The Job (1998)

The Job

Douglas Kennedy's 1998 thriller follows Ned Allen, a Manhattan advertising salesman for a computer magazine, from a takeover that seems to make him publisher to the loss of everything and a lifeline with murderous strings attached. At the top of the curve, just before Christmas, he goes shopping. (Open Library)

Watches

Jaeger-LeCoultre (unidentified model)

Secretly promised the publisher's chair by the magazine's new German owners, Ned settles half his debts and then spends: $3,200 on a new front tooth, $2,000 on golf clubs for his mother and $3,400 on a Jaeger-LeCoultre for Lizzie, who has admired that watch for years. She is dumbstruck when she opens the box, and at the first class check-in for Nevis asks whether he is keeping something from her. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Anyway, $3,200 for a new front tooth seemed cheap when compared with the $3,400 I splurged on a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch for Lizzie. Okay, okay, without question, an over-the-top extravagance. But I knew she'd been admiring that watch for years. (Douglas Kennedy, The Job, scan cataloged as Little, Brown (London), 1998, p. 120, where the scan prints dashes around "without question"; she opens the gift on p. 121; the narrator names himself on p. 3; Internet Archive scan OCR)