All Tomorrow's Parties

30. ANOTHER ONE

FONTAINE had spent most of the late afternoon on the phone, trying to lay Clarisse's creepy Japanese baby dolls off on a decreasingly likely list of specialist dealers.

He knew it wasn't the thing to do, in terms of realizing optimum cash, but dolls weren't one of his areas of expertise; besides, they gave him the horrors, these Another One replicas.

Specialist dealers wanted low wholesale, basically, so they could whip the big markup to collectors. If you were a collector, Fontaine figured, specialist dealers were nature's way of telling you you had too much money to begin with. But there was always a chance he'd find one who knew somebody, one specific buyer, to go to. That was what Fontaine had been hoping for when he'd started dialing.

But now it was eight calls later, and he was reduced to talking to this Elliot, in Biscayne Bay, Florida, who he knew had once been put under electronic house arrest for something involving counterfeit Barbies. That was a federal rap, and Fontaine ordinarily avoided people like that, but Elliot did seem to have a line on a buyer. Although he was, as you'd naturally expect, cagey about it.

'Condition, Elliot said. 'The three salient points here are condition, condition, and condition.

'Elliot, they look great to me.

' 'Great' is not on the NAADC grading scale, Fontaine.

Fontaine wasn't sure, but he thought that might be the National Association of Animatronic Doll Collectors. 'Elliot, you know I don't know how to rate condition on these things. They've got all their fingers and toes, right? I mean, the fucking things look alive, okay?

Fontaine heard Elliot sigh. He'd never met the man. 'My client, said Elliot, speaking slowly, for stress, 'is a condition queen. He wants them minty. He wants them mintier than minty. He wants them mint in box. He wants them new old stock.

'Hey, look, Fontaine said, remembering what Clarisse had said, 'you don't get these things unused, right? The grandparents bought them as, like, surrogate offspring, right? They were big-ticket items. They got used.

'Not always, said Elliot. 'The most desirable pieces, and my client owns several, are replicas ordered just prior to the unexpected death of the grandchild.

Fontaine took the phone from his ear, looking at it as though it were something dirty. 'Fucking hell, Fontaine said, under his breath.

'What's that? Elliot asked. 'What?

'Sorry, Elliot, Fontaine said, putting the phone back to his ear, 'gotta take one on the other line. I'll get back to you. Fontaine broke the connection.

He was perched on a tall stool behind the counter. He leaned sideways to look at the Another One dolls in their bag. They looked horrible. They were horrible. Elliot was horrible. Clarisse was horrible too, but now Fontaine lapsed into a brief but intensely erotic fantasy involving none other, with whom he had not been conjugal in some while. That this fantasy literally involved Clarisse exclusively, he took to be significant. That it produced an actual erectile response, he took to be even more significant. He sighed. Adjusted his trousers.

Life, he reflected, was rough as a cob.

Through the sound of rain sluicing down around his shop (he'd rigged gutters) he could hear a faint but rapid clicking from the back room and noted its peculiar regularity. Each one of those clicks, he knew, represented another watch. He'd shown the boy how to call up auctions on the notebook, not Christie's or Antiquorum, but the living messy scrum of the net auctions. He'd shown him how to bookmark too, because he thought that picking what he liked might be fun.

Fontaine sighed again, this time because he had no idea what he would do about the boy. Having taken him in because he'd wanted a closer look at-well, had wanted, did want-the Jaeger-LeCoultre military. Fontaine would have found it impossible to explain to anyone why he had subsequently fed him, gotten him showered, bought him fresh clothes, and shown him how to use the eyephones. Actually he couldn't explain it to himself. He was not inclined to charity, he didn't think, but sometimes he found himself moving as if to right a particular wrong in the world. And this never made sense to Fontaine, really, because what he made right, he made right only for a little while, and nothing ever really changed.

This boy now, he very likely had some sort of brain damage, and most likely congenital, but Fontaine believed that trouble had no first cause. There was sheer bad luck, he knew that, but often as not he'd seen how cruelty or neglect or hard-luck genetics came twining up through the generations like a vine.

Now he dug down deep, into the pocket of his tweed slacks, where he was keeping the Jaeger-LeCoultre. By itself, of course, so that nothing else would scratch it. He pulled it out now and considered it, but the tenor of his thoughts prevented the momentary distraction, the small pleasure, he'd hoped to take from it.

But how on earth, he wondered, had the boy gotten hold of something like this, such an elegant piece of serious collector's ordnance?

And the workmanship of the strap worried him. He'd never seen anything quite like it, for all that it was very simple. An artisan had sat down with the watch, whose lugs were closed not by spring bars but permanently soldered rods of stainless steel, integral parts of the case, and cut and glued and hand stitched however many pieces of black calf leather. He examined the inside of the strap, but there was nothing, no trademark or signature. 'If you could talk, Fontaine said, looking at the watch.

And what would it tell him? he wondered. The story of how the boy had gotten it might turn out to be not the most unlikely adventure it had had. Briefly he imagined it on some officer's wrist out in the Burmese night, a star shell bursting above a jungle hillside, monkeys screaming…

Did they have monkeys in Burma? He did know the British had fought there when this had been issued.

He looked down through the scratched, greenish glass that topped the counter. Watches there, each face to him a tiny and contained poem, a pocket museum, subject over time to laws of entropy and of chance. These tiny mechanisms, their jeweled hearts beating. Wearing down, he knew, through the friction of metal on metal. He sold nothing unserviced, everything cleaned and lubricated. He took fresh stock to a sullen but highly skilled Pole in Oakland to be cleaned, oiled, and timed. And he did this, he knew, not to provide a better, more reliable product, but to ensure that each one might better survive in an essentially hostile universe. It would've been difficult to admit this to anyone, but it was true and he knew it.

He put the Jaeger-LeCoultre back in his pocket and slid from the stool. Stood staring blankly into a glass-fronted cabinet, the shelf at eye level displaying military Dinky Toys and a Randall Model 15 'Airman, a stocky-looking combat knife with a saw-toothed spine and black Micarta grips. The Dinky Toys had been played with; dull gray base metal showed through chipped green paint. The Randall was mint, unused, unsharpened, its stainless steel blade exactly as it left the grinding belt. Fontaine wondered how many such had in fact never been used. Totemic objects, they lost considerable resale value if sharpened, and it was his impression that they circulated almost as a species of ritual currency, quite exclusively masculine. He had two currently in stock, the other a hiltless little leaf-point dirk said to have been designed for the US Secret Service. Best dated by the name of the maker on their saddle-sewn sheaths, he estimated them both to be about thirty years old. Such things were devoid of much poetry for Fontaine, although he understood the market and how to value a piece. They spoke to him mainly, as did the window of any army surplus store, of male fear and powerlessness. He turned away now, seeing the dying eyes of a man he'd shot in Cleveland, possibly in the year one of those knives had been made.

He locked the door, put the CLOSED sign up, and went into the back room where he found the boy still seated, cross-legged, as he'd left him, his face hidden by the massive old eyephones cabled to the open notebook in his lap.

'Hey, Fontaine said, 'How's fishin'? You been finding anything you think we should bid on?

The boy continued to monotonously click a single key on the notebook, the eyephones bobbing slightly in time.

'Hey, Fontaine said. 'You gonna get netburn.

He squatted beside the boy, wincing at the pain it brought to his knees. He rapped once on the gray cowl of the eyephones, then gently removed them. The boy's eyes blinked furiously, swimming in the vanished light of the miniature video screens. His hand clicked the notebook a few times, then stopped.

'Let's see what you found, Fontaine said, taking the notebook from him. He absently touched a few keys, curious to see what the boy might have bookmarked.

He was expecting auction pages, each one with a scan and description of a given watch on offer, but what he found instead were numbered lists of articles that came up in an archaic font meant to recall typewriters.

He studied one list, then another. He felt something like cold air across the back of his neck and thought for a second that the front door was open, but then he remembered locking it.

'Shit, Fontaine said, pulling up more of these lists. 'Shit, how'd you get this?

These were bank records, confidential tallies of the contents of safety deposit boxes in banks of the brick-and-mortar sort, all apparently in Midwestern states. And each list he saw contained at least one watch, very likely part of someone's estate, and very likely forgotten.

A Rolex Explorer in Kansas City. Some sort of gold Patek in a small town in Kansas.

He looked from the screen to the boy, aware of being privy to something profoundly anomalous.

'How'd you get into these files? he asked. 'This stuff is private. Should be impossible. Is impossible. How'd you do it?

And only that absence behind the brown eyes, staring back at him, either infinitely deep or of no depth at all, he couldn't tell.