Quicksilver(4)

“What’s that?”

“A brooch,” he said.

“Why would anyone wear a cockroach brooch?”

He looked up from the loupe and raised his bushy eyebrows. “It’s not a cockroach. It’s a very different species of beetle, a scarab. It’s made of silver, tarnished at the moment, and adorned with some of the finest sapphires, rubies, and emeralds it has ever been my pleasure to see.”

“Cockroach, scarab—beetles are beetles. I don’t like bugs.”

“Scarabs were sacred to the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.”

“That’s probably why their civilization didn’t last. Look what I found.”

He put aside the jeweled scarab and the loupe to examine my coin. “Where did you get this?”

I told him a version of the truth without lying, leaving out the tarantula because I didn’t want him to tell Sharona how I’d been scared off by a mere spider. “Is it worth something?”

“At retail, from a collector, it would bring forty thousand dollars, maybe a few thousand less.”

I was gobsmacked. I’d been hoping for maybe a hundred bucks. “Holy moly, puddin’ and pie!” I declared, which was something we said at the orphanage to avoid a cruder exclamation in the presence of the nuns. “I guess I better find out who it belongs to.”

Julius frowned. “Belongs to? From what you told me, I’d say it belongs to you. It’s not as if anyone who ever owned that restaurant is still alive. Anyway, if I remember the article you wrote for the magazine, all that property was eventually condemned and taken under the public domain laws.”

“Then the county owns it. Or Washington. There’ll probably be a finder’s reward.”

I’d been standing by the desk all this time. Now Julius pointed to a chair and said, “Sit down. You’re light-headed.”

When I said I felt fine, he told me to sit down again, this time more sternly than I’d ever heard him speak.

He said, “What might the government do with forty thousand dollars? Buy a hand-soap dispenser for one of the Senate restrooms? Add two feet of new track for a train to nowhere? Listen, son, if you were anyone else, I’d offer twenty-six thousand, maybe a smidgen more. But I’m pretty sure in a month I can sell this to a collector for near that price I mentioned, so I’ll take some more risk and come up to thirty thousand. Young as you are and poor as you are, this is a blessing you should just thank God for and get on with your life.”

Maybe I was too innocent for my own good, or maybe I didn’t want him to think I was all that young, meaning too young for Sharona, if she suddenly became enamored of me. Whatever my absurd reasoning, I said, “I’m not so young, really, I mean I’ve got a nice job, my own apartment. I’ve got prospects.”

“Son, if you’re not young, then I’m older than dead.” He leaned forward in his chair, balancing the coin between his thumb and his forefinger. “Say you’ll take the money, or I’ll flip it. If I flip it, then if it’s heads, I’ll flush the coin down the john, and if it’s tails, I’ll also flush it down the john.”

“You’re joking.”

“Try me.”

“But what kind of choice is that?”

He got up from his chair. “It’s the only one I’m offering you. I won’t participate in your reckless confusion. And if you think I’m too old to keep you from taking this away from me before I can flush it, you’d better be wearing a metal cup and be prepared for other injuries.”

In retrospect, I think that the idea of suddenly having thirty thousand dollars scared me. I’d come into the world with nothing and had lived on the orphanage’s dime for eighteen years. Even with my job at Arizona!, I’d never had enough money to worry about losing it. I didn’t want to prove to be a fool by misspending thirty thousand, because then not only Sharona would write me off as a loser, but so would any other woman with a brain.

So I took the thirty thousand. Julius paid twenty-nine thousand with a check and gave me a thousand in cash, so that I could replace the bald tires on my rust-bucket Toyota right away and even have a small celebration. I went directly to the bank and made a deposit.

Because my bank and Julius’s were the same, they phoned him for verification and made the funds available the next day, Saturday—which had by then become my choice for best day of the week.

The following morning, after I’d showered and had a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, I was seized once more by the strange magnetism that had drawn me to that ghost crossroads. This time, I was impelled to return to the bank and withdraw four thousand dollars in hundreds and twenties. I didn’t spend a dollar of it. I took it back to my apartment, secured it in a small ziplock bag, and tucked the bag under a cushion of my only armchair.

I recalled having read an article that recounted a time when banks had failed, and I supposed I was just being paranoid about losing my newfound wealth.

On Monday, during my lunch break, I returned to the bank and withdrew two thousand more and put it in the ziplock bag. After I withdrew three thousand more on Tuesday and another three thousand on Wednesday, I had begun to scare myself. No, I didn’t feel that I was out of control. Rather, I sensed that I was preparing myself for something more than the collapse of the bank, that somehow I knew trouble was coming, as I had known where I would find a valuable coin.