They knelt in front of the cart, side by side, and looked at it.
"Oh no," said Nicky softly. "Oh no, no, no. Handle like a baby."
"Don't pull it."
"I wasn't going to pull it."
"You were reaching."
"I was reaching to not pull it."
"Move," said Theda, and he moved, and she reached for her purse.
She had carried the tool roll since her first week at Corso Brothers, when she was nineteen years old and an apprentice model-maker in a basement room on Chestnut Street that smelled of hot wax and pickling acid, and a grim old Neapolitan master named Mr. Iacono had told her that a jeweler without her tools was only a woman with opinions. It was a strip of soft brown leather the size of a rolled newspaper, and she untied it now on the green linoleum and laid it open: needle files, two pairs of tweezers, a jeweler's loupe, a set of tiny screwdrivers in a little plastic sleeve, a burnisher, a ruler marked in millimeters, a scalpel with a cork on its tip, and a roll of Scotch Magic Tape, which Mr. Iacono had considered the second-greatest invention of the twentieth century, after the dental drill.
Nicky looked at the tool roll. He looked at her.
"Who are you?" he said.
"Hold the light."
There was a flashlight hanging on a hook by the door for power failures, and he got it, and held it while she found the smallest Phillips screwdriver and turned the cassette over on the cart and took out the five tiny screws, one at a time, and dropped them into his open palm without looking. She lifted the top of the case away. She eased the crumpled tape out of the rollers with the tweezers, a fraction of an inch at a time, holding her breath, while he held his. Then she fitted the loupe into her eye and bent over it.
"It's creased," she said, "about nine inches. Here. And here. It's stretched in the middle, the oxide's flaking. That bit's no good. It'll never play."
"So what do we do?"