Fontaine heard Elliot sigh. He’d never met the man. “My client,” said Elliot, speaking slowly, for stress, “is a condition queen. He wants them minty. He wants them mintier than minty. He wants them mint in box. He wants them new old stock.”
“Hey, look,” Fontaine said, remembering what Clarisse had said, 128 “you don’t get these things unused, right? The grandparents bought them as, like, surrogate offspring, right? They were big-ticket items. They got used.”
“Not always,” said Elliot. “The most desirable pieces, and my client owns several, are replicas ordered just prior to the unexpected death of the grandchild.”
Fontaine took the phone from his ear, looking at it as though it were something dirty. “Fucking hell,” Fontaine said, under his breath.
‘What’s that?” Elliot asked. ‘What?”
“Sony, Elliot,” Fontaine said, putting the phone back to his ear, “gotta take one on the other line. I’ll get back to you.” Fontaine broke the connection.
He was perched on a tall stool behind the counter. He leaned sideways to look at the Another One dolls in their bag. They looked horrible. They were horrible. Elliot was horrible. Clarisse was horrible too, but now Fontaine lapsed into a brief but intensely erotic fantasy involving none other, with whom he had not been conjugal in some while. That this fantasy literally involved Clarisse exclusively, he took to be significant. That it produced an actual erectile response, he took to be even more significant. He sighed. Adjusted his trousers.
Life, he reflected, was rough as a cob.
Through the sound of rain sluicing down around his shop (he’d rigged gutters) he could hear a faint but rapid clicking from the back room and noted its peculiar regularity. Each one of those clicks, he knew, represented another watch. He’d shown the boy how to call up auctions on the notebook, not Christie’s or Antiquorum, but the living messy scrum of the net auctions. He’d shown him how to bookmark too, because he thought that picking what he liked might be fun.
Fontaine sighed again, this time because he had no idea what he would do about the boy. Having taken him in because he’d wanted a closer look at-well, had wanted, did want-the Jaeger-LeCoultre militar~з Fontaine would have found it impossible to explain to anyone why he had subsequently fed him, gotten him showered, bought him fresh clothes, and shown him how to use the eyephones. Actually he couldn’t explain it to himself. He was not inclined to charity, he didn’t 129 ‘1 think, but sometimes he found himself moving as if to right a particular wrong in the world. And this never made sense to Fontaine, really, because what he made right, he made right only for a little while, and nothing ever really changed.
This boy now, he very likely had some sort of brain damage, and most likely congenital, but Fontaine believed that trouble had no first cause. There was sheer bad luck, he knew that, but often as not he’d seen how cruelty or neglect or hard-luck genetics came twining up through the generations like a vine.
Now he dug down deep, into the pocket of his tweed slacks, where he was keeping the Jaeger-LeCoultre. By itself, of course, so that nothing else would scratch it. He pulled it out now and considered it, but the tenor of his thoughts prevented the momentary distraction, the small pleasure, he’d hoped to take from it.
But how on earth, he wondered, had the boy gotten hold of something like this, such an elegant piece of serious collector’s ordnance?
And the workmanship of the strap worried him. He’d never seen anything quite like it, for all that it was very simple. An artisan had sat down with the watch, whose lugs were closed not by spring bars but permanently soldered rods of stainless steel, integral parts of the case, and cut and glued and hand stitched however many pieces of black calf leather. He examined the inside of the strap, but there was nothing, no trademark or signature. “If you could talk,” Fontaine said, looking at the watch.
And what would it tell him? he wondered. The story of how the boy had gotten it might turn out to be not the most unlikely adventure it had had. Briefly he imagined it on some officer’s wrist out in the Burmese night, a star shell bursting above a jungle hillside, monkeys screaming…