Moving Day: A Thriller (21 page)

That accent. That beautiful house.

You don’t want to leave anything, he’s explained to his crew, punctuating the lesson by tossing the carton of pictures into the green Dumpster. You want to take everything. You need the annihilation to be total, so they know what they are dealing with. So they’re not tempted to tangle.

He has explained, demonstrated all that to his guys, and look what happened.

He’s been thinking about it all night. Thinking about the old man’s show of friendliness. Thinking about his own crew—Chiv, Al, LaFarge. The trick with them is, they’re real movers. They look like they are, feel like they are. They have a simplicity of spirit about them not to arouse any suspicion. They make the marks feel relaxed. In part, he knows, because they’re not, at heart, mean guys. Nick knows very well that he is the mean one.

For this, he needs a little more meanness than his guys have.

“I’m Nick, by the way.”

“Dustin,” says one of the skinheads.

“Lee.”

“Pork,” says the third, with a hard, hungry body, and an expression that says,
Don’t ask
.

All curt, militaristic.

This could work.

He sits with the skinheads and tells them exactly what he does. Tells these peculiar, dangerously disconnected near-strangers exactly how he makes his living. How he bought the farm. Tells them about the operation. All about it. They are rapt, fascinated, drinking it in, their eyes lit like children’s at Christmas, twinkling in the light of the tree. Visions of sugarplums. Nick tells them so that they trust him.

Nick sits and talks to them and looks at them with their swastikas on biceps and between Dustin’s eyebrows, like Manson. Early twenties, all of them, he’s guessing. He looks at them in their identical open leather vests, with their fierce conformity to one another. He has always known that despite their wild appearance, the skinheads out here are ultrarightists, Aryan-nation supremacists. While they all sit over a morning beer, then two, then three, getting comfortable, getting to know each other, he draws them out a little in their views, casually points to a few headlines on the front page of
the Great Falls papers in the wire newsstand by the door, and he hears enough guarded jokes and sneering asides—about faggots and towel-heads and sand niggers and slants—to know they are subtly testing him, too. Poking around at the edges of his own intolerance. They’re the backwoods-Montana, American-pop version of Hitler Youth. With the same militaristic bent. With, Nick assumes, the militaristic urge for a mission.

“So, listen,” Nick says finally, honestly, “the reason I came over, the reason I wanted to talk to you”—he leans forward, comes finally to the point—“I’ve got a job for you to do.”
You freedom fighters. You super-Americans.

Their eyes light with a new charge of schoolboy eagerness. Nick is nauseous from the ease of it.

A Jew, Nick tells them. A Jew in California. A Jew in a Mercedes. As if the Mercedes part and the California part furnish irrefutable proof of the Jew part. He tells them what happened. How the Jew came and stole Nick’s things.

Pork, Lee, are suddenly even more animated, shifting in their seats, excited. Hey, they saw him, driving. Shit, yeah, they were sitting right here. A half memory. As if they’ve seen the old Jew in their dreams. As if this is fate. As if their future has been put divinely and finally before their eyes by a higher, unknowable but ultimately righteous, force of justice.

They look at one another. As if they can’t believe their good fortune. To be called to the Cause.

Dustin. Lee. Pork. It might be the beers, but Nick finds himself warming to them. Feels a connection to them. He recognizes in them his own sharp anger, his own impatience with the world. His own distastes, his own bitternesses. It’s laughable, but he doesn’t deny it. In some strange sense, they’re his boys.

Nick hasn’t the slightest idea if the old man is Jewish. Who
knows? Who cares? But for the purposes of his new partnership, he certainly is. Big-time Jew.

And coming after his belongings like that. Finding where Nick is. Taking back only what is his. That niggling ledger-book accuracy. That sly justice. From everything Nick knows about him, seems like a Jew.

I
t is a California morning—meaning perfect. The sun is bright, the sky a crystalline blue, suspended above a deeper blue and endless Pacific. A Pacific that suitably frames forever.

Peke is on the back deck, having his pulpy, fresh-squeezed orange juice and his bowl of granola, staring out at the ocean. Rose is not awake yet; typically, she will be another hour. They are already settling into their new patterns. Their last new patterns, he knows, the patterns that will in all likelihood take them into their final sicknesses—whatever those turn out to be—and gliding frictionless and light, he hopes, into the ends of their lives.

But the thought evaporates in the vision of the blue Pacific. In its unfathomable depth. In its rhythmic wash of eternity. It is God rendered in liquid and gases. Not merely evidence of Him. People misunderstand that. It
is
Him. That ocean. Peke doesn’t know if that conception of God comes from a seven-year-old boy’s untutored, wild deifications in the brutal winter woods of Poland—a protective mechanism of survival, an adaptive trick of mind. Or if it is—as he half suspects—actually a genetic inheritance, an ancient collective-unconscious connectedness that someday science will better grasp. He knows only that when he looks at the ocean—or the moon, or a redwood, or a leaf, or a stone—he feels he is literally
looking at God. He’s surprised others don’t simply feel that. He knows he is like primitive man in that regard. Which is odd, ironic, given the majority of his life, a life of urbanity and sophistication and intricate judgments of art and politics. He is, has always been—in many more ways he sees as he grows older—a primitive.

They are settled into the house. As planned, much has gone into storage now. The new house is gracious, California contemporary, teaks and redwoods, proud beams and broad glass soaring.

They have spent time with some old friends, Manny and Sylvia Walsh, who preceded them here, have become closer to them lately, now that all of them seem to understand—unspoken—that they will spend the remainder of their lives with one another. They have already been to dinners and local theater with some of their new neighbors. They already command respect. They are already welcome, as they have been welcome everywhere, as worldly success makes one quickly welcome, as simple civility makes one welcome. It has taken almost no time. This is already their life. Educated, civilized retirees fit in instantly in Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is for them.

Though he can’t help thinking about Montana, of course. He debates whether to now inform the police, afraid that if he does, the story will get out somehow, the local press will somehow sniff out the appealing, irresistible tale of an old man retrieving his things from a master thief. He will be made into some representation of bravery or revenge, something abstract and unreal. The police, regardless, will not like that he acted alone, took matters into his own hands, no doubt illegally at several stages, and he will make them look bad and incompetent besides. At the least, he will have to testify, his wife will have to testify, it will be time-consuming, ugly. The police will be annoyed, and maybe more than that. He is willing to trust policemen as individuals, but not the police as an institution. He hasn’t had fond experiences with institutions of authority.

But if he doesn’t tell the police, will the thief come find him? He came back for the safe-deposit box, after all. Came back as if it were an item he’d simply forgotten, or an item he’d simply dropped, traveled back across the country to scoop it up. He is possessive, this thief. So will he come find Peke?

Peke eats his granola on the porch, the redwood decking beneath his slippered feet. From this high perch lording over the Pacific, commanding it, owning it, but thoroughly humbled by it, too. Once again, the vista sweeps away his darker thoughts, as if with a glittery, foamy wave.

He smiles, remembering the moment when he pulled their old Mercedes convertible up to the fishing cabin and Rose came out the screen door, onto the porch.

It felt like a date. Neither of them knowing exactly what to expect of the other.

A prince arriving in a carriage.

Bearing a gift. And no mere trinket. The gift of their past. The gift of their lives, retrieved.

“Get in,” he said to Rose. Meaning,
Just get in—leave the bags in the cabin, leave everything else behind
.

It had been a moment that sparkled not for its time or place but for its feeling, for its instant lubrication of the soul. And he noticed soon after, and notices again now, how it was a moment balanced between possessing his things and being free of them, having them again and not having them. A moment poised between both victory and freedom, awash in the two.

Seeing him in the Mercedes, she knew, of course, that there’d been some sort of victory. She accepted that. It was enough to know. She really didn’t need any further details, and he didn’t feel any urge to supply them.

“The Ford?” she asked.

“Left it at the side of the road.”

And they had driven west, into the setting sun, the top down, one with the Western highways, the wind noise around them mostly too loud to speak above, but what would they say anyway? What was the point of words amid the Western magnificence? They would not drive like this again. They had never been here before; they would not be here again. A sentiment one began to experience more regularly at this stage of life.

Back in their own Mercedes. Driving west, like any other Americans. Like any other older American couple. Meeting their belongings at their new home in Santa Barbara, California.

And now, on his redwood porch. Like any other American retiree.

Looking over the blue Pacific.

Thinking, for a foolishly serene, blissful moment—for a high, clean, cool moment, in the high, clean, cool air—that this can last.

T
he alarm screams at three in the morning.

Peke sits up as if shocked into sitting.

He has the circuit rigged to everything. Threaded like a string through the house. The two alarm engineers—oddball electronics-whiz kids who seemed by their pallor never to have stepped out into their native Southern California sun—at first resisted such a thorough residential system, then got absorbed by the challenge and eventually were proud of their handiwork. Dozens of sensors. Redundancy circuits. The latest electronics that—once again—could hardly be expected of a seventy-two-year-old survivor.

His heart and pulse thump so forcefully, it occurs to him sharply that a heart attack is probably a greater risk than the break-in itself.

In a few seconds he orients to the dark and the situation and swings his legs off the bed assertively to head to the stairs to see.

“No,” says Rose, trying to hold him from behind, her hands surprisingly forceful around his forearm, trying to restrain him from getting off the bed.

“Yes,” he says, pulling his arm away, in a way she knows there is no choice.

The alarm whines and moans insistently. Wails like a sackclothed widow, sings its perfectly repetitive song of human disaster. He heads to the top of the stairs, pulse still pounding.

It’s ringing at the police station, too, he knows. They’ll be here in less than two minutes. They timed it—two friendly, suntanned officers did a practice run when he had them over to demonstrate and integrate the system. The Pekes live in the hills above town. The station house is down in the coastal flats. On the one hand, two minutes is pretty good. On the other hand, a lot can happen in two minutes.

He looks through the windows onto the street. The house is so much glass. Easy for a thief to see into. But easy for an owner to see out of, too.

From this angle, he does see something. Feet disappearing up the sidewalk. Gone. Like wildlife retreating. Human wildlife.

The police arrive in two minutes precisely.

This patrolman is deeply suntanned, too, despite the night shift. A movie cop. Peke sits in his robe, helps fill out the paperwork. Forms to be buried and forgotten, he’s sure.