Quicksilver(3)

As I turned the heavy coin between my fingers, I marveled that my subconscious must have recognized what it was on the day of the tarantula and must have held that knowledge for months. However, why I would suddenly be impelled to return here after all this time was even more of a mystery than how such a coin had come to be in an abandoned restaurant in a once-busy crossroads that now led nowhere in four directions.

I left the lifeless snakes to rest in creepy peace and returned to the city, where I visited a shop that bought and sold everything from French antique furniture to Meiji-period Japanese bronzes. The owner, Julius Shimski, knew everything anyone could know about all things old—coins, stamps, paintings—not least of all because he was eighty-nine and had spent his life learning. Julius had a monk’s ring of white hair, eyebrows as lush as albino caterpillars, blue eyes as clear as the water in Eden, and a face that had not lined with age but had smoothed into a semblance of what he must have looked like just before his bris. In a profile of him in Arizona!, he had explained his pink-cheeked appearance by saying, “When you fill yourself with knowledge about any subject, it plumps you.” I didn’t write the profile, because Julius wasn’t dead, but after I read it, I began stopping by his shop now and then to chat.

The place is more than a shop, really. It’s a two-story brick-clad concrete-and-steel building, designed to be so fireproof that even the Devil couldn’t get it to take a destructive spark from his finger. The shop’s stock is worth millions, so to be admitted, you have to have an appointment or be known to Julius. In either case, entry is through a bulletproof-glass vestibule, where you’re scanned for a weapon before being buzzed through the inner door. When Julius was just forty-one, working out of another location, he was robbed at gunpoint and pistol-whipped, whereupon he built a fortress of a shop because, as he said in the profile, “Paranoia I can live with, but not a bullet in the head.”

On that Friday, his granddaughter, Sharona, was staffing the front room, which made me feel doubly lucky when I saw her from the glass vestibule. With her jet-black hair and dark eyes and exquisite arrangement of features, she is one of those women at whom you can’t look for long without losing the ability to speak coherently, or at least I can’t. She’s thirty, eleven years older than me, so from her perspective I’m hardly out of adolescence, while from my perspective she’s my dream girl. Among other things, she’s a philatelist, which isn’t as sexy as it sounds; she knows everything there is to know about collectible postage stamps. Like her grandfather, she is a knowledge sponge. I can’t imagine why she’s not married. Although she treated me with the affection that an aunt might show for a favored nephew, I fantasized that one day I would do something—maybe save a family from a burning house or take a gun away from a crazed terrorist—that would cause her to look at me in a much different way and see me as the romantic figure of her dreams.

She waved and then buzzed me through. I passed by the cluster of Tiffany lamps and the Japanese gold-lacquer boxes that dated from the Taishō through the Heisei eras, and went to the sales counter, where she stood. A display of highly collectible wristwatches lay between us. If I had been more attuned to the menacing melody that destiny had chosen as background music for what was coming, I might have seen those watches as an omen that time was running out for me.

Instead, I regarded Sharona with a smile that was probably more like a boyish grin, and declared, “You look so Friday,” when what I meant to say was that she looked lovely today.

She smiled that aunt-to-nephew smile. “No one has ever said that to me before, Quinn. What does Friday look like?”

“Well, just like you.” Elaboration seemed essential, so I kept going. “Friday is the best of days, don’t you think? The workweek is done, and Monday is still in the distant future, so for a while we’re free. Of course, I’ve got the day off, and you don’t, so maybe you see the whole situation in a different light. But to me, right now, this week anyway, Friday is great. Friday is beautiful.”

There. I’d actually said it. I had told her she was beautiful, even though she might need a translator to have my meaning properly conveyed.

She cocked her head at me. “You’re really wired, Quinn. How much coffee have you had this morning, dear? My Uncle Meyer was an eight-cups-a-day man and ended up with a bleeding ulcer when he was just thirty-four. Three days in the ICU.”

“Oh, not to worry. I’m a two-cup man. That’s all it takes to charge me up. A good Jamaican blend.” In fact, I didn’t often drink coffee. I favored caffeine-free Pepsi or Coke, but I worried that she would think I was still a boy if I preferred a soft drink to a good cup of joe. I was ashamed of myself for lying, even if about something as inconsequential as coffee. To avoid plunging deeper into the swamp of deceit, I produced the gold coin from a pocket. “Why I stopped by is I found this. I think it might be worth something.”

“I’m mainly a philatelist, though I know a lot about Tiffany, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. Grandfather is the ace numismatist.”

I so much liked the way “philatelist” sounded when she said it that I wanted to ask her to say it again, but I restrained myself.

“You know where Grandfather’s office is. I’ll intercom him and let him know you’ll be stopping in to see him.”

Julius’s office was at the back of the building, on the first floor. I passed through a storeroom of treasures and found him at his Art Deco desk, which I knew was by Ruhlmann, because he had once told me its history when I asked if I could buy one like it at Ikea. He was examining a cockroach with a jeweler’s loupe.