Moving Day: A Thriller (19 page)

The furniture, the cartons of books and china, the bright flanks and chrome of the Mercedes convertible—all their belongings—are pierced and bathed by the light of day.

T
he truck pulls grandly onto the compound grounds. Big, white, new, gleaming brightly. Twenty tons of warrior-savior, at the beck and call of the mottled septuagenarian standing small in front of the barn.

As it happens, painted white. As it happens, roughly matching the truck that took his belongings. Once again—like finding his safe-deposit key in the thief’s desk—an elegant symmetry of fate. Justice as if mathematically balanced and precise.

He has Grady’s cell phone number, called early this morning from the cabin one more time before they went out of cell range. They had just passed the Idaho border. They had explicit directions from him. He even drove the final hour of it himself several days before, gathering landmarks, just to be sure. Coming straight into the compound, he figures, is how they’ll arouse the least suspicion. A truck pulling in, a truck pulling out, like always, he is sure. Certainly no one will think anything as the truck pulls past the crossroads. Pulls by Freedom Café.

Through the truck’s cab window—broad and flat, like a movie screen—Grady, the driver, big and muscled, sees an old man in a Western hat, standing out in the Western barrenness and scrub, gesturing the immense vehicle toward him.

In a symphony of hisses and squeaks, of sharp turns and air brakes—the grand concluding notes of its cross-country song—the truck backs into position outside the barn.

Grady hops down from the cab, looks around at the oddness of the scene. A kind of bright desolation. He wears a closely contained but still evident air of amusement at where he suddenly finds himself after two days in the saddle, blasting westward.

“Why, hello, Stanley Peke,” he says, the slightest bit of Irish brogue still in the uttering of his old boss’s name, his blue eyes smiling brightly. Peke sees the familiar scar down Grady’s right cheek—a barroom scar, he’s always been sure. He knows this isn’t just any crew. It’s a crew that’s ready, just in case. Grady. There are such various immigrant experiences, thinks Peke.

If the crew with Grady doesn’t always have such a paramilitary quality to them, they have effectively assumed it here. They ask no questions, proudly make it clear they will not ask questions, will respond only to whatever the need is. They’re alert, Peke notices, not immense men, but beneath their T-shirts, not men to tangle with. The crew remains silent, as if to further abet the powerful, seamless impression of a dream. Of a calm, sure, smooth unreality in the truck’s arrival.

They are the men in the white hats, Peke thinks, riding into a Western town to save him. The opposite, the mirror image, of the thief and his crew. He notices the symmetry. Another symmetry. Like his being in the thief’s office.

Peke shows them. “Everything in this pile. Everything here. It’s mine.”

Grady nods. “And where’s it going?”

Peke hands him the address on a scrap of paper:
3901 Pacific View, Santa Barbara, California
.

Grady nods again.

But before beginning the task at hand, before marshaling his men to it, he regards Peke with a sudden expression of loyalty and reverence
and curiosity that Peke can’t quite decipher. Grady’s half smile is on the verge of words but is containing them. A look that half warns:
I will ask one question, one relevant question, and that is all
.

“And where are
they
?”

“Taking someone else’s,” says Peke—with a vehemence, a disgust, he did not expect to feel. It surprises him, there inside the barn. It satisfies him, too.

If Peke went to the local Montana police, he can imagine what would happen.

They would raid it, yes. They would have the glory of breaking the burglary ring, of recovering the merchandise.

But after that, he would become a witness, needing to fly back here continually, or even east, to where the original theft took place, to be deposed, to testify—it would consume his privacy, his time, his life.

And his belongings—they would become state’s evidence, exhibit A. It could be months of argument and appeals before he and Rose got them back. The valuables more damaged by months as state’s evidence, probably, than in the careful thieves’ hands.

Returned to him finally, perhaps years later.

That’s how these things work, he knows. He is seventy-two. He doesn’t have that kind of time.

And maybe it wouldn’t result in a conviction anyway. Maybe it could be argued away, or there would be a backroom compromise struck, a deal made, as there often is, where justice is the last matter, the last item on the agenda. Maybe it would be lost in legal argument, in point and counterpoint. Maybe it’s harder to get a conviction on interstate transportation, for instance. Multiple jurisdictions.
Maybe the thief even knows all this, relies on it. Maybe it’s part of his plan.

The loss of Peke’s privacy. The loss of his time.

To be a hero. To be of service. In bringing a chancy justice.

He watches them carrying the items from the barn. No. This is much better.

To help with the loading would be foolish vanity on his part, counterproductive. Yes, he is a strong and healthy seventy-two, possessed of a rude, raw physical health that is a genetic accident and gift. It is the envy of his wife and friends, he can see, this basic robustness, that always shines through his aches and pains. But he senses Grady and the crew don’t want him lifting alongside them. It mildly reduces and insults their heroics. Isn’t really useful, anyway. But it feels foolish to just stand here, watching. So what will he do while they work?

Peke finds himself wandering the property.

It is scraggly, brushy, dusty, and undistinguished. Untended woods and field, undifferentiated weeds and undergrowth. Without the haphazard fencing, there would be no sense of borders at all.

In a few minutes along a narrow path, where the woods open unexpectedly into a field, he comes upon it: an immense mountain of trash. They must simply pile it up out here, not bothering with any formal disposal. The property is large enough to accommodate its own trash site. But as Peke ambles closer, looks up at it—maybe twenty feet high—he can analyze its contents better, more specifically. It is filled with cast-off household dishes and furniture and toys and games and televisions and electronics, all clearly from other lives like his own.

Some scraps of food—melon rinds, eggshells—lie scattered a few yards away from the mountain’s perimeter, probably dragged around gleefully by local feasting wildlife. But that’s the minor part
of it. It’s mostly hard goods, in various states of destruction and unrecognition.

A particularly American pile of detritus, Peke thinks. Brightly colored packaging, retaining its resolutely cheerful color after season upon season in the rain and snow. A pile of absurd variety, of ridiculous plenty.

It occurs to him that this is where much of it ends up anyway, in a pile like this. That despite his arguably brave and high-principled rescue operation, despite any subsequent return to normalcy, when he and Rose pass on, their children will take a few items to which they assign personal meaning, and the rest of it will make its eventual way, either over weeks or over years, to a place like this—a legal one, but one that looks much the same.

He feels that simple realization like a weight on him. Amid the exhilaration and excitement of retrieving his belongings, a sudden weight of brooding. It’s almost enough to make him go back, tell them to unload the truck again, back out empty, call it off. This is where it will end up for the thief, too. Their odd communion. Meaninglessness piled high.

Only now does he notice the books in among the items. Hardcovers, paperbacks, which, like so much of the rest of it, must have no value to the thieves. Books, cartons of books, among the broken chairs, the drawerless upturned desks, the half beds.

How could he not think of it? Maybe because it is so distant in time and place. Maybe because he was resisting the memory. It is as if the pile has been accumulated, assembled out here in a field like those other fields, by the woods like those other woods, exclusively to pierce him.

How could he
not
think of it? They would come at night, in the wee hours, he and the other boys, to the smoldering piles at Cracow’s eastern edge. To scavenge what they could. Using the immense pile itself as camouflage, remaining unseen by the guards
by keeping the pile between the guards and themselves, like a game, while they picked over the items, took what they could carry at a run, what they could trade, what they could fit inside their torn coats. The guards were old and unalert, when there were any there at all.

It continues to pierce him. Because at first there were the other boys, a wild pack of them, swift and dancing night creatures with the power and confidence of their numerousness and anonymity, but in the end, it was only Abel and he.

The items piled high. The stuff of life. Life, history, existence, piled up and burned. The piles were both practical and symbolic.
Your lives are done. Piled up here in front of you. And the small, technical, leftover detail of your aliveness—we’ll attend to that soon.
An efficiency, the pile, but an efficiency meant to humiliate.

He looks up, and Grady is standing next to him. “We’re ready. You want to check it all?”

Peke shakes his head no.

“Beautiful Mercedes there, sir, if you don’t mind my saying.”

Peke smiles.
It is, isn’t it?

“We’ll be at 3901 Pacific View Tuesday morning,” says Grady brightly.

“We’ll be there to let you in,” Peke replies.

They smile briefly, diffidently at each other. It’s proving easier than either of them expected.

“I’ll close the gate after you,” says Peke.

Grady frowns, clearly uncomfortable with Peke’s staying behind. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. These people will be back.”

Peke pats him lightly on the shoulder, never dropping his gentle smile. He can play old and wise when he needs to. “I’ll only be a few minutes behind you. It’s OK.”

Peke watches the truck pull out. White and gleaming against
the landscape, its surfaces playing games of light with the afternoon Montana sun.

He walks one last time into the big wooden barn.

The outside light is cast at an angle against the old Mercedes convertible, tucked into the side of the garage bay.

He opens the door. Settles into the richly familiar driver’s seat. Inserts the spare Mercedes key that is still on his own key ring.

The car coughs twice and turns over. He pushes a button on the burled-walnut dashboard. The top lowers, smoothly mechanical.

He pulls his car carefully out of the barn, into the sun.

It has been so easy. So fluid, so smooth. So quiet, so dreamlike. An old man casually strolling the enemy’s lair. He is suspicious of how easy. But he is suspicious of everything. Maybe it is simple at last. Maybe there is a balance here. That in a life in which what should have been easy was so brutally hard, it is time for what should be hard to be easy.