The Watchmaker’s Hand

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 metaphor stretched 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.

“We have to listen to that?” Brunet, slightly older, asked with an unnecessary glance at the radio. It was disgorging soft rock.

“So change it. Whatever you want. What’re the odds he’ll show up here?”

“You’re not saying that you really mean what’re the odds. You’re saying it like you mean this’s a waste of time.”

Blond: “Ex-act-ly. No, that’s country. Find another station.”

“You said whatever I wanted. I changed it to country.”

“Hip-hop.”

“I could do hip-hop.”

The NYPD unwritten rule was that on stakeout it was okay to listen to music because that tended to keep you awake. Sports were forbidden because games distracted from your mission of observing bad guys doing bad things. This was tough. Nine-tenths of the force loved sports. The rest were assholes.

The cultural compromise ironed out, they sat back and continued to watch the street.

“Uhm. Where’d this come from?” Brunet asked the question.

He hadn’t been at the briefing. Blond had snagged him for the detail because they got along pretty well and agreed on most stuff. Important stuff. Teams and politics. Music didn’t count.

“You know that guy in the wheelchair? Ex-cop.”

“Who doesn’t? Rhyme. Captain. Crime Scene.”

Blond told him, “There’s somebody got into the country. Terrorist or something. Snuck in in the wheel well of a plane. From England.”

“Calling bogus. You couldn’t do that. Impossible.”

“A hundred bucks?” Blond reached into his pocket and pulled out bills. He counted. “Eighty-seven bucks?”

Brunet grew cautious. “Put it away. But how the fuck?”

“Oxygen tank and a heater.”

“No shit.” Brunet was both impressed at the feat and relieved that he hadn’t lost the price of dinner for him and the wife.

“So this guy’s the one behind the crane this morning.”

“And Rhyme’s running the case? How’s that work? He’s a civie.”

“Sellitto out of Major Cases, downtown? He’s lead.”

“Oh, the sourpuss.”

“But Rhyme kind of runs it.”

Moments passed, more scanning the street. Brunet said: “So, he really can’t walk? Rhyme?”

“Sure, he can walk. He runs marathons too. He just sits in a wheelchair all day ’cause it gets him sympathy.”

“I’m only saying.”

Sipping more of the Cuban coffee, Blond looked at the printout once more, then scanned the street again for a sighting of the man depicted on the sheet.

Charles Vespasian Hale.

A more ordinary-looking man you could not find.

One thing was key: the suspect would probably pay a visit to one of the legendary outdoor timepieces of the city.

He’d actually said that, Sellitto had said. “Legendary timepieces.” Most of them in the watch room struggled not to snicker.

There were five of these Rhyme had picked and the PD had undercover teams on them all.

Brunet sat forward, scanned a passerby. Blond checked too. The pedestrian wasn’t him.