Unbecoming (32 page)

She bought a used laptop and then had little money left. She found work tutoring easily at first, then less so. She hard-boiled eggs in the lobby’s microwave and ate them with bread and pickles in the beginning, without pickles later on, as she trolled the European auction records for sales of paintings with questionable or nonexistent papers. They were easy to spot; these were the “discoveries” people had made in sheds and attics. The laptop died after three weeks, and she moved to the college’s computer lab. Her swipe card still worked. She hated using those machines, leaving traces of her plans on them, but there was no longer any other choice.

In the second week of September, after several weeks of dead ends and hang-ups, Grace tracked down the original owner of a dubious Corot and inquired if he collected Dutch Golden Age. He’d given her the phone number for a woman, Katrin, who’d in turn sent her to Wyss.

Wyss had given her a date and an address in East Berlin. She had lived in New York, she told herself—she could do this. She packed up what little she had and went, via bus. People had romantic ideas about European trains, but the bus was cheaper, and this trip was not at all romantic. She didn’t
want
to sell the painting anymore, but what else could she do?

When the bus dropped Grace at Schönefeld, she badly wanted to scrap her directions and take a taxi. What if she screwed up now and missed the meeting? But she had enough for a night in a hostel and a return bus ticket, with little margin for error. She followed the crowd out of the bus station to the train. She had to make only one transfer, at Ostkreuz, and when she got off at Alexanderplatz she could not believe that this part, at least, had been easy, that she was not lost. She walked up the street until she found a place calling itself an Irish pub, and there she waited until four, when she walked outside to watch to see how someone hailed a taxi in Berlin, and then she did it herself. When the driver pulled up to the address, she gave him twenty euros and asked him to wait half an hour. She didn’t know if he would, but there was no one around for him to pick up instead.

She never knew whether she had met Wyss or not. There were two men. The one Grace would remember was the one who was waiting when she pulled her rolling suitcase up to the building, the last concrete block in a tight row of ten-story concrete blocks the same color as the sky. He’d shown her to the elevator, and she had noticed the grime that arced beneath his gums. In the elevator he was closer to her, and when he smiled, she was startled to realize that it was not dirt under his gums, but shadow. His gums were loose, hanging over his teeth.

He had shown her to a bright, empty office, big water stains on the carpet but no desks or chairs. She’d unrolled the painting on the floor, where a second man, stout and spectacled, looked closely at it, but only for a few minutes. He asked her where she’d gotten it. “My grandfather,” she said, knowing it didn’t matter. He sent the first man away. Grace didn’t understand the German. When the man returned, he opened Grace’s suitcase and emptied a garbage bag of cash into it.

“How much did you get?” Hanna asked her now.

“Seven hundred thousand euros,” Grace said, and Hanna gasped. “Maybe. I didn’t have time to count it. He had me followed, and the next morning, I heard a key in the lock, and I thought it was the hotel maid, and I shouted that I didn’t need anything.” Without thinking, she reached to run her fingers over the rough patch on her crown where the hair was still sparse. She wore her hair back now, to cover it. “But it was not the hotel maid,” she said. She tried to laugh, but she still couldn’t manage it.

She would not tell Hanna everything.

Grace had quickly decided against the hostel. She’d been robbed once already and now she had a rolling suitcase full of cash. She hadn’t made any reservations, suddenly superstitious about jinxing the sale. Living without a laptop, and traveling especially, was like going back in time. She didn’t know how to do
anything
without a computer. She got back into the cab and had no idea where to go. A folded tourist magazine was jammed in the crack of the seat, and on the back cover was an ad for the Hotel Reiniger. Grace showed the driver the ad and told him to take her there.

She had enough cash on her for the cab, but she had to unzip the suitcase in the hotel lobby restroom to peel off the money to pay for two nights. The sight of the money—not neat bricks, but a messy pile with grimy bands—sickened her. Those dirty stacks were so damning and yet looked so insubstantial, like kindling.

She’d planned to open a bank account, but now the idea seemed impossible and cartoonish—showing up with wads of cash, like a drug moll from the movies. She couldn’t take the money anywhere but obviously she couldn’t just leave it either. She rolled the suitcase under the bed and waited to know what to do. She wished she had someone to talk to. She wished Alls had come, and when regret crept up to remind her
why
he had not come, she shoved it down as best she could.

She wished she could call Mrs. Graham and ask to come home.

For the next seventeen hours, Grace didn’t leave her hotel room. At six in the morning, she called for room service and ordered some proud German specialty that sounded like French toast. She clicked dumbly through the TV stations, stopping at a performance of what appeared to be quintuplets in vinyl catsuits. It was Eurovision, the multicountry singing contest. She and the boys used to watch clips of it online, baked and howling with laughter.

She had gotten what she wanted now, hadn’t she? She was rich and away from Garland. But it was like one of those three-wishes fables: She’d duped herself. Yes, she was on a down comforter in a Berlin hotel with gilded mirrors, but at home in Garland, Mrs. Graham wished Grace had never met her son. Alls likely wished her dead.

She jumped at the knock on the door.

“Room service,” a girl’s voice said.

Grace undid the chain and gestured her inside, embarrassed to be alone in this fancy hotel room. The girl was probably Grace’s age, and Grace wished she could offer some explanation. But she was rich now, and rich girls could go to hotels alone without any explanation.

“Danke,” Grace said. She didn’t think you tipped for room service in Germany, but she wasn’t sure. A fifty-euro note was the smallest bill she had, change from check-in, and she handed it to the girl, whose eyes flickered briefly in surprise. When the girl had gone, Grace peeled off a five-hundred-euro note and put it in her nightstand drawer. She needed to be brave enough, at least, to get some change.

She was eating, ravenous but surprised that she could eat at all, when she heard another knock at the door. She stopped chewing and looked to make sure she had chained the door again. She had. “No thank you!” she called, her voice unexpectedly quavering. She fumbled for the German. “Nein!” she called. “Nein danke!” The do-not-disturb sign should have been hanging on the knob. She had checked it when the room service girl left.

She muted the television and listened for whoever it was to go away, to apologize for disturbing someone who wasn’t to be disturbed. Instead there was quick, slick sound, a soft click. The swipe of a key card. And then her door was open a crack.

“Excuse me?” she accused like some hysterical mother who’d just been cut in the checkout line. “Stop!” she shouted. “Halt!”

She jumped up from the bed and ran to the end of the room, her back to the wall, which didn’t make any sense, but when you heard a frightening noise you ran away from it; you couldn’t help it. She watched the crack, the chain tight across it, and then a pair of bolt cutters clunked up the gap and quickly, neatly cut the chain in two.

The man in the door was the man who had taken her up the elevator yesterday to Wyss. The man with the slack gums.

This cannot be the end
, she thought.
Not this.

“Okay,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “Give it to me. Give me the money.” His voice was teasing, almost amused.

“I don’t have it,” she said as he came toward her. “I don’t.” She should have gone to the phone, she realized now, not the window.

“Oh?” His mouth stretched wide. He had stopped just before his body touched hers and now he loomed over her. She could see the dark shadows where his teeth disappeared. He nodded toward her half-eaten breakfast. “How will you pay for your
Kaiserschmarrn
?”

She knew that he would look under the bed first, maybe in the closet, behind the curtains, in the bathtub—

“This won’t be like the films,” he said. “I won’t ask you again and again.” He threw the bolt cutters onto the bed and grabbed Grace’s shoulders, hurling her onto the bed as if she were a bag of laundry. Grace kicked at him furiously, but her legs seemed to fall through the air. All her self-defense training had come from Mrs. Graham, who’d taught her to dig her thumbs into a man’s eye sockets, or, failing that, to knee him in the groin, or, failing that, to bite hard, anywhere. She could do none of these things. And she was supposed to be screaming. He planted his knee on her shin, pinning her down. Her bone was going to snap. Then he opened the bolt cutters and brought them up under her Achilles tendon.

“If you were a professional, I would cut you here,” he said. “But you are no professional.”

She would have told him where the money was then, if she could have spoken. This was that nightmare in which she needed to scream and couldn’t, her voice trapped in sleep, and she woke up at the sound of her own frail whimper, lungs gasping.

“It’s okay,
Liebchen
,” he said. “I will help you grow up.”

He stood up and yanked her ankle, flipping her onto her stomach, and she heard her sob of terror before she felt it. She shut her eyes. Her head was yanked back. He had grabbed her ponytail. The first hairs to break were the ones on the outside, growing from her face and behind her ears. But as he twisted her ponytail in the bolt cutters, she felt instead all the hairs that wouldn’t break, that wouldn’t release, dense inside her ponytail. Her scalp was coming apart. The grinding snap of breaking hair gave way all at once and her head fell forward, her face crashing into the pillow.

He tossed the ponytail onto the pillow next to her and she heaved, sobbing. Then he looked for the suitcase. She could hear him. The curtains, the bathroom, the mini-fridge. When he came back and looked under the bed, he laughed.

He pulled out the carry-on, and there was the money, nearly untouched, just as he had put it there. He zipped it back up and extended the telescoping handle.

“Okay, bye,” he said. “Enjoy the rest of your trip.”

Grace lay weeping, dry-throated, at the pain until she opened her eyes and saw the blood on her pillow, the blossom spreading as it dripped down her scalp. She pushed herself up. In the bathroom, she ran the water until it was lukewarm, and with a sharp breath, she pushed her head under the sink faucet.

She gasped through the stinging and blinked the water out of her eyes. Blood ran in trails down her arms and neck. The sink was stained pink with it. Most of the blood seemed to be coming from her crown, which she couldn’t see and couldn’t bear to touch. She groped in her plastic toiletry bag for a compact and held it up at an angle, turning away from the sink mirror, terrified of what she would see. A patch of skin, perhaps the size of poker chip, had been torn away with the hair.

She grabbed a hand towel and, too gingerly at first, dabbed at the wound. She cried out at the pain and pressed the towel harder to her head. She was going to pass out, she knew—already there were dark flashes wherever she looked—and then she would bleed to death. She leaned against the bathroom wall and lowered herself all the way to the floor, back flat. She braced her legs against the vanity and pushed back until her head was against the tiled wall, the balled up towel smashed between them.

Later, she went back into the bedroom and picked up the ponytail by its tip, trying not to look at the root. She wrapped the ponytail in toilet paper, the better part of the roll, until she couldn’t see any part of it, and then she dropped it in the wastebasket.

What hair was left hung around her face in jagged shards. Her hands shaking, she found her scissors, little pointy things for hangnails and loose threads. She held the ragged ends of her hair gently and cut the rest of it off.

 • • • 

Hanna was watching her. “I got a little roughed up,” Grace said, shrugging. “But I’m here.”

“My God,” Hanna said.

“They could still turn me in,” Grace said. “One word, you know? Everything would come unglued.”

“It’s already unglued,” Hanna said.

They looked up at the sound of the studio door. Jacqueline started at the sight of them sitting together at the worktable.

“What are you two doing working so late?” Her voice was overly friendly as she recovered herself. “I can’t pay overtime on that thing,” she said, nodding toward the centerpiece.

“We know,” Grace said. Hanna said nothing.

Jacqueline paused at her office door. “Julie, a moment.”

Grace followed her.

Jacqueline smiled nervously. “Good,” she said, as if Grace had answered some question.

She opened the black velvet box before her to reveal another ring, this one an Edwardian engagement ring. Grace thought it was beautiful. The ring’s setting was empty around the center solitaire. The four sockets were darkened with age. Jacqueline handed her a packet of four stones, emerald cut, probably from her bag of zircons.

“Do it here,” Jacqueline said.

“In your office?”

“Yes, now.”

When Grace went to fetch her tools, Hanna was staring distractedly at the centerpiece.

Grace sat down in Jacqueline’s chair and took up a loupe. She saw the sharp, bright track marks in the sockets where someone had crudely plucked out the stones. She nestled the first stone in its square socket while Jacqueline, sitting on a file box of papers, watched her. Grace glanced up and saw her boss’s mouth set tightly, a white rim around her lips.

Grace set the first two stones on either side of the solitaire. When she sat back and looked at the ring under the light, she nearly laughed at how bad it looked. The center solitaire was an antique, old mine cut. It glowed softly and looked almost buttery in the light. Jacqueline’s blowsy zircons looked like cheap sequins next to it.