The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(21)

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 fa?ade 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.”