“Huh,” Clarisse says, “he hikes watches. How come you don’t have your own kids over here?” Her eyes narrow, deepening the wrinkles at their outer corners, which Fontaine desires suddenly to kiss. “How come you got some ‘spanic fatboy likes watches instead?”
“Clarisse-”
“Clarisse my butt.” Her green eyes widen in furious emphasis, a green pale as drift glass, DNA-echo of some British soldier, Fontaine has often surmised, on some chose Kingston night, these several generations distant. “You move these dolls or you be vexed, understand?”
She spins smartly on her heel, not easily done in the black galoshes she wears, and marches from his shop, proud and erect, in a man’s long
tweed overcoat Fontaine recalls purchasing fifteen years earlier in Chicago.
Fontaine sighs. Something weighs heavy on him now, evening coming on. “Legal, here, be married to two women,” Fontaine says to the empty, coffee-scented air “Fucking crazy, but legal.” He shuffles over in his unlaced shoes and closes the front door, locks it behind her. “You still think I’m a bigamist or something, baby, but this is the State of Northern California.”
He goes back and has another look at the boy, who seems to have discovered the Christie’s auction.
The boy looks up at him. “Platinum tonneau minute repeating wristwatch,” he says. “Patek Philippe, Geneve, number 187145.”
“I don’t think so,” Fontaine says. “Kind of out of our bracket.”
“A gold hunter-cased quarter repeating watch-”
“Forget it.”
“-with concealed erotic automaton.”
“Can’t afford that either,” Fontaine says. “Look,” he says, “tell you what: that notebook’s the slow way to look. I’ll show you a fast way.”
“Fast. Way.”
Fontaine goes rummaging through the drawers of a paint-scabbed steel filing cabinet, until eventually he comes up with an old pair of military eyephones. The rubbery lip around the binocular video display is cracked and peeling. It takes another few minutes to find the correct battery pack and to determine that it is charged. The boy ignores him, lost in the Christie’s catalog. Fontaine plugs the battery pack into the eyephones and returns. “Here. See? You put this on your head. . 96 23. RUSSIAN HILL THE apartment is large and has nothing in it that is not of practical use. Consequently, the dark hardwood floors are bare and quite meticulously swept.
Seated in an expensive, semi-intelligent Swedish workstation chair, he is sharpening the knife.
This is a task (he thinks of it as a function) requiring emptiness.
He sits facing a nineteenth-century reproduction of a seventeenth-century refectory table. Six inches in from its nearest edge, two triangular sockets have been laser-cut into the walnut at precise angles. Into these, he has inserted a pair of nine-inch-long rods of graphite-gray ceramic, triangular in cross section, forming an acute angle. These
hones fit the deep, laser-cut recesses perfectly, allowing for no movement whatever.
The knife lies before him on the table, its blade between the ceramic rods.
When it is time, he takes it in his left hand and places the base of the blade against the left hone. He draws it down, a single, ‘smooth, sure
stroke, pulling it toward him as he does. He is listening for any indication of imperfection, although this would only be likely if he had struck bone, and it has been many years since the knife struck bone.
Nothing.
He exhales, inhales, places the blade against the right hone.
The telephone rings.
He exhales. Places the knife on the table again, its blade between the hones. “Yes?”
The voice, emerging from several concealed speakers, is a voice he knows well, although it has been nearly a decade since he has shared physical space with the speaker. He knows that the words he hears come in from a tiny, grotesquely expensive piece of dedicated real estate somewhere in the planet’s swarm of satellites. It is a direct transmis 97 sion, and nothing to do with the amorphous cloud of ordinary human communication. “I saw what you did on the bridge last night,” the voice says.
The man says nothing. He is wearing a shirt cut from very fine gray cotton flannel, its collar buttoned but tieless, French cuffs secured with plain round links of sandblasted platinum. He places his hands on his thighs and waits.