Fontaine picks up the watch, affords himself a quick squint through the loupe. ‘Whistles in spite of himself. “Jaeger LeCoultre.” He unsquints, checking; the boy hasn’t moved. Squints again, this time at the ordnance markings on the caseback. “Royal Australian Air Force, 1953,” he translates. “Where’d you steal this?”
Nothing.
“This is near mint.” Fontaine feels, all at once, profoundly and unexpectedly lost. “This a redial?”
Nothing.
Fontaine squints through the loupe. “All original?”
Fontaine wants this watch.
He puts it down on the green pad, atop the worn symbol of a golden crown, noting that the black calf band is custom-made, handsewn around bars permanently fixed between the lugs. This work itself, which he takes to be either Italian or Austrian, may have cost more than some of the watches in his tray. The boy immediately picks it up.
Fontaine produces the tray. “Look here. You want to trade? Gruen Curvex here. Tudor ‘London,’ 1948; nice original dial. Vulcain Cricket here, gold head, very clean.”
But already he knows that his conscience will never allow him to divest this lost soul of this watch, and the knowledge hurts him. Fontaine has been trying all his life to cultivate dishonesty, what his father called “sharp practices,” and he invariably fails.
The boy is leaning forward over the tray, Fontaine forgotten.
“Here,” Fontaine says, sliding the tray aside and replacing it with his battered notebook. He opens it to the pages where he shops for watches. “Just push this, then push this, it’ll tell you what you’re looking at.” He demonstrates. A Jaeger with a silver face.
Fontaine presses the second key. “1945 Jaeger chronometer, stainless steel, original dial, engraving on case back,” says the notebook.
“Case,” the boys says. “Back.”
“This,” Fontaine shows the boy the stainless back of a gold-filled 52 Tissot tank. “But with writing on, like ‘Joe Blow, twenty-five years with Blowcorp, congratulations.”
The boy looks blank. Presses a key. Another watch appears on the screen. He presses the second key. “A 1960 Vulcain jump-hour, chrome, brassing at lugs, dial very good.”
“‘Very good,’ “Fontaine advises. “Not good enough. See these spots here?” Indicating certain darker flecks scattered across the scan. “If it were ‘very fine,’ sure.”
“Fine,” says the boy, looking up at Fontaine. He presses the key that produces the image of another watch.
“Let me see that watch, okay?” Fontaine points at the watch in the boy’s hand. “It’s okay. I’ll give it back.” The boy looks from the watch to Fontaine. Fontaine puts the Smith & Wesson away in its pocket. Shows the boy his empty hands. “I’ll give it back.”
The boy extends his hand. Fontaine takes the watch.
“You gonna tell me where you got this?”
Blank.
“You want a cup of coffee?”
Fontaine gestures back, toward the simmering pot on the hotplate. Smells its bitter brew, thickening.
The boy understands.
He shakes his head.
Fontaine screws the loupe into his eye and settles into contemplation.
Damn. He wants this watch.
LATER in the day, when the bento boy brings Fontaine his lunch, the Jaeger LeCoultre military is in the pocket of Fontaine’s gray tweed SlaCks, high-waisted and extravagantly pleated, but Fontaine knows that the watch is not his. The boy has been put in the back of the shop, in that cluttered little zone that divides Fontaine’s business from his private life, and Fontaine has become aware of the fact that he can, yes, smell his visitor; under the morning’s coffee smell a definite and insistent reek of old sweat and unwashed clothes.
53 As the bento boy exits to his box-stacked bicycle, Fontaine undoes the clips on his own box. Tempura today, not his favorite for bento, because it cools, but still he’s hungry. Steam wafts from the bowl of miso as he un5naps its plastic lid. He pauses.
“Hey” he says, back into the space behind the shop, “you want some miso?” No reply. “Soup, you hear me?”
Fontaine sighs, climbs off his wooden stool, and carries the steaming soup into the back of the shop.
The boy is seated cross-legged on the floor, the notebook open on his lap. Fontaine sees the image of a large, very complicated chronometer floating there on the screen. Something from the eighties, by the look of it.