Moving Day: A Thriller (34 page)

A fully uniformed Nazi colonel stands over him.

He smooths the flanks of the uniform, admires it, feels the ruthless, raw, animal power coursing down his spine, tingling wildly in his ancient balls. He has waited to wear this uniform. Eyed it, desired it, since he was seven.

He banished such thoughts and feelings, forced them down, and then, unable to anymore, at the safe remove of a new land and a new life, began tentatively to read about these urges, to explore them privately, like pornography.

The psychiatrist he finally went to see—just once, in a serene, minimalist office high above Manhattan—merely, but sympathetically, confirmed Peke’s speculations. They discussed, like colleagues, Stockholm syndrome—by now a well-documented phenomenon, he was assured. Adapting the beliefs, the mores of the oppressor, the captor, the torturer. Making a complete identification with the aggressor. But Peke resented the dispassionate, academic tone of the articles he had found and the cool, scholarly pronouncements in
that sparsely furnished Manhattan office. Even learning that each case is to some degree unique, that each person concocts and suffers his own version, the explanation still fell short for him. It was nothing so simple, he knew. It was nothing with such an easy label. It was, Peke could see, hopelessly more entangled and complex. Tied up with larger subjects. Authority. Belonging. A hunger for order. For deliverance from inexorable chaos.

What is that he feels as he smooths these flanks? As he inhales with pride, in relief that the uniform is finally on him, as he regards and inhabits its utter familiarity and utter strangeness, what does he feel?

He is quite outside himself, yet he still occupies himself. But which self? A new one, or a previous one always lying in wait for this? He is using the uniform for the crafty purposes of survival, for shock, for a lesson, but aren’t those all excuses to let this moment fulfill its subtler purpose? A greater, personal, primitive, ineffable purpose?

The psychiatrist steered the discussion to the two absent figures. He could sense the man’s eagerness to explore there, a belief in finding hard-won answers there.
They abandoned me to save me. Saved me by abandoning me.
The syllogism that might solve the puzzle at the core of his being.
Saved by being abandoned. Abandoned to be saved.

He feels the uniform. He loves the uniform. He despises the uniform. Attracted, repulsed, aware of the pornography, unable to resist.

How could he ever share it with Rose? How could he share it with anyone? It is the past that will not be consigned to the past. That refuses to become history. So he has carried his past silently, alone, because it has remained too present.

He has survived. He has survived again, escaped again. How can that be? How is that possible, when so many have not escaped,
have not survived? It is unfathomable that he has done it again, that he does so apparently every time. He cannot accept it. He cannot accept the unfairness of it again. The overwhelming unfairness to so many others. To so many millions gone.

This time, he will not escape. He is determined not to escape. He is determined to stay within the fatal loop of his past, the loop his past has evidently confined him to, the dark, closed circle of seventy-two years. The uniform will certainly help assure that he will remain in the past—long enough to get it right? Long enough to triumph? To provide some sort of completion?

He feels only barely in control. Untethered. Unmoored. Cut loose from all logic, reason, civility. It is the animal existence he once knew—unleashed, returned, surging up. The strange physical repetition—the woods, the farmhouse, the barn—is only the surface of it. The sense of precariousness that he knew as a lupine child in the woods and fields—that precariousness, that anarchy—has been reawakened and is as wholly familiar to him as a long-lost friend, and he greets its familiar energy, its addictive drug rush, and fears it as much as anything so far.

“And now,” he says, listening to the icy, preternatural calm of his own voice, not knowing exactly whose words, whose thoughts these are, “I can show you the real thing. I can teach you some real Nazi games. Perhaps you’ve heard of some. I’ll bet you haven’t, though. Now you get to play them. Just as you’ve always wanted.”

Just as little Stanislaw Shmuel Pecoskowitz has always wanted . . .

The Colonel is taped to the chair identically, in a perfect mirroring, he notices, of the way the Jew was taped not a half hour ago. He watched the Jew wrap each of the skinheads with rope and tape, binding their arms and legs tightly.

Taped to the chair, the Colonel watched it all. He is sure that his watching was the intent.

The Colonel begins to whimper.

“Whimpering is how we begin,” the voice says.

From brutal woods to brutal woods. From persecution to persecution. Has he moved nowhere in more than sixty years? Has he not advanced?

His life has come full circle. And a little bit more, hasn’t it?

He remembers the games, he finds. Games that involve fingernails. Toenails. Fifth fingers. Earlobes. The tongue. The tips of ears. Artful scarifications with a knife on white skin. Hearing about them first, boys’ holy voices in the dark. And then seeing them played—with, against others—watching from the distance and safety of the darkness, mesmerized, transfixed.

He remembers the games. Buried deep, stored, waiting—whether they only seized and irreparably deformed a childhood imagination, or whether they were observed and suppressed, or whether in some now-indecipherable mixture of the two, here they are, pure, unchanged, recalled, returned to him, summoned up complete like nursery rhymes. His own peculiar nursery rhymes, his own strange childhood games, like songs not sung in a lifetime, and one is amazed to hear oneself sing them first note to last without missing a word or a beat.

He is outside himself. He is someone else. He has stepped whole, weirdly, unnaturally, into the slanted shadows, the opaque blackness of his past, and then beyond it somehow. There is a narrow, pale, small remnant of who he actually is, standing by inert, observing but barely there. Someone else will carry out these duties. Someone, it seems, who has stood by patiently, waiting to carry them out. Someone he doesn’t recognize but who has apparently been there all along.

In a part of his brain—a human, reflective part—he knows it is some kind of dissociation, because he senses himself looking on from a distance. Maybe through the distance of time. Maybe through the distance of history. Someone else is taking over from Stanley Peke. And Stanley Peke hardly dares to interrupt.

He can see already, before he even begins: droplets of blood binding in globules, like mercury patterns, on the cold floor of the barn.

Fingernails. Earlobes.

The authentic Nazi experience, with all the trimmings.

He can provide it undiminished, unabbreviated, to the naked, shaking, sobbing man taped to the chair.

T
he big white truck rolls up to the barn at dawn. Nick makes a quick three-point turn in the dirt—truck ballet—and backs the white beast toward the overhead doors.

LaFarge jumps out, goes behind the truck to unlock and pull open the barn bays.

LaFarge is slightly nervous. He remembers the last time. When the last load suddenly wasn’t there. But this time, he notices, the dogs are barking, scampering in the yard as usual when they arrive. Roaming and guarding as they’re supposed to be. A sign of normal. He herds them into their pen, the way Nick likes, getting them out from underfoot before they begin unloading.

In a perfectly coordinated effort, as LaFarge is hiking up the first of the barn’s overhead doors, Chiv pulls open the rear gates of the white truck.

Four men in black ski masks leap out.

One of them lands on top of Chiv, and Chiv crumples. He is on the ground, in the dusty dirt, almost instantly, and as he struggles to get up, a swift kick to the stomach and then the groin puts him back on the ground.

The dogs howl ferociously, attack the fencing of their pen uselessly.

LaFarge looks around from the overhead door to the truck in time to see a black-ski-masked man coming at him full speed, and there’s hardly time to put up his arms to defend or swing before the man’s body plows into his. Though LaFarge manages somehow to remain upright for a moment, blows start landing in his solar plexus, swift and hard, and he is down, too, moaning into the dirt, his hands taped behind him in an instant. He doesn’t know yet it’s with packing tape.

Hearing the dogs’ ferocious howling, looking in the driver’s side mirror, Nick sees LaFarge go down, a black-hooded figure over him. For a moment, it doesn’t seem actual—it’s something occurring only in the mirror. He doesn’t know what’s happening, or how, or why, but he nevertheless responds intuitively, slamming his palm at the truck’s big gearshift, gunning the truck forward.

Too late. Another black-hooded figure is already up next to him, as if suspended outside the driver’s side window. Still partly mesmerized by the implausibility of events, a half-beat behind in shock, Nick watches the figure pull the cab door open, and—holding the steering wheel, unable to defend himself—Nick watches a boot get pressed against his rib cage, forcing him out of the driver’s position and across the truck’s bench seat. As Nick reaches to the glove compartment for his gun, the black hood, now fully inside the cab, elbows him hard in the diaphragm.
Uhhh
. . . Smart
. . . , Nick thinks, as he fights for breath, and the man applies the brakes and brings the truck to a stop. Then he kicks Nick—still struggling for oxygen—hard against the passenger door, and somewhat awkwardly pulls handcuffs from his belt behind him, and cuffs Nick to the passenger door’s interior handle, before sliding the truck’s key out of the ignition. It is he, not Nick, who pops the glove compartment to take the gun he correctly assumed Nick was reaching for.

Al must have been put down, too
, Nick thinks vaguely, somewhere along the passenger flank of the truck.

The dogs snap and snarl, howl with frustrated fury.

It is all instantaneous. Over in moments. The advantage of surprise.

And despite its admirable efficiency, Nick senses something loose about it all. It’s not a sleek, professional violence. It’s more passionate. Like a bottle uncorked. Barroom brawl–ish. Enthusiastic.