.

They check the Blue Book for a price on the Mercedes. While the salesman and the manager test-drive the Mercedes down the dealership strip and back, Peke and Rose stand out front, watching them, wordless, hands shielding eyes from the bright sun in a Western pose, as if counting cattle. The manager returns, jots a credit for the Blue Book amount on a slip of paper from his shirt pocket, hands it to Peke. It all happens quickly—with the wordless, unspoken efficiency of what Peke imagines as an American frontier transaction. A settler’s quick trade with the Indians. They are clearly afraid of Peke changing his mind.

With the salesman’s help, Peke picks out a gray gunboat of a Ford Fairlane.

The salesman moves their luggage into the Ford for them, and they thank him. The manager scribbles out a check for the
difference. Mercedes minus Fairlane. There is more tight-lipped, nearly wordless outpost trading, until there is a handshake. Peke will deposit the check quickly, hoping they will speculate only briefly, conclude Peke’s reversal of fortune, and think nothing more about it after that.

“We have millions of dollars in the market, don’t we?” she queries him calmly, staring out the window, the scenery of the American West rushing at them, running down the side panels of the strange car like liquid.
Millions in CDs in the bank
, she thinks, holding her gaze steady, almost haughtily.
Our homeowners’ policies have never had a claim before this. We could replace almost everything in a blink, without batting an eye, without missing a beat. Get anything we need or want.

She knows he knows it. Saying it aloud won’t make the point any more obvious or compelling to him. So she shifts her thoughts away, addresses something higher.

“You’re not putting us at risk, I hope.”

Because it’s not worth risk. We still have time ahead of us, years to be happy, to enjoy our children, the tribe of our grandchildren that grows as steadily as those enumerated Bible tribes.

But I can’t tell if you care about any of that at all.

I’m your last possession. Your last chattel. Even if I am just chattel to you, don’t risk losing me.

This unsaid, too.

“I won’t put us at risk,” he says. As if he has calmly and accurately read every thought in her staunchly expressionless face. “I promise. If it comes down to that, I’ll back away. We’ll just go on to Santa Barbara.”

At any moment, of course, any moment he chooses, he could decide to ignore the insistent little beep and flash. The tiny blinking
red dot. At any moment, he could shut off the device. At any mile in the two thousand miles so far, he could have turned the wheel, changed course, headed the car toward the gorgeous simplicities of Southern California, continued their lives.

But he cannot. And if it were even slightly possible at the outset to abandon his plan, it is unthinkable now. The insistent little red dot is like a heartbeat. Hypnotic. Not just an electronic pulse—it is somehow
his
pulse. He cannot abandon it, because he would be abandoning himself.

He could stop this chase anytime. Except that he can’t.

A seventy-two-year-old man who has lived several lives already, who has balanced on the ledge of life, who has been curled into the heart of the planet’s fiercest mid-twentieth-century insanities, doesn’t have that much to give up, it seems to him. A few dinners. A few conventional family celebrations and milestones. An endless stream of the morning paper, one day’s edition largely indistinguishable from the next. A few cycles of seasons, which come at him now with such demoralizing speed, it might be easier giving those up anyway. But he has to keep in mind that she doesn’t understand this. He has to make allowances. His perspective may be skewed. On the other hand, she has to understand that the willingness to risk was how he has gotten anywhere. How they have any of this. That in a way, risk is all he knows. He will try to rein it in. Out of deference to her. He will not let her lie awake unnecessarily. What would that accomplish? But he can make no guarantees.

Seventy-two. How much more is there?

He has lived his life. No one is more thankful for that than he. But now, after all, he has had that life. And here is a last opportunity. When he thought he was done with opportunity, in the land of opportunity, here’s another. How can he pass it by?

G
reat Falls, Montana. A sea of sky. An ocean of land. Elemental and raw and open. A stunning inverse of the way he arrived here—amid endless water that still haunts him in only distant, fractured memories of his passage. The close gray sky that hung above the crowded, creaking, groaning steel vessel. The vast blue sky now above the steel craft that floats over the waves of the road in soft, plush American-car style. The slap of water against the hull, the whistle of Western wind against the car windows. There is in him a sense of coming full circle. But still, making a crossing.

He pushes the buttons of the GPS display once more. They’re within a few hundred miles of where the signal settled a day or so ago. Stopped its movement.

Great Falls. He pulls the Ford off at a scenic overlook. They get out and stretch. The snowcapped mountains are so distant, so out of scale, they seem to exist in another dimension, to be lit by a different light. One feels, staring at them, a sense of personal glory and yet of inconsequence. He listens. There is a kind of sacred silence here. He has noticed this silence, growing in tone, enlarging somehow, as they travel west. A silence that is sacred, but common and natural, too. A grand quiet that is repeated on a human level in the acutely limited exchange of words that is the local style—in diners,
at rest stops, in convenience stores, at motel registration desks. He was always more comfortable not speaking. Silence is far preferable. Maybe this is where he always belonged. Maybe he was meant to be a Westerner. He feels an affinity for it. He smiles.

Great Falls, Montana. This is a land he could have been happy in, he senses. Here is his chance to look in on other lives, lives not lived.

He checks them into a bed-and-breakfast. It is much less quaint than their previous B and Bs, sparer and plainer. Thin white towels, simple bureau, simple bed, no embroidered curtains, just a single pull shade. He tries on a cowboy hat in the shop next door, likes it, buys it. Finds boots a few doors farther down. Pays cash for both. More the norm out here. Comes back upstairs, all smiles, to his wife. Looks in the mirror at an American of a certain type, of a certain age. A rancher. A Westerner. Grain prices and hog futures. His accent so mild it’s heard now only in a slight stilting of speech, his Europeanness revealed (and only to a sophisticated observer) by his dark-eyed, watchful gaze, his habit of separateness. His middle-European features, his slightly prominent ears and proud nose, his outsider identity, all disappearing under the brim of that hat. Disappearing, it occurs to him, at long last.

After sixty years of trying to fit in, he thinks with amusement, all it took was one of these hats.

He puts it on the hat rack behind the door. A hat rack! My, my.

And really, what is this seventy-two-year-old Jew doing in the land of outlaws? In the land of last stands?

Making one.

“National Moving and Storage.”

“Annelle,” the voice says.

“Nick,” she responds, automatic, curt. Nick can feel her anxiety from here. Her hostility. Her dread on hearing his voice.

It’s a small, careful selection of frightened women on insulting clerk’s salaries who work in the back offices of a handful of moving companies. Annelle. Dora. Sara-Jean. Cultivated carefully over time, with a modest but reliable stream of cash. Nick, like the steady husband none of them has, the silent, sturdy provider, and that seems to serve some classic need, to tap something primal in this subspecies of woman.

“You miss me, Annelle?”

No response. As he would expect. Her silence, her resentment, signal that all is well in the relationship. She hates needing the money. She needs the money.

“I’ll call you after five, Nick.” Easy to decipher:
I can’t talk now. I’ll have your names for you by then. Your prospects.
Nick knows she’ll call. She needs the money. She knows the consequences.

It’s simple, what they have to do. Everything is computerized in these places, and the computers are always on. They look at a screen, scroll and troll, tell him what it says. Call him from a pay phone—not from the office, not from home (though in 95 percent of the cases, that would probably be just fine)—and give him names, addresses, and pickup times. Simple. A twelve-year-old can do it, and earn money for dope.

Moving-company offices are casual, congenial, blue-collar places. Employees tend to gossip about clients anyway—sweet old lady, husband just died.
Man, Annelle, you should have seen this place!

And then the simple counterbalance, the safety check to his system. Virtually every one of the moves is interstate. Moving to Florida, California, Arizona, New Mexico, coastal Georgia or South Carolina, from the Northeast or Midwest. Interstate manifests have to be filled out and filed with certain state offices in advance. A trucking company has to file its plan. And as part of
that plan, there has to be an estimation of cargo value. It’s simple: his contacts in the interstate trucking offices call him when they see a high-value estimate. (The trucking companies don’t lowball the numbers, because they pass this cost, like all others, on to the customer and mark it up. They love coming across a genuinely high-value move and have a financial incentive to duly record it for the authorities.)