Chapter 20 #2
The watchmaker’s shop announces itself with a window the size of a tea tray, five timepieces on a bottle-green cushion, and a name in gold leaf gone caramel with age.
Inside it smells like machine oil and old paper, one lamp per counter.
Behind the last counter sits an old man with a loupe pushed up on his forehead, who takes one look at Khristofer and says something in Italian too fast, too friendly for me to catch, except the shape of it is scolding.
Khristofer answers in Italian, something loose in his shoulders I’ve never seen in a room that wasn’t dark, and the two of them shake hands across the counter like a treaty being renewed.
“Cavalli. Naomi Vale.”
“The young lady has been told what she’s marrying into?” Cavalli says, in English, to me, with a straight face. “Not the other business. The sickness. The watches. It’s worse.”
“How long has he had it?”
“He walked in twelve years ago with a dead chronograph he’d bought at auction against my written advice.
” Cavalli produces a small tray, worn velvet again, someone’s repaired movement resting on it like a patient in recovery.
“Now he owns nineteen and he trusts me with perhaps five. The rest he does himself, on that bench of his, with my tools that he pretends he didn’t order through me. ”
The bench. The word goes into the notebook I keep behind my eyes.
He has a bench. Somewhere in that lake house full of locked rooms there’s a bench with small tools where the man this coast whispers about sits alone doing surgery on time, and he’s mentioned it to me exactly never.
I’m going to find it if it takes me all winter.
“The Longines,” Khristofer says, ignoring all of this. “Tell me you’ve finished the Longines.”
“The Longines is convalescing. You can’t rush a mainspring, you of all people.” Cavalli’s eyes drop to Khristofer’s wrist, professional reflex. “Fifty-two years old and he wears it in salt air. Criminal.”
“It’s doing its job.” His eyes come to me for half a second, and a line from July arrives back across two months with its meaning grown. It’s for knowing exactly how long I’ve been somewhere I shouldn’t be.
“And how long is that, now?” I ask him, quietly, the second half of a conversation we started at a rail above the sea.
“The audit never closed,” he says, and Cavalli looks between us, rewinding the exchange by hand to hear it again.
They fall into movement talk, escapements, amplitude, a debate about a donor balance wheel conducted like theology, and I drift along the cases, watching him more than the watches.
This is the first thing I’ve ever seen him want for himself.
Not territory, not control, not me, a mechanism, small, old, repairable, and the wanting makes him younger by a decade.
At the last case he stops talking mid-sentence.
It’s a small gold dress watch, plain to the point of arrogance, its silver dial gone the color of weak tea, hands thin as pencil lines.
No jewels showing, no story I can read. But he looks at it the way I’ve caught him looking at me across a dinner table, once, twice, then away, deliberately, a man rationing something.
“The Vacheron,” Cavalli says quietly, without being asked. “Nineteen fifty-five. It came in this spring. I’ve told him three times.”
“Told him what?”
“That it will sell.” The old man spreads his hands. “He looks. He doesn’t buy. Twelve years I’ve known him, he buys anything he wants in one visit. This one he visits.”
Khristofer is already moving toward the door, settling his cuff over his grandfather’s year like the subject never happened. “Send the Longines when it’s honest,” he says, and the bell above the door lets us out.
On the street I take his arm, which I’ve never done in daylight, and feel the surprise go through it.
“You didn’t buy it.”
“No.”
“Why not? Cavalli said you buy what you want in one visit.”
He’s quiet for half a block of Milan, security drifting behind us like staff I’ve stopped noticing.
“Some things you don’t acquire,” he says finally.
“You wait until you’ve earned them. It’s not a rule anyone taught me.
It’s just the only way I can explain twelve visits to a watch I could’ve owned in April. ”
I look up at his profile and something enormous moves through me on soft feet, because I don’t think we’re talking about the watch. Neither does he. Neither of us says so, and the bell of a tram covers the moment like a kindness.
The final fitting happens at four. That’s the fact I’ll keep if anyone asks about the afternoon.
Bruni has the green dress pinned, the last adjustments chalked.
Then she’s called away to the desk by a delivery, all apologies, five minutes, madam, and the private floor empties around us, one wall, one curtain, the shop’s murmur beyond.
I’m on the little platform in front of the triple mirror, pinned into wool the color of bottle glass.
Khristofer is in the chair with his elbows on his knees, and the quality of his attention has changed in a way the mirror reports in triplicate.
“Say it,” he says quietly. “You’ve been carrying it since the necklace.”
So I say it to the mirror, because it’s easier to tell three of him than one.
“I’m scared I’ll disappear in here.” The pins hold me still, which helps.
“Not the house, I can leave a house. In the life. The clothes arrive, the gold arrives, the manager apologizes, everything gets softer, easier, and one morning there’s no version of me that exists without your name attached for context.
I’ve watched it happen to women. It’s a good life right up until they need a door, and then there are no doors, there’s just his world with her furniture in it. ”
He doesn’t dismiss it. He doesn’t move for a moment, either. Then he stands, comes to the edge of the platform, and turns me by the shoulders, gently, mindful of the pins, until it’s him instead of the mirror.
“I’ve stood beside you in a room where you gave a professional interrogator nothing,” he says.
“You held a line under threat that most of my men couldn’t hold.
The woman who did that doesn’t disappear, and I’m not building her a softer cage, I’m arming her, keying her, backing her.
You saw the difference today, you named it yourself. ”
His hands stay on my shoulders, their weight an argument of its own. “I want you beside me. Not beneath me, not behind me, not inside my name. Beside. If you ever start to disappear, Naomi, you tell me, and I’ll burn whatever’s eating you, even if it’s mine. Even if it’s me.”