Walt put on his loupe. Lin came down off the stairs. Nadia leaned in on his other side.
"I didn't see it this morning," Ray said. "Printer in the car's garbage, and I wasn't looking. I was looking at the watch. That's what I was supposed to be looking at." He put his finger at the upper edge of the image, on the faint red-and-white band. "That's a reflection. Somebody took this through glass. Through your window, Mr. Szabo, from the sidewalk, and your window picked up the sign across the street. Backward."
Walt looked for a long time. Then he straightened and took the loupe from his eye.
"That's Bernice's sign," he said. "Her father hung it in 1971. He fell off the ladder doing it and broke his wrist, and I set the time on his watch for him because he couldn't wind it with the cast on. Every picture anyone has ever taken of my window has that sign in it, if the sun's right. Tourists take pictures of the window all the time. I see it in the glass every morning when I kneel down."
"The complainant says his dad bought that watch in Geneva in 1968," Ray said, "and that it was stolen out of his house on Upland Road two weeks ago, and that this is a photograph of it from his family's files. And there's my problem. If this is a family photo, why was it taken from the sidewalk on 36th Street, through a shop window, across from a hardware store, with the watch sitting on your velvet? It wasn't in his family's files. It was in your window, and it's only been in your window for nineteen days." He looked up. "Which means he didn't photograph his watch. He photographed yours. And then he reported it stolen."
Nobody said anything.
"I could be wrong," Ray said. "It's a smudge. It's a reflection. A defense attorney would say a hundred things. But I don't think I'm wrong." He breathed out through his nose. "I took it out of your shop this morning. I took it off her arm. I want you to know I know that."
"You did your job," Walt said.
"I did my job badly. There's a difference." He rubbed his face. "My sergeant wanted it closed because the complainant was calling the Major. I wanted it closed because my sergeant wanted it closed. I didn't read the report twice. I didn't look at that card in your window like it meant anything. I looked at a gray-haired guy in an apron in a secondhand shop, and I thought, I've seen this before. Old guy buys something off a kid out the back door, doesn't ask questions, puts it in the window." He met Walt's eyes. "I'm sorry. That's what I came to say."
Walt was quiet for so long that Nadia thought he wasn't going to answer.
"In 1956," he said finally, "my father was a watchmaker in Budapest. In October there was a revolution, and in November the tanks came back, and in December he walked to Austria with my mother and a roll of tools. He told me once that the thing he could never forget wasn't the tanks. It was a police captain who came into his shop in 1955, very polite, very correct, and said, 'Mr. Szabo, we have a report.' That was all. A report. And after that they could take anything." He folded his hands on the glass. "I've lived in this country seventy years. I've never once been afraid of a police officer. This morning, for about thirty seconds, I was. And then you took that box with both hands, like you were carrying something that mattered. And I thought, all right. He's not that captain. He's just a man who's in a hurry."
Ray's throat moved.
"So you're sorry," Walt said. "Good. I accept. Now. What are you going to do about it?"
* * *
Nadia laid her laptop on the counter and opened it, and for twenty minutes she talked and the three of them listened.