Norwegian by Night

me. I sent him to you, but…’

‘I got in late.’

‘You got in late. So I bought it.’

Sheldon was wearing a leather apron and a white shirt, and had slid his reading glasses to the top of his head. He was looking a bit scruffy, and his blue eyes caught a glint of the afternoon. Not that Bill noticed. Bill had no sense for the dramatic, the fleeting, the ethereal. Nothing magical existed for Bill. Which was a pity, because as Sheldon saw it, Bill had one of the most magical shops in New York — aside from his own — and no one knew this better than his son had.

To Saul’s boyish delight, Bill’s pawnshop was the exact same size and shape as Sheldon’s. There was something about the identical shape that allowed Saul to feel proprietary over Bill’s shop, too. Bill, divorced and childless, welcomed this.

In his father’s shop, Saul had to walk down a few steps to enter through a single gated door. On the left was the repair centre. Sheldon had a big wooden desk there, and along the wall behind him were thousands — maybe millions — of tiny little shelves, each one smaller than a card catalogue at the library, with nothing but numbers on them. The light was good here, and Saul watched as people passed through, all of them nice to his father.

In Bill’s, there was a big display case so people could look in and see all the strange things he had for sale. At one time he had a Viking shield with fur on the front side. Another time he had Rock’em Sock’em Robots from Mattel, an antique pistol from the Wild West, a broken typewriter, a letter opener from France, a vase with fish for handles, and a mirror surrounded by gold leaves.

Bill did not wear a leather apron like Sheldon did, nor a watchmaker’s loupe, and so there was still something special back in his father’s. The apron was faded and folded, and clearly had been worn by knights as they fought dragons. Saul knew this, because Sheldon had told him. In fact, Sheldon had no special interest in looking like an old-world horlogeur, but he couldn’t deny that leather aprons were extraordinarily handy when he dropped tiny watch pieces. With the apron he could hear the pieces hit the leather, which let him know that, yes, he had dropped something. Also handy was how the tiny pieces could be easily collected from the folds. So while it actually belonged to a cobbler — not a watchmaker — it was both handy and had magical dragon-fighting qualities. Together, they made it easy to don and hard to remove.

When Bill walked in that morning, Sheldon had a thermos of coffee on the workbench and was carefully fitting a used balance spring into a new Ollech & Wajs diver’s watch.

‘Congratulations,’ said Sheldon. ‘Now you have a watch.’

‘What are you doing?’ asked Bill.

‘Something that’s been on my mind for a while.’

‘What?’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘It’s complicated, right? Technical? I wouldn’t understand.’ Bill shook his head and whistled. ‘You Jews. You’re so clever. There’s nothing you’re not good at.’

Sheldon didn’t take the bait. ‘Staying out of trouble doesn’t seem to be our thing.’

‘So tell me what you’re doing, Einstein.’

Sheldon took off the eye loupe and placed it to the right of the work space. He pointed to the watch casing on the left.

‘That was Saul’s. They recovered it from his body. It came home with his personal effects.’

‘So you’re fixing it.’

‘No. I don’t want to fix it. I’m doing something else. Have you ever heard of elinvar?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a metal alloy that’s incredibly resistant to changes in temperature. The word is from the French elasticite invariable, which they shortened to elinvar. It’s used to make the balance spring on a mechanical watch like these two watches here.’

‘Valuable?’

‘No. It’s just iron, nickel, and chromium, but it makes a lot of stuff useful. The balance spring is a very delicate piece. It coils around and around and around. When you wind a watch, you’re coiling the balance spring. As it uncoils, the tension causes the watch parts to move and the whole thing to tick. The balance spring is the heart of the watch.

‘Thing is, there are only a few foundries actually producing the stuff. So most balance springs can be traced back to the same foundries. It’s like… the hearts all come from the same place. Like every watch has a soul, and is connected to every other one because they all came from the same home.

‘Saul’s watch was a modest Ollech & Wajs. Bought it from a magazine. Nothing you’d have ever heard of. Fancy people don’t own them. Working-class people do. Soldiers. And they get what they pay for. I like them. So I bought a new one recently, and I’m taking the balance spring from Saul’s old watch and I’m placing the old heart in the new one. This way, when I go about my day, and I check the time, and I make some decision or other, we’re connected. It makes me feel a little closer to him.’

‘That’s something, Donny.’

‘It’s what I’m doing, anyway.’

‘So how’s that any different from taking a battery from one watch and sticking it in another?’

Sheldon rubbed his face. ‘And you wonder why you never get laid.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You really don’t, do you…?’

‘How much for the new one?’

‘About thirty-five bucks or so. They used to be around seventeen.’

‘So look, guess how much I paid for the gold watch.’

‘How much?’

‘Oh, come on, Donny. Ask it like you mean it.’

Sheldon opened his hands a bit and asked in the same bored tone of voice, ‘How much?’

‘That’s more like it. Eight hundred.’

‘Eight hundred what? Dollars? Jesus, Bill. For a watch? You’ll never be able to sell that!’

‘I’m not gonna sell it. It’s an investment. I’m gonna buy a dozen of these things, stick ’em in a vault, and in twenty years when we sell these shops those watches will be worth thousands! We’ll retire. Get a place on Long Island. Fill it with Playboy bunnies, and drink champagne.’

The wooden desk chair creaked as Sheldon rocked on it.

Sheldon asked, ‘What are we going to do with Playboy bunnies when we’re in our seventies? Admire the way they carry drinks?’

‘You mark my words, Donny. By that time, with the way science is rushing on today, they’ll make a pill or give us a shot or something that’ll build a rocket in every old man’s trousers. We just landed on the moon ten years ago. That’s a young man’s dream. By the time those same scientists are our age, they’ll set their sights closer to home. They won’t want to go where no man has gone before. They’ll want to go where every man has gone before. And you know why? Because it’s nice there.’

‘What about our wives?’

‘Our wives… ’ said Bill, taking the question seriously, ‘I won’t be married and… by then… Mabel will be glad you’ve found a hobby.’

Sheldon leaned forward and opened his desk drawer. ‘You’re a visionary, Bill. I’ll grant you that. A horny, spendthrift visionary.’

Sheldon took out a small box and handed it to Bill.

‘What’s this?’ said Bill.

‘I want you to store these at your place. Just stick them someplace. Don’t sell them.’

‘What are they?’

‘Some medals they gave me, coming home from Korea.’

Bill took the box without opening it.

‘Why do I have to take them?’

‘I don’t want my wife to find them. Or Rhea. She’s getting bigger, and running around asking