Unbecoming (10 page)

Grace waited. Hanna drank from her glass and spat the ice chips, one, two, three, back into the water.

“A client,” she finally said. “I injured a client who threatened me.”

“He threatened to expose you?”

“She,” Hanna said. “I cut her right down her neck.” She pointed with her fork to her jawline and gestured toward her clavicle. “Down to her collarbone with my small utility knife.”

Grace swallowed. Hanna cleared her throat. “She wanted me to sell her husband’s inherited antiques, you know, that she had brought in for ‘cleaning’ or whatever, and make copies for her to take home in their place. I wouldn’t do it. I won’t
steal
.” She frowned.

“But you forged,” Grace said doubtfully.

“It’s one thing to make something from nothing. If your eye can’t tell the difference, I don’t see how that’s my problem. You get the same enjoyment and status from the piece.”

“How did she know you could pull it off?”

“She had one of my pieces. A side table. She had commissioned it! She knew exactly what that table was, but she threatened to turn me in for forgery if I didn’t do as she asked. She wanted me to help her steal from her husband—her own husband! Would you do it?”

“Never,” Grace said.

“Right. But I hadn’t made her sign anything for the repro, so, stupid me. I had no proof that she knew she’d paid for a repro except how little she’d paid for it. And I was very frightened of her. She was a very intimidating woman.”

Grace nodded, though it was difficult to imagine Hanna intimidated by anyone. That was the benefit, Grace thought, of showing no affect. You couldn’t manipulate someone if you couldn’t see their feelings.

“But then,” Hanna went on, “that night, she did something
very
stupid. She grabbed one of my knives and tried to threaten me with it.”

“What?”

“I should have let her, of course. It would have been better. But in the moment, you know, someone has a knife to your throat, it’s hard to think.”

“So you defended yourself,” Grace said.

“She was a very prominent citizen, and I was a criminal. She made my one small crime validate all her claims. You can guess the rest. If I’d cut her arm or something, I don’t think I would have even been arrested. She wouldn’t have risked the potential embarrassment. But the neck, you know. Can’t hide that.”

“My God,” Grace said.

“And that is why I don’t work in Copenhagen anymore.” Hanna folded her hands. “Now I’m fastidious in my restorations. No one could be more scrupulous. Every scrap of paper, every mote of dust is accounted for.”

“Jacqueline knows? About the assault?”

“I’ve told her no lies. I would be at a much better establishment if I didn’t have this mark.” She dabbed at her mouth with the corner of a napkin. “But Jacqueline will hire anybody.”

Grace had come to Jacqueline with no references and no credentials, just wildly feigned confidence and an offer to work for free for two months, learning all she could, while Jacqueline judged her potential. Grace had been broke when she made the offer, but desperate with hope and determination. When Jacqueline said yes, Grace sold the only thing of value she still owned, an agate horse-cameo bracelet and Graham-family heirloom that Riley had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She had hung on to it all through Prague and Berlin as some kind of proof of her good intentions. When she dropped it into the palm of Mme Maxine Lachaille, a dealer in Saint Germain des Prés who sometimes referred work to Jacqueline, Grace had felt as though she were discarding her own handcuffs.

“And what about you, Julie? Why aren’t you working somewhere better?”

“You know,” Grace said. “Stray cat.”

“But you want to stay in Paris?”

Grace nodded. “I love it here.”

“It’s so bizarre to me, you know? A lot of American girls want to live in Paris, but what we do is
not
what they have in mind. Sitting in a basement all day, in private crisis over a badly dried varnish. You don’t look like someone who should be in this line of work. More like one of those art gallery girls—someone smiling by the door.”

“Oh, and would
you
want to do something like that?”

“Not for five minutes.”

They laughed.

“But why Paris? You work late every night, and here you are today, alone, and you say you come every week. What about Paris do you love so much? If you have visa issues, why not go to New York and make sacks of money? Relatively speaking, of course.”

Grace laughed again, but Hanna was waiting for an answer.

“I hate Americans,” Grace said, thinking that answer would certainly suffice, but she was wrong, or she had taken a beat too long to answer. Now Hanna was not smiling. She was watching Grace carefully, like a piece of veneer she had glued down that was just waiting for her to look away before it sprang up again.

Grace knew she needed to give Hanna more to satisfy her curiosity, but she also knew Hanna would not be easily assuaged now that her radar had picked something up.

“My ex-boyfriend,” she said carefully. “He was just released from prison, and I don’t want him to find me. So I won’t go back.”

Already she regretted it.

Hanna raised her eyebrows. “Abusive?”

Grace nodded, relieved at Hanna’s willing suggestion. “I’ll stay here all my life if it means I never see him again.”

She had said enough. Hanna averted her eyes, suddenly respectful of Grace’s privacy, and called for the check.

 • • • 

When Grace got home that afternoon, she sat cross-legged on her bed and looked up Hanna Dunaj online. She found dozens of articles, all in Danish except for one in English from the
Copenhagen Post.
In 2003, Hanna Dunaj had been arrested for the assault of Antonia Houbraken, twenty-four, and subsequently charged with fraud. The photo with the article was not of Hanna but of Houbraken, leaving a building wearing a black leather jacket and a light blue scarf. She was tight-lipped, with long dark hair. She was the wife of a football player, FC Copenhagen forward Jakob Houbraken.

Hanna Dunaj had been a furniture restoration specialist in Copenhagen and Kolding, the article said, who also sold restored antiques. “Houbraken suspected that a piece purchased from Dunaj was not the antique Dunaj had represented, but a forgery. Houbraken reported that when she confronted Dunaj in her studio, Dunaj attacked her with a utility knife.”

Hanna was extradited to her native Poland, but the article did not say why, only that she would serve her sentence there and be barred from Denmark for a period of ten years.

Grace read the article several times. She wouldn’t have thought Hanna capable of sudden violence. Her blood seemed to run too cool. Riley had been that way too, except about Grace. “I love you so much it scares me,” he’d told her more than once. When they were kids he’d said it with earnest bafflement, and she’d felt drunk on her own romantic power. But as they got a little older, he would sometimes mumble it into her ear as though she were hurting him.

Grace slid the silver box gently out of her canvas bag and onto her lap. She lifted the lid and ran her fingertips gently along each of the inside corners, feeling for any hollowness, any give. A secret compartment would be close to proof that she had an authentic Mont, but she had not wanted to look in front of Hanna. Now she caught it with her fingernail: the thin rim of a hidden slip, a secret envelope. She slid her fingers inside, thrilling at the possibility of what might be waiting. But there was nothing. The compartment was empty.

She’d first read about James Mont in an old issue of
The
Magazine Antiques
, which she now excavated from the ziggurat of various back issues stacked by date against the wall under her window.

James Mont was born Demetrios Pecintoglu, and he had come to America from Istanbul as a teenager in the 1920s. In his twenties, he got a rewiring job in a Brooklyn electrical supply shop, and began to sell lamps there that he had designed. One day, Frankie Yale, neighborhood crime boss, stopped in with a girlfriend. Mont charmed the pair up to their ears, and soon after, Yale asked Mont to decorate his house. Mont then decorated for Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano; he’d found the client base to delight in thick, glossy lacquers and metallic glitz. Grace, too, loved his ballsy juxtapositions of squat rectangles and sweeping curves. He made armrests out of carved and gilded Greek keys, repeated them along lamp bases and upholstery trim. Either he or his clients were obsessed with the motif. Grace remembered something she’d learned from Donald Mauce, her old boss in New York: The nouveau riche loved classical shit. To their eyes, nothing made new money look older than naked white statuary and a few plaster columns propping up the roof.

Mont and his clients were completely uninterested in the round-spectacled efficiency of midcentury modernism that was springing up around them. In a Mont house, you blew smoke, fucked against the mantel, and drank gimlets until you passed out in the flared arms of a velvet chair. Modernism wasn’t Grace’s catnip either. Modernism had spawned the American suburb, its blank cul-de-sacs and houses with garages like snouts, square green lawns, and little clumps of impatiens. Grace had come to loathe the American lawn
and all its flat propriety. She preferred Mont’s excess: a chair’s legs flaring insolently beneath a deep, plush seat; strong arms surrounding a narrow back that arched up and away. Every corner, every joint, and every inch of material seemed to announce his intentions.

During Prohibition, Mont designed case goods with hidden compartments: bars that folded down into baby grand pianos, desks that held hidden gun drawers. He was a gambler who made big bets and had trouble covering his losses, and he had a fearsome temper that was only stoked by working for gangsters. In 1937, when Mont had graduated to Hollywood clientele, he married Helen Kim, an actress eight years his junior. Bob Hope attended the ceremony. Mont had achieved the kind of life he’d designed for others. Twenty-nine days later, Helen Kim was found dead in their apartment, an alleged suicide.

Two years after that, Mont asked a pretty young lampshade designer, Dorothy Burns, to his apartment to discuss a contract. When she resisted his advances, he beat her to within an inch of her life; she was hospitalized for two weeks. Burns was so humiliated by the attack, the trial, and the publicity that she hanged herself. Mont did five years in Sing Sing for the assault. He sat out the entire war there, and upon his release, he returned to eager clients, either forgiving or forgetful.

The boys had been sentenced to eight, and they hadn’t attacked anyone.

Grace’s Mont box must have come over to France long ago, perhaps with some starlet in the 1930s who used it for her jewels or pills. Some of the velvet along the bottom of the inside had come loose from its backing; the glue had deteriorated. One of the hinges had a dent Grace would have to bang out, and all of the hardware needed to be thoroughly cleaned, down to the screws. She would have to teach herself his gilding process in order to convincingly fill the chips and scratches. She relished every injury, running her fingers very lightly over them as if they were sensitive bruises. Each one was a chance. She would repair them all.

7

G
race was first to work on Monday morning. She spread the last batch of beads on linen towels to dry. What had been a pile of murky clods a few days ago was now a speckled rainbow made of thousands of bright, worthless jewels. She pulled a pair of cotton gloves from the clean laundry. Latex gloves protected their skin from turpentine, benzene, and toxins; at other times, the cotton gloves protected the work from their skin. Grace rolled two clothed fingers over the glass beads and then examined her fingertips up close, looking for any remaining residue. She felt sudden warmth at the nape of her neck.

“You won’t find any dirt.”

Grace wheeled around, colliding with Hanna. “You scared me.” She touched the back of her neck, calming the nerves there.

“Now that we can see the beads clearly,” Hanna said, “I can source replacements from Kuznetsov for the cracked and broken ones. We’ll have to go over each color to distress it reasonably so it matches. But today I will continue with the figures.”

She picked up the sheep she had begun on Friday.

“Six sheep, two maidens, three swans, and an ox! It will take me days simply to gather the right materials! I need white wax, shell silver, gelatin, silvering solution, wooden dowels, gum arabic—did I tell you it’s private? A collector.”

Dealers had profit margins to consider, and museums had budgets, not that Zanuso ever did museum work. A collector meant a maniac with money. Hanna wouldn’t have to cut a single corner.

She was the same Hanna, Grace told herself. Nothing had changed except what Grace knew about her. But all day, the sound of Hanna’s chair grinding on the floor, the clip of her pliers, her quick exhalations of accomplishment—every noise from across the table seemed threatening. Hanna, her friend, beige and orderly, had slit a woman’s throat and gone to prison. Hanna had neither hidden her past nor flaunted it. Grace had simply misjudged her, just as she was meant to.

Grace imagined shrugging over a sandwich and telling Hanna everything she’d done to end up in Jacqueline Zanuso’s basement. Impossible. Hanna had not needed to unravel any lies; she was only filling in blank spaces. Grace had crudely, hurriedly filled in her own blank spaces whenever they appeared, and never with the truth. She was like someone faking a crossword puzzle by socking in random letters so it would look finished from a distance.

Grace started at the buzz of machinery and looked up to see Hanna with the keyboard vacuum. She had taken a break from the sheep to clean the field of wheat in the centerpiece’s summer quarter. She moved the nozzle in tiny circles among the stalks in a trance. Grace had been shaken by Hanna’s confession, but Hanna wasn’t unsettled at all.

When Hanna went out for afternoon coffee, Grace went to the computer and checked the
Albemarle Record
—just once, quickly, crossing it off for the day—and then her e-mail. She used one address for work and another for her parents. Today there was an unwelcome e-mail from her mother.