Unbecoming (36 page)

“You can have the diamonds,” she said.

“I already have the diamonds,” he snapped. “How much you reckon those are worth?”

“The little ones aren’t much, maybe four hundred each, but those trillions are special. At least five thousand each, as much as ten. Euros. I’m far from expert but you could take those and get on the Eurail and sell them in Madrid next week for fifteen thousand dollars, probably.”

“Bullshit,” he said. He put his hands in his pockets. “But is that what you think the last three years of my life are worth? Five thousand dollars a year?”

“No,” she said quietly. “But I’m not going to help you. I’m not going to steal anything.”

“Anything else,” he said.

“Anything else,” she sighed.

“If only I believed you,” he said. “But it’s not like I found you working in an orphanage, healing the sick or disfigured. I see great potential here.”

Grace was worn out with fear and now she was exasperated. “Just tell me what you want from me.”

“I want from you what you wanted from me.”

“I wanted you,” she said.

“Too little, too late.”

They were quiet for a minute, listening to the echo of their footsteps on the sidewalk. Grace wondered what would happen if she ran.

“I was bringing the bags from the study to the living room,” he finally said. “Riley was loading up his own bags. The front door opened, and the old groundskeeper was standing there.”

She listened.

“And Riley ran at him.”

That hadn’t been in the papers.

When Alls saw the groundskeeper, his first thought was to turn around, to hide his face. And so he saw Riley, in the doorway behind him, his face monstrous with fright, run at the groundskeeper holding an andiron over his head. The groundskeeper, clutching his trash bag, fell against the doorway, hitting his head on the jamb, and dropped to the floor. The andiron swept through the empty air at the end of Riley’s arm.

“If that andiron had hit him, that man would have died right then,” Alls said. “But no one knows Riley swung it except for me and Riley. Not even the groundskeeper. He couldn’t even pick Riley out of the lineup.”

Alls called for Greg, who came crashing down the hall with his bags and kicked the door open. He ran out to the car, jumping over the old man on the floor. Riley stood over the groundskeeper, staring at his slackened face, until Alls shouted at him to get moving. They drove to the Walmart and switched cars, but Riley was a wreck. He stayed glued to the TV at the lake house, certain that they were missing crucial details because their crime was only regional news at Norris Lake, not local news. He wouldn’t go to New York and he was in no shape to anyway. He had sorely overestimated his own nerve.

“When you left with the painting,” Alls said, “you left me with him.”

“You could have made the switch that night,” she said. “Or shredded his copy and left it all behind.”

“How was I supposed to believe in you at all, huh? You have me tear out the painting for you, you have Riley fake a copy for you. I’m sure there’s a real deep record of things you
didn’t
do.”

“I wanted you to come. I was just worried something else would go wrong—”

“And it did.”

Riley insisted on returning to Garland; he said it was less suspicious for him to be there, like everything was normal, even though he himself wasn’t normal at all. The groundskeeper didn’t improve and Riley started threatening to turn himself in. He listened to the people on the news describe the thugs who’d locked a frail volunteer in an airless room and couldn’t believe they meant
him
. He wouldn’t leave the house, and for three days he neither showered nor slept. He had glued himself to the TV and seemed to be praying to it, for the groundskeeper to pull through, for himself to wake up from a bad dream.

“And you were worried about the painting,” Grace said. She’d played out the scenarios in her mind thousands of times: They discovered the painting was missing and blamed the culprits of the second crime for the earlier one; or Alls was found out and then so was she.

“No,” he said. “Not that.”

“You weren’t?”

“You were so focused on the painting,” he said. “The days before you left—like you didn’t trust me with it. And I started to wonder if you really wanted me at all.” He stopped and looked at her. “I really wasn’t sure. And then you took it.”

I wanted you
, she wished she could say.

They had reached Zanuso. “Stand here,” he said. He nodded to the brick wall, under the awning. “Watch,” he said, nodding first toward the street and then up at the building’s windows. He seemed comfortable; he knew where he was.

There was not a soul in sight. Alls got to his knees. When he moved his feet, his shoes made no scuffing sound against the pavement, as though he were barefoot. He reached under his shirttail and took from just inside the waistband of his jeans a leather case. He silently unzipped it and pulled out a small tension wrench and a steel pick. He wriggled the short end of the wrench into the keyhole and then slid the pick in next to it. She couldn’t tell him she had a key now. He pushed gently on the wrench, bobbing it clockwise, as he pushed and pulled the pick with his other hand, raking the inside of the lock. He frowned, and Grace looked nervously up and down the block. Still silent. Alls pulled the pick and wrench from the lock and slid the pick back into his case. He chose a small hooked one now, and, shifting his crouch to get even closer to the lock, he slipped the hook inside the keyhole and began to probe, pushing down on the handle, then pulling the pick out a bit and pushing down again.

She heard something inside the building and touched his shoulder, but he had already heard it. His tools were out of sight and he was on his feet, hustling her toward the corner. They made it just around when she heard the door burst open, a man muttering to himself as he hurried up the sidewalk in the other direction, the door falling shut behind him. She could hear Alls’s heartbeat against her, or maybe she could feel it through his clothes and his skin.

He worked on the lock for what felt like a very long time, but when Grace looked at her watch, only ten minutes had passed. She heard a car, probably two blocks away but getting closer. Alls pulled the pick from the lock and made one quick tug upward on the wrench. The lock clicked. He turned the doorknob and nodded for her to enter.

She let him close the door behind her. He was almost silent, and in the dark, with only her yellow dress as light, it seemed impossible that she was not alone. But she heard his voice behind her. “Go on,” he whispered.

She reached out for the wall to steady herself, and she followed it to the stairwell. She groped for the rail and stepped down, one two three, feeling the wall for the turn, and then the nine steps to the bottom. And then there was another door, and another lock.

This time, he used a flashlight. He had it open in two minutes.

Grace had spent hundreds of hours alone in the studio late at night, lights blazing. But now she was scared to touch the light switch.

“You know what they say,” he joked, his voice overwhelming the dark. “Weakest part of a lock is the keyhole.”

She felt him in the room, moving silently about. She stood still. In a moment he had turned on her desk lamp.

He looked over her table, the tools neatly grouped by form and by function in glass jars, the stack of folded cloths.

“You should pick locks,” he said, more to himself than to her. “You’d be great at it.”

He walked around to the Czech centerpiece. “What is this fairyland here?”

She took a deep breath. “You can’t take that. You’d never find a buyer for it.”

“I just asked what the hell it
is
,” he said. “It’s as big as a doghouse anyway.”

She toured the centerpiece for him, the silk cornstalks and beaded trees, the muslin shepherdesses and wax peaches. Hanna had done such beautiful work.

“The peaches are mine,” she said. “And these acorns, this beading.”

“What about the jewelry?” he asked. “Where is that?”

“In her office,” Grace said, glancing at Jacqueline’s doorway.

She followed him in.

“In here?” he asked, pulling open her desk.

“No, in there.” She pointed to the stack of magazines sitting in front of the safe.

He took a quick breath and flexed his hands.

“You’re kidding,” she said.

“You going to try to stop me?”

“Could I?”

“I haven’t done this much,” he said. “Could take a while.” He lay down on the floor, on his belly. His legs bent at the knee and his feet stuck up, shoes dangling. He didn’t fit on the floor.

Grace watched for a while as he spun the dial back and forth. “Are you listening to it?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “I wish. These wheels are too light to click.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“Not your problem, remember? Any guesses on the combination? Birth date, phone number, weird superstitions?”

“I’m not going to help you,” she said.

“Yeah, I got it. You would never.”

He asked for scrap paper and a pen, and Grace brought him the supplies from her desk. He began to try combinations and mark them down. What he was doing looked like a joke. Cracking a safe couldn’t possibly work this way and he couldn’t possibly believe it would.

“You can’t try every combination,” she said.

“You know, in some ways, you seem really different. Right off the bat. For one thing, you’re not trying to get everybody to fall in love with you all the time. Laughing and covering your mouth, telling little stories about how clumsy you are. But you’re still a know-it-all.”

“If I was so transparent,” she started, but he interrupted her.

“To answer your question, I don’t think I’ll need to try every number.” He’d clenched his teeth in concentration. “The wheel was parked at thirteen, so we’ll start with that as the last one. And there’s a little forgiveness for the shaky handed. Multiples of five should do it.”

She didn’t know what to do. She sat down in Hanna’s chair and flipped through her notes on the centerpiece.
Vendredi, 24 août,
the top page read. Tomorrow.
Nous ratisserons la pelouse et finirons la caisse.
Comb the lawn and finish the case.

Ratisserons
,
finirons
.
We
will comb,
we
will finish. Hanna had accepted her help more fully than Grace had realized.

 • • • 

At five thirty, he came to her table with three sheets of paper marked up with numbers. “Let’s go,” he said. “You need to change your clothes.”

“I’m not coming to work,” she said. She hadn’t told him that she’d meant to leave Paris today. “Not if you robbed my boss.”

“Yes, you are,” he said. “Unless you want her to think you did it.”

“Jesus Christ, have you learned nothing?”

“More than you have, apparently. But I didn’t get the safe open. Not yet.”

“Yet? You think I’m coming back here with you tonight?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’re going to sit there like a cherub and watch me crack your boss’s safe. Because you haven’t changed at all, right?”

“You think I get off on this,” she said in disbelief.

“I know you do.”

They rode home on the first train of the day. She had sometimes gone to work this early, but she couldn’t remember ever coming home so late. When they got there, Freindametz was still gone, and Grace found herself relieved. She didn’t know what was happening, but at least she didn’t have to explain it.

When Grace got out of the shower, Alls was asleep on her bed, on top of the blanket, stretched out straight on his back. Her wet hair dripped down her chest as she watched him. She quietly pulled a skirt and shirt from her closet and took them back into the bathroom to change.

He could have been hers, if she had done it right. But that was an Alls from a long time ago. She didn’t know this one at all.

 • • • 

When Grace got to work, only two and half hours after she’d left it, Hanna was checking her measurements for the carrying case. Grace had no work of her own. She watched as Hanna jotted a series of tidy check marks in her notebook. Her vision was distorted with fatigue, every shape oversharp and indistinct. When she reminded herself that Alls was at home, asleep in her bed, she found herself doubting that it was true. She might have hallucinated it—him, what he would say to her. He might have been a dream. But then, staring at Hanna’s table, she saw Hanna’s notebook, the familiar printing, and she knew that all of this was very real.

“Hanna,” Grace whispered. “He’s here. Alls is here.”

“This is a great day,” Hanna said proudly. “Last tasks. On Monday I send this carnival packing.”

Grace stared, and Hanna blinked gaily at her as if she had not heard.

“He broke into my house last night,” Grace said.

Jacqueline stepped out of her office and curled her finger toward Grace.

At her desk, Jacqueline took the lid from a cardboard box. Coiled inside was a pearl necklace. “It’s filthy,” Jacqueline said, lifting it out. Hanging between the pearls were six gold disks with impressions of concentric circles, and in the middle of each disc was a ruby cabochon, each one like a lozenge of melted sugar. They reminded Grace of the cookies Riley used to have in his packed lunches, the ones with a blob of cherry filling.

“Take these stones out and replace them with something semiprecious,” Jacqueline said. “Take out just one to match at Fassi and leave the necklace with me.”

This time, she didn’t even offer an explanation.

At her table, Grace extracted the first ruby cabochon from its gold doughnut.

“Do you need anything from Fassi?” she asked Hanna, as if she were going out for a sandwich. But Hanna didn’t respond, not even a nod, a twitch, a flicker of recognition. It was as though Grace had not spoken at all.

In his shop, Fassi laid out rhodonite, rhodolite garnets, rubellite, red spinel, and lab rubies. He and Grace held each stone up to the light. The lab ruby was closest. The bill for all six was only twenty-two euros. Fassi dropped them in a sack like jelly beans, not even wrapped.