"Of course," Ruiz said. "Write down what you can."
He wrote Swiss hallmarks / serial number on the pad, and after a moment, Geneva, and pushed it back.
Ruiz nodded to Teo. Teo cut the evidence seal with a pair of scissors and lifted out the black box and set it in front of Walt, and stepped back, and Lin turned the gooseneck lamp an inch to the left without being asked.
Walt opened the box. He unfolded the chamois, two turns, exactly as he'd folded it. He looked at the watch for a moment without touching it, and Ray, standing by the door, saw something pass across the old man's face that he would not have known how to name. It was the look of a man seeing someone he loves come through an airport gate.
Then Walt put on his loupe and went to work.
He did it so quickly and gently that Ray found he was holding his breath. A small case knife slipped under the edge of the caseback, a twist, and the back came off. The movement inside caught the lamp light and threw it up at the ceiling in a scatter of brass and gold, and someone in the room, maybe Teo, said "Oh" under his breath. Walt pulled the crown out to its setting position, pressed a tiny lever with the point of a screwdriver as fine as a hair, and drew out the stem. He lifted the movement free of the case and laid it on a cushion of plastic, dial up. He laid a sheet of thin clear plastic over the dial to protect it. Then he took up the hand-lifters, two small flat-ended levers like a pair of tiny spatulas, and slid them under the hands from either side, and with one smooth, even pressure, lifted all three hands off the center pinion at once and set them down on a square of tissue paper like three pressed flowers.
"Dial feet," he murmured to Lin, and she handed him a screwdriver even finer than the last, and he loosened two tiny screws at the side of the movement. He lifted the dial away.
He laid it face down on the chamois. The waves were hidden. Underneath was a flat disc of brass, frosted and dull, with the little wheels of the motion works sitting on it like a city seen from a plane.
Walt reached up and tilted the camera on its tripod an inch, so it pointed straight down, and then sat back and took his hands away from the table and put them in his lap.
"There," he said. "Look."
Ruiz leaned in. Ray came away from the door and leaned in beside her. Carrow, after a second, half rose.
Around the edge of the main plate, in a band of polished steel no wider than a grain of rice, someone had cut letters. Tiny, perfect, deep. Ray needed Lin's loupe to read them. She handed it to him without a word.
W. SZABO — BALTIMORE — No. 1 — 1979
And below that, in the clear space between the center wheel and the rim, in the same tiny hand, a line in a language Ray had never seen written:
Évának, aki megvárt.