How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  “Do not be a fool,” his father said. Baseball Cap struggled and shouted in the mantrap. He was very frightened. He looked like a sparrow trapped in a room full of closed windows.

  Kizakov picked up the diamond, squinted at it quickly and closely with it held between his forefinger and thumb, and then placed it in his pants pocket.

  “Put that one in the mantrap with him,” he said. “You!” he shouted at Baseball Cap. “Quiet down! You want I should shoot you? You want I should hit you on your head?” He was breathing heavily and he sat down, suddenly, in a green leather chair I often sat in on that side of their little showroom.

  “Use the gun, Idan,” he said. “Wipe it off. But hold a gun on him while you put his partner in there. Robert, no, you do not move.” I was walking around the showcase to help Idan. “This is our business.”

  Idan had dragged the unconscious robber into the mantrap. His friend huddled in a corner. I expected Idan to menace him a little with the gun but he was all business. Then I remembered that after high school Idan had been in the army like all Israelis.

  “Let them go, Idan,” Kizakov said. “We don’t bother with them anymore.”

  Kizakov bent over and untied and tightly retied his shoelaces. He pulled the black leather laces so hard I thought he would break them. Then he sat up straight and brushed his hand back across his head.

  “Bring us some vodka, Idan. How is your eye? All right? You will have a black eye for the girls. You can tell them it was a prizefight! Come look at this diamond and tell me what you think. It is better than I would have guessed. They must have stolen it also. It is probably three thousand a carat, I am thinking. Come on, Robert, have a glass of vodka with me and my son. We are all three of us comrades in arms now.”

  This was one of my best times in the jewelry business.

  Once the story got around town, the joke was that only Elie Kizakov could be robbed and turn a twenty-thousand-dollar profit on the deal.

  “You saw it, Bobby? Did he really pistol-whip that nigger?”

  “He wasn’t black. They were two white guys.”

  My role in it as eyewitness made even me a minor celebrity. That added some fun to the runs.

  Several years after this incident Idan married an Israeli diamond wholesaler’s daughter, one of the biggest in the business. I was at their wedding in Tel Aviv. Clouds of live doves were released from great hidden nets during specified times in the ceremony. Soon she caught him in an affair with a man and made it very public in the industry. She went door to door with the story. That kind of spectacle, enacted by his wife, was not well received. They divorced, and last I heard he was selling cars.

  Sheila wouldn’t let me sell until after Thanksgiving, so along with my Dallas runs I spent the next six weeks on the buys and the repair counter. These were the last two showcases on the east side of the store, behind the bead board, the rice pearl case, and the men’s jewelry. It was also where we did our giveaways, the coupons for free amethysts, topazes, or “Authentic Two-Carat Cubic Zirconium” that Popper ran across the bottom two inches of the big full-page Star-Telegram ads every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

  Everyone except for the elite among the sales force, the real top-of-the-boarders, had to do a turn on these counters once a week. But new people started there before they went on the floor. Most of the salespeople—and the salespeople in training, like me—preferred the buys to the repairs. You could make the store more money faster on the right buy than on any sale. The buys, during the early eighties gold boom, were how Ronnie and Sheila made their stake.

  I had been instructed on these facts, yet I avoided buying because of the young mothers, the edgy-eyed blacks and Mexicans, the poor and discouraged people. When a sad buy approached the counter I went to the bathroom, or bent and tied my shoelaces very methodically and patiently, and someone else picked it up.

  It was Friday morning and I had just taken in a clean, oil, and adjust on a ladies’ Rolex two-tone. I walked my customer through the crowd to the door and thanked her. That was unusual with a repair but I took special care of the Rolexes. As soon as the door closed behind her Jim caught me by the arm.

  I thought I was in trouble for dawdling. I had been taking my time with her because I had been eating Lisa’s speed all morning and I felt that if I took a step the world would tilt over on its side. Probably onto my head.

  “Is that a Rolex? Is that a ladies’ two-tone? Is that her leaving? In the suit? The black suit?”

  “It’s a COA. I got her for four hundred.” On a nice COA Jim told me to try to up-sell them into jewelry if I could. So when he grabbed the job envelope I thought he was looking for a few extra items or a second invoice.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I said. “She wasn’t buying. I even showed her twister beads and silver charms. She only cared about her watch.”

  “We need the COAs. You get a hundred bucks on a COA now.”

  “Right.” I saw he was not angry. “I know. Give it to the Watchman, right?”

  “We can do it. Why waste the job envelope? Let me take a look.”

  He poured the virginal stainless and gold watch out of the paper and cardboard envelope. It was a pretty ladies’ two-tone.

  “Perfect. It even has the right dial. Come with me. Hurry.”

  We squeezed our way through the crowd to the back-of-the-house.

  Before we were past the diamond desk, Don Frazier, the bullion and auction man, seized Jim by the arm.

  “Whose watch is that? Where did you get that?”

  Jim laughed. “Sorry. My deal.”

  “You’re not shipping that watch.”

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  In back the phone girls were clustered around lunch, eating. The fat girls standing at the catered sandwiches, their hands full and their mouths wet, looked like animals at a carcass.

  I followed him around the safes and through the rows of desks to the little jewelry cleaning room. Behind a half-finished aluminum-beam and Sheetrock wall, on the opposite end of the store from the bookkeeper’s room and the stairs to Mr. Popper’s office, there was a bench and sink and the various messy tools you need for cleaning jewelry. We had six ultrasonics, of various temperatures and strengths, lined up in a row and always humming and bubbling like scientific cauldrons, and two big red and blue Swest steamers. Beyond the steamers in what had once been a coat closet was the polishing wheel. There was no vent hood or dust screen. They had simply put it on an old desk safe, screwed it into the wall, and plugged it in. Only the older guys were allowed to use this machine. It was dangerous and you could destroy a piece of jewelry in an instant. The most common mistake was wrapping a bracelet or necklace around the wheel. Then it would spin ferociously until you could shut the machine off. This would stretch the gold, pop out diamonds, and shatter color. The Watchman had once notoriously destroyed a seven-carat black opal, a fifteen-thousand-dollar gem at cost, just this way.

  Working very quickly, Jim removed the bracelet from the head of the watch, changed the wheels on the polisher, and began to work on the outside steel links of the Rolex bracelet.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him. “I thought the jewelers do that. While Benny’s servicing the head.”

  “Set it,” he said, and handed me the head of the watch. “Give it a good wind. And wipe it down. Clean next to the lugs. That’s where the dirt will be. We want to make it look brand-new.”

  First I cleaned the interior of the lugs with a toothbrush we kept at the steamers. Inside the lugs, at the corners, a black and green wax or dirt gathers like the grime you might find under a fingernail. It is made up mostly of human skin and oils. Then I used a Q-tip and alcohol to clean the rest of the head. Finally, after checking the crown to make sure it was tight, I held the head in rubber-tipped metal tongs like I had seen the watchmakers do and steamed off the watch.

  “Hurry,” Jim said. He already had the band hung on a wire in the ultrasonic. It was buzzing. He lifted it out, inspect
ed it, rinsed it off in the sink under the tap, and dried it with a paper towel. Then he carefully reattached it to the head. He performed this operation with the patient affection and ease of a mother placing a diaper on her baby.

  “Get me a Rolex box,” he said.

  I still did not understand what he was up to.

  “I thought we were out of Rolex boxes.”

  “We are out of real Rolex boxes. Get me one of the Watchman’s boxes. Tell him you don’t want a Chinese one. You want an Italian. One of the green leather ones. The good ones. If he’s not there, look under his desk. That’s where he hides them. Get the whole thing: the exterior box, the books, the papers, everything. Tell him it’s for me. Tell him a hanging tag and crown. The whole damn package.”

  He slipped the open-buckled watch over his wrist. He compared it with his own watch. He was checking the timing.

  “Look at that bracelet,” he said. “It looked brand-new before I even hit it. This watch isn’t a year old. Look how smooth and tight it is.” He fondled it between his fingers. “Like silk.”

  It was very hot in the room with the steamers. Or maybe it was the speed. I knew I had taken too much, but I wanted some more.

  “This watch is right on the money,” he said. He took the watch off his wrist and folded up the buckle. He pinched in the soft steel edge of the buckle slightly to tighten it up. It snapped shut with a soft click.

  “Why did she bring it in, did she say?” Jim asked me. “Did she say it was running slow? Or it stops?”

  For the laugh I said loudly, “She said it stops when she doesn’t wear it.”

  Several salespeople around me laughed. There was a line of them waiting to use the steamers.

  Many Rolex and other customers who own automatic watches do not understand that for the mainspring to stay wound you have to wear the watch. You run into this at least once a week. The customer takes off her watch because she is going to play tennis or go to the spa and forgets to wear it for a couple of days, and when she puts it back on because they are on their way to meet friends for dinner she is dismayed and confused to see that the watch has stopped. It starts running again as soon as she has it on her wrist so she quickly resets it before her husband notices—why worry him, it was such a nice gift?—and then hurries down the next day to see us. We sell her the four-hundred-dollar COA and explain that it’s not uncommon that a Rolex might require the procedure, even in a new watch, because one never knows how long the watch may have been in the factory in Switzerland before being shipped, and in any event it is part of the regular maintenance of such a fine, rare, and expensive timepiece, which is why it will stay in the family for generations. “Like owning a leopard or a tiger,” you say. “This is no housecat. A bit more in care and feeding but well worth it for the exquisiteness. For the uniqueness.” Then, only after we return the watch to her, we explain how an automatic movement functions, so that we do not see her again in a couple of weeks.

  I went to fetch the box.

  The Watchman protested.

  “Nope. Not an outer box,” he said. “These are the last. You can have the inner box but not an outer. Use one of the big white Taiwanese boxes. We just got in a whole shipment of them. The ones for the big South Sea ropes. The inner fits in one of those. They are almost snug. You can’t have that Rolex outer box. I only have three ladies’ outers left.”

  I said, “It’s for Jim,” and he said, “He better be selling a goddamn President. Tell Jim I said it better be nothing less than a goddamn ladies’ President, little brother.”

  When I returned with the Rolex box Jim hung the real Rolex tags on the watch and placed it in the counterfeit box. He inspected the real Rolex books and the counterfeit papers and placed them carefully under the leather box in the counterfeit cardboard outer box. It was a lovely green box, untouched, it looked like it had been made a few minutes before, with that Rolex oyster artwork printed all over it. Then he placed the gold crown on top of the leather box and closed up the whole package.

  “Okay, follow me,” he said.

  We went back out on the sales floor. He elbowed his way through the throng of salespeople lining the counter toward the diamond room.

  Lisa waved to me from the pearl showcase and winked. She was showing a long double rope of pearls. I waved back to her. She waved again and smiled, and I realized that the first time she had been waving to Jim.

  Jim stopped outside the diamond room door.

  “Okay, Bobby, you only listen. Not one word,” he said. “Stand in the corner, be invisible, and learn. Don’t even ask him if he wants another drink. Let me do that.”

  He opened the sales door to the diamond room and put his head in.

  “Good news,” I heard him say. “I found one,” he said.

  I followed him in and stood in the corner. The customer, an obviously important customer, sat at the diamond table. Jim sat down next to Dennis and placed the Rolex box showily on the table, a large antique desk with spindly legs. The legs did not look like they could support the desk. In the center of the desk was a diamond pad, and on the silk pad was the alexandrite necklace.

  The alexandrite necklace was a white elephant Sheila had bought at the Jewelers Circular Keystone Las Vegas show a year and a half before. It was tagged at four hundred thousand dollars and I knew it had a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus plus the regular ten-percent-of-the-net commission. It was fifty-two carats of perfectly calibrated square-cut natural Siberian untreated full-color-change alexandrite set in eighteen-karat green gold. The center stone was six carats and, loose, was worth fifty thousand dollars. In natural sunlight the necklace was bright green, green like five-thousand-a-carat Colombian emerald. Here in the artificial light of the halogens it was pigeon-blood red. On the way outside, if you were carrying it in your hands or wearing it on your neck, it would pass through half the colors of the spectrum, each one individually recognizable.

  But it was impossible to sell. Alexandrites have no sparkle, and if a husband or a lover has spent half a million dollars on her necklace a woman wants her friends to know that her necklace cost half a million dollars, and one can only be sure of that with big diamonds. At the very least she wants some rubies or emeralds. Something they recognize. Alexandrites you have to explain, and that defeats the purpose. That was why, unlike all of our other showpieces, the necklace never went to any society parties. It was perhaps the most beautiful piece of jewelry you would ever see, but it lacked the crucial quality of all jewelry: bang for your buck. Flash for your cash. Like a Fabergé egg.

  I had seen this customer in the store before but did not know his name. He was a large, strangely pale man, wearing black crocodile boots and a leather baseball cap, with very dark eyes, eyes that looked black until you looked at him from the side and saw they had many dark brown rings around the pupils. As white as his skin was, he nevertheless had the exaggerated jaw and facial features of an Indian, like the Iroquois you would see sleeping in the bus stations or by the train tracks back in Calgary. But here with his beaded belt and his cowskin vest he was an American cowboy.

  He wore a platinum President and a platinum wedding ring with a seven-carat emerald-cut in the center. I remembered when Dennis sold that ring, just a few weeks after I arrived at the store. Jim had bragged about it during a sales meeting. It was sixty thousand dollars, and the customer had paid in cash.

  “I didn’t think we could do it three days from Thanksgiving,” Jim told him. “Everybody’s out. There are just no new ladies’ two-tones available right now. I called all over. Not even Rolex USA in downtown Dallas has them. But I have a friend across town who saves a few back for occasions like this. To sweeten a deal. He drove this over for me. His last ladies’ two-tone. He was planning on giving it to his wife for Christmas. Brand-new in the box. Books, papers, everything. Fresh from the factory.”

  “What the hell does a jeweler’s wife want with one of these?” the customer said. “Shouldn’t she have a gold Rolex? I wouldn’t put
my wife in a three-thousand-dollar watch. Not if I was in your line of work.”

  He opened the box. The gold plastic Rolex crown fell out and sat next to the necklace.

  “You know how it is with women. They are just the thing right now,” Jim said. “This guy’s wife has a couple of Presidents, she has a Patek and a Cartier. But now she wanted a ladies’ two-tone. She wants what she knows her friends want and won’t get this year.”

  “Looks like she won’t get it, either,” Dennis said. His curly hair, along with that bright-toothed smile of his, made him look like an elf or a devil. “The shoemaker’s wife.” He laughed.

  “Hell, I imagine she’ll get her turn,” the customer said. “Her husband’s in the business.”

  “After Christmas,” Dennis said. “A few months after Christmas Rolex will loosen up on them.”

  Dennis and Jim fell into their own imaginary world of the made-up jeweler and his wife who was supposed to get this watch for Christmas, the watch that I had taken from the wrist of my customer only minutes before. I could almost see the worried jeweler and his disappointed wife. And I could feel the story working. It made even me want the customer to have the watch. Just so that other fictional woman who was supposed to get it couldn’t. It was ours now. In our hands. She would have to wait.

  “You boys do come through. I gotta hand it to you, Jimmy. Well, Dennis, let’s get down to business. How much you gonna sell me this little dude for? This one of those nineteen ninety-five specials you fellas run in the paper?”

  “Let’s think about it as a package,” Dennis said. “You know Mr. Popper wants to move this necklace. You know what it’s worth. You know he needs the money. Make him an offer. I’ll take any fair offer up to him. Make him a cash offer, Glen.”

  The customer looked over at me. His black eyes were supple and healthy. You would have bet he was an honest man. But he’s rich, I told myself. He must be cleverer than he appears.

  “Make yourself useful, would you, son, and refill my drink here? I think these boys are about to mug me.”