Greg had given Riley and Alls ten thousand dollars each in cash—guilt money, start-fresh money—upon their release. He had gone to work in his mother’s wine shop—he could never become a lawyer now—and saved for his friends’ release. He had brought Alls care packages—requested books, candy, better socks—every month. Greg, Alls said, would be ashamed for the rest of his life. He was castrated with it.
Alls left town with his magazine clipping. He’d procured the necessary travel documents with the assistance of a friend of a friend he had met in the prison library, “reading National Review,” he added.
“You have a fake passport?” Her own false identity was so flimsy in comparison.
“I couldn’t have left otherwise, and now I can’t go back.”
“Why would you do that, violate your parole? Risk more jail time?”
“There’s nothing there for me, Grace. My parole is contingent on me living with my father. In Garland. Some people can do that, but I can’t.”
“I know,” she said quietly. “I couldn’t.”
He was silent for too long and she hurried to fill the space. “When did you get here?”
“Two days ago,” he said. “Today, I followed you home, rode behind the bus on a bicycle.”
“And what—what were you planning to do, once you found me?” The real question, the one she wanted to ask but could not bear to, scratched in her throat like a struggling cough.
He shrugged. “That depended on who I found.”
? ? ?
He wanted to know everything she did at Zanuso et Filles. She told him she restored antiques. Her boss gave her broken things, and her job was to unbreak them. What kinds of things, he asked. All kinds, she said. Furniture, lamps, china, weird old art projects. She told him she filled gouges, melted enamel, puzzled together shattered porcelain, cleaned dirt from unseen crevices, found duplicate handles, bases, hinges, and pulls when the originals had been lost— “You love it,” he said.
“I do,” she admitted.
He looked around. “They don’t pay you much.”
“It’s not that. I really like the things. I don’t have to talk to the owners, who I’d probably hate. I just make repairs, and take my pleasure in the beauty of the thing itself.” She tried to explain to him how the work—repetitive, probing, apologetic, minute—felt like a service. Not to people, but to the objects.
“A penance,” he said. “You’re doing penance.”
“In a way.”
“For what we stole, not who we stole it from, and not to me, not to Riley.”
“No one made you rob the Wynne House,” she said.
“Where does stealing diamonds fall within this belief system of yours?”
“My crooked boss had me stealing for her, replacing diamonds with fakes.”
“So you’re skimming a little off the top. That’s beautiful.” He stretched, wrenching his back from side to side. He reached down into his pants pocket and then spread her trillions and her little stones on the table. She had not seen him take them. He turned a trillion to catch the light and studied the bright spots that floated on the ceiling.
“Gracie,” he said. “You know you owe me.”
28
So she’d learned about jewelry, he said. Not much, she protested. She didn’t know about jewelry, only the simple mechanics. Jewelry repair was a skill accidentally acquired.
“Like you and the locks,” she said. “You had perfectly fine reasons for picking locks.”
“Perfectly fine,” he said wryly. “Almost like we couldn’t help it, what happened after.”
“Where is he?” she begged.
He smiled. “Show me your office. I’d like to see where you work.”
“I don’t have a key,” she lied.
He shrugged: a minor inconvenience.
It was after two o’clock in the morning. No metro. He told her to call a taxi.
“Tell him to pick us up at your stop and drop us off at—what’s the nearest landmark building to you?” When he saw that she would not help him, he rolled his eyes. “I have the address. I’ve already been there. Just save me the step, okay?”
“Sacré Coeur,” she said.
They walked to Gallieni in the balmy night haze, passing no one on the street but a group of teenage boys who heard Alls’s English from up the block and began making lewd comments in approving tones. They were excited, Grace could tell. Tourists never came to their neighborhood.
“Put it in her ass tonight, man? Put it in her ear?” The boy couldn’t have been eighteen. “I bet she sucks it good.”
“Mange de la merde,” she said, passing them by.
? ? ?
In the cab, Alls chattered loudly about how excited he was to be here with her, and how sorry he was that they had to stay in such a crappy hostel, but if she could just see past that for a sec she’d see that they were finally in the most romantic city in the world, headed toward Sacray Core late at night, and did she bring the camera, and baby please don’t pout, I promise I’ll bring you back in ten years and we’ll do it up in style. Grace was mute with anxiety, the color gone from her face and her lips dry, but when the driver glanced at her in his rearview mirror, her grim pallor only added to Alls’s charade.
The walk from the cathedral to Zanuso was just over a kilometer.
Grace had so many questions for Alls that she was scared to ask because of all the questions he could ask her in return. The small, impossible hope she had felt that he was here because he still loved her was drying up, a persistent drip from a faucet finally wrenched closed.
“I don’t know what you think I can give you,” she said. “I have nothing.”
“And isn’t that why you’re taking me to your work? Because when you have nothing to give, you take from someone else?”
“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.