Nadia had come down off the stairs. She stood at the end of the counter, not quite close enough to look, until Walt turned the notebook toward her.
"I started it in January of 1978," he said. "My father had died the summer before. Heart. He was at that bench," he nodded toward the back, "he put down his tweezers and said, 'Walter, I am going to sit down for a minute,' and he sat down and that was all. I was twenty-five. I'd been his apprentice since I was fourteen. I knew everything he knew about fixing watches. I didn't know if I could make one." He touched the page. "So I tried. Every night after closing. Eva would bring me soup and sit on those stairs where you were sitting and read a library book and tell me when it was two in the morning. It took me twenty-two months. The case I cut four times. The dial I cut nine times. The first eight weren't good enough."
"What happened to them?" Nadia asked.
"Eva made them into Christmas ornaments." He shrugged. "She said the tree didn't care."
Mrs. Doyle laughed out loud and then covered her mouth.
"And when it was done," Walt went on, "I took the dial off one more time. Under the dial, where the hands don't go and the eye doesn't go, on the main plate of the movement, I engraved my name. And the date I finished it. And one more thing." He closed the notebook. "Only a watchmaker opening that watch would ever see it. My father taught me that. You sign your work where it counts, not where it shows."
"So if they open it," Nadia said slowly, "they'll see your name."
"They'll see my name."
"Then it's over. It's simple. They just have to open it."
Walt looked at her with an expression she couldn't read.
"Nadia," he said, "who opens it? How many detectives in the Baltimore Police Department know how to take the hands off a watch without bending them? And the man who says it's his, he'll say, don't let the shop owner touch it, he'll fake something. So they send it to someone. And it sits in a locker for six months. That's how your father lost eleven months, I think."
She didn't answer. Her mouth had gone tight.
"Hold on," Marco said abruptly. He had been standing by the window with his hands jammed in the pockets of a jean jacket covered in pins, staring out at the street. "Hold on. Walt. Didn't the Sun do a thing? A story? About you?"
Walt frowned. "That was a long time ago."
"No, I remember. I remember it, I was a kid, my mother cut it out because she thought it was so nice somebody from the Avenue got in the paper. It was in the—what do you call it—the Saturday thing. The neighborhood page. There was a picture of you at the bench with that big magnifier on your head, and you had a mustache, God help us all."