The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  To my surprise, Holmes didn’t have her wig cap on. She didn’t have on a costume, either. She’d changed into a new pair of black jeans, a black button-down shirt done up to the collar. With her usual intensity, she was rooting through a makeup case.

  “How are you doing yourself up?” August asked her, adjusting his fake nose. “Tourist? Nanny? Sorority girl?”

  “Myself,” she said, looking in her hand mirror, “in the other universe where I’m an art student desperate for lodgings.” With a small brush, she began doing her eyes up in silvers and blacks.

  “Won’t that be a hazard?” August asked. “You could always go redhead—”

  “If you want to help, you can fetch me a curling iron,” she told him. “And after that, you can decide how badly you want Hadrian to continue thinking you’re dead.”

  “That sounded like a threat,” he said mildly.

  She took the iron from him and plugged it into the wall. “Either you’re in or you’re out. For the record, I’m fine with you staying here. I’m sure Milo has some data entry you can do.”

  He stared at her for a moment, his face drawn. “I’ll go,” he said, with a barely concealed edge. “I suppose I already have my nose on.”

  EAST SIDE GALLERY WASN’T ONE. OR IT WAS, BUT ITS NAME made it sound like it was tucked away in some snooty building, where people drank champagne and bought paintings for millions. I don’t know why I’d expected that here, a city where art was everywhere, transforming everything, a public act of reclamation.

  Because East Side Gallery was the Berlin Wall. The wall that had divided the east part of the city from the west, a result of World War II and later, the Cold War, a symbol of a divided, unequal Berlin. One run by outside forces, separated by a wall that was barbed and booby-trapped and separating the poor, Communist-controlled eastern side from the richer, capitalist west. After demolition finally began on the wall in 1990, artists began painting murals on a mile-long section. Long, uncanny, evocative murals, of men wandering against a dark screen like ghosts, of doves and prisons and melting figures in the desert.

  We approached it on foot, and I lagged a few steps behind Holmes and August, reading a short history of it all on my phone. The last few weeks felt like a history lesson I’d only caught the tail of, one on Berlin but on London, too, on love and inheritance and responsibility. It was like I was trying to read the cheater notes on the last century right before a midterm.

  All of this made me feel really young, something I wasn’t used to, not when I was next to Holmes. She operated with such absolute confidence, even when the playing field was thick with adults. But now, walking this strange, lovely city after dark, the hint of snow on the wind made me pull my jacket a little tighter around myself, wishing I was home with Shelby and my mother, watching TV under a blanket on the couch.

  We weren’t the only ones out after dark. Tourists clustered in front of a mural made of handprints, fitting their own palms against the wall. A street artist was selling painted tiles on the corner, playing quiet Europop from a battery-operated stereo. A pair of girls took turns taking pictures in front of a mural that depicted long twirling locks of hair. The blond girl laughed, tipping her head forward so that her curls spilled over her face, and as the other girl snapped photos, she said, Yes, you are my queen. Holmes brushed past them, August at her heels, and the brunette girl said, Forget it, I want her hair, looking after the two of them with longing.

  They made a striking pair, Charlotte Holmes and August Moriarty. He looked, as usual, effortlessly cool—this rankled, especially when I knew my own came with a good bit of trying. He’d dyed his fauxhawk a temporary dark brown, and his false nose turned up at the end, but he was wearing his typical ripped jeans and bomber jacket. And Holmes strode beside him, looking now like a weapon made real. Her eyes were rimmed in a thick black that made her irises seem translucent. Her hair was a tumble of slept-in curls. She had a dark portfolio bag under her arm, and she walked like she had somewhere to be.

  We were still ten minutes from eight o’clock, the earliest she thought he’d show. But the East Side Gallery was a mile long, and though Holmes was checking her phone to see if Milo’s grunts had caught sight of Nathaniel on their security feeds, we hadn’t spotted him yet. I was beginning to feel like we were too out in the open. There weren’t any cafés around for us to hole up in if we were spotted. The road beside us was busy and broad, and there was no cover for us to duck behind. So we kept walking.

  Until, half a block ahead of us, I saw Nathaniel blowing on his hands on a street corner.

  My phone buzzed. Holmes had noticed him at the same time I did. Approach him, her text read, and tell him your uncle’s sick.

  This hadn’t been the plan. At all. Uh I barely escaped the last time, I typed back.

  He’s early. He’s going to see us. Better we make it intentional—at least you’re here at the right time. See if he’ll take you back to his flat. We’ll follow.

  And what would he do to me there? If he was working with Hadrian Moriarty, if, despite Milo’s intelligence, he knew that Leander was dead, the only thing he could be doing here tonight was baiting a trap he’d set for us. We’d hardly made it out of our lunch with Phillipa unscathed.

  I had to ask myself again—what were we even doing here?

  Ahead, August was saying something in Holmes’s ear. She shook her head violently, but he ignored her. Half-turned to me, and nodded.

  Then he took off at a jog to meet Nathaniel Ziegler.

  Holmes stopped short. I was still a few steps behind. And August had a hand on the art teacher’s back, steering him away from us, saying something to him I couldn’t quite hear.

  “He’s asking Nathaniel to take him to Hadrian,” she said, turning to me. She looked ready to spit nails. “He’s buying us time.”

  “For us to do what?”

  “To go raid Nathaniel’s horrible house for evidence,” she said. “Come on.”

  IT STARTED TO SNOW.

  The trip across town took an agonizing twenty minutes in traffic. Holmes kept scrubbing fog from the window and glaring out into the road, like she could will the other cars to disappear. We didn’t know how much time we’d have. We didn’t even know if Nathaniel still lived there, in that house above the cavernous pool, the place he’d been arrested for possession.

  “Did it say what kind of drugs he’d had on him?” I asked her, at length.

  “Pot, I think. I don’t know how actively prosecuted it is. Someone might have had to rat him out to get the police’s attention. I’m sure his being a teacher didn’t help.” The car slowed to a halt. “Finally,” she said, and shoved a bill at the driver, pushing me out the door with her other hand.

  I pulled on my gloves. The façade of the house loomed above us, a warning. “Is there a reason we aren’t taking a Greystone car?”

  “My brother’s men. My brother’s cars. My brother having bugged my left shoe this morning, and the right one yesterday. My brother who thinks that he and my father are infallible and that the rest of us are imbeciles.” She barked a laugh. Her breath came out in a cloud. “Do you know that, in the footage he has, ‘Leander’ has to look down to find the doorknob to our front door? The house he grew up in. He doesn’t reach for it automatically—he looks for it. It’s not him, Jamie. Who knows how he was really dragged out of there. They could have dressed someone up like him for the cameras. Milo says I’m imagining things. He thinks he can’t make mistakes. And I play into it. I haven’t done anything for myself since I’ve been here, I’ve just relied on him, and I—”

  She pivoted on her foot and made for the front door, but I caught her elbow and steered her back.

  “Take a breath. Don’t look at me like that—breathe. You can’t go in there like this. Breathe.”

  She glared at me. “You are not my meditation tape.”

  “And you’re mad about something that isn’t Milo.”

  We stared at each other, inches apart. Her pu
pils were blown wide. I wondered, for an awful moment, if she’d taken something or if she was just upset, and I hated myself for not knowing how to read the distinction.

  “August is going to throw himself back in with them,” she said, a rush of words. She was standing too close to me. I could feel the heat of her breath. “He’s going to get himself taken down, too. I can’t—they’re monsters, Jamie, and I swear to God I’m going to prove it.” She grabbed my hand. “There’s no time, we have to go in. Look. You’re my stepbrother. I’m starting at Sieben after Christmas. We’re looking for a place to stay until then, because my mom just threw us out—”

  “Stop,” I said, and brushed the snow out of my hair. For the barest second, she leaned into my hand. “I have a better idea.”

  The girl who answered the door had a pierced nose and a scowl. She said something to me in German.

  “English?” I asked her, and she nodded curtly. “Sorry. My friend left her camera at a party here last night. She said this guy was asking her about it—brown hair, fortyish, really loud. She thinks he teaches at the art school. Do you know who he is?”

  “You think Professor Ziegler could have stolen her camera?” the girl scoffed. “No.” She started to swing the door shut.

  I stuck my foot between it and the doorframe. “Sorry,” I said again. “I’m not saying he stole it, I’m just wondering if he found it. She thinks she left it by the pool.”

  Holmes nodded beside her. Her body language mirrored the girl’s—hand on cocked hip, a snarl. Strangely, it seemed like it made the girl more at ease.

  “I already said his name was Professor Ziegler,” she said. “His email is on the school website. I have to go.”

  I smiled at her, but I didn’t move my foot. “Did he ever live here?”

  “Who are you?” she asked, crossing her arms. “Why do you care?”

  “My camera,” Holmes said, in a low, accented voice, “cost me three months serving drinks to assholes.”

  The girl sighed. “Ziegler used to live here. The only man who ever lived here until the school found out and made him move. They didn’t like that he lived with all college girls.”

  “Not his students?” Holmes asked her, disgusted.

  “College girls. Not Sieben girls. But Ziegler’s friend owned the building, and so he got cheap rent. Whatever. Not important. Ziegler doesn’t have your camera. He’s not a thief, just a creep.” After a moment’s pause, the girl shifted her weight and said, “I’ll look for it. Your camera. Come back tomorrow, ask again.”

  “Who’s his friend?” I asked. “Ziegler’s friend?”

  “For the love of God,” the girl said. “His name was Moriarty,” and she slammed the door against my foot, once, twice, three times, until I pulled it away and limped triumphantly down the steps.

  “That was rather straightforward,” Holmes said.

  I could feel my pulse in my crushed big toe. “Well, I guess I’m not very subtle.”

  “It’s been thirty minutes.” Holmes checked her phone. “Feel like doing one more?”

  Three long blocks and an alley, then four flights of stairs. Holmes moved like a dog on the scent. We were surprisingly close to our next destination.

  It only took us a few minutes to ransack Nathaniel’s loft, the place we’d been to last night, where the Draw ’n’ Drink had been. Holmes had me pull up the public records on the building while she rifled through the sketches that the Sieben students had left behind.

  “This place is owned by the school,” I said, peering at my phone in the dark. “On the school webpage, it looks like it’s listed under faculty housing. I think. The translate function is saying it’s ‘house for grown bears.’”

  She took the flashlight out of her teeth. “Clearly, he doesn’t live here full time. Check the bedroom.”

  “What bedroom?” I craned my neck to look up into the loft. “The only thing up there is an easel.”

  “Exactly,” she said, taking the sheaf of sketches and slipping it into her portfolio bag. “There has to be a third residence. Some place where he actually lives. Hold on, I’m going to give it the loft once-over. Look for loose boards. Footprints. That kind of thing.”

  Holmes usually didn’t explain her methods to me. “Need any help?”

  “No,” she said, with a bit more sharpness than necessary.

  I raised an eyebrow at her.

  “We don’t have enough time,” she amended. “And anyway, you haven’t gone through that closet yet,” and she hoisted her bag over her shoulder and zipped up the stairs.

  The closet had a sad-looking jacket in it and a man’s left snow boot. The kitchen cabinets had some mismatched wineglasses; under the sink, there was an old, disgusting plunger. Other than the chairs and tables I’d seen here the other night, the loft was empty of anything interesting. And God knew I couldn’t read clues into dust trails or windows cracked a half inch open. I looked around the loft with some disappointment. Surely, somewhere here, there was a clue to where Leander was being kept. There had to be—

  “I found something,” Holmes said, pounding down the stairs. “Look.”

  Forms. A thick stack of them. The top one said INVOICE, and below it, an address for Hadrian and Phillipa Moriarty. This painting for this amount of dollars. This painting for more. It was an inventory of all the work that Nathaniel had sold to Hadrian, his counterfeit middleman.

  Langenberg, one of the pieces said, followed by an item number. I ran my finger down the list. Langenberg, Langenberg, Langenberg . . .

  “Where did you find that?” I asked.

  “Under the floorboards. With this underneath. Look.”

  It was a business card, dog-eared and scuffed. DAVID LANGENBERG, it read. CONSULTANT.

  “That’s descriptive,” I said. “This was all in the floorboards?” Almost like she’d just materialized them.

  “Langenberg,” Holmes said impatiently.

  “I can read,” I reminded her. “I thought that Hans Langenberg didn’t have any children.”

  “He didn’t. But he might have nephews. Great-nephews. Leander was posing as ‘David,’ right? David Langenberg. Simple.” She tucked the card and the papers into her portfolio. “Did your father text you those IP addresses?”

  “Earlier, while we were at East Side Gallery.” I showed her the list on my phone. “I haven’t had a chance to look through them yet.”

  “Send them on to Milo’s grunts.” She smiled at me, sleek and satisfied.

  “I thought you were just complaining about Milo’s grunts doing all the work for you.”

  “Let them.” She closed the space between us, put her fingers on my chest. I almost recoiled—was I being played?—but then she scuttled back, like she’d only then realized what she’d done. “I’m starving. Don’t you want to get dinner?”

  Charlotte Holmes was never satisfied. Charlotte Holmes was never hungry. Charlotte Holmes was never the girl who convinced you to get a naan pizza and root beer floats from a sketchy little place in the tourist district, but that’s exactly what she wanted to do.

  In the shop, we sat in the window, watching the snow fall. She picked the pepperoni off the pizza a piece at a time while I made notes on the IP addresses in my journal.

  “This one, they pinpointed to Kunstschule Sieben,” I said. “So at least one of the emails Leander sent was from there. Maybe he followed Nathaniel to school. Or maybe it’s the same IP address as that faculty housing.”

  Holmes nodded, making a giant stack of pepperoni with her fingers. I wasn’t sure how much she was paying attention.

  “There are a number from cafés. Milo’s team sent along some names. It looks like Leander visited a Starbucks . . . do you think it’s down the street from where he was staying? The last one is from this address, here.” I pointed to it with my pencil. “It’s in a part of the city we haven’t explored.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Uh-huh.” Aft
er considering it for a second, she popped the giant stack of pepperoni into her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said, her mouth completely full. “I didn’t think I could pull that off. My calculations were right!”

  I’d never seen her act like this before. “What are you on?” I blurted.

  Holmes gave me an affronted look, the brunt of which was undercut by her chipmunk cheeks. She chewed for a minute and swallowed. “We found proof. Definitive proof. Haul Nathaniel in, question him, and you’ll have your link to Hadrian Moriarty. I’m sure August has him en route to Greystone right now. We’ll find my uncle before the day is out, I’m sure of it.”

  Holmes’s instincts hadn’t been wrong this fall, when she’d refused to consider August Moriarty as a suspect in Lee Dobson’s murder. But this felt different. It wasn’t sentiment, or nostalgia. It wasn’t wishful thinking, either. It felt . . .

  “Too easy,” I said to her. “Isn’t this too easy? All the information you need is under the floorboards?”

  Holmes rolled her eyes. “Occam’s razor, Watson. I’ve texted August and told him to bring Nathaniel back to Greystone tonight. But he said he won’t be home until late. We have some time to kill.”

  She was trying to distract me, I knew she was, but the glee in her voice was contagious. “Well, what do you want to do?”

  “A date,” she said.

  “A date.” I blinked. “What kind of date? Are we talking, like, dancing? A movie? A soda shop?”

  “Better.” Shy, suddenly, she dropped my gaze and looked out the window. “Something . . . well, something I love. Something we can only do here.”

  “A German something.”

  “Well, when in Rome,” she said, and that was how we ended up at the Christmas market at Charlottenburg Palace, three days before the holiday itself.

  At first glance, it looked like a sea of candles bobbing in a dark pool. Tents, white tents, rows and rows of them lit from within like clouds of daylight in a line, all topped with light-up stars and wound with garlands. People were crowded around them in earmuffs and gloves, drinking from mugs and eating giant frosted cookies. It was silly, and charming, and a little bit weird, and honestly, I loved Christmas. I always had. I was missing my family something fierce, tonight, thinking of wrapping presents around the fireplace back at home.