Midnite Moving Co

At five minutes to two it rang, making both of them jump.  The silence had long since worn off; George was demonstrating his skill at making theremin-like music by squeezing his hands together. Jesse suspected trickery and could not determine exactly what the fraud was or how it might be executed, so after his initial start, he sighed in relief that they finally had a client.

“Where are you? He’s on his way from the airport!” George held the phone away from his ear. Jesse had no trouble hearing her.

With composed courtesy, George said, “Fearing some temporary communication trouble, Madam, we came across the bridge and are minutes from your house. Madam, we need your address.”

Silence. Only George heard her when she said, “I asked the governess to provide it. I’m so sorry for the misunderstanding.” She provided an address, which was, as promised, mere minutes away, and they rolled out.

Jesse whistled as he got out of the truck.  They’d never had such good access to a move site before; he estimated the turnaround was large enough for three tractor trailers and maybe thirty cars. Jesse did not get to bask for long. He and George were wordlessly greeted as the door was opened by a perfectly coiffed, groomed and uniformed maid whose fixed smile woke Jesse’s PTSD with a vicious blow.

This was no one who could help him or protect him. This was the face of someone terrified of someone else, and willing to watch you drown to stand on shore.

She led them into a smallish, comfortable room off the entranceway.

Jesse remained standing to make a show of respect and also to stay alert, as he had no intention of moving his gaze from the door. He managed breathing exercises while he did it. You’re a superstar. On the inhale! Silent affirmations please. On the exhale!

“What’s with you,” George muttered.  He was running a finger over a wooden sideboard, which looked like a splendid antique. “You sound like a bellows — puff, blow, puff, blow.  Having tummy troubles?”

“No,” Jesse said, and continued his breathing exercises. George acted like a social justice fellow traveller, but he had a marked distaste for a show of weakness from anyone, and beaked off if he saw it (and whenever else he chose.) It was a failing, and an instructive one.

George abandoned his antiquarian pose and stood next to Jesse.

The client entered and said, “Please follow me.” George made a small noise which could have been assent.  Jesse couldn’t have spoken, and walked, in a strange foggy state, after George. Even George seemed cowed by this woman; he’d never been this consistently servile with anyone before. It spun Jesse around, and it scared him.

He realized she would only speak with George, so he could zone out.

She was very polished; her hair was a shoulder-length brown cascade but Jesse thought, looking at her unmemorable beauty, if I look away I will not be able to remember her face, and does that make me face blind or racist?

George stopped dead and said, “Madam, I smell blood.”

The woman turned, eyes wide, and then said, “I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

“As you say, Madam,” George said. “You said it was a selection of pieces which you want moved.”

They had started late, and then they ran into the second snag.  It was a doozy.

It was a fifteen room house, and she wanted them to move something from every room. In each case it was an item no sane two person crew could manage. something antique and delicate. Or something really awkward and heavy. Jesse’s thinking, already slowed by unease, now slid into panic. They had maybe half a dozen furniture blankets. Not an issue, she responded.  She seemed amused for the first time, but the pleasant expression passed and a fixed glare replaced it.

She would supervise them as they were wrapped. She sent the maid to get tablecloths, immense swathes of patterned white linen, to make up the deficit.

Unlike every other woman they had helped so far, she would not touch a single item or pack a single box. She stood at the foot of the entryway stairs and directed traffic in a steady flow of Mandarin and some other language George couldn’t make out, and then the clear soft English.

“Does Madam expect your husband to arrive in the middle of the move?” George asked.

“Do as I ask,” she said, which was not an answer.  She quietly directed her maid to block two doors open, both facing onto the yard and away from the front entrance.

“Who is this person?” Jesse said under his breath as they moved the first piece onto the truck.

“I don’t know past her name and her pedigree, but I can still smell blood, and I could swear that whoever was bleeding is still bleeding,” George said. He said, “I wish I knew more about the husband.”

“I wish you could teach a course in how to smell things,” Jesse said. He didn’t want to think about the blood, and couldn’t understand why George would say such a thing to a customer, even if it was true, as was Jesse’s dark prediction.

As they spoke, they moved a brace of lacquered chairs. To Jesse’s mind they were hideous and impossible to keep clean but another thousand bucks awaited them if they helped this person, as requested, so Jesse was fine not expressing his opinion.

“It’s a gift, and a shitty one. Teach it? — that would be impossible! It would be no gift if I could, in the sense that you could merely take it from the box and use it when you were bored and wanted to do party tricks,” and George nodded to himself. “It’s no fun living in a metropolitan area and having a usefully precise sense of smell. The smell in the back of the van, for example, is not something you want in the Smell-O-Vision equivalent of Dolby Digital 5.1, with commentary track.”

“Let’s be thankful our host won’t get into the van,” Jesse said.

“We’ll see,” George said. “I wish I knew for sure where the child is.”

“If the client’s as terrified of the husband as she acts, then the nanny and the kid are probably gone already.”

“Perhaps,” George said.  “I’m going to wait until Madam isn’t looking, though, and check.”

“I think we should mind our own business,” Jesse said.

“I think we should establish who it is we’re helping.  There’s something not right here.  Kid first, client next, staff next, husband last.”

“I hate to sound like a tired old leftie but I’d prefer it if the staff came before the client.”

“I hate to sound like a capitalist, especially when I’m not by nature, but I’m trying hard to remember who’s paying us,” George said. “I’m going to use the washroom,” George said, leaving Jesse to wrap and stack the chairs.  He walked around the house, which was very large and set on a steeply sloping lot, and came in through one of the doors that had been propped open.

He avoided being seen. The closer he got to the end of the hall of the west wing of the house the more overpowering the smell of blood became.

He found the nanny in a guest room closet. She had been stabbed in the arm and chest, incompetently bandaged, tied up tight and gagged. She made a strangled and fearful sound. George put his finger to his lips and said, “Do you want the cops to come?” Vehement head shake. “Do you want us to get you out of here?” Equally vehement nod. “I’m sorry, but until I can move you safely I’m not untying you.” Her eyes pleaded with him. Sadly, he shook his head.

The child was in a bassinet pushed up against the wall. From her breathing, George suspected she had been drugged. He scanned the colour of her lips and nails, checking his disgust for the people who would do such a thing, and saw with relief that she was probably fine.

To the terrified nanny, George said, “The child is okay. I’m going to go back and keep working, but we’re not leaving without you,” George said. He was careful not to say ‘both’. 

He heard Jesse yelling, put his finger to his lips again and slipped out of the room, putting his finger over his lips one last time and closing the closet door. He found an exit – the house seemed to have a million doors – and sprinted back to the truck, to find a Chinese man in his late thirties holding a gun on Jesse.

I see Daddy’s home, George thought. The suit the gunman was wearing would have made his cousin Michel exclaim with pleasure.

“Get down,” the man said.

Jesse swiftly complied.  George walked up, hands in the air, and said, ludicrously, “How can I help you, sir?”

“Unload the truck and get lost,” the man said. His eyes flickered to the front door.

“The nanny is tied up and bleeding in a closet, and the child she looks after has been drugged,” George said.

“Jesus,” said Jesse, taking his eyes from the gunman long enough to give George a wide-eyed stare.

“Shut up, both of you,” the man said furiously. “Don’t come back in the house,” he added over his shoulder, “Put everything on the ground and leave.”

“She owes us a thousand dollars,” Jesse called after him, not wanting to sound intimidated, and realizing too late what a bad idea it was. The front door slammed.

“A bit over the top,” George chided softly. “Okay, you unload the truck and I’ll go stand between him and the servants.”

“We’ve got to call the cops,” Jesse said.

“No, I don’t think so. If somebody who’s been stabbed and tied up in a closet doesn’t want the cops called, I’m inclined to go slow until I know more.  I suspect if we call the cops some of the staff are gonna end up in the CIC pokey,” George said, referring to the Immigration lockup.

“Fuck,” Jesse said.  He’d never had a gun drawn on him before and was now feeling rather hollow. “Fuck all rich people.”

“Not all rich people,” George said. “The man with the gun said, ‘Unload the truck!’,” George added. “Back in a minute.”

I’m not moving another fucking thing tonight, thought Jesse. Jam a gun in my face, you asshole, and see how fast I work once the gun is gone.

Thirty seconds later, the lights went out, including the yard lights. Jesse remembered his absent Maglite® and felt frightened and ill-prepared and uneasily relieved that it was George poking the bear, not him. There was more yelling, abruptly cut off, and Jesse developed a powerful urge to close the tailgate and start the truck, so he did.

The lights came back on.

After a moment the front door opened. George came out with the nanny and closed the door, and Jesse saw his brief thumbs-up. The nanny seemed dazed and the front and left arm of her white uniform was covered in blood.

“What about the kid?” Jesse called.

“Unharmed and not mine, so I’m leaving it with the parents. You can tell me I’m an idiot later, but the kid wasn’t bleeding… so. Anyway, there’s some good news. We can keep the contents of the truck for our troubles.”

“How the hell did you manage that?” Jesse said, almost squeaking. “I was expecting gunfire.”

“Gun jammed, as it does, when you spend all that time at the range and never clean the damned thing,” George said.

“Did it really,” Jesse said flatly. 

He and Jesse got the woman settled between them.

The nanny spoke for the first time. “My passport,” she said.

Jesse groaned. “Where is it?” George asked.

“It’s in the safe,” she said.  Her eyes were closed. She was sweating hard and panting.

“This should be fun,” George said.

Jesse never learned what George did to get into the safe, but after about five minutes he came back out to the truck with the passport – and the nanny’s BC Services Card, since the next stop was the hospital.

George gave the woman all the money he had on him, while Jesse scowled. They left her at the Lions Gate Hospital emergency department. The nanny said she intended to stay with a friend while she recovered, and that she would fly home the first chance she got. George and Jesse never saw the nanny, their unusual client, her unconscious child and her angry husband again.

Months later Jesse was still saying, “What the hell happened?” Sometimes he phrased it as, “So that Chinese guy took a shot at you and the gun jammed?” “How did you talk them into giving you the antiques?” “I wonder if we did the right thing, leaving the kid there. Who stabbed the nanny?”

George’s responses wandered around usefulness without ever arriving there, but the one that stuck with Jesse was, “Marriage is a highly variable human pastime.”

They unloaded their haul into George’s apartment. Jesse was late getting the truck back, and the rental guy angrily told him to find another supplier.

George didn’t get as good a price as he wanted for the antiques, mostly due to problems with provenance, but in the end, Jesse’s payday for getting a gun pushed in his face was thirty grand. He never told Raven, but she didn’t complain when he spent a little of it on her at Le Crocodile. He hadn’t even known it existed until he Googled “10 Best Vancouver Restaurants”.

When the food started to arrive, she once again wanted to know the occasion, and Jesse said, with an expression of brotherly indulgence, “Just because you’re you.”

“Bullshit,” Raven said, with quiet suspicion.

“Eat your carpaccio and shut the hell up,” Jesse said, and balance was restored to the universe.

Jesse had never seen George eat, or show interest in a woman, or take a personal phone call, or drive a car (he claimed not to know how), or do any banking, unless you considered his apparently endless supply of cash to be some form of banking, or go to the washroom except as a ruse (although Jesse admitted to himself that if George really did have some kind of digestive problem that only allowed him to take a shit during a household move it was probably okay to feel sorry for him) or drink a beer, or, indeed, anything, or take a bong hit, or admit to watching current television, or talk about any celebrities, or show much interest in politics that wasn’t local, or show any interest in sports (besides a not always compellingly sincere appreciation of sports as a demonstration of fitness.) It was telling that he didn’t care if athletes used performance enhancing drugs.

Jesse solemnly asked for his opinion, and his bloviation was unleashed. “What a ludicrous question. Since the bar is set at detection, virtually everyone is doing it, and trying to follow whatever protocols will allow them to pass whatever inane, inconsistent and media-infested tests which are applied to them during their careers. Some have good doctors and canny coaches and some don’t, but with a few honest exceptions, most athletes are doping, and they’d be fools not to.”

Jesse started laughing. “You don’t even watch sports!” Jesse said.  He followed Junior A hockey, it being the only game he could imagine himself playing, but not much else. Soccer was oka-a-ay as long as it wasn’t one of those fucking snore-fests, all about the defence, and long boring stretches of nothing happening but some sonorous wanker with a deferential English accent going on about nothing to do with the game. “And yet somehow you always have an opinion,” Jesse added.

“In that, how do I differ from anyone else?” George said, apparently offended.  “I have an opinion about excellence, and I’m not as fussy as you about where the excellence comes from.”

“Spoken like a man being supported by his girlfriend,” Jesse ventured.

“Oh no,” George said, smiling a weird little smile. “That teat has been decently tucked away.” Then, poking Jesse, who resentfully said, “Ow!” he added, “And that was a sexist remark.  There’s no reason for me to feel guilty about that if it doesn’t bother her.”

“Wait a minute. You’re kidding. She cut you off?”

“Um. I’m trying — trying to think of a compassionate way of putting this,” George said, as if he didn’t give much for his chances.

“Tell me straight, doc, am I dyin’?” Jesse said. He was concerned about the business, and would have a hard time without George, and didn’t feel like hiding that he knew this.  George took it the wrong way, but not in a bad way.

“Screw you,” George said amiably. “She has projects which require all the cash both of us can raise.  Since I, too, will profit immensely from the positive outcome of these projects, I am helping her with the sales and turning the proceeds over, less the bank charges of course, because I can’t run it all cash, as much as I’d like to. And, of course, there’s the difficulty associated with keeping the transaction sizes small enough that they don’t raise the attention of the feds, also a concern. But — I have to raise enough money to be taken seriously, or this whole project won’t work.”

Jesse got that whiff of fantasy again, and poked. “How much money.”

“I can’t see doing it for less than twenty million dollars,” George said. He didn’t sound worried.  He sounded like a man considering what he said, as he said it. 

Jesse was entranced. “What is it? An indie film project?” He could see having some fun with this sunny-tempered grandiosity. “World’s first 3D Zero-G porn film?”

George, laughing, sputtered something in a language Jesse didn’t recognize. “I should keep that in the queue as a potential money maker,” he said, sobering. “Good suggestion! Good talk!” and Jesse knew that the moment of honesty, during which George revealed himself as an anxious man, and possibly as a full-stop lunatic, had floated away.

He had spent intense bursts of time these last three months with George, and still had no idea what the hell he was up to. He didn’t lie about anything Jesse thought was important, but he’d evaded basic questions about his past.

In retrospect it had been the right thing to do, but Jesse remembered the disbelief — which started as a blast of heat between his eyes and rapidly spread to his whole face — when George had handed over their whole take to the nanny. The fairytale ending was the stack of bills he’d made a slick for in the bedroom door of his co-op house in Strathcona, but there had been no way to expect that outcome when a well-connected Communist Party scion married to a multi-millionaire’s daughter shoved a gun in his face.

George lived a charmed life, and a lot of it happened where and when Jesse couldn’t see him. It was part of the fascination, and the lion’s share of the aggro.

He couldn’t sneak up on him.  The fucker was uncanny, always knew where he was. He’d considered it, but there seemed to be no point in paying to have someone else follow him when he was that careful of his surroundings. During his most aggrieved and somnambulant plotting, Jesse thought of bugging George’s apartment but that didn’t seem wise. George had a knack for noticing security cameras and more than once had stopped Jesse from doing something stupid in plain view.

By the end of the summer of 2013 George liked and trusted Jesse as much as he could remember trusting anyone.  He had tried to like Ágnes’ special friend, back in the day in Budapest, but there had been a quiet accumulation of insults from Mátyás and he hadn’t the temperament to pretend to be his friend.  It was as an act of penance for ever being that much of a poltroon that he maintained his waxen civility, able at any time to cool into a pleasing shape or disperse in heat and light, and smoke, for George saw much of himself in Mátyás. In the way he clung to Agnes, and moaned about her sex work, he reminded George of his bad–tempered pleading with his own mother. 

He had pretensions to being a revolutionary too, and George had distinct notions of what the order of operations would have to be to take down the current régime, while Mátyás was full of pamphlets and empty of practical notions like how to keep the proletariat fed properly and transportation and power production running while the grim legal stuff like a new constitution was worked out.  He liked demonstrations, and George loathed them. “By all means, Mátyás, let’s put all the state’s enemies into one cozy pile in the middle of a lovely broad intersection across which troops can have a spiffing field of fire and when you’re done with that carnage you can watch the previously injured randomly be crushed by men on horseback or stand up to flee merely to be pounced on at the first choke point and hauled off in wagons. Foolishness. Absolute foolishness.”   

Family lore said large gatherings of anything were a criminally bad idea.  He had said that offhandedly to Jesse once.

Jesse said, “I’m going to have to start keeping track of your family lore.  Tell me again about the not driving.”

“We don’t drive ourselves; we hire vehicles,” George said.  

“While living in rural Romania, nay, even Transylvania.” Jesse briefly considered imitating Bela Lugosi but decided against it.

“I can’t help where I was born,” George said tartly.

“Or how,” Jesse said. “I’m getting a mental image of your mother riding on horseback to the delivery room like a boss.”

“You’re not getting that mental image from me; she was never on a horse in her life. I was born at home, as is proper. Being born in a dirty, badly-lit hotel full of strangers with ghastly infections is no way to start life,” George said.

“Were you guys Roma?” Jesse said, believing he’d at last figured it out.

“No,” George said. “If I was Roma I’d still be there. They are not often given a chance to emigrate.”

He changed the subject. “You haven’t told me much about your family, except Raven, who seems to be a species of angel.”

“The name-taking, ass-kicking kind,” Jesse said amiably.  He’d started to study how George could dodge a direct question, and with some downtime, now was as good a time as any to practice.

They were waiting for the all-clear from the client. There was some kind of three way slap-fight going on up there, and if the police weren’t called, one of the combatants would eventually stomp off and he and George could finally get in. At one point, from the café across the street, where the harassed manager had allowed them to sit on the patio after closing, as long as they put the chairs away, they’d heard something wooden crash, with a spatter of exploding crockery, like a cabinetful of Royal Doulton getting knocked down some stairs.

“You don’t talk about your mother,” George said.

Jesse scowled.  “You know she abused me; I told you that, and you never forget anything.”

“I’m very fortunate to have an excellent memory for the spoken word. How were you abused?” George asked, and got another scowl.  George said in a flat voice, “It’s hard for me to say how my mother abused me, because not everyone who witnessed it thought it was abuse, and a child needs to be believed before the abuse is real. Before anyone believes you, it’s just how things are, at least as far as the child’s concerned. I had something wrong with me, health problems I’ve since more or less grown out of.”

Jesse said, “She bullied you because you were weak.” George certainly despised weakness now, even as he took steps to protect it with that unselfconscious superiority of his.

“Almost to death,” George said. “It wasn’t what she did, it’s what she let others do.”

Much of the time Jesse thought he wouldn’t be able to tell if George was lying; he had no tells. Now he was convinced that George was being truthful, although he knew he had no way of confirming anything he said.

“My mother was not physically abusive, but she didn’t have to be,” Jesse said. “She terrorized all of us, but I got it worst because my mother hates men, and I was a little man and going to be a big one, just like my useless sperm donor father, and no matter how she tried to make me a good man, I was still a man. And then of course her sister got pregnant by the same guy three months before she did and when Rhonda told them, he took off without learning that he’d also knocked my mother up. She was a little tetched even then.”

“And yet you’ve managed to be a feminist. I’ve observed you very closely,” George said.

Feminism doesn’t stop being necessary just because my mother never got a diagnosis, Jesse thought. Aloud he said, “She didn’t hit me. But I wasn’t really a human being to her. Rhonda did what she could. When she was twelve, Raven decided to run away from home with me, and when we were fourteen, she made it happen.”

“Running away from home can be dangerous.”

“The exact opposite. We went to school.  It was fucking amazing. We got a year and a half in the regular system in the Interior when HellMom took to her bed and didn’t homeschool us anymore, so we managed to get caught up to our grade levels. It wasn’t too hard, academically, anyway, getting from where we were to an alternative high school in New Westminster, and it was on the Skytrain line, and we lived in a fucking dump of a one bedroom apartment and went to school 24/7. Raven got a scholarship and went to UBC.” Jesse closed his mouth and compressed his lips. There had been another crash from across the street, and one of the voices had risen to a shriek.

There was a door slam.  Two men exited the apartment onto the shared balcony, bolted down the stairs and took off.

George said. “Either the police have been called or somebody threatened to call them.”

“Looks like.”

George said, “We should wait until he calls.”

Jesse said, “Okay. Anyway, Rhonda came down to see us a couple of times, and that was it.  I haven’t seen my mother in almost ten years, and nothing she says or does will ever put me in a room with her again. My gift to her is not killing her. Well, that and learning to understand the source of family violence and how it echoes through generations.  If a man she knew had done to a girl-child what that fucking maniac did to me, she would have brained him with the nearest paperweight. She can’t see the hypocrisy of this but I know she’s crazy, not an emblem of all womanhood. I was abused by a feminist, but feminism gave me the legal tools to escape from her, so I’m not going to ditch feminism just because my mother was a flaming asshole.”

George’s phone rang.

“Hello,” he said, putting it on speaker.

Their client’s voice was tired and distraught. “Hi, it’s Chris. I have to clean this mess before we can do anything… can you wait half an hour?”

Jesse waggled his eyebrows and shrugged to show he was happy to help clean up.

“Not a problem. We can help. We’re just across the street,” George said, “See you in a minute.”

Chris’s ex Drew, and his not-to-be-named herpes-ridden rent-boy side-piece (Chris’s take on him, not theirs) had done a spectacular job of wrecking the apartment.  They had indeed knocked a hutch over. Jesse spent the first five minutes of the move trying to talk Chris into for fuck’s sake putting sturdier shoes on. His flip-flops were a health hazard, Jesse said sternly, and he stood over Chris as he found a broken-glass-free chair to sit in, and swapped shoes.

“Much better,” said Jesse. “Hokay, let’s get the broken stuff in a plastic container,” and volunteered to go downstairs to get a wheelie-bin for the debris.

As he was sorting through the bins to find one that was empty, and with luck not too smelly, Chris’s ex and current squeeze got out of their car and approached him.  Not having George’s hearing, he didn’t notice until they were upon him.

“So you’re Chris’s new boyfriend,” the younger one said.

“Jesse,” Jesse said, sticking out his hand.

Finding no takers, he ignored them and hauled the bin up the stairs.

“If you’re not crazy now, you will be,” Drew yelled after him.

“I’m not the one who trashed Chris’s apartment,” Jesse said. “If ya don’t want two years less a day in Agassiz for mischief, under Section 430 of the Criminal Code, kindly to fuck off now.”

“It’s his word against ours,” Drew said.

Jesse burst out laughing.

“My partner and I were watching from across the street,” he said, enunciating his contempt with care, “And while I don’t see George going to court, I’m happy to testify.  Now get lost before George gets hold of you, that guy will fuck you up.”

“Someone call my name?” George said with greasy amiability, coming out onto the landing and looking at their upturned faces.

Jesse gave George a little wave and then stabbed his finger down at Drew and his noisy little chum. “Okay, I warned you two fuckers, it’s time to take out the trash in East Van,” Jesse said.

He looked back at George.

“I can’t watch what happens next, it’s too upsetting,” he said with mock sadness.

“I’m a brown belt in karate,” Chris said, and took up a stance. Jesse shook his head. “Seriously,” he said under his breath.

“Good, good!” George said. “But it won’t help.”

Jesse was not able to give much credence to his eyes for what happened next. It seemed to him that George threw himself down the stairs, cleared Jesse (and the bin) by perhaps 10 centimetres and then bounced on his left arm like it was a pogo stick. Spinning right way up, he landed on his feet about a meter from Drew, bending his legs only slightly and not even grunting. Faced by this apparent suspension of the laws of physics, Drew was so startled that he fell over backward with a cry.  The other man, yelling, “Jesus! What the fuck, man?” backed up at speed but stayed on his feet, his eyes out on stalks.

“Boo,” George said pleasantly. “Do either of you want to go?”

Drew’s buddy hauled him to his feet, and with many a curse and slur, the two of them booked it. They stood by the car, gazing wildly at the back door of Chris’s building and waving their arms.  

“You know,” Jesse said, face screwed up, “If a fully grown adult man throws his entire weight onto his arm, it breaks.  He doesn’t bounce like Tigger.”

“The circus is in my blood,” George said, as he climbed the stairs.

Since Jesse could not think of anything to say that didn’t involve calling George a monstrous new specimen of liar, he returned to the task of helping the client.