Moving Day: A Thriller (4 page)

In another couple of minutes, after savoring last tokes of tobacco, they are all back in the truck cab, out the gate, hunched shoulder to hunched shoulder, a military night operation. The truck painting is probably unnecessary, but Nick doesn’t discount its symbolic value—demonstrating to the crew the importance of being careful. To protect their franchise. In that alone, the effort might be worth it. If trouble ever comes, Nick knows, it will more than likely arise from some unforeseen incompetence of LaFarge, Chiv, or Al.

While the painting may be unnecessary, it’s almost traditional by now, a ritual part of the trip. Like a favorite roadside stop on a family outing. At a certain point you just do it because everybody expects it. It’s simply part of the journey.

He looks at them—Chiv, LaFarge, Al—in the rearview mirror. Some outing. Some family.

Pulling back out onto I-80. Heading west.

P
eke still has the Mercedes sedan. He still has money in the market and in the bank. He still has his wife. He still has his kids, and their futures, and their quick, easy smiles and comfort in the world, and his grandchildren with their bright eyes and adorable faces. He still has what he was wearing the day before.

“Oh, Daddy,” his daughter Anne says on hearing.

The others, Daniel and Sarah—she from some far-flung terminus of modern life, he in an office Peke can picture precisely, each of them reduced to a slight, tinny voice over the wire—simply listen, stunned, offering suggestions hollowly, knowing their ever-competent father already has it as well in hand as anyone could. He is wordlessly proud that none of his three children indicates any thought of selfishness—of heirlooms gone, of their rightful inheritance of expensive artwork looted. They seem to be concerned primarily and genuinely with the effect on their parents, and with nothing beyond that.

All three have been living their own lives for years now, as Peke and his wife have always hoped and wished for them. Their parents’ life is remote to them. They all accept that at this moment, oddly, there is nothing more for them to do.

Rose’s reaction, though wordless, is the most pronounced. This was her home, her roost, as it is so often a wife’s more than a husband’s. She has gone silent. Has drawn in. She says nothing because there is nothing to say. She seems to feel nothing, because, he knows, there is too much for her to feel. She seems to be in a kind of limbo—fully recognizing the fact but not yet accepting it, functioning without feeling. It seems that she wants no discussion of the event—no grieving, no wistful philosophy, no recrimination or assignment of blame. He has always thought of her as highly resilient, but in truth her resilience has never been tested. For Rose, it seems the event is simply still too close. In truth, he can’t tell how she will handle it, because she is not handling it yet.

A further conversation with the police brings little else. Peke learns (one of those little facts that he’s sure he will now know forever) that there are 246,000 semi tractor-trailers on the American road at any given time, and to most Americans, of course, apart from their signage, the vehicles are indistinguishable from one another. This sleek white one is likely not so sleekly white anymore, says the detective.

“I mean, can you describe the truck to us at all? Any markings? Any distinguishing features?” the detective asks, his weariness undisguised, as if knowing already that Peke cannot. As if knowing already that Peke barely even looked at or considered the truck. “That’s the beauty of the scam,” says the officer, with a thin smile that hovers between admiration and resignation, which Peke resents.

Stanley Peke has been shrewdly alert all his life. His shrewdness, his alertness, have indeed brought him his life. And for a moment, he was stupid. And one stupid moment, it seems, one lax moment, wipes out all the shrewdness of a lifetime.

For days, he’s furious. He inhabits the fury, sleeps with it, wakes with it, lies in bed with it, waiting for it to burn itself out enough for him to sleep. He’s ready to get into the Mercedes and spend the
rest of his years, if it takes that, driving around the continental United States, looking for them. Looking for the truck. Looking for wherever they took it. He’ll find it, too. That is the intensity of his rage. Irrational. Fanciful. Consuming.

The slick deception returns to him in individual elements. The foreman’s concerned look. Peke had thought it was concern about his senility. Yes—checking, assuring, that Peke was senile and gullible enough.
And, uh, you’re all set for tonight? With a place to stay?
—the seemingly concerned questions had been only the thief noting Peke’s schedule and plans.
Staying right here? Wow. Huh. Well, enjoy it.
The foreman-thief calculating that it gave him just one night’s head start until the scam was discovered, but that was plenty, more than enough.
No, sir, it’s today. The twenty-fourth.
Earnestly checking the clipboard. Employing the authority of the written word. Peke relives every moment of precisely how it was done. He witnesses again every one of those smiles. Inauthentic smiles, he’d correctly sensed. But he’d thought it was only company policy, company edict, that was behind their inauthenticity. And that general cheerfulness? Perhaps the one thing that was real. The cheerful realization that their slick trick was going to work. Work again, no doubt—as practiced, as polished, as it seemed to be. The rage wells up in him again.

Though another line of thought is always alongside that rage, on a parallel, logical track:
It’s only our things. We have plenty of money. We can live simply. What have we really lost? We don’t possess our memories physically, after all, and those are certainly worth more than the rest of it, and we still have those. We have reached the stage of life where we want—need—to simplify our lives. Doesn’t this do just that? Force it, accelerate it, but simplify nonetheless?

Of course, he knows that this criminal—this thief—probably counts on exactly that attitude. (Rage needs focus, and the focus of his rage has narrowed to the quick-grinning, too-earnest foreman,
presumably the ringleader.) Peke can imagine that the man preys exclusively on the elderly. It’s so easy, and the elderly never press the police very hard; the elderly respect the system. Accept, resign themselves to the loss, collect the insurance. Remind themselves that they haven’t been physically injured or even threatened. This criminal, this thief, probably counts on all that, and it works, and that infuriates Peke anew. Fans the flame.

And something else. Something else tucked into his rage and frustration that he knows he can’t separate out. An extra texture to the crime, to his victimization, that he pushes away, that he is not yet ready to confront.
The uniformed men. The empty house.
His rage, he knows, covers it over and consumes it, for now. A rage that he knows is beyond this event. A rage that is visceral and primal.
The uniformed men. The empty house.

Their plan had been to drive across the country, he and Rose. Take it slow. See America. Visit friends along the way whom they hadn’t seen in years. Neither had ever driven across America. They were classic coastal dwellers, and they wished to finally erase their myopic coastal arrogance. Their clothes for the trip were packed into two suitcases in the Mercedes trunk.

They delay their departure while they sort things out. He gets them a room at a pretty little inn in town where they always wanted but never had occasion to stay. He makes appointments with the insurance adjusters, talks to his lawyer, files the first claims, begins to order and gather the few truly necessary replacement documents—the most recent bank and brokerage statements, another copy of the title to their new Santa Barbara home. He thinks about the contents of his desk drawers. Papers. Insurance policies. Monthly bank and brokerage statements. Stock buy and sell slips.
Nothing irreplaceable, he thinks. In truth, there aren’t so many truly essential documents. Some phone calls, some explanations, and it will all be reissued. The wake of the disaster is more orderly and less stressful than he would have thought, and he can’t help but think that is something the thief relies on as well.

Waiting at the house to meet with the two insurance adjusters, to take them step by step through the events, as they politely but insistently requested that he do, Peke is surprised to find the life of the house continuing in his absence. The grounds attended to, per the closing contract. (The new owners are returning from a five-year posting in Asia and will not take occupancy for another month.) He notices that mail keeps coming. Not the first-class mail, which is being forwarded, but everything else. The junk mail. Flyers, solicitations, credit card offers,
TO CURRENT RESIDENT.
And all the catalogs. Catalogs of physical objects. Of items, of things. A pictorial index of the known domestic universe. Beds and tables and chairs and hassocks and ottomans and lamps, candies and chocolates, tools and toys and boats. As if the Fates know what has just occurred and have dispatched catalogs filled with convenient and immediate replacements. Curtains and clothes and bathroom towels and linens and robes. What convenient temptation, and how perfectly timed. American commerce at its finest and most clever. He can simply reorder his existence. Dial 800, speak to flat-toned, pleasant Midwesterners, and reorder his life.

Dreams delivered to your doorstep. Consummately American, these catalogs, he’d always felt. The object as imagery, imagery as object, the distinction utterly blurred. Here was all any immigrant ever needed to see. Catalogs of objects, still entering his former wooden fortress of objects, sliding in deftly under the door, Trojan horse–like, glossy and perfect-bound.

He thumbs idly through an electronics catalog filled with gadgetry, trying to recall what purchase, if any, would have brought a
catalog like this into the house. Maybe the security system; he thinks about the house’s protection, its elaborate, multizoned alarm system, which he and Rose installed and then steadfastly kept unarmed. But it would have made no difference on the day of the move, Peke knows, when all the doors were thrown open, as it happened, welcoming the thieves, letting them shop—spend the day shopping, as it were.

He wanders around. The house is identically empty to their first and last night in it. But of course, that emptiness now has a completely different quality. The same wide-planked maple and cherry floors. The same panoramas of woodland beyond the windows. The same loved evergreens and deciduous trees and prize plantings doted on individually through the seasons like children. But a new memory now lies atop all the others, smothering them. The memory of plunder, of loss. Of the uniformed men’s earnest and smiling faces. Smiling like carnival barkers.

The uniformed men. The empty house
. The images push at him resiliently. He tamps them down, focuses intently on the here and now.

His desk drawer. His papers. He tries to picture them. Is he forgetting anything? That depends, he realizes, on whether he has truly grown forgetful. Perhaps in his new forgetfulness he’ll even forget about this insult. Or perhaps this event will stir him from his forgetfulness. His lack of material concern, of material attentiveness, could hurt him now, particularly with the insurance companies. He and Rose could have itemized the things in the house, like the insurance companies always suggest. His wife might very well recall more than he, though he has begun to see that she isn’t necessarily much better at remembering. And if he can see that in her, then isn’t that a good sign about his own alertness?

His lack of materialism. Not keeping account. It concerns him as he waits for the adjusters. But only a little.

Is he forgetting anything? He doesn’t think so. He hasn’t had to truly worry about anything in so long.

The fact is, he’s been good at forgetting. And he knows that while some of his forgetting is certainly biological, an inevitable consequence of aging, he also knows that some of it is another sort of forgetting. A habit, a practice of forgetting. Purposeful and protective and useful. Forgetting as healing, as balm. Forgetting ancient events that this event seems nonetheless determined to call up. He has never needed to distinguish between the two kinds of forgetting—the natural and the adaptive. They have contributed to each other, flowed into each other easily. He senses—fears—that that is about to change.