“I understand if you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Other people are the ones who don’t want to talk about it,” Hanna said, pursing her lips. “Well, I had to find something else I could do. And restoration, as you know, is not so far from forgery.” She smiled. “Except the work is half done for you.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To Paris? I’m not allowed in Denmark, and no one would hire me there even if I were. Not now. But France has been very forgiving. Of course, I should be somewhere much better than Zanuso, but—” She shrugged.
“You should,” Grace agreed.
“And so should you.”
Grace was pleased by the compliment even as she felt the prickle of implication. She might need to give Hanna more of a story, but only if she asked. To bring it up before then would only sharpen Hanna’s suspicions, whatever they were.
“How long were you in prison?” Grace asked.
“Almost four years.”
“Four? For antiques forgery?”
“No,” Hanna said. “For that, only two months. The rest was for assault. The matters got tangled up, legally.”
“What did you do?” Grace hadn’t meant to say it like that, and she didn’t really expect Hanna to answer her. But she could see that Hanna was thinking about the question and choosing her words, which Grace had never seen her do before. Hanna’s words always sprang neatly from her mouth as complete and orderly thoughts. Whatever Hanna was about to tell her was important, Grace knew, and she tried to keep her face relaxed. I certainly won’t judge you, she wanted to say, but that might have far overshot the mark.
“What was it?” Grace pushed.
Hanna tore off a crust of bread and chewed it at her. “You can look it up,” she said. “There’s no secret.” She cracked her neck from side to side.
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.
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