Did they have monkeys in Burma? He did know the British had fought there when this had been issued.
He looked down through the scratched, greenish glass that topped the counter. Watches there, each face to him a tiny and contained poem, a pocket museum, subject over time to laws of entropy and of chance. These tiny mechanisms, their jeweled hearts beating. Wearing down, he 130 knew, through the friction of metal on metal. I-be sold nothing unserviced, everything cleaned and lubricated. He took fresh stock to a sullen but highly skilled Pole in Oakland to be cleaned, oiled, and timed. And he did this, he knew, not to provide a better, more reliable product, but to ensure that each one might better survive in an essentially hostile universe. It would’ve been difficult to admit this to anyone, but it was true and he knew it.
He put the Jaeger-LeCoultre back in his pocket and slid from the stool. Stood staring blankly into a glass-fronted cabinet, the shelf at eye level displaying military Dinky Toys and a Randall Model 15 “Airman,” a stocky-looking combat knife with a saw-toothed spine and black Micarta grips. The Dinky Toys had been played with; dull gray base metal showed through chipped green paint. The Randall was mint, unused, unsharpened, its stainless steel blade exactly as it left the grinding belt. Fontaine wondered how many such had in fact never been used. Totemic objects, they lost considerable resale value if sharpened, and it was his impression that they circulated almost as a species of ritual currency, quite exclusively masculine. He had two currently in stock, the other a hiltless little leaf-point dirk said to have been designed for the US Secret Service. Best dated by the name of the maker on their saddle-sewn sheaths, he estimated them both to be aboUt thirty years old. Such things were devoid of much poetry for Fontaine, although he understood the market and how to value a piece. They spoke to him mainly, as did the window of any army surplus store, of male fear and powerlessness. He turned away now, seeing the dying eyes of a man he’d shot in Cleveland, possibly in the year one of those knives had been made.
He locked the door, put the CLOSED sign up, and went into the back room where he found the boy still seated, cross-legged, as he’d left him, his face hidden by the massive old eyephones cabled to the open notebook in his lap.
“Hey,” Fontaine said, “How’s fishin’? You been finding anything you think we should bid on?”
The boy continued to monotonously click a single key on the notebook, the eyephones bobbing slightly in time. ~ PARTIES 131 “Hey,” Fontaine said. “You gonna get netburn.”
He squatted beside the boy, wincing at the pain it brought to his knees. He rapped once on the gray cowl of the eyephones, then gently removed them. The boy’s eyes blinked furiously, swimming in the vanished light of the miniature video screens. His hand clicked the notebook a few times, then stopped.
“Let’s see what you found,” Fontaine said, taking the notebook from him. He absently touched a few keys, curious to see what the boy might have bookmarked.
He was expecting auction pages, each one with a scan and description of a given watch on offer, but what he found instead were numbered lists of articles that came up in an archaic font meant to recall typewriters.
He studied one list, then another. He felt something like cold air across the back of his neck and thought for a second that the front door was open, but then he remembered locking it.
“Shit,” Fontaine said, pulling up more of these lists. “Shit, how’d you get this?”
These were bank records, confidential tallies of the contents of safety deposit boxes in banks of the brick-and-mortar sort, all apparently in midwestern states. And each list he saw contained at least one watch, very likely part of someone’s estate, and very likely forgotten.
A Rolex Explorer in Kansas City. Some sort of gold Patek in a small town in Kansas.
He looked from the screen to the boy, aware of being privy to something profoundly anomalous.