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Authors: Isaac Adamson

BOOK: Complication
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Pondering the unknowns of the local real-estate market jarred loose a thought that should have occurred to me much earlier. Ever since I'd heard about the watch theft and the existence of Martinko Klingáč, I'd assumed that he killed Paul so he wouldn't have to pay him his cut. But then if he already had the watch, why torture Paul? I'd theorized Klingáč wanted to know the identity of the third conspirator, but I hadn't reasoned out why. To tie up loose ends? To keep an eye on her in case it looked like she might talk to the cops?
I hadn't considered the most obvious reason.
Paul didn't have the watch. Vera did.
By the time Martinko Klingáč had caught up with my brother, he'd already ditched the watch with Vera for safekeeping. Maybe
as an assurance that he got paid. Or maybe they had just plain double-crossed Klingáč, had stolen the thing without ever intending to pass it on. They would sell it themselves, keep all the profits, double their money.
Vera stopped in front of a white, three-story, many-gabled house guarded on either side by twin pine trees rising above the obligatory red tiled roof. A BMW motored past as Vera stood outside the gate and punched her code into a keypad mounted on the fence. Amber lights blazed from inside the large picture window on the first floor, and I saw a fleeting silhouette move behind the glass as Vera closed the wrought iron gate behind her and started walking up the entryway. I hurried to the other side of the street for a better view.
Just as she was walking up the stairs, the front door swung open and a child rushed out. The kid was maybe five or six years old, barefoot and dressed in his pajamas. Vera chirped some mild admonishment, he giggled, and then she scooped him up in her arms. His face shone over her shoulder and even through the rain, from a distance of some thirty yards, I knew. Same broad nose, same mischievous turn to his lips. It was so much like looking at an old Polaroid that I half expected to find my younger self in the frame, posed next to my little brother in a snap button shirt and Tuffskins jeans from Sears circa 1977.
She carried the boy inside and pulled the door closed and then all was silence and stillness save for the pines moving in the breeze, their heavy limbs undulating as if dancing to secret music. Then a car roared up and came to a splashing halt beside me, and the driver rolled down the window and stuck out his head, red eyes bulging, teeth grinding inside his mouth so hard for a time he couldn't speak. He didn't need to. The first floor lights in a white house on a quiet corner of Lomená Street went off, and I stepped from the sidewalk, opened the car door, and slid inside.
The Cruel Geometry of Zugzwang—Part II
March 13, 1938
 
My Dearest Klara,
 
You excelled at the abrupt departure, taking even your ultimate leave with but a few indiscriminate words, a parting to fit your lifelong abhorrence of the sentimental, the maudlin, that urge to say things more powerfully left unsaid. For me goodbyes have always been an agonizing, drawn out exchange, and I fear this farewell may yet grow more tortured.
And so let us now resume with my haggard face pressed to the smoked glass of my shop window, as I watch Doctor Kačak tottering down the street, afraid that any moment he will change his mind, reverse course, and come back toward me with his crippled spider's gait. Let us begin as he finally rounds the corner and I retreat from the window. Let us commence as I carefully swaddle the watch in its velvet cloth and steal down the groaning backstairs to the cellar that acts as my workshop, storeroom, and sanctuary, a cluttered enclosure that makes the shop's main floor appear a cheery paragon of organization and restraint.
Let you find me in the cellar where rickety shelves line damp stone walls, where rows of forgotten books form a vast mildew farm and cobweb skeins cling to every corner (curiously, I've seen neither spider nor fly in all my time there—perhaps they've fled to be with spider and fly relations in America). Upon the floor are strewn decaying wooden crates crammed with a hodgepodge of rolled maps, cases of old Victrola records, forgotten musical scores, rolls for player pianos. From
a bent nail in the wall hangs an eighteenth-century rare Spanish Miquelet flintlock pistol. Broken gramophone, bladeless ice-skates, chipped Meissen figurines, brass candelabra, jar of preserved fetal pig, box of mousetraps, box of better mousetraps; for the thousandth time I pledged all must be gotten rid of lest they start crossbreeding and multiplying. Except now it appears they will remain while I'm the one who'll be gotten rid of.
But my narrative outraces my pen.
When Doctor Kačak had unveiled the piece, it was the exquisitely crafted ivory inset of the White Lion which first alerted me, nay, grabbed my lapels, shook me bodily, and roared, Wake man! Raise the alarms and rouse the guards, for I am no ordinary watch! Now in the privacy of my cellar, I am able to inspect it unencumbered, without fear that my mounting enthusiasm may betray me.
The watch's shape is the first sign of its authenticity, its tambour cylinder housing typical of watches made in the latter half of the sixteenth century. I find no anachronisms in the works—there is no minute hand, and the fusee cord consists of catgut rather than miniature drive chains. The escapement is of the verge rather than anchor, deadbeat, or lever variety and uses a primitive balance wheel but no balance spring. No suspect alloys, the delicate gears fashioned from hand-cut steel and everything held in place by pins and rivets rather than screws. Closing the watch's casement and turning it over, I discover upon its rear surface the obsidian symbol I almost dared not hope to find.
The self-consuming snake. The Ouroboros.
I re-swaddle the piece and set it down on my workbench as if delivering an infant into the arms of sleep. I need no further proof but still race to the bookshelf and scan the dusty leather and cracked vellum spines of my library until I've found
Curiousities of Late Medieval Horology
. Scarce do I begin thumbing through its yellowed pages of when my eyes land on the description in mid-sentence:
“ . . . though many believe the ivory lion engraving on the watch's case had special significance for Rudolf II. Court astronomer Tycho Brahe had prophesized that Rudolf's fate was tied to that of his favorite pet lion, a declawed and toothless beast given to him by the Sultan of Turkey. An inventory of the Kunstkammer completed in 1595 also describes the case as featuring an inset of the ‘Ouroboros'—the Greek name given to the circular symbol of a serpent swallowing its own tail, which alchemists used to represent infinity and primordial unity.
“Beyond its rumored link to nefarious court charlatan Edward Kelley, the origins and authorship of the Rudolf Complication remain murky. Jacob Zech, inventor of the fusee in 1525, likely had no role in its creation, though we can't rule out a skilled apprentice. Jost Bürgi is another name often put forth, but the Rudolf Complication predates the Prague arrival of the clockmaking genius and algorithm inventor by some years. If surviving accounts of the piece are to be trusted, the Rudolf Complication also far surpasses in miniaturization any known work by famed Rudolf contemporary Christof Margraf.
“Its ultimate fate remains murkier still. After Rudolf died in 1612, the unrivaled collection of art, esoteria, and naturalia that made up his ‘Cabinet of Curiousities' was systematically looted over the next 150 years. His hated brother and successor Mathias took many of the treasures to Vienna, new seat of the Hapsburg Empire. Following the Battle of White Mountain, Bavarian conquerors hauled away some 1,500 additional wagonloads of precious works. During the Thirty Years' War, Rudolf's elderly Kunstkammer guardian, Dionisio Mise-roni, was tortured into giving up the keys to occupying Swedes in 1648. What little the Swedes left behind was auctioned off by order of Emperor Joseph II in 1781. Unsold items were unceremoniously dumped into the Vltava River below the Hradčany, and the space which once housed perhaps the largest and most varied collection of art the
world had yet seen was henceforth used as a storehouse for gun powder and cannonballs.
“As with so many of Rudolf's treasures, the whereabouts of the Rudolf Complication are unknown to this day. Sadly, this treasure must be presumed lost to history.”
Emperor Rudolf II stares out from the page opposite, eyes hooded, wide, Hapsburg chin jutting above a disc of white frills orbiting his neck while the watch dangles at the end of its golden chain a gaudy albatross. A clever forger could have used this very portrait as a model of the watch now before me, but only the most diligent cheat would have known about the black serpent on the reverse side of the case.
I clap the book shut. Ouroboros or no ouroboros, the final, surefire method of verifying that Doctor Kačak's watch is the genuine Complication is to pry the back casing open and find the hidden clock face where time runs backwards, just as on the Hebrew clock adorning the Jewish Town Hall mere blocks from my shop.
Happily, I discover the complication intact, an ingenious reverse geometry built to send the indicator dial spinning the wrong way around the hidden face. In watches of this era, the movement was typically somewhere signed by its creator, but in keeping with its unknown origins, no signature is etched thereupon. Perhaps the watchmaker had a knack for self-preservation. The piece was, after all, delivered to Rudolf II under the pretense that it would give him eternal life. And when Rudolf eventually noticed that he was still getting older, still getting sicker, someone would be made to pay.
Two curious markings do appear etched in miniature upon the winding key, which Doctor Kačak has left in its arbor slot. Seemingly Hebrew symbols of some sort, they might as well be Egyptian hieroglyphs as far as this would-be Jew was concerned. Perhaps Grandfather Weil, wellspring of my pending racial impurity, could have transliterated the eldritch markings, but I find myself at a loss. The
important thing is that the key is there at all—had Doctor Kačak truly wished to prevent me from stopping the piece while I repaired it and then just winding when the work was complete, he need only have withheld the key.
And so I set to work, opening the frontspiece to access the forward-turning half of the inner workings. The problem is readily apparent—the fusee cord is in tatters, scarcely enough catgut left to link the mainspring and escapement much less preserve the tension necessary to govern the watch's speed. Before removing the cord, I spend time digging through various boxes and drawers trying to find appropriate repair materials, mindful that replacing it with a length of wire would be simpler but may lower the piece's resale value when I take the Complication overseas (though perhaps I'm granting American antiquarians higher powers of discernment than they in fact possess). In the end I settle on an old lute string. It's not ideal, but the width and tension seem adequate.
But when trying to unhitch the old cord from the mainspring barrel, I find it too tightly attached. Forced to ignore Doctor Kačak's absurd instructions, I remove the mainspring itself, which will stop the watch movement. I'm inspecting the fusee and gauging the width of its spiral grooves (I know, Klara, that the minutiae of watch repair would bore you to death were you not dead already, but I go into such detail only to demonstrate that I have done nothing out of the ordinary) when it occurs to me that something quite extraordinary is happening.
The escapement is still working.
The tiny drive train gears of the Complication are still spinning. For several moments I listen to the half-dissembled watch tick as I stare dumbly at the piece, searching its exposed machinery for some hidden drive mechanism. Perhaps the backward spinning of the secondary, reverse mainspring somehow also propels the forward workings through a hidden cross-beat escapement? But even with epicyclic gearing—well, I'll cut to the quick.
The watch should not be working.
But it is working.
Each tick and every tock an affront to my expertise.
A mockery of the laws of physics.
An horological miracle.
At this my thoughts turn to God's Miracle, and I realize I've completely forgotten his supper. He will be up on the third floor, wondering what has happened to The Man Who Brings Him Food at Nighttime, and eventually he might make his way down the stairs and into my workshop, though he knows I won't allow him to enter. His clumsiness has cost me in the past.
Reluctantly I leave the impossibly ticking watch and make my way upstairs, sure that when I return with fresh eyes, the mechanism will be obvious. The ascent is one I must have made thousands of times since moving into this building. Up winding stairs to the apartment, down winding stairs to the shop, spiraling further to the cellar, helixing back up to the apartment, my world increasingly restricted to airless and corkscrewed vertical terrain. This is how your husband spends his days now. Up and down, down and up, serving as his own rickety dumb waiter until the end of time.
But Franz is not upstairs, which means he must still be wandering the streets. It often happens that he loses track of time, and so once again I must go hunt him down. Outside the wind keens and the streetlamps cast their dull penumbra. In the houses along my street, a few scattered lights glow opaque behind curtains, but most neighbors haven't bothered removing the blackout paper from their windows, measures taken when defense rather than surrender seemed imminent, and the city sought to cloak itself from the Luftwaffe. Now the blackout materials appear to issue a silent plea on behalf of their owners—take the country if you must, but let us sleep undisturbed behind darkened windows and heavy doors; let us withdraw into limitless interiors. Wake us when all your history making is done.

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