The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  “Hadrian could have had agents in England,” I said.

  “He wouldn’t dare. I have every inch of our house surveilled.”

  “And Phillipa—”

  “Lottie has her own plans there. I imagine.” He frowned. “Either way, it’s not as though you’re in any danger. I’ll send along a sniper or two.”

  “A sniper or two,” August muttered. “You’re all the same.”

  Beside him, Holmes moved her hands up and down in front of the screen. Nothing happened.

  “Excuse me?” Milo said. “I’m juggling a number of flaming clubs here, one of which is you. I’m more than happy to find you a position in Siberia, August.”

  “Thank you. Really. I’m sure Leander appreciated this kind of meddling, too.”

  “Oh, yes,” Milo said blandly. “He was thrilled.”

  “Hold on,” I said. “If he wasn’t hunting down Hadrian and Phillipa, what exactly was Leander investigating in the first place?”

  With a small sound of triumph, Holmes jerked her wrist to the right. All twelve surveillance screens changed: a series of views of the Sussex home’s front door. Her left hand made a sharp diagonal, and they all began to rapidly rewind.

  Milo pursed his lips. “You’re going too fast.”

  “I’m not,” she said, and flipped both her hands upside down. The screens obediently stopped. “Those sensors are a ludicrous waste of resources, by the way. Whatever happened to a remote control?”

  August coughed. “I designed the math for the sensors. It’s based on a differential of—”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” she snapped. With an imperceptible motion, she set the screens going again. “Look here. The night Leander disappeared. We have him and Jamie having what I’m sure was a very touching moment by the woodpile; here they go, one, two, back to the house. Through the window, we see the family assembled at dinner. Leander in his room.” A flick, and the screen changed. “We’re on a time lapse, inside. Milo only had still cameras within the guest rooms. They photograph every ten minutes.”

  “An oversight,” he said, “that I’ve now rectified.”

  “Obviously. Here: Leander on his phone. Pacing, or at the very least moving about. Now Leander packing his bags. And here, in the front hall. He heads quickly down the stairs, holding his suitcases, and”—she flipped to the camera of the outside of the house, where a man in a black cap took off down the drive—“there he goes. Off screen, to a waiting car.” She leveled a look at her brother. “Where did he go after that?”

  With a sigh, Milo snapped his fingers. The screens went black. “We don’t know where he is now. But we know where he was and what he was doing before. According to my contacts, the German government has hired him to infiltrate a forgery ring and compile enough evidence to prove their work as fake. These forgers have been knocking off the work of an artist from the 1930s, Hans Langenberg. The sheer number of paintings that have been ‘recovered’ has raised some alarm bells, so they’re making this a special case.”

  A painting appeared on the screen. I blinked. It had that atmospheric quality I loved, all cobalts and grays with flashes of eggshell white. In the painting, a girl sat reading in the corner, bored in a red cotton dress. The man next to her turned a letter opener in his hands. Another looked out a darkened window. They were all clustered together in the painting’s lone splash of light; the rest of the room was muted, unexplored.

  “This is his most famous painting—The Last of August, it’s called. He was German, from Munich. Unmarried, no family. Intensely secretive, and thought to be very prolific, though he only ever gave his agent three of his paintings to sell. In the last year, an actual trove of ‘newly discovered work’ popped up on the auction circuit.” The screens were crowded, suddenly, with similar paintings, ones set in attic rooms and garrets, a back garden at night. Always a group of figures somewhere in the background, holding bright objects in their hands, both looking and not looking at each other. “They’ve stumped authenticators. It’s impossible to tell whether these were Langenberg’s work. And if this is revealed to the public, it could look like opportunistic forgers are benefitting off of genocide. Already there are murmurs that the money is lining neo-Nazi pockets. The German government wants this stopped as soon as possible.”

  The paintings were all appealing, forged or not, and I was disappointed when the screens shut off again.

  August must’ve seen my face. “They’re lovely,” he said in that voice I hated, the one where he was pretending to be himself.

  “Yes,” Holmes said, to my surprise. “The Last of August. Funny, it’s beautiful. They all are. And Leander was attempting to track down the supposed forger, examine their studio, find evidence that Langenberg’s renaissance is a fake one?”

  “That was his specific operation, yes.” Milo nodded to Peterson, who began packing up the cart. “For his safety, I wasn’t told more than that. But Lottie, this ring runs the length and breadth of Europe. Berlin is a fair place to start, of course, but I know for a fact that he was exploring connections in other cities. Budapest. Vienna. Prague. Krakow. This is a massive undertaking, and he could quite literally be anywhere. Yes, he stopped sending emails to Jamie’s father, but he could be in deep enough that he doesn’t want to risk exposure. Sending lengthy daily reports to your best friend, last name Watson, isn’t exactly the height of subtlety.”

  “He called me Lottie,” she said to him, a plea in her voice. “In his message. He never calls me Lottie. He didn’t leave me a present when he left.”

  “Darling, everyone calls you Lottie.” He stood. “Don’t be a child. Leander could very well be in over his head. He could, in fact, be in danger. But he has been before, and he will be again. It’s his job. I won’t make it my business. Especially not when I’m in such a precarious position with Hadrian already. Do you think it was easy explaining to him that Leander had just suddenly decided on a sojourn outside the country of his own volition, and not because he was two seconds from stumbling on information that would uncover Hadrian Moriarty’s dirty dealings? No. I have a line to walk here.”

  “This isn’t that missing giraffe fiasco in Dallas, or that piracy case in Wales. This—it feels different. He disappeared from our house.”

  “And Father says he’s fine,” Milo said, as though that was an irrefutable argument. “I know you’re concerned, but I need to focus my extraprofessional efforts in a single direction. Honestly, Lucien is much more of a concern right now. If there’s any chance he was involved in Mother’s poisoning . . . and who knows? That threat could involve Leander as well. You can’t argue that it would hurt for me to double down on Lucien Moriarty and on our family’s security. Our mother is in danger, and while I know that she isn’t Lottie’s favorite person”—Holmes flinched—“I also know she doesn’t want her dead. My men on the ground are examining the security breach. I’m getting weekly reports. I’m nearly done weeding through our staff. My concern is that Lucien is in Thailand, getting through to his men somehow, and I need to find out how.”

  “Which means?” August asked.

  “Which means I’m headed to Thailand. Tonight. I need my own eyes on the situation.” He smiled thinly. “I’ll be back soon. I do have a war to run, you know.”

  I remembered Alistair saying that. I was the architect of several wars. Clearly the impulse to take on the world ran through the Holmes family. But his sister didn’t have his same scope of his ambitions. Hers had a laser focus.

  Milo was giving his sister a rundown of what agents she could turn to if she needed help, though I wasn’t sure if she was listening. For his part, August was preoccupied, his eyes fixed on the cart as Peterson rolled it out the door.

  “We have that lunch with Phillipa, which I’m sure will be totally fine and not at all awful and insane. And then Holmes and I are going to the East Side Gallery tonight,” I told August, though she and I hadn’t discussed it. “That professor, Nathaniel, had a standing appointment with Leander. It�
�ll be interesting to see what happens when he doesn’t show up. Especially because—is he that dealer that Leander approached? Before he left?”

  But August was hardly listening. “He trusts me,” he said. “He just . . . laid all of that information out, about my family, like it was nothing. He trusts me not to tell them what he knows or what he’s doing.”

  I looked at him sharply. “Will you?”

  “No,” he said, barking a laugh. “I never would. I told you I came here to make peace, and I meant it. He’s just never confided in me like that before. I don’t know what changed.”

  Holmes was touching Milo’s shoulder, leaning forward to say something in his ear. He shook his head, and kissed her briefly on the cheek. “I’ll see you soon,” he said, and with a nod to us, he left.

  “Congratulations, August. You’ve been given codeword clearance to the file on your own family.” She tugged at her CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS shirt. “Can we please get on with our day? It’s already seven a.m., and I want to have this wrapped up by midnight.”

  HOLMES ASKED AUGUST AND ME BACK TO THE ROOM TO “strategize” before our lunch with Phillipa, but August begged off, saying he needed to work.

  “On what? You don’t exactly do anything.” Holmes raised her eyebrow at the look I shot her. “What? He talks constantly about how he does nothing. I don’t see how it’s impolite for me to acknowledge that fact.”

  He put his hands firmly on her shoulders, like he was her tutor again. “Charlotte. I don’t have any work to do. I’m—very politely—trying to ditch you so I can get an hour to myself. Unlike the two of you, I start to feel ragged after too much of all this togetherness.”

  “You could have just said so.”

  With a shake of his head and a smile, August took off toward the elevator.

  I wondered where he was going.

  “Don’t tell me you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the polite no,” I said to Holmes as she opened the door to our room.

  “I’m not. I simply expect more from my friends. Honesty is far more efficient than lying.”

  “Milo is just telling him that information to see what he’s going to do with it.”

  “Of course. But I trust him. He chose to erase himself rather than turn me in. I doubt he’s gone and changed his mind now.” She thought about it for a moment. “And anyway, even if he is off trying to tell on us, he’s overdue for a little selfishness.”

  “You’re feeling that cavalier about it?”

  Her smile was all teeth. “I said he could try. I’m fairly sure Milo still has a target on August’s back. Hadrian can try getting information from a smoking pile of ash, but I don’t think he’ll succeed.”

  It was such an awful image that I had to laugh. “You’re chipper this morning.”

  “I am,” she said. “Gird your loins. I need to run through our strategy for our lunch with Phillipa.”

  “THE RAW BAR IS EXCELLENT,” PHILLIPA WAS SAYING. SHE lifted a subtle finger, and like a bit of magic, a white-clad waiter appeared at her elbow. “Could I please have a split of champagne. Whatever your house champagne is, nothing fancy.”

  “Isn’t champagne by definition fancy?” I asked.

  “It’s barely midday,” Holmes said without looking up from her menu.

  “Children.” Phillipa smiled thinly. “Don’t tell me you’ve never rinsed your oyster shell with champagne. What are they teaching you at that wretched school?”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “How to frame children like us for murder.”

  This whole business was absurd. Phillipa had insisted on choosing the restaurant; Milo had been sent an address ten minutes before we left. He’d raised an eyebrow when he saw. “That restaurant opened in 1853,” he’d said, loading us into a car, “and since 1853, it’s been overpriced. Enjoy the Italian marble. I’ll send some discreet security to sit nearby.”

  But we walked in to find that Phillipa Moriarty had booked the entire restaurant. She waited at a table in the back, under a glittering mosaic of a dragon. “Hello, all,” she’d said pleasantly. “I hope this suits you?”

  “Absolutely not. Unacceptable,” Holmes said. “I want my brother’s men to see us through the windows. Up. Let’s go.” And she led us to a table by the window, like we were children she was taking to the principal’s office.

  That set the tone for the next wretched hour.

  “Do you prefer New England oysters?” Phillipa was saying, toying with her tiny fork. “I do, but it’s so hard to ship them across the ocean, and what’s the point, really, when we have such lovely Italian shellfish close at hand?”

  “Where is Leander?” I asked, in the tone someone takes with a small child. “I know you know.”

  “Fine,” Phillipa said, ignoring her, “I’ll choose them myself,” and raised her finger again. She rattled off an order that might as well have been in Italian, for all I understood it.

  “Where,” I said, “is Leander.”

  Grimacing, Phillipa adjusted her scarf. “They really could turn up the heat in this place, couldn’t they? Brrr.”

  “Where is. Leander.”

  This had been our plan, insomuch as we had one: I would hammer away at Phillipa with the question she wouldn’t answer until she laid out her reasons for meeting us. If she’s going through the trouble of arranging a lunch, Holmes said, she’ll want to pretend at civility. That gives us time to maneuver. Hammer away at her. It’ll give me time to learn her tells.

  “Where is Leander,” I said. Then I ordered a soda from the waiter. Holmes was still pretending to study her menu, but I was sure she’d found a way to study Phillipa’s face. The older woman wouldn’t stop fidgeting. It was subtle—she’d smooth a piece of hair, or tug at a sleeve—but her hands were in constant motion.

  Five minutes passed. Ten. Phillipa seemed to be waiting for something. I would’ve worried that our meeting was a diversion, but for what? It wasn’t like Greystone HQ would be made vulnerable by our absence.

  The oysters arrived on a shallow platter, on a bed of ice. Holmes’s eyes narrowed, for a moment, in pleasure. She’d had them for the first time at my father’s house in Connecticut when Abbie, my stepmom, had brought home a sack from the fish market, and Holmes had eaten nearly a whole tray. I knew her well enough to know she liked the ritual of it, the strange, beautiful meat, the tiny tools used to prize it out.

  Almost reverently, Holmes lifted an oyster and studied it. “How are your orchids?” she asked Phillipa in a polite voice.

  And just like that, Phillipa’s mask slid off her like oil.

  “I’ll give you one chance to bargain with us,” Phillipa said, placing her hands on the table. “It’s more than you deserve, and you know it. Tell me where August is, and I’ll negotiate on your behalf with Lucien. Hadrian isn’t interested in treating with you, but I am. Surely that’s why you called me here to this farce of a lunch.”

  “It’s too bad that your gardener quit, and so suddenly,” Holmes said, lifting the shell to her nose to study it. “That was just this morning, wasn’t it? Milo did need someone to tend to his . . . carnations.”

  “There are other orchid gardeners,” Phillipa said. “Here are my terms. I’ll ask Lucien to give you two years. Two years’ amnesty from the death sentence he’s put on you—long enough for you to grow up, come of age, finish school. And then you’ll disappear. Choose a new identity. A new name.”

  “Milo chose that gardener on my recommendation,” Holmes said, turning the shell in her hands. “Oh, these just smell like the ocean, don’t they? Makes me wish I was at home. In Sussex.”

  Phillipa paused. “In Sussex.”

  “Yes. With my very sick mother. And my missing uncle. Tell me,” Holmes said, and reached across the table to pluck the tiny oyster fork from Phillipa’s plate, “have you seen Leander Holmes recently? The last I saw him he was concerned about my . . . very sick mother.”

  “The better question would be where you’re keeping my baby brother,” Ph
illipa snapped. “Don’t toy with me.”

  “Your brother,” Holmes said.

  “My brother.”

  “Which one? The child-murderer hiding out on a beach in Thailand? Or the antiquities thief with the receding hairline?”

  “Did nobody teach you any respect?” Phillipa exploded. “No one! Did nobody tell you that being clever isn’t enough? You need to be willing to work with people. I’m attempting to offer you an out.”

  “I will never work with you.”

  “I’m willing to call in men, right now, to take you to Lucien,” she continued. “He might be done taking it slow. I’m sure he’d be willing to speed things up. Break your hands. Kill you. Let’s see if I can get you out of the country and to Thailand before your bear of a brother can stop them.”

  “The waiter is texting someone,” I told Holmes, not bothering to whisper. “He pulled out his phone the second she started yelling.”

  Holmes leaned forward. “August might be alive. And my uncle might be just taking a short jaunt across the Swiss Alps and forgot to tell us. Listen—there’s no time, you’ve made sure of that. These are my terms. You order your brother Lucien out of hiding. You and Hadrian go to England. You apologize to my parents. And you tell me where my uncle is. And then perhaps I dig August up and see if he still wants anything to do with you.”

  “Apologize to them? For what—having the misfortune of producing you?”

  “For poisoning my mother,” she said quietly. “For trying to kill me. For taking what was a mistake and blowing it up into a horrible international war.”

  I’d been half-turned, watching the front window, and there they were—cars pulling up against the curb, like dark beads on a white string. “We have to go,” I said. “Now.”

  “Those terms are unacceptable.” Phillipa sat back in her chair. “No, Charlotte. Remember that you fired the first shot. August will come to us in time.”

  “Holmes,” I said, keeping my voice even, “they have guns.”

  With a fingernail, Holmes dug the meat out of her oyster and dropped it onto her plate. She poured a draft of champagne into the empty shell. Tossed it back.