My Employer Ordered One Last Polish Before The Widow Arrived

At 8:41 that Tuesday morning, Silas Creed asked me to erase a dead man's name.

He set a gold pocket watch on my bench. Its back had already been rubbed so thin that the crest looked like a thumbprint.

"One more pass, Tomas. Kindly make the surface clean."

"It's clean. Another pass will make it weak."

"Then please make it weak in a tasteful way."

I was fifty-three, a Puerto Rican man with brown skin, a square gray beard, and a left eyebrow split by an old bicycle scar. I repaired antique watches in the narrow back room of his private auction house on East Twenty-Eighth Street.

I signed every repair sheet Tomas Velez, then added the exact time.

My good ear faced the door. My damaged ear faced the wall. Creed called me his half-deaf bench worker, usually when a client could hear.

"A blessing in this trade," he would say. "He misses the gossip."

I missed some words. I missed very little else.

Silas Creed was a tall white American man with silver hair combed flat, pale lashes, and long hands that never seemed to touch dust. At fifty-eight, he bent over people with the soft care of a man closing a box.

I laid the watch on a square of blue watch paper. I folded one corner up. My father had taught me that habit in his repair shop in the Bronx. The raised corner gave small screws a place to stop.

"The movement doesn't belong to this case," I said.

"We disclosed a replacement."

"The stem sits too high."

"Then lower it. We are selling history, Tomas, not accuracy."

He smiled at his own line. I wrote it nowhere.

What I wrote was: Lot 41. Case bed number 68417. Replacement movement. Stem under strain.

That number sat inside the gold shell, beneath the movement. A wheel train and a thin metal ring had covered it. Polishing the outside could not reach it.

I lifted the movement, set my own microscope over the empty case, and took three photographs. One showed the whole watch beside its job card. One showed the number. One showed a tiny flaw beside the last digit.

My repair agreement let me keep condition photographs. I had insisted on that line after a customer once blamed me for a crack that came through my door.

Creed had signed it without reading past my rate: $90 an hour.

He owned the auction room. I owned the microscope, the camera, and the image files. My notebook held the key between each file and each job.

I put that notebook in my bag every night.

"No need to photograph the underside," he said from the doorway.

"There is if I'm fitting a movement."

He watched me for a moment.

"How admirable. Even the unseen gets your care."

Three unpaid weekly invoices sat beneath my lamp. Each was for $1,620. I had asked twice. He had thanked me twice for my patience.

At noon, I took the watch upstairs for its preview case. A woman in a raincoat stood at the desk with a printed photograph.

"That's my husband's," she said.

Our catalog director, Mara Dane, kept both hands flat on the counter.

"Many watches have blue enamel, Mrs. Bell."

"Many husbands don't scratch their wedding date inside the lid."

Creed came out of his office.

"Mrs. Bell. May I offer you a chair? Grief can make standing quite hard."

"Someone broke into my home. Don't explain grief to me."

He took the photograph but did not look at it.

"Our seller supplied papers. You're welcome to submit your concern in writing."

I looked at the blue edge of the dial. Then I looked at her hands. One finger had a pale ring mark.

"Was it repaired before?" I asked.

"In 2008. My husband kept every receipt."

Creed turned his head toward me.

"Tomas has work waiting."

Mrs. Bell left a copy of her police report. Mara slid it under a catalog.

I did not take it. I wrote down the report number while I still remembered it.

Outside, the air smelled of wet scaffolding and the flower stalls farther west. I had an appointment with a new customer at six. I arrived at 5:42. My watches kept exact time. For strangers, I always left extra.

The customer never came. A younger woman stood beneath the repair shop's awning instead, handing out flyers.

"Have you seen him?" she asked.

The face belonged to Daniel Rios, the courier who carried Creed's locked watch cases. I had not seen him in eleven days.

"I'm his sister, Rosa. Police have a missing-person report."

I remembered a receipt Mara had clipped to Lot 41 that morning.

Daniel's name was on it. The delivery date was nine days ago.

My hand tightened around my bag.

Rosa held out her phone. "The investigator said to call if anyone knew his route."

Before I could answer, my own phone rang.

Creed's voice was gentle.

"Would you please return Mrs. Bell's watch to my office before you leave tomorrow? And Tomas, kindly stop speaking to people outside your work."