Unbecoming (41 page)

The room was furnished in bizarre simplicity with a single bed, a shabby dining table with one chair, and a child’s writing desk. The bedspread was threadbare. Grace thought of her attic bedroom at the Grahams’ and quickly shook off the memory.

“Here,” he said, pointing to the table.

“Here?” Grace repeated. The man had been far too passionate about the restoration to have Grace drop it on a rickety table.

“It’s bolted to the floor,” he said, kicking gently at a table leg.

Another man had appeared, a secretary, perhaps, and the three of them together slid the centerpiece out onto the table. The collector sat down in the chair and stared, his hand over his mouth.

“It’s like going back in time,” he said finally.

Grace hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath. He was pleased.

“Yes,” she said.

“Your work,” he said, “is exquisite.”

“Thank you.”

He stood and backed up to the wall, never taking his eyes off the centerpiece. He pushed a button on the wall, just under a small crude oil painting of a pair of goats. She heard it before she saw it: A clear acrylic lid, a bottomless box, was descending from the ceiling on steel wires. The collector and his secretary switched places wordlessly and the collector hurried to the centerpiece. He motioned with his hands for the lid to drop, to pause, to drop a little more, as if he were helping someone park on the street. They stopped when the lid hovered just over the tops of the trees, and they waited until it was completely still in the air and they were sure the centerpiece was correctly positioned under it. Then the secretary pushed the button once more, and the lid settled around the centerpiece with a soft clunk.

The collector relaxed his shoulders and clapped his hands. “I love it!” he squawked. He put his hands on his hips and bent over his new prize.

“Did you see the peaches?” She pointed toward the orchard. “They’re my special favorite.”

He laughed when he saw the bite marks. “However did you do it?” he said. “You must have such steady hands. Me, I can’t even thread a needle.”

When she left, he tried to write her a check, she supposed as a tip. Grace couldn’t take checks; she had no way to cash them. “I couldn’t,” she demurred. “No, please. You paid for our services. That is the arrangement.”

“Please, please,” he said. “You have made me so happy.” He tried again to hand her a check. She saw that he had written it to Hanna Dunaj. Jacqueline must have told him—he might even have e-mailed with Hanna, or spoken to her. Grace had never had such intimate contact with a client.

“Really, I can’t,” she said.

His face changed; he was used to giving people money and used to them wanting it. “Ah,” he said with a thin smile. He withdrew a clip of bills from his pocket and peeled off several of them. He handed her the rest. “You have given me so much joy—you can’t be compensated fairly for that.”

“Thank you, you’re very generous. Would you like a copy of the notes?” she asked him. “You might enjoy reading our notes on the restoration.”

He looked positively aroused. “I would love that,” he said. “Oh do send
all
the notes, please.”

 • • • 

On the sidewalk, she looked down at her phone. There, a missed call. She thought she might capsize in the wave of relief; the number on the screen was like a hand reaching out for her.

She couldn’t fuck up now.

Outside Zanuso et Filles she pressed the buzzer.

“Who is it?”

Jacqueline never asked who it was. Grace knew she had opened the safe.

“Julie,” she said, calling Alls at the same time. When the phone rang twice, she hung up. She tromped down the stairs, making up for her wobbly-legged anxiety by landing hard on her feet.

Jacqueline was at the door, dry-lipped and wild-eyed. She motioned Grace in and shut the door behind her. “We’ve been robbed,” she said.

“What? When?”

“Over the weekend. The safe is empty.”

“My God,” Grace said. “What was in it?”

Jacqueline pushed her hands through her hair. “Where is she?” she demanded. “Where is Hanna?”

Grace shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do,” Jacqueline said through her clenched jaw. “You two talk all the damn day. Tell me where she is.”

“We’re just work friends,” Grace said limply. “I don’t even know where she lives.”

“
She
has a key, and
he
has a key.”

“Jacqui,” Amaury warned her from across the room.

“You’ve called the police?” Grace asked.

“Ha,” Amaury said.

“We have to call the police,” Grace said, stepping toward Jacqueline’s office.

“No! I already called the police. They’ve already been here.” She looked at Amaury, threatening him into believing it, but he was slumped over at his desk, arms crossed, looking at his lap.

“I knew this day would come,” he said.

Jacqueline was almost gasping for breath. “I knew she was a thief,” she said.

“Are you sure it was her?” Grace asked. “She might just be sick.”

Jacqueline rolled her eyes. “You don’t know her,” she said. “Look, her things are gone too.”

Amaury sighed.

“Go home,” she snapped at Grace. “There is nothing to do.”

“I need to be paid,” Grace said. “You said you’d pay me on Friday.”

“Get out!” Jacqueline shouted. “If you ever want to work again, just get out!”

Amaury groaned and stood up. Grace followed him out the door. She had almost a thousand euros in her purse from the collector. She reached in and fingered the bills.

“What will she do?” she asked Amaury outside the building.

He shrugged his soft, hilly shoulders. “What will
we
do, you mean.” He looked at her tiredly. “The job is gone,” he said, gently breaking the news. “You don’t need to come back.” She threw her arms around him, and he stumbled back in surprise. He gently patted her back, unsure and uncomfortable.

The ship had been going down anyway; he’d known it and so had she. She released him and slipped a hundred euros into his pants pocket. He was far too discombobulated to notice.

“I guess I won’t see you for a while,” she said to him.

“No,” he said.

 • • • 

She had almost a thousand in her pocket but had planned to end the day with ten, and Alls was not expecting her for five more hours. She could have called him and said she was early; they had certainly allowed for the possibility that Jacqueline would close up shop immediately. But Grace had not sold the trillions, and while the money in her pocket was a nice surprise, it was not nearly
enough
surprise. Maybe she had the time, after all, to try again.

No one would give her a good price for loose diamonds. She had the ring she had taken the diamonds from; she could pop them right back in. But that wasn’t the case she had made to Alls; she had promised him that she could set diamonds stolen from the Joneses into jewelry stolen from the Smiths.

Grace went to the third arrondissement to look for earrings. Her requirements were specific, and she knew she might come up empty. She needed a pair in eighteen- or twenty-two-karat gold with simple, three-prong settings and only semiprecious stones, so she wouldn’t have to go too deep into her pockets to pay for them. Such earrings weren’t fashionable here; she would have had better luck at the Albe-mall.

The small shops had nothing for her. She vowed to give up after two hours, but it didn’t take nearly that long. She found them in Galeries Lafayette for two hundred, white gold with aquamarines. She paid in cash and threw the receipt in the can on the way out. Switching these stones at home would be easy for her, child’s play. She was excited: This wasn’t exactly the plan, but maybe it was better. She would show him. She would show him that he needed her.

 • • • 

Alls was not at home. The jewelry boxes were gone from her desk. He had left her. So tidily, hadn’t even left a mess. Grace leaned back against the wall.

His duffel bag was still there.

She pawed through it, her mind sparking in a dozen panicked directions. No jewels. She yanked open her drawers, a burglar in her own home, searching desperately for evidence that he had not gone without her. And what if he had? She had half-expected it, hadn’t she?

The Mont box. She had shown it to him last night, every varnished layer and every babied hinge. Now she threw it open. She groped in the slip until her nails hit metal. They were there. He had hidden them away. Yes. Of course.

When Alls came in an hour later, Grace had shoved the earring posts into the bottom of a plain wax candle that she held upturned between her knees. She sat by the window, hunched over. She would have to buy a new headlamp, a new magnifier, since she was freelancing now. She would eventually need a portable soldering apparatus like the one at work. But today, she had only to open the prongs and close them around a pair of diamonds as big as unopened sunflower seeds. She allowed herself a sigh of relief when she heard him come in.

He wanted to know everything that had happened so far. She gave it to him in detail, keeping her eyes on her work. He seemed more interested in what she was doing than disappointed that she hadn’t sold the trillions, and that was how she knew. She felt like a plane touching down, finally on safe, hard ground.

She’d wrapped the aquamarines in a tissue. “We should save those,” she said. “They might come in handy sometime.”

He stood behind her as she clamped the last prongs closed.

“Hand me that cloth,” she said, pulling the earrings from the wax. The diamonds were nearly naked, barely held. Only a woman with more money than she could ever spend would wear something so valuable and so vulnerable.

“Put them on,” he said.

She wiggled the posts into her ears. He followed her into the bathroom, and they looked together at her reflection in the mirror.

“They don’t look real,” he said. “They’re too big to look real.”

“Diamonds only look real if you already look rich,” she said.

He laughed.

“We could still sell them today,” she said. “I can do it. Come with me. You’ll see.”

He shook his head. “These are probably easier to hide than the cash would be,” he said. “Safer to travel with.” He reached up and took her earlobe between his fingers, and she turned and pulled him closer.

 • • • 

Alls watched her pack with curiosity: Another Grace was emerging. The cardigans would be left behind with Petit Trianon and her books. When she tucked her black boots along the side of the suitcase, he remembered them. He’d taken a picture that day in New York, he said, of Grace smiling in Union Square on their way to the auction. She’d never seen the photograph, but she could imagine: At eighteen, she’d looked corn-fed, a babe in the woods but for another girl’s dress and the stiletto boots and all that they implied. She had been so eager to change.

Now the boots suited her perfectly.

At dusk, they stepped off the bus at Gallieni. He had their bags, his small duffel and her larger rolling suitcase. They crossed the street to where the tour buses were idling, sweaty travelers embarking and disembarking.

“Tickets?” the stubbly driver asked, looking at his clipboard.

“We need to buy them now,” Alls said, handing the driver the money.

He waved them onto the bus, and they turned to mount the metal stairs.

“No, no!” the man called after her, and Grace whipped around in the sudden grip of alarm.

“You have to put your big bag down here,” he said, pointing under the bus. “Only small bags up there.” He held out his hand, ready to assist her.

She looked to Alls, but he was already on the bus. Inside her suitcase were the Mont Box and all the secrets it held, her tools, precious metals, and a fortune in gemstones.

Grace smiled and let the driver take the handle. “Thank you,” she said.

Alls had found them two seats together near the back. In front of them, a young mother nursed a fretful infant. Three backpackers, separated by four rows of people, debated what they’d heard about the Madrid hostels. Alls took her hand as if they were any young couple traveling Europe on a shoestring, looking out the grimy windows, wondering at the smells of other people’s food. The driver climbed into his seat, and the bus lurched away from the curb, where a small crowd of strangers waved them good-bye.

Epilogue

G
race turned twenty-five outside Brussels, at the wedding reception of a rich Belgian girl she’d befriended at a daytime watercolor class six months before. Three hundred people were now crowded onto the brick terrace at the girl’s parents’ house, and when the bride’s father, silver-haired and American, raised his flute to toast the happiness of his only daughter, Alls raised his glass an extra centimeter for Grace. They would celebrate her birthday later, alone. The crowd applauded the young couple and then began to spread across the garden in clusters, waiters streaming between them with platters of canapés. Alls set his champagne flute on a white-dressed table and disappeared inside to find a bathroom. Grace plucked a tartlet from a passing tray.

“Galette de pigeon,” the waiter said.

When Alls came out of the house thirty minutes later, he found Grace chatting about Byzantine art with someone’s uncle, who laughed uproariously at her colorful jokes about Justinian. Grace fed Alls a bite of her lobster salad and wiped the sauce from the corner of his mouth with her pinkie, and
l’oncle
sidled away, beckoned by his wife to talk to an older couple. Alls had finished inside, and Grace could tell from his languid gestures and the softness of his forearm around her waist that his job had been an easy one, but they would have to stay through dinner anyway, mostly to charm but also to commit small, strategic offenses that would travel back to the bride and her family tomorrow and over the next weeks: a dirty joke shared sotto voce during the mother’s tearful toast, an ungenerous comparison of the groom to his brother, some uncovered yawning and unladylike postures. They had to kill any friendships to ensure an easy exit from the lives of their marks. She’d long since given up on others’ kind opinions of her; she had to shed these as easily as she shed her names. To offend someone swiftly, efficiently, even, as you left forever was kinder by far than to slowly withdraw, to confuse and disappoint. You didn’t want them to miss you. Anger was simple, self-sustaining as a cactus. You couldn’t look too closely at it, lest the spines get you in the eye.