The Last of August

by Brittany Cavallaro

  Rex, regis, regi, regem, rege. I inhaled one final time. Waited a beat, then exhaled the smoke. The plurals, now, and slower. Reges. Regum. Regibus. Reges. Regibus. I appreciated that flip and repetition: the dative, the accusative, the ablative. It had a certain musicality. I’ve always loved a counterturn.

  I stabbed out the cigarette. Forty-eight minutes had passed. I asked the pilot to please start up the helicopter again and kept my eyes trained on the door to the building.

  “You win,” Lena said.

  “You know, you look cute in a flight suit,” Tom was telling Lena.

  Her eyes were guileless. “We need to get you one, too.”

  “Did yours come with Milo’s chopper?”

  “No,” she said. “I just had it lying around.”

  He grinned at her. Soon, they were kissing. Noisily. I hadn’t put on my protective headphones earlier, but I did now.

  When the door finally opened, August and Watson came slowly through it, followed by a small number of Milo’s men. Watson had an ice pack against his face. He was sporting several bandages and a limp, but I was pleased to see he still moved with his usual stubborn determination.

  “Are you fit to travel?”

  “Yeah,” he said. I had to read his lips, with all the noise. “Nothing happened to you in that warehouse?”

  “I happened to that warehouse.”

  He smiled, and then he winced in pain.

  “Try not to move your face,” I advised. “Do you remember what I said, about Prague?”

  “About us going there?” Watson said it with some difficulty.

  I nodded. The pilot was motioning for us to hurry up. He’d take us to the airport, and we’d hop on Lena’s father’s company jet. Commercial travel wouldn’t do, not this time. We were a strange group of people, and I didn’t want us to be conspicuous.

  That would come later.

  “What’s the plan, Holmes?”

  The stirring in my blood when he asked me that question. Nothing in the world could replace it.

  “Well,” I told him, “I have a mask for you to wear.”

  I’D HEARD IT SAID BEFORE THAT PRAGUE WAS A FAIRY-TALE city. Watson repeated it now as we made our slow progression in from the airport. Steepled roofs, pastel buildings, cobbled roads and switchbacks. An astronomical clock that stood stories high in a public square. I’d been there once before with Milo when we were children. Our Aunt Araminta had decided we needed “culturing.” I think she may have mistaken us for bacteria.

  “It is a fairy-tale city,” Watson insisted. “Look at those doors.” Our cab was descending a bumpy brick road, and every few feet we passed one of them. Medieval-looking metal doors, reinforced with spiny rows of hammered-in nails. “I wonder what’s behind them.”

  “On this street? Souvenir shops.” I disliked it when the term “fairy-tale” was bandied about. Most often it was used to mean “whimsical.” This is inaccurate. In fairy tales, the forest swallows you up like a dinner. Your parents wrap you in a cloak and set you loose in the dark. Everything happens in threes, and only the oldest child survives. As a younger sister, I particularly resented that last implication.

  “We can buy you a commemorative shot glass, if you’d like,” I told him.

  He rolled his eyes, but I could tell he was pleased. “Where are we staying?”

  “Somewhere far away from all this madness. Someplace sensible.”

  “Define sensible.” The nurses had stuffed him with enough painkillers that he was able to talk without pain. He was, it seemed, taking advantage of that fact.

  “My brother found us a bedsit flat near the auction house.”

  “A bedsit.”

  “It was quite expensive.”

  “Holmes, we’ll be on top of each other.”

  “It doesn’t have any windows, either, so it’s entirely safe.”

  “No windows?” He flung an arm toward the window for emphasis. “The city’s all lit up like a storybook. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. We’re in Prague. And you rented us a studio apartment without windows?”

  I frowned. “I think it was originally a maintenance closet.”

  It was only the two of us in this car; Lena and Tom had gone on ahead to their hotel. Though we’d flown in together, we’d arrive at the auction separately. For his part, August said he’d find his own place to sleep. He was aware that Watson and I had fought, and I imagine he was giving us the chance to kiss and make up.

  “I hate you,” Watson said to me, emphatically. “What is it with you and closets?”

  “They’re often quite clean. And if they aren’t, one can usually find cleaning supplies in them.”

  “Holmes—”

  “Actually, I booked us a room in an Art Deco hotel,” I said, and moments later our car pulled into its circle drive. I’d always prided myself on my timing.

  “Hats on,” I said, handing him his, “and sunglasses. Let them think we’re film stars.” I wanted no chance of our being seen.

  “You’re awful,” he said, laughing. “I can’t believe you made me think—”

  “You just had yourself beaten unconscious. I thought we might as well get you a comfortable bed.” Watson had laughed. His eyes had crinkled at the corners. Hours ago I thought he might have been dead. “There’s also a view of the river,” I said, and like a miracle, he laughed again.

  Oftentimes, I withhold information from Watson for this very reason. He resents this, I think. My “magic tricks.” I don’t know if he’s understood yet who the reveals are really for.

  Inside, the desk clerk raised an eyebrow at Watson’s battered face. “Lawn-mowing accident,” I told her, and she averted her eyes.

  “Wouldn’t there be blades if it’d been a lawn-mowing accident?” he asked in the elevator. “Wouldn’t I be, like, sliced open?”

  “It could have been a riding mower. You could have fallen off it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Please continue stripping my heroic act of all its heroics.”

  “You did throw him to the ground,” I allowed. “Before he knocked you out, of course.”

  The doors on our hall were all appropriately medieval. Hammered nails, stained glass, that sort of thing. When we found ours, Watson smiled to himself, and let us in.

  We talked that night. It wasn’t so different from these sorts of talks when we’d had them before—I want this, and What you want isn’t possible, and What’s left for us, then, to be to each other? I always felt as though he wanted us to reach a solution, as though he and I were a mathematical proof that simply needed to be balanced. For a very long time, I thought he considered me to be the problem, and then I worried he thought that I was the solution. I’m neither. I’m a teenage girl. He is my boy best friend. We would be everything to each other until we couldn’t. The room had two beds, but we slept on opposite sides of the same one, and if I woke in the middle of the night in his arms, I can tell you that he slept through it.

  He slept through it, too, when I disentangled myself from him and went to sit alone on the bathroom floor until the screaming in my head subsided. I am in control, I reminded myself. I am in control. I took fourteen breaths. I thought about the kit I had hidden away in my bag for emergencies, and then I forced myself to stop thinking about it. I am in control of this, I repeated, and felt better, and then I got back into Watson’s bed.

  I had never wanted him to see me vulnerable. But what if showing vulnerability was a decision I myself made?

  “Wake up.”

  He stirred the smallest amount.

  “Wake up,” I said again. “I need you to answer a question.”

  This time, he sat up. His face was a mottled wreck. Eyes blackened, lips cut and bruised. Empirically, I knew that he needed sleep to heal, and if this wasn’t so important, I would never have woken him up. I wasn’t my great-great-great-grandfather. There was no pleasure to be had in ordering him into danger, in waking him before dawn.

  I preferred to watch Jamie Watson sl
eep, because if he slept and I was watching, he was safe. I would rather Watson be at home, doing research and reading novels, because one prefers to have their heart locked safely in their chest. When I loved August Moriarty, it was that I recognized myself in him and saw that self redeemed. He and I were so alike in how we were raised, in how we saw the world, and he culled what he needed from that childhood and he resisted the rest with his whole self. He thought of others first. He read indiscriminately, traveled the world, listened to me when I spoke as though I wasn’t an experiment or a wind-up doll, but a person, a complete one, with the contradictions that all people had. I wanted to be him, me, when I never wanted to be anyone else. If I wanted to be with him, it was because of that.

  And Watson? If August was my counterpoint, my mirror, Jamie was the only escape from myself I’d ever found. When I was beside him, I understood who I was. I spoke to him, and I liked the words I said. I spoke to him, and the words he said back surprised me. Sharpened me. If August reflected me, Jamie showed me myself made better. He was loyal and kind, stalwart, like the knights from the old tales, and yes, he was handsome, even with a bruised face and a furrowed brow, miles away from the place we met or from the places we called home.

  “What is it?” His voice was thick with sleep.

  “Do you want this?” I asked him. I’d asked it once before, when I wanted to gauge how much distance I’d have to put between us if he did.

  “I think so,” he said. “Only—do you?”

  I took off my clothes. I’d been wearing pajamas, so it wasn’t a particularly slow reveal, or a seductive one. He watched me with shadowed eyes. When I reached for the hem of his shirt, he stopped me. I’ll do it, his face said, and with a grimace, he lifted it over his head. His torso was a wreck, battered purples and reds, and from the way he moved his shoulders, like an old, tired boxer, it was clear that the painkillers he’d been given had worn off in the night.

  “Do you want this?” he asked me, with effort.

  “I do,” I said, and hated my voice for breaking. “Can we—can we get under the blankets?”

  I lay down first, and he did next, gingerly, pulling the blankets over our heads like we were children. I had the insane urge to laugh, not because he was in pain but because I was, too. I hadn’t known my own motives until then. I was always so good with logic, causality. If, then. If, then.

  If we were both broken. Then.

  After what would happen in the next few days, after I made the decisions I would have to make to get Leander back, to save my family from themselves—there was a chance that he’d never want anything to do with me. Otherwise, maybe, I would have waited for this. A few more months. Another year. See if I was able to heal any further. But I couldn’t wait.

  And the fact of it was that I wanted him.

  With the back of his hand, he traced the line of my jaw, then down my neck, and I stiffened when his fingers touched my collarbone. His skin was warm. His breath was hot. He had far more experience than me, and I thought, again, as I always did, of the last time anyone touched me this way, Dobson’s thick fingers unbuttoning my uniform blouse, and I’d wanted to say something, anything, but I’d taken enough opiates that the wires had been reconnected wrong, my hands too heavy, and—

  Watson stopped. He watched me, my face, and when I nodded, he gathered me up in his arms and kissed me, slowly, and we talked through it until it was over.

  I suppose I could recite the literal progression of events, but I find that I have some small reserves of modesty. We didn’t have protection; we didn’t have sex. We did other things. Dicere quae puduit, scribere jussit amor—I may, for some time, think about his beautiful arms. They are lovely, like those of a statue I once saw when I was a girl, in a museum, somewhere, back when I hadn’t yet cried in my best friend’s bed, in a hotel in Prague at dawn.

  WHEN WE WOKE, WE DRESSED QUICKLY, AS WE HAD THINGS to do.

  We spent the next day holed up, fine-tuning my plan. That is to say, I told Watson the particulars and coached him on his dialogue, until he rewrote it all in a fit of pique. The two of us had never worked in tandem like this before, not purposely. It turned out we were rather good at it.

  This took us through to lunch. I had Peterson bring the USB drive and our disguises and our props. At a certain point, Watson demanded a sandwich. I’d forgotten how often he ate. I made him ring room service for it and then insisted he answer the door with his mask on. It went as planned: the delivery boy ran screaming down the hall.

  We didn’t talk about kissing, or about getting back into bed. We played poker. He lost. We played euchre, and he lost, and he lost again in gin rummy, and then he beat me in old maid, and then it was time for us to go.

  “Do you have the USB drive?” he asked, patting his pockets.

  “Of course,” I said. “Do you remember what we’re doing?”

  “‘As Michel Foucault says in Discipline and Punish—’”

  “Excellent.” I paused. “Try to enjoy this. Today. It’ll be fun, I think, for you.”

  Until it wasn’t fun. Until he never wanted to look at me again.

  “You know,” he said, rubbing his eyes through the holes in his mask, “we might actually pull this one off.”

  I don’t know why he sounded so surprised. It might be messy, awful, destructive, might end with a body count and my best friend disavowing me, but I do always pull it off in the end.

  twelve

  “OF COURSE WE’RE ON THE LIST!”

  The clerk frowned down at his clipboard. “I’m so sorry, Miss—”

  Charlotte Holmes ran a hand through her short black hair. The Coke-bottle glasses sitting on her nose made her eyes into huge, ridiculous saucers. “Don’t tell me you don’t see Elmira Davenport. How dare you. Check it again.” She kept her arms bent at the elbow, palms up, and when she turned to me, she pivoted at the waist like a toy. “I can’t even believe that we’re being subjected to the hegemony of lists! Lists! I am an artist. You are making me perform myself! This is unacceptable!”

  “Unacceptable,” I intoned.

  “I still don’t see you,” the man said apologetically.

  “Fetch Phillipa then. There’s surely been a misunderstanding.” A line had grown behind us—women in fancy dresses, men in suits and long coats, all shivering against the cold. Holmes clearly wasn’t budging. The line behind us grumbled. “Go on! Fetch!”

  He scampered off into the auction house and returned with the piggish blond Moriarty in tow. If I squinted, I could remember seeing her in that warehouse in Berlin. I couldn’t remember much from that night, to be honest. The carpet. Holmes tapping my cheek. The vicious beating of the helicopter blades. The rest was gone. For someone who played contact sports, I didn’t have a very sturdy constitution.

  Phillipa stopped short when she saw it was the two of us. “Phillipa,” Holmes said. “This is a party! Quite a party! We are so excited, Kincaid and I. Such short notice for you to pull this off! Yes, very good.”

  “Very good,” I intoned.

  “Let them in,” Phillipa said at length. I was sure she recognized us; it wasn’t important if she did. She’d known that we’d be there.

  “But madam,” the clerk whispered, “they’re not conforming to the dress code. I don’t even know what to say about that mask—”

  With a shrug, Phillipa escaped to the party. The clerk wasn’t so lucky.

  “Kincaid!” Holmes grinned toothily at me. “Kincaid does not wish to be seen by the panopticon.” With her arms, she made a wild arc. “His mask pixelates his face, yes? The cameras on the street, the cameras in here—they cannot see him! He is the unsurveilled territory! This is his work—to disappear!”

  “I am an artist,” I intoned. “I am my own work.”

  She dropped her voice to a whisper. “And I wear these skinny jeans because I refuse to pretend to a class I am not.”

  “She is not of that class.”

  “I am not of the petticoat class! I am E
lmira Davenport!”

  “Is that—is that Elmira Davenport? Let her in!” It was the man behind us. “She does video installation. Very strange. Very compelling.”

  The line began to buzz. “Yes, I think I’ve heard of her,” I heard someone say. “Didn’t she paint herself purple on top of the Eiffel Tower?”

  “Yes!” Like magic, Holmes produced a fistful of business cards from her pocket, and began passing them out to the crowd.

  “Is your work up for auction, dear?” the man’s wife asked, touching my shoulder.

  “It is up for auction,” I intoned.

  “You’ll have to wait for the very end,” Holmes said with a wink, “when the best always comes,” and dragged me in by the wrist, past the protesting clerk, past the small throng of men in sport coats and all the way down the end, to the lofted center hall of the museum.

  A stage had been set up, with an auctioneer’s podium. Seats were arranged in two cascading wings. From the looks of it, Hadrian and Phillipa’s art auctions attracted a good hundred people, and most of them had managed to come out, even with such short notice.

  “I’ve heard they have some incredible find they’re auctioning off,” the man next to us was saying. “It isn’t even in the catalog.”

  His friend replied, too quiet to hear.

  “No,” he said. “They’re on the up-and-up. These two scout the globe for a living; of course they’re bringing home fabulous work that was thought to be lost. Doesn’t mean it’s stolen. Didn’t you see Hadrian on Art World Today? He addressed this very subject!”

  Holmes and I toured the room. She shook hands while I glowered into the distance. Everyone, it seemed, had heard of us from somewhere they couldn’t really remember. Liars, all of them. It was incredible the lengths people would go to to feel like they were in the know.

  As we made the rounds, we kept hearing that same echoed uncertainty about the legitimacy of Hadrian and Phillipa’s catalog. Someone would say, But all of these paintings were presumed lost, and someone else would reassure them, too loudly, So they must be very good at finding them. The whole room stank of desperation, and Holmes flitted through it, tossing her bristly wig and ranting on about art and the intellect and the soul. She sounded like Nathaniel Ziegler on steroids, which I think was probably the point.