“I’ve done a few of those myself,” Tessa said. ALL TOMORROW~S PARTIES 47 12. EL PRIMERO FONTAINE’S first glimpse of the boy comes as he starts to lay out the morning’s stock in his narrow display window: rough dark hair above a forehead pressed against the armored glass.
Fontaine leaves nothing of value in the window at night, but he dislikes the idea of an entirely empty display.
He doesn’t like to think of someone passing and glimpsing that vacancy. It makes him think of death. So each night he leaves out a few items of relatively little value, ostensibly to indicate the nature of the shop’s stock, but really as a private act of propitiatory magic.
This morning the window contains three inferior Swiss mechanicals, their dials flecked with age, an IXL double penknife with jigged bone handles and shield, fair condition, and an East German military field telephone that looks as though it has been designed not only to survive a nuclear explosion but to function during one.
Fontaine, still on the morning’s first coffee, stares down, through the glass, at the matted, spiky hair. Thinking this at first a corpse, and not the first he’s discovered this way, but never propped thus, kneeling, as in attitude of prayer. But no, this one lives: breath fogs Fontaine’s window.
In Fontaine’s left hand: a 1947 Cortebert triple-date moon phase, manual wind, gold-filled case, in very nearly the condition in which it left the factory. In his right, a warped red plastic cup of black Cuban coffee. The shop is filled with the smell of Fontaine’s coffee, as burnt and acrid as he likes it.
Condensation slowly pulses on the cold glass: gray aureoles outline the kneeler’s nostrils.
Fontaine puts the Cortebert back in the tray with the rest of his better stock, narrow divisions of faded green velour holding a dozen watches. He sets the tray aside, on the counter behind which he stands when he does business, transfers the red plastic cup to his left hand, and with his right reassures himself of the Smith & Wesson .32-.22 Kit Gun in the right side pocket of the threadbare trench coat that serves him as a dressing gown.
The little gun is there, older than some of his better watches, its worn walnut grip comforting and familiar. Probably intended to be kept in a freshwater fisherman’s tackle box, against the dispatching of water snakes or the decapitation of empty beer bottles, the Kit Gun is Fontaine’s considered choice: a six-shot rimfire revolver with a four-inch barrel. He doesn’t want to kill anyone, Fontaine, though if truth be known, he has, and very probably could again. He dislikes recoil, in a handgun, and excessive report, and distrusts semi-automatic weapons. He is an anachronist, a historian: he knows that the Smith & Wesson’s frame evolved for a .32-caliber center-fire round, long extinct, that was once the standard for American pocket pistols. Rechambered for the homely .22, it survived, in this model, well into the middle of the twentieth century. A handy thing and, like most of his stock, a rarity.
He finishes the coffee, places the empty cup on the counter beside the tray of watches.
He is a good shot, Fontaine. At twelve paces, employing an archaic one-handed duelist’s stance, he has been known to pick the pips from a playing card. –
He hesitates before unlocking the shop’s front door, a complicated process. Perhaps the kneeler is not alone. Fontaine has few enemies on the bridge proper, but who is to say what might have drifted in from either end, San Franciso or Oakland? And the wilds of Treasure Island traditionally offer a more feral sort of crazy.
But still.
He throws the last hasp and draws the pistol.
Sunlight falls through the bridge’s wrapping of scrap wood and plastic like some strange benison. Fontaine scents the salt air, a source of Corrosion.
“You,” he says, “mister.” The gun in his hand, hidden by the folds of the trench coat.
Under the trench coat, which is beltless, open, Fontaine wears faded plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a long-sleeved white thermal undershirt rendered ecru by the vagaries of the laundry process Black 49 shoes, sockless and unlaced, their gloss gone matte in the deeper creases. Dark eyes look up at him, from a face that somehow refuses to come into focus.