Moving Day: A Thriller (36 page)

Because it will seem so unlikely to him, ruminating on it years from now, that he—who never listens, never hears, who his whole life has been accused of paying no attention—should hear it. Oh, it will eventually make at least some sense to him: to experience at that intense moment a hyperalertness, a heightened receptivity of the five senses, that a mammal—a man, in this case—discovers access to, on decisive, life-and-death occasions. He will learn eventually that it is an effect well documented by those in certain lines of work—mercenaries, rescue workers, emergency personnel, Special Forces soldiers in close combat. Human beings in extreme situations.

But the question will remain. Did the old man in the uniform intend him to hear it? Or intend him not to? He will never know.

But Avi does hear it.

“Shema yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad.”
Little more than a whisper.

And Avi looks into the uniformed Nazi’s eyes—black, liquid, floating, warm, he will reflect. As he will remember the uniformed Nazi looking back into his own eyes, isolated and exposed in his black ski mask.

He has never practiced his own religion. In truth knows little about it. He knows his own rage at what it has cost him, knows its ultimate cost to two generations of his family and therefore to his life. But the actual religion itself has played no role in his upbringing. His own life has been entirely secular, nonobservant. Taken up with arguments with neighbors and bosses, fights with
landlords and lovers, with recklessness and insolence, with the difficulties of living.

But though he knows nothing of his own religion, he does know that.

It is the prayer of Jews at the moment of death. A declaration of faith at the moment of expiring.

Tears well up. Tears he didn’t think he possessed after all that has happened to him, after the tangle and tumble and harshness of his life. Tears that run from those black exposed eyes down his cheeks, beneath the black ski mask.

Thank God he knows that stupid fucking prayer.

He feels his right hand shudder for a moment, involuntarily. The hand holding the knife. An uncontrollable physical shudder, from somewhere beyond him, a shudder sent from the past. A shudder of consolation and retribution, of righteousness and evil, rolled into one.

He straightens. Breathes deep once. Pivots. Steps toward the naked man taped to the chair.

The rest of his crew are still occupied outside. He is fully aware of the figures on the floor, as he is somehow aware that they are of no consequence.

No one will see except the two of them: the Survivor wearing the Nazi uniform, and the naked Nazi whose uniform it is.

You are the people of darkness. We are the people of the light. The ugly children of Satan, the chosen children of Adam . . .

He holds the knife to the naked man’s throat.

He looks at the Survivor.

Who looks back at him, and turns away . . .

To some other place, some other world.

With a single, clean, fluid stroke, Avi slashes the naked man’s throat.

When the overhead door had opened and the light had flooded in and Stanislaw Shmuel Pecoskowitz had turned to see the charging, black-hooded figure, he had known it was the devil’s messenger. An angry God’s emissary. His escort to hell, here at last. He’d been expecting this, in some form or another, all his life, and he stood fascinated, momentarily transfixed.

He had discovered he could not do it. Could not, would not, go through with the Nazi games. He had every intention. He had started. Taken off an earlobe, held its softness in his fingers. He’d begun with that, knowing that it hardly hurt to lose an earlobe, caused relatively little pain, but it would have the requisite shock value, the desired effect, to hold it in front of the victim, as a starting point.
I guess you hear me now. I guess I have your ear now.
The shock of flesh: a little test for the victim, and the perpetrator, too.

And there, something had stopped him.

He doesn’t know what, exactly. He will never know. The Colonel’s terrified screams as he approached, which were after all only screams of anticipation? Maybe a sudden sense of futility, of uselessness, in holding that small piece of flesh? Or simply some sudden realness of events—some wave, some assault of actuality, of the here and now? The vivid realness of the past days and hours, after being so long without it.

Or simply his life, he will think later. Its comforts, its pleasures, its vistas, its minutenesses, its dailyness, its ironies, its tenor, its confusions, seeping into him steadily, inevitably, over the past sixty years. Its continual washing up against previous events like cool, clean water flowing over a hard rock. Smoothing the edges into a new shape, barely recognizable.

Or Rose. Maybe it was simply his Rose.

Whatever the reasons, he can’t do it. The fingernails, the toenails, the scarifications, any of it. Each time he approaches the naked Colonel, knife drawn, intent, he finds he cannot. Can’t, or won’t. (He knows he will never be able to sort out the difference, the relationship between the two.) Although the Colonel, permanently shivering with cold and fright, seems sure Peke will pull away each time holding another piece of him, Peke discovers that he can’t—but notices that he nevertheless retains his threat.

Anticipation. He knows its power. Thinking in some sense all his life that they would come for him at any moment. Living a lifetime with hot breath at the back of his neck.

Anticipation. The fear of what’s coming, which can be as terrifying, as effective, as what does eventually come.

Which is when it occurs to him. Something much simpler and more apt. Something that lets him move away from the Colonel, move back, makes any of his actions seem purposeful, pointed. Something that gives him the time, the reason to continue to wear the uniform. To experience, to understand the urge. And maybe to feel the lessening of its effects, of its aura, by familiarity with it, by the steady loss of its allure.

Something more satisfying. Perhaps by being more insidious.

“Dawn,” he says to the Colonel simply—a single word, leaning forward, serving it up on a pleasant little smile. “Dawn.”

No light penetrates the barn. And as dawn approaches, he can even throw a tarpaulin over the Colonel’s head. A sensory deprivation, so the Colonel will not know when dawn arrives. Can only . . . anticipate.

Precisely what the Colonel and the skinheads inflicted on Peke only hours before, as they had been marking time until Nick’s return, waiting for the appointed moment, the permission to unleash. The marking of time, the excruciating ticking of the clock, now turned neatly back on the Colonel.

“Dawn,” he repeats to the Colonel as he walks by him.

The implication clear. An appointment with mortality. A long military tradition of such appointments, thinks Peke in his uniform. And no one knows military tradition like the Colonel.

Dawn. Meaning night for you, Colonel. Eternal night.

Dawn. A beginning that means the end. An irony of the spheres. The misty meeting point of day and night.
You are the people of the darkness, and we are the people of the light.
Oh yes? Then we’ll meet in the middle, rendezvous at dawn, when it is something else—not day, not night, not darkness, not light, but both and neither, inextricably . . .

He secures the ties on the neo-Nazis. Climbs up and lies down in the catwalk loft. And mutters the word as if under his breath, as if with pleasurable anticipation, within earshot of the Colonel:

“Dawn.”

When we fulfill tradition.

Having no clear sense, of course, what dawn will actually bring.

And wishing—vaguely, uselessly—that dawn will bring some kind of dawn for him.

And through that strange, fractured night in the barn, up through roiling floodwaters of memory released by the night’s events and by the barn itself, it surfaced. It loomed up, rendered visible at last in the contrast provided by this reliving, the contrast between this time and that time, this barn and those barns, between now and then. A tiny darkness that had plagued him, inexorable but unnameable. The little black secret that had torn at him for more than sixty years, gnawed at him across a lifetime:

It was fun.

For a seven-year-old boy, pure exhilaration. No rules, no laws, no conventions, no boundaries, the rule only of stark feeling and brute impulse. A rawness, an impulsiveness of existence. Every morsel a feast. Every sip a coursing pleasure. Every moment pure excitement, an adrenaline thrill, a boy’s wild dream. Existence itself as a never-ending game.
Fun.
God, what fun! Induplicable. But how could you tell the stylish guests in a chandeliered room it was fun? How could you tell guests in a chandeliered room—or your sweet, smiling child in your lap, or your wife curled snug against you in bed—that it had been fun? That the violence, the passion, the surprise, the energy, had galloped through you every moment. How could you describe the rush of feeling—the exhilarating confusion, the wild pound of blood—when that old guard strolled beneath the underpass and you and Abel dropped the stone? Watching the old guard crumple instantly, silently, into a puddle of coat and backpack and boots and gun. A perfect hit. A stunned exhilaration coursing through your seven-year-old body. A shock of elation that a seven-year-old body isn’t built for. The suddenness of power, the momentary reversal of all your weakness and fear. Delivering a mortal blow from above. Godlike.

How could he explain that? Killing when there was no threat, killing for no reason. How that had been some of the best fun of all?

Abel had been shot the next day. Unceremoniously. No warning. An impulsive round fired by a frustrated sergeant, fed up with these ragamuffins, these trash-bin scavengers. A single bullet, while Abel’s wild young companion looked on.

There the fun had ended.

And the two events—the stone dropped from the bridge, his friend’s execution—had linked into perfect justice in the mind of a seven-year-old. Perfect justice, retribution swift and precise. The
truest evidence of Nazi power: to render justice in even the darkest forgotten corner, even to little boys. Oh, they were powerful. Oh, they were righteous. Oh, he longed for that power.

The simple psychology of the seven-year-old:
I want that. I want what they have
. But attached to what a seven-year-old should never have to attach it to. Should never have to know in a lifetime, much less live by hour to hour. Life. Death. Oh, to control life and death like that, in warm uniforms and shiny boots.

And then to drop the stone off the bridge—challenging, undermining, the very power you crave. In that victorious instant, to experience triumph yet suffer shame, and then a swift, godly seeming retribution—all packed together in a single drop of the stone. A stone dropped off a bridge. A universe falling into a void.

As he lies there in the dark barn, pondering those stark boyhood joys and their stark ending, the games come floating back to him. Not the Nazi games. Boys’ games. A world of games that ended only with the game of the stone. Games of aggression and dominion and camaraderie and trust and testing that boys play. With one twist. Playing them for real.
Go out in the woods and play. Go play, keep playing, don’t come back.
His mother’s final instruction. Her last words, with meaningful looks, to her dutiful son.
Go out in the woods and play and don’t come back.

But he disobeyed. Disobeyed his mother’s explicit instructions and went back. In a few days wound his way back, with a boy’s growing competence in the woods.

Entered stealthily from the backyard bramble. Moved cautiously around to the front of the stone farmhouse. Stepped up the familiar rough-hewn stone front steps to the stone-and-timber landing. Stepped over the shards of glass from the broken windows. Stepped in through the wide-open front door, its wooden panels smashed. Looked numbly at the casually burned interiors. Regarded the patterns of black char.

There was nothing there. The young boy understood. Everything of value had been taken. The paintings. The silver. The objects and possessions of his parents’ pride. He knew what those were. And saw they were gone. He experienced not disbelief at what had happened, so much as a wholesale evaporation of the idea of believing. He had entered a realm of dream, and he had the sense—even then, as a seven-year-old boy—that to some degree, he would never leave it.