The Belgian wedding cake was American in style, tiered and fondant encased with gum-paste lilies of the valley, each no larger than a molar. Grace bent to admire the petals’ ruffled edges. Miniatures always reminded her of Hanna, who worked for a frame shop in Warsaw now. The owner was named Dunaj; Grace assumed that Hanna had been given a family job. She hated to imagine Hanna glassing in impressionism posters and college degrees, wasting her talent. She’d be very good, Grace thought, at decorating wedding cakes. So would she, if she ever had to reform.
But even in her split-second daydream, cake decorator was another costume, a cover.
After cake, Grace found the bride and groom and paid her delighted respects, flirting a bit obnoxiously with the groom. The bride would not call her again.
? ? ?
That night, Grace sprawled gratefully on their downy hotel bed, still in her wedding clothes, and watched Alls undress. He was a careful dresser, and he neatly hung his jacket, his tie, his shirt, and his pants as he took them off. Grace sometimes thought that heaven, whatever that was, would be a small and potent happiness looped forever. Her heaven would be lying down on a soft bed and watching Alls undress.
He undid the five straps that bound his hidden pockets to his thighs. When he dropped the pouches onto the bed, the comforter puffed up around them. He knelt on the bed and slipped his hand through the slit in Grace’s dress. Her own pocket snaked around to her inner thigh. Whenever she pushed something into it, something small and heavy, she would lean forward slightly, to laugh or take a bite, as the small lump traveled down the narrow tunnel to the soft purse fastened between her legs. She and Alls never put anything in plain pockets anymore, because of the inkwell problem: The weight made clothes hang wrong. Alls retrieved her spoils and dropped them across the comforter, puff-puff-puff.
He lay down next to her and she rolled onto her belly to examine their gifts. From the safe, Alls had taken a heavy tangle of jewelry containing at least twenty carats of diamonds and a smattering of other precious stones. In addition, Grace had picked up l’oncle’s Russian diamond tie pin and some his-and-hers gold card cases that Grace happened to know were in the forest green–wrapped box in the wedding gift pile in the guest room next to the powder room.
She opened and shut one of the card cases, enjoying the heavy, satisfying click. “These are revolting. The bride would have hated them anyway,” she said.
He laughed. “You’re a liar.”
“Well, she should hate them.” She bent her head to his and touched her nose to his nose. “I’m surprised there wasn’t any cash. Or gold bricks, not that we could have fit them. They seemed like gold brick people.”
“They’ve got more than one safe,” he said. “Smart.”
“Lucky me, then, that we got the jewelry.”
Alls loved opening safes, picking locks and pockets. He didn’t care whose or how; he craved the breach itself. Grace didn’t, not especially. Working parties and weddings was only the necessary means of stocking her supplies. What thrilled her was the transformation: An audacious cocktail ring became a modest brooch; a bracelet studded with chartreuse peridots was renovated with stolen diamonds that made it 150 times as valuable but far less memorable to the eye. No one could remember a thing about their diamonds except the sparkle. They all sparkled.
She, too, was reborn in stunning ambiguity.
Turning her hands to herself, Grace could raise and lower her eyebrows, thin her lips into a patrician dash or blow them up into pillowy distractions. She could pin her hair across her forehead, a louche and slouchy party girl, or shave her hairline back to be the perpetually disappointed stepdaughter of a foreign diplomat. That was easy. She could starve a few weeks to deepen the hollows beneath her cheekbones and the wells above her collarbones, or fatten on bread and cheese until she puffed back into rosy-sweet baby fat. She could aerate her voice, make it low and soft as fog, or she could be Hanna, crisp angles and impatient expertise. When she scrubbed off her makeup at night, a naked canvas blinked back at her in the mirror.
When you stopped trying to be one perfect person, you could be many. Grace had been a dozen girls in the past three years, every one a sylph.
Alls pulled her on top of him and traced an imaginary necklace along her chest. “Do you wish we were having a liver-toast wedding?” he teased.
“A pigeon-pie wedding?”
“You can walk down the aisle right here,” he said. “Start from the bathroom door and pass the TV—”
“We’ve got rings,” she said. “Several to choose from.”
Alls began to sing the wedding march as if he were the tuba in a brass band and he’d been told the song was a battle cry. Grace imagined toddlers throwing rose petals and broke into laughter, shaking against his chest.
“You know I’d marry you if I could,” she said when she could stop.
“Who needs to get married? We’re more than married.”
They rolled onto their sides, nose-to-nose and knee-to-knee, and she knew it in her very bones: This was the only life for them. Here was her only anchor. She risked for him and he risked for her. She’d sinned for him and he’d sinned for her. For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, and everyone else was a stranger, either a mark or a liar. This was their happiness and they would not let it go.
“Happy birthday, Gracie,” Alls said. “I love you.”
But that was the least of it. He knew the worst of her, and that was better.
? ? ?
On a cloudy evening about two weeks later, Grace sat down to work on the floor in front of the cracked laminate coffee table facing the TV, the best feature of the flat she and Alls had rented in Odense. She’d found a channel that played American movies, and lately she’d been turning them on for background while she worked alone. Alls had been out working on a job for the past six nights, and Grace had been uneasy without him. The life they’d chosen was riddled with chance, and with every triumph, she feared they’d finally tilted the odds against them. She always worried that Alls would be caught or worse until the moment she heard him clear his throat on the stairs. He did, every time, just to let her know that he was alone, intact, and that they’d made it another day.