That was how Rob came to have the set of “extra” passports—Ron would have frowned at the term “forged”. “I always obtain my materials at source,” he’d said to Rob over the phone long ago, in the offended tone of an artist whose integrity had been called into question. The passports bore Ron’s face, but someone else’s name, and they referred to an involved backstory which Rob had been required to memorize—a whole invented history of parents, places, jobs held, a whole false life completely supported by documentation planted in a hundred places. Rob had paid high for this at the time—or had thought he had. By his present standards, the price was now peanuts, and worth every penny, at the moment when he most desperately needed to go somewhere and not be noticed.
Normally he could have gone quite openly. Normally the excuse would have been, “I’m going to visit my money.” It would have been true. Since the GSM-using countries had started hardwiring Rob’s “Henchman” data exchange protocol into every cellphone they manufactured, CortCorp had grown to twenty times the size it had been ten years ago, and had millions of francs’ worth of sheltered investments in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Rob dropped in fairly frequently to see his European regional managers, and make sure that things were running smoothly. But this trip, the unavoidable public ruckus that attended his arrival anywhere would have made it impossible to do what he was going there for.
So, this trip, he’d laid a false trail. He’d sent his second-string Learjet and his executive staff to Eleuthera, telling them that he wanted to take a week off in the sun, but he had a few last-minute things to tidy up before he left. The first-string jet, the Longhorn Lear, he had ordered unhangared and out to its “ready” stand on the civil-aeronautics side of Sea-Tac. And there it would sit for a good while yet, because Rob had called a cab to meet him several blocks from HQ, slipped out of the building through one of the two blind spots he had designed into his own security, caught first the cab and then a train to San Francisco, and at nine the next evening was on a Swissair flight to Zurich.
To keep his cover as complete as possible, he’d flown coach…not that it was such a hardship, just this once. It was almost a treat, in some ways. Instead of being surrounded by the kind of people who usually hemmed him round—employees with important papers for him to sign, or non-employees who desperately wanted his attention and support for one project or another—now his world was bounded by seats full of businessmen who carried their own briefcases, and vacationers in sweats, and mothers with fidgeting children. When the flight attendants dimmed the lights about fifteen minutes after the takeoff, Rob relaxed almost completely. No one had recognized him so far, since the back of economy class was not a place that most people would expect Robert Willingden to be. In the darkness, with his seat light turned off, a blanket tucked up around him, and an eyeshade on, no one was now going to recognize him at all. He was a little nervous about how his documents would be treated at Zurich…but there was no point in worrying about that now. He put the thought aside.
Besides, he had been sent a good omen. When Rob came back from using the lavatory before he settled in, walking slowly behind the drinks cart that the flight attendants were trundling up the aisle in front of him, in the seat directly behind him, spotlit by his seat-light against the darkness, he saw a small blond boy. Other kids in the plane might be squirming and screeching and trying to scheme their way out of their seat belts, but this one was completely oblivious to being strapped in. He was buried deep in the first of a pile of about twenty comic books.
Rob smiled as he settled back into his seat and pulled the blanket up around him. As he started to put his eyeshades on, though, he stiffened in shock for just a second. Past him, in the wake of the flight attendants, lit just faintly by the blue-green light of the little LED movie screens hanging down every three rows, a shadowy figure went softly by, carrying what looked like a box.
Rob blinked, and then saw the shape better in the light coming from between the curtains that separated the first-class galley from the rest of the plane. A male flight attendant had passed him, carrying a couple of small flats of soft-drink cans, stacked one on top of the other. Not a thief. Not something stolen…something of mine.
Nonetheless, Rob swallowed, nervous. Now the omens had fallen both ways. There was no telling what might happen.
Rob put his eyeshade on and did his best to sleep.
*
All this had begun when his favorite clock got broken—the 19th-century Thomas crystal regulator mantelpiece clock that he wouldn’t trust even his personal staff with. Rob had been going to Zürich anyway, to visit Trudi, his trusts-and-portfolio manager at Bank Julius Baer. It had suddenly occurred to Rob while he was packing that if there was anything you should be able to do in Switzerland, it was get a broken clock fixed. He had Chei make a few calls, and when he had the name of what was supposed to be the best repair place in the city—”Zeit Zone Zürich”, it was called—Rob had padded and boxed the clock up himself, and strapped it himself into the other lounge seat in the main cabin of the number-one Lear. Once Rob was finished with his business in the cold lovely Beaux-Arts building on Paradeplatz, the limo took him about fifteen minutes’ drive out into the suburbs, to a ten-foot-wide shopfront at the end of a line of stores that seemed about as close as the Swiss could get to a strip mall. Considering the place’s reputation, Rod had been expecting something ornate, in an eighteenth-century housing, like one of the high-powered watch and jewelry stores on Bahnhofstrasse. Here, though, was a mirrored plate glass window, and beside it, a couple of steps up to an aluminum and glass door: nothing more.
Rob had pushed the door open, stepped in, glanced around, and found that there was nowhere in particular to go. He was hemmed in by a waist-height table directly in front of him, and a chest-height counter directly to the right of him. Behind the counter a worktable was butted up against the front window and the light grey side wall. On a high stool behind the workbench sat a young blond guy with a jeweler’s loupe in his eye, carving delicately with a scalpel at some tiny piece of metal held in vise-forceps under a magnifying lamp. Sitting in front of the other, lower table-counter was an ancient lady in equally ancient furs, and she and a shop assistant in jeans and a T-shirt were examining a watch of such chaste and severe plainness that Rob thought it was probably more expensive than any mere Rolex, with or without a few carats’ worth of diamonds.
No one had given him more than a glance when he came in. It was as if they were completely used to giant bulletproof Mercedes limos pulling up outside and emitting the presidents of multinational corporations. Maybe they were. But at this point in his life, Ron wasn’t used to this kind of treatment. His face was just too well known. All the same, he wasn’t going to make a big thing of it. He stood there quietly, waiting.
At last the guy who had been working at the bench on that microscopic piece of metal paused in his work and stood up, turning to Rob. “Kann Ich hilfen Sie?”
Rob’s German was not great: it didn’t have to be. He had translators for that. For a moment he considered calling his chauffeur in, then put the idea aside. “Uh, entschuldigen Sie mir bitte, Ich spreche kein Deutsch. Does anybody here speak English?”
The man behind the counter, and the lady in the furs, both looked briefly at Rob as if he’d just arrived from Mars. Then they went back to their conversation about the watch. “Ein moment, bitte,” said the man to whom Rob had been speaking, and went through a door in the back wall of the shop, a few feet away.
That was when Uli Siegler came out from the back of the shop. Rob had had an image of the owner of this place as some bewhiskered ancient with wrinkled eyes and careful hands. On first sight, the man in his mid-twenties, in a white polo shirt and faded blue jeans, had come as a surprise. The gray eyes were not wrinkled, but thoughtful, behind little oval spectacles, in a smooth face that looked oddly like that of William Tell on the five-franc coin—sharing the long straight nose and high forehead, but with a buzz cut above it all that
might have puzzled Tell. The man’s hands were as careful as Rob had expected, though, as he reached out to take the box containing the Thomas from Rob.
“A very beautiful timepiece,” he had said without any other preamble, putting the box down on the counter and taking out the clock. “American. Eighteen… ninety? Yes. And very sensitive to vibration, I am afraid. Was it bumped or dropped before it stopped working?”
“Uh, yes. Not very hard. Someone fell against it at a party.”
Uli made a tch, tch sound under his breath as he removed the lead-crystal dome over the Thomas. “Mmm, yes, I see. The escape wheel broke a tooth when it fell over. Those were always a weakness in the Thomases built in 1890: he got a bad batch of brass that year, the wheels machined then did not last long… And the entrance pallet, you see this sharp bit here that rocks back and forth to let the escape wheel move?—see how that is bent. Mm, both must be replaced. Perhaps also the crutch pin: I will test it.”
“How long will this take?” Rob said.
“Is the need urgent?” Uli said.
“No, not really.”
Uli thought. “One week, then. If you will leave me an address, I can ship it to you.”
“Not this clock,” Rob said, maybe too forcefully.
Uli smiled at that. “I see you are attached to it. This is good. Will you be over here for that long?”
“Until the Monday after next.”
“Then here is my card. If you call at the end of a week, I will have the clock ready for you.”
Rob left the shop wondering just why it was “good” that he was attached to the Thomas.. Well, it had been his grandfather’s, the only memento he had of that cranky, kindly, good old man, forty years dead now. He was determined to take good care of it.
As the limo had brought him back into town, he caught himself humming a song:
Oh, my grandfather’s clock
was too large for the shelf…
Rob raised his eyebrows at the old memory. I guess I should have a bigger shelf made for it if I’m going to leave it out in a public area of the house, he thought. And one a little more out of the way. I don’t want it to be wrecked. …And looking a little more closely into the security for that room might be smart, too. As bad as having it get broken would be seeing it get stolen…
…like some other things…
The memory had dropped down around him as suddenly as night at the Equator. Dripping darkness, cold air, the acrid scent of wet, scorched oak: and a shape dodging away hurriedly through the hole the firemen had hacked in the roof the night before. A man, all in dark clothes, carrying a box…
Rob had put the memory forcibly aside as he stepped in the door of his hotel, the Schweizerhof, considering instead where he might go that evening. He caught the slightly annoyed glance of one of his security people at the busy main street outside the hotel, and did his best to hide his grin as he went inside. Most of his staff couldn’t understand why their boss disdained the two high-priced hotels by the lake, theoretically much better ones than this. Rob knew, though, that his security people suspected the real reason. While staying at the Eden Roc or the Dolder Grand, it was impossible for Rob to slip out undetected late at night and do the thing his staff despaired of—go for a good long walk by himself in city streets, without a bodyguard. His chief of security had been going nuts about this kind of thing ever since the attack at the economic forum in Brussels by the Societé des Anarchistes de Tartes, when a protester who didn’t like ContCorp’s company’s investment policies had rushed out of the crowd and hit Rob square in the face with a very passable short-crust pie shell full of chocolate crème patissiere. For a few weeks Rob had behaved himself while his staff calmed down…but nothing his people could say was going to get Rob to change his habits this late in his life. If his number came up, piped onto a pie or scratched on a bullet, so be it. Meanwhile, late at night in the city streets was still where Rob came up with some of his best ideas; and in that way, after mornings of meetings and afternoons of negotiations, he amused himself for some days.
On his second Saturday morning in the city, Rob woke up to find a message on his hotel room’s voice mail: Uli’s voice, saying, “I will be done with the clock this afternoon: I will bring it to the hotel at six.” Rob’s return call to the shop just rang and rang. Maybe he’s working on it at home or something… But then Rob wondered how Uli had known which hotel to call. Maybe he saw something in the papers. That was almost certainly it. Rob couldn’t go much of anywhere without the press noticing, whether or not he was on company business and attended by the usual complement of press releases.
At six o’clock Uli turned up almost exactly as Rob had seen him the other day, the only difference a dark suede jacket thrown over the polo shirt in a nod to the Schweizerhof’s unspoken dress code. He sat down across from Rob in the hotel’s pompous, chilly little first-floor caviar-and-champagne bar, and took the lid off the small wooden box he had set on the table. From the cotton-wool padding inside it Uli brought out the Thomas, set it down, lifted the dome, and gave one globe of the downhanging “pawnshop” pendulum a push. The pendulum began to rotate back and forth, and the clock, set for six, began to chime.
Rob smiled at it, then looked up again. It was a shock to see Uli looking at him. Somehow, irrationally, he had expected to see his grandfather—had expected to hear him saying, “I want you to have this…”
But that had been twenty years ago, before Rob’s company took off…in what now often seemed like a previous life. Rob swallowed. “Can I get you something to drink?”
They sat there talking casually for a long while amid the white marble walls and the polished tables, and every now and then one or another of Rob’s security staff peered in the door from the lobby and went away, reassured. The conversation went in every possible direction, and Rob couldn’t remember much of it. It couldn’t have been the fault of the wine: he didn’t have that much. He did, though, remember Uli glancing up from his second glass of a Dôle red as blood, and saying, “I have been working with time for a long while. But you know this also: otherwise you would not have come to me.”
The phrasing struck Rob as odd…and obscurely it frightened him. Many people who thought there was no end to his riches had tried to sell Rob the impossible over the past decade. He had seen more than his share of perpetual motion machines, and had been invited to bankroll several different kinds of attempted cold fusion. Rob thought he’d developed a good early-warning system for the ridiculous, and could get up in the middle of the most formal meetings and vanish when it presented itself. Yet now he sat right where he was while Uli talked. He could never remember afterwards just how the conversation got from that point to his realization that Uli claimed to be doing repairs, not merely on clocks, but on time itself.
“Or I assist them in being made,” Uli said. “The client merely enables me to enable him to do the work. This is nothing new. There is something you wish to repair.”
It was not a question.
Plainly this conversation was going to surpass even Rob’s usual definition of odd. A little breath of cold passed over the back of his neck. A draft. And it’s freezing in here, with all this marble. But he didn’t succeed in convincing himself. Who is this guy? Rob thought.
But then—and maybe this time it was the wine, a little—he thought, Why should it matter? My people are within call. And if he tries selling the story to the National Inquirer or something, I’ll just buy the pub rights from them—
Rob went ahead and told Uli about the theft, and all the while the fear grew in him that Uli would find it foolish, and laugh. But that grey-eyed gaze rested gravely on him, unsurprised, all the while he told the story; and when Rob ran down at last, Uli merely nodded and said, “I think you must attempt this repair.”
Rob could now only try to hide his embarrassment by scoffing. “Oh, yeah, sure. Let’s just go back in time and put it all right.”
“‘Right’ can look many different ways,?
?? Uli said, not rising even slightly to the bait. “But all your life since then, it seems, has been a rage against that night, when the thief came and stole from you. It is not that much good has not come of it—but the good seems to have come to everyone else but you. You will not, what is the phrase in English, accept delivery on it.”
“You’re going to tell me I have to ‘just let it go,’” Rob said, scathing.
“No. I am going to tell you that you must catch it first,” Uli said. “What you do with it after that is your business. But I can put you where you can make the attempt to stop the theft. If you succeed, you can then stop walking the streets of city after city at night, looking for what you desire, and finding everything else instead. Not, as I say, that you have not done good. But it would make more sense to do it on purpose, rather than by accident.”
Rob turned his empty wineglass around and around on the round marble table, and said nothing.
“It is irresponsible,” Uli said, “to leave things broken when they can be repaired.”
That was almost exactly Rob’s grandfather’s voice: stern, uncompromising. A shiver went down Rob’s back. Finally he looked up. “What’s this going to cost?” he said.
“A great deal. But not more than you can afford, and not so much that your company directors will try to have you committed. This is about a repair, not further damage.”
Rob sat quiet for a few moments more, while Uli drank what was left of his wine. “Payment first, I suppose,” Rob said, trying to hang onto some shred of at least sarcasm, if not control.
“Not at all. Payment afterwards, when the repair has been tested.”
This sounded completely unlike any scam Rob had ever been involved in. All of those had required up-front investments with lots of zeroes before the decimal point. And it was very hard to look at those gray eyes and find even the shadow of deceit in them.