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
Grace 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.