* * *
By two o'clock there were seven people in Szabo & Son and none of them were buying anything.
Bernice had leaned her broom against the regulator case, which Walt would normally not have allowed, and was sitting on an upturned crate with her arms folded. Marco had closed Charm City Vinyl with a sign on the door that said BACK IN 20 MIN OR WHENEVER. Mrs. Doyle, who had come in for her watch and stayed for the drama, was on the customer stool. Lin Tran, who had swept this floor every afternoon as a sixteen-year-old and now set diamonds for a jeweler on Charles Street, had driven up the minute Marco texted her, and was standing behind the counter next to Walt with one hand on his back as though he might tip over.
Nadia Brandt had not left. She'd called her office to say she wouldn't make the half-day she'd promised for Saturday filing, and she'd called her father and then hung up before he answered, and now she sat on the stairs to the back room with her knees up and the carbon receipt flattened on one knee, reading it again and again as if the words might change.
"It's a scam," Bernice said, for the third time. "Somebody's saying somebody stole it when nobody stole it. Don't look at me like that, Marco Dellapina, I knew you when you had hair."
Walt wasn't listening. He'd gone into the back room and come out with a cardboard file box that said EVA – TAXES 1978–1981 on the side in his wife's square capitals, and set it on the counter, and was lifting out its contents one by one. Ledgers. Receipt books. A cigar box full of photographs. And at the bottom, wrapped in a pillowcase, a green clothbound notebook with a cracked spine.
He opened it. Lin leaned over his shoulder and made a small sound.
The pages were graph paper, gone the color of weak coffee. Each one was crowded edge to edge with drawings in pencil and blue ink: a balance wheel seen from above, from the side, in section; an escapement, every tooth of the wheel numbered; the curve of a case lug drawn twenty times, each a little different, with a note in Hungarian in the margin that Walt did not translate. There were columns of figures. Beat rates, tolerances in hundredths of a millimeter. On one page a sketch of the dial, the waves, with the note rose engine – cam 14 – ½ turn offset each pass – DON'T RUSH IT underlined three times.
"Walt," Lin said. "I never knew you did all this. You never showed me this."
"You never asked."
"I asked you a hundred times how you made that watch."
"And I told you. With my hands." He turned another page. "You were sixteen. You'd have tried to copy it, and you'd have done it wrong, and you'd have cried. You cried when you broke a mainspring."
"Everybody cries when they break a mainspring."
"I didn't."
"You're a liar," Lin said affectionately, and he smiled for the first time since the officer had walked in.