Moving Day: A Thriller (26 page)

This is the beginning of the torture, Peke knows. A psychological torture tailored to him. Weighing whether the thief means it or not. To decide, to decipher, if it’s only a game, or a plan. The thief knows it is torture of the most effective kind. For Rose to make a deal, to behave in good faith, and then to be denied. While Peke must witness the truth, must see the other side from his nailed-down chair, must hear the whispers behind the curtain, and then be hung with it.

For what is worse than death? Only one thing: death with foreknowledge.

She paces, distraught. She doesn’t know what to do. Her husband, who in one sense has asked so little of her all these years, and in another has asked everything of her, has asked it all: her loyalty, her obedience, and now her willingness and preparation to continue without him.

Do nothing he says. Deny him everything. We’ve had a good life.

And should she obey her husband? Was it bluster and bluff for the kidnappers’ benefit, or did he truly want her to say no, to refuse to cooperate? Did he simply want to control the situation, to win, out of some immaturity, some irremediable male impulse? Or did his wish reflect a higher moral stance? One that was somehow beyond her ken? Was he putting his own wishes ahead of his responsibilities to her, to his family? Or did he see one’s greatest responsibility as being true to oneself?

Damn his history. Damn his past. It skews and burdens every judgment, makes it impossibly layered, textured. Should she call
the police, try to save him? Or leave them out of it, as the thief warned?

Who is to be taken at his word here? The thief, or her husband, or neither? Hard to believe that she is treating them together, that they are two points of a strange, tight triangle, equal suitors to her “affections,” to her reason.

She paces. She realizes there are no answers. You make a judgment and go on. Your own judgment is all you have.

She realizes that, from this thousand-mile distance, she has never been closer to her husband. To the ontological dilemmas of his barely spoken past. When there is no map, no guide. She is inhabiting a similar dilemma now. She is in a vast, featureless land of no answers. He entered it, inhabited it, from the very first years of his war-tossed life. She is finally forced to inhabit it only toward the end of her easy, civilized, coddled own.

She paces. She looks at the objects around her. The gilded, the polished, the cherished, the symbolic, the retrieved. All about to disappear again. The objects around her, mutely mocking her.

To all of them she says:
Good riddance. Take them all. Just give him back.

M
orning. Clean, sunny, deceptive morning. Merely a few jagged hours later. Rose sits in their other Mercedes, the sedan they bought to replace the one they sold in Boise. She is parked across the street from the police station. The quaint, old brick entrance, shaded by evergreens and deciduous trees, looks more like a stylish shop or a tony private school than a police station. She watches the doors. Secretaries, support staff, going in. A few cops—tanned, relaxed, ambling, friendly.

“Can I help you?”

Rose turns, and there is a cop—hang-jowled, sweetly hound-like, friendly—looking in at her through the passenger side. Smiling. A little flirty, even.

“I see you watching the station,” he says, sufficient explanation for his inquiry. “Help you with anything?”

She looks, shakes her head. “No. It’s nothing.”

“You sure?”

She smiles in resignation.
My husband’s been kidnapped. They’ve taken him to Montana. They stole all our possessions. He stole them all back. If I speak to you, they’ll kill him.

“I’m sure,” she says.

His smile disappears. Goes flat, businesslike, competent, a little annoyed. He knows she is not saying something. “You change your mind, you try us.”

LaFarge passes by Peke.

Peke looks at him. The friendly black one. Peke remembers. He knows LaFarge does, too.

LaFarge glances at him and glances away.

LaFarge, Chiv, Al—Nick has told them to stay away from Peke and the skinheads. He has told them this doesn’t concern them. As if it is assumed that they don’t have the stomach for this, whatever this will turn out to be.

LaFarge, who said that maybe it wasn’t right to take the old man’s pictures. Who bantered with the old man. Now the old man himself is here, tied up.

LaFarge wonders what Nick is doing. Couldn’t whoever came for the old man’s things the first time come back to get him? This is so risky, so unlike Nick. It could bring down the whole enterprise. Something has gotten under Nick’s skin, LaFarge can tell. Then again, Nick probably has it covered: the old man is the collateral. Nick will make it clear:
you come for him, he dies
. But Jesus, it’s all changed so fast. It ain’t what it was.

LaFarge thinks for a moment about cutting the old man free. But he’d be caught. He’d be figured out. So does he cut the tape and leave? Walk out? Would Nick and the crew come after him?

“You’re not so friendly now, I see,” comments Peke.

LaFarge says nothing. Wants to say something, anything, but doesn’t know what—and anyway knows he’d better not. He
learned his lesson from Nick. Nick taught him his lesson. Nick knows what’s right, what works.

“Nice chatting with you,” says Peke, as LaFarge walks silently out the door into the yard.

Nick, passing by, suddenly sits down on the shredded-up couch nearest Peke. He assumes an air of familiarity. “You weren’t following us. I would have seen you. How did you do it?” He asks it almost cheerily, a chipper interviewer, as if he never asked in the car. As if the question has never occurred to him before.

Peke stares, says nothing.

“You’re going to tell me,” says Nick, cheerily, undeterred. “I can’t have that happening again.”
I will be continuing in my mode of existence, even if you won’t.

Peke says nothing.

“You will tell me,” the thief says confidently, with no sense of rush or urgency about it.

“You’ll get nothing,” Peke says defiantly. “My wife will respect the wishes of a dead man.”

But will Rose listen to him?
“Do nothing he tells you. Deny him everything . . .”
Will Rose obey? She knows only generally where he is. Up at the fishing cottage, he never revealed exactly where he was going—the knowledge could have been dangerous for her. But now, her sum of not knowing, of desperation, might cause her to give in to their demands. To grab at their dangled promises.
Don’t, Rose. Stand mute. Stand firm. That’s what I want.

You’ll get nothing
, says the old man, but he doesn’t know Nick. He doesn’t know how smart—how uncommon—a common criminal can be. Nick is already getting something from Peke. Peke is already giving him more than he thinks.

Nick is thinking about the old man’s accent. An accent so slight you have to listen closely to be sure you really hear it. A slight accent—banished, buffed away to a residue. Left over from years ago. And that’s the point.

What kind of rich old man risks so much—discovery, injury, his elderly neighbors’ ridicule—to come after his things? What kind of rich old man doesn’t call the authorities, doesn’t leave it to the police? What kind of rich old man proceeds so intently? Goes to reclaim his possessions in the most primitive way, by simply taking them back just as they were taken? Not a conventional rich old man. A rich old man who’s prepared to risk everything. Who fears nothing. But equally fears having nothing. The old man has revealed more than he might want.

Nick snickers to himself, shakes his head. A real Jew, Nick promised the skinheads. A Jew in a Mercedes, he told them, having in truth no idea at all about it, nothing but the money and the vague accent to go on. But now he thinks about that accent. And the old man’s age. And the old man’s distrust of the police. And the old man’s absurd sense of self-reliance, his primitive notion of justice and setting things right and self-righteously coming after his belongings. The old man’s arrogant belief in himself, his pride, his self-containment, even as he sits bound to the chair. Nick knows now that his little joke, his cynical, calculating lure to the skinheads, has ended up as truth. Nick the street punk doesn’t doubt for a moment the world’s death and chaos and stink. Nick the career criminal knows how deeply, how universally, such stink runs. He knows there are these people who escaped. This is a real Jew, he knows—the kind that came escaping Europe. Escaping death.

“When did you arrive here? Before the war, or during?” Expecting to surprise him with his civility, with his worldliness and wisdom.

Peke doesn’t answer.

“Without a dime, I’ll bet.”

Peke stares steadfastly away.

Nick says it as it occurs to him. “Maybe without a mother or father.”

Peke suddenly looks up at him, regards Nick as if he has seen him for the first time. “Yes. Without a mother or father.” There is, however, no defiance in it. The hardness of the old man seems to instantly melt. The old man’s eyes seem to float for a moment, warm and soft. It is as if by Nick’s striking so close to the truth, the old man has suddenly—in this single instance—decided to concede it. To reward Nick for his intuition.

But it could be a ploy, thinks Nick. It could be a ploy on the old man’s part, a ploy for connection, a ploy for mercy. Jews are extremely clever. That is well known. Clever enough to have found Nick here, by some method Nick still doesn’t know. The man has cleverness enough to have fooled Nick once. Nick has to be clever enough not to be fooled again.

Yet at this moment, at this mention of mothers and fathers, Nick experiences some kind of shift, too. Nick finds—sitting opposite him like this—that he feels a connection to the old man. The connection he felt the edges of on the ride in the Mercedes. A sudden magnetic draw. Peke’s arrival without mother or father; Nick’s string of foster homes and foster neglect. But Nick thinks that their connection may go deeper than that. Because while no one ever beat Nick or abused him, people did not understand him and so stayed cleared of him, left him alone. So he existed without them. He raised himself. Alone. Running wild in the streets. And by the arrogant sense of self-sufficiency that he sees, he senses that the old man lived some version of that, too—if not in ancient European ghettos, then running loose in the cobbled streets of New York or Boston or Philadelphia or Baltimore. No parents: that is a sizable thing to have in common. Monstrously sizable.