Chapter 19: The Pawnshop
The errand was a simple one: a guest at the Beacon Grand had left a watch at a jeweler's on Tremont Street, and Paul sent the night porter, in daylight for once, to fetch it.
"Take the long way back," Paul said. "You have earned some sun, old friend. Though I notice you never say what you did before this work, and I have stopped asking."
"You are a gentleman, Paul."
"I am a hotel manager. It is the same suit on a different man."
George took the long way. He walked the way old barbers walk, reading the street in reflections, and that was how he saw them: in the window of a pawnshop between a trumpet and a wedding ring, lying on black velvet under a hand-lettered card that read, in marker, GOLD SHEARS, DECORATIVE, $150.
He stood on the sidewalk for a minute, with the jeweler's parcel in his hand, looking at the founders' shears.
They were not his shears. His were gold to the core, and these were plate over steel, made for a display case, and Evelyn had called them the crown jewels and laughed every time she passed them. But they were Velour's. They had hung beside the register where clients had admired them, and some boy with a leased car and a Friday promise had priced them at four hundred dollars and change.
The bell over the pawnshop door had the same voice as the bell over his first shop, and his hands shook only slightly as he went in.
"Help you?" said the pawnbroker, a broad man named Sal, according to the certificates, with eyes that priced everything including George.
"The shears in the window," George said. "The gold ones. May I see them?"
"Decorative piece. Heavy, though. You a collector?"
"Of a kind." Sal laid them on a cloth with the respect men of pawn give to anything that has been sold, and George picked them up and turned them to the light. Along the spine, small enough that you had to know to look, were the founder's marks and the year, and under the pivot, the two tiny letters Evelyn had ordered engraved: E.A.
"She used to say plate was honest," George said, half to himself. "It never pretended to be gold all the way through. She said there was a sermon in it, if a man was willing to hear one."
"You know these?" Sal asked.
"I knew the woman who commissioned them. Long ago."
"Then you know they came in hot." Sal said it without apology, pricing George again. "Young fellow, nice hair, fancy apron in his bag, said they were his to sell. I gave him four hundred because I liked his face and I give everybody one mistake. I have had them three weeks. If they are yours, old-timer, say the word and we call the police, and you fill out forms till Christmas."
"No police," George said. "The young man made a mistake, as you say. Mistakes should be redeemable. That is the entire point of your business, is it not, Sal? Everything in this shop is a mistake somebody is allowed to buy back."
Sal considered him, and his face did something complicated. "Ticket says he has till Friday week to redeem at four-forty. You want them now, it is the ticket price plus my margin. One-fifty on the tag is a lie I tell tourists."
"Name your honest number."
"Four hundred sixty dollars puts them in your hands, with the ticket and the paperwork, all legal, all clean."
George counted out four hundred and sixty dollars from his wallet, and he did it without a flicker, the way a man pays a debt he has been carrying for somebody else. Sal wrote the receipt slowly, in block letters, and tore the pawn ticket from his spike and laid it on top like a garnish.
"Name on the ticket," George said, reading it upside down without appearing to. "For my records."
"Whitaker," Sal said. "Chase Whitaker. Mean anything?"
"It confirms something," George said. "That is a different thing from meaning something."
He carried the shears out wrapped in brown paper, and at the door he stopped, because Sal called after him: "Hey. What does E.A. stand for? I always wondered."
George thought of a two-chair shop, and soup on cold days, and a woman cutting a stranger's hair like she was blessing him.
"Every head held high is what it stood for," he said. "The initials were the lady who taught me."
He walked back to the Beacon Grand through the bright afternoon with the jeweler's parcel in one pocket and the founders' shears in the other, a porter carrying a kingdom's evidence and a dead woman's sermon, and he said nothing to anyone at all.