The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(48)

“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.