The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “I’m not much for it,” I said, as Simon. “I’m already a bit nervous. A pint never does much to help that, for me.”

  “Odd. It’s usually the opposite.” He pulled a mug from an otherwise empty cabinet, filling it with water. “You’re a nice kid.”

  “Am I?” I laughed. I sounded a bit insane.

  “No, you are. But you seem a little sad. Is anything wrong?”

  I shrugged. “Just feeling a little out of my element.”

  “I’m happy to introduce you around.”

  “Thanks,” I said, hating that I wanted to say yes. “I think I need to take my time with that.”

  “Bad night, huh. Okay, I’ll take the hint,” he said. “So how’d you find out about the school here? We’re not very well known outside of the city.”

  I decided to try for a direct approach. “My uncle lives here. I’m staying with him nearby. He couldn’t come out tonight, but the Old Met is his Saturday night place, and he told me to check it out. Maybe you know him? Tall? Dark hair? He wears it slicked back—”

  With a sharp crash, Nathaniel dropped the mug. “Oh—oh, God, I’m sorry, shaky hands, long night. You know. I can’t believe—you’re David’s nephew? He never talked about his family.”

  Hook, line, sinker. So much for FUBAR. As long as David was, in fact, Leander’s alias. “You know him?” I asked, as Nathaniel kicked the ceramic pieces into a pile.

  “You could say that.” He was avoiding my eyes. “And he’s at home tonight? I didn’t think—well.”

  “He is,” I said blithely. “You know him. Cooking up a storm. Arguing with the crossword puzzle answers.”

  “That sounds like him,” he said, which was good, as I had no idea what “David” would do on a Saturday night in. Or who exactly Nathaniel was to him. All I’d had was his name, that he was one of Leander’s contacts. Maybe. Did that mean that he was under suspicion? Had he stolen paintings? Organized a forgery ring? Was he part of a drug cartel? Was he helping Leander out? Was he so surprised to hear about “David” because he knew he was being held somewhere or—awful thought—dead?

  What the hell was I doing, and where was Holmes?

  “I should get home, actually,” I said, forcing a yawn. I needed to talk to my father. I needed to get him to give me the details. “He worries if I’m out too late. I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear that I met you.”

  “Yes. Yes of course.” Nathaniel squinted at me. I felt, suddenly, like an insect on a slide. “Tell him to meet me tomorrow night at East Side Gallery. Our usual corner, at the usual time.”

  That didn’t sound sketchy or anything. “Yeah, okay.”

  “It’s Simon, right?” His stare grew thornier.

  “Right. See you!” Before he could ask for Simon’s last name, I was out the door.

  Holmes met me outside. Her arms were covered in goose bumps, and I gave her my jacket. She took it with a show of reluctance. “Is this our new status quo? You leave me to babysit your girlfriend while you muck up my investigation?”

  “Our investigation. Hey, maybe I do. How come I ended up playing pool with your boyfriend while you threw yourself at some auctioneer?”

  “Honestly, will you quit imagining that I’m some tarted-up Mata Hari? My espionage work is far more subtle than that.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Then how did you approach him?”

  “I appealed to his sympathies.”

  “Holmes.”

  She paused. “I might have threatened to kill his shih tzu—”

  “No. Never mind. Stop.”

  We looked at each other. After a second, she started to laugh. “Watson, do you even know exactly what Leander is doing here in Berlin?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Not exactly.”

  “I don’t either,” she said. “Shouldn’t we get back to Greystone, then, and find out?”

  six

  Have you found him yet?

  My father’s text woke me at five the next morning. Call me when you wake up. I need to know, my screen read. I turned it around in an attempt to assuage my guilt.

  We’d spent this past fall fending for ourselves because Holmes had been too proud to ask her family for help. No more, I told myself, and clambered down from her lofted bed. When we’d gotten in last night, she’d flopped facedown on the cot and gone instantly to sleep, as though her body recognized the rare opportunity to recharge.

  I slept fitfully, and now that I was awake, I was anxious to get going. Ten more minutes, and I’d go wake up Milo. I’d get him to throw some real resources at the Leander situation. Surely, with his help, we’d find Holmes’s uncle within the day, and then we could get down to normal things. Museums. Curry shops. Christmas shopping, maybe, and for a moment, I wondered what I should get Holmes. Pipettes? A book on something bizarre, like anglerfish? August would get her something better than that. Something more inventive.

  No, it was definitely better to focus on the task at hand.

  Milo was waiting for me in the hall, as though he were a robot that had been left to recharge there all night. “Watson,” he said impatiently. “Come along. Breakfast is in my kitchen.”

  As I trailed after him, I realized that his actual living quarters were on the other side of the floor. Holmes and I, it seemed, had been housed in the hallway just outside the rooms that held Milo’s personal security team. He never said it out loud, but I got the sense that his sister was housed outside his penthouse for her protection and not because he thought she’d muck up his nice vintage carpet.

  She was the first person I saw when we entered his rooms. She was framed by the floor-to-ceiling window, playing a song on her violin. I stopped in the doorway to listen. The sound was spectral, almost galactic in its runs and rivulets—it had an aching descant. A song for worrying. Except for her, the rooms were quiet. Milo had bustled back to the kitchen, busying himself with a coffee grinder. This morning he probably razed a small city. Now he was readying a French press.

  His place had a musty sort of lived-in feel, all midcentury like the lobby but shabbier. On the plaid sofa, August sat with a mug between his hands, listening to Holmes’s violin with closed eyes. I was surprised to see more feeling on his face now than I’d seen at all the night before.

  “Jamie,” August said as I dropped down beside him. “You’ve met Peterson, right? He’s arranging a briefing for us on Leander. Holmes is waiting for coffee, but there’s tea.”

  “Thanks.”

  He settled back into the cushions. “I love this one.”

  She’d changed styles. Now she was playing something straightforward and mathematical, which meant it was probably Bach. She was wearing a pair of my socks and her CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS shirt and she was playing her ex-tutor’s favorite song, and I wondered if this was as close as she came to feeling sentimental.

  She paused, a note still fluttering in the air. “Peterson,” she said to the doorway, her voice still thick with sleep. “So good to see you.”

  “Ma’am.” He was wheeling in a kind of AV cart, but this one had twelve screens branching out from some kind of glowing processor.

  Milo came in with a tray. He poured out the coffee carefully, in a way that suggested long practice.

  “I would’ve thought you’d have someone to do this for you,” I told him.

  “I think you discount the importance of routine,” he said. “My father always spoke about the importance of doing things for oneself, the same way every day. Frees the mind to focus on more important pursuits.”

  Jesus, I thought, imagining him going through this whole ceramic-tray coffee ceremony alone, on this couch, as Peterson prepared his morning briefing. I’d surrounded myself with geniuses—the most miserably lonely geniuses I could find.

  “Jamie.” Peterson powered up the monitors. “Feeling better?”

  “I am, thank you.”

  “We’ll be speaking more generally than we normally do,” he said in his a
ffable way. “Mr. Holmes has requested that I bring you up to speed on the basics of art theft and law enforcement.”

  “Wouldn’t the most expedient solution be to call the German government and ask them to tell you what Leander was up to?” Holmes asked, flopping down on the carpet.

  “Mr. Holmes has in fact gathered that intel,” Peterson said blandly. “But he believes you are all in need of an education on the subject.”

  With the air of long practice, Holmes waited until Milo raised his mug to his lips, and then reached up to whack his elbow. Coffee splattered down his front. She smiled her black-cat smile.

  “When we’re finished here, I’ll fetch you a bleach pen and a new shirt,” Peterson said to a sputtering Milo. “Now, as for your basic education on modern investigation into art crime . . .”

  We learned that the art world is largely unregulated. There is no worldwide database that tracks the buying and selling of works of art, so it’s incredibly easy for unethical dealers to sell stolen or forged pieces. Since most large governments only employ two to three full-time art theft investigators, those dealers can operate without any real fear of getting caught.

  All of this is complicated, Peterson told us, by the staggering amount of art that the Nazis stole from artists and collectors—mostly Jews—as they fled Germany during World War II. Of course, not all escaped. When German Jews were put into concentration camps, their homes, too, were looted. Though the German government has made attempts to track down these pieces and return them to the families of their owners, many works of art have vanished altogether. In a field like this, it’s easy for those pieces to reappear, magically—and for no one to ever realize that they’re actually forgeries, despite the best efforts of authenticators.

  “Essentially, it’s lawless,” Peterson told us, “and most law agencies have more pressing matters on their hands. Private investigators like Leander Holmes are often the last hope for those looking to track down forgers and forgery rings, networks of dealers selling art looted from Jewish refugees, or your token drug cartel using paintings as collateral. Since these are very small, exclusive circles, in order to investigate, he’d have to spend months establishing his cover before he could ever hope to gain access to any real information.”

  While he talked, the monitors behind him played an aquarium screensaver. I took notes on a pad that Milo lent me.

  August raised his hand, like we were all in class. “How do my brothers fit into this? Lucien? Hadrian?”

  Peterson hesitated. “Hadrian Moriarty is best known for paying off the leaders of corrupt countries to look the other way while he and his sister make off with their national treasures.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said, turning to Milo, “but how do they fit into this particular situation?”

  Milo made a hand motion, and the twelve screens switched over to a security feed. A number of different security feeds, and none of them black-and-white, as they were in the movies, but full, deep color. A beachfront cabana, complete with billowing curtains that framed a view of the ocean. A bedroom with a four-poster bed. Other scenes, other rooms—and the four monitors on the bottom, which all showed a different approach to the Holmeses’ Sussex house. With a start, I recognized the woodpile where I’d last seen Leander.

  Milo ticked them off on his fingers. “Your brother Lucien’s latest hideout over here. And here, your brother Hadrian’s pied-à-terre in Kreuzberg—really, August, do get yourself born into a better family next time—and his front entryway, and the view of his back windows, and one of his toilet, though for propriety’s sake I’ve chosen not to show you that one. There’s a rather large window in there, though, so I deemed it necessary.” He flicked his wrist again, and the screens changed. “I have every angle of every room in our family home, including a camera on the septic tank, and two specialists who do nothing but watch these screens and synthesize their deductions.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” August said. Beside him, Holmes leaned forward to see the screens better, drumming her hands against her knees.

  “If Lucien sneezes, I know about it. If he orders a different cocktail than what he usually has delivered to his sad little beachfront hideaway, it’ll be one of my men bringing it to him. If he even thinks about getting into a car, it’ll be missing three gaskets and the back right tire, and if anyone remotely connected with him takes a flight to Britain, it makes an emergency stop in Berlin, during which they are forcibly removed from the plane.” Milo’s voice was electric with hate. I shrank a little as he spoke. “I’ve stripped him of his resources and his connections. The last phone call he made was three weeks ago, to his sister Phillipa, and I had it terminated after one point three seconds.

  “So to answer your question, if Lucien has something to do with Leander’s disappearance, he is better than me at my own game, and I am the best. I told my sister she shouldn’t worry, and so she won’t. We’ll sort this through.”

  Holmes looked up at her brother questioningly. He stared back down at her, his face still tight with anger, until she lifted the enameled coffee pot to refill his mug. Marginally, he relaxed.

  She turned to look back at the screens. When Milo spoke, he was his usual dour self again. “As for Hadrian Moriarty, he’s employing me.”

  I coughed. August lowered his face into his hands.

  “Explain,” Holmes said. She didn’t sound surprised.

  “Why, Lottie. I thought you’d be able to figure it out.”

  She took a breath. Thought about it. Then began ticking it off on her fingers. “The sort of services you’d provide to a man like that would be in the personal protection business. I can’t imagine that he’d employ your mercenaries for anything else, unless it was the transportation of legally dubious artwork from one country to another, and as most self-respecting governments loathe you and your ‘independent contractors’ as it is, I doubt you’d get your hands that dirty for the sake of a Moriarty. Sorry, August.”

  From behind his hands, he groaned.

  “So you’re providing agents to serve as his . . . bodyguards. It would have to be bodyguards. But how did it come to pass? Hadrian would never approach you, not unless he’d gleaned that August was working for Greystone, and I imagine that if that were the case, we’d have seen some fallout already. Unless Leander’s disappearance is the fallout—but no, he’d have gone for me directly. From what I’ve heard of Hadrian Moriarty and his six-thousand-dollar watch, he’s not particularly subtle. No. You approached him.”

  Milo sipped his coffee.

  “But why on earth would he agree? Even if he doesn’t personally want me flayed and hanging on his wall, his older brother does, and I can’t imagine Hadrian wanting to rock the boat without a good reason. What could you have offered him? You don’t appeal to a Moriarty’s better angels. Sorry, August”—August groaned again—“but you don’t get traction that way, not really, and so you had to make him afraid.” She read some invisible cue in her brother’s face. “No. You didn’t. You appealed to something he was already afraid of.”

  “Leander,” I said, putting the pieces together. “He’s afraid that Leander will expose his forgery ring.”

  “But he wasn’t investigating Hadrian directly—oh. Leander was deep undercover. He might have kicked up some stray information that led back to Hadrian. And if no one in the government is paying any attention to art swindlers—”

  “And then a Holmes comes along with a boatload of information, and takes it to the press—”

  “—even if the government never goes after him, his international reputation is ruined,” Holmes finished neatly. “No more lining his piggy bank with cash from plundered treasure.”

  August looked up. His eyes were miserable. “So you’re feeding my brother information about Leander’s investigation, you do his private security. And your men report back to you about what Hadrian is doing.”

  “Peterson,” Milo called. “Please get these three some gold stars.”


  Maybe I was getting better at this. Maybe I was just the only one who was properly afraid. “Are you so morally bankrupt that you’re willing to gamble with your uncle’s life?” I demanded.

  “The information runs both ways,” Milo said. “I told Leander how to keep safely out of Hadrian’s way. I told Leander how to avoid Hadrian. It was the only way to keep abreast of the situation. It’s a lesson of my father’s—it’s always worth sacrificing safety for omnipotence.”

  “It isn’t your safety you were sacrificing,” I told him, and he set his jaw.

  “So it can’t be Hadrian who has Leander,” August was saying, with palpable relief. “Or Phillipa, the two of them are inseparable. You’re saying they’re not involved?”

  “Insofar as I can tell,” Milo said, “no.”

  Holmes looked down at her hands. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t upset. For a brief moment, she looked . . . crestfallen. As though she’d known, absolutely known the solution to Leander’s disappearance, and had that surety taken away. I’d wondered why she hadn’t been more outwardly worried about her uncle. Here was my answer. She thought that finding him would be as easy as tracking down August’s brother.

  She wasn’t used to being wrong.

  Scowling, she leaned forward to study Milo’s security feeds again, as if the answer were there. Maybe it was.

  I turned back to Milo. “Hadrian knows the details of Leander’s investigation. And you don’t think he’s responsible for his disappearance.”

  Milo sniffed. “Leander wasn’t anywhere near Hadrian’s operation, not until very recently, when he ended up working a source—a dealer who also represented Moriarty interests. Hadrian heard about it, so I heard about it. And as soon as I did, I phoned my uncle up and told him to leave the country. To go stay with my father, who had connections that could shed new light on the investigation from a distance. It was enough time for the dealer to go to ground before Leander returned. Everyone happy. Everyone unharmed.”