Moving Day: A Thriller (35 page)

And Nick—a tactician even amid this confusion, this disaster—has a single refrain looping in his head, pressing hard against his skull:

How in fuck’s name is this happening to me?

D
ays earlier, at his folder-strewn wooden desk in the plant’s still-modest back offices, Daniel hung up the phone, stunned.

They’ve taken him, his mother said. They called to prove they had him. In her voice was a peak of franticness that she was fighting to quell. Attempting to suppress insuppressible thoughts and images. They want their things back, his mother said. That’s how they put it. They want their things back.

But even as she was speaking, even as she was whimpering over the phone line, struggling not to break down, to remain at least coherent, even as Daniel was processing the fact that she had finally picked him to call, as had his father, each unbeknownst to the other—even as Daniel was trying to allay her fears and feeling his own fears forming, even as he was on the verge of tears himself, thinking of it—
my father, after all he has suffered and survived
—even with all of it, the plan was already forming in his head.

They want their things back. So they’ll come in their truck
, reasoned Daniel.

He gets up from his desk, heads down to the loading dock.

Grady. Where’s Grady?

He passes, as he walks along the loading dock, dozens of the immigrants working there, a haphazard UN, their workforce a rough-hewn experiment in discord and harmony, a spicy human stew, rough and tumble, as such men generally are. A hiring practice begun by his father—in sympathy, in connection—and a tradition continued by Daniel. He has transformed the business, but hasn’t altered the philosophy.

Daniel finds Grady, pulls him aside. They kidnapped the old man, Daniel tells him. They called my mother. And if they smell police, he’s dead. Crazy fuckers, they’re coming to get everything again.

Quietly: I need you to go again. To take a truck again. But this time, it won’t be our truck.

Grady looks at Daniel, waiting for more.

And this time, there’s going to be a fight.

Grady doesn’t flinch. Seems, if anything, a notch more interested.

You don’t have to do it, says Daniel. Knowing that it’s the only way he can think of. The only way there is.

You’ll hide in the back of their truck, Daniel explains. Jump in the back when they’ve finished loading, when they’re in my parents’ house, making a last sweep. My mother will help you. She’ll know. It’s the only way we can find out where they’re keeping my father. It’s probably the same place you were, but might not be. This guy is careful, a planner, pretty sharp. He may have other places, other hideouts. And we can’t risk being wrong.

Grady shrugs. It’s cold enough out, he says. We won’t melt like Mexicans crossing the border. We’ll stretch out on the furniture. Bring battery lanterns. Radios. Relax. Grady’s blue eyes twinkle. He gives a quick bravado smile.

Who do you want? asks Daniel.

My same crew, says Grady.

You want more? Take more.

Grady thinks a moment. Maybe Avi, he says.

Daniel looks at Grady for a moment. The hothead Israeli? The most erratic personality on the loading floor? Compounding risk with risk?

Then again, no one’s more ready for a fight.

Sure, Daniel says. Take Avi.

The crew decided, Daniel is already on to other things. Logistics. Timing. Not thinking about Avi or the others anymore, but about the plan.

At the same time that LaFarge and Chiv have been put to the dirt and Nick has been cuffed to the truck’s passenger door, another figure in a black ski mask hikes open the overhead barn door that LaFarge had just finished unlocking. Traveling in moments from the darkness of the truck bed to the sudden daylight of the Montana morning, and now into the barn’s deep interior dark, the black-ski-masked, charging figure at first has difficulty seeing.

But as his eyes adjust, there is little doubt about what he sees.

The sight penetrates his experience, awakens his history, nauseates him.

There is an old man bent in a chair, naked, and a Nazi in full uniform standing over him.

Avi stares, thunderstruck.

T
he loading-dock joke is that Europe couldn’t handle him, so he went to Israel. Then Israel couldn’t handle him, so he came to them.

Daniel, son of a survivor, student of survivorship, sees it differently:

There are three kinds of survivors. There’s the Stanley Peke kind. Who arrive with nothing and remake themselves from nothing, succeed on determination and intelligence and sheer will, make you believe anew in the power of the human spirit, in the triumph of man. Walking miracles.

The second kind—no less remarkable, in a way—arrive with their old-world crafts and old-world beliefs and set up shop and set up house and continue their lives as if nothing has happened, as if there’s been no upheaval, no rupture at all. There was a jeweler in the town he grew up in—Itzhak something, his father knew him—who was that kind of survivor.

But the third kind of survivor. The third kind never again find who they are. Never regain their footing. Spend their days and nights lost, adrift. Furious at what has been taken, angry at the universe that has robbed them, trying to get even. Lurching desperately from difficulty to difficulty, place to place. Trying to find an existence. The
congenitally lost. The severed. Avi is one of those. So Daniel takes him in. As he has seen his father do. He will try to help whomever, though this third kind of survivor is a far different proposition than the other two. Orphaned Avi, who lost all four grandparents and numberless aunts and uncles and cousins in the camps, and then lost his destitute settlement parents—scraping a refugee existence from the desert land—to a Syrian raid in the months before the ’67 war. Daniel thinks about Avi’s parents—cast off from a continent penniless to meet extermination on another continent a generation later. Avi, who has stayed lost. Drifting in and out of a succession of menial jobs—grocery clerk, bike delivery boy, landscaping crew—lasting only weeks at a time, until some fistfight or other infraction ends it. Daniel can’t begin to know what that is like. He can at least try to help. Who would he be if he didn’t try?

It is like a rip in the fabric of time. Like a living exhibit in a perverse museum. Or an incriminating snapshot stumbled onto in a raid. Or a painting, its dramatic, self-conscious interplay of light and dark, its admirable fidelity to the past, evident in its detail—the authenticity of the dagger, the naked torso’s glistening sheen. A moment of capture, a captured moment—the uniformed Nazi and the prisoner both looking up, united in their surprise, actors in the same drama, their performance intruded upon, their script interrupted.

Time is stopped, suspended, but emotion is propelled headlong. Revulsion. Shock. All the immediate feeling the painter surely intended. The scene is magically static. But the emotion it produces tumbles and screams, bounces and sears.

Avi feels his fury surge. He knows his own fury well, and though it has been his continual adversary, it has also been his constant companion.

He has the knife. It is for self-defense, they’ve said, but he has it, and from the moment he has held it, it has felt comfortable, has felt right. And he is in his black ski mask, unrecognizable, worn to give them all the element of surprise and the aura of terror, worn to free them up for any action necessary, but the point is, no one knows who he is.

And here is a Nazi. A Nazi torturing an old man.

He sees the dagger sheathed in the Nazi’s uniform. Technically, it is knife for knife, but the dagger is nothing, he knows. Avi is faster, stronger, than the old Nazi.

History has cursed him. Now it offers him sly redemption.

History has abused and humiliated him. Now he can get even with it.

You’ve been a fuckup all your life. Here’s your chance at last.

All of it in a mere beat, a single pulse. Almost instant.

We’re commandos, they’d said quietly into the blackness, sprawled on the moving blankets they’d pulled off the furniture, arranged in the back of the truck. Repeating it into the dark, a half joke, but only half, a mantra to summon their own bravery. Taking leaks in the dark into the empty bottles of soda they’d already drunk.

At a certain point, Grady’s cell phone had gone out. They’d lost touch with Daniel. We’re out of cell range, Grady had told them. It means we’re getting close.

Yes, a commando. With a black mask and knife.

Crouched, sharklike, unthinking, a honed weapon in human trim . . .

And now he draws his knife and presses forward to a swift, silent justice . . .

To reach its blade across a generation. Across history. A small, quiet retribution across time.

“Do it now!” the naked man screams—all his suffering of the past hours, the past night, rolled, apparently, into a single note of retaliation.

As Avi draws back his knife, the Nazi officer starts to recite it softly.

Maybe he means it to be too soft to hear.

Avi will wonder about that, in rooming houses, on loading docks to come. He will reflect on it, sitting alone in bars, stretched out on benches in closed city parks at night, staring up at the stars.