After Roy (1989)

Mary Tannen's 1989 novel finds Maggie, once a rock-and-roll groupie, eight years into returning the signing chimpanzee Hilda and other laboratory chimps to the wild at a remote station in an invented African country, where two people from her past come looking for her. Her link to the capital is Didier, the station's former driver, now on the government's payroll. (Open Library)

Watches

Rolex (unidentified model): Didier brings the mail, already slit open, and presents of Belgian chocolates. Shortly after the coup moved him to the government payroll he turned up wearing a heavy gold Rolex, which neither he nor Maggie has ever mentioned. It glitters on his wrist whenever he is described; Maggie wonders what she really knows about a man who wears one where the average yearly income is six hundred dollars, and Sparks takes it as proof that a driver with a Rolex is probably their enemy. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Shortly after he took over his new post, he showed up wearing a heavy gold Rolex watch. Neither he nor Maggie has ever mentioned it. (Mary Tannen, After Roy, scan cataloged as Ballantine Books, 1991, pp. 10 to 11, the sentence running across the page break; the Rolex returns on pp. 47, 98, 167 and 188; Internet Archive scan OCR)