Moving Day: A Thriller (6 page)

The welcome, sudden silence after the day-and-night drone of the engine. The fresh air after the close, musty stench of the truck’s cab. The immense, star-soaked Montana night sky after the frustrating clots of traffic, the glaring illumination of highways and cities. Nick watches as Chiv, LaFarge, and Al go, wordlessly, familiarly, straight toward the farmhouse. He stands outside a moment, listening, while they crank up the spectacular stereo in the crummy, beat-up living room and splinter the stillness. Chairs and couches you can barely
stomach sitting in. They are lighting up and stretching back. Cigarettes. Marijuana. Someone will start a midnight spaghetti dinner.

In a few minutes, Nick walks in with a carton under his arm. He goes past the mild celebration, the ritual winding-down, into his office. Flips on the office lights, closes the door behind him.

The Dell computer sitting on the Biedermeier table. The elegant Knoll office chair.

Rows of antiques catalogs. Rows of reference books. American eighteenth-century furniture. Ming dynasty porcelain. Postimpressionist paintings. All the Sotheby’s and Christie’s collection announcements, delivered biweekly to a post office box. He’s fairly expert at this point. He laughs sometimes that it’s the office of a fag. That he’s a street tough in a fag business. Or maybe a fag in a street tough’s business. He stands outside easy categories. In their blurry margins. That’s partly why he remains a loner. But remaining a loner is part of his success, he knows.

The guys will unload in the morning. No rush. He’ll begin to contact buyers. And only eventually—slowly—to fence. First store everything for a while, in case some police department does initially check with known fences, which is all they can practically do.

He will wait until the little bits of his trail go fairly cool, if not icy cold.

He’s brought in with him from the truck the carton containing the old man’s desk drawer contents. At the house, Nick personally packed the contents of Peke’s desk while taking mental notes.

He begins now to go through it more carefully, systematically. You never know what you’ll find. Old stock certificates. Savings bonds. Safe-deposit box keys. He always starts with the desk contents. You never know.

Within minutes, he’s come across a decorative little cardboard box—about two inches square, must have held cuff links or something. He opens the box, and there it is: a safe-deposit box key. Labeled with the box number, for Christ’s sake. What a world these people live in. They know their own forgetfulness. They think they’re invulnerable.

Little town like that. Maybe two, three local banks at most. So this presents an opportunity, of course. To go back for the contents. Unless the old man has already emptied it out. If he’s alert enough. Sometimes the shock of an event like this stirs them to alertness. Stirs them at least momentarily out of the lethargy and complacency they’ve been living in. But an event like this can also confuse them, paralyze them. If the old man realizes and changes the lock? There’s a chance of that. But there’s also a chance—a good chance—he won’t even think of it. These rich old people. He’s learned a lot about them, doing this. And one thing he’s learned, a lesson initially hard for him to take in, hard for him to accept, given the material meagerness, the tatters and scraps, of his own grim upbringing: a lot of them, they can’t even keep track of what they own.

Nick’s got Peke’s signature in triplicate on the stack of bogus transportation documents. In the desk drawer, he’s got plenty of Peke’s IDs—Social Security card, passport, etc. If it were a big institution, a big city bank, he would have someone practice forging the signature, to match the signature card on file, which would get them into the safe-deposit box vault room. But this is a small town. Probably a small, old-fashioned, personal bank. They might know Peke personally. They might even be watching for Peke’s name. In which case Nick’s got another idea. A deft, beautiful idea.

It’s safer, of course, not to go back. Not to risk it. But there’s something in this old man. Something in the man’s proud posture, his swollen chest. Some arrogance, some strength, something unshakable, that rubs at Nick. That rubbed at him a little all that
moving day. That’s rubbed at him a little the whole trip here. The mild, unplaceable European accent. As if the old man doesn’t belong in America and has come here and taken Nick’s things. As if, if he hadn’t come here, these would be Nick’s things. As if this is a little Manichaean universe of just the two of them, and he has taken up Nick’s rightful possession of it and right place in it.

He holds up the old key. Brass, faded, and dull. Cut with the old-style round fob. Check the oldest bank. The first bank. They’d lived in that town forty years, didn’t he hear the old man say, and undoubtedly people like that don’t change banks a lot. He may have forgotten entirely about the safe-deposit box. After all, here’s the key in the corner of a drawer. Likely it’s worth the risk, worth the effort. The old man’s memory is shaky. And if he changes the lock, so be it.

This one, Nick is going to hit again. Wipe out completely. Pluck the last feathers of the proud peacock.

He continues carefully through the carton of desk drawer contents, but it’s like staying down in the mine when you’ve already had a strike. In his head, Nick is already heading back East.

T
he adjusters gone, Peke closes the door of their home for the final time in forty years, slips the key for the last time into the lock, and at that moment—only then—thinks of the other key. The key in the corner of his desk drawer. The key to their safe-deposit box.

His heart clutches a little. He can picture it in the very corner of the right desk drawer, under the papers. He can picture it there, in its little box. Shiny, a brass invitation . . .

How can he have forgotten? But the answer is obvious. Because he is seventy-two. Because what’s in the safe-deposit box hasn’t been thought about by either of them for years. Because the annual charge for the box is simply deducted from one of the monthly bank statements that he barely checks anyway.

In a moment, though, he is calm again. Not alarmed. It’s easy enough for Peke to have the box’s lock changed. It’s late afternoon; the bank is closed now. He can take care of it first thing in the morning. It seems unlikely that the thief will even come across the key.

The prudent thing will be to change the lock. The safe thing.

Peke thinks for a moment about this.

If he did find the key, would a creature like this thief actually return for the items in the safe-deposit box? It seems preposterous. Clearly, the thief’s scam calls for planning and care, and to come back to the scene of the crime would be outside the plan, unnecessarily risky. Nevertheless, the key is there, and Peke can’t remember for sure, but he has the nagging sense that he actually Scotch-taped the box number to the key at some point, years ago, so that he wouldn’t forget it. There are only a couple of main banks in town, so it isn’t out of the question that the thief could locate the safe-deposit box.

Peke sits for the last time on the front steps of his former home. He forces himself to watch that day—moving day—again, carefully, in his mind’s eye. To listen again. To observe again the care, the thoroughness, the precision of the operation. All of which he appreciated as he watched them work. All of which now have a different meaning, now seen in a different light. The calculation. The mechanical coldness of the short, broad man’s smile.

Yes. The thoroughness, the completeness, seem somehow, for this man, part of the point. Maybe for this man it is a necessary annihilation. Maybe it’s merely the perverse satisfaction of a job well done. He remembers men like that. He remembers that particular character trait, having observed it a long time ago.

Thoroughness, completeness. Admirable qualities in your employees, your colleagues—except when those qualities stand for something else, hostile and unresolved. Something more than thoroughness and completeness. Some effort to prove something, to combat some inner messiness, to deny some inner sense of incompletion. Yes, Peke could see how a man like this might actually return. Come back to finish the job.

To be sure, the odds are vastly against it, but just to be safe, change the lock. That is what any cautious, just-victimized, seventy-two-year-old man would do.

He has brought the stack of catalogs outside with him. He was going to take them back to the inn, to Rose, not knowing what else to do with them, exactly. He had set them down on the flagstone step next to him, while he fiddled with locking the door. Now, sitting on the cool steps of the flagstone landing, he begins to thumb through the stack, until he reaches the electronics catalog once again. He opens it, thumbs through, then begins to squint closely . . .

His seventy-two-year-old heart ticks a little faster.

And in counterpoint to his quickened heartbeat, Peke feels a momentary calm. The day seems suddenly supernally quiet, the wind and birds caught in a momentary pause, as he squints at the electronics catalog—its communication and information gadgetry, its security devices, its pages of protective paranoia—in the fading afternoon light . . .

The Pekes’ safe-deposit box is at a local bank called First County. It’s a small town. Peke knows the bank president from local charity functions. “Earl? Stan Peke.”

“Yes, Stan, hello.” Then a shift in tone. The formal, appropriate condolence, and within it, an authentic one, too. “So sorry to hear what happened, Stan. Jesus. What a world.”
So the news has made its way around
, thinks Peke.
Well, really, how could it not?

“Well, thank you. I appreciate that.” His slow, authoritative tones. People always seemed to believe him. To accept his authority. To defer. That was good. A small usefulness of his past in the present. There was good reason to believe him. “Listen, the reason I’m calling. We’ve got a safe-deposit box over there at First County. And the key . . .”

“You’ve lost your key,” Earl cuts in, hearing the first note of a familiar refrain. “You need a new one . . .” Earl’s spry, neighborly eagerness to be helpful.

“The key was in my desk,” Peke explains, “and everything in the desk was stolen . . .”

“Oh, OK, then. You need a new box
and
key. Just to be safe. You never know these days. I’ll waive all the usual ID requirements for you; I’ll see to that, you know, in light of what happened, and not having your documentation, I’m guessing . . .”

Peke goes a little slower now. Says it pleasantly, but as though he doesn’t plan to say it again. “Yes, I’d like another key. That’d be nice of you, Earl.” Now very slowly. “But no, see, I want to keep the same safe-deposit box.”

“But . . .”

“I still want the stolen key to work.”

“But . . . they could get into it,” Earl says bluntly, not understanding. He sounds disturbed, distraught, as if it could be his own loss. “They could go through your effects, Stan, and they could figure out where that key goes. It’s a long shot, but they could. I’m assuming you wrote down the number of the box somewhere—most people do—and isn’t it possible they could come across that?” The fantasy of the thief’s return, growing in the cautious banker, gaining in vividness, an increasing momentum of colorful alarm. “Don’t you see, Stan, if they know what box it is, and if one of them can learn to copy your signature and uses your desk contents to put together some ID . . .” He calms down a degree. “I guess I could alert the employees to anyone using your name. But that’s hardly foolproof or secure, Stan . . . I don’t know.” He pauses. “Christ, we’re a local bank. Can’t we just change the box?” Peke can tell that Earl is concerned Peke doesn’t quite understand the nature of the danger. That Peke’s not putting two and two together. Indicating
Earl’s doubt about Peke’s mental capacity. Probably now guessing at his long-standing customer’s age.
Early seventies? So he could be a little senile, a little irrational.
Not unlike the thief, Peke realizes, with his false concern that the Pekes had a place to sleep that night. Only cleverly gathering the information.