The Man Who Keeps the Hill Ticking

I'd like you to meet the subterranean watchmaker of Capitol Hill. His name is Pierre Hatem, and he works in a tunnel under Independence Avenue SE.

It's a rather nice tunnel, at least this part of it. It allows pedestrians to shuttle among the various buildings of the Library of Congress. While the tunnel gets a little forbidding farther on -- a little dimmer, with exposed overhead pipes and buckets set out to catch drips -- here it's cheery and well-lighted, and it bustles with workers and researchers on their way to and from the library's various offices, stacks and reading rooms.

Once a week, Pierre presents his black, oversize briefcase to the Library of Congress security guards. Then he takes the elevator down and walks to a table set up just outside an underground cafeteria.

He opens his bag and pulls out a worn square of pale velvet about the size of a handkerchief that he places on the table. He also sets out: a battered cigar box full of watch batteries in little foil packages; four trays and several Ziploc bags holding leather watchbands; an assortment of tiny screwdrivers, tweezers and wrenches; a contraption for removing watch crystals; and a Bausch & Lomb 4x loupe.

A sign on the table reads "Watch Repair Every Tuesday."

The customers start showing up immediately.

"How much for a watch battery?" asks a woman in a purple dress.

"Five dollars," says Pierre Hatem.

She hands Pierre the watch. He slips off the spectacles he wears halfway down his nose and screws the loupe into the socket of his right eye. He presses the short blade of a knife against the back of the watch and, like an epicure opening an oyster, pops off the cover. Then he tips out the dead battery, puts down the knife and sweeps up a pair of tweezers. He rummages among a few foil packets until he finds the right size battery, pokes open the package with the tips of his tweezers, snatches the battery and drops it in place. He puts the watch's cover back and firmly pushes it tight with his thumbs.

Then, loupe still sprouting from his eye, he consults the Longines watch on his wrist and sets the correct time on the customer's newly re-electrified timepiece.

She hands Pierre a $5 bill, and he slips it under the cigar box.

Pierre has been coming just about every Tuesday for the past 15 months, ever since he replaced the previous watchmaker the Library of Congress brought in for the convenience of its employees.

Pierre didn't think he would do it for long. He was 69 then -- he's 71 now -- and was slowing down a bit. Who needed the hassle? But he started to enjoy it.

"Not for the money only," he says, "but being in a place where a lot of people come, friendly people."

And it is friendly down here, like a small-town Main Street. People greet one another and stop to say hello to Pierre, even if their watch isn't broken. Electric carts zip past every now and then, and blue-smocked workers push wheeled bookshelves labeled "Mass Deacidification."

As Pierre replaces old batteries and takes links out of floppy watchbands, he tells me about himself. He grew up outside Beirut, where his father was a shopkeeper. One Christmas, Pierre and his three brothers all received wristwatches.

"Of course, as kids, we broke these," Pierre says. "So now they're not running."

Pierre wanted to know why, so he took them apart, not understanding that watches have to be taken apart the right way. "If you take them apart the wrong way, they jump into all sorts of pieces."

But he was intrigued. He fashioned his own tools from old wire and from then on was constantly fiddling with mainsprings and balance wheels. At school, "the teacher would notice I was playing with watches, and he would throw them out the window. At recess, I would look for them. That's how it started."

At age 18, he apprenticed with a master watchmaker, spending a year at his elbow.

He came to the United States 42 years ago to study at Columbia Union College and has lived here ever since with his Jordanian-born wife, Diana. For many years, he was the factory-authorized Washington area repairman for Omega, the fine Swiss watch. He still has a shop in Silver Spring.

As it is most Tuesdays at the library, today it's mostly batteries, and not just for watches. Latesha McCalip unzips a black case and pulls out the back half of a pool cue. The very end is supposed to light up when she strikes a ball, but the batteries are dead.

Pierre stacks three batteries at the end of the cue and screws the cover shut.

Latesha taps the cue a few times and watches it blink. "I'm back in action," she says gleefully.

Then a man in a baseball cap, several gold chains hanging from his neck, puts a ring on the table. "I want to know if I have anything of value," he says.

Pierre gazes at the ring through his loupe. "It's gold plate," he says.

"That's what I thought," says the man, who pockets the ring and moves down the tunnel.

If Pierre is disappointed that the finely jeweled movement has been replaced by a chip of quartz and a button-size battery, he doesn't show it. He's worked nonstop since he got here at 10 a.m.

At a little after 2 p.m., the subterranean watchmaker of Capitol Hill starts packing his things to go home. On the table in front of him is a pile of silver: 43 tiny dead watch batteries, glinting in the fluorescent light.