Grace knew the broken peaches alone would take her all morning, quite possibly longer. Like needlework, the centerpiece was intended to display skill. She and Hanna had to do the work even better than the eighteenth-century artisans who’d created it, if their work was to pass. Grace had begun here with easy things, learning on jobs too simple for Jacqueline to waste Hanna’s or Amaury’s time with: vases with cracked feet, jeweled compacts with bent clasps. She had since worked up to broken filigree, chipped enamel, and even, once, a reliquary with several slack gemstone settings that allowed the stones inside to rattle around like loose teeth. This week she would make pea-sized peaches; next week she’d be painting Bible verses on grains of rice. If there was a next week.
She rolled a ball of wax in her fingers, measured it, and recorded the diameter so that all the future peaches would match. She pinched and rolled and pinched and rerolled ten copies. When she had eleven equal balls of wax, she dug out her veiner, a plastic stem with a tapered end that cake decorators used to carve marzipan, and began to push a cleft down the side of the first peach. When all the peaches had clefts and pin-sized pits for the stems, Grace cut bites from two of them with her knife’s narrowest blade and held her breath as she sculpted the round pits. She wheedled a few winding veins into the pits with the eye end of an upholstery needle.
Grace carved and painted peaches all day, stalling toward the end. She scumbled their shoulders with dry paint while she waited for everyone to go home. Hanna was last to leave. When she had finally gone, Grace pulled her James Mont box from the brown paper grocery bag under the bookcase where she had hidden it that morning. First, she removed all the hardware, and then she began to sand. Mont’s gilding process required sanding each layer of paint or leaf down to nearly nothing before adding another. Grace worked softly down through the layers, pausing to take photographs as each hidden layer of color was revealed.
The studio computer had broken speakers, so Grace brought Jacqueline’s laptop out of her office to listen to NPR while she worked. During the day, they tended toward Chopin, Schubert, and the news on the radio, but alone at night, Grace often craved American voices. She didn’t care what they were talking about. Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s voice, in particular, had a fatty American timbre that eased her expat melancholy. Grace snapped her goggles on and started melting powdered enamel with a torch while Lynne discussed the attributes of farmer’s cheese. Minutes ticked by behind the tiny flame until Grace heard a door slam.
“I decided not to leave it uncovered overnight,” Hanna said. “Even to dry. The dust.”
Grace watched Hanna taking in Grace’s secret project, their boss’s computer.
“Please don’t tattle,” Grace said.
Hanna rolled her eyes and came over to look. “It is pretty,” she murmured, running her fingers over the chip where Mont’s gilt receded in mica-like layers. “What are you going to do with it?”
“Sell it, of course,” Grace said. “I need something going when this place collapses.”
“How much do you think you’ll get?”
“Three, maybe four hundred.”
Hanna giggled. “Is it even worth it?”
“He’s worth more in the U.S.,” Grace said, defensive. “You must make a lot more than I do here, if that’s so paltry to you.”
“How much does she pay you?”
“How much does she pay you?”
“Just under three a month,” Hanna said. “Half what I made in Copenhagen.”
“Three thousand?” Grace knew that Hanna made more but she had not known how much more.
“How much does she pay you? I know you get cash.”
“One thousand,” Grace said.
“My God, how can you live on that?”
“I barely do.” Grace covered her eyes. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose this job.”
“I didn’t know you were so worried about it,” Hanna said.
“Look around,” Grace said. “You and Amaury have got the only work.”
“Valois will open up again under some other name. He always does, and Lemoine too. The work will come back.”
Grace nodded, uncertain.
“I’ll talk to Jacqueline,” Hanna said. “I’ll make sure she knows how valuable you are.”
? ? ?
Grace hardly slept that night, and when she did, she dreamt that she and Mrs. Graham were pulling weeds in her herb garden, and then Grace dug up some teeth and tried to hide them from Mrs. Graham, but she grabbed them out of Grace’s hand and ran inside. Grace couldn’t go back to sleep after that.
In the morning, when Grace got to work, Hanna was already hunched in a corner like a dead spider, her fingers bunched around a thread of beads. Grace sat down across from her and picked up a peach stem.
They worked silently until Hanna stood up and went to the sink. It was half past eight. When she came back with her mug of tea, she gently took the tiny peach from Grace’s hand and held it up. “These were all finished last night,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing now is going to ruin them.”
Grace tried to think of something she could say that would make sense. She was too tired to reason. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said, as though that answered a question.
“Me neither.” Hanna had switched to English. They’d never spoken English together.
They were the only ones in the studio. Hanna put her hands on her hips and looked toward the transom windows. “You know, today I have been away from Copenhagen for nine years. My anniversary.”
“You want to go back,” Grace said, now speaking English too. It felt strange and private, as though she’d suddenly shed her clothes.
“Doesn’t matter if I do or not,” Hanna said.
For a minute they were quiet, which was unusual only because neither woman was working. They were accustomed to long stretches of silence, but not idle ones. Hanna looked at Grace. Grace rearranged some of the tools in her jars.
“What was he in prison for? I don’t think you told me.”
“Robbery. Antiques, actually.” Grace felt the blood rush into her cheeks. “He and some friends looted an estate.”
“An estate?”
She didn’t know how to describe the Wynne House, the likes of which did not exist in Paris. The nearest example she could think of was Versailles. “A big old house where no one lives anymore, and now it’s open to tourists, but they almost never come.”
Hanna raised her eyebrows. “Daring,” she said. Grace couldn’t tell if she was sincere.
“They were caught in five days. They hadn’t sold anything yet. The estate got it all back.” Except for the painting.
Hanna began to flip through her notes, but Grace could tell she wasn’t really looking at them. “When did this happen?”
“About three years ago,” Grace said. “Just after I first came to Europe.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Now they’re out and it’s just got me a little . . . unsettled.” She shrugged hopelessly.
“This is the one you’re afraid of,” Hanna said.
“Yeah,” Grace said, her throat growing hot. She shifted uneasily in her seat. “I never broke up with him. I was afraid to. I went to Prague for a summer college thing, and a week later, I read in the local news that he and his two best friends had been arrested.”
“I didn’t know you’d been in Prague. Why didn’t you ever tell me that?
Grace shook her head. “I don’t know. Never came up.”
Hanna frowned. “What did you do when you found out?”
“Nothing,” Grace said quickly. “I never talked to him again. I was so shocked and horrified, I just—shut down.”
Hanna held a line of tiny beads threaded along a needle. She tipped her hand and Grace watched the beads slip off the needle and down the thread like drops of water.
“I never went home. I was supposed to go home after, but I didn’t. And I never wrote, never called. Not even to his family.”
“You found out about the arrest on the news? You didn’t talk to him?”
“We e-mailed each other. But I had no idea he was planning it.”
“Then it’s good you got away when you did,” Hanna said.
“Yeah,” Grace said. “You never know someone as well as you think you do.”
Hanna seemed to think this over. Grace didn’t know what she wanted to happen. She regretted lying to Hanna—how many times, just in this one conversation? She hadn’t meant to. It never felt like lying while she was doing it so much as trying to tell the truth and failing.
And of anyone she had ever known, Hanna was the one Grace could tell. Hanna would forgive her; she would have to. She had slit a woman’s throat. She knew how quickly a bad decision was born.