“He really loves his souls,” I said.
“Yeah.” Her smile faded. “He got kind of angry at me for changing out some of Picasso’s elements here. Said I was straying too far from the assignment. During critique, he said the nicest things about the paintings that looked like exact copies. It seemed kind of stupid, honestly. I was still working with Picasso’s style.”
I was pretty sure I knew the answer to my next question. “Does he just have a thing for Picasso?”
“No,” she said. “He works in conjunction with the art history teacher. Hands out a list of painters that she teaches in her first-month overview. It’s like this whole project—we study the painter we choose, their life, their history, really get a feel for their work. It counts for both classes.”
“Who else do people imitate?” She gave me a funny look—I was asking too many questions. I stuck my hands in my pockets and looked down. “I’m just . . . it’d be good to have a jump on this assignment if I ended up coming here.”
Marie-Helene laughed. “I’ll do you one better,” she said. “Go get me another coffee from the café, and we can try a little breaking and entering.” At my shocked look, she amended, “Into my friends’ studios. What did you think I meant?”
At that moment, she sounded so much like Holmes that my stomach turned. Was that why I wanted to immediately run off and do what she told me to? Stupid, so stupid, I thought, what is it with these girls? Why do I always end up trailing after them? But this one studied under Nathaniel, and she had a group of friends who were forging paintings, whether or not they knew that was what they were doing, and no, I didn’t want to be with her, but she had this immaculate spray of freckles across her nose, and so of course I told her yes, what kind of latte did she want this time?
“YOU KNOW, THIS MIGHT BE THE BEST NOT-DATE I’VE EVER had,” Marie-Helene said, pushing open the door to her friend Naomi’s studio. It wasn’t real breaking and entering, of course; there wasn’t even any lockpicking involved. People had their personal supplies stored in strongboxes under their tables, but the spaces appeared to be communally used.
“Naomi did her project on Joan Miró. A lot of people did. Professor Ziegler was pretty funny about it, actually,” she said, and now I had Nathaniel’s last name. “He had an unofficial prize for the best one and hooked them up with some kiosk outside the Centre Pompidou—the museum—that sells imitation paintings to tourists. Supposedly you make pretty good money doing it.”
Naomi had imitated Joan Miró. Rolf, in the studio next door, had chosen Da Vinci. The next was Twombly, all painted squiggles and sparks, and then a black-and-white Ernst collage, where a girl in an old-fashioned gown held an iPhone to her ear (“Nathaniel really hated that one,” she said), and then an American Gothic, a really terrible imitation of Starry Night (actually, I thought, maybe Simon could go to this school), and finally, as I caught Marie-Helene not-so-subtly checking the time, we wound up in her friend Hanna’s studio. The girl with the paint-splattered backpack, the one who warned me about the men at the pool party.
“She’s from Munich,” Marie-Helene explained. “She really loves all the twentieth-century German painters. A lot of us don’t like taking art history—we’d rather make our own—but Hanna really works hard at it. She’s a great artist, and she’s really smart.”
Langenberg. I kept my face neutral. “As smart as you?” I asked.
“You tell me,” Marie-Helene said with a shrug, and began to pull the paintings back one at a time for me to see.
They were all surrealist landscapes. Every last one of them done in clashing neon colors, horrible to look at. No hushed scenes in sitting rooms. No dark colors. No people, even. And maybe my taste in art was just underdeveloped, or maybe I was just frustrated to again have hit a brick wall. But when we got to the last of them, I knew I was done.
It was a relief.
“Maybe I just drank too much last night,” I told her, taking off my hat to rub at my temples. “I think I just need a nap. Sorry to be so lame.”
“Not lame,” she said, and took the hat from me to prop on her own head. She grinned. “I actually had a lot of fun today.”
I had, too. Almost a normal kind of fun, when I used to go hang out at the pub on long afternoons, having the kinds of conversations where I didn’t feel like I needed an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a scorekeeper. Where my friends liked me and I liked them, and that was the whole of it. When I could go home and bicker with my sister and read a book in bed and not worry that everything I cared about was retreating slowly out of my grip.
The kind of fun where nobody’s shooting at you, I thought, and when I took my hat back from Marie-Helene, I kissed her on the cheek. Before I could pull away, she snaked a finger through my belt loop. “I could see you when I come back,” she said quietly. “I think I might like that.”
“I’ll be in London,” I told her. “But if you ever come out that way—” Don’t call me, I wanted to say, because you’re lovely and deserve better than an imaginary posh asshole who doesn’t like you as much as he should.
“If I do.” She kissed me on the corner of my mouth, a slow kiss, an unexpected one. It wasn’t chaste, and it wasn’t romantic—it was a suggestion, an ellipsis. I closed my eyes against it.
“See you later, Simon,” she said, and I dragged my heels back to Greystone, not sure what I’d say to Holmes when I got there.
I WAS SO LOST IN MY HEAD THAT I DIDN’T NOTICE THE CAR trailing along behind me. At first I thought I was imagining it. But the sky was bleak and whispery with snow, the roads nearly empty, and the black car crept down the street like a moving tumor.
I slowed at a crosswalk. The car slowed, too. When I ducked through an alley and out onto a different road, the car was there moments later. Finally, I stopped at a corner, my hat in my hands, and I waited.
It pulled up to the curb. The back window rolled down.
“Mr. Watson,” the voice said. “Do you need a ride?”
The click of a gun cocking. It wasn’t a suggestion. I got in.
seven
THE BLACK CAR DIDN’T TAKE ME TO A CELL, OR A WAREHOUSE, or a secluded field with a pre-dug grave. I wouldn’t have known to be afraid if it had, because I couldn’t see where we were going. When I climbed into the car, I was immediately grabbed and blindfolded, my hands tied with what felt like a zip tie. All I’d seen before I was bound was a man in a suit with a black bag over his head.
What the hell was going on?
“James,” the voice said, inflectionless. The slip of the bag-mask being pulled off. “Before we begin, I’d like you to know. This is not my voice. I’ve employed this man to speak to you on my behalf. He’s being fed his lines.”
I strained my ears, and I could hear the light tap of fingers on a screen across from me. There must be a seat facing mine. Someone else sitting there, writing his words on a tablet. I kicked my foot out and connected with someone’s knee.
A gasp of pain. A shuffle. The safety being switched off on a gun. Maybe he wasn’t typing on a tablet, after all. But I wasn’t given time to consider it—I was thrown against the door, and after a scuffle, they bound my legs.
“I have no intention of hurting you, idiot child,” the voice said. “Stop flailing about.”
There was a pause while everyone settled back down. The car took a slow turn to the right. If I were Holmes, I would’ve tracked our route by the number of turns we’d made and deduced where we were going. Three? Four? I wished I had a map of the city committed to memory, the way she did.
But I didn’t. I had to get over it. I focused instead on the car’s interior—how many people were in here with me? Two, I knew for certain. When the voice spoke again, I listened for the dead places in the car, where his voice hit resistance. Three, maybe?
“This is not your fight. This was never your fight. You’re putting Charlotte Holmes in danger.”
The voice was English. That was a useless deduction, because I was surroun
ded by bloody English people, and it wasn’t his real voice, anyway.
“Actually,” I said, hoping to keep them talking, “I’m pretty sure you’re the one putting her in danger, Hadrian.”
I was pretty sure it wasn’t Hadrian in the car with me, but it was worth a shot. Who else would have a fleet of black cars and bother kidnapping me to make their point?
(That said, I’d noticed that the Holmeses had at least one of these black cars, and a driver who took them around town. So did Milo. I wondered if a black car appeared in your garage the morning after you came into some money, like some kid’s movie. Frog chauffeurs instead of coachmen. A bloodthirsty art dealer instead of your fairy godmother.)
The voice paused. “According to my instructions, I’m supposed to laugh at you now.”
“Go ahead?”
The voice managed a kind of embarrassed chuckle.
More soft tapping sounds, but the voice spoke again before they finished.
“I won’t give you my identity. It’s not important. Know that I am an interested party, and I want you to begin booking your travel back home. You have no particular skills. You know this. You’re a fairly standard teenage boy. You have no use but to be used.”
“I know it’s fun to be cryptic, but that last thing made zero sense.” I wanted the voice to keep talking, because as I wiggled my hands, I realized the zip tie wasn’t as tight as it needed to be.
“Think of yourself as a package. It’s Christmas, so picture a nicely wrapped present. Charlotte carries it around. It’s heavy in her arms, but it’s pleasing to look at it. Maybe the package talks. It’s witty. It’s flattering. It makes her feel special, and she likes that feeling. And one day Charlotte leaves it somewhere in public, and poof, it is taken from her. Charlotte is sad. Then furious. Charlotte will do anything to get her present back. Horrible things. Things that will end in her death, or imprisonment. We don’t want Charlotte to do these things.”
“So in this weird children’s story you’re telling me, I’m a talking package.” I’d put my wrists between my knees, and slowly, slowly, I worked one curled hand out of its binding. “That’s a pretty stupid extended metaphor. Did you fail English class? You were more of a math person, weren’t you?”
A pause. “Go home, James. You know that you can’t offer her anything.”
My hand was almost free. With my elbow, I felt as unobtrusively as I could for the location of the door handle. “I do make a pretty mean pasta carbonara.”
The car slowed. Were we coming to a stoplight?
“Go home,” the voice said sadly, “or we’ll call your father.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Please,” I said, “I haven’t talked to him in a few hours, he’ll want an update,” and when I jerked my hand out of the tie, I pulled the door open and tumbled out of the car.
Wheels skidding on concrete. My fingers yanking off my blindfold. Honking, someone shouting, and a mess of cars pulling around me, but I’d learned at least one thing in the last few months. Before I crawled the two feet to the curb, I committed the black car’s plate number to memory.
I TOLD THE CRYING BYSTANDER THAT I HADN’T BEEN KIDNAPPED. I told the other one that she didn’t need to call the cops. She did anyway, so I told the police my friends and I were doing a German fire drill. No, I didn’t know the name of the driver, or the person the car was registered to. I’d just met them today. No, I didn’t want to make a statement. Yes, I’d pick my friends better in the future. No, I was fine walking down the block to Greystone, because that’s where we were, within sight of Milo’s headquarters, and I wanted to be spared the indignity of being driven the final five feet.
I limped the rest of the way there. I’d sort of wrenched my shoulder in my roll out of the car. Scratched up my hands. They were still battered from a run-in I’d had this fall with a two-way mirror, and it didn’t take much for them to start bleeding again. The guards at the Greystone front door took pity on me. This time, I was only subjected to a retinal scan.
I needed to find Holmes, though I wasn’t looking forward to it. Breaking news: I got into a strange car where someone told me I was useless. How was your afternoon?
No one in our shared room. No one in Milo’s penthouse, at least the areas I was allowed into—I definitely wasn’t going to ask the guard in the hall to let me search his bedroom. I asked her if she’d seen Holmes or August, and she shrugged, like it was beneath her to answer.
“Well, is there a lab here? One that’s usually off-limits to Holmes?”
“If you’re referring to Charlotte, then yes. Ninety-four percent of this building is ‘off-limits’ to Mr. Holmes’s sister.”
“I’ve had a very bad day,” I told her, “and I’m one hundred percent sure you know where she is. Will you just take me there?”
Down three floors and around the corner, and the weary guard led me to a keypad-locked door. She punched in the code and nosed the door open with her rifle. “Our audio-visual laboratory.”
The lab was the kind of bright-white clean I associated with the dentist. Computer terminals were set up in a cluster in the center of the room, and big buglike speakers and screens mounted on the walls. Holmes sat below a cluster of those screens. She’d taken one apart with a screwdriver—at least I assumed that’s what she’d done, because she had a toolbox beside her—and now she was plucking at a series of black wires with a pair of pliers. She was whistling something tuneless and gleeful, so I assumed it was going well.
August Moriarty had scooted up a swivel chair behind her. He leaned over her shoulder, saying something into her ear.
“I have a Watson for you, Miss Holmes,” the guard announced.
Neither of them moved.
I cleared my throat. “A bleeding Watson, who’s been kidnapped.”
August stood up. Holmes wrenched her head around.
“Thanks,” I said. “If I want to get your attention next time, should I be an actual bomb?”
For the record, I was in a really bad mood.
“Your hands,” Holmes said, and she crossed the room to me. “What happened to your hands this time?”
I held them up, letting the blood drip on the floor. “Black car, plate 653 764. Lavender air freshener. Two people in the car, maybe three. I’m not sure. I was blindfolded, I didn’t get the particulars, but I think they drove around in a circle. It took about five minutes—”
“Watson, I don’t need a report just now—”
“They told me I was useless. That I should leave you here and go home.”
She looked at me steadily. She didn’t say a word.
“And when I rolled out of the car, I think I dislocated my shoulder. August, could you? I need it put back into place.”
He went pale. “Isn’t there a doctor on the Greystone staff?”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Holmes said, “what on earth did they teach you at Oxford,” and after mapping my shoulder with her palms, she made me lie on the floor. Then she stuck one foot on my stomach and jerked my arm back into place.
I shouted. Louder than I needed to, maybe. I took a breath. Straightened. I tried my shoulder. The pain wasn’t any worse—it had lessened slightly.
“It would probably be a bad idea for me to ask you for painkillers,” I said to her as she helped me to my feet.
“Probably,” she said. “Though I might have something in my shoe, if you want me to look.”
I looked sharply at her, which set off another spasm of pain, and she put up her hands. “Watson, please, I’m joking. The plate number you gave me is one of Milo’s cars. The cars in his personal fleet all start with 653. I’m sure he’s just worried about your safety. This isn’t exactly your mission.”
I wasn’t looking for reassurance from her, but I also wasn’t looking for her to join in to that particular chorus. “Right, then,” I said. “Your brother wouldn’t, I don’t know, call me and ask me to leave?”
“I’m sure he appreciated the theatrics o
f it all. Lavender air freshener? That sounds wretched enough to be him.” She took one of my arms by the wrist and peered at my palm. “These are fairly minor abrasions. I’ll call down for some bandages, and we can get back to it.”
“Back to what, exactly? How have you spent your afternoon?”
“Picking apart that screen.”
“I didn’t realize you’d started up an AV club in my absence.”
She frowned at me. “That was the security feed we were running. It stopped working. I’m fixing it.”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”
“Stop acting like one, then. How was Marie-Helene?”
“How do you think she was?”
“Stupid enough to find your little act charming.”
“She isn’t stupid.”
“Really,” she said. “I consider myself to be fairly intelligent, and right now I find both you and Simon obnoxious. How do you square that?”
I kept my voice cold. “I made out with her until she showed me a floor’s worth of forged paintings. They were done as assignments for a Sieben class taught by Nathaniel Ziegler. I didn’t see any of Langenberg’s work, but I didn’t get through the whole building. It doesn’t matter. We have enough to know this is the connection Leander was exploring. I know this isn’t exactly my mission or anything, but if I were to guess, I’d say that Leander was just trying to track down the intermediaries. Figure out how the money was changing hands. You always follow the money, right? It’s like hot potato. Whoever’s left with the cash in the end is the guiltiest one.”
I’m not stupid. I’ve never been stupid. I got good grades. I paid attention when someone was teaching me something, and I made it a point to learn it fast. Fine, I didn’t have Holmes’s training or her aptitude, but just because I wasn’t a genius didn’t mean that I wasn’t smart.
The Last of August Page 13