Moving Day: A Thriller (37 page)

He walks, of course, down the dark hallway to his bedroom. He steps over the shattered lamp—the lamp in whose flickering light his mother once removed a deep splinter, freeing him suddenly from pain. He glides past a broken hallway table—the little round chestnut table where the family left each other notes and jokes and riddles. He runs his finger along the hallway wall as he always has, but this action from before does not restore anything from before, nor does it help to tether him to the ground. He is floating. He is disconnected from himself. Taking exactly the same steps that a little boy who once lived in this house took, but he is someone else, someone ancient, coming to look, temporarily retracing a little boy’s footsteps.

The bed is upended. The toys are scraped from the toy shelf in what is clearly a single, summary motion. The clothes have been taken in a single armful from the narrow closet and tossed onto the floor. He is surprised that they have found his little sanctuary at the end of the hall. He had always thought it was safely hidden, tucked away, forgotten even by his parents. It will occur to him later that they were only there looking for valuables—salable treasures that the clever, deceitful Jews might have hidden in a child’s room. He will understand later that such searching is why the bed’s mattress is so brutally punctured. But that is not what the seven-year-old boy thinks then, seeing all the mattress’s wounds. He thinks it is him they are looking for. Hoping to puncture him. Stabbing at his ghost.

His home is gone, his parents are gone, his toys are broken, his bed is upended. But those facts aren’t separate from one another. Home, mother, father, room, bed: it is all the same thing to a seven-year-old. All tendrils of security, of being, of one’s place in the world. Home, mother, father, toys, things: all hopelessly inextricable and intertwined, all lost together. Everything, gone. Everything in his life—except his life.

It happened early to them, he would later learn. His family was among the first. It was perhaps a local, specific vendetta—he would never know, of course. Yet his mother had anticipated it, had powers of intuition. Perhaps that was her legacy, his only inheritance: an intuition for survival.

He stood alone in the ruined, looted house. (His feral friends, a couple of years older, had hung back, afraid of ghosts or some kind of spooky contagion.) He felt life shift inside him as profoundly, as suddenly, as his life had externally changed. He can’t articulate—even to this day—precisely what that change was. But he felt it. Felt its rearrangement even physically.

Had he misunderstood? Had he played too long? Had he missed her call to come home?
Go out in the woods and play and don’t come back.
He had heard her say it, but he now doubted that was what she had said. It seemed impossible now, too unlikely, and yet the words rang in his head. And he had gone out in the woods and played the games so long that the games had become real.

Uniformed men. The empty house. It had happened to him before.

But he never saw the uniformed men. He never saw the truck they loaded. He never saw his parents again.

Gone, swept violently off the shelf of existence, packed up and carted off as if with their belongings, as if along with the valuables, with the items he was always instructed not to touch.

What is all this, really, here in the woods of Montana? Seeking
a second justice for Abel? Seeking a second justice for himself? Or merely, futilely, seeking a resolution that can never come?

In a moment, he knows what it is that has come charging into the barn.

No supernatural emissary. No divine escort.

It is simply the world. The world beyond the barn. The world as always. Here to save him. Here to imprison him again.

The Shema. The prayer by which they died. The prayer by which he lived.

B
ursting into the barn moments later, the blue-eyed, black-ski-masked leader drops his backpack of bottled water, flashlights, half-eaten sandwiches, Dramamine. He rips off the ski mask. Reaches deep into the backpack, pulls out a satellite phone, and dials.

“Got him,” says Grady. His familiar Irish lilt, in just those two words.

Never more sparkling or twinkling
, thinks Daniel on the other end.

“And he’s OK?” Daniel pleads, heart beating, breathing labored, back muscles like broad arcs of pain, they are so tense. “He’s OK?” Asking again, to be sure he’s been heard as the signal bounces across the sky, to be sure he can believe the response.

Grady looks around. Takes in the scene. Considers a moment. Sees now that they have some work to do. A few things to take care of. They will need a vehicle to get out. He sees immediately that the blood is fresh, and knows that Avi did it, and can tell by Avi’s silence and shrugging stance that Avi plans to say nothing, to imply—or say outright, if forced to say—that the man was dead already. Avi has upped the stakes, hasn’t he? It doesn’t surprise Grady. It doesn’t unnerve him. Grady is up to it. He welcomes it. All the better. But
he doesn’t mention any of this to Daniel. Nor does he mention the German uniform. Why confuse the moment?

“Yes,” says Grady, in his twinkling Irish lilt. “Yes, your old man’s OK.”

The local police, having received an anonymous and suspiciously well-informed tip, will two hours later find a black man and two white men arrayed in the dirt around the truck, their wrists and ankles bound with packing tape. They will find a barn filled with stolen goods. They will find blood on the barn floor but no figures to attach it to. They will reasonably suspect bodies somewhere on the compound, but how would they ever find them? One hundred fifty acres of Montana scrub. How could they even begin to search it?

For the next two years, they will field calls from insurance companies and small police departments across the country. Rich little enclaves that they never knew existed. They will be busy, so busy they will grow somewhat resentful, but that will be tempered by their reception as heroes, which they will find absurd and ironic, since they were simply responding to a phone call from someone with some kind of English accent whom they will never meet and never see. Their investigation into whoever made that call—which they can’t trace and therefore assume was a satellite phone—will go nowhere.

They will know immediately of the disappearance of three local skinheads, troublemakers they’d been watching anyway. One of the skinheads’ beat-up pickup trucks is gone. Maybe they drove it into the gorge. Maybe they’ve skipped town. Maybe there was some conflict between the skinheads and one of the local militias. Some white-supremacy dispute settled among themselves. That wouldn’t much surprise the local police. That wouldn’t surprise anyone. No
one will be too upset if they rid the world of each other. In any case, there is never much motivation to find them.

The empty handcuffs in the moving truck will always intrigue them. Not because of how whoever was in them got out of them. That was obvious. The crowbar must have been kept under the bench seat, and that must have done the job, though not without considerable pain. But what happened to whoever was in them. His name was Nick Pelletiere, according to the black man and the two white men. But what happened to him, they couldn’t say. Their own faces had been put into the dirt. They couldn’t see. They didn’t know. Probably wouldn’t ever know. Because if Nick escaped, the black one pointed out from his holding cell, he wasn’t about to contact any of his old crew anytime soon.

Wrists searing with pain, the left one broken, he thinks, stomach still knotted and burning from the blow, Nick trots, bent over, toward the woods. The pain rips through him, encases both hands, climbs up his forearms, shoots rampantly around his body.

His timing, though, is perfect. Through the truck’s rearview mirror, he watched the black-ski-masked leader heading into the barn, then saw the other black ski masks enter the barn a few moments later, probably called by the leader, at which point Nick—simmering in pain, pain so great he is fighting to stay conscious, but now with a chance, a chance—slipped down from the cab of the truck.

Now, he ducks into the woods. The foliage hides him momentarily. He has made it to the woods, knows the temporary safety of the tree line, where he stops for a moment to breathe and to assess.

He looks back. He sees it all. Everything. Everything he has, everything that’s his, in the middle distance behind him. The truck. The barn. The crummy house. The thousand objects inside them.
Everything is gone now. Everything has been suddenly taken from him. He hasn’t even got a wallet or a dollar of cash. Nothing. He has nothing. He is starting over. But he can do it. He will limp, tramp through the woods to the roadway. He will commandeer or sweet-talk his way into a ride. He will reach Freedom Café. He will make it. He will live.

Peke is standing outside the barn when he hears the barking suddenly intensify and sees the dogs’ noses jerk in their pen. Exhausted from the long night, he has been waiting out here, as instructed by Grady, who is in the barn with the others, attending to whatever it is that he doesn’t want Peke to see. So Peke has been watching the dogs, listening to them bark at him in frustration, in misery, still out of their reach. He has been vaguely pondering the dogs’ possible fates, for no matter how fearsome, they are innocent creatures, after all. And then the barking intensifies and their noses shift. Something—some movement, some smell detected by these highly tuned black machines—has triggered it. He remembers hearing the soldiers’ dogs in their pens. Learning to tell if they had heard you or not. If it was you they heard, or something else.