The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  But that was the undercurrent to my thinking. The rest of me, as always, knew what to do. The west hallway. We would take the stairs one at a time.

  I had been waiting since last night for the Moriartys to make their move. Here we were.

  Review your facts, my father said, before you build deductions on top of them.

  The facts were obvious. This is what I had deduced:

  We were being kept in the basement because we were children and therefore supposedly collateral. Milo had gone away—I’m sure that last night, Hadrian had managed to weasel that fact out of his guileless little brother—and Hadrian saw his opportunity. He would make a point to his older brother Lucien that he was capable of doing what, to Hadrian’s mind, Lucien could not do—that is to say, punishing me for what I’d done to baby brother August. After all, I was still alive.

  This is all idiocy, of course. Lucien was doing a lovely job. My mother poisoned? My father somehow still in fine fettle? A multitude of cameras in the family home, a live-in physician, and no evidence to be found? Was I or was I not puzzling through this at least once every seven minutes? Yes, of course I was. If Lucien was interested in killing me, I would be dead, Milo or no. No, toying with me was Lucien’s hobby, and one’s hobby stops being a hobby once it’s buried beneath an angel statue in an excruciatingly posh cemetery.

  I had never worried about Lucien murdering me; I worried about Lucien murdering Watson. Think of the endless mental trauma—it would be exquisite, a masterpiece of revenge. Think of the iterations! Exhibit one, in which I am framed for Watson’s murder. Exhibit two, in which I do in fact kill Watson: for example, am put into an impossible situation where I must slit his throat or see a city explode. Exhibit three, in which I do and Lucien explodes the city anyway. Exhibits four through twenty-nine, the last of them so wretched I couldn’t even consider it.

  Watson leaned more heavily against my shoulder; he’d stopped moving his own legs, but his breath in my ear let me know he was still alive. We’d reached Phillipa’s office. I knew it was hers because of the way in which the carpet was worn—a woman’s heel had tread this, and often, a tall heel judging by the pressure points, and I’d seen her wearing stilettos at our horrid lunch. Just inside the door, her bodyguard checked the time. I could hear the snap of his phone as he locked it.

  This one would be a bit more complicated.

  TWO AND A HALF MINUTES LATER, I’D PUT THE UNCONSCIOUS bodyguard through the window, and I had his gun trained on Phillipa Moriarty.

  It wasn’t particularly good to see her again. She looked much the same. Her face had a pinched, appraising look I most often associated with toddlers. “What do you want?”

  We had approximately thirty seconds more before her baby brother arrived with the cavalry. The battering sound at the door had finally stopped. There was no use worrying about August—what was done was done, and anyway, I’d seen that he carried a knife in his boot.

  I hoisted Watson up; his legs were beginning to go, and with an effort, he managed to straighten them. His eyelashes were fluttering. “Where is it?” I asked Phillipa.

  “Where is what, exactly?”

  With my other hand, I clicked the safety off my gun. “Twenty seconds. Where is the auction being held, and at what time?”

  Because the halls I’d dragged Watson down, on this floor and the one below it, were filled with paintings. Paintings with quite a lot of black paint, and sad-looking young Edwardians looking at glass scarabs and their hands and microscopes and each other. This was a storage facility, but she was pleased with her wares and proud of herself, her crown jewels, these forged Hans Langenberg paintings, and what is a Moriarty if not someone who gilds their abattoir?

  (Watson, when you read this, I do hope you appreciate my restraint in reserving this information until now.)

  Of course they would be sold to buyers through her private network; the question was only when.

  “January,” she said. “The twenty-seventh. It’s a pity that you aren’t dead, Charlotte.”

  “Yes, well, we all have our crosses to bear,” I said. “January is too late. You’ll have one sooner.”

  “When?” She spat the word.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Why on earth should I do that?”

  “Because I’ll expose you. Because I’ll send every last bit of information I’ve gathered on your operations to the government. Because, if you don’t, I will have my brother hit this warehouse twenty minutes from now in a precision strike that he’ll write off as a training exercise, and then, for good measure, I’ll do your house. Because I’m holding a gun, you cow, and I am perfectly capable of making your death look like a suicide.”

  In that moment, I wasn’t entirely sure I was bluffing.

  “Fine,” she said at length. “Where?”

  I took a few steps forward. The office had concrete floors, and Watson’s shoes skittered along them. “At your auction site in Prague. You still use that museum after hours? Give me the address.”

  She hesitated. My time was up. I could hear the feet pounding up the stairs.

  Very, very carefully (as one must be in these situations), I shot out the panel of glass above her head. She screeched.

  “Phillipa!” someone called below.

  “You will in fact give me the address, or I’ll have all of your assets frozen by the morning.” I thought for a moment. “And your new orchid gardener sent on permanent vacation.”

  “Without your brother, you’d be toothless,” she said.

  “Accurate. Unfortunately for you, he’s very much alive. The address. Now.”

  She gave it to me: it was in Prague, in Old Town, and I committed it to memory. The footsteps in the hall now. Watson moaned, low in his throat. Under his weight, I’d lost all feeling in my left shoulder.

  “Return our phones,” I said. She placed them on the table; I caught them both up in a hand. “Thanks. You’ve been a great help.”

  “Don’t you want to know what’s happened to your uncle?” she said to me. “Don’t you care at all?”

  I knew what had happened to Leander. I hadn’t wanted to believe it. I had insisted to myself that I needed to find firm evidence. But the truth of it was I had known, bodily known—not known with my brain, and so perhaps not legitimately—but my heart had been saying it since the day we’d left Sussex. My heart! The absurdity of it.

  I knew, too, that there was nothing I could do to rescue him until I could tie Lucien Moriarty to the crime. Whether or not he was guilty was beside the point.

  The alternative was unthinkable.

  “Tell anyone I know about this auction, tell anyone I’m coming, and I’ll have you killed. No,” I said, as Watson coughed, “I’ll do it myself.”

  The door flung open behind me.

  “Charlotte,” August said cautiously, as the men behind him raised their guns. They both had Greystone haircuts—military, with better sideburns. Milo appreciated aesthetics.

  I relaxed marginally.

  “August,” I said, as it’s polite to greet one’s friends.

  “Charlotte. There’s a girl on the roof. She says her name is Lena.” He cleared his throat. “She says she brought the helicopter you wanted?”

  eleven

  IN THE BACK OF HADRIAN MORIARTY’S CAR, I HAD TEXTED Watson some suggestions about fleeing. In the process, I’d also discovered a number of texts from my Sherringford roommate, Lena, informing me that she had decided to do some last-minute Christmas shopping in “a European city” and had chosen Berlin (“Though, ew, Char, do they even have a Barneys?”) because she was tired of “you and Jamie dodging me. Is it because he’s still mad at Tom?”

  Tom and Lena, our Sherringford roommates, were dating. And no, Watson was not still angry at Tom, even though the little charmless frog had spied on him throughout last semester in exchange for cash. Tom had believed—erroneously—that his girlfriend, the daughter of an oil tycoon, would dump him if he didn’t have the means t
o impress her with presents and trips and the like.

  Things Lena Gupta was impressed by, in my experience with her: high-fashion jackets covered in snaps, spikes, and other metal hardware; unstudied eccentricity; things that exploded; boys who were willing to hold her bag. Things Lena had zero interest in: other people’s financial backgrounds. Lena was the kind of girl that let me draw her blood for an experiment without asking a single question. Lena never asked very many questions at all. This quality, among others, made her an excellent friend.

  When, outside the Moriartys’ warehouse, I sent both her and my brother messages saying I might need medical assistance, Milo didn’t immediately respond. Lena did. She wrote back “ok!” and a number of those smiling faces with hearts for eyes. As Watson was being pummeled, I took the few seconds needed to send her our location before I joined into the fray myself.

  Lena arrived with a medevac helicopter, two nurses, a pilot, and a bug-eyed Tom with headphones on. Around her shoulders was a faux fur stole. It was beautiful. I was very happy to see her.

  “We should live together again next year,” I told her as we helped Watson into the cabin. August climbed in next to the pilot.

  “Totally,” she yelled back over the noise. “Do you think we could get a room in Carter Hall? They have private bathrooms!”

  Watson was laid out on a stretcher, and though he was clearly conscious, he didn’t try to speak. His jaw was swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Instead, he motioned for me to give him his phone.

  Emails, he wrote, with difficulty.

  “From Leander to your father? Are they on your phone?”

  Yes. Read them.

  I took his phone. The two nurses shooed me away. They put in IVs, shone penlights into his eyes. Tom looked over at Watson’s battered face, and then buried his own face in his hands. Empathy? Delayed guilt? I raised him a quarter of a notch in my estimation.

  I directed the copter to return to Greystone. There was a helipad on the roof and doctors inside the building. I wanted to avoid police involvement as much as possible, and taking Watson to a hospital in this state would certainly raise some red flags.

  They would take him down to the medical bay. August would run alongside to help them through the security checkpoints. Before they left, I told the nurses to check for internal bleeding, a reminder I’m sure they appreciated.

  “You’re not coming?” August asked.

  “No,” I said. “I need three cigarettes and fifty minutes in silence. I can’t have a cigarette in a hospital room, and anyway I can’t think when he looks like that.”

  “It might be a comfort to him,” he said. They were loading Watson onto a gurney.

  “His comfort isn’t my priority.” It was number five on the list, after all. “Give him my love, if he asks.”

  August blinked at me, as though I’d said something strange. I wasn’t unused to that look from him. In our time together in Sussex, when he was still my tutor, he’d often do this—blink at me slowly, almost languidly, when I gave an unexpected answer to his questions. Some might have taken it as a sign of judgment. I took it to be fascination.

  It never evolved past that place for him. Never into attraction, as it did for me. Still, he acted as though he had a claim on me. I wonder if he understood the nature of that claim. I was the instrument of his downfall. If he wanted to be near me, it was to ensure I didn’t ruin anyone else.

  “He will ask,” August said.

  “Then you’ll answer. Go.”

  He did.

  “I’ll hang here,” Lena said. “Don’t worry, I won’t talk.” As usual, she understood me completely. When I looked over, she was playing Tetris on her phone.

  “Charlotte,” Tom said a bit awkwardly. “I—”

  “No,” I said. That shut him up.

  I pulled a Lucky Strike from my cigarette case and lit it. Four long inhalations. My nerves lost some of their frantic hum. I missed that hum when it wasn’t there, but I knew how to regain it, quickly, if I had to. I’m skilled at regulating my systems, though it’s taken rather a lot of practice. Not to mention the several stints in rehab.

  In the next twenty-eight minutes, I concocted, vetted, and finalized my plan. Honestly, I was pleased that August and Watson were for the moment gone. Democratic decision-making had failed us so far, as a team (was that what we were?). Things ran more smoothly when I was their benevolent dictator.

  We would go to Prague, to the art auction. I believed Phillipa when she said she’d hold it. I believed her, too, when she said she wouldn’t tell anyone about our presence. She did like her orchids, after all. And these auctions were her livelihood. She would set up armed guards and hope that my goals were as childish as she believed me to be.

  This wasn’t to say that the auction would be safe. It wouldn’t be. I simply had no doubts about our getting in.

  The particulars. Something about surveillance, I thought. Something about privacy. When I’d arrived at that horrid art squat yesterday, I’d spent some time wandering through the open studios, trying to gather my thoughts. The fight I’d had with Watson had affected me more than I’d liked, and my new location wasn’t very soothing.

  Really, the sheer amount of blow available to me was impossible to ignore. When the second boy in ten minutes offered me a bump, I declined with enough difficulty that I was concerned I would say yes the next time.

  I took myself away to a corner studio. The artist was missing, but his work was on display. It had to do with CCTV, those surveillance cameras that line both European and British street corners, and the means he’d concocted to avoid their gaze.

  He had a certain display of masks I found intriguing.

  I would get to that later.

  The last emails, then. I spent my second cigarette reading them through.

  I learned that Leander had pretended, at times, that I was his daughter. I had never pretended he was my father. Fathers were exacting and distant and cruel. Leander was none of those things. Still, I was charmed.

  More importantly, my uncle doubted his theory that Nathaniel was in fact Hadrian in disguise, and I did as well. How on earth had he been teaching a class? How had he made that work? Still, if there was any truth to it, I needed to know.

  I sent three texts to my brother. This time, he replied quickly. He offered resources. He approved of my plan. His final text read, I’m sure he wishes I was his son, too.

  Well, he only said it about me, I wrote back, with some pleasure, and then I turned my phone off.

  My next order of business was to confirm some minor financial details with Lena. We discussed a choice of clothing for the event, as I knew this would please her. I owed her quite a few favors at this point. We hammered out escape routes. She informed me that she’d entered my name into something called a Secret Santa back in Sherringford. The other girls on our hall were to exchange presents when we returned in January, and according to Lena, my participation was mandatory. I told her I’d contribute a book on snails. She frowned, and then shrugged in assent.

  That settled, I reviewed photographs of the Moriarty family. All blond. All tall. All rather vicious looking, even August, who’d taken pains in the past to soften his appearance with that particular professorial haircut. He’d pared himself down now. That guise was gone, and what was left was spiny and sad. Watson often compared our lives to art and entertainment—this was like a sitcom, that was like a circus. If that was the case, August Moriarty had gone from living in a campus novel to playing Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The latter was more interesting, of course, but I may have lingered over the old picture of him on the Oxford website.

  Because that man—the man in the photo—was dead. He and I both knew it, and knew it was my fault. I wondered if our relationship now was a kind of shared mourning for the old August Moriarty. It’s strange to grieve for your former self, and still I think it’s something that any girl understands. I’ve shed so many skins, I hardly know what I am now—muscle, maybe, or
just memory. Perhaps just the will to keep going.

  When I looked up, still deep in thought, I caught Tom craning his neck to see my screen. I’m not particularly proud to say that I snarled at him.

  “Char,” Lena said mildly. She didn’t take her eyes from her phone.

  “You’re disloyal,” I told Tom. “You proved that with Mr. Wheatley. I swear to you that if you ever give up sensitive information again—if you ever betray Watson again—I will find a way to wear you as a hat. Stop looking at my screen.”

  Tom shrank back into his sweater vest.

  “I’ll play you in Tetris,” Lena offered. He nodded shakily.

  I was making quite a few threats today. It wasn’t my favorite mode of operation, but it was to be expected when I was surrounded by petty criminals.

  I lit my last cigarette.

  Final matters. For this mission, I would need to recruit a few armed guards. Only those loyal enough to Milo that they would extend that same loyalty to me. Though I disliked working with those outside my circle—Tom, even now, was chewing gum as he sat across from me—I understood its necessity. I couldn’t perform my role if I was preoccupied with pointing a gun. To that end, I sent one of the swarming mercenaries to find Peterson and a few others. They’d follow us to Prague.

  It was settled, then. I smoked my cigarette down to its filter, coaxing my brain to slow its rapid patter. If I burned too hot for too long, I would go limp and useless—I would sleep—and so I had developed methods to cool myself down. Running through Latin declensions worked best. Amo, amas, amat was standard, if sentimental, and I did like running through the declensions for the body (corpus has a lovely sound), but tonight I only wanted the word for king.