Moving Day: A Thriller (2 page)

“How long you lived here?” asks the black man, perhaps only politely, perhaps genuinely curious.

“The whole time,” says Peke, smiling, pleased at his own friendly wit, and the black man smiles back appreciatively.

At the truck, the foreman with the clipboard is supervising the loading. Surveying the space and the items, fitting things together ingeniously. He looks up, smiles at Peke, looks back to his work. You can see the man has a talent for it. And has been lucky enough to discover that talent. Peke has been lucky like that, too. It was at a desk, it was manufacturing, but the business grew, always steadily grew, and he was fortunate enough to be doing the right thing at the right time, and it gave him this house and this life.

Peke watches the man fitting, refitting, thinking ahead. A three-dimensional puzzle to solve. It probably isn’t a bad living, thinks Peke. He begins to compute in his head what the move is costing, times the number of people a crew might move in a week, minus the capital costs of the truck, minus the percentage you shared with the moving company, but still . . . you could raise a family decently. You could do fine.

He watches as they continue loading. Every item has its moment in the sunlight—in many cases for the first time in forty years—and then, in another moment, is wrapped snugly in blankets, like a precious child, and tucked into the truck. He watches until he can’t watch anymore, and he wanders out back to the patio, sits, and scans the
Times
, until at last they come and take the patio furniture, too.

Late in the afternoon, looking out the kitchen window, he sees the four of them pull from the truck and position two steel rails and then, with exquisite care, coax the old Mercedes SL convertible up into the truck. It feels almost ceremonial, because it is one of the final items.

And then they’re done. The foreman with the clipboard rings the doorbell. The other green-uniformed men are arrayed behind him, just as when they arrived.

“That’s it. You just initial it here, saying no damage was done to the floors or doorways.”

“And you’ve got the exact address?” Peke looking over his bifocals at them.

“Yessir, we do,” crisply. “And we stay in touch with our office as we go, so you can always check in with them.” The broadly built foreman drums his index finger on the clipboard as he reads through the shipping manifest once more, double-checking the sheaf of papers himself.

“Here’s your receipt,” he says, pulling the top, yellow copy off and handing it to Peke.

Following it with his hand for a handshake, and his quick, efficient grin. “See you at the other end,” he says with a smile. His eyebrows lift. “And, uh, you’re all set for tonight? With a place to stay?” Peke detects the note of concern. A sudden sliver of uncertainty. That since Peke confused which day, maybe he has also confused or even neglected his own sleeping arrangements.

Peke smiles. “Staying right here,” he says. The foreman looks puzzled, his concern deepening. “On an old mattress. With a candle. Same way we spent the first night in this house. With nothing but our name.” And now the movers presumably know what is packed in the big carton at the back of the garage that Peke instructed them to leave there.

The foreman with the clipboard nods, smiles with understanding. “Wow,” he says. He seems to be pausing, really thinking about it. “Huh. Well . . . enjoy it.”

Peke lights the candle. He positions the mattress. He builds a fire in the fireplace. The mattress, the candle, the fire. It was all they had when they moved in forty years before. (The house much smaller, simpler then, before they added and renovated and transformed it into the stately gray-shingled palace it is today.) They will re-create that night. Though not in all its details. He smiles. Not with all that youthful energy. But in effect, in feel, it is the same.

As he lies down next to her on the mattress, lowering himself carefully to the floor (the floor where he hasn’t been, it occurs to him, since he played with his infants years ago and since a back spasm one midnight a decade earlier), he can still remember so vividly how he lay down next to her on the mattress in this room in front of this fire forty years ago. What a strange moment—time disappearing, time upended. Forty years like a single day. A finger snap. A blink. He is seventy-two, she seventy, and though they tease each other about the new pills available, their affection now takes the place of their sex, but their sex was vivid enough that the memory satisfies.

They say little. They hold each other. Her flesh against him—after a half century of his male rumination and regard—is truly more familiar to him than his own. They fall asleep to the candle and the fire.

He gets up in the middle of the night to urinate, to empty his old man’s bladder. He walks through the silent house. The house is empty, couldn’t be more empty. The house is full, couldn’t be more full.

Each room echoes in its emptiness.

Echoes with memory.

In the morning, a short time after they awaken and dress, the doorbell rings.

Peke moves to the big, gracious door slowly, as slowly as he finds himself moving everywhere these days. Peke notices now, sees through the skylights, that outside it is an identically cloudless day to the day before, to moving day.

He opens the door, and standing there is a different foreman with a clipboard, another team of green-uniformed men, and another white truck.

They seem slightly, indefinably, less crisp than yesterday’s crew. He’s confused. “You . . . you were here yesterday.”

The clipboard man looks at him, with a mirroring expression of confusion. “Well, no, we weren’t, sir. You’re scheduled for today.” The man looks at his clipboard, then at Peke. It is precisely the same look that the short, broad foreman gave him yesterday, Peke sees. Like Peke is a little senile. Peke is put off by that. “Look, your guys were here yesterday,” he says more insistently. With irritation.

“Sir, these are our guys,” the man says with a matching insistence. “And they weren’t here yesterday.” The clipboard man looks past Peke into the gracious entrance hall and the living room behind it, and sees that they are both empty.

“Tell me I’m not seein’ what I’m seein’,” he says.

Police trace the receipt Peke was handed to a printing shop in Wheeling, West Virginia. The printing bill was paid with cash, and it leads no further. The flimsy yellow receipt is checked for fingerprints—fingerprints other than Peke’s. Peke can’t remember whether the man ever touched the receipt fully or not. The results come back. Apparently, the man did not.

“Usually, of course, the residents don’t stay in the house. They’re not so romantic,” says the detective. “So usually it’s only discovered a week later. When you’re waiting for your belongings. And they never come. And who knows where these people are a week later.”

Stanley and Rose Peke have a lifetime of memories from the big house in Westchester.

And nothing else.

T
he white truck moves sleekly along I-80.

They’ll reach Montana in less than forty-eight hours.

America
, thinks Nick.
What a place.
No wonder the Russian mobsters, the Cuban sea scum, the crazy Dominicans, the bug-eyed Syrians, the slopes and sand niggers . . . no wonder they all want in. Well, this is something they can’t pull off, at least. This is a little tricky for them. Higher up the crime chain. The truck. The smiling, uniformed crew. This is a niche.