Alls’s favorite was a painting of a painting: The inner painting was of Venus, rising naked from the sea, in an ornate frame; the outer painting was of a white cloth draped over the frame to conceal her nudity. The white cloth looked ten times as real as the woman behind it. Grace tried not to read anything into his appreciation of it.
She remembered the grandfather clock Riley had drawn with permanent marker on the wall of their living room on Orange Street.
“Do you remember the clock—”
“Yeah,” he said.
There wasn’t anything else to say after that, and after a diminished show of appreciation for the next few pieces rendered along the wall, they drifted toward the door. But then Alls caught sight of the sign for the fourth floor, for the traveling Van Cleef & Arpels exhibition. She saw the glint reappear in his eyes.
“It’ll be totally clogged with old American women,” she said.
“I want to see you see it,” he said, making looking at bracelets sound like something dirty.
Grace had been right: In the first room, it was hard to see anything for the women in bright cardigans bent over the glass cases. In the next room, the jewels were mounted behind glass bubbles set into the wall, like in a public aquarium, with a wide round tank on a pedestal in the center. She and Alls slipped into the ring of people.
Much of the jewelry looked like animals. In one brooch, a peacock’s tail fanned out into a half dozen individual feathers, scalloped and lined like madeleines. The peacock held a citrine teardrop in its open beak; an emerald carved into a plume arced from its golden head. The lace wings of a wooden butterfly brooch were inlaid gold droplets. An onyx bangle became a panther’s carved head on one side and its tail on the other. The tail was inset with oval wreaths of diamonds inset with emeralds carved into tufted pillows. Even the ugly things impressed her; she felt humbled by the detail. She had always found jewelry very boring when it was stripped of sentiment. The shiny rocks, the little claws that held them—the formulas seemed so simple and so limited. But here was a jeweled flower that appeared to be soaked completely red: There were no visible settings, no telltale golden prongs, only an undulating grid of ruby cubes packed shoulder-to-shoulder.
Grace felt the familiar glimmer of envy. These pieces were so far beyond her. She had never made anything from scratch. She could cobble together the picture, but only if it were already broken into jigsaw pieces.
She showed Alls a ring of pavé diamonds surrounding a spray of topaz and pink tourmalines. The design was a bird of paradise, the gem petals’ sharp ends tucked safely into gold bezels.
He leaned over the case. “How do you make something like that?”
“I’m not a jeweler,” she said, shrugging. These pieces had been made by bench jewelers, niche experts in an assembly line. “I don’t know how to dance, just follow.”
“Come on,” he pressed. “Say that pink one came loose, what would you do?”
“It wouldn’t come loose,” she said. “It’s bezel set, see? You’d have to pry the bezel open all the way around to take the stone out. You cast a cup for the stone out of metal, make the rim too high, and then once the stone is in you have to file the edges down so there’s just a shallow lip, and then you push the edges down tight around it. Then you have to burnish them until they’re flush and smooth.” She shook her head. “Now those little diamonds, the pavé, those are just held in with claws. But it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s hard to get just one piece out if all the others are in tight. You have to really sneak down under the stone and pop it.”
She pointed to a fly brooch with a yellow diamond body and bezel-set lapis eyes. “Now, in that one, the most precious stone is the big yellow one, and it’s held in with nothing but a few fingers.”
The women next to them were staring. Alls nudged her to move along.
? ? ?
“What do you want from me?” she asked him once they were back on the street.
“Are you going to ask me that every day?”
“How many days are there?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m collecting on a debt.”
“The safe where I work. Will that be enough?”
“I don’t know what’s in it.”
“And you think I’ll just go in there Monday morning like everything is fine,” she said.
“It will be, for you. You can keep your job.”
“Like she won’t know,” Grace said emptily. She would have to keep going to work now.
“But she won’t know, will she? What’ll she do, call the police? She’s a crook. You said it yourself.”
“And you’ll rob somewhere else? You think they won’t catch you?”
“I don’t think they will identify and apprehend me, no.”
“Where will you go?”
“You think you’re the only girl who works in a jewelry shop?” he said. “I have to think long term.”
“You’ll leave me when you’ve emptied it,” she said. “You’ll leave me alone then.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
She had known it was coming, so why did it sting so badly? Not today, she wanted to tell him. Today, they were pretending.
? ? ?
Because it was Saturday night, Alls didn’t want to pick the lock before three a.m. He would take as many nights as he needed, he said. It could be forty. He wouldn’t rush and risk making a mistake with the safe, skipping a number.
He went to sleep at eleven and set his watch alarm for two. “I suggest you do the same,” he said, lying in her bed.
She hadn’t his gift for rational sleep execution. She curled up on the couch downstairs and half-watched Qui Sera le Meilleur Ce Soir? on TV, pulling at strands of her hair. Tonight Christophe Dechavanne, the diminutive host, presented an array of child performers vying for prize money. A fifteen-year-old boy juggled fruit from a grocery cart. A girl of twelve entwined herself in a length of rope descending from the ceiling to perform proto-sexual acrobatics, her ribs gleaming under her shimmery leotard. Victoria Silvstedt, the towering Swede and retired Playmate who assisted Dechavanne, nodded and clapped squarely and evenly for every performance. The juggler won.
One morning, Hanna would be nursing her Biedermeier and Grace would be leeching diamonds out of a Mickey Mouse brooch or something when Jacqueline discovered the empty safe. Alls would be gone.
Hanna hadn’t believed her.
She’d been too caught up in Alls to think about Hanna until now. “I didn’t believe you,” she had said when she saw Alls. But now she did. When Alls robbed the safe, Hanna would think it was Grace. Why wouldn’t she?
Grace was drinking cheap Beaujolais out of a jelly jar when she heard the bed creak and the sound of his feet hitting the floor. He came downstairs with his shoes on. In the kitchen, he plucked an apple from the colander on the countertop and chomped into it. He didn’t look the least bit nervous.
“I don’t want to come,” she said.
“You don’t have a choice.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes. You know what you want and you either get it or don’t, and you go. If anything, I’m a liability.”
“That’s what you said last time,” he said. “You never want to help anyone, Grace. You want all the help. But you’re coming with me, and you’re going to sit there and watch.”
30
That night, he picked each lock in less than a minute. He was on his belly before the safe in no time at all. Grace sat down at her desk and slumped with her head in her hands. A strange cocktail, dread cut with impatience. She tapped a pencil against her desk and stared dully at Hanna’s table in front of her. The carrying case was where she had left it, in pieces, stained but unassembled.