Chapter 4 — THE INSIDE OF A RING
I took my ring to a man named Isidore Petrakis on Wabash who has been repairing jewellery above a shoe shop since 1974.
He put the loupe in and he was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, "Where's the other one?"
I said, "What?"
He said, "This is one of a pair. Where's the other one?"
He turned the shank toward me and showed me a mark down inside the band, so small I had taken it for a scratch every time I had ever looked: a V and an M, overlapped.
He said, "Viktor Malek. Jeweller, Ravenswood, closed in ninety-one, dead in ninety-four. I bought his bench."
He said, "He didn't do one-offs. He did pairs. Mother and daughter, two sisters, a wedding. He was known for it."
I said, "How do you know this is one of a pair?"
He turned it again and showed me a tiny Roman numeral cut into the inside of the shank next to the maker's mark.
I.
He said, "The other one has a two on it."
Tess sent me a photograph three days later, after I had written to her and after she had not answered for two of those days.
She had gone to a jeweller on Belmont and had him photograph the inside of her band through a loupe on a phone.
ROSEWOOD.
VM.
II.
Isidore had Viktor Malek's order books in a plastic crate in the back, because he had bought the bench and the books came with it and he is the kind of man who does not throw away another man's records.
It took him nine days.
Order 3311, dated the fourth of September 1978.
Two rings, gold, rose form, garnet cabochon, matched pair, interior engraving to read ROSEWOOD, numbered one and two.
Client: E. Rosewood.
Paid in three instalments, the last on the twenty-second of December 1978.
E. Rosewood was Elena.
She was twenty-seven years old and she had two rings made for herself and her mother in September of 1978 and she paid for them across four months because she could not pay for them at once, and one of them has been on my hand since the eleventh of May 1997.
I sat in that shop above the shoe store and I did the only arithmetic that mattered and I got the answer immediately, and then I spent eleven more weeks refusing it.