This was no recent hobby. It was the first detail Nicolas noticed about people, after the color and shape of their eyes. In the rue du Laos duplex, a small safe was fitted into the back of a closet, where he kept his precious watches. There was one watch he never talked about. One particular watch he did not own, one watch that haunted him and that he thought about nearly every day: his father’s orange-faced Doxa Sub. Capitaine Cousteau’s watch. Robert Redford wore it in Three Days of the Condor. The Doxa Sub was famous for its robustness. It could still function even in the deepest parts of the ocean, where the pressure was at its highest. Théodore Duhamel had never removed his. He’d kept it on even to sleep. When Nicolas was a little boy nestling in his father’s arms, he could hear two things: the beat of his father’s heart and the tick of his watch. If his father had drowned—the theory his entourage seemed to agree upon—then Théodore Duhamel had slid down to an aquatic void wearing that watch.
