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The Watchmaker … Well, this changed everything.
Her response was simple:
Yes.
A fast hit of oxygen, then she rolled the canister onto the passenger-side floor and slammed the transmission into first.
25.
WHILE HE WASnever uneasy, as anyone else might use the word, anyonenormal, an intense hum of edgy anticipation now pulsed within him.
Charles Hale’s entire plan hinged upon what was about to happen.
He wasn’t concerned about security; the associate he was meeting had been vetted multiple times and there were precautions in place. It was simply that, as with a timepiece, the slightest deviation from tolerances would make the difference between functional and useless. And he needed this person’s role in his plan to work out perfectly.
Like when he was making watches he had to depend on a metalworker in Germany to make the springs—an art in itself.
A third-party expert.
Just like now.
The traffic here in Harlem was thick and swam along the streets like a school of fish that were simultaneously uncertain andassertive. He pulled the Pathfinder into a slot near the City College of New York and walked west through St. Nicholas Park, along a winding pathway glistening from a recent sprinkling. He smelled earth, car exhaust, a floral scent from a row of yellow flowers that were nonlethal and, as he’d reflected not long before, of little practical use to him. They were, however, pleasant to look at. Hale had little time for aesthetics, but he was human, after all, and could be moved, provided the emotion wasn’t a distraction or dilutant.
He broke from the park and started along 139th Street, part of Strivers’ Row, a nineteenth-century residential real estate project by David H. King Jr., the man responsible for constructing the 1889New York Timesbuilding, the base of the Statue of Liberty and the second Madison Square Garden. The brownstone, yellow-brick and limestone town houses here, many of them trimmed with terra-cotta, were gems. They had been marketed to middleclass whites, the predominant demographic in Harlem when they were built. The project failed and the foreclosing financiers let the units sit empty for twenty years before reluctantly agreeing to sell to Black purchasers.
Hale knew this fact about the neighborhood because there was something else here that appealed to him, and he saw it now: an outdoor clock, jutting over the sidewalk.
Six feet in diameter, dating to just after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, the timepiece was affixed to the façade of the Baker and Williams Building. The structure had at that time housed a musical instrument manufacturer, brass their specialty. Proud of their neighborhood—and more than a little aware of publicity—the owners decided to commission the clock.
Another motive for adding the attraction dated to the time that Baker, who was Black, was, for no fiscal reason, denied a loan by a vice president at Merchants Bank and Trust on Wall Street,over whose front door hung a similar clock. The timepiece that Baker ordered built and installed in Harlem was exactly one inch larger than the bank’s.
The company was long gone and the building had been converted. It featured a coffee shop at street level with apartments on the remaining eight floors.
The clock was simple—there were no complications, not even a day-of-the-week function. But the one thing that it featured, which many others did not, was a transparent face. You could see the workings perfectly. If he happened to have a job in New York, it was one of the half-dozen or so outdoor timepieces to which he made a pilgrimage.
This was perhaps his favorite. Both for its construction and its history, which was proof that time exists wholly independent of race, gender, national origin, orientation. It had, you might say, no “time” for such human constructs and the division that resulted from them.
An interesting philosophical question, and one he might think about further.
Though not, of course, at the moment.
•••
“Borrrrrring.”
“Uhm. We’re sitting on our asses with Cubano sandwiches and coffee. What, you want to be running tweakers to ground?”
“We’re watching it being hung is what we’re doing.”
“What?”
“Watching wallpaper being hung.” A pause. “Instead of paint drying. I was trying to be clever. Didn’t work?”
“Hm.”
The young detective who’d slung out the botched metaphorstretched and sipped more of the sweet, powerful brew. He was in the driver’s seat of the plumbing van—confiscated during a drug bust and now used for stakeouts and surveillance. It had a vague scent of metal, which probably came from metal, but might also have come from blood, which the Vehicles crew at NYPD hadn’t sufficiently scrubbed away.
Assigned to the nearby 32 House, he and his partner, who was lounging in the passenger seat, resembled each other vaguely. They were both short, athletic. The noticeable difference: the driver was blond, the other brunet.
