The Last of August by Brittany Cavallaro
I wanted my ax back. Or Milo’s head on a pike.
The city was bare of snow and warmer than London, and I realized I didn’t really know a lot about where we were. Anything I did know about Berlin was rooted in world history textbooks and movies about the Second World War. I knew about the Nazis, and I knew that Germany made the best cars, that their language had compound words for emotions I didn’t know had names. My mother liked to refer to schadenfreude, joy at the misery of others, whenever she laughed at the traffic report on the radio. Who would be silly enough to own a car in London, she’d say. We took the tube like proper Londoners, or like what she thought proper Londoners should be.
The Berlin I saw now reminded me a little of London, in that the buildings we saw all seemed to be on their second lives. A grocery store we passed had the façade of an old museum. A post office had been turned into a gallery, the old Deutsche Bundespost sign faded above a window that displayed sculptures of . . . ears. I spotted a painted lamppost looming on the brick wall behind a real one. Everywhere there was art, on the buildings, on the billboards, creeping down the brick walls onto the streets in murals that read KILL CAPITALISM and BELIEVE EVERYTHING and KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN. The words were all in English—lingua franca, I guessed, though I remembered hearing that the city was full of émigré artists, drawn by the cheap rent and the community. What struck me the most was how none of the graffiti had been covered up. It was like the city was made of it, this twinned transformation and discontent, and the storefronts that stood new and clean began to look unfinished, somehow, at least to me.
Though it wasn’t all like that, especially as we approached Mitte. The car took us by park after park, postage-stamp-sized in the middle of neighborhoods, and as we approached Greystone, we passed grand old beautiful museums, giant turnabouts, walls that gardens hid behind.
I pulled out my notebook to write it all down. Beside me, Holmes was looking out the window, too, but I didn’t imagine she was taking any of it in. She’d been there before. And anyway, if I were her, I’d be deciding what I could possibly say to August Moriarty.
By the time we pulled up to Greystone, I had a full page of notes, and I hurried to finish them as the cab stopped.
“Come on, Watson.” Holmes tossed a bill to the driver and dragged me out the door.
Greystone, it turned out, took up the top ten floors of a glass tower that loomed over the rest of the block, new and strange in its surroundings. Because it was private security—because it was Milo—we were put through a metal detector, a full-body scan, and two separate fingerprinting kiosks before we were sent up to him on the freight elevator. Floor after floor of office space. His penthouse was at the top.
“He knew that we were coming, right?” I asked Holmes for the tenth time.
“Obviously,” she said as the elevator lurched. “Did you notice how hastily that retinal scan was set up? He’s obviously watching his security feed with a bowl of popcorn. Jackass.”
The elevator lurched again.
“Stop insulting him,” I told her, “or we’re going to plunge to our deaths.”
Milo Holmes had always reminded me of an actor who’d wandered in from a movie set in another century. He had the same sonorous speech as an English professor, and I’d never seen him wear anything but a tailored suit. (One of those suits was folded up in my suitcase. I tried to feel bad about having filched it, and failed.) His offices were just like him—old-fashioned and stuffy, like the MI-5 of old spy novels. It was like he’d cherry-picked his favorite fictional references and rearranged them into a hodgepodge of mismatched places and times.
But I hadn’t really expected the armed guards.
Two steps out of the elevator, and a pair of them stopped us, automatic weapons pointed at our chests. One started mumbling rapidly into her wrist, something about unfriendlies and unauthorized access.
“We were cleared. We should be fine,” I said to the guards, my hands up. They didn’t budge. “Uh. Should I be speaking German?”
The other soldier hoisted his gun to my face.
“I guess not.” It came out sort of high-pitched.
Holmes, unbothered, was peering up into the light fixture. “Milo. I know you can hear me. Have you entirely forgotten your manners? You’re making Watson squawk.”
“Of course I haven’t,” her brother said, stepping out of a door that swung open from the wallpaper, as if invented on the spot. He nodded to his guards, and they shouldered their weapons, disappearing down the hall in the two-bit magic show that was Milo Holmes’s bread and butter.
“Wasn’t that fun?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Do you treat all your guests this way?”
“Only my little sister,” he said, tucking his hands into his elegant pockets. “You know, you could have come up the visitors’ elevator, and we would have had far less trouble.”
“They put us on—”
Holmes lifted a hand to stop me. Her eyes were scanning the room. “You haven’t updated your lobby. It still looks like an ugly antiques shop in here.”
“It is, as you well know, not a lobby. This is my private residence,” he said. “You’ve seen the actual lobby quite often. And now you’ve been x-rayed in it. Would you like to visit it again?”
“Yes, it is so good to see you spending your time on worthwhile causes like photographing my teeth when you could, in fact, be looking for our uncle. Or adding guards to the family estate.”
“Who says I’m not?”
“I am. I’m watching you do nothing.”
“You wouldn’t know how to look.”
She took a step toward him. “You monstrous pig, I knew how to read people before you knew your alphabet—”
“Oh? Because I’ve been holding my tongue about the fact that you and your ‘colleague’ there have obviously begun doing the nasty, and that—pity—it’s not going very well—”
At that, Holmes lunged, and he dodged her, letting out a triumphant laugh.
“Guys. Guys. Where is he?”
“Who, Watson?” she asked.
“August Moriarty. The reason you two are fighting? I could be wrong about that. It’s just an assumption.” I looked Milo over, head to toe, the way I’d seen him do to me. “As is the assumption that no one’s done the nasty to you in years. Three? Four?”
Milo adjusted his glasses. Then he pulled them off and began polishing them with a sleeve.
“Two, actually,” a soft voice said behind me. “He never really did get over that comtesse, and I haven’t seen any girls around here since.”
Charlotte Holmes went completely still.
“Though it’s been longer for me,” the voice said. “So I shouldn’t really be making fun. Speaking of, I hear I have you three to thank for breaking off my engagement. And I do mean that. Thank you.”
Milo sighed. “August. It’s good you’re here. Lottie, I’ve given him access to my contacts. He’ll show you around. I—well, frankly, I have more important things to do.” He stopped at the end of the hall. “By the way, Lottie, Phillipa Moriarty called to confirm your lunch. I’ve left her number in your room.”
With that bombshell, he left. I didn’t have any time to process it. I’d been left with Holmes and Moriarty. And because I was—am—a coward, I waited until the last possible second to turn around.
August Moriarty was dressed like a starving artist. He had on ripped black jeans and a black T-shirt and steel-toe boots—black, of course—and his hair was cut into a blond fauxhawk. But while he was dressed like a poet, he had the polish of a rich kid, and his eyes were burning with an intensity that reminded me of—
Well, it reminded me of Charlotte Holmes. All of him did. In the picture of him I’d seen on his math department’s website, he was smiling in a tweed blazer, and now he was standing here like her looking-glass twin. Before they’d even exchanged a word, it was clear that they had done something to each other, broken each other, maybe, or distilled each other like
Maybe I was reading too much into it. Into him. Things between me and Holmes were tenuous enough already, though, and here was a gust of wind that could take the rest of it down.
A very polite gust of wind.
“Milo’s said some nice things about you,” he was saying as he shook my hand. He had a tattoo on his forearm, something dark and patterned. “Which is interesting, since Milo usually doesn’t notice people that aren’t holograms.”
“I didn’t know the two of you were close,” I said. I had to say something. We were still shaking hands.
He had a strong grip. I pressed harder.
He laughed, a friendly sound. “We’re both ghosts. Where else would you work if you legally don’t exist? I’m fairly sure that Milo’s scrubbed his digital footprint so clean that he wasn’t even technically born. We have that much in common.”
“That makes sense,” I said, because he was still shaking my hand.
“I should probably also apologize for my brother. Do know that I never told him to kill you.”
My fingers were starting to go numb. “I’m pretty sure I’m just the collateral damage there.”
“Right, of course. Of course.” A strange look passed over his face, and then vanished. “Sorry.”
“So. Phillipa?” I asked. “Are you two . . . close? Do you know why she’d want to see us?”
“Not really,” he said. “We haven’t spoken since I died.”
I risked looking over at Holmes. She hadn’t moved, except for her hands, which were pressed against her sides. She didn’t look nervous or scared. She didn’t even seem like she was cataloguing him, the way I’d expected her to, taking in whatever changes the last two years had worked on him. What her betrayal had done. Whether he hated her for it.
She was just looking at him.
“I got your birthday card,” she said quietly. “Thank you.”
“I hope you didn’t mind that it was in Latin. I didn’t mean it to seem pretentious. I just wanted to—”
“I know. It reminded me of that summer.” Her eyes brightened. “That’s what you intended, right?”
August Moriarty was still shaking my hand. More accurately, he was holding it, because neither of us was moving anymore. He was staring at her like she was a penny at the bottom of a well, and I—well, I was staring at the space between them.
“I need this back,” I said, and pulled my hand away.
August didn’t appear to notice. “You must be exhausted from your trip. Both of you. You’re here for the week, yes? I’ll have Milo’s body man show you to your room so you can settle in. You had lunch on the plane? Excellent. And tonight—well, there’s a bar we should go to. Some things I’d like your opinion on, there.”
“Aren’t we going to talk about this Phillipa thing?” I put every bit of venom I was feeling into her name.
“Is the bar the Old Metropolitan?” she asked him.
“It’s Saturday night, so it’s where Leander would be.”
“We’ll go tonight. I can’t imagine what he’s— I can’t wait any longer than that.”
“The Old Metropolitan,” August said, and there was a surprising thread of bitterness in his voice. “You just knew that, didn’t you? How did you guess?”
“I never guess.”
I cleared my throat. “We could have just asked my father. He’s been getting daily updates from Leander since October. I’m sure he has a list of places for us to look. And can we talk about Phillipa? What does she want with you?”
Neither of them even glanced at me.
“Walk me through it. How you knew it was the Old Metropolitan,” August said, drawing her over to a bench between the elevators. He sounded intrigued, and something else, something darker. “Step by step, and slowly. Charlotte, it had to be a guess.”
“It’s Saturday night,” she repeated. “And I never—”
“No, you don’t,” I said, but I was saying it to no one.
I DECIDED TO FIND MY WAY TO MY ROOM ON MY OWN WITHOUT waiting for Milo’s “body man,” whatever that was. I couldn’t stand between Holmes and August for another second.
But it wasn’t difficult to orient myself. Most of the doors on the hall were keycode-locked—honestly, I didn’t want to know what was behind them—until I tried the one at the end of the hall.
I opened it. I took a breath.
It was like being back at Sciences 442. Like being back in Holmes’s room in Sussex. It was like being back inside Charlotte Holmes’s head.
The room was dark; unlike her lab at Sherringford, this one had a window, but it was tinted so dark that no natural light crept in. A series of lamps snaked down from the ceiling. Some half-finished chemical experiment was laid out on a table, with a set of burners and white powder measured out into piles. No shelves, but books everywhere, piled up beside an overstuffed armchair, behind the sofa, on either side of a white plaster fireplace, and inside its grate, too, like kindling. I picked one up from the pile beside the door. It was in German, with a bisected cross on its cover. I set it down.
In one corner, uncomfortably close to the chemistry set, someone had brought in a twin bed. It was clearly a new addition, much nicer than the shabby furniture surrounding it. It was clearly meant for me.
I decided to camp out on Holmes’s bed instead.
Milo (or his men) had built a loft for her, a bed bolted high up into the wall, as small and remote as the crow’s nest of a ship. From up there, she could survey her tiny fiefdom. I wondered how old Holmes was when Milo gave her this room. Eleven? Twelve? He was six years older; he’d have been eighteen, at the beginning of building his empire, from the timeline Holmes had given me. And he’d given her a space of her own in that new life. As I climbed up the loft’s ladder, I tried to imagine a miniature Holmes doing the same, a flashlight clenched in her teeth.
She must have felt like Milo’s first mate, surrounded by his loyal men, in a ship’s cabin of her own. Untouchable. Away from the world.
I knew what I was doing. By taking over her perch, I was gunning for a confrontation. Some sign that she still knew I existed. Watson, she’d say, lighting a cigarette. Don’t be a child. Get down here, I have a plan.
August Moriarty wasn’t a child. He was a man. That had been my first impression, and the one that ultimately mattered. I couldn’t help seeing him as a standard by which I’d already failed. If he was the finished sketch, I was the unfinished space around it. Let me put it this way: I was five foot ten on a good day. I had on faded jeans and my father’s jacket. I had twelve dollars in my bank account, and still, somehow, I was along for the ride, and the ride was in Europe, where my best friend paid for everything and spoke German to the driver and I tried not to feel like the cargo she’d strapped to the top of the car.
Time passed. Thirty minutes. An hour. I hated this line of thinking, but it was what I’d been left with.
To torture myself, I wondered what Phillipa Moriarty could possibly want with Holmes. Why she would agree to a lunch. I mean, I wasn’t stupid. I had a few solid ideas—death, dismemberment—but going through Milo’s mercenary company made me think she wasn’t up to serving violence. A détente, maybe? Maybe she knew where Leander was being kept. Maybe she was going to tell us that she wasn’t siding with Lucien in this ridiculous war.
Maybe she’d found out that her little brother August was alive.
As an act of desperation, I took out my phone to text my father. What do you know about Phillipa Moriarty?
The response was prompt. Only what’s been in the papers, and you’ve seen that, too. Why?
What about a bar called the Old Metropolitan?
Leander went there on Saturdays to meet with a professor from the Kunstschule Sieben. One of the local art schools. A Nathaniel. Gretchen was another name that came up quite often.
The forgers Holmes had mentioned. Any other place
I’ll email you a list. I’m happy to hear that Milo’s taking this so seriously.
I was pretty sure that Milo wasn’t, and that he’d shoved us off on August because of it. I put my phone away.
After a minute, I pulled it back out.
When you were working with Leander, did you ever feel like you were his baggage? Like he’d insist on taking you along on a case, and then he’d run off and solve it without you?
Of course. But there’s a way to stop feeling like that, you know.
How? I asked.
I don’t know when my father became someone I trusted to go to for advice. It was an uncomfortable feeling.
My phone pinged. I’ve put a hundred dollars in your bank account. Now run off and solve it without her.
THE OLD METROPOLITAN WAS BUSIER THAN ANY BAR I’D been to in Britain. Not that I’d been to too many bars—but I’d seen enough. In Britain, you could have a beer with your dinner at sixteen if your parent bought it for you; at eighteen, you could order whatever you wanted for yourself. Germany’s laws weren’t all that different. One of the great ironies of my life is that I got shipped off to America for high school, a country that didn’t let people drink until they’d nearly graduated college.
The Old Metropolitan was full of students. It was only a few streets away from the Kunstschule Sieben’s campus, something I learned while wandering the neighborhood. When I’d left Greystone HQ, it was still late afternoon, so I decided to spend the time before nightfall cultivating a disguise. I’d watched Holmes remake herself in front of me, how putting a slight spin on her usual presentation turned her into an entirely different person. I’d asked her, once, what she thought of me going undercover. She’d laughed in my face.