Moving Day: A Thriller (8 page)

These characters make him nervous. So do the local skinheads, who are louder and more boisterous and have at best a loose, looping connection to any philosophy or point of view. But he recognizes this is where he belongs. He bought his Dobermans from a skinhead who raises and trains them out of his trailer. This is the home of lawlessness. It’s where lawlessness is the unofficial law. This is what’s happened to the Wild West, he supposes. This is where it’s gone. So this is where he’s gone with it.

P
eke picks up the new key from Earl, exchanges a few sunny pleasantries, and is led personally by Earl to the lovely red-carpeted foyer that is the entrance to the safe-deposit box vault room. Here Earl leaves him with a deferential smile. The VIP treatment, small-town version. Relaxed. Informal.

Peke walks straight to the box—Earl has looked up what number it is, but Peke thinks he might have remembered anyway by his sense of its position on the far wall. Damn it. So why did he bother to record it in his bottom desk drawer?

Well, this is all precautionary, so far-fetched anyway. The thief probably won’t have the cleverness for this. Or might have more cleverness than this and stay away.

But a crow is drawn to sparkle—some instinct in Peke suspects such a bird, such a flight.

Peke opens the lock, pulls out the drawer.

Some bearer bonds, old stock certificates, a copy of a superseded will. He’s forgotten about half this stuff. And nestled among the papers, clumped and curled, several pieces of jewelry too heavy and impractical and gaudy to wear.

What should he leave in here, as a lure? Only a little of it? Then
the thief might suspect that Peke—or somebody—was on to him, and might withdraw. Might not take the bait.

Or does Peke risk leaving all of it, letting the thief feel overwhelmed by his good fortune, letting him try to stuff his pockets? Unfortunately, the more that is in the metal box—the more camouflage, the more distraction—the better the chance that what he’s thinking will work. It’s best, unfortunately, to leave it all.

He knows at least this about the thief: the thief will take it all. Whatever is in there. A thief who cleans out a home down to its bare walls, down to its dust, is a thief who empties out a safe-deposit box.

So Peke removes, for now, only the gaudy gold watch. Puts it in his pocket. Closes the drawer. Feels nothing in particular, he notices, about the contents. About the objects. He is onto something bigger now.

Itzhak had been a jeweler’s apprentice when the war began. Here in town, he has a little local store. He’s a different nationality from Peke. A very different background, a very different person. But they are nevertheless bound. As far as Peke knows, since Myra Goldtharp’s passing, they are the only two survivors in town. The survivors’ club. Exclusive. Lifetime membership. The dues are high.

Itzhak has had the little store for fifty years. It says so in the window. He has not become an industrialist or a philanthropist. But he has had a success. He has had a life.

Peke stands in the cool shop, amid the glass display cases lined with dramatically lit objects. Bowls and vases of porcelain and cut glass. Necklaces and bracelets and rings, mantel clocks and heirloom watches.

As if somehow knowing, as if without even being informed by the shopgirl or by his daughter, Itzhak emerges from the back.

Seeing each other inevitably summons the past for both of them. It’s all they can mean to each other. Peke lived in the fancy section. Itzhak has his store and lives very simply, Peke knows. They are different stories from the same war. A war with fewer and fewer stories.

“I’m sorry to hear,” says Itzhak. His accent still prominent after all these years here, while Peke’s is almost gone.

“Thank you.”

If anyone knows, Itzhak knows. How it is everything, a thing like this. And how at the same time, it is nothing.

“What brings you?” Itzhak says.

“What else? I have a jewelry job for you.” He hears a slight return of his own accent, as if reengaged by Itzhak’s. The slight harshness, the slight clipped challenge in his words. He takes out the gold watch. “My watch.”

“What is it?”

“Can I show you in back?” Peke says. Clearly meaning privately.

Itzhak nods, leads him.

It is a dark, cramped little alley of a room. Broken clock faces; springs and gears and coils; dusty, chaotic, untended, particularly compared with the rest of the neat little shop. Time indeed seems stopped here. A fairy-tale workshop out of another era, and Peke can feel that it is Itzhak’s alone—that the pretty shopgirl and Itzhak’s daughter come only to the doorway, never step in, as if fearing they will be lost in time.

Itzhak frowns, looking at the watch. “But it seems to be working.”

Peke takes a small, clear, unopened package from his jacket pocket. “But not with this.”

Itzhak squints at the no-nonsense black lettering on the small, clear packaging. Beneath the plastic is a small sensor, half the diameter of a dime, about as thin.

Peke ordered it from the electronics catalog. He dialed the 800 number and spoke to the pleasant, midwestern woman operator.

A section of the catalog features security devices. Tiny cameras. Tracking and homing devices. Antibugging equipment. Seeing-through-walls surveillance. He’s never gone in for any of these devices. He has insurance. It’s America. He has felt safe, and with the devices, he would not have felt as safe.

“I want you to put that into the watch. Can you do that?”

Itzhak looks and nods with barely a delay.

“How long will the sensor run?”

Itzhak’s low, inflectionless voice. The accent so thick it’s slurry. “If I attach it to the watchworks, it should run when the watch does. But who’s to say, exactly? It’s a little bit experimental, yes?”

Itzhak opens the tiny package.

While Peke, standing next to him, simultaneously opens the somewhat larger package that came with it. An antenna on a small black box. Like a palm-size transistor radio.

As he watches Itzhak work, pushing and poking at different angles with the tiny jeweler’s tools, he can see the little green row of numbers on Itzhak’s inner forearm. Smudged, but still there. You can have them removed nowadays, easily, but what would be the point now for Itzhak? He may want to look at the numbers, be aware of them. Peke has no numbers. Escaped the numbers. Had an entirely different experience. His survival bears no physical evidence like Itzhak’s. His survival is invisible.

Peke thinks how astonishing it is that Itzhak can come here and carry on the same craft in the same way—a world and a half century away. Still a jeweler. Picking up where he left off. Whereas Peke has had to remake himself entirely. Become a new person. Peke from
Pecoskowitz. The world has inverted, turned inside out, ignited within the crucible of history and emerged transformed and unrecognizable, and yet Itzhak is still standing at his jeweler’s table. How is that possible?

He watches Itzhak work, and it takes only a minute, but in an idle, waiting minute a lot of thinking can get done.

Itzhak inevitably makes Peke consider his own assimilation. An assimilated American Jew. An identity, he thinks resentfully, as profoundly and unfairly reductive as any previous European one. Assimilating completely, into the dreams, the values, the spirit of the place, losing himself in it, abandoning himself to the new as much as Itzhak does not.

Once Itzhak is done with the minute work, Peke switches on the black, palm-size device to test it.

There is immediately a consistent little beep. The tiny setup screen flashes
GPS—GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM
for a quick moment, before a grid of coordinates appears. He and Itzhak look at each other.

No, a thief is unlikely to equate an old man like Peke, an old Jew like Pecoskowitz, with the vanguard in electronic surveillance. But Peke is himself a product of the unpredictable, a subject of the incongruent, and he therefore knows its power.

“What do I owe you?”

Itzhak slaps away the question like an annoying insect buzzing around his head. You owe me nothing.

And Itzhak never asks why. Because, Peke knows, he can perhaps imagine. And something they both know—something that informs both of their existences so deeply that they never need speak of it, and never would: anything now is inconsequential, is mere coda, to before.

“I’ll just set the time . . . ,” says Itzhak, the final step, indicating he’s finished.

“No,” instructs Peke sharply. “Leave the time wrong. And don’t wind it any more. I want it to run down.”

Itzhak leaves the hands alone, regards the rare watch another moment, before passing it wordlessly back to Peke.

Peke knows that the tiny device represents much more to him than a chance to find this thief. He has known that since the moment he saw it in the electronics catalog, when he felt it immediately sidling up to his soul.

Global positioning. It’s symbolic of being found.

It’s a powerful talisman, an electronic amulet, for one who was once so lost. One who was once a seven-year-old waif, a child wandering the earth . . .

Peke feels a stirring in himself—a momentary uplift—a brief, blind optimism that the world actually progresses, that man’s knowledge, his science, his efforts, make life better, make it good . . .

Now, you could be located anywhere on that earth’s surface . . . Now, no one is lost . . .

A watch
, thinks Peke.
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
Every moment relentlessly marked. And with this special watch, marked in time and space.

He still recognizes how unlikely the scenario is. Absurd, far-fetched. This is something he’s doing merely for himself, to fashion some response, to be doing
something
in preparation, in defense. And the watch is appropriate for that, too, he realizes. Its slow ticking. Its limitless patience. Its countdown quality. All appropriate to a rendezvous. One that will probably never come.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.