The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(70)

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 Elmira 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.